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, in 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.

Throughout the summer there was an interesting thread in the Mobygames forums on the subject of ‘death’ in video games, in response to an article written for The Guardian. The general feeling among players questions the importance of death in games, and why it remains to be such a central part of the medium. I wasn’t satisfied with The Guardian’s article which doesn’t penetrate the issue very deeply, so I thought I’d take a stab at the notion of what death ‘means’ in gaming, and how (as designers) we might start to re-think the rather hackneyed game mechanic and come up with slightly more novel ways of making deaths meaningful for players.

We’ve all had this feeling: wanting to throw the keyboard or controller across the room after fighting our way through 25 minutes of death-wielding baddies, only to mis-time a critical jump and land in a pit boiling lava. And I must admit, when I was 10 years old I was treated to about 35 GAME OVER screens while playing Choplifter! on my Sega Master System in a single marathon; I threw the controller at the TV and called it quits for the night (and then quickly made sure that I didn’t break anything).

According to Pete Hines over at Bethsoft, “Having your character die or fail is important because your actions have to have some meaning in the game, and to you”. That may be, but that’s like saying, ‘The reason I like ice cream is because ice cream tastes good’. If we’re going to penetrate a bit deeper than those kinds of generic statements (which are true, yet unrevealing), we need to turn to a bit o’ history first.

Early Generation Games and Death

If you look at some of the earliest video game systems and personal computers (for the Apple //e, the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, Commodore 64, etc) - the majority of their initial game offerings centered around two-player gaming. The earliest games such as SpaceWar! and Pong
were built around a social model that stressed (rather rudimentary) competition between the players instead of the player vs. the computer. The whole idea of “dying” in both games is rather ludicrous when you look at it - nobody would claim that these abstract onscreen shapes would represent a meaningful death for the player beyond ‘You won, I lost. Damn.’ Besides, losing in those games gave us the opportunity to challenge each other to a new match, which is hardly punitive.

The idea of associating “death” with punishment came a little later, with the advent of single-player arcade games. Games such as Breakout, Space Invaders, Galaxian, Galaga and Defender introduced an economic and gameplay model based on loss: players would eventually play to a level that was so difficult that they “lost” and had to insert a coin and start from the beginning. Tempest refined this model by allowing the player to “continue” from the level that they lost, adding even more addictiveness to the model ¹. In the end, calling a GAME OVER screen “death” seems a bit abstract compared to the real thing; in that sense “death” simply became associated with losing to the computer and dumping in more quarters - a slightly annoying inconvenience.

Soon after the decline of the golden age of the arcade, the third generation of consoles picked up where they left off. Many of the early titles for systems such as the Sega Master System, the NEC PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16), and the Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom), were direct ports of games from the arcade with slightly crappified graphics and sound. However, ports of most arcade games (Double Dragon, Ghouls’n'Ghosts, and After Burner) dragged along the model of death-as-inconvenience rather than something novel. It is rather strange when you think about it: the arcade versions of these hits relied upon dying as an economic model, and this model floated across to the home consoles as a bizarre artifact that became common parlance for gamers. We thought nothing of it however, and simply treated GAME OVER screens as a frustrating, punitive challenge. As games matured a bit on these consoles, battery-backed up RAM and save passwords allowed players to continue from their previous positions ². With few exceptions, this model of death has become a hallmark of video games ever since.

The Exceptions

Of course, the word “death” certainly found its way into video games somehow. After all, we would have called it “GAME OVER” if we didn’t somehow associate this moderate inconvenience with death. Without waxing philosophically here, most cultures do not treat the idea of dying lightly, and there is a strong (yet broad) set of personal feelings and emotions associated with death and dying.

The first, most demonstrative, death I ever saw in a game was in the arcade classic Sinistar. While the concept is mostly derivative of Asteroids - floating around in a tiny ship with space junk flying at you in all directions - the game introduced one of the most terrifying villains I have ever seen since: Sinistar. After a minute or so of playing the game, you would be greeted with the terror-instilling voice of Sinistar ominously declaring, “BEWARE! I LIVE.”, and moments later, “I HUNGER, COWARD!” When Sinistar does appear onscreen, it appears to be a disembodied skeletal spacecraft with dagger-like fangs and a gaping maw. Trying to escape Sinistar is senseless, and only seems to enrage the terrifying creature and encourages it to chase you; eventually it will catch up with you and your tiny space ship will get chewed by its gaping, hungry jaws and explode.

Above: The painting Saturn Devouring his Son by Goya.

Sinistar literally eats your spaceship alive while triumphantly roaring a bestial ROARRRRRRRR! The idea of dying in this game is horrifying and terrible, and closely follows many Western societal ideals around death and dying - the fear of being eaten alive. Sinistar is death incarnate - the stuff of nightmares; unfortunately a cheesy YouTube video will not do this fear justice. The painting by Goya, of course, illustrates the same kind of fear that Sinistar draws upon. I won’t go into the deeper psycho-historical mythology behind the Western fears of being eaten, but anyone who had Little Red Riding Hood read to them as a child can immediately remember the menacing fangs of the ‘Big Bad Wolf’. This faery tale draws upon millenium-old fears to give the player an immediate sense of terror in a very similar way.

This might all seem to be a stretch of the imagination, but it surely makes more sense simply claiming that being inconvenienced is akin to dying. So let’s turn to more modern games to see how death is taken up in other genres.

In the realm of console-based role playing games, the Final Fantasy series has typically made strategic use of death during gameplay: the player does not control a single player, but a party, and party members are free to heal and resurrect each other as the battle ensues. In that way, death is neither an inconvenience or a fear of being devoured, but a part of a larger battle strategy. In fact, sometimes playable characters must die in order to survive the battle (ie. if they turn on other PC’s due to a curse spell). In that way, playable characters in the game never really die to the player, they’re only temporarily unavailable in battles.

Furthermore, if you’ve played Final Fantasy VII, you’ll remember that one of the central playable characters is murdered mid-way through the game in a rather dramatic cut-scene. The first time I played the game I was anguished by the character’s death, in the same way I might be anguished by the death of a character in a novel or film that I had grown attached to. In that sense, imagined deaths can of course evoke some of the same feelings as ‘real’ deaths - but only momentarily - it wouldn’t do to have the player go into mourning for weeks on end (after all, it’s just a game!). For this game series, death is both a strategy/gameplay device and has been used as an affective narrative/story device.

Other games, especially in the adventure genre, circumvent the whole sticky issue of death by ensuring that the player never dies. Most of the LucasArts games (such as Sam and Max Hit the Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle) provide the player with a death-free experiences; players never see a GAME OVER screen through a combination of creative scripting, dialogue and character feedback. Stupid or dangerous decisions are usually rejected by the playable-characters in favor of more creative (healthier) approaches to puzzle solutions.

There do also exist a small number of games that feature what is known as “permadeath”, which usually involves the permanent removal of a playable-character from the game after losing a scenario. While I’ve never played the infamous Sub Mission (which actually deletes your character from the diskette when you die!), I have played the post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland.

Above: Even Wasteland had an infamous GAME OVER screen after the entire party was unconscious, wounded or dead.

When party characters are wounded in battle, they quickly degrade into increasingly dangerous levels of wounding that eventually lead to a skull icon beside the character’s name if left untreated. Since Wasteland was originally distributed on floppy disks, it was critical to quickly eject the data diskette from the disk drive before the computer saved the game, and made your 100-hour-old dead party member a permanent gravestone! While this attempt at immersion worked if you weren’t concerned with losing your characters, it certainly broke down if you were ejecting your floppy disk every 10 minutes and restarting the battle (ie. “save/loading”).

Finally, the best examples of creative uses for death (in terms of gameplay and story) are in the classic RPG Planescape: Torment. In a sense, the entire game is thematically centered around death and rebirth through a fairly philosophical exploration of what it means to die. The central character of the game, ‘the Nameless One’, is cursed with both immortality and amnesia for the sins of his previous lives, and the player is left to help him discover his ‘true’ identity. Using very creative dialog and narrative techniques, the designers of the game ensure that immersion is never broken. For example, in one scene the Nameless One must demonstrate his immortality to a doubtful NPC by allowing her to plunge a dagger into his heart, murdering him on the spot. When he re-awakens, the NPC provides him with a vital piece of information that allows the story to continue. In that way, death is integrated into the game through the story, and less so through the player’s emotions. I highly recommend reading Ernest Adams’ article on death in Planescape: Torment as it goes into far more detail.

Meaningful Death

I hope I’ve demonstrated at least a few different uses and understandings of death across different genres. Clearly, death is not only a punitive gameplay hack that forces players into a survival role and somehow makes their gameplay experience meaningful; and if a character’s death is meaningful to the player there are certainly other reasons for it.

So the question for game designers is ultimately “how should death be treated in games?” There is, obviously, no single answer here. However, there is a general standard at which death can be used profitably:

Does your use of death (player punishment, narrative fulfillment, gameplay, strategy, emotional expression, etc.) fit into all aspects of the overall aesthetic of the game?

For instance, if you’ve played Out of this World (which I reviewed recently), character death is featured prominently and frequently using rather gruesome and vivid death scenes. This design choice had two effects:

1. In terms of atmosphere and mood, grisly deaths contribute strongly to the game’s dark and dangerous atmosphere and further immerses the player in the story.
2. According to many players, dying every 15 seconds (and being forced to repeat the scene) was frustrating and players felt that this distracted them from the gameplay.

Clearly, death had both a beneficial and adverse effect on the overall game experience. If we accept the implicit assumption that the game’s only function is for “enjoyment”, then clearly designers should spend their time tailoring their game to fit the player experience profile of #2 - the traditional (conservative) choice. Choosing to focus on gameplay is neither good nor bad, but simply reflects the kind of audience that the designer intends to please. Games such as Quake do not bother to reflect much on ‘death’, and instead respawn the character as soon as possible such that the player never sits idle; these kinds of games have been the norm for the last 10 years.

Above: Wonderfully cinematic and atmospheric, Indigo Prophecy (aka. Fahrenheit) features one of the most frustrating and distracting control systems I’ve ever had the displeasure of using: think ‘Simon’ with dual analog sticks during a cut-scene.

However, as some games move towards the more artistic realm that involve more than simple enjoyment, designers must reconsider the importance of player profile #1. Instead of being easy to play or enjoyable, games that focus more on the immersive aspects that garner a certain mood for the game possibly at the cost of gameplay. These more atmospheric games are the kind that we typically see as the ‘flawed masterpieces’; I think Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy is a good example of this kind of game.

Returning to the original standard, there is a third option that truly gifted and creative designers can shoot for: integrating all aspects of the game (story, atmosphere, gameplay, etc.) thematically through concepts such as death. While Planescape: Torment thematically revolves around death/rebirth and fits almost the entire profile of a truly aesthetic experience that is both enjoyable and goes beyond enjoyment, the in-game battles bring nothing novel to the RPG genre and remain derivative of former Dungeons & Dragons titles. This may seem like a harsh charge against one of the best role-playing games ever released in 25 years (I think!), but underlines the need for creativity in all aspects of a game and might encourage designers to work on more innovative solutions.

Editorial note: This post is included as part of a PJ’s Attic Round Table discussion, in response to a previous discussion held in 2006 on “death” in video games. Follow the below drop-down list for other September ‘07 Round Table entries.

Since I haven’t played Paradroid yet, I certainly don’t have much to add to his review. However, the way that the review is written is important. Continuing from yesterday’s criticism that very few game reviews ever bother to do much more than describe their “reaction” to a game, I think Jason has done a good job showing what a stronger or “deeper” review might begin to look like. How is his review different from the average game review?

In the second half of the review, after he has introduced some of the core game mechanics, Jason tells us why the circuit-board mini-game is both sophisticated and congruent with the rest of the game. Where the average cRPG has the player killing sewer rats that have nothing to do with the story or plot and thus feels contrived or tiresome, Paradroid manages to integrate the building block-style growth mechanic into the theme of the game perfectly. There is something deeply integrative and “beautiful” (says Jason) about that kind of design - which I agree with.

Now, what makes this important? Well, what he gets at in the review is that some games have a beauty to them. Some are beautiful in terms of their artistic/graphical presentation (like Beyond Good & Evil), but others are beautiful in terms of other things like their game mechanics (like Paradroid). Some games, like Okami, seem to blend both game mechanics and artwork together to create a truly beautiful experience. I won’t review Okami here, but its particular blend of japanese myth, stylized art, and game mechanics (that use a ‘paintbrush’) give the player an absolute sense of integrated beauty. To put it simply - the entire game (art, design, mechanics) shares a central metaphor (a japanese painting) that it rarely deviates from. And while Okami probably won’t change your life or make you a better person, but it is a beautiful thing to witness.

He had a worthwhile interview with designer/coder Rod Humble who recently released The Marriage - an abstract art game based on a few simple relational principles. I haven’t had time to articulate a response to his game yet (which I found intriguing, if not overminimalistic), but I did come across something surprising in the interview. Other than mentioning his obvious interest in Wittgenstein and “language games”, he was asked to provide a quick definition of what “works of art” are to him (I also noticed that mentisworks liked the broad definition too):

JR: Can you give us a one-sentence definition of art? In other words, how do you differentiate works of entertainment from works of art?

RH: Entertainment is giving enjoyment to the maximum number of people you can. Art is that which can make at least one person a better human being. Long may they both prosper.

Now that is an interesting choice for a definition. It’s not often that you find game developers well-versed in modern philosophy. At the very least, Rod Humble seems to think like a philsopher. Let’s break open his definition a bit, since he didn’t get the chance to in the interview…

There is a long tradition in philosophical thought can be historically traced through what Charles Taylor calls the “expressive-constitutive” tradition (through other philosophers like Herder, Heidegger, etc). I won’t go into Taylor’s philosophy much here, but suffice to say that the ways we use language (”expression”) somehow partially “constitutes” our being - the people we are. So, to put it glibly: we are what we do. But what does that have to do with art?

From part of the same tradition, ideas have been drawn out from philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty that “art” is somehow made of the same stuff. Somehow, art has a way of making us see the world in a different way. He argues in an essay called Cezanne’s Doubt that artists often perceive the world truly differently than others - and their artistic expressions (such as paintings, or I would argue some games) can allow other people to re-perceive their worlds in a different way. For this tradition, expressive art is ontic … it doesn’t just give us new ‘facts’ about the world, it changes us in what we are sensitive to - and who we are. This is where Rod Humble’s articulation of what ‘art’ is about is so crucial: he’s got a constructive sense of it. He sees art as not just changing the world in a very vague sense (ie. creating new genres, new art movements), but he sees art as acting in a far deeper and specific way… it changes us in our being.

Now, is there anything curious about Rod’s definition? Well, for one thing - he doesn’t want art to simply change us … he wants it to change us for the better. Art should, through its magic, give us the tools to become better human beings. This is something shared by the contemporary philosopher of psychology John Shotter as well as Charles Taylor - they both envision that “expression” (think ‘artistic expression’) gives us new tools for thinking about the world differently. And by virtue of having new tools - new ways of apprehending reality - we can make new choices about how we want to live and who we want to be. So in that way, what makes us “better people” isn’t that art makes us happier or more enjoyable people, it’s that art can give us the tools to re-imagine ourselves that weren’t possible previously. Artful games are generative. There’s a lot more to be said on this topic of course - and I certainly won’t attempt to summarize a millenium worth of t