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Anti-Irreplaceable

Wow.

Over ten percent of all the traffic that has ever gone through this blog went through in the past week in response to my previous post about Chaos Theory.

Needless to say, that was totally unexpected. I realized sometime in the evening last Saturday that it was Chaos Theory's 10 year Anniversary and decided to quickly throw together a blog post. In fact, I had originally started writing with the intent of telling three little tales about the development of the game, but, as I am sure you are aware, I can be a bit wordy, and it was getting late, so I only shipped one of them.

I guess it just happened that the particular story I chose struck a chord. Obviously, quality of life issues in the game industry remain a big issue, and what happened to me (and many others) continues to happen today. It was decidedly not my intent last week to drop a bomb and then drop the mic. What to me is 'some crazy shit that happened to me a decade ago' is a big deal to a lot of people, it turns out. So perhaps I should speak that.

I think the most important thing that I feel about it, is that the problem of quality of life in the game industry is not a simple problem, and that having a simplistic stance on the issue is not helpful to the people who are suffering.

Many people seemed to be blaming the evil bosses of the evil corporations for the imposition of eighty hour weeks. While this happens, and it is shameful, I assure you, no one has ever imposed an eighty hour week on me, and I have never ordered a crunch on any one of my teams, ever. My eighty hour weeks were something I did to myself. They were not mandated by Ubisoft.

Other people pinned the long weeks to shitty production practices and bad planning. It's true that some of our planning was shoddy, but at the same time, I can say with certainty that even if we had had better practices and planning I would definitely not have gone home after 40 hours a week. I wanted to be there. It was the only thing I wanted.

Many pointed out that the science shows that prolonged crunch demonstrably leads to bad results. Sure - data shows that. But that does not mean there are not exceptions. Certainly there were bad results for me and my health (and for others as well). But there were no bad results for the game. I'm pretty sure that the game was not a 100 metacritic and all our crunching left us with a lousy 94. Those hours and all that stress mattered. To say that it did not, or that it was deleterious to the final game is simply false in this case.

Others seemed to want to rush forward and empathize and say 'hey, that sounds awful, but you should know it was worth it'. While I appreciate the sentiment and the empathy, what you mean by that is that you believe it was worth it because what you gained was valuable. That's great, I am flattered. But you actually don't, and can't know the cost. It's as if I bought a cookie from you for five dollars and ate it, and you are telling me it was worth it because you're happy with your five dollars. But you don't know what the cookie tasted like. The taste of the cookie is my experience. Not yours. So while I appreciate the empathy (I sincerely do), I still feel it's important not to jump to a simplified perspective on a complicated issue that has such potential to damage people. What we really need to do is try to understand these quality of life issues, and empower people to come up with ways that allow them to solve the problems that are specific to their own lives in the contexts in which they are dealing with them.

Probably every quality of life issue is different. Everyone gets sucked into different traps. Long hours can be the thing that causes the problem. They can be the thing that compounds it. They can be the thing that people use to conceal the problem. Believe it or not, they can also be the thing that helps. There is no single problem, and there is no magic bullet.

As I said, in my case on Chaos Theory, I was not being told to work three jobs and put in eighty hours a week. I chose to do it. I did it because in a very real way, doing it made me happy. I felt empowered, fulfilled, and appreciated. I did it because I believed it was possible to make a better game than the original Splinter Cell, and that the easiest path to get there was through a lot of hard work. The positive feedback I was getting in the short term sucked me into a destructive spiral over the long term. I was exhausted and stressed, but the best way to deal with that problem was to get a few important things done on the game and get the high from having moved the game forward.

Back in 2001, just before I left Vancouver to go to Ubisoft and start my career in games a friend of mine gave me a bit of advice. He told me (I'm paraphrasing), "If you want to be successful in a big company, the way to do that is to make yourself irreplaceable." That's what I did almost from the minute my feet hit the ground in Montreal. I just started working like a machine. I stuck my nose in everything and I tried to pick up every loose task I could. By the time the original Splinter Cell had shipped I had gone from being a rookie level designer who had never worked on a game before to being a level designer, game designer and scriptwriter on a 92 Metacritic blockbuster that sold over five million copies (that was a lot in 2002). My level had been the one to represent the game at E3. My other level was the one on the demo disk in Official XBox Magazine. My other level was the first one in the game. I was irreplaceable.

When the core Splinter Team left Ubi to go found EA Montreal, it was obvious that I would take the Lead Level Design job and write the script. Who else would you ask to do that? I became the Creative Director not long after that, and yeah - no question I was irreplaceable again. 

You know the rest of the story from the previous post. But here's the part I didn't talk about:

After Chaos Theory, I was pretty seriously burned out. I said at the time that I never wanted to make another Splinter Cell again - because frankly, I'm pretty sure I can't do it better, so what would be the point? So I decided to go and work on Far Cry 2. And at the same time as I made that decision, I also  considered that advice my friend had given me about making myself irreplaceable. I realized that while it had technically 'worked', it was totally unsustainable and would not end well. I decided I needed a new strategy, and what seemed a straightfoward alternate strategy at the time was to just 'do the opposite'.

I decided to go into Far Cry 2 with the explicit goal of 'replacing myself'. What that meant, concretely, was finding a better Lead Level Designer than me, and finding a better writer than me so that I would only have one job, and then - perhaps even more important - working to build as many of the creative leaders as I could so that maybe one day, I could have no jobs. Presumably this would lead to me being at the top of some kind of pyramid scheme where I got to sit on a beach and drink mojitos and play videogames for the rest of my life - but I didn't really think it through that far.

Anyway - that's exactly what I set out to do. I brought in a Lead Level Designer who unquestionably was better at it than I was. I evolved the role of 'writing' into the role of Narrative Design, and brought in a Narrative Designer who was better than I was, and then I spent the next three years having them tell me how stupid I was and it was great. 

Far Cry 2 was hard as hell. In a lot of ways, it was harder than Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. There are things that that game changed in me that will never go back to the way they were before. Maybe I'll write about those when Far Cry 2 turns ten. But all that said, for the most part, I worked 40-50 hour weeks for almost the entire development of Far Cry 2. I didn't suffer real damage in the way I did on Chaos Theory. Yes, there were people who worked a lot longer and harder hours that. On several occasions I tried to order people to leave the building, and I remember asking the Producer how we could force people to go home. Some of the reasons those people were working so hard had to do with bad planning and management. Some of it had to do with scope creep. Some of it was because they were super engaged. I'm sure their reasons are as complex as mine were, and I won't try to diminish them through simplificiation. It's complicated. It's hard.

Today, the Lead Level Designer, the Narrative Designer and the Art Director from Far Cry 2 are all Creative Directors on different projects. Far Cry 2, in my opinion, is a better and more important game that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I won't try to take too much credit for that, but I do suspect that if I had continued to position myself as irreplacable, I would not have made it through at all. The project would have crashed and burned, the game would have been taken over by another creative lead and likely rebooteed. Likely many of the people who developed themselves through the course of that production would have been derailed and might not be doing as well professionally as they are today.

So there you have it - those are my thoughts on the complexities of quality of life in the game industry and that's my one and only strategy for not getting snuffed out: replace yourself. It's not a magic bullet, but that's all I've got. 

(It just so happens I feel the same approach applies to designer authorship - but that's another topic.)

Ten Years Down

I realized earlier today that it's been ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped.

Obviously, a lot has changed in that time, but I'm not going to wax nostalgic about that. I thought instead I would regale you a never before made public tale of what that game meant to me.

Chaos Theory was a hell of a project. I began as the Lead Level Designer and the Scriptwriter, which meant from the start I was doing two serious, full time jobs. I had to get the level design team queued up to deliver 12 maps that were of much higher and much more uniform quality than those in the original game, and I had to make sure we had a story and script that worked all the way through. I also had to get a commitment from that entire team that - come hell or high water - we would not cut a single level. This was doubling down on both the team, and on quality - it meant everyone on the level design side was bought in, but it also meant I could work with confidence on a script that would not later be hobbled by having to move or cut levels.

At the same time, there was a lot of stuff to fix in terms of the global vision of the game. The original Splinter Cell had been a big hit, but it was not without its serious faults. Punishing 'Game Over' gating and brutal trial-and-error gameplay that we should have fixed in the original needed some challenging and innovative solutions if Splinter Cell was to be moved forward.

Development was hard. Sometime around Alpha, mandate came down from Ubi that all internal projects needed to have a Creative Director. Mathieu Ferland - the Producer - asked me to do the job. I said no. I was not convinced that it was not just a bullshit management position and I was worried that I already had two jobs. But after a few discussions with friends and family and the team, a week or so later I changed my mind and became Creative Director, Lead Level Designer and Writer for the game. If you watch the credits, you'll see that three of the first five names in the credits are me. The other two were Mathieu Ferland, and the Art Director, The Chinh Ngo. Anyway, these responsibilities came with a heavy price, though. I spent most of the 24 months of Chaos Theory's development working 80 hours a week.

About six months after I became Creative Director, when the game was around Beta, my good friend Dave (who had been an AI programmer on the original Splinter Cell, and who is currently one of the founders of Tiger Style) came to Montreal to visit. He stayed with us, and he slept in our spare room for a week or ten days. That week I took 'time off' - by which I mean I left work at 6pm or so every night so we could have dinner and hang out. It was fun - I've been told. I don't really remember.

I went to GDC in March of 2005, while the game was in the distribution process, and I gave a talk about the narrative structure of the game. Of course, I also got to hang out with Dave under far less stressful circumstances. Over dinner one night, we got to talking about the time he'd last been in Montreal. During that discussion, I kept correcting him about what we'd done the last time he was in Montreal, but we kept disagreeing about the details and the timing. Over the course of the meal, we realized that I actually had no memory of his trip to Montreal six months previously, and that I was recalling a previous visit he'd made about a year or so before that. Dave had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear - I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.

Once we realized that the incongruities in our conversation were the result of a legitimate failing of my memory, Dave helped me trying to find a handle. We talked about it over dinner, and then on and off over time. I spoke with my wife about it (she, of course, had full recollection), and eventually, I was able to pin a few minor pieces of my memories to the cork board of my brain and piece together a kind of past.

Over time, I was able to slowly reconstruct some significant part of that lost week. I remember a few meals and a few conversations in a few bars. I remember my friend being in my house. I remember us drinking coffee together and smoking cigarettes.

Writing it all down, now, I have to confess I have mixed feelings about it. I am really, truly proud of what we accomplished with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It stands the test of time as one of the best games ever made. At the same time, the personal cost for making it was real and serious. It's not about forgotten beers in some bar on St Laurent. It's about brain damage and the loss of life. To this day, I am still not sure what the right equation is there. I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I'm still not sure if I would do it again if I had the chance.

Anyway, here's something you've never seen before:

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.

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....)

Full and Bright

Two smart posts over at Steve Gaynor's blog, Fullbright.

The first is his thoughts on 'storymaking'. I think it's a pretty good overview of the different levels at which the player is making his own story. I have a long comment (not approved as of this posting) that breaks down some of my own thoughts on it. If I have time, I'll write that comment up as a post here in much more detail to try and get at the heart of what I'm saying. In any case, if you're interested in the modes of player-authored story, get over there.

The second is a solid overview of FPS encounter design - in particular as relates to FEAR and FEAR 2. I have not played either of those games, but he generalizes his thoughts on FPS encounter design and offers some clearly stated rules of thumb that I think any FPS level designer should be familiar with. I don't mean to be condescending when I say that the post title is approporiate - it is the 'basics' of FPS encounter design and I don't think experienced designers will learn much, but it's short and clear and concise - so a useful reference even for the old pros, because so many people have now written books hundreds of pages long that can barely get to the points Steve makes in 4 paragraphs.

Pat's Narrative Design Slides

Pat Redding is the Narrative Designer on my project, and he gave a wicked talk at GDC about the narrative design of Far Cry 2. He has recently put his slides up for anyone interested, and they are annotated with the text of what he said, meaning they're actually usable.

This is must-have info for anyone interested in the design and implementation of systems that turn control of the story over to the player.

Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock

The problem of what the game is about

[traduit en francais ici]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The game begins by offering the player two contracts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narrative and Flow

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