Click Nothing

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.

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.

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 I

So for those who missed it in the microsecond that it flew past on Twitter, I will be keynoting the GameX Industry Summit conference taking place in Philadelphia on Oct 24-25. Here are the working title and summary of the talk I plan to give:

The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm

The games of today unsurprisingly strive to mimic the linear, authored structures of previous generations of media largely because gamers and game developers have grown up in a world where those media are culturally dominant. That is changing. As our media become more richly interactive and as our experience of the world becomes increasingly fragmented and parallelized, a new media culture is disintegrating the old. Games of the future will reflect this cultural shift by themselves becoming more fragmentary, more parallelized, and less focused on rich simulation and traditional notions of immersion.

This talk examines the potential long-term future of gaming by looking at the accelerating convergence between rising technologies and competing media from the internet, games, music and narrative media to augmented reality and the prominence of portable wireless devices.

Sorry that the summary sounds so brainy and cerebral - I promise it will be a talk about games and that it will be as chaotically poetic and filled with increasingly obsolete jokes about the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons as the rest of my recent talks.

But more than just announcing that I'm speaking at GIS, I wanted to announce that I am expanding the trip to do the talk in several other cities. I don't want to announce any places or dates yet, because I'm still putting it together, so I'll let those interested speculate away. I will admit that a part of planning this as a 'tour' was because I am a couple of trips 'in debt' following cancellations resulting from my injury - so if you had been hoping to see me talk a few months ago and were disappointed by a cancellation, odds are good you'll be getting a second chance.

For the subject of the talk - it spawns out of a lot of the thinking I have been doing recently. Needless to say once you come off a project and get some rest, your narrow, single-minded focus on closing and delivery opens up and you get to look at the big picture again... so that psychological shifting of gears definitely has inspired the core of the talk. Also, recent conversations online - particularly the discussion that evolved out of my debate with Manveer, and even yesterday's discussion on the nature and future of the expressive potential of games between David Jaffe and Anthony Burch (and others) (extended) are all topics that have been close to my heart lately and will be elementary to the talk. I'm hoping to be able to synthesize some of these ideas with my own recent talks about Immersion and Generational Shift. If you really want to get the most of the upcoming 'CN Tour 09' talk, you might want to refresh yourself on those two previous talks...but...

As an added bonus (and you get all this for free!) - I am also looking toward launching a few other special projects to 'celebrate' the tour that will hopefully increase the utility of Click Nothing as a whole and make the idea of reviewing those old talks a little easier.

So - to use the most ironic metaphor I can muster - stay tuned - if I can keep a modicum of focus, it's going to be an exciting post-midsummer.

Finally Caved In...

Finally, Jonathan Morin managed to find the time to put up his blog.

For those who don`t know the name, he was the Lead Level Designer on Far Cry 2 and we worked very closely together on that title for three and a half years. Maybe you know him from solid talks he gave at GDC 08 (which I can`t find on the GDC site, but info and a video is here) and GDC 09 (discussed by Sirlin, and Burch (who I am sure you heard a lot about today already)).

Anyway, I highly recommend you click your way over there and put some pressure on him to keep blogging his thoughts to get him over the 18 month hump I figure it takes to become a habitual blogger.

I don`t see his slides and presentation materials posted up there yet, but I can only assume he is planning on getting that up in the near future.

Welcome aboard Jon.

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....)

Well Played 1.0

A few years ago, I was invited down to Carnegie Mellon by Jesse Schell to visit the Entertainment Technology Center. While there, I met Drew Davidson who is currently the Director of the ETC.

This past year, Drew has been hard at work trying to trick a bunch of us slacker game developers, bloggers academics and others to submit critical discussion pieces on (for the most part) well known games.

His hard work has finally paid off, and Well Played 1.0 is currently available online where you can read it for free on the ETC website, or available for free download or hardcopy purchase through Lulu.com.

I am one of the contributors to the book - but as I mentioned - I am a slacker, and all I was able to provide to Drew was a reprinting of my post on Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock, which every single person to have ever visited this blog has apparently read.

Far more important than my own redundant contribution to critical thought are more than twenty other pieces contributed by all manner of game brains.

From game development legends such as Noah Falstein and Greg Costikyan the book offers insight into Advance Wars and Europa Universalis. Fellow blogger L.B. Jeffries extends the bredth of discussion on Rockstar's Bully, and professors and researchers of all kinds from some of the best schools in the world round out the book with examinations of games as complex and layered as Civilization IV, to those as casual and as accessable as Guitar Hero.

At very least, any game developer should have the online version in their favorites as a valuable reference, and any blogger, reviewer, critic or anyone else who wants to write throughful criticism of a game they feel is important should read it carefully.

GDC09 - Part 3 - Wines and Rants

The last set of slides I have to put up are those for my five minute talk about game rating systems that I gave as part of Richard Lemarchand's Microtalks session on Thursday morning.

Overall I really enjoyed the session - though the prep was a nightmare. I guess it's pretty easy to enjoy a session where you only have to do 10% of the work and then you get to listen to smart people explain to you what exactly it is that you do for a living.

Anyway, the five minute format is colossally difficult. Especially if you are trying to make a point and support it with arguments instead of being all hand-wavy and theoretical. I wish I could have brought to bear all the arguments I have as for why we should switch from 10, 20, 100 or even 1000 point rating systems to a simple five point rating system, but I just didn't have time.

I guess that's what blogs are for.

Here are the arguments I made in the talk:

100 point rating systems are so analog that the human brain cannot make sense of the granularity (what is the difference between an 86 and an 87 in real perceptible, measurable terms?). These systems nobly attempt to make a threshold-less system - but when the brain is overloaded we add thresholds back in... we say '61-70 is above average' and '71-80 is good' or whatever. This is effectively adding back in the thresholds that a 100 point system endeavors to remove... but it is adding them back in in a less rigorous way leading to a mysticism created around certain improbable thresholds at the far reaches of the curve. I called this mysticism the Cult of 90+ and talked about it specifically in the context of wine rating.

I talked also about the relationship between the review scores, the reviewer, the publishers of the review and the developers and publishers making the games. There are pressures in these relationships that push reviewers to give higher scores. This is very easy to do in a 100 point system (because of the bracketed question in the previous paragraph), meaning a reviewer under pressure can relieve that pressure incrementally by inflating a score ever so slightly to make everyone involved a little bit happier. This systemic, distributed pressure release into the system of review scores is inflationary and increases game review scores over time.

In terms of inflation, I present the evidence of it by looking at the aggregated game ratings taken from gamerankings.com and I discuss why it is bad: principally because it prevents cross-generational comparison of games (in fact, this need for cross generational comparison means we should impose and maintain a bell curve in ratings even if games are getting empirically better over time).

As an aside: Adam Sessler ranted against a different set of problems inherent with the way aggregators work at this years Rant session. Adam is also right, in my opinion, and a global switch to a five star system would also work alleviate his complaint to some extent.

In any case, if you want the discussion on the above points, you can download the slides and the text of the talk here.

Also of note is that I used Kent Hudson's 'How To Pick a Lock' talk from GDC 2008 as a point in the discussion and I have had a couple people ask me about it. For those interested in that discussion, Kent's slides and video support can be found here. Thanks Kent.

Now - over and above the points raised in the talk there are a couple other arguments for why we ought to undertake a global switch to a five star rating system for games that I did not have time to cover in the talk itself.

Firstly, 100 point rating systems leverage the 'fallacy of precision' to lend authority to the accuracy of the rating (difference between accuracy and precision is here). Essentially the argument here is that if I claim a game is an 82, then most readers are likely to think 'well, it must be somewhere between an 80 and an 85'. In fact, this is a fundamentally invalid assumption. If I were to use a 10 point system and give the game an 8, readers would assume it to be 'probably between a 7 and a 9'. If I were to use a five star system and give a 4, they would assume it 'probably between a 3 and a 5'.

The problem is that the precision afforded by an 82 does not make the accuracy of the rating higher. It is as likely to be a 60 or a 100, just as a 4 star rating is probably somewhere between a 3 and a 5. Accuracy and Precision are orthogonal concepts, but the fallacy of precision leverages the fact that our brains tend to correlate them. In a the highly subjective field of rating games, it is much more important that we be accurate than that we be precise and someone who plays a lot of games can be accurate in a five star system.

To go one step further with this argument, I would point out that in a world full of aggregators, we still have 100 and 1000 point systems and having these systems aggregating five star ratings into percentages is useful and good (provided everyone uses a five star system and their aggregation policies are standardized, fair and well understood - cf Sessler). Having them aggregating ratings that are already claiming 100 points of precision makes the aggregators susceptible to the effects of the aforementioned inflation (in fact it is in the aggregators that we are able to measure the inflation).

For the record - this point was misquoted in IGN's article on the talk wherein they wrote:

According to Hocking ... 35 of the 100 current top-rated games (as tracked by an aggregate site) were released after 2001. That presents a skewed view of the industry's history and points toward a recent inflation of sorts in game reviews.

Note that an astute commenter then went on to reply this:

To say 35 of the top 100 rated games of all time came out since 2001 means that scores have been inflated since them is not consistent. Since 2001, there have been 8 years of games released. We can assume that almost all games with ratings have come out since around 1985, or 24 years ago. The past 8 years represents 1/3 of this time, and 35/100 is about 1/3 of the total game volume. It is consistent that ratings have NOT been inflated as 1/3 of the top rated games have come out in 1/3 of the time period of game releases.

The commenter is exactly right if 35 of the Top 100 rated games of all time were released since 2001. But the real quote was that 35 of the Top 41 highest rated games of all time were released since 2001. That`s not the 35% we would predict, that is 85%. Get it right IGN, you kind of invalidated the entire talk by erroneously reporting the most critical and central piece of data. Maybe it was the precision that threw you off?

I won't go into the other horribly broken arguments in the comments thread... I should know better... but here's my personal favorite:

Clint is a joke. Far Cry was overrated trash. The 100 point system is fine. It allows a more accurate score. Period.

That's like a straw-man multiplied by the denial of the fallacy of precision. Awesome stuff.

As a follow-on from the fallacy of precision point is the argument that the kinds of precision implied in 100 point systems feel elitist to 'ordinary' people. At a time when the industry is experiencing explosive growth - when new players of all demographics are starting to take up gaming - it serves our interest to give them reviews and rating scores they can understand. An 89.3 implies a level of refinement in perception among gamers and reviewers that not only does not exist, but is also intimidating for the mass market. It is the equivalent of terms like 'mature oak finish' and 'fruity nose' in wine discussion. These concepts are alienating for the market and make people feel excluded when - in the end - the entire purpose of game reviews and particularly of giving numerical scores at all is to help inform people about the product and invite them to play.

The final point I wanted to make was that - as members of a press with increasingly important social responsibilities - the reviewers, writers and editors giving the review scores should be the ones championing the push to a five star system. For all the reasons mentioned above, finer granularity systems are broken and compromise the integrity fo their work (and the utility of their work to developers). Chris Hecker also gave a mini rant this year and he called for the gaming press to do their job well. I believe the first step in doing that lies in radically reducing the importance and weight given to numerical scores and emphasizing the importance placed on quality reviews, well written.

I am pretty sure no matter what I say, this call is going to go unheeded... but I am also pretty sure that those who don't make the transition are going to find themselves very rapdily serving a smaller and smaller niche of an explosively growing market. I look very much forward to continuing to work with those who survive the transition.

Connect the dots

Daniel Golding, over at Subject Navigator, brilliantly torpedoes my last post below the waterline by linking the 29 Blogs switched-on gamers should read. (and as a bonus, there aren't 29, but 39) In most cases he links not only the blog, but one or more of the most important posts of the past year from the blog.

If you're new to this, and want to catch up on the state of game criticism - or if you just had your head in the sand for the last twelve -to- eighteen months like I did, then get over there and get reading.

Critical Condition

So for those who don't know, I've been on vacation. In fact, I have just gotten home from being on vacation from my vacation. Even better, that nested vacation followed hard upon a vacation nested in my honeymoon nested in my vacation. So it has been a long time chilling out for me.

Prior to that - which I assume you do know - I was shipping my game (hence the necessity for multiple nested vacations) and prior to that, I was merely working on my game. At some point during the 'working on my game' era, I more or less faded out of the blogging community.

Boy have things changed in the last eighteen months.

The prequel to this post came about after I found Tom Francis' cool blog and chatted a bit over there as he was finishing out FC2 and all his regulars were (politely) damning me for my misestimation of the frequency with which one would encounter armed guard posts in a failed Africa state.

Anyway - two years or so ago, I was lamenting the relative lack of game criticism (as opposed to reviews), and apparently at some stage during the long quiet that emanated from Click Nothing, my lament was answered. Not only do we have Tom Francis, but my sporadic last days and weeks of looking around at the game blogging community have kicked up a good number of really awesome blogs.

A surprising number of these bloggers are wicked smart and have been buzzing around like busy little bees making me look like some sort of Salinger-esque recluse at best, or washed-up slacker at worst. I'm hgappy to say that (despite what you will find on the forums - which are exploding with haterz) a good number of them seem pleased with - or at least very intrigued by Far Cry 2... many having written actual criticism of the game.

Tom Chick, Ben Abraham, Chris Remo, Stephen Totilo and Mitch Krpata (among others) have given the game some high praise - in some cases listing it as or among their games of the year, with Ben citing the immersive qualities of the game as critical to his enjoyment, while roBurky challenges the game's application of immersion. Meanwhile - on the 'less related to me, but more important from a critical thought perspective' front, Steve's thoughts on Immersion are more engaging and more general, riffing off of Jon Blow's fantastic keynote at the MIGS 08 conference and picking up where my own thoughts on Immersion - as examined by The Brainy Gamer - were left weakly dangling. Thanks for picking up the slack guys. Hmm... that sounds condescending. How about 'thanks for bringing the rope, the sand pit, and two tug-of-war teams to a limp little noodle of nothing-but-slack I might have dropped in the playground somewhere'.

And speaking of slack... Iroquois Pliskin gives me none for my obtuse phrasing of 'ludonarrative dissonance'. He's right. But judging by the number of hits that crazy post still draws, the term itself seemed to somehow become a rallying cry - popping up wherever smart people were talking about game criticism, or the lack thereof (again, nothing to do with me - on August 18th game-story duality was the furthest thing from my mind... I was on a plane to Leipzig I think).

I said in my lament just over two years ago:

"We are this close to having an explosion in the field of game critical analysis. When Bogost doesn't have to spend half his time lamenting, and I don't have to spend five times as many words reiterating - when there does exist a small but noticable and steady stream of this kind of media analysis, all these wasted words will disappear and be replaced with more criticism and analysis. Bogost and myself and dozens of others will shift from complaining about not having the analysis to actually providing it. It's a tipping point. Once we reach it the slow linear growth of this kind of material that we see now will shift into a period of exponential growth, and we'll have arrived."

So I think we have arrived... even as Gamasutra lists 'not arriving' as their #2 biggest disappointment of the year. Maybe that's my contribution to this year in the game blogging world that I feel like I missed. Maybe - for what it's worth - stumbling back out into the wild with last year's map still in my hands is the perspective that I get to bring back in exchange for the perspective that you've all provided.

Let me say it again - things changed a lot in the last eighteen months. And it's great.

(Oh, and that part about being willing to pay a thousand dollars to overhear critical discussion of my game because I'd make it back tenfold... well, on double-checking my math, I take that back...)