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Video Games Are Better

Having read Ian Bogost’s recent piece in The Atlantic several times now, I think I’ve managed to digest what he’s saying and figure out how I feel about it.

First off, I feel the piece is trying to do too much. Bogost opens by eulogizing Maxis, and celebrating the studio’s impressive contribution to our medium, but hitched to that wagon is a larger statement Bogost is making about the kinds of games we make, the kinds of games we could make, and the kinds of games we ought to make. The eulogy is fine; I don’t have much to say about that. But I feel like the rest of the piece makes a claim (I think unintentionally) about how we might categorize games that I have a really hard time agreeing with. 

Bogost laments that we (as players and as developers) have become fixated on characters in games, and suggests that we would do better to design games that allow us to explore and examine systems that are larger than ourselves. The effective unpacking of his title is that there are games that try to be about individuals and games that try to be about larger conceptual structures – social, political, economic and cultural ideas – and that games about these larger structures are better. Better, to Bogost, seems to mean at very least that the medium of games is more suited to present those ideas and thus games about them achieve better outcomes, but even beyond that, he implies these things are somehow qualitatively more valuable as things for us to explore.

Now, I strongly agree we should make games that afford us the opportunities to play with and thereby deeply understand the higher order systems that we exist within. I agree that games are uniquely suited to expose these sorts of large, complex systems which – outside of the context of a game are typically obfuscated, hard to isolate, hard to read, and impossible to examine objectively. 

However, I disagree that games about characters preclude the sort of examinability of higher order domains or formal structures or patterns that Bogost wants to see more of. I feel like Bogost is presenting a false dichotomy: that there are simulations that can speak to the higher order constructs of our culture, and that there are stories of the journeys of individuals that cannot, and that we must choose between them. Bogost is saying there is SimCity – which allows us to examine Wright’s Americanized synthesis of a range of sociocultural theories – and then there is The Last of Us which allows us to examine – at best – a few small relationships between a few poorly simulated individuals. Bogost’s lament is that SimCity’s perspective on the forces that shape our culture is elevating, while The Last of Us is at best an inferior novel. Without saying it directly, Bogost is making the claim that there cannot exist a category of game that allows the player to understand and feel and engage with those higher order systems while also undertaking an individual journey through them. I think this is already demonstrably untrue.

Molleindustria’s Unmanned provides fascinating perspectives into the banality of automated war-fighting, the proceduralization of violence, and the impact of ethical siloing on interpersonal relationships, and it does all of these things from the perspective of an individual character on a journey. Unmanned is a comparatively simple game, and it does not allow me to directly touch the sliders that embody the relationships between those higher order concepts – but it does enable me to feel that those sliders exist and are interrelated.

Bogost, I am sure, would argue that a novel or a film would do a better job of both providing me with that simple, authored perspective, and with taking me on that journey. Surely, taken as a whole, Syriana – which deals with all of these themes and more – does a better job of communicating them than Unmanned. I would agree – but not because games about individual journeys cannot also be about higher order constructs – rather, I would agree because Unmanned is just a very small game, and Syriana was a $50M film with an excellent script, a solid director and amazing actors to bring it together.

In terms of its themes, Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is similar to Unmanned. In Papers, Please, I embody a character, and I go with that character on a personal, transformative journey that I control in large part. The game also gives me perspectives on the higher order structures of our culture: the numbing banality of bureaucracy, the deresponsiblizing power of distributed systems, and their impact on how individuals judge and treat one another. Papers, Please does not let me directly manipulate the sliders that control how oppressive or violent the State of Arstotzka is. It doesn’t allow me to objectively observe how the cost of food and gas affects the behavior of a border guard with insufficient training and ever-increasing pressure to process travelers quickly under ever more byzantine constraints.

Playing Papers, Please, I do not build and test the hypothesis that subsidizing the price of gas would diminish stress on border guards, and thus lead to more ethical outcomes in terms of how people are evaluated at the border, which in turn would reduce violence, increase regional stability and lower gas prices – removing the need for subsidies, giving my state more economic stability, and simultaneously increasing happiness. But at the same time, I feel that Papers, Please helped me understand those things the way Bogost seems to claim a game about characters could not. In fact, it helped me understand those things better than Syriana did.

So again, I think that Bogost has presented a false dichotomy by suggesting there are games about characters and there are games about higher order cultural constructs and that as game developers and as players we need to choose between them when we make a game or when we play a game.

I think that a game like Crusader Kings presents a model of complicated human interpersonal interaction, and a simulation of how the implicated personalities and their relationships drive human culture. In fact, Crusader Kings stands out to me as an exemplar of a category of games that Bogost seems to want to wave out of existence by asserting we have to choose between one of two categories into which Crusader Kings does not fit.

Admittedly, Crusader Kings is significantly closer to SimCity than Papers, Please is, but perhaps from Bogost’s perspective the ‘embodied characters’ are really abstract constructs and to him Crusader Kings is just another SimCity. That might be a fair stance.

But further out from Crusader Kings is Shadow of Mordor, where you clearly and undeniably embody a character, and yet at the same time you interact directly with an interactive simulation of the politics of succession, leadership and authority within Orcish society. Now, I will be the first to admit that the kind of ‘cultural takeaway’ Bogost seems to want players to receive from the games he is talking about is not going to be much informed by a more sophisticated appreciation of the Rites of Succession of the Uruk-hai, but subject matter is irrelevant if what we’re looking for is existence proof. There is no reason this kind of higher-order simulation of sociopolitical brinksmanship, applied violence and the consequences thereof could not be stood-up in a context that is relevant to the world we live in. Swap the Outcasts for some ex-patriate mercenaries, Orcish warlords for African ones, and Mordor for a failed African state, and suddenly you might find a game where good and evil, race and creed, partnerships and politics are significantly less cut-and-dry, and significantly more informative of the kinds of larger cultural forces that shape the lives of millions of people (if you succeeded - which no one yet has).

So yes, I think we already have numerous, though tentative examples of these kinds of games; games that are both about the journey of an individual, but also about the big ideas of the culture (fictional or otherwise) in which that individual exists. I will admit that along a number of axes we have mostly done a fairly poor job of achieving the goals Bogost implies. Bogost wants us to truly understand and feel the consequential interdependency of large scale, richly interconnected, sensitive systems, and it is definitely true that accessing the sliders that move those systems by using the guns or swords of our embodied characters to shoot or stab them up or down a notch is a clumsy interface at best.

But I don’t think we should bury the idea along with Maxis and throw our arms up in the air. I think there is a huge undeveloped space here for us to explore as designers, and a fruitful landscape of discovery here for players. I feel that if we make these sorts of games well, and continue to refine them, we can begin competing and innovating on the axis of ‘how my embodied character influences the sliders’.

I personally hope that we can evolve the play experience over time from one where you play the mercenary/assassin who tips the balance by killing the right people, to one where you play the spy with much finer grained control who murders rarely or not at all. Eventually, perhaps, we can play the diplomat, the senator or the lobbyist constantly challenged to overcome and manage her interactions with other players and characters in a dynamic, empathic exploration of these higher order cultural systems in a way that presents them as complicated - not because they are harder than shooting an AK-47 at a moving target through the jungle, but because humans are just really bad at them.

And maybe then, if these games are good, and we play them a lot, maybe we’ll get better at them, and maybe we’ll be empowered to confront these problems not as a bunch of sliders to be optimized, but as the messy interpersonal problems they are; mired in doubt and fear and weakness and frailty. Those sound like fucking spectacular games to me.

Dynamics: the long and the short versions

Last night was the opening night of the Art of Games exhibit at the EMP Museum, and along with several other great speakers from local the local industry, Valve co-worker Dave Kircher and I were there to give short talks about programming and design respectively.

My talk, titled The Art of Games, Why Are We Here, is about games and their relationship to more traditional art, and how games acheive their meaning. The slides (which include in the notes more or less exactly what I said) are here, as well as over on the right.

If you find the discussion interesting and would like a more robust (full hour) talk on the same subject, you can get the slides and notes for the entire GDC 2011 talk here (also linked on the right) or check out the full video of the talk on the GDC Vault, where it is now available for free.

I was never completely happy with the conclusion of the GDC talk, and the version of the slides linked here includes what I feel is a much stronger and clearer conclusion that better encapsulates the thesis and nails the point I was trying to make a little more strongly.

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.

[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.

On Auteurship in Games

So this Friday just past, the latest New York Times Magazine ran a piece about the rising 'indie movement' in game development. It's a good piece - providing what I feel is an accessable overview of the current state of the games/art discussion and the rising importance of the indie scene and what these developers are doing.

I'm sure a lot of people will roll their eyes and say 'games and art again - isn't this discussion over?'. I suppose it is over for us (developers, I mean) as we all know that games are indeed an art form but that just like painting, literature, or music, games can also be just simple entertainment and there is nothing wrong with that. In other words, for those 'in the know' - a game can be a work of art. Full stop.

That said, I am not convinced that the 'real' population of the world is aware of this yet. An article in New York Times Magazine that talks about it is thus very welcome. I don't mean it is welcome because it is a validation for those of us who stood up and said 'of course games are art', but simply because it means that the 'real' population are now about to step into a world that - for the first time in a century or so - has an entirely new art form in it. That's amazing and wonderful. And even though the article does not represent some giant breaker being flipped in the cultural consciousness, it is one of the more significant bitflips in the grand scheme of games' general acceptance as an important form of art and an important contribution to human culture.

Anyway - mostly the piece is an interview with Jason Rohrer, but also interviewed are Jon Blow, Jonaton Soderstrom, Jenova Chen, Eric Zimmerman, and several others, myself included. It seems like I get cast in the role as the 'big industry dude who is sympathetic to the cause' - which I suppose is how a lot of people see me. I myself would call that an oversimplification, but hey - it's an overview piece for a broad audience. I'll live.

There is one thing I want to call out in the article and kind of 'distance myself from' however - and that is the emphasis on the notion of the importance of the 'auteur'. I'm going to be careful not to put words in the mouths of Jason, Jon, Jenova or any of the others, but it feels to me that this article pushes the notion that central to the indie movement, and central to the idea that games are (or can be) art is the need to demonstrate that there are auteur game developers and it is the existence of the auteur that allows games to be art.

The meme pops up a few times in the article:

on Page 2, second paragraph

Even when working on more original fare, the enormous teams that create today’s video games dilute artistic intention. There are exceptions like Will Wright, whose legacy includes The Sims, but they stand out because they are exceptions. “For the most part,” Rohrer said, “there’s no single person trying to bring a specific vision to life.”

on Page 4, eighth paragraph

“Braid is something you could show to Roger Ebert and say, ‘Here is a work of authorial intention,’ ” Rohrer says.

also on Page 4, lower

"But it does reflect the fact that Braid is both a game and the artistic vision of a single person."

SoI think it's not unreasonable to read that the article is presenting the stance that the evolution of the status of games from 'toys and entertainment' to 'art' is fundamentally linked to the idea of authorship coming from the singular creative vision of an individual.

For the record, I strongly disagree with this stance - and furthermore, I feel it is treacherous ground in which to plant the 'games are henceforth art' flag, as I suspect it is ground that will quickly be lost to (or surrendered by) the first generation of artists who even attempt to question it (in fact - for those of us 'in the know' it has been and continues to be, questioned all the time).

Now - keeping in mind that not that long ago I wrote a post titled 'On Authorship in Games' - a kind of sister post to this one - that championed the notion that there was authorship in games (in an attempt to address Ebert's challenge). How can I say the opposite now?

Well, frankly, I am not saying the opposite. What I said then was that there is authorship in games and if that is the criteria Ebert needs to have fulfilled in order for him to count games as art - then it exists and the question is closed. I was not arguing that authorship is universally, or even for me, what makes games art.

For me the criteria is much simpler - games are art because some people believe them to be. That's all that is really required. And it is with that definition safely in my back pocket that I will continue to question the 'auteur' model of meaning and artfulness that seems sometimes espoused by the indie movement and by others (and by the article in question).

I really, honestly, do not believe that games 'ought to come from the singular creative vision of an individual'. They can, of course, and I celebrate the existence of the Blow's and Rohrer's out there. But for me, the real beauty of games comes (partially) from the collaborative process that creates them (the development process) - which itself parallels the (centrally important) collaborative process that allows them to mean at all (the playing of them).

I guess what I am saying is that I am concerned that the article conflates two ideas that for me are very separate; one, that there is authorship behind these seemingly unauthored stuctures we call modern games, and two, that games are art. These ideas existing side-by-side seems (in my reading of the article) to suggest a connection between the idea that it is in authorship that the art of games lies. This idea is runs counter to everything I believe about games and I can't accept it.

I believe very fundamentally that the more authorship is removed, the more room there is in a game for beauty. By extension, I further believe that the more the 'auteur' abdicates his own 'singular vision' to those with whom he is collaborating in the creation of the game, the more room there is in the game for beauty.

Now this notion of 'leaving room for beauty' is a bit tricky, I admit. There is a lot of room for beauty in the Louvre, but there is also a lot of room for beauty in an abbatoir. How that room is used is kind of central. Clearly, you can much more predictably provide beauty with a well-rounded portion of authorship while still leaving lots of room for players to add to that beauty if they so choose. Clearly, abdicating all authorship means asking the player to be an artist, and that's probably not a very high-yield recipe for art.

But in some ways, I feel this is the very purpose of games. Every other artistic medium is authored in the traditional sense: the message passes down from author to audience through the medium. But games (as we know) are different. Input is expression, and when players input their expression it passes back into the medium, where it feeds back against predictions the author(s) made about the kinds of things players might express (never reaching the author directly).

In McLuhan-ian terms the message of all (okay, most) other media is that the Author is 'above' and 'primary' and that meaning and art 'declines' from His Wisdom and Grace. The message of games is that the Author has 'recused' Himself and that he has willingly set himself outside the system of his work so that meaning and art can 'incline' from the Player.

That's, like, the most beautiful thing ever.

To me, it does not matter that most of the art will be 'bad'. In fact, the notion that all these player expressions are 'bad art' only exists when we cling to auteur-centric models of what makes good art. It's like the religious notion that morality is not valid unless you subscribe to the religion in question - that even if you lead a 'good' life, you will go to Hell if you don't accept Jesus or some shit. The point is that it doesn't matter if the vast majority of player expressions are nonsensical and seem to be 'bad art' - the beauty comes from the fact that they are player expressions. It doesn't matter if you take Jesus into your heart if you live a good life. If believing in the player's expression condemns me to eternity in player-created-content-purgatory, so be it.

To me, that's what games are: they are places for players to practice self-expression safely, where they can gain confidence in their ability to express themselves and hopefully one day recognize that all the ways in which they express themselves are beautiful. When all of mankind is able to confidently express themselves beautifully, I believe the work of human culture is done.

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....)

Ethical Decision Making

Manveer over at Design Rampage threw up his Pecha Kucha style slides, notes and audio from his GLS talk about Ethical Decision Making in games.

He makes more or less the same points that I made in a similar talk back in 2004, linked here as well as in the stack on the right. PK talks are great because they cut right to the point. In all honesty in today's age, I am starting to lose faith in the 1 hour talk format.

I commented briefly on Manveer's site, but I wanted to recap the point here. One of the four points Manveer identifies in his talk as being important to designing for meaningful ethical decisions is `permanence`. He states in his notes "A dilemma ceases to be a dilemma if you get a do-over. Save games, unfortunately ruin this.".

I find myself unwilling to accept this. As I said in the comments over on his side, this is seeking to apply an author-centric narrative model to a medium with which it is not compatible. Games (at least modern single-player computer games) allow the ability to redo actions through save-load. This is inherent to what they are and quite possibly need to be.

In The Iliad, when Hector decides to go and fight Achilles, we know he's going to die... so does everyone else. So does he. And that's the point. Hector can't do anything else because Hector is Hector and that is why we care. Author centric media allow for this inevitability. In fact, they are dependant on it.

In a game, Hector is not Hector. Hector is the player and the player will keep fighting Achilles until he wins, and this is the way it should be. In fact, making it impossible to change the decision and do it differently - arguably even making it difficult to beat Achilles to try and make the player feel the way Hector feels - is contrary to what both games and difficult decisions are about. The emotional emphasis and resultant challenge should be on the decision to commit to fighting Achilles, not the rote mashing of buttons to launch the combos that will sever the tendon that bears his name and beat him.

The path forward - in my opinion - is to invent a new ethical decision making model specific to games that embraces what games are instead of rejecting it for the models used in other author-centric media that have been successful up to now. I don't know exactly what that model is shaped like (though I talked about it in my talk), but I know that if we adopt a narrativoid, author-centric model, we may one day manage to make EDMs in games that are as compelling as those in authored media, but we'll never exceed the emotional weight of those media.

If we truly want to be the dominant culture form of the twenty-first century, we have fight on our own terms, not on their terms. We have to do it the way that works for us. We have to step out on the field of battle and face our own Achilles, even if it means we will lose, because it's in our nature and we can't do it differently anyway...

Or maybe we can.

Maybe we can all try it our own different way and collectively solve the problem by trying all the different permutations simultaneously and seeing which way works and comparing notes in real time via the interwebs instead of waiting for someone to write down the authoritative solution and teach it to us.

That's what I'm talkin' about. How's that for a meta-post.

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.

Reading Between the Lines

Smarty-pants Jane over at Game Girl Advance picks the bones clean on my last post and gets to one of the points I only managed to gloss over - that of procedural literacy and how us folks who create in this medium need to be 'literate' in the 'language' of systems before we can express ourselves in them.

In fact, I had another couple hundred words on that side-line but tossed them to keep that last post from getting totally gross... it's a miracle anybody read it in the first place. But yeah, this idea of what real literacy in this medium means is something I have been thinking a lot about for a couple years, going back to an old post on the topic over at Grand Text Auto.

I'll have to get my head around those ideas one of these days, but thanks for the reminder Jane.  

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.