Reiding…

Very interesting conversation between Will Wright, designer of Spore and Jill Tarter, an astrobiologist. I think Jill asks some important questions that Will Wright for whatever reason glosses over. For instance:

NOTE: The following has other questions and responses removed for the sake of keeping this shorter.

JT: Okay, so now they’ve got a better idea. How do they put it into effect, if it’s not already built into the structure of the game?

WW: …they can now have an intelligent debate about how they think it differs from the way the world really works.

JT: I agree with you. But, again I’m eager to understand how learning to be good at a game makes you good at life, makes you good at changing the world, and gives you skills that are going to allow you to reinvent your environment. Because, in the game, you play against an environment that’s been given to you.

WW: I don’t think of games as something to replace traditional education… If you can spark an interest in a kid, then you just have to get out of the way.

JT: I keep thinking about the generation that’s getting exposed to all this wonderful, rich opportunity of game-playing as education, and that they expect to be able to manipulate the real world the way they do the game world. How do we bridge that? How do we turn them into socially functioning members of humanity on one planet?

WW: It’s funny, because I think they are able, more and more, to manipulate the real world like the game world. If you look at the tools that they have available on their cell phones, Google Maps, and such, the amount of formalized information that we can extract from the world around us is skyrocketing. And it’s very much based upon things like game interfaces.

Here he doesn’t answer the question. I think this is a very important question developers of social issue games are trying to answer. How do we make a game that motivates people to affect change in the real world?

JT: Right. But this takes me back to what we’re doing as we use games to study evolution. I mean, are you, Will, the great Pied Piper who is leading our kids into a future where they will accept enhanced attributes in, or on, their own bodies and give up some of the biological aspects of humans as we know them now? Are you leading the way to the singularity?

WW: Well, as I said, if there’s one aspect of humanity that I want to augment, it’s the imagination, which is probably our most powerful cognitive tool…

A different but equally important question Jill asks, is basically, what do our games say to people? It’s a bit of a stretch to assume Spore is trying to get people to buy into the idea of the Singularity. Yet, it is important to be aware of the possible ways our games can be interpreted by everyone. Something I don’t particularly enjoy is that most of the games I play and develop basically say that violence solves everything. I don’t personally believe in that and wish more games had a different message.

Back to how to get players to affect change in the real world. Without making games that are directly tied to our environmental, political and economic systems a game has to make players care about the issue and motivate them to get involved directly. There’s a five step process explained in Made to Stick that has influenced my approach to social issue games. Make players:

1. Pay attention

2. Understand and remember the issue

3. Agree/believe it

4. Care about it

5. Be able to act on it

Biggest challenge is getting players to care about it, step 4. That’s why I believe character driven games can help, because with relateable characters players can empathize with them and understand the situation more.

In cinema, there are many examples of excellent movies that tell a story using a sport as the context for the events that take place. I just watched American Pastime about Japanese in an internment camp who play baseball against many of the soldiers who ran the camp. Then there’s Escape to Victory and Rocky, both starring Slyvester Stallone. Miracle is about the 1980 Olympic ice hockey underdogs that take on and beat the vastly superior Russian elite hockey team and eventually go on to win the Gold medal. It is an amazing story about determination and love for one’s country based on a true sporting event. It’s so inspiring that Michael Phelps (USA Olympic swimming sensation) said he and his teammates watched it before a big meet in the 2004 Athens games.

There a many sports videogames, Skate, Madden, Need for Speed but few have engaging storylines. Why not create a story mode for Madden and give it an engaging narrative treatment that transcends the value we currently give to sports videogames?

Rudy! How could I forget Rudy.

I’ve been playing Braid for about 4 days now and have probably put in over 12hrs. I bought it because someone said you can beat it 6 hrs. Even though I’ve put a lot of time into it, more than I hoped I would, I am enjoying the brain twisting puzzles, for the most part. Some are really frustrating, more than they should be.

The whole game is one big experiment in game design, from the game loading without any title screens to its game mechanics of manipulating time. In the game you collect pieces of a jig-saw puzzle after completing obstacles that deal with manipulating time. Some are easy, some are very hard. So far they are hard because you have to know very specific mechanics of how things work in the game, but the game doesn’t teach you these things. There are also other objects that make you immune to the manipulations of time for a brief moment. Basically, there’s a lot of shit you need to learn and apply to complete some of the puzzles, but the game doesn’t teach you. You are expected to experiment and learn about them as you play. This can take an extremely long time depending on how experimental you are. It’s hard to make this clear without specific examples but I don’t want to give anything away. I’ll just say that only by accident when I made a mistake did I learn about a new ability I had.

I wonder if that’s the whole point? Some of the writing in the game does speak about learning from past mistakes. Maybe that is the point, that by playing Braid you get life lessons, such as, it’s OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them. Though, if someone tries hard enough they can get many life lessons from any game, “Super Mario Bros. teaches you to ‘look before you leap!’”

I’m very very eager to finish Braid with two pieces left to collect. Apparently, the ending makes the whole experience worth it. I’m skeptical.

Over at FullBright blog, (which I wish I read more of) is a concept called “Peace” I really want to see work as a game. Not as a game that you win or lose but a game where you explore your views on the subject of violence. I was going to post a reply in the comments section but it got way to long. I recommend you read Christiaan’s proposal for “Peace” and then read below.

I love the concept and suggest checking out the movie, Rendition. It has a cyclical storytelling approach, where what you see in the beginning is what you see at the end, but from a different perspective. Everything else in the middle is learning a little bit why what you see at the beginning and end occurs.

I feel Peace needs more focus. Focus on the suicide bombing event itself and nothing else. You also need to say something with the interactions players can do. If I were making this game, I would say that violence begets violence, that we must take responsibility for our actions to stop the cycle of violence. Everything in the game must serve this.

I think the sequence of scenes is important. Here are my suggestions:

1. Mother with child caught in suicide bombing. In the café with the daughter, you pick up a newspaper, headlines read, “Increased security amid rumors of suicide bombing.” Daughter asks you, “What’s in the news mama?” Do you tell her that we live in a messed up world and must eliminate our enemies before they do the same to us? Do you smile and give her a kiss on the cheek? Do you try to explain to her the reality of the situation and that violence isn’t the answer?

Mood and pacing: Calm, foreboding, peaceful until the blast.

2. Soldier deals with the chaos afterwards, who’s a threat? Who do I protect? You are given orders to detain anyone you think is a possible suspect and to use any amount of force you deem necessary.

Mood and pacing: Frantic, violent, angry, hopelessness.

3. As someone else, you tell a young boy, 7 his mother died in the suicide bombing. How do you do this? Gently? Not at all? See his emotional reaction, cries, punches you in the legs.

Mood and pacing: Slow, sorrowful.

4. As a paramedic you grab someone injured, put him/her in the ambulance and then discover his/her chest is strapped with bombs. What do you do? Bomb’s disabled, your partner wants to kill the patient, do you stand by and let him/her do that? Do you try to save the patient? Do you join in?

Mood and pacing: Frantic, fearful, angry.

5. You are the suicide bomber. What might make it interesting, is that sometimes they force the bombers to press the activate button and then upon release it explodes. What if players are tricked into doing this and then, “Oh by the way, don’t release Right Trigger until we say so.” What do you, the player, the suicide bomber do then? No matter what, you are a dead man/woman. Do you try to run to an isolated area to not hurt anyone else or say, fuck it, if I’m going, then I’m bringing someone with me. Also, I think it would be very interesting if you see the other suicide bomber that you saw while as a paramedic in the same place as you. It will be interesting to be confronted with the possibilities of your actions and really hit home the idea of violence creates more violence.

Mood and pacing: Slow, fearful, sorrowful, or hopeful.

Here’s an excerpt from a press release on a new social issue game, Dead Ends.

“Dead Ends is a full 3D computer game commissioned by Channel 4 to support Disarming Britain, a major new season examining the effect of gun and knife crime on Britain’s streets.”

Overall, it is an impressive effort by student game developers who had an incredibly short amount of time to make the game, 6 weeks from initial approach to going live with public downloads. I think there are two kinds of social issue games. 1) An awareness building game and 2) a call to action game. Dead Ends succeeds as an awareness building game but I think would be more successful as a call to action game, which requires more resources. Overall I feel its biggest let down is that it doesn’t answer its own question, “why does this happen? Why do teens resort to gang life?”

The game allows you to play as a teenage gang member and a detective trying to find who murdered the teenager. I give big props to the developers for putting the player in the role of the gang member and the detective, rather than some outside observer, such as a journalist which many social issue games use. Yet, despite playing as people directly involved, the game has very little about the real life reasons for teens participating in gangs.

Again, I realize they had 6 weeks and for that it shows how important it is to give social issue games the time needed to develop a game that reaches its full potential by exploring the issues properly. Here are some ways the issue could have been explored further. As a teenager, you live in a low income home with only one parent. For gameplay, you struggle to take care of younger brothers and sisters while cooking dinner for them. You must race back and forth between the boiling pot on the stove and picking up your siblings to keep them from causing trouble. Your mother comes home from work, dead tired and expresses her concerns about paying the bills. Your family needs money quickly or else you will be forced to leave your home. You, the teenager must quit school and find work.

You go to school to hand in your papers notifying them you are leaving and run into a friend of yours. The friend mentions his gang is looking for people and they pay really well. You are free to choose whether to join or not. Pros - lots of fast money. Cons - risk going to jail. You can choose to get a job at a local fast food restaurant instead. Pros - stable, legal job. Cons - doesn’t pay enough and the family still can’t pay the bills. No matter what, due to the circumstances of your situation, you are forced to join the gang and hope for the best.

After joining the gang, you steal cars and earn a percentage on the price of the cars. The more expensive cars are more risky to steal but net you more income for your family. Soon drugs become an option and then turf wars erupt and finally the game ends tragically in the death of the player character.

As the mother, you play a short sequence where you try to do you job as best as possible, but are turned down for a promotion, possible due to a form of discrimination or your level of education.

The other component is to offer a solution. You play the part of someone who’s been sentenced to work with low income kids for a small crime they did. Your character, doesn’t respect the kids who come from low income homes but must learn to do so. You eventually help kids find suitable jobs and take skill building classes after school. The point here is to explore the issues of respect and fear and show the kids other options. The teenagers think fear is the way to get respect. They’ve never been respected in another way by an adult, especially by someone like you. Once your character learns to show them proper respect, they learn that there are other ways besides gang life to get the respect they desire.

With this approach, we see a bit more from multiple perspectives why a teenager may be driven to join a gang and ways to help them realize there are other options.

In closing, I think they could have been able to answer their own question if only more time and resources were allocated for development. Here’s hoping they get another shot at it soon.

A friend of mine pointed me to this criticism of achievements in multiplayer games that happen to detract from the experience because the achievements don’t complement the intended gameplay. I agree 100%, achievements should be integrated into the gameplay seamlessly without encouraging players to deviate from preferred play behaviors.

Some examples:

In The Ship, an achievement could be successfully killing your target without being caught 5 times in a row. It fits within the intended gameplay and lets players be creative, to explore how they can accomplish the achievement.

A poor achievement for the The Ship could be asking the player to kill an opponent only with a knife. This forces players to play a certain way and if too many are trying to get the same achievement simultaneously it hurts the play experience for everyone.

In the early TF2 concepts, there was a plan to allow players to collaborate and help each other, such as a player helping to load ammo for a turret, which would increase the rate of fire for the other player using the turret. Achievements that encourage this kind of collaboration are highly desired.

Speaking of TF2, over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun they show just how much achievements can cause people to stray from the ideal experience the designers intend. I think a solution could be tying achievements to officially released levels. This way, people can’t make special maps solely for the purpose of farming experience points to acquire achievements.

For those trying to find a way to design better multiplayer achievements, a good question to ask yourself is, “If everyone in the game tried to accomplish this achievement simultaneously, would it detract or add to the multiplayer experience?”

When I was younger, I used to play ice hockey and during practice once, I fell down trying to pass others. I thought my coach was going yell and scream about sloppy skating, but he didn’t. Coach said to the whole team, “It’s OK to fall down. It means you are challenging yourself, pushing your body to improve and strengthen your legs.” In other words, I was exploring the limits of my capabilities and fortunately, he did not punish me. I got back up and tried again. Then I fell down some more and it felt great.

After reading one of Clint Hocking’s presentations, it’s clear videogames allow players to explore. Players explore the game mechanics (rules and system dynamics), game space (world), and themselves. Just as when I was playing hockey, trying to explore the limits of my skills, games allow me to explore my skills and my perspectives about the world.

Games often use death and failure for various reasons such as to heighten anxiety/tension or to communicate incorrect choices by the player.

Yet, if games are about exploring and if we want games to encourage players to explore themselves, then using systems that punish players may actually prohibit exploration. Players may become frustrated and stop playing. They may seek out an approach that works and stick with that approach, without trying others in fear of more death and failure. Both of these hinder the freedom necessary to explore and learn from those explorations.

As an aside, not really related to the topic of games as an exploration, another reason to not use death and failure in a game design is because it simply destroys immersion. It breaks the fourth wall by reminding the player, “Hey, you’re playing a videogame! Go RELOAD your last SAVED GAME!”

It also breaks FLOW, the loop of players facing challenges, overcoming them via appropriate feedback loops and then facing increased challenges. Videogames that maintain the cycle of FLOW tend to be incredibly immersive. Players often note that they lost track of time and had no idea what else was going around them in the real world.

Whether you are looking to increase the immersiveness of your game or encourage players to explore the game and themselves, I suggest you think about what value using death and failure conditions adds to your game. You just might find you are better off without them.

Clint Hocking, creative director at Ubisoft consistently makes me think and challenges me as a game designer. On his blog, he talks about an impressive card game that lets people explore the concept of gluttony. As a game design challenge for myself, I wanted to design a videogame that lets people explore the mechanics of gluttony. All of the following is on the fly designing and I haven’t edited it all.

When I think of gluttony, the concepts that come to mind are:

SLOW

HUGE

CUMBERSOME

UGLY

All are negative and fairly easy to put into a game. There must be a mechanic that allows the player to “eat”, to acquire something that is of value, yet there are consequences which in addition to the benefits, make the player SLOW, HUGE, CUMBERSOME and UGLY. Once that system is figured out, you can tie those negative consequences to the game. For example, say we are making a 2D platformer and as you acquire stars, you grow in size. The more stars you acquire the more your fame grows and that translates into points. Yet, the consequences are that your avatar will move much more slowly the larger you get. This will hurt your ability to acquire more stars that move faster than you or to avoid obstacles that get in your way. You’ll also become much larger, which will prevent you from acquiring harder to reach stars. It will make your movement cumbersome, you won’t be able to navigate tricky areas, you’ll have to go out of your way to find easier, alternate routes. Maybe you won’t be able to jump as high, won’t be able to crouch or may even fall down sometimes. Lastly, you’ll become UGLY and the people that adore you will soon find you repulsive and run away.

I was just typing this on the fly and suddenly, I realize while the mechanics are about gluttony, they can also be about greed and this could be a metaphor for people who seek fame. Those who seek to be famous, sometimes end up making themselves look ugly (plastic surgery) or they do things that make their personalities repulsive. With the new fame comes many demands for time and therefore, they move more slowly. They become “HUGE” as in, very visible and unable to escape the public eyes.

So, this was really fun, choosing a theme and coming up with a game on the fly. Question for you, would anyone play this?

There was a lot of interest at the 2008 Game Developers Conference regarding creating videogames for social good, explore human themes or that at least are embedded with something important to say. I’m really happy to see this because it’s a goal of mine to create games around social issues that inspire people to take action.

Related to that, Philip Zimbardo (social psychologist of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment) is interviewed on Wired.com about his work and his theories as to why good people can become evil and treat others inhumanely. He says during the interview, “But once I switched to being the prison superintendent, I was a different person. It’s hard to believe that, but I was transformed.”

Here’s something to think about. I do believe videogames can be used to transform people, help them to be more open to different ideas and possibilities, to be more tolerant, and accepting of others. That’s all fine and dandy, but if I believe that to be true for the positive side of videogames, shouldn’t I be able to admit that videogames can do the same for the negative side? If videogames can make people more tolerant of others, can’t they also have the power to make people less tolerant?

It’s a scary thought, because, as creators of the most immersive and potentially most influential medium yet, we have a great responsibility not to screw things up for everyone else.