Since I quietly reopened this blog, I've been kicking a thought around in my head. It keeps coming back to me, even when I think I've given up on it, so there must be something there. I think I've had trouble figuring out how to write about it, because it seems to touch a lot of things. But I'm going to try.
There's an ongoing question of what drives us. It's been a part of writing this blog over the years; it's part of any deep examination of ourselves and what we do; our behaviors. Games are behavior. Making them is behavior. What's begun to interest me is not so much what games "are," or what they "should be," or why we're compelled to play them or make them, but, being so compelled, what values we uphold when going about these behaviors. What I keep coming back to is the value of respect.
Respect, I think, is at the crux of every interaction we have in life. Respect toward others determines whether a child is bullied or not; whether someone is robbed or not; whether a discussion becomes an argument, or an argument an altercation, or an altercation a murder. Respecting others is seeing yourself in them. Mutual respect between peers is the foundation of a healthy and long-lasting relationship, which leads to everything else. The golden rule. So on and so forth.
These observations are nothing new, but they seem to be at the center of everything in our lives. They determine how we interact with the world, and therefore who we are. And so conducting oneself in a way that shows respect to others would seem to be the utmost value one should uphold in all things. It's worth considering what this means, not just in big, overt interactions like those mentioned above, but in small, indirect ones, too-- how we impact people through what we do, even people we might never meet.
Games are made up of interactions. And the game itself, the artifact, is an interaction between the designer and the player. What is respectfulness in this sphere?
One aspect concerns the rules of the game itself, and how they regard the player. If there is any resource in our lives that has value above all others, it must be time. Time is something we never get back. We live, then we die; how we spend the time in between is the only thing with real, irreplaceable value. All other resources-- money, energy-- are means to the end of spending that time in a way that we find rewarding.
And so any game mechanic that willfully wastes the player's time inherently disrespects the players themselves, by stealing away something they can never get back. This exploitation takes many forms: "grinding," wherein the next gameplay milestone is delayed only by repetitive, meaningless action (a "timesink," as opposed to a meaningful decision or display of skill.) Or unskippable story sequences, requiring the player to watch for minutes just to get to more play, whether they want to or not (this lack of the ability to opt-out serving the storyteller's ego, not the player.) Or the "energy" mechanics in "freemium" games, whereby you can only perform so many actions per hour before you must wait to play more... or spend money to be able to play more right now. In other words, trading your money in exchange for your time. Clearly one of those resources is more inherently valuable to the player than the other; these freemium games exploit this dichotomy willfully, to their own ends, not the player's.
That is what it comes down to: making design decisions in the interest of the player, not the developer. A fair exchange of value is respectful; creating a play experience which is inherently valuable to the player, and requesting a fair price in return is respectful. Taking someone's money with the promise of a valuable experience, then wasting their time or trying to extract more money once they've already paid is just the opposite. Everyone wants to be respected: you, and your players. Uphold your end of the bargain.
It's kind of absurd to have to come all the way back around to this conclusion. All I'm describing is commerce as it's existed for thousands of years. A valuable product for a fair price; any less is a swindle, or robbery. But in this day and age the form that a "product" can take, and the methods by which value can be compromised, are constantly expanding and morphing. It's worth remembering that any decision made expressly in the interest of the developer's personal gain-- "this is so the player will pay more in microtransactions; this is so the player will keep playing longer instead of trading in their game"-- compromises the core value proposition, the thing they've paid for, and breeds a rightly suspicious player. Respect, on the other hand, breeds respect-- customer loyalty, through trust not coercion.
We can show respect to others through many aspects of our lives. In our personal relationships with friends and family, clearly; in our interactions with strangers in public; in supporting equal rights for all people, whether they're exactly like ourselves or not; and, if we're going to develop games, in the experiences we craft for players, and what we ask in return. The respect you give your players will come back to you; it will make having made the thing worthwhile.
2.18.2012
Respectfulness
1.17.2012
1.13.2012
What if things were different
I'm currently reading Uzumaki by Junji Ito, a horror manga where supernatural phenomena revolve around spiral patterns. I find it to be more of dark humor than truly frightening, but that's okay. It's a fun, strange, and often really gross read. But aside from the specific content, I appreciate the approach Ito takes in creating his own twisted take on the modern world. It's a technique used often; this work just brought it to mind.
Uzumaki is a series of stories that take place in a small Japanese coastal town where people go about their lives and everything functions normally-- except that the town has somehow mysteriously been "infected by the Spiral." One man becomes obsessed with the spiral, until he is drawn in so deeply that he contorts his body itself into a spiral form, losing his life in the process. When he is cremated, the smoke rises into the sky, causing a spiral in the clouds that transfixes the town's residents. Unsettling whirlwinds spiral through the town; locks of girls' hair spiral and take on a life of their own; the spiral stairway of a lighthouse leads residents to their death. The spiral is everywhere, and it makes life in our world different, scary, and surprising.
It's a way of thinking that many artists possess, and that leads us to follow them into their imagined works: the power of visualization, not to take the world around them for granted, but to picture, "what if things were different?" It connects straight back to how we see the world as children. Before we know how everything around us works, and we settle into static assumptions about our surroudings, the possibilities are endless. It's the fertile ground in which imagination grows. Could there be a monster in the closet or under the bed? No reason there couldn't be, so maybe there is! Could aliens come down out of the sky? Could dogs and cats talk to each other when people aren't around? Could there be ghosts and angels everywhere, that we just can't see? Could another world exist on the other side of the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole? Before we knew it couldn't, it could, and we imagined, "what if this IS the way the world works?"
This kind of functional question, explored in fiction like Uzumaki, engages directly with the rules of our world. It disrupts them, adds in a variable, and explores the implications. In that sense, this sort of imaginative journey maps directly to games. It changes the ruleset of ordinary life, and games are all about rules. The sense of discovery is the same, when you first get your hands on a new game and explore how it works: what do the buttons do? What can I pick up and climb onto and go inside of and affect in this world? How does everything work? Once you've become comfortable in that gameworld, and all its possibilities are exhausted, the newness and sense of discovery fades away.
But the artist continues to see new possibilities. And in that way, game designers can take the world we know, imagine if it worked differently, and then by abstracting and implementing those rules in a game, allow players to experience the possibilities they've imagined. Working backwards, having come in contact with this new and unexpected vision of our own world, the player can return to their familiar assumptions, and question them just a bit more.
If you've read Uzumaki, you probably didn't think about spirals the same way for a while when you encountered them in your daily life. And if you've played Katamari Damacy, maybe you had trouble driving for a while without thinking about rolling up traffic cones. Maybe you enter the lobby of the public library and think what you'd use for cover if the Covenant were to attack, or start noticing great hiding spots for GTA's Hidden Packages as you wander around the city.
All of us should be so lucky as to retain our sense of wonder and infinite possibility from childhood; the best games show us possibilities we never would've imagined, let us play with them, internalize them, and bring them back into our own world, imagining, "what if?"
In small but important ways, contact with inspiring gameworlds transforms our everyday into something just a little bit less ordinary.
11.03.2011
Helping Players Find Their Own Way - talk from NYU Practice 2011
This past weekend I was lucky enough to participate in the first annual Practice Conference at NYU. I gave a talk on level design technique and wanted to share it here. So please click through to the presentation on Slideshare and be sure to click the "Speaker Notes" button beneath the slideshow. This way you can read through the presentation along with the illustrations.
Here's the presentation.
You can also download the .ppt directly from Slideshare if you prefer to view it offline.
Thanks to Charles Pratt, Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman and everyone at NYU for inviting me, and to all the incredibly smart and inspiring designers I met there. It was a fascinating event and I'm really glad to have taken part. Hope to be there again next year!
9.18.2010
The closed loop
"Humanity, loss, race, friendship, acceptance - heavy topics for any medium, and especially difficult for videogames. After finishing Minerva's Den, these are the things I'm contemplating regardless."
So, a couple of weeks ago, Minerva's Den, the story-based DLC for BioShock 2, was made available on Xbox Live and Playstation Network. This gives me some stuff to talk about.
8.27.2010
The Thinker Knows
BioShock 2: Minerva's Den will be released for Xbox 360 and PS3 on August 31! 800 MS points, $9.99 on PSN. Below is a trailer we put together to herald the launch. I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I hope you'll find it intriguing as well.
That Minerva's Den poster at the end is the handiwork of the immensely talented Karla Zimonja, my assistant director on the project, and Devin St. Clair, our lead artist. It sure would make a nice desktop image, wouldn't it? Well, sure!
8.05.2010
Minerva's Den
It's officially announced! The upcoming story DLC for BioShock 2 is called Minerva's Den-- a new part of Rapture with its own story, featuring a cast of new characters plus a few familiar faces.
I was writer and Lead Designer on the project (as well as designing the first level myself...) and while I can't say much more about it yet, I can say that I'm extremely proud of what our team accomplished. Lots of new stuff is packed in there for one DLC! New levels, new story, new weapon, new Plasmid, new enemy and bot variants, even a new type of Big Daddy!
It's funny: I guess this makes me some sort of specialist on expansion content. My first design job was on an expansion pack for FEAR, then I worked on a direct sequel, and now an expansion for that direct sequel. I look at it as a blessing, really: never underestimate the value of working on top of a stable base.
Anyway, I'm really excited for people to start exploring Minerva's Den. It's a little project, but one with a lot of heart, I feel. Look for more info soon.
8.02.2010
On the old vs. the new
I think it's fair to question the motives behind striving for "immersion," sensory or otherwise. "To be immersed" shouldn't be an end unto itself; it's a means to achieving some specific mix of sensation, but what?
I think that, at its essence, traditional, sensory immersion imparts a feeling of wonder: wonder at being in a wholly different place and experiencing a context outside our everyday, to feel new in some way. It rekindles that feeling of endless possibility that surrounded us in childhood, which I feel is a very good thing indeed.
Big, expensive, sensorily-complete video games have spent decades pushing towards the sense of truly "being there" in a simulated space. The player is drawn into the fictional world, and is given the chance to exist there for some time before returning to our own. It gives us new places to visit, places that have never existed and that never will.
These experiences are most often solitary, shutting out the rest of our world so that we can exist wholly in the other. Is this isolating? Lonely? Escapist? Maybe it is, if too are the experiences of immersing one's self in a novel for hours, or sitting silent and still in a darkened movie theatre, or listening through a new album end-to-end, headphones on and eyes shut.
There is of course more than one way to achieve this sense of wonder.
7.17.2010
Specific Violence
How does one refer to this discussion? It's the one we have all the time, in the blogs and in the design pits-- the one about maturity, about meaning, gravity, the medium mattering. About how all we do is let players shoot each other in the face and how we could be so much more. The one about our potential and how we fall short and what we can do about it. The one about how we're a bunch of little boys who want to grow up but don't know how. That one.
It strikes me that we discuss these things in vague and airy terms, but we don't know what we're looking for. Maybe we know what we're not looking for-- "I want a game where you don't have to kill things all the time"-- or what accolades we desire-- "for games to be considered art"-- but we don't have the concrete, mid-scale examples of what trips us up, or exactly what we need to achieve. We're missing a measuring stick.
All together now:
Violence in film, literature or on stage can either be meaningful or meaningless. When it is meaningful, it resonates with the audience; when it is meaningless, it is largely (and rightly) derided. Consider the death of Shakespeare's Hamlet following a duel, or of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, or of Evelyn Mulwray at the end of Chinatown, versus, say, the nameless mooks mown down in Rambo II or Commando or Hard Boiled. The killing by the protagonist of those without identity devalues human life in the work, and thereby robs the violence of meaning (it being perpetrated upon human forms with no value.)
And so a metric for games comes to mind: violence performed by the player in a video game is only legitimate if the victim is a unique and specific individual.
The metric becomes a constraint on content: don't remove the violence-- remove the faceless masses of "enemies." If every character the player interacts with is a unique and specific individual, then any act of violence committed by the player is invested with some amount of meaning: individuals have families, homes, jobs, friends, and most importantly, relationships with other characters in the game. The player's act spiders out from the individual to those that surround them, even if that social web is for the most part only implied. There are no more broad swaths of generic violence, then; there are only discrete acts of specific violence, each of which has the potential to matter.
The metric becomes a constraint on scale: if the player is able to commit violent acts, and they may only visit violence upon individuals, then every character the player meets must be unique, and therefore the approach to making the game-- the scale of environments, the construction of the cast, what the player does-- must be considered differently from the ground up. The end product cannot be the same.
At that point, maybe violence in games starts to mean differently.
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Notes and examples:
* This obviously shares some overlap with Warren Spector's theoretical "one city block" game. If a game took place entirely within one city block, then clearly every person in the game would be an individual with a face and name, and any violent act performed would instantly reverberate through the entire block (or have to be very carefully concealed.) Maybe this is an idea whose time has finally come.
* One extant example that takes a somewhat more abstract form would be Shadow of the Colossus. While they aren't human, there are only sixteen enemies in the entire game (no filler fodder to wade through between Colossi) and each has its own unique appearance, environment, and behaviors. When you kill one, you have killed the only one of its kind, and the act carries with it a sense of sorrow and regret. The killing is a transaction between the player and another individual; and so, the violence has meaning.
* SPOILER: Consider BioShock. At the climax of the story, Andrew Ryan is killed by the player. This follows the deaths of hundreds of Splicers, deranged freaks that attack the player on sight and are eradicated en masse ("it's the same guy!") And yet, despite the numbing effect that this shredding of fodder should have on the player, Andrew Ryan's death still means. And it means not because of the fact of the parentage twist, but because Andrew Ryan has been built up over the course of the game as an individual, with an intellect and a history and a set of ideals. Such is the power of violence against the individual, that its ability to mean survives despite any devaluation of human life that precedes or follows it.
* Similarly, embracing fodder in film generally relegates the work to genre status, but not always: think kung fu films. Masses of foes fall to the heroes, and the works are considered niche and lightweight. Then along comes a film like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that wraps a compelling human melodrama around kung fu fighting at the height of its grace and theatricality, and it moves us as any great piece of human expression might. But it is the exception, not the rule. Alternately there is a whole genre of film-- the slasher film, like Friday the 13th or Saw-- that is composed of nothing but individual, named characters being killed, and these films are almost always dismissed as trash. The problem of course being that these individuals are introduced for no other purpose than to be killed in spectacular ways (and maybe to get naked.) Point being, removing fodder is no magic bullet.
* There are games now that are both character-based and have no generic fodder characters: games like The Sims, Animal Crossing, or most point-and-click adventure titles. Notably, they almost never feature any potential violent interaction at all (or if so, introduce more generic targets to the game for this express purpose: think of the bike duels in Full Throttle.) The mixing of the two seems to be largely taboo, possibly because it's really hard to support.
* A character doesn't have to be lavished with tons of backstory, a fully-fleshed-out family tree, or even a name to be a unique and specific individual: we might not know the name of the cop who's tortured and killed in Resevoir Dogs, or the men killed by Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver, or the female Viet Cong killed at the end of Full Metal Jacket, but they are nonetheless individualized, and their deaths are meaningful in context. The specifics known about individuals are scalable, whereas fodder is only fodder.
6.17.2010
Darks Days 2
Sorry the blog's been dark (again.) I'm consumed once more by getting something squared away at work. Hopefully sooner than later it'll be revealed publicly. Until then... maybe not a lot of blogging. Apologies, but with any luck, this will end up having been worth missing some blog posts for.