Click Nothing

Convergence Culture

Part Eight: Future Past

Seven months ago when I started writing this column, I suspected the things I would be talking about were mostly wishful thinking. The idea that an increasingly entrenched game industry would see value in connecting casual, social or mobile gamers to their blockbuster AAA titles through meaningful gameplay seemed likely to fall by the wayside in favour of more aggressive exploitation of insidiously monetized shovel ware. How could developers – constantly understaffed and struggling to make every deadline – ever find the time to build a Facebook or iPhone game that would meaningfully link casual players to their fifty million dollar Christmas release if they couldn't find the time to make their Beta?

The World of Warcraft Armoury has been around for quite a while, but let’s face it: Blizzard can afford to put a man on the moon if they want, so they’re not much of a model for the rest. Various Spore browser apps allow you to look at the Sporepedia on a mobile device, but these offer no gameplay, and aren’t even built by EA. The best that the year’s biggest releases could muster – like Modern Warfare 2 – were fan made game guides and various utilities for mobile devices that allowed you to find Intel Drops, know what Perks and Kill Streak Rewards were coming and read some map strategies. None of these things were meaningfully linking different groups of players to a single unified experience.

I wasn't my only non-believer, either. I received plenty of emails skeptical of the idea that some 40 year old executive might want to manage a crime family from his Android phone, and in doing, drive a component of the open world urban crime game his son was playing. More openly hostile emails condemned me for selling out to the marketing vampires I identified in the intro for suggesting we could do everything I was suggesting profitably, while others accused me of undermining the ultimate goal of building the perfect immersive simulation of everything.

But while my pipe-dreams and prognostications may remain heretical for some, they might also end up coming true. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – developed by my esteemed former co-workers – has done a fantastic job of opening the door for a huge audience of casual and social gamers to peer into the amazing world of Renaissance Italy and the life of Ezio. I had no idea AC: Legacy was being developed, but it achieves many of the things I suggested months ago (and in many ways better than I imagined – which is no surprise knowing who was involved). This is an important first step toward the future that I’m talking about because it challenges the notion that the kinds of fantasies gamers are interested in are inaccessible to a broad audience. We may have always suspected that the fantasy of Assassin’s Creed had a broad appeal beyond the existing audience of a few million hardcore gamers – but we couldn’t prove it. Now we can. Now we will be able to measure the appeal of that fantasy to a real audience.

Dust 514 – though still in development – openly attempts to link two of the most hardcore audiences of gamers out there: competitive online FPS players and dedicated PvP MMO players. While the potential scope of this intramedia link is smaller than that which would connect Assassin’s Creed on console to Facebook gamers, the data will be just as interesting and important. Will an audience of ‘me first’ shooter players accept the cascade of consequences that emerge from the proposed design? Will they – for example – willingly engage in a battle they can’t win to achieve the strategic goal of a group of players in EVE? Will EVE players be willing to leave their best laid invasion plans in the hands of a bunch of bickering fourteen year-olds with hyper-conductive nervous systems? Is the patience and ruthless plotting of the EVE community compatible with the twitchy thirst for chaos of an FPS community?

And perhaps the most important question raised by these games is whether or not the connection between different audiences will act as a gateway between the games. Will people who have never played a console game give Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood a chance if they are invested in Legacy? Will ageing shooter fans invested in Dust 514 decide to give EVE a try as their reflexes fail them and they fall under the curve?

Before this article ever sees print we'll have answers to these and other questions, and developers will already be hard at work on a second wave of games that strive to do even more than I imagined. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet."

Convergence Culture

Part Seven: Agency Beyond the Magic Circle

For the past six months, I have been writing about ways to build connections between different games, and by extension, their audiences. I've imagined fashion design games for portable platforms that feed clothing designs to open world games where avatar clothing customization matters. I've imagined social world building games whose player-authored environments become playable levels used in action adventure games. I've imagined players of organization management games popping on to their mobile devices intermittently throughout the day to allocate resources and assign missions which are then subscribed to by real players playing action games. But all of these imaginary connections beg a fundamental and challenging question; if the interesting results of my decisions and choices are happening in someone else's game - why should I care?

Agency is the ability of the player to take meaningful action in a game and to witness the results of his decisions and choices. I believe that agency is the very stuff of games. It is fundamentally tied to how games mean, to why we play them, and to why they matter to us as individual players and as participants in the human cultural landscape. Have I imagined my way into a future where games are all interconnected in such a way that the feedback (the 'witnessing the results' part) has been cordoned off from the players who need it in order to feel the agency that makes games matter?

The short answer is, I don't think so. On the contrary, I think that - done properly - we not only protect the traditional feelings of agency we appreciate (and depend upon), but we also generate feelings of agency in new ways and along new and different axes. To properly achieve this, there are three basic requirements for designing games that cross over and interconnect in the ways I have described.

First, the internal agency of each game must be protected. Players must still be able to see the results of their decisions and choices within their own game as a standalone experience. An example of a game that has done this poorly is Farmville. When I give a gift to someone, the gift is always an abstract object. A separate screen that allows me to send a Red Christmas Tree to my nephew is totally meaningless. The gift costs me nothing, and the tree itself isn't even really a tree, but is instead a picture of the tree. The tree would be more meaningful to me if it appeared in my world and clicking on it gave me the option to gift it. Even better from an internal agency standpoint would be if I could click on anything on my farm and gift it directly. This would give me more meaningful attachment to the objects I was gifting, even if the cost of gifting was still zero. This is not to dismiss some real design challenges that such a change brings, but the fact remains that gifting in Farmville does not feel meaningful.

The second criteria is that of strong reporting. If I use a crafting mobile application to run a shop that is instanced in the open world RPGs of my friends, I need more information than 'Joe bought a Diamond Pickaxe for 100 Gold'. I only feel the agency internal to my own game as it reports the results of my decision to sell a Pickaxe. Better would be if I could fetch detailed reporting on what Joe does with my Pickaxe. Better still would be if that information could be used to help me improve my future crafting of Pickaxes. This would not only enhance my feelings of agency in knowing how the Pickaxe I crafted was meaningful - but the experiencing of that agency would also be of benefit to me.

The third requirement is that we better facilitate player-to-player reporting. Many of my own greatest moments in gaming have been made even more wonderful and meaningful to me when relating them to friends. Today, the internet is overflowing with thirty second video clips of these spectacular and improbable moments. Leaving players to email each other about the wonderful things they've done with a gifted Red Christmas Tree or purchased Diamond Pickaxe is making it too hard, and we can do better.

A brute force approach to this would be to design your game to constantly record and overwrite the last sixty seconds of play, saving it aside on demand for editing or immediate upload and sharing. While non-trivial to implement, this approach could facilitate the kind of player-to-player sharing and communication crucial to ensuring that players are able to feel their agency across the boundaries between games. This makes agency a collaborative and social emotion capable of connecting diverse audiences across widely different games.

Convergence Culture

Part Four: An offer that can't be refused

Thought Experiment One: imagine Pong, tweaked to be more exciting. Instead of showing the AI paddle on the other side of the screen, we hide from the player everything that happens over the center line. An elegant pacing algorithm tracks the players returns and the score of the game, and fakes everything that happens over the line in order to constantly escalate the intensity. Pong matches would be full of ever more spectacular volleys reaching increasingly extreme climaxes. Every game would be more incredible than the last - and yet, very obviously, something would be lost, and this game would suck.

Thought Experiment Two: imagine a Battlefield 2 match where both team Commanders colluded to make the match as dramatically exciting as possible for the unwitting players on the ground. The Commanders would share information to guide their respective squads into interestingly asymmetric skirmishes. They would track the score and collaborate to keep things close, ensuring things like supply drops, artillery strikes and air support always arrived at the most desperate hour. Suddenly every Battlefield 2 match would be as good as the best one you ever had (unless you discovered the collusion, in which case it would all suddenly seem very pointless).

The principle challenge in designing and building a dynamic narrative that responds to player action is not in the building of it (which is, itself, a wicked problem), but rather in the designing of it. It is, in fact, the same problem as designing Extreme Pong: that in handing over drama management to an invisible algorithm, the player has no way to know his actions are driving the story and the dynamic narrative becomes indistinguishable from an authored one - and likely not as good.

With Commander mode, Battlefield 2 hints at a way to cut the Gordian Knot: it suggests the possibility that we can outsource drama management to other players. On the one hand, playing the Commander gives strong feelings of agency and on the other, players on the ground know the difference between a high level experience that is pre-packed by a designer and one that is managed on-the-fly by a player with an agenda.

The main problem with Commander mode is that it needs to be synchronized with the main game at runtime, making it a pretty niche kind of fun. But I believe this is easily fixed by decoupling the 'game' of player controlled drama management from the low-level action game being managed. If the management game is designed to be fun as a management game instead of as a part of a low level combat game, then one player's management game becomes another player's drama manager. This is where intramedia convergence comes in.

Thought Experiment Three: imagine Mafia 2, the open world game, shipped with Mafia Wars, the mobile application as its player narrative driver. Instead of spamming all of Facebook with requests to join a mob, Mafia Wars players would try to recruit the best players of Mafia 2 to join their mobs. Players of Mafia 2 would subscribe to a handful of Mafia Wars players, who would become the warring Dons of their game world, and the missions they were sent on would have meaningful repercussions in their worlds. As one Mafia Wars Don rises to power, his influence cascades throughout the game worlds of his subscribers. As other Dons rise to challenge him, Mafia 2 players find themselves embroiled in the familial intrigue of the best mafia fiction - contracted to protect, bribed to betray, or tasked to assassinate based on the real needs of real players (who would in fact be playing a different, but connected, game).

Unlike the Extreme Pong example, the beauty of this intramedia link between two different games connected via the cloud is that players on both sides of the line know there are other players out there returning their volley. At the same time, because the players operating at the Mafia Wars level are not tied to the minute to minute play the way Commanders are in Battlefield 2, they can appreciate the game at the pace of a social, bite-sized, mobile game.

Even more important is the bridge-building between two divergent audiences. The overlap in the Venn Diagram between Mafia Wars players and Mafia 2 players is probably not great, but then neither is the overlap being proposed between their games. Your Uncle Bob from Wisconsin who plays Wii Sports with you every Thanksgiving at Grandma's probably loves Mario Puzo books and clicks away at Mafia Wars three or four times a day between meetings, and would love nothing more than to have you as his man on the ground in his ongoing feud with Mike from Accounting. And with every click the decisions he makes in his game world could be changing the landscape in yours, and vice versa.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part II

In the beginning, there was nothing

It's been a long time in coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on the Click Nothing Tour 2009.

It's going to be a long and complex one, but it should be fun. One talk, seven cities, ten days.

The talk, as detailed in a previous post, is about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.

The dates and locations, for those who might be intertested in attending, are as follows (though not all are open to the public):

Sunday, October 25th, 9:30 am
GameX Convention, Keynote
(details)

Monday, October 26th, 3:30 pm
ETC Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, October 28th, 4:00 pm
MIT, GAMBIT Game Lab
(details)

Thursday, October 29th, 6:00 pm
NYU, New York
(details pending)

Monday, November 2nd
SCAD Savannah
(details pending)

Monday, November 3rd
SCAD and IGDA Atlanta
(details)

For a walkthrough of the tour, you can drop this into Google Earth. If you're on Dopplr, friend me and you'll see the specific dates I expect to be around in which towns. If you're on Facebook and/or Twitter, friend or follow me and you'll be able to keep tabs on my frequent updates.

Since I already gave an early version of the talk at Ubi, here in Montreal, the Twitter stream for the tour and its collected talks is live if you want to listen in on #CNTour09.

Hopefully, if you had any interest at all in listening to my demented ramblings, I will be coming to somewhere vaguely near where you live - drop by and see the talk and harrass me with questions that I won't be able to answer and then we have a drink and talk less seriously.

If I'm still not coming anywhere near you or if you have to go to your cousin's wedding on the night I am passing through your city - don't worry. I am currently in the process of building out video for many of my previous talks - including this one - and I hope that over the coming months you'll have access to this material in video format that you can watch in your underwear while eating ice cream, or on your iPhone on the bus - or both.

Hope to see you somewhere between here and 32 degrees North latitude.

(No, I don't have t-shirts, but I promise if I survive this and do it again next year, I will have some made.)

iTest

So this is just a test post. Now that I have myself set up on facebook and (should be) linking all my blog posts there, and now that I have the facebook app on my iPhone, I figured I'd see if the typepad app works. Also testing with a photo just to see if it works. I basically never put images in my posts - come to think of it, I am not even sure I know how. So this is also a picture- post test. Whether it works or not I don't imagine I'll be updating my blog from my phone very often as it is not the most pleasant way to type, and without copy/paste, i'm not sure how I would set up a link - or even if it's possible. Anyway - let's see what happens.