Category: Thoughts

If you’re a game designer, you should probably listen to the lecture Jonathan Blow gave at the Montreal International Games Summit.

Not only do the opinions expressed sound similar to our own. It’s refreshing to hear these points spoken out loud, and so eloquently illustrated.

Contrary to us, Mr. Blow still firmly believes in games as rule-based challenges to achieve a certain goal. But he posits that the learning required to engage in such an activity should be worthwhile. A game should teach us something interesting. And game designers should be aware of what their game is teaching players.

The latter could be a serious problem as the quality of games is currently almost exclusively judged by whether a game is fun or not. This is where Mr. Blow’s tremendously insightful analogy with drugs and fast food comes in. He advocates designing games with rewards that are intellectually nutritious and not simply addictive.

Doing so will not only improve the quality of life of the player. But it will also open up the interactive medium to being capable of addressing the many different types of content that have made cinema, literature and music into the dominant forms of entertainment and enlightment that they are today. Mr. Blow urges game designers to design with the intention of making something “worthwhile or deep or interesting”. Something that is oddly very rare today indeed.

A recording of the talk is available from his website.

Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum have started a project that reminded us of things we have been saying in the past about the importance of authorship in games.

The “Values at Play” (VAP) research project assists and encourages designers to be mindful of what values their computer games promote. We would like to see a diversification of video game values to include positive principles like equity, creativity, diversity, and negotiation, along with the traditional tropes of violence and machismo.

I’m not sure what form this “assistance and encouragement” will take. I’m secretly hoping for some “violence and machismo” in this area. And I’m not sure if the current generation of fun-obsessed game designers will care (or will realize that they don’t). But I think it’s important to put this issue on the agenda. Perhaps in the past, it was ok to design games as if they were footballs, or pogo-sticks or ping pong tables. But, like it or not, with the advances of technology (and new forms of game appreciation in the public), games have become an expressive medium. And, as a designer, you better be aware of what your game is expressing!

Visit Values At Play!
I’d especially recommend the short snippets of interviews (from Tracy Fullerton and Celia Pearce amongst others). Hope we get to see and hear more of these.

Envying the precision of the framing through which Almodovar tells the story of “Todo Sobre Mi Madre”, I was reminded of something a visitor of Vooruit’s birthday party said. She was wondering how come the image of The Endless Forest that was being projected large in the room was not the same as the image that was seen on the interactive consoles. I told her that it was different on every computer: the same world but seen from different angles.

I think this is very meaningful and often underestimated. Framing is a powerful technique but games are not about pictures. They are about worlds. And much like film tells its story through framing more than through acting, as theater did, games need to find the technique that tells their stories. And it’s not framing. It must be related to the worlds that games create. It probably has something to do with interaction, with agency. How does one call the technique that manipulates interaction, like framing manipulates vision?

Game developers and journalist often stress the importance of conflict as part of a story and (thus?) of a game. I have always questioned this claim. Mostly because they used it as an excuse for throwing more monsters and bigger guns at us. So I figure only men like conflict in their games.

But hearing the (predominantly female) players of The Endless Forest talk, has changed my mind somewhat. I think women like conflict in their entertainment just as much. Not conflict as such but also, just like men, because they get a kick out of resolving the conflict. It’s just that they tend to resolve conflicts in a different way.

I hope readers of this post don’t think I’m sexist for saying this. And please contradict me if I’m wrong. But from what I have seen, women tend to want to keep the peace, above all. They are quicker to apologize, consider other people’s arguments more deeply (or pretend to) and are generally happier when everybody gets along, sometimes even at the expense of their own status or pride.

I used to think that this type of behaviour meant that women (or men with similar tendencies) don’t like conflict in games. But seeing how much they enjoy the “peaceful resolution”, I have changed my mind about this. Perhaps they get as big a kick out of peacefully resolving a conflict as men get out of blasting the monster into oblivion.

Are there any games that cater to this desire?

Peaceful conflict resolution probably doesn’t lend itself well to spectacular visual effects (explosions etc) but it could perhaps introduce a new form of play. And open up a new audience.

Some people are better at playing games than others. And they have more fun.

Sure, some are better at achieving high scores or figuring out puzzles in record times. But that’s not what I mean here. Other players are better at playing itself, playing along you might say. They use the game as a theater stage and they play their part. The response of the game is then interpreted as part of the story.

The reward is not an increase of a certain number or the acquisition of an item but the feeling of being part of the narrrative. This is a form of play that computer designers often seem to ignore. Computer games tend to be very goal oriented, even when it comes to narrative. Designers try and find all sorts of ways to make the players do exactly what they “should” be doing to bring the (still often linear) experience to a proper resolution.

But how about giving the player some freedom and some responsibility? How about creating a universe where the player is responsible for his own pleasure? No punishment and no reward. Simply play.

The game designer provides the tools and the setting. And the player manipulates those to play a story. A player who does well, will have a better experience than one who doesn’t do an effort to “get into” the story, to play along.

In computer games, the focus of the experience often shifts from the purpose of an action to the action itself.

Older games tend to be highly symbolic. Any move you make on the board, if not entirely abstract, represents an event in an often highly abstracted manner. As a result, you make the move for the purpose of advancing in the game somewhat. Sliding a pawn over a board isn’t the world’s most exciting experience. Contemporary computer games tend to add a layer of simulation to “making a move” that can be a source of pleasure in and of itself, disregarding the outcome of the move as a result of the game’s rules.

Historically, these simulations have been nothing more than ways to dress up the game (either visually or narratively). But the technology and skills of the creators (and possibly the expectations of the audience) have evolved so much that the simulation layer is quickly becoming the thing that many people enjoy most in a computer game. Game rules design as such has not evolved much. As pure games, computer games have not delivered greater masterpieces than board games. But they have delivered something else, a new type of experience.

What I long to see is a computer game that is nothing but simulation. Not the sterile spreadsheet-based simulation of Sim City or Tycoon games. But a simulation painted by an artist: an sensual, expressive environment that focusses entirely on the (inter)action for its own sake, with no purpose other than pure experience.

The key mistake made in the definition of “games” along traditional lines is that it ignores the major strength of the interactive medium.

“But it’s not really a game, is it?” is no longer an acceptable way to look at a piece of interactive entertainment; its value must be measured in terms of sociability, narrative and even education.

Interactive Entertainment isn’t just about “gameplay” – it has learned new tricks, and designers must now learn how to enthral people by creating social spaces and weaving compelling narratives.

YES, exactly.
Excerpt from “Telling Tales” by Rob Fahey

Read the entire article on GamesIndustry.biz.