Bending Time in Skyrim

Original Post: December 20 2011 (Games.on.Net)

Time is a strange thing in videogames, especially in open-world RPG type simulations such as Bethesda’s Skyrim. A fair amount of scholarship has been undertaken examining time in games (Juul and Eskelinen are a good place to start, if you’re interested) although these tend toward explaining time with regard to narrative theory, rather than pertaining towards the more uniquely videogame experience of time. Time is also bound up in theories of space, so Nitsche’s work on videogame spaces is probably another important background to this present discussion, as is Adrian Forest’s recent post about Skyrim in particular.

"Time is ‘spent’ by people with the knowledge that they will never get it back. So every action has a ‘cost’ to the human. This is important because we generally want more experiences within the same real-world time while playing a videogame than would naturally occur in everyday life"The fundamental problem of time in videogames is that the time flow a human player exists within is immutable and inexorable. Real-world time cannot be slowed down or sped up, it is non-negotiable. Time is ‘spent’ by people with the knowledge that they will never get it back. So every action has a ‘cost’ to the human. This is important because we generally want more experiences within the same real-world time while playing a videogame than would naturally occur in everyday life. We use games (and other artistic/entertainment media) to cram more action, drama or other experience into each real-world minute we engage with the work. Artists cut out vast stretches of down-time in most narratives in order to progress through various scenes without actually costing the viewer the same amount of time in the real world as passes in the fictional one. So we can read a historical account of World War I in less than five years, for example.

Obviously in this, we miss out on a great deal of detail. One of the great strengths of various narrative media, and our literacy with them, is the ability to abridge time and omit detail, and still make sense. This is not a trivial matter! Learning that time can pass between shots in a film is a terribly foreign concept, if one were to apply real-world literacy to the film. How does one jump forward in time by several hours? Linear media can also rewind time, to depict events from multiple perspectives, but having occurred at the same fictional time. This is another impossible feat to replicate in reality, humans can’t go back in time to see what was happening somewhere else.

Certain videogames operate on a similar temporal structure. That is, in a level-based, linear game, we might skip several hours or days between playable missions. In others, we may play as different characters, acting in different locations simultaneously (in fictional time). Call of Duty: Modern Warfare comes to mind as an example of both of these techniques. In this we can begin to discern the relationship between space and time: the shifts in time often occur when the player-character is being ‘extracted’ and moved to a different location. So the game simply skips the long plane flight and picks up again at the insertion point.

Skyrim, however, is not like Call of Duty. In Skyrim there are (almost) no ‘cuts’ between which time can be shifted, not in the same familiar filmic way Call of Duty does.

Elder Scrolls games, and large RPGs in general, face a difficult problem. One of the reasons for a time-shifting cut in games or novels is to skip over a (tedious) journey. But for Skyrim (and the other similar Bethesda worlds) one of the primary ways of engaging with the world is travelling through it. Travel is so important that whole quest lines are built into caves and other locations that players are more likely to stumble across than be led to. One could argue that the point of building an open world as densely-packed with ‘stuff’ is to travel through it—so a travel-skipping cut would truly defeat the purpose of the game. Yet at the same time, travel takes a long time. So the point of an epic journey across Skyrim is to take an epic journey, but epic journeys are largely epic because they take a long time to complete. So how can an experience be designed that feels like an epic journey, but doesn’t take the same amount of real time as crossing a state, even a small one, on foot?

"The alchemist in Solitude speaks of Whiterun as if it’s a place so far away as to be inaccessible to her, so she’d need an adventurer to take a letter there. Yet, I can make the journey, on foot, in a few game-time hours"One answer which is obviously not taken is to simply speed everything up. I mean everything. Put the game in fast-forward. But that would be unplayable, and certainly unenjoyable. Players would have no time to react to events, and it would just look stupid!

Another option, and this is the one that Adrian discusses at more length, is to make the world small but feel big. There are many ways to do this, and he goes through several in his blog post, so I will only summarize. The rendering technique makes the world visually look larger than it actually is, using different methods of fogging and reduction of detail to create a slightly distorted perception of distance.

The problem for me, though, is that even if the world looks fairly large, and feels fairly large, it still isn’t. This is where time-bending comes into play, and gets more complicated the more one thinks of it. What seems to occur is that there are at least two time scales in Skyrim: one for the player-character and one for the rest of the world. Certain quests in games such as Skyrim don’t make sense because of the strange time scales used. For example, NPCs will ask the player-character to take notes from one hold to another, and speak of the difficulty in making such a journey. The alchemist in Solitude speaks of Whiterun as if it’s a place so far away as to be inaccessible to her, so she’d need an adventurer to take a letter there. Yet, I can make the journey, on foot, in a few game-time hours. But even better, there’s a horse-drawn carriage just outside the city gates. Why doesn’t she just take that?

As a fast-travel system the carriage is diegetic, that is, it fits in the world sensibly and doesn’t look out of place. But no one but the player-character and the drivers of the carriages seem to know that it even exists. This weirdness goes farther than just the carriage though. It’s almost as if the player-character operates on this time scale where so much can be accomplished in one day, but the NPCs do not. So, for example, we have a College of Wizardry apparently conducting an archaeological investigation of a site not 10 minutes’ walk from their front door, which has presumably been there for hundreds of years, and yet is only just now being looked at. What have they been doing all this time?

There is also the obvious problem of the theoretically time-sensitive series of events driven by multiple-part quests. The sort where an NPC asks you to meet up with her so you can, say, assault a fort. Later can mean either immediately, going there right now, or after several days of game-time.

There’s the craftsmen NPCs who spend all their time, day after day, working on blacksmithing for instance. The player-character, on the other hand, can turn up and crank out dozens of daggers, armour and whatnot in an hour or two. Either Adrianne is hoarding a warehouse full of gear somewhere, or she’s just really, really slow.

Time isn’t just measured in minutes and hours. In fact, minutes and hours don’t exist—they’re totally made up by people, as the alternate speed at which minutes pass in Skyrim demonstrates nicely. A slightly more reliable way of measuring time is by how long it takes a regular person to do a thing like make a dagger, or walk to town. This is why space is important. Space and speed are pretty reliable measurements, and they are very familiar to us. We know roughly how far we can walk in a day because we know how fast we can walk.We know we couldn’t walk across the state in one day because of its size and our speed. The problem for Skyrim is that Bethesda need the big long things to take some big long time, but not so much that it becomes tedious in real-time, and yet not speed everything up so much that the little things whip by in an instant. So they stretch and contract time constantly, in order to cram all those events into a reasonable number of real-time minutes. The final problem with this is that in reality, the significance of events is often measured in, or at least influenced by, the time it takes to do it. Writing a novel takes time, months, even years. Graduating from school not only requires passing tests, but taking the time to go through each course, because after all, we can’t fit all the exams in as short a period as we might like to. Building a sandcastle takes time and therefore patience. Some things in reality can’t be rushed, so merely completing the task is meaningful in and of itself.

Sometimes, then, the achievement of arriving at that far-away city in the deep frozen North should take a lot of real-world time - or it risks feeling meaningless to the player regardless of how important a place it is in the game.

The Australian Videogame Industry

Original Post: October 19 2011

The Australian videogame industry is suffering right now, in a bad way. Though the small, more agile teams and the two juggernauts of iOS games Halfbrick and Firemint are going gangbusters, the larger-scale, higher budget sector has been all but obliterated over the past four or five years. Following this, there is a perceived 'brain drain' (how often we hear that with regard to the Australian workforce...) or an 'exodus' of talent moving overseas, particularly to Canada. Why are the pastures so much greener in the snow-covered gardens of our northern Commonwealth brothers? What has happened to the local industry to cause such a drought? How can we pick up the pieces and carry on?

I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I have some thoughts. 

Firstly, I think its important to recognise that we have the talent here in Australia. There are dozens of designers, programmers, artists etc who have worked in the A-grade industry environment for a number of years, and a whole lot of them are out of work. We have even more graduates of an increasing number of videogame related tertiary qualifications from both private and public universities or colleges. Local talent is not a problem. If (and when) we do lose some overseas, we are very well-placed to produce more.

Further, our talent is being nurtured by this new wave of videogame degrees. I am responsible for one of them! Increasingly, the academy is working on enhancing the education these graduates receive. Rather than simply a programming degree working in UDK one semester, we are incorporating the critical artistic skills that differentiate an Arts/Humanities graduate from a TAFE tradesman. Our talent will have more going for them than the ability to follow instructions and program what their creative leads tell them to. Our talent will be the creative leads. They won't just know how to create videogames, but why it's worth doing so.

The international developers know some of this. According to Anthony Redden, formerly of THQ Studio Australia, after the exposure the closure of his studio received in the media, international recruiters were contacting him with job opportunities. These overseas studios actually want the kind of talent we have here in Australia. Further, some of the talent is obviously willing to move, internationally, to wherever the work is. To me, that means there is an opportunity to import talent if we need to--Canada is doing it, why shouldn't Australia?

The question becomes how do we manage to keep the work here in Australia. To understand this problem it's worth taking a moment to note where the work came from in the first place, to know why it all dried up so suddenly. Several of studios that have closed recently: Blue Tongue and THQ Studio Australia, Pandemic and Visceral Games, Team Bondi, Krome and now KMM, relied significantly on foreign investment. Blue Tongue and THQ Australia were subsidiaries of THQ, Pandemic and Visceral Games both belonged to EA, and Team Bondi, well... they worked with Rockstar and fell apart for their own special reasons. The executives at Team Bondi were former Team Soho Studio employees, so foreign in a different way.

The relationship a lot of Australian game development work had to the publishers was essentially outsourcing. Many of the games developed by these studios, while big enough to often be casually classified as 'AAA' (whatever that means...) were not of the same ilk as the work being done by the other studios these same publishers own in other countries. The Ubisoft studios in Montreal, for example, or Rockstar North were not making licenced games such as Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (Blue Tongue), The Last Airbender (THQ Studio Australia). Nor are those other studios tasked with sequels like De Blob 2 (Blue Tongue) or Star Wars game after Star Wars game (Pandemic and Krome). So many Star Wars games...

This isn't to cast dispersion on the work that was done by those studios, but as a bit of a reality-check. These studios weren't valued for their original creations, they were used by the larger companies that owned them to produce the middle-range film tie-ins and other licenced material. We were a high-quality outsource location, not a producer of original, unique content. Consider Pandemic, who produced the Saboteur--an original IP and a game I really quite liked--who were promptly shut down after its release. My goals with the work I do at the university is to equip my graduates with skills that enable them to do much more than follow a brief handed down from the licence lawyers at International Publisher Headquarters via email. I want my students to be the creators of art, not the factory workers of the videogame industry. I really hope I'm not the only one in Australia who wants this.

The question is, if Australia is a world-class country full of the talent that international corporations are willing to invest in, willing to recruit into their closer-to-home studios, why are we acting like an outsource location? Why aren't we, as Australians, creating our own original content and keeping control over our IP and our industry? Why are practically all the major studios (including Firemint now) owned and operated by overseas publishers/developers?

Obviously the game development scene in Australia needs a bit of a boost if it is to continue. I am not a proponent of the "let's just all make iPhone games forever!" attitude. Those kinds of games already don't need the kind of help I'm talking about, and they do not have the kind of potential I will describe below. They lay a great foundation for where we need to go from here: the kind of game you pay $30-40AU for on Steam, right up to genuine AAA games. Personally, I like the big-budget, richly immersive games that take me to another place and time, cast me in an exotic role, and tell me a new story. I am really tired of tapping cartoons on my iPhone. I like the games that give me a little something to think about other than how to knock down the next pile of sticks and ice blocks. There is no reason these can't be made in Australia. Videogames are not a physical resource that has to be mined from the ground. They can come from anywhere.

These kinds of games require an investment framework that allows them to work for a number of months or years towards a large-scale, higher-risk release. Yes, there is risk. This is why the international investment has dried up: the cost of doing business in Australia no longer outweighs the risk associated with larger development projects--even projects assured of some degree of success because of their licences. As the global economy has struggled over the past few years, the Australian dollar has become increasingly valuable, so the cost to foreign companies rises. If the invesetor was Australian, however, they might not run for the hills the moment our currency reaches parity with the US dollar. Its a tragic situation when, as our economy actually shows some strength and resilience, this particular sector all but collapses because the whole paradigm relies on the weakness of the dollar through the late 90s.

So, yes, there is a lot of room for governmental incentives of the sort Canada offer to court the big players back to Australia. But there is even more room for better incentives to encourage Australian investors to set up an end-to-end development and distribution industry locally that does not rely on international investment. International sales? Absolutely, go for it. But we shouldn't be waiting around asking for permission from the big American publishers to make our own products. We shouldn't consider ourselves lucky for being able to work on something that Rockstar North or Ubisoft or THQ Montreal don't want to because they are too busy with Grand Theft Auto 5, FarCry 3 or Warhammer games.

That image at the top of this post is of a sunset, and is one of the saddest pictures I think I've ever seen. But, even if this is an end of an era, we have the opportunity to start a new one. Its a lot of hard work, believe me, I know. There weren't any game design or studies units at Macquarie University when I got here, there certainly weren't any degrees or majors in the area. There are now. This stuff can be done. It will be done, so long as we don't give up. We could flip that image of sunset around so the game development industry is looking into dawn instead.

Age of Empires: Pay to Play

Original Post: August 26, 2011 (GameSpy)

Free-to-play, social, online -- these three terms have, for me, defined a slew of insipid, frustrating experiences that resemble reinstalling Windows or downloading a series of patches as much as anything I'd call a "game." The core mechanic is of setting a series of timers, then waiting. And waiting. The end result of waiting is the ability to set yet more timers. For me, not only were the wait times interminable, but the payoff never came. I began to wonder, though, about what the play experience would be like if I actually paid some money for these games. I realized that comparing the experience of a game I've paid for upfront to one I was playing for free was a terribly unfair contest.

Within a couple days of this realization, Age of Empires Online was due to be released. I decided that I would use Age of Empires Online as my test case for a pair of reasons: firstly, I had a benchmark to measure the "game" aspect of Age of Empires against its previous installments. Would the symptoms of some free-to-play, online, and social disease transform this real-time strategy war game into a collection of egg timers? Secondly, in my entirely unscientific way, I had a generally optimistic view of Age of Empires, I had reason to believe I would have a good time with it. So I gave this free-to-play thing its best chance of succeeding by stacking the deck a little, and started my little experiment. I decided to budget for this game, rather than just spending willy-nilly. I aimed for about $40 (in Australian dollars, but we're still close enough to parity), since that was what Tropico 4 was going to cost me. A mid-sized game, not a blockbuster, but one whose predecessor I've had a tremendous amount of fun with.

I went into this Age of Empires Online experiment largely ignorant. For example, I didn't even realize it wasn't a browser game. Well, I thought to myself as I installed the client, I wasn't sure how the real-time aspect of the game was going to work in the browser, so maybe this is a good thing. It was.

As I went through the download and installation process, I reflected on what I expected of this game. To sidestep my major frustrations with other free-to-play games, Age of Empires Online would have to provide an actual real-time game, with units moving around on a battlefield, not a series of progress bars. It should provide playable content anytime I wanted to play; I was not looking forward to paying money to sit around waiting. The game should also let me continue to play inside the free area for as long as I want, rather than interrupt what I was doing to offer paid content. Even if that free area was limited, it should be self-sufficient.

So I started on my journey.

On founding my capital city, I was immediately greeted by the FarmVille-like interface and a Dreamworks Studios aesthetic. I became apprehensive. There was very little in the way of interaction available in my capital city, and I could sense the underlying structure of slowly acquiring different buildings and vanity features. Clicking on the floating yellow exclamation point quickly altered my perception. I accepted my first quest, and genuinely embarked on a mission. I left my slow-moving capital city and found myself in command of a real-time outpost, instantly recognizable as an Age of Empires battle. I could point-and-click, select soldiers, build houses, and watch my small army of villagers scurry about. I led my troops into the fog of war and did battle. In short, I was playing a real-time strategy game, online and for free, with a social chat window in the lower left-hand corner.

So Age of Empires Online had already somewhat flummoxed my original intentions by being fun even before I paid any money! I kept having fun for a good six or seven hours before I really started to think about paying for the pleasure. I mentioned earlier that the capital city screen reminded me of the FarmVille-like games I was seeking to escape, and it still does. Although certain resource-producing buildings that tick over slowly in real-world time do make an appearance, this is not the sole game experience. As should now be clear, Age of Empires Online has two very distinct, complementary game modes. The Empire view is one, and the real-time quest mode is the other. Where clicking timers in other games serve only to unlock more timers to click, in Age of Empires Online the tending to one's capital city enables better units and technologies on the battlefield. Performing well on the battlefield, meanwhile, furnishes one's capital city with resources, currency, and upgrades.

The paid content is geared toward improving one's capital city directly, but this has the repercussions of creating a stronger army on the real-time map. Age of Empires Online utilizes a massively multiplayer online role-playing game-like architecture based around quests, rewards, and loot -- even breaking that loot into familiar grey, green, blue, and purple tiers. These rewards are used to improve the buildings in the capital city. While playing prior to paying, I received a couple of blue rewards which would bolster my infantry and villagers' abilities. But alas, only by upgrading to the premium content could I actually equip these rare rewards! Subtle, if insidious, incentive to upgrade. I respect the subtlety, though, as I was never offered a brigade of spearman for a mere 500 Microsoft points that would turn the tide of a real-time battle. The money-spinning seems limited to the Empire screen, allowing an unencumbered concentration on tactics during real-time warfare. When I finally cracked and bought the launch offer pack (Greece and Egypt civilizations with the Defense of Crete booster pack), I spent $49.50AU so I could equip the blue shinies sitting in my inventory.

So far, I have thoroughly enjoyed Age of Empires Online. The most telling factor is that I actually want to go back and play more. Its novel combination of MMO architecture with RTS action is a much-needed antidote to the frustrations I had with other free-to-play games. The free content is generous, and does not feel like half a game. Age of Empires Online clearly demonstrates that free-to-play does not immediately require a FarmVille-like experience, and that an MMO can end with "RTS" just as comfortably as "RPG." I feel that my eyes have been opened somewhat, my jaded assumptions challenged, and a little faith restored. "Going free-to-play" or "online" or "social" doesn't necessarily spell disaster for a video game, even by the offline, paid, single-player focused standards I hold.

Sustaining Content Providers, redux

Original Post: August 10 2011

I wrote an article over a year ago in response to Ars Technica openly discussing their dilemma regarding generating cashflow. Theirs is the same problem faced by many, if not all, commercial websites providing media content. I am inspired to bump that article again here, as the problems have come to a head today. The Escapist have, up to now, hosted a remarkably successful video series Extra Credits. A very nasty disagreement has erupted quite publicly between the two.  From Extra Credits, there are accusations of non-payment and breach of contract, along with unreasonable claims made on charitable donations to cover medical expenses. From the Escapist, various explanations, mitigation, and an admission that they simply didn't have the money to pay their content providers, such as Extra Credits. (Here's a post that seems to be tracking and updating the situation.)

Siding with the perceived 'little guy' in this situation is all too easy, especially since I really like the content Extra Credits produce. Yet I feel for the Escapist in this situation too, as a representative of a huge slew of online publishers that I'm learning a bit more about lately. Paying creative producers like the EC team is an absolute necessity, I have no doubt about this. But where does that money come from? The standard set all those years ago is that content on the internet should be free, so the money doesn't come directly from the consumers, that's for sure. The alternative, up to now, has been to rely on advertising revenue. Is it working? Well I'm not privy to the accounts of enough websites to know for sure, but from what I do know, online games sites aren't all rolling in cash.

So I ask again, all the same questions that are in the article, one of the first I wrote for this blog. Where to now? 

Ads, AdBlocker, and Sustaining Content Providers

Recently Ars Technica presented 'their side' of the story regarding free websites and ads. Of course, we all know that creating and hosting a website costs money, and most of us know that money doesn't grow on trees. Advertising on the website can generate a significant amount of revenue for a high-traffic site like Ars, but when those ads are not viewed, they won't.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis.

I must admit, I was one of those people who thought something along those lines, if I really thought about it at all. The problem is almost as old as the internet itself: how do we get people to exchange money for content in an environment where end users have been trained to expect everything for free? Andrew Zolli over at Newsweek has some ideas on the matter and some speculation.

What I see is not so much a lack of willingness to pay for things, as Zolli points out. We--people like myself who are the second wave of the early adopters--are coming of age. We are online almost constantly. We may never have purchased a newspaper for ourselves (and if we have it was probably for a plane flight where we can't be online). But the important bit is that we're growing up and we actually are starting to have the money to buy things. Back when I first started surfing, I didn't, so I couldn't have paid for things I wanted, now I can.

What is holding us back, I think, from paying for online content is just how fiddly it would be. Imagine having to register your credit card with every news site or blog you visit. Firstly, many people wouldn't want to do that for safety's sake. But forget that for a moment, think instead of having to go through the form that would have to pop up between the link on your friend's Facebook page, and the content of the article you want to read. Wouldn't happen. But would you kick in $0.05 to read the article if it just ticked over in an account you maintained with your PayPal information? I think some people would.

If we can add a widget to Firefox that allows us to add links to Facebook, Digg or whatever else we use, surely there is a way to click one button to authorize a tiny exchange of cash directly to the publisher. The key is to create trusted links between the content provider and the plugin we use for our browser, which enables us to authorise the transaction without having to type long numbers, fill in forms, or really break the flow of link-to-story at all.

I name PayPal because its the one transaction system I know of that's large and trusted enough to support this kind of thing, but there could be others. The service should allocate a set amount of funds for this kind of thing, and warn you when you are approaching your 'cap' so you don't suddenly realise that you have spent $500 browsing through Gamasutra and didn't realise you were paying for every pageview. Alternative options would be a few dollars for unlimited access a month (pretty standard subscription). Pop $5 into your account, surf away at some reasonably small fee per story, and keep an eye on your balance in the plug-in's toolbar. Think of it like the E-tag systems modern toll roads use. Get a tag, drive through and it debits your account. Top up the account every so often, and off you go.

Overall, the system has to be EASY. iTunes and Steam prove that people are willing to pay (in significant numbers) for content that is available to be pirated illegally, why not for other kinds of content? The trick is, as especially iTunes demonstrates, make it easy.

Questions for further thought: How much would one user's read of the story be worth? How much are sites pulling in via the ads? Would the paid version eliminate the ads (keeping in mind there are ads on cable TV)? What about printing, or re-reading the same article?

R18+ and Managing Information

Original Post: July 22 2011

So this is a knee-jerk response post to the R18+ discussions at today's meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys General in Australia. While the reporting on this issue is likely to be all over the usual outlets (GameSpot.com.au, Kotaku.com.au, ABC's Tech site and it seems likely the Laura Parker will be featured on the major TV news broadcasts tonight), its also a little confusing. From what I can tell, despite the reports of NSW AG John Rau opposing the rating earlier in the week, he doesn't actually oppose it. Further, ABC's story calls this a delay, when in fact this meeting signposts the most progress since, well, ever on this issue.

So all around this is good news, though apparently South Australia consider a ten year old and 17 year old to be the same thing, such that any game rated MA15+ will be rebadged with the R18+ stickers before being sold. Bizarre. As someone deep in my Twitter feed said, this only deepens the gulf between ultra-childish and ultra-adults only. Its a deep conception of games, that they are either entirely juvenile, or entirely pornographic with no middle ground whatsoever.

Still, the most disturbing thing I heard flew a little below the radar, regarding a proposal by Rau to make Facebook an 18+ website... somehow. Of course he didn't go into details, but rather gave anecdotal evidence of a mother who was concerned about the slutty pictures her 13 year old daughter was posting on the site. Having discovered them, the mother found that she could not force Facebook to take them down. So this is why Australia should prevent all children in the country from using the single most widely accessed website in the history of the internet, because one woman is a terrible mother. Not only can she not keep enough of an eye on her own offspring to stop her from taking, then posting the pictures, but she is unable to sit down with her, explain the situation, and have the daughter take the pictures down herself? I'm sorry but I call bullshit.

This is obvious avoidance of parental responsibility. Out of the hundreds of millions of users of Facebook, some percentage are going to get themselves into trouble. That can't mean a government needs try to legislate this fact into non-existence. Rau trotted out the same old "Parents can't be around their kids 24/7 to watch what they do. Gee whiz kids these days are so clever," argument that is so prevalent in these kinds of discussions. But this is not a new thing. Parents have never been able to do this, why are we suddenly making laws about it in the case of new-ish media? I mean, any parent who doesn't realise their kids are a little different at school or in that God-forsaken space between school and home is delusional. Of course the difference in some kids is greater than in others, but there aren't any laws against this. Where and when did today's adults learn to swear or talk about sex and drugs and whatever else? Around the kitchen table? I think not.

At one point, I heard the phrase "Managing the flow of information through the internet." They still don't get it. They don't get the internet and they don't get liberal democracy.

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.