“I am not sure that I have lived since my childhood.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight

December 20, 1987

My sister and I are sitting in front of a small black-and-white television, the bevelled corners of its glass face smudged with dust and cat hair. Our eyes are locked on two elongated snakes, each trailing behind it a long tail. The snakes move in eight directions, chomping down on anything in their path -- including my one tail if I lose my concentration. The four snakes on the screen -- two played by the computer, and two by us -- are all different shades of grey against a snowy field. But I do not see grey snakes as we play -- I see a turquoise-blue one, a blood-red one, a golden one, and one the colour of birch leaves. My sister always takes the green one, and I the red. Outside the cedar-framed window it has started snowing again, with a cold that numbs the cheek, even with our parkas on.

We are sitting on the carpet indian-style, and we are both cradling the Mattel Intellivision controller in our hands, elbows propped up on our knees; our thumbs rest tensely on the ’4′ and ’6′ buttons, waiting for the next surprising change in direction. (I would note, years later in a dingy arcade, that this game plays exactly like TRON’s light-cycle game.) My sister begins to grin, and I laugh: I know that she is up to no good, and plans to force me and the computer-player into a corner, a collision that I will pay her back for later.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHXS1oBk5Rk

November 19, 2010

Twenty-three years later, the glass doors of our humble guild-house (in fact, the local Lion’s Club building) shake against the wicked arctic winds that punish the snow-covered streets. The packed room is full of energetic teenagers: some are artists, some are gamers, and some are just kids who want a place to hang out with others. Months ago, my wife and I started an after-school club for teenagers living in the rural town she teaches in. We call it “The Art Guild”.

A guild-mate comes up from behind and elbows me: “Star Fox 64. Right now!” She is fifteen-years-old, and she is my closest friend in the guild.

We plop down in front of a Commodore 1702 monitor (which serves as the guild-house television), sitting a few feet away from the screen, and squint at the conglomerations of triangles on the screen, trying to make out our spaceships on a field of green. We are not playing on the Lylat map, we are on Lylat. Shards of laser beams careen over my shoulder -- she is firing at me, locked on my tail. I am Peppy Hare, and she Fox McCloud. I barrel-roll, dodging hard left, trying to get her off my six o’clock. Her teeth are locked in a grim rictus. “How do I do a somersault?”, I ask, feigning a casual tone. “Not telling!” she jibes. For the next hour, we mock and tease each other as our ships take a similar barrage. We not only play a game (which is in fact, a serious affair), but are playful with one another. For these Dionysian moments, in the thrill and agony of combat, we are made equals.

The Barbaric Past and the Ideal Future

People who reflect on the past, like myself, come under perennial attack from those who see the past as a barbaric obstacle or time of humble ignorance. Many would point at Snafu and ask me, ‘How can you even tell what it is? Is that supposed to be a worm or something?’ And if I reply, ‘That is one of the most original and wonderful games I have ever played’, I am immediately accused of a pernicious nostalgia that makes lemon-aid of lemons. To my accusers, my childhood appears a bit like a Feudalistic farmer, barely surviving under the hardships of serfdom and poverty, crying “My God, I love this.”

I understand that criticism -- for nostalgia would indeed be a fair accusation if I thought that the past only existed in total isolation from the present and that games can be thought of as static objects with mechanical properties. What I mean by that is that gamers, by and large, still think of games as “things” -- as objects to be wrestled with, that have clear and defined properties (i.e. programmed logic, gameplay mechanics, quantifiable sound and graphics). Games are not seen as gaming practices, as ways of engaging with oneself and other people, as spaces or occasions that make possible a whole slough of personal and social experiences. When a game is treated like an object, a subject (the player!) now appears, full of all sorts of warped perceptions and personal vices -- their opinion cannot be trusted, because it is likely to be full of all sorts of personal bias… it is too “subjective”. And worse, lost and confused in the objective view, is the connection between the past and the present: was the game the same for me as a child as it is for me as an adult? It must be so by definition: it is the same game with the same mechanics. Any difference in the game is thought to be due to my subjective biases, as an adult and as a child. My childhood becomes as meaningless and fruitless as my adulthood, and the story that connects both is ruptured in the process.

The Heart of the Field

My sister and I, my friend and I, both play on the same imaginary field. We both are conjoined in some kind of common space that makes our playfulness towards one another a reality that encompasses us both. Moments after the Intellivision and the N64 are shut off, that field disappears. But we do not forget. We all retain that virtual field as part of our future psycho-emotive habitudes. The love of those moments spent with one another, in the comfort of warm rooms embattled by raging winter storms, sows within us a dark seed that awaits its radiant bloom.

Nels Anderson recently pointed out a post over at Jamie Madigan’s Psychology of Video Games blog. While Madigan’s post does not really say anything new (and is based on the kinds of experimental social scientific research that went out of style in the 1960s – sorry, couldn’t help myself), it does bring up the most important unanswered question that we have as gamers: Why do we play video games?

Nels takes us a large step in the right direction towards understanding this problem when he observes (in his own response to Madigan’s post) that, “We need better ways to talk about what makes games enjoyable.” Gamers, I’ve found, lack articulacy when it comes to understanding our own experiences playing games. Sure, we can go on for hours about what we like/dislike about the game’s rules or design, which characters we found empathizable and which we could not connect with, or how “immersive” the world is. But that’s not the same as being articulate about our own experiences and what they mean to us. Speaking articulately about ourselves requires some kind of language to put things into perspective, especially when it comes to sketching out what makes playing games so darned enjoyable.

Towards that, I want to play with the idea of “mastery” that both Madigan and Nels mention, and how mastering a game is its own enjoyment.

Mastery as Pleasure

Nels writes,

… there are certainly some [games] where I engaged with the story and characters (Planescape: Torment, Fallout, any adventure game, etc.). But the majority of my favourites would be games where I had the opportunity to master their systems, to improve skills. I think this also helps explain why so many games can have a terrible story and lackluster writing but still be a very satisfying experience…

I share in his enjoyment of mastery and skill acquisition, as I think most gamers do. Recently I’ve been playing through Final Fantasy VII again, and re-acquainting myself with the world after a long hiatus. Even though this is the n’th time I’ve played through the game, I’m always finding out something new and surprising (I truly didn’t understand Elemental materia until now, for instance) – or learning how to exploit certain areas of the game to maximize my characters’ levels. Anyone who has played Tetris understands the joy of mastery (think of your pleasure at completing four unbroken rows).

Mastery as Unpleasure

At the same time, mastery is not the only way in which we enjoy things. Often, mastery stands in the way of enjoyment. For instance, there is a large nature preserve near our city that my fiancée Stacey and I like to go hiking at. It is a large and complex forest, with plenty of trails to get lost on. We have hiked with people who wish to master the trails: they want to know all of the short-cuts, the fastest way to get from beginning to end, the most efficient method of eating (on your feet!), etc etc. When Stacey and I go for a hike, it’s to see the scenery. The land, the trees and the water all speak to us – we have to be very still, very silent some times for this to happen. This kind of joy cannot happen when we distance ourselves from the park by trying to master it.

Back to gaming. I worry that gaming has become predominantly a means for mastering imaginary places. Shadow of the Colossus, as a game that definitely lends itself to killing things, becomes an exercise in dominating other beasts. The rich joys that it’s sparse landscape evokes are passed over in favour of a joy of control, mastery, usage. The same can be said for games like World of Warcraft that throw the player into an exploitative form.

This is especially obvious when, as Madigan recognizes, many of us primarily play games as “to temporarily detach escape from reality, including our jobs or school. While some games leave us whit knuckled, others can be very relaxing. And at their heart, games are about mastery, developing new skills, or acquiring new knowledge.” Games have become a way of managing psychological symptoms – they allow us to withdraw from the stressors and responsibilities that fill our everyday lives. Our desire for mastery in the private world of games seems to point, most obviously, to a desire for control that is unmet in our public lives. We turn to games to fulfill that desire, and they become what is termed (in Freudian language) “substitute-gratifications” or “neurotic pleasures”. Gaming, when negatively defined as a way of managing work or school stress, is a form of repression. That is what I call a “negative definition” of gaming – a method for modulating stress without realizing anything positive in itself. Work now circumscribes and enframes play. That is a dangerous place to be in.

The Way Out (or: Poetic Joy)

I wish to resist that pessimistic interpretation. That is what got Freudian psychoanalysis into trouble in the first place, because he saw the end-product of civilization to be repression. I would rather follow the path that Norman O. Brown carves out in his magnum opus Life Against Death (Chapter XVI: The Resurrection of the Body) and Gaston Bachelard does in his Poetics of Space. Joyful living: true enjoyment, free from the burden of repression, “pure sublimation” as Bachelard calls it, is possible. This activity is called Play. Playfulness – expression as a pleasure in itself – does not abhor boundaries nor does it see them as unbreakable “rules”. Play takes boundaries and makes them part of its expressive dynamism. Work – all of our institutionalized settings – become places for playing. But playfulness for adults is not the naïve polymorphous perversity that we see in infants. Adults must learn to play through the language, cultural practices and institutions that we live in, whether we like them or not. Video games and work are two of those institutions.

I see the “poetic imagination” as one source for the joys of play. When I imagine through the world that a story, a poem, or a game  has to offer, part of me is “in the game” and part of the game “is in me”. I cannot distinguish very easily between myself and this imaginary world. In those moments, where I allow myself to imagine freely while respecting the world the place has to offer, I am at my most playful. I see things that I did not see before. I feel things – fear, pleasure, anger, surprise, disgust – that I did not feel when I stood outside of the world and peered into it from a distance. That world calls out new emotions and experiences from me – Shadow of the Colossus is no longer a series of quests with colossi that must be overcome in order to complete it, but an austere landscape that allows Agro’s trot, canter and gallop, to explode with vitality. Watching Agro run, and imagining the wild thunder of its hoofbeats echoing across the canyon, is a pleasure of its own. Feeling the awesome earthquake of a colossi’s footfalls as Wander stumbles madly to get away is frightening. As I play and use the world’s contours to enrich my imagination, I am reminded that I not only have a body, but that I am a body.

Becoming Expressive

In other words, I sometimes play games to “blow off some steam” from work, or to escape from the nightmarish demands of a student life that stands outside of my control. But when mastery (or domination, violence, aggression, etc) becomes a game’s central source of pleasure, it places a mortgage on my desires, gratifying them temporarily until they rear up again in a few weeks. It is neurotic pleasure.

However, when I fulfill a game with my own imaginings and make myself a part of the world it offers – whatever that might be – and allow myself to be transformed (emotionally, bodily, spiritually) in the process, I enjoy the game in a completely different way that does not pay dues to repression or neurosis. This poetic way of imagining changes the game: I can no longer just shut down the game after a few hours and call it a night. The game dwells in me. I lay awake at night imagining how to express to my fiancée, family, or friends, what I experienced earlier that night. Poetic imagining places within me the demand to become an artist of a kind: to express for others something that demands re-expression. Learning to play a game in that second manner, and showing for others how a game is part of my means for expressing myself, has become my life’s work.

I turned back to her son, and he was frowning intently at the Game Boy. He reached out tentatively and pushed on the plastic screen. Nothing happened. He pushed again, in a different spot. Nothing. I reached over and pushed a button -- Mario jumped. He looked at me with a puzzled expression, and turned back to the game. I eventually had to slide his fingers over to the D-Pad and buttons, pushed them down a few times to show him how it worked, and he started to “get it”.

I realized in that moment that we are now living in a time when the standard D-PAD + Buttons layout can no longer be assumed the “standard” way of playing a game. A new generation of players are growing up with motion-based interfaces from Sony (the upcoming Playstation Move), Nintendo (Wii MotionPlus, Balance Board), Harmonix (Rock Band), as well as touch based devices from Apple (iPod Touch/iPhone). Where the 1980s and 1990s almost always guaranteed a familiar mediating interface -- whether it be a keyboard, mouse, or D-Pad -- I wonder at how the recent explosion of alternative interfaces has changed the way gamers understand what a game is?

For instance, can we really say that Myst or Monkey Island 2 SE for PC are the “same games” as their iPhone variants? On what basis could we distinguish between our experience of playing the two (temporarily setting aside differences in sound quality, resolution, etc)? Is the “touch” aspect really that different from a point-n-click interface using the mouse?

I’m going to waffle here, because I just don’t know. And here’s why:

When I play any game, using a standard NES/PS2/PS3/Xbox/GameCube controller layout -- my fingers and thumbs find their places. If it’s a NES, my right thumb handles the A+B buttons while my left thumb takes care of the D-Pad. There are no moments of confusion, I never have to ask myself, “which button is it again?”. The same goes for the PS2 and PS3 games: my fingers know their business. As soon as I settle down to play the game, my fingers are no longer fingers to me. They are a part of the game -- my fingers become something like my mouth when I am speaking -- they spring into action when Mario needs to bound over a Chain Chomp or needs to go down a green pipe. My fingers never become a part of my foreground or focal experience -- in other words, my fingers become repressed parts of my bodily experience.¹ If I had to think about what I was going to do next before committing myself to the act, Super Mario 3 would become unplayable.² In other words, games like Mario 3 require us to forget that we have fingers for a few moments in order to bring a natural flow into the game. Without getting too artsy or mixing metaphors, many games demand that the player become a pianist of a kind.

Mouse-based interfaces that we typically see in adventure games require a different kind of skilfulness. My hand has to learn to map the horizontal two-dimensional space of the mouse to an on-screen virtual space. I have to learn that forwards-is-up, and backwards-is-down, and that I have to move the cursor to the right position in order to make my character do something. In this kind of interface, I still “repress” my hand -- at some point my hand disappears and the cursor becomes invisible to me. The cursor moves simultaneously with my hand. My hand knows where it needs to go on-screen in order to make Guybrush Threepwood pick up a wooden mallet. I don’t think to myself: there is a mallet, and I need to click ‘pick up’, then click on the mallet. Exploring the world of Monkey Island 2 becomes a natural gesture for me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiYUIcxibtY

(this review demonstrates how focal one’s finger can become when playing Myst on a touch device)

But can the same be said for touch-based devices that require us to make physical contact with the display in order to play the game? For instance, while the Myst interface is more or less the same between the PC/Mac and iPhone versions, the fact that I have to occlude some of the screen with my fingertip in order to “do” something changes the game subtly. Every time I reach forward and click on the screen with my finger I feel the cool glass push back at me, and I leave a fingerprint. There is something very focal in interacting with touch-based devices, because my finger does not fall into the background as easily. Compare that to the PC version: my hand is always on the mouse, my fingers always in their familiar positions on the mouse buttons. They never leave that surface, and the mouse becomes an extension of my body. On the iPod, my finger is constantly leaving the surface, popping in and out of my visual field.

But it’s the same game, right? Not for me. While the iPhone version of Myst is a wonderful port of the original game, I cannot quite dwell in the world simply because I cannot repress my awareness of my fingertips. I feel like I am playing a game. It is not quite bad enough to totally remove me from the world, but it is enough to remind me that yes -- I am playing a game on my iPod Touch and this is a virtual/fictional world that I am interacting with. The PC version of Myst is nothing like that -- when I click something I am reaching into the world and flipping a toggle switch.

Returning to my anecdote: does my friend’s 2 1/2 year old son experience his favourite iPod Touch game as a ‘real’ world? Or is his experience like mine — somewhat disembodied and self-conscious? Is this an inherent problem with touch-based interfaces, or do some of us already experience bodily repression that allows us to ignore our fingertips when we touch the display? How much have designers appreciated the qualitative change in gameplay experience as a result of the massive turn towards touch-based gaming, and have they done anything to respond to it? What are your experiences with touch-based (or even motion-based) interfaces; how do they change your experience of the game?

All of those answers – yes they are, and no they aren’t, X – get us no closer to answering his initial question. And that’s the same question we’ve been trying to face for years in the gaming world. When do we call a game a game? Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey’s (Tale of Tales) creations The Endless Forest, the Graveyard, and The Path all provoked a response from gamers. Some praised their willingness to experiment with what has become a starkly conventional medium. Others simply raged with incredulity at what they saw lacking in terms of gameplay, while others said things akin to, “I want to tell you that, in its most banally distilled form, The Path is a game about exploration, risk, patience and vulnerability – but I’m hampered by the obvious fact that The Path is just not a game. At all.”

That last response is the one that interests me most. In some ways, it reflects the problem that Kenton Smith runs into in trying to define comic books in terms of their essential structure. Although Kenton is obviously sensitive to the importance of a reader’s experience in defining what a comic book “is”, he does not approach the question that way. Similarly, I think that most of us get caught up in using language that tries to define a game as “a thing” rather than as a kind of experience that we have. We create a problem for ourselves when we think of games only as things with definable properties separate from ourselves, when really no problem exists at all. We continue to try defining games as objects with properties – as Igor Hardy attempts to do in this recent article on adventure games – and end up confusing ourselves over what they really are for us. (Edit: Be sure to read Igor’s article and the comments below it, as well as the exchange between Igor and I. We have a lot more in common than I originally assumed!) In this article, I provide an alternative to the current understanding of games, and hope that it gets us out of this foxhole.

(Note: Chris Crawford’s wonderfully written The Art of Computer Game Design is a step in the right direction I think, but not a complete one)

We call it a game when we are gaming.

I think Kenton’s original question sets us off in the right direction. The question isn’t “what is a game?” (that leads straight into the territory of the confusion I mentioned earlier), but rather, when we’re doing some activity – when do we know that activity is called gaming?

In my opinion, the only place to turn to in order to answer that question is everyday experience. I know I’m playing a game by the kind of activity I’m engaged in. If I’m playing a console game, I hit the PS button on my controller and walk to the kitchen while hearing the familiar orchestra tuning bootup noise. I grab a coke from the fridge and a glass full of ice. My fiancee isn’t home – I take a sip of the ice cold drink with guilty pleasure, because I know she’d scorn me for it if she was there.

I lazily slump down on the couch and load up Trine. After the first few awkward minutes I’m drawn in by the introduction, and begin to lean forward. My elbows are now perched on my knees and my wrists are perfectly parallel to my legs, thumbs resting comfortably on the thumbsticks. My eyes are fixed intently on the screen and they dart around as they attend to highlights and surprises that appear out of nowhere. The rest of the room disappears from around me – literally disappears.. our three cats (despite their annoying whines) are no longer part of my perceptual scene. As I traverse the levels my thumbs do the work on their own accord, although at times my index fingers still haphazardly fumble with the R1/L1 triggers, trying to switch to the right character quickly. The more intense the action, the more I lean forward, until my face is closer to the TV than my hands are. I’m tense, even though the game is not very demanding. When I’m done playing – usually in bored frustration – I don’t even bother saving the game and toss the controller into the corner of the couch. That’s the last I see of my PS3 for a few days.

With PC games, it’s a whole different – yet similar – activity. I walk into my office, and turn on the machine, letting the glow of my cinema display light up the room with its warm blue glow. While the computer boots, I walk over to the kitchen and put on a kettle of tea. While the kettle heats up, I run back to the office to get Mass Effect 2 loading, because I know it’s going to be a few minutes. Stacey says that she’d like to work on her paintings in the office while I’m playing, and I’m glad to have the company. I pour both of us a cup of rooibos and honey, and I turn my complete attention to the game. I get the sense that an entire world is waiting to be explored. I lean back in my chair and watch the introduction cinematic. At first, I can hear Stacey turn her chair to watch it with me – but after the first couple of minutes she loses interest and goes back to her painting. I turn down the sound a little to allow her to concentrate on her artwork; my ears strain even more to involve me in the game’s world.

A very young Chris sits back with nerd pride after finishing Ghostbusters II, while his mom takes a photo of the credits rolling for posterity. That’s Slimer on the screen left side of the screen. (Note the Strongbadesque 3.5″ low-density diskette box behind the printer.)

As I play through the tutorialized introduction, my vision darkens around the peripheries… already the office has begun to disappear around me. A few minutes later, I am fully drawn into the game, I am speaking with fellow marines and scientists around me and shooting at droids that are patrolling the area. When I run, my eyes pay attention only to the center of the screen and allow the details at the fringes to blur around me. When I scrutinize an area for equipment lockers, I walk and check every  dark area of a room, my eyes on the hunt for anything cube-like on the screen. When I’m speaking with other characters, my eyes move between the text at the bottom of the screen and the physiognomy of each character; I find their motion-captured gestures distracting, so I spend more time reading the text. Mostly, I hear their voices – no I feel their voices… the actor’s voices and the text are more tangible to me than the visual scene. Eventually, my body becomes weary and Stacey has long gone to bed – I did not even notice her leaving. It is 1am, and I’m remorseful for not talking with her tonight. But I feel satisfied, as if I’ve completed the first leg of a long journey ahead of me. I am putting my character to sleep, just as I put myself to sleep.

In both of these cases, I have no confusion about what I am doing. I am gaming; I am playing games. I do not need to seek an essential structure in each game, because both evoke from me a certain kind of response – one I recognize as a demand “to sit back and play this for a while”. When the space between me and the game collapse, either due to frustration, boredom, or exhaustion, I know that I am done gaming. The game does not exist for me all of a sudden, and I have other more important things to do.

What does this view afford us?

If we came to understand games as interactive experiences that create “a space for playing”, we would be much closer to figuring out why they are so different (and perhaps similar to) other kinds of activities that we do. And, it would also help to define – I think – the difference between an RPG, an adventure game, or an FPS. They are experientially different and technologically the same. From this view, there is no such thing as a game mechanic outside of the way I play the game.

Developers no longer should focus on trying to get “the right mechanic” – but rather to try setting up a certain kind of experience for the player. If you want the player to play an adventure game, do not introduce control schemes that draw out an FPS experience. If you want the player to experience your game as an RTS, create a space in which their eyes are drawn in all four cardinal directions of the screen, waiting for the ensuing invasion. If you want your game to be experienced as an RPG, you better be able to draw the player into a world they experience as real and meaningful. In the end, the designer has to know a lot more about how players experience a game than what the rules of the game are. That’s why playing your game over and over again – and allowing other people to play it – turns a mediocre game into one worth talking about.

I’m nearing the end of Fallout 3, and my wasteland ranger who has spent most of his adult life trying to free the wastes from oppression and slavery, is loaded with every kind of ammunition and ranged weaponry imaginable. Despite his meek and non-aggressive social demeanour, there is nothing humble about someone who’s packin’ a Fat Boy – a shoulder-launched nuke weapon – around all day.

While both of these games always offer a “high road” approach to moral choices in conversation as we would expect in a contemporary RPG, the games still rely upon a highly individualistic and egocentric play structure. In this article I try to understand how games supposedly devoted to allowing moral choices, in fact offer highly hypocritical experiences for the do-gooder player. (Spoiler-alert for Planescape: Torment and Ultima IV near the bottom of the article.)

The Hero Archetype and the Spiritual Quest

Within many cultural and religious traditions, acts of poverty and self-defacement are seen among the highest forms of piety possible. Vows of poverty, for instance, were a requirement in order to join the righteous Knights Templar (aka. “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon”). Around the same time, it was not uncommon for Anorexia mirabilis (“miraculous lack of appetite”) among pious women, who later experienced spiritual enlightenment… a famous case being Catherine of Siena, “who purportedly ate nothing but a spoonful of herbs a day, aside from the Eucharist” . Among the Crow aboriginal people of Montana, cutting off a piece of one’s finger and severe fasting were ways of inducing sacred visions. Even for us living in modernity, the whole idea of a spiritual and moral quest somehow involves “giving up oneself” or one’s treasured things in favour of some kind of insight into oneself. In each of these examples there is the sense that one makes self-sacrifice in order to fulfill something greater than oneself – it is an act of good, pure and simple.

Similarly, role-playing games are often premised on a hero whose quest is ordained in relation to some greater good. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepherd is a potential galactic saviour, Jack of BioShock wishes to escape his imprisonment and save the little sisters, the Avatar of Ultima VIII: Pagan wishes to return to his own world, Cloud of Final Fantasy VII is on the trail of his nemesis Sepiroth, the Fallout 3 protagonist begins with a search for her/his father, and Crono and the gang are on a quest to prevent the destruction of the world in Chrono Trigger. (In most of these games it is equally possible to refuse the higher calling, but I will confront this later.)

All of these games are premised in some kind of moral choice that the player must make.

In most of these games, I attempt to play a character that is capable of saving his (sometimes her) own butt in a pinch, but ultimately tries to live quietly and benevolently. In most cases, PC-NPC dialogues support a Ned Flanders type character through the traditional Good/Neutral/Evil response options, although sometimes requires a bit of tactfulness on my part to make things work out morally for the character. Threat of violence is a last resort.

Yet, despite my social niceties, in almost every one of these games, I can expect to be dozing on a bed of filthy lucre, armoured like a steel triceratops, and carrying an arsenal of weapons capable of total world annihilation a few times over, by the end of the game. It usually ends up in some final boss fight where I have to put all of my destructive

powers to the test in order to vanquish the Enemy (whether it is a character or a problem of some kind). Inevitably, my decked-out party overcomes the Enemy and happiness is granted to the universe once more. My character (and her/his party) is exalted into glory, and occasionally the hero(ine) wins over the love interest. I watch the ending cinematic, give a few Oscar nods to the friends and family who made it all possible, and call it a game.

Yet, days later, I feel like Conan the Barbarian, sitting on his throne at the end of the first film like a king who has done it all yet feels ultimately unfulfilled. This is when the spiritual hollowness of traditional RPGs grates at me.

The hero’s quest, which was originally a spiritual quest of the ilk I described earlier, has become literalized into a gradual accrual of power; in doing so the chances for spiritual development and transformation are almost completely squashed. Rather than going through a process of “giving up” oneself for a greater good, and later realizing that evil is always carried within oneself and not ‘out there in the world’ – as we see in traditional piety, the modern RPG hero/heroine does the opposite – s/he overcomes evil by destroying it. I still go through the rituals of self-sacrifice and a whole lot of blood’n'sweat’n'tears, but they are all motivated toward making myself a demi-god.

The Hypocritical/Moralistic Hero

In that light, traditional RPGs – not all of them mind you! – produce what I’d like to call the “hypocritical hero” or the “moralistic hero”. This is the hero that always gives out 10 gp to beggars on the street, knowing that s/he has 4500 gp resting comfortably in the larders. There is no real self-abasement this hero’s acts; it is temporary inconveniencing under a mask of generosity. Sort of like the guy who lambasts anyone who doesn’t drink Eco-Friendly coffee, and proceeds to drive his Hummer to work.

I should note: I have purposely neglected the “evil” hero in the prior thoughts because many RPGs already lend themselves to this kind of role-playing. I can simply choose the “bad guy” conversation options and live out my days as a greedy gunslinger with an attitude. The point is that the evil hero is fully supported by the game, because s/he is guaranteed to be rich and powerful by the end of the game. There is no hypocrisy possible for the evil hero; most RPGs already celebrate this kind of behaviour in the gameplay itself.

Notable Exceptions

Here be spoilers: At the same time, there are some major exceptions to my characterization of RPGs. The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment begins on an identity quest that is ultimately resolvable in a very different manner than the kind I noted earlier. While the evil and greedy incarnations of The Nameless One can be role-played throughout the game effectively, the “good” character can resolve his identity by embracing his symbolic shadow. He learns his true name in an act of humility and self-acceptance. The Nameless One can fulfill his spiritual quest without destroying or battling anyone as he realizes that he has always faced an inner (moral) battle. He makes no use of his accrued power, swords or sorcery, and instead relies upon the insight that he is the source of his own evils. In other words, the “good” ending is truly possible in Torment. Equally possible are the evil or instrumental endings, but those are premised against the possibility of being truly regretful of his past sins.

In another example, the protagonist (yourself) of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is sent on a spiritual quest, although this one is not particularly about you. It is about the meaning of things and the discovery of a moral reality that underlies all acts of good and evil in the world of Britannia. It is about saving a world gone to petty thievery and selfishness. Acknowledging the virtues (Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Honor, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Humility) involves the player discovering ways of practicing each of these virtues in the game itself. Like the Knights Templar, acts of sacrifice and compassion are a requirement for membership in this game. And like Planescape, the game is not resolved in an epic battle made possible by insane physical strength or mental powers, but by answering 8 questions that test your knowledge of the virtues themselves. One of the final phrases asks, “What, in knowing the true self, knows all?” To the modern gamer, ending an RPG with philosophical questions would be unimaginable. At the same time, an “evil” or selfish ending is not possible in this game – the game is only resolvable if you accept and fulfill the quest of being the Avatar (the embodiment) of the virtues.
/end spoilers.

Concluding Thoughts

What I’ve been trying to get at in this article is that despite our appreciation that games are meaningful, they often celebrate the worst aspects of our humanity (selfishness, the desire to dominate others) with the guise of moral righteousness. Worse, games like Arcanum, the Final Fantasy series, and Fallout 3 make it completely impossible to complete a game without needing to max out the protagonist’s attributes and inventory and in doing so celebrate adolescent power fantasies. The original spiritual quest, despite it being the entire point of the game as acknowledged by the story, is totally maligned by the underlying gameplay. If developers want to genuinely acknowledge our desire for meaning and self-transformation, they will have to develop a better sense for what is involved in a “moral choice”… it is certainly not a case of hoarding guns’n'ammo and picking the ethical alternative in a conversation.

In this article I try to plead a case against ”good” interface design. Rather, I would like to see interfaces that frustrate the gamer and encourage them to explore the game’s world creatively, rather than instrumentally.

Here are some of the interface design goals that Matthew suggests:

1. Visibility: It Should Be Obvious What a Control Is Used For.
   If I press this button, what will happen? If I want to unlock the door, which control should I use? A system with good visibility allows the user to easily translate goals into actions.
2. Affordance: It Should Be Obvious How a Control Is Used.
   The system should provide “strong clues to the operation of things”. A button affords pushing, a lever affords pulling, etc. The user should know how to operate a control just by looking at it.
3. Feedback: It Should Be Obvious When a Control Has Been Used.
   Once the user has pressed a button, the system should react in a manner that clearly communicates what has just been accomplished. If nothing has happened, this fact should also be obvious.

Each of these design principles is sensible precisely because they are grounded in the way of life we already live: we have goals (or are given goals by the designer), we encounter objects in the world, we use those objects to achieve those goals, we receive feedback when we engage in them. Almost all games that we’ve played are based on this very rational structure.

Instrumental reason in video games

But to get a little philosophical here, all of these principles are based on an instrumental relation to video games. It’s an instrumental view insofar as the world is seen as a collection of things, and the gamer is an organism with clearly specified goals. In order to achieve those goals, s/he must use those things in the correct way. The fact that we call our HIDs “controllers” now instead of a “joysticks” is very indicative of the culture we live in: we tend to believe that games are there to satisfy goals.

But are games tools or instruments? This is the problem I have with Donald Norman’s usability studies: they are all based on an instrumentalist view of the world. If you aren’t playing by the rules that the designer has created, you aren’t doing it right. So the designer is encouraged to make the game’s goals and controls as transparent as possible, so gamers can satisfy quests/goals/rules as efficiently as possible.

But what about play? When we play games, are we trying to satisfy our instrumental goals? Perhaps vaguely. A friend and I used to play Midtown Madness together, and try to cause horrible traffic jams at one side of town, so we could race our car down the highway and hit the jam at the highest possible speed. Sometimes the car would catch an edge of a bumper and launch over the other cars in the jam – kudos would be awarded for the most spectacular collision. We were not playing the game according to the rules – we were trying to break the rules and create new possibilities within the constraints of the game.

Making a case for ‘broken’ interfaces

If you’re designing a new hammer or building a sports car, you want the ‘interface’ (the usability) to be predictable, reliable, and intuitive. You don’t want the hammer dancing around the nail, nor do you want your new sports car choosing a random direction every time you turn left.

But when we make video games, we should not be engineering for usability. A game is not a utility. It is an imaginative space and a play space. Creating “user-friendly” video games is another way of saying, “We are making a faster, better, hammer, that practically anyone can use!” What we need instead, I think, is a game that frustrates us. A game where learning the rules of play – whatever they are – is an exploration in itself. We don’t need to learn the rules first, then learn how to play. We play a game, and learn the bounds of the space as we do it.

Iroquois Pliskin (understandably) argues that Resident Evil 5 suffers from ”bad interface design” that prevents the player from moving forwards in the game. In my view, this has the potential to be a wonderful opportunity for play. Unfortunately, RE5 is just as instrumentally-minded as most gamers are, and only one “solution” to the “puzzle” is the “right” one. Creativity and play do not imagine specific ends such as these. So instead of making RE5′s interface more intuitive, easy-to-play, or straightforward, I’d like to see the game enable creative solutions to its very difficult challenges.

Sure, instrumental reason satisfies our desire for achievement and consumption… but it fundamentally denies other desires we have, such as the desire to play, think creatively, and undermine the rules. I’d like to see some badly designed interfaces that leave lots of cracks in the pavement – spaces for the imagination. A game is not a hammer.

Thank you to (fellow Canuck!) Matthew Gallant and Iroquois Pliskin for their thoughts on game interfaces.

Note: Nels Anderson, who lives dangerously near the 49th parallel, has some interesting thoughts on design/UI issues that are directly pertinent to this discussion here and here… his thoughts fall closer to Matthew Gallant’s reading of Donald Norman’s book than mine do, but they offer an articulate interpretation of game mechanics and interactivity.

For many of us, Zork hangs among our earliest memories of computer games. In many ways the series’ massive fanbase – in its entire gamut of casual and hardcore and obsessive players – is our miniature equivalent of the Star Wars fanbase: it is rabid.. it demands quality.. it cannot tolerate any deviation from canon.

So designing a new game based on the Zork franchise was a dicey and dangerous decision, especially considering the close ties the series has with the history of video games in general (it was among the first games derived from Colossal Cave Adventure). Stakes were high for everyone involved.

Yet, for every aging gamer out there worried about how the latest instalment of the Zork series would fare, there are 1000 more that did not grow up with text adventures. They did not get eaten by grues. They did not integrate the bizarre and off-kilter humor of The Great Underground Empire into their jargon. They are not used to directing a game’s action through computer-parsed language. They do not have to imagine themselves into a world constituted by text.

A Short Review

Here are a few comments selected from the aforementioned thread:

“That is my main and only complaint about the game: it’s absolutely passive. It’s the exact contrary of every other Zork game, where it was your wits and skills that saved the say rather than an automatic dice roll.”

“I like it and I’m playing it(played some beta aswell). I never played the original and frankly; I don’t wanna play text based rpg in this day and age.”

“I have a workmate who did grow up with the Zork originals and I pointed him in the direction of LoZ. His reaction is quite the opposite than John Biggs’ whereby he moans at me there aren’t enough action points in the new one (suggesting he wants to keep playing) but when he tried out the Flash based originals again, he was, like I was, simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

“Point and click/graphical games always will pale to each of our individual Zork experiences — at least for those of us who played the original text games. LoZ is the same. It isn’t much for “Zorkiness” as it’s a totally different style of game. But I really enjoy it.”

“Legends of Zork is the kind of game that you play for 10-15 minutes in the morning, between checking your e-mail and reading the news. It’s an entertaining diversion.”

These mixed reactions provide an interesting cross-section what happens when people have to make sense of a twist in the path. As several of the commenters point out, Legends of Zork is a turn-based lightweight RPG that is very reminiscent of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon: you walk from town into the forest, kill monsters, return to town with loot, and rest when your hit points are low. In many ways, it is a browser-based incarnation of Diablo, sans a coherent storyline. All battles are decided through visible statistics: an encounter with an enemy plays back a script that describes hit percentages, chances of winning, experiences points gained, HPs lost, and zorkmids won. All and all, the game is a fantastic reinterpretation of hack’n'slash games, repackaged with an eye for 15-minute casual gaming. The artwork comprising the interface reminds me of both Professor Layton and the Curious Village, as well as The Curse of Monkey Island, and seems to do the trick.

Living with Cultural Change

Yet, if I may summarize the collective reaction, it goes something like this: “It’s a fun, cute, game. I can see some people liking it. But it’s no Zork.”

Beyond the pessimism of nostalgia, I think gamers have recognized that something is indeed missing in the formula. Sure, the writing might not be as humorous. Sure, the art style might not suit some people. Sure, going into statistical battles ain’t too much fun after a while. But I think something deeper, more dangerous, lies at the heart of the issue.

The problem is that Legends of Zork is the distant echo of a death knell that rang out in the 1990s when text adventures lost their sheen, and were replaced by clumsy graphical interpretations. Soon afterwards, graphical adventure games themselves were tossed in favour of real-time tactical and FPS games. A rift in our way of living, as gamers, has opened up between the 1980s and the present. Legends of Zork, while a noble attempt at bridging the gap between these alienated gaming eras, has only shown us just how wide the gap is.

The Dialectics of the Imagination and the Game

When I sit down to Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, I am greeted by a stark black space. I hit return – the space fills with white text against the black space – words! My eyes skim across the white-on-black space: I do not see words, I imagine places. I see things. I am located somewhere. The world opens up around me.

I am standing west of the white house. I imagine the texture of the boarded front door: When I was a young boy, there was an abandoned home down the street that I used to sneak into, and steal utensils from its dusty kitchen. The window was boarded up with rough spruce plywood, with a dark knot nestled into the top right corner. It is that rough piece of plywood that I imagine on the front door of the white house. The fear and excitement of the abandoned home is sparked in me for a moment – I do not consciously remember the abandoned home as I play – but the feelings it evokes persist.

I look over at the mailbox. The mailbox is the standard issue grey American mailbox that stands at the end of one’s yard. I recognize it from a scene in Stand By Me in which a group of hooligans drives around smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. While I do not consciously remember the scene, my limited experience with Americana is stirred for a second.

Curious of the mailbox, my fingers dance over the keys on the keyboard – my eyes fixed on the screen. I do not consciously notice the keys clacking under my fingertips, but my intentions – my whole imagination – leans toward the mailbox.

I smirk a bit realizing how silly my action was – the world resists my clumsy intentions. I try again. This time my hands know exactly what to do. My fingers walk me to the mailbox.

It is one of the leaflets that I stuffed into people’s mailboxes in 1988, when I helped my mother distribute advertisements for a friend of hers who was running in a local election. I was nine years old. The leaflets were a bright orange, filled with text about the “New Democratic Party”. A large dog chased me from one of the yards, and I ran back to our Ford Econoline van, screaming and crying. It is that orange leaflet that I find in the mailbox, but I do not consciously recall the childhood memory of the leaflet – I am only filled with a sense of foreboding sparked by the terrifying dog. A call to adventure. I pick up the leaflet and read it.

I laugh and the tension is relieved. There is something strange about this place – a world that is part fictional world and part my world. I should be writing my dissertation, and the thought of it provokes guilt in me, but I want to play along. I want to be in the Great Underground Empire, just for a little while.

Imagination Lost

Legends of Zork is neither a bad game, nor is it a trivialization of the Zork series. It is the expression of the generational gap we find ourselves in today.

When I stare at the map of the Great Underground Empire as the creators of LoZ imagine it, my eyes take in the gorgeously drawn map – not the places themselves – but the world as seen from a bird’s eye view. I do not walk through the world. My fingers do not dance over the keyboard and do the walking for me. I point with my cursor, and the cursor – the computer and its algorithms – transports me to another place. I magically re-appear in front of the white house. But this is not the abandoned white house of my youth. It is not the house that I stole a rusted swiss-army knife from. It is a white house that corresponds to a popular modern children’s art style. It evokes nothing for me.

I click on the Dark Forest just as I would click on a news link or an RSS feed. The page reloads, and I am presented with a cute illustration of a forest and troll. I am about to choose whether I should run away or fight, but an AJAX script instead takes over and plays back the results of the battle – I do nothing. To the left of the adventure window is a menu that allows me to read a FAQ, change my account settings, or read posts over at the forums.

After a while, my interest wanes. I realize that the game is, for all intents and purposes, a wonderful thing in its own right. It is a game crafted for my 13-year-old cousin who spends most of his day on Facebook. It is crafted for him and his generation, because sitting in front of a black-and-white screen and walking through the world using his fingertips is not possible anymore. He does not imagine himself as a part of the Great Underground Empire, nor is he beckoned by the mailbox. He wants action and he wants cute illustration and he wants it now. He will use up his fifteen minutes of “action points” today and come back to the game tomorrow, nestled in between Twittering and posting his Facebook status. If I ask him, the art style will likely remind him of a handful of Miyazaki films that he’s seen. But it is not a part of his life – it is a part of his day.

Finding the Bridgeheads

We are likely to see more games like Legends of Zork in the future, and I welcome them. These kinds of games will come to define the basis for meaning for an entire generation of gamers that are coming into their own now, just as some of us did in the 1980s. No doubt some of those gamers will eventually come to reflect, not without a touch of sadness, that the games they played and loved as children are gone too.

I do not mourn the loss of text-adventure games; after all, I suspect that more text adventures are being crafted in the homes of indie game designers than ever were created back in the day. What I mourn is the loss of a way of life. Gamer culture has changed so much that a new Zork adventure game no longer would make sense to us. And we know it ourselves: one commenter said that he was “simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

I am fragmented inside. Part of who I am – my identity as a gamer – still lives in a world where my fingertips walked me through the Great Underground Empire like little feet in a vast geography. The GUE is world that lives only in my fingertips and my mind; the game itself is only a focus for my imagination. But it is the past, and I can only look back it over a great distance. 

Another part of me lives in the present. I walk in the Fallout 3 world by holding down the ‘W’ key. Every detail of that world – from the shapes of the mountains to the kinds of needles on the trees, has been provided for me. When I reach out to open a mailbox, I never fail. I hit the ‘E’ key. I cannot fail at opening the mailbox for a computer algorithm opens the mailbox for me. The mailbox opens without the help of my imagination.

Bridging the gap between these two estranged worlds requires something more than a translation of Zork for a new audience. It requires that we, as gamers, discover new ways of using our imaginations in a world that all but prevents us from doing so. It requires that we, as developers, discover ways of expressing subtlety and nuance using whatever tools we have. It requires that we, as an older generation, find common ground with younger gamers and share in new gaming experiences with them. The outrage levied at Legends of Zork is in many ways unfounded; it is a projection of anger stemming from our social anomie.

Until we locate those bridgeheads and begin building common experiences between them, I think that we will find ourselves constantly disappointed with anything new.

A Bit of History

In the last three years I have witnessed a trend in game journalism and game writing. Throughout the 80s and 90s, and the first half of the new millennium, major print publishers were our primary source of game reviews. Cries of review bias and a lack of journalistic integrity were ubiquitous in the 90s… and represented a general discomfort with the idea of a publication being the arms-length advertising appendage of a major console/game publisher. Especially now, it is hard to conceive of Nintendo Power as a credible journalistic source. But, I can remember being 13 years old, dropping five bucks every month on the latest copy of GamePro magazine, knowing that its reviews were skewed at best, and all-out fabricated at worst. I bought a copy of Faceball 2000 for my GameBoy based on a raving review, only to find out it was a horrifically unplayable bastardization of Wolfenstein 3-D. But I still swallowed it, and purchased games in a frenzy.

The De-institutionalization Movement.

Fast-forward to 2005. Twenty years of cynicism mounted, and the “indie” game movement was gaining momentum. All of a sudden gamers and bloggers alike were crying for deeper, less biased, reviews of games. For the next couple of years we tossed accusations of marketing bias and journalistic poverty at the major online review networks, and saw them slowly crumble to what they are now. And I should be clear here… I think the de-institutionalization of game reviewing/writing was a major and welcome disruption of the status quo, and we are better for it. We saw smaller blogs sprout from the collective disillusionment, and the last three years have seen a gradual growth of this “new games journalism”, such that now I do not even find myself cruising the major gaming news networks for information on the latest’n'greatest.

A New Hope.

Now that the great publishing beasts have been defeated and their ashes scattered to the four corners of the Earth, we might take a brief respite to mull over where we have ended up. The “New Games Journalism” movement proposed originally in Kieron Gillen’s Manifesto gave some of us the courage to write about our “subjective” experiences of games. And there is something liberating in the idea: instead of relying upon the traditional objective review criteria (ie. on a 1-10 scale) we could turn to our experiences for inspiration. Like Tom Wolfe, we were going to embrace the “I” in game writing. We were going to build new communities of thinkers and write deeper, more insightful, ways of understanding the boxes of bits and bytes we’ve treasured for the last 30 years.

The New Dire Straits.

But something happened along the way that corrupted the heart of the NGJ ideal. Instead of becoming deeper and more insightful, we became pretentiously intellectual. Instead of writing about our personal connections to games and what they mean for the entire social collective as loving/breathing/thinking human beings, we write about our individual opinions. Instead of understanding the game-player dialectic as a holism – one implying and transforming the other – we atomize and deconstruct gameplay and player experiences as separate things. Instead of providing deep critiques of games and reflect upon what they express of our societies as they are now, the vast majority of critiques cherry-pick superficial aspects of a game – such as an NPC’s skin-colour or gender – and perpetuate the very stereotypes they wish to undermine. Journalistic objectivity has been replaced by opinion and thinned-down experiences, rather than exploring how games-publishers-societies-experiences set the stage for our opinions of them. We ignore hundreds of years of thought on the review of art and aesthetics, and instead feed off of the blogs and inane personal judgements of game developers who are themselves part of the mess.

Most disturbing in this stillborn transition to a NGJ, I think, is an insidious double-move that involves both the critique and reliance upon “AAA” publishers and the games they release. Where the major online and print publishers of yesteryear were financially dependent upon AAA developers, we have become personally dependent upon them in terms of our identities. Yes, we rant and rave that Electronic Arts and (to a lesser extent) Ubisoft refuse to “innovate” and have become creatively complacent institutions. We pick-apart their games and show that the games they release lack interesting characters, stories, novel narrative approaches, artistic details, and rely upon tired genres and franchises. But in doing that – what new insights about the relations between human beings and games have we come to? None. Or worse, this. We now consume game writing in the same way we consume games. I assure you that the AAA publishers have not suffered because of us.

This New Games Journalism – that was originally supposed to be something like travel writing – was profoundly corrupted in a consumeristic way of thinking about gaming. Instead of reading print mags, we now rely upon blogger “impressions” or “analyses” to justify our purchasing habits, just as we have already been doing for the last 20 years. In the end, journalistic coverage of new game titles consist of “previews” or “reviews” based on web-culled images and personal opinions, the modern re-incarnation of a blogger-driven GamePro. The advertising arms of Nintendo and Sony, where once were discernible in the popular “official” magazines and criticized on that basis, have now been fully integrated in blogger game writing. We now are at the edge of the most pernicious form of self-censorship possible: we have come to understand our tastes and subjective experiences in terms of the individual consumption that the AAA game economy relies upon while at the same time pretending and affirming that our tastes are trustworthy and personal in themselves. We consume games, and write many things about them, and believe that our self-created “communities” of consumption are thoughtful, social, and sufficiently critical. They are not.

The Way Out.

I recognize that this argument will receive some opposition, especially from those deeply committed to game writing and their particular game-playing habits. I recognize my own complacency here – in most articles I have written over the years there is an enticing view of the gamer as someone on a self-critical quest for meaning and self-transformation. Rather than presuming who we are as gamers (which I myself have done for too many years), it is the gamer her/him-self who needs to question his attachment to games.

A New New Games Journalism is concerned with our very being-as-gamers, in light of the specific games we play. It is concerned with how games are both the expression of our societies and selves, and how they come to shape our personal lives in how we play them. It is not based on our opinions of whether a particular game is good or bad or boring or fun, but rather whether we should be playing these games at all or doing other kinds of things. It should be concerned with how we can play games in the light of certain personal goals, or show how particular games transform us to see the world in certain ways. It will be concerned with understanding if games are actually playful or if they are steeped in some other form of activity like consumption or violence. This New New Games Journalism has to give us new opportunities for expressing ourselves in the social arenas we live in, rather than new opportunities for self-censorship and its associated self-deception.

We must write our personal narratives and think about them – just as Kieron Gillen pointed us towards – and show how they fall into a larger living world beyond mere opinion. And in doing that we have to resist the temptation to institutionalize game writing as form of rigid and lazy academic thought, a malignant tumour already beginning to metastasize in some places, and pursue it as a form of poetic self-expression. Game journalism can be just as exciting and enlightening as playing games themselves!

Yes, de-institutionalizing game writing was a step in the right direction, yes we need to become better writers (as Chris Buffa notes), and yes getting rid of objective review criteria was a good thing. Now is the time to take the ball and run with it – we have been running-in-place at the 50 yard line for far too long. There are already some writers out there trying to eke out an existence in the collective roar, but they remain at the fringes of what is read, and require more critical engagement in order to come to a fuller and less fragmented expression. We need a new community of writers willing to try something new together, rather than perpetuate the existing style.

With all the pomp and circumstance of a 15th century aristocrat, I pronounce the New Games Journalism movement dead, rotting in the ground, and in need of a successor.

Long live New New Games Journalism!

Update: Brendan Caldwell wrote an excellent response to my article (and several others on NGJ) that both critiques my position as he sees it, and brings up new, thoughtful questions about the practice of game writing. I highly recommend reading it.

Author’s note: Although this article has been worded quite strongly,  I truly mean no personal disrespect to the writers and gamers and journalists implied or critiqued here. Rather, this is an opportunity to really open up a new discourse on game writing that is sorely overdue. I hope that this produces (even heated) responses, rather than quashes them.

Recently, Michael of the Brainy Gamer wrote a brilliant (yet terribly misunderstood) exploration of the phenomenology of keeping a scorecard at a baseball game. Sounds a little boring eh? You bet… until you understand the level of intimacy that he creates just by writing down a few numbers and thinking through the game. In this post I’ll try to do justice to just what Michael might have meant by the word “engagement” by talking a little bit about what people do when they “engage” themselves with a game. Before you read this, it’s critical to read Michael’s post first… because I’ll be referring to it throughout. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Let’s deal with scorekeeping a baseball game first:

“Scoring a ballgame brings you closer to the game being played on the field”

How is it possible that keeping a score card at a baseball game could actually create a level of intimacy with the game that goes beyond spectating? Isn’t it just a cold calculus of the mind?

From what I can tell, this intimacy is produced in two ways:

1) Through the mechanics of maintaining the scorekeeping card. Michael writes of his experience: “A right-handed batter steps to the plate to face a right-handed pitcher. These two have faced each other many times, so I note that this pitcher “owns” this batter with a mark next to the batter’s name. The flags, which indicated that the wind was blowing out at the start of the game, have now gone limp, so I note that on my scorecard as well.”  From what we gather from his story, keeping the score card requires patience, attentiveness, technical skill, judgment, and a darned good memory. This skillful act, while important (as we’ll find out), is secondary to another personal act…

2) Through the imaginative work of playing the roles of the pitcher, batter, fielders, basemen, etc. This act, as form of engagement with the game, is primary. It involves how we imagine the on-field players are feeling and thinking. As Michael says in a later comment, “If the batter can be patient, he will likely see a good pitch to hit, but if he’s over-anxious, as my scorecard tells me he was both previous times, he’s probably going to be vulnerable to a pitch low and away. He knows this. The pitcher knows this. And so do I.”

Now let’s think about what happens when someone scorekeeps the way he does. The scorekeeper does not just record numbers, statistically analyze them, and spit back out the results. He also does not just imagine the game as a personal fantasy; the game is going on in front of him. He is also not a passive spectator – he feels invested in the game as if his judgments were just as important as the pitcher’s choices.

What the scorekeeper does, and I daresay all people familiar with role-play do, is engage themselves with the game at a level beyond both rule-following and imaginary fantasy. The scorekeeper is like an appreciator of fine art or music: they are mindful of the subtleties and nuances of the ‘rules’ while simultaneously mindful of the art work itself. Where the casual spectator can only engage with the game in fantasy, and the rigid statistician does not “see” a game but a complex calculus, the scorekeeper plays the game. They are engaged with the baseball game at a bodily and spiritual level – the game unfolds for them at their personal pace.

Based on those distinctions we can imagine that there are three (idealized) kinds of video game players:

“The Accountant”

The game is enjoyed at a distance as sets or levels of generative rules. The game is played in terms of understanding these rules and making distinctions, and using this understanding to obtain something of personal interest: in-game artifacts, treasure, quest completion, character attributes, etc.

Because the player has no personal engagement with the rules, the rules are seen as inviolable, impersonal, and external; the player often attempts to master or dominate the game.

“The Devourer”

The game is enjoyed as a flight into fantasy; it is “consumed” by the player because s/he makes no distinctions of quality or quantity within the game. This kind of player simply relies upon their inchoate sense of personal value which determines their play style, and the game is subsumed by their desires. If the game rules do not suit them, they are tossed, ignored, or violated (ie. cheating). The kind of game does not matter much in the end; an FPS could be just as enjoyable as an adventure game as long as it satiates their desires.

“The Role-Player”

The game is understood as deeply personal yet otherworldly. The game world exists as a living, breathing, self-sufficient world, separate from the player’s desires. Yet, the role-player finds ways of discovering his/her desires within the game, by understanding the game’s rules. The player’s desires, in the end, are reshaped by their understanding of the rules. They engage with the game world (usually through a Player-Character or avatar) with a sense of commitment, care, and personal value for what happens in the game. This player plays in the game.

Of course we can see that these player types are idealized, and every player sits in all camps simultaneously, but drawing out the distinctions brings us closer to understanding just what’s at stake for the average player.

Loving Games is Hard Work

Appreciating anything is more than just distilling our personal enjoyment from it, and more than just coldly analyzing its constituent elements one at a time. Appreciating games, art, music, baseball, the subtleties of my cat’s meows, all require a deep personal engagement only possible when we allow ourselves to become mindful of the rules, what’s happening in front of us, and our selves. Developing a phenomenology (a description of our personal engagement with some phenomenon) of video and computer games is one of the new languages that we have to develop, among other things. Understanding and appreciating games allows us to engage with them in deeper waters and ensures that they won’t become just another flavor of the month. I’m deeply thankful that Michael started paddling us down this creek in the first place.

1. There is no communicative “medium” to speak of in art. A medium presupposes a message of some kind – a basic, unambiguous code that can be transmitted from point to point. Because artistic works are inherently ambiguous in their meaning, there are no messages in artistic works. Video and computer games are not a communicative medium, and they have no message.

2. The artist has no hidden message for us. Even when an artist deeply desires to communicate, moralize, educate, challenge, or amuse the audience – their artistic creation will always frustrate, deny, and exceed their intentions. Trying to interpret or understand an artistic work by guessing at the artist’s intentions is a blind, endless, alley.

3. What we think of as an artistic “medium” is simply a set of conventions and tools used for artistic expression, bound together in a common style or genre. Painting or drawing media, such as crayons, charcoal, and paper, are tools used for expressive purposes. Computers are the primary medium through which video and computer games are created; games are therefore not a “medium” in the creative, artistic sense. Games are creative expressions brought to life through many kinds of tools.

4. The expressive qualities of a work of art, or video game, come from many different sources. Some of those sources of meaning are bound up with the artistic medium – the fact that a game must proceed in a logical, rule-based, manner. The artistic methods and techniques of the artist also bring a particular personal expression to the work. The cultural and historical context that an artist works in, responds to, lives, contributes to the meanings we find in the work. The emotional and intellectual depth, imaginative capacities, intensity and breadth of feelings, and sensitivity of the reader/viewer/player/audience bring meaning to the art piece. All of these things, bound up together, give us a “sense” of what an artistic work means. Segregating any of these elements (culture, language, artistic method, the artist, the audience, the piece itself) and trying to pin down the source of meaning onto just one thing is a plain mistake. However, contextualizing and interrelating these elements, one to another, gives us the chance to understand what art is about.

So there are a few distinctions: the first (1 & 2) having to do with the confusion over a medium-as-a-means-for-communication, and the second (3 & 4) having to do with the confusion over a game-as-an-artistic-medium.

In the end, games are no different from other symbolic forms insofar as understanding them, what they mean to us and not simply our opinions of them, demands a holistic view of the particular game, the genre, the artist, the artistic method, the culture, and the audience, among many other things. As Michael suggests, sometimes 21st-century Bolivian painters do have much to learn from 18th-century composers, just as game designers have a lot to learn from books, films, music, drama, and fine art. All human expression is a thick jambalaya of influences, and to single any one particular thing out – for instance by claiming that the language for video games should not include the language for film or music – is a mistake, I believe.

And finally, pulling together the roots, similarities, and relationships of meaning in games are not simply “academic” endeavors that only some elite crowd can do. Even being able to say “I’m playing an FPS” is a step in the right direction – of recognizing that this particular game belongs in a long history of first-person shooters. What is tougher is taking those extra few steps, and showing how the particular feelings the game gives you, the other games it plays like, the style of the art or technical direction, or the culture of war or violence that the game was created within – all give a sense to this being a meaningful thing. This is someone everyone is capable of, as long as they’re willing to make a few more connections they weren’t planning to. Like Michael said – this is something worth doing.

In this article I take on the very common problem of players becoming bored or frustrated by “art games”. I try to spin some new language around games that help us understand how they relate to art, and vice-versa, all in the hope that more gamers have the opportunity to take on any kind of game without quitting in frustration.

I don’t begrudge gamers for having difficulty with understanding art – almost everyone does. Gamers came up with these responses to The Graveyard and The Jackyard (culled from various sources):

“Am I right in saying that Tale of Tales don’t make “games”, rather, they make “interactive experiences”, because it would be crass to call their works “games”?
Sigh.”

“That wasn’t very fun.”

“I think ‘interactive experience’ is a fair name for it; there’s very little which is traditionally game-like about it. Anyway, not really worth playing, I think. There’s just an awkward camera, a slow walk, and a quiet song.”

“The camera is actually sort of central to what I don’t like about the game; that they give you the pretense of a world you can walk about and explore, and then the inexplicably broken camera is the excuse that keeps you from being able to explore it at all. So I immediately fight with it, walking off the screen till I can’t see the lady any more and am afraid I’m stuck on something back there.”

“Does anyone know what to do???
(Except walking around?)”

“Certainly interesting, but seems very short.”

Common to all of these comments is the sense that games are about immediacy: action, reaction, novelty, responsiveness, control, like, dislike, etc. For a large majority of gamers, games are about immediate and momentary enjoyment. Games that don’t respond with immediate feedback, give the player a sense of exploration or achievement, or give the player complete control over the character, are often reviewed as boring or frustrating experiences. To some degree that accounts for why the great majority, 99.999% of all games created today, are player-driven action games. These kinds of games put the player in the hot seat and hand over the keys to an on-screen representation of themselves. “Interaction” is understood as something active, something that the player does and the game responds to.

In other forms of art, interaction is often understood differently. Viewing a painting, listening to music, or reading poetry is also thought of as an interactive experience – between the viewer-listener-reader and the art piece. “Interactivity” in this case is predicated upon the idea that the artist produces a work that engages the audience’s imaginations and feelings. Ultimately, the responsibility for engaging with a work of art is in the hands of the audience – the artist has no “say” in determining what our experiences are. The art piece is a public artifact in an imaginative dialogue with an audience.

Video and computer games are held against a different standard of interactivity. “Interactivity” in games mean that the computer must provide the player with the illusion that the computer is “responding” to the player’s choices. When that illusion is frustrated, for instance because the character cannot “do” what the player wants her/him to do, players often feel that their sense of dialogue with the game is destroyed. In this form of immediate activity the player is in a literal dialogue with the game. In many ways video games imitate or represent real-world dialogical interaction. Action-reaction. Decision-consequence.

The point is that in imaginative dialogues the audience shoulders the great responsibility of the interpretive work. In video games, the great bulk of interpretive work is done by the computer. In the first, the audience gains a sense of closeness with the piece through the imagination – the symbols in the work of art evoke imagery and feelings for us. In video games, the sense of closeness is based upon a physicalistic metaphor – if I push against a box on the screen it better damned move! The meaning of what is happening is progressively and literally shaped by the computer, in response to the player’s actions.

This is why games like The Graveyard and The Jackyard often receive such (empty) criticism. Many gamers don’t want to interact with a piece through an imaginative dialogue, they want the kinds of literal dialogues that they’ve become accustomed to. So-called “art games” often play at the more imaginative end of the tension between imagination and immediacy – art games require the player to make some kind of interpretive judgment in order to determine what is meaningful, and rely much less upon the elements of literal dialogue to shape meanings.

True, we speak in relative terms here. There are many games that play at the tension between imagination and literal interactivity, and many of these accomplish the feat marvelously. Interactive fiction games often deliver interactivity through the imagination. Sandbox games provide an open environment where the imagination can be expressed through interactivity. Somewhere closer to the middle are role-playing games such as Planescape: Torment and Wasteland that put the player in the midst of the action, yet provide a living and breathing landscape that defies total control.

Near the imaginative end of the spectrum is The Jackyard. Richard Hofmeier does a great job of exploiting and frustrating the expectations of the literal gamer. The game is full of obstacles that aren’t puzzles to be solved, art images that simply exist for their aesthetic qualities, and a coal-colored palette that is deeply integrated with its equally stark musical score. The world that Richard has produced is an artifact for our exploration and understanding, by prodding at artistic expression through the language of game. Determining how and if his work achieves what it is trying to do is your work as the player. So temporarily put aside your preconceptions (or not) and give The Jackyard and The Graveyard a go. Post your comments on the games, and let’s try to figure out together what the heck they mean.

Once we’ve started to develop this new language of art in games, I suspect that “game criticism” and “game reviews” will be much more interesting than a reviewer’s opinion.

Whether cavemen, plumbers, femme fatales, cutesy dinosaurs or aliens – they’re all bound to save the world by the end, or die trying.

Although taken tacitly as the standard for the vast majority of character-based video/computers, the Hero protagonist is the ubiquitous yet completely understudied workhorse in the history of video games. In this article I explore the uses of the hero in video game narratives, and how an over-reliance upon certain kinds of hero characters has limited the kinds of stories being told in video/computer games.

What is it about the hero role that we find so engrossing and rewarding? Why do we always shake on the social contract that sets us up as the beasts of burden that repair worlds in imbalance, deliver miscellaneous goods, rescue damsels in distress, return ever-missing kings to their mushroom kingdoms, or rise up against ridiculous tyrannical dictatorships?

Hero Stories

Within the heroic genre, there seem to be a few kinds of roles. The first kind of role is an already established, somewhat powerful, protagonist who must overcome an army of villains. We might think of these as the James Bonds, Lara Crofts, or Sam Fishers of video games – protagonists born of high standing and carry out deeds of Supermanesque proportions. For these characters doing The Right Thing is a foregone conclusion, and inner tensions are nonexistent – we simply cannot progress in the game without carrying out some kind of predetermined task of moral rightness, which usually results in the world being saved. The great majority of video/computer games rely upon this kind of hero. True, we speak quite generally here, but the idea is to draw out a few ideal characterizations that will serve as a guide for later.

The second kind of role is more akin to a Campbellian hero – a weakling protagonist that rises up to meet the call for adventure, and in doing so, becomes a savior in the end. These characters are often born of low stature and come to great fortune as they overcome terrible obstacles, and in the end typically discover that they are in fact of nobler birth than once thought. Although it is much more difficult to pick out examples of this kind of hero, Link (Zelda), Cloud (Final Fantasy VII), Cutter Slade (Outcast) and Norman Gordon Freeman (Half-Life) are particularly straightforward examples. In each of these games the hero is drawn into the (sometimes reluctant) role of savior, yet always rises to the occasion in the end. Again, in the end the world is saved and everyone goes home and eats their bucket of KFC.

A third kind of role has only been explored more recently, and involves some amount of moral relativity on behalf of the player. This kind of hero can be either powerful or weak to begin with, but her/his choices throughout the game come to determine (to some degree!) if they will save the world, or assist in its ultimate destruction. These relativistic heros often must choose between good and evil by doing good and evil things. Protagonists like this are found in games such as Mass Effect, Fallout, and Knights of the Old Republic. The fate of the world hinges upon whether the hero freely helped the old lady across the street, demanded cash from her before doing it, or pushed her into oncoming traffic.

All of these kinds of heroes share a common thread: their actions ultimately lead to the liberation, repair, destruction, or transformation of an entire planet or galaxy. All of these stories draw their appeal from the oldest hero myths that pit the protagonist against unwinnable (winnable!) odds, usually consisting of ultra-evil corporations, god-like enemies, or behemoths of an evil nature. What counts as ‘winning’ the game is having some kind of effect upon the external world; almost always the inner world of the hero is left unprobed. The player, as hero, satisfies these external criteria and in doing so, satisfies her/himself.

A Road Less Travelled

This is where we hit much more interesting narrative territory, I think. Because there are so few games that offer non-traditional protagonists, we will have to dig a bit deeper.

In Dreamweb you play the anti-hero Ryan, “a bartender in a futuristic dystopian city whose nights are plagued with strange dreams. In the last dream before the game starts, Ryan is asked by the master monk of the keepers to be the deliverer and kill the seven evils who are united to break the Dreamweb.” As Ryan, you pursue these seven evils throughout the game and murder them using whatever means possible: shooting a rock star to death in bed, crushing a man to death with a heavy crate, and driving a doctor into an oncoming carriage. All of the deaths are grisly, public, and morally justified in the eyes of the player.

In the end, Ryan is thanked by the mysterious Dreamweb monk for his deeds, and is sent back to the material world. SPOILER ALERT (Please – first play this game and return later to read the remainder of the article!): The game ends as Ryan walks out of his apartment, recently acknowledged as savior of the world, only to be confronted by the police who shoot him to death on the spot. The player has, through Ryan’s delusional dreams, aided and abetted in the brutal murder of seven innocent strangers. The ending is one of the most powerful conclusions to a game I have personally played, and stands out as a narrative marvel that predates films such as Memento by almost 10 years.

In Dreamweb there is no recognizable way of “winning” the game – we are always chained to Ryan’s situation, his state of mind, his dreams. If Ryan is killed during the game, the player is treated to a heartwrenching story sequence that relates the annihilation of the world as the Dreamweb falls into the hands of evil forces. If Ryan saves the world it is only in his own eyes; his reward is death, and worse his acts of heroism are treated as outright murder by an unwitting populace. There is no way out for the protagonist nor the player than to simply acknowledge the tragedy of heroism. This kind of hero story leads to an inward effect: the hero (player) is forced to come to terms with her/himself in the end.

This kind of story, I think, is far deeper than any of the aforementioned hero tales. The ideal of the hero is not only inverted in the story, but is ultimately destroyed. The game destabilizes the mythical footing that players are used to relying upon, and ultimately draws the protagonist into a truer moral world: is it right or fair to be heroic? Who do I put in danger by acting selflessly?

Roads for Other Journeys

What I’ve tried to present here is an often taken-for-granted character role in video/computer games, and how these kinds of roles lead to different kinds of experiences. Despite the sharp contrasts I’ve drawn here, the kinds of protagonists we play in video games are always much more relatively crafted; in fact many ubiquitous kinds of heroes lead to fun, enjoyable experiences for the player. Role-playing games have led to the idea that the player must make choices and that their choices have consequences for the protagonist and her/his world. Yet, I strongly suspect that these kinds of hero stories bear few psychological fruit for the player in the end: winning or losing come with no meaningful conclusion for the player beyond the mere completion of unfinished tasks. Only in games that feature more complex protagonists, whose fates are bound up with their own flaws for instance, do we see the seeds for powerful, deep, storytelling. Games such as Dreamweb, Shadow of the Colossus, and Planescape: Torment sketch out protagonists that can grip us in powerful ways without turning to melodrama, and in doing so transform us in the ways that stories should.

Note: 100footcroc posted an excellent review of Wander, the hero protagonist of Shadow of the Colossus. The article is absolutely worth reading!

This post is included as part of a Blogs of the Round Table discussion on character archetypes in video and computer games. Follow the below drop-down list for other May ’08 Round Table entries. The list below links to other blogs who participated in this month’s Round Table – I strongly suggesting visiting them.. these articles are all particularly good reads.

But does playing these old games matter? Does writing about them matter? What value is there in sweatin' to the oldies? Is it only for reminiscence or nostalgia? In this article I make a few arguments about retro gaming/computing that outline the meaningfulness of tying together the past and the future in the present..

Earlier this week I was listening to the 1 Mhz Apple ][ podcast (which I highly recommend!) and its host, Carrington Vanston, mentioned that his interest in retro computing isn't just for the sake of reminiscing about old stuff or waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. Rather, Carrington's interest lies in showing how the Apple ][ is a fun, exciting, system that has found new uses in the present. His inaugural episode includes a review of Tass Times in Tonetown – a classic graphical text adventure set in a wacky re-imagining of the 1980s new wave culture. In the review Carrington focuses upon his current-day experience of the game and the ways in which it stands out as something different from the usual fare, such as the inclusion of a feelie newspaper included in the box called “The Tonetown Times” which the player must read to discover the names of characters s/he can talk with in-game.

But why should this matter? Isn’t this just like digging through your old box of hockey cards and marveling at your memory of opening the first pack? Here’s where we get into the nitty-gritty of understanding history.

Understanding what History Means

First, let’s correct a false assumption that often undermines this kind of historical exploration: it does not involve living in the past, it involves living through the past. In history we look at ourselves in the present through the past, and come to understand ourselves as standing in a long genealogy of meaning that pre-exists us. Now that’s a lot to swallow for the modernist who sees him/herself as largely being self-made and sees the past as a sequence of barbaric events that are thankfully left far behind her/him. That kind of modernist philosophy still persists today: we see it in people who cannot understand why Yar’s Revenge, Chrono Trigger or The Faery Tale Adventure are still compelling games. They simply stare blankly at the screen and think to themselves, ‘these graphics sure suck!’.

A corollary of this is that every game we’ve ever played, whether it be Wonder Boy in Monster Land or Mass Effect, all bear some kind of relation to the games, films, novels, poems, myths, paintings and other art media that came before it. Not only do they stand in artistic relation (in terms of the genres, styles, inspirations) but they stand in phenomenal relations. That is, when I say that I “enjoyed” Mass Effect yet “found the gameplay repetitive”, I try to tug at the entire web of language implicit in the meaning of enjoyment or repetition. Put differently: we experience enjoyment and repetitiveness in different ways, depending upon the way we are able to use those words to describe different games. If we’ve only played 10 console games in our lifetime we are going to have a very empty idea of what repetitiveness means, because we’ve only experienced the kind of repetition associated with level-based japanese RPGs. However, the gamer who has played hundreds of games understands that calling Windows Solitaire repetitive is a fundamentally different meaning than calling the battles in every Square-Enix RPG repetitive.

History for Gamers and Game Writers

The current bemoaning of the state of video game reviewing can almost be completely attributed to a problem of language. Reviews are superficial and empty typically because the people who review games typically do not engage themselves with games as standing in a history of meaning. Saying that, “I found the gameplay repetitive” is for all intents and purposes a meaningless statement. If the reviewer says that “the battle scenarios are not unlike the random battles found in all Final Fantasy games prior to XII” we have a fundamentally different meaning, one that breathes life into the doldrums of using the word “repetitive” to describe gameplay.

Now, here’s the big leap that I’d like you to take with me: changing our understanding of words changes our very experience of them. This stands in long relation to the certain forms of philosophy (if you’d like, look up folks like Herder, Goethe, and Charles Taylor). But the point here is that when I make comparisons of repetitiveness between Solitaire and Final Fantasy I actually come to experience the gameplay differently because I can see how each game I play comes to re-shape just what I mean by repetitive. History is about breathing new life into the present and future through the past.

But that’s not possible without actually playing, and writing and talking about, the thousands of games that came before us. Without making the miniscule distinctions between the qualities of the text parser in Tass Times in Tonetown and later Infocom text adventures that on the surface seem petty and redundant, we lose the chance to enrich the language of video/computer games, and in doing so, our experience of modern day gaming!

History Matters for Developers: Any Good Writer is a good reader

I should make one thing clear: understanding history won’t stop anyone from making an unsuccessful game. You can spend your life reading all the works of Shakespeare and still write poetry that nobody reads. But, like a good game, your poetry can be rediscovered decades or even centuries later because it managed to tap into the eternal – the long history of poems, stories and myths that preceded it. Although digital gaming is a medium in its infancy, we can still draw from the deep well of history to fill our games with meaning.

Whether plumbing the depths of The Hobbit on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum or reading Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo a good developer hones her/his craft through immersing her/himself in history. The very idea of playing a game through the eyes of a protagonist, themes of friendship and betrayal, or the story of the journey home, have been around for over a thousand years. The way that these themes were became typified in the great (and not so great!) works of art of human history all bear upon the way that people experience computer and video games now.

The developer, as artist and creator, can only make their creation compelling for an audience by steeping it in a vast ocean of meaning. Without a historical engagement the developer both re-invents the wheel and turns what could have been a deep, compelling work, into a hackneyed consumer product that lasts a week in a gamer’s stomach. The great works, the games that we come back to after 20 years and wonder to ourselves how the game still feels current, are the ones that withstood the test of time because they managed to capture the infinite wisdom of a thousand years of storytelling and poetry on humor, sadness, or friendship – and to a lesser degree at least 30 years of gameplay.

Conclusion

What I tried to suggest here is an alternative to the disappointment that we face when we pick up our dusty copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and find out that the game just isn’t as compelling now as it used to be when we were 12 years old. Nothing can be more traumatic for the gamer than finding out that their favorite game just didn’t grow with them – and if that’s the case it’s even more important to understand why it didn’t grow. If we try to live in the past through our “rose tinted memories” of games we surely can learn nothing new about them, or ourselves.
 

This post is included as part of a Blogs of the Round Table discussion on our ‘favorites’ and ‘least-favorites’ in video games. Follow the below drop-down list for other April ’08 Round Table entries. The list below links to other blogs who participated in this month’s Round Table – I strongly suggesting visiting them.. these articles are all particularly good reads.

When I logged into The Endless Forest, the first thing I did was fiddle with the controls. I walked my fawn around in circles. I had it rub its side against a tree, and eat some purple flowers. I visited an ancient stone shrine that made my fawn’s head glow after kneeling before it for a minute, and visited the ruins of a cemetery. It was serene, but lonely.

Then I logged out, slightly frustrated. I was worried that I had missed something crucial… a cleverly hidden gameplay mechanic, a story-line or introduction that failed to get trigged… some kind of point to the game!

Then I read an interview with Michael and Auriea¹, where they discussed some of their goals with Régine Debatty, and it all became clear:

They are brilliant.

If there is a single human element that unifies just what makes games ‘gameful’ – it is play. Despite its daily use, “Play” is not a well understood term in the gaming world. Play is often used as a part of other game-related words: gameplay, player, playable, playing, multiplayer, role-play, etc. But just what we mean when we use the word “play” is often ambiguous. What does it mean to play a game? Does it mean we are playing with a game, like the way a baby plays with a toy, or the way a dog plays fetch? Does it mean that we are playing with ourselves? Or is there something more enigmatic to human play, something beyond simple mechanical interactivity? Is it possible to perhaps play through a game as an extension of our bodies?

The Endless Forest, I think, demonstrates a theory of play at a fundamental human level and corrects what was a long history of games that were not very “playful” and were more like “toys”. Before I discuss the game any further however, we need some new language to talk about games with, because our language for talking about “play” is not very rich.

Forms of Play

Pictured above: This is what happens when players get bored with your game, and resort to monadic play. Courtesy of Garry’s Half-Life 2 mod.

When a child plays with a stuffed bear, she often imbues the bear with aspects of her own personality: the bear is grumpy or happy. She tells the bear secrets, and even scolds it when she thinks it has told on her. This model of play relies on the child’s imagination to set the rules for play; the bear cannot talk-back or disagree outside of the child’s mind. This form of play I will call monadic play. An example of a game that has some monadic play to it would be Will Wright’s Sim City. In this game the player is free to explore the world and build in it, destroy their creations with earthquakes and tornados, or make smiley-faces on the map using the in-game tiles ² – hence the term “sandbox” game.

A second kind of play is found in children (and adults!) who play games with each other, such as hide-and-go-seek, cops and robbers, and tag. These games often feature rule systems that are decided by the players as the game is played – children always find ways to “cheat” in these games and convince their friends that the “rules” don’t really matter and they make up new ones on the spot (think to yourself – is there any definitive rule in a game of ‘tag’ or ‘hide-and-go-seek’ that cannot be broken?). This form of play is set apart from monadic play in that the rules of the game are now formulated, argued, and enacted by more than one person – thus I will call it dyadic play. It is a dyad (two) because two is the minimum number of human participants necessary to engage in this form of play. Dyadic play can occur in multiplayer video games that have some amount of gameplay freedom – for instance we can make our own game of ‘tag’ or ‘hide-and-go-seek’ in World of Warcraft if we want to. However, most multiplayer video games distract players from engaging in dyadic play by forcing external rules upon the player. For instance, in World of Warcraft I cannot ‘play’ in most areas of the game as a low-level character because I will simply be killed by randomly spawning enemies. In that way, opportunities for play are greatly reduced because the designer has some ideal method of play in mind for the player (Second Life is a much better example of dyadic play, but I haven’t played with it enough to use it as an example). This is certainly different from pencil’n'paper roleplaying games that offer the richest forms of dyadic play in that the settings, social contexts and battle rules are almost completely decided by the players as they make up the story (often using rulebooks such as Dungeons and Dragons as the norms for gameplay).

Pictured above: This is what happens when players mix monadic play with dyadic simulation – the kind of gameplay that World of Warcraft often falls into. Um, wow.

A third form of play is typically only found in video games, and sits somewhere in between between monadic and dyadic play. In most single-player games, the author decides what the rules of the game are, and what tools the player can use to play within those rules. This form of play is often the most restrictive, and does not give the player much opportunity to engage in their own personal goals. In that way, we are playing with the computer as an opponent or assistant, acting as a stand-in for what would normally be another human being. This form of play I will call monadic play with dyadic simulation. Most video games fit this bill to varying degrees, because they presume that the player must learn and discover the rules set by the designer and play according to them. That’s the theory; in practice things are much stickier. At one extreme, we have games that are only playable if the player follows the rules set by the designer (ie. Tetris) and purely make use of dyadic simulation, but at the other extreme (ie. RPGs such as Fallout 2, or Neverwinter Nights) we have many more opportunities for monadic or even dyadic play. Each game obviously makes use of many different forms of play, but Fallout 2 and NWN seem to offer the richest opportunities for other forms of play because they allow the player to role-play. For instance, in Fallout 2 there is no rule that forces my character to fit a certain personality type; I can be a psychopath, a murderer, a savior, or simply a wanderer; as such I can engage in kinds of play that are purely imaginal – the character only exists insomuch as I impart some meaning on them. I can role-play a psychopath that only wishes to maximize his personal benefit and takes advantage of others at every turn, because my imagination imparts a meaning to the act of killing an NPC on the screen after taking his money; this is obviously a monadic form of play.
Alternately, in Neverwinter Nights forms of play are granted even more flexibility through user-created scripts and multiplayer capabilities – possibly allowing for dyadic play. However, it must be understood that even in games that offer players great flexibility with forms of play, players often resist engaging in monadic and dyadic play and prefer to engage with the computer as a dyadic simulator. Often, we see this in MMORPGs: players who spend hundreds of hours in what I call a “math fight” – a brute-force attempt to subjugate the character level/experience math curve that the designers have imposed upon the game (other people just call this “grinding”).

Poesis: Creating Play

Now that we have a bit more language to ‘play with’ (*groan*, I couldn’t resist that one), why do I think that the developers of The Endless Forest are brilliant artists? What tipped me off was their response to Régine’s question regarding future updates to the game:

All of these [additions] will be more poetic than game-like. Our priority [is] definitely with poetry. To some extent we only use game-type interactions to stimulate people to hang out in the world a bit longer. Ideally, however, we want to design interactions that are poetic in and of themselves.

At first glance, that response seems a bit odd. What do they mean when they say they desire “interactions that are poetic in and of themselves”? This is where the language of ‘play’ might come in handy. Poetry, if you don’t mind a rough definition, involves play-using-words (Robert Frost has even said that poetry is “serious play“). And “poetry” comes from the Greek word “poesis” – literally, to “make” or “create”. What matters here is that poems somehow bring together words and play to create something new.

Pictured above: Communication and play in The Endless Forest. Is the fawn saying, “hello”, or “mount me”?

Turning back to Michael and Auriea’s comment, we now can understand that part of their goal is to create opportunities for play using the in-game symbolic system. Literally, they want people to play with each other in the most basic form of human engagement: dyadic play. And what makes The Endless Forest different from other MMO’s is that it discourages people from resorting to other forms of interaction that decrease the chances for dyadic play. Concretely, there is no in-game chat system, nor any other way of talking to other players than by using symbolic acts such as shaking your the antlers, rearing up on your back feet, or erupting a loud squeal. None of these acts ‘mean’ much of anything alone, and require other human players to react (ie, if I rear up on my hind legs, you cower in deference) and give the symbols a meaning. The game is literally creating a language for play from the ground-up by allowing players to decide what everything means. That is why the developers did not build any quests or external goals: all of the goals are determined by the players themselves. In that way, players have to ‘decide on’ what games they are going to play with each other from the very beginning: first they need to play together in order to determine what the symbols/icons mean to each other, then they can use these symbols to make up “2nd order games” with each other.

To put this more concretely, imagine that you and I do not speak the same language and meet each other on the street. I move my hands around, and you move your hands around, vainly attempting to communicate using gestural language. Eventually, we might come to an understanding that if I point with my finger in a certain direction and wave my arm towards it, I want you to follow me. After a while, you decide that you’re tired of following me, and wave to the north – and I follow you. The second that our actions become mutually responsive to each other, we are playing a game together – we are playing the following game! And in that way, my fawn avatar in The Endless Forest is literally an extension of my body – just as my hands and arms are when I’m trying to communicate with the stranger on the street.

This kind of play is what the game lends itself to producing opportunities for: games of ‘tag’, ‘Marco Polo’, and ‘hide-and-go-seek’. And even better, it forces us to make up the rules on-the-spot for the symbolic language that we’re going to play the game in. Play is poetic – it requires us not only to negotiate with other human beings on the rules of a game using words or symbolic acts (and in the game’s case, deer-like actions), but come to new formulations of those rules when someone breaks them. In that way, The Endless Forest is the ultimate user-created fantasy world where our spoken languages no longer matter and we can, as human beings, come to define languages and games within the world together. The “game” is not really a game as we currently understand them (as abstract rules-systems that designers allow us to play) – the game is really a world, a forest (!), or a city park that gives people new opportunities to play with each other freely with as few external rules as possible. That is what sets the game apart from other MMORPGs that rely upon external rules to give players a sense of purpose of duty – in this game the goals are left unspecified and totally to the player’s imagination and social context. That is what makes the game truly artful – it destroys our pre-conceptions of ‘play’ in video games.

That is why players who think that ‘the game has no point’ are utterly confused, or personally resistant to monadic or dyadic play. The world can have a point – but it’s up to the players themselves to decide what the point is by playing/interacting with other players.

And that brings us to what is missing in the game to make this budding masterpiece work: it needs more people playing it! In order to engage in dyadic play, you need at least one other person – and if you want to create a language using the symbols they have in the game, you need a critical mass of people that regularly log-in and stand in front of each other making funny gestures until they cohere into a recognizable set of social meanings.

With any abstract language, tag and hide-and-go-seek are the most simplified forms of play – but imagine the possibilities in this kind of world! With enough work and creative ingenuity I guarantee that a group of players will eventually figure out how to tell the story of King Lear, or a deer drama troupe will learn how to act out an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation using the deer iconography. The possibilities for play in The Endless Forest are truly endless.

If I’ve persuaded you at all to give The Endless Forest a shot, there is no better time than this week! On Thursday November 1st, starting at 4pm 10pm GMT, the world will celebrate its next “Abiogenesis” – 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. This will be the first Abiogenesis I’ve attended, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they have planned for All Hallow’s. If you’re looking for me, I’ll be logged in with my girlfriend. We’ll be the two deer walking around with the same pictograph above our heads. Feel free to signal a ‘hello’ – we’ll figure it out what it means eventually.

What Forms of Play might mean for game developers

I realized that I neglected to add some comments directed towards game developers. Basically, forms of play (monadic, dyadic, simulated play, etc) are simple descriptors used to allow us to think conceptually about game play. The concepts are important because they give us the ability to identify just how particular forms of play make more or less use of the imagination, are more or less social, or are based on interaction with a computer. So, for instance, if you’ve decided to make an MMO game that’s based on a high degree of player interaction – you might rethink the whole idea of making generic quest generation algorithms that make Player X deliver a Y to NPC Z and receive Q coins in return. In fact, you might allow players to create quests of their own – ie, “challenges” that are funded by a guild like killing a dragon – dyadic play at its best. You might develop a built-in escrow system that only hands over the prize after the enemy has been smoten. Monadic and dyadic play also demonstrate why “griefing” is always going to happen in MMOs, when players literally become bored with static gameplay mechanics that the designers have imposed on the world. Griefing, many kinds of bug exploitation, and general out-of-character behavior are all the acts of a creative mind searching for something more interesting in the confines of a rather bland game.

Alternately, if you’re making a single-player RPG you might provide the player with enough flexibility to allow them to explore the world freeform using completely non-linear adventuring and storytelling (ie. Ultima VII) – and not force them along a very narrow linear story (ie. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion). Freeform exploration and non-linear storytelling are much closer to a kind of monadic play using dyadic simulation but much richer than the usual cRPG. It is richer, because it depends upon the player’s imagination and personal choices to decide where the story is going – and the computer only exists insomuch as to facilitate their choices.

In the end, Forms of Play demonstrate that our jobs as developers involve providing players with opportunities for play using the player’s imagination, their friends, often with the computer acting as a facilitator for those play experiences. Who really wants a math fight with a computer anyway? That gets boring, quick. Might as well go play the slots in Vegas.

I recently came across a post over at Jeff Tunnell’s blog that reminds game designers how important it is to have many design ideas in mind, rather than just relying on a single idea. It made me think about one of the central problems in modern mainstream game development: a lack of fresh, innovative games. As I was writing this article, GameSetWatch posted footage from the Independent Games Summit of an “Innovation in Independent Games” panel consisting of Jenova Chen, Jonathan Mak, Kyle Gabler, and Jonathan Blow. After listening to the hour-long discussion, I decided to integrate many of the comments into this article, because they were inherently relevant and profound for any discussion of the creative process.

While many people assume that independent game developers, by virtue of being unconstrained by publishers, auto-magically have creative, interesting ideas. However, as I hope to demonstrate – creative innovation is far from guaranteed simply because we’re ‘indies’, and requires a certain kind of developer or team to come up with something worth playing.

First off, I want to be very upfront about the nature of this piece: If you’re an indie game developer (like myself) this article is not meant to take the wind out of your sails – it’s meant to encourage, challenge and implore you to hone your creative ideas before you start working on your next platformer, arcade shooter, or Zuma clone. Pursue a game that you’re passionate about – something that you want to play – and not something that you imagine your audience might want to play. And if you want to play Zuma meets Bubble Bobble – by all means go for it.

On any given day, you can head over to TIGSource, Indygamer or JayisGames and find a great majority of indie-made games with minimal creative insights. These are often attempts at producing something ‘innovative’ or ‘artistic’ and become formulaic: they either (a) ape pre-existing genres without any creative insight, or worse (b) try to break all design conventions just for the sake of breaking them and end up with an uninteresting mess.

Creativity and Indie Developers

So if you do want to work creatively, and produce games from ideas that you are interested in, here’s how according to some of the current indie developers (my comments are in grey):

According to Jeff Tunnell:

“You should have literally hundreds of them floating around in your head. Even better, you should have hundreds of them written in your own design portfolio or journal.”

“One idea won’t cut it. What if you can’t get other people on your team to buy into your one idea? What if the technology is not available to get your one idea done? What if you can’t find a publisher if your idea is too big to fund yourself? There are many, many reasons why you need a LOT of game ideas.” And finally, Tunnell suggests that designers must always be on the prowl for creative inspiration from other artists.

Game designers can naturally find their inspiration in other games – but Tunnell makes us think a bit broader and implicitly suggests that all forms of creative expression are valid sources of inspiration. Often, I find that this is the weakest point among many developers, a fundamental lack of creative depth caused by:

1. A lack of experience with more than a single game genre (ie. arcade shooters).
2. (More broadly): A lack of familiarity with other forms of entertainment (ie. film, music, theatre).
3. (And even more broadly): Too few personal experiences to draw upon period – what we might call a ‘sheltered life’.

Turning back to Tunnell’s suggestions, where do creative ideas come from? Creativity is inspired by other creative works and creative people, and more generally from a broad array of (meaningful) personal experiences. For the moment, this may sound a bit too unspecific, so let’s move on to another developer.

Jenova Chen from the Innovation in Independent Games panel:

Jenova’s comments and presentation focus primarily upon the role of ‘feelings’ in game development. In his presentation, he turns to modern film and shows how the genres have developed into broad categories all separable by the general ‘feeling’ that they express: action, dramas, comedies, etc. He suggests that video game genres follow a different categorization system, one based in technological differences: First-Person Shooters, ‘Shmups, MMORPGs, etc. With that in mind, Jenova suggests that instead of designing for technological innovation, designers must instead “design for feeling” and “design for entertainment”. And in terms of his personal style, he prefers to design with a very broad audience in mind and not necessarily ‘art’.

If we accept the argument that video games and films are inherently different on the basis of their underlying genre metaphors (‘feeling’ vs. ‘technology’), we at least can make a distinction between games that have been designed for a technological appeal (ie. BioShock) and games that were designed to capture a certain feeling (ie. X-COM: Terror from the Deep). In that way, the audience playing your game is separable into two kinds: those who are entertained by technological innovation and those who enjoy emotional expressivity. (Keep in mind that these distinctions are only conceptual, because of course all games are a mix of technology and expression – but the idea is to work with the concepts he’s presented us with)

Pictured above: Screenshot from X-COM: UFO Defense courtesy of Mobygames.

Returning to Jenova’s argument – he suggests that if we design games they must be unified or created in terms of the feelings the author her/himself feels. For instance, to capture ‘fear’ or ‘terror’ in the X-COM series, the designers/artists/musicians had to all understand the underlying feeling of the game: the aliens have attacked Earth, and their only goal is the complete annihilation of humans. In that way, the entire game is designed around fear: the music is dark and brooding, insect-like aliens sneak up on the player using the ‘fog of war’, your UFO strike team can lose morale – panic and drop their weapons, and so on. Games that were developed with a unifying feeling in mind often inspire the same feelings in the player – and in that way are successful (anyone can remember the terror of playing DOOM with a pair of headphones on in a dark room).

Is that enough, then? Are ‘creative’ games simply only mediums for the expression of a single personal feeling for the entertainment of an audience? Now, I don’t think Jenova is suggesting that only one feeling should underly a game (since he said “feelings”) – but the large majority of modern films are dominated by single feelings. I’ll come back to this in later comments, because I believe that setting Hollywood films as the gold standard for ‘feelings’ in games leads us down a garden path to emotional superficiality and didactic storytelling.

Jonathan Mak from the Innovation in Independent Games panel:

Jon, in his markedly passionate and direct Torontonian style, turns us toward the importance of “individual expression” in game development. He suggests that worrying about [technological] innovation does not matter, since the technologies that are used in games are simply tools used to further an expressive agenda. In that way, he says that if games are designed with a technology as the focus of the development, “the game won’t be about you anymore.” He then suggests that if games are a form of individual expression, you must “follow your own inspirations” and trust your own personal judgment and tastes when you design your game. What if other people don’t like your game? Fuck ‘em – “You can’t be afraid to piss people off. You have to piss someone off!” because then (he suggests) your work cannot be ignored. To thine own self be true.

Finally, in terms of practical advice – Jon simply says that you should “Go home. Don’t innovate. Play lots of games. Find the ones you like, and make a game based on that.” And as a side note, it is interesting that Everyday Shooter was developed as a blend of his interests in music and games – albums and arcade shooters.

So, what can we learn from Jon? Are games really only about “me” the designer? Should the audience be ignored? This is a rather different style than Jenova, who says that he prefers to work with an audience already in mind when he makes a game.

Pictured above: Still frame from Frank Miller’s Sin City.

According to Jon, innovation doesn’t matter. He says that indie games are about the developer themselves – and not about their potential playability by the unseen masses. Unfortunately, this is where the details become sticky, because (according to edenb in the TIGsouce article comments section), while “innovation shouldn’t be the end goal, it does help us accomplish feelings that we couldn’t otherwise portray“. After all, certain camera techniques and graphic art styles did give Sin City an overall feeling that would be unportrayable using say – a handicam and pencil crayons. However, there is a grain to truth to Jon’s challenge, because there is no such thing as anything completely ‘individual’ in the world. We all exist as persons – we all eat, sleep (well, most of us), shit, laugh and cry. By focusing on our own personal humanity, we can necessarily (and accidentally!) strike a chord with other like-minded human beings; after all, Jon is a gamer and a music lover – his tastes are inherently human tastes. What he cautions against, I think, is treating a game like a product and forgetting that the person making it is themselves a living, breathing, joyful creature with their own interests.

Returning to Jon’s final comment (Go home, play games, make a game), we can now appreciate the importance of finding creative inspiration in things we ‘like’. While I certainly agree that a game designer must have a passion for gaming, it does not seem so wise to simply play games that we ‘like’. If I were to only watch films like that ‘like’, I would be off to see the next craptacular Jerry Bruckheimer marathon on TV. This may seem like a petty semantic distinction, but my ‘likes’ are often much different from my ‘loves’ or my ‘passions’. And furthermore, doing only things that you like (aka. hedonism) is a sure way of producing shallow pieces of art, since we truly do need a broad array of experiences to draw upon in order to give our works some depth. Want my advice? Play some games that you’ll hate. Play games from genres you’d never normally touch. The ones that stick out in your memory as being meaningful in any way are the ones you should have in mind when you make games.

Jonathan Blow from the Innovation in Independent Games panel:

Jonathan starts with the idea that no “great work” was great because it was innovative – it was because of something “deep inside the work”; those who aspire for innovation often produce creations that are ‘gimmicky’ or shallow. His overall argument is that while technological innovation can become more and more refined, it does not provide us with the “depth” necessary to become “relevant to humanity”.

In terms of practical suggestions, Jonathan tells us that “good” ideas should be thrown away because it’s the “great” ideas – the ideas that we become enamored with – that should be explored and deepened. He also says that “You know you’re doing something right when you end up discarding the idea you started with, and doing something different that you got to by following that idea.”

Similar to the previous panelists, Blow tends to focus on a divide between technological innovation and depth. What he does not do, unfortunately, is tell us what he means by “depth”. The depth of feelings? Stories? Concepts? Thoughts? Ideas? People? Experiences? All of these concepts involve depth, I’d argue.

The idea of designing for “depth” is controversial. According to Lyx (in the TIGSource article comments), “You need to understand how to express this deep meaning efficiently to others. As already shown in the previous example: it is not enough it to the player on a conceptual level. It is not enough to transmit a concept – you must be able to transmit what it feels, smalls and looks like…. not just by simply drawing it on the screen, thats not what i’m talking about“, and, “unless the receiver of the message accepts the message, it wont work.” Lyx seems to suggest that meanings/feelings are first ‘selected’ by the designer, identified, and then must be ‘transmitted’ to the player.

This kind of philosophy treats artistic works as an engineering problem, and puts the complete power of the work in the artist’s hands – turning the wayward designer into a god and the audience into his followers. This is, of course, non-sense. When artists beat their audiences over the head with a concept or ‘message’ they have to tell, audiences find it preachy and insulting. I often find films that engineer feelings for the audience shallow and uninsightful, something that acclaimed directors like Steven Spielberg are horrendously guilty of: treating the audiences like puppets. What does this mean for game designers? If they shoot for this level of depth, their games may have some feeling to them (ie. DOOM was scary!) but that’s all that they will ever have – they never end up penetrating much deeper into the human experience. However, if designers allow themselves to survey a broader emotional scenery, they hand over the interpretive responsibility to the audience instead of hoarding it for themselves. This is the pinnacle of creative achievement, in my opinion – because it stimulates the audience’s imagination and allows them to feel in ways that were not necessarily intended by the author. This is a truer ‘depth’. More on this topic must be said, but for now it should be enough to say that depth comes from the imagination of both the player and the designer, and not from simply from clever engineering.

My Unsolicited Thoughts on Ideas and the Imagination

Pictured above: poster for Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. Not pictured: Any indie game that I can think of with as much imaginative depth.

I often find that maintaining a creative critical-mass only can happen when I’m thinking actively about game design, and allowing my mind to freely roam. Sometimes I entertain silly ideas; ridiculous ideas; boring ideas. Other times I’m reading more serious material, and I find myself thinking about the human condition and the circumstances of our existence. Sometimes I find myself reminiscing about meaningful childhood memories, and imagine the kinds of games that I would have wanted to play as a child. But whatever the circumstances, I’ve always found myself tying my trains of thoughts back into games and how games can be experienced.

One of the problems with this kind of free-associative mode was that I used to lose track of inspired design concepts as I was working them out in my head. That’s why having a notebook or voice recorder is handy – they allow you to explore your associative thoughts on paper (or out loud), and eventually commit them as more formalized concepts. And later, those loose design concepts can then be further refined, and committed to a design document – eventually resulting in a full game design.

Some of my best ideas have come from mundane situations like washing the dishes, brushing my teeth, watching The Simpsons, listening to music, and playing retro games. Potentially any human activity can be modeled into a design concept, but the designer’s emotional sensitivities must ultimately decide if the design concept is enjoyable, meaningful, or downright fun. This is why having a broad array of experiences to draw upon is so important – because the collective fusion of all of these experiences is what goes into a game whether we realize it or not.

Finally, I cannot stress the importance of finding other like-minded folks to bounce ideas off of – this is something that wasn’t mentioned by any of the aforementioned developers. In my case, I’m lucky to have met my creative doppelganger in graduate school and we spend many hours each week discussing potential design concepts, storylines, and programming models. We free-associate together and take turns playing with our imaginations, freely trading ideas back and forth. Eventually both of us end up at a place where we say “This sounds fucking great! Let’s make this game right now!” The ideas that we both find promising or interesting are then committed to the company wiki, and later can be tweaked or rewritten. Sometimes these concepts begin to expand and aggregate with other concepts, and eventually we have a full-length design document. Other times these ideas just sit for months on the wiki, neglected or ignored. Either way – as Tunnell said – hundreds and thousands of ideas are floating in the air at any one moment. In the end, we don’t discount or disparage any single idea, because while it may seem silly or meaningless alone, it can sometimes become integrated with other ideas to become part of a larger game.

Making meaningful games is not so much about making games that we ‘like’ or we find ‘entertaining’ necessarily (since feeling angry or depressed doesn’t fit into either of those categories very well) – it’s more generally about finding meanings that accord with human experience. Engineering, tweaking, and re-design all come after we allow our imaginations to roam freely.