Click Nothing

[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.

Didacticism in Game Design

There is a trend in game development that has been growing a head of steam over the last couple years, and I have some concerns about it. The trend is in support of the notion that game developers need to somehow demonstrate the maturity of their medium and of their own creative capabilities by making games that have a moral – or at least a socially responsible – message. The form this trend often takes is toward features such as morality meters and discrete moral choices at key branching points in game narratives. Now, I certainly have no problem with the ambition of developers to step up to the plate and demonstrate the maturity of the medium and their own creativity. I do, however, worry about some of the approaches.

I have talked and written in the past about a few of the numerous implementation challenges designers confront when trying to integrate these kinds of ethical decisions into gameplay – this post is not about that.

Rather than delving deeper into the questions of how we implement this sort of material – I want to back up a bit and make sure that in our attempts to design and build these new ‘socially responsible’ features into our games we are not missing the rather important prerequisite understanding of why. More importantly, I want to be sure that in our focus on ‘how to implement socially responsible messages’ we are not, in fact, directly undercutting the reason we have considered these sorts of designs in the first place – which in my view is to elevate the medium to a higher level of maturity and sophistication.

To begin with, I want to differentiate between three ideological stances:

The first – and I believe the most generally held throughout the game industry is:

“Games do not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful.”

Obviously we work in a professional climate where most people simply do not give a shit about ‘elevating the medium’ or about ‘making games that are more socially responsible’ or more specifically about integrating moral or ethical decisions into gameplay or game narrative in order to offer deeper messages to our audiences. That’s fine. If that is what you think, I encourage you to continue thinking that way. I too appreciate the thermobaric annihilation of my enemies-of-the-moment, the resultant unlocking of new perks, and the accompanying wry one-liner. You’re right – there is nothing at all wrong with games that offer only that. In fact, so many games fail to deliver on even that, that perhaps discussions about anything deeper are premature. The fact remains though that this discussion is already happening in the sense that each new game released that incorporates these sorts of features is an argument within that discussion. Some may think we should let sleeping dogs lie – but the reality is the dogs are very much awake. They are already fighting in the pit, and the ones that survive will become the breeding stock of the future. It’s fine to place your bets and enjoy the spectacle without concern for the repercussions on the future – but others of us do care which dog has his day and what the resultant new breed of man’s best friend will be like.

Essentially, I argue that the stance: ‘Games do not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful,’ is a fallacy. Properly phrased we could say that ‘a specific game does not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful,’ but the jury is definitely out on the applicability of that stance to ‘games’ in the general sense.

The other two stances I would like to identify are similar to one another in that I believe they are both concerned with the aforementioned breeding stock. The first is a top-down stance; it is goal-focused and non-prescriptive. The other is a bottom-up stance that is prescriptive and is focused on an approach.

The first, non-prescriptive stance is:

“We should endeavour to elevate the medium of games.”

The second, prescriptive stance is:

“We should elevate the medium by making games that are socially responsible.”

(okay, disclaimer time – ‘We should endeavour to elevate the medium of games’ is also prescriptive, but it is more general in the sense that it does not prescribe the means, so when I say the second stance is prescriptive, I mean that not only does it offer a prescription for what we should do (like the first), it also offers a prescription for how we should do so.)

I reject the second, prescriptive stance, and – with apologies for using film as an example – this is why:

Imagine if decades ago during the formation of United Artists, Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith had as their stated agenda that it should be the role of filmmakers to make movies that were ‘socially responsible’. Had they been as successful  (which, BTW, I suspect they would not have been), a hundred years later I believe we would have ended up with an entire medium of politically correct, didactic, sentimentalist-pandering drivel.

In fact – in the film industry, hardly anyone sets out with the explicit goal to make movies that are socially responsible – as though social responsibility is some feature that a movie needs to have. The film industry instead empowers the creatives – the directors, writers, actors, and the entire production crew – to make movies that explore things that they care deeply about… and as a result almost every movie (at least in some ways, and almost always indirectly) has some kind of socially responsible message. Even those who do explicitly set out to make films that are socially responsible (say Michael Moore) are driven by their own creative goals – not by their belief in the inherent value of socially responsible messages as a feature of film-making that would elevate the medium. Michael Moore probably never said to himself 'film would be better if those darn movies were more socially responsible'. On the contrary - I suspect he said 'a film about how darn socially irresponsible those bastards at GM are would make a great movie', and then he went out and made Roger and Me.

No one set out to make Terminator with a socially responsible message. In the end, though, the fundamental underlying takeaway of Terminator is that love is an unstoppable force for human salvation. This is because ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ is a message all people care deeply about. 'Unstoppable killing robot' is a message that ten percent of people care deeply about. Perhaps, in certain cultures (like ours), you need those ten percent to leverage the rest of the population, but if you only have unstoppable killing robots, you only get the ten percent. In the film industry, this is potentially a failure. That said, clearly Cameron did not set out with the explicit goal to make a movie whose message was ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ – rather, he set out to make an awesome movie about unstoppable killing robots, and in order to do so in a way that was creatively meaningful to him and resonant with a significant audience, he chose more general, more human, more socially relevant themes for the indestructible titanium skeleton of his unstoppable killing robot opus.

It is not the role of games nor should it be the role of games to be socially responsible, nor should it be the role of game creators to attempt to be didactic by instructing people how to live, how to think or how to behave. Unfortunately, this is what the discussion on the social responsibility of games tends to boil down to these days: a surface level discussion on how to add features that have moral messages so players can learn morality. We’re too often attempting to add the indestructible titanium skeleton of social responsibility as a feature-focused afterthought to a package of vat-grown meat that too frequently resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Many recent games too quickly and too often reach for moments of ‘morality dilemma’ as a feature to position or differentiate themselves as titles that have some deeper message about the human condition. To me, this approach not only risks didacticism but – worse – is potentially a risky step back from the more systemic messaging of earlier generations of games.

By removing the (weakly) systematized representation of morality such as exists in a game like Ultima IV (for example), and exchanging it for discrete moments of realization intensive story branching based on single (or few) decisions we risk reducing the breathtaking complexity of human morality down to a marketing bullet point. By ensuring there is one neatly contained morality puzzle per hour or per level of real gameplay, and preferably having one big important one at the third act climax we do a terrible disservice to the beautiful nuance of the human condition. We strip away everything that is important about morality (its complexity, nuance and irresolvability) and replace it with a conveniently contrived idiocy that espouses a message.

As McLuhan says: the medium is the message. When canned, discrete moral choices are rendered in games with such simplicity and lack of humanity, the message we are sending is not the message specific to the content in question (the message in the canned content might be quite beautiful – but it’s not a ludic message) – it is the message inherent in the form in which we’ve presented it: it effectively says that ‘being moral is easy and only takes a moment out of each hour’. To me, this is almost the opposite of the deeper appreciation of humanity we might aim to engender in our audience.

Instead of aiming to elevate the medium by making games that are more socially responsible  – which by my estimation reduces quickly down to a feature driven approach that ultimately offers little more than cheap didactic moralizing, our aim should be instead to empower our creative visionaries to explore the human condition through their work. This is a creatively driven approach which I believe will lead to people who create games being forced to think about what moves them deeply and about what they care about in life, instead of thinking about how to make their next action blockbuster sequel more socially responsible than that of a competitors action blockbuster sequel.

Believe it or not – given the time and the budget and the support – many of us would much rather be making games where we feel the unstoppable power of love as a force for human salvation, than games where yet another endless horde of terminator robots falls beneath our plasma cannons. If we hope to make games that are truly socially responsible and offer players the satisfaction of more deeply resonant messages about the human condition we must start not by looking at the feature set, but by looking to our creators. We must empower them (ie: give them the authority and the responsibility) to explore their own feelings and make games that move them deeply and reject another generic action game with a morality meter tacked on the side – because all that is, is a farce. We should be ashamed of that.

I firmly do not believe that we need to put in place some agenda to add social responsibility to games. I don’t even believe it is about having a broader domain of game development where we can make a class of low-risk, controlled margin games that are socially responsible to demonstrate our goodwill to a world increasingly doubtful of the notion that games can speak meaningfully and generally to the human condition.

It is about believing in our creators – and about empowering them to believe in themselves – and about helping them make the mature sorts of games that can speak to the other ninety percent of the population who can’t be fucking bothered with another horde of terminator bots and who are laughing at us when we tell them that between hordes of terminator bots they will have a neatly packaged ‘love is an unstoppable force for human salvation’ moral dilemma that will branch them into either fighting the red-eyed terminator robots to save the Earth or the green-eyed terminator robots to destroy the Earth for their own glory.

In short: all we need to do to start making more socially responsible games is grow up and start acting like the mature creators we hold ourselves up to be. When we have done that, we will almost by definition have made games that have embedded within them more socially responsible themes and messages which are there because they are beautiful – not because we have a didactic agenda. And in so doing, we will have elevated the entire medium.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part IV

Savannah.

It's hot here - like 25 degrees and sweltering humid. Didn't expect that as I'd been keeping an eye on the temperature in the weeks before we left, but what can you do.

So far, things have been going very well. After GameX, I did three big schools pretty much back-to-back. First was CMU in Pittsburgh, then MIT in Boston and after that, NYU in Manhattan. Each time I had the pleasure of getting different tours, meeting and talking to lots of students and seeing what they were working on, and each night following the talk, I was lucky enough to get to grab dinner with some faculty or students or local devs or all of the above. So I've gotten to see a lot of cool stuff, and meet a lot of cool people, and eat a lot of great food (dessert at Rouge Tomate - check it out if you're in NY)

The talk seems to go over well, even though it's a pretty hardcore philosophical talk. Anyway, it was really intended for Masters students, so it's not a typical 'general public' audience, and - judging by the questions that I'm getting grilled with - it shows.

Tonight, we've got tickets to the Savannah Film Festival. Sounds like we'll getto see Woody Harrelson premiere his latest film (not the zombie one). After that, another fancy dinner at The Pink House - while we watch the kids wander around trick-or-treating in their ghost town of a village.

Tomorrow I give the talk here at SCAD in Savannah, and then Tuesday I'm off to Atlanta for the last stop.

Thanks to everyone who has showed up so far, and I look forward to meeting more of you in the next few days.

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....)

The Well of Souls

This is awesome.

Somehow, someone dug up and posted the transcript of several days of discussion between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan where they conceived and developed the story for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I won't recap the post from the original blogger - get over there and read it. And then - if the post leaves you as fascinated as it left me, you can download the entire transcript of the meetings here.

(If the link breaks or is discontinued, contact me and I will point it somewhere else.)

Really, incredibly fascinating stuff. Must read for any writer or any creative working in the concept stage on anything.

Escape from City 17

This is pretty sweet.

Tracking down the creators reveals they are David and Ian Purchase - the Purchase Brothers - who seem to be a Toronto-based directing duo. They appear to be represented by Sons and Daughters agency in Toronto.

You can see their page on the Sons and Daughters site here, where their other commercials are viewable - or at least will be until traffic nukes the site... I expect this thing is going to get a lot of attention.

I wonder if they're auditioning for a medic for Episode 2?

Festival du Nouveau Cinema Presentation

So I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema here in Montreal yesterday. The theme of this years Festival was 'Immersion' and much of the Festival was devoted to exploring new techniques in displaying film (360 degree projection, 3d, etc), and as a component of the Festival they did a full day that featured presentations and panels with game designers.

I did a short (25 minute) presentation called 'The Game Designer's Toobox' which is now posted over on the right. It is a kind of 'intro the the highest level concepts of game design' and is intended for a general audience. Game dev professionals probably won't get a lot out of it, and most of the material is stuff I have talked about in much greater depth in other presentations, but for those who know little about games as a medium, maybe you'll find it interesting. For game developers, maybe you will find it useful as a reference if you are ever called on to speak in front of a more general audience.

On Authorship in Games

Not that long ago, famed film critic Roger Ebert stated that games are not, and indeed, cannot be, art.

Recently, following up on a response made by author/game convergence guy Clive Barker at the Hollywood And Games Summit, Ebert clarified his claims.

Ebert's basic argument is that art requires authorship, and that games abdicate authorship to the player, and therefore cannot be art. This is certainly a compelling and useful argument, as it strikes at the nature of our medium, not at the content we so frequently produce. Ebert is clever not to bother arguing whether or not another boring old rehash of the game where you use 24 different weapons to kill 6 different types of aliens in 18 unique levels and save mankind from annihilation is art or is not. He is going for the kill, and good for him.

As a student of the ‘school’ of design that often loudly and passionately advocates abdication of as much authorship as possible to the player, I guess I need to step up and help Ebert understand what he’s trying to say and what it means.

Ebert claims that because games – or indeed, any interactive medium, abdicate authorship to some degree to the player, that this at least diminishes, and potentially destroys the capacity of an interactive work (or at least a game) to be art. He also tugs gently at the idea that it is potentially in the interaction with the work that the artistry lies, and thus any artfulness in a game or other interactive work is not innate but rather, if it exists at all, is imbued by the audience.

Ebert is wrong for two important reasons.

First, there is authorship in games, no matter how much we abdicate. The form of the authorship is different, and hard to understand, but no matter how much we try to abdicate it, it will always remain. It is undeniably there, and it is inextricable from the act of creating a game.

Second, interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it. Therefore, while there can be an art of expression in the way someone reveals the art, this does not necessarily diminish the art in the design of the work itself.

As both Ebert and Barker acknowledge, we could debate endlessly what is and is not art, or what is and is not a valid definition of art. For the sake of argument, I will accept Ebert’s roughly stated thesis that art requires authorship. In fact, I actually agree with him. I think he just does not understand where authorship lies in games.

Here is how it works:

• I am able to express my ideas, thoughts and feelings through the design of interactive systems
• Because a game is a complete formal system, the entire possible range of outputs from those systems is determined by me
• People interact with those designed systems and receive the outputs I have determined
• People literate in the medium can reconstruct my ideas, thoughts and feelings by experiencing these outputs
• Therefore, by definition, there is an unbreakable chain between my ideas, thoughts and feelings and the player's experience – I author mechanics that yield deterministic outputs in the game dynamics that lead the player to experience the aesthetic I want them to experience (within a given tolerance)

Now – by way of clarifying this explanation as well as pre-empting some of the counter arguments, I’ll try to lay out the best and most valid ones.

The Epistemological Argument
First there is the epistemological argument – which counters by saying ‘how do you know you are able to express your thoughts and feelings in the design of interactive systems’. Believe it or not, this is the best argument, because the best rebuttal is simply to say ‘I just know it.’ You could ask ‘how do you know the sentence you are speaking is not nonsense?’. I know because I understand it. What I am expressing makes sense to me both intellectually and emotionally. If others do not understand it, it is not really a question of whether I am expressing myself, but rather one of whether I am expressing myself clearly.

Beyond the subjective epistemological edge of this argument there is a requirement that the audience be literate. Hieroglyphics can’t express anything to me, but clearly the people who wrote in them had the capacity to express themselves, and they knew it. In the end, while this is a compelling argument, it degenerates quickly to a purely epistemological one, and arguing on that front is not going to enhance anybody’s understanding of the issue of authorship in games. I’d like to think even Ebert is not interested in pursuing this argument any further.

The Argument to the Incompleteness of Authorship
The next argument is whether or not it is, in fact, true that the entire possible range of outputs from a games’ systems are really determined by me. Well, honestly, no – they are not. Games are extraordinarily complex, and there are many outputs which are not literally determined precisely by me.

If we were to conduct a sort of inverse Turing Test and put me in a room and have me attempt to return the exact same outputs (ignoring ridiculous factors such as speed and precision of calculation) to a player playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory as he or she would receive from an Xbox… well, I would fail to pass myself off as an Xbox running SC:CT. I did not write every line of code in the game, nor do I have a complete comprehension of that code. Therefore, the argument could be made that my authorship of the game is only approximate, or incomplete.

The rebuttal to this argument lies in a comparison to film or to music or to any other collaborative artistic creation. Is every single note of a symphony perfectly determined by the composer? Is every single photon of light that enters the retina of every single viewer of a film determined by a director. No. There is noise in these systems too – some of it comes from the collaboration of others, and some of it comes from random noise. We do not deny Ode to Joy its status as art because it is playfully manipulated by a conductor, nor because the 3rd clarinet breaks a reed. It is the same with games. The outputs are broadly determined by me and heavily formalized by a large crew of people working with me to deliver on a promised aesthetic. Sometimes we make mistakes, and there are bugs. Even mediocre art can tolerate this approximate or incomplete authorship, so I am forced to assert that games can too.

The Arguments from Noise and Nonsense
The next argument would be that audiences cannot reconstruct the meaning I intend them to by way of interacting with systems. At very least there is a legitimate challenge here in saying "maybe they could reconstruct it, but they can also construct so many random meanings or contrary meanings, or generally just bring so much noise into the experience as to dilute the meaning to the point where it is not legible."

This is an interesting point, but again, this is not unlike other works of art. People can watch Citizen Kane and fast-forward the ‘boring parts’. They can watch it in ten sittings or fall asleep during parts of it and forget what it’s about. This does not strip the film of its status. So, yes, I would concede that because (some) games offer the player so many ways to play, players might well ‘miss’ the meaning, but I don’t think the likeliness of missing the meaning should determine the artfulness of the work. There are some paintings hanging in far away back rooms of the Louvre that would likely take four hours of walking full speed non-stop to get to – this does not diminish their artfulness. If the audience does not participate with the work they may never perceive the art, but that does not mean it is not there.

And what about those nonsensical interactions? The argument here is similar to the one above, and suggests that people can interact with games in all kinds of silly ways that don’t support or develop the meaning the creator intends them to experience. That’s true. I can play GTA 3 purely as a racing game, without ever doing any of the non-racing missions. How does that support the game’s central meaning (which I take to be about freedom and consequence)? Well, the answer is, it doesn’t. But hold on… I can also use War and Peace to prop up the broken leg of my couch, or view Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in a pitch black room and then say I don’t get the message. The point is that the audience must always interact with a work on some level (in games, this is very literalized), but their ability to interact with a work in nonsensical ways does not diminish or destroy the art.

You could say that in the Tolstoy example, the book is not being read, and in the Warhol example, the painting is not being viewed – but in my GTA example, the game is being played… and that’s the difference. I would actually simply say that is inaccurate. When you’re only playing one tiny part of GTA, you’re not really playing it at all, any more than you are reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you are only reading the sexy bits.

The Argument from Legitimacy
Another argument against the existence of real authorship in games is the argument about the legitimacy of the kind of authorship I am talking about. In his responses to Barker, Ebert says:

“If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”

In other words, he is questioning the nature of an authorship focused on providing a single perspective, versus an authorship that affords the player a range of perspectives.

I agree with Ebert that there is a difference in these two kinds of authorship. Romeo and Juliet is one love story. The play gives us a specific and authored understanding of what Shakespeare wants us to think about love in this specific case, between these two specific characters, in this specific set of circumstances. But Ebert is wrong to suggest that games – in affording a different kind of authorship somehow do not lead to inevitable conclusions, or that they offer a simple ‘smorgasbord’ wherein ‘every emotional journey’ is somehow possible.

In a sense, the kind of authorship in a movie or a play requires an inductive approach to understanding the meaning. If I start with the specific love of two star-cross’d teenagers in Renaissance Verona whose families despise one another, and then try to generalize what love means, I am likely to end up with a lot of useless conclusions. It’s an inductive and error-prone process to move from the specific to the general. With all of the inductive errors possible, what can I truly understand about love in general from Romeo and Juliet alone? I could reasonably induce that real love can only exist in the convoluted set of circumstances of the play where one lover drinks a sleeping potion, and the other - distraught at seeing their love 'dead' - suicides with poison, so that the first can then prove their love equal and true by also drinking poison on awakening.

Certainly that would be an absurd notion of love, and that problem with induction is fundamentally why we continue to write love stories at a breathtaking rate… because when you are providing singular examples of love, and trying to facilitate the audience feeling love, you will always have room for more examples. You can write unique and powerful love stories forever and never exhaust the infinite scope of the material ‘love’. Examples piled on examples forever will never pile up to infinity. Regardless – and for good reasons – this ‘inductive’ form of artistic expression is the kind of authorship that we see in most media (and it is wonderous).

In games, it is different. The artist does not only create the specific case of the convicted criminal suddenly set free when his prison transfer bus is ambushed… it does not only tell the story of one criminal learning about the importance of liberty and the consequences of unchecked freedom. The artist is also capable of creating an entire expressive system space that explores a potential infinity of different notions of freedom and liberty. Where most other media require the audience to induce their meaning, games afford the audience at least the possibility of deducing their meaning.

In other media, ‘supporting material’ that is coherent with the central themes of the work is pushed to the side in a B-plot… in games, this supporting material affords the artist ways to illuminate the meaning from many, many possible directions, allowing the player to explore the meaning the artist is trying to provide. Potentially, because the game designer is able to express himself in systems rather than in examples, infinities can be examined.

Now, I guess this is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but surely this is a concept Ebert can understand. Many filmmakers, from Taratino to Inarritu to Haggis and dozens more have been increasingly attempting to explore stories from multiple angles in an attempt to mimic – in a medium severely limited for this purpose – what games can do innately. If Haggis’ Best Picture winning Crash was 100 hours long, and contained 100 different interconnected plots all echoing the same themes of racial tension from different perspectives, would it suddenly lose its status as art? It probably wouldn’t be a very good movie, because 100 hours of movie is painful. In any case, no matter how long you make Crash, you will never fully explore the domain of the themes of racial tension in modern America. 100 hours is just 50x what the movie already offers, and is no closer to the infinite depth of the theme than is the existing 2 hour film.

GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.

In a response to a reader letter dated November 27, 2005 Ebert said:

"To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers."

Well, here you go. Let me state it clearly and for the record:

Taken as wholes, GTA: San Andreas is a more compelling, meaningful and important work of art than Crash.

Admittedly, not everyone will agree, and admittedly, I have a high level of literacy in reading systems. The point here is not to enter a subjective debate about what is a superior work of art, rather the point is to say that – yes – if a game is offering a smorgasbord of unrelated mechanics that are neither supporting each other nor driving toward a coherent theme, if they are not providing the player with a broad range of perspectives on a specific meaning that the creator is trying to express, then Ebert is right.

But if a game creator does have something specific he is trying to communicate, and he designs his game well, and the mechanics and dynamics are coherently supporting that aesthetic, and providing the player – more or less whatever he does (assuming it is not wilfully nonsensical) – with insight into that meaning, then yeah… it’s art.

The Argument to Migrated Authorship
The final argument that I see remaining is the one that asks ‘who is the artist here anyway?’ Ebert says:

“I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.”

This is a much easier point to tackle simply because there is a fallacy in Ebert’s argument. He is implying that interacting with a work is the same as changing it. But this is not true. My ‘paint’ is not ‘what the player does’. My paint is ‘the rules that govern what the player can do’. The way the player expresses himself is a form of artistic expression (or a least it can be), but it is impossible for him to change the rules or even to express himself outside the domain of the rules that I have created. And it is not simply a case of saying ‘people who make paint are necessarily artists, while painters can be artists’. I do more than ‘make paint’. If all I did was 'make paint', I would concede the point in Ebert's response to his reader where he states games cannot move "beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art."

If I created ‘magic paints’ that could only be used to paint flowers that appeared highly vaginal, would I be less an artist than Georgia O’Keefe? While some painters using my paints could make crappy paintings of vaginal flowers that were not artful, and others could create beautiful masterpieces – I think it would remain clear that I was an artist for having created ‘paints that constrained the set of possible paintings achievable to those that dealt with a set of themes I had chosen’. There is a statement there - a statement about flowers and vaginas (and paint) and it is as important as any statement in any of O'Keefe's works. It may even be as important as all of the statements made in all of O'Keefe's works combined... but we don't need to get ahead of ourselves here.

The best analogy here, again, is that of a symphony. There is an art in the composing of the symphony itself – the creation of the song and the recording of the instructions for reproducing that song using a symphony orchestra. Yet, because of the comparative fuzziness of the transcription, there is often a high degree of malleability in interpretation of those instructions, and the ability to interpret those instructions well and to facilitate an orchestra to actually play the symphony is an artistic task. There are ways to do it non-artistically. Technically, a metronome and sheet music could do the job of conducting an orchestra, but we make a lot of room for conductors because in their art, they can add a tremendous amount of beauty to what is already a beautiful work.

Ebert’s fallacy extends to suggest that Ode to Joy is not a work of art once a composer conducts it, and that the conductor's art is not art for long anyway, because as soon as a musician plays it, he or she becomes the artist. The reality is, they can all be artists, and when an artfully composed work is conducted by an artful conductor, and played by artful musicians, the full perspective of the work is truly appreciable.

It is the same with a game and a player. Technically, a game could be played by a computer – many games are played by computers. While the beauty of the particular play experience might be diminished or even destroyed by doing it that way, it does not diminish or destroy the artfulness inherent to the game itself.

Such is the relationship between the designer and the player as I see it. The designer is the composer, the player is the conductor. The orchestra is the hardware and the sheet music is the software.

Conclusion
I think that about sums up my rebuttal to Mr. Ebert. When he made his first statements months ago, I was mostly just upset and insulted, but with his latest clarification of those original statements, he has not only looked more carefully at the real and relevant question, but he has opened the door to have the real nature of authorship in games described. I hope – should he happen past here and read this – he’ll finally understand the scope of the issue and admit that he’s wrong.

Convergence 'No longer a theory'

Oh well, I guess I was wrong when I refuted the theory that games and film can converge. According to Ed Ulbrich, the President of the commercial division of Digital Domain, it's not just something they're talking about. By buying the digital effects house and setting out to make games, Michael Bay has somehow proven that convergence is 'no longer a theory'. Don't I look stupid now.

In a reposting of an LA Times article on Michael Bay's blog, they lay it all out for us... the new vision of the ludocinematic future.

Some gems:

A budget of about $25 million may not be much for director Michael Bay, maker of such mega-budget movies as "Armageddon" and "Pearl Harbor." But it's enough to get him launched on a new passion: creating a video game that matches the quality of a feature film.

I love how this statement implies that games don't have the quality of a feature film. I can only assume they mean creating a game whose real-time 3d visuals match the quality of pre-rendered visuals in a modern 3d film? If they actually mean that they think 'Armageddon' (5.8 average on Imdb) or 'Pearl Harbor' (5.3) is 'better' than 'Half-Life 2' (9.6 average on Game Rankings) or 'GTA: San Andreas' (9.5)... then, well, whatever, I guess I don't really have a response to that.

"I make world-class images," Bay said. "Why not put those images into a game?"

Well, sure... okay. But I think Bay is missing a few important points. First, the way Bay makes those images has an awful lot to do with controlling the camera, so if he's willing to give up that part of what he does, I welcome him to join us in wrestling with this challenge. Second, while I don't have any problem with making games with great visuals (9.4) I'm not entirely sure what his point is here. Is he implying that his great visuals (even delivered to the player without the strict authorial camera of a director) will inherently make his games better?

And this:

Digital Domain plans to develop four or five games over the next two years, tapping into a lucrative industry whose sales in the U.S. climbed 19% to a record $12.5 billion last year, according to research firm NPD Group. As video entertainment becomes more sophisticated, the line between video games and movies is blurring.

(my emphasis) A bit of a non-sequitor there, but whatever. The thing I don't understand though... and it perplexes me more and more every time I heard this banal platitude... what the hell does it mean 'the line between videogames and movies in blurring'?

Do they think that 10 years from now I won't be sure whether I just watched a movie or played a game? Again, I have to make some assumptions about what they mean to have this kind of crap make any sense at all... I can only assume they mean 'the production methodologies and business models are increasingly similar and it is becoming more and more practical to look at doing feature film development and game development simultaneously as part of a multi-media production that increases efficiency'. In other words, they mean convergence in the purest business sense.

But on the other hand:

Nonetheless, company executives say they have a competitive advantage: a network of A-list directors that includes David Fincher ("Fight Club") (8.6), Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious") (5.7) and, of course, Bay, whose latest movie, "Transformers," is one of the summer's most anticipated releases. Most film-based games are developed through third parties, and filmmakers often have little or no creative control. By contrast, Digital would let filmmakers direct their own games.

So they don't mean it only in the purely business sense. They actually think that they can just hand over lead creative on a game to someone who made some movies and that will work. Well, I wish them luck. Okay, that's not true. I don't wish them luck. I hope they fail. I'm sure people will be happy to tell me what an egotistical asshole I am. But let's not forget I'm not the one gambling 25 million bucks on an ego that says just because I directed some movies I can therefore direct games.

Maybe we'll get to see if the man-god can bleed after all.

Hey UNESCO - What About Us?

I know that it is incredibly old school to read a newspaper while waiting for a BLT in a pub at lunchtime while out shopping, but I was in an old school kinda mood today. Flipping through the weekend 'Life' section of the Gazette, I discovered that the City was hosting 'Design Montreal's Open House', an open-doors day for some 40 Montreal design firms including those representing Landscaping and City Planning, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Architecture, Interior Design and Fashion Design.

Apparently, on May 12th of last year, UNESCO named Montreal a 'City of Design' an honor held by only two other cities in the world - Berlin and Buenos Aires.

So needless to say, while it is very cool that the City is sponsoring this event to bring public interest and attention toward all the different forms of design, and while I'm super excited to see if I can take advantage of this and get out and see some things, I can't help but wonder two things.

First, why in the world would UNESCO not include Game Design - or at least more broadly - Interactive Design, in this list of design disciplines being recognized? When I was in Paris last year, I got to see - and interact with - a wonderful interactive installation that is in front of the UNESCO HQ and L'Ecole Militaire in Paris. They know what Interactive Design IS if they are commissioning an interactive installation of this magnitude. Surely given the strength and importance of Montreal's game design community, we deserve to be included with our fellow professional designers in this. Also, I find it surprising that someone in the field of Landscape Design, Urban Planning or Architecture would not have spoken up about the absence of Game Design given the fact that a little video game is probably single-handedly more responsible for bringing a generalized appreciation of the importance of those fields to the public at large than is any other single source.

Second, as a professional, award winning designer whose work has been experienced by millions of people, and who works for a firm employing a handful of designers who are arguably among the best  game designers on earth - a firm which has likewise won several, if not dozens of important, internationally recognized awards for design... why in the world would I have never even heard of this? Clearly part of the City's goal in hosting this 'Open House' is to increase public awareness of Montreal's importance as a cultural hub for design... but shit... it might help if the designers themselves knew about it.

The article says that the City and the Province want to establish the Open House as a yearly event. Good. So now I have another side mission, which is to get Game and Interactive Design added to the UNESCO recognition and see at least one Montreal game company in included in the Open House for next year.

With all the continual talk about media convergence in face of the sad reality that all games can ever be in relation to film is some kind of bastard step-child, shouldn't we be going out of our way to celebrate the things that make us distinct and different? Especially in Canada? Doubly so in Montreal? Game Design is - not surprisingly I hope - a design field. We should start acting like it and make sure that we are considered and recognized as such by a world of designers who are our colleagues.