Sleeper Hit review digest October 12-29
I’ve been neglecting posting here, because school work is ridiculous and I’m busy writing things non-casually for News Games and Sleeper Hit. I’ve been working at Sleeper Hit for a little under a month now, and I’m finally getting into a groove for product reviewing. I’m still trying to figure out how to mix in personal touches without being too NGJ and how to insert meaningful game studies lessons without coming off as overbearing or tangential. Receiving free games is weird. We’re a pretty small site, but basically all it takes is one or two polite emails to get anything we want sent over. Nobody emails us to ask how the review is going if it’s taking more than a week, and nobody posts angry, anonymous comments if we write a slam piece. I guess, because we don’t have advertising (and a payroll), things are just idyllic. Also, I get a press pass to PAX East, so that’s awesome.
ODST – This is where I got myself a little too into the NGJ mess, with 800 words about what the first Halo and its pistol meant to me.
Trine – One of the best indie games I’ve played on Steam yet. Great contrast between the mage and thief characters, lame level design and reliance on “physics.”
Critter Crunch – This is where I tried to insert a lecture about puzzle games and the power of context… and failed. It feels tacked on; better luck next time. Good game!
Oh and, “Editing. Editing never changes.” Apparently having an MFA in creative writing doesn’t automatically imbue one with the ability to construct complete sentences.
LARP field study: Mafia
For my LARP field study I played a night full of Mafia with Paul, Pauline, and Jenifer from class (along with a number of their friends). Doug Wilson of IT Copenhagen calls Mafia “the most political game ever conceived.” The game is an ideal LARP for non-traditional roleplayers, because there are no combat rules to remember or stats to track. Typically the game is played with between 10 and 20 people, seated in a circle. We had ten for our session, a number which lends itself to a more intimate and competitive experience.
One player takes the role of the narrator (game master) who randomly doles out roles at the beginning of each play experience, tracks the state of the game, and provides a narrative context for every game action. There are two cycles in the game: night and day. The game begins at night, with all heads bowed. Six players were assigned the role of basic townsperson; they have no special abilities or duties. Two players constitute the Mafia, and each night they raise their heads to select one person to kill. One player is the detective, and each night they can point to one person, asking the narrator if that player is in the Mafia. Finally, one player is the doctor, able to select one person per night for protection. Nobody knows what role the other players bear.
During the day stage, the results of the Mafia’s activities are reported. If the marked player was not protected by the doctor, they die. If the detective accurately discerned a Mafia member, she may want to declare the fact. But if she reveals her identity, she becomes an easy target for the Mafia if the doctor is unable or unwilling to protect her. Then the townspeople begin accusing each other of being in the Mafia, stating their (usually tenuous) reasons for believing so. Players can choose not to condemn anyone, but usually the Mafia players will attempt to sway the townspeople toward killing each other (which leads to counter-accusations, etc.). An accused player gives a defense speech, then the players vote on which person to lynch.
When the Mafia murder somebody, the narrator does not reveal what role the dead player bore; however, when the townspeople lynch a player they are told what role the dying player held. The game ends when either all townspeople or all Mafia members are killed.
It took awhile for us to get the game started. During the first round, I forgot which role I had been given and ruined everything. Everybody forgave me when the narrator forgot what was going on during the second round and spoiled that one. The third attempt was a success, especially for me. Because I knew what roles everybody had been assigned during the first two unsuccessful attempts, I used fuzzy math to try to discern which players were the most likely to be Mafia. Basically I went on the false mathematical assumption that the chance of three successive “heads” in a game of coin-flip is 1/8 instead of 1/2 (I still want a look at the theorem that establishes that bit of nonsense).
As it turned out, my fuzzy math worked! I successfully picked the two Mafia even though I was only playing a lowly citizen. The first time I nominated one of the suspect players, nobody believed me and didn’t vote for him to die. So during the next round, I falsely stated that I was the detective and that I knew the second suspect was mafioso. The healer was dead at this point, so I knew I would be killed after the round was over. I gave an impassioned speech about self-sacrifice, everybody bought it, and we lynched the suspect player. I was right about the pick, and I was also right that the remaining Mafia player would off me that night. But the real detective was still alive, and he found out who the second murderer was in time to win the round for the townspeople.
The next round, I was killed straightaway. I assume it was because I had such good hunches during the first game. This is similar to the experiment of iterated prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, where bias from previous plays affects how the players within the dilemma choose in subsequent rounds. I watched the players to figure out if any of them had tells, and I discovered that one of the players giggled whenever he was in the Mafia. During the third game, I heard the distinctive giggle on the first night and outed him to everyone during the day. After I explained my reasoning, a few players believed me and we successfully lynched him. Then I got killed the next round. Playing Mafia too well usually means you’re going to get axed.
By the fifth and final match, I’d consumed a bit too much alcohol for my own good. This resulted in me persuading the townspeople to murder two innocents in a row. I’m glad we stopped after that round. So I’ve played Mafia twice now, and I’ve never actually gotten to be in the Mafia. As a result of this, I can’t speak for how to strategize a defense while playing one of them. The rounds that I was the healer and the detective were the rounds where I died the first day, so I also don’t know how to play as those roles. Mostly I’m good at playing a standard townsperson, and I’ve got a knack for picking at least one of the Mafia off before getting slaughtered the following night (healers tend to be very stupid; they never protect me, their star player).
Is there a difference in embodiment while playing something like Mafia over a videogame? I don’t believe so. Identification with avatars in first- and third-person camera views has been well-documented. There’s a palpable, giddy energy to live action play, but for calculating players such as myself the difference seems negligible. This is probably because of the principle Gee calls the “psychosocial moratorium,” or what Huizinga calls “the magic circle”; this is a protection from real-life consequences and harm that some believe is intrinsic to play (perhaps the only exception would be in what Caillois identifies as Ilinx, or “vertigo,” play… there is a real danger present with things like roller coasters and skydiving).
I have no problem sacrificing myself for the team in Mafia, because I know I’m not dying in real life. The act of taking on a role is always a necessary step away from absolute embodiment and identification. I shun anonymity in online play, so I’m always just playing an accentuated fraction of my real self when I play any game. This appears to hold true in live play: I was sarcastic, calm, and reasonable (except when I became inebriated… which can affect performance in online games as well).
As for the strategic difference between NPCs and real human players, I hold, along with Jason Rohrer, that there isn’t much of one. I didn’t know any of my fellow Mafia players exceedingly well, so I tested and prodded them much as I would an alien computer intelligence. As a material and physical determinist, I think people behave with predictable regularity (except in panic situations). I read the one player’s giggle-tell much as I would a sound cue in a videogame. If I’d been playing with family or close friends, this might have been different–but only because I would know them and their personal rulesets all the better. They could act to upset my predictions, but I would probably be able to counter-predict that if I were playing carefully enough.
One notable exception to this rule was that we had a player named Akido who spoke little English. His defense was always, “Why do you think I’m in the Mafia? I am innocent!” It was impossible to read him, because he wasn’t fluent enough to craft different responses based on his current role and situation. I correctly identified him by luck during the first round, but every time after that (if he were mafioso) nobody was able to nail him. We avoided accusing him, perhaps out of fear that we would be discriminating against him. I wonder how this could be simulated in an NPC?
Jenifer made two videos of the experience, but I can’t speak to their quality because I don’t want to download them:
End of Life IF
End of Life is an interactive fiction about family life and decision-making. It started as an idea in Ian Bogost’s newsgame project studio. One of the branches of newsgames we have identified for our book is the documentary game. Typically these have a medium-length (20 minutes to two hours) playthrough time and are built as a mod for a 3D engine. There are three major types: spatial, procedural, and personal. Personal documentary games mix spatial and system-based models in order to tell share a story from a unique, subjective point-of-view. End of Life is a text-based adaptation of the documentary game form, addressing the real-world issue of “end of life counseling” or the decision whether to pull life support from a dying loved one.
The high concept pitch for EoL would sound something like, “It’s Ruben & Lullaby meets The Sound and The Fury.” Point-of-view switching is a powerful literary device, but in static texts this typically implies a forced perspective. In EoL, the player can switch back and forth between five family members at any moment and in any order. If they don’t like a character, they can ignore her for the course of the playthrough. The invalid family patriarch is our Benjy Compson (the mentally handicapped member of Faulkner’s fictional family), providing commentary that the active family members do not have access to. Some characters always do the same things in every playthrough; most have branching choices based on their moods at certain points in the day. When there is no choice in action, mood will instead dictate how the character mentally reacts to her situation.
Ruben & Lullaby provides the inspiration for the interaction model: the player controls a wisp that can nudge the emotions of one family member per hour. I see this as a direct contradiction of the interaction model of The Sims, where players are cued to a desire or feeling in the Sim that they can rectify or not by dictating action. Players of R&L and Facade are often frustrated when their commands don’t lead to tangible results in game, and I wanted to capture a similar frustration in EoL. Each family member begins the playthrough in a randomized mood. Each is variably susceptible to particular mood swings, leading to healthy dose of guesswork and replay value. The player can also choose to abstain from influencing the characters, letting the drama play out based on the beginning values.
At the end of the game, the family convenes to decide the fate of the patriarch; some will vote to keep him alive if they are in a good mood, some if they are in a bad mood. This decision takes place offscreen, much as in the violent sections of Greek tragedy (mostly because I wasn’t good enough to code it dramatically). The player has gleaned parts of their personalities in the playthrough, but he doesn’t know everything about each family member. Most importantly, their ethics aren’t considered. The game argues that people make decisions based on who they are and the mood they are in. Ethics certainly make up who we are, but they tend to be remarkably malleable under duress. Decisions are also relational; some people, under some circumstances, will take radical action to counteract what they see as the controlling influence of others.
In discussing digital media, we often fall back on an essentialist logic that says that an artifact is aesthetically legitimate if it maximizes the affordances of the medium; however, there is a slightly older aesthetic criterion, coming from Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which states that aesthetic legitimacy arises not from essentialist qualities but from the reflection of the work’s means of production–it has to reify the cultural milieu of a time and place, adopting a suitable form for conveying it. End of Life draws from the latter school of thought, directly confronting a relevant public issue and encapsulating how one specific family deals with it.
The suggestion that a digital artifact should provide always immersion, embodiment, and agency is perverse. It only makes sense if one views digital media as escapism, created to fully engage the user in the place of the real world around them. A brute fact of human life is that we don’t have control over much of our lives or the lives of others. Aarseth argues that games become more “gamelike” if they are configurative, that the player should be able to see the meaningful influence her actions have on a virtual world. I would argue that agency and embodiment mean more in configurative work when they are directly contradicted in non-configurative work. By taking these essential qualities away sometimes, we make them more cherished. Such qualities should be selected from to suit the work, not the other way around. Defaulting to what is important to us robs it of importance. This is an educational opportunity, an antidote to the intoxicating sense of power that most digital artifacts provide. Some things simply aren’t configurative in the real world; families are a good example.
A week before finishing this project, I finally found published theoretical grounding for my position. In their early work on augmented reality games, Jay Bolter and Blair MacIntyre argue that point-of-view switching provides adequate embodiment in lieu of actual agency in a digital environment.2 I actually don’t find their particular example of this principle compelling; basically they simplified Twelve Angry Jurors to Three Jurors, strapped a backpack computer and a virtual reality visor to a player, and then allowed the player to switch between inhabiting the mindset of one of the three characters as a static drama played out. I think EoL takes point-of-view switching one step further and provides a better proof-of-concept for their argument.
I consider End of Life no small success. My writing is admittedly the weakest element; mentally I finished the piece the moment I finished coding the framework girding the story. This project combines everything I’ve learned how to do in Flash thus far (excepting animation), and it constitutes the first true state machine I’ve ever made completely by myself in the platform. Even though the writing is somewhat trite, pulling from every cliche of everyday family life I’m familiar with, it becomes true in that I pulled it from one specific, real-world family (my own).
There is some room for future development here, both graphically and procedurally. Right now there are two variations for every character in every round based on there mood. Given the way the structure is set up, I could add mood variations to the branching story sections or add a third mood variation (neutral) given enough time and literary inspiration. I would also love to try to remake this project as a true documentary game, in a 3D engine, with unique art assets and dialogue. The current iteration of this project represents the utmost level of my design and programming abilities given the time constraints and the specifications of the assignment.
I should note that this situation didn’t actually happen to my family, and the personalities have been a bit blown own to be more compelling. My grandfather died five years ago from Alzheimer’s disease, asleep in his bed, in the room that I grew up in. This isn’t meant to be a universal story, though it can be generalized to the extent that families are, after all, families; it is a directed experience featuring characters with largely determinate personalities. This is the way I wanted it, and I hope the player enjoys what I crafted for them. A big thank you goes out to Graham Jans for teaching me how to randomize variables in Flash. I’m also indebted to my family for providing me with the strong personalities embedded in the family members of this fiction. Thank you to my father, who used to work as an intensive care nurse, for describing the hour-by-hour care of a comatose patient.
———————-
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16-45.
MacIntrye, Blair and Jay Bolter. “Single-narrative, multiple point-of-view dramatic experiences in augmented reality” in Virtual Reality 7 (London: Springer-Verlag, 2003), 10-16.
Hey I’m a Journo Now
So I’ve been a bit absent from this blog lately, pouring most of my time into schoolwork. I just finished my thesis proposal, which I’m split about posting here because 1) it’s ridiculously long and 2) I don’t want to share the core concept until I’ve written a lot about it. Is that selfish or stupid? Anyhow, the main goal is to expand Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric to incorporate subversive readings by players and understandings of game space that go beyond simply acknowledging them as the places where mechanics and players meet. The ancillary goal, from a design perspective, is to flesh out that vague middle letter in the MDA formula.
For News Games we’ve mostly been prepping the book for review at a couple of university presses, and we’ve got a number of fresh, new writers who’ve tackled a bunch of the more recent games we’ve come across. So I haven’t written much there, except for a piece about the Dante’s Inferno marketing campaign that got a nice amount of buzz for a day or so.
The big news is that I recently acquired an associate editor position at Sleeper Hit, which is an ideal foray into enthusiast press for me for a number of reasons. First, I spend a lot of time and money on new games, but I usually don’t have any school-related reason to write about them. If I don’t write about a game right away, my memory of the play experience slowly fades into vague talking points for arguments on Twitter. Being an editor at Sleeper Hit means I’ll get first pick on review copies of games, which will save me a lot of money and give me a reason to write about almost everything I play (something I used to do on this blog). Second, I’ve never played a game that I hadn’t read anything about beforehand. Doing product reviews means I’ll need to write about games before I get a chance to read what other reviewers have thought about them–an exciting and scary opportunity. Third, the website is relatively new (having broken off from GameTopius, I believe), so I’ll have a chance to influence its direction and expertise.
Finally, it’s a long-awaited chance to work with my friend Tom Cross of GameSetWatch fame. Tom was my first game blogging compatriot, introducing me to Jon Mills, who introduced me to the Brainysphere bloggers. Tom is a fairly strict narratologist, and I’m a fairly strict ludologist. We’ll be able to learn a lot from each other by editing each others’ work, clashing in the “Versus” column and podcasts, and generally having a good time reviewing games. So please stop by the site in the next few weeks to see my first honest efforts at pure consumer reviewing, and thanks again for being such good friends and readers.
Benchmarking Fiction & Interactive Drama
“Speaking in Djinni” spoke directly to my childhood self: I remember quite clearly, after seeing Disney’s Aladdin, pondering for hours how I would perfectly phrase my three wishes so as to maximize their potential and avoid fatal misunderstanding (I was terrified of the tale of Midas). Harrell relates the difference between human language, which vaguely describes phenomena in highly subjective ways, and the imperative languages of djinni and computers, which literally have the power to create but only produces satisfactory results when worded carefully and in the proper grammar. The argument that follows shows how the peculiarities and affordances of programming languages inform the software and development kits that are built upon them, which in turn constrain and guide the actions allowable within the artifacts constructed with those digital tools. This work can be seen as a direct antecedent of the work of Bogost and Montfort on creating the Platform Studies series for MIT Press.
“Benchmark Fictions” seems to be a relatively early work in comparative media studies; I say this because of its matching of a strong conceptual frame with a disappointing proof-of-concept executed in tedious early digital standbys such as wikis and chatbots. Benchmarking fiction takes its name from benchmarking software, which tests the performance of the computer hardware that runs it through a series of procedural pings. The prime directive is to separate the “content” of a literary work from its original printed or digital “form” in order to learn more about both through a series of procedural translations or adaptations. A major problem here seems to be that the authors quickly write off the suggestion that form and content really can’t be separated, just before they mangle a fairly revelatory short story by attempting a number of crude digital “adaptations” that have little or nothing to do with what or how the story means. They also note how the interaction models of games require novel forms of adaptation, but the best they can muster is a chatterbot that responds to pre-scripted questions with coy hints as to who is The Lady and who is The Tiger.
Mateas and Stern finally answer that final question for the authors of “Benchmark Fictions,” by recognizing the possible antagonism between interactivity and narrative before finding an out in Laurel’s work in interactive drama. Drama is an ideal model because it already involves actively constructing a “story” arc through acting. It also operates on a model of causally connected actions with a tight rising in tension. Mateas takes the Aristotelian hierarchy of drama and substitutes “character” for “user/player,” showing that in an interactive drama that player is the inferred formal cause of all meaning except the action/plot which undergirds the experience. We can see this at work in their Facade, a game that will always progress from introduction, to initial signs of unrest, to drinks, to open conflict, and finally to either a happy resolution or the player’s expulsion from the apartment. Yet within each of these major stages, procedural variation and player choice lead to a number of possible conversations and revelations.
Years before “Benchmark Fictions” had been written, two satisfactory procedural translations of complex source texts had already been undertaken. Chris Crawford left his job at Atari to create Balance of Power for the Apple II. The game allows the player to take on the role of lead negotiator either for the United States or the U.S.S.R.; the goal is to avert elevating tensions leading toward mutually-assured destruction. In fact, this game was Crawford’s interpretation of the memoirs of Henry Kissinger; while working under Nixon, Kissinger speculated that the U.S.S.R. would run out of fiscal security sometime during the 1980’s–the way to “win” the cold war was to survive until that occurred. Nixon and Kissinger embarked on a number of compromises with Soviet authorities that both conservatives and liberals in the U.S. disparaged. Balance of Power communicates this tangible sense of danger and walking-the-tightrope.
Will Wright and his team at Maxis, on the other hand, created one of the first popular citybuilding simulations called SimCity. This game allows players to build basic public utilities such as transportation and power, specify three city zoning types (Residential, Commercial, and Industrial), and maintain growth and the public interest through taxation rates and law enforcement. Wright came up with the idea for the game after studying Forrester’s Urban Dynamics, a book about urban growth and decay cycles containing both reflective analysis and prescriptive suggestions for managing public welfare, sprawl, and re-gentrification. Most infamously, Forrester argued that social spending on underprivileged minorities in the inner city would decrease a city’s worth instead of increasing it; on the other hand, he also had the foresight to predict that the construction of the Interstate system would lead to the neglect of areas in between major highway hubs. Wright attempted to model as much of these principles and arguments in SimCity as he could, including the famous example of encoding a correlation between rising tax rates and social unrest.
Crawford worked alone, rigorously working and reworking his procedures and datasets until he could fit all the information and complexity he desired into the constrained memory that he had available. The programming language and platform had a massive influence on the finished product, so much so that Crawford spent nearly twenty years crafting his own “Storyworld” development kit and scripting language in order to present Balance of Power again. SimCity, on the other hand, has gone through a number of translations and versioning for every new operating system that emerges. The countless number of spin-offs to the series, some more popular than the original thread itself, provides us with an ideal model for how benchmarking fiction should work. These games also show us how the expression of the same idea changes based on the imperative languages and development kits used to create each new iteration.
1) Do you think it’s possible to separate form from content? Or do you think a better experiment toward finding the essence of digital media art would be to construct novel works such as Facade?
2) How convinced are you by the solution of substituting a dramatic arc for narrative? Are Mateas and Laurel overly relying on old Greek paradigms of meaning creation in their insistence of an arc-like structure with tension, climax, and denouement?
3) Benchmarking experiment, following my work in Ian’s project studio: in groups, pitch two different kinds of games (from editorial, documentary, infographic, or puzzle) dealing with the same public issue (traffic, healthcare, the war in Iraq, etc.).
Oh, cool
Look what I came across while ego-surfing myself, from Ian’s CV:
Books:
Bogost, Ian, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. Newsgames: Doing Journalism with Videogames.
Under review. Expected publication 2010.
Book Chapters:
Bogost, Ian, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. “Newsgames.” In News Online: Transformation and
Continuity, edited by Graham Meikle and Guy Redden. London: Palgrave, forthcoming.
News & Games Digest, 8/19-9/10
So I’ve decided to stop double-posting my News Games articles here and on that site, because I realized it was probably annoying for my readers. But I also don’t have the time to write clever sidenotes for each one, because I’m writing like four research papers right now. In any case, this is still just as much an archive as it is a blog, so here’s what you missed if you don’t follow the News Games blog.
Making Stimulus Readable & Playable is about an interactive map of California that helps you track where stimulus money has gone, breaking it down by county and category of each project funded. Made by one of the alumni of our project studio, it attempts the ideal of directed activity through an infographic. Basically he added a quiz to the thing, and the quiz requires you to teach yourself how to use each feature on the map. Pretty cool stuff.
Red Faction Guerrilla: Proceduralizing Terror? takes apart a Kotaku interview with some dude from Volition wherein he claims the game has nothing to do with the Iraq War. Rather, they looked to the struggle of Afghanistan against the Soviet Union for inspiration. Really? Of course it’s about Iraq. In attempting to create a blank slate of a space, they wrote all their own ideas about the conflict onto it. They also allow players to do the same. So you get people crashing airplanes into buildings.
Batman and the Rhetoric of Incarceration is my take on being Batman and the evils of Arkham, including a healthy portion of what it means to practice non-lethal apprehension of criminals and the thin line you walk when you depict the mentally infirm. I don’t really know if Arkham Asylum is an evocative space; it’s pretty drab for the most part. But I suppose you can treat it like it’s the primary antagonist, because it’ll kill you more than any stupid mutated thug with a peashooter will.
Game Bloggers Search Engine I created this nifty thing with Google Custom Search (beta). One of the things I hated about blogging was that I always had to sift through a million archives and ask people stupid questions on Twitter, all because Google was clogged by press releases whenever you searched for a game. This thing only searches independent, non-commercial blogs that avoid printing news and previews. Also, I created tabs that let you parse the search for gameplay, narrative, social issues, etc.
I got in a fight with a Joystiq editor a few days ago, by the way, because I maligned the writing of one of his fellow snarky aggregators. Basically, this dude wrote a “column” on Batman that had a neat three-part structure: 1) you play a role when you play videogames 2) this game’s role is a flying ninja 3) this ninja doesn’t kill people. This wouldn’t be something to comment on if the article didn’t begin with a warning that it was “pedantic” and “verbose,” or if the commenters on the site and a number of other Joystiq editors hadn’t told the guy that he was the best critic on the Internet, a genius, and various other honorifics he didn’t deserve. As long as these morons continue to clog my Google queries and ignore actual game critics, I’m going to make fun of them on my Twitter feed. And I’m going to be mean if they try to talk to me.
Narrative Grammars & Level Design as Narrative
Short Essay: Analyze and compare the narrative grammar of Propp, Greimas, and Aarseth.
From earlier studies in film history and comparative literature, I’ve been familiar with Vladimir Propp’s narrative grammar for quite some time. Propp broke down a selection of Russian folk tales into 31 functions and 7 generic characters, elaborating possible combinations and causal sequences. That Propp was able to create his typology was no surprise to me, because I had already learned about oral mnemonic techniques used in commedia dell’arte and the codification of Platonic dialogue and Homeric epic. Once you understand that oral storytellers memorize a set amount of objects, characters, and events along with a structure for connecting them and then improvising, the revelation that folk stories carried down from an oral tradition follow such a grammar is almost trivial. My major problem with this grammar is that it ignores everything that’s wonderful about folklore—the flourishes and improvisations. In the face of Mark Turner’s ability to create compelling prose building upon otherwise stale research in cognition and early childhood development, Propp’s grammar strikes a dull chord. I am reminded of Janet Murray’s ability to find personal meaning in the rote act of manipulating the falling bricks of Tetris. Perhaps Propp too felt this lacking, reflected in his later decision to study literature instead of linguistics (Wikipedia).
Greimas attempts to bridge the gap between deep linguistic structure and surface narrative structure, explaining “the fact that a narrative enonce is represented at the linguistic level by a whole paragraph” (797). Much of his work goes into breaking down subjects, object, and verbs (which he renames “functions”) into the form of signs. Greimas expands narrative grammar into story grammar when he dichotomizes narrative and non-narrative enonces. A non-narrative enonce builds from a stative verb, or one that addresses being and qualification (800). Toward the end, Greimas conceives of how to represent the literary device of asyndeton (he merely labels it “ellipsis”) as symbolic logic in the form of a series of conditional statements—or a narrative syntagm (804). Greimas understands that a compelling narrative grammar must explain the structural affordances that allow for story grammars and literary devices.
Propp was a Russian formalist, meaning he identified with the goal of separating the artist from the text and then showing how formal elements such as syntax and structure were inherent in how a text means. Greimas, on the other hand, was closely associated with structuralists such as Levi-Strauss. Structuralism attempts to break down a text into signs and the structures by which they’re related. These structures are held as “real,” whereas the signs they order merely refer to the signified objects and events that exist outside the literary artifact. From the introduction to his Cybertext, Espen Aarseth appears to adhere to a variation on post-structuralism—a movement that critiqued such assumptions as the importance of the author’s intent and the inherent “deep meaning” of a text. Poststructuralism originated primarily in France, but I’d argue that Quine’s indeterminacy of translation principle made the first step toward establishing the cultural relativity of the connection between signifier and signified. Poststructualists (according to Wikipedia) break down the distinction between signifier and signified to hold the combination as “real,” but I’d add to this that they recognize that there exists a culturally-specific (and personally-specific) version of each of these constructs.
Aarseth’s model of an ergodic textual machine—placing the “text” inside the vertices “operator,” “verbal sign,” and “medium” (21)—seems to uphold the idea that there is no single meaning to a cybertext; rather, this meaning is generated through the conflict of the vertices. These textual machines constitute localized microcosms of the general poststructuralist mission of critiquing social structures through playful deconstruction. Although Aarseth specifically establishes the textual machine in order to explain cybertexts and not textuality-in-general, I think it also applies back all the way to oral storytelling in a way that Propp was unable to capture. In “Double-Scope Stories,” Mark Turner imagines a dialogue between mother and child to accompany the reading of a bedtime story—it is this dialectic (trialectic?) that Aarseth ends up capturing with the ergodic machine.
Assignment: Write a design sketch for a narrative engine to be coded next week.
For my narrative generation project, I’d like to create flash fiction that describe the varying experiences of moving through discrete zones in a level from a generic FPS game. The initial idea for this comes from an earlier essay I wrote for Michael Nitsche last semester, about reading Left 4 Dead as a team-based rhythm game. In that essay I elaborated on what I saw as a somewhat vague but valid set of ideas from Henry Jenkins and Celia Pearce about “evocative space” and “game design as narrative architecture.” I delineated a few basic binary options for any zone in a level, such as whether it is wide or narrow, linear or multi-linear, light or dark, defense or offense, enclosed or open. Although I didn’t fully flesh the idea out, I grappled with explaining the psychological effects that various combinations of these attributes—and the act of moving between different zones—would have on the player.
Around six months later, I came across this short article by Justin Keverne. In it, he breaks Resistance: Fall of Man down into seven distinct models of gameplay and attempts to show how various combinations of these can elicit aesthetic responses such as “pushing through to teammates” and “camaraderie followed by loneliness.” His explication of this design method lacks the binary structure of mine, but he takes the critical step toward integrating it into the MDA model of starting from an aesthetic goal and working backward to determine the dynamics and mechanics required to elicit it. In the MDA model, level design seems to be a bounded box surrounding and structuring dynamics—it is a conduit through which dynamics can be fed directly into an aesthetic grammar.
Thus, for this project I will attempt to create a narrative generator that asks for desired aesthetic responses (in sequence) as input. The engine will generate an introductory zone based on the binary attributes I delineate, then it will attempt to create a sequence of zones to match the emotional flow described by the user’s input. Another desired feature will be the user’s ability to constrain the choice of binary attributes (such as ordering the machine to only use enclosed and linear spaces). The output of the generator will be in the form of a short story. This is a decidedly structuralist approach to the assignment, but I don’t mean for the output to be the final product of the endeavor; rather, I see the project as being a tool for brainstorming and design-sketching for level designers. I have no idea if my coding abilities will be adequate for this project, but I hope to be able to at least mock up a convincing prototype using PHP and mySQL. Even if I can’t hack the back-end sufficiently, I at least hope to develop the vague notion of level-design-as-narrative into a comprehensive grammar.
Images from Wikipedia, Creative Commons, etc.
Reset, a gamelike/comiclike poem thing
Text/Technique Analysis
Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes is an experiment in recombinant poetry. Queneau wrote ten separate poems of fourteen lines each, all featuring intercut sets of rhyming couplets (I cannot recall the proper name for this device). Corresponding lines across all ten poems implement the same rhyming structure. Because of this rhyming consistency, substituting line ten of poem four with line ten of any other poem will at least result in a rhythmic fit—though not necessarily a contextual one. Thus, in order to construct a coherent meaning for herself, the reader/player must confront what Mark Turner calls the “invariance principle” (Turner 31). For Turner the invariance principle holds sway over image-schematic mapping, that is, a causal link between two actions metaphorically or analogically linked.
“Events are Actions” (26) is the name of a primitive cognitive operation, observed by both Lakoff and Turner, by which we understand a literary event such as “the sun beat down on the aching traveler” by relating it to a source action such as one person beating another. One of Turner’s examples of an event-story (30) is from a Browning poem called “Porphyria’s Lover”:
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake.
Turner holds that there is a causal connection between the source action of a human agent tearing down a structure and the target event of a non-rational agent such as the wind in the poem tearing down the treetops. Now look at two lines from Queneau’s work (1-1 and 9-2), which I carefully picked from a number of significantly more incomprehensible possible couplets (translated by Bev Rowe) :
The pampas king betrays his devotees
any diner chooses escargots
The image-schematic mapping doesn’t come naturally, because the invariance principle has been violated. We can easily match the king to a diner lording over a dinner table, but what exactly is the link between choosing escargots and betraying devotees? One could forge a link here, assuming the devotees are of the peasant class (“bread and butter,” say) and those the king betrays them for the upper class (“escargot”); however, this causal link between the two image schemata is by no means natural or straightforward, and it is unlikely that everyone reading these lines together would create the same link.
William Burroughs employs a similar method in his Nova Express, created using “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” that he wrote of separately in A Casebook on the Beat. Tristan Tzara formulated this method at a Surrealist rally in the 1920s by cutting up a poem, placing the fragments in a hat, and drawing them at random to create a new work. The story is that this caused a riot in the audience, leading Andre Breton to expel Tzara—who went on to form the Dadaist movement—from the proceedings. The method in itself borders on the mundane, but Burroughs undergirds it with a modus operandi and theoretical grounding that add legitimacy and intrigue to the project. First, Burroughs encourages the reader to cut up the work of other artists. Then, through the cut-up method, the words of the original artist becomes yours. Burroughs himself did this in Nova Express, pulling from a number of texts including T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The claim Burroughs makes here rings true even today, as it is the exact same claim of legitimacy and authorial right used by Lawrence Lessig for recombinant, intertextual digital art such as Anime Music Videos (though this isn’t an exact analogue, because the works Lessig refers to are primarily contrapuntal and not randomized in any way).
The exact section of text we looked at from Nova Express is “The Death Dwarf in the Street” (Burroughs 74-79). I am unfamiliar with any previous works this segment may have drawn upon, but it reads like a fairly typical segment of postmodern science fiction in the vein of Thomas Pynchon or Philip K. Dick at his most obtuse. Death Dwarfs assault their victims by stealing their voices and thus overriding control of their mental processes, while Sex Dwarfs assault “erogenous zones” with connotations of rape and venereal disease. They are controlled by an Insect Mind defended by Crab Guards who become more powerful when directly assaulted. Perhaps this text is so easy to make sense of because of the literary works that followed it, but each clause seems carefully combined to the next for its evocative imagery and to aid in breaking through the invariance principle. The segment also contains a meta-discussion of “Juxtaposition Formulae” and how if one understands how the literary mind works one can control it (as Burroughs carefully does throughout the work).
Here, Burroughs makes the mental process of a parabolic blending of spaces (Turner 60) physically manifest. Turner explains that a figure such as The Grim Reaper (76-82) composes a blended mental space from a number of more primitive inputs spaces including the story of one specific death, the tautological maneuver that Death causes dying, the folk conception of Death as a rational agent, the farmer with his scythe, the murderer who stalks his prey, and the monk with a hood that obscures his face. The Death Dwarfs and the Sex Dwarfs are manifestations of our greatest fears of mental control and bodily desecration. The two kinds of dwarves are mirrored by the sequential manipulation Burroughs creates through the cut-up method and by the evocative imagery that attempts to cause a visceral reaction in the reader. The Insect Mind represents perhaps the author who pools from numerous texts and attempts to control readers, the Crab Guards who cannot be directly assaulted the struggle of the reader against authorial tyranny.
Conclusions
From my own educational history, I know of two major goals of Surrealism: distance and dream logic. One Surrealist theatergoing practice involved holding a hand up in front of one’s face and viewing the moving pictures through the undulating slits between the fingers. Both Queneau’s recombinant method and Burroughs’ cut-up method create a distance from the literary source material in a much more tangible way. Also, the original print form of Queneau’s work (unlike the electronic form) involved a similar tactile experience of flipping paper slats with the poem lines and probably seeing the couplets one was passing by in the process. Both experiments also seem to approach the goal of manufacturing dream logic, because the primary engine of making sense of dreams seems to be confronting Mark Turner’s invariance principle in order to structure dreams into a sensible progression of events and connections.
To answer the question of whether either of these methods is a novelty or a useful tool for future experimentation relies somewhat on the knowledge of later works. For instance, the band Radiohead has been transparent about the fact that they use the cut-up method to write some of their song lyrics. Of course, this band is known for having somewhat incomprehensible lyrics that serve as evocative snippets to braid with the instrumental music moreso than as a means for structuring oral storytelling. Although I am not aware of whether David Lynch uses these Surrealist techniques to create the plot structures for his films, the dream logic he implements in a work such as Mulholland Drive certainly seems commensurate with the technique. Lynch intercuts the dramatic with the everyday and awkward, the horrific with the fantastical—space and time become malleable under the knife of his editor Mary Sweeney.
Thus, these techniques would seem to be useful for brainstorming or iterative narrative design—as Burroughs admits to editing himself—a means of unlocking one’s ordered literary mind and approaching disruptive logics; however, it is unclear how useful they would be for a procedural medium, because they both assume a carefully authored source text that doesn’t necessarily have to exist for a digital artifact. For instance, one could procedurally generate a number of sentences or lines of poetry by parsing an online dictionary and forming Strings such as “<article> <noun> <verb> <article> <noun>,” or any other imaginable structure. Certainly cutting up or recombining a source text would yield a more elegant product, but in the hands of an expressive AI artist such as Michael Mateas more complex procedural structures would yield more human-readable results.
Project Documentation
Reset attempts to combine the methods devised by Queneau and Burroughs with the gamelike interactive comic work of Daniel Benmergui (especially his Storyteller). I wanted to explore the music of my favorite musician, Tom Waits (a white male), while interrogating his influences in early musical work by persons of color. Two songs from Mule Variations, “Come On Up to the House” and “Chocolate Jesus,” were selected as exemplary of his post-blues and twisted gospel style. His most direct POC influence, according to Allmusic.com, is Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary” means a lot to me because of its use in a number of my favorite films, including the cryptic coda at the end of Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry. I also selected “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” in order to achieve a selection of four songs thematically linked by their religious subject-matter.
There are four pictures on each line, and the player can select one of these per line. Each picture is matched to a line from one of the songs. These are not arranged in a linear manner, so clicking the first picture on each line will not result in calling up the four selected lines from a single song. Once the player has framed four of the pictures and formed a four-line poem at the bottom, they can unlock the next line in each disrupted song couplet by placing the correct avatar in the proper frame. The avatars are from the SNES game Earthbound, chosen because the game holds a special place in my heart and because I didn’t trust myself not to accidentally embed stereotypes into my own pixel art (though, as you can see, the representations are somewhat problematic). In the top two lines, white avatars unlock the lines of Waits songs while POC avatars unlock the lines of Armstrong songs. In the bottom two rows, I switch it up a bit in order to disrupt this flow and invoke themes of harmonious interracial relationship. Finally, following the fact that Burroughs encourages one to edit the results of the cut-up method, the player can click on any line to add or delete words in order to make their poem make sense to them.
There are a few things I would change about this game if I had more time and knowledge. For one, the code is incredibly rudimentary even though this is the most complex artifact I’ve built in Flash to date. I forgot how to implement classes in Flash over the summer, so the code is inelegant and clunky. As it stands, the work hardly deserves the name “comic”; in order to change this, I would like to make it so that the player can select four frames and then have those frames fill the screen to be played with. Although I figured out how to target the pictures with the avatars, I couldn’t figure out how to make them recognize each other as targets (so this is a lost interactive opportunity that I tried to make up for by crafting complementary responses). Since I’m missing some regulatory code, the game is rather easy to break if you don’t follow the directions. And this is okay, because I want people to play with it, break it, edit it, and discover secrets. One thing I would have done if I had the musical talent would be to create midi versions of the songs I drew from, so that aural cues would help players fit the proper lines together.
Special thanks to Kate S. (kateri) for helping me research Tom Waits and his musical influences, and to Ben Medler and Krystian Majeweski for simultaneously Tweeting me the code snippet for adjusting alpha values in AS3. Do not distribute; contains copywritten material (images from Flickr, Wikipedia, and the videogame Earthbound). Online version of Queneau’s sonnets created by Bev Rowe.
A Case for Mods
Written for Sande Chen’s “Game Design Aspect of the Month” blog. A reply to this post by Reid Kimball.
Reading Reid’s article, I found myself agreeing with everything he was saying (except perhaps the knock on physicians for their love of pharmaceuticals, which I’m sure he and I can debate heatedly some other place, some other time). That said, I found it sorely lacking in one practical consideration: convincing a publisher that it would be worth their money investing in an advocacy game. Although The Sims shows that a boring game can move units, Maxis takes a decidedly apolitical stance incongruous with the idea of making a game strictly for advocacy. I’m a fledgling academic and designer, so I don’t have the industry experience to speak here with certainty; however, even in academic game design emphasis is placed on the proof-of-concept. I imagine this works quite the same when pitching a game commercially—a working prototype does persuasive wonders that even a thorough design document could only dream of. I’d like to suggest a form of one-session game that would make strides toward convincing people that advocacy games are commercially viable (at least on a small scale).
One relatively early text in the theory of political games is “Ephemeral Games” by Gonzalo Frasca, who later went on to design the first newsgames September 12th and Madrid. In the article, Frasca asks a question that has been circulating in game design blogs (especially Clint Hocking’s and Manveer Heir’s) recently: how does it effect the impact of a game’s ethical decisions if we allow the player to take them back by loading a save? His answer was the “OSGON,” or “one-session game of narration.” The idea was to make it clear to the player that they would only be allowed to play the game once, after which their copy of it would lock them out. This, he thought, would ensure that players made decisions carefully and would forever reflect on the consequences.
Interestingly, in the past few weeks two such games were created. One by Terry Cavanagh, called Airplane Adventures, asks the player not to release their mouse. When they eventually do, their plane crashes; on reloading, players receive not another chance to play the game but a message, “YOU HAVE CRASHED.” Another game by raitendo, You Only Live Once, tells the story of a Mario-type who goes on a quest to free his girlfriend from a Bowser-type; when the player dies and tries to hit continue, they are treated to a series of humorous cartoons depicting the aftermath of their avatar’s death. Neither of these games can be played again without clearing out your Flash caches. Raitendo explored the same idea with Free Will, which endlessly cycles the player’s failed attempt at the game after they die (though this can be reloaded). Note that neither of these games feature ethical decisions, cues that the game cannot be replayed, or could be considered models for profitable advocacy games. To my knowledge, a politically-minded OSGON has never been created. Frasca himself opted for games that almost demand replaying.
Putting aside the idea of an OSGON, I’d like to suggest another type of small-scale project that, if successful, would serve as a proof-of-concept for the public’s willingness to engage seriously with an advocacy game: the mod. Mods have always enjoyed a curious existence on the fringes of mainstream gaming. One reason for this is that they are, to date, available only to PC gamers. The other is that they are only advertised on personal blogs and forums. Every once in awhile, a publisher will observe the quality and quiet success of a mod and decide to purchase the idea—the best example being Counter Strike. The makers of another mod, Killing Floor for Unreal Tournament 2004, found funding after the mod gained popular attention in gaming magazines; eventually the makers polished the mod into a standalone game and sold it on Steam this year.
Of course, you can see some problems here: the best examples of profitable mods are shooters, and as online games they demand the kind of replay addiction Reid avers. What hope does a political or educational game have in such a market? On the other hand, mods have been popular in the academic and artistic game design circles for quite a while. Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] is another Unreal mod that takes players through the interior of one of her traumatic childhood memories. One day, while walking home from church, she saw smoke billowing from her home in the distance… she knew her father was inside. [domestic] allows players to move through an expressive 3D recreation of her burning home, the walls textured with prose and the ever-present FPS gun replaced by a fire extinguisher. Escape From Woomera (Source mod, I believe) was designed by an Australian art collective in order to expose the machinations of a government-run camp for illegal aliens. The press wasn’t allowed inside the camp, so the game was pieced together from accounts by those who had been interred there. Finally, Medieval Unreality (Unreal mod) is an abstract trek through a nightmarish landscape designed collectively by some of the victims of the infamous Albanian blood fueds.
All of these games take less than an hour to play, and the replay value is fairly little. Also, they fall into the problem of being a bit too “serious” or “boring” for the average player (with the exception, perhaps, of Woomera). Another possibility would be to build the political mod into the existing structure of an open-ended game. Humana, the health insurance company, recently realized that it pays to keep their customers healthy rather than letting their health deteriorate to the point that supporting them becomes cost-prohibitive. Thus, they have begun inviting student interns to design health advocacy games for them. Many of these are ARG-types, but one is a mod for (you guessed it) The Sims that helps elderly men and women understand the importance of basic monitoring and medication. The mod also makes it easy for the player to understand the purposes and uses of any medical devices the insurance company or doctors may have suggested for them. Again—this is an admittedly boring example, not exactly what you’d show a publisher to pitch a larger game. But who’s to say that somebody like Reid couldn’t make a similar mod that simulated the lifestyle choices he had to make on learning that he had Crohn’s disease? Such a mod could be used, at the very least, to prototype mechanics that would prove that it would be intriguing to have a AAA protagonist with a disability, disorder, handicap, or disease (this was, I believe, attempted in Condemned 2 with alcoholism).
One of the reasons I only have boring examples to show you is that, for the most part, these mods weren’t made by working game designers. Although the lives of most designers are already strained by hours on the job, more and more professionals are leaving the big companies to start their own or work independently. In the coming years, I think we’ll see more short-length mods with mainstream appeal and “serious” aspirations coming down the pipe. People are already willing to pay between $1-$8 dollars for an iPhone game… so I think the acceptance of micro-sized, niche-interest games can only be considered to be on the rise. Thanks for reading, and if I’ve gotten any specifics of the life of working designers and publishers incorrect here I hope you’ll take the opportunity to educate me instead of flaming!
