Category: Thoughts

I very much enjoyed reading Steve Gaynor’s insightful article about the future of games. There’s a lot of good points in the article, so I recommend reading the whole bit as any kind of summary would not do it credit. His main point is that

video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have

I find it interesting that he isn’t talking about the medium as an art form but simply as something with cultural relevance, be it good or bad quality, high or low brow. The main obstacles for games, according the Mr. Gaynor, are high barriers to access and a certain attitude within the industry to continuously cater to the same incrowd. He likens this situation with that of comic strips which, despite of having produced several master pieces, are still by and large regarded as juvenile.

The one thing that I think Mr. Gaynor is overlooking is that the new medium that he is talking about, is not “games” as such but a much wider field of interactive entertainment. Games are a subset of the interactive medium. Almost as much a genre as action movies are a genre of cinema (and perhaps even comic strips a genre of literature).

Games have been around for millenia. They are neither new nor are they a medium. They have their place in society but they have never had a cultural impact like architecture, painting, music, literature or movies. The mere fact that games are made with and enjoyed through computers will not change this.
Games are not what is interesting and new about this medium! What it is exactly, we haven’t quite figured out yet. But we’re working on it. Some of this work is done within the games industry. Some of it outside of the games industry.

I share Mr. Gaynor’s pessimism about games ever becoming widely culturally relevant. In fact, I don’t find this pessimistic at all. It would worry me to no end if the human race would suddenly start playing games en masse. But I don’t believe his pessimism applies to the entire interactive medium. The small group of games that do reach further, may very well be the first steps into a much more accessible and widely relevant interactive medium. But that medium will probably not be called “games”.

Unless, perhaps, some smart business people in the games industry follow Mr Gaynor’s advice:

Who do you want to be backing further down the line: an insular, stunted medium like comics, or a full-grown, culturally-relevant, and hey, PROFITABLE, medium like film? We aren’t going to reach that point by catering to the current hardcore. And we’re not doing ourselves any good by assaulting the casual gamer with the deluge of crap that’s been thrown at the Wii audience so far. We’re going to expand our customer base by trying to give them new, subtle, interesting approaches to interactive experiences that are universal and human.

The article below is somewhat of a continuation of the things that came up in our post “The meanings of games” and the comments that followed it.

There are two very distinct ways in which computer games can be experienced. As a result, there are two very distinct ways in which they can be designed. On the one hand computer games can be the culmination of formal games. With clearly defined rules, challenges, goals and rewards. Abstract and logical systems. The fruit of a happy marriage between automated logic and the strict rules of games. On the other hand, we see a form of experience (and design) that is growing in importance as computer technology becomes more powerful and accessible. Here the focus is on storytelling and expression. These games tend to feature recognizable graphics and sounds and less formal kinds of play and interaction. They use computer technology to breathe life into landcapes and characters and to connect things with each other.

At the moment, game design (and experience) seem to be in a schizophrenic state, attempting to fuse games-as-systems with games-as-stories, if you’ll excuse the rather poor terminology. A futile attempt, in my opinion, that does neither any good.

Computer games designed as systems are perfect. They are intricate machines that are complete by design. A computer could run games like this all by itself. But that wouldn’t be much fun. So the designer purposely destroys one of the cogs in the machine and allows a human to take its place. The challenge for that human is to be as good as the cog. The better you perform, the better the machine will run and the more pleasure you will experience.

Computer games designed as stories are much simpler. They don’t do much on their own. They don’t have missing parts. They are a missing part. What they become is entirely up to the user. And it is in this becoming that games-as-stories differ from games-as-systems. They may not be very significant by themselves, but they have limitless potential for growth. As they become part of the human who interacts with them.

If games-as-systems are big machines that allow you to play a little cog, then games-as-stories are little cogs that want to find a place in the big machine that is the user. The system-machines require the cog to change and adapt, to try and become as perfect as itself. The little stories-cog does not change ever. But when it becomes part of a user-machine, it causes changes in that machine. And these changes know no boundaries.

Games-as-systems create magic circles. Becoming part of the game, stepping into the magic circle, requires accepting the rules of the game, performing in a way that the system expects, playing the role that you are supposed to play. As an abstract ruleset, the game does not need you. The magic circle does not disappear when you stop playing or when you break the rules. It just becomes invisible. To you. You play or you don’t play. And there is a clear border between the two.

Games-as-stories don’t require you to become a part of them. They want to become a part of you. If you allow them to, they will find a little place for their own in the flow of your life. There is no need for you to suspend life for a moment and to step into a magic circle. Games-as-stories step into your life instead. How far they go, how much they mean, or even if they make the step at all, is left entirely up to you. They don’t absorb you. You absorb them. And then they change you from within.

Games-as-systems push you to become as good as a computer would be. They require your submission to their rules and don’t allow you to add to them. They are perfect. And that is their limitation. And why they are not art. Perfection is a level cap. It implies an upper limit to the possibility space. It ultimately confines the experience of the user.

Which is not to say that games-as-systems can not be enjoyable. They most certainly are, especially as they continue to challenge you to become perfect. Systems can also be beautiful. Systems create patterns. Patterns bring pleasure to the human brain. Or think of the beauty of mechanical clocks and ship engines. Marvelous spectacles to behold!

Compared to those, the game-as-story is small and modest. It does not offer much. It requires your attention, your devotion, your willingness, your creative input. It cannot mean anything without you. But with you, its potential for meaning is limitless.

There is nothing wrong with games-as-systems. We all enjoy them. But when we try to combine them with games-as-stories, the perfection of the system tends to hold back the potential of the art! I don’t know how far games-as-stories can go, artistically. Maybe not far at all. But we should give them the opportunity to explore what’s out there.

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Original clock image kindly borrowed from DTP999.

As the graphics of computer games continue to improve, my desire to explore their strange new worlds increases. Sadly, however, contemporary gameplay design often does not allow us to actually enjoy the simulations that the developers so painstakingly build.

Games have become ever more realistic, ever better at simulating living breathing worlds. They look and feel and sound convincing. The only aspect that is lagging behind is interaction. Game interactions feel rigid and artificial compared to the environments they happen in. Which is a pity since it seems like it would be an easy problem to fix. It can be as simple as not demanding too much effort or skill from a player, as Endless Ocean shows. Or just allowing players to walk around without doing any missions and making that interesting, as happens in Grand Theft Auto.

In many contemporary computer games, however, game structures are starting to clash with the graphics and the sounds and even the A.I. and other simulation aspects. Soon gameplay itself will be the cause of the dreaded uncanny valley: the thing that makes you stop suspending your disbelief, the thing that makes you stop playing.

It is possible to imagine the history of computer games as follows.

Many games have been well respected throughout the ages.

Games have been around for as long as humans have been. And while they have probably always had some educational function, humans mostly played games because they were fun. Games have a connotation of frivolity and even triviality. Nevertheless, the elegance of their abstract systems has been admired by many throughout the ages.

The first computer games were built by scientists.
Has anything changed since then?

When computers made their appearance, they were big, bulky and very serious machines who could do superhuman work. For some of the more ludic minds that built them, this seriousness must have been too hard to resist as a challenge. So they made a game for this machine. The irony of using such an expensive and serious device to play a trivial game must have been hilarious at the time.

Who really cared about the princess?

As it turned out very quickly however, and especially when computers became smaller and cheaper, the contradiction was only superficial. In fact, the logic by which the computer did its work and the structure of the rulesets of games were eerily similar. At some point, it may have seemed as if computers were invented for creating and playing games. Game rules and programming languages form a happy marriage.

The complex structure of games can generate a kind of immersion,
not unlike the one offered by fiction novels.

When computers became more sophisticated, computer games followed suit. Spreadsheets, databases, complex algorithms all became part of game design. To the further glory of the elegance of abstract systems.

What the game looked like didn’t matter much. As long as we could make out the black pawns from the white ones, we could interact with the machine. Playing a game was about this interaction, about becoming part of the structure of the game, of the abstraction. With exhilarating effect.

As the characters and situations presented in games become more
believable, our emotional involvement with them increases.

As computers developed better and better ways to present images and sounds with ever more detail, game designers obviously implemented them in their games. There is no harm in replacing the green pixel with a cartoon character and the beeps with actual music. As technology kept evolving and computers got faster, the graphics and sounds used for the representation of games became ever more sophisticated.

The combination of rules-driven interaction and realistic graphics,
may seem a tad ridiculous to the outsider.

The quality of computer game graphics and sound will soon be on par with painting, photography and film.

The people who were playing the old pixelly games of the past are now playing games with fancy graphics and elaborate musical scores. It doesn’t bother them. They can still get their kick out of the abstract systems. Those have not changed much.

Sometimes, the narrative elements of a game start leading a life of their own.

But the “eye candy” also attracted another audience. People who couldn’t care less about green pixels and computer bleeps in the past now swarm towards games like bees to honey. Do they enjoy interacting with the sophisticated rulesets of games? Probably. But I doubt if they deeply understand the mathematical elegance of becoming one with the abstract system. Instead, they enjoy how a character talks, they enjoy walking through a beautiful landscape. They enjoy the stories and the music. For them, the choice is not between a board game and a computer game. The choice is between a movie and a computer game, or a book and a computer game.

Game designers should probably not write stories.

And this is where things fall apart. And where the conflict between gamers and the rest of the world comes from. The stories and characters and themes that attract those swarms of bees are largely still the product of the same kinds of minds that build the abstract rulesets and mathematical constructions. The problem is that these people, unlike most of the avatars they create, are not superhuman. While their algorithms may be of an unparalleled refined elegance, their stories and their pictures and theirs sounds are lacking. Not in terms of quality (they either hire talent or build better machines for that) but in terms of content.

Beauty in the eye of the beholder.

When you ignore the sophistication of the rulesets, most games are about nothing at best, and about really attrocious things at worst. Not because all engineers are nazis or sexists. No, because they are scientists. Scientists are objective. They make no moral judgements. They just want to make things work. Disregarding the consequences. Their sense of aesthetics is extremely formal. They don’t judge. They don’t express opinions. And that makes them bad artists. They have no story to tell. And if they had, they wouldn’t know how. Their creativity lies elsewhere.

What will happen when artists start creating games?

When more and more people start playing games for very different reasons than the original gamers, it is only logical that the teams who create those games start changing as well. I’m very curious to see what kinds of games will come out of that. Games that are not designed by engineers but by artists, games where the graphics, sound and meaning are the basis of the design and not just the pretty packaging of an abstract system.

People love playing games.

This is not just economically sane or simply logical. It is an ethical necessity. When most people play games for their content and not for their mechanics, it is of vital importance that this content is carefully considered. We cannot simply assume that the player will understand that the muscular hero and the armored vehicles and the neverending bloodshed is just a metaphor for an intricately elegant system underneath. We need to realize that the audience interprets these things as stories, and not just as dressing.

When numbers mix with people, terrible things can happen.

The games that are being produced today have an intense expressive power. But nobody seems to be controlling what these games are saying. The stories and characters flow out of the game design naturally. But that game design is riddled with morally problematic concepts. Mathematics is not ethical. It doesn’t need to be. But we know very well what happens when humans start thinking in abstract systems and lose sight of the practical realities of life…

Games are fine. There is no need to dress them up.

When game logic is presented as a story, we get racism, sexism, violence, determinism, power struggle, etc. Horrible horrible stories. Very limited stories. With game technology’s increasing sophistication in representation comes a moral obligation to design games around stories, and not the other way around. Because people experience them as stories, and not as abstract systems. This heavy responsibility rests on the shoulders of game developers.

When looking for the essence of a medium in order to exploit it and create the best possible work with that medium, it’s easy to make mistakes. When movies came about, I’m sure people considered the fact that the image moved to be the one thing that defined the medium, its tool that should be used for expression. Now we know that this is incorrect: the real crucial aspect of film making is editing. Editing the flow of a film is unique to the medium and is the ultimate tool for expressing its content.

Film editing, by definition, is the only art that is unique to cinema and which defines and separates filmmaking from almost all other art forms. The job of an editor isn’t merely to mechanically put pieces of a film together, nor to just cut off the film slates, nor merely to edit dialogue scenes. Film editing is an art form which can either make or break a film. (Wikipedia)

I bet nobody saw that coming in the early days of film. It was something that needed to be discovered through trial and error and inspiration.

Games may face a similar problem. We are all very quick to assume that interactivity is the most important aspect of this new medium. But is this correct? Is designing interactivity to games what editing is to film?

The games medium is on the treshold of maturity. Maturity, for me, is defined by variety: variety in experiences, variety in the audience. When there’s a game out there for every single person on the planet looking to be entertained, the medium will be mature. I believe that the major thing standing in the way of this happening is what many consider to be the core of the medium: the high priority put on gameplay and fun. And I think we are about to abandon it.

The reason why I think so is because of the growing discrepancy between the narratives that games deal with and the things that their gameplay expresses. In the past, stories in games were simplistic. There were only so many pixels to paint a picture and children were the prime target audience. The gameplay was equally simplistic, so the whole thing felt together. This is why Mario and Zelda continue to convince.

In the past years, however, we have seen an enormous growth in the kinds of stories games try to deal with. Gameplay, on the other hand, has not evolved (or it may have achieved its absolutely perfection and there is no room to evolve further). In fact, I would argue that in essence, the gameplay of virtually all AAA titles is the same, even though their stories are vastly diffferent. Tomb Raider plays the same as Bioshock plays the same as God of War plays the same as Gears of War plays the same as Assassin’s Creed. Gameplay has become a standardized formal layer on top of narrative worlds that vary greatly.
This is probably one of the reasons why the true hardcore gamers have turned away from commercial games in favour of independent games, where stories and gameplay often still form a consistent whole. One could definitely argue that, in terms of pure game design, independent games are often superior.

But pure gameplay holds very little appeal to the majority people. People don’t play Halo because it allows them to shoot things and score points. You can do this in any game. I believe that it is only a matter of time for game designers to understand that what their gameplay is expressing has nothing to do with what they are really trying to talk about. And then they will be forced to take the next logical step: to rid themselves from the archaic concept of gameplay and step into the broader realm of interactive entertainment. When this happens, the doors to the medium’s maturity will be wide open.

There’s something that has always stayed with me from my philosophy classes in high school. In my memory the idea is attributed to 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work I still admire. But it could have come from somewhere else too.
Anyway, they idea goes something like this:

Happiness does not exist. There is only suffering. Sometimes the suffering is reduced a little. When this happens, we call it happiness.

This idea often comes to mind when I’m playing a video game.

It seems like most game designers’ strategy works through the same principle: they start by making life hard for you, and then they remove the problem. The relief that you feel at that moment is experienced as “fun”, “joy”, or “happiness”. While in reality, all the game did was take away the misery it had caused to you in the first place.

It strikes me that this method, while effective, is very different from how Auriea and I design games. If one would call the method described above as subtractive, then our method could be called additive. At Tale of Tales, we try to start from wherever the player is at the moment when he or she starts playing. And we build up from there. We like to think of our games as things that add something to your life, that become a part of it, rather than replace it temporarily. We expect the player to bring something to the game. We expect a human being, who knows what it is to love and to desire, who knows how fresh sheets feel on skin and wet grass between bare toes. We need you to be somebody, not an empty shell, or a shadow without memories. But a strong core around which the game can wrap itself.