Clubberjack’s Unfocused Ramblings

• The Escapist : The Game Design of Art
  A fantastic explaination of where games have to go to be recognized as Art — I’ll try to blog soon about why I agree and disagree at the same time.
  (tags: gamedesign game art)

I bought it this weekend, but I really want to finish Assassin’s Creed before I get lost in Liberty City.  Edge provides further commentary on the greatness of GTA IV:

It’s unforgiving stuff – an evisceration of America’s insularity, its gluttony, its petty suburban miseries, its lethargy and artificiality. As funny as GTA IV is, this really is laughter in the dark – brilliantly observed, unnerving and bitter.

…

Through encounters with friends and girlfriends, GTA IV tackles this disconnect [between likability and sociopathy -CJ] head on, revealing that the contradiction is in Niko himself: a man troubled by his own bleak world-view, traumatized by his experience of the Balkan conflict. With his humanity whittled down, Niko arrives in Liberty City looking for revenge, but you don’t have to spend long in his company to hope he finds redemption instead.

The whole review is worth reading.

Some thought provoking links from the past few weeks:

• Keith Stuart of the Guardian wonders “can games do the apocalypse?”
  This one really got me my designer brain cranking.  Could you design a game that portrays an apocalyptic event in the middle without alienating the player?  Ideally, you’d want to use the same mechanics on either side of the event, but the change in the environment would change the dynamics (and therefore the aesthetics) arising from those mechanics.  You’d want the player to simultaneously feel mastery of the mechanics (the same as before the event) and experience loneliness and solitude through the lack of familiar ways to interact.  Seems do-able but difficult.
• Borut Pfeifer asks “how can a game be subversive?”
  It seems like the answer lies not in the trappings of the game but in the systems and mechanics.  Perhaps this relates closely to my previous discussion of choice and consequence.
• Chris Plante explores the sandbox games we’ve seen lately (Crackdown, GTA IV)
  I really enjoyed Crackdown, and I wonder if that game and Assassin’s Creed might be spoiling GTA IV for me.  If I can’t scale buildings and run across rooftops, I’m going to feel rather limited.

That’s all for now.

This all started with a column from Randy Smith, in which he wonders what happened to true choice and consequence in games. He observes a trend in game design towards “stripping away everything but the fun” in service of providing the most entertaining experience for the player. On the face, this sounds like a good idea, but Smith points out that we’ve removed the messiness and challenge that comes from true consequences. He worries that by streamlining the process in the name of fun we are actually teaching some dangerous mindsets:

Sure, I’m overstating a bit, but I worry that in the course of evolution we created a philosophical divide with exploration, choice, and consequence on one side and goals, scores, and balance on the other. I’m not sure the two sides are equally vital for producing unique, relevant works. Are we so hooked on the escapist fantasy of an uncomplicated life, of reverting to the safety of childhood, that no other games should be made? Have we explored alternatives? How can we make a game about something personal and organic, like human relationships, if we insist on goals and scores? What kind of relationships would we portray?

He makes a good point. While it’s challenging to design a game system that doesn’t pander to the player, it seems like a worthy challenge. Brenda Brathwaite raises the issue in relation to the specific mechanic of death. Just that one mechanic has seen a trend from arbitrary and mean to almost meaningless. Perhaps there’s a solution between the two? Or maybe we need to change our perspective completely, focusing on things that can be meaningful without being mean.

I haven’t been paying close attention to the lead up to the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Clearly, it’s going to be a good game. However, I may have underestimated the importance of this particular game. From the New York Times:

Grand Theft Auto IV is a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun. It calls to mind a rollicking R-rated version of Mad magazine featuring Dave Chappelle and Quentin Tarantino, and sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts.

…

Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else. The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture. Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup.

This calls to mind Clint Hocking’s description of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:

GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.

I guess these Rockstar guys are on to something. I’ll be looking at GTA IV more eagerly now…

UPDATE: More corners heard from:

• Daily Show
• Guardian (Peter Lyle)
• Guardian (Keith Stuart)
• NPR

This has been around for a while, but I’ve only recently played Passage by Jason Rohrer. Just as I was going to write some insightful commentary, I found that my favorite blogger/journo-type, Clive Thompson, has already said some pretty smart stuff in a Wired column:

What makes Passage so remarkable is not merely its lovely, intentionally abstract graphics. It’s that Rohrer uses the mechanics of gameplay as metaphors. He takes the very thing that Ebert finds artistically limiting about games — the player’s agency, her ability to interactively “do” things — and uses it to explore human experience.

I recommend reading all of Clive’s piece (though playing the game first would be a good idea - it won’t take long). He delves into some analysis of the metaphors, which is nice. Rohrer’s Creator’s Statement is also worth a read (again, after playing the game).

For me, what was missing from Passage, a game about life and death, was the notion of children.  Representing life without recognizing birth seems incomplete.  However, Rohrer’s got me covered here too, with Gravitation, a game that reflects the creative process and its relationship to family (once again, the Creator’s Statement is worth reading).  If anything this one hit home more acutely than Passage.  Maybe it speaks more directly to what’s going on in my own life (hint).

Heh.

Clint.  Brenda.  Warren.  Ultimately, I just wanted to draw attention to Clint Hocking’s continued eloquence.  This time, his words came via Brenda Brathwaite’s interesting article in the Escapist.  Before you could say “blockquote,” Warren Spector beat me to the punch.  Here’s a taste:

It makes me very sad that many of these people will die fearing games. I would so rather include them, but they have to meet us in the middle or become sad, lonely, reclusive luddites.

It’s a zinger.  Read the whole quote in Warren’s post.

I recently ran across a reference to Philip Zimbardo’s talk at the TED conference.  Zimbardo is, of course, the man who ran the famous (or perhaps I should say infamous) Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, and he is still studying humankind’s capacity for evil, a transformation which he has labeled the Lucifer Effect.  From the Boing Boing post summarizing Zimbardo’s TED talk:

Abu Ghraib soldiers were good but the barrels were bad and that made bad apples…  When Rumsfeld came to investigate, he said “who is responsible?” That’s the wrong question to ask. “What is responsible?” What turns good soldiers into bad? What is the bad barrel? The power is in the system, it creates the situation that makes people evil.

To me, a game designer - a designer of systems - this is a really fascinating concept.  I would love to design a game system that encourages evil using some of Zimbardo’s principles (though I suppose you could argue that games like Fable already do this to a certain extent).  But more than that, I wonder about a game designer’s ability to design real world systems that discourage evil.  The best game designers utilize their skills to create systems that give rise to certain behaviors (that would be dynamics, in the MDA framework) with certain aesthetic results (the A, of course) for the players.  Could a game designer craft a societal system (through policy, economic manipulation, law, etc) that removes some of the conditions for the Lucifer Effect?  Could that be done working within the current system or would we have to start from scratch?  Or is this just what policy wonks and economists already do?

Interestingly, Zimbardo offers his own antidote to the Lucifer Effect: Heroism.  At first blush, this would seem to be what (some) games offer, tutorials in heroism.  However, Zimbardo cautions that the heroism of “comic book superheroes” is wrong.  It’s hard to look up to someone who has superpowers, someone who can do things you will never be able to do.  Zimbardo puts forward real role models (whistle blowers, for instance) as courageous people who act heroically in the face of real personal risk.  Maybe, instead of game designing reality, we need to focus on creating games that address this kind of courage and heroism (a game equivalent to Michael Mann’s The Insider as opposed to Spider-Man).

Coincidentally, after reading the Zimbardro piece, I flipped through Jane McGonigal’s slides from the Game Designer’s Rant at GDC.  She offers a middle ground (in a way).  Integrate games into the real world to foster happiness.  Fostering happiness and eliminating evil may seem somewhat different, but it’s hard to imagine that creating happiness wouldn’t eliminate some of the conditions that give rise to evil.

Thoughts from GDC coming soon.  In the meantime, here’s some random linkage:

• Introversion inspires me
• Clint Hocking is my hero
• Clive Thompson thinks about human/AI relationships in games
• Sweet wooden art (the robot is great, but the Chewbacca is priceless)

That is all… for now.