Participation Concrète

This is a post I've been wanting to write for a long time. It's an important thing to talk about for me, since it really sums up what I'm all about as far as games and interactive stories are concerned, so I wanted to get it right. I did touch upon it a little in an earlier post called The Meaning of Choice, but I really want to expound on that idea.

I was listening to a talk that Braid creator Jonathan Blow gave at the Montreal International Games Summit a couple of years ago. While it's definitely worth listening to, I couldn't help but feel that there was something he was missing. He was talking about the meaning of game mechanics. After a while, it struck me: he was considering games as rhetorical devices.

Thinking about art-forms in rhetorical terms is nothing new. See the Susan Sontag quote that I used in The Meaning of Choice. Lajos Egri made a similar point far earlier when he talked about the 'premise' of a drama. The premise is a statement that the drama is a process of 'proving' or demonstrating, much like a logical premise is proved by an argument. Very simple and neat. And, ultimately, all stories have this. It might not be anything profound, but there is a moral statement at the core of every story.

The problem I had with Jonathan Blow's application of this to games (if it indeed can be called a problem) is that while games are interactive, rhetoric is not. How can you offer a player a choice while trying to impart some moral statement to her? It doesn't seem to make sense. Egri suggested that drama must go the only way it can go to demonstrate its premise. How does that fit in with interactivity? The answer is: it doesn't. Rhetoric is not interactive. Rhetoric does have an interactive counterpart, however, which we call dialectic. It's a revolutionary new thing that those young firebrands Socrates and Plato are using against those musty old Sophists. Those crazy kids.

Let's talk about BioShock, since that was the game Blow criticised. The intended 'message' of BioShock appears to be that cooperativism is better than Objectivist individualism. Blow quite rightly pointed out that that message was lost in the interests of achieving game balance. And that's fair enough. However, if we change BioShock's premise from a statement ("Cooperativism is better than Objectivist individualism.") to a question ("Is cooperativism better than Objectivist individualism?"), BioShock suddenly amply (albeit unintentionally, as far as I'm aware) provides a space in which the user can have a "dialogue" with the game to try to answer that question. This is a rudimentary form of video-game-as-dialectic.

One of BioShock's creepifying Little Sisters. Harvest her for resources out of self-interest, or save her to gain her cooperation.

I see the video-game-as-dialectic working very well for moral problems that are subjective or ambiguous. These themes are what are all too often missing from games, and this is the reason 'mature' in gaming terms is a shorthand for what is really a juvenile fascination with blood, guts, sex and swearing. This is strange, because a video game is theoretically far better-equipped to tackle these themes than any other medium. Authors of traditional stories who flirt with ambiguity can only really propose a solution and have the reader accept or reject it, or else leave the solution open-ended and let the reader think about it. A video game, however, can assist a player in working towards a solution.

I don't want to get all prescriptive here, and definitely I think that rhetorical games are worthwhile (particularly in serious games, and extra-particularly in serious games for pedagogy, a research interest of the lab - I certainly don't mean to tell educators how to do their job!). However, from an artistic perspective, this is, for me, an important facet of the medium. I want to see games the moral premise of which is not a statement, but a question, and the process of which is not rhetorically trying to prove the statement, but dialectically guiding a player towards answering that question.

Consequence-free

I've been thinking about the notion of consequentiality in games. Of course, we all know that it's important for a player's actions to have consequences. You do something, and it changes something in the world. That's basic agency.

However, I am unconvinced by recent arguments that players should have to deal with the consequences of their actions. A classic example of this is the permadeath game; you get one life, and when you die, you can't play any more. A less extreme example would be a game that only offers one save slot, and saves over it each time you make a decision, disallowing backtracking to see what happens if you make a different decision (short of starting the game again).

I used to think this was a good idea. I, too, was fooled into the thinking that allowing the player a do-over somehow cheapens the impact of their decisions. I thought it was a bad thing that I could choose to disarm the nuclear bomb and destroy Megaton, because if I did both, where was the choice? What meaning did a decision have if I could just reload and try something different?

Megaton, what will become of you?

But recently, I've sort of come to the conclusion that it has more meaning precisely because of that. When we play a game, even a game with the most simplistic of stories, we divide our experiences into those that are canonical, and those that are not. Getting killed by the first Goomba in World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. is not what really happened, right? What really happened was defeating Bowser and rescuing Princess Toadstool. Since being killed right at the start is not what really happened, it's unimportant, right?

We're quick to dismiss the path not taken because it's not what 'really' happened, but surely nothing gives more meaning to our actions and decisions than these glimpses of how it could have been otherwise. These abortive tendrils of narrative thread that will never be followed through - but that nonetheless hang around in our consciousness - offer us insight into what our 'true' decisions mean. I can only guess at what saving Megaton really means until I've actually seen it destroyed. In the end, I do both. My decision is not of which action to perform, nor of which action is right or wrong, but, in retrospect, of which action was 'true' and which was 'false'. Which action was 'canon' and which was just a look at an alternate possibility.

Did that just happen?

We don't want linear games; we want choice. We say that a game should not be linear, and yet we still hold fast to the idea that our path through the game should be linear. After all, stories are linear, right? I don't know about that. Perhaps such adherence to the linear structure of the experience of traditional stories is dismissing the power of the video game medium just as much as adherence to the linear structure of traditional stories themselves is.

Long live quickload!

The Meaning of Choice

Let's get some housekeeping out of the way, first. I haven't written anything here in a long time, due to some personal circumstances. I'm mostly better, now, and ready to write some more.

Today I want to talk about choice in videogames. Janet Murray defines agency as "the satisfying power to take meaningful actions and see the results of our decisions and choices". We've more or less unquestioningly accepted this definition, and mostly agreed that agency is a good thing. But it's about time, now, that we look at exactly what it is that makes an action meaningful. Questions such as "What is meaning?" are philosophically interesting, but the questions are a little too vague - and the answers a little too ambiguous - to be of any practical benefit.

I keep going back to what Susan Sontag said about authorship and "the truth of fiction". She said:-

I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent. In my view, a fiction writer whose adherence is to literature is, necessarily, someone who thinks about moral problems: about what is just and unjust, what is better or worse, what is repulsive and admirable, what is lamentable and what inspires joy and approbation.

Sontag later, in the same essay, observed that moral issues are not necessarily only concerned with what is good and bad, but also with what is important and unimportant. What she says is easily observable in Aesop's Fables, or in the parables of Christ, but she contends that it is present in all stories. If we realign our expectations to the thinking that the moral problem at the core of the story is not necessarily very deep, and not even necessarily consciously considered by the author, I think I can agree with this. And this, to me, is what meaning is. To be meaningful in the context of a story, choices necessarily have to have a moral component.

Dungeons & Dragons' alignment system

There have been no shortage of games that have attempted to leverage this moral component into their decisions. In such games, choices are usually cast as a choice between 'good' and 'evil', often written into the game mechanics with a metric of just how good or evil your character is. Lionhead's games, such as the Fable and Black & White series, are fundamentally based on the idea that you get to choose between good and evil. The Fallout series likewise has its 'karma' system, as does The Elder Scrolls series have its own metric of morality. The Neverwinter Nights games used Dungeons & Dragons' biaxial alignment system (above), which was an improvement, but not much. The problems with these choices are several. For one thing, the notion of 'good' and 'evil' is rather oversimplistic, which is why Fable III inconsistently conflated 'good' and 'evil' with 'popular' and 'unpopular'. For games to look at mature moral issues as other media do, we have to do away with looking at morality on a linear scale. Perhaps more importantly, though, they're false choices. We, as the player, are told up-front what the 'right' choice is and what the 'wrong' choice is. Why would anyone co-operating with the game's fiction pick the 'wrong' choice? (Parenthetically, it can be fun to play an evil character, but it comes at the expense of sacrificing our covenant with the narrative. "Good and evil" choices can therefore create a false dichotomy between story and fun, which no game should ever do. Ever. It's absurd.)

Authors of stories in traditional media have essentially two choices, and they choose one of these far more often than the other: they can present to the reader a solution to a moral problem, which the reader can then accept or reject, or, less frequently, they can present a moral problem to the reader and leave its solution as a challenge to the reader. Games are different. They can present a moral problem to the player and then react to the player's solution, following through on that line of thinking. In essence, I think of traditional stories as "moral rhetoric", and video games as (potentially) "moral dialectic". By telling us which choices are 'right' and 'wrong', game designers deny that potential, and limit games to the "moral rhetoric" of other media.

Fable III's choices failed because it told us which choices were 'right' and 'wrong'.

One way around this is the notion of subjective judgement. In games which employ subjective judgement, the game itself doesn't measure how good or evil the player's behaviour has been, but rather relies on the approval or disapproval of the characters (who will not always agree with each other) to provide that feedback. Subjective judgement has been tried a few times, but it rarely works. It rarely works not because subjective judgement is a bad idea, but because subjective judgement alone is not enough to make a choice meaningful.

Deus Ex employed subjective judgement to great effect. Complete the Castle Clinton mission non-violently, and Sam Carter would praise you, while Anna Navarre would criticise you. Go in guns blazing, and those characters' reactions would be the opposite. (At least, that would have been the case if not for some poor scripting which would, under some circumstances, cause a non-violent approach to be flagged by the game as a gung-ho assault.) The sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War attempted the same trick, and pretty much failed. While DX:IW certainly presented the player with a lot of choices, the meaning of those choices was supposed to be imparted by the approval or disapproval of several characters, all of whom were equally unlikeable. Because it was hard to care what those characters thought, it was hard to care about the choices presented to the player, and those choices ultimately felt meaningless - a situation not helped by the fact that the player was free to switch allegiances at any point right up to the end of the game, no matter how badly they had pissed off a certain faction previously.

Deus Ex: Invisible War's choices failed because their meaning was contingent on the opinions of unlikeable characters.

BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins also did away with previous BioWare games' linear moral systems and introduced subjective judgement. With somewhat more compelling characters than Invisible War, it was a lot easier to care about gaining these characters' approval. And yet, DA:O's choices still felt arbitrary and meaningless. DA:O's failing was not in failing to provide strong characters to judge the player's choices, but in failing to provide proper motivation and contextualisation for those choices in the first place. It's obvious that, before loading the game for the first time, the player has never visited Ferelden. A lot of the choices the player is asked to make in the game (particularly early in the game, when a new player) are informed by things which the player character, as an inhabitant of that world, would know, but which the player herself, as a visitor to that world, certainly does not know. A lot of pressure is put on the player to decide what her character is like, and even then, to make uninformed choices. A choice in which we can't make reasonable projections about the likely outcomes is a meaningless choice. (Choice was further undermined by approval being a transparently mechanical thing: it's ok to pick a choice of which a character disapproves if you have a nice gift in your inventory to give them afterwards. It was a little upsetting to see the effects of my moral choices immediately overridden by my companions' rampant materialism, but that particular manifestation of ludonarrative dissonance is gab for another day.)

Dragon Age: Origins' choices failed because they were informed by things the player couldn't know.

To summarise, then, for a choice in a video game to be meaningful, it needs to be:-

• Not pre-judged by the author of the game,
• Judged by the approval or disapproval of characters whose opinions we can care about, and
• Based on information the player has, so that she can make an informed decision based on likely outcomes.

Canada (again)

Japanese video game luminary Keiji Inafune, having previously talked about the death of the Japanese videogame industry, has now spoken about why Canada is becoming so important in video games. Aside from the government incentives to develop there (the lack of which in the UK Ed Balls so recently lamented), and Canada's proximity to the USA, Inafune also cited the Canadians' work ethic, saying that "compared to Americans, Canadians are a bit... more serious, if you like."

As I said when I wrote about Ed Balls' comments, my intention to move to Canada is as much personal as it is industrial (if not more so), but there seems cause to be optimistic.

Women in games

[Super important update: This piece no longer reflects my thinking on the matter. I'm leaving it up as an example of some of the traps a naive white male can fall into when trying to deal with this topic. If you want to stop being naive, I recommend actually listening to some women. I mean, really listening. --AW, 2014-10-09]

There have been a couple of posts in the blogowebs over the past couple of weeks about allegations that publisher Activision has been telling its developers not to create games with female protagonists. Whether or not the allegations (which Activision denies) are true, I'd like to put my perspective on it.

A female video game protagonist (Kit Ballard from Blade Kitten).

Identification with the protagonist of a game is a complicated enough issue as it is without bringing in gender politics. For example, Dragon Age: Origins presented the player with pretty much a blank slate on which to create their character. Some people loved that, while others (like me) felt that it made my character's emotional response to certain situations somewhat arbitrary and meaningless. This is in contrast to (the somewhat similar) Mass Effect, where, although Commander Shepard's personality was subject to the choices of the player, those choices felt more like an interpretation of Shepard's character than a creation of that character by the player. (Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, in keeping with BioWare tradition, allowed the player to choose whether to play as a male or a female character.)

Vanya at split/screen co-op argues that "There are many cool games that mainly appeal to boys. The lead characters in most of those games are strong males that the players can identify with. If the players are male that is," implying that such a decision, if true, is driven by an outdated attitude that the gaming market is mostly made up of males. I respectfully disagree. I don't necessarily identify with those strong male characters. The phenomenon isn't male-centric, but adolescent-centric. It's not about identification, but about power fantasy. That is, of course, motivated by the outdated attitude that the gaming market is principally adolescent.

There are also plenty of games out there where the protagonist isn't even human. One of my favourite games is Ōkami, in which I play the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu incarnated in the form of a wolf. The title of this blog notwithstanding, it's a bit harder to identify with a wolf than it is to identify with a woman, but that doesn't make the game any less appealing to a boy like me. Also of historical note here is in some ways Ōkami's spiritual antecedent, Ecco the Dolphin, in which the player played as a totally un-anthropomorphic dolphin. To say that boys couldn't identify with a female character is like saying a pale Scottish lad like me couldn't identify with GTA: San Andreas' CJ because he's a black American. Similarly, then, why couldn't a girl identify with a male protagonist in a game?

I don't think identification with a game's protagonist is necessarily a gender issue, and knowing what would attract females to gaming if not a female protagonist is somewhat outside my ken (I've asked a few women, gamers and non-gamers alike, about this: not nearly enough to be a statistically valid sample, but 100% of them said the gender of the games' protagonists wasn't an issue), but what about the other issues concerning female characters? Let's take quick stock of the female protagonists in games. We have, obviously, Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series, Samus Aran from the Metroid series, Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, April Ryan and Zoe Castillo from The Longest Journey series, Cate Archer from the No One Lives Forever series, Ruby from Wet, Kit Ballard from the forthcoming Blade Kitten, and so on. Not all of these are startlingly wonderful representations of women, but maybe the problem is that we expect them to be. Not all male protagonists are great representations of men, either: I find the testosterone-fuelled machismo of Command & Conquer: Renegade's Nick "Havoc" Parker to be absolutely cringe-worthy, but I don't find it insulting to men because it's not supposed to reflect all men. We don't expect the moral flaws of the Grand Theft Auto series' (exclusively male) protagonists to reflect on all men, either. (Many of the female characters listed are engaged in violent activity, and there is an argument that that's a male domain. I'm not sure what to think about that.) How can a female protagonist represent women without essentialising women, which is inherently patronising? The answer, I think, is not to politicise female protagonists, but to depoliticise them. The thrust of feminism being, essentially, that women are people too, why can't a female video game character stand - like male video game characters do - for that one fictive woman, rather than for all women?

I think there are three possible reasons to make a video game character female: one is commercial, one is political, and the other is creative. The problem with making a video game character female for commercial reasons is that the female protagonist is likely to be hyper-sexualised, to objectify women (as was arguably the case with Lara Croft originally, and is still the case with some female protagonists today). The problem with making a video game character female for political reasons is that the female protagonist is likely to be essentialising and patronising. This was the case with Purple Moon, which made games targeted at pre-teen girls in the 90s. There is a caveat that I don't want to disparage Purple Moon for that at all: as Purple Moon's Brenda Laurel says (quoted in Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games), it was politically necessary at the time, but we're sort of past that, now:-

I get a lot of crap from both women and men who don't understand the social context in which Purple Moon and its sister companies came to be. They don't remember the time that girls were afraid of computers, boys dominated computer labs in elementary schools and girls thought tech was not gender-appropriate for them. The conditions that we were trying to address when we started Purple Moon no longer exist.

I think, then, that the best chance for creating a positive female character is to take a creative perspective on it. That's probably the most thoughtful approach to what it means for the character to be female. But what do we mean by a 'positive' female character? Literature is full of anti-heroes whom we really shouldn't like, but with whom we nevertheless sympathise: Orwell's Winston Smith, Dostoyevsky's Rodion Raskolnikov, Burgess' Alex, Fowles' Frederick Clegg, and so on. If we want to accept gaming as a mature medium, shouldn't it be free to deal with those less savoury aspects of human life? And is there any real reason those anti-heroes should be exclusively male?

I want to leave this post with a somewhat controversial thought about the sexual objectification of women in games. Gamers are, by and large, very quick to defend that shooting a fictional game character in the face is nothing like doing the same to a real person. Far fewer, it seems, are willing to say that sexually objectifying a fictional female video game character is not the same as sexually objectifying real women. While in my gut I sympathise with that viewpoint, I'd be hard pressed to articulate why that issue's any different.

Mirror Balls

I never really paid much attention to Ed Balls, beyond childish sniggering at his name. But this week he said something that made me pay attention. In his blog, he blamed the administration of Dundee's Realtime Worlds on the Con/Lib coalition's cutting of Labour-instituted tax breaks for video game developers. He also said:-

The [video game] industry, which contributed to £1bn to the UK economy last year, is competing with significant incentives provided by countries like Canada who are seeking to entice companies to relocate jobs there.

Ed Balls MP

This struck a chord with me for a few reasons. Firstly, I am interested in the video game industry (obviously). Secondly, I grew up near Dundee and I don't like to see these things happening in the closest thing I have to a hometown. Thirdly, I am a Canadian citizen and plan to move to Canada when I finish my PhD.

I don't necessarily believe it, of course: Realtime Worlds' reach exceeded their grasp with APB. They took a big risk on it, and it didn't work out. That's just business, and in my totally uneducated opinion has little to do with government support. Balls makes a solid point, though, in that a non-government-supported British industry can't really compete with a government-supported foreign industry.

Although my reasons for wanting to move to Canada are as much personal as they are industrial (if not more so), Balls' statements made me feel uncomfortable. Of course, he was really criticising the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition, but, through a trifecta of coincidences, it almost felt like he was directly accusing me of being a traitor.

Eyes on the game

I will not be buying Nintendo's forthcoming 3DS console.

It uses a technique called autostereoscopy to present a 3D image without the need for special glasses, which sounds brilliant for most of the population, but not for me, and the perhaps 5% of the population who suffer from amblyopia. Apparently even mild amblyopia (commonly known as "lazy eye"), can negate the effects of autostereoscopy. So I might as well be playing a regular 2D-display game anyway.

It's not the first time my eyesight has caused me trouble. I played Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 for a little while, but I had to give up on the otherwise great WW2 shooter because my colour-blindness (~7% of the male population) made it difficult for me to tell the difference between Russian green and Nazi grey uniforms, leading to situations where I frequently killed my teammates. My long-sightedness (~30% of the population, but correctable with glasses) exacerbated Mass Effect 2's tiny text problem.

Mass Effect 2's text was difficult to read on standard definition screens, and more difficult for those of us with hyperopia.

When we talk of accessibility in games, we often think of making games available to the disabled. And that is certainly a laudable goal into which game developers really should put more effort. But I am not disabled, and even I struggle with some games. It appears we still have a long way to go.