Systemic Emotion.

I have the rather troublesome habit of lying in bed, when I should be sleeping, and thinking about game design. When this happens, I’ve been known to spam Twitter with the thoughts running through my head in the hopes that one of the many far more intelligent people who follow me can help to work out what I’m actually thinking. Sometimes, too many times in fact, the 140 limit becomes an issue. Pith is an incredible useful skill, especially for a game designer, but it’s not always the best approach. This is one of those times, and so I’ve decided to expand upon my thoughts here to try to make my concerns a little clearer. The original tweets are included here, poor grammar and spelling unaltered, along with explanatory comments. These Tweets were a single stream of thought, written as I lay in bed at around 1am. My apologies if this is a bit of a break from the usual format, but it’s maybe an interesting insight into my unfiltered thought processes.

JKeverne #GameDesign The trick seems to be getting players to think about systems without realising. The moment they do they’ll try to optimise it.

My initial thoughts came from the argument that the way forward for narrative game design is through the use of systems and processes not through scripted content. Though I essentially agree with this sentiment, I have constantly had the sense (A vague unease at the back of my mind) that there’s a big problem with that approach, and I was now starting to get a grasp on what I thought it was. My concern is the natural approach to systems and processes is to approach them logically, to find the correct or optimal solution. To effectively game the system.

JKeverne #GameDesign Once they start to optimise their actions emotional engagement is lost. Everything becomes an object…

If when presented with a system players natural tendency is to optimise it, that inherently strips that system of its ability to engage emotional, as all elements within the system, regardless of what they are contextualize as, start to be regarded simply as objects. As something to be used, as a negative to eliminate, or a positive to accentuate.

JKeverne #GameDesign Still purely systemic modeling of human condition leads to potentially sociopathic attitude. Humans become objects, numbers.

So if the system is that of human relationships, when players become aware of the systemic nature they could potentially stop treating the human elements as humans, and instead view them as objects, stripping out all emotional investment in, and engagement with, the system on a non logical level.

JKeverne #GameDesign Which does actually lead to some intresting meta narrative potential.

Jumping slightly out of context, I did think that the idea of treating humans as objects did present some interesting meta narrative potential.

JKeverne #GameDesign Need to hook into right brain, systemic thought guided by empathy. Human condition is a system but a messy emotional one.

JKeverne #GameDesign Essentially then goal is right brain processing of a left brain concept. Systemic immersion that feels like aesthetic immersion.

I was now starting to try and work out a way to either prevent this tendency to approach systems logically, or at least mitigate it. The obvious solution it seemed was to use emotion to, in essence protect and obfuscate the underlying system. To present the system in such a way that it can be approached emotionally while still having the underlying strength of a systemic approach. Which is to say the ability to allow interaction, manipulation and exploration without enforcing a purely logical, analytical, mindset.

JKeverne #GameDesign Might explain why combat is the default mechanic. Highly systemic construct with a very low level emotive kicker.

Thinking about systems overlayed with emotional content, led me to consider why combat is still the most common form of conflict resolution in games. It seemed obvious on reflection: Combat is a highly complex system perceived through a highly emotional filter. It requires high level systemic processing of the strengths and weaknesses of different weapon combinations against different hostile non-player characters, but it is presented with a very low level emotional context, fight or flight, kill or be killed. It’s a perfect example of systemic behaviour within an emotional context, an emotional shell.

JKeverne #GameDesign So then is key to effective systemic modeling of human condition actually found in the aesthetic and not the systemic elements?

The next conclusion I formed was that the key to approaching systemic design, might lie not in the systems themselves but in the context in which they are presented. The emotional shell used to cover them.

This still seems like a very interesting point to consider.

At this point I started to get some very intelligent responses to my rambling…

lucasrizoli @JKeverne, you’re discounting feelings of awe & wonder brought on by insight, discovery, complexity & complication, or size of a system.

davidcarlton @JKeverne I’m not so convinced that’s a bad thing – go is one of my favorite games, and it’s all about the systems. As are most board games.

gryphoness @JKeverne The realization, & one of the powers of intentional analytic exercise, is showing us what we’re capable of w/o active compassion.

As was pointed out by many people purely systemic games like Chess or Go can still lead to deep emotional insights, systems can be directly emotive. However my concern is that often in order for that to occur the player needs to have effectively mastered the system, this emotional insight cannot come when they are sitll learning the system itself. This led me to wonder if potentially the ideal is a system that is understood on an instinctive level not an analytical one.

JKeverne #GameDesign Once we grok systems we stop actively thinking about them and work with them instinctively. Are games too reliant on complexity?

Maybe the problem with the current use of systems in game design is that the systems are simply too complex, that once players have learnt to master them they feel there is little left to understand and so they abandon them.  Might the solution be to rely on simpler systems, so that mastery is achieved quicker and players can move through that into the stage where they are interacting with the system instinctively and thus opening themselves up to being emotional affected because their primary concern is no longer intellectual analysis.

Feeling uncomfortable with the notion that only simplistic systems could bring emotional engagement without mastery I felt I had come full circle. The problem still remained, if the systems and processes approach to game narrative and meaning, as held by Clint Hocking and others, was the way forward could we prevent players from simply viewing the systems from an analytical perspective, potentially treating them as something to control not something to experience?

The obvious response is, why is such an approach problematic. More specifically, what is wrong with designing games around obvious systems? Isn’t that just as valid an approach as any other? In theory yes, however if whenever presented with a system the natural response of a player is to view it through the lens of logic, that seems destined to severely limit the range of topic we can deal with. How can we model highly emotional subjects like love, faith, hope, or justice, using a systemic approach if the players can only approach such systems logically and analytically?

Are the big questions, the questions vital to our understanding of the human condition forever bared from us, because the very core of games is formed on systems that can only be approach logically? Or does that implies that games are by their very nature philosophical, approaching complex subjects with logic and analysis?

I apologise for the cheap trick of ending the post with a question. I promise if I had any answers I’d present them instead.

Territorial Control.

Having previously examined the possibly meanings that can be drawn from logical exploration, in the form of resource cycles in BioShock and Beyond Good & Evil, I’ve decided to take a step back and look more closely at the concept of exploration in a territorial sense. What meaning can form of exploration impart? I have already examined one way in which games define territory, this second method should serve as a complement, not a replacement to the first. The original breakdown of territory into Logical and Functional is one that is defined  statically, spaces that are Logical rarely change to Functional and vice verse. This time I’m interested in how the nature of territory changes dynamically.

To that end I’ve chosen to look at two games which handle the concept of territory in different but, I believe, equally meaningful ways.

The makeup of the physical territory in Halo: Combat Evolved (And other games in the series) is essentially binary. For a given location, the player is either not in combat or in combat, the space they inhabit is either Safe or Hostile. Within this Hostile space it’s possible to further sum divide the space once more, into locations in which the player is under fire and those in which they are in cover. In the former space the immediate priorities are those of direct combat and with tactics and planning taking a backseat. In the latter space the player’s shields (Or stamina in the case of Halo 3: ODST) are able to recharge and the immediate priorities switch to tactics and planning. When all enemies in a location area have been neutralised the entire location switches from Hostile to Safe.

The overall aim of any location is to convert all Hostile locations into Safe ones. The tools provided to the player, are all geared toward the accomplishment of this goal. Weapons allow the player to directly engage enemy characters and neutralise them; items and vehicles serve as second order modifiers and power-ups, providing either additional weaponry or modifying the nature of the current Hostile space to improve the ability of the player to convert that location from Hostile to Safe; shields that create temporary in cover locations, cloaking devices allow safe movement through Hostile territory for a brief period.

Every tool available to the player is one that is used to either directly or indirectly change the state of the space form Hostile to Safe. The underlying meaning of Halo seems to be that of safety through superior firepower.

The second game I want to look at is, unsurprisingly for me, Thief: The Dark Project. On the surface the makeup of territory in Thief also comes down to Safe and Hostile space, however one of the major differences between Thief and Halo is that the definition of safety in Thief is far more granular. Instead of a strictly binary divide between Safe and Hostile locations there exists a scale of safety in Thief. At one end of which are locations which are unlit, with soft surfaces for floors, and empty of non-player characters. Such locations are the Safest a Thief level gets. At the other end of the scale are locations which are well-lit, have hard floors, and are patrolled by non-player characters, these are the truly Hostile locations in Thief.

Any location within a Thief level can be placed somewhere on this scale, with most locations falling between the mid-point and the upper limit of hostility. Few locations in Thief are Safe, at least to begin with.

Any area that is well-lit is one that is Hostile to the player, it might not contain any non-player characters at the moment but that can easily change. One of the most important tools for the player are water arrows which can be used to douse torches, extinguishing light sources and significantly altering that location’s relative safety. Intelligent use of water arrows can very quickly change a Hostile location into a Safe one.

However despite the variety of tools available to mitigate the hostility of the current location, it’s difficult to make any areas completely Safe and impossible to make the entire level Safe. The majority of every Thief level is composed of Hostile territory. Regardless of how much time and effort the player may put into changing the exact breakdown of Hostile and Safe locations within the level there will always remain some Hostile locations; the player cannot ever be entire Safe within any location.

Playing Thief the underlying meaning becomes apparent: you are a rogue element within an overwhelmingly Hostile location and no matter how hard you try you can never hope to be entirely Safe. You do not belong.

NOTE:

Any such analysis of Thief: The Dark Project and it’s sequels comes up against a problem, which is that much like Halo spaces are mechanically only Hostile to the player when some non-player character is present to provide a direct threat. It is possible for a Thief player to incapacitate or otherwise neutralise every non-player character in the level, thus greatly affecting the Hostility of the level. However such action is difficult, and time consuming, additional several levels include locations where the player is still at risk from traps and other environmental elements. Finally spend some time inside Thief: Deadly Shadow’s Shalebridge Cradle and you’ll understand exactly how Hostile a location can be even when apparently devoid of any non-player characters.

Amplification of Input.

Stripped of all context there is a single ability true to all video games: amplification of input, the translation of a simple input into a complex output: I press this button and a whole new range of options become available to me; I pull this trigger and that car explodes. The idea is not to exactly replicate the input required to achieve the desired output; the chain of causality from action to consequence is often long and complicated, one single action rarely leads to a complex output without a myriad other factors.

The underlying aim of all games is the codification and abstraction of complex ideas and situations into ones over which it’s easier to obtain competence in, and eventually master of. Through mastery comes insight, understanding, and an appreciation of the complexity of the original situation. In order to achieve this insight, this appreciation, the simplification and abstraction of the original situation must be achieved in such a manner that the simplified version is easier to master but that the lessons learned from this simplified form are still applicable to the original.

Chess is not warfare, it is a highly abstracted conflict with some contextual association to warfare. It is a lot easier to learn Chess than it is to learn how to command a real military force, however a lot of the high level strategic lessons still hold. It is still applicable to the concept of warfare.

The closer games move to complete 1:1 replication of input to output, the smaller this amplification effect becomes until the gap between the skills required for a video game version of Golf and an actual game of Golf start to disappear. Is this really a problem? Well I didn’t turn on the video game of Golf in order to play Golf, I did so in order to play a video game representation of Golf.

The appeal of the representation is different to the appeal of the reality.

The fallacy of choice.

The appeal of Nathan Drake is that he is a decisive character. He might be flawed, imperfect and not always able to make the best decisions yet he will always make a decision. He doesn’t hesitate, he acts, often with little understanding of the full consequences of his actions but still with an appreciation of the danger he will face. He is heroic precisely because he makes decisions and chooses to act even when he knows the risk. Though described as such, he is appealing precisely because he is not an “everyman”‘ a real “everyman” would have fallen to his death within the first few minutes of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. We want our heroes to be relatable and fallible, but still heroic, still decisive, still decidedly not mundane.

That’s why the most uncomfortable parts of Among Thieves are precisely those when the way forward becomes unclear. For Drake there is always a way forward even if it’s not necessary the best choice in the long term. The appeal is in being able to have that certainty of purpose, that knowledge that there is always a way forward even if it might be the more dangerous path. These games are not about the choices the hero makes, but about the drama and emotion of operating in that decisive manner.

It might seem antithetical to the concept of interactivity but the inclusion of more agency into a game like Among Thieves would be detrimental to the appeal of playing as Nathan Drake. Choices lead to hesitancy, and deliberation, traits that Drake might possess but ones that rarely come to the fore when decisions need to be made. Stubborn, yet able to be swayed by the opinions of those he cares about, once he’s set himself on a course of action he will follow it until the end, even if it might mean his death. The appeal of playing such a character is fundamentally tied to this focus on the task at hand, this need to not make decisions, to not take orders, but to act.

Even the most limited moment of interactivity creates an immediately closer sense of association between audience and action than existed prior to that point. Even in a heavily scripted game such as Among Thieves players, when recounting their experiences, will not say “Drake…” rather they will describe the events as if they occurred directly to them.

When, after fighting your way through a heavily defended train to try and rescue her, Chloe tells you it was a mistake to come back, the sense that you have just wasted your time is one shared by both player and protagonist, though the intensity of the sensation may be different. Would the reaction have been more powerful if players had been given a choice of whether to try and rescue her or not? Potentially, however in such a situation Nathan Drake, simply wouldn’t have made any other decision. No heroic character would, it’s the difficult path, the dangerous path, and the only path such a character would ever choose. That’s what makes them the type of person they are, the type of person we want to feel like when we start playing. We choose to abdicate ourselves of the pressure of making those big decisions in the knowledge that Drake will make them for us; he is not like us, he is the hero we wish we could be more like.

What good the choice when there’s only one path that anybody would reasonably be expected to take? Is a false choice any more meaningful than no choice at all?

If a game features a well defined protagonist then the notion of including the option to behave in a way that goes against the nature of that protagonist is foolish, the very appeal of such a character is that they are already defined, often as a heroic character. Why introduce the seconding guessing and evaluating that comes from the inclusion of choice?

Among Thieves is not a game about the selection of the right tactics, or the development of complex strategies, it’s not a game about making choices. It is a game about the tension, fear and drama inherent in being heroic. It is a game about action, the quintessential action game.

Two steps forward…

With each consecutive hardware generation it takes time to achieve what was possible at the end of the previous generation. New hardware requires new software techniques and often a return to first principles. The initial move from sprite based to polygon based games saw a marked increase in the spatial complexity of environments but was accompanied by a dramatic decrease in the size and number of objects that could exist within those environments. This clearest example of this can be seen when comparing Doom and Quake, two games separated by three years and an entire dimension. It wouldn’t be until five years later that the release of Serious Sam saw a return to the sprawling environments and hundreds of enemies that Doom boasted.

Twenty years ago I was playing a game that allowed me to explore thousands of square miles of virtual terrain. I was driving snowmobiles down mountains in order to meet one of over thirty non-player characters each with their own personality and skills which I would hopefully convince them to use in the fight against the invading forces of General Masters. This was Midwinter, prequel to the game I still  consider my favourite game of all time, Midwinter II: Flames Of Freedom.

Since then, with each hardware generation, the scale of the environments in which I’ve been able to play has decreased. Only recently has the  trend started to reverse and I have been able to have a similar experience to that I had twenty years ago. Far Cry 2 is the nearest I’ve come to recapturing that experience of first playing Midwinter, yet even though Far Cry 2 shows a significant increase in graphical fidelity over Midwinter the range of options available to me, the possibility space of the game, feels reduced.

It would be extremely narrow minded of me to ignore the impact the increase in technology has had on my reaction to the game, or to underestimate how the subtle changes in available mechanics have altered the dynamics. Despite these advancements in both technology and design it’s still difficult to ignore the feeling that somehow I’m playing a version of the same game I played twenty years ago and that the core experience has changed little in that time.

Twenty years of technological advancement, several hardware generations all so I can have essentially the same experience available on my Atari ST. I can’t help but wonder if that time has really been put to the best use.

This is not the only example I can think of where a recent titles has felt like it could have been created years previously. Last year saw the release of Left 4 Dead, a major factor in its appeal is the ability to face off against hordes of zombies alongside three companions.  Four players together fighting off dozens of mindless enemies, it’s a fantasy that holds a lot of appeal. Yet that sense of four players against overwhelming odds, is an experience I can distinctly remember having eight years ago. Alongside three friends I faced down hundreds of enemies in the twisted ancient Egyptian setting of Serious Sam. The sheer number of enemies that game is able to thrown at the player is absurd, the final level is subtitled “Infinite Bodycount” and I honestly wonder how much of that is hyperbole.

The mechanics of Left 4 Dead could have been implemented seven years earlier in Serious Sam or even fifteen years earlier in Doom. The graphical fidelity of such an implementation would be much lower, but would the experience itself be that much different?

Of course it’s not only technology that has changed in that time. Those seven years have allowed artists, sound designers and level designers to hone their craft to the extent that even if Left 4 Dead or something similar had appeared earlier it would not possess the same level of craft. It takes time to learn and apply the techniques of filmic art direction and indirect training that make Left 4 Dead the holistic experience that it is.

This still doesn’t completely lessen the sensation that twenty years of technological advancement have done little for the actual design of games, and that is  a wasted opportunity. Commercial video games are approaching their fortieth anniversary and with the first few years of each hardware generation spent trying to recreate the experiences that were possible before it’s little wonder that it can feel like video games have had trouble growing up in that period.

Housekeeping.

Just a quick update to deal with some personal and site related things that I’ve not had a chance (been too lazy) to get around to until now.

Michael Abbott, of The Brainy Gamer, recently completed his Summer of Confabs, where he asked a number of developers, bloggers and academics to participate in a series of podcasts focusing on a specific topic that they felt has had the most impact this year. I highly recommend listening to them all, and as he was kind enough to invite me you can find my disjointed ramblings on the third podcast.

In a sort of quid pro quo arrangement Ben Abraham who I recently interviewed regarding his Perma-death Far Cry 2 experiment has also interviewed me. I can assure your that reading it will leave you will a desire to never listen to a word I say again, which in some ways might be for the best…

Finally I’ve started to update my Portfolio page with additional material, the most recent additions are a number of creative writing samples.

Love potentially a little emo, the clue’s in the title. I’ve included this as a short example of my ability to deal with a topic rarely dealt with in games.

The Argument a dialogue heavy short story focusing around a specific argument between a heterosexual couple, again focusing on a topic not usually handled in games.

A Date with Fortune, this is a short story set in the Honorverse low on dialogue the focus is on motivations and character development, building to an action sequences. I suppose some would call it fan fiction though the concept and all the characters are entirely of my own creation.

More material should be appearing there over the coming weeks, as I finally sort out what I’m actually going to use that part of this site for; blatant self promotion I believe is the order of the day.

DM-Aerie – Progress Log 3.

Sometimes you make decisions that in hindsight are really, really stupid. One such decisions and my procrastination over dealing with it is why this latest Progress Log is appearing, several months after the previous one. However before I detail that stupid decisions, I should first return and explain the motivations for the changes made to the initial revised floorplan.

Revised Floorplan.

Though improved over the original floorplan this revised version was still extremely linear in nature, although there were now multiple levels with routes between those levels movement throughout was still in based on straight lines. This type of design for a deathmatch map leads to a reliance on long range engagements with little room for tactical play, no blind corners, no potential ambush points. Such a design can be very successful, one of my deathmatch favourite maps of all time, Quake 3 Arena’s Q3DM17 “The Longest Yard” is a great example of such a map.

Q3DM17 "The Longest Yard"

With the exception of the floating platform for the Quad Damage there is literally nowhere to hide, play is fast and the Rail Gun is mater; I have spent far too much time on this map. However the aesthetic decisions I had made regarding the look and feel of DM-Aerie didn’t lend themsleves to such a design.

Therefore it was important that I redesign the floorplan to focus on medium and close range engagements, with room for tactical play. DM-Aerie needed to be about ambushes and quick escapes, with maybe the occasional risky run through the open. To that end I made the decision to reorientate the Control Room and Airstrip so they were at ninety degree angles to the main facility. I suspected this wouldn’t be enough to solve the problems with the floorplan but it was something I could test quickly and doing so would help indicate further changes that could be made. Though I draw up floorplans manually on graph paper first these are usually a poor representation of how the final level looks, the initial ideas I have are usually, to but it bluntly, terrible. It’s only after physically moving through the environment that I get a good sense of the space itself and how it should connect together, and how movement should flow through it.

Improved Floorplan.

Several iterations later I had reach a point that I was substantially more comfortable with, a set of stairs had been added to join the basement level to the main level, elevators had been added to join the basement to the Control Room and Conference Room. I’d made several experiments with the stairs in the main level and had settled on a layout I was comfortable with.

At the back of my mind while working on the floorplan and general layout was the thought of how I would handle the mountain ontop of which the entire facility was to be built. I knew I’d have to face that problem eventually so eventually decided that it would be best to simply face the difficult task. This led to me laying out a terrain mesh and shaping it into a mountain around the existing floorplan. The flaw in this approach might be obvious.

Improved Floorplan with Mountain.

I let my artistic sensibilities overide the nagging sensation that the floorplan simply wasn’t working and started chipping away at the terrain mesh using the visibility tool to remove any areas where the mesh passed through the exterior walls into any of the rooms of the facility. This was a time consuming and frequently frustrating task and my focus on doing it was distracting me from the simply fact that the floorplan still wasn’t right. I spent too mhc time ensuring that the terrain mesh didn’t intersect with the BSP and it was only when I finally stopped that I realised I would really need to change the floorplan again and doing so would require a future modification of the terrain mesh.

I’d just wasted several weeks. At this point I should note I was not spending as much time on the level as I should have due to various reasons. I have a full time job, though really that’s just an excuse, I was putting it off as I knew I’d been focusing on the wrong thing but didn’t want to admit it.

Finally I accepted that I really would need to change the floorplan, and so I deleted the terrain mesh and set about pulling the level apart and rebuilding it.

In the next progress log, which I promise will be within the next week or so, I’ll focus on specific areas of the level and detail the changes that took place and the reasons for each. Though at this point I suspect I’m only writing these for me, but that’s ok.

The Perma-death interview.

A large part of what fascinates me about games is the subjective nature of the play experience itself, the notion that no two people will have the same experience even within a heavily scripted game. Recently Australian blogger Ben Abraham has been gaining attention for his decision to partake in an “iron man” play through of Far Cry 2, no reloading when his character dies the game is over. The manner in which this player imposed boundary altered his play experience is something I’m particularly interested in. Fortunately Ben was kind enough to answer some questions I had:

1. In your own words, what prompted your decisions to play Far Cry 2 in this fashion?

I think the initial desire was to impose a new way of playing Far Cry 2 that would lead to more of those fun moments where it feels like something is really hanging in the balance – where the outcome is hinged upon my performance. I thought that perhaps by imposing a limit of a single life, it would add more drama and weight to my actions and performance in the game and ultimately provide me with a more satisfying experience.

In that sense it was for entirely selfish, experiential reasons – I wanted to enjoy and continue enjoying Far Cry 2 having played it a lot already.

2. Having completed Far Cry 2 previously, can you describe some of the ways in which permadeath changed the way you approach the game? Have you noticed yourself doing things differently when you played it under normal conditions?

I guess the approach I took reflected my desire to have a fun experience, and so I took it very seriously and played it quite safe at first. When the initial sense of tension and danger wore off I experimented a bit more, deliberately courted danger a little bit. When playing normally however I probably strode right up to danger and punched it in the face, trusting luck and skill to get me by, but by prioritizing my survival I became much more reserved and cautious. Kinda boring, really.

Practical things that changed how I played included picking safe options, and utilizing all the points on my “How To Kill People More Effectively” strategy. Basically any time there was a dangerous option and a boring safe option, I took the safe one.

3. Do you think this type of play through is something you could imagine doing for a game you had never played before?

I don’t think so. Far Cry 2 is quite forgiving of your mistakes in the sense that if you ‘die’ with a rescue buddy around, you get a second chance. That’s one of the reasons I thought it would be feasible for an ordinary non-uber player like myself to complete Far Cry 2 without ever dying.

4. Is there something specific to the design of Far Cry 2 that makes it more suitable to this type of play through than other games? Do you think Far Cry 2 was a good choice for what you were intending to do, and if so why?

I think the buddy rescue system is one of the best ways of dealing with the problem of lost and wasted game-time that you get by forcing players to reload and try parts of a game again – and I do think that it is a loss. Jesper Juul talks about ‘time lost’ as a punishment in a talk from GDC earlier this year.

5. You have been describing the events that took place from a first person perspective (With a notable exception), and as a connected narrative, is there an explicit reason for this approach to the presentation of your experience?

Part of the attraction to the “one life” approach was that it made everything in the game more meaningful to the story – that is, never ever was an action ‘wasted’ because I died and had to start over. I had also hoped that it would add weight to every action, even insignificant ones, but as it turns out, it’s not quite that straightforward.

I wanted to write from a first person perspective because of a couple of reasons – firstly I was (and still am) increasingly bored with straight essay style writing about games. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate the good ones, and they’ll certainly always have their place, but more and more I’m finding myself attracted to the kind of games criticism that involves some application of creativity of expression. I’m a bit of a desperate fan of Kieron Gillen’s somewhat controversial New Games Journalism style of writing because it doesn’t just give permission to a writer to be creative, it demands it. I think a lot of people mis-read it back in the day and took it as meaning that was the only way you were meant to write about games, but it’s not meant to be so constrictive – it’s just another tool in the critic’s toolbox.

I also thought that the first person perspective would let me describe how I was feeling while playing it, and as the whole point of the exercise was to change the experience, keep it new and interesting, that seemed the logical choice.

6. The concept of adding additional rules to a game is not a new one: “Iron Man” runs, “Speed Runs”, various approaches have been adopted when playing Thief: The Dark Project: “Ghosting” etc. From your own perspective why do you feel your play through has garnered so much attention? How much of it do you feel is because of the way your have presented your experience? Do you feel people are more interested in the story of your play through, or the concept of what you are doing itself?

I think Kieron Gillen when he linked to the story in RPS’ Sunday Papers hit the nail on the head when he said he wished he’d thought of it. Like you say, self imposing additional rules and constraints isn’t new, but the idea of writing about them is still not done particularly often, and almost never with a view to how it changes the experience.

So in that respect I think it’s the concept that made people sit up and take notice. Whether they stuck around and enjoyed the story, I can’t be sure, but if it’s any indication comments have dropped off slightly in the later episodes while pageviews are still holding steady at somewhere around 100 a day.

When thinking about whether people are explicitly interested in the story, the question I’ve got to ask is “What really is the permanent death story?” Is it the experience that I, the player, have in the game? Or is it the story I construct with blog posts and pictures as it’s received by readers of the blog (and eventually, in the PDF novelization)? From my vantage point as both player and reader of the story, I know that there are a lot of things that happened in the game that get cut from the written story because they either make it too long and boring, compromising the quality of the narrative, or they’re nearly impossible to convey to a reader.

How does one write about the feeling of boating down a river under the cover of darkness as the moon slides behind trees? How do you convince a reader that you really were imagining the feel of the breeze in your face, and the feel of being immersed in this environment? Does the reader even care whether or not I was engaged at this particular point or not? How do I convince a reader that the idea of a soldier who I already shot, but who was still staggering around, was going to burn to death mildly horrified me? The fact that it horrified me in a videogame at all is still amazing to me because videogames suck at making me feel anything other than a desire to collect shit or blow stuff up.

I think it’s in trying to convey these sorts of experiences and personal reactions that I draw the most inspiration from NGJ. Not that Permanent Death is even an NGJ piece, it’s not quite personal enough and it often borders on the edge of being Fan Fiction, so I guess there’s that.

7. Permanence is an unusual term to use when discussing any video game, after all isn’t every decision you make permanent? You can return, change your actions and play out the consequences of that alerted decision but that doesn’t remove the fact that at some point you did make that initial decision?

When writing my thesis last year, I downloaded a single-life speed run of Halo 2 completed on Legendary difficulty. I watched it religiously – I watched all two and a half hours of it through more than once. I think what was so attractive and mesmerising about it was that it seemed to me like this is how Halo 2 was meant to be played.

In terms of making sense within the overarching narrative and fiction, this was how Master Chief would have done it. Any time you die, you mess up and you fail to live up to the chief’s standard, so you have to repeat a section until you get it right. Why do we not see the inherent weirdness in this? I think we have this ingrained, rote-learned blindness to the fundamental strangeness of videogame narratives. We do not experience the real world in anything remotely like the way we experience the events in a videogame.

Obviously, there are lots of good reasons for some of this – if it weren’t possible to fail then where would the challenge in the game come from? I think there are some great alternatives just waiting to be discovered, but so far all we do boils down to retconning the story on-the-fly. Ideally, every game would be perfectly set at that optimum level of difficulty that made it just hard enough to stay interesting, but not hard enough that you ever die and have to repeat any sections. I think most games err on the side of un-boring and go for just a little too hard. Which is fine, but it’s hardly a perfect system.

8. In reference to the previous question, would the decision to play Far Cry 2 again after this play through mitigate the decisions you made? Is that your intent, to never play Far Cry 2 again, and therefore make this your definitive play through?

I definitely intend to play Far Cry 2 again in the future, so no, the series of events in-game that became ‘Permanent Death’ are in no way meant to be the (or even just my) definitive Far Cry 2 story-experience. For starters, they are a fantastically more boring sequence of events than I have had in even other games of Far Cry 2, so it would be doing the game a disservice to leave it at that.

I don’t think playing again would diminish the permadeath story, either. There will always be the written record that roughly equates to that in-game series of events so I don’t think it would be impacted by playing again – or even by someone else attempting the same (or similar) thing.

9. How do you feel about the fact that there is no way to prove you have actually done anything you’ve described? Have you ever considered that there is no way in which the game can confirm that you in fact have not died? Is there such a means of recording this information that I have missed?

It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking recently about what I would do if I died right before the end of the game in a brain-meltingly stupid way, by shooting myself in the face with a grenade launcher, for example. If I was tantalisingly close to the end and messed up I know I would be tempted to lie about it and just keep playing as if nothing happened – after all how would anyone know? As far as the written Permadeath story goes, it’s whatever I say it is, right?

I guess there is no way of proving that I really did all the things I said I did, except to take me at my word. I don’t know if I’d want to there to be a way of proving what I said I did was what really happened, either. I wonder if it would limit the things I could do with the written story – as in, I couldn’t get away with as much ‘sexing up’ of the story as I have so far. I’ll freely admit that I’ve added in all sorts of stuff to make the written story more readable – like adding in some imaginary reasons for why I did the things I did in game.

It’s quite boring to just say “And then I shot some dude because it feels good to click my mouse and have the little man fall over” so I often invent a motivation for the character. I think it comes back to the question of ‘What is the Permanent Death story?’, because if you’re being truly honest, there aren’t any reasons for why we do a lot of what we do in games. Why do we shoot enemy soldiers? Because we’re told we should? Are we even explicitly told that most of the time? It’s certainly not because we are afraid of dying ourselves, as would be the case in a real combat situation. So is it fair game to pretend that’s why I was doing it in the game? I think for the sake of making an interesting written story, it is.

10. Do you think if there was an Achievement for completing the game without dying (Well until the very end), this is something you would have attempted for no other reason that obtaining that Achievement? What about if there was a scoreboard recording the total play time before death, would you be interested in trying to beat the “scores” of others?

I think if there were an achievement for it I wouldn’t need to do the Permanent Death ‘experiment’/story. I’m not very interested in achievements so I may have never bothered with it, but then I may have just to get some additional replay out of the game. Who’s to say?

Actually, I take that first bit back – I may still have done the permadeath play through because it’s important to note that anyone who finishes the game already does never die – because any “narrative branch” of the story that leads to the players death, gets pruned off when they die. Your loading the game eliminates the series of events between that save and your previous death from the Far Cry 2 history and your character goes on none-the-wiser. You may know and remember, but as far as the story is concerned, no one else does because it never happened. Now, the difference with permanent death is that there are no pruned branches.

I’m not really a competitive player, so scoreboards hold next to no interest for me. If you want to play Left 4 Dead with me though, I totally love cooperation and I daresay I work harder at a game when it’s for a cooperative goal than when it’s for a competitive reason.

11. Personally where do you fall on the ludology vs. narratology debate? How do you feel your personal opinions have influenced the decisions you have made during your play through?

I think the ludology/narratology debate is worn out and as Ian Bogost says in his DiGRA keynote, even the question of whether it’s one or the other presupposes a formalist approach to the ontology of games. Realistically, my opinions on whether games are play versus narrative only really matters when thinking about games as stories or games as playgrounds and any other time of the day I’m quite happy to let games be whatever they want to be.

Bogost characterises the Ludology/Naratology debate as “a formalist rather than functionalist approach to the study of games” and by arguing over what games are we end up ignoring what games mean already.

12. A number of other people joined you in your permadeath play through at the start, I believe none of them are still playing having already died. Do you think there is anything about the way you have approached your play through that has helped you to stay alive?

I think it’s more sheer bloody-mindedness that’s kept me going. Michel McBride got bored and quit, and if you’re an experienced player it’s not that hard to stay alive on normal. A reader who started up his own blog was playing along too, but on the hardest difficulty and he didn’t last very long. For me, it’s turned into an endurance test, rather than a skill test.

In defense of the author.

Ask somebody about something they did or something that happened to them recently, you might have encourage them to open up but try it anyway. I can wait…

… Let’s assume for the moment that you did that, what happened? You were told a story. Whether the teller realised it or not, they almost certainly explained their events using dramatic tools and structure. There were characters, there was an ordered sequence of events; there was likely a beginning leading to a middle an through to an end.

Now ask somebody about something they did or something that happened to them in a game they played recently. The resulting story will be very different in terms of content, but the form in which they explained those events will be same. They dramatised it, they provided it with a structure and logical order that it didn’t originally contain.

People having be creating and retelling stories about events in their lives since the birth of communication. Encouraging players to do the same with the events that happen to them in a game is natural; in fact I’d say it’s impossible to prevent them from doing so. Self-authorship, or more accurately the post structuring of events into a dramatic sequence, is a natural human trait and of course it should be encouraged.

But what about the meaning of these stories? What is the emotional and intellectual potential of this self-authorship? How much can players learn about themselves and the world through games that focus largely on self-authorship? Self-authorship relies on players contextualizing events based on their own experience and bias, events are analysed and structured through the lens of the individual experiencing them, they are stories formed through self-reflection. Self-reflection is powerful, but difficult to master and gaining insight from it can be a laborious task that, though, ultimately rewarding may come too late in life to put that insight to use. Insight without sustained self-reflection requires us to be challenged, it requires a catalyst to push that self-reflection into new and previously unexamined directions. It needs events to be examined through the lens of another, somebody with a different viewpoint from us, different values, experience and a different bias. Insight of this kind can change the way we think about the world, by encouraging us to see it through the eyes of somebody of a different gender, or race, or sociopolitical philosophy. Insight of this kind requires an author.

Really? What about The Sims, Michael Abbott (The Brainy Gamer) recently proved that The Sims has the potentially to offer powerful insight into his own psychology and affect him in unexpected ways. The Sims doesn’t have an author so clearly I’m talking nonsense…

… Though it’s true that the story Michael described had no prescriptive author beyond himself the game itself has dozens of authors. The fact that Michael was able to be affected by the game was because the context was instantly understandable and relevant. The tasks he was performing and the decisions he was making had a cultural significance. The Sims presents a view of life that is familiar not simply from our observed reality but also from decades of suburban Americana in other media. Western culture is rich with that particular strata of American culture. From The Wonder Years, to Desperate Housewives, suburban American is a social and cultural construct that many of us understand immediately even if we’ve never been directly exposed to it. The Simsdidn’t need an explicit author it has already had hundreds of them.

The range and type of self-authored stories that emerge from a game like The Sims is something not seen in a game like Spore which provides a lot of the same tools for self-expression and agency. I think the reason for that is that alien civilization as depicted in Sporedoesn’t have the cultural cachet of suburban American. There is not the wealth of pre-extant authored content to serve as contextualization for our actions. With no author for the work itself, and few examples in other media Sporeis a play ground devoid of relevance or association to our own lives. We can only relate to our creations in the most basic terms and with no external lens through which to view them, we are forced to find meaning once more from self-reflection. Powerful yes, but difficult and not always pleasant.

As powerful a tool The Sims is for self-authorship and self-discovery it could only exist in a culture overflowing with the idealised view of suburban American that exists throughout other media. The Sims is a game that could not exist without the authored work of dozens of writers, producers and directors over the last several decades. Left 4 Dead’s power comes from the filmic history of Zombie movies, Grand Theft Auto IV’s from shows like The Wire, or The Sopranos.

Is this the best games can do? Relying on the work of other authors to define the context and meaning of available actions?

The Sims is rich with meaning but it is inherently limited in scope, it has a lot to say about family, and human relationships (Which is incredible if you stop and think about it), but little to say about the meaning of life, or the nature of good and evil. It can deal very well with the topics we engage with everyday of our lives but it’s ability to push beyond that to questions that are outside the immediate scope of the family and the neighbourhood is limited. In order to explore these questions games need to start relying on different topics, potentially ones that don’t have the preexisting cultural associations that The Sims is able to draw upon.

Therefore games need an author, to provide the different lens through which we can examine our own actions and decisions. Games need the author to provide the structure against which we can push, the authority we can rally against, the challenges we can overcome. Games need the author or they are doomed to rely on the authorship of those who have gone before, and therefore limited to only mining the veins already tapped.

Games need authors. The only thing left to discuss is how visible those authors should be and that’s a topic that will keep us going for the next few years at least.

Multi-level decision making.

At any moment during a game players are liable to be thinking about events in multiple timeframes at once. Performing tasks that are over in seconds, in order to achieve goals that are over in minutes as a means of completing missions that may take hours.

The lowest level of actions occur on the Immediate layer, these are the second to second decisions made in the heat of combat, during a conversation, or while climbing a wall. When and where to shoot, which dialogue line to select, which handhold to reach for. These events are the Encounters, over in seconds and repeated dozens of times during the course of the game. The narrative strength of actions in this layer is best served through directly embedded content. Animation cycles, dialogue lines, and the options available to the player all serves as vectors for narrative meaning.

Above this there is the Tactical layer, the longer term minute to minute decisions made in the execution of plans. Which particular enemies to engage, which NPCs to talk to, which wall to scale. These are the Objectives, and can be defined either explicitly by the game, or implicitly by the players themselves. Variation in these Objectives and the levels in which they take place can be used to provide narrative.

Operating above both of these there is often, but not always,  a Strategic layer, actions on this layer occur over a much longer term, possibly hours. They include, which missions to accept, which character upgrades to select, which tools to equip. They can be either explicitly defined as Quests chains, or often they are not defined at all the goal of the Strategic layer simply being to reach the end of the game. This layer is best used to define the narrative context for actions that occur on the lower layers.

• The Immediate layer is Reactive.
• The Strategic layer is Proactive.
• The Tactical layer is both.

Though some traits can be associated with each layer,  the boundaries between them are fairly permeable. The goals of the Immediate and Tactical layer are often elements of those defined on the Strategic layer. Strategic goals lead to the creation of multiple Tactical goals, and multiple Immediate goals will be needed to fulfil a specific Tactical goal.

If the Strategic goal is to get to a specific location, it might require engaging in combat with several groups of enemies. This leads to the creation of Tactical goals concerned with how to deal with each enemy group and in what order. These Tactical goals in turn lead to the creation of Immediate goals, when to shoot, where to move. Successful completion of the Strategic goal requires successful completion of the Tactical and Immediate goals that stem from it.

In this way it can be seen that actions on the Strategic layer directly influence those on the lower layers.

Plans trickle down from higher layers to lower ones. Immediate actions are defined, their scope is limited by decisions made on the Tactical layer. Where you are and which tools you have at your disposal are based on decisions made at the Tactical layer, which in turn are influenced by decisions made on the Strategic layer. If a particular character upgrade has not been obtained on it will not be available.

This flow of influence does not only occur in one directions. Actions and their consequences trickle upwards. Events that occur in the Immediate layer change the Tactical status of the world, new routes are located, items are found. Events on the Tactical layer in turn affect the options available in the Strategic layer. Meaningful actions are ones that send ripples out beyond the layer in which they occur and affect decisions made on all layers: actions on the Immediate layer that leads to consequences on the Tactical and Strategic layers.

In ludic terms each layer has some degree of repetition, as there are only so many valid actions that can be performed at any given time. The repetition is mitigated most on the Strategic layer because the goals are long term, any repetition that does exist occurs over the course of several hours making it difficult to ascertain any patterns in the type of actions being performed.

On the Immediate layer the sense of repetition can be the strongest, as often the core mechanics of a game only allow for a few options. However at this layer the direct connection between action and outcome serves to lesson the impact of the repetition, as the consequences of actions on this layer are often the most directly stimulating, the blood spurts of a successful headshot, the ding of a loot pickup, the fluid animation of a character clambering over a ledge. Each one a little endorphin kick that keeps us engaged; if anybody is in doubt I point you to the immediate feedback presented in a game like Diablo.

The biggest problem with repetition comes on the Tactical layer. Action games suffer the most on this layer. Consider Far Cry 2, the actual combat mechanics and the options available to players in combat can be quite engaging (The Immediate layer is well designed). The ability to select which missions to attempt and in which order lessens the restrictive sense of repetition on the Strategic layer. However regardless of which mission the player selects and for whom, the short term goals required to complete each are usually very similar, if not identical: go here kill, these people\find this item, get back to here. The execution of these individual Tactical goals on the Immediate layer might be entertaining but that does little to cover up the fact that players are basically doing exactly the same thing during each mission. This is not helped by a lack of narrative feedback regarding the overarching consequences of actions. Assassinating a Police chief might be contextualised differently to the assassination of a Warlord but the narrative feedback from each event is not differentiated enough to mask the underlying repetition.

Because Tactical goals can take minutes to an hour to complete they occur over too short a timeframe for their patterns to be lost in the noise of all the other decisions, yet at too long a timeframe for that endorphin kick to keep players engaged. It’s here that a strong narrative context can keep players engaged in performing what are mechanic very similar actions.

Halo: Combat Evolved is another prime example of a game that suffers on the Immediate layer. Those “thirty seconds of fun”are, at least for me, some of the most pleasurable in gaming, but there can be no denying that on the Tactical layer the game is little more than a sequence of goals of the form: “Kill these hostiles.”

With their focus on Immediate and Tactical actions, action games are geared to a shorter play session, that serves to mitigate their repetitive nature. Plans are often completed within seconds or minutes, so players are given more points at which they are “free” to quit because they have no plans remaining to complete. Under these circumstances it’s little surprise that action game stories are fairly perfunctory, serving only to cover up the core mechanical repetition and provide a loose context for who, where and why.

In comparison a high level strategy game (An accurate genre name if ever there was one) like Civilization IV  relies almost entirely on actions playing out on the Tactical and Strategic layers. This leads to a long term investment as players keep playing in order to see the consequences of actions, the beloved\cursed “one more turn” syndrome. Goals at these layers are well served by a more “hands off” approach to narrative, as players will be less likely to baulk at the lack of direct feedback on the Immediate layer, when they have played a greater part in the selection of the Tactical goals that led to those Immediate actions.