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Video Games Are Better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IFOG Symposium

Last week I was able to attend UCSC's Inventing the Future of games Symposium in Mountainview. Overall, I foudn the conference to be super interesting as it brought together a diverse range people who are working on the problems of dynamic narratives using a wide range of approaches.

I gave a short presentation (slides and text are here) along with Microsoft's Richard Rouse (and a former colleague from Ubi Montreal) as well as Telltale Games Kevin Bruner. We represented the 'people working on interactive narratives in the Capital "I" Games Industry.

Another set of talks and a panel included Emily Short (Versu), Stephane Bura (Storybricks) and Asa Kalama (Disney) each presenting very different perspectives on interactive storytelling from the ones we had discussed on our panel.

A third set of talks featured Matt MacLaurin (eBay), Susan Bonds (42 Entertainment), and Tawny Schlieski (Intel) talking about transmedia and how narrative and different media can overlap with our real world in interesting ways.

The whole day was opened by Warren Spector and closed by Brenda Romero - so all told, the speaker line-up was incredibly impressive.

Hopefully they'll do the same thing next year.

La Dissonance ludo-narrative

(english follows)

J'ai été contacté l'autre jour par quelque un en France qui a un blog sur le site GameKult. Lui a m'informer qu'il a tombé sur mon post de Bioshock et il avait aidé à articuler pour lui de quelques problemes qu'il avait avec le jeu.

Il a décidé de traduire le post en français pour partager avec la communauté des joueurs francophones. Mon français n'est pas assez bon pour avoir fait le travail de traduction moi-même, donc je tiens à dire merci. J'ai lu le post, et il a omet certaines sections de l'ouverture et la fermeture (qui sont plus personel, est pas tres important de la thèse) Il a fait une bonne traduction de la reste. Je vais mettre un link ici pour mes lecteurs qui sont plus confortables a lire en français. Un link a été ajouté à l'article original aussi.

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I was contacted the other day by someone in France who keeps a blog on the GameKult site to inform me that he had come across my post on Bioshock and it had helped articulate for him some of the problems he had had with the game.

He decided to translate the post to french in order to share it with the francophone gaming community. My french is not good enough for me to have done the translation work myself, so I'm very thankful. I've read the post, and while he omits some of the opening and closing (which were, in any case, more personal, and not related much to the thesis of the peice), he seems to capture the rest very accurately. I am linking it here for my readers who may be more comfortable reading it in french. A link has also been added to the original article.

Dynamics: the long and the short versions

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

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

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

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

Why Are We Here

Tomorrow night the Smithsonian's travelling Art of Video Games Exhibit opens at the EMP Museum here in Seattle.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibit, the EMP is hosting the Game Night event which will feature lots of gaming, as well as talks from seven different game developers talking about different a range of different topics. Game Night opens at 6pm for EMP Members and &pm for the public. The talks start at 7:30.

My Valve co-worker Dave Kircher and I will be sharing the last speaking slot of the evening, starting at 9:45. My talk is called "The Art of Games: Why Are We Here".

I'll post slides after the talk is done, but I hope to see some local Seattle devs and gamers there for the live version.

 

First We Take Manhattan…

A couple weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece about Fumito Ueda, and his games Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a good piece, and one that I am extremely happy to see running in such a prestigious publication with an audience broader than the audience for most writing-about-games.

The piece quotes me in support of its loose thesis that ‘games can be art’. While certainly flattering, and while this is a thesis I support, there is not a small amount of irony that arises from the piece running more or less in parallel to my last post which questions whether or not games should be art.

I should clarify one thing about the specific quote, which is pulled from Tom Bissell’s book Extra Lives. I said,

"Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters."

The quote is accurate; that’s what I said. But then, as now, my own thinking on the subject of ‘how games mean’ was evolving (and has been evolving for some time). What I should have said back then was,

"Finding a way to make the dynamics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters."

Furthermore, the way I would prefer to express that idea today would be to say,

"Finding a way to make the dynamics of play support the creative expression of players—to me that’s the only question that matters."

Anyway, putting aside the subtleties related to where meaning in games can reside or where I personally think it ought to reside, the fact that articles like this are appearing with increasing regularity in mainstream publications is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it gives game developers an opportunity to gain some much needed traction toward building credibility and artistic legitimacy in the eyes of a real audience of billions instead of a pathetically small audience of tens of millions. It’s a curse because I still supect that most of the people intrigued by such an article and inspired to take a closer look at games will be largely disappointed once they gtet beyond a very small handful of games, such as those of Ueda and a few others.

As we see more and more articles like this, and as we draw the attention of a real mass market, I worry that the limited depth and breadth of our work (at least our most visible work) cannot sustain and nourish the attention we receive from that mainstream. I suspect that, in the long term, that may be a bigger problem than not receiveing this kind of attention at all.

[REDACTED] The Dominant Cultural Form of the 21st Century

Recently I was in an email discussion with some friends and colleagues (who will ironically go unnamed here) about the whole ‘game designers getting their name on the box’ debate. Putting the two related (but different) issues of credit standards and the absurdity of boxes themselves aside for another time, I want to talk about what I think having one’s name on the box means. Actually, to say that better, I'd rather not talk about it, because I think the debate is kind of meaningless and backwards looking, but because my perspective on it is so different from the folks with whom I would normally agree, in guess I should clarify my position.

First, I think there are some obvious, surface level debates about designers having their name on the box. There is the debate about whether or not, given the massively collaborative nature of game development, there ever really is a singular vision holder on a game project who deserves sole top billing. There is also the debate about IP ownership and how, since creatives effectively cannot own IP in the current Platform Holder / Publisher / Developer climate, getting the 'right' to have this kind of top billing is basically impossible anyway. There is also the debate about 'how it works in other industries' (ie: Hollywood), and the questions of whether it should work similarly in games. I think these debates are all fairly well trodden. I also happen to think they are all kind of missing the point.

I think the idea of a star developer having his or her name on the box is just subscribing to the same floundering cultural models that the Platform Holders and Publishers have necessarily bought into and staked their futures on. It’s about upholding and participating in the culture of brand, personality and celebrity that is the central driver of the author-centric broadcast culture we’re ultimately in the process of tearing down whether we realize it or not. In some ways, the very idea of the ‘name on the box’, or ‘getting top billing’ is emblematic of what I am calling broadcast culture. An Artist has something to say, He creates a work of Art with a Message, He puts His Name on it and we all consume it. That’s what a painting and a poem and a novel and a play and a film and an album are.

But that’s not what a game is. A game can be that, and that’s why that movie-critic dude was wrong; games can be broadcast culture High Art handed down to the masses by Artists. But as our cultural tastes and sensibilities evolve to appreciate how games mean, we will come to recognize that the stuff in games that speaks deeply to us, that resonates, that makes us weep and rejoice does not come from what the Artist Hath Wrought but comes leaping, unforged, naked and honest from the masterfully conducted runtime, often as much a delight to its coders as to its players. So while games can be Art, even High Art, I think subscribing to a games-as-art perspective is kind of relegating games to a pitiful, sorry existence.

These days, if you attend a game conference, or read a serious essay discussing game culture, or even engage in a moderately rigorous discussion about games, you would not be surprised to hear someone utter the phrase, 'the dominant cultural form of the 21st Century'. The notion that games are the English longbow to the warhorse of television and the armoured knight of cinema is increasingly seen as a real possibility. But while we say it, discuss it's inevitability, ponder it's timeline, and desperately try to monetize it, we don't actually very often talk about what it means. Film and television are in many ways a technological enhancement and hybridization of older broadcast media, such as the novel, the play, or the album, but they are still fundamentally part of the broadcast culture paradigm. Games, I believe, are not part of the same paradigm. Games belong to a different paradigm that includes the oral tradition of storytelling, improvisational music, sport, dance, philosophical debate, improv theatre, and parlour games (among many other cultural forms).

In many ways, the divide is between creative forms that have a means of encoding an authored message, or a notation, where the 'beautiful part' is crafted by an artist and then played back or read by or for the audience from the notation, and creative forms that do not have a notation, and where the 'beautiful part' is created at runtime by those acting within the space described by the form.

I'm sure to attract a legion of pedants with that one, and I'm sure not going to defend the notation/non-notation divide as a rigorously defining point of distinction, but it is a fast litmus test. The distinction is too simple for many reasons; chess and dance and baseball all have notations, for example, and in the case of film, the notation (the images and sounds recorded on the film strip) is hard to distinguish from the work (the projection of the information encoded on the strip as an audio-visual landscape), but the distinction between forms that record their beauty for playback and those that have it dynamically synthesized at runtime can broadly and roughly be delineated there. Let's move on.

Seeing games assume their role as the 'dominant cultural form of the 21st Century' is not merely about the replacement of film and television with 'better film and television that are controlled by a joystick'. It is the wholesale replacement of the author-centric broadcast culture paradigm of 'people who disseminate their beautiful notations for other people to follow' with the totally different cultural paradigm of 'people who beautifully figure out the following step while taking the current one'.

The way I see it, the 'name on the box' is a derivative of the former, broadcast cultural paradigm and does not have an (important) place in a culture driven by the latter paradigm. The reason we cling to the name on the box is because all of our economic, social and political concepts have been inextricably intertwined with broadcast culture for at least 500, and arguably 3500 years, ever since Socrates made the case against the written word and then went and drank a cup of hemlock. Disentangling the idea of the primacy of the author from the work is at least as complicated a cultural revolution as killing God - and look how complicated that's proving to be.

It's not just the governments and the banks and the universities and the corporations and all of the beautiful rich and famous people who you should aspire to be like who have an interest in upholding the name on the box. We all have an interest in it, because even those who suffer under it, and those who are oppressed by it, and those who would fight to see it torn down are scared shitless of what it looks like to wake up in a world without it. The name on the box is comforting because it has been a part of what we are for centuries. What if changing it is a mistake? Without Steven Spielberg, without Stephen King, and without Steve Jobs, where will we find our heroes? Who will inspire us to strive to be better than we are?

I think the answer to that question though, is already well understood. His name is Steve Yzerman or Steve Smith or Steve Nash. People don't go watch the Phoenix Suns play basketball because it's a game designed by Dr. James Naismith. They don't watch it or play it to experience it's design. They go see basketball because it is beautiful to see talented people like Steve Nash play it beautifully, and they play it to perform declarations of self, such as 'I can outmanoeuvre that guy', or 'I can do a lay-up'. And just as we recognize the great authors in the broadcast culture paradigm, we also recognize the great actors in the interactive culture paradigm.

But is it fair that you can't sell a recording of the song 'Happy Birthday to You' without paying some absurd amount of money to license the song from the great great great grandchildren of the dude who wrote it decades ago, but that Steve Nash makes more money every time he bounces a basketball than Naismith made in his entire life? In a sad way, and in a way that I suspect most people will disagree with, and most importantly in a way that makes me scared as hell to try to build the future that I'm talking about when I utter the words 'dominant cultural form of the 21st Century', I think the answer has to be 'yes, that's fair'.

I think it's fair for three reasons.

First, I think it's fair because when I take stock of the most beautiful things in the games I have worked on; a cold-blooded execution of an Andre Hippolyte; an amateur guard blasted down an elevator shaft; a wounded mercenary immolated in grassy field, I have to admit that I am not the person who created those things. They are beautiful, arresting, heartfelt and profound statements about what we are and what we can be, and being witness to them has enriched my life. I am immeasurably proud to have chalked the lines on the fields where those beautiful events unfolded, but I didn't make them.

Second, I think it's fair because the argument of who should be paid for what in all this mess would (I believe) become a moot point if games were to truly become the dominant cultural form of the 21st Century in the way I am talking about. The impact of the cultural transformation that would be required for that to actually happen would reverberate through all of our institutions in such a profound way that they would become unrecognizable. The replacement of author-centric broadcast culture with actor-centric dynamic culture throws the persistence of our current concepts of finance and business and even government into question. As with any revolution, you kind of unfortunately have to accept that you need to figure out how to feed people after the King's head is in the basket, not before.

Finally, I think it's fair because out there, somewhere, there is some kid in elementary school who really wants to grow up and be a game developer like me. He doesn't know who I am, of course, because my name is not on the box, but even despite that, he sees me, or someone like me, as his hero.

My message to that kid is this: I don't want to be your hero. I want you to be your hero.

Cost of Entry

Damn. It's sure costing me a lot of money to leave this blog sitting here, doing nothing.

I havent even had the time to get my GDC slides from 2011 up yet. I have wanted to go back and clean up the end of the talk, as the conclusion never really hung together the way I wanted.

Looks like I might be giving that talk again in a couple places in the not too distant future which would force me to fix the wishy-washy ending (and convince you all that I really, truly am a communist), and then hipefully get the thing up here (maybe as video??!!) shortly after that.

We'll see what happens between now and year end...

 

Convergence Culture

Part Five: Gaming Across the Fifth Dimension

Revolutionary ideas in science, technology and philosophy don’t exist in isolation in academic institutes, government think tanks, or corporate R&D labs, they touch all aspects of our culture. The ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin undercut millennia of oppression, giving rise to concepts like literacy, democracy and equality. Relativity went hand-in-hand with the dismantling of objectivity in art and literature. Today, as scientists unravel the many-worlds interpretation and similar theories, we see a simultaneous blurring of the boundaries between the online universe and the physical universe. Our sense of the immediate here-and-now is altered by the layer of the internet, its systems, data, and users. This new sense of reality is reflected in our art – and our games.

Who is ‘there’ when we play Left 4 Dead? Am I hosting the server? Is he? Did it migrate? Is he there or is that a bot? Has he joined another game? Am I alone? What does ‘alone’ even mean where worlds overlap and relocate, and characters’ bodies are intermittently inhabited or automated. We don’t think twice about these things when we play L4D, but the hyperdimensional structure of the game reflects a culture that similarly doesn’t give a second thought to navigating with stitched together photographs taken in different months or years to rendezvous with friends geo-tagging their tweets only to find out they have already left – leaving us in the physical company of one set of friends and the psychological company of someone absent. Even if L4D’s feature set had been technologically possible in 2000, no one would have accepted it. Today, we take it for granted.

Fifteen years ago it was interesting to set up a LAN in a room full of PCs so we could play co-op Rainbow Six. Today, pop-up notifications that friends have come online, or joined your game are not just normal, they are banal. The New Interesting is not having to grind for twelve hours to be able to safely play Crackdown in co-op. We were too long handcuffed by a wrongheaded desire to protect the coherence of the fiction of our game worlds, and this made allowing players to play co-op games difficult. But our shifting cultural perceptions have loosened those bonds. The story of Crackdown doesn’t break if my friend helps me level up, and we don’t need to explain it with some kind of complicated and fictionally justified side-kicking system. If the system you contrive to protect your fiction is so complicated that it stops people from playing, you’re doing it wrong.

Demon’s Souls gives us a fantasy realm where the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the damned overlap strangely. I see the apparitions of other players fighting enemies I haven’t yet encountered. I witness the ghosts of their demise like footprints in interdimensional snow. In System Shock 2, these apparitions needed to be explained as neurological side effects of the upgrade system. In Demon’s Souls, we need no such explanation – not because it makes better sense, but simply because we ‘get’ the idea of overlapping universes and are willing to explore those ideas in our art.

Captain Forever runs in your browser. Conveniently, so does Twitter. Captain Forever saves your entire game history on a server and allows other people to launch a new game using your ship at any point in its history simply by clicking on a tweet. “That’s not fair,” we cried in 1999, “players should have to earn that ship.” Bullshit.

In order to make the grade as a Captain, Commander Shepard has some things to learn, I think. I’d way rather have a dozen friends playing Mass Effect 3, all playing different characters, and be able to click on their tweets to populate my crew with their leveled up characters and all the relationship history that was developed by them over time than have cleverly authored characters filling out my roster in a branching narrative.

Mass Effect story die-hards and fanboys will, of course, disagree. Probably so will EA and Bioware. And people will continue to wonder why gaming has such a hard time climbing out of the cultural ghetto inhabited by schlock sci-fi and superhero comics. The answer is simply that until we make more games that address the current human experience using the central voice of the medium we belong in that ghetto.

Most ‘AAA’ games today use story and character to explore themes we have explored before in other media that – simply put – use story and character to better effect. Demon’s Souls, Left 4 Dead and Captain Forever all explore the way we experience and perceive the very fabric of our world as individuals and collectively through our culture. And they do so using the uniquely meaningful properties of interactive games.

These are games that have something to say that can’t be said in other media.

These are the games that are pushing human culture forward.

Live and Let Die

So, what started as an experiment by Ben over at Sometimes Life Requires Consequence is starting to pick up steam. It's been tagged a couple times now at Game Set Watch and Kieron Gillen over at Rock Paper Shotgun blasted some buckshot his way in today's Sunday Papers. Already at least a couple other players have taken up the 'challenge' and are trying the same thing. In at least one case, some form of tragedy has ensued (and in some ways the nature of that tragedy is the subject of this post.)

Not to steal Ben's thunder, but here's some history on how these 'permadeath' playthroughs began.

Last month, Manveer and I got into a debate about how to design more meanginful and emotionally engaging games. On one branch of that discussion, Manveer had suggested designing a game to make certain decisions irreversible. I was opposing that approach on the grounds that it was relying on what I feel are narrative tools (in particular irreversibility and inevitability).

I was suggesting that - while we could of course make games more emotionally engaging using narrative tools, I feel we ought to be pursuing (possibly exclusively but at least primarily) the application of ludic tools to this same end. My reasoning is that by leveraging narrative tools the most engaging emotional moments we will create are equivalent to those of narrative media (like film or literature) - whereas by leveraging ludic tools, we can discover something new which is potentially more powerful, more deeply affecting, and more honestly and powerfully about the human condition.

On a lark, Ben (who I currently rank as the #2 all-time Far Cry 2 fan - but watch out Chris, he's catching up quick) took the abstract discussion and literalized it in most spectacular fashion. He is now playing Far Cry 2 under self-imposed 'permadeath'. No reloading allowed - a la oldskool Iron Man Modes of play - with the ultimate consequence being that if he dies, that's it: game over. He will wipe his save game and that's the end of that.

Needless to say - this has the effect of making every decision he makes 'irreversible'. It means that if he decides to keep a buddy - say Frank Bilders - on stand-by to rescue him if he gets overwhealmed in battle, then Frank may well be mortally wounded during any rescue attempt.

With Frank lying on the ground, shaking from a sucking chest wound as his blood seeps into rusty African soil, Ben will pick up his friend and cradle him in his arms... and then what will he do? Frank will ask Ben to inject him with a syrette. The angry shouts of APR reinforcements will be cutting through the jungle canopy getting louder... closer. And when Ben gives him an injection and Frank asks for another... and another... what will happen? Will Ben use his last syrettes to euthanize Frank? Will he save his valuable syrettes and use a bullet instead? Will he abandon Frank to whatever grim fate awaits him if the APR finds him lying helpless in the grass?

The decisions that Ben will make in these moments will be real decisions. It will be just like life, and from it, Ben will feel something real.

Or will he?

Something is very ironic about all of this....

In fact, the design of Far Cry 2 already innately supports the emotional dilemmas described above. We made it that way on purpose - it was the entire point of the Buddy system - to design an 'out of frying pan, into the fire' system where the player would be baited further and further down a losing path until he ultimately would occasionally be required to make a choice between giving up a limited though not overly rare 'resource' (a buddy) in exchange for not having to reload and redo a lengthy section of the game. Then the limited resource would be 'disguised' as a real human character and the decision of the player to abandon (or 'deny') the resource would be dressed up in classic filmic costume of 'loyal ally dies in your arms'.

Players would cry.

The existing design of the Buddy system in Far Cry 2 in some sense is a (soft) solution to Manveer's call for a design that makes certain decisions permanent and allows players to feel 'real' emotional consequence. Yet at the same time, this focus on designing meaning that arises from narrative-like structures is something I am now opposing. Why? Well, in the end, I think that even if we made a hundredfold improvement in the design and realization of the buddy system in Far Cry 2, the very best we could ever achieve in terms of making players feel the death of a buddy in a real and honest way would be equivalent to what they felt when Wade died in Saving Private Ryan.

It's worth noting that even reading a detached description of the plot points of the film that detail what happened to Wade is more moving than having a buddy die in your arms in Far Cry 2, so we have a lot of room for improvement and maybe going down that path is a good idea.

But I am conceptually opposed to going too far down this path of using narrative techniques - not because we can't make our games much more emotionally engaging than they are currently - but because we already know the limits of this approach. By mastering these narrative techniques and wedding them to our designs (as we did with the Buddy System in Far Cry 2 - but better) we can arrive at Saving Private Ryan. What that means is that 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, we will deliver a brand new entertainment medium that is as powerful and moving as one we already have. That's great, I guess. But if I am going to dedicated my life this, I want to end up with something that is more, something that is better than what we have now. (There is another branch to this argument which has to do with the potential real-world irreversibility of going down this path, which is basically what happened to the comics industry, but that's a different debate that I am not going to go here.)

All that said - there is something much more important happening with Ben's 'permadeath' experiment. There is something happening at a higher level that is more than just him embracing a narrative constraint to make his playthrough more emotionally moving.

There is at least one more level of irony here that goes to the core of the future I am looking for.

Ultimately, when I reject narrative techniques in favor of ludic ones, what I am really saying is that I reject traditional authorship. I reject the notion that what I think you will find emotionally engaging and compelling - and then build and deliver to you to consume - is innately superior to what you think is emotionally compelling. By extension, I reject the idea that I can make you feel the loss of a friend in a more compelling way by authoring an irreversible system than you could make yourself feel by playing with a system wherein a friend can be both dead and alive simultaneously and wherein his very existence can be in flux based on your playful whim.

What I am saying at a higher level of abstraction is that meaning does not come from playing a game... it comes from playing WITH a game. It is the manipulation not only of the actors in the game that is meaningful, but the manipulation of the game itself. This discussion is not about how to make a game more meaningful. It is about how games mean.

The irony then is this:

The reason I think people are paying attention to what Ben is doing is not because he is having a more emotionally engaging narrative experience. It is not because he is playing the game in a more serious way in order to experience more serious emotions.

It's not that people suddenly want to know what will happen within the fiction of the game - I'll tell you what will happen - the third time any Buddy is downed in combat he will not be able to be revived and the player will be systemically forced to choose between shooting the buddy (he will be automatically given a pistol to enable this decision if he does not already have one), euthanizing the buddy with syrettes (it takes three and he may not have enough, potentially elminating this decision possibility), abandoning the Buddy (which means he will not die and will show up in the end to get his revenge), or reloading the game (which Ben has self-denied).

The reason I think people are paying attention is because Ben is playing with the game. He is manipulating the game itself. He is playing with the magic circle. He is looking at all sides of it like a Rubik's Cube and even taking the cube apart in order to see how it is built and what are its underlying immutable rules. It is here that people start to pay attention. It is here that Ben is being moved by his experience. It is here that others, too, care about what happens... not to Frank, but to Ben, and to the game itself. They care about what can happen to Frank. The are invested in the expressive possibility space enabled by the game. They care about the real immutable limits of the question and about the limits arbitrarily imposed by the save game system, and by Ben's willful rejigging of the magic circle to exclude it. They care, now, about the Ben/Frank/Far Cry 2 system which is something real. They don't care about whether Frank Bilder's lives or dies... because that is an illusion and they know it.

Effectively, by attempting to experience the meaning that arises from adding irreversibility to Far Cry 2 and taking away one of the things he was allowed to play with, Ben is playing with the game more, not less. It is not the combination of Far Cry 2 + authored narrative irreversibility that is making the permadeath experiment meaningful to Ben and to others, it is the the fact that he is able to manipulte the game to create this experiment that is bringing meaning.

My belief is that it is this manipulation of a game's systems that allows us to understand and feel what a game means... not a better implementation and realization of its embedded authored narratives. My fear is that it has taken us too long to figure this out; that those on the authored narrative side have already won... that the next Call of Duty will make me cry when Wade dies in my arms, and it will make you cry when he dies in your arms, and it will make everyone cry when he dies in their arms in exactly the same irreversible, inevitable way it has happened since Achilles irreversibly, inevitably died.

And we will love it.

And we'll stop asking what could have been.

(and I'll go work in film....)