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Our Man in Havana Returns

It's been a long time since I posted - but I have a real excuse, with links to prove it. Aside from Christmas, and an extra week of vacation in Havana I managed to squeeze in as a result of the game being delayed, I've been busy as hell meeting with the press and promoting the game.

Our first official teaser trailer has been released. Cheeky commentary from Kotaku and from Joystiq on that.

I presented the game to Gamespot's Andrew Park in San Francisco who wrote a great preview here, that follows up an equally awesome preview from last fall.

Far Cry 2 became Ubisoft's first game to take the cover of Edge Magazine, with another great article that is available online here.

Stephen Totilo ran three seperate segments on the MTV Multiplayer blog - one about our innovative integration of explosive barrels (no kidding), one about the PC game market and a third one about the challenges we've been facing building real meaningful investment in characters who are mechanically and procedurally developed in the narrative design.

And speaking of the PC market UGO called Far Cry 2 the 4th most anticipated PC title for 2008... following StarCraft 2, Fallout 3, and Spore. Damn you Will... edged out again.

There is lots of other new coverage out there if you're interested.

On the GDC front - coming soon - I'll be giving a talk about Immersion, I'll be participating the Game Developers Rant, and for the first time I've been invited to be on the Faculty of the Game Design Workshop. Attending the GDW was probably the most valuable time I ever spent at GDC, and I think everyone in the industry should attend it at least once. Hopefully I'll see some of you there.

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.

Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock

The problem of what the game is about

[traduit en francais ici]

About a year ago, I praised Ian Bogost's critique of Bully and lamented the unfortunate lack of game criticism, as distinct from game reviews. Roughly speaking, we could say game criticism is for game developers and professionals who want to think about the nature of games and what they mean. Game reviews are for the public – for people who play games – and they are intended to help those people make decisions about which games they should buy. Both are valuable and important contributions, but sadly, we seem to only have one.

So this is not going to be a review of Bioshock. If you want a review of Bioshock go here. This is going to be a critique of Bioshock – a limited one perhaps, because I don’t have the time to really give this game the 50,000 plus word critical examination I think it deserves, but it will be a critique nonetheless.

Before I tear into it though, I want to apologize to the folks who worked on the game. If this was a review, it would be glowing, but as a critique it’s going to be pretty rough. I mostly really enjoyed this game, and aside from a few minor quibbles that are inevitable coming from a guy who lists System Shock 2 as his favorite game of all time, I basically think the game is great. In a very important sense Bioshock lives up the expectations created by its ancestor by inviting us to ask important and compelling questions, which is wonderful. But unfortunately, in most cases, I think the answers Bioshock provides to those questions are confused, frustrating, deceptive and unsatisfactory.

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game’s narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player’s ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.

So what is the form of this dissonance and why does it shatter the internal consistency of the work so totally?

Bioshock is a game about the relationship between freedom and power. It is at once (and among other things) an examination and a criticism of Randian Objectivism. It says, rather explicitly, that the notion that rational self-interest is moral or good is a trap, and that the ‘power’ we derive from complete and unchecked freedom necessarily corrupts, and ultimately destroys us.

The game begins by offering the player two contracts.

One is a ludic contract – literally ‘seek power and you will progress’. This ludic contract is in line with the values underlying Randian rational self-interest. The rules of the game say ‘it is best if I do what is best for me without consideration for others’. This is a pretty standard value in single player games where all the other characters in the game world (or at very least all of the characters in play in the game world) tend to be in direct conflict with the player. However, it must be pointed out that Bioshock goes the extra mile and ties this game mechanical contract back to the narrative in spectacular fashion through the use of the Little Sisters. By ‘dressing up’ the mechanics of this contract in well realized content I literally experience what it means to gain by doing what is best for me (I get more Adam) without consideration for others (by harvesting Little Sisters).

Thus, the ludic contract works in the sense that I actually feel the themes of the game being expressed through mechanics. The game literally made me feel a cold detachment from the fate of the Little Sisters, who I assumed could not be saved (or even if they could, would suffer some worse fate at the hands of Tenenbaum). Harvesting them in pursuit of my own self-interest seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice. This is exactly what this game needed to do – make me experience – feel – what it means to embrace a social philosophy that I would not under normal circumstances consider.

To be successful, the game would need to not only make me somehow adopt this difficult philosophy, but then put me in a pressure-cooker where the systems and content slowly transform the game landscape until I find myself caught in the aforementioned ‘trap’. Unfortunately, when we take the first, ludic contract and map it to the game’s second contract, the game falls apart.

The game’s second contract is a narrative contract – ‘help Atlas and you will progress’. There are three fundamental problems with this being the narrative contract of the game.

First, this contract is not in line with the values underlying Randian rational self-interest; ‘helping someone else’ is presented as the right thing to do by the story, yet the opposite proposition appears to be true under the mechanics.

Second, Atlas is openly opposed to Ryan, yet again, as mentioned above, I am philosophically aligned with Ryan by my acceptance of the mechanics. Why do I want to stop Ryan, or kill him, or listen to Atlas at all? Ryan’s philosophy is in fact the guiding principle of the mechanics that I am experiencing through play.

Thirdly, I don’t have a choice with regards to the proposition of the contract. I am constrained by the design of the game to help Atlas, even if I am opposed to the principle of helping someone else. In order to go forward in the game, I must do as Atlas says because the game does not offer me the freedom to choose sides in the conflict between Ryan and Atlas.

This is a serious problem. In the game’s mechanics, I am offered the freedom to choose to adopt an Objectivist approach, but I also have the freedom to reject that approach and to rescue the Little Sisters, even though it is not in my own (net) best interest to do so (even over time according to this fascinating data).

Yet in the game’s fiction on the other hand, I do not have that freedom to choose between helping Atlas or not. Under the ludic contract, if I accept to adopt an Objectivist approach, I can harvest Little Sisters. If I reject that approach, I can rescue them. Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan, and if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach – well too bad… I can stop playing the game, but that’s about it.

That’s the dissonance I am talking about, and it is disturbing. Now, disturbing is one thing, but let’s just accept for a moment that we forgive that. Let’s imagine that we say ‘well, it’s a game, and the mechanics are great, so I will overlook the fact that the story is kind of forcing me to do something out of character…’. That’s far from the end of the world. Many games impose a narrative on the player. But when it is revealed that the rationale for why the player helps Atlas is not a ludic constraint that we graciously accept in order to enjoy the game, but rather is a narrative one that is dictated to us, what was once disturbing becomes insulting. The game openly mocks us for having willingly suspended our disbelief in order to enjoy it.

The feeling is reminiscent of the Ikea commercial where we are mocked for feeling sorry for the lamp. But instead of being tricked by a quirky 60 second ad, we are mocked after a 20 hour commitment for having sympathy for the limitations of a medium. The ‘twist’ in the plot is a dues ex machina built upon the very weaknesses of game stories that we – as players – agree to accept in order to have some sort of narrative framework to flavor our fiddling about with mechanics. To mock us for accepting the weaknesses of the medium not only insults the player, but it’s really kind of ‘out of bounds’ (except as comedy or as a meta element – of which it appears to be neither).

Now, I understand the above criticism is harsh, and also that it is built upon complex arguments, so let me clarify a few things.

First, this is not a review. If it was, I would be raving (mostly) about the interesting abilities, fun weapons, beautiful environments, engaging enemy ‘eco-system’, freedom of choice, openness to explore, and a mountain of other fantastic things. But I’m not talking about all of the reasons players should play this game and all of the reasons they will certainly enjoy it. I am talking about the fabric of the game. I am talking about the nature of the game at the most fundamental levels that I can perceive. I am talking about weaknesses that I see (or more importantly that I feel) when I become deeply drawn into the game and really experience what is being expressed in its systems and content.

Second, the points I am making may seem trivial or bizarre to a lot of people, and certainly the arguments the points are built on are complicated. I am sure they are hard for many game developers to understand and impossible for laymen. Honestly – I only partially understand what I am experiencing when I play a game as thoroughly as I played BioShock, and frankly I only half understand what I am saying as I write this. With the ‘language of games’ being as limited as it is, understanding what I am ‘reading’ is hard, and trying to articulate it back to people in a useful way is a full order of magnitude harder.

So take this criticism for what it is worth. It is the complaint of a semi-literate, half-blind Neanderthal, trying to comprehend the sandblasted hieroglyphic poetry of a one-armed Egyptian mason.

Not long ago – in my rebuttal to Ebert – I asserted that GTA: San Andreas was a more important work of art than Crash. Now, I’m not going to bother to announce that BioShock is a work of art. I will, however, point to another often used film-game comparison… the one that states that games do not yet have their Citizen Kane. Similarities between Orson Welles and Andrew Ryan aside, BioShock is not our Citizen Kane. But it does – more than any game I have ever played – show us how close we are to achieving that milestone. BioShock reaches for it, and slips. But we leave our deepest footprints when we pick ourselves up from a fall. It seems to me that it will take us several years to learn from BioShock’s mistakes and create a new generation of games that do manage to successful marry their ludic and narrative themes into a consistent and fully realized whole. From that new generation of games, perhaps the one that is to BioShock as BioShock is to System Shock 2 will be our Citizen Kane.

Narrative and Flow

Although I have not seen the presentation myself, nor had the chance to look at the slides and notes, Pat is back from Austin and he's posted the materials from his talk. By all accounts it went well, hopefully we'll find an hour when we're not putting out fires (or starting them) so he can present it internally.

I'm not in Austin

But Pat is.

Pat is the Narrative Designer on my project, and has been busting his ass for the last 2+ years to do all the nuts and bolts work of making this crazy dynamic interactive narrative we dreamed up for Far Cry 2 actually work.

He'll be sharing some (but nowhere near all) of his insights Wednesday afternoon, so for those in the Austin area who are interested in how to look at narrative as a dynamic system rather than a static construct, check it out.

You're going to have to learn this stuff eventually.

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.

Hey UNESCO - What About Us?

I know that it is incredibly old school to read a newspaper while waiting for a BLT in a pub at lunchtime while out shopping, but I was in an old school kinda mood today. Flipping through the weekend 'Life' section of the Gazette, I discovered that the City was hosting 'Design Montreal's Open House', an open-doors day for some 40 Montreal design firms including those representing Landscaping and City Planning, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Architecture, Interior Design and Fashion Design.

Apparently, on May 12th of last year, UNESCO named Montreal a 'City of Design' an honor held by only two other cities in the world - Berlin and Buenos Aires.

So needless to say, while it is very cool that the City is sponsoring this event to bring public interest and attention toward all the different forms of design, and while I'm super excited to see if I can take advantage of this and get out and see some things, I can't help but wonder two things.

First, why in the world would UNESCO not include Game Design - or at least more broadly - Interactive Design, in this list of design disciplines being recognized? When I was in Paris last year, I got to see - and interact with - a wonderful interactive installation that is in front of the UNESCO HQ and L'Ecole Militaire in Paris. They know what Interactive Design IS if they are commissioning an interactive installation of this magnitude. Surely given the strength and importance of Montreal's game design community, we deserve to be included with our fellow professional designers in this. Also, I find it surprising that someone in the field of Landscape Design, Urban Planning or Architecture would not have spoken up about the absence of Game Design given the fact that a little video game is probably single-handedly more responsible for bringing a generalized appreciation of the importance of those fields to the public at large than is any other single source.

Second, as a professional, award winning designer whose work has been experienced by millions of people, and who works for a firm employing a handful of designers who are arguably among the best  game designers on earth - a firm which has likewise won several, if not dozens of important, internationally recognized awards for design... why in the world would I have never even heard of this? Clearly part of the City's goal in hosting this 'Open House' is to increase public awareness of Montreal's importance as a cultural hub for design... but shit... it might help if the designers themselves knew about it.

The article says that the City and the Province want to establish the Open House as a yearly event. Good. So now I have another side mission, which is to get Game and Interactive Design added to the UNESCO recognition and see at least one Montreal game company in included in the Open House for next year.

With all the continual talk about media convergence in face of the sad reality that all games can ever be in relation to film is some kind of bastard step-child, shouldn't we be going out of our way to celebrate the things that make us distinct and different? Especially in Canada? Doubly so in Montreal? Game Design is - not surprisingly I hope - a design field. We should start acting like it and make sure that we are considered and recognized as such by a world of designers who are our colleagues.

Hollywood’s Bloody Ballet – What Game Design Can Learn From 300

Or
If We Would Just Kneel – And Why We’d Rather Die

For all of the lip service we pay to the notion of convergence, how many of us really understand what it means? Most often in the game industry convergence is used exclusively to refer to the coming together of games and movies. More ideally, most people would have it mean that we in the game industry can learn from Hollywood and Hollywood can learn from games, and everyone will be happier and richer for it, and both players and moviegoers will benefit from a more entertaining, meaningful and even – potentially – a more ‘tailor-made’ entertainment experience.

For me, well, convergence is the word that most makes me want to punch people in the face.

con•ver•gence  k&n-'v&r-j&n(t)s noun

1: In Hollywood – the code word for a strategy to seduce publishers and developers in the videogame industry into manufacturing games to go along with lunch boxes, t-shirts, action figures and other blockbuster movie merchandise in order to nurture secondary markets around the faltering primary market of film making itself in the hopes of maintaining a cultural stranglehold on the 18-34 year old male market segment.

2: In the videogame industry – a theoretical solution to the problem of expanding the market for games to include segments outside the traditional 18-34 year old male audience. It argues that game developers could learn from filmmaking creatives how to make their games more broadly or generally appealing. The argument is fallacious for reasons detailed below.

Thankfully – while convergence is the buzzword that everyone whispers around the boardroom and at the shareholder meetings, the creatives in both Hollywood and the game industry are busy proving why convergence is little more than a buzzword. 300 is – in fact – the movie that proves that convergence between film and videogames is impossible.

Snyder’s film rolls us back almost a hundred years of filmmaking to remind us what filmmaking is really about. His compelling, at turns disturbing and constantly electrifying visuals harken back to the apocryphal days when footage of a train steaming toward the camera would chase moviegoers out of the theatre for fear of being run down.

He reminds us that a film is not a story – at least not ultimately, not finally, and not centrally. He reminds us that a film is a series of images moving very quickly. He reminds us that the story between those images – the story that takes place in Scott McCloud’s ‘gutter’ that’s whizzing by so fast you can’t perceive it – is important, but not as important as the story being told in each and every one of his 4,043,520 or so frames.

What is 300 about? 300 is the story of a bunch of guys who fought to the death defending a way of life that we in the west ultimately take for granted to this day. And while it’s a great story, and a noble one, and important too – important enough that we’ve told it thousands of times and will probably tell it thousands of times more - the fact is that that is not what 300 is about at all.

300 is not a movie about freedom. It is not a movie about the nobility of sacrifice for a cause. It is not a movie about fighting for the greater good or about standing up for what is right in the face of certain death. In fact, in all likelihood, claiming that it is about something so lofty and rational and intellectual is a bit of a slap in the face to 300 dead guys who would kick your ass for slapping them.

At the high level – in terms of its plot and in terms of the kinds of emotions the movie wants you to take away and talk about over the water cooler the next day, sure 300 might be about some of those noble ideas. And it’s a good thing too, because those kinds of emotions – those lofty, rational, intellectual sorts of emotions we inherited from the Greeks who didn’t die at Thermopylae – those kinds of emotions are easier to put into language. Easier to sell. Easier to use to convince Larry from accounting to go see it next weekend.

But at the low level, in terms of what a movie actually is, well, 300 is a hard movie to talk about. In terms of its visual story-telling, in terms of the things that 300 is really about – the things that 300 makes you feel – 300 is an important and challenging and profound film. But if 300 isn’t about all those lofty Greek things, what is it about?

Well, 300 actually is about all those lofty Greek things. 300 is about the human form. It’s about the elegant simplicity of the physical. It’s about the beauty of the human machine, and the nature of the reasoning mind that compels it to put itself into situations that will rend it limb from bloody limb. And further, it is about the divinity of that conflict between the rational and the physical… the non zero sum conflict between our bodies and our minds that ultimately enables us to touch the spiritual, to rise above what we could ever achieve with our fists or our brains alone, or in concert.

Every frame of 300 is a tribute to the beauty and the power of our fearsome flesh. 300 is four million paintings of sand in your eye, the taste of blood, a trickle of sweat on your back, a leather strap cutting into your shoulder, the weight of fatigue in hot muscles, the compression of energy into all of your tendons and the sudden directed release of that energy as a kinetic explosion that can rend another human being in half.

It is the nature of this low level visual storytelling – these things that 300 is really about that makes it clear that 300 has more in common with dance or with music than it does with narrative. 300 is a movie that is easier to describe in poetry than in conversation. How does one describe a song, or the ballet, or a meal?

On the surface, 300 reminds us that (many of us) are descended from a fine tradition of rationality and democracy. But in its heart – its bloody, beating, meaty and very delicious heart – 300 must also remind us that we are all descendants of a more terrible and considerably longer tradition. The few dozen millennia that gave rise to our minds are insignificant next to the time that was spent forging our bodies. As Plato tells us, we are men now, but we are animals first.

Man is a civilized animal. Nevertheless, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then, of all animals, he becomes the most divine and most civilized. But if he be insufficiently or poorly educated, he is the most savage of earthly creatures.
          Plato (427 BCE – 347 BCE)

So what does all this have to do with convergence?

Well, thanks to Snyder, the point is made. If 300 proves that filmmaking is ultimately, at its core, about low-level visual storytelling, and that the lofty high-level plotting of a movie, while often important, is simply not central to a film, then there can be no real or meaningful convergence between the two mediums. Music is about the low level sequencing of tones. Cooking is about the low level blending flavors. Film is about the low level sequencing of images. Games are about the low level interaction between player and system.

Saying that games can learn from film and vice versa – while not entirely untrue – is only as true as saying convergence between cooking and ballet would make ballet taste better and would make meals better express the beauty of the human form. Ridiculous.

So, if convergence is presented as a reciprocal agreement between the game industry and film industry that will improve the quality of both games and film, will consequently broaden markets for the game industry and secure markets for the film industry – but the core promise of improved quality through shared approaches is impossible, what remains of the reciprocal agreement?

Unfortunately, things now start to look a lot more like the story of 300, and in this version of the story, Hollywood is our Xerxes. He’s really tall and really rich, and he has an indefatigable army at his disposal. We are outnumbered 1000 to 1. And in his mercy, he will allow us to remain masters of our realm, as long as we accept that our realm is the measly one of making games that are more like films. We will be kings of a very small barren rock in the middle of a great sea if only we will kneel and concede that the best a game can ever do to emotionally engage a broad and general audience is to emulate the techniques of filmmaking.

Unfortunately, as it was with Leonidas and his Spartans, this is not only something loathe to us, it is something impossible for us. Even if we wanted to accept Xerxes’ terms and kneel, we cannot because making better games by learning from film is impossible.

By my reckoning that’s where we stand. We’re between the Gates of Fire with no chance of victory. We can delay the inevitable, deny what we are, and sit passively by to watch the thing we care about be devoured alive as it takes its first steps into brighter future. Or we can resist. And fail. And in so doing show the rest of the world what that future looks like.

As far as I know – and I should know – even with the new demands of fidelity and complexity that come with the next-gen consoles and PCs, 300 people are well more than enough to make a game that makes a difference. With that in mind, I know what I have to do.

GDC - Part V - Smith and Smith

So this (late) post will be my last one about GDC. It will briefly cover my impressions of my two favorite sessions which I already acknowledged will probably not be surprising to anyone. Both were design talks, and both tackled specific issues in design that I have thought about often, but have never had the chance to sit down and figure out in detail.

Again - often the most important part of GDC for me is having access to the thinking that other really smart people have done so that I don't have to do it myself. Both of these talks were exactly that, as I have in the last two years wrestled with precisely the things that these two talks were examining.

Harvey Smith on the psychology of the Player-Avatar relationship

Along with my own talk, this was one of Dave Perry's Picks in the design track, and in my opinion Harvey's talk torpedoed mine below the waterline and sunk it like the Bismarck. Harvey is wicked smart, and his design philosophy, and his talks at GDC, have always been very inspiring for me, as well as incredibly influential on the work I have done.

Harvey talked a lot about a number of important concepts I have only had time to give passing thought to. I'm going to paraphrase some stuff here, but he talked about how we can build stronger player investment in and attachment to the avatar, and he talked about (what I call) the hybrid-entity that is the player-avatar. He talked specifically about ways to make the player feel a stronger sense of identity with the avatar giving specific repeated player actions an avatar-flavored realization.

For example if in your game the player can be a Priest or a Barbarian or an Alchemist and you want all players to be able to heal themselves, then give the Priest the ability to pray to his gods for health, give the Barbarian the ability to eat his enemies hearts for health, and give the Alchemist the ability to make healing potions (part of that example comes from a specific game - I forget which). If the player is playing a Barbarian, he is likely going to feel a stronger attachment to a heart-eating ability than he would to some generic class-undifferentiated particle effect, even if the ability is mechanically identical. I feel more like a Barbarian when I eat hearts than when I see a blue swirly particle effect, and thus I feel more closely bonded to my avatar.

Anyway, I left the talk with a better understanding of what it is that players (or even users - as the avatar is not a game-specific notion) use avatars for. Part mask, part expression of self, part statement of initial stance on the issues that will be addressed in the forum, part wishful idealization, avatars are a kind of projection of our self-image and all of the complexity that comes with that. He examined several techniques that designers can use to challenge players understanding of themselves, or to help players challenge their own understanding of themselves.

In some ways, I think a better design understanding of avatar is central to moving our medium foward to the point where it can truly move the general public in an engaging and emotionally compelling way, because games are really the only medium where the player actively makes a statement about themselves when they engage the media, and that statement is made (partly) in their choice of avatar.

Randy Smith on Save-Load

The only thing I didn't like about this session was that it was only 20 minutes.

The original Splinter Cell had shitty checkpoints. Chaos Theory had save anywhere, but the game was so immersive that it was easy to forget to save. But how do I fix it? I hate the fact that players are punished with having to replay areas of a game, but at the same time, playing a game where you cannot lose is boring. This is a core dilemma in game design and one that needs really smart and detailed analysis.

Randy's (too-short) lecture looked at Save-Load compulsions principally from the standpoint of the psychology of risk analysis. Players will reload based on a risk analysis of what they have lost balanced against what they think they could gain. He looked at the different sorts of risk analysis players are typically asked to do in a game, and he pointed out how formal risk analysis is a pretty good indicator of how players will behave confronted with the kinds of losses and rewards games typically dole out. It seemed pretty clear from Randy's presentation that - go figure - a better understanding of what the player is winning and losing in the moment to moment play will help us design better save systems that don't degenerate as easily into save-crawling or into punishing cycles of replaying the same area repeatedly.

As with so many things, understanding and using our tools better allows us to make better games. Along with Harvey, Randy is one of the sharpest designers out there and his deconstruction of this problem gives me better tools to use to make better games for one percent of the effort it would have taken for me to reach the same conclusions.

So the reason these two sessions rank as my two favorites are simply because they are the most practical and useful for me. Randy and Harvey did the work that I would have done if I have not been spending so much time and energy thinking about Exploration. I haven't yet had the chance to bug either of them for their slides, but if I manage to find out where they are available (neither seem to be in the GDC proceedings) I will let you know.

GDC - Part IV - Second Best

So for some people, these two talks might come out of the blue. Both of them were in tough slots, and both of them were in small rooms. One was about level design and one was about writing. Two topics that speakers have a hard time impressing me with. But as was the case with most of GDC this year the talks surprised me with how great they were.

Susan O'Connor on Storytelling Challenges in Gears of War

The only thing I didn't like about this talk was the part of the title I omitted from above. Grrrr. I don't even care if a literal Hero with a Thousand Faces was central to the talk... simply reading those words makes me wanna punch someone. Campbell's book seems to have as firm a stranglehold on game writing as Tolkien's books have on game design. I'm fucking sick of magic elves, and I'm fucking sick of Campbell. Oops - rant over... back to the talk.

Actually, I don't have a lot to say in particular about the talk, other than to point out that it was illustrative of the fact that O'Connor is in the camp of game writers who 'get it'. Writing for games is not about having better stories or plots. It's not about having better, less cliched characters and dialogue. Yes we need all of that too - but it's not about that. Writing for games is not even really about writing at all. It's about mechanics. More specifically, game writing is structuralist and the structure of a game story is malleable.

Susan gets that, and was able to address a handful of writing challenges she confronted in Gears where her awareness of this fact clearly saved what was otherwise a collection of cliche characters in a cliche sort of story from falling totally flat. I'll be the first to admit that Gears - for all of its cliches, rises above them in many places. Obviously design-wise, artistically, graphically and visually it is worlds better than any of its competition and the same goes for its story, largely because O'Connor was clearly able to identify levers in the structure that she could pull to get me to laugh or smile or growl along with or in juxtaposition to my avatar in (mostly) the right ways.

Brian Upton on Narrative Landscapes

Talk about a tough slot... last hour of the last day. I almost didn't even go to this for a number of reasons; I was exhausted and it was 'another level design talk' - I have not had much luck with level design talks at GDC. But Upton was lead designer on the first two Rainbow Six games, which I played the shit out of back in the late 90's, and the R6 games sure had unusual level design. I've also had the luxury of seeing that level design sensibility evolve over the years with countless of my co-workers working on different Rainbow titles down the hall from me, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It was great. If anyone can pinpoint Brian's slides, let me know.

The heart of Upton's talk was an analysis of Kevin Lynch's seminal treatise on urban planning, The Image of the City (which I have yet to read). Specifically, Upton contextualized Lynch's concepts of Paths, Edges, Nodes, Districts and Landmarks to make them relevant to level design, then looked at the inherent dramatic and mechanical values of these concepts. He showed how we can use Lynch's ideas to conceptualize our designed spaces (whether interior or exterior) to get the player to experience specific feelings when encountering these spaces. The presentation was long on details and examples, and I'm not going to throw up my lenghty notes here, other than to just comment on one.

He used the example of doorways in Rainbow Six as Edges, and pointed out how Edge transitions are full of dramatic tension. Clearly that's the case in every Rainbow game from the original to Vegas. I did wonder (and I asked the question after the presentation) whether Upton felt that with improvements in AI and changes in mechanics and in overall focus over the course of the Rainbow series of games had altered the impact of the Edge transitions at doors in Rainbow.

In early Rainbow games, the teammate AI was particularly vulnerable at doors. Partly this was 'realism' - from the folks I've spoken to who know about this stuff, a huge percentage of casualties in CQB situations occur at a doorway - but partly this was also an AI failing - getting four AI characters to move through a doorway and cover their angles correctly, with all of the animation, navigation and synchronization required is a very, very hard AI problem.

In playing the original Rainbow Six, doors were certainly dramatic... but they were also potentially very frustrating because a minor AI failure could turn six guys into six corpses in point-six seconds. Any time I took a team through a door in the original R6, it was a gamble that I would fail the mission. In the intervening years, and over the course of several titles, the problem of having AI breach a door effectively seems to be completely solved. At the same time, however, the designers of more recent Rainbow games have also changed the way the games' encounters tend to unfold. They have de-emphasized the 'binary', or 'life-or-death' nature of doors.

Breaching a room successfully in the early Rainbow games tended to end with a pile of dead terrorists. Failing tended to end with a pile of dead Rainbow and a reload. Now, rooms in Rainbow tend to be much more analogue. The 'breaching' of the room is just the first 'act' - if you want - in each room, the 'clearing' of the room is the second act. Often there are (scripted) reinforcements, or enemies hidden out of line of sight of the door or doors who then engage the team once they have entered the room and gotten to cover. Failing to breach perfectly generally means a complication pushed to the second act of the fight.

My question for Upton was whether he felt this was more or less dramatic, or whether it was a better use of Edges (and/or Nodes) than in the original highly 'edgey' doorways of earlier Rainbows. I think, technically, the dramatic punch of the edges in the early Rainbow games may have got more bang-for-the-buck so to speak. While the conditions were binary, and the challenges were often frustrating, there was really clear edge-based drama at every door. In recent Rainbow games it's a lot more complex. In terms of what is fun and what fits the context of the overall play experience, the edge/doorway challenges of more recent Rainbow games are doing exactly what they should. At the same time, I think you could say that the pure dramatic intensity and the clear design focus on edges in early Rainbow games was exceptionally well realized and worth learning from. Very probably this clarity of design vision (in regards to doorways and other factors as well) is what made the original R6 games so successful, and is what still inspires smart designers to continually try to wrestle these hard problems ot the ground.

Anyway, that wraps it up for my two 'second favorite' presentations of this GDC. In a day or two I'll post my favorites - which I think are probably pretty predictable. If I have time befre I jet off to Paris next week, I'll try and fire up a sort of GDC wrap-up as well.