Click Nothing

Convergence Culture

Part Three: If you build it, they will come.

Ever since I can remember, I have loved using level editors. I got my start before I was even a teenager building Lode Runner levels on the Vic 20, by my mid twenties I was making levels in UnrealEd to play with friends, and my first game industry job was as a level designer. The game level editor was at least as important to my personal creative development as was the word processor. I believe a good level editor can be as engaging and entertaining as a game itself and - when combined with a great game - has the potential to create a positive feedback loop between playing and creating. This is important if you believe - as I do - that playing and creating are fundamentally the same thing.

But designing and building level editors is hard. On one hand, you want to give players unchecked freedom to design and build any environment they can imagine, from a space station to an African savanna to the Eiffel Tower, or even all of these things at once. Conversely, you also want player created environments to play well within the context of your game. Designing a level editor that connects creators who want to express themselves with players who want tightly designed levels is a challenge I believe can be overcome by making level building into a game itself.

The first time I saw a screenshot of the isometric grid of flowerbeds and fences, cornfields and cattle that we call Farmville, I was stricken with clammy-skinned flashbacks of Floaters and Chrysalids. I needed to know where 'Sniper' Sato was, and who was packing the Blaster Launcher. But regardless of superficial similarities, Farmville is nothing like X-Com. Farmville is essentially a level building game, and X-Com is a game that needs an unending stream of new levels. What a match.

Farmville affords player expression through the design of farms, and a forum for sharing those expressions with others. The actual gameplay of Farmville is either shoddy, evil or non-existent depending on your worldview. X-Com, by contrast, is a hardcore, single-player strategy game in which players express themselves through the way they confront the game challenges. The forum they have for sharing that expression is non-existent (but at least it's not evil).

One of the amazing achievements of X-Com is that it uses a procedural 'level assembler' to construct appropriate levels on demand, offering an infinite variety of terrain in which players battle to repel the alien invasion of Earth. Underlying this 'assembler' are simple rules which determine what makes a valid level. Farmville farms, by contrast, are player generated. Because Farmville explicitly rewards time spent with experience and profit, many Farmville farms are rigorously optimized with dense fields of high-yield crops. But because Farmville is also a platform for socialization and expression, there is also an incredible variety of farms that reject progression entirely; from eclectic need-one-of-everything collections, to idyllic pastoral scenes where some kind of virtual Feng Shui reigns.

In order to give players the feeling of scope required by an X-Com game, a modern remake must confront a difficult challenge. Building an entire planet worth of content by hand is not feasible. Procedural generation risks feeling wooden, and lacking in creative flourish. Relying simply on user generation risks undercutting serious themes with an overwhelming percentage of penis-shaped levels. But a game that incentivizes players to make appropriate X-Com levels can potentially solve this problem.

A casual game for mobile devices or the web that puts players in the role of Mayor, Farmer, or Ranger, and gives them the tools to build all the urban, rural and wilderness landscapes needed, while explicitly rewarded their time spent with experience and profit would quickly generate the needed content. Adding another reward axis selecting for designer-defined 'appropriateness' would lead to player created maps suitable for playing X-Com in. Those maps could then be published to the cloud and pulled down by the game on demand. These casual players cum level designers would be rewarded with experience, gifts, rare items and prestige for designing X-Com appropriate environments. Friend management, sharing, and publish/subscribe tools would begin to bridge the sadly widening gulf between two important groups of players.

It's been almost twenty years since X-Com and an entire generation of similarly hardcore games excluded a mass-market gaming audience a hundred times the size of the audience they chose to service. Today, the pendulum is swinging the other way. The casual revolution - as exemplified by Farmville - is excluding the hardcore gamer. It doesn't need to be this way. We do not have to accept the cynical segregation of diverse audiences when the technology exists today to unite us. By linking our games, we create new domains in which all kinds of players can create, co-operate, compete, collaborate, and ultimately converge.

Agency: Past, Present, Future.

I don't want to make ClickNothing a clearing house of second run stuff I am writing for print magazines, and I still want to make sure I get original content up here. I'm working on some stuff, but am also pretty busy. Part of the reason I decided to take these writing opportunities with Edge and GamesTM was to give myself a kick in the butt to get writing again.

The stuff I am doing for Edge is (if you haven't been following) a serialized column specifically about what I am calling intramedia convergence. You can read Part One here, and Part Two here. Part Three has already streeted in the UK I think, and maybe the US too. I will post it here in a couple weeks. I just submitted Part Five to Edge today, so there will be at least six parts in the serial (I'm thinking I'll run out of stuff to say by Part Eight).

This piece is being republished from an article I wrote for the 100th issue of GamesTM Magazine. It's cool they asked me to do this, because my first game, Splinter Cell, was featured on their very first cover, one hundred long months ago. Yes, I've been around that long (and longer). I feel this piece is a more concise companion piece to the article I wrote for RPS for the 10th Anniversary of Deus Ex.

Here it is:

 

Agency: Past, Present and Future

In her seminal 1998 work Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray first formalized the concept of agency, defining it as the feeling we get when we take meaningful action in an interactive system and experience the results of our decisions and choices. Agency is, in effect, the aggregate of computer, program and designer telling you that your expression in the game world matters. While this concept may seem straightforward and obvious, its implications are profound.
 
Aside from 'the interactive system' (or for our purposes, the video game) there is no other medium of human expression that literally validates the expression of the audience. Agency, therefore, is not just a feature of games, it is the very foundation of what games are and how they mean. It is not simply that your expression and its validation matters, it's that your expression and its validation are all that matters. This is a fundamental departure from the author-centric notion of what art is and what it can be, and it is no understatement to say that agency changes everything.
 
A decade ago, with the critical acclaim of ‘high agency’ games such as the Thief and System Shock games from now defunct Looking Glass Studios, and the Deus Ex games from Ion Storm Austin, agency was on the rise. When I got my own start in the game industry in 2001, it seemed obvious that the path that would see games delivered into the promised land where they'd be recognized as a legitimate form of creative and artistic expression was by increasing the agency they offered. Unfortunately, despite their critical acclaim and their lasting influence on professional designers, these high agency games were largely commercial failures.
 
To compound the problem, Microsoft went toe to toe with Sony by launching the Xbox and bringing what was traditionally the highest agency type of game possible – the so-called ‘immersive sim’ fps – to a more casual (and explosively growing) audience of console gamers. Halo is still a pretty high agency game, but compared to the complexity and nuance of player expression available in games in the 'Looking Glass School', it was a step backwards. But it was a mega-hit and it helped define the expectations of an entirely new generation of gamers.

The last decade has seen a widespread reduction in agency. Racing games like the Burnout series became 'chutes of awesome' instead of games of skill and strategy and tactics. RPGs like KoTOR constrained agency to the mid and high levels of play, while turning over most low-level agency to probabilistic determination. Even traditionally high agency first-person shooters have increasingly sacrificed the potential for incredible awesomeness to arise from player agency, highly interconnected systems, and emergence, in exchange for pre-masticated 'wow sequences' that are exciting to watch - once - and rarely meaningful to actually play. Even GTA - the king of agency 10 years ago, has seen its system space massively curtailed in its latest iteration in order to make more room for the authored narrative. Action adventure games rely heavily on non-systemic QTEs and unique qameplay one-offs in an attempt to be more filmic while often missing the point of what both film and games are.

For every step backward, there are steps forward to be sure. Oblivion and Fallout 3 more than answered the call for an RPG with incredible agency across all levels. The Bioshock games have proved themselves worthy successors to the System Shock series. Portal offers irrefutable proof that ludonarrative dissonance can be dealt with if the writer realizes that his work must be in service of the player experience and not vice versa. This is to say nothing of multiplayer games from WoW to Modern Warfare to Little Big Planet to Left 4 Dead, where agency will (hopefully) always reign.

I do not generally believe in 'slippery slope' arguments. Mankind (and perhaps game developers especially) are more than the wet clay certain mythologies would have it we are wrought from, we are thinking beings. One of the things we do best is balance and optimize complex situations. I am more fearful of arms race scenarios. Arms races happen when easily predictable gains along a single axis suck intelligent well-meaning people toward inevitable conclusions that they are unable to avoid despite their clear visibility. Incremental sacrifices of agency in exchange for massive leaps forward in development of authored film-like narrative technique is - in my opinion - just such an arms race. Especially if that race is the Zeno's paradox I believe it to be.

While selling games that appeal to a broad audience is our responsibility as professionals, we also have a responsibility of stewardship over the resource of agency. As the newest, and perhaps the final domain of human artistic expression, and as the democratizing force of human creativity, the responsible and sustainable development and exploitation of agency is critical to our collective future. Over the next ten years, the choices we make in terms of delivering agency to players and developing their taste for agency will impact not just the direction of the game industry, but the direction of the development of human culture in general.

It is not, and it never will be, a mistake to make games that offer all different degrees of agency, from the high to the low. But it is a very serious mistake indeed to dismiss its importance, to adopt a laissez-faire attitude, or to neglect our responsibility as pioneers into the last great frontier of our cultural development.

Convergence Culture

Part Two: The Emperor's New Clothes

Imagine for a moment an alternate reality where racing games suck. Here, racing games only exist on portable devices. And they don't ever let you actually race. You have a couple dozen car models, and a few different engines. You can swap out tires and spoilers, choose from a few different fender, grill and lighting packages, change paint jobs, and decorate with a handful of decal designs before sharing your cars with friends. In the best of these games your car can race against a friends car, but remember - no driving. The cars do an automated lap around a plain oval, and a winner is declared.

What I'm describing is not an alternate reality racing game, but rather the actual current state of fashion design games, using racing games in substitution, to illustrate that fashion games are firmly ensconced in a pink ghetto of lifestyle brainwashing gadgets for girls. Meanwhile, racing games are among the most important genres in gaming, leading the charge into the future along a number of important technological axes including rendering, physics, online capability and user customization. Why?

Aside from the industry's utterly shameful lack of diversity, the reason why fashion games suck is that the design problems inherent to a good fashion game are harder to solve than those of a racing game.

I believe there are two big challenges to making a great fashion game. The first is the creativity problem. Similar to our bizarro racing game, most fashion games let users mix and match their designs from predefined sets of fabrics, colours and cuts. The game then evaluates 'success' based on proximity to some hidden value set. If the game is looking for [pink], [cotton], [sundress], then a pink silk sundress will be more successful than a pink wool sweater.

The problem is that this is not design in any meaningful sense. It is avatar customization at best, which is hardly enough to support an entire game - never mind a genre. Unfortunately, designing a freeform editor usable by casual gamers that can generate near infinite variety - and then designing supporting systems that evaluate the impact of the user design on other game systems is an impressively difficult challenge.

Spore solved it though, so now we have existence proof that it can be done. Next?

Next is the context problem. Assembling outfits from a library and sharing them with friends is not fashion design. Fashion needs more than designers. It needs people to wear it, to be influenced by it, to look good - and bad - in it. The context of the interplay of people expressing themselves through their choice of clothes is what fashion is, the same way the context of pushing a car to the limits to complete a lap faster than the other guy is what racing is.

So even if we could theoretically make a Spore-like editor for designing clothes that would run on iPhone or DS, how would we provide the necessary context? I believe everything exists to do this today, and I think the game to do it would best be called GTA: Garment District.

GTA:GD would not only allow you to create any article of clothing you can imagine, it would also allow you - optionally - to design a boutique and to publish that boutique to the cloud. From there, players of GTA could subscribe to user created boutiques to replace the default clothing chains in their game world. These clothes would not only be made available to 10 million Niko Bellics, but would seep out into 10 million Liberty Cities. The fashion designs of all those designers touching the lives of millions of AI driven Libertarians.

The popularity of given brands (defined by subscriptions) and given individual styles (defined by aggregated data on what all the Niko's wear) would seed a simple simulation of the cultural evolution of tastes that would determine the outfit of each civilian as he is spawned into the world. Style in any given instance of GTA would evolve and change.

Even better, GTA:GD players would receive meaningful feedback on their designs. It would give players for whom being a fashion designer is a valuable fantasy a sense of what it really feels like to design fashion, the same way racing games allow us to get a sense of what it feels like to drive a race car.

More importantly, intra-media gaming like this builds connections between people by giving them something they can share across wildly different games. It can dispel a daughters resentment for a lack of paternal attention, or a fathers frustration at the cost of buying her what he knows is a crappy game. It can give them a new way to engage with, and to understand one another, and in doing so create a new and much needed context where gaming welcomes and encourages girl gamers instead of cynically exploiting them.

Convergence Culture

Part One: The Vampires of Culture

From a design perspective, 'convergence' is a dirty word. Convergence is a business concept that aims to bring about an overlap in otherwise diverse audiences by leveraging IP across games, film, toys, books and comics, television or other forms of entertainment.

In the game industry, the traditional approach to convergence finds second tier publishers floating themselves on licensing deals for third rate movies that yield fourth rate games that still outsell some of the best titles of the year because uninspired marketing twits would rather trick Wal-Mart shopping soccer moms into buying something crappy than attempt to nurture a growing need for a new entertainment medium that enriches us, moves us, and challenges the way we experience the world.

I find this approach cynical and exploitative. But contrary to rumours of my anti-capitalist tendencies, I am actually in favour of responsible trans-media leveraging of IP, and not simply because it is profitable. As the cultural chasms between generations widen and deepen, and as the mountains of inequity separating the richest and poorest steepen, I believe that well crafted trans-media properties have a unique capacity to foster convergence; weaving together the shared experiences of differing peoples to form the very fabric of our culture.

But the reality of trans-media convergence is that we have, up to now, been mostly incapable of even making good cross-platform ports of our best gaming experiences. Modern Warfare rocks on the current home consoles - not so much on iPhone and Wii. With this being the case, is it any surprise that trying to port those experiences across to other media fails so miserably?

Every time anyone has tried to create a rich trans-media IP to appeal to diverse audiences they have failed in at least one major domain. Star Wars, Harry Potter and Clancy come to mind as our best successes. Star Wars novels never appealed to a broader audience than existing Star Wars fans, Harry Potter contributed little of value to the game space, and Clancy never brought anything to the table that was appealing to kids or families (though that's probably a wise omission). That said, the Star Wars novels and the Potter games were financial successes - and that's the point I am trying to make. Because the expected margins are great, and no investment in quality is required - creativity is sucked out of the system by business and marketing executives before these trans-media properties even have a chance to be good.

So what is to be done? As long as 'convergence' remains a rallying cry on Wall Street, and investors freely offer up their vaults as financial safe-haven to the vampires of culture, I fear we'll never see the dawn. But I for one am tired of playing the cowering Carpathian peasant; they have the Internet in Transylvania now too, you know. And XBox and wi-fi and iPad. I think it's high time we get a mob together, and armed with Wii-motes and iPhones and PSPs in place of torches and pitchforks we'll drag those bloodsuckers out into the streets and stake them to the ground. And if our mob is made up of people who care about games as a medium of human expression, then what shall be the sharpened stick on whose point we stake our bloody claim?

I say we use the word convergence itself, hacking it like a turret in Bioshock to turn it to our own purpose. If we stop talking about convergence in the cold business terms that have drained the life from so many games (and developers, and gamers) and start talking about it in design terms, we not only have a dangerous new weapon of our own, but we have appropriated one of the more dangerous weapons that has been fielded against us.

This new convergence will be the topic of this series of columns. In the coming months I am going to talk about how new and changing paradigms of design, play, interaction, technology and economics are reshaping the games we play, the people who play them and the industry that makes them. This new convergence is not a trans-media convergence, but rather an intra-media convergence. It is a bottom-up convergence given life by the plethora of smartphones and tablets we carry into battle and enabled by ubiquitous wi-fi, connected consoles, cellular data networks and a new overhanging Cloud that miraculously does not block the sun.

This is the convergence I believe we should be talking about and working toward. It is a convergence that starts by getting our own house in order, and by bringing diverging audiences of players together. For too long casual gamers, hardcore gamers, bite-sized gamers and mobile gamers have been playing in separate worlds. Until we can bring them together and unite them around a common experience - custom to each platform, but ultimately connected - is there any reason to imagine we can fill a movie theatre with people who don't give a shit about games to begin with?

Republishing

So for those who subscribe to the print version of EDGE Magazine, this is old news, and for those who do so in the UK, I think it's even older, but for the last few months I have been writing a column for them.

Now that the first issue has streeted world wide, and now that the first in the series of columns has gone up online, there is no longer any embargo in place, so I am allowed to repost it here. Obviously, getting access to this delightful and free content either at EDGE Online or here should not dissuade you from ordering a paid subscription to EDGE. It is paid subscriptions that allow them to pay me to write this stuff, and given how high rent is in San Francisco, frankly, I can use the money.

Expect to see me putting up each new column in the series here on or around the first of each month following the month the paper mag streets in the US. Also, expect to see minor differences between what EDGE runs and what I post. I will be posting my pre-editor version, the version I submitted to them.

My version will probably have more swearing.

Day One

So, yeah, the rumours (and even the official press releases) are true. I have accepted a job as a Creative Director at LucasArts in San Francisco. For those who didn't follow the adventure on Twitter, I signed a week and a half ago, I packed on Wednesday, loaded a truck on Thursday and flew out of Montreal on Friday. I looked for apartments here in San Francisco all weekend and I started work officially today.

I've gotten a ton of emails and Facebook and Twitter messages asking questions and for specifics. All I have to say is that I am happy to have found a new position where I feel I can confront the kinds of challenges I feel I need to confront going forward with my career.

I have always tried to keep my 'public' life here on ClickNothing separate from my life as an employee, and I don't typically talk about my job. I look very much forward to the time when I can more openly discuss what I am working on, but as you are all well aware by now, that could be a long while. Even then, most of that discussion won't happen here, it will happen in the press where I will be more than happy to talk about it in an 'official' capacity.

Now that these several months of looking at my options are behind me and I have finally made a decision about going forward, I am excited to get back to work, to get back to blogging, and to get back to talking about games and game design and the game industry.

I hope you'll all join me for the next adventure.

452 Thanks

In the last week or so Click Nothing has taken tens of thousands of hits and generated a couple dozen comments. I have received dozens of messages through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and have seen my inbox flooded with dozens more emails of support, of congratulation, and even of thanks - along with not a few condemnations for those respawning checkpoints from the forum kiddies who figured out I was the one responsible.... It's extremely flattering to know that so many of you would read my sentimental goop, nevermind take the time to comment or drop me a line.

I've been pretty irresponsible in getting back to many of you whether simply to thank you for a kind word or to respond to any of the numerous job offers that have been extended. I hope you'll please consider this post to be the thank-you that you may not receive personally, as there is just no way I am going to be able to get back to everyone. So thank you all so much for your kindness.

I'd also like to take a moment to address a couple of points. It seems that there are some misunderstandings and rumors floating around that I might as well clear up.

First, I am not planning to leave the game industry behind. Maybe the overwealming melancholy of the previous post left the impression that my departure was more extreme or more permanent than I hope or expect it will be. I apologize for any misunderstanding. I still expect to spend the rest of my life or so making games, it just might take me a little while to get that mission back on track. That said, I am not in a hurry. I am going to take the time I need to make sure that the decision I make is the right one. I promise to let you all know in due time when I know where I am going and what I am doing.

Second, as you can probably now guess from the point above, I am not currently employed. You thought respawning checkpoints were bad, but in a time where respawning banks have fucked up the entire economy, some may rightfully think it is nuts to jump without a parachute. I assure you that, as foolhardy as it may seem, my decision was taken neither quickly, nor rashly, and I have been uncharacteristically prudent in my evaluations and actions. For reasons far, far beyond the scope of this post to enumerate I felt the best path forward for me was to go parachute-less. I am not at all worried that I have the time for a little freefall while I figure things out - so please don't worry about that.

Third, if you are one of those people offering a job, or just trying to touch base via LinkedIn or another social network to discuss different opportunities - thanks a million. As much as the support and encouragement of friends and well-wishers nourishes the soul, ultimately it will be the nourishment of a hot meal that I am going to need to sort out in the long term. I am currently in the process of gathering my options, but I am taking it slow and I am leveraging my most direct contacts first, so it might be some time before I get back to you. This certainly does not mean I am not interested - only that I have limited bandwidth now that I am without my army of personal assistants and hot secretaries.

Finally, I am not fat anymore:

 
So while I truly appreciate all the coverage in, and links from, the actual press (which have generated the hits and consequently the offers), please feel free to contact me for an up-to-date photo. I can even provide Speedo shots, or me in fireman gear if the price is right.

Once again, thank you all so much for your support.

More news soon.

More games to follow.

-Clint

451 Weeks

Nine years ago, I was stuck. I was stuck in Vancouver, stuck in school, stuck in a life of habits – mostly bad – and stuck in the tragic comfort of doing the same things, and making the same mistakes, over and over again. There were plenty of good things going on too. I was writing a lot – working on my thesis and writing scripts for independent films. I was making those films even, and working on the film projects of friends. There were a lot of creative things going on then, but the thing that would have the biggest impact on my life was the one that I considered to be only a hobby at the time. I was fiddling around more or less constantly (to the detriment of a lot of my other work in many cases) with the Unreal Level Editor. I was editing existing Unreal Tournament levels and working on levels for Unreal Mods. When I received an email from a friend of mine linking to a job posting from Ubisoft in Montreal calling for people with experience using the Unreal Editor, I sent in a resume on a lark. Six weeks later I was living in Montreal.

Within the same year – with the upcoming release of PS2 and the original XBox, I would hazard to guess that 10,000 other people got their first job in the game industry. A good percentage of them probably didn’t last a year. Another big chunk probably never shipped their first title. Of those that did, very likely whatever the game was, it wasn’t a blockbuster. And of those few remaining out of ten thousand who were lucky enough to ship a blockbuster for their first game in the industry, I suspect exactly zero of them can claim to have had the kind of luck I had starting as a level designer, then working as a game designer and scriptwriter on the original Splinter Cell. I was a rookie on an upstart team that won the World Series in their first season in the Major Leagues. Official XBox Magazine gave Splinter Cell a 96 – topping the 95 they had given to Halo. And it didn’t stop there. In my almost nine years here, I have shipped three games with over twelve million units sold through, and an average meta-critic of over 90%. I’ve been very lucky to say the least.

Yet, over the years, a number of friends have accused me of a certain false modesty in attributing so much of my success to luck. They’ve encouraged me to take credit for the hard work and the dedication. And over the years I have come to understand that, in fact, my hard work has been a non-insignificant factor in my success and resultant happiness. But more important than the hard work, probably even more important that the random chance that put me on such an amazing team, in such an amazing company, at such an amazing time, was one ingredient that I had not realized had been essential in flavouring the recipe of my life. I think today, looking back at the last decade, that the mystery ingredient in all of this was courage.

I am a person of habit. I have many good habits, but the reality is that new habits develop and reinforce themselves everyday, and it is rare that one just picks up good habits. We pick up bad habits, mostly, and the good habits we have and the few we are lucky enough to adopt often atrophy into bad ones. That is what was happening to me in Vancouver a decade ago, and while it is hard to look at your life and say ‘this is unsustainable’, it is even harder to look at your life and say ‘the reason my life is unsustainable is because I am unsustainable.’ It takes courage to do that, and it takes even more courage to take steps to rectify it. Luck and hard work only determine whether or not you regret taking those steps later. I can say with certainty that I have absolutely no regrets about the step that brought me to Ubisoft. I am thankful that Ubisoft fostered a development atmosphere that I, and so many others who came before and since, have felt so lucky to be a part of. I am proud – beyond measure – of the hard work that I and my colleagues have done here. And I am absolutely certain that those things will continue to grow and flourish; creating new opportunities for new developers willing to work hard and swing for the fences. I am certain that courageous people will continue to come here and grow, and excel, and achieve things that they may later foolishly attribute merely to luck.

But I am a person of habit. For me, habits begin to form when I am comfortable and content, and over time those habits settle. Their weight begins to rest heavily on the foundations of contentedness on which they were built. All the courage and hard work required to overcome my bad habits and forge myself a place where I can be happy, leads me back, inevitably to a place where I am once again comfortable and content. It’s a tragic spiral that I have been through a couple of times in my adult life now. It’s the fractal of my emotional landscape; habits recursing through habits, great pustules of discontent revealing themselves to be whiskered with golden curls of incredible joy which themselves, on closer inspection, reveal an acne of sorrow speckling their surfaces, ad infinitum. In the 451 weeks that I have been here, I have adopted many new habits. It has taken tremendous effort to prevent those habits from atrophying into bad ones. Pride burns into hubris. Willingness wilts into desperation. Confidence slows to stubbornness. Passion boils into anger. Each of these faults and others – without care and constant self-examination – risk becoming habits.

I am too comfortable. I am too content. And I know where that can lead for me.

Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I know the way forward. The way forward lies in my having the courage that I did not know I had a decade ago to bid farewell to those tragically comforting habits. I need to walk on hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails. I need to chew on broken glass. I need to drink paint. This post has gotten long enough and I am still afraid to come to the point, but what I really need more than anything is to write these words;

I gave notice of my resignation to Ubisoft on Monday, April 26th, 2010.

That’s me, acknowledging that I am unsustainable and taking the steps I unfortunately feel I need to take in order to rectify it. The odds of me having the same luck I had the last time I took such a step may be 10,000 to one against, but this time I hope my ability and willingness to do the hard work are beyond question. In that context, I guess we’ll find out just how true or false my modesty is. And I’ll be happy to admit it if I was wrong (but not too happy, and not too soon, I hope).

Without Regret

-Clint

Didacticism in Game Design

There is a trend in game development that has been growing a head of steam over the last couple years, and I have some concerns about it. The trend is in support of the notion that game developers need to somehow demonstrate the maturity of their medium and of their own creative capabilities by making games that have a moral – or at least a socially responsible – message. The form this trend often takes is toward features such as morality meters and discrete moral choices at key branching points in game narratives. Now, I certainly have no problem with the ambition of developers to step up to the plate and demonstrate the maturity of the medium and their own creativity. I do, however, worry about some of the approaches.

I have talked and written in the past about a few of the numerous implementation challenges designers confront when trying to integrate these kinds of ethical decisions into gameplay – this post is not about that.

Rather than delving deeper into the questions of how we implement this sort of material – I want to back up a bit and make sure that in our attempts to design and build these new ‘socially responsible’ features into our games we are not missing the rather important prerequisite understanding of why. More importantly, I want to be sure that in our focus on ‘how to implement socially responsible messages’ we are not, in fact, directly undercutting the reason we have considered these sorts of designs in the first place – which in my view is to elevate the medium to a higher level of maturity and sophistication.

To begin with, I want to differentiate between three ideological stances:

The first – and I believe the most generally held throughout the game industry is:

“Games do not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful.”

Obviously we work in a professional climate where most people simply do not give a shit about ‘elevating the medium’ or about ‘making games that are more socially responsible’ or more specifically about integrating moral or ethical decisions into gameplay or game narrative in order to offer deeper messages to our audiences. That’s fine. If that is what you think, I encourage you to continue thinking that way. I too appreciate the thermobaric annihilation of my enemies-of-the-moment, the resultant unlocking of new perks, and the accompanying wry one-liner. You’re right – there is nothing at all wrong with games that offer only that. In fact, so many games fail to deliver on even that, that perhaps discussions about anything deeper are premature. The fact remains though that this discussion is already happening in the sense that each new game released that incorporates these sorts of features is an argument within that discussion. Some may think we should let sleeping dogs lie – but the reality is the dogs are very much awake. They are already fighting in the pit, and the ones that survive will become the breeding stock of the future. It’s fine to place your bets and enjoy the spectacle without concern for the repercussions on the future – but others of us do care which dog has his day and what the resultant new breed of man’s best friend will be like.

Essentially, I argue that the stance: ‘Games do not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful,’ is a fallacy. Properly phrased we could say that ‘a specific game does not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful,’ but the jury is definitely out on the applicability of that stance to ‘games’ in the general sense.

The other two stances I would like to identify are similar to one another in that I believe they are both concerned with the aforementioned breeding stock. The first is a top-down stance; it is goal-focused and non-prescriptive. The other is a bottom-up stance that is prescriptive and is focused on an approach.

The first, non-prescriptive stance is:

“We should endeavour to elevate the medium of games.”

The second, prescriptive stance is:

“We should elevate the medium by making games that are socially responsible.”

(okay, disclaimer time – ‘We should endeavour to elevate the medium of games’ is also prescriptive, but it is more general in the sense that it does not prescribe the means, so when I say the second stance is prescriptive, I mean that not only does it offer a prescription for what we should do (like the first), it also offers a prescription for how we should do so.)

I reject the second, prescriptive stance, and – with apologies for using film as an example – this is why:

Imagine if decades ago during the formation of United Artists, Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith had as their stated agenda that it should be the role of filmmakers to make movies that were ‘socially responsible’. Had they been as successful  (which, BTW, I suspect they would not have been), a hundred years later I believe we would have ended up with an entire medium of politically correct, didactic, sentimentalist-pandering drivel.

In fact – in the film industry, hardly anyone sets out with the explicit goal to make movies that are socially responsible – as though social responsibility is some feature that a movie needs to have. The film industry instead empowers the creatives – the directors, writers, actors, and the entire production crew – to make movies that explore things that they care deeply about… and as a result almost every movie (at least in some ways, and almost always indirectly) has some kind of socially responsible message. Even those who do explicitly set out to make films that are socially responsible (say Michael Moore) are driven by their own creative goals – not by their belief in the inherent value of socially responsible messages as a feature of film-making that would elevate the medium. Michael Moore probably never said to himself 'film would be better if those darn movies were more socially responsible'. On the contrary - I suspect he said 'a film about how darn socially irresponsible those bastards at GM are would make a great movie', and then he went out and made Roger and Me.

No one set out to make Terminator with a socially responsible message. In the end, though, the fundamental underlying takeaway of Terminator is that love is an unstoppable force for human salvation. This is because ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ is a message all people care deeply about. 'Unstoppable killing robot' is a message that ten percent of people care deeply about. Perhaps, in certain cultures (like ours), you need those ten percent to leverage the rest of the population, but if you only have unstoppable killing robots, you only get the ten percent. In the film industry, this is potentially a failure. That said, clearly Cameron did not set out with the explicit goal to make a movie whose message was ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ – rather, he set out to make an awesome movie about unstoppable killing robots, and in order to do so in a way that was creatively meaningful to him and resonant with a significant audience, he chose more general, more human, more socially relevant themes for the indestructible titanium skeleton of his unstoppable killing robot opus.

It is not the role of games nor should it be the role of games to be socially responsible, nor should it be the role of game creators to attempt to be didactic by instructing people how to live, how to think or how to behave. Unfortunately, this is what the discussion on the social responsibility of games tends to boil down to these days: a surface level discussion on how to add features that have moral messages so players can learn morality. We’re too often attempting to add the indestructible titanium skeleton of social responsibility as a feature-focused afterthought to a package of vat-grown meat that too frequently resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Many recent games too quickly and too often reach for moments of ‘morality dilemma’ as a feature to position or differentiate themselves as titles that have some deeper message about the human condition. To me, this approach not only risks didacticism but – worse – is potentially a risky step back from the more systemic messaging of earlier generations of games.

By removing the (weakly) systematized representation of morality such as exists in a game like Ultima IV (for example), and exchanging it for discrete moments of realization intensive story branching based on single (or few) decisions we risk reducing the breathtaking complexity of human morality down to a marketing bullet point. By ensuring there is one neatly contained morality puzzle per hour or per level of real gameplay, and preferably having one big important one at the third act climax we do a terrible disservice to the beautiful nuance of the human condition. We strip away everything that is important about morality (its complexity, nuance and irresolvability) and replace it with a conveniently contrived idiocy that espouses a message.

As McLuhan says: the medium is the message. When canned, discrete moral choices are rendered in games with such simplicity and lack of humanity, the message we are sending is not the message specific to the content in question (the message in the canned content might be quite beautiful – but it’s not a ludic message) – it is the message inherent in the form in which we’ve presented it: it effectively says that ‘being moral is easy and only takes a moment out of each hour’. To me, this is almost the opposite of the deeper appreciation of humanity we might aim to engender in our audience.

Instead of aiming to elevate the medium by making games that are more socially responsible  – which by my estimation reduces quickly down to a feature driven approach that ultimately offers little more than cheap didactic moralizing, our aim should be instead to empower our creative visionaries to explore the human condition through their work. This is a creatively driven approach which I believe will lead to people who create games being forced to think about what moves them deeply and about what they care about in life, instead of thinking about how to make their next action blockbuster sequel more socially responsible than that of a competitors action blockbuster sequel.

Believe it or not – given the time and the budget and the support – many of us would much rather be making games where we feel the unstoppable power of love as a force for human salvation, than games where yet another endless horde of terminator robots falls beneath our plasma cannons. If we hope to make games that are truly socially responsible and offer players the satisfaction of more deeply resonant messages about the human condition we must start not by looking at the feature set, but by looking to our creators. We must empower them (ie: give them the authority and the responsibility) to explore their own feelings and make games that move them deeply and reject another generic action game with a morality meter tacked on the side – because all that is, is a farce. We should be ashamed of that.

I firmly do not believe that we need to put in place some agenda to add social responsibility to games. I don’t even believe it is about having a broader domain of game development where we can make a class of low-risk, controlled margin games that are socially responsible to demonstrate our goodwill to a world increasingly doubtful of the notion that games can speak meaningfully and generally to the human condition.

It is about believing in our creators – and about empowering them to believe in themselves – and about helping them make the mature sorts of games that can speak to the other ninety percent of the population who can’t be fucking bothered with another horde of terminator bots and who are laughing at us when we tell them that between hordes of terminator bots they will have a neatly packaged ‘love is an unstoppable force for human salvation’ moral dilemma that will branch them into either fighting the red-eyed terminator robots to save the Earth or the green-eyed terminator robots to destroy the Earth for their own glory.

In short: all we need to do to start making more socially responsible games is grow up and start acting like the mature creators we hold ourselves up to be. When we have done that, we will almost by definition have made games that have embedded within them more socially responsible themes and messages which are there because they are beautiful – not because we have a didactic agenda. And in so doing, we will have elevated the entire medium.

On Auteurship in Games

So this Friday just past, the latest New York Times Magazine ran a piece about the rising 'indie movement' in game development. It's a good piece - providing what I feel is an accessable overview of the current state of the games/art discussion and the rising importance of the indie scene and what these developers are doing.

I'm sure a lot of people will roll their eyes and say 'games and art again - isn't this discussion over?'. I suppose it is over for us (developers, I mean) as we all know that games are indeed an art form but that just like painting, literature, or music, games can also be just simple entertainment and there is nothing wrong with that. In other words, for those 'in the know' - a game can be a work of art. Full stop.

That said, I am not convinced that the 'real' population of the world is aware of this yet. An article in New York Times Magazine that talks about it is thus very welcome. I don't mean it is welcome because it is a validation for those of us who stood up and said 'of course games are art', but simply because it means that the 'real' population are now about to step into a world that - for the first time in a century or so - has an entirely new art form in it. That's amazing and wonderful. And even though the article does not represent some giant breaker being flipped in the cultural consciousness, it is one of the more significant bitflips in the grand scheme of games' general acceptance as an important form of art and an important contribution to human culture.

Anyway - mostly the piece is an interview with Jason Rohrer, but also interviewed are Jon Blow, Jonaton Soderstrom, Jenova Chen, Eric Zimmerman, and several others, myself included. It seems like I get cast in the role as the 'big industry dude who is sympathetic to the cause' - which I suppose is how a lot of people see me. I myself would call that an oversimplification, but hey - it's an overview piece for a broad audience. I'll live.

There is one thing I want to call out in the article and kind of 'distance myself from' however - and that is the emphasis on the notion of the importance of the 'auteur'. I'm going to be careful not to put words in the mouths of Jason, Jon, Jenova or any of the others, but it feels to me that this article pushes the notion that central to the indie movement, and central to the idea that games are (or can be) art is the need to demonstrate that there are auteur game developers and it is the existence of the auteur that allows games to be art.

The meme pops up a few times in the article:

on Page 2, second paragraph

Even when working on more original fare, the enormous teams that create today’s video games dilute artistic intention. There are exceptions like Will Wright, whose legacy includes The Sims, but they stand out because they are exceptions. “For the most part,” Rohrer said, “there’s no single person trying to bring a specific vision to life.”

on Page 4, eighth paragraph

“Braid is something you could show to Roger Ebert and say, ‘Here is a work of authorial intention,’ ” Rohrer says.

also on Page 4, lower

"But it does reflect the fact that Braid is both a game and the artistic vision of a single person."

SoI think it's not unreasonable to read that the article is presenting the stance that the evolution of the status of games from 'toys and entertainment' to 'art' is fundamentally linked to the idea of authorship coming from the singular creative vision of an individual.

For the record, I strongly disagree with this stance - and furthermore, I feel it is treacherous ground in which to plant the 'games are henceforth art' flag, as I suspect it is ground that will quickly be lost to (or surrendered by) the first generation of artists who even attempt to question it (in fact - for those of us 'in the know' it has been and continues to be, questioned all the time).

Now - keeping in mind that not that long ago I wrote a post titled 'On Authorship in Games' - a kind of sister post to this one - that championed the notion that there was authorship in games (in an attempt to address Ebert's challenge). How can I say the opposite now?

Well, frankly, I am not saying the opposite. What I said then was that there is authorship in games and if that is the criteria Ebert needs to have fulfilled in order for him to count games as art - then it exists and the question is closed. I was not arguing that authorship is universally, or even for me, what makes games art.

For me the criteria is much simpler - games are art because some people believe them to be. That's all that is really required. And it is with that definition safely in my back pocket that I will continue to question the 'auteur' model of meaning and artfulness that seems sometimes espoused by the indie movement and by others (and by the article in question).

I really, honestly, do not believe that games 'ought to come from the singular creative vision of an individual'. They can, of course, and I celebrate the existence of the Blow's and Rohrer's out there. But for me, the real beauty of games comes (partially) from the collaborative process that creates them (the development process) - which itself parallels the (centrally important) collaborative process that allows them to mean at all (the playing of them).

I guess what I am saying is that I am concerned that the article conflates two ideas that for me are very separate; one, that there is authorship behind these seemingly unauthored stuctures we call modern games, and two, that games are art. These ideas existing side-by-side seems (in my reading of the article) to suggest a connection between the idea that it is in authorship that the art of games lies. This idea is runs counter to everything I believe about games and I can't accept it.

I believe very fundamentally that the more authorship is removed, the more room there is in a game for beauty. By extension, I further believe that the more the 'auteur' abdicates his own 'singular vision' to those with whom he is collaborating in the creation of the game, the more room there is in the game for beauty.

Now this notion of 'leaving room for beauty' is a bit tricky, I admit. There is a lot of room for beauty in the Louvre, but there is also a lot of room for beauty in an abbatoir. How that room is used is kind of central. Clearly, you can much more predictably provide beauty with a well-rounded portion of authorship while still leaving lots of room for players to add to that beauty if they so choose. Clearly, abdicating all authorship means asking the player to be an artist, and that's probably not a very high-yield recipe for art.

But in some ways, I feel this is the very purpose of games. Every other artistic medium is authored in the traditional sense: the message passes down from author to audience through the medium. But games (as we know) are different. Input is expression, and when players input their expression it passes back into the medium, where it feeds back against predictions the author(s) made about the kinds of things players might express (never reaching the author directly).

In McLuhan-ian terms the message of all (okay, most) other media is that the Author is 'above' and 'primary' and that meaning and art 'declines' from His Wisdom and Grace. The message of games is that the Author has 'recused' Himself and that he has willingly set himself outside the system of his work so that meaning and art can 'incline' from the Player.

That's, like, the most beautiful thing ever.

To me, it does not matter that most of the art will be 'bad'. In fact, the notion that all these player expressions are 'bad art' only exists when we cling to auteur-centric models of what makes good art. It's like the religious notion that morality is not valid unless you subscribe to the religion in question - that even if you lead a 'good' life, you will go to Hell if you don't accept Jesus or some shit. The point is that it doesn't matter if the vast majority of player expressions are nonsensical and seem to be 'bad art' - the beauty comes from the fact that they are player expressions. It doesn't matter if you take Jesus into your heart if you live a good life. If believing in the player's expression condemns me to eternity in player-created-content-purgatory, so be it.

To me, that's what games are: they are places for players to practice self-expression safely, where they can gain confidence in their ability to express themselves and hopefully one day recognize that all the ways in which they express themselves are beautiful. When all of mankind is able to confidently express themselves beautifully, I believe the work of human culture is done.