While you are welcome to an opinion (on something you have not played, as you’ve indicated), please remember that people who enjoy these games, as well as their artists/designers, are just as committed to their particular genres as you are to yours. This is not a public place for venting your personal frustrations - it is a place for understanding just what video games are, and not a place for criticizing them for what they aren’t.

As for your particular claim, I agree that there is something peculiar to the idea that a 3rd person avatar is somehow less committable than a 1st person avatar. This is perhaps one of the firmer standards in artistic expression - that player perspective does matter. I suspect that this is why (as you’ve indicated) so many FPS games rely upon a 1st person view.

Bingo! Much better than my long rant. Very well put…

Indeed, coming up with ideas by yourself ain’t easy. This is like putting a camera pointed to you and expecting you to come up with some well-thought out lines as Seinfeld or good acting like Jack Nicholson.

We’re not poets, nor game designers: let creative people do what they do best and let’s eagerly anticipate it… OTOH, perhaps if Kojima or Wright were playing the deers something truly astounding could come up out of the aquarium.

I didn’t happen to actually “play” this “game” as it “Requires Windows and a fast 3D videocard!” and I have neither. However, I’ve taken the care to read the FAQ, general instructions and comments here about all the fuss.

So, you’re a deer and should act like such and enjoying this experience should possibly make a big emotional impact in you life. Meet you deer friends, eat some grass, scratch your virtual back in a tree trunk. Watch the world come alive and the sun rise and give way to clouds.

I have to say I feel like I’d have a better time feeding my fish and watching them swimm in the aquarium. Or reading Parnassian poetry.

Telling me I am a character and should act accordingly only works as far as there are objectives and a clearly defined player character persona — with their own traits and personal agenda — which is not really the same as mine. Solid Snake, Niko Bellic and Link being three great examples. Well, perhaps not so much Link as he follows those old traditions of putting a mute avatar to represent the player, but in recent incarnations has been decidedly more active.

What puts them all apart for this deer though are their objectives and motives in the game. This deer has none of those except enjoying hanging around. I call this kind of pointless, plotless, “sandbox” games “aquarium games”: you have fun watching things happening around in this contained space and how they react to you feeding some little pointless input. It is almost as passive an entertainment form as watching TV, except you can’t argue with some stupit commentary the anchor throw in your face. Which is to say: you exercise your brain even less.

It’s the same as The Sims by the way. Pointless, boring, but a massive success with casual gamers who enjoy feeding fish and watch them swimm. Better than TV, I guess, but far from the joy of exchanging exciting ideas in a blog.

In other words: I don’t buy it. Let alone the brilliancy of the creators. This sounds like some online sociological idiocy: “a get-together where Michael and Auriea login to the world as gods (or simply as ‘nature’), and create real-time changes in the world (ie. playing music, or creating objects) as people play”.

People are not playing: they are watching things happening under their virtual noses. They enjoy it because they know there are other people the other side acting like a deer as well. The dyadic play is indeed about as exciting as hide-and-seek and developing an understandable language out of such limited actions is more infuriating than coding in brainfuck.

BTW, a game that worked much better and had his very own “language” as well was Abe’s Oddysee and it’s sequel, Exoddus. Objectives, language, motive and well-developed player character, that’s what good games should have.

I sadly believe dyadic play only truly shine in videogames in the FPS arena. It’s hard to get a sense of commitment and truly enjoy a virtual world all by itself when you’re contrained to controlling an avatar from a distant 3rd person viewpoint. Suspension of disbelief would work if there was any sense of urgency from some quest your avatar was involved…

Sorry for the long rant. Nice blog. Shame I came late to this one…

I’m not sure if I’m altogether clear on your view of that psychology however, because I believe that there is a much deeper, rich, sense of meaningfulness that comes from dyadic and monadic play than just saying ‘the brain causes it’. The teddy bear, and these are not my words but belong to other psychoanalytic traditions, acts as a ’stand-in’ for people that exist in the child’s life. What makes this form of play meaningful is that the child imparts his/her imaginative meanings upon the bear and gives it a character or role to play. Yes, children do eventually become bored of the bear - you’re definitely spot-on there - but not before developing a deep attachment.

In that sense, I have to recant a bit of my original claim, because I truly believe that there is *very little difference* between monadic and dyadic play: both involve imaginative acts. However, only one of them involves another fleshly human being - which seems to matter.

I’m looking forward to playing Spore myself! I certainly hope that his insistence on catering to both forms of play don’t “water down” the gameplay.

Thanks again for the extensive comment.

Modern video games have evolved using a dyadic style of gameplay because it has been successful. History has shown the more monadic the game, the less popular it has been (generalization. Black and White was fairly popular, and had reasonable monadistic elements.) Dyadic gameplay is what *most* people yearn for.

That is fairly obvious, if you simply look at the current market. But an interesting debate could be had as to the reasons “why?” I think the answer lies in basic human psychology.

The more monadistic an activity, the more appealing it becomes to a young child, and the less appealing to an adult. Your bear example, for instance. As a human brain develops, it seems to need this monadic form of play, and it becomes less important to it’s development. It appears that monadic play is a required structure for brain development, but once its usefulness wanes, so does the desire to partake in it.

To take another approach at this interesting topic, consider a monadic style of game that comes out with newer versions as technology improves. The goal is to give the players more and more tools so that they might “play” in any way they wish. In a monadic fashion. As technology improves, so does their options, and the realism of the world, until eventually the game world is indistinguishable to the real world. So for this game, you are placed in a room with a table, a ball, and a door. And there are no rules, you may do *anything* you wish. Do you know what I would do? I would leave via the door, and find something interesting to do. Something *dyadic*.

I believe the “appeal” of games often depends on their blend of dyadic and monadic aspects. For example the Sims appealed to a wide audience - many of which traditionally didn’t “go” for video games - because it contained dyadic components, and much more monadic components than traditionally.

Spore, also by Will Wright, is an upcoming game with many of both elements, and is eagerly anticipated by a large audience.

If you are too extreme at either, however, you will completely lose one audience, and the dyadic one is *probably* bigger.

Thanks for the comment!

And at the time of this reply, the forest is getting alot less lonely too..

ps, flackattack is great so far - I’m enjoying reading the articles.

thanks for the article,
since you mentioned Second Life you might be interest to read an article we made for an online/paper book. It is called “The laws of digital world autonomy” and, like the entire book, it’s about autonomy and freedom in Second Life (and, for extension, in any other non-goal-oriented game or software application). You can find it here:

http://www.flackattack.org/Prod/pdf/Flack_Attack_Autonomy.pdf

Carlo Giordano

The article was an attempt at articulating something about The Endless Forest that was beyond “I got bored” or “I hated it” or “I thought it was pretty!”. I tried not to drop into too much scientific or psychological language to do that, and in that respect the article may have failed - perhaps I should have referred to more scholarly sources for a ‘theory’ of play as you did. Either way, I was just glad to draw attention to the game as an interesting example of ‘free’ social play.

Anyhoo - thanks for writing.

October 30, 2007 in Artful Games, Philosophy by chris(revised by Bryson)

I started playing the game but got bored.

I read an article, and got an idea from this article which I will try to describe.

Forms of Play
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Firstly, my understanding of the term “play” is somewhat ambiguous.

Bryson: My own definition of play is that it is the process of learning and exploration, where a person learns the relationships between themselves, others, objects, and their environments. It is a neurological process.
Dr. Stuart Brown at the National Institute for Play describes play as “a long evolved behavior important for the well being and survival of animals.”

“Research on the brain demonstrates that play is a scaffold for development, a vehicle for increasing neural structures, and a means by which all children practice skills they will need in later life.” (Childhood Education, Fall 2002 by Isenberg, Joan Packer, Quisenberry, Nancy)

I will define two types of play, “playing by oneself” and “playing with others.”

I will then place these two types of play on opposite ends of a spectrum.

I am not impressed by computer simulations, and they do not count as “playing with others”

Language : Creating Play
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Bryson: The title is confusing. Perhaps a better title would be “Play and Learning using Limited Language”. That would sum up the general idea in this section.

I think that the creators of The Endless Forest are creative.

I believe that the creators of this game want us to “play with others” using a simplistic form of communication.

It follows that those engaged in the game will explore how to operate with each other using this simplistic communication. This involves the act of “play”.

I am trying to communicate when I “play” with this game. I find it fun to guess what other people are trying to communicate. This game allows me to exercise creative thinking.

I don’t know of any limits to this limited communication, so I will posit that any content can be communicated through it.

What Forms of Play might mean for game developers
——————————————————————————————-
The spectrum of “play” as defined above can be used to measure whether we are “playing by ourselves” or “playing with others”. And they should involve creative thinking.

Games should be tailored based on this measurement, and also include creative thinking.
______________________________________________________

1 I think the developers name gives an indication of their personality and goals in life

Bryson: The original description of this game, by Chris, is like walking through an Endless Forest. (Ad-Hominim I know, :-P)

What I was trying to achieve in this article was a particular conception of ‘play’ that doesn’t begin with “a computer”. I attempted to show that play is something natural to human action (as you correctly note that “The Rules of Play” attempts to describe in theoretical terms) - and that designers typically do violence to the idea of “play” by limiting games through computer-based rulesystems that do not allow the player to express themselves. I also attempted to make the argument that The Endless Forest was an example of a game that has the possibility for more natural childlike ‘play’ than we normally see in games. I suggested that other MMORPGs limit the chances for dyadic and monadic play because they flood the player with rules-systems that often constrain player creativity.

I also made the argument - and apparently I was not clear enough here as your comment seems to demonstrate - that constrained symbolic systems do in fact allow for complex play. Would anyone claim that the roman alphabet, due to its limitations of 26 letters, does not allow for anything as complex as King Lear? I’m making a sociogenetic argument here: that people can come to define what the world ‘means’ in terms of the language they use to interact in it - and that language is currently up for grabs in the game. I’m making an argument using an idealized theory - and no real game would ever satisfy it, but I thought The Endless Forest was a beautiful example of something off the beaten path. I’m making the argument that it is not simply an “arty veneer” - that in fact there is some artistic depth in the game that goes far beyond real purty pictures and deer.

And now to say that “it’s simply not user-created, nor does it offer rich interactions between players” does not argue anything. It’s an assertion without an argument. If you’ve got an alternative way of thinking about the game, I’d love to hear it. An opinion alone won’t get us very far in understanding each other. I’m fully willing to accept the possibility that my way of framing gameplay misreads this particular game, but I need something more to work with.

And to make my reply a little more constructive: did you play the game? What did not resonate with you regarding symbolic play? Is the game in fact constrained by other things that I didn’t take into account? What game(s) would comparably show more opportunities for monadic and dyadic play?

I apologize for my rather incisive reply, but constructive criticism is the only form of discussion that I find insightful.

Regards,
- Chris

I’m afraid that I don’t particularly buy the idea of The Endless Forest being an outstanding endeavor with limitless possibility. If anything, it’s simply an interesting experiment: what if we took the typing out of a graphical chatroom, and abstracted the avatars from humans to animals? The limiter to further possibilities here is the lack of meaningful player actions and interactions. The players can do little in the world beside move their avatar about, create a uniform vocalization, and perform a few emotes. While, as you mention, this is a perfectly fertile ground for an impromptu game of follow-the-leader, or simply to jump about with other deer in a moment of completely undirected play, I wager that anything more complex, such as say, acting out King Lear, is beyond the scope of the game.

Which isn’t to say it’s not unique, or nice. And I understand that the creators are adding new content over time. But an emote-based graphical meeting place given an arty veneer is a bit of a silly thing to pile with grandiose assertions of being “the ultimate user-created fantasy world.” It’s simply not user-created, nor does it offer rich interactions between players. While it is a peaceful place to pretend to be a deer on the internet, I posit that it amounts to little more than that.