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First We Take Manhattan…

A couple weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece about Fumito Ueda, and his games Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a good piece, and one that I am extremely happy to see running in such a prestigious publication with an audience broader than the audience for most writing-about-games.

The piece quotes me in support of its loose thesis that ‘games can be art’. While certainly flattering, and while this is a thesis I support, there is not a small amount of irony that arises from the piece running more or less in parallel to my last post which questions whether or not games should be art.

I should clarify one thing about the specific quote, which is pulled from Tom Bissell’s book Extra Lives. I said,

"Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters."

The quote is accurate; that’s what I said. But then, as now, my own thinking on the subject of ‘how games mean’ was evolving (and has been evolving for some time). What I should have said back then was,

"Finding a way to make the dynamics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters."

Furthermore, the way I would prefer to express that idea today would be to say,

"Finding a way to make the dynamics of play support the creative expression of players—to me that’s the only question that matters."

Anyway, putting aside the subtleties related to where meaning in games can reside or where I personally think it ought to reside, the fact that articles like this are appearing with increasing regularity in mainstream publications is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it gives game developers an opportunity to gain some much needed traction toward building credibility and artistic legitimacy in the eyes of a real audience of billions instead of a pathetically small audience of tens of millions. It’s a curse because I still supect that most of the people intrigued by such an article and inspired to take a closer look at games will be largely disappointed once they gtet beyond a very small handful of games, such as those of Ueda and a few others.

As we see more and more articles like this, and as we draw the attention of a real mass market, I worry that the limited depth and breadth of our work (at least our most visible work) cannot sustain and nourish the attention we receive from that mainstream. I suspect that, in the long term, that may be a bigger problem than not receiveing this kind of attention at all.

[REDACTED] The Dominant Cultural Form of the 21st Century

Recently I was in an email discussion with some friends and colleagues (who will ironically go unnamed here) about the whole ‘game designers getting their name on the box’ debate. Putting the two related (but different) issues of credit standards and the absurdity of boxes themselves aside for another time, I want to talk about what I think having one’s name on the box means. Actually, to say that better, I'd rather not talk about it, because I think the debate is kind of meaningless and backwards looking, but because my perspective on it is so different from the folks with whom I would normally agree, in guess I should clarify my position.

First, I think there are some obvious, surface level debates about designers having their name on the box. There is the debate about whether or not, given the massively collaborative nature of game development, there ever really is a singular vision holder on a game project who deserves sole top billing. There is also the debate about IP ownership and how, since creatives effectively cannot own IP in the current Platform Holder / Publisher / Developer climate, getting the 'right' to have this kind of top billing is basically impossible anyway. There is also the debate about 'how it works in other industries' (ie: Hollywood), and the questions of whether it should work similarly in games. I think these debates are all fairly well trodden. I also happen to think they are all kind of missing the point.

I think the idea of a star developer having his or her name on the box is just subscribing to the same floundering cultural models that the Platform Holders and Publishers have necessarily bought into and staked their futures on. It’s about upholding and participating in the culture of brand, personality and celebrity that is the central driver of the author-centric broadcast culture we’re ultimately in the process of tearing down whether we realize it or not. In some ways, the very idea of the ‘name on the box’, or ‘getting top billing’ is emblematic of what I am calling broadcast culture. An Artist has something to say, He creates a work of Art with a Message, He puts His Name on it and we all consume it. That’s what a painting and a poem and a novel and a play and a film and an album are.

But that’s not what a game is. A game can be that, and that’s why that movie-critic dude was wrong; games can be broadcast culture High Art handed down to the masses by Artists. But as our cultural tastes and sensibilities evolve to appreciate how games mean, we will come to recognize that the stuff in games that speaks deeply to us, that resonates, that makes us weep and rejoice does not come from what the Artist Hath Wrought but comes leaping, unforged, naked and honest from the masterfully conducted runtime, often as much a delight to its coders as to its players. So while games can be Art, even High Art, I think subscribing to a games-as-art perspective is kind of relegating games to a pitiful, sorry existence.

These days, if you attend a game conference, or read a serious essay discussing game culture, or even engage in a moderately rigorous discussion about games, you would not be surprised to hear someone utter the phrase, 'the dominant cultural form of the 21st Century'. The notion that games are the English longbow to the warhorse of television and the armoured knight of cinema is increasingly seen as a real possibility. But while we say it, discuss it's inevitability, ponder it's timeline, and desperately try to monetize it, we don't actually very often talk about what it means. Film and television are in many ways a technological enhancement and hybridization of older broadcast media, such as the novel, the play, or the album, but they are still fundamentally part of the broadcast culture paradigm. Games, I believe, are not part of the same paradigm. Games belong to a different paradigm that includes the oral tradition of storytelling, improvisational music, sport, dance, philosophical debate, improv theatre, and parlour games (among many other cultural forms).

In many ways, the divide is between creative forms that have a means of encoding an authored message, or a notation, where the 'beautiful part' is crafted by an artist and then played back or read by or for the audience from the notation, and creative forms that do not have a notation, and where the 'beautiful part' is created at runtime by those acting within the space described by the form.

I'm sure to attract a legion of pedants with that one, and I'm sure not going to defend the notation/non-notation divide as a rigorously defining point of distinction, but it is a fast litmus test. The distinction is too simple for many reasons; chess and dance and baseball all have notations, for example, and in the case of film, the notation (the images and sounds recorded on the film strip) is hard to distinguish from the work (the projection of the information encoded on the strip as an audio-visual landscape), but the distinction between forms that record their beauty for playback and those that have it dynamically synthesized at runtime can broadly and roughly be delineated there. Let's move on.

Seeing games assume their role as the 'dominant cultural form of the 21st Century' is not merely about the replacement of film and television with 'better film and television that are controlled by a joystick'. It is the wholesale replacement of the author-centric broadcast culture paradigm of 'people who disseminate their beautiful notations for other people to follow' with the totally different cultural paradigm of 'people who beautifully figure out the following step while taking the current one'.

The way I see it, the 'name on the box' is a derivative of the former, broadcast cultural paradigm and does not have an (important) place in a culture driven by the latter paradigm. The reason we cling to the name on the box is because all of our economic, social and political concepts have been inextricably intertwined with broadcast culture for at least 500, and arguably 3500 years, ever since Socrates made the case against the written word and then went and drank a cup of hemlock. Disentangling the idea of the primacy of the author from the work is at least as complicated a cultural revolution as killing God - and look how complicated that's proving to be.

It's not just the governments and the banks and the universities and the corporations and all of the beautiful rich and famous people who you should aspire to be like who have an interest in upholding the name on the box. We all have an interest in it, because even those who suffer under it, and those who are oppressed by it, and those who would fight to see it torn down are scared shitless of what it looks like to wake up in a world without it. The name on the box is comforting because it has been a part of what we are for centuries. What if changing it is a mistake? Without Steven Spielberg, without Stephen King, and without Steve Jobs, where will we find our heroes? Who will inspire us to strive to be better than we are?

I think the answer to that question though, is already well understood. His name is Steve Yzerman or Steve Smith or Steve Nash. People don't go watch the Phoenix Suns play basketball because it's a game designed by Dr. James Naismith. They don't watch it or play it to experience it's design. They go see basketball because it is beautiful to see talented people like Steve Nash play it beautifully, and they play it to perform declarations of self, such as 'I can outmanoeuvre that guy', or 'I can do a lay-up'. And just as we recognize the great authors in the broadcast culture paradigm, we also recognize the great actors in the interactive culture paradigm.

But is it fair that you can't sell a recording of the song 'Happy Birthday to You' without paying some absurd amount of money to license the song from the great great great grandchildren of the dude who wrote it decades ago, but that Steve Nash makes more money every time he bounces a basketball than Naismith made in his entire life? In a sad way, and in a way that I suspect most people will disagree with, and most importantly in a way that makes me scared as hell to try to build the future that I'm talking about when I utter the words 'dominant cultural form of the 21st Century', I think the answer has to be 'yes, that's fair'.

I think it's fair for three reasons.

First, I think it's fair because when I take stock of the most beautiful things in the games I have worked on; a cold-blooded execution of an Andre Hippolyte; an amateur guard blasted down an elevator shaft; a wounded mercenary immolated in grassy field, I have to admit that I am not the person who created those things. They are beautiful, arresting, heartfelt and profound statements about what we are and what we can be, and being witness to them has enriched my life. I am immeasurably proud to have chalked the lines on the fields where those beautiful events unfolded, but I didn't make them.

Second, I think it's fair because the argument of who should be paid for what in all this mess would (I believe) become a moot point if games were to truly become the dominant cultural form of the 21st Century in the way I am talking about. The impact of the cultural transformation that would be required for that to actually happen would reverberate through all of our institutions in such a profound way that they would become unrecognizable. The replacement of author-centric broadcast culture with actor-centric dynamic culture throws the persistence of our current concepts of finance and business and even government into question. As with any revolution, you kind of unfortunately have to accept that you need to figure out how to feed people after the King's head is in the basket, not before.

Finally, I think it's fair because out there, somewhere, there is some kid in elementary school who really wants to grow up and be a game developer like me. He doesn't know who I am, of course, because my name is not on the box, but even despite that, he sees me, or someone like me, as his hero.

My message to that kid is this: I don't want to be your hero. I want you to be your hero.

Cost of Entry

Damn. It's sure costing me a lot of money to leave this blog sitting here, doing nothing.

I havent even had the time to get my GDC slides from 2011 up yet. I have wanted to go back and clean up the end of the talk, as the conclusion never really hung together the way I wanted.

Looks like I might be giving that talk again in a couple places in the not too distant future which would force me to fix the wishy-washy ending (and convince you all that I really, truly am a communist), and then hipefully get the thing up here (maybe as video??!!) shortly after that.

We'll see what happens between now and year end...

 

Convergence Culture

Part Five: Gaming Across the Fifth Dimension

Revolutionary ideas in science, technology and philosophy don’t exist in isolation in academic institutes, government think tanks, or corporate R&D labs, they touch all aspects of our culture. The ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin undercut millennia of oppression, giving rise to concepts like literacy, democracy and equality. Relativity went hand-in-hand with the dismantling of objectivity in art and literature. Today, as scientists unravel the many-worlds interpretation and similar theories, we see a simultaneous blurring of the boundaries between the online universe and the physical universe. Our sense of the immediate here-and-now is altered by the layer of the internet, its systems, data, and users. This new sense of reality is reflected in our art – and our games.

Who is ‘there’ when we play Left 4 Dead? Am I hosting the server? Is he? Did it migrate? Is he there or is that a bot? Has he joined another game? Am I alone? What does ‘alone’ even mean where worlds overlap and relocate, and characters’ bodies are intermittently inhabited or automated. We don’t think twice about these things when we play L4D, but the hyperdimensional structure of the game reflects a culture that similarly doesn’t give a second thought to navigating with stitched together photographs taken in different months or years to rendezvous with friends geo-tagging their tweets only to find out they have already left – leaving us in the physical company of one set of friends and the psychological company of someone absent. Even if L4D’s feature set had been technologically possible in 2000, no one would have accepted it. Today, we take it for granted.

Fifteen years ago it was interesting to set up a LAN in a room full of PCs so we could play co-op Rainbow Six. Today, pop-up notifications that friends have come online, or joined your game are not just normal, they are banal. The New Interesting is not having to grind for twelve hours to be able to safely play Crackdown in co-op. We were too long handcuffed by a wrongheaded desire to protect the coherence of the fiction of our game worlds, and this made allowing players to play co-op games difficult. But our shifting cultural perceptions have loosened those bonds. The story of Crackdown doesn’t break if my friend helps me level up, and we don’t need to explain it with some kind of complicated and fictionally justified side-kicking system. If the system you contrive to protect your fiction is so complicated that it stops people from playing, you’re doing it wrong.

Demon’s Souls gives us a fantasy realm where the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the damned overlap strangely. I see the apparitions of other players fighting enemies I haven’t yet encountered. I witness the ghosts of their demise like footprints in interdimensional snow. In System Shock 2, these apparitions needed to be explained as neurological side effects of the upgrade system. In Demon’s Souls, we need no such explanation – not because it makes better sense, but simply because we ‘get’ the idea of overlapping universes and are willing to explore those ideas in our art.

Captain Forever runs in your browser. Conveniently, so does Twitter. Captain Forever saves your entire game history on a server and allows other people to launch a new game using your ship at any point in its history simply by clicking on a tweet. “That’s not fair,” we cried in 1999, “players should have to earn that ship.” Bullshit.

In order to make the grade as a Captain, Commander Shepard has some things to learn, I think. I’d way rather have a dozen friends playing Mass Effect 3, all playing different characters, and be able to click on their tweets to populate my crew with their leveled up characters and all the relationship history that was developed by them over time than have cleverly authored characters filling out my roster in a branching narrative.

Mass Effect story die-hards and fanboys will, of course, disagree. Probably so will EA and Bioware. And people will continue to wonder why gaming has such a hard time climbing out of the cultural ghetto inhabited by schlock sci-fi and superhero comics. The answer is simply that until we make more games that address the current human experience using the central voice of the medium we belong in that ghetto.

Most ‘AAA’ games today use story and character to explore themes we have explored before in other media that – simply put – use story and character to better effect. Demon’s Souls, Left 4 Dead and Captain Forever all explore the way we experience and perceive the very fabric of our world as individuals and collectively through our culture. And they do so using the uniquely meaningful properties of interactive games.

These are games that have something to say that can’t be said in other media.

These are the games that are pushing human culture forward.

Live and Let Die

So, what started as an experiment by Ben over at Sometimes Life Requires Consequence is starting to pick up steam. It's been tagged a couple times now at Game Set Watch and Kieron Gillen over at Rock Paper Shotgun blasted some buckshot his way in today's Sunday Papers. Already at least a couple other players have taken up the 'challenge' and are trying the same thing. In at least one case, some form of tragedy has ensued (and in some ways the nature of that tragedy is the subject of this post.)

Not to steal Ben's thunder, but here's some history on how these 'permadeath' playthroughs began.

Last month, Manveer and I got into a debate about how to design more meanginful and emotionally engaging games. On one branch of that discussion, Manveer had suggested designing a game to make certain decisions irreversible. I was opposing that approach on the grounds that it was relying on what I feel are narrative tools (in particular irreversibility and inevitability).

I was suggesting that - while we could of course make games more emotionally engaging using narrative tools, I feel we ought to be pursuing (possibly exclusively but at least primarily) the application of ludic tools to this same end. My reasoning is that by leveraging narrative tools the most engaging emotional moments we will create are equivalent to those of narrative media (like film or literature) - whereas by leveraging ludic tools, we can discover something new which is potentially more powerful, more deeply affecting, and more honestly and powerfully about the human condition.

On a lark, Ben (who I currently rank as the #2 all-time Far Cry 2 fan - but watch out Chris, he's catching up quick) took the abstract discussion and literalized it in most spectacular fashion. He is now playing Far Cry 2 under self-imposed 'permadeath'. No reloading allowed - a la oldskool Iron Man Modes of play - with the ultimate consequence being that if he dies, that's it: game over. He will wipe his save game and that's the end of that.

Needless to say - this has the effect of making every decision he makes 'irreversible'. It means that if he decides to keep a buddy - say Frank Bilders - on stand-by to rescue him if he gets overwhealmed in battle, then Frank may well be mortally wounded during any rescue attempt.

With Frank lying on the ground, shaking from a sucking chest wound as his blood seeps into rusty African soil, Ben will pick up his friend and cradle him in his arms... and then what will he do? Frank will ask Ben to inject him with a syrette. The angry shouts of APR reinforcements will be cutting through the jungle canopy getting louder... closer. And when Ben gives him an injection and Frank asks for another... and another... what will happen? Will Ben use his last syrettes to euthanize Frank? Will he save his valuable syrettes and use a bullet instead? Will he abandon Frank to whatever grim fate awaits him if the APR finds him lying helpless in the grass?

The decisions that Ben will make in these moments will be real decisions. It will be just like life, and from it, Ben will feel something real.

Or will he?

Something is very ironic about all of this....

In fact, the design of Far Cry 2 already innately supports the emotional dilemmas described above. We made it that way on purpose - it was the entire point of the Buddy system - to design an 'out of frying pan, into the fire' system where the player would be baited further and further down a losing path until he ultimately would occasionally be required to make a choice between giving up a limited though not overly rare 'resource' (a buddy) in exchange for not having to reload and redo a lengthy section of the game. Then the limited resource would be 'disguised' as a real human character and the decision of the player to abandon (or 'deny') the resource would be dressed up in classic filmic costume of 'loyal ally dies in your arms'.

Players would cry.

The existing design of the Buddy system in Far Cry 2 in some sense is a (soft) solution to Manveer's call for a design that makes certain decisions permanent and allows players to feel 'real' emotional consequence. Yet at the same time, this focus on designing meaning that arises from narrative-like structures is something I am now opposing. Why? Well, in the end, I think that even if we made a hundredfold improvement in the design and realization of the buddy system in Far Cry 2, the very best we could ever achieve in terms of making players feel the death of a buddy in a real and honest way would be equivalent to what they felt when Wade died in Saving Private Ryan.

It's worth noting that even reading a detached description of the plot points of the film that detail what happened to Wade is more moving than having a buddy die in your arms in Far Cry 2, so we have a lot of room for improvement and maybe going down that path is a good idea.

But I am conceptually opposed to going too far down this path of using narrative techniques - not because we can't make our games much more emotionally engaging than they are currently - but because we already know the limits of this approach. By mastering these narrative techniques and wedding them to our designs (as we did with the Buddy System in Far Cry 2 - but better) we can arrive at Saving Private Ryan. What that means is that 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, we will deliver a brand new entertainment medium that is as powerful and moving as one we already have. That's great, I guess. But if I am going to dedicated my life this, I want to end up with something that is more, something that is better than what we have now. (There is another branch to this argument which has to do with the potential real-world irreversibility of going down this path, which is basically what happened to the comics industry, but that's a different debate that I am not going to go here.)

All that said - there is something much more important happening with Ben's 'permadeath' experiment. There is something happening at a higher level that is more than just him embracing a narrative constraint to make his playthrough more emotionally moving.

There is at least one more level of irony here that goes to the core of the future I am looking for.

Ultimately, when I reject narrative techniques in favor of ludic ones, what I am really saying is that I reject traditional authorship. I reject the notion that what I think you will find emotionally engaging and compelling - and then build and deliver to you to consume - is innately superior to what you think is emotionally compelling. By extension, I reject the idea that I can make you feel the loss of a friend in a more compelling way by authoring an irreversible system than you could make yourself feel by playing with a system wherein a friend can be both dead and alive simultaneously and wherein his very existence can be in flux based on your playful whim.

What I am saying at a higher level of abstraction is that meaning does not come from playing a game... it comes from playing WITH a game. It is the manipulation not only of the actors in the game that is meaningful, but the manipulation of the game itself. This discussion is not about how to make a game more meaningful. It is about how games mean.

The irony then is this:

The reason I think people are paying attention to what Ben is doing is not because he is having a more emotionally engaging narrative experience. It is not because he is playing the game in a more serious way in order to experience more serious emotions.

It's not that people suddenly want to know what will happen within the fiction of the game - I'll tell you what will happen - the third time any Buddy is downed in combat he will not be able to be revived and the player will be systemically forced to choose between shooting the buddy (he will be automatically given a pistol to enable this decision if he does not already have one), euthanizing the buddy with syrettes (it takes three and he may not have enough, potentially elminating this decision possibility), abandoning the Buddy (which means he will not die and will show up in the end to get his revenge), or reloading the game (which Ben has self-denied).

The reason I think people are paying attention is because Ben is playing with the game. He is manipulating the game itself. He is playing with the magic circle. He is looking at all sides of it like a Rubik's Cube and even taking the cube apart in order to see how it is built and what are its underlying immutable rules. It is here that people start to pay attention. It is here that Ben is being moved by his experience. It is here that others, too, care about what happens... not to Frank, but to Ben, and to the game itself. They care about what can happen to Frank. The are invested in the expressive possibility space enabled by the game. They care about the real immutable limits of the question and about the limits arbitrarily imposed by the save game system, and by Ben's willful rejigging of the magic circle to exclude it. They care, now, about the Ben/Frank/Far Cry 2 system which is something real. They don't care about whether Frank Bilder's lives or dies... because that is an illusion and they know it.

Effectively, by attempting to experience the meaning that arises from adding irreversibility to Far Cry 2 and taking away one of the things he was allowed to play with, Ben is playing with the game more, not less. It is not the combination of Far Cry 2 + authored narrative irreversibility that is making the permadeath experiment meaningful to Ben and to others, it is the the fact that he is able to manipulte the game to create this experiment that is bringing meaning.

My belief is that it is this manipulation of a game's systems that allows us to understand and feel what a game means... not a better implementation and realization of its embedded authored narratives. My fear is that it has taken us too long to figure this out; that those on the authored narrative side have already won... that the next Call of Duty will make me cry when Wade dies in my arms, and it will make you cry when he dies in your arms, and it will make everyone cry when he dies in their arms in exactly the same irreversible, inevitable way it has happened since Achilles irreversibly, inevitably died.

And we will love it.

And we'll stop asking what could have been.

(and I'll go work in film....)

GDC09 - Part 1 - GDW and Family Dynamics

Here begins my long slow recap of GDC wherein I will ultimately get around to posting all of my various slides and presentation materials, as well as different commentary on the sessions I saw and what I thought was valuable about GDC this year.

First up is my quick recap of the Game Design Workshop tutorial. The GDW this year was the best yet, even eclipsing last years. It seemed a little smaller, but that might just be because we (ie: Mahk) were better organized and there were some structural changes that made it run more smoothly (I think I foolishly resisted making those changes last year... my bad).

It's clear to me (and not just from GDC) that the quality of students, new grads and recently-employed game developers is going up rapidly. I am pretty sure the rest of the GDW 'faculty' agrees with me on this. It is humbling - even a little bit intimidating - to see these smart new people rolling in and showing us that they have already learned much (or all) of the theory that underpins the workshop... good thing it's not a talky thing - but rather a practical, hands-on thing, or we'd be outta business (whether we all end up out of business in the broader sense remains to be seen).

 

Speaking of practical and hands-on, above is one of the groups that signed up for my elective 'Family Dynamics'. Family Dynamics is an exercise that asks each team to take a random graph which represents the relationship between two unnamed variables (ie: a mechanic) and a random word from a heavily loaded list of things related to families (ie: an aesthetic) and attempt to join the two using limited materials and their own design sensibilities.

The above team made a game about 'impotence' using a two-part graph that plotted (what they defined as) fertility and a progression through three-stages of emotional and physical arousal to try and explore how it might feel to struggle to conceive a child under the pressures that can build up in a family relationship over time.

It was an excruciatingly difficult exercise, I think, and not all of the teams made it through. The point is not really to succeed, though - it's to learn and I hope everybody did. Either way, whatever I come up with next year will likely be a bit less insane.

If you have any interest in reviewing the exercise materials, or in replicating the exercise yourself, feel free to download the parts I am able to make available, over on the left.

Here's lookin' at you - algorithm...

Two interesting links floated around work in the last couple days. Both related to visualizations of information or information processes.

One was this beautiful work being done by Alex Dragulescu at MIT Media Lab where he is feeding patterns from software viruses into 3D software to create visual representations of what they 'look like'... and I have to say they are very... viroid... be sure to look at the full size images.

The other was this cool web-based chess program that shows you what the computer is thinking. Go play a game. At first you might think 'so what - this doesn't enlighten me much, it's just pretty...' but play a WHOLE game. These screenshots show how the patterns of chess evolve over the course of a single game. It's fascinating actually seeing how the huge complex patterns break up somewhat quickly into overlapping patterns of lines of attack, and then devolve into tight defensive rids and huge sweeping lines for the losing and winning sides respectively.

What I wonder is if this information would be useful in teaching certain kinds of people - people with certain ways of thinking - how to play better chess. It certainly offers an alternate abstraction of the information that we get from observing a chess board. One feature I would like is for the creator to allow you to set up any board position you like - or even to feed entire games to the brain and see the patterns for each board position. This might allow a rich and interesting analysis of classic chess games and might offer interesting insights into how and why certain strategies work. Maybe I should fire a mail off to the ChessMaster team and get them to hire this guy and integrate this. That would be cool.

Anyway - beautiful stuff - these two things made my day.

GDC 2008 - Part Two - Game Design Workshop

So this year Mark Leblanc invited me to join the faculty of the Game Design Workshop. The GDW is the 2-day Tutorial that runs on the Monday and Tuesday prior to 'GDC-proper' where we conduct a series of design excercises to familiarize designers (or anyone) with important design concepts like paper prototyping, fast iteration, and the MDA framework as a model for looking at, thinking and talking about design.

I attended the GDW for the first time back in 2006 and loved it. I swore up and down I would go every year, but of course I was super busy come 2007 and couldn't. I was planning on attending this year when I got got asked on board the faculty and jumped at the chance.

Ultimately, as much as I got out of it as an attendee (which was a LOT) I honestly think I got even more out of it as a faculty member. Seeing so many people wrestle with challenging design problems was not only enlightening and will certainly make me better at my job, it was also very inspiring. Some of the excercises are HARD and I frequently found myself thinking - "fuck that's really difficult - they're all gonna give up before they get half-way" - but not only do the participants rise to the challenge, they typically output very impressive results. And they do so with a positive attitude. They work together. They challenge one another. They put the team and their ego's aside. They listen and communicate critically and effectively.

Why can't school be like that?

Speaking of challenges I didn't expect anyone to rise up to, my own elective was (I think) particularly brutal. Here's how it went.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Participants were broken into groups of about 4-7 people. Each group was given 1 standard deck of playing cards (52 cards plus 2 jokers). Included in each deck was a slip of paper with one of the Seven Deadly Sins written on it and a brief definition (ripped more or less from Wikipedia) of the sin. The Seven Deadly Sins are Greed, Wrath, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth and Pride.

The excercise was to use only the cards, and to design a game that enabled the players of the game to experience - through the mechanics and dynamics of the game - the sin in question. In an hour.

To be honest, I expected only a couple teams would even come up with a game at all, and that exactly zero of them would succeed in making a game that captured the essence of the sin they were going for. In fact, almost every team came up with a working game, and I would say about half of them had a game that made a significant step toward reaching the experience they were shooting for. A couple of them had very compelling designs. One in paticular has stuck with me, and I will share it (as I understood it).

Gluttony

I think there were two gluttony teams, but one of them in particular came up with a game that really surprised me. The rules as I remember them were this:

• The game supports about 2-6 players. I think 4 is probably ideal.
• Deal each player 3 cards.
• Place the remainder of the deck face down in the center of the table.
• The first player flips a card face up from the deck.
• Any player who has a matching number in his hand can slap the card down on top of the flipped pile. If he is first to do so, he gets that card (and every card underneath).
• The next player flips a card from the deck.
• Repeat until the deck is gone.
• The winner is the player with the most cards in his hand when the deck is gone.

Some kind of timer or a way to put pressure for a pace seems to be necessary (they were still wrestling with this as they wrapped up the excercise). Another option would be to have an independant 'referee' flip over one card from the deck every 2-3 seconds to enforce a pace.

Why does this game work?

Well, in my opinion, any game in which you are rewarded for getting as much of something as possible could be a game about gluttony (or greed for that matter). What I felt was important - and shocking - about this game is that the dynamics of the game are in conflict with the mechanics of the game in a way that makes players feel the 'sin' of gluttony. The dynamics, in a sense, make a moral statement about the mechanics.

When I have 3 cards, and a card that matches one of my cards is flipped, it is very easy for me to parse my three cards, and slap a matching card down on the pile. I am quick because I am 'light'. As I accumulate cards, it takes longer for me to parse my hand and find a card that matches the card just flipped. My reactions are slowed, and consequently my ability to compete with the other players is reduced as I get 'fat'.

Essentially they used a negative feedback loop where the mechanics feed back into the dynamics to cause players in the lead to have a harder time maintaining their lead. The dynamics (players parsing their accumulating hands, finding a match, and slapping it down on the table) are being 'leveraged against the mechanics' to give the game a meaning that speaks to our common moral understanding of gluttony.

The timer they were trying to impose was a response to a weakness in the design they were wrestling with. Without a timer to keep the pressure on they observed players sorting their collected cards - effectively allowing the fatter players to continue to parse their hands as quickly as the thinner players. This had the consequence of working against the meaning. So the team was working to impose a mechanic (forced tempo of play) that would ensure the accumulation of cards became a handicap for the fat players instead of an advantage (messy disordered cards in a chaotic arrangement are signifcantly harder to parse for matches than are ordered cards).

Anyway - as simple as the game is, I think it was a beautiful and elegant solution to a problem that I didn't think anyone would solve.

I think it also provides insight into some of the questions people have asked me regarding my rant thesis - that "the mechanics of trust are not harder to model than the mechanics of rope". Lots of people have lots of qood questions about that. The answer to the vast majority of questions is simply - go and make a game about trust using only a deck of cards and you will find a mountain of fascinating insights into what trust means and how it can be modelled mechanically - then, if you want, you can make a AAA FPS where trust of your squadmates is an actual mechanic in the game.

The GDW teaches us (at least it taught me) that in games more than anywhere else, we learn by doing. Try it, fail. Fix it a bunch of times. Strive to reach a testable aesthetic goal. After a while, you may find your approach sucks. Start again. In a matter of days you can iterate through dozens, even hundreds of mechanical models of whatever you are trying to say with your game. This will help you understand what you are trying to say about trust, duty, honor, gluttony or whatever the fuck you think is important. Once you have a handle on what you want to say, and you are familiar with some mechanics that can lead toward delivering it, you can wrestle with the slower and harder-to-iterate problems of building computer-based dynamics that work with those mechanics to make the player experience those feelings.

Anyway - the GDW was a big, big highlight of the conference for me. To those who were there, I hope you found it rewarding. To those considering attending, I hope to see you next year whether I am invited back on the faculty or whether I am participating myself.

GDC 2008 - Part One - My Slides

Finally got around to posting my slides from both the Game Designer's Rant and my Immersion talk. You can grab them over on the right along with all the presentations I have ever done. You don't need my permission to give these presentations to your coworkers or students or do whatever the hell you want with them.

I'm very pleased at the feedback and the criticism I've received from both talks, which I will summarize briefly here.

The Rant

It seems like the feedback from the Rant is overwhelmingly positive. I am kind of surprised by that. I expected a few more people to at least challenge the premise that we can make games about concepts like honor or trust. It seems like only a year ago (never mind five) people who suggested such a thing were considered a little bit weird. Last year - putting forth similiar ideas in my exploration talk - I think there were still a lot of people who thought those ideas were a bit flakey and out of touch with production reality. Now it seems like we are ready to simply accept as a fact that we can make games about these sorts of feelings and ideas and get on with the challenging business of doing so. A lot can change in year in terms of our attitude. Let's hope as much can change in a year in terms of our execution.

For those looking for other ranter's slides and materials - I found Jane McGonigal's stuff here. If you find others let me know.

Immersion

There seem to be three camps in terms of how the immersion talk is received.

The first camp seems to have found it an inspiring and insightful talk and were apparently more than willing to overlook the (many) omissions, errors in reasoning, and lack of structural support for some of the bolder arguments. Apparently there is a lot to be said for covering up the faults in your reasoning with Kirk-and-Spock jokes. To those in the first camp, I would suggest you read a bit deeper and look for some of the flaws - they can be illuminating. Immersion seems to be a powerful tool that is easy to use badly or for the wrong reasons. This talk was never intended to be a promotion of immersion (neither a criticism) but rather a deconstruction and examination of immersion and the techniques used to induce it as formal tools. An excellent starting point for looking deeper into immersion is Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen, which was an invaluable resource for me in preparing the talk (in particular refer to Unit 3: Play, Games as the Play of Simulation) - thanks Eric and Katie.

The second camp seems to have caught on to the weaknesses to a greater or lesser extent, but has been generous in attribution of value to the talk as a whole. Quite a few people have said they thought I was 'cheating' my reasoning in a number of places but were nonetheless happy to have any kind of formal examination of a topic that we too often take for granted and pin to the wall as a project objective without consideration for what it means. If nothing has been accomplished with this talk aside from helping this group of people avoid some of the mistakes I have made blindly in the past, I'm more than happy to accept their grace in excusing the weaknesses of the talk. Thanks for not kicking me when I was down. This camp could be called the 'glass-is-half-full' camp.

The third camp would then be the 'glass-is-half-empty' camp - and that's the camp I would put myself into. We are the ones who wanted this talk to be more than it was. We wanted it to be 55 minutes long instead of 35 minutes long. We wanted it to have a middle where the loosely formalized tools of the first part were examined in context and used to expose where existing games may have stumbled or excelled in their application of immersion. We wanted all of that to fit together well enough to justify a hand-wavey ending that - if it can be compellingly demonstrated - is in fact a really, really important notion.

I have spoken to many of the camp three people at length and they have helped me see how and where the talk falls short. A number of interesting suggestions were made as to how I might tie off some of the squirting arteries dangling from the disembodied heart of the talk. For now I'll just pinch them off and toss that heart back into the simmering cauldron of my subconcious where it can stew for a while and maybe eventually I can patch the talk with the middle that it probably deserves. Anyway, thanks especially to the group three folks for kicking me when I was down... you can never see the root of a problem until your head has been thoroughly stamped into the dirt.

I'll try to follow-up over the week with some more of my thoughts about GDC as a whole. 

Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock

The problem of what the game is about

About a year ago, I praised Ian Bogost's critique of Bully and lamented the unfortunate lack of game criticism, as distinct from game reviews. Roughly speaking, we could say game criticism is for game developers and professionals who want to think about the nature of games and what they mean. Game reviews are for the public – for people who play games – and they are intended to help those people make decisions about which games they should buy. Both are valuable and important contributions, but sadly, we seem to only have one.

So this is not going to be a review of Bioshock. If you want a review of Bioshock go here. This is going to be a critique of Bioshock – a limited one perhaps, because I don’t have the time to really give this game the 50,000 plus word critical examination I think it deserves, but it will be a critique nonetheless.

Before I tear into it though, I want to apologize to the folks who worked on the game. If this was a review, it would be glowing, but as a critique it’s going to be pretty rough. I mostly really enjoyed this game, and aside from a few minor quibbles that are inevitable coming from a guy who lists System Shock 2 as his favorite game of all time, I basically think the game is great. In a very important sense Bioshock lives up the expectations created by its ancestor by inviting us to ask important and compelling questions, which is wonderful. But unfortunately, in most cases, I think the answers Bioshock provides to those questions are confused, frustrating, deceptive and unsatisfactory.

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game’s narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player’s ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.

So what is the form of this dissonance and why does it shatter the internal consistency of the work so totally?

Bioshock is a game about the relationship between freedom and power. It is at once (and among other things) an examination and a criticism of Randian Objectivism. It says, rather explicitly, that the notion that rational self-interest is moral or good is a trap, and that the ‘power’ we derive from complete and unchecked freedom necessarily corrupts, and ultimately destroys us.

The game begins by offering the player two contracts.

One is a ludic contract – literally ‘seek power and you will progress’. This ludic contract is in line with the values underlying Randian rational self-interest. The rules of the game say ‘it is best if I do what is best for me without consideration for others’. This is a pretty standard value in single player games where all the other characters in the game world (or at very least all of the characters in play in the game world) tend to be in direct conflict with the player. However, it must be pointed out that Bioshock goes the extra mile and ties this game mechanical contract back to the narrative in spectacular fashion through the use of the Little Sisters. By ‘dressing up’ the mechanics of this contract in well realized content I literally experience what it means to gain by doing what is best for me (I get more Adam) without consideration for others (by harvesting Little Sisters).

Thus, the ludic contract works in the sense that I actually feel the themes of the game being expressed through mechanics. The game literally made me feel a cold detachment from the fate of the Little Sisters, who I assumed could not be saved (or even if they could, would suffer some worse fate at the hands of Tenenbaum). Harvesting them in pursuit of my own self-interest seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice. This is exactly what this game needed to do – make me experience – feel – what it means to embrace a social philosophy that I would not under normal circumstances consider.

To be successful, the game would need to not only make me somehow adopt this difficult philosophy, but then put me in a pressure-cooker where the systems and content slowly transform the game landscape until I find myself caught in the aforementioned ‘trap’. Unfortunately, when we take the first, ludic contract and map it to the game’s second contract, the game falls apart.

The game’s second contract is a narrative contract – ‘help Atlas and you will progress’. There are three fundamental problems with this being the narrative contract of the game.

First, this contract is not in line with the values underlying Randian rational self-interest; ‘helping someone else’ is presented as the right thing to do by the story, yet the opposite proposition appears to be true under the mechanics.

Second, Atlas is openly opposed to Ryan, yet again, as mentioned above, I am philosophically aligned with Ryan by my acceptance of the mechanics. Why do I want to stop Ryan, or kill him, or listen to Atlas at all? Ryan’s philosophy is in fact the guiding principle of the mechanics that I am experiencing through play.

Thirdly, I don’t have a choice with regards to the proposition of the contract. I am constrained by the design of the game to help Atlas, even if I am opposed to the principle of helping someone else. In order to go forward in the game, I must do as Atlas says because the game does not offer me the freedom to choose sides in the conflict between Ryan and Atlas.

This is a serious problem. In the game’s mechanics, I am offered the freedom to choose to adopt an Objectivist approach, but I also have the freedom to reject that approach and to rescue the Little Sisters, even though it is not in my own (net) best interest to do so (even over time according to this fascinating data).

Yet in the game’s fiction on the other hand, I do not have that freedom to choose between helping Atlas or not. Under the ludic contract, if I accept to adopt an Objectivist approach, I can harvest Little Sisters. If I reject that approach, I can rescue them. Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan, and if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach – well too bad… I can stop playing the game, but that’s about it.

That’s the dissonance I am talking about, and it is disturbing. Now, disturbing is one thing, but let’s just accept for a moment that we forgive that. Let’s imagine that we say ‘well, it’s a game, and the mechanics are great, so I will overlook the fact that the story is kind of forcing me to do something out of character…’. That’s far from the end of the world. Many games impose a narrative on the player. But when it is revealed that the rationale for why the player helps Atlas is not a ludic constraint that we graciously accept in order to enjoy the game, but rather is a narrative one that is dictated to us, what was once disturbing becomes insulting. The game openly mocks us for having willingly suspended our disbelief in order to enjoy it.

The feeling is reminiscent of the Ikea commercial where we are mocked for feeling sorry for the lamp. But instead of being tricked by a quirky 60 second ad, we are mocked after a 20 hour commitment for having sympathy for the limitations of a medium. The ‘twist’ in the plot is a dues ex machina built upon the very weaknesses of game stories that we – as players – agree to accept in order to have some sort of narrative framework to flavor our fiddling about with mechanics. To mock us for accepting the weaknesses of the medium not only insults the player, but it’s really kind of ‘out of bounds’ (except as comedy or as a meta element – of which it appears to be neither).

Now, I understand the above criticism is harsh, and also that it is built upon complex arguments, so let me clarify a few things.

First, this is not a review. If it was, I would be raving (mostly) about the interesting abilities, fun weapons, beautiful environments, engaging enemy ‘eco-system’, freedom of choice, openness to explore, and a mountain of other fantastic things. But I’m not talking about all of the reasons players should play this game and all of the reasons they will certainly enjoy it. I am talking about the fabric of the game. I am talking about the nature of the game at the most fundamental levels that I can perceive. I am talking about weaknesses that I see (or more importantly that I feel) when I become deeply drawn into the game and really experience what is being expressed in its systems and content.

Second, the points I am making may seem trivial or bizarre to a lot of people, and certainly the arguments the points are built on are complicated. I am sure they are hard for many game developers to understand and impossible for laymen. Honestly – I only partially understand what I am experiencing when I play a game as thoroughly as I played BioShock, and frankly I only half understand what I am saying as I write this. With the ‘language of games’ being as limited as it is, understanding what I am ‘reading’ is hard, and trying to articulate it back to people in a useful way is a full order of magnitude harder.

So take this criticism for what it is worth. It is the complaint of a semi-literate, half-blind Neanderthal, trying to comprehend the sandblasted hieroglyphic poetry of a one-armed Egyptian mason.

Not long ago – in my rebuttal to Ebert – I asserted that GTA: San Andreas was a more important work of art than Crash. Now, I’m not going to bother to announce that BioShock is a work of art. I will, however, point to another often used film-game comparison… the one that states that games do not yet have their Citizen Kane. Similarities between Orson Welles and Andrew Ryan aside, BioShock is not our Citizen Kane. But it does – more than any game I have ever played – show us how close we are to achieving that milestone. BioShock reaches for it, and slips. But we leave our deepest footprints when we pick ourselves up from a fall. It seems to me that it will take us several years to learn from BioShock’s mistakes and create a new generation of games that do manage to successful marry their ludic and narrative themes into a consistent and fully realized whole. From that new generation of games, perhaps the one that is to BioShock as BioShock is to System Shock 2 will be our Citizen Kane.