Opinion
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History
Posted by Frank Lantz on 01 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion
Earlier this year I had the pleasure of participating in the Art History of Games conference, put together by Georgia Tech and SCAD. Recently they posted videos of the talks. You can see mine here.
One of the things that really stuck with me about this conference was the intersection of two different talks that spoke to each other in a surprising and powerful way.
The first talk was the one given by the (non)game designers Tale of Tales. ToT made a presentation which boldly and provocatively declared once and for all that Games Are Not Art. Games are games and they are fine as far as that goes, but they have no place engaging with the serious and important problems of art, to elevate the human soul, to struggle towards transcendence, to contemplate great truths, etc. Game technology might do that, but not games.
Make More Tennis Balls
Posted by Charles J Pratt on 10 Jun 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion
Preface – Below is the text from a four minute talk I delivered at the Games for Change Festival in New York a few weeks ago. It was one in a series of talks organized by Colleen Macklin and Richard LeMarchand.
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So there were a lot of games, a lot of big games, released last year, some which I didn’t play and some of which I did, but what I played the most of, by far, is a little game called Shadow Complex.
When Shadow Complex was released it was compared mostly to Super Metroid, and this is a pretty fair comparison; they’re both side-scrolling action games with ‘lock and key’ style progression and large worlds to explore.
The thing is, the reason I played so much of Shadow Complex was not primarily for the ways it was mechanically similar to Metroid, which was the explanation for many people that praised the game. Instead I was drawn to one of the particular ways that the game could be played.
In Praise of Spoilsports
Posted by Charles J Pratt on 30 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion
Preface: This was written for a seminar that Jesper Juul was hosting at the NYU Game Center on the ‘ludic contract’, and was done mostly with the idea of simply presenting some of the ideas I’ve had knocking around in my head about the nature of games. As such it’s not terribly persuasive and is somewhat scattershot (especially at the end), so I’m not really happy with the structure overall. Nevertheless I decided to post it because I think that there are good ideas presented and I’m always interested in getting people’s responses. I also think the piece goes some way in explaining the thought behind some of my tendencies; for instance, the hope is that after reading this one might better understand my being somewhat dismissive of the importance of some thematic elements in some games, my skepticism about ‘meaning’ in games, and my belief that video games are not fundamentally different from other types of games.
The Truth in Game Design
Posted by Frank Lantz on 25 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion
Jonathan Blow gave a talk recently at Champlain College. The subject of the talk was a game design philosophy in which you ask questions of the universe and then are open and attentive to the answers. In Jon’s view, game systems are like scientific instruments that can reveal complex and fascinating truths about the world. It’s a terrific talk, and you can download the whole thing here.
Jon’s talk made me think of what a couple of brilliant game designers said at GDC.
In two separate talks Sid Meier and Rob Pardo talked about how players consistently misunderstood, and were frustrated by, randomness. For example players, like most people, tend to subscribe to the “gambler’s fallacy”, the mistaken intuition that random events are spread evenly over time instead of clumping, well, randomly as they actually do. This is the fallacy that leads people to expect a flipped coin to be less likely to land heads after a run of heads.
Pardo and Meier both described the same solution to this problem, which was to alter the behavior of the game to correspond more closely to the player’s intuition about how randomness should behave. For example, if you have an event that is 50% likely to occur, and it doesn’t occur, then you make it 60% likely on the next attempt, 70% likely after that, and so on until it is certain. Voilà! A coin that is less likely to come up heads twice in a row, and never has a run of more than 6 heads.
Now, Rob Pardo and Sid Meier are amazing game designers and it’s a privilege to hear them speak. Both talks were full of invaluable insights from practitioners at the top of their profession. But this particular detail really stuck in my head, and rolled around there with Margaret Robertson’s microtalk about behavioral economics and Chris Hecker’s talk about external reward systems, and the numerous discussions of Zynga’s quantitative, behaviorist, social-game design methodology that loomed over the whole conference like Chernabog glaring down from Bald Mountain.
The Question I Didn’t Get to Ask
Posted by Frank Lantz on 06 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion
I just finished participating in the amazing Art History of Games conference. And the last panel, moderated by Ian Bogost, included Whitney curator Christiane Paul and game designers John Romero, Harvey Smith, and Richard Lemarchand. I thought of this comment too late to say it then but I want to say it anyway.
Earlier Christiane had said that certain games, like DOOM, don’t belong in a museum, but that it wasn’t about high and low, that she didn’t believe in that distinction. But as I was listening to the panel, I thought about the influence of heavy metal on the creation of DOOM, about how John and the rest of the folks at iD had wanted to capture the speed and power and over-the-top energy of that music in the game. And I couldn’t help thinking that this distinction was all about high and low. And the thing is, that’s ok. That’s what it means to be a smart person with good taste nowadays, we recognize that high and low exists, not as a value judgement, but as different modalities, different tones, different styles, and then we make value judgements within those different modalities.
DOOM doesn’t belong in a museum, not because it’s not worthy, but because it’s rock and roll. It’s too fast, too loud, too hard, and too fucked up to be in a museum. There are some games that will work in a museum and some that won’t ever and that, by itself, doesn’t say anything about their value. We need both.
Exploring the Breakspace
Posted by James L on 18 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion
I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age: Origins recently and I’m still trying to figure out why I’m enjoying it. I’ve gotten far enough in the game to hit the point that I hit in nearly every 80+ hour RPG, the point at which I stop really caring about sidequests or character arcs and I’m basically holding down the escape key to skip past every conversation with a character not related to the main plot. The point at which I lose the patience to read about bandits robbing the town or the cave infested with spiders. So I must be playing because of the gameplay. Except I’m not really that interested in the battles – I feel like the important decisions I’ve made were choosing my talents in the level up screens, and the way I handle the battles has only a slight effect on the outcome. That said, there are some battles that are interesting, battles where that slight effect is the difference between winning and losing, but the vast majority of the battles are the standard slog through minions to get to the boss. The other main part of the gameplay, the character progression, is mostly a guessing game about the exact numbers behind text descriptions.
So what am I enjoying about Dragon Age? I think it’s this: there’s a system, and I want to break it.
A Brief Review of “Racing the Beam” by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
Posted by Josh on 04 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion
I really enjoyed this. It looks at game design from the perspective of the design of the Atari VCS (2600) system itself — how the limitations and quirks of that game console led to certain design decisions (good and bad) that affected some very seminal games.
I’m a programmer, so when I think about game design it’s very hard for me to completely distance myself from thinking about what would be easy or difficult (or impossible) to actually implement. Sometimes laziness prevents me from making design choices that would be harder to execute. But I like to think that having an intimate understanding of the platform (say, iPhone) gives me a more refined sense of how to make something good particularly for that platform. I can avoid getting mired in things that just won’t work. Like how painters study their brushes so they know what the possibilities are as far as texture, stroke weight, etc. So talking about game design from exactly this perspective clicked with me very nicely.
Also: I am just a bit young to have experienced the Atari 2600. I’ve seen them and probably poked at a game or two as a kid, but I’m of the Nintendo generation. Reading this book with the internet handy to watch some of these games in action gave a really great introduction to the Atari 2600 (or, at least, as good as one could get without really playing one). And this book contains a lot of info about the history of Atari (and Activision and other 3rd party devs) as well as the historical context of all of this.
Finally, this book seems like a great introduction to the hardware history of computers. The book talks about the chips, the design of the motherboard (if that’s what it’s called), and how the hardware impacted the platform. And get to learn a bit how TVs work. Electrical engineers won’t be impressed, but I learned some stuff.
So, yeah — even though this book can get fairly technical (on an introductory level, at least), it’s still a very easy read. Well organized. Fun. Very interesting. Great book!
(Crossposted to Auscillate.)
The Jungle of the Real
Posted by Charles J Pratt on 03 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Opinion
Recently Matt Kaplan asked me to give my thoughts on the ‘No Russian’ mission from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that has caused some controversy. He published my thoughts along with those of others on his Game In Mind blog. Reading through the perspectives offered by the members of the game criticism literati, such as L.B. Jefferies and Ben Abraham, I have to admit that I started to feel a little out of place. What struck me was that they all in their own ways seemed to take the topic much more seriously than I did. While I could appreciate what each was saying I couldn’t quite connect to any of their feelings on an emotional level. For each of them the existence of this mission was an important moment in the history of games, at least in the way that it was finally bringing certain subjects to the surface. For me, the whole thing seemed a little banal (the incident in the game, not the discussion).
Just the other weekend I was in Boston and I had the pleasure of grabbing lunch with Wes Erdelack (also known as Iroquois Plisken). Wes’ site Versus CluCluLand is one of a few blogs on games that I always look forward to reading. As we sat over burgers and discussed games and those who talk about them I explained to Wes that I wasn’t really interested in fiction. Wes was kind enough not to fall out of his chair, by the look on his face I imagine he wanted to. It occurred to me then that the rift between my perspective on games and that of the rest of my small corner of the blogosphere might be a bit deeper than I had imagined.
Indeed, what unites all the big name games that have come out and are coming out, and all the discussion that swirls around them is the topic of fiction. Modern Warfare 2 is controversial because it allows players to shoot fictional bullets at fictional civilians and that makes some people uncomfortable for various reasons. The talk around Uncharted 2 basically centered on how the game portrayed the relationship between its characters, the pacing of its plot, and how it captured the feel of Indiana Jones movies. Most of the talk of Assassin’s Creed 2 is about its re-creation of the major cities of Renaissance Italy.
While I would never pass judgment on people who find these topics engrossing (it’s wonderful to find what you care about in a game and write about it passionately) I have to admit that more often than not I find myself wondering what all the fuss is about. More often than not I find myself wondering if anyone is ever going to change the subject.
What interests me about games are not the ways in which they are fictional, or fake, but the ways in which they are real.
Football, IQ, and the World of Mathcraft
Posted by Frank Lantz on 27 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Opinion
How should we think about worldly success? When someone accomplishes a difficult goal or achieves impressive results to what degree is it a consequence of inherent ability, hard work, or random luck? These are interesting questions about life, right? They are deeply related to the fundamental philosophical issues of how one should live one’s life and what we should find admirable in other people. To me, these questions seem to have all the hallmarks of the sort of big ideas that “speak to the human condition” in the way that we would like games to be able to do.
I am put in mind of these questions by the recent kerfluffle between Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell, and the role that Football stats have played in this debate.
Digging for Family Secrets
Posted by Charles J Pratt on 20 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Opinion
End of Life is a piece of interactive fiction developed by Simon Ferrari, a game critic and theorist currently completing his Masters at Georgia Tech. Though structurally pieces of interactive fiction tend to be less interesting than larger video games their low overhead means that they can take much bigger risks and production is open to a much wider range of people. Centering on a family’s decision of whether or not to remove their comatose grandfather from life support, End of Life continues a tradition in interactive fiction of featuring themes that are neglected in most video games. However, Ferrari’s piece breaks with tradition in that the user is intended to have relatively little agency. The actions taken by the user have next to no immediate feedback and the characters of the narrative form their own positions and forge their own courses of action, which both drift as the story progresses. Instead users are simply a “wisp”, in Ferrari’s own words, pushing each character gently in one direction or another.
What is most interesting about End of Life is that it is not simply a system of branching choices. Each family member’s ‘mood’ is randomly generated at the beginning of the play session, and each character will have random changes in mood as the story proceeds. Because the fate of the grandfather is determined by the combined moods of all family members the path to one conclusion or another is complex and can at first appear highly arbitrary. However, a deeper exploration of the system of the piece done by tracking outcomes over many sessions of play reveals certain biases in the system. These biases can, in turn, lead to different interpretations of the characters presented.