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Thank you, Mr Douglas E Smith

I just came across the news (also) that Douglas E Smith, the creator of Lode Runner passed away last week. Lode Runner was a pretty formative game for me  and not simply because I played it a lot. It contributed to my design thinking in a really profound way. I wrote about it indirectly for Edge Magazine's 20th Anniversary Issue just over a year ago when I was still doing a monthly column for them. It first appeared online on their website here.

I'm reposting the article here, today, to re-present those thoughts outside of the celebratory context they were originally published under.

 

Time Invested

Toward the end of 1982, sales of the Commodore VIC-20 were in decline and as Christmas approached outlets like K-Mart were marking down prices on the VIC-20 to clear out shelf space for its next-gen replacement, the Commodore-64.

As the only child of a single, working mom, I had long given up hope of ever receiving an Intellivision or a ColecoVision, so it must have been some magical combination of my relentless begging, K-Mart’s aggressive pricing, and Captain Kirk’s commercial for the ‘home computer of the Eighties’ that allowed my mother to entertain the fantasy that her son might one day work with computers on a starship.

Her fantasy came half true – and so did mine. The VIC-20 could play games on cartridge, just like a console, but the selection was terrible and the cartridges were $80; half the price she’d paid for the machine itself. I only ever received one.

Fortunately, the one I got was Lode Runner, which is an excellent game. Even better, it included a level editor that allowed me to design my own levels and save them to cassette. Once I had exhausted the levels that shipped with the game, I began making my own content. When I tired of that, I taught myself to code in BASIC and made my own games. My first complete game was a text adventure where you were a thief who needed to get to a safe and loot it before the person in the house caught you. 

Sadly, by ’84 or ’85 I had all but drained the VIC-20 of its fun. Making more text adventures to play by myself offered diminishing returns and after three years of Lode Runner, the game had become stale. My mother could not afford to buy me another computer and eventually I stopped using my VIC-20.

My last hurrah as a gamer was spending most of ’85 - ‘86 school year playing Ultima IV with a friend on his Apple II. We played nearly every day after school and finished the game perhaps three times, but after that, I don’t think I played another game for about seven years.

Twenty years ago, in 1993, I emerged from my own personal gaming Dark Age. The game everyone was playing was Doom, and while I still did not have a PC to play it on, I had several friends who did. A good many of my nights were spent hanging out at friends’ houses playing Doom while everyone else watched Aliens on VHS and got hammered. And it didn’t stop with Doom; Syndicate also came out that year, and the following year X-Com and TIE Fighter both landed. The year after that was Dark Forces and Command and Conquer. And as the decade wore on, things just got better. Duke Nukem 3D and Quake both launched in ’96, and 1997 was Jedi Knight. And then, sometime in late 1997 or early 1998, I played the demo of Thief on a friend’s PC. That was when I knew I had to have my own machine.

In 1998, both Thief and the original Rainbow 6 turned first-person shooters on their head by challenging the notion that ‘shooting’ was the important part of the genre. I played both on my own Pentium II, 300 MHz machine with 64M of RAM, running under Windows ’97. It was on this machine that I played Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, Unreal and Unreal Tournament. By the time Deus Ex shipped in 2000, my pitiful P2 couldn’t keep up – and neither could my wallet. 

And then something magical happened. I started leveraging the skills I had learned years before on the VIC-20. Not the BASIC coding skills or the Lode Runner specific level design skills – but rather the tenacity and determination to squeeze more fun out of the machine. I started building levels for Unreal Tournament, and then levels for mods. I found copies of older games – games that built a bridge back across my Dark Ages toward my childhood. I played Dune 2, Command and Conquer, Ultima V. I played Wolfenstein 3d and made levels for that too.

I used the times when I was not able to consume games as entertainment to reflect upon how and why I value games in the ways that I do. Before sitting down to write this column and reflect upon the last twenty years of gaming, I had assumed that the seeds of my appreciation for player expression and creative play were planted by a few key titles in the mid ‘90s. But now I see that, for me at least, the verbs ‘to play’, ‘to create’ and ‘to learn’ all represent effectively the same concept and that fusing these concepts is something I hope my games might do for others. 

It seems to me, now, that these past twenty years of playing games, learning how they mean, and how to make them, and then creating them for others is an obvious – even predictable consequence of those three years I spent with my VIC-20. In some sense, the person I am today represents the delivery of some vague and indirect promise that Captain Kirk made to my mother. He suggested that a game machine is a delivery vehicle for content and that it ultimately supports the broadcast culture paradigm that separates creators from consumers. A computer, by contrast, can be used to create. And as a consequence, even in technological obsolescence its potential value approaches infinity. A game machine will always depreciate in value, while a computer is an investment in the future.

Convergence Culture

Part Eight: Future Past

Seven months ago when I started writing this column, I suspected the things I would be talking about were mostly wishful thinking. The idea that an increasingly entrenched game industry would see value in connecting casual, social or mobile gamers to their blockbuster AAA titles through meaningful gameplay seemed likely to fall by the wayside in favour of more aggressive exploitation of insidiously monetized shovel ware. How could developers – constantly understaffed and struggling to make every deadline – ever find the time to build a Facebook or iPhone game that would meaningfully link casual players to their fifty million dollar Christmas release if they couldn't find the time to make their Beta?

The World of Warcraft Armoury has been around for quite a while, but let’s face it: Blizzard can afford to put a man on the moon if they want, so they’re not much of a model for the rest. Various Spore browser apps allow you to look at the Sporepedia on a mobile device, but these offer no gameplay, and aren’t even built by EA. The best that the year’s biggest releases could muster – like Modern Warfare 2 – were fan made game guides and various utilities for mobile devices that allowed you to find Intel Drops, know what Perks and Kill Streak Rewards were coming and read some map strategies. None of these things were meaningfully linking different groups of players to a single unified experience.

I wasn't my only non-believer, either. I received plenty of emails skeptical of the idea that some 40 year old executive might want to manage a crime family from his Android phone, and in doing, drive a component of the open world urban crime game his son was playing. More openly hostile emails condemned me for selling out to the marketing vampires I identified in the intro for suggesting we could do everything I was suggesting profitably, while others accused me of undermining the ultimate goal of building the perfect immersive simulation of everything.

But while my pipe-dreams and prognostications may remain heretical for some, they might also end up coming true. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – developed by my esteemed former co-workers – has done a fantastic job of opening the door for a huge audience of casual and social gamers to peer into the amazing world of Renaissance Italy and the life of Ezio. I had no idea AC: Legacy was being developed, but it achieves many of the things I suggested months ago (and in many ways better than I imagined – which is no surprise knowing who was involved). This is an important first step toward the future that I’m talking about because it challenges the notion that the kinds of fantasies gamers are interested in are inaccessible to a broad audience. We may have always suspected that the fantasy of Assassin’s Creed had a broad appeal beyond the existing audience of a few million hardcore gamers – but we couldn’t prove it. Now we can. Now we will be able to measure the appeal of that fantasy to a real audience.

Dust 514 – though still in development – openly attempts to link two of the most hardcore audiences of gamers out there: competitive online FPS players and dedicated PvP MMO players. While the potential scope of this intramedia link is smaller than that which would connect Assassin’s Creed on console to Facebook gamers, the data will be just as interesting and important. Will an audience of ‘me first’ shooter players accept the cascade of consequences that emerge from the proposed design? Will they – for example – willingly engage in a battle they can’t win to achieve the strategic goal of a group of players in EVE? Will EVE players be willing to leave their best laid invasion plans in the hands of a bunch of bickering fourteen year-olds with hyper-conductive nervous systems? Is the patience and ruthless plotting of the EVE community compatible with the twitchy thirst for chaos of an FPS community?

And perhaps the most important question raised by these games is whether or not the connection between different audiences will act as a gateway between the games. Will people who have never played a console game give Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood a chance if they are invested in Legacy? Will ageing shooter fans invested in Dust 514 decide to give EVE a try as their reflexes fail them and they fall under the curve?

Before this article ever sees print we'll have answers to these and other questions, and developers will already be hard at work on a second wave of games that strive to do even more than I imagined. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet."

Convergence Culture

Part Seven: Agency Beyond the Magic Circle

For the past six months, I have been writing about ways to build connections between different games, and by extension, their audiences. I've imagined fashion design games for portable platforms that feed clothing designs to open world games where avatar clothing customization matters. I've imagined social world building games whose player-authored environments become playable levels used in action adventure games. I've imagined players of organization management games popping on to their mobile devices intermittently throughout the day to allocate resources and assign missions which are then subscribed to by real players playing action games. But all of these imaginary connections beg a fundamental and challenging question; if the interesting results of my decisions and choices are happening in someone else's game - why should I care?

Agency is the ability of the player to take meaningful action in a game and to witness the results of his decisions and choices. I believe that agency is the very stuff of games. It is fundamentally tied to how games mean, to why we play them, and to why they matter to us as individual players and as participants in the human cultural landscape. Have I imagined my way into a future where games are all interconnected in such a way that the feedback (the 'witnessing the results' part) has been cordoned off from the players who need it in order to feel the agency that makes games matter?

The short answer is, I don't think so. On the contrary, I think that - done properly - we not only protect the traditional feelings of agency we appreciate (and depend upon), but we also generate feelings of agency in new ways and along new and different axes. To properly achieve this, there are three basic requirements for designing games that cross over and interconnect in the ways I have described.

First, the internal agency of each game must be protected. Players must still be able to see the results of their decisions and choices within their own game as a standalone experience. An example of a game that has done this poorly is Farmville. When I give a gift to someone, the gift is always an abstract object. A separate screen that allows me to send a Red Christmas Tree to my nephew is totally meaningless. The gift costs me nothing, and the tree itself isn't even really a tree, but is instead a picture of the tree. The tree would be more meaningful to me if it appeared in my world and clicking on it gave me the option to gift it. Even better from an internal agency standpoint would be if I could click on anything on my farm and gift it directly. This would give me more meaningful attachment to the objects I was gifting, even if the cost of gifting was still zero. This is not to dismiss some real design challenges that such a change brings, but the fact remains that gifting in Farmville does not feel meaningful.

The second criteria is that of strong reporting. If I use a crafting mobile application to run a shop that is instanced in the open world RPGs of my friends, I need more information than 'Joe bought a Diamond Pickaxe for 100 Gold'. I only feel the agency internal to my own game as it reports the results of my decision to sell a Pickaxe. Better would be if I could fetch detailed reporting on what Joe does with my Pickaxe. Better still would be if that information could be used to help me improve my future crafting of Pickaxes. This would not only enhance my feelings of agency in knowing how the Pickaxe I crafted was meaningful - but the experiencing of that agency would also be of benefit to me.

The third requirement is that we better facilitate player-to-player reporting. Many of my own greatest moments in gaming have been made even more wonderful and meaningful to me when relating them to friends. Today, the internet is overflowing with thirty second video clips of these spectacular and improbable moments. Leaving players to email each other about the wonderful things they've done with a gifted Red Christmas Tree or purchased Diamond Pickaxe is making it too hard, and we can do better.

A brute force approach to this would be to design your game to constantly record and overwrite the last sixty seconds of play, saving it aside on demand for editing or immediate upload and sharing. While non-trivial to implement, this approach could facilitate the kind of player-to-player sharing and communication crucial to ensuring that players are able to feel their agency across the boundaries between games. This makes agency a collaborative and social emotion capable of connecting diverse audiences across widely different games.

Convergence Culture

Part Six: Platform Jumping

For the last five parts of this series I talked around the issue of Single Player games and their place in the intramedia landscape I have been describing. I've looked at how social world building games like Farmville might seed content into SP game worlds. I've looked at how mobile apps might provide the backbone for a game economy whose principle consumers would be players in SP worlds. I've looked at how organization management games like Mafia Wars could provide a framework of story content to sustain the ongoing life of a SP game. But I've not really talked explicitly about the Single Player game itself and what it might be like in this new intramedia model.

While I personally feel that modern AAA single player games are too long, the reality is that is not the case for your typically 18-24 year old who does not have an enormous game buying budget and needs a lot of content if he has any hope of keeping himself distracted from studying. I would love to make the argument that the next-generation of Single Player game should be a four hour experience, but I know that's not realistic. That said, with the increasing economic pressure for even SP games to be online (to protect against piracy), I am beginning to suspect the oft-recurring memes of the Episodic SP game, and the game-world-as-platform are finally going to arrive.

In the case of the more systemic open world games such as Fallout, Borderlands, GTA and others, we already see a trend toward serving players a lot of downloadable content. The reasons for this are obvious; the profit margins on DLC are relatively high for developers and publishers. This means that even if demand is low - say only 5% to 10% of players purchase DLC after they finish the original game - the development costs to shipping what is effectively script into an open world is a tiny fraction of what it costs to build that same content in parallel with the game (especially given that shipped games are stable).

I think the real question facing Single Player games going forward - particularly in the difficult economic climate of today - is how to reduce the cost of getting the game world into the hands of players, and increase the amount of high-profit-margin content we release post-launch into these stable, proven platforms. This only makes economic sense when you consider that currently only a tiny handful of game releases are profitable and all other game development is funded by a few hits.

Why is Fallout 3 a one hundred hour experience? Admittedly, even I made time to finish it, and I even downloaded some of the DLC. But it came at a tremendous cost in terms of lost opportunity to play other games. With the world of Fallout 3 sitting on my hard drive, and the ability of the developers to push more content into that world at any time, the real question is, could they have reduced their development costs by shipping me the game in five ten dollar chunks over the course of the two months that it took me to play it?

When we start to imagine a game like Fallout as being more like a platform for serving content, the integration of some of the other concepts I previously discussed starts to make more sense. The small settlements that dot the landscape can easily be imagined as being served to the platform from a 'manage your wasteland settlement' social game. The shops in those settlements can easily be imagined as shops run by players from their mobile devices. And without the game needing to become a full-blown persistent world MMO, is it trivial to imagine supporting drop-in co-op. Once we have a game world rendered perpetually 'fresh' because of the input of other players, it is also much easier to imagine that I would pay a reasonable price for the game-world-as-platform, even if it only shipped with four hours of developer content. Done correctly, I even suspect the world could be given away for free, with features such as player-generated settlements and player run shops being unlocked by micro transaction. High quality, well polished story content could then be sold at a premium - five to ten dollars for an episode running anywhere between 3-6 hours.

I think the appeal from a publisher and developer standpoint is obvious. This is a powerful way to maximize the efficiency of your staff and to generate higher-margin, lower-risk profit, more steadily. The argument I hear against trying it this way is that it is unproven and conservative executives don't seem to want to be the first to risk their company on unproven business models.

Perhaps all the executives need is for players to demand it loudly enough - and to support it when it does finally arrive.

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.

Convergence Culture

Part Four: An offer that can't be refused

Thought Experiment One: imagine Pong, tweaked to be more exciting. Instead of showing the AI paddle on the other side of the screen, we hide from the player everything that happens over the center line. An elegant pacing algorithm tracks the players returns and the score of the game, and fakes everything that happens over the line in order to constantly escalate the intensity. Pong matches would be full of ever more spectacular volleys reaching increasingly extreme climaxes. Every game would be more incredible than the last - and yet, very obviously, something would be lost, and this game would suck.

Thought Experiment Two: imagine a Battlefield 2 match where both team Commanders colluded to make the match as dramatically exciting as possible for the unwitting players on the ground. The Commanders would share information to guide their respective squads into interestingly asymmetric skirmishes. They would track the score and collaborate to keep things close, ensuring things like supply drops, artillery strikes and air support always arrived at the most desperate hour. Suddenly every Battlefield 2 match would be as good as the best one you ever had (unless you discovered the collusion, in which case it would all suddenly seem very pointless).

The principle challenge in designing and building a dynamic narrative that responds to player action is not in the building of it (which is, itself, a wicked problem), but rather in the designing of it. It is, in fact, the same problem as designing Extreme Pong: that in handing over drama management to an invisible algorithm, the player has no way to know his actions are driving the story and the dynamic narrative becomes indistinguishable from an authored one - and likely not as good.

With Commander mode, Battlefield 2 hints at a way to cut the Gordian Knot: it suggests the possibility that we can outsource drama management to other players. On the one hand, playing the Commander gives strong feelings of agency and on the other, players on the ground know the difference between a high level experience that is pre-packed by a designer and one that is managed on-the-fly by a player with an agenda.

The main problem with Commander mode is that it needs to be synchronized with the main game at runtime, making it a pretty niche kind of fun. But I believe this is easily fixed by decoupling the 'game' of player controlled drama management from the low-level action game being managed. If the management game is designed to be fun as a management game instead of as a part of a low level combat game, then one player's management game becomes another player's drama manager. This is where intramedia convergence comes in.

Thought Experiment Three: imagine Mafia 2, the open world game, shipped with Mafia Wars, the mobile application as its player narrative driver. Instead of spamming all of Facebook with requests to join a mob, Mafia Wars players would try to recruit the best players of Mafia 2 to join their mobs. Players of Mafia 2 would subscribe to a handful of Mafia Wars players, who would become the warring Dons of their game world, and the missions they were sent on would have meaningful repercussions in their worlds. As one Mafia Wars Don rises to power, his influence cascades throughout the game worlds of his subscribers. As other Dons rise to challenge him, Mafia 2 players find themselves embroiled in the familial intrigue of the best mafia fiction - contracted to protect, bribed to betray, or tasked to assassinate based on the real needs of real players (who would in fact be playing a different, but connected, game).

Unlike the Extreme Pong example, the beauty of this intramedia link between two different games connected via the cloud is that players on both sides of the line know there are other players out there returning their volley. At the same time, because the players operating at the Mafia Wars level are not tied to the minute to minute play the way Commanders are in Battlefield 2, they can appreciate the game at the pace of a social, bite-sized, mobile game.

Even more important is the bridge-building between two divergent audiences. The overlap in the Venn Diagram between Mafia Wars players and Mafia 2 players is probably not great, but then neither is the overlap being proposed between their games. Your Uncle Bob from Wisconsin who plays Wii Sports with you every Thanksgiving at Grandma's probably loves Mario Puzo books and clicks away at Mafia Wars three or four times a day between meetings, and would love nothing more than to have you as his man on the ground in his ongoing feud with Mike from Accounting. And with every click the decisions he makes in his game world could be changing the landscape in yours, and vice versa.

Convergence Culture

Part Three: If you build it, they will come.

Ever since I can remember, I have loved using level editors. I got my start before I was even a teenager building Lode Runner levels on the Vic 20, by my mid twenties I was making levels in UnrealEd to play with friends, and my first game industry job was as a level designer. The game level editor was at least as important to my personal creative development as was the word processor. I believe a good level editor can be as engaging and entertaining as a game itself and - when combined with a great game - has the potential to create a positive feedback loop between playing and creating. This is important if you believe - as I do - that playing and creating are fundamentally the same thing.

But designing and building level editors is hard. On one hand, you want to give players unchecked freedom to design and build any environment they can imagine, from a space station to an African savanna to the Eiffel Tower, or even all of these things at once. Conversely, you also want player created environments to play well within the context of your game. Designing a level editor that connects creators who want to express themselves with players who want tightly designed levels is a challenge I believe can be overcome by making level building into a game itself.

The first time I saw a screenshot of the isometric grid of flowerbeds and fences, cornfields and cattle that we call Farmville, I was stricken with clammy-skinned flashbacks of Floaters and Chrysalids. I needed to know where 'Sniper' Sato was, and who was packing the Blaster Launcher. But regardless of superficial similarities, Farmville is nothing like X-Com. Farmville is essentially a level building game, and X-Com is a game that needs an unending stream of new levels. What a match.

Farmville affords player expression through the design of farms, and a forum for sharing those expressions with others. The actual gameplay of Farmville is either shoddy, evil or non-existent depending on your worldview. X-Com, by contrast, is a hardcore, single-player strategy game in which players express themselves through the way they confront the game challenges. The forum they have for sharing that expression is non-existent (but at least it's not evil).

One of the amazing achievements of X-Com is that it uses a procedural 'level assembler' to construct appropriate levels on demand, offering an infinite variety of terrain in which players battle to repel the alien invasion of Earth. Underlying this 'assembler' are simple rules which determine what makes a valid level. Farmville farms, by contrast, are player generated. Because Farmville explicitly rewards time spent with experience and profit, many Farmville farms are rigorously optimized with dense fields of high-yield crops. But because Farmville is also a platform for socialization and expression, there is also an incredible variety of farms that reject progression entirely; from eclectic need-one-of-everything collections, to idyllic pastoral scenes where some kind of virtual Feng Shui reigns.

In order to give players the feeling of scope required by an X-Com game, a modern remake must confront a difficult challenge. Building an entire planet worth of content by hand is not feasible. Procedural generation risks feeling wooden, and lacking in creative flourish. Relying simply on user generation risks undercutting serious themes with an overwhelming percentage of penis-shaped levels. But a game that incentivizes players to make appropriate X-Com levels can potentially solve this problem.

A casual game for mobile devices or the web that puts players in the role of Mayor, Farmer, or Ranger, and gives them the tools to build all the urban, rural and wilderness landscapes needed, while explicitly rewarded their time spent with experience and profit would quickly generate the needed content. Adding another reward axis selecting for designer-defined 'appropriateness' would lead to player created maps suitable for playing X-Com in. Those maps could then be published to the cloud and pulled down by the game on demand. These casual players cum level designers would be rewarded with experience, gifts, rare items and prestige for designing X-Com appropriate environments. Friend management, sharing, and publish/subscribe tools would begin to bridge the sadly widening gulf between two important groups of players.

It's been almost twenty years since X-Com and an entire generation of similarly hardcore games excluded a mass-market gaming audience a hundred times the size of the audience they chose to service. Today, the pendulum is swinging the other way. The casual revolution - as exemplified by Farmville - is excluding the hardcore gamer. It doesn't need to be this way. We do not have to accept the cynical segregation of diverse audiences when the technology exists today to unite us. By linking our games, we create new domains in which all kinds of players can create, co-operate, compete, collaborate, and ultimately converge.

Agency: Past, Present, Future.

I don't want to make ClickNothing a clearing house of second run stuff I am writing for print magazines, and I still want to make sure I get original content up here. I'm working on some stuff, but am also pretty busy. Part of the reason I decided to take these writing opportunities with Edge and GamesTM was to give myself a kick in the butt to get writing again.

The stuff I am doing for Edge is (if you haven't been following) a serialized column specifically about what I am calling intramedia convergence. You can read Part One here, and Part Two here. Part Three has already streeted in the UK I think, and maybe the US too. I will post it here in a couple weeks. I just submitted Part Five to Edge today, so there will be at least six parts in the serial (I'm thinking I'll run out of stuff to say by Part Eight).

This piece is being republished from an article I wrote for the 100th issue of GamesTM Magazine. It's cool they asked me to do this, because my first game, Splinter Cell, was featured on their very first cover, one hundred long months ago. Yes, I've been around that long (and longer). I feel this piece is a more concise companion piece to the article I wrote for RPS for the 10th Anniversary of Deus Ex.

Here it is:

 

Agency: Past, Present and Future

In her seminal 1998 work Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray first formalized the concept of agency, defining it as the feeling we get when we take meaningful action in an interactive system and experience the results of our decisions and choices. Agency is, in effect, the aggregate of computer, program and designer telling you that your expression in the game world matters. While this concept may seem straightforward and obvious, its implications are profound.
 
Aside from 'the interactive system' (or for our purposes, the video game) there is no other medium of human expression that literally validates the expression of the audience. Agency, therefore, is not just a feature of games, it is the very foundation of what games are and how they mean. It is not simply that your expression and its validation matters, it's that your expression and its validation are all that matters. This is a fundamental departure from the author-centric notion of what art is and what it can be, and it is no understatement to say that agency changes everything.
 
A decade ago, with the critical acclaim of ‘high agency’ games such as the Thief and System Shock games from now defunct Looking Glass Studios, and the Deus Ex games from Ion Storm Austin, agency was on the rise. When I got my own start in the game industry in 2001, it seemed obvious that the path that would see games delivered into the promised land where they'd be recognized as a legitimate form of creative and artistic expression was by increasing the agency they offered. Unfortunately, despite their critical acclaim and their lasting influence on professional designers, these high agency games were largely commercial failures.
 
To compound the problem, Microsoft went toe to toe with Sony by launching the Xbox and bringing what was traditionally the highest agency type of game possible – the so-called ‘immersive sim’ fps – to a more casual (and explosively growing) audience of console gamers. Halo is still a pretty high agency game, but compared to the complexity and nuance of player expression available in games in the 'Looking Glass School', it was a step backwards. But it was a mega-hit and it helped define the expectations of an entirely new generation of gamers.

The last decade has seen a widespread reduction in agency. Racing games like the Burnout series became 'chutes of awesome' instead of games of skill and strategy and tactics. RPGs like KoTOR constrained agency to the mid and high levels of play, while turning over most low-level agency to probabilistic determination. Even traditionally high agency first-person shooters have increasingly sacrificed the potential for incredible awesomeness to arise from player agency, highly interconnected systems, and emergence, in exchange for pre-masticated 'wow sequences' that are exciting to watch - once - and rarely meaningful to actually play. Even GTA - the king of agency 10 years ago, has seen its system space massively curtailed in its latest iteration in order to make more room for the authored narrative. Action adventure games rely heavily on non-systemic QTEs and unique qameplay one-offs in an attempt to be more filmic while often missing the point of what both film and games are.

For every step backward, there are steps forward to be sure. Oblivion and Fallout 3 more than answered the call for an RPG with incredible agency across all levels. The Bioshock games have proved themselves worthy successors to the System Shock series. Portal offers irrefutable proof that ludonarrative dissonance can be dealt with if the writer realizes that his work must be in service of the player experience and not vice versa. This is to say nothing of multiplayer games from WoW to Modern Warfare to Little Big Planet to Left 4 Dead, where agency will (hopefully) always reign.

I do not generally believe in 'slippery slope' arguments. Mankind (and perhaps game developers especially) are more than the wet clay certain mythologies would have it we are wrought from, we are thinking beings. One of the things we do best is balance and optimize complex situations. I am more fearful of arms race scenarios. Arms races happen when easily predictable gains along a single axis suck intelligent well-meaning people toward inevitable conclusions that they are unable to avoid despite their clear visibility. Incremental sacrifices of agency in exchange for massive leaps forward in development of authored film-like narrative technique is - in my opinion - just such an arms race. Especially if that race is the Zeno's paradox I believe it to be.

While selling games that appeal to a broad audience is our responsibility as professionals, we also have a responsibility of stewardship over the resource of agency. As the newest, and perhaps the final domain of human artistic expression, and as the democratizing force of human creativity, the responsible and sustainable development and exploitation of agency is critical to our collective future. Over the next ten years, the choices we make in terms of delivering agency to players and developing their taste for agency will impact not just the direction of the game industry, but the direction of the development of human culture in general.

It is not, and it never will be, a mistake to make games that offer all different degrees of agency, from the high to the low. But it is a very serious mistake indeed to dismiss its importance, to adopt a laissez-faire attitude, or to neglect our responsibility as pioneers into the last great frontier of our cultural development.

Convergence Culture

Part Two: The Emperor's New Clothes

Imagine for a moment an alternate reality where racing games suck. Here, racing games only exist on portable devices. And they don't ever let you actually race. You have a couple dozen car models, and a few different engines. You can swap out tires and spoilers, choose from a few different fender, grill and lighting packages, change paint jobs, and decorate with a handful of decal designs before sharing your cars with friends. In the best of these games your car can race against a friends car, but remember - no driving. The cars do an automated lap around a plain oval, and a winner is declared.

What I'm describing is not an alternate reality racing game, but rather the actual current state of fashion design games, using racing games in substitution, to illustrate that fashion games are firmly ensconced in a pink ghetto of lifestyle brainwashing gadgets for girls. Meanwhile, racing games are among the most important genres in gaming, leading the charge into the future along a number of important technological axes including rendering, physics, online capability and user customization. Why?

Aside from the industry's utterly shameful lack of diversity, the reason why fashion games suck is that the design problems inherent to a good fashion game are harder to solve than those of a racing game.

I believe there are two big challenges to making a great fashion game. The first is the creativity problem. Similar to our bizarro racing game, most fashion games let users mix and match their designs from predefined sets of fabrics, colours and cuts. The game then evaluates 'success' based on proximity to some hidden value set. If the game is looking for [pink], [cotton], [sundress], then a pink silk sundress will be more successful than a pink wool sweater.

The problem is that this is not design in any meaningful sense. It is avatar customization at best, which is hardly enough to support an entire game - never mind a genre. Unfortunately, designing a freeform editor usable by casual gamers that can generate near infinite variety - and then designing supporting systems that evaluate the impact of the user design on other game systems is an impressively difficult challenge.

Spore solved it though, so now we have existence proof that it can be done. Next?

Next is the context problem. Assembling outfits from a library and sharing them with friends is not fashion design. Fashion needs more than designers. It needs people to wear it, to be influenced by it, to look good - and bad - in it. The context of the interplay of people expressing themselves through their choice of clothes is what fashion is, the same way the context of pushing a car to the limits to complete a lap faster than the other guy is what racing is.

So even if we could theoretically make a Spore-like editor for designing clothes that would run on iPhone or DS, how would we provide the necessary context? I believe everything exists to do this today, and I think the game to do it would best be called GTA: Garment District.

GTA:GD would not only allow you to create any article of clothing you can imagine, it would also allow you - optionally - to design a boutique and to publish that boutique to the cloud. From there, players of GTA could subscribe to user created boutiques to replace the default clothing chains in their game world. These clothes would not only be made available to 10 million Niko Bellics, but would seep out into 10 million Liberty Cities. The fashion designs of all those designers touching the lives of millions of AI driven Libertarians.

The popularity of given brands (defined by subscriptions) and given individual styles (defined by aggregated data on what all the Niko's wear) would seed a simple simulation of the cultural evolution of tastes that would determine the outfit of each civilian as he is spawned into the world. Style in any given instance of GTA would evolve and change.

Even better, GTA:GD players would receive meaningful feedback on their designs. It would give players for whom being a fashion designer is a valuable fantasy a sense of what it really feels like to design fashion, the same way racing games allow us to get a sense of what it feels like to drive a race car.

More importantly, intra-media gaming like this builds connections between people by giving them something they can share across wildly different games. It can dispel a daughters resentment for a lack of paternal attention, or a fathers frustration at the cost of buying her what he knows is a crappy game. It can give them a new way to engage with, and to understand one another, and in doing so create a new and much needed context where gaming welcomes and encourages girl gamers instead of cynically exploiting them.

Convergence Culture

Part One: The Vampires of Culture

From a design perspective, 'convergence' is a dirty word. Convergence is a business concept that aims to bring about an overlap in otherwise diverse audiences by leveraging IP across games, film, toys, books and comics, television or other forms of entertainment.

In the game industry, the traditional approach to convergence finds second tier publishers floating themselves on licensing deals for third rate movies that yield fourth rate games that still outsell some of the best titles of the year because uninspired marketing twits would rather trick Wal-Mart shopping soccer moms into buying something crappy than attempt to nurture a growing need for a new entertainment medium that enriches us, moves us, and challenges the way we experience the world.

I find this approach cynical and exploitative. But contrary to rumours of my anti-capitalist tendencies, I am actually in favour of responsible trans-media leveraging of IP, and not simply because it is profitable. As the cultural chasms between generations widen and deepen, and as the mountains of inequity separating the richest and poorest steepen, I believe that well crafted trans-media properties have a unique capacity to foster convergence; weaving together the shared experiences of differing peoples to form the very fabric of our culture.

But the reality of trans-media convergence is that we have, up to now, been mostly incapable of even making good cross-platform ports of our best gaming experiences. Modern Warfare rocks on the current home consoles - not so much on iPhone and Wii. With this being the case, is it any surprise that trying to port those experiences across to other media fails so miserably?

Every time anyone has tried to create a rich trans-media IP to appeal to diverse audiences they have failed in at least one major domain. Star Wars, Harry Potter and Clancy come to mind as our best successes. Star Wars novels never appealed to a broader audience than existing Star Wars fans, Harry Potter contributed little of value to the game space, and Clancy never brought anything to the table that was appealing to kids or families (though that's probably a wise omission). That said, the Star Wars novels and the Potter games were financial successes - and that's the point I am trying to make. Because the expected margins are great, and no investment in quality is required - creativity is sucked out of the system by business and marketing executives before these trans-media properties even have a chance to be good.

So what is to be done? As long as 'convergence' remains a rallying cry on Wall Street, and investors freely offer up their vaults as financial safe-haven to the vampires of culture, I fear we'll never see the dawn. But I for one am tired of playing the cowering Carpathian peasant; they have the Internet in Transylvania now too, you know. And XBox and wi-fi and iPad. I think it's high time we get a mob together, and armed with Wii-motes and iPhones and PSPs in place of torches and pitchforks we'll drag those bloodsuckers out into the streets and stake them to the ground. And if our mob is made up of people who care about games as a medium of human expression, then what shall be the sharpened stick on whose point we stake our bloody claim?

I say we use the word convergence itself, hacking it like a turret in Bioshock to turn it to our own purpose. If we stop talking about convergence in the cold business terms that have drained the life from so many games (and developers, and gamers) and start talking about it in design terms, we not only have a dangerous new weapon of our own, but we have appropriated one of the more dangerous weapons that has been fielded against us.

This new convergence will be the topic of this series of columns. In the coming months I am going to talk about how new and changing paradigms of design, play, interaction, technology and economics are reshaping the games we play, the people who play them and the industry that makes them. This new convergence is not a trans-media convergence, but rather an intra-media convergence. It is a bottom-up convergence given life by the plethora of smartphones and tablets we carry into battle and enabled by ubiquitous wi-fi, connected consoles, cellular data networks and a new overhanging Cloud that miraculously does not block the sun.

This is the convergence I believe we should be talking about and working toward. It is a convergence that starts by getting our own house in order, and by bringing diverging audiences of players together. For too long casual gamers, hardcore gamers, bite-sized gamers and mobile gamers have been playing in separate worlds. Until we can bring them together and unite them around a common experience - custom to each platform, but ultimately connected - is there any reason to imagine we can fill a movie theatre with people who don't give a shit about games to begin with?