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SHOOTER in StoryBundle

A few months ago I was honored to be invited by Reid McCarter (@reidmccarter) and Patrick Lindsey (@HanFreakinSolo) to contribute the foreward to an anthology they were editing called Shooter. It's a collection of essays about first-person shooters and their place and relevance within the larger context of media and culture. The fifteen chapters are contributed by a talented and diverse collection of some of the smartest critics currently writing about games as culture. I was fortunately enough to get to read a version of the book before it was released, and I found it really engaging and thoughtful.

Cameron Kunzelman had this to say in his review of the book for Paste:

Shooter stands out from the crowd of books about games in its quality, its general accessibility, and its steadfast commitment to critique. It is a serious book that takes serious looks at some genres we don’t always take seriously, and it does a fine job at helping reconfigure some gamer memory that we take as fact. Anyone interested in seeing what critique of games should look like has a great model in the essays in Shooter.

Anyway, the book is currently featured in the StoryBundle, (until the end of this month) which means you can get it along with three other amazing books by even more amazing game critics, and four bonus books from even more amazing writers - all for a very good price. If you want to get up to speed on the state of the art in game critical writing, you should check it out.

To tease you, I agreed with Reid and Patrick to republish my foreward here. Hopefully this will pique your interest and inspire you to grab the bundle. Here it is:

 

On Gunplay

Of all the major professional team sports; football, soccer, basketball, baseball and hockey, I believe pretty strongly that hockey is the best of them. While this is a question of personal taste and preference, hockey, with its speed, its constant back and forth, its ever-changing match-ups, and its balance of positional team play and individual reflex skill, is the most dynamic of the professional sports. The way all the elements come together - particularly at the elite level of play - makes for an exceptionally beautiful game.

While I could discuss at length why I think hockey is better than any of the other major professional sports, that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about shooters - videogames wherein the main player activity involves shooting other (virtual or simulated) players. A well-executed competitive shooter, such as Counter-Strike, is also an exceptionally beautiful game, and here is the thing: while I believe that hockey is objectively better than football or basketball, I don’t think I can say that hockey is better than Counter-Strike. With its speed, its constant back and forth, its ever-changing match-ups, and its balance of positional team play and individual reflex skill, Counter-Strike is as dynamic as the most popular competitive games in the world. Counter-Strike is an exceptionally beautiful game. Like all great competitive games, it is engaging to watch, enriching to play, and highly demanding of the serious player who can endlessly plumb its depths and range over its enormous strategic terrain in a quest for self-betterment that will never, ever end.

Like hockey, Counter-Strike, and competitive shooters in general, challenge a number of player skills; reflexes, strategic decision-making, match-up evaluation, positional knowledge and awareness, and local, tactical decision-making. Because of the dynamic nature of these games, the skills effectively have no ceiling, so the challenge is not to meet some arbitrary, fixed skill bar, but rather to out-perform the opponent. Both Counter-Strike and hockey deliver what I call synthetic meaning: meaning that arises through a ludic dialectic taking place between players constantly proposing and counter-proposing theories of optimal play. Counter-Strike and hockey are ongoing arguments. They are arguments about what it means to be human in the context of the relevant skills.

But if competitive shooters see their meaning synthesized at runtime through a dialectic between players, what does that say about the single-player shooter? Single-player shooters largely challenge the same core player skills as multiplayer shooters; reflexes, strategic decision-making, match-up evaluation, positional knowledge and awareness, and local, tactical decision-making, but because there is no opponent, the challenges are at least broadly (and in some cases quite strictly) authored. The game designers have decided where to fix the skill bar for any given corridor or arena - if the player meets the bar, she continues, if not, she tries again. In this sense the single-player shooter moves away from being a dialogue, and toward being a lecture. More important than that; because the opponent is not another human, but is instead the game itself, the single-player game is not a lecture about what it means to be human, but is instead a lecture about the nature of the game. A single-player game is, in some sense, a prescribed curriculum of drills, gated with tests.

There are a few interesting repercussions that arise from using this framework for thinking about meaning, (and this is only one possible framework for thinking about games in general or shooters specifically - you will encounter others in this book). First, this framework seems to imply that all competitive shooters are necessarily about the same thing; they are about a specific perspective on human existence. It implies that Counter-Strike and Quake are ultimately the same game; they are arguments about the same topic, perhaps being conducted in different languages, but essentially the same conversation. That may sound like a crippling critique of the competitive shooter, but the second repercussion of using this framework implies something equally critical of the single-player shooter: that the authoring of an arbitrary skill bar by a designer makes the skill component of the game only as important to its meaning as any other authored element. In other words, in single-player shooters, the gameplay is only of the same magnitude of importance as the story - the single-player shooter’s ability to express the specific undermines to some extent its capacity to address the universal.

Simply stated, this framework suggests that all competitive shooters are about one universally important and fundamental thing, while each single-player shooter is about something different. If we want to validate that, we can extrapolate the framework to other games and across different media to see whether it is predictive of things we generally hold to be true. For example, we can look at professional boxing and professional MMA fighting - two different but similar competitive combat sports - and determine that, yes, they are broadly ‘about’ the same thing (perhaps ‘the comparative importance of the cerebral cortex and the amygdala’). At the same time, we can look at two different films about boxing - such as Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull, and see that they express wildly different ideas. The fighting in these films becomes a motive force for the development of the characters and the plot. As in a typical single-player shooter, the range of ‘player skill’ (in this case the boxing capability of the characters) has been authored in service of the story.

Curiously, the documentary When We Were Kings is an authored film that directly examines ‘what boxing is about’ by presenting the idea that the Rumble in the Jungle was essentially an argument between Muhammad Ali’s theory that the cerebral cortex was more important and George Foreman’s theory that it was still the amygdala. Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull are both excellent films that talk in their own specific ways about human strength and human frailty. When We Were Kings interprets the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire as being a fundamental statement about the triumph of seven million years of human evolution that literally gave rise to everything we know (thankfully Ali won). Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull are beautiful because I empathize with the things they are about. Boxing is beautiful because I am what it is about.

Back to shooters.

I am not here to throw the single-player shooter under the bus. The best game I ever worked on was a single-player shooter, and while I happily concede that it was not as beautiful a game as Counter-Strike, that does not mean that some theoretical single-player shooter could not be. On the contrary - I think the single-player game is uniquely positioned to leverage the competitive game’s power to address the universal within the context framed by its more authored and specific meanings. The first step toward achieving this, of course, lies in having something to say.

One of the biggest challenges developers of single-player shooters must confront if they hope to achieve this is to escape the potential well of the inherent universal meanings of the competitive shooter. The conventions of the competitive shooter are strong and well-defined, and deviation from them is risky. It’s safer for developers to simply adopt the trappings of the competitive shooter form, accepting along with them the sense of universality that they confer. But it is only a sense of universality; it is only a façade. Without the ludic dialectic of player-versus-player, the argument risks becoming self-indulgent, and the game only pretends to the universality of the themes. For the most part, it seems that the single-player shooters that claim to speak to universal human truths are more often affecting importance than they are actually being important.

This is because, when viewed through this particular interpretive lens, meaning in the single-player shooter does not come from the same places as meaning in the competitive shooter. In both sorts of games, we could say that the meaning comes from the ‘gunplay’ - but in the case of the competitive shooter it comes from the ‘play’, and in the case of the single-player shooter, it comes from the ‘gun’. Whether we want it to or not, meaning inherits significantly from the fiction of the gun itself. In a competitive shooter, meaning comes from the ludic dialectic and the fiction of the gun is much less significant. In a single-player shooter the fictional wrapping of the gun is of central importance. For there to be any hope of saying something important, developers must acknowledge this - anything else is whitewashing.

Fortunately, guns are inherently important. It is not hard - at least conceptually - to say important things with respect to guns. In fact, guns by their very nature amplify the importance of the things they are implicated in. This is probably why they are so commonly and prominently featured in stories and in games. To some, the gun is a heroic symbol of rugged individualism. To others it represents a detached, banal, industrialized form of domination and control. For some the gun is an equalizer; representing the promise of liberty, for others it is a symbol of fear, oppression and violence.

But while guns offer the developers of single-player shooters easy access to an accessible set of universal themes, those themes are also highly politicized. Nearly anything that anyone can meaningfully say about the role of guns and gun violence in human society is heavily entangled in ideological and highly divisive political discourse. You can’t talk about guns or shooting in any meaningful way without pissing someone off.

For the ‘Capital I’ Game Industry of the early 21st Century, this presents a real problem. Shooters demand extreme levels of visual fidelity, high agency simulations, richly interactive environments, and sophisticated AI, all running at high frame rates. They are the most expensive sort of game you can invest in, and presenting a shooter with a divisive theme is a really good way to lose all your money. The problem that needs to be solved in order to elevate the single-player shooter is a problem that gets twice as hard to solve every eighteen months.

At the same time, however, the climate and culture of games is also evolving rapidly. We live in a time when game development is easier than ever. It’s true that the quality bar for a AAA Industry produced shooter is excessively high and demands a development team numbering in the hundreds and a budget in the range of tens of millions of dollars. But this is not the only way games can be made. A small team using free tools and developing for open platforms can set themselves apart more easily than ever before, simply by having something to say.

In parallel to the evolution of the technology, the last decade has seen an explosion of increasingly sophisticated and informed dialogue and criticism relating to shooters specifically and to video games in general. This book is part of a still young, but increasingly strong tradition of discourse that both keeps developers honest, and at the same time encourages and empowers those who have something to say. As you read the essays in this book, I encourage you to consider not only the subject matter of the writing itself, but also how it fits into and supports a tradition that improves not only one genre of videogame, but games and human culture as a whole. As someone who has benefitted, both materially and emotionally from the rising tide of game criticism over the past decade, I can assure you that the words on these pages are as important to future of the medium as are the games themselves.

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.

Far Cry 2 Map Editing Guide

Wow - two posts in a row about books that I contributed to - albiet this one is only indirectly as I didn't actually write anything for it.

A few months ago, Ubisoft announced that they would be facilitating the creation of a map editing guide to be written entirely by the Far Cry 2 map editing community.

It's done (age gated). I finally got my hands on a copy of the finished product yesterday, and I think it's pretty cool. Published by Charles River Media, the guide is hefty and acts mostly as a super-robust handbook for the (already awesome) editor. It discusses all the different classes and game modes and weapons, and breaks out all the different biomes that the game supports, as well as providing a lot of interesting discussion on the design implications of different topolgies, terrains and environments. It touches on the classic pillars of multiplayer map design and even provides detailed indexes of the object libraries (which is very helpful - particularly for the console mapper).

Since most of my readers here are developers, I'll be honest and say I don't think the book would be of much help to a pro (though it's not just for designers, a lot of programmers on our team played with it and were very happy with the results - I would recommend any programmer, animator, or producer who has never been hands on with a level editor give it a try just to see what they can do). Mostly though, for an amateur or hobbyist, or - perhaps more importantly - someone looking for a way to hone level design skills for a resume, I think the book is a really valuable contribution.

I'll also say I'm really impressed by a fan community who can organize themselves around the considerable and daunting task of seeing a collaborative book project all the way through from conception to completion in such a short time.

To see this kind of commitment coming from fans of the game makes me even more proud of it.

Available from Amazon here.

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.

In Sid We Trust

"You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world."

Change the world? As far as I'm concerned, for the first time since Alpha Centauri, Civilization:Revolution [2] has allowed me to do it. More than that, it has, itself, changed the world.

I never played Civ or Civ 2. The first time I had a PC that could really do the job SM:AC was the flavor of the day and I got my first taste of Meierian awesomeness as the Spartans. Locked into an abusive relationship with the Hive, I was unable to do anything except what they demanded for over a thousand years. Until I got the bomb and began stockpiling. I was eventually forced to win that game by carpet-nuking the entire planet, wreacking untold devastation on every enemy city - and even some of my own - spartan concrete and iron cities shattered under the overpressures of proximal planet buster detonations. If the only honorable death is in service of Sparta... I unleashed a lot of fucking honor that day. Only a handful of domed Spartan cities remained - awash in a radioactive sea.

Civ 3... I must have played it ten times and never finished a game. Somewhere around the Renaissance - either at the tail end of the Middle Ages or the dawn of the Industrial Era at best, I would become swamped. With hundreds of units in play and often well over fifty cities, I would not be able to maintain any forward momentum. The sheer weight of Civ 3's background systems would drag the pace of the game down to a standstill. Maintenance, Inefficiency, Unit Support and proper basing, Pollution... all of these factors would fall like a hammer on my growth and mire the game down into turns that would sometimes take me over an hour to execute. My PC would then need to churn away on the turns of the other factions - sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes or more.

I never even considered playing another Civ game after that... until they announced it was coming to console. It was then that I realized there was no way they could even release a game whose turns would take two hours to complete. They would be forced to deliver a game that could be played from beginning to end in that time. The only question was whether or not the game would be fun with all the complexity stripped out? How much simpler and lighter could you make Civ without it becoming too easily solvable or too degenerate.

I've now bought the game twice. Once on DS and once on X360, and I have played the game upwards of 20 times. In almost every case I have finished the game (after having played it 5 to 8 times, I would tend to abandon a fresh game if starting terrain seemed particularly lop-sided either for or against).

So what's so great about Civilization: Revolution?

You will finish every game you start
And you will do it in between 2-6 hours, depending on how you play, which path to victory you choose, and how singular your commitment to your strategy. Playing on DS will be faster as you can skip the animated depiction of combat... cutting quite a lot of dead time from the game.

It is 'Civ:Lite'... but in a good way
A lot of the heavy underlying systems of previous Civ titles have just been removed. Not consolidated. Not automated. They are just gone. Unit Support? Talk about hidden numbers that have very far reaching effects... this concept is gone entirely. Efficiency? Again - a hidden 'tax' on what a city could produce that diminished the further the city stood from the capitol - it's gone... simply removed from the game. Does this unbalance the game? Now you can support 10,000 units if you want. Now growth is unchecked by efficiency. Isn't that a problem? Well, we could talk about it for hours, these sorts of questions are rooted in fundamental questions about game themselves. In the end, I am pretty certain that the answer we will arrive at is 'no' ... boy I could write 100 pages on that...

It's the same game on X360 and DS (and presumably other platforms)
This is what is world changing for me. In a game development climate where we seem to be trying to release a version of a game on every imaginable platform and we seem to have to do a lot of work and make a lot of compromises and a lot of changes for each platform (often staffing an entirely new team to deliver the game on each platform), Civ:Rev proves that you can release the exact same game on a handheld as you can on a Next-Gen 'living-room' console. Why - oh why - have our DS games tended to be shoddy reskins of other DS games painted up to look like whatever AAA console title we're launching. Why - oh why - do the big console versions of handheld titles seem almost like a joke of an 'up port'? For me - this is the most important statement made by the game. It is the thing that proves Sid Meier still fucking ownz all our asses. It is the thing that calls into question all of the assumptions we've made about game development for this entire generation - even making Will Wright's statements about player creativity and proceduralism, and the 'second processor' and sharing, ranking, rating - seem a bit off the mark. How do we deal with the current generation's 'divide' between the big machines from Sony and Microsoft and the generation-winning machines from nintendo? Sid just showed us.

The Air War
My friend Greg loves kicking people's asses with air-power. From the TIE Defender to SMAC's shard helicopters, nothing can stop him gloating over his air power as he pounds the fuck out of everything with endless waves of aircraft that seem to materialize around him when his singular Goring-esque commitment to air-war pays off at the start of the end-game. Civ:Rev's air-war is different. Civ: Rev wins the air-war thus; there is no better game to play while on an airplane than Civ:Rev on a DS. Period. Trust me. I flew to Africa, Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai, and then Africa again with Civ:Rev DS. If you don't have a DS and you have a flight coming up, it is worth buying one right now, just so you can play Civ:Rev on it while you fly.

What's wrong with Civilization: Revolution?

It is degenerate
The game is degenerate. Keep in mind, I still had to play the game ~10 times to lock down degenerate strategies, but lack of some of the above mentioned overly-complex balancing features leads to two major problems. The first is that aggressive growth strategies always win. I typically win the game with 20+ cities compared to my next leading opponent having 8 or so, and behind him a cluster of opponents with 4-6. The AI simply does not seem able to keep up with even moderately aggressive player growth strategies.

Another unfortunate degeneration is that the Aztecs simply seem unbeatable. The ability to have units always heal to full, plus the later bonuses that this Faction receives (Temples producing science, reduced cost roads, increased gold production) all stack up to make a faction that is just too powerful.

Geographical Determinism
As I mention above, I tend to restart a game within 50 or so turns if the starting terrain seems too lop-sided. If a kind of bias to a theory of geographical determinism is leveled against Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, then nowhere could this bias be more clearly expressed than in Civ:Rev (note - this is a failing of all the Civ games I ever played, not just this one). The reality is, there are myriad ways in which the starting geography of the game can determine the entire outcome of the game, and after you have played half-a-dozen times, you will probably want to abandon about one game in three after the first 45 minutes or so should the geographical advantages be too extreme.

No customization
A sadly missing feature is the ability to customize - even to a slight degree - the nature of the planet you will play on. The planet tends to always be a fairly similar Pangaea, causing games to often play out in similar ways. In Civ 3 and SMAC you could tell the world generator how much to age the planet, how wet or how dry to make it, how eroded, how old, etc. I miss this feature. For example, I would like to try a very naval focused game playing as the Spanish, English or the Japanese - but the probability of an archipelago-style world being generated by the game is low. Also, you cannot choose which factions you will play against. Having the ability to customize the planet generation parameters and the opponents allows you to play some interesting edges of the game... setting the world up as an archipelago and playing as the Spanish - but offsetting your naval advantages by filling the world with powerful military factions like the Mongols, Germans, and Aztecs forces you to play a game of aquatic commerce and culture, which is very different from the 'typical' game which is imposed by the  degenerate elements. I miss that.

Anyway, that's my review of Civilization:Revolution for the XBox360 and Nintendo DS. I highly recommend you try one or the other (or both).

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.

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.

A psychopath, a fascist, a rapist and God walk into a bar...

Last week some of us were chatting at work and Alan Moore's Watchmen came up in conversation. I realized then that although I had read it several times, I had never owned my own copy. Five years ago, while packing my stuff to move from Vancouver to Montreal, I realized that the copy on my shelf actually belonged to a friend of mine - so I nobly returned it. Our little water-cooler chat got me wanting to read it again, so I stumbled out looking for a comic store and picked up the latest trade-paperback reprint.

I'm sure most everyone who would end up at this site has read Watchmen, so I won't worry about spoiling anything here. If you haven't read it, get off your as and do so... it's fucking spectacular.

There are a number of things that strike me about this story... not the least of which is that it bears many, many re-readings and that the characters become deeper and more compelling every time. I remember the first time I read it being extremely engaged by the Comedian, and the way the entire story is about his discovery of the Greatest Practical Joke Ever Imagined. I remember being floored by the elegant unveiling of that joke and how strongly I identified with him in the few glimpses we catch of his final moments. Here is a man who has made his trade in being in the world's biggest cynic. His cynicism is so powerful that it makes him superhuman... he's a rapist, a murderer, an assassin, and yet he is so totally amoral and nihilistic that these horrors he commits are water off a ducks back.

On later readings, I found more and more depth in Veidt/Ozymandias, who has come up with a super-villain plan to kill millions, but in fact he is not a super-villain at all. He might be a sociopathic fascist, and he kills millions of people in a truly disturbing and horrifying move, but the underlying certitude behind his logic is almost a priori infallible. The perfection of his rational approach reminds me of Kurzweil - though I can't imagine wearing Ray Kurwzeil perfume or playing with a Ray K action figure.

When the true nature of Doc Manhattan is revealed in Chapter 4, it almost makes you feel bad for God. Doc M is omnipotent in the real sense of the word, yet at the same time he is rendered utterly impotent in the face of determinism. Although probably the least compelling character due to his completely inhuman nature, the way Moore tracks his origin back to a fat man stepping on a watch at Coney Island and the subsequent inevitability of the events that follow is haunting. Moore is in dangerous territory in the scene where Laurie accidentally draws him to the realization that human individuality is essentially a thermodynamic miracle, but he pulls off a little literary slight of hand, and Gibbon's wonderful pull-back on two nested Martian craters distracts you for the blink of an eye needed to pull the rabbit out of the hat. I would say this is probably the only part of the book that gets weaker on re-reading.

And Rorschach. Wow. Now here is probably the single most deeply realized character in comic history. He's cryptic yet comprehensible, paranoid yet rational, psychotic yet controlled. Of the three 'main players', Rorschach, Veidt and Doc Manhattan, it is Rorschach who is the most human (I consider Dan and Laurie to be supporting players). Veidt never has a human moment in the story proper (though I think we are meant to feel one in his back-story). Doc Manhattan's human moment with Laurie (mentioned above) doesn't quite click. But Rorschach's human moment - when he calls his landlady a whore in front of her children and realizes (without even any words devoted to it) that he has allowed his cruelty to touch an undeserving innocent - this is the moment where he explodes off the page and becomes a fully realized, living and breathing character. His disintegration by Doc Manhattan at the end is is not only the end of the story, it is the ultimate punchline the Comedian foresaw, it is the inevitability of determinism as Rorschach's refusal to compromise collides with Veidt's a priori solution to the world's problems.

In a sense, all of Watchmen's main players - Doc M, Veidt, Rorschach and the Comedian have rejected or lost their humanity. It is only Rorschach who manages to recover his - if only for an instant near the end, and perhaps in his final act. And yet alongside these modern gods is a supporting cast of truly you-and-me people. Dan with his bumbling attraction to Laurie, his nostalgic drop-in visits with Hollis, his mid-life crisis and his regained virility. Laurie - who is just hopelessly over her head in dating a guy who can't merely see the future, but for who past, present and future has no meaning. She rejects her mother and at the same time is compelled to follow the path her mother has chosen for her. The bumbling Doctor Huxtable-esque shrink whose happy brown-stone and tweed existence is shattered by the bullet that is Rorschach's psyche, the dim-witted and ignorant news-vendor, the lesbian trying to live up to her new girlfriend's expectations, the meek Moloch who just wants to die and fade away, the two cops who half-heartedly sniff their way around the edges of the crime that sets the story in motion yet resist looking for an actual solution - all of these people enrich the world, and as their individual stories collide at the climax we feel the cost the Veidt's master plan and wonder if it could possibly be worth it.

Of course, Watchmen was written back in '86 when the standing vision of war meant casualties counted in megadeaths. Our world is not that world anymore. It wasn't a giant psychic tentacle monster from another dimension that appeared in the middle of New York that changed the world forever. It was something much more mundane and the numbers were orders of magnitude lower.

The thing that moved me the most about Watchmen this time was the comic-within-the-comic - the story of the stranded sailor who fights his way across the sea to save his family from the dread marauding pirates that sank his ship, massacred his crew and left him for dead. It is a cautionary tale of a man who becomes the enemy he has set out to defeat. It tells us that there exist paths through life that lead us to damnation even though each individual step itself can be called moral and just. In 1986 it read as an allegory on the balance of power, and the possibility that mutually assured destruction might be inevitable even with rational people making perfect decisions at every junction. Thankfully that turned out to not be true.

Twenty years later, the 2006 reading of the same story is a little different. It reminds us of Nietzsche's axiom that he who fights monsters becomes a monster. It makes us compare the reflex death-sting of a giant extra-dimensional psychic tentacle monster to the response of the world's only hyper-power to being stung itself. It reminds us there are no heroes and no villains - only those who have retained their humanity, and those who have lost it, and it reminds us that there is no objective reference point that will help you know which side of that line you are on until it's too late. We may set out to save the world from chaotic-evil pirates, but the cost of succeeding might be more than we're willing to pay. In attacking New York, Ozymandias might have locked us into an unrecoverable spiral whose outcome is the a priori guaranteed failure of everything we believe in.

Moore opens Chapter 11 with a quote from Shelley's Ozymandias, which may be the single greatest poem of the Romantic era; 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.' But Moore leaves out the next line - which is where the poem gets all it's power - 'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.'. It is a poem about the absurdity of human pride, arrogance and hubris. So let's just hope we're facing Shelley's Ozymandias, and not Moore's.

Incompleteness, Uncertainty, Relativity and the Universe

Been a month of heavy reading for me with two books of tremendous and mind-bending scope.

First was Simon Singh's latest 'The Big Bang'. I'm a huge fan of his sort of 'popularized history of science' kind of writing. His first book 'Fermat's Enigma' floored me with its engaging histories of insane mathematicians from Pythagoras (a^2+b^2=c^2) to Fermat (for n>2 there are no whole number solutions for a^n+b^n=c^n) to Wiles - the dude who proved Fermat's theorem in '91 or '92. I should link that book in the list on the right, but the only image I have of the cover is too big to fit in the column.

Singh also wrote 'The Code Book' - another excellent romp through mathematical history, this time as relates not to one of the great riddles of our time, but as relates to the people whose livelihood lies in creating and solving riddles themselves. Crypto is cool... and a naturally engaging topic for a history-of-science writer because it's all full of intrigue and war. I highly recommend it - especially if you're borderline OCD like me and have a dangerous fascination with that stuff. Of course - if you actually are OCD - stay the fuck away from it because it will make you go batty for real.

So his latest book - which I think is more than a year old now - is 'The Big Bang' and he veers away from the purer mathematicians toward the theoretical physicists and cosmologists who have been trying to explain the shape of the universe (spatially and temporally speaking) for a few thousand years. He starts with Aristarchus measuring the distance to the Sun using wells in Africa and the Stade as a unit of measurement and runs all the way up to the late 20th century, covering everyone from Ptolemy to Copernicus and Galileo to Hubble and Einstein. He doesn't go into the real up-to-date stuff like string theory and M-space though.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the book because I think Singh has a knack for finding the human stories and for making characters out of these names that you've been reading in textbooks since high-school. Science is so much more engaging when it's about people instead of just about ideas and numbers... kind of like games in a way. Unfortunately, my own appreciation of the book was hobbled a bit by the fact that I had covered the vast majority of the material in a 'Stars for Rockstars' course at UBC - one of those mandatory science courses for folks in the humanities.

So if you didn't take Astronomy For Arts Students Who Don't Understand Calculus 101 while in school - and you wanna know about more about the stars, planets, galaxies and universe itself so you'll have that information when you need it... I suggest picking it up.

The other book I read was the at turns tear-jerking, at turns punishing 'Incompleteness' by Rebecca Goldstein. It's about Kurt Godel, his life and his work. It's pretty short, but in some places trying to finish the page is akin to having a tooth extracted. I suspect that trying to put together a layman's description of Godel's Incompleteness theorems is a next-to-impossible task and it sure turned my brain into glue as I tried to read it. I'm very glad I pushed through though, because the last couple of chapters of the book are amazing. I cried at the end even, at how sad it is that someone as earth-shakingly brilliant as Godel can just kind of fall between the cracks of society - even in a place like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

What is great about the book though, aside from the touching perspectives on Godel himself, is the assertion that guys like Godel and Einstein - who us post-modernists most commonly take to be relativists - were in fact the purest of Platonists. Doubly weird when you consider that the term 'relativist' probably gets the majority of its current strength from Einstein himself.

How can Einstein and Godel - the two guys who (along with Heisenberg) probably dealt the most serious blows to any notion of objectivity - be Platonists? I think the argument goes something like this: (and I'll come at it from the Relativity side because it's less abstract and less full of self-referential statements than if I try to come from the Incompleteness side)

Time is relative to the observer and there is no preferred - or objective - frame of reference (duh). But in a sense, what that ends up meaning - or at least this is what I read Goldstein as claiming it meant to Einstein and Godel - is that the General Relativity equations themselves are an absolute and objective description of time. Time literally is the mathematics that describes it - and all of the infinitude of subjective frames of reference are just data-points in the system of time as is defined by General Relativity. Thus - in defining the system that encompasses subjective time, we have a new objective measure of what time is. I think that's kind of cool.

To put it in a context that anyone likely on this site might be more comfortable with... there are an infinite number of possible experiences for a player of Mario Bros. Every single play experience is unique, and none of them are 'preferred' - so if I've played it, I can say 'Mario Bros is X' and if you've played it, you can say 'No, Mario Bros is Y' - each of us is essentially describing his linear experience of the game. We are both right from our own perspective, but also we are both wrong in a sense. Neither of those singular experiences is Mario Bros. Mario Bros - in the Einstein-and-Godel-are-Platonists-sense - is the code. It is the all-encompassing truth that describes all the possible individual, subjective experiences and is itself an absolute. It is because of the code that both of our unique experiences can exist. Each unique experience becomes one of an infinity of solutions for the algorithm that is Mario Bros.

It goes back to the Allegory of the Cave (which I ironically used to help define the role of the Level Designer here). Einstein shows that each reference - each instance of subjective time is just a shadow on the wall, a projection of the Form of his equations... it shows rather irrefutably that there exist objective - though intangible - things... and you can't be much more Platonic than that.

Anyway - if you can tough out the math and can hold onto your marbles through highly self-referential sentences broken down into formal logic, then I'd recommend it. It'll be a breeze if you're a programmer, because the symbolic logic and equations aren't hard, they're just self-referential which sends the mind spinning a bit.

Zero Sum Zanshin and the Tao of Low Strong

So I haven't posted in about a week because my free time has been pretty much obliverated, but I had to get on here and post my thoughts on David Sirlin's book Becoming the Champion.

This is not a book I would have picked up on my own, and the only reason I read it was that the author handed me a copy after my GDC presentation. In the end, I'm really glad he did, because I found the book extremely interesting and engaging, and so hopefully by throwing up a post about it here, I'll drive a few folks like me, who would not have otherwise considered it, to give it a read.

The book is an analysis of competitive gaming and a kind of philosophical handbook to understanding the challenges of becoming a competitive gamer. A good chunk of the book is a re-examination of Sun Tsu's Art of War as it applies in the context of competitive games. Weird, I know, but it works.

I have read the Art of War and have always had some problems with analyses of it that try to make it applicable to endeavours other than war-fighting. I find that such attempts often simply turn something highly literal into something pointlessly abstract and metaphorical. Because Sirlin is writing literally about (simulated) fighting, his adaptation of the original work holds up much better.

In particular, I appreciated the fact that he was able to maintain his analysis through his chapter 'Attacking with Fire', which is (in other analyses I have read) a troublesome chapter to extend into other spaces. It's clear in Master Tsu's original work that he's not talking about attacking with fire metaphorically - he's talking about torching fields and forests to cut off escape routes so you can massacre your enemy without dividing your forces. Deliteralizing this principle and trying to apply it to diversifying a junk-bond portfolio always seemed like a bad idea. Sirlin smartly confines the scope of his chapter and doesn't overextend himself. His chapter on attacking with fire is only a page and a half long. He talks about the use of fireballs and ranged attacks in Street Fighter as a way to create a pin and then attack from a different direction - the time required for the fireball to cross the screen means the attacking fighter and the fireball can arrive on the enemy at the same time - enabling an attack from two directions at once. He also points out that pins and forks in chess are essentially the same thing (though they are slightly different mechanically because in chess they must operate in a turn-based play-space).

Another cool part of the book is his comparison of play-styles of famous chess masters and (admittedly less) famous competitive Street Fighter players. I don't know enough about the history of chess, and I know almost nothing about the history of competitive Street Fighter, but even I have heard of Capablanca. Sirlin illustrates that there are certain styles of play that cross game-specific boundaries, and points out that in any community that surrounds any game you will find some of the same types of people. His point - I think - is that by studying other kinds of competitive gaming he was able to develop a more robust perspective on the competitive sphere surrounding his own game, which maybe he could not have seen from the inside. He was able to identify and categorize his competition and develop a deeper understanding of the psychology of different players. He was also able to identify and categorize his own strange play-style and use his new found understanding of himself to improve his game (and to migrate toward a more robust play-style).

In some sense, it is his 'warriors approach' to understanding competitive gaming that makes the book so interesting and makes Sirlin himself a compelling author/character. Sirlin appears to be as dedicated to his 'war art' as any real warrior. He studies the art itself, and practices constantly, but acknowledges also that a hundred thousand matches is not going to make you a master without also studying related arts, without studying the relevant history, without adopting the necessary competitive mind-set, without putting yourself in real situations that test your capabilities.

What I think is most interesting though is that Sirlin gave me his book right after my presentation on designing to promote intentional play. I some sense I was directly attacking the notion of competitive play which Sirlin seems to think requires (what I called) 'seeing the Matrix in the Matrix'. He talks about competitive players who 'know the algorithm' and about the quest to find the optimal peaks in the game-space described by the mechanics of the game as part of the job of the competitive gamer. People playing games like this is not something I particularly want, or at least something I would discourage. So part of me wonders if Sirlin gave me his book to say 'dude - wake up - games are about the quest to understand mechanics'. On the other hand, maybe he felt there was some underlying similarity between what I was saying and his own philosophy.

In some sense, there is a pretty clear case to be made that Street Fighter has brought more to Sirlin's life than any of my games brought to anyone else's life (to my knowledge) - so who am I to say we should design our games to appeal to these people here, but not those people there? This isn't to say I'm going to start designing games to be more suited toward competitive tournament play - merely to say that I need to be careful not to invalidate or fail to recognize that there are many, many ways to enjoy a game and that any of those ways is potentially equally valid.