Notes on Perfomer and Audience in Rock Band

"Where does this leave the presumed player? Does his male gaze become a female one as his viewing of these four attractive men gets elided with that of the all-girl audience?"

Bonnie Ruberg, "Beatles: Rock Band" and the Female Gaze

"People pay to see others believe in themselves."

Kim Gordon, "I'm Really Scared When I Kill My Dreams," Artforum, 1983, reprinted at Dennis Cooper's blog.

Discussing Rock Band 2, which doesn't use the likeness of any real stars, Harmonix's Helen McWilliams once told me, "We want it to be about you, and your rock star fantasy... You're there with your band, for each other, and you're fulfilling your rock star dream together, and the audience is there for you." The Beatles: Rock Band is the total opposite.... I've never felt less important in a game than this one.

Chris Dahlen, The Beatles: Rock Band Review at Pitchfork

I'm interested in the meaning of Rock Band avatars because I feel incredibly personally invested in my own. I was the perfect target for Rock Band's peddled rock star fantasy--I have a bass I never learned to play and though I'm too old to start a band in earnest I'm not old enough to accept that it's never going to happen. Rock Band's story mode never felt right, though. A band doesn't catapult to international success by playing flawless cover versions of bands across decades and genres. The narrative of the rise to fame is a small part of the mythology of rock, and not the important one where Harmonix's game is concerned. Instead, Rock Band plays with the dichotomy of performer and audience, creating a game experience where the player fulfills both roles. By eliminating the distinction between performer and audience, already tenuous in rock performances, players can virtually realize the dream of being a musician.

September '09 Roundtable: Shadowplay in the Virtual Cities

September '09

Isn't That Spatial?: Every video game has certain benefits and constraints in the way it represents space. Interaction fiction, arcade titles, 2D side-scrollers, isometric RPGs, and first person shooters all have advantages and disadvantages to how they deal with space--some technical in nature, some design-based. This month's topic invites you to explore the ways games have represented the spatial nature of their storyworlds and what this does for the audience experience. Is it possible to ignore the constancy of spatial relationships in a graphical game? What would such a game look like? Are there ways of representing spatial relationships that we haven't explored? Do you have ideas for games that could intentionally twist the player's perception of space, or do you want to write about a game that already has?

My favorite subsection of video game criticism right now involves spatial relationships. A few years ago I didn't know there was a critical body of work, and now it's the most exciting part of my RSS reader. I'd like to quickly credit a few people who are doing great work on the subject: Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun whose guest posts at BLDGBLOG are among the most fascinating nonfiction I've read, and Bobby Schweizer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Nothing in this post is half as interesting as "Space and Playgrounds" at his GameCulture Journal Blog, so you should go read that if you haven't already. A lot of the posts there, including those related to his thesis, cover urban game environments. They've helped inform my understanding of virtual spaces.

Exploration tends to be my favorite part of games, especially in 3D gameworlds like Morrowind, Oblivion and even more limited game environments like KOTOR and Mass Effect. (You can check out my Bartle test results on gamerDNA if you don't believe me.) When Star Wars Galaxies was released, my excitement for exploring the universe quickly evaporated when I became bogged down in MMO grinding. I was also discouraged when I would run out beyond the starting location as far as I could go and there were still dozens of other players ahead of me. I couldn't discover anything in the game, I could only rediscover locations that were new to me. The more I thought about it, though, I wanted something that games couldn't provide--I wanted to be the first person to experience an area, and even if I was the first player, the designer had already been there. Virtual worlds can't exist as an unexplored ideal for the gamer the way that remote physical locations can.

Enter Jim Rossignol. One of his great guest posts at BLDGBLOG is "Procedural Destruction and the Algorithmic Fiction of the City," which is pretty much over my head but introduces (to me, anyway) the concept of procedurally generated urban landscapes. Rossignol's focus seems to be the technical, architectural, and aesthetic aspects of these environments, but I'm intrigued by their potential as an environment to actually be explored. A procedurally generated environment could be recreated for each new user, and by inhabiting the gameworld a player would make it static, real, and habitable. When that player leaves and the next one comes, it would be an entirely new environment. I would be tempted to put down roots, to claim a corner of that hypothetical city for myself so that it wouldn't evaporate. An entire city could be inhabited that way--although, at that point, the city would be fully realized and exposed. But that wouldn't really be a game. Maybe it's the nature of virtual spaces to be completely defined.

Of course, the real world itself is largely explored now, too. Even inhospitable and remote areas have been mapped by satellite cameras and global positioning systems. New technologies and their in-game equivalents have developed concurrently, eliminating much of the mystery and wonder that unmapped places used to possess. For a specific game example, consider the Grand Theft Auto series. The in-game mini-map in GTA3 was limited enough and the pause menu so slow that I primarily navigated Liberty City through memory and intuition. My experience with the city-space was organic and emotional. GTA4, on the other hand, featured a larger game world and more tools to navigate that world more effectively. The GPS system, which at times demonstrates suggested paths and specific instructions, completely recreated the way that I interacted with the city and how I felt about it.

I know I haven't said too much about games yet, and I'd like to go off on another tangent. I'll try not to get too boring with the details.

I love driving. I love exploring the relationships and interconnectedness of even everyday places; I once swore I'd never take the same route twice. I'm still amazed at how many buildings in my hometown I've never seen. I used to spend a lot of time in Baltimore, and there's only a handful of ways to drive into the city. [Note: if you'd like to follow along, feel free to open up Google Maps, although in some ways that might defeat the purpose. There really is a payoff to all of this, too.] From the north, you take I-695 to I-83 South to downtown. From the south, I-95 is the logical choice. It's a little bit trickier from the west--I-70 ends at the Beltway, so you need to take US-40 into the city. I lived in the North part of Baltimore near Johns Hopkins University, so I usually took I-83, but I got bored of that and decided I'd use US-40. Until Gwynn Falls Park, US-40 is Edmondson Ave, and then 40 veers south on West Franklin Street. Through a combination of bad signage and bad luck, a lot of drivers miss the turn and suddenly find themselves lost in West Baltimore. This started happening to me. I knew that I needed to head east and north, and somehow I'd always end up on the wrong side of Druid Hill Park on Druid Park Drive. Because of the way the roads loop around the park, I'd quickly lose my orientation and just head off in blind faith until I reached a road I recognized. Over a couple of months, I made the same wrong turns repeatedly, consistently winding up way off from my intended goal. At the time I didn't have a smart phone, and I never used a map, so I would be completely lost. As I continued doing this multiple times, the environment became familiar. Eventually, I recognized every street corner and every building, but I had absolutely no idea where I was.

Think about that for a minute. I feel like it's the defining metaphor of my life.

Eventually, I got the hang of staying on US-40 and better oriented myself toward the big roads. In fact, when I tried to recreate this route later, I couldn't remember where the wrong turns were. With the help of Google Maps and its Street View feature I have a general understanding of what was happening, but I'll never be able to relive that same experience.

There's a lot I like about this story. It didn't really develop as a full concept until I read Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City. It was frequently referenced in a lot of basic game criticism books I was reading, and it promised to appeal to the general reader. Sadly, even with the book at hand I don't think my memory or writing would do a good job of summarizing its contents, but I'll try to give an overview. The book primarily functions as an urban design guide, showing the ways that cities map themselves onto the residents' experiences. It can represent in detail the ways in which Baltimore's street structure as referenced above would support mistakes and confusion. I connected to Lynch's writing the most when he elaborated on how imageability is personally experienced. Regular grids produce stability but boredom, central spires and consistent architectural structures result in the security of community, and sprawling and ill-defined areas lead to uncertainty. Most of the game writing I've seen advocates that game designers should employ Lynch's definitions to create navigable and intuitive game spaces, but I'm more interested in the gameplay potential of spaces that lead to the more nuanced and unpleasant aesthetic and emotional responses.

I really enjoy the game creation challenges included in the Roundtable topics because it lets me be creative without doing any actual work. It's easy for me, because I don't have any relationship to the game industry so it's all completely abstract. This game I might take a little too seriously. I first started thinking about it for Gamasutra's 2020 contest for GDC last year and couldn't make it work, so I'm taking a stab at it. This is also the only time I've thought not just that "this would be a cool game," but "I want this to be an actual game." As soon as I read the Roundtable topic for this month, I knew this would be the perfect place to talk about it. If this game had a single theme, it would probably be "to ignore the constancy of spatial relationships in a graphical game."

Here's the single sentence reference-heavy pitch: It's like Portal meets indie favorite Closure, and the game world is Dark City complete with "tuning" crossed with the labyrinth from House of Leaves, and it plays like Left 4 Dead.

High-concept enough for you?

Okay, let's try this from the top. The game world is a city at night, and the players begin at a central location; say, a train station, or city hall, or a large apartment complex. The immediate area, no larger than a city block, is illuminated. The rest of the city is virtually invisible, lost in shadow. So the game isn't completely dark, it would probably be best to lay out the rest of the city in wireframe. The players' collective goal is to bring light to the rest of the city. There will be several major locations, likely large buildings, that will light up the surrounding area when reached by a player. To get to them, small teams of players will need to move out into the darkness toward their targets. Without maps to aid them, players will need to navigate using landmarks; for example, they may see a billboard opposite their destination or know to turn right at the extra-wide street ahead. Lurking in the darkness are Wraiths*, spectral figures that will try to defeat the players any time they veer from the protection of the light. To find their way around the larger gameworld and for their protection, each player will choose a personal light, either a lantern which illuminates around the player in a short circle, or a flashlight that can cover greater distance but only a narrow area. Ideally, one or more flashlight-wielding players would group together within the range of a lantern-carrier.

The game's challenge derives from its central exciting innovative dynamic!, a constantly shifting overworld. Periodically, probably every couple minutes or so) the entire unilluminated gameworld will shift and turn (again, imagine "tuning" in Dark City or the twisting, roaring, dynamic labyrinth of House of Leaves.) Players that were standing next to each other may now suddenly be several hundred in-game feet apart. The landmarks that moments ago were leading the players to a central location may now be scattered over the space of several blocks. Now the players will need to relearn their environment, locate each other, and head back toward their goal, all the while avoiding the enemy Wraiths (who possibly could be controlled by another team of players like the Special Infected in Left 4 Dead multiplayer.) The Wraiths would not only try to defeat the main player characters directly, they could also target illuminated buildings to try to turn back the coming light. Ultimately, the goal would be lighting up the entire city, preventing the sudden physical shifts and vanquishing darkness. It could work with larger groups of players, with small groups breaking off to go after specific sites.

What I'm striving for is recreating the uncanny in a game space. The competing sensations of familiarity and strangeness that I had in Baltimore would play out with every level shift. The dark/light aesthetic would also reinforce the unease of the unknown. I'm also excited about returning games to their naturalistic navigational roots, away from the ever-expanding HUDs and maps that delineate so many contemporary game worlds. I don't know if there's a dynamic level editor in existence that could support a game like this, but if there's anyone at Valve who wants to send me a check and give it a shot, I'd be all for it.

Yeah, I didn't think so. Still, it was fun.

* I'm trying to ensure that this hypothetical game does not develop a racially-tinged subtext at this point. The villains of Dark City are clearly Other, but like many contemporary scifi villians--The Matrix's Agents, for example, or Star Trek's Borg--they are light-skinned aliens and culturally aligned with whiteness. The imposing dread implicit in many cultural representations of urban environments, including those based in classic noir style and contemporary news reports, often seems a negotiation of the class and racial borders in these environments. This game was never intended as a commentary of that world, but it's not lost on me that there are several racial slurs that incorporate mythological otherness along with the menace of darkness. My academic understanding of the subject is largely from Richard Dyer's White, which includes a chapter on the cultural meaning of "The Dark Continent." Maybe it's naive to imagine a game about darkness and light in a city setting and yet try to keep race out of the equation entirely. On the other hand, calling attention to that possibility may have the opposite effect of my intent; that is, to say that the game was based around an aesthetic and a mechanic, and is not intended as a cultural allegory on a larger issue like race. I felt it better to acknowledge the possibility of that interpretation and the challenge in dealing with even seemingly (to me, anyway) innocuous representational ideas like light and darkness. This is also really cart-before-the-horse; I fear I'm more interested in the practice of cultural criticism than the studied objects themselves. I hope that makes sense; that's a really long footnote up there.

April '09 BoRT: Civilians in War Zones

Taking Games Seriously, Making Game Seriously: This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you. The recent months have seen controversy sweep through the video game industry. Whether people are objecting to the use of imagery widely considered to evoke racial stereotypes, or to the gameplay based on violent sexual crimes, or to the fact that anyone would complain about either topic–the discussion has been fierce. This month, contributors to the Round Table are invited to design a game that focuses on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.

IMPORTANT: Because I expect many of these posts will be difficult and/or disturbing for portions of the audience to read, I ask that you consider using a high level of language to describe the contents of your design. I also ask that you both rate your posts and include rating descriptors as laid out by the ESRB (http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp).

Like a lot of people, I was following the Six Days in Fallujah controversy pretty closely--in fact, I expect to talk about that in detail later. I was disappointed when reading the developer's comments that though they gave lip service to representing the human cost of conflict, there was little indication that the actual gameplay would incorporate civilian casualties in a meaningful way. Looking back over Atomic Games' studio president Peter Tamte, the primary goal was to use civilians as an educational tool about the rules of engagement. I'm not sure that any game could do justice to innocents killed in war, so I'm going to take a different approach. Instead of making a game that realistically depicts violence, I'd like to make it harder for other games to detach their violence from their real-world counterparts. This post is rated M for Mature, even if most games with the violence I'll be describing would probably rate Ts.

I think this game strategy would work better as a mod than an independent game. In fact, it's possible that people have created and implemented similar mods, but I don't know of any actual cases. The mod would work with team deathmatch or capture the flag shooters, with Counter-Strike serving as a classic example. The player would take on the role of a civilian. The player's only goal is to survive. It might be necessary to establish a motivation for the player to stay within the limited game environment; i.e. you haven't had time to evacuate, or you need to remain with your family. Your actions wouldn't have any bearing on the combat as a whole, and if the player's character dies, the character remains dead. The body remains where it fell, and there's no score at the end. In researching recent military conflicts, I've been disturbed to find that militaries do not devote significant resources to accurately gauging the civilian casualties in conflicts, and that reporters most often rely on international aid agencies. In the same way, the game wouldn't record the loss of civilians; it would only resonate if directly witnessed. If the player's character is killed in a crossfire but neither team notices, it would model what can sadly occur in the reporting of actual armed conflict.

There would be challenges in implementation. Most maps in these games are large enough that a noncombatant may be able to hide or would never be in the line of fire in the first place. This could be resolved with a large team of noncombatants, but I don't think that would be necessary. The main goal of this mod is not to produce a civilian body count but to challenge the way that players think of game spaces. Counter-Strike's environs suggest actual cities, albeit less technologically sophisticated ones, but the buildings never seem to have had inhabitants. I had the same feeling when playing Gears 2--even though I might discover a collectible that dramatized the lives of the city's residents before the Locust attack, it was purely exposition. The game's design reinforced that walls and rooms only existed for cover; they were not narrative spaces. No game character lived in those homes or suffered from the conflict.

In a post at Insult Swordfighting, Mitch Krpata concluded his commentary on Six Days in Fallujah, "The more I think about this, the more I think that it would be easier to talk myself into rejecting other games based on real-life wars than accepting Six Days in Fallujah." I think I feel the same way, but that I want to take it even farther. The war games we play generally don't try to realistically represent conditions on the ground. They have their own tropes and objectives, and often they're only tangentially related to the ways that actual conflicts work. On the other hand, I don't think we spend enough time considering how influential games can be in the ways we think about the environments and dramas they represent. Maybe all violent games, at some basic level, are glamorizing war and conflict. I don't know that I'm ready to go that far, but if I could make a mod like the one I described, I would have a more complete understanding of the relationship between violence and entertainment.

Ada Lovelace Day: The Shadows of Prince Achmed

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

Though I don't have a background in technology, I was enthusiastic about Ada Lovelace Day because I love media. While this blog is ostensibly about video games, and though games are an ideal integration of technology and art, I wanted to turn my attention to the field of animation. Like nearly all media, animation is an art form that continually incorporates new technology as it evolves. Some of the earliest animated films, while technically limited, often still retain a unique charm unmatched by contemporary technological advances. With her silhouette films, especially The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Lotte Reiniger combined technology in art in a fashion that is still imitated today.

Animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi describes the film's construction and drama:

The feature film (one of the first animation features in the world and the first in Europe), was entitled Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed). The technique used involved a particular type of cut-out animation; the silhouettes, cut from black paper, portrayed backlit people, animals, and objects. . . . Chases and escapes by princesses, love stories, fights between the good spirit of the lamp and monstrous devils are narrated with a refined taste both in figuration and in the movements of filigreed paper actors." (33)

Some of the effects are breathtaking--in one scene, the princess Pari Banu is bathing, and silhouettes shift in the water to capture her reflection. Though the drama is the high adventure expected in early adventure films like Flynn's Robin Hood, the music and art are still evocative. During close-ups of the main characters, Reiniger uses such detailed silhouettes for the characters' faces that even subtle shifts in their orientation or slight movements of their eyes portray nuanced emotions. Without discounting the complexities of animation borne from illustration, I am still fascinated by the number of different structural elements that go into even simple sequences in the film. An individual silhouette may have a dozen points of articulation, and each movement involves a synchronization of the silhouette, the background, surrounding characters, the camera, and other film elements. While the film's sophistication is an artistic masterpiece, it is also a significant technological achievement. 

Reiniger was part of a collective of avant-garde filmakers in Germany in the 1920s. Her collaborators on Prince Achmed included Berthold Bartosch and Walter Ruttmann, talented filmmakers themselves. The art and industry of animation were still nascent, and many elements of the production were new to the artform. Katja Raganelli's documentary Lotte Reiniger: Homage to the Inventor of the Silhouette Film credits Reiniger and the film's crew, including Reiniger's husband, Carl Koch, with the first use of a multi-plane camera setup, a technical innovation generally attributed to Disney's Ub Iwerks. Reiniger and the other German animators often first worked on special effects for live-action films, even proceeding their complete animated works, and their status as pioneers is reinforced by how early their talents are visible. The technology of animation often sprung up independently in different parts of the world, and while it is difficult to identify the creators of various techniques, but Reiniger and her peers were clearly pioneers and innovators.

With Prince Achmed Reiniger created a new subgenre of animation, yet the work is so fantastic and proficient that it has overshadowed every subsequent film that utilizes a similar style. It's an extraordinary feat in film; a comparable example would be if Citizen Kane had come out in the nineteenth century. It might seem, then, that Prince Achmed is a cultural dead-end, but aspects of the film resonate through contemporary animation and even across other media. While traditional cel animation is usually regarded as two-dimensional and is arrayed along a plain, illustration and linework can create perspective. With a few exceptions, such as the phenomenal procession sequence, there is little depth of field in the movie. Because the silhouettes cannot overlap, most action occurs with the characters at the same scale and adjacent to each other. The fairy-tale adventure features constant physical struggle, magical combat, flights, jumps, and similar action along an often-static plane. Watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed with contemporary eyes, the film is practically a video game from the eighties. Stylized computer animation--for example, the credits sequence in The Incredibles--use fields of color and contrasts, and dramatic action, to convey many of the same sensations produced in Prince Achmed. Even eighty years later, this animated classic and its unique style still resonate in popular culture and media.

Read more posts about women in technology here.

Works Cited

Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Indiana UP, 1995 (publisher link)

Reiniger, Lotte. The Adventures of Prince Achmed Milestone Films (on DVD)

[Insert Confused Cartoon Face Here]

March '09

About the Author: This month's topic turns the literary focus from the medium, to the author. If you submitted a post to either the January or February topics, feel free to write about the process you underwent in converting literary themes into gameplay. Did you struggle with anything in particular? Are you satisfied that your game design(s) communicated what you intended? Have subsequent comments or idea made you wish you could go back and start he process over? And how much does your design say about you and your own interpretation of the themes of the source material?

In "The Curious Incident... for Wii," I described a hypothetical adaptation of a popular novel about an autistic child into a Wii video game. There are a lot of questions in this month's topic, so I'll try to tackle them in roughly the order they're presented.

Curious Incident can be described as a novel primarily about a social issue, not just a story that includes the issue. According to his bio in the book, Mark Haddon had worked with autistic children in his youth and now teaches creative writing, and I think the book has an educational tone. The book avoids pedagogical traps through its use of a first-person narrative, which effectively dramatizes not just the effects of the disability but also its accompanying mindset. On one level, it's simply a practical education, a way to learn by doing rather than telling, which is accomplished virtually by the reader's identification with Christopher's first-person description. This is the primary element I wanted to convey through a game, and one of the under-appreciated aspects of the power of video games. There is a cognitive dissonance between the "I" of a narrator and the "I" of the reader, but it is not the same dissonance as between a video game character and a video game player. This tends to be discussed at some length in the criticism of interactive fiction, and MIT Press's First Person is a good place to start on the issue. The main reason I avoided IF as part of this design is because I think a game like this adaptation requires a visual virtual environment and an embodied character. I think that I covered most of that territory in the original post, but I wanted to revisit the "educational game" aspect of the proposed game design.

Dramatic irony is a key part of Curious Incident, and while I did not explicitly discuss it, I struggled with ensuring it remained a part of the gameplay experience. Irony is multi-tiered in the novel; not only does Christopher not understand information that the reader does, but the notion of irony--reference the novel's Smarties test, a false belief test that dramatizes the cognitive process Theory of Mind. Sometimes this is used in a traditionally dramatic fashion, as when Christopher does not realize the significance of a character's emotional response. Often this distance reinforces how far Christopher's experience differs from our own, and that works contrary to the book's ability to place the reader completely in his shoes. There is a particular section at the beginning of the novel that demonstrates these overlapping ironies. [See image above; click to expand.] It's a brilliant passage; it demonstrates Christopher's inability to recognize irony while the reader participates in it. The sequence also has an emotional component, and it's a valuable beginning for understanding the tragedy of his relationships. This is a tricky issue to represent in a game, and I allude to it at the end of the post when I ponder the risks in dramatizing a disability in a ludic way. I try to evoke a version of dramatic irony by representing certain elements in the game environment. If a player can view everyday events and objects both in their banal state and as troubling elements the way Christopher views them, then the player's relationship to those objects will resonate in a fashion similar to the ironic comprehension produced by the novel. Most game environments that are modelled on the real world have representational and functional elements, often overlapping. One overt example would be Mirror's Edge--the meaningful objects in the environment are the ones that the player can interact with, and through coloring and other means the game highlights these for the player. Curious Incident is intended to work similarly; players would become trained to recognize crowds of people as an equivalent game threat to a mob of zombies. Though a crowd of normal people does not pose a physical threat to him, what they represent to his peace of mind is entirely consistent to a player's visceral reaction in a violent game. I still don't think I'm really doing the book's irony justice, but I think I'm exploring some of the same thematic territory.

This leads me to the main purpose of the Curious Incident game: to create a realistic gameworld that resonates with the player after the game is over. I'd like to make a brief diversion here and describe real-life situations that were informed by gameplay.

• After a long session of GTA3, I was walking through a mall parking garage. Though not a car person, I now had an appreciation for the way that Mustangs handled and the kind of damage a Hummer could do. I remarked to a friend, "I want that car . . . and that one . . . and that one . . ."
  
• I was driving recently and passed a business that had small white outdoor propane tanks. Though they were many feet away, I slowed down and watched them carefully out of the corner of my eye, lest they explode like in L4D.
  
• Just last week I was playing Burnout Paradise regularly. I found that rather than paying attention to the car right in front of me, my gaze would wander ahead to see how many cars were at the next intersection or if the next three lights would all be green.
  

These little moments didn't appreciably affect my day-to-day life, and they don't have any intrinsic meaning (except to suggest I should take longer breaks from video games.) Nevertheless, I think they effectively demonstrate that the way we view virtual environments informs our perceptions of real ones, especially if there is a functional relationship between the two. This is the purpose of the Curious Incident game. If the novel encourages the reader to imagine life from the perspective of an autistic child, then the game should do the same, and both should change the way that the world is viewed.

I feel like answering the last question is almost too obvious. "What does all of this say about you?" My girlfriend's son was diagnosed with PPD-NOS, which is generally recognized as falling within the autistic spectrum. He is not emotionally distant and is in fact very engaging, but does demonstrate many traits common to autism: repetitive behaviors, unusual responses to sensory stimuli, and limited communication. At times his behaviors seem arbitrary or irrational, and getting him to eat or nap is even more frustrating than with other children his age. Public interactions are also awkward; strangers will ask him how old he is or what food he eats and he will be completely non-responsive. At first, I thought the reason why I wanted an autism simulation was to help people who weren't aware of how it works to recognize some behaviors, but I think I was crafting the game idea as a way to change the way I thought about it myself. When his occupational therapist advised that D. was likely to seek out sensory information through a variety of means, it made more sense that he would take off his shoes and socks and then walk on, instead of around, the toys in his room. I'm continually learning the patterns and reasons that inform these behaviors, and I now recognize that it is a system of its own, albeit one that remains largely hidden. By conceptualizing Christopher's disorder as game, I was trying to structure that system to explore it from the inside. Ultimately, I think that's a valuable way to demystify the entire process and interact with the disorder in a dramatic and intellectual manner.

February '09 Roundtable: Games and Interpretation

Turning Over a New Leaf: (We're trying something new with the topic this month, so please read carefully.) February's BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month's Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

Game as Interpretation

When I first read the post Oedipus the RPG, I thought it was a bad idea. Isn't Greek tragedy all about the inability of the individual to escape the trappings of the gods and the state? Why would a player want to control the doomed Oedipus? Moreover, wouldn't your actions be an attempt to extricate him from his inevitable fate, which would either invalidate the story or eliminate all player agency? Of course, Oedipus the RPG doesn't encounter those problems. Both Travis's reading of the play Oedipus the King and his gameplay decisions create an experience at odds with my traditionalist understanding of the tragedy. To identify the game design element I want to incorporate into this month's post, I have to explore how his design choices work.

I think the most significant decision is making the player a common citizen of Thebes and not an active participant within the dramatic text. In conversation at the #GBConfab channel, Travis identified the player-character as a member of the Chorus, which places the player within the text but still leaves him or her free to act on the story's periphery. This is represented in-game as the first thing seen by the player: "You are a citizen of Thebes." There are several significant consequences of this design choice.

Most character-driven video games embody the player as a character or group of characters within a game, and the narrative unfolds primarily from the resultant individual perspective. This is trickier in genres like JRPGs, where you may control an entire group. These games often involve several different type of in-game narratives, including character-specific ones and plots that involve the groups collective interests, but generally there is one main player character who serves as the locus. By situating this experience on a non-actor, the player's point of view becomes largely interpretive. Moreover, many of the non-textual additions to the game concern social, historical, or other contextual factors. The most significant of these may be one described in the comments: "One key piece of evidence is that the Athenian audience would have been very, very familiar with stories of how oracles could be bribed to give responses favorable to the bribing parties." Localizing the player as a Greek citizen makes discovering that bit of information not just an important part of exploring the story, but a logical consequence of successfully roleplaying the player's character. In fact, in a later comment Travis advocates that the game should reward the player for playing his character in a realistic manner, the very definition of roleplaying.

In order to play the game effectively, and to explore the game's narrative most fully, the player cannot rely on only the dialogue between characters and the events that constitute the text of the play. The design of the game does not force a player to adopt the interpretation of the play that Travis holds, but it does give the player the means to reach that conclusion through smart design choices. Perhaps most significantly, his game does not itself invalidate a more traditional reading of Oedipus, as the player can still identify with Oedipus's tragic undoing merely as a witness of his fall. It is this design element--the use of game-specific concepts to recreate interpretive positions--that I want to explore further.

Interpretation as Game

The Princeton University Press description of Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws identifies a similar controversial critical perspective:

[Horror films] seem to offer sadistic pleasure to their viewers, and not much else. Clover, however, argued the reverse: that these films are designed to align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the female tormented--with the suffering, pain, and anguish that the "final girl," as Clover calls the victim-hero, endures before rising, finally, to vanquish her oppressor.

In my reading of Clover's theory, there are diegetic and non-diegetic means by which the viewer transfers his or her identification with Leatherface to Sally, the "final girl." I want to focus on non-diegetic factors using the camera and player control. In the film, the camera moves from a point-of-view aligned with the murder to that of the last potential victim. Clover refers to Laura Mulvey's sadistic-voyeuristic look, which is espoused in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."  This filmic gaze, a staple of horror and slasher films, uses the punishment of a female character as a means of resolving certain psychosexual challenges (link here). For example, in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we watch from within the home as the victims move through it until their murders. The camera is closely aligned with Leatherface. However, by the time Sally has been held captive by the Leatherface and his family, the camera is virtually her point-of-view as her tormentors laugh and mock her, at times by looking into the camera. To achieve my stated goal for this month's topic, the Final Girl game needs to use gameplay mechanics to recreate Clover's theory. To successfully replicate the successes of Oedipus the RPG, however, the Final Girl game should also be entertaining and viscerally consistent with the film.

While the camera is the primary formal means of identification with a character in film, in a game a player identifies primarily, and sometimes exclusively, with the character under his or her control. To effectively convey Clover's reading, the player should alternately control both the hunter and the hunted. To convincingly document the film viewer's transition between the competing points of view from the film, it is not sufficient for players to simply play one and then the other. There must be an in-game point where the transition itself is part of the gameplay. Fortunately, I think that the Chainsaw film does have such a moment: the chase sequence through the woods. This chase immediately follows the murder of the last main character other than Sally. The sequence is near-constant action for five minutes as Sally is chased by Leatherface through the woods, into a house, and to a gas station. The tension, previously relieved by quick executions, stretches out for that entire period. Finally, Sally escapes, and for the first time since the movie began survival seems a possibility. From this point on, the viewer's identification is primarily with her.

Leatherface vs. The Final Girl: A Texas Chainsaw Massacre game

In the game, you play both characters. At the beginning, the player is Leatherface, whittling the group down one by one. I think the appropriate mechanic would be more strategy- or stealth-based than action-based; for example, trying to remain unseen while moving through the house or the outdoors until suddenly sprining on the victims. Once the final chase begins, though, the player begins taking control of both characters. This might require onscreen prompting, such as with the quick time events I love complaining about. The player would need to navigate both Sally and Leatherface past each obstacle. Specifically, the player would need to perform an action to make Sally duck under branches and then make Leatherface cut them. While on the surface level this creates a conflict between competing goals, I think that players will adapt to changing goals as long as they are successfully communicated. Several different in-game cues can relate to the player that expectations have changed: for example, a timer, or a map showing the amount of territory still to be crossed. The challenge would come not from resolving the chase through action, but successfully prolonging it. If the player fails Sally's challenges, then Leatherface kills her and the game ends. If the player fails Leatherface's challenges, then she gets away, also ending the game. The real goal of this level is not saving or killing the girl, but stretching the tension to its narrative conclusion. In the last level, though Sally and Leatherface still occupy the same space, the player's control rests exclusively with her, and the player can finally win her freedom. If successful, the player would dramatically enact the transition from participating in the sadistic violence to finally saving the "final girl," and engage with the entire process as emotionally as one does with the film.

[Full disclosure: I have not read Men, Women, and Chainsaws, although I've read parts of it and essays that referred back to it. This description of Clover's ideas is cribbed from Google Book Search previews of that book and the anthologyViewing Positions, which features the final essay in Chainsaws. I supplemented these texts with the Wikipedia entry for Final girl, which was the original inspiration for the game and this post.]

Dead Rising, Beyond Good and Evil, Media Ethics, and some other stuff

This post is a response to Chungking Espresso's post Dead Rising & Interventionist Media Ethics. It rambles quite a bit, and I think I'm not responding to Simon's own points but instead going off in my own direction. I hope this is clear from the text itself, but if it's not, this was a really inspiring and fascinating post, and it really helped me focus my own thoughts on similar subjects. Please take the time to read it; it's an interesting piece of opinion and it provides necessary context for the contents here. I've made some revisions, but I decided reframing the post as anything other than a response to the Simon's blog post would be disingenous. And really hard.

This post will also serve as my first blog contribution for the Vintage Game Club. I've been playing Beyond Good and Evil since the VGC started this round, but I haven't publicly commented on it yet. I had a couple of things in the works but this seemed like as a good a time as any to put my thoughts down.

I've been thinking about this subject in relation to games from two different angles. I've been playing Beyond Good & Evil as part of the Vintage Game Club and have been interested in the relationship between Jade's status as a journalist and the gameplay. While BG&E and Dead Rising are both interventionist, I think it's more a gameplay necessity than a conscious thematic goal--which doesn't invalidate your analysis of the narrative. [Note: I've only played Dead Rising in passing, so my impressions of that game are ill-informed and may be off-base.]

I never got the sense that the camera minigames or the scoop system significantly informed the progression through the game's plot. After all, the game relies heavily on familiar mission tropes: escort, boss battles, timed survivals. Complete a gameplay task and you get rewarded with the next level. That being said, I'm intrigued by the way the game creates a sense of urgency by allowing the plot events to continue whether you're there to witness them or not. That game element, in particular, does seem to make successfully playing the game a matter of journalistic and narrative priorities. Does Dead Rising force you to make ethical decisions as a consequence of the narrative goals? Do you have to choose between getting the next scoop and saving civilians in trouble? If so, then that represents a major step toward dramatizing the plight of a photojournalist more than the challenges of preparation or time management.

At the risk of going off-topic, I'd like to talk about Beyond Good and Evil a little more, primarily because I'm more familiar with it. To successfully complete missions, Jade must uncover and publish evidence of a government conspiracy.  In BG&E, this isn't part of the game's meta-narrative, but a required component for completing each section. In the Factory level, which I think is a fairly representative level for the game, Jade must sneak past a number of enemies and snap a picture of an undisguised enemy. After the level's completion, the NPCs in the game begin to rebel against their rulers, not because you successfully combat the level's boss, but because your image was published for all the world to see. This may suggest that Jade's purpose and the game's meaning is a journalistic one, but this is a false construction of plot and not a consequence of actual gameplay. At its heart, BG&E is a traditional combat-focused platformer, where the most important ability is beating up enemies. I suspect that Dead Rising is the same way.

I think the best way to unpack the role of journalism in these games is to first identify what the games value in play and then to see how that is changed to suit the game's narrative goals. While this is probably too blanket a statement, all games are interventionist. Witnessing a game's program isn't sufficiently involving for a rewarding gameplay experience; the player must affect his or her game environment. Even Pokemon Snap is guilty of this; the biggest in-game rewards come when you first transform and then document your surroundings, as when you push a Charmander into lava to cause it to evolve. Could a designer create an involving and emotionally satisfying game with a non-interventionist mentality? Perhaps, but I suspect this would require a game that rewards the player's documentation of a crisis with an indirect change in the gameworld that is explicitly a result of a related gameplay mechanic. For example, if a player documents the commission of a war crime, that photo could shift public opinion or be used as evidence against the perpetrator. I think Beyond Good and Evil is trying to get to that point, but the game devalues the process of journalism in favor of capping off combat with a quick camera snapshot.

Beyond Good and Evil further complicates the role of the camera in the game by providing an in-game weapon that fires from the first-person camera screen. The camera is no longer only a tool of recreation; it also has become an implement of destruction. Like the flashlight rifle attachment, the gyrodisc subverts the act of seeing into the preliminary stage of a hostile act. While the IRIS Network may just be a way of making the Rebel Alliance more family-friendly for a children-of-all-ages-esque game, it still seems like some form of betrayal against the characters' stated journalistic values. I think this is a phenomenon similar to FPS war-based games. A couple recent blog posts (including Subject Navigator and a second one I don't remember) question how WWII games address or fail to address the horrors of war. Put another way, is it possible to make an anti-war game where the only thing you do is successfully wage war? If one war video game teaches us that military force saves the world and another claims that it destroys the world, yet they are both played the same way, can the games themselves be said to have an ethical component? Many games use their narratives to impart morals thematically, but few evoke them through the act of playing the game. I think BG&E clearly belongs to the former.

While a zombie or alien invasion does seem like a credible use of "humanitarian crisis" in the context of videogames, it is hard to reconcile these outlandish and violent struggles with their real-world equivalents. We're really talking about the ethics of photojournalism during wartime, which is unfortunately way above my head and beyond my capacity to respectfully discuss, although I think I would like to return to it at a later point.

The second way I've been thinking about this issue is in relationship to Resident Evil 5, although by way of non-games media. Since I'm going even further off-topic, I'll save it for another post.