The other contributor to the nervousness was not knowing how one leaves a comment or speaks their mind to politicians and such. I always over complicate it for some reason. “What am I going to say? How will I say it? Who will I talk to?” Maybe it’s a self defense mechanism to prevent me from actually facing my fears. But the call to the comment line was really easy, what a relief!

I waited on hold for a just a few minutes, no more than five and then a woman answered and I told her I wanted to leave a comment about the President considering using military commissions instead of criminal courts for terrorist suspects, but I didn’t know what the process was and what I needed to do. She understood and concisely told me that I state my position on the subject of terrorist trials and then they record it and pass it along.

That’s what I did. I told her I wanted to President to use the criminal courts instead of military commissions because I feel they can handle the facts of the case and make appropriate decisions better than the military commissions. She summarized my position for confirmation, I agreed and then we said goodbye. It was easier than I led myself to believe. It also felt empowering.

I feel that speaking up, especially during the very contentious political climate we have in Washington, is really important. It’s taken me a long time to feel comfortable speaking my opinions with those in Washington, but it’s also my job as a citizen. It sure beats signing a petition and not knowing if it does any real good. That’s not to say I think my call will change things by itself. But it at least feels like I’m doing something about it rather than complaining. It feels more direct and if more people called with the same position, it would have an impact I think.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

His main premise is that games of the future will continue the trend of all media becoming more relevant to or at least connected with reality. Current examples of this trend he cited are the virtual plant that grows in the Honda Insight (though he incorrectly said it was the Toyota Prius) when drivers are more fuel efficient. It’s a game to encourage better driving behavior. Facebook games frequently encourage players to connect with their friends, to share virtual items or challenge them. XBox has its public achievement system that can pressure someone to play more to get more points so they can brag to their friends in the real world, about something that doesn’t exist if there’s no electricity.

Schell says this trend started because people care about reconnecting with what is real. That in the past twenty to thirty years, technology has enabled us to gorge on fantasy and escapism and now we are finally awakening from our post-gorge-fest to realize it was a sham. A farce. Empty calories that aren’t delivering what is real and true to the experience of being human.

We now want real experiences, we want real change and to reconnect with nature. Partly why Avatar was so successful was because it reawakened a deeply muted and numbed core of the human experience, which is to be in tune with nature, life and your own body. Many are sick today because they aren’t awake; they don’t know what “real” feels like.

So that’s the now, which I’ve sort of emphasized a bit more than Jesse Schell did and put my own interpretation on what I’m seeing. What about the future? What did Jesse Schell have to say about where games will go?

I think this was the best part of his presentation because it aroused strong feelings of disgust within and will leave me thinking for days, if not weeks, until I can figure out how to deal with it, because I see what he predicts as a very real possibility. In summary, what he predicts is massively multiplayer advertising games through sharing of dynamic electronic tattoos that display brand advertisements, cereal boxes with leaderboards among friends ranking who has eaten the most and Amazon reviews that give bonus points if the Kindle detected your eyes read every single word. Massive, pervasive awareness of what you see, what you eat, what you drive, how you do it, why you do it, where and when.

It’s not a future I want to see. I don’t like advertising, I think it pollutes the mind. “You are ugly. You are fat. You are hungry. You are friendless, hairless and depressed. What you need, we have. What you want, we sell. To be better, buy now.” Now couple that with achievement systems for being a “better” consumer and we have an already ill western society built up on consumerism now on a fast track to even greater self-destruction.

I went to a town hall recently and several members of the city government gave presentations, including the mayor and commissioner, as well as citizens. The topic was on peak oil, climate change and what it can do to our local food supply, the citizens and the planet as a whole. One point that really struck me was that for generations we’ve been brought up to be consumers. We consume food, clothing, information, services, products, art and raw materials of the earth. If we are to not only survive, but thrive in the coming generations, we need to adapt our way of living away from consumers to instead being contributors. We’ll need to become contributors of local community services (carpool organizer), food (grow your own), clothing (sew your own), healthcare (be your own doctor) and information (teach others what you know).

The question for us game designers as we move ahead to creating more reality infused game experiences is, are we going to create games that are leaderboards for how many calories players have consumed for McDonalds? Or are we going to create games that help people positively, to be more connected with nature, genuine and compassionate towards all life? Are we going to be creating generations of consumers, or generations of contributors? Which way will you contribute to the future of society?

Also posted on my Gamasutra blog.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

But my inspiration wasn’t Avatar, nor was it FernGully, or Dances with Wolves, or Pocahontas or any other movie one cares to compare Avatar to. My inspiration for the environmentally and socially conscious video game was real life. It was the many actual real events that I have read about or watched short videos on.

It always upset me when people couldn’t talk about anything besides making comparisons to other films because they were completely missing the point. Avatar isn’t a rip-off of FernGully or Princess Mononoke; it’s a rip-off of what is happening right now all over the world in the United States, the Amazon jungles, coasts of Somalia and the remote regions of India. Mega corporations based in the US and UK are mining for minerals and resources, just like the fictional RDA mining corporation in Avatar. And just like the fictional RDA, they are destroying the environment and harming, if not killing, the people who live in it.

I wish that Avatar wasn’t so escapist and that people after watching it could make the connection that what happens in the movie is reality and that it needs to stop, sooner than later.

With the greed of corporations driving the pollution of the planet, bit by bit, we are slowly killing ourselves. The rivers become polluted and we who drink from it or swim in it, contract diseases, which happened with me. But that is a story for another post.

In the meantime, educate your thinking with these links below.

• India’s indigenous are threatened by Vedanta’s mining (video 8 minutes)
• Amnesty International UK’s Take Action page about Vedanta in India
• Crude documentary (I ordered this and should be getting it soon)
• Amazon oil pollution by Texaco (now Chevron) and Chinese oil companies (video 14 minutes)
• Somalia pirates try to stop illegal dumping of radioactive waste
• Pollution in China photography essay

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

At some point I just stopped drawing. I think hockey and video games took up most of my free time. I also remember becoming frustrated with drawing. My method was to copy cartoon drawings free-hand. If there was a picture of Garfield, I’d copy it free-hand and it was nearly identical, except in black in white pencil.

Over time I moved on to more complex drawings, like one of RoboCop. I labored for hours over the intricate mechanical pieces and proportions. I remember it being frustrating more than fun. I think that’s when I hit a road block in my skills development. I never took more art classes besides the few I had earlier in my elementary school years. Not having taken classes seemed to stunt my growth as an artist. I could not draw real world objects if my life depended on it.

This why I’m rather stunned at what I accomplished tonight. For years, I’ve wanted to improve my art skills in the traditional ways of drawing. I recently started reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I attempted my first art exercise before the book went into any teaching. Doing the first self-portrait is a way of measuring how well I improve as I read the book. I expected the self-portrait to be hideous. This is what I did in one hour of drawing myself while sitting in front of a mirror.

"Presence" by Reid Kimball

I can’t wait to see how my skills improve after reading the book and doing more exercises.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

I found the episode inspiring because it uses a popular media format for social good. My chosen medium is video games and my passion is to use it for social good. Several comments from the actors and producers of the show really struck me. One of them was “re-humanizing” people who may be different in some way. The other was that people often resort to violence because they feel they are out of other options, that violence is their only solution.

When 9/11 happened, I was gun-ho blood thirsty for some vengeance and retribution. As the years passed I read more about war and terrorism and came to the conclusion that the US was going about it all wrong. That one can never stop terrorist violence by trying to kill the terrorist before they kill us. It only fuels the fire of hate that lead towards their participating in terrorism to begin with.

The people who are drawn to terrorism are no different from anyone else, but they have suffered greatly and believe they have no other options left than to commit an act of terrorism. The “global war on terrorism” is into its ninth year and in my eyes it’s only spreading. First it was Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Somalia and now it sounds like we’ll be focusing on Yemen for some time. Oh, and then there’s Pakistan, how could I forget? That’s five countries in 9 years where we have launched counter-terrorist operations, usually in the form of drone attacks that kill innocents. There is no slowing if the US continues this behavior and our vulnerability to a terrorist attack is more likely. The war is making us less safe.

Most terrorists are well educated and they must be to go to terrorist training camps. You think they pick up wooden clubs and beat each other like mindless brutes? No, they area in fast paced classes learning calculus and trigonometry and chemistry and dozens upon dozens of weapons names, stats and functionality. They’re smart and their anger is often justified.

The whole point of using military is to scare the enemy into quitting. But with most terrorists, they are fearless and actually welcome death to become a martyr. We can’t win with violence when the enemy welcomes it. We have to listen and by listening, we’ll be able to give them better solutions than resorting to terrorism. One way to stop the expansion of the “global war on terror” is to “re-humanize” the terrorists. We must understand where their hate comes from and it’s not because of our freedoms.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Let me tell you a story. I’ve never told anyone this story in person or in writing or by any other means of communicating stories to others. It was a hot summer evening in 2004, I was on a date with a very kind, generous and pretty woman and we walked together back towards my apartment. We had just finished eating dinner at a local burger joint where I had a cheeseburger without the lettuce, tomato and onion because I couldn’t stand “healthy” food back then.

While walking back, my date was talking about a conversation she had had with someone. My date said, “And I told her, ‘no way, not going to happen.’”

As I listened intently, suddenly, without warning diarrhea started to run down the back of my thighs. I stopped in my tracks, heart pounding, butt cheeks helplessly clenched and said to her, “Uh, there’s a problem.”

She snapped, “That’s what told her! It’s a big problem and it’s not going to happen.”

I corrected her, “No. Me. I… uh… wait.”

I felt a swooshing sensation in my gut. Noticing I was frozen and not saying much, she asked what was wrong.

The next few moments were probably the most embarrassing and hard to deal with I’ve ever had. How do you tell a date, one that you’ve gone out with several times and really like that you just lost all control of your bowels? I had mentioned to her I had Crohn’s Disease when we first started dating, but never went into detail about it with her. I wasn’t even sure she understood what I go through, with the unpredictable diarrhea and painful gut spasms.

I just didn’t know how to tell her and said, “You know how I have Crohn’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it happened.”

“It?”

“Yeah… you know. I need to get to a bathroom.”

“Let’s go back to the restaurant.”

“No, I can’t do that. They’ll see it.”

“Uhm. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

I had to stand there and let it all sink in for a moment, collect my thoughts. We were within walking distance to my apartment and I finally suggested we just walk back to it.

Less than a minute later we reached the gate of my apartment complex. Horrified, I see the gate is closed and locked. Residents have no control over it. I had no key, no remote, nothing. We tried to squeeze through the gaps in the bars but couldn’t.

It was so frustrating because we were less than a 30 second walk from my apartment if the gate was open. Instead we had to take a 10 minute walk in the complete opposite direction to circle around to the other side of the gate.

A mile is forever when your pants are full of liquid shit.

Forever ended when we got back to my apartment. I immediately took a shower while she waited. As soon as I was done, she decided to leave.

I felt so embarrassed; I didn’t know what to say, but “Thanks for being so cool about all of this. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, no worries, shit happens!” We both laughed. “Call me tomorrow, OK?”

Then she left. I was too embarrassed the day after to call her. A week later she told me she was dating another person and it was going really well. That she saw me more as a friend than someone she was dating. At the time I wondered if my incident had anything to do with it. I don’t know and it’s really something I don’t think much of anymore.

So, that’s what life is like with Crohn’s, unpredictably painful physically and emotionally. It was later that same year, 2004, when I felt like my gut was going to explode and I wrote an email to my mom. I don’t remember what I wrote, but it must have moved her enough that she searched online for help. She found a diet called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and during Christmas of 2004 I started it when I came home.

24hrs later my bowels were the most solid I had ever had since Crohn’s started in 1997. Overnight I became a fanatic believer in the power of food to heal one’s body from aliments and diseases.

Less than 2 years later in early 2006, still following the diet fanatically I was able to stop taking Pentasa with no ill effects. On September, 11th 2007 I had a colonoscopy which showed I was in remission from Crohn’s, meaning no signs of inflammation and active disease. It was a huge win for me and ever since then I’ve only grown stronger. No sudden diarrhea and significantly less, if not zero pain on a consistent, daily basis.

I love getting up in the morning, not to go to work, or see a special someone, but to get up and cherish how great I feel and savor every bite or sip I take when I eat. I LOVE how I feel. After years of gut pain and nights of crying, just observing that my gut feels cool and calm, like a refreshing mint brings a huge smile to my face.

To get to this point I’ve had to follow the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, which is a whole foods diet that eliminates fake processed food and only allows natural whole foods that have simple carbohydrates and sugars that occur naturally in the food. I eat very well, organic meats, diary, fruits and vegetables. Here’s a sampling of what has been key to my regaining my health:

• Whole foods (nuts and meat without added preservatives and additives)
• More fruit and vegetables
• Yogurt
• Probiotic
• Glutamine powder
• Vitamins
• Organic whenever possible
• Water (32 oz in the AM and 32oz 2hrs – 4hrs later)

If you think about it, what we put into our bodies is no different than the fuel that we put into a car. The gasoline makes the car go from point A to point B. But imagine if Exxon started making 26 different types of gasoline with added ingredients that made it smell like flowers, colored it different colors or even taste better. But those ingredients were only cosmetic and actually made the gasoline perform poorer and as a result the car started to suffer internal damage.

The engine would begin to rot and rust. No longer were you able to go from point A to point B as reliably as before. You took it to a shop trying to figure out what was wrong and the mechanic said, “It’s a part of the car’s aging process. It’s natural. But I can give it a pill for it. Feeling helpless and trusting the mechanics “expert” knowledge you agree to give the car the pill. Months later, the car starts to leak oil. Another pill. Then the exhaust pipe clogs up and explodes. More pills, more breakdowns. Eventually, you have to scuttle the car and get a new one.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that with your body. What you’ve got is all you’re gonna get. If you have some health issue and you take a pharmaceutical drug for, I strongly recommend you try to eat healthier. You just might find your problem go away months or years later. If not, you at least help prevent future problems from arising and having to take more drugs. If you want to fuel your body with the right ingredients, the same ingredients that we evolved to thrive on millions of years ago, here’s a few tips to get back to the basics:

• Chew your food until it becomes liquid. The enzymes in your saliva are very important for beginning the process of breaking down your food and allowing you to absorb the food’s nutrients. In our modern society we’ve been conditioned to go fast and faster. Sitting down to eat a slow high quality meal has taken a back seat to eating on the go. Say no to this societal shift and reclaim your quiet personal time to take care of what’s important, feeding yourself.
• Avoid packaged food with long lists of ingredients. If the package has a picture of the food on it, don’t buy it. Good healthy, wholesome food doesn’t have advertisements for itself on the packaging. It’s kinda like the guy or gal who drives an extremely flashy car. You know they are compensating for something.
• Stop eating out. This even includes high end restaurants and especially goes for fast food joints like McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, In and Out, etc. They simply cannot sustainably keep food fresh and full of nutrients that is the fuel for your body. Yes, this means more cooking. Trust me that it’s not a big deal. It only takes 20 to 30 minutes to cook a decent, nutritious meal. If you had a choice between fueling your car for 20 minutes and having it last for 20 years or fueling it for 5 minutes and having it last 5 years, which would you choose?
• Buy local, buy organic. It’s your best bet to ensure high quality and nutrient-rich food to keep you healthy. Food that isn’t locally grown usually travels thousands of miles across country. In that time it loses a lot of its nutrient value, but its price doesn’t go down with it.
• Use more olive oil in cooking. Try it with scrambled eggs and vegetables instead of butter. It’s a very healthy cold-pressed oil that is great for your heart.

In the first half of the first decade in 2000 I was suffering physically and emotionally from Crohn’s Disease. In the second half, I began a life changing journey towards health and wellness by changing my lifestyle to cook my own food. I’ve come a long way and while I am pretty much free from physical symptoms of Crohn’s, I still suffer from its emotional scars. It’s hard to explain, but I’m still not 100% confident when going out in public, even though I have nothing to be afraid of now. In 2010 I hope I can continue to improve in that area. To live with a little less fear and to be just as hungry for life as I am for good wholesome food.

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to 2010 and a new decade ahead full of limitless love, joy and growth.

Here’s to food!

Here’s to health!

Here’s to you!

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Goals
I have a passion for creating games that explore more serious topics like health, the environment, human rights and war. I don’t get to make these kinds of games during my day job but I hope to one day because I believe games can provide very engaging and empowering experiences for people. I’ve written about how games can be used for good in several different articles; Using Games as a Dialog with Players, Infusing Games with a Moral Premise, and Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

Part of the reason I wanted to create What Goes Around was to challenge myself in creating a game that could communicate a specific message through gameplay mechanics (called procedural rhetoric) and combine it with other content that strengthens the message.

The term, “procedural rhetoric” comes from an article by Ian Bogost. In my experience, most games that attempt to have a procedural rhetoric tend to be void of context, such as The Marriage. Bare abstract mechanics are difficult for many players to interpret. It’s important for me to explore how to combine both contextual visual and aural elements with gameplay mechanics to say something specific and have it be easily understood.

Inspiration
I was inspired by an anti-war ad campaign titled “What Goes Around” made for Global Coalition for Peace by Big Ant International. The concept of the posters intrigued me because they were printed in wide format to be wrapped around a pole. On one of the posters, at one end was a soldier with his arm extended as if in the middle of throwing and at the other end was a grenade flying through the air. When the poster was wrapped around a pole, it looked like the grenade was being thrown at him.

Another poster with the same concept uses a fighter jet at one end having just fired a missile, which is at the opposite end. When wrapped around a pole, the missile is about to hit the back of the fighter jet.

When I saw the fighter jet poster it immediately reminded me of a video game side scrolling shooter. The concept for What Goes Around instantly came to me at that moment and I challenged myself to adapt the anti-war ad campaign to a video game format with a procedural rhetoric.

The other reason was to express my views about war, especially because at the time the concept came to me, it was August 29th, 2009 and President Obama was debating what to do in Afghanistan. To my disappointment, the night of completing this game, he announced plans to increase troop numbers by an additional 30,000 to be deployed to Afghanistan.

Designing the Procedural Rhetoric
Again, if you haven’t played the game, please do, it only takes a few minutes.

The player starts on the left side of the screen as a Predator drone that can fire one single Hellfire missile. The core mechanic that starts the procedural rhetoric is the player shooting at the target in front of them on the right side of the screen. The target, which is a Turban wearing UFO, which I like to call a Turbalien, disappears as soon as the missile gets near it.

The missile continues to move left to right and then when it reaches the right edge of the screen it wraps around to the left edge of the screen. It continues moving and looping, left to right. This establishes the message of “What goes around, comes around.”

But it needed to be more than simply having the missile loop left to right endlessly. The missile needed to destroy the player on impact to really drive home the idea that violence causes violence, that what goes around, comes around.

Iteration of Gameplay and Message
The first time I play tested it myself, I knew what would happen and moved my Predator drone out of the way so when it looped, it would pass by without incident. I realized that players could avoid the message easily and wanted to change that. I added random deviation to the Y axis of the missile’s path so that it randomly moved up or down. After a lot of iteration, I got it so that it’s impossible to survive after launching the missile. This further strengthened the message, since the delivery of the point was inevitable and also says that no matter what, past transgressions will always catch up to you, it’s just a matter of when.

During futher play testing with other people, they said they didn’t move their Predator avatar after firing the missile, and when it loops around to the left edge of the screen, they died immediately without much understanding of what happened because it was so quick. To fix this, upon launch of the missile initially, it moves down below the Predator avatar so that if the player doesn’t move their avatar, it will pass right by them.

On first pass at this new mechanic, when it was flying below the Predator avatar, the missile started to randomly move up or down, sometimes colliding with it and causing it to explode. I didn’t want that to happen so soon and had to delay the randomness of the flight path until it passed the Predator avatar. This allowed players to witness the behavior of the missile and hopefully understand what was happening.

I included images of civilians caught in war that looped right to left because I feel strongly that there is no good reason for anyone to die, especially civilians. I wanted to draw a connection to the player trying to fire at what they may perceive to be an enemy but have very little understanding of (UFO, alien) more often have unintended consequences for civilians, whether displaced, maimed, killed or losing someone they know. War is different in today’s modern times. Casualties of today’s war may grow up to be tomorrow’s Osama Bin Laden. That’s how I see it at least. It’s insanity to keep waging war and think it will lead to more peace.

The sound effects and music were done by Nikolas Sideris, who did an excellent job despite my not being able to provide him with specific direction. I was only able to communicate the kind of mood I wanted the music to evoke and he did a terrific job. I remarked to a friend that I was afraid the music might out class the whole game and I still wonder about that.

Challenging My Design Philosophy
When I began development of What Goes Around I didn’t foresee how much the game would challenge my views about game design and in the end it helped solidify my positions, their reasonings and discover new ideas.

I’m critical of lengthy single player narrative games. I think most games released are too long and overstay their welcome hours after their worth has run dry. Many games I play could easily be the same, if not better, experience in 2 – 4 hours of length. Most games don’t have mechanics with enough variety or depth to warrant more time than that and their simplistic plots get padded with busy-work objectives that do little to contribute to the heart of the story.

The goal of What Goes Around was to communicate a specific message and while I could have padded it with extra waves of targets to shoot at, I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to waste people’s time or insult them by repeating the procedural rhetoric over and over.

At one point I felt guilty that people would have to download the game but only play it for a few minutes. I realized the game should have been done in Flash. Unfortunately, I don’t have Flash and I’m not an accomplished programmer yet. Development would have slowed to a crawl and I’m sure the game would have never been released. Despite my worries and guilt, I had to ignore them and do what I felt was best for the game, making it short and to the point.

Another traditional design I chose not to implement was progression. Most shooters have the player collecting more powerful weapons and facing tougher enemies. I didn’t include that for two reasons. One, because it would unnecesarily lengthen the game. Second and more importantly it would have distracted from the message I was trying to communicate.

I see many examples of developers attempting to create “meaningful” games but they fail because they resort to mechanics that make the experience about acquiring meaningless points or achievements and it cheapens what they were trying to accomplish. Life isn’t about keeping score, it’s about the emotions we feel within and what we do with them.

One thing I didn’t realize I believed in until designing the game was the idea that it’s OK and even powerful for players not to act. That inaction is just as equally valid and acceptable a choice as acting. In the game, I try to challenge players with this by having a military commander order them to attack the Turbalien. In a way, that military commander is me talking to the player, daring them to attack. If players disregard the order and do nothing, that to me is significant. They reject the call to attack, the traditional gameplay of the genre to shoot anything and everything and instead want a peaceful resolution to war.

After demonstrating their ability to think for themselves and not blindly follow gameplay traditions, I think there is a crack in that moment where they are open to new ideas. After that, a short dialog occurs between the player’s CIA Predator drone and the Turbalien.

Finally, the most contentious part of the game is what happens after the dialog between player and Turbalien, which is nothing. Nothing new happens at all. During the dialog, the player is clued into how they can stop the war, but it’s up to the player do it. The Turbalien says to the player that they can “end the war”. Again, this is me talking to the player, trying to inspire them to act. In the main menu, there is a button labeled, “End War” which replaces the traditional “Quit Game” button. I hoped players would remember that and realize to end the war in the game, they must do what I consider to be a more powerful action, exiting the game, than an action within the game. Most play testers didn’t get that and wanted immediate closure, more ways to express themselves within the game world and not outside of it.

In a way, by quitting the game before any real reward event occurs I see it as a physical commitment to the cause of ending the actual Afghan and Iraq wars. My design goal was to transition players from game world to real world and motivate them to think about the game and its content after exiting. I wanted to motivate people and spark real action to end the wars. It may sound naive and silly, but other art forms are able to motivate people to act in various ways.

Final Thoughts
Designing What Goes Around taught me that a procedural rhetoric is fairly easy to put into games and yet we don’t see much of that, to my disappointment. There is no reason a game can’t. The Modern Warfare AC-130 mission can easily be about poor information and the inability to discern friend from foe from civilian, how one deals with inaccurate information in a war and whether following orders blindly still means doing ones duty. I hope to see more games that use mechanics as a procedural rhetoric coupled with traditional visual and aural content. While What Goes Around won’t win any awards, it proved to me there’s vast potential in this area to be explored.

Also posted on my Gamasutra blog.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

The controversy surrounding the video is that the acronym for the fake organization spells out, “F.A.G.S.” The word fag used against gays is a hateful, offensive and disparaging word. Another word in the same category, but usually accompanied with more extreme vitriol is the word nigger.

Robert Bowling said in a recent interview, “We are responsible for what we say and what we do, and we can be held accountable for our successes and failures.”

They damn well ought to be held accountable. There has been a lot of debate about whether that word is offensive or not and whether Infinity Ward did anything wrong. Most of the people who don’t think the word fag is offensive either lack experience or knowledge of how offensive and dangerous the word is.

The word nigger comes with a history of violent oppression and murder of African Americans in the US. The word fag also has a similar history, remember Mathew Sheppard? He was brutally murdered for being gay. Anti-gay churches picketed Shepard’s funeral as well as the trial of his assailants, displaying signs with slogans such as “Matt Shepard rots in Hell”, “AIDS Kills Fags Dead” and “God Hates Fags”. Like the word nigger, fag also is closely associated with violence and oppression towards a particular group of people, in this case, gays.

There is absolutely no reason for Infinity Ward to be condoning use of that word or making jokes out of it. It’s appalling. Their Modern Warfare series is very popular online and during online matches a lot of trash talking occurs. Some in good fun, some not so much. The word fag is often used, hurled by one stranger to another. Infinity Ward knows their audience very well, but that doesn’t make it OK for them to stoop down to their audience’s level.

They ought to act as a role model. Players respect their games and the work they do. It’s obvious to me that we, the gaming industry have a serious problem on our hands. The problem of hate speech during online multiplayer gaming is so pervasive that we have grown to accept it as people being “asshats”. Shockingly, it seems Infinity Ward embraced it in their ad because they think it’s funny.

In my opinion, we as an industry need to recognize hate speech is a problem and make a concerted effort to eliminate it, the sooner the better. I call on Infinity Ward, all major developers and publishers such as Valve Software, EA, Ubisoft, Activision, Eidos, Bungie, Microsoft and others to release a real PSA about combating online hate speech, respecting one another and good sportsmanship. They could collaborate to release a PSA featuring popular characters from their games or release them individually per game.

They have the power and the responsibility that comes with it to educate their audience that certain words hold more power than virtual guns. If we neglect to act on this pervasive problem, we’re taking a big risk that nothing tragic will happen in the future. We can’t wait for an incident like what happened to Mathew Sheppard to inspire us to action. We need to start now and Infinity Ward has an opportunity to lead the way.

Also posted on my Gamasutra blog.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

No, my problem is mainly with the fact that by and large the videogames industry prides itself on making the most addictive games possible. It’s become a selling point to claim just how addictive the game is. Or to a lesser degree, a developer will claim that someone can put in many hours because of its replayability just for the sake of replay rather than to learn something new.

I can’t think of any other media; theater, painting, music, film, novels or other, where the industry works extremely hard to create addictive works and then further encourages that practice by trying to create monetization schemes that benefit the most from addicted players.

I don’t like it. Not at all. I have a very different philosophical approach to game design. I want to create games that people only need to play once. They are certainly free to play more than that, but it’s not necessary because they get a satisfying experience the first time through.

As a social progressive game designer, I see so many people who are unknowingly victims, locked inside a vicious cycle, unable to escape because they don’t know any better. Games have the power to help free people from being victims in their daily lives. Whether it’s being a victim of prejudice, bullying, sexual harassment, social status, economic systems, disability, disease, or even their own mind, many people are trapped in a vicious cycle of victimization and can’t find ways to break away.

A game can do that though. It’s an idea that has yet to gain mainstream acceptance. Critics of the idea, without being able to see my vision with their own eyes, may call this a boring serious game, or a not so fun self-help game. It’s more than that. It’s an inspirational experience that one can relate to and gain valuable wisdom and knowledge to apply to their own lives. It’s the Erin Brockovich of videogames.

Erin Brockovich is a woman who fought against PG&E in court for polluting the drinking water of Hinkley, CA. The citizens had an abnormally high rate of cancer and sickness. Through her hard work and determination, she taught herself law to take on the powerful utility company, PG&E. The sick citizens whom she fought for were compensated $333 million after winning the suit. While money will never help them regain the health and lives lost, what she did was prove that one person can make a difference for a community by fighting for their ideals and justice.

Erin Brockovich’s story inspired millions and became a very successful film, nominated for several academy awards. Her story is one that can inspire someone to act in similar ways to fight against an injustice. It’s a story, no scratch that, it’s an experience that can be replicated in a game and give people not only the motivation but the real life tools and skills to apply in their daily lives.

In the United States, I look around and I see people who are victims of 24 hour news channels that lack news, victims of a food industry that lacks sustenance and victims of a health care industry that does not care.

It’s all shit and it’s all wrong. Everyone knows it, but few act. If only they knew their power. The games industry thrives on power fantasies, but not the kinds that can change a person’s life. Instead, it creates addictive escapist fantasies and many developers pride themselves in that. They pat each other on the back and tell one another they earned their pay by making people happy, by putting smiles on their faces. By helping them escape all shit that’s killing them.

No, they’re not doing that. Not at all. They’re only delaying the routine of victimization, if only for a few hours. But when players turn off the game and get back to their daily lives, the problems are still there. The media still controls what they think. The food still clogs their arteries and the drugs still create more problems than they solve, forcing them to take more drugs. The vicious cycle continues.

They don’t have to be victims though. My own battle with Crohn’s disease is proof of that. I was once a victim, of my own vanity. Of my own low self-esteem. My acne. I took all kinds of acne medications, one after another. From low grade to the motha-fuckin’ A-Bomb itself, Accutane. It destroyed my immune system. Years later, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. Symptoms for people with Crohn’s can range from blood in the stool, fistulas, bowel obstructions and uncontrollable diarrhea.

It’s a shitty way to live… I can joke about it because my Crohn’s is now in remission. I learned how to break free from the vicious cycle by not listening to my pharmaceutical brainwashed doctors. Instead, I listened to my gut and changed my lifestyle and diet. It took a lot of hard work and dedication, but my story proves the benefits one can wield by refusing to be a victim.

I don’t think of Crohn’s as a curse. It’s a gift. I now eat healthier than ever before and love to cook. I don’t take life for granted. My experience proves people don’t have to be victims, not of their relationships, society, technology, corporations, government or of themselves.

However, people aren’t going to get there without a little help. A game can be the hammer that smashes the chains and breaks them free. But the kinds of games the industry strives to make aren’t going to help anyone get there any sooner. To help people realize their full potential and help improve the world, we can start by breaking the vicious cycle on addictive multi-play games. In this complex and increasingly dishonest world we live in, it’s time the videogame industry stepped up to the responsibility it has when wielding such a powerful yet largely untapped medium.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Cultures thousands of years ago first used values to help influence behaviors and decisions among their people. Values have been so fundamental to the evolution of civilizations that they have helped spawn legal and religious systems that continue to this day.

The strength of a society is often derived from how strongly the public defends its core values. If its people do not strongly protect their values, then it is deemed to fall eventually, as those in power subvert their own laws once deemed inconvenient. It’s worth considering creating games based on values, since values have served an important purpose for thousands of years and will continue to do so.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

If we agree that games with a narrative have a moral universe, full of characters that follow their own moral values and gameplay choices made by the player following their own moral values, then do games have an arc in their moral universe? Do characters go through a moral arc? Does the player?

Too often the main character does not go through a moral arc. The ideal is that the player also goes through the very same moral arc as the player character. However, this depends on the structure of the game. A game may have a linear narrative progression that players simply go along for the ride, whether they agree with their character’s pre-authored moral arc progression or not.

The other option is for the game to react to the player’s choices, interpret where they stand on the moral arc and reflect that back through a slightly non-linear, though heavily guided narrative. This is where the dialog possibilities in games lie, as I mentioned previously in my blog article titled, “Dialog in Games”.

This article proposes a framework that can help establish a game’s and character’s moral arc and how to make sure the gameplay and narrative are in sync.

Creating a Moral Premise
A lot of what I’m going to talk about is heavily borrowed and adapted from the concept of a Moral Premise which is covered in the book, “The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success” by Stanley D. Williams, Ph.D. Williams makes clear in the book that he isn’t the originator of this idea either, rather it was something he observed as existing in many popular and successful films. The idea of a Moral Premise being central to a story is derived from many past writers such as Aristole’s concept of a “controlling idea” and Lajos Egri’s concept of a “premise” in stage plays. While reading the Williams’s book, it struck me that the concept may work in videogames even better than in other art forms such as theater, novels and films.

As stated by Stanley D. Williams, “The Moral Premise is at the heart of all successful storytelling from ancient history right up to the modern day. We find its controlling nature in the writings of Plato, the Bible, and Aesop.” (p.XXII) The Moral Premise serves to describe a story’s moral meaning. It is the practical lesson of the story and the moral does not refer to only what is right, but both what is right and wrong. The juxtaposition of both right and wrong leads to conflict of values, which all good stories require.

Before we can begin creating moral premises for games, we need to look at its structure. The moral premise has four parts to it.

1. Virtue
2. Success
3. Vice
4. Failure

The designer or writer chooses a virtue that they personally believe in and includes its opposite, the vice. Then, using the two, virtue and vice, they construct a statement that they believe to be true. Or coming up with the statement first and then figuring out which values are involved can form the Moral Premise.

For example, say I want to make a game about the virtue trust and therefore I include its opposite, the vice suspicion. Next I formulate a statement that I think is true about trust and suspicion that I wish to use during my dialog with the player through gameplay and narrative.

“Trusting others leads to cooperation and success,
but misplaced suspicion of others leads to mutiny and failure.”

Notice there are two parts to this statement. Part one says, “Trusting others leads to cooperation and success.” Part two says, “Misplaced suspicion of others leads to mutiny and failure.” The game mechanics must be constructed in such a way that through play, the player experiences the truth of either side. Think of it as two sides of a coin, they are inseparable, but a player might only bare witness to one side throughout their play, depending on their choices.

The use of a Moral Premise naturally leads to games that allow multiple play paths. A player could have the following moral arcs through a game:

1. At start: trusting others. At end: trusting others even more.
2. At start: misplaced suspicion of others. At end: learns how to trust others.
3. At start: trusting others. At end: is suspicious of others for no reason.
4. At start: misplaced suspicion of others. At end: has greater misplaced suspicion of others.

Path 1shows how people can achieve greater heights of their potential if they work hard enough. Path 2 is the ideal narrative path showing dramatic change in the player and their character from harmful actions to helpful actions. Path 3 is a tragic tale of falling from grace. Path 4 is another variant on the tragic tale but potentially more tragic as we see someone who can’t escape flawed past actions and falls deeper into suspicion of others.

The nice thing about this concept of using a Moral Premise to make a statement about values is that it can be implemented in purely game systems form or it can be skinned with a narrative to give it context.

Examples of a Moral Premise
As an example, in the purely game mechanics form, imagine a 2D topdown game where you have to escape a maze, but must ask for others to help you. Asking another NPC blob is done with a simple button press and represents entrusting another person with a task to help everyone escape the maze.

However, if you follow behind too closely or ask a specific NPC blob repeatedly, the NPC blobs interpret this as suspicion towards them and they are likely to not cooperate. Mechanically, the player needs to ask once and leave the NPC blobs alone to do their thing, to trust them. While this isn’t deep, hopefully it illustrates the potential.

The problem with a purely system driven game like this is that it’s too abstract. Players won’t know the game is really about the value of trust in society. It won’t come across as a dialog either because it will be hard to tell which questions are being asked, if any at all.

To help with this, the game mechanics of a Moral Premise can be coupled with a narrative to give the Moral Premise context, making it easier for players to understand and reflect upon the moral lesson. This is why stories have been so powerful in cultures over thousands of years. People can relate to them and internalize their meanings.

If we take the above Moral Premise and put it in the context of the player as a captain of a pirate ship with gold treasure, then we can see more clearly the truth of the statement. If players put trust in their shipmates, then at the climax in the narrative when the ship springs a leak, the crew valiantly plugs the hole long enough to reach shore. If players don’t trust his or her crew, everyone fends for himself or herself and you are left alone on the sinking ship.

Without trust that everyone will get an equal share, everything breaks down into a last man standing sword fight, where everyone kills each other and there is no happy resolution. The pirate ships’ treasures sink to the bottom of the ocean, metaphorically representing the group’s morals.

To engage in a dialog, the game designer can use the Moral Premise in story and gameplay to setup situations and characters that ask the player questions. Perhaps something like, “Is it OK to spy on others to protect the groups interests?” The player can answer through a dialog response if it’s posed via character conversation. The game notes the player’s answer and then presents a gameplay situation that tracks the player’s commitment to it. Based on player responses and behaviors and the designer’s own point of view, the game can present counter-points that hopefully persuade the player to reconsider their beliefs if needed or encourage their current viewpoint.

The dialog topics you can have with players are endless. You can have a dialog with players about the right of mankind to serve only their own interests and no one else’s. Doesn’t that sound familiar? In fact, it sounds a lot like the ideas presented in BioShock. Upon a closer look, BioShock already uses the concept of a Moral Premise, though, not as well as I think it could have.

Examination of BioShock’s Moral Premise
BioShock’s Moral Premise is:

“Extreme selfishness and greed leads to destruction,
but selflessness and generosity leads to creation.”

We can see that “Selfishness and greed leads to destruction” is true when one player harvests all of the little sisters for their own gain and they get the bad ending[4]. In that ending the player destroys the lives of the little sisters and escapes with them to bring his brutality upon the world outside of rapture.

If the player acts selfless and generously by rescuing all of the little sisters, they get the good ending[5]. In the good ending, years later on the player character’s deathbed a family of little sisters surrounds him. His selfless actions to rescue them all created a loving family.

Implementation Issues of the Moral Premise in BioShock
However, there are several issues in BioShock regarding the application of its Moral Premise.

• There is a Ludonarrative Dissonance.
• Players can embrace the vice and still “win” the game.
• Harvesting vs. Rescuing doesn’t make the Moral Premise clear until the very end.

Clint Hocking wrote a great critique on BioShock[6], explaining that the gameplay mechanics allow the player to be selfish and greedy through harvesting the little sisters, yet narratively, they have no choice and are forced to be generous in helping another character, Atlas and his family to escape.

A solution and one that applies to all games that use the Moral Premise on purpose is to allow multiple narrative paths that match the multiple gameplay paths. Perhaps players are given the explicit overall goal to escape Rapture and presented with the choice early on to go it alone (selfish track) or to help Atlas and his family (generous track). On either track, the player’s own moral values are tested constantly, in progressively more complex ways that are more difficult to deal with.

In the end, if the player defeats the final boss while on the selfish track, narratively, they do not succeed in escaping Rapture. They are stuck there forever, to live out the rest of their lives as a brutal selfish and greedy dictator. If they finish on the selfless (generous) track, they escape with the little sisters to start a new life and family.

Related to the above issue, in BioShock’s current state, players at the beginning of the game are given the goal to escape Rapture and even if they embrace the vice of the Moral Premise (selfishness) they still “succeed” in their overall goal. This creates a false Moral Premise that says,

“Selfishness and greed leads to freedom and destruction,
but selflessness and generosity leads to freedom and creation.”

Seflishness and greed does not create freedom. People who live by those values become prisoners of their own behavior, or in the case of people like Bernie Madoff, prisoners in the flesh.

The third issue with BioShock’s implementation of the Moral Premise, is that Players who choose either side of the Moral Premise don’t know what effect their choices have until they witness the end cinematic, which is good if they rescue or bad if they harvest. This is not really fair to players because they should have more immediate and frequent feedback based on their behavior. This will allow them to self-correct their path if they decide they don’t like where things are headed.

Film typically shows the main character who has flawed values making poor choices and their consequences early on because they are embracing the vice side of the Moral Premise. At many junction points through out the film they are given a chance to switch sides and are shown the possibilities of living life another way.

This is the personal psychological struggle they go through as they decide how to approach the problem they are trying to solve. Often another character will offer them a chance to embrace the virtue of the Moral Premise but the main character needs to see the value of it own their own. They need to come to an epiphany in which they realize what they believed in the past has been wrong and to be successful they must change their behavior.

Examination of Mirror’s Edge’s Moral Premise
Mirror’s Edge also features a Moral Premise, but it is strictly in the narrative and not within the gameplay mechanics. This is the exact opposite of BioShock’s application of the Moral Premise. The Moral Premise for Mirrors Edge can be stated as:

“Running from someone’s problem leads to them becoming your own,
but running towards other people’s problems leads to solutions for everyone.”

The gameplay is about running, usually by running away from your attackers. Other times you may choose to run towards them to engage in close combat. With notable exceptions in the latter part of the game, the gameplay mechanics don’t lead to negative consequences if you run away. Running towards enemies can lead to either good or bad consequences, depending on the skill of the player. There is no consistent message within the gameplay.

The narrative on the other hand is quite clear. At 4:20 mark in this video[7], the player character (Faith) talks to her sister (Kate) a police officer about the murder of an old friend and a candidate for mayor. Faith in the cinematic expresses her value of running by trying to get Kate to run away from the scene of the crime with her. Faith says, “Come on, come with me. I’ll take you somewhere safe.” Kate refuses to act in such ways, “This isn’t the time to run! I’m not like you. Running will just make me look guilty.”

Kate pleads for Faith’s help and Faith says, “I can’t get involved in this.” But the refusal of Kate’s call doesn’t last long as Faith agrees to help before leaving the scene in a rush to avoid the police. In the ensuing gameplay sequence, Faith must outrun police and is now running towards various leads to uncover the mystery of the murder of Robert Pope and clear her sister’s name. By trying to solve the mystery, Faith helps her sister escape police custody, which could represent the imprisonment of the citizens of the city.

The city is a totalitarian society where the government controls information and spies to get even more. The citizens have given up their freedoms to live under a false sense of security (hello Patriot Act). At the end of the game, players can destroy government computer servers that collect all the communication data of the citizens, thus freeing them, temporarily from their government’s watchful eyes.

The narrative of Mirror’s Edge seems to say that running towards someone’s problem, in this case, Faith helping Kate’s problem of being framed for murder, leads to solving a problem for everyone, such as Faith bringing down an oppressive instrument of a totalitarian government.

The one but massive improvement for Mirror’s Edge’s use of a Moral Premise is to allow players to see the consequences of running away from someone’s problem and the successes that come with running towards a problem to solve it. Again, an open world like structure works best, players are introduced to the world, and maybe they see injustices of oppression by the police, yet do nothing but turn and run away. By doing that, the problem hits close to home and the player’s sister Kate gets in trouble.

It is not unlike the beginning of the film Braveheart where William Wallace wants to stay out of trouble and raise a family in peace. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen and he’s forced to fight back.

The Game Universe Bends Towards Meaningful Experiences
In this article, I’ve introduced you to the idea of using a Moral Premise in games. The benefits are twofold; fuse narrative and gameplay into a more meaningful, cohesive experience and to engage players in a dialog. Stories have been used for thousands of years to teach people within its societies valuable life lessons, morals and profound insights into the human condition. Through a Moral Premise, there is potential to engage players in thinking about important ideas on a variety of subjects that will help them understand the world or their own lives better.

Also posted at my Gamasutra blog.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.