Understanding Games (by proxy)

Finally got around to reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, and surprise, surprise - it's no surprise why so many people in the game industry talk about this book.

I was a pretty big comic book geek in my youth, but the eighties and the nineties were a long, dark time for popular commercial comics, and frankly, I just gave up. Obviously, I could have switched to some of the indie books that were starting to rise up in that era, but Marvel and DC had their hooks in me pretty deep and to me at the time, those other books just looked like cheap knock-offs of the 'good stuff'.

I know now that I was way off base, but likely I won't ever go back to comics.

In any case, I'm very glad to have picked this up. It's an excellent overview of the medium of comics/sequential art, and it's full of interesting insight into how comics actually operate and how audiences engage them.

In particular I was fascinated with his analysis of time in sequential art. The way panels can be broken up to separate time, or the way a continuous time can be contained in a single panel. It made me revisit some thoughts I had had last year when thinking about the odd way that time functions in games. Time in games is a really bizarre concept that could probably fill a book itself - though it might not be terribly practical.

I also liked his overview of the six stages he identifies for the 'artist's journey'. It certainly helped me understand some of the issues I am having as I transition from being a very hands-on designer and content creator to being a Creative Director who has to work at a higher level. It's a tough transition that I've talked to a number of colleagues about. Everyone who makes that leap is going to wrestle with it. This section of McCloud's book really gave me some insights and in many ways put some of my concerns to rest.

I did think the chapter on color was unnecessary though. Simply because almost the entire rest of the book is devoted to a formal discussion of things that are universal to comics, and color is clearly not one of those things. Obviously it's important to many comics, and it gives the artist a powerful additional tool to use, but it's still not universal. Nonetheless, he kept the chapter brief and to-the-point so it didn't wreck the experience or anything.

Another thing I really loved - and that I think is perhaps the most relevant to the game industry - is his notion of 'Amplification through Simplification'. Basically stated, that's the notion that the more iconic or 'cartoonish' a representation, the more general its domain of applicability. A photographic representation can be one person, an accurate drawing can represent a few. A sketch could represent many, and ultimately a simple line doodle can effectively represent anyone. The more simplified the rendering, the more universal. There is power in this notion clearly. In games - where we often work so hard to simulate things perfectly and accurately, this notion is something we need to be more familiar with, because we use it all the time.

Pong was a systemic simplification of the rules of a number of racket-based sports. Thirty-four years later, Rockstar Table Tennis has complexified the rules considerably. Now it cannot represent tennis, squash, 1 vs 1 volleyball, or any other racket-based sport... it represents ping pong. Period.

Imagine if Pong had been called 'Argument'. And instead of squares for paddles, they were shaped like faces in profile. Imagine if instead of a moving square, the 'ball' was a comic-style speech bubble with the word 'Yes' written in it when one player returned it, and the word 'No' written in it when another player returned it. No rule changes. The words 'Yes' and 'No' would be bouncing back and forth from the mouths, occasionally slipping by and not being responded to. It's clear, then, that this simplification of systems represented by Pong could have been about any number of things aside from a racket-based sport. The rules were simple enough that they could in fact represent a huge range of things. If Pong had been called 'Argument', what would its successor look like 34 years later?

Look at the procedural dynamic gang-war system in GTA:SA. Its rules are incredibly simple. About as complex as a game like Reversi, Connect Four or Dice Wars (here). But in GTA:SA it's called a 'Gangwar'. What will its successor look like in 34 years? Or 10? Or in 17 months? The simplification of the rule system can be painted up as anything. Th designers choice of what to call that system and how to dress it up gives it a flavor. The more robustly we simulate it, the more precisely it will represent the thing it claims to be. By enriching that representation - by complexifying it - the designer has 2 choices, really. He can decide to simply simulate it as accurately as possible, or he can make choices about the structure of the rules and create a gang war (for example) that tells us something meaningful about gang wars through his choice of systems. Anyway - this is a huge topic, and I'm sure I'll formalize my thoughts on it in much greater detail soon.

Back to the book - clearly a number of the statements McCloud makes about the importance of his medium, and about its role in culture and the arts in general are eerily close to thoughts that many of us have about games. It's a tough time for our industry with all the political attention we're getting. Many of us feel disempowered and see that our right - and in fact in many cases - our obligation to be creative and expressive in our medium is very much in jeopardy. I wish the game industry had a book like this, and I doubly wish the meddling, middling democrats who are functionally illiterate in the medium of 'expressive systems' would read such a book. They wouldn't though. I'm starting to get the impression that they don't really give a shit about whether games are potentially harmful, they just want to create and then feed off of a hysteria in order to pull a few fence sitters over to the Blue team before the next US election. Maybe the game industry gets to be a sacrifice, tossed on the bonfire of democracy. Maybe in the current social, economic and political climate, freedom of expression is less important than disagreeing with the other guy over something - anything - in order to get elected.

Comments

[Paul Mendoza]

I just read your paper on level design and it was really good. I typically build multiplayer levels so it's interesting to read about single player level design.

[Patrick]

I agree there is much power in the way a system is "skinned", and game writing, both in terms of specific text assets and overall framing, is a sorely underdeveloped discipline. However, I think we need to innovate in terms of new mechanics. If Pong were released argument all those years ago, we wouldn't nessecarily have interactive dramas by now. Its possible that such an approach would have gotten people thinking in that direction instead of say, the best way to distribute med-kits through a 3D space, but its also possible we'd just have terribly extended metaphores with the same genuses of mechanics at root.

So this raises a question which is both fresh and very old, that of rules versus fiction in game design. More specifically, I'm wondering what the role of the design metaphore is, as you explicate in your GDC '04 talk, and if these things should be treated as writing/content creation hueristics or as something more basic.

Personally, I think combining an interesting design metaphore with a comprehensive play spec (listing all the verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs that compose the mechanics) is a good approach in pre-production.

Once we devise mechanics that catch up with all the wild design metaphors we dream up, then we'll be at a much stronger position as a medium, one which by popular groundswell will not be an easy or desirable target for opportunistic politicians.

[Steven Davis]

It is good to get back to basics. I think we need to work to identify these basic games so that we have our vocabulary for game design. Of course, if the computer game industry considered itself a part of the rest of the games industry, it would have a rich well of ideas to tap. I have recently been reading Parlett's books on board games and card games. They have spurred a ton of ideas on game systems.

[andrew stern]

Pong as conversation / argument, with faces as paddles:
http://www.theadm.com/iremember/

[Steve gaynor]

I think that two of the most prescient points made in Understanding Comics are one you pointed out-- amplification (and identification) through simplification-- and another, related point: the idea of a person constantly maintaining a simplified image of their own actions, facial expressions, and so on, even when they can't necessarily see any of it; the way that you are constantly "seeing yourself" through your mind's eye, and in McCloud's case, how this provides resonance with the simplified character in comics.

The way I see this speaking to games is in how the player relates to his own player character. People generate this simplified image of their own actions through their sense of touch, air passing them, how their muscles are moving and so forth. Games, as almost an entirely visual medium, can't allow a player to inhabit his character using the same senses. But I think the natural process we all go through of visualizing our own actions as we perform them allows the player to bridge the gap of disbelief by projecting himself onto a character whose actions he is seeing in the third person. I think that the third person perspective is a much stronger tool for drawing a player into the gameworld for just that reason.

It seems counterintuitive, since the first person perspective literally shows the player the world through his character's eyes.. but the third person gives the player a human form to identify with, something to anchor their suspension of disbelief to. It's only a relatively short leap from "seeing ourselves" in our mind's eye to seeing ourselves in the actions of a person onscreen.

Then there's the the fact that in first person you don't have peripheral vision, and third person perspective's wider range of view does a better job of simulating that as well.. but McCloud doesn't talk much about peripheral vision in his book :-)

cheers

steve

[jayrod]

nice

[jayrod]

i would have to say that it was a good book!!!
i really liked it.