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.

Comments

[mike d]

I was working on an FPS, about five years ago, and we were grappling with the typical multi-player issues of griefing, cheating, skill matching, kicking, banning and a limited player base.

One of my ideas was that in FFA mode players should be allowed to ignore other players. Not just their chats, not just avoiding their matches, but being able to play in the same match while still ignoring that specific player completely; the ignored player and their actions would simply cease to exist in the game for the one who ignored him. But, crucially, the ignored player would not be ignored by the rest of the players in the same match.

Essentially, all players at a given time could play on the same level, in the same match, but they could carve out a subset of the player-set for themselves; and each player's player-set need not match any other's. Or put another way, they could each subscribe to their own private list of players they wished to play with, so that Alice could play with both Bob and Carol at the same time, while the latter two would only play with Alice.

Needless to say this idea was tossed out as completely ludicrous and never implemented, but I still think that it elegantly solves all of the issues with only the cost of a potentially incoherent game space.

[Matt]

"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."

That's a really interesting idea. Your crew is suddenly populated with a variety of people who are loved and hated by various parts of the galaxy. And maybe your friends neglect to tell you they just pissed off the entire Ansari race, so when you pop into an Ansari-held system to have a chat, things go very poorly. And maybe your love interest is unfortunately already much more interested in another friend's character-- but no worries, you can arrange for his death in an upcoming firefight.

Needless to say, it would require a much more robust system for NPC interactions, and resolving conflicts (hey wait-- X is hated because he killed Y... but Y is in your party!), than ME2 had. But it would be a very fun design to pursue, no question. That single conceit-- your friends' characters come into your party, relationships and all-- launches several potentially interesting designs.

[Ben Abraham]

Reading this I first thought, "Really? We wouldn't accept the L4D style drop-in/out loose hold on fiction a mere 10 years ago?" But then I thought about it for a while and realised that I have no idea. I literally cannot remember or imagine how I thought ten years ago. That fact gives me pause to think that you're probably right on that front. Ten years is a long time.

[Michael B.]

Inevitably, contensions will arise that say authored stories have their place. The truth behind that really doesn't matter though. It's that attitude that prevents more Left 4 Deads and Demon's Souls from finding home.

[Dagda]

Matt, I find myself looking in the other direction. To design a game where the supporting cast roles are filled by other people's characters, I would start by ensuring that the game allows players to adopt all those roles for themselves. The example I have mind here is Mount & Blade, where virtually every NPC in the world is doing things you can do yourself- the bandits who roam about and raid villages, the bounty hunters who pursue them, the merchants who carry goods between cities and sell them at a profit, the nobles who lead their armies under the flag of a nation, even the king who commands them.

Mind you, this creates a very different type of story- one that rarely manifests via dialogue trees, and usually consists of your actions in and of themselves. How you raided a noble lord's village, or defeated him in battle but chose to release him once you had him at your mercy.