Yesterday I was involved in a workshop for a bunch of teachers about new media. We spent part of the day talking about using games to educate and I gave them some advice, which I’ll repeat here.

There is no question that games teach skills and knowledge. You need only watch this video of a guy playing both ships in Ikaruga to see skill. Hold a conversation with a child about all 493 Pokemon (with stats) for a glimpse into the amazing powers of recall of the human mind. Moral content aside the only real complaint an educator can level against games is that they are teaching the “wrong” knowledge or skills.

Why is this so?

The answer is easy. We don’t play educational games because most educational games suck. The tragedy is that they seem to suck in a predictable, systemic way. When people get together to make educational games, they make EDUCATIONAL games instead of educational GAMES. The problem with this approach is that once you get past about age 4, the old “Hey everyone, let’s play the tidying up game!” trick stops working. Kids can tell when you are giving them something lame and unfun to do but calling it a game.

The key to making a good educational game is to have the educational part be a secondary rather than a primary focus of the gameplay. It’s difference between having a quiz show game with questions about European geography and setting Diplomacy in Europe using real city and country names.

In the first game, the goal (learning) IS the play. And if people aren’t in to the goal, they won’t play and the learning won’t happen. In the second game, the learning is a side effect of the goal. The goal of Diplomacy is to take over Europe with your little armies. As you master the game, you can’t help but memorize the map, just as a consequence of staring at it and talking about it all the time.

This isn’t new. Phys Ed teachers have been using games to trick people into doing exercises since the beginning of time, but for whatever reason, this knowledge hasn’t ported well over to the other kinds of games in an educational context.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. Oregon Trail and Sim City are shining examples of educational games done right. With any luck, Spore will be another.

Make fun games and ground them in educational knowledge instead of fantasy knowledge. The result will be addictive experiences that keep people coming back for more, while you drip feed test answers into their brains.

There’s a kerfuffle on the Internet about the fact that you can kill people in a video game series and how you can pay to have sex with women in the same series and how you can choose to do these things in rapid succession to the same fictional person. The geniuses at IGN decided to put out a video featuring hooker killing.

The result has been an entirely rational discussion consisting of game enthusiasts and feminists coming together to form a nuanced understanding of freedom of speech, the troubling depictions of women in violent situations, and the interplay of player agency and creative narrative and mechanics in forming the content of a game along with the shifting line between stereotypes and satire. It certainly has NOT resulted in shrill protestations of innocence by gamers who often fail to even grasp why there is a big deal and even shriller condemnations by feminists, many of whom have never played the game that they are tearing apart.

The problem with trying to find a nuanced middle ground here is that it’s difficult to defend the game without falling back on either the “it’s just a game” or the “well no one HAS to kill a hooker” defenses. Both are disingenuous.

If we believe that video games are an important cultural force (and I do) then when the criticism comes, we can’t back away and say “hold on, it doesn’t count here”. There should be no take-backs. If we think that games have merit then we should be able to defend them on their merit. Grand Theft Auto 4 has a Metacritic score of 99/100. It’s pretty clear that the gaming press broadly agrees that GTA:IV is a good and important game. So it should be defensible as such.

We can’t hide behind “no one has to kill a hooker” or “it’s the players not the designers doing the murder” either. The fact is that any video game is created by a bunch of people and the collective decisions of the developers, publisher (and sometimes regulatory bodies) determines what rules and verbs are implemented in the game. Designers shape the world and decide what can and can’t be done. In GTA:IV, for all its realism, I can’t climb over a wall that’s waist height. At some point during development, Rockstar had a meeting about my character’s movement abilities and “climbing short walls” was left off the list.

Which is just to say that if they’d wanted to, Rockstar could have prevented hooker killing. They could have left hookers out of the game. They could have made it so that the hookers were invulnerable to damage after you’d paid them. They could have had cut scenes as part of the sex act that involved the hooker walking away to safety while the main character dozed in post-coital bliss in his driver seat. They could have made the game’s sanction for killing paid hookers (perhaps a bunch of crazed heavily armed pimps) so high as to make the decision untenable. There’s no way that Rockstar was unaware of the controversy around this feature in earlier games from the series, so we can’t argue ignorance or emergent gameplay. Hooker killing is in the game and it’s in there on purpose.

Does this make the game misogynist?

GTA:IV is a game about transgression. Liberty City, as photo-realistic as it is, is not a neutral simulation of the world. Just get in a car (you can borrow your cousin’s) and try to avoid committing a crime and you’ll see what I mean. The controls are tuned for high speed chases - it takes real finesse to stay under the speed limit and in your own lane without causing a pileup. Traffic moves at a snails pace and you can’t help but gun the engine and blast past all the suckers, careening around corners sending cars, pedestrians and lamp poles flying. Cars are disposable and easily stolen and a multiple homicide killing spree and police chase can be ended by ducking in to a spray shop to give your car a new coat of paint or simply by laying low for a few minutes out of sight of the police. You can attack, at any time, anyone that you see. It is far easier to be violent than it is to be law abiding in the GTA universe.

The main storyline tells the tale of a Eastern European immigrant’s rise through the ranks of the underworld, with all the violence of Scarface (the movie) and with the body count of a Mario game (which is to say - a lot). It stars a mostly male cast of racial and cultural stereotypes, though some female characters are present. In order to advance the story, you’ve got to commit a whole lot of crimes.

It also, incongruously, features one of the most robust dating simulators I’ve ever seen in a video game. You meet girls over the course of the game, you exchange phone numbers and then you can call them and ask them out. Sometimes, they call you. Once the date is arranged, you can choose to actually meet them, you can calls to cancel or you can just stand them up. Sometimes you have to choose between completing a game mission and keeping your plans. They’ll comment on your car and your clothes as you take them to places you think they’ll like (bowling, darts, cabaret show, drinks) and have awkward small talk with them. You can decide whether or not to go in for a kiss when you drop them off (I haven’t played long enough, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t date rape them, thankfully).

But it is misogynist?

On balance, I think that it’s hard to argue that GTA:IV makes it hard to play a misogynist lead character. As far as I know, there aren’t any male prostitutes offering their services, and you definitely can’t play a female lead (though to be fair, even Deus Ex had to cut the female option because of time and space constraints). There is sex in this game and the sex is clearly aimed at a straight male audience.

That said, it’s easier still to be an equal opportunity scum bag. Of all the people I’ve passed (or run over) on the street, I haven’t identified a single prostitute. The game pulls from criminal and mobster pop culture for its tropes, so the vast majority of the people you will be gunning down will be men. You have to go out of your way to hunt down and kill women. It’s part of the game play but it’s not a core part. There are tutorials or how to date someone properly in the game. You have to work out for yourself (or read about it in someone’s angry or purile screed) that you can hire and murder prostitutes.

The difficulties in talking about games like GTA:IV are legion. For one thing it’s so big that every player’s experience will be very different. Comparing notes with a friend, I learned that he’d spent a good chuck of time watching TV in the game! I didn’t even know you could do that. The scope, scale and detailing of the world in which the game happens is astounding.

The biggest reason for any of the controversy around GTA is that it sits on this weird crossroads between a realistic setting and video game ethics. No one is up in arms about the death toll in any of Super Mario Bros, Mega Man or Final Fantasy despite the fact that the number of flattened Goombas in a single session is APPALLING. GTA takes that ethic and transplants it into a world that looks very much like our own. It’s very easy to stop seeing pixels and start seeing real people, which is why Jack Thompson characterized the games as “murder simulators”.

So cultural commentators see a video featuring the death of two virtual women and get up in arms and the defense, which is “yeah but I killed hundreds of other people too” just takes the discussion on a turn for the worse. Grand Theft Auto 4 is probably one of the best games ever made. It’s also one of the most violent both because of the mandatory storyline killings and because of the freedom you are given to prey upon civilians (prostitute or otherwise) whenever the whim strikes you. It’s a fantasy about being able to cause mayhem in the real world and is all the more effective for how real the world seems.

Warren Spector, who is one of the smartest people in game design, sums up my feelings really well in an interview with Gamespot.

I am frustrated that the games in the GTA series, some of the finest combinations of pure game design and commercial appeal, offer a fictional package that makes them difficult to hold up as examples of what our medium is capable of achieving. The fictional context of GTA all but ensures that it will be portrayed in the mainstream press (and, I guess, in the courts!) as little more than a ‘murder simulator’ when it clearly is so much more–if you take the time to look.

Sadly–and this is part of the point I was trying to make in the interview last week–most people won’t take the time to look past the surface, the fiction, the context. They don’t see the fun and the freedom the game provides. They see carjackings and gun battles and hookers. You can talk about game design genius ’til you’re blue in the face. The people who want to regulate games, and the mainstream audience we want to reach, will ignore you. And then they’ll drop the hammer on our medium. Hard.

Just read a cool analysis of the appeal of LOST in terms of CRPGs. The treadmill aspect of long running series or games can be done well, as in WOW where in the early levels there are parts of the world where you clearly can’t stay (and which you sometimes have to dash through to get to areas you can thrive (see: the trip from Menethil Harbour to Iron Forge if you are a young Night Elf). It can also be done poorly as in Oblivion where common bandits suddenly started acquiring ELDRICH ARTIFACTES as I gained in levels.

Maintaining the treadmill of a relatively even difficulty curve while also giving a sense of progress is a special kind of art form in and of itself. Even WOW which is overall masterful lost me to the perpetual grind when I realize just how far from level 60 I was and how little marginal value to my life those final 20 levels would have been compared to playing a different game entirely.

A few nights ago, after we were done talking about Project Wonderful business, Ryan and I got to talking about the Fleen thread that exploded about the business of comics. (Ryan linked to it here)

This subject is dear to me because of the parallels with making money as an indie game developer – a perpetual source of stress. It seems like no thread about the state of the games industry can go more than a few posts before someone bemoans how hard it is to make a living making games. In this problem, neither games nor comics are unique. Pretty much every content industry including movies and music (especially music) are feeling the squeeze from the combined forces of hobbyists who are giving pretty good competing stuff away for free and pirates who are giving away YOUR stuff for free.

I think that there are lessons to be learned by games people who look at the online comics scene. Consider that by giving away their creative output and selling ’secondary’ things (t-shirts etc) many comics creators have managed to turn piracy into a FEATURE and a BENEFIT. We don’t even think of people re-posting their favourite Overcompensating comics as piracy at all, but if it was a movie or an MP3, you can bet that the **AA would be all over it.

Pining for the good old days

Not everyone is happy about this on the comics end of things. There are a number of complaints in the Fleen thread along the lines of “but I don’t want to be a t-shirt salesman, I want to be paid for making my comics”. Here’s the thing guys, you were never getting paid for making comics. You were getting paid for helping to sell advertising. Unless most of your income was coming from the sales of books (which could also happen to a web comics creator) then you were an advertising shill. You just didn’t have to get your hands as dirty.

The collapse of syndication has very little to do with the rise of online comics and everything to do with the collapse of newspapers. As newspapers stumble, advertising sales no longer subsidize the content and so cartoonists are having to find other sources of income. The model has shifted from (indirect) ad salesman to (direct) merchandise salesman. Jim Davis might be the patron saint of the web comics scene.

Beacons of hope

This is a topic that we games creators think about a lot, so I’ve collected a few articles here that people might find interesting.

First off is Kevin Kelly’s inspiring post about the idea of 1000 true fans. Summary: if you can get 1000 people to each pay you the equivalent of a days wages every year, you can live quite comfortably as a content creator.

Next, this excellent article aimed at game makers about learning from touring bands. Danc has a lot of really great stuff about the (small) business of making games.

Here is Chris “I wrote The Long Tail” Anderson’s article introducing us to the concepts that will be covered in his new book FREE.

Lastly, another one from Kevin Kelly called better than free which is a great way to start brainstorming ways to make money off of your content that works with instead of against the fact that the Internet is the best, cheapest copying machine ever made.

In which I follow up my indictment of lifegain as a power-up with a rousing celebration of the healing power of healing.

Last week I started talking about the problems that designers are faced with when they create healing powers.

I showed that the main problem is that damage abilities are a path to victory where life gain abilities are sad little conditional things that risk only becoming powerful enough by making games interminably long and boring.

That isn’t the whole story.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which I begin a two part talk about healing in games and the problems that designers face when they try to implement lifegain.

Here’s an abstract strategy question: would you rather have an ability that healed yourself or damaged your opponents, given some random game that has health or a lifebar of some kind? For the sake of argument let’s say that these abilities are mirrors of one another, the healer heals just as hard as the hurter hurts.

You might think that because they’re mirrors, it doesn’t matter which you pick. The interesting thing is that this isn’t true, and that most of the time a damage ability is more powerful than an equivalent healing ability. This is what I want to talk about today.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which I digress at length about using systems of rules to create meaning in games before coming back to the point and discussing Passage and The Marriage.

Games about Life and Love

Rob Humble’s The Marriage and Jason Rohre’s Passage both caught my attention at about the same time. Broadly speaking, they are similar games. Both touch on life and human relationships. Both are abstract and open, leaving us to do the heavy lifting as far as interpreting the meanings. Most importantly, both are minimalist art-games that use the rules of gameplay to impart some kind of message.

I love both of these games just for existing. Both games give you a space to play in and ask you to sort out what’s going on.

The meaning of the game is pulled not out of the storyline, art or sound but out of the rules. It’s in the rules of play that you find attitudes about life and relationships. This stands in sharp contrast to most games which use cutscenes and other trappings of film or books to get across story and meaning. On his site, Humble explains “The challenge as I saw it was to have the primary medium of expression something unique to games.”

If games are a system of rules with which you interact, then inherent in those rules is a kind of ethical system structure around the rewards and penalties that are applied as you play. This isn’t a huge insight. Ethics and laws are systems of rules with carrots and sticks to encourage one along the path of compliance. The ethics of Tetris aren’t that complicated. Filling the screen is bad, clearing lines is good, clearing lots of lines at once is better. The virtuous get high scores while the sinners stare at a game over screen.

You should download and play both games before reading more.

(Download: The Marriage. Download: Passage)

Using Rules to Construct Meaning

The key idea in both projects is that the rules of a game can carry with them an agenda or message. This isn’t new either. The Soviet Union banned Monopoly, fearing that its pro-free-market gameplay would corrupt the public, while today moral crusaders continue to go after violent games on the grounds that they are youth-corrupting murder simulators (Hi Jack!). But in most cases the ethical message (if any) is a side-effect.

News gaming’s September 12th is a pretty pure example of a game where the agenda is explicitly build right in to the rules. There are civilians and terrorists. You are trying to kill the terrorists. If you kill a civilian, then nearby civilians are likely to become terrorists. You are armed with a hopelessly inaccurate and slow missile, and everyone runs around randomly. The sum total guarantees a steady stream of botched air strikes and a growing army of enemies (or you can choose to do nothing, which leaves terrorists running free anyway).

The game is by no means a simulation and the message is clear and simple “trying to kill terrorists creates more terrorists”. Sledgehammeringly obvious? Yes, but no less simplistic than Rainbow Six’s game rules which in essence say “a sufficiently skilled elite strike force can heroically shut down whole armies of evil-doers”.

Because there is so much plot in there, a game like Rainbow Six is almost inevitably criticized as if it had been an action movie starring an elite strike force that heroically shut down whole armies of evil-doers. September 12th, stripped of just about everything but gameplay, forces us into arguments around the rules themselves. Don’t we have access to more accurate means of dealing with terrorists than clumsy air strikes? (Maybe the Rainbow Six crew are available?) Don’t terrorists recruit other people into their ranks even if we do nothing? Why is there no mechanism for terrorists that give up and drift back into the civilian population? What about car bombs?

Back to the Games!

Which brings me back to Passage and The Marriage. After playing each game through a couple of times and reading the artists’ statements, my first critical instinct was “wait a sec, I don’t agree with these rules!”

In The Marriage, the blue square (the dude) loses size whenever he gets pulled back towards the lady (pink) square. When they ‘kiss’ the dude further shrinks and grows a little more transparent. The lady grows and gets more opaque. She loses opacity with the passing of time. Both of them gain size when they touch coloured circles and the dude gains opacity as well. Shrinking to nothing or going totally transparent ends the game (the marriage).

The economy is pretty simple. The dude gains life force through interactions with the outside world. He loses it when he’s pulled back in to the relationship. The lady on the other hand grows a little when she encounters the outside world but otherwise relies exclusively on the dude for her opacity. Without reading too much into Humble’s personal life, the implication that the blue square would be JUST FINE if he didn’t have to keep tending to the whiny pink square paints a pretty dismal picture of a marriage.

Where I in charge of making The Marriage 2.0 I’d propose the following modification to the rules: Both squares shrink and fade constantly (though each at varying rates during different phases of life). Both squares gain opacity when they kiss and gain size when they encounter coloured circles. If this proves too easy them we add a rule where if the squares have just kissed, they temporarily lose the ability to absorb coloured circles.

I might also throw in some other squares that can be randomly kissed, resulting in an opacity boost for only one of the partners (and maybe an opacity loss for the other?) but that would be maybe getting too far into the world of friends outside the marriage or even open relationships.

Passage goes beyond the simple primary relationship, being an entire life distilled down to 5 minutes of exploration. Early in the game you meet a lady, with whom you can travel for the rest of the game. She speeds up your movement, giving you a great deal of extra freedom if you want to explore east. The cost is that together you are a lot less manoeuvrable, making exploring to the south much more difficult.

On my third run through the game I started wondering: If this game is presenting relationships in the context of a life, why do I only get one shot at a mate? Why do I have to marry so young? Why can’t we get divorced?

If each game says something about the game maker’s attitudes towards relationships, Passage seems to see the mate as someone that lets you see further but that prevents you from going “deep” into things and blocks you from material success. You only get the one and the relationship is a yes/no proposition.

Here are my proposed alternate rules for Passage 2.0: Populate the world with multiple potential mates. Give each of them different attributes. Some speed you up, but make manoeuvring harder. Some slow you down but extend your reach when you go after chests. Some let you pass through walls. Some pull you against your wishes in different directions. Press D to get a divorce.

More Power More Problems

Passage is very calm. You always live for the the same length of time, and there is nothing you can do to accelerate or delay on onset of death. You have one main choice to make (life-long commitment or go it alone) and then some smaller choices about where to wander with varying degrees of meaningfulness, depending on whether you are playing to go as far as you can or as deep as you can or to get the highest score. In Passage there’s not much you can control about your life except where you go and the overall effects is of pleasantly wandering through a garden.

The Marriage, on the other hand, is STRESSFUL AS HELL. With an extremely fragile equilibrium staving off failure, the game ends early and often. You are in charge of the movement of the squares, so when things go wrong, this is clearly your fault! The Marriage gives you a lot more agency. The game can end sooner or later depending on how well you balance the fading and shrinking squares. You have more responsibility for how things turn out.

It’s interesting that The Marriage is the more frustrating game even though it’s the game that gives you MORE power over the events that transpire. More to the point, it’s the more frustrating game because it seemingly gives you more power while also putting you in control of a leaking nearly-doomed ecosystem. May I never view my own relationships in a similar light!