Sabatoging an Open World

Original Post: July 1, 2011

I remember the moment with crystalline clarity, both emotionally and critically. As it unfolded, it confirmed for me something I’d long suspected about open world games. There I was, en route to a mission, following the orders of an NPC. His initials were in gold letters, so I knew his requests were the most important thing I could be doing at the time. But as I was nearing my destination, something caught my eye. On the corner, three Nazis were posed with their rifles shouldered. I slowed down, thinking perhaps it was another bug. It was not. I coasted up close enough to see the two civilian women cowering before them. I heard the dialog:

“Please, you don’t have to do this,” one said. A fraction of a second later, the Nazis fired and the two women fell dead.

My personal quest for vengeance suddenly felt incredibly hollow. The desire to avenge the death of Sean’s long-time friend Jules was the motivating fuel for the missions in the Saboteur, yet he was merely one life among millions caught up in the horrors of the Holocaust and Second World War. And he was perhaps less innocent than the two women I’d just seen murdered before me – after all, Jules and I had been trespassing, and just rolled Dierker’s car off a cliff… Why was Jules’ life worth a revenge quest, I thought, and these two nameless women are left bleeding in the street with no one to mark their passing, let alone avenge them? Veronique eventually explains this to Sean, yet the game doesn’t allow me to act on her advice.

Later, I saw more episodes of Nazi oppression. Many soldiers strike civilians as they pass, sometimes with the butt of a rifle, for no other reason than getting too close from what I could gather. I also saw a man forced into the back of a truck at gunpoint, bound for the torture chamber of Commandant Dierker, or perhaps a concentration camp, yet I stood idly by. His fate was not my concern, because he, like the two women before, did not have golden initials on the minimap.

Narratives, in linear media, are often formed around a concept of example: this is an example, focusing on a handful of characters, of the way things are here and now. Saving Private Ryan was about one private among thousands, and his story explained much about war, without profiling dozens or hundreds of other soldiers. Jules is an example of a person killed by the Nazis, and Sean is an example of someone who fights against them. Narratives in videogames are useful for motivating a player to action. Yet in an open-world game, set in occupied France, what motivation or personalisation is required? I don’t need to see Jules killed to motivate me to action. I don’t need an example of the Third Reich’s brutality, for two reasons: firstly I already know about it, anyone who needs a personalised revenge plot to be convinced the Nazis should be resisted is beyond help. Secondly, I can see for myself how it is to live in occupied France. I see the beatings in the street, the kidnappings, the executions, all first hand. Or rather, I could if I weren’t spending so much time looking for golden initials or exclamation points.

Nazi-occupied France is a note-perfect setting for this kind of open world game. There are ready-made factions, perhaps the most reviled villains in control of an interesting and historic location, justifications for wanton destruction, and the ‘part of something larger’ motif with room for a dramatic linchpin hero making a difference. Other games have crafted fictional worlds following the same pattern, Fable 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, inFamous, and Assassin’s Creed to name a few. Yet all of these spend much effort in trying to distract the player from the way the world works by enforcing a strict narrative plot. They insist that these are the important characters, these are the vital steps towards our goal. Anything that lies outside of it is unimportant, unrecognised and in the end, ineffective.

If I had saved the two civilian women, or the man bound for imprisonment, what effect would it have on Paris? They are real Parisians, in so far as they actually live in the fictional version of the city. Does rescuing them not make the Resistance somehow stronger? Does eliminating the soldiers responsible weaken the Nazis in that area? Conversely, what effect do the golden initial missions have on these sorts of events? I never noticed the terrifying sound of the huge Howitzer mounted to the Pantheon in all my hours roaming Paris. Yet the man with the golden letters tells me the story, so it must be true. What does Kessler contribute to Paris? What difference does it make if he is rescued – a German defector – when I watch the real innocents die in the street? Does rescuing him prevent any of the misery I actually see or just misery and destruction that one of the golden-initialed NPCs tells me about?

In videogames we have the potential to tap directly into the systemic nature of, for example, a military-occupied city, rather than the individual stories of certain limited personalities within that city. Of course, in this kind of game we still follow the heroic journey of our player-character, but we need not force him to do the bidding of the special few with the golden initials. Instead, we can present the city, oppressed by a military power, and leave him to find his way. Do we really require an explanation that a secure base of operations is a good idea for a resistance? Or that destroying enemy ammunition dumps will make them less able to fight back? Do we have to explain why these men who kill women in the streets are bad guys, or can we let their programming do the talking? These kinds of games are able to show the player what he can do but do not need to tell him what he must do.

Perhaps if Pandemic, and other studios with similar designs, were to trust their worlds rather than their narratives, I would have saved those civilians. I would have, if I thought that it would matter.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? So I Don’t Have To…

Original Post: June 28 2011 (Kotaku AU)

Early this morning the United States Supreme Court finally judged that Video Games were a form of speech, therefore deserving of protection under the First Amendment. In Australia, video games, or any form of media for that matter, are not granted the same rights. Adam Ruch, as an American living in Australia, can’t understand why and, in this compelling piece, discusses the issues with censorship in this country.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? So I Don’t Have To…

The US Supreme Court has ruled that videogames are like other forms of media in that they express ideas and are therefore deserving of the same protection under the First Amendment. Specifically this ruling was made in response to a California State proposal that would ban the sale of ‘ultra-violent’ videogames to minors. This situation is almost a perfect inverse to the what we now face in Australia, and may help us to understand our own circumstances better.

First a criminally broad background discussion of the American Constitution, which is a wonderfully idealistic document that has influenced every aspect of American government for over two hundred years.

Generally, the spirit of the Founding Fathers was one of individual liberty, enshrining the rights of men to live their lives largely unencumbered by oppressive government. The government was there to provide for the society, but a society made up of individuals with their own capacity to make decisions and duty to accept responsibility for their actions. The idealism boiled down to many practical rights, such as the right to bear arms as to facilitate the raising of a powerful militia to oppose the national military, should the need arise. The right to privacy, including requiring the government’s agents to secure a warrant, through the judicial system, to prevent unreasonable searches of a man’s home. The right to free religion. And finally the right to freedom of expression, to prevent the government from silencing dissent. The earliest Americans experienced a need for all of these things, under the rule of the British monarchy, which led to the founding of the United States in the first place.

I have lived in Australia for almost 15 years, and am an Australian citizen, but I was born in the United States. I have had the American sense of individuality engrained in me right through my childhood and increasingly supported by rational decisions into my adult life. Notions of personal freedom coming at the cost of personal accountability are second-nature to me. I believe it is absolutely the right of each person to make his or her own decision, with the knowledge that decisions have consequences that one cannot shirk. From this perspective it is difficult for me to fathom the reasoning behind a government mandating what I can and cannot put in my PlayStation 3. If anything, living in a country that was not founded on this principle has caused it to become stronger within me.

In Australia, personal rights are much weaker than in the US. There is no precise equivalent to the Bill of Rights for Australian citizens, for example. There is a provision for free speech in the Australian constitution, but it only applies to political speech (perhaps explaining the idiotic performances in parliamentary question time). As a result, the government has always had the power to regulate artistic expression, legally. So, here we have a National Classification Scheme, which is a piece of legislation that brings the full weight of the punitive justice system to bear on infringements.

Historically the earliest incarnation of the Classifications Board was in a single agent known as the Chief Censor, who was part of the Customs Department. He, and his subordinates, literally checked books and reels of film as they entered the country for obscene content. Their aim was to protect the morality of Australian society from the evils of the outside world. Now, our classifications mostly revolve around the protection of children, and so the sale of many types of media to minors is an offence. Yet this notion of preserving the overall purity of Australian society remains in the legal ability of the government to expunge certain content from the country entirely.

Of course the United States has a range of classification schemes as well, but they are not legally enforceable. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) are industry sponsored bodies that work to satisfy the community’s desire to protect children from material that may be difficult for them to manage. Whether the film, for example, is very violent, sexy, full of obscene language, or even simply scary, the MPAA will weigh these factors against their standards, and make a recommendation for rating. In effect, the MPAA or ESRB work very much the same way as our own NCS, only they cannot make arrests if a person doesn’t follow the rating, as they are only guidelines. They do not attempt to control citizens, only to advise them.

The American system rests on that assumption that people are free to make their own decisions, because they are ultimately responsible for themselves. Further, parents are responsible for raising their own children. The opponents of an R18+ rating here in Australia show surprising contempt for the ability of parents to act as such, especially considering that some of the loudest voices come from family and parenting groups such as the Australian Council for Children and the Media. In the ACCM submission to the SCAG consultation in 2010, the group claims that the “present sale and hire system prohibitions are not effective in preventing access by minors.” They also respond by rewriting one of the questions regarding the potential R18+ game rating from a suggestive to a declarative. The question read: “Is it difficult for parents to enforce age restrictions for computer games?” In the space for response the ACCM wrote: “This question should read ‘It is difficult for parents…’” (Italics in ACCM source)

This group, more than others, also claims widespread illiteracy in the NCS, and that an R18+ rating would only confuse the issue, where “the message that an R18+ category might send is unnecessary if such games were Refused Classification.” Time and again they demonstrate a preference for governmental censorship over the expectation of parental vigilance and decision-making, as well as completely ignoring the right of adults stated in the NCS code to consume what media they want.

Australian parents are, according to the R18+ opponents, so inept that it is literally inevitable that, should adults-only games be allowed to exist in this country, children will get their hands on them, they will be mentally and emotionally damaged by the content, and in sufficient numbers that the problem warrants a federal law banning them more strictly than alcohol, cigarettes or operating an automobile.

The ruling of the Supreme Court this week takes an astonishingly different position, particularly Judge Scalia’s opinion. His opinion could be used as a point-by-point counter to the arguments presented from the anti-R18+ camp over the past … aeon:

Firstly he refutes the assertion that because of interactivity, videogames should be considered specially apart from other media, which is the fundamental reason that the R18+ rating wasn’t included in the Australian NCS in the first place. Had Scalia been part of the Classifications Board in the 1990s, this may never have been a problem for us.

“Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny-a question to which we devote our attention in Part III, infra. Even if we can see in them ‘nothing of any possible value to society… they are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature,’” says Scalia.

Second, he refutes the science that is always trotted out to demonstrate that any time a child plays a violent videogame, they are made more violent: “California relies primarily on the research of Dr Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, ‘[n] early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology.’” I cannot actually explain why this point has been so difficult to make in the Australian debate. Those who use this research, time and again, to support their ideological position simply refuse to abide by the logic, rather than opinion, expressed here by Scalia.

Finally, the most basic point for me is the government’s role in all of this in the first place. Is it not the parents’ place to act as parent to our children? Scalia says: “While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want. This is not the narrow tailoring to “assisting parents” that restriction of First Amendment rights require.”

Here, he clearly states that it is not the government’s place to determine for its citizens what constitutes appropriate or inappropriate media. Some parents may indeed feel their children should not be exposed to certain videogames, as is their absolute right. But do they need a federal law to ensure this happens? In Australia, only the unsupported claim that children will access whatever media they want justifies our law. And what of the parents who do not feel their children need to be restricted from this media? This Californian proposal would restrict them from making their own choice, so effectively the pro-restriction parents are acting as guardians for all American children—as the NCS currently acts not only for Australian children, but Australian adults as well.

Surely here in Australia, we can see the sense in this decision. Surely Australians are not more primitive beings than our American counterparts that we cannot parent our own children, nor discern gameplay from reality. Surely there is some merit in a Supreme Court ruling that the science of Anderson et al. is not the last word on media effects. Surely the fact that the MPAA and ESRB have emerged in a country where this is no legislated requirement for classification demonstrates that a community can work together with industry to maintain a civilised society. Is Australia less able to do the same? Our government certainly seems to think so.

Mass Effect Contingency and Canon

Original Post: May 30 2011

In another in a series of pieces discussing largely unanswerable questions, this piece will examine the relevance of the ‘canon’ to an interactive form such as Mass Effect. The background to this discussion is the overall controversy regarding sex in videogames, and why it is such a difficult subject to handle well, that began in particular regarding Mass Effect a few years ago. More recently, speculation surfaced and inspired a heated debate regarding the possibility of expanding same-sex relationships with previously-established characters in Mass Effect 3. The debate, while very likely motivated by personal aversions to non-heterosexuality in general, revolved around canonical and continuity objections. My question here is, can an interactive medium have a non-interactive canon? Who is to say what the truth is, in a medium where nothing is true, and everything is permitted?

I’m getting a lot of mental mileage out of this topic, and I’m spreading the thoughts out in various outlets. This blog post is one version of the thinking. I will be developing it further in a paper I’m presenting in July at an academic conference, and I had a chat to Mark Serrels over at Kotaku AU for a slightly more approachable take (albeit with slightly different concentration). There is a lot more to be said about Mass Effect, romance, fiction and simulation and I hope to be involved in saying. For now, let’s begin with this discussion of canon. 

Videogames can be described as ‘state machines’ meaning they are constructed out of many sets of options which can be set to a range of different positions. A light switch is a very simple state machine, with both an on and off position while a windmill is a poor example, as there is no switch from on to off, and the speed the mill turns at is highly variable. Games usually contain many, many sets of possibilities, or individual option-cases, that can be set to one of range of possibilities. The class of your RPG character, whether a Little Sister is still in the level or not, and further whether she was rescued or harvested. Some states will either imply or preclude other options in a different set. Think of Morrowind or any other faction-heavy game, where being a high-ranking member of one faction forbids you becoming a high-ranking member of some opposing faction.

Taken all together, these state cases are ‘what is possible’ in a game. Generally the state of any of these cases is entirely dependent on the choices and actions of the player. The possibility space is the player’s domain, as we work through the long set of options, we flick switches to the position that pleases us. The size of the possibility space is usually biggest in strategy games and RPGs where the ‘how’ you play is a major feature of the genre. These games typically present the world as open to the player’s input, malleable to the player’s will. If I want to become exalted with the Cenarion Circle, I know exactly what I need in order to do so, and really, nothing and no one can stop me. If I want to have the maximum proficiency with daggers, I know how to achieve that too. There is really never any question about the potential of the player’s character. Whatever he/she sets out to do will be achievable, provided that it exists within the possibility space in the first place. The ability to manipulate and eventually dominate the possibility space is the prerogative of the player in videogames. This is generally viewed as unproblematic. Yet, as in life, the case of romance and sexuality becomes problematic, and requires greater nuance.

In traditional media the possibility space is defined, or rather described by, the canon. The canon of a particular work is ‘the way things are’ in that universe. Canon, for our purposes here, is something of a history book, and in the case of sci-fi or fantasy, a physics lesson. The canon defines who people are, what they have done, and more generally what is and isn’t possible in the world, based on narrated events in ‘canonical’ texts. That is, the canon is extrapolated from the published novels or films etc. from the original or authorized sources. So, no, your Harry Potter slasher fan-fic is not considered canonically true.

What does this mean in a medium where, for different players, the things that happen and who people are can be wildly different? In the Mass Effect canon, are the Rachni extinct and the Geth reprogrammed, or not? Is Shepard male or female? Is Ashley Williams alive or dead? Mass Effect’s canon is as contingent as the narrative. The way my Mass Effect universe ‘is’ as defined by what actually happened will be (or can be) quite different to yours. What is possible doesn’t change; we both have the same opportunities to begin with. Therein lies the rub: is the canon formed of narrative events, or by the possibility space?

Continuing to use Mass Effect as an example, the array of options regarding the so-called ‘love interest’ characters present us with an interesting case. For the moment, let us ignore the relative believability of any particular character’s sexual orientation, I will return to that later. The question for now is this: on any one playthrough, Shepard can only fully pursue one character, with the clash between two potential romance partners resulting in a decision being made between them. So, two of the available characters are demonstrably attracted to Shepard. Does the fact that an experienced player knows that if the game were played differently, another character would also be available, or would change their sexual orientation, matter? Is the possibility part of the canon when it doesn’t actually happen?

For example: Liara can romance either a male or female Shepard. Does this make her a ‘bisexual’ (in human terms, she’s attracted to both sexes and this has nothing to do with her own lack of definite gender)? Or is she simply (human) straight and attracted to a male Shepard in that case, or a (human) lesbian being attracted to a femShep? Given that it requires two fundamentally different playthroughs of the game to demonstrate her bisexual availability, is it fair to assume the same from one playthrough? Take another example: upgrading the Normandy. In different playthroughs, the ship can be anywhere between stock-standard and fully upgraded. Given that both are possible, does this indicate that in the ‘canon’ the Normandy is somehow both? A “bi-engineered” ship both with and without upgrades? And does the possibility for the player to choose a male or female Shepard mean that canonically, Shepard is actually a simultaneous hermaphrodite?

My suspicion is that we want to attribute something more like personality to Liara, Jack, Miranda or any other character, and less like state machine coding that actually defines them. Especially when it comes to sex, but generally because these characters are more fun when thought of as people, we want to construct for them an interpretation of their possible states as behaviours rather than programming. We want them to be more real, with their own agency, rather than simply accepting input from a player, and activating the appropriate animation and dialog according to the selection criteria. Further, it is unprecedented for each ‘reading’ of a text to present a materially different story, so despite this possibility in videogames, we tend to treat/imagine Liara as the same person when romanced by either male or female Shepards—even though this is a different story.

When we combine the player-centric possibility space with a more traditional understanding of character and canon, these problems arise. The term ‘Shepsexual’ is used in the BioWare forums to describe the peculiar, unlikely experience of everyone on the ship being attracted to Shepard. We can avoid this sensation if we compartmentalize our plathroughs into separate versions of the story, though. This places some expectations on the shoulders of players, to change their perception of character, and less on those of developers. The reason I suggest this first is that from a story-writer’s perspective, having a love-interest in a story such as Mass Effect in a linear medium may indeed be inevitable, possibly vital to the experience. In an interactive narrative, the decision must be made between allowing/providing for a romance with one particular NPC (let’s say Ashley) meaning that the only playthroughs to feature a romance arc are those by a male Shepard, by a player interested in Ashley (and not Liara or Kaiden). The alternative must then be alternatives. It is not part of the story/narrative that all characters desire Shepard, but part of the deeper structure that a romance arc (of some sort) should be possible for any given Shepard. Therefore, the designers must plan for romance for each different Shepard by creating different versions of each NPC: romanced and non-romanced. Within that, we should probably find romanced-by-male and romanced-by-female, and possibly even the non-romanced version of each as well.

The question becomes whether any particular character being bisexual is actually part of his/her story or if it is simply a mechanical reaction to the player/character’s gender. This is a deep problem between traditional game design and realistic world building. If we are to create worlds, and especially characters, features such as their sexuality must seem to belong to them, as a person, rather than being part of the possibility space that the player controls, or it feels disingenuous, even pandering (especially to certain hetero-male fantasies). Design fundamentals tell us that games should be fair; life tells us that the world is not fair. This demands a very awkward balance between enabling a wide array of player experiences, particularly those personal ones such as romance, and creating an unrealistic world where everyone wants to sleep with you.

A Series of Interesting Choices

 Original Post: May 18 2011 (Kotaku AU)

Kaiden or Ashley? Rescue or Harvest? How do you make decisions in video games? Video games were described by Sid Meier as ‘a series of interesting choices.’ Indeed, many good video games today involve choices that go beyond which gun to use or how fast to run through a room. Many involve decisions between two general strategies, or like the above examples between two characters or responses that affect the rest of the game. The question here is, how do those choices matter?

I want to suggest that there are two different types of choices available in video games, and wish that there was a third. The first I will call a ‘mechanical choice.’ These are the kind that may not even seem like choices to experienced gamers, as they are built into the mechanics of the game. These are the ‘choice’ to grab a Mushroom in Mario, or to pick up a sniper rifle in Call of Duty while standing on a rooftop. Do you upgrade your sword and armour or not? Of course you do these things, because they help you to beat the game. Mechanical choices are economic: they make the player-character (or his allies) more powerful.

The second kind of choice is a ‘narrative choice.’ These are the kinds of decisions that affect the fiction/story of the game, but not the relative power of the player-character. By rescuing either Kaiden Alenko or Ashley Williams in Mass Effect, the strength of the overall party isn’t affected, since the two characters are more or less interchangeable given the right balance of the other party members. We do not have the option to rescue both, so a loss is inevitable. The only difference is which personality you lose. Playing as a good or evil Cole in inFamous is a general strategy (like any other good/bad split we see so often these days), but doesn’t affect the strength of the hero either way. Each power is balanced against its opposite, so in the end, a Cole of either alignment has equivalent firepower.

In Bioshock, we can either harvest or rescue Little Sisters. Does it matter, in the end, which we choose? Jack gains more ADAM initially by harvesting them, but then ends up with more than he needs anyway. A saviour gains the extra plasmid ability that balances out the lack of ADAM in the critical battles against Big Daddies later on. FarCry 2 designer Clint Hocking explores in detail the reasons he feels the game is a betrayal to the player, and the mechanical weakness of the Little Sister choice is part of it.

The problem though, is this: if you were made genuinely, significantly weaker by choosing to save the Little Sisters, would you do it? Videogames are almost entirely about seeking to increase one’s power, in order to overcome dangerous obstacles. What kind of videogame player would seek to make himself weaker, and thus in danger of not being able to finish the game? Yet this is exactly the kind of problem any altruist finds himself in. The choice to save Little Sisters (in a real world) would be meaningful because of the self-sacrifice on Jack’s part. He sacrifices power in order to preserve the life of a little girl, the ethically noble option. By then rewarding the player with a new power, the videogame essentially takes away the meaning of that initial choice.

In a world where we create videogames with different difficulty settings, can we not incorporate that into the fiction? Why shouldn’t Bioshock be harder to finish playing as a good guy? (Or inFamous, Mass Effect, Fable or Fallout 3 for that matter.) Our ethical frameworks in the real world often will tell us that the ‘right’ thing to do is often not the ‘easy’ option. Why don’t our games reflect this?

Take the Mass Effect example again, and combine it with the romance arc. Let’s re-imagine the mechanics a little, and for example use a male Shepard who has pursued Ashley in the romance. Having gotten to the end stage of the romance arc, Kaiden (not Ashley) will be granted some extra mechanical combat strength, whether a new weapon or armour or ability, making him clearly more powerful than Ashley. Then, when the vital decision must be made, the player asks himself: Do I save Ashley whom my Shepard loves, or Kaiden, whom my player-brain tells me is the more valuable game piece? This asks the player to think about the party members as characters, rather than only pieces of gear to be wielded in a fight. It asks the same of the designers, of course. (Reverse all this for a femShep, for a similar effect, and just do the math if you want to include Liara—she’d have to be put in a similar life-threatening situation for it to work though.)

It’s simply too easy to ignore the fiction, in our medium, and hide behind economics. There are too many ways to fail, and not enough ways to bring the story to an end. Mass Effect 2 goes some way to explore this by providing many different ending scenarios, not all of which are victorious at all. Heavy Rain does the same by providing several different endings, and not forcing the player to go back and play the last level over again if someone dies. So you might have ‘beaten’ the game, but you certainly haven’t won. But it’s not just the end of the game that matters, it’s how we get there, and why we make the decisions along the way.

So the third type of choice I imagine is the kind that actually breaks some game design rules, and unbalances the game—if it should. Life isn’t a game, and it certainly isn’t always fair. If we want to explore more realistic human experiences, game designers will have to confront this fact eventually. Naturally, we can’t guarantee all players will respond to and think about the context of these choices. Many will continue to ignore them in favour of whatever the most economical decision is. But how many interesting, compromising, uncomfortable and increasingly horrifying choices can a designer compel a player to make, with the promise of greater power? I’m not arguing here for games to be impossible to ‘beat’ if you make the good choices instead of the bad ones (not all games anyway…) but that you’ll have to be more careful, work out a better strategy, or do more preparation work like Mass Effect 2 makes you do in the lead up to the Omega Relay jump. All that time you can savour the knowledge that you’ve done the right thing. Or not, and enjoy playing a psychopath for a bit.

A Riposte to Blunt Criticism

Original Post: May 10 2011

A few days ago I was cited in a piece by Danc on his Lost Garden blog as being an example of “shallow game criticism.” While I don’t take personal offence to the citation, nor even the tone of Danc’s article, I feel compelled to respond (as many have before me) to its argument. In a way I welcome the opportunity to clearly enunciate my own position, even if it is from a defensive posture. And like any good narcissist, I’m pleased anyone is reading my work–even when they disagree! So, herein lies something of a personal (please note, personal) manifesto.

The two points that Danc seems to take issue with are the nature of criticism in general, and the purpose of videogame criticism in particular. He has not engaged deeply with the concept of criticism of other art forms, so I can only speculate about what he feels the nature and purpose of literary criticism is, and I may well do so throughout this discussion.

Firstly, about videogames themselves:

Yet though games do possess evocative elements, they also are driven by a functional heart that resists being reduced to only the softest of sciences. Bridges, though undeniably aesthetic and cultural objects, can also be understood as functional or economic creations.  Playthroughs, aesthetics, rhetoric, literary theory, film theory, art history may be one set of valuable perspectives, but if you only rely on these, you will fail to paint a complete picture the babbling, whirring human-mechanical reality of a games.

Games have much in common with functional works involving mathematics, psychology, governments, economics or other complex systems.

As for games criticism, he is quite particular. Games criticism must be:

Grounded: Are you basing your theories off empirical evidence?  Do not write something merely because you had a feeling to express.

Aware: Do you know what other people have written in the past?  Do the research and be an informed commenter.

Insightful:  Does your writing add a substantial new perspective or tool that moves the conversation forward?  Do not rehash the same old thing simply because you have an opinion on the currently popular meme.

Actionable:  Does your writing identify a course of action that previously was obscured? Do not let an exploration of an idea wander off into vague hand-waving.  Ask the reader to perform an experiment that increases the knowledge of the community as a whole.

Of my piece, he says:

Yet the essay is little more than a series of personal descriptions of how he feels when he plays certain games.  There is little insight that couldn’t be gained by sitting down with a beer and a controller. There is no attempt at gathering empirical evidence. Adam could have saved everyone a vast amount of time with the TL;DR summary: “In 3rd person you can see (and thus empathize) with a visualized character and in 1st person, you can’t.” Once you strip away the laborious language, you have yet another bit of fluffy gamer opinion written by a young student.

And follows with:

He is a student acting as an academic, writing what is essentially a playthrough that in turn masquerades as game analysis.  The fact that he is a student writing a playthrough is fine.  The multiple levels of deception are what initially raised my hackles.

Given this, if you fail to disclose your perspective, you are very likely wasting the precious time of your reader.  If you deliberately obscure this information (as I’ve seen many student or indies tempted to do) you are being a dishonest member of our community.  Hey! Stop doing that…there is no shame in writing openly and honestly about your perspective.

So working through some of these points, perhaps to quibble a little before I launch into what I really want to say here:

Regarding the “disclaimers” that Danc seems bent on, whereby each writer will post a bio or resume at the top of each of their pieces, I did that. I was introduced as an academic. My title (with the help of Kotaku’s editor Mark Serrels) is a riff on the content and purpose of the article. “What’s Your Perspective?” The title was a question, my essay was an answer. The purpose of the article was to give my perspective, follow my thought process, and provoke others to do the same of their own thoughts and reactions to games. In that, I feel eminently successful. The article sparked the most successful debate and discussion anything I’ve written has so far accomplished. It’s even been linked by someone who disagrees with me vehemently! It was a perspective piece, informed by my own reasoning.

A “playthrough” is a new term for me, maybe like a walkthrough, which is an unbiased description of events as they unfold, explaining the how-to’s of a game. Nowhere in my piece does it instruct anyone on how to play any of the games I mention. It would be a woeful playthrough, in fact, in its lack of detail. Perhaps the problem here is the word Danc chose to apply: “analysis.” If he has a specialist understanding of “analysis” which requires empirical datasets, graphs and metrics, then my piece is not analysis. Yet he is the one who used that word in the first place. Personally I have a broader definition of the word which includes the careful study of an object by one person reporting his findings, supported by a logical argument. Further, if Danc had ever read any of my genuinely academic writing, he would find that I engage quite specifically with the mechanics of videogames as a matter of course. In fact, I almost never only talk about the story, or a character, or other elements of fiction without engaging with how they function as part of the system. Instead he reads one of my pieces, on a public enthusiast blog site, and fails to appreciate that even that one is actually a question of the most basic mechanical nature: player perspective, and writes me off as a ‘shallow game-illiterate’ when in fact I have Crawford, Zimmerman and Koster on my shelf right now. I’m also not sure what he believes the difference is between a student and an academic.

Regarding his four-point checklist for a critical article: I frankly and unreservedly disagree with his first point. If I have no right to express what feelings a piece of art instilled in me as an individual human, then all is lost and we should all just go home now. The primary occupation of humankind is coming to terms with being a human, and understanding the feelings and experiences we have in life. Criticism is a parallel to artistic practice in helping us to do so (more on this later). Secondly, it will become evident throughout this piece that I believe Danc has himself failed on his next point, that of being informed about the research into what has already been said on this subject. He can drop names like Koster, Zimmerman and Crawford, but this is cherry-picking in the extreme and demonstrates no awareness of the ebb and flow of theoretical perspectives in recent game study and criticism (more on this later too). With his third point, Danc seems to be stating that not everyone has a right to express their own personal interpretation (as indicated in the first point) of a game experience. He seems to value his time quite highly, so we writers should think of him and question whether he has read something similar at some other time. Also, if the article in question does not answer the (Danc’s) questions satisfactorily, then we should also not bother…which brings me to the fourth point: action. Rather than introduce my objection to this here, it will appear in more detail below.

Finally he implies some level of dishonesty, even out-right deception using me as an example for argument, suggesting that people like me (students or indies) wilfully obscure their identities. I have never done this. I don’t even use an alias (Danc is your real name?) in my work, my university email address is my public contact information, I am introduced in my article as a PhD student, and have the same posted on my blog. I am also easily accessible on Academia.edu. In any event, the identity of the author should be secondary to the quality of the writing. If Danc judges the work by the author, he commits a grievous act of prejudice that I simply do not have time for.

 

The Purpose and Nature of Videogames Criticism (for me).

Are videogames art? Are they machine? Are they emotional, evocative? Are they calculating, engineered? Are they narratives? Are they games? Yes. Of course.

These are questions theorists such as myself have been battling with for over a decade now, and have more or less moved on from. The hybrid nature of the videogame has become evident, almost taken for granted. We have gradually specialising videogame theorists such as Aarseth, Juul and Frasca who have moved from a hardline ludological position towards a middling perspective, and back again—more at peace with those of a different perspective than in 2003. On the other side there are people like myself, Ben Abraham, Monica Evans, Ewan Kirkland, Miguel Sicart, Julian Dibbell, T.L. Taylor, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, and Nate Garrelts who perform (or edit collections of) analyses from a wide range perspectives.

Game critics, whether their testamur reads BSc or BA, must and do acknowledge the varied character of their object of study. That is, in fact, the entire focus of my PhD thesis: an analysis of the structure of a swathe of videogames in an attempt to articulate how and why their active systems engage with the fictional content they present, and how that fiction works to contextualize otherwise meaningless code. In his piece Danc is echoing rather loudly the hardline ludological position perhaps best personified in Markku Eskelinen or Jesper Juul ten years ago. Eskelinen’s most famous quote reads: “If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Like early ludology, there is no room in Danc’s position for a literary or aesthetic criticism of videogames because games are, essentially, mechanics.

Yet in a similarly blunt fashion, I could ask whether Danc (or Markku, should I ever encounter him!) sees code or characters when they look at Red Dead Redemption. What is on the screen, flowcharts and algorithms, or people and places? Why do we spend millions of dollars on the scripts, voice actors, motion capture, environment modelling, musical score and sound effects if what games are, really, is code and mechanic? If at the end of the day, all that fiction stuff is mere fluff why is it there at all?

The truthful answer is always “both.” The horse I ride in Red Dead is both animal and subroutine. Videogames are a medium, evocative and emotional, but they are a systematic medium. Videogames are unique among games in that they are media, and unique among media in that they are games. So, indeed, a critic who fails to address the systemic nature of the videogame is ignoring something fundamental to the object itself. But a critic who fails to appreciate the human experience of playing is missing the point of videogames in the first place.

The point, if videogames can be said to have one, is to affect the player. Designing a working system is trivial, at this point. If a computer programmer cannot create a working system of zeros and ones, then he is not a programmer. Yet this meaningless accomplishment is not the goal of the game designer. His is an artful craft, with the same humanist goals as other art: expression, communication, even communion with humanity, explorations of what it is to be human. Videogames are the medium that expresses our new(ish) understanding of life, the world and the whole stinking thing as a network of related agents moving in patterns, affecting each other in different ways, with consequences and potential both realised and unrealised. See Ben’s favorite Latour, Foucault or Deleuze and Guttari for various network theories about reality.

Danc repeats a familiar ontological assessment: the rules of games are “real” and “true,” therefore residing on the “real” side of an ontological divide between “real life” and “fiction.” They are objective, like geology or physics. This is simply, patently untrue. The rules that define Super Mario are entirely contrived, man-made and ultimately, arbitrary. They are not found, discovered, in nature the way rocks and gravity are. They lie on the same side of the ontological divide between truth and fiction beside Robinson Caruso and the Force. The rules of a videogame are ontologically identical to the rules that define the speed of Warp 9 or the difference between a Jedi Knight and a Sith Lord. The difference is their presentation, manifestation, not their ontological nature. In a film or novel, we imagine the rules that bind the fictional world by modelling them internally based on the examples we are shown through description and action in the narrative. In videogames we have an almost direct access to the rules, with which we can experiment to observe their cause and effect ourselves. They remain fictional rules, only “true” inside the fictional world bound within our PlayStation, instead of between book covers or title sequences and credits. This concept of mine is influenced by a ‘transmedial’ understanding of fiction/narrative described by Marie-Laure Ryan mostly in Avatars of Story.

Given that videogames are in fact entirely fictional, though systematic, they are just as open for personal reflection and deep, individualised criticism as any other artform. Danc’s preference for empirical data to somehow find the “truth” of what a game… is? means? …is laughable. I do not require a survey to explain why Romeo and Juliet is tragic. I do not require a set of metric data to understand my experience of the Shawshank Redemption. To suggest that only through qualitative data will we ‘understand’ a film, novel or painting is ridiculous. Following from this, how will the quantitative analyst even know what questions to ask, without a treatise from an individual player thinking about his own experience? How did we come up with words like ‘fun’ or ‘immersion’ or ‘agency’ in the first place if not by attempting to describe personal experience in words rather than numbers?

Criticism in the artistic tradition is a method by which a person reflects deeply on the work of an artist to elucidate and/or disseminate its meaning more widely than is likely to occur without such work, whether that meaning is obscured through difficult or complex text, genre convention, specific social or historical context, or some esoteric symbology or allegory. For further reference on a traditional critic, see The Intent of the Critic by Wilson, Foerster and Ransom. For an example, read something by Pauline Kael. Artists in other traditions are assumed to be masters of their craft, or at least assume themselves to be such that they do not look for validation or “tips for improvement” from a (mere) critic (though the working relationship between Modernist writers such as Eliot, Pound, Woolf and Joyce is worth thinking about). The critic is not writing so much for the artists as for the audience, the same audience he shares with the artist. The responsibility of the critic is indeed, as Danc suggests, to “know more” than the average reader/viewer/player as to make his observations appear insightful, or the connections made seem meaningful rather than obvious. A critic making obvious observations can indeed be said to not be doing the job. But it is simply not the critic’s primary job to tell the artist what to do next—any artist standing around idly waiting for such instruction is a sad fellow! Coupled with this exploration and explanation of meaning is a judgement, an assessment of either why this artwork is indeed so meaningful, or where it falls short of the mark. Perhaps a film is confusing, but isn’t meant to be—this is the job of the critic to point out. No, dear viewer, you are not missing something, this is just poorly edited film. Or, instead, this film is about confusion and is not meant to be easy to understand (Memento? Fight Club?)

I wonder what Danc would think of the essays regarding Ayn Rand and Objectivism that Bioshock inspired. Is this all useless babble because it didn’t give a bulleted list for improvements to be made in Bioshock 2? Is he so caught up in the commercial-industrial nature of videogame production that what exists no longer matters, and only what is yet to be made has any relevance? What of criticism in other artforms? Should a critic of Shakespeare limit himself to analysing the grammatical style or other ‘functional’ aspects of a play, with the goal of writing a better play, at the expense of enjoying Hamlet? The fact is, these Bioshock essays were adding meaning to the game for players not immediately familiar with Rand or Objectivism. The critiques (which can be positive, by the way) were allowing the less informed players (like myself, initially) to understand more of what Bioshock had to offer, effectively making it a better game for those players. The only call to action there would have been to read Atlas Shrugged and then play Bioshock again.

Yet even that last sentence isn’t true. I have written criticism of videogames like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed, both of which I really liked, specifically addressing shortcomings in the mechanics of both games. The question I put to Danc, is why would I do that? What makes a game “better” in his own terms? He never really articulates what he thinks a “better” game would be, he seems to take the end goal for granted. To me, a “better” game is one that marries the systemic mechanics (ie. What you can and can’t do, and what happens as a result) with increasing tightness to the narrative. See Clint Hocking, Ian Bogost and Jonathan Blow for these kind of ideas. So, a game called Thief should be about hiding and sneaking, not running and gunning or farming. How do we know what makes one mechanic better than another? If we can only refer to hard science, the answer is: as long as the bridge doesn’t collapse its fine. Nevermind that it’s ugly! So as long as the game doesn’t crash, its fine? No… that’s just wrong and I’m not even sorry to say it.

In summary, Danc does not want to read game criticism. He wants a report written by a systems analyst for purposes of systems design. I actually have a qualification in that field, from my undergraduate degree. I have both a major in English Literature and Information Technology, with a third major in “Informatics” (now called Digital Cultures) which is essentially the deliberate marriage of the two. I have a further major (serendipitously) in Art History and Theory. I have written systems analyses, designed algorithms and databases, and I realise that many of the same skills apply in the development of a videogame. The same can be said for cinematography: an electrician is required to set up the lighting, a sound engineer to record and edit sound and maintain equipment, a camera operator to maintain and use the correct cameras. To suggest that only technical knowledge and insight is required to produce a film  is preposterous (or any other artwork: novels have grammatical syntax, painting has linear perspective and chemistry of paint, thinner and colour theory, sculpture and architecture rely on geometry and physics). Of course, many of these technical skills are found within the artist himself: an author will likely know the grammar of the language he is using; the director will probably have experience in most aspects of film technology. But art is not the sum total of its techne. I choose to view videogames as art, and not as pure technology. Danc may choose to view videogames differently, but has no ground upon which to stand in condemning my work and the work of others for not satisfying his purposes.

First or Third Person - What's your Perspective?

Original Post: April 18 2011 (Kotaku AU) 

Adam Ruch is a PhD candidate, currently writing about Video Games Criticism. He is, by most measure, a pretty smart guy! So when he emailed me asking if he could write a post about the first and third person video games, and the different ways in which they can immerse the player, I thought ‘have at it old bean’. This piece is meant to inspire debate: which do you find more immersive – first or third person games?

First or Third Person – What’s Your Perspective?

Bethesda’s Fallout 3 is one of those monumental titles that happened to be released during my WoW days, meaning I only even registered its existence about two years ago. I tried it out back then, and only just made it to Megaton before abandoning it. Two years and a very cheap Bethesda Steam bundle later I tried it out again. This time I made it as far as Galaxy News Radio in two or three play sessions. Now I struggle to come up with a single aspect of Fallout 3 that I actually like.

This article is the result of a nagging concern regarding one aspect of the game that I floated on Facebook as an invitation to discuss. What I wrote was: “Putting this out there that I think my ‘immersion’ and/or level of empathy with my character is higher in a third-person game than a first person game because I can recognise the motion of the body when I can see it than when I appear to be a floating camera-without-body skimming smoothly over the surface of the gameworld. This is opposite to the common wisdom that gets peddled in game theory.” After the discussion, I have a better understanding of my own position, and of the ‘common wisdom’ that some of my friends also supported.

My issue lies somewhere in between the concept of immersion and character-identification, which aren’t exactly the same thing. The two are related, and reinforce each other, but can also operate independently and in different ways. The first way, the ‘common wisdom’ is repeated in game design manuals and states that first-person perspective is more immersive and makes the player feel more like they are the character in the game.

First-person immersion seems to rely on a concept of self-transporation from the ordinary world into the gameworld. So the player of the FP game is injected into the gameworld as the non-character within the fiction. The player-character is a digital shell that requires the player to inhabit in order to become a complete (fictional) entity. This is certainly the case for a Fallout 3-style RPG when there is no pre-existing character to speak of. The player literally builds up its characteristics and personality as they go. But the important key is that the player-character is not a ‘character’ in the normal sense of the word. Instead it is transparent, more like part of the interface like the keyboard and mouse which allows the human player to act within the digital realm. So in this respect, the player is not engaged with the character at all, but with everything else in the gameworld.

From this perspective, we can’t actually say that there is any character called Gordon Freeman. That is simply the name of the subroutine that turns mouse motions into camera tracking and panning, clicks into gunshots, etc. The entity that shoots baddies and solves physics puzzles is the player. Directly. I find this a strange and incomplete perspective. I, Adam, PhD student, would not make a very good space marine or theoretical physicist. We are all already and always play-acting as someone else in gameworlds. Despite what the interface tells you, you are not there. Very little of who and what you-the-player are is an asset in videogames, especially the apocalyptic space marine variety. To survive that, I, we, have to become someone else. Which brings me to my rebuttal of this common wisdom.

Lately I’ve played many more third-person action games (on consoles) than first-person games (console or PC). I also find I respond better to these. Through the discussion I mentioned earlier, I have reasoned that this is due to my awareness of my role-play, my desire to role-play. I actually don’t want to be “me” in gameworlds, because “me” wouldn’t do very well there. I actually want to be someone else.

Without any hard empirical data to back this up, I’d suggest that far more fiction exists describing the average third-person player-character than describing an average first-person character. There is, at least, a constant reminder to the player what the character looks like and how s/he moves. This is fairly important to a character like Ezio Auditore, and perhaps less so for Niko Bellic. In either case, I still know more about them as individual human beings than I do Gordon Freeman, simply from camera angle. To me, this (pardon the pun) fleshing out of the character’s body is one of many important ways we are able to create more convincing fictional characters in games. My original proposal is that we are already pretending to be someone else in a videogame, so all the better to know more about that role we are assuming.

The corporeality of human existence fades from view almost entirely in a first person game (see some exceptions below). In Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and most other FPS titles, the designer and player are both allowed to forget about how a human body moves. This enables inhuman strafing and spinning based more on mouse sensitivity than on footwork. In Fallout 3, I glide across as torn landscape with the fluidity of a hockey puck on the ice. Compare this with the lumbering physicality of Marcus Fenix’s “roadie run.” His is an almost primal physicality, connecting him to the terrain. We feel heavier as Fenix than as Ezio, and even the assassin (or Cole from inFamous) does not glide effortlessly over rooftops. We see him place every footfall and handhold, making the traversal of the architecture mean something.

Those that support the first-person immersion view contend that this third-person perspective distances them from the character, reducing the experience to puppeteering. This is a fine and obvious metaphor, visually and physically. I prefer a different one, though: theatrical role play. The more I know of a character, the more I am able to become him (and now I take on the same metaphor of immersion and identification). This is how actors take on a role as well. To argue that a player cannot ‘become’ Ezio, Fenix or Niko because they are physically visible is analogous to arguing that an actor cannot ‘become’ Hamlet because there is a script for him to speak and stage notes describing what he should do.

If you are the actor, there is no other Hamlet aside from the one you are playing on stage. Though obviously you-as-Hamlet can’t see yourself from behind, this informative description was imparted to you before show time while studying the script and carefully rehearsing the role. Perhaps if the first-person game encouraged me to go to such lengths, I would experience a similar level of empathy for that invisible character. To do this, however, that character would not be the same blank-slate described earlier.

So the perspective is linked to a concept of empty vessel/complete character. The first-person character is never you but merely a make-believe character you are improvising as you go. In third-person games, that character is deeper for a number of reasons in a number of ways, which makes inhabiting their lives a more compelling experience for me. This doesn’t explain everything I dislike, or rather find missing, in Fallout 3, but the hollowness of my character is certainly a contributing factor. That might paint me as a less creative, expressive individual, but I challenge anyone’s ability to be creative while in the shoes of a Call of Duty or Halo character.

Thanks to: James, Patrick, Cass, Ben and of course Krystal for your thoughts on this.

What’s your view? Do you prefer first person games or third person? Let us know in the comments below.

Contested Vocabulary in Game Studies

Original Post: February 23 2011

I want to take a moment to pour over the semantics of a few important terms/concepts often used in the context of videogame studies. These terms are fundamental to our study, but are in my opinion, abused. That is to say they are either given new or limited definitions, or claimed by game studies when up to now, they’ve been deployed with different meanings and in different contexts. So without further ado: Play, Rules, Learning and Goals.

Play: Play is a tough nut to crack. Huizinga and Callois wrestle with this word for two different books’ worth of exposition. These two seem to remember that play is not the exclusive property of “game theorists” as they nominate many other meanings of the word play, which I’d like to remind any game critics (or maybe just myself) of. A play is a dramatic, theatrical production. A play is acted out by players who occupy a role, which they also play. Musicians also play the music and their instrument with two slightly different meanings. Finally the meaning as in the play of the steering wheel, which I think is fundamental to our understanding: the space for free movement within a rigid mechanical structure.

If we take a step back, and use the’ free play within structure’ as a fundamental definition, I think it actually works for all the previous meanings. A musician can play his instrument, but only in so many ways according to the rigid physical reality of how the instrument works. He can find novel ways to do it, like knocking on an electric guitar to make percussive noises, but that’s still within the physical limitations. The same musician is playing the musical score, which like the character in a theatrical performance, is defined by the original author. Each player is free to interpret that role or score, to embellish or emphasize certain aspects, but there is a structure within which, or with reference to, they perform their free movements. Take the reinvention to far, however, and whether the character/song are in fact the ‘same’ as is described by the score or script. Play is a creative process, but located and contextualised by some kind of structure which can be game rules, a script, a musical score or the amorphous rules of child’s play.

Rules: Rules are not endemic to games. Rules do not, for example, define games as different or exceptional to ‘real life’ in that all our lives are governed by different rule structures. These are cultural rules of etiquette, governmental law, rules of physics, rules of corporate bureaucracy, etc. Rules are also present in supposedly non-rule based media such as novels and film. Early ludology claimed that it was a videogame’s rules that set it apart from other media, yet one can investigate two sets of rules that govern the details of any given narrative, especially obviously in science fiction or fantasy genre. Firstly, structuralism explored the rules by which all stories are crafted. Propp and Levi-Strauss in particular dissected myth to discover how each one did the work of meaning-making. Rules that govern the hero’s journey, for example, explaining the stages of narrative, and of narrative construction itself by Genette and Chatman.

The second kind of rule is internal, fictional so to speak. These are the rules such as Star Trek’s Prime Directive. The characters within the fiction must obey that rule. The speculative scientific rules of warp drive are consistent within that universe, meaning that Warp 9 should (if the narrative is well-formed) always be the same speed. Picard cannot suddenly read minds as to conveniently advance the plot, because that contradicts a rule that says he is not an empath. Like us in the real world,  characters in typical fictional works are subject to the rules of their world. Whether that world’s rules deviate far from ours or not is irrelevant, though the deviant, fantastical worlds make the rules more obvious to the audience. Returning to Callois, “Rules create fictions.” We may simply change the tense of a sentence such as ‘Some special humans have been mutated to possess strange new powers,’becomes ’some special human beings can mutate to posses strange new powers,’ to create worlds within which narratives occur–the world of the X-Men, for example. This applies equally in the mundane fictional world of Emma Woodhouse, who explores social rules and patterns.

Learning: Learning as abused in relation to rules. In A Theory of Fun Raph Koster uses the notion of learning as if it does not happen in any other way than in rule-based games. Though I agree with his premise that we are pattern-recognising animals, and that we seek patterns in most everything, the distinction between games and narrative as being based on the ability to ‘learn the rules’ is erroneous. As described above, narratives have rules too. Mostly we are interested in learning the fictional rules, as opposed to the structural ones. Learning the structural patterns is expressed in a negative way by labelling a novel or film ‘formulaic.’ What is a formula but a rule, and algorithm and structure for crafting a narrative?

Discovery is a term more likely to be associated with narrative experiences. We discover what happens as we read through a book, because we didn’t know to start with. By discovering events we extrapolate rules, the ‘why’ not just the ‘what’ of a drama. The reasons why Romeo and Juliet ‘happened’ are the rules of their society, of human nature, as well as the rules of tragic narrative form. Games are better equipped to teach us rules in that they can check our understanding in ways that novels and films cannot, not formally anyway. But games are, thus far, not very good at checking our understanding of the narrative/fictional rules, rather concentrating on the supposedly separate rules of gameplay mechanics. When designers master the technique of integrating these two things so they are the same rules, we may have some deeply satisfying experiences to play with.

Goals: Goals are implicated in my discussion above about learning and rules. In game studies the existence of goals seems to confirm or deny the ‘gameness’ of a particular object. The discussion of ‘player goals’ as opposed to ‘game goals’ has cropped up here on this blog a few times and I’d like to explore the difference. Game goals are the internally validated, hopefully consistent win state, or objectives which move the player towards the win state. These kind of goals implicate an objectively (or at least externally) justified win state. That is to say, among the possible ending states (should there be any) one is classified as better than the other based on game rules. If the game lacks discreet end states, then conditions or operant states such as an avatar’s state of mind (ie. Happiness) may be substituted this way. The game assesses performance against a rubric that cannot be explained within the gameworld’s fiction.

I have goals in real life, such as becoming a full-time university lecturer, but that does not make my daily activity a game. Commander Shepard in Mass Effect has the goal of stopping Saren and the Reapers, that does not make the narrative fiction within Mass Effect a game, to Shepard. A goal which is explained through means other than winning a game does not necessarily imply game-ness. It implies challenge, opposition, or conflict between active agents, but if all conflict is a game, then everything is a game and nothing more needs to be said. Like explored above, many (if not all) contexts in life can be articulated as conforming to a set of rules. That does not make all contexts of life games.

For the player of Mass Effect, goals can take the form of a role to play. Much like the player of a theatrical role, the player will project an identity into the gameworld as best he is able, by manifesting that personality through the choices BioWare have implemented. James Paul Gee helpfully outlines the projected identity in this way. The goal of playing a ‘paragon’ or ‘renegade’ Shepard does not imply a formally-defined win- or loss-state. It implies a manner of engaging with the fictional world of Mass Effect. Further, playing a compassionate Shepard, perhaps engaging in a romance with a crew member is an even more subtle goal, since unlike the Paragon and Renegade example, there is no meter for love. The human need satisfied by playing a role this way is more akin to the need that causes people to watch sentimental and romantic movies, the satisfaction is not one of victory, but of dramatic pleasure. The pleasure of witnessing a positive resolution within a human drama. (The same could be said in the inverse, horror films, tragedies and negative outcomes, these satisfy different human needs again, and further complicate associating these outcomes with ‘winning.’) The person who justifies a romantic sub-plot with the gamifying reference to extrinsic rewards exposes a great deal about that person’s understanding or appreciation of love.

So goals can characterise, influence the choices individuals make when presented with the free space within a contextualising structure in which to play. This is analagous to a musician deciding to play a mixolydian or phrygian scale–neither one ‘wins’ the playing of a song. They are expressive of the player’s feelings, personality, or mood. This is the case when the structure of rules doesn’t imply winning or losing, sometimes they do, so the goals are bound up in that. But the mere presence of structure, rules, the ability to make choices, does not necessitate the external validation of one choice as ‘right’ and the other as ‘wrong.’ No one can dismiss the experience of Hamlet because he didn’t ‘win.’ We learn about the rules of humanity through his motivations, choices and their consequences, just as players of Mass Effect do.