There were too many good moments of Freeplay for me to list them all. The whole weekend was a little like a bomb going off in my brain, in an excellent way, and it’s left me with a lot to think about.
I felt, for maybe the second time ever at a games event, unequivocally welcomed and valued. I felt acknowledged for my work and appreciated for my insight, even though I’m not a programmer and I work in liminal places. I didn’t once have to justify live games or LARP or Twine games or text as being worthy of inclusion. The fact that I’m not a full-time game designer, that I’m employed outside the industry, didn’t single me out as an outsider or render my input less valid. I wasn’t a token woman or a token live game person or a token anything.
In the broader world, games like the Gobstopper Job and The Trial and the Twine projects I’ve got running in the background are strange hybrid things that have to fight first to be accepted before they can be loved. But at Freeplay on stage for the first time I used the word “art” to describe Detritus, and it wasn’t inaccurate.
The second day’s keynote was given by Steve Swink, who talked (among other things) about the need to keep creating, to keep getting ideas down. The 10,000 hours theory. He shared an anecdote about a talk in which a designer waded through page after page of comments about how awful his games were until finally reaching a slide that said: yeah, that one was OK.
I am scared of making bad things, things that aren’t legitimate, that aren’t the best thing they could be. I have been in enough conversations where people deride the sorts of things I make as “too niche” or “not interesting” or “shallow marketing ideas” or “not really games” or redefine them as “concept pieces” (as opposed to “solid games”, like that’s a meaningful distinction) and I have internalised some of that, even while being aware that it’s total crap. I have a depth of feeling here that I wasn’t aware of, until now. Becoming aware of it has meant becoming aware that it’s been blocking me from doing some things I’ve wanted to do for a while. Little games. Silly things. Learning new tools. Making shit art, as Steve Swink would have it.
And I’ve made a start on some other things. ibis, fly! had stalled badly; now it’s moving again, albeit slowly, because the structure needs some work. I’m going to be writing more regularly about Twine games here – if you have favourites, please send them my way. And the Boobjam project I didn’t think I knew enough to make – I think it might work in Unity. If I can work out how to make Unity work, if I can learn enough about those tools to encode what I know about game design and systems and play in a new medium. Which means making shit art, and not caring if it starts out shit, and not caring if other people don’t think it’s art.
This was written in part as a response to the current Blogs of the Round Table topic, “What’s the story?” If you want to read the other responses, please go there and use the dropdown list, because I still can’t get it to work here without breaking my blog. 🙁
Stories in games are a battleground, especially in digital & video games. I’ve had a couple of tangles in the past with folks who think games can’t tell stories, that good stories and good games just don’t mix, and that games built around stories don’t sell; others say that all games have a story of some sort, even if only an experiential one, and that narrative’s essentially built in to all games.
Reality, as ever, is somewhere in the middle, and a bit more nuanced than that. Zombies, Run, Gunpoint and Gone Home, to name three at random, are excellent examples of narrative built in to digital games from the ground up; Tetris, Super Hexagon and Peggle are excellent examples of games that don’t need narrative at all. Most games do try to tell a story, but the most successful ones let the player do the telling themselves, and give them agency over the narrative – or at least acknowledge the primacy of their play over authored and scripted elements.
Gone Home, Day Z and Minecraft, despite their many differences, are all about creating a world and letting players explore it. Each lays out the bare bones of their worlds and invites exploration, asking players to make their marks on the experience, by creating their own niche within the world or by uncovering the mysteries and reaching conclusions the game’s creators left behind. The difference is in scripted vs unscripted narrative, the difference between imposing an authorial vision on the player vs instructing and equipping them to make their own.
Cut scenes in gaming are, to be blunt, godawful ways of telling a story. So are journal pages left scattered around a landscape – pointless objects supposedly created and discarded with not even the most cursory nod to believability or the internal credibility of the game world. Players are asked too often to suspend their disbelief, not in a “this giant underwater city is (a) real and (b) full of drug-crazed libertarians” way to buy into a grand narrative, but in a “my character’s arch-enemy would definitely communicate privately with themselves through tapes strewn randomly around corridors and cafes” way that denies the internal consistency of the characters within a world. Players are asked to tolerate having control taken completely away from them by an invisible hand, for the sake of a plot point or two. They’re asked to carry out all the action most of the time, but remove themselves and watch passively when it matters most.
Sacrificing believability for delivery undermines a story, and taking player agency away mucks about with consent and identification in ways that most games don’t bother to consider (the first Bioshock game is the obvious exception here). Game stories that use the medium well are incomplete without a player – they require play as an intrinsic element of their enaction, not as a way of filling in the gaps between cut scenes, and they don’t subvert played choices with authored ones (see also: LA Noire, Nico and the prostitute in GTA4).
For instance, The Last Of Us succeeds as a story not because it is a revolutionary approach to narrative, but because it is decently written and because its play elements accord with its authored ones. It makes the player complicit in a combined act of authorship as the game is played: it doesn’t force conflict between the experienced and the authored story.
So much of the perceived conflict between game stories and game mechanics comes from an arbitrary approach of pushing story out on its own – whether it’s seen as more or less important than mechanics in a game, it’s the fact it’s seen as separate that causes problems. Sometimes it’s a decision by studios to keep story creation separate from gameplay. Sometimes it’s a broader production approach that considers them as two separate elements, when – at their most successful – they’re inextricably intertwined. Too many games fail to integrate story into the game at the mechanical level, breaking both the story and the game in the process.Story doesn’t work if it’s limited to spaces where the player no longer has agency, or where their agency is strictly limited by things like dialogue trees or morality systems with the subtlety of a bludgeon.
One of Douglas Adams’s lesser-known games, Starship Titanic, relies on both adventure-game point-and-click mechanics and on freestyle text inputs that let you converse with the robots that inhabit the ship. It was released in 1998, and has more than 10,000 potential responses coded into its conversation engine. Making the characters robots is a smart choice that lets the game get away with repeated scripted responses, and making it possible to talk to them – to say anything at all – is still revolutionary. At one point you have to persuade a bomb (played by John Cleese) to stop counting down. There’s no list of standard responses, no ‘persuade’ options, no raw skill numbers to test against. There’s you, typing, and frankly it’s some of the best games dialogue ever written.
What’s the story? The story’s a collaboration. The author’s not dead, but she’s a shifting entity made up of many others: the designers, the writers, the game’s creators, and its players too. Game makers have to give players the tools they need to do their part of the job without going against anything that’s come before. Video gaming is at heart a performative medium with at least one actor, often more akin to theatre than to cinema. Storytelling in a game is not a broadcast act with a teller and a receiver. It’s an act of authorship that’s incomplete until it’s played.
The first Bit.Trip Runner game is an abomination. It is almost excellent, for the first ten levels. It has you learning to leap, kick and duck to avoid obstacles, running at speed through a pink-and-purple tinted robotic landscape. The blocky, retro graphics are chunkily beautiful, but the sound is what makes the game. Each gold you get, each jump you make, each obstacle you navigate or ignore contributes a tone to the ambient music: each element is perfectly placed to fit with a broader rhythm. Play means mastering a complex pattern, pushing the right buttons at the right time to navigate increasingly complicated landscapes: the process of mastering those patterns, and the moments when they work well, are both gloriously satisfying.
But at the eleventh level it goes wrong. Odyssey is too long. It isn’t that it’s too challenging – but that it requires more concentration and a much longer stretch without error than any other level in the game up to that point. The joy of Runner is about mastering the patterns in each level, fine tuning to the point where you can not only play the piece note-perfect, but add your own elements on top: a trill here, a crescendo there, an extra jump to get the last gold for a perfect run. Odyssey does not give you chance to master the later patterns, because they are two minutes’ hard concentration away from where you start out. It is too long. It’s been an insurmountable barrier to my playing further: I can see the elegance, the joy in the early levels, but that one defeats me. It’s not worth the effort it takes to surpass.
On your side
Bit.Trip presents… Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, henceforth referred to as BTp.R2FLoRA, expands on the first game and fixes the faults that make Odyssey such an iron bar on the train tracks. I picked it up in the Steam sale expecting to find it a flawed but interesting play – as I do most of the other Bit.Trip games – but instead I find myself turning to it frequently in spare moments, being sucked in to play dozens of levels, hours at a time.
As with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, music is both the purpose and the punishment for the Runner games. Failure – falling to your death, or crashing into an obstacle – makes the music stop playing. In the first game, these failures reset you right back to the start of the level, collapsing the musical landscape back to a very simple, straightforward beat. But the second offers checkpoints – in its own version of Odyssey, multiple checkpoints. As the difficulty ramps up in later levels they’re not generous, and every checkpoint is skippable if you want a harder challenge. But their presence is crucial – they turn an experience of severe frustration into one where you are certain if you just try it again, one more time, you’re sure you can do it right this time. Unlike Runner, BTp.R2FLoRA is on your side.
Dazzling leaps
This time all three difficulty levels are worth playing, because all three have gold to collect. You can play on Quite Easy to pick up collectibles and learn the level structure, then switch through Just Right to Rather Hard for a proper, teeth-grinding challenge. All three play differently – Easy is a thrilling, speedy rush of music, rarely interrupted, while Hard can be determinedly repetitive, a slow push to get a little further each time. After a Hard level, playing on a lower difficulty feels like drinking a cold glass of lemonade on a hot day: refreshing, dazzling, thrilling.
Even within levels the pacing is elegant. Tricky series of jumps and slides that must be timed to perfection and embellished for a perfect score are followed by dazzling leaps in which gold is handed to you by virtue of your trajectory. Moments where you lean forward, snapping buttons in perfect time and deep concentration, are tempered by these sudden, exuberant periods where you have nothing to do but luxuriate in your achievement. You leap joyfully across the screen, which glitters and gleams and rewards you with visual extravagance as you relax for all of about three seconds. These moments are water breaks, waypoints in your race. They are a substantial part of the game’s excellence.
And again, as with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the beat always acts to ground your actions, the way a metronome does when you are playing music. It’s tyrannical too, the way a metronome is when you don’t yet know the notes, or when you can’t move your fingers fast enough over the piano keys to sound the tune correctly. The music acts both to make your experience more difficult and easier; sometimes both by turns, as you learn to master each track. Missing a note, missing one of the optional obsctales or choosing a less complex route, or avoiding a power-up that gives you both a score multiplier and a tonal shift to the background music: these aren’t punishments, but they are moments you could improve, if you played better. You could jump faster. You could hit the Bit.Trip equivalent of all the meedly-meedly notes. But if you don’t, that’s OK. The music still plays.
Dance button
I still haven’t played Hotline Miami. This is an admission of failure on my part, because I know I will love it, once I get past the violence. It’s about understanding a complex landscape and the patterns within it, moving very quickly and improvising based on what you know, learning the levels and mastering them. It’s a game of mastery, and those games are like catnip to me. But the violence is a barrier. I get home from a hard day and I want to relax in a way that doesn’t mean beating someone’s head off a pixelated floor. I don’t want to shoot dogs or see my avatar’s guts spilled, even with hypnotic pulsing music and vibrant psychadelic graphics and a story that’s meant to say something interesting about the violence. I want joy.
BTp.R2FLoRA lets you dance.
Not enough games have a dance button. You aren’t told about it until a fair few levels have passed beneath your constantly running feet, but there it is: you can dance. Dancing can happen at any time, on a flat surface; the animation lasts a fixed length of time, and can’t be interrupted to slide or jump, so it has to be timed well to avoid dancing to your death. Each of the characters you find – there are seven in total, with five found by completing optional levels – has several different dance animations. They are joyous.
They aren’t only joy. Fully completing the game’s extra achievements requires dancing an astounding amount, dancing for an hour when each dance is a second or so. It means dancing as much as you possibly can, treating dancing as a necessary embellishment. It adds a further layer of difficulty to the game: suddenly, Easy mode is no longer a lean-back gentle play with few button presses, but a trickily-timed endurance mode full of single-button improvisation. Hard mode becomes essentially impossible. You learn to read the road, using the beat to guide you: that spiky mushroom dude is coming up there, if I dance here and jump now I can clear it and get the gold to the right of it without dying.
Digital mandala
It is never so carefully thought through as that, of course. Like every excellent game in which speed and mastery are at the core of play, you play better in a slightly distracted reverie. Super Hexagon is one of the games at the pinnacle of this genre: despite having only two buttons, left and right, it is a rich and engaging challenge to learn the game’s patterns well enough to anticipate them, to almost be already moving by the time it becomes clear which direction you should move in. Time slows as you play, relying on what you’ve learned to guide you – relying on instincts faster than conscious thought. On harder levels, thought itself is too slow to guide you. By the time you’ve actualised what’s happening in your head, you should have already reacted. Distracting yourself is key to the top levels of play; using it like a sort of digital mandala, I play best when I am furious, or extremely stressed.
BTp.R2FLoRA never quite reaches those heights of instinctive reflexes, but it begins to come close. It proves this to you beautifully at the very end, which I won’t spoil here. There is a boss fight at the end of each world, in which you must run, dodge, jump and kick against a moving enemy that works against you. The final boss is a glorious reversal of everything you’ve spent the rest of the game learning, and playing it is proof positive that you have learned far more than you’ve realised over the preceding levels. It is gleefully self-assured, a moment that could feel like a betrayal if it weren’t for the game’s excellent mechanics, elegant implementation and perfectly judged difficulty curve. Instead, it has you feeling as though you have discovered a whole new skill that the game’s been hiding from you all along. It has you jumping for joy.
Dressed in a green cap, as Link, I strode into the Lost Woods, certain that I would find my way through. I didn’t know which way to go or how to solve the puzzles there. Eventually I had to ask friends how to solve it, so that I’d be able to progress. I couldn’t work out something that, in retrospect, seems incredibly simple. Follow the music and you’ll find friends. It seemed impossible at the time.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf is similarly, strangely impossible. I haven’t played the other games in the series, and I picked this one up with some trepidation. Not because it didn’t appeal, but because I was worried it might appeal too much. To be given a canvas and asked to create is a wonderful opportunity, and rare in gaming outside of modding communities. New Leaf, from what I saw of it before I bit the bullet and bought it, was not an unfiltered sandbox but a carefully constructed playground in which you could decide to play with the toys you preferred. You can catch bugs and fish, harvest and rearrange your fruit trees and your flowers. You can add buildings, make friends with digital townsfolk, create your own clothing, furnish your house. It is not a world-building game, nor a story-driven one, but a game about quiet creation and your own personal interests. Here is a town you can create from whole cloth, sewing yourself in where you wish. Here are a myriad potential towns: choose your own path. I am sucked in by such promises.
I was nervous before I bought it. It’s strange to say it out loud, as an adult, but I’ve watched other adults get sucked in, calling out for friends online so they can get the most out of their little town. I wanted to make something in New Leaf, a little world of my very own, but I didn’t want it to be cut off from the world. I understood instinctively something that @jennatar touches on tangentially, in passing, in her review: Animal Crossing, without real friends to ground it, becomes impossibly lonely. Impossibly sad. You are building something not to share but to sit untouched. New Leaf is meant to be played with other people: you open your town gates and other people come by, via the internet, to play together and see your little world. You go online to visit others. It’s a game about visiting, about creating something special and then sharing it. It has the nervous joy of showing someone your own artwork or reading your creative writing. It’s fragile and delicate.
My game has a problem. I can’t connect online. I can see other people’s gates are open. I can open mine. But only once has that connection functioned as it’s meant to. Someone came in and gave me a bounty: nine cherries, which I used to plant a new orchard. I wanted to show it off, next time they came. It has never let me connect online again. I’ve built a museum exhibit and stocked the flea market full. I’ve built bridges and clocks, planted bananas and mangoes, persuaded all of my animal townsfolk to stick around. I’ve made black flowers and caught rare bugs and learned to dance, and each of those moments was quietly exciting, in its own way. But without another human touch in this little computerised world, it’s meaningless. It’s a lonely town, and I’m a mayor without a purpose.
New Leaf is a beautiful game, and it’s wonderful to play online. I’m certain of this, because I’ve seen on Twitter the glee other people express when they find something new or share something entertaining. It’s a game full of delights and tiny surprises and astonishing, unfathomable attention to detail. But without other people, it becomes a grind: a slow, limited playground where your creations are nothing but fodder for animated creatures to use to fake a relationship. You sink time and energy into creative processes, coaxing life from pixels, then get back nothing in return. Sending letters and bushels of fruit to collections of automated responses is not enough. New Leaf makes you yearn for human touches: by design it asks you not just to create for yourself, but to create for an audience. When it fulfils that need, it is vastly successful, I’m certain. When tech problems mean that need is unfulfilled, it is nothing but cruel.
The Summer Sale cards drop when you vote on games you want to buy, or spend money on games. Subtle.
As part of the Steam summer sale, which ends tomorrow, the service has released publicly the trading card system that’s been in beta for a few months. It works like this: participating games have a ‘badge’ that you can acquire for your profile, and that contributes to a recently introduced level system. You get the badge by collecting cards – virtual items that land in your inventory – and crafting them together, and in the process you might get a special emoticon you can use in chat as well. You can get up to half the cards you need by playing the game, and the rest you have to trade with friends or buy on the community market. You can make the same badge multiple times, earning you more experience points towards your level and getting you a new image. And if you’re high enough level, you have a chance at getting booster packs that contain several cards, or foil cards that can be combined for an extra special badge.
Let’s be absolutely clear here: we are talking about .jpgs on screens. Collections of pixels.
Every time someone buys a card, Steam gets a cut – and I assume so do the game devs. People who don’t care about the cards get a chance at making some very easy money – pennies at a time, perhaps more if they get a rare drop. People who care a lot can plough time and money into buying rare pictures. People who feel like making money off this can play the market – that’s already happening with the summer sale cards, as they’re high enough volume to sit at a stable price, but folks are only making a penny or two at a time. But once the economy starts to settle down, some folks will get good enough at it that they won’t need to pay real money for games ever again. Some people will most likely write bots to autobuy items below a certain price, too, once prices start to stabilise more broadly. If it’s successful – and it looks successful, right now – it’ll become its own market, the way MMO trading posts do, algorithmic trading and all.
At the moment, badges aren’t tied to achievements – special pictures unlocked when you do something specific within games – so there’s no gameplay tie. In part that’s likely to be because achievement cheating is so common, devaluing achievements as a participation mechanic. But the flip side is that you can get card drops just by having a game open – you don’t need to be actively playing it – so plenty of people are leaving their computers on with card-dropping games open, and idle. Games they’ve not yet played, or games they’ve played to death and don’t want to have to go back to in order to get the new special picture. It’s not a bad way of making a bit of pocket money.
But it’s almost certainly not what the system designers wanted, unless the whole purpose was just to get players to open up games more often. It’s definitely a way of getting a game’s ‘hours played’ stats up, if that’s a metric you care about. A lot of people buy games in Steam sales then don’t play them (I’m guilty of this) – this might be a way to trigger collector types into at least opening them up for the sake of collecting something else. But because of the current implementation, it’s not actually incentivising play: it’s just getting people to sit on menu screens while they do other things. Activity levels in Steam are going to go up very fast, but people won’t actually be playing. It’s a gamification system that offers incentives for a behaviour that the designers probably don’t actually want. (Well, the game designers at least. I can certainly imagine that a lot of transaction fees and inflated activity metrics aren’t a particularly bad thing for Valve.)
Talking about character and plot without form rapidly becomes ungrounded and airy, because I’m hearing about people that aren’t real and things that didn’t happen without any grounding in the countless craft and form choices that made all of that junk matter. If plot and character was all that mattered, Wikipedia would be a sufficient replacement for literature. Any description of the effect a game has on the author should come with your explanation of how that happened. What exactly was it about the heartbreaking indie puzzle platformer that made you feel nostalgic? What did Jane Austin do to make you like that dour Mr. Darcy so much? These are not strange or unusual or “academic” questions, they are questions of very basic specificity and clarity in any sort of writing. It’s incomplete to talk about the emotional reaction the game effected in you without describing the cause. This matters for “game mechanics” but it applies equally to writing, art, and music, and the mechanics and form and craft that drive those as well
Where I part ways with him is that I don’t think it’s critics’ backgrounds in literature or English that are an issue here, so much as it’s the particular critical skills that are being brought to bear on games. At present a great deal of games writing is concerned with hermeneutic questions – issues of interpretation. What does it mean? What is it trying to say, or saying without trying? Is it aesthetically pleasing? What’s the cultural or generic context? But much less common, as Andrew notes, are questions of poetics: questions that tackle the mechanics of how a game functions, how its elements fit together and act upon the player – or how the player acts upon them – to cause an effect.
Robert Louis Stevenson speaks to game designers about realism as a tool, as well as to writers. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters has kinship with the Personism Manifesto in its approach to accessibility, personality, realities of experience. It’s only a matter of time before we get a video game version of Projective Verse, most likely delivered at a conference or in free ebook form disguised as a design approach to the Oculus Rift. I can see Aristotle getting along nicely with video game formalism.
This leads me to suspect that – concerned as they are with the mechanics of language, the careful structuring of words to build worlds with minimal tools, with rhythm, pace, meter, tone, pattern, breath, the physiology of the reader, the interweaving of meaning with mechanic – theories of video games are going to end up having a surprising amount in common with theories of poetry. I know that my own thinking about game mechanics – in terms of their effects and their overall aims – draws on poetics as a framework along with other disciplines. But they’re often excruciatingly inaccessible, and perhaps lifting the curtain is less engaging for audiences who want to be entertained, rather than to examine the nuts and bolts. As Stevenson says:
There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. … We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be stated but never can wholly be explained…
I don’t think the organisers have created an event which is non-inclusive; I’m not boycotting the event based just on the description of the panel or Krahulik’s comments. As the Pop Up Playground statement says, those things just revealed to us that the culture surrounding PAX Aus is not that different to the problematic culture associated with Penny Arcade in the past. We weren’t invited to speak – we submitted an idea for a panel and were accepted. Most of the panels are community suggested; the organisers and the high ups at Penny Arcade have pointed this out in the wake of criticism. They didn’t title them or write the descriptions. So the program of panels ought to give us an idea of what the community at PAX wants to talk about; the community that created them is the community that wants to engage with PAX Australia.
Given that, is it telling that something like only 15% of panellists overall are women? That a clear majority of panels have no women on them at all? (I’ve no idea what the ratios of non-straight, non-white participants are like.) Perhaps they weren’t invited; perhaps they were and didn’t feel comfortable participating, despite the clear harassment policy and lack of “booth babes”, both things I certainly applaud. When you look closer at the PAX Aus program, you find a lot of near misses; panels that almost, but don’t quite engage issues of social justice. There’s discussion of games being criticised for being sexist and racist (“Why So Serious?”), but not of the racism and sexism in games. We have two panels critical of how other forms of media portray geeks and gamers (“That’s What She Said”, ”Is There Such A Thing As A Fake Geek?”), but none about how our own medium portrays women and minorities. There’s advice on how women can navigate games as a man’s world (“Not Fair? Then Grow Some Ovaries and DO Something About it!”), but no challenge of the systemic sexism which makes the industry unwelcoming to women. There’s even one about the entitlement players feel and the impact this has on makers (“Gamer Rage – Entitlement Issues”), but nothing about the entitlement and privilege unconsciously possessed by white, straight and/or cis-male players.
Looking at all that, it’s easy to be left with a clear impression that the PAX audience hasn’t thought about these issues yet – or doesn’t want to. In such a climate, it’s not hard to see how people wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing them up.
PUP aren’t the only people to have pulled out; Brendan Keogh has also decided not to take part, and there may be others I’m not aware of, who have decided not to participate at all or rescinded after seeing the events of recent months. Their decisions won’t have been easy ones. Ben’s been careful to articulate the tricky decision here: is it better to stay and attempt to change the culture from the inside, or back off and make your statement by disengaging? Either way, something is lost.
It’s a fair bet there will be a lot of eyes on that panel this weekend, and a lot of interest in precisely how equality issues are enacted this time round, at this particular event. Thanks to a panel description and some extremely unwise comments from a founder in a different country, PAX Australia has become a flash point for the broader issues at play here. Whatever happens, whether it passes without incident or implodes in a mess, it’ll be held up as emblematic.
But misogyny, transphobia, racism, homophobia in gamer cultures: they are not one incident, one big emblematic moment. They are a series of small decisions, individual moments that taken in isolation are small. It’s climate, not weather. It’s not one massive fish, but an ocean teeming with small ones. The problem with PAX is not just the problem with PAX: it’s also all the smaller problems it subsumes by being so visible. It’s not only the events themselves but also the standard set.
So here’s hoping for a positive PAX that solves some problems, turns some of those near misses into hits, and sets a higher standard. And much respect to Ben, for setting a very high bar.
Some of the comments on the IGN announcement of their new moderation policy. As they say, there’s a long way to go before the change takes hold.
IGN, one of the largest gaming sites in the world, has recently announced changes to its commenting policy explicitly aimed at tackling the culture of abuse in its threads. In a blog post announcing the change, editor-in-chief Steve Butts says:
Will that mean we won’t tolerate disagreement or fiery debates? Not at all. We’re an audience of advocates who come to IGN because we feel passionately about certain platforms, products, and philosophies. Being able to express and defend those tastes is part of why we’re here. Articulate disagreements about those tastes are a healthy and necessary part of those interactions. The comment guidelines aren’t meant to stop that.
The problem comes when a disagreement stops being about the merits of the argument and starts being about the people making it. It’s okay for us to disagree with each other, but we won’t tolerate abuse and threats disguised as disagreement. We also won’t tolerate ad hominem attacks, where you insult a person’s character or identity merely because you don’t like that they’re not the same person as you. None of us are perfect, and we all have bad days, of course, but we can’t let a difference of opinion devolve into being nasty to each other.
The context to this change, on top of years of growing hostility in the comment threads at IGN and elsewhere, is an open letter posted on Reaction last month by Samantha Allen, calling games media generally and IGN among others specifically to account over the toxic discussions they host below articles. It is worth reading in full, repeatedly; it’s a measured, articulate, passionate piece that firmly places responsibility for debates in comment threads with the sites that host those debates, and gives three clear calls to action for those in a position to change those debates. Addressing site editors by name, it says:
We have a problem and you can do something about it.
Our medium and the culture surrounding it is still in its adolescence and we’ve been experiencing a lot of growing pains lately. Those of us in the games community who are a part of marginalized groups have been going through hell lately. You can help us. You can do more than just express sympathy.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” You have a chance, right now, to shorten that arc. You are in positions of power and privilege. You have the luxury of being able to effect change at a level that we can only dream about.
Framing commenting and community policy and moderation as a moral issue is not new, but locating responsibility squarely with sites and publishers, rather than the commenters who frequent them, is a quietly revolutionary attitude. And a right one: much as people who run social spaces in the real world take on responsibility for enforcing behaviour norms within those spaces, people who open up social spaces online have to enforce the behaviour they want to see within them too. Simply opening a door then washing your hands of the damage caused is not enough.
IGN’s new policy is interesting not least because of its relative mildness. It bans personal attacks and discrimination, while encouraging debate and disagreement; it bans trolling, flaming and spam while permitting sensible pseudonymity. There’s also a section on questionable content, to act as a sort of catch-all:
Since we can’t have a rule to cover everything, this is the rule to, well, cover everything. These are public discussions, so act like you would if you were in a public place (a nice place). These issues are left to the discretion of individual moderators and staff, but may include any material that is knowingly false and/or defamatory, misleading, spammy, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, sexist, obscene, racist, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person’s privacy, that otherwise violates any law, or that encourages conduct constituting a criminal offense. Asking for or offering any of the material listed above is also not permitted.
It’s a sensible policy and it’s excellent to see IGN taking responsibility for the comments on their site and committing to improving the discussion. They’re being careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, keeping what’s good about their community and reinforcing the positive behaviours they want to see – rather than turfing over the comment section, closing it or outsourcing it. I hope it comes with increased mod resource and support, and the buy-in of their writers too. It’s a strong commitment, and I hope their actions speak as loudly as their words on this – and that more sites follow their lead.
Node map for Detritus. Broken-looking passages use the print macro to link based on the contents of a variable.
One of the side projects I’ve been hacking away at in my spare time recently is Detritus, an interactive fiction game thing about, well, packing. It’s a packing sim. In all it’s taken me about two months of intermittent work, including a couple of days where I put in six hours or so on it.
It’s made using Twine, a pleasingly versatile game creation tool that lends itself really well to branching narratives. It’s widely used by all sorts of awesome game makers, and it’s capable of a great deal more than it at first appears. There’s a Google group associated with making it better; there are some talented people devoting themselves to making macros for it, chunks of code that extend its native capacities to let people who can’t code do complicated things simply. I’m indebted to Porpentine’s resources list and a bunch of Webbed Space’s macros – without those things Detritus would have been impossible.
It’s much cleverer than it would be if I’d tried to do it all from scratch myself. I learned while building it that by far the best way to implement my ideas was to build on the work other people have done before me. It is not the first time I’ve bodged something together standing on the shoulders of giants, but it’s the first time I’ve literally copied slugs of code without knowing anything about what they do, as though they were magic spells where my only input is to know the activation words. It is humbling to create with tools other people have given freely to the world.
I learned that sometimes, not knowing what you’re getting yourself into leads to bigger, more exciting work than you’d originally intended. I decided, when I started it, that Detritus would have five short acts, each one using a different technique, because that would be a good way to teach myself some of Twine’s idiosyncracies and I’d come out of it knowing which ones worked for me and with some ideas about how to employ them. I thought it’d be a quick project. If I’d realised, when I chose the first objects the player encounters, that my choices would lead to having to write fifty separate individual passages and a reasonably complex looping system to make act 5 work, I might have chosen to do it differently. But I don’t regret that choice at all – it’s a much deeper, more intricate piece than I’d otherwise have written.
I learned that it’s sometimes better to work out what you’re doing before you do it, too. At one point about half way through act 3 I spent an upsetting amount of time stripping out and redoing the inventory system so it used array variables rather than single-item strings, because I had a list of twenty or so individual variables that might have several values and I was trying to write if statements and failing horribly because of the complexity. Not incidentally, I also learned quite a lot about Javascript array variables. And I learned that no matter how many bugs you think you’ve squashed, in a project this complex, there will always be at least one more. (Detritus has done more for my coding ability in two months than Codecademy managed in six.)
I learned about branching. Every time a narrative branches in a game like this, the path not taken by the player can, if you like, be seen as wasted work. If you want your players to see everything, you have to avoid branching too much, or branch only with descriptive elements. But the flip side is that then player choices don’t necessarily have much weight. I wanted Detritus to have weight in every decision, and it felt right to close off branches, to leave much more unread by the player than read, every time. It’s a game about loss, and that loss ought to be expressed mechanically, not just verbally; that’s why I wanted to use Twine to tell an interactive story, after all, rather than just writing something linear to express it. The game’s 27,000 words long, but the average playthrough will see less than a quarter of what’s written. There are easter eggs down some pathways, too, that mean much more because they aren’t signposted, and because they’re easy to leave behind.
Biggest and best thing about making Detritus, though, has been the wonderful feeling of making a solo creative project work, seeing it through from opening lines to existence in the wider world as an actual thing that people can genuinely play. It’s been too long since I did that, and without Twine and the community around it I probably still wouldn’t have managed. The democratisation of creative tools has meant an explosion in the numbers of people who can create and publish, in games and in fiction just as in other forms of publication. People with stories to tell or games to make can do so. Even if that story is a packing sim about loss and carrying your life in a suitcase. It is a wonderful thing.
Warren Spector’s latest GI column asks: where is the Roger Ebert of gaming? He bemoans the lack of accessible, consistent writing about games in mainstream media, aimed at broad rather than specialist audiences. The key passages are a call to action:
I’m not saying reaching an audience that doesn’t know enough to take games seriously will be easy. I’m for sure not finding fault with people currently trying to accomplish this difficult goal. I’m just saying we need to continue working and harder to bring more writers and thinkers into the area between Reviewers and Academia. We can’t be complacent and say, “Aw, what we got is good enough.”
Let’s inundate the bookshelves, magazine sections and the web with work that isn’t above (or below) the heads of readers. Only in that way will we achieve the level of respect I believe we deserve. Only in that way will we create an audience more demanding of the medium, which will inevitably lead to different and, I’d argue, better games.
This kind of treatment – as exemplified by the Times articles mentioned above – would do games a world of good. Establishing games in the public mind as something good and worthy and serious, and not just “fun for kids, but not for me” seems important to me. It’s important to developers, publishers, players and maybe even to – for want of a better word – enemies who might come to a more nuanced understanding of our medium.
Frankly, if games are not up to this sort of critical analysis then maybe they are just a way to provide some thrills and chills or some time away from real world problems, as our critics (in still another sense of the word) contend.
I agree, broadly, with the sentiment of the piece – that there is not enough mainstream game criticism of explanation, rather than of evaluation – but the issue is not that we do not have one or many Roger Eberts. It’s that we don’t have Roger Ebert’s editors. In the English speaking world, we don’t have a mainstream press that commissions these pieces consistently from the many talented critics who are already doing this work. We have a mainstream press, for the most part, that commissions very short reviews with evaluative ratings on only the very biggest, most blockbusting titles, or that syndicates specialist content written for gamer audiences rather than for the general public. We have a mainstream media that doesn’t want to – or can’t – pay excellent writers properly to produce excellent work, or promote it appropriately when it does. (That’s a sweeping generalisation, of course. There are many exceptions and many outlets where this is changing. But there aren’t enough.)
Outside the specialist press, the enthusiast press and the academic press, accessible games criticism is not reaching the audience it deserves because it’s not being widely commissioned or published in mainstream publications. It’s not that there’s no demand from audiences – the proliferation of intelligent and accessible work on Tumblr, on personal blogs, and elsewhere is testament to the voracity of that demand. It’s not that there are no writers capable of such accessibility, insight and excellence; there are dozens.
It is, however, about the business and budgetary crises in mainstream media. It’s about the gradual shift away from gamer-as-identity to gaming-as-mainstream-pastime, as more people play games and fewer think of game-playing as a fundamental element of their personality. It’s about the youth of video games and video game writing alike as creative media, and their dual resistance to external critique. And it’s about the shift in thinking involved in situating video games as culture and entertainment when historically mainstream media has covered them as technology. These are all issues that time will solve, one way or the other.
This month’s Blogs of the Round Table topic over on Critical Distance asks what the future of video game blogging is, and this can serve as my response: the future of video game blogging is mainstream. At the moment – like it or not – the best, most accessible, most interesting games writers are freelancers, working for niche outlets and writing for themselves. The future for video games blogging is a mass audience. And hopefully better pay along with it.
