Chungking Espresso

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 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.

“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.).

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.

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.

Simultaneously posted on Bogost’s News Games blog.

Pictures for Truth is a newsgame funded by Amnesty International, produced using Microsoft’s XNA software development kit. You play an American journalist in China just prior to the Beijing Olympics. You have a date to meet with a Chinese journalist covering poor living conditions at a toxic electronics dump. When you arrive at your hotel, you receive a call informing you that your friend has been detained by authorities at the dump.

A police officer at the dump confiscates your camera and hauls your friend off to jail. You must find a new camera, interview people at the dump and outside a jail, and take pictures to accompany the “stories” generated by the interviews. You write three stories: about the health issues surrounding the dump, the working conditions of those living near the dump, and about China’s municipal system in regards to the death penalty (this story is unlocked by completing the first two).

Aesthetically the game is rather beautiful. Unlike many of these investigative reporter games we’ve played (like Homeland Guantanamo), PFT is rendered in realtime 3D. So instead of clicking between discrete composed scenes, you get to move through sensory-immersive recreations of the dump and the Chinese jail. The game is in black and white, presumably to compare the game with a newspaper. Texturing is spare, mostly hatched greyscale or pencil scribbling. The characters look like white paper cutouts.

A lot of effort has gone into making PFT “gamey.” You receive fame points for every interview question you ask and for adding pictures relevant to the stories you are composing. Fame unlocks three “power-ups:” a zoom lens, an extended hard drive for your PDA, and a hidden camera.

Unfortunately, only the hidden camera is actually useful. You must have this in order to take pictures inside the jail cell where your friend is being held. The zoom may increase the fame points you receive for taking pictures, but if this is true it would violate the photographic rule of thirds (placing the focus of your pictures in a third of the screen, with axis of action from the subject aiming toward the unoccupied two thirds (this assertion is disputable, but the fact that the NPCs remain static means that there’s no real reason to zoom up close to their faces to catch, say, teardrops forming in their eyes). The PDA hard drive space is only needed to store pictures; you can delete unwanted or used pictures, and there aren’t really enough subjects to require massive amounts of space.

The biggest problem with the game is that there’s no real room for agency on the part of the player. All one has to do is click through every available conversation piece with each NPC. Anyone used to playing games made by Bethesda knows the drill: swiftly click through the conversation tree without paying attention to much of anything in order to unlock everything, and then find the one piece you need to progress the game state and read it carefully. Adding insult to injury, the game only takes two lines of conversation and forces you to use them for the article you’re writing. It would have made much more sense to add a score for each line and then allow you to combine then to maximize the “fame” points for the article. This would at least provide some feedback educating the player on the quality of different types of information. The picture mechanic does some work to remedy this: much like in Dead Rising, capturing points of interests (represented as nodes or “hot points” once the cameras snaps) awards more points; re-using the same subject twice in an article subtracts points.

In the end it’s obvious what Amnesty’s purpose was for this game: not to teach one how to be a journalist, but to teach one how difficult it is to be a journalist in China. There’s also the ancillary educational goal of teaching players about living, working, and municipal conditions in China.

The makers do connect these three educational points with their narrative thread. Another occupant of the jail holding your friend is a woman who has been jailed for trafficking heroin. She did this in order to buy medicine for her daughter, a girl you encountered earlier in the dump standing around by herself. You can choose whether or not to enlist a doctor’s help for the child, but it really doesn’t make sense not to do it and your ending condition doesn’t change if you do this or not.

As a side note, this game did highlight for me the difficulty of using XNA to create one of these games. Only a Windows machine will run games made in this way, and they have a somewhat high barrier of entry on account of the fact that Windows has to install the .NET Framework 3.5 in order to run them. This requires roughly 15 minutes of downloading, installing, and configuring (plus a mandatory system restart) – of course, this is a one-time only thing, and now your computer is set up to play anything else built in XNA. The payoff seems worth it in the end, however, because the product comes off as much more polished than something developed in Flash. Realtime 3D rendering is always a plus, and at the very least this game didn’t require as much of a download time as a game distributed through Kuma War’s download client.

This is more for my own record-keeping than for your reading pleasure, but some of my friends might find it fun to tear into me for how I present this information and/or be inspired to go check out the stuff we’ve got on the News Games blog.

The News Games blog has enjoyed fairly consistent amounts of visitors throughout its existence. November and December (2008) saw the highest number of unique and repeat visitors (10,479 and 605, respectively) because of some high-profile linking by mainstream gaming websites. Q1 of 2009 saw a slight dip in readership despite increased recognition by other websites (7,694 unique visitors), and numbers have been steadily rising through the beginning of Q2 (with 5,691 unique visitors thus far). The top referring links were from (in descending order) Kotaku, Slashdot, Game Set Watch, and Digg—although the most consistent flow of readers came from no referring link at all, which means that a number of our regular readers bookmarked the website themselves.

Recorded visit lengths show that roughly 20% of visitors stayed long enough to thoroughly read at least one article, three percent read multiple articles (spending up to an hour on the site), while 2% browsed the website for longer than an hour! Readers came from at least 21 countries, with all continents represented except Antarctica. Seventy-six percent of readers came from the United States, 6% came from Canada, 4% from the UK, 3.4% from Brazil, 1.6% from Australia, and 1.2% from Singapore (other countries represent less than 1% of the readership).

News Games has published 91 articles over the past 6 months, which averages to one post every other day. Once normalized, the posting schedule was one article on every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The articles cover topics such as (but not limited to) journalistic connections to mainstream games; analyses of news, editorial, and documentary games; connections between games and the journalistic values of verification and transparency; explorations of interactive info-vizualization and traditional newspaper puzzles; and general musings on the current state of print journalism and the nature of games as a serious artistic/informational medium. Readers and contributors have authored 116 unique, non-spam comments on articles over the course of the project.

The most popular search query used to reach the site is “journalism games,” followed closely by “news games” and “news games georgia.” This implies that either a decent number of Internet readers were interested in the subject beforehand or became interested in the subject after the project had been linked by popular gaming websites. The latter query also shows that the project has been recognized and explicitly associated with Georgia Tech. Following the most common queries are “newspaper games,” “tenants of journalism,” “ethics in games,” and “journalism kids.” The searches show that our project has become associated with the disciplines and business models of traditional journalism, the question of morality in games, and the potential educational uses of news games.

News Games enjoyed a healthy dose of mainstream attention throughout the past six months. Gawker Media’s Kotaku, one of the most popular and influential videogames-related websites in the world, linked an article called Do Really Games Qualify As Escapist? in late November of 2008, netting a decent amount of outside attention for the blog and challenging mainstream gamers to consider the ability of games to address social issues. This article was also picked up by Digg, a popular bookmarking and crowd-sourcing website. Game Set Watch, the respected casual arm of the games industry mega-site Gamasutra, linked four articles from News Games through Q4 2008 and Q1 2009:

Newsgames in the Pipe (a hypothetical business model for making newsgames in the newsroom)

Technical Aspects of Breaking Newsgames (a followup to the previous article)

Dead Rising and Interventionist Media Ethics (about an action reporting videogame and its possible relation to the media ethics of Conrad Fink)

Huys/Hope – Turkey’s First Political Game (an analysis of the connection between Turkey’s first editorial game and its relation to journalism and Gonzalo Frasca’s Madrid)

The Online Journalism Blog published an article in early Q2 2009 called Now That Journalism is In Trouble, Why Not Play With It? that aggregated numerous writings from the News Games blog, setting up a discourse on the question of videogames as a possible solution to the problem of news media companies failing to reach wider audiences in the era of the Internet. This article was picked up by the UK Guardian newspaper, a bookmarking website called Slashdot, and Kotaku. Readers treated the idea with a mix of excitement and fear, thinking that both games and the news might be possibly tarnished or at least changed irrevocably if the connection between the two were strengthened in the future.

The most recent recognition of the News Games project comes from Professor Roger Travis (of UConn) and his Video Games & Human Values Initiative, which linked the article Beyond Good & Evil and Photographic “Truth” (about another action reporting game and its reliance on a naïve view of documentary reality).

Our project received some attention from academics as well, which was exciting (and, frankly, amazing) considering the relative youth of the project and its niche focus. Two professors had the News Games blog as required reading for media studies classes in the spring semester of 2009. Professor Ed Halter of Bard College drew upon the site for case studies in his Film 106: Introduction to Documentary Media. Professor Casey O’Donnell of the University of Georgia blogrolled News Games for his Introduction to Game Design class; students in this class were required to write 250-word synopses of games-related articles from the blogroll each week, many of which ended up being drawn from News Games.

Because the University of Georgia was close by Georgia Tech geographically, the project’s spring 2009 graduate assistant (Ferrari) visited UGA to deliver three lectures in February. The subject of the lectures was an introduction to news, editorial, and documentary games (as well as the work of the News Games project); he spoke to a 150-person class on Introduction to Reporting taught by Professor Barry Hollander—as well as smaller classes taught by Casey O’Donnell, Game Design and Introduction to New Media. The latter lecture was attended by Dr. Hugh Martin, a senior faculty member of UGA’s Grady School of Journalism, who responded to the idea of teaching newsgame production in the context of J-school positively. Journalism students and professors responded well to the idea of integrating newsgame production into the newsroom/reporting process. Ferrari shared some resources on learning Adobe Flash-based game development to the students who were interested in pursuing the idea further in their own coursework.

I’ll probably be able to finish the second (slightly longer) piece of my response to the hipster discussion between Jeffries and Pixel Vixen later tonight, but Ian just sent me another proofreading job:

The opening chapters of the book, about Stella and Combat, absolutely brutalized me the first time I read them. I’m hoping that it won’t happen again, but it’s a lot harder to do this kind of thing when you’re trying to quit smoking. Pray for me.

***SPOILER ALERT: This is an academic paper; we spoil everything, you crybabies.***

ABSTRACT
The World Ends With You is part of a recently popularized genre of games I’m calling the “mutual reliance game.” These games emphasize group dynamics over the valorization of individual action, and throughout the paper I attempt to draw from a series of theoretical writings that may lay the groundwork for an understanding of the genre and can be used to examine other games that take part in it. Through a tight coupling of narrative, control, and mechanics, TWEWY makes its argument for mutual reliance while distinguishing a community mentality from its negative analogue—totalitarian control.

INTRODUCTION
The World Ends With You is a game about mutual reliance. Its protagonist, Neku, is a misanthropic adolescent who escapes the world around him by constantly wearing headphones. Neku has died, but he doesn’t remember the details of his murder by gunshot until later in the game. In his time among the living, Neku was a denizen of Shibuya—Tokyo’s vibrant center of fashion and youth culture. In TWEWY, a mysterious group of agents known as the Reapers allow the dead to compete in The Reaper’s Game for a second chance at life.

The Reaper’s Game takes place in an alternate realm, spatially coexistent with the land of the living, known as The Underground; the ghostly Players can see the living and read their thoughts, but communication between the quick and the dead can only take place hrough a version of Ouija called “Reaper Creeper.” Players of The Reaper’s Game receive one task a day for a week. In order to survive in the Underground, which is inundated by evil powers called Noise that flock to the negative thoughts of the living like moths to a flame, each Player must quickly find a partner. Any Player who allows his partner to succumb to the attacks of Noise—or fails to complete a daily assignment—faces permanent “erasure” (videogame conventions run deep in the land of the dead). A single Noise manifests simultaneously on two planes of existence, each of which must be defended by one of the two partners. Thus, Players of the Reaper’s Game are required to place a great deal of trust in their partners—a particularly daunting task for a self-absorbed solipsist such as Neku.

TWEWY represents the two combat planes physically by placing each on one of the Nintendo DS’s dual screens. Players control Neku with the stylus, while controlling his current partner with the thumb of their left hand on the D-pad. The partner character will go into “auto-play” mode if the player neglects to press the D-pad; while in auto, the partner will perform attacks less often and thus open itself to additional harm. By maintaining a steady beat, Neku and his partner can pass a light puck granting a damage multiplier back and forth. Neku collects a set of pins that grant him different attacks. The player invokes each pin with a different type of stylus scratch (circles, flicks, presses, and taps) or microphone input (blowing, shouting). Companion characters gain access to new D-pad combos based on the item in their accessory slot. The game features two difficulty sliders (one for Neku’s health and one for Noise strength) of incredibly fine granularity, encouraging each player to find their own “sweet spot” at which the combat’s team-based mechanics begin to shine.

A Genre Defined?
Individual action, once an unquestioned virtue in single-player games, has become slightly less popular over time. This is not to say that games about an individual struggle to succeed have fallen completely out of favor – Far Cry 2 is a recent popular example about one person’s survival in an environment where even one’s friends can quickly become enemies. But recent years have seen a rise in games focusing on group dynamics.

Prince of Persia echoes Braid’s forgiveness mechanism with the character of Elika, who saves the hero every time he makes a false move and is about to die. Left 4 Dead, an online survival horror game, enforces group reliance by making the game virtually unwinnable alone. Beyond Good & Evil effectively fractures the action adventure hero popularized by The Legend of Zelda by making its protagonist, Jade, reliant on one of two partners to solve environmental puzzles and defeat bosses. These games cross genre lines, making them difficult to recognize as representing a cohesive thrust in game design; thus, throughout this paper we will attempt to show how TWEWY helps define the features and concepts behind a new thematic genre I have tentatively named “the mutual reliance game.”

Portable Gaming Devices
But TWEWY is a different sort of game. Relegated to the handheld Nintendo DS, one plays this game alone, while even a single-player console or PC game can be played in the company of friends. A portable gaming device allows one to escape from daily life even when physically immersed in the world outside one’s living room—before there was the iPod, there was the Game Boy. The history of the Game Boy’s development is somewhat occluded for non-Japanese speakers. One can assume that Japanese market data supported the idea that a console playable on long Tokyo train rides would perform well, but The Ultimate History of Video Games contains a quote from Don Thomas of Atari implying that most people thought the device would fail because of its clunkiness and small, black-and-green screen:

Nobody, including me, thought that the Game Boy would take off like it did. Game Boy is the most perfect example in the industry that you can’t be sure about anything. (397)

If any device demands the amount of close hardware inspection provided by Bogost and Montfort’s Racing the Beam, it is the original Game Boy. The Nintendo DS is quite a different beast, but the effect of its hardware limitations on artistic choice inform much of how TWEWY works. We will address this in our discussion of the game’s controls. Lost in Blue—a survival simulator about two children who find themselves alone on an island and must cooperate to survive—is another mutual reliance game for the DS, but is not nearly as self-conscious about being a portable game. For our purposes, the most important fact about TWEWY’s relegation to a portable is that it continually asks its players to take off their DS headphones and develop a sensus communis (in the Kantian sense, not the rhetorical or Aristotelian).

A Tale of Tight Coupling
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw criticizes TWEWY for creating what Clint Hocking calls ludonarrative dissonance:

What I’m saying is I like games where the story and gameplay go hand in hand. In most JRPGs, the story and gameplay are kept either side of a wrought-iron fence made of tigers.

Incidentally this is almost the exact wording of Croshaw’s critique of Braid—leading one to infer that the reviewer aligns with Raph Koster in holding that game mechanics cannot carry semantic freight. If one considers the surface-level act of scribbling on the DS screen with a stylus to be the extent of TWEWY’s mechanics and control, then this is a reasonable conclusion; however, it ignores many of the levels on which this game operates. It might initially strike one that Croshaw is a particularly easy straw man to mount a defense against; however, in the wake of the great ludology/narratology debates a suggestion of ludonarrative dissonance stands as one of the most serious claims one can level against a game. The following will attempt to show that TWEWY in fact manages a tight coupling of mechanics, control, and narrative rarely seen in Japanese roleplaying games.

Losing Control
Lev Manovich explains part of what makes game challenging (and AI seem a lot smarter than it actually is) by positing that, mediated by the controller, our avatars in a game world represent only a fragment of our potency:

In short, computer characters can display intelligence and skills only because the programs put severe limits on our possible interactions with them [...] the computers can pretend to be intelligent only by tricking us into using a very small part of who we are when we communicate with them. (33)

Understood in this light, we see that TWEWY forces the player to fracture themselves even more than most games. The game’s AI is fairly innocuous even by hack-and-slash standards, but the sheer number of Noise on each screen—coupled with the difficult controls—makes up for the weakness of each individual unit.

The player can move Neku around his screen in order to avoid danger by dragging the stylus. Because the stylus is the only way Neku can attack, players must choose at any given moment whether to use their pins or evade attacks. Pins periodically run out of energy and must recharge, so there are times when evasion is the player’s primary modus. The character on the top cannot be similarly maneuvered, because the directional pad only controls their attacks. It is hard to protect this character because of the relative uselessness of the left hand; nevertheless, the limited manual control still proves more effective than “auto” mode. These facts all come together to show that TWEWY’s combat system is a process of mutual reliance between a human player severely limited to the actions of his right hand scribbling with the stylus and either a weak AI companion or a significantly smaller portion of their brain enacting simple button presses on the D-pad.

“I exist, me, Hélène; isn’t that enough?”
The Blood of Others, an early novel by Simone de Beauvoir, is a fiction rooted in same ideas as her later philosophical work The Ethics of Ambiguity—namely, the implication (following Husserl) “that all adolescents are Cartesian-like solipsists who imagine themselves to be the only consciousness that exists” (Holveck). The heroine, named Hélène (perhaps after Helen of Troy), is a naïve youth who sees herself as completely free from societal bonds; thus, throughout the beginning of the book she uses other human beings instrumentally to fulfill her desires. Not until Paris is invaded by the Nazis does her sense of communal responsibility for other women begin to develop. The unit operation of joining hands, common in videogames such as Ico and Lost in Blue, is invoked when Hélène claims to know an impoverished stranger in order to get her a ride back into Paris with a group Nazi officers. Significantly, the women also share bread together despite the prospect of starvation.

Neku and his teammate share a common health bar—the blood of others becomes the blood of one’s own. This communal life force links the success or failure of two partners in the Reaper’s Game. Shared health bars are a fairly rare occurrence in games, highlighting the fact that the developers desired to deliver a deliberate message with this choice. Winback 2: Project Poseidon is a shooter in which the player controls two different characters, one after the other, on two different routes through any given level. Critics panned this design decision, perhaps because it had little narrative motivation. Forever Kingdom, a little-known JRPG with strong tones of group reliance, features three characters linked by a shared “Soul Gauge.” In this second case the Gauge has direct bearing on the combat tactics native to the game, as well as having a cause in the narrative (evil wizard, blood curse, etc.) Accordingly, the critical reception of Forever Kingdom game was markedly more positive than in the case of Winback 2.

Despite this distinction, some conventional reviews of TWEWY cite the health bar as one of the major contributors to the game’s high difficulty curve. But is a shared health bar so different from what we see in other mutual reliance games? In Lost in Blue, keeping fed is a communal process between Keith’s hunting and scavenging and Skye’s fire-tending and cooking. In Beyond Good & Evil, one of the commands available to the player is to transfer health-restoring items between Jade and her current companion. Admittedly it is a bit too easy to acquire health items in BG&E, a situation that Left 4 Dead turns on its head: players are only given between 4-6 health packs per level, which means that one often has to make the decision whether to heal a teammate or save a pack for oneself in anticipation of future danger. Shared health—and the accompanying need to care for one’s teammates to preserve that health—can thus be seen as common unit operations across the mutual reliance genre.

Dark tourism
“Dark tourism” is a relatively established brand of adjectival tourism focusing on visiting sites associated with death. TWEWY is an exploration of the spatial life of the dead that exist in the Underground of Shibuya. This is an important component of the game for our discussion, because the temporary life of a tourist is one of almost complete reliance—explaining why Ptolomea, the second-innermost zone of Dante’s 9th circle of the Inferno, is reserved for those sinners who betray their guests. Navigating a foreign city is a simultaneously exciting, exhausting, and anxious experience.

Players of TWEWY are visitors to Shibuya, significantly reliant on a map that occupies the top screen of the DS when viewing the menu. The map is divided into different areas, each of which has a different popularity chart for the game’s many consumer brands. Payers must pay attention to these charts, because wearing either the most and least popular brands will grant Neku’s team bonuses and negative effects, respectively. Because the game returns so often to the same locations, every mission features a different blocking off of the city based on invisible walls that either remain static or can be destroyed by fulfilling certain tasks. The map thus often becomes the only way to get from one point of interest to another, weaving one’s way between the shifting blockades.

The fracturing of the city space echoes the mental synecdoche and asyndeton described by Michel de Certeau as intrinsic to pedestrian life (Certeau 101). When walking through a city, one primarily remembers landmarks that draw attention to themselves or hold some significance for the walker; thus, these individual locations become representative of a larger area—synecdoche, poetically speaking. In between these key locations, walkers mentally ignore scenery and thus manifest the second poetic tool of asyndeton. The sites that TWEWY centers around are often emblematic of Shibuya as a youth culture center, but some of the back alleys in which major plot points occur do not necessarily strike one as well-traveled. Thus, even citizens of Tokyo will find the Underground of Shibuya somewhat disorienting, because TWEWY’s particular spatial synecdoche and asyndeton adhere to an idealized, rather than an actual, walker of Shibuya’s streets.

Some Distinctions
Individuality is not an unalloyed evil in the eyes of TWEWY’s designers. Much care, primarily through the game’s narrative but also in a few key mechanics, goes into establishing a difference between mutual reliance and a complete forfeiture of the self. An important part of the definition of a genre is to explicitly understand what does not constitute membership. The following discussions of shopping, trends, and rhythm attempt to lay the groundwork for these distinctions.

A Consumerist Game?
Shopkeeps, perennially some the least developed characters in Japanese roleplaying games, become a vital component of TWEWY’s argument against solipsism. Just as in the real world, one develops relationships with shopkeepers in TWEWY by becoming regular customers. Doing so unlocks new, more powerful pins and clothing for the player to purchase. This is the source of many mainstream critiques of the game as overly consumerist: in the game, one is literally only truly alive while inside a store—the ghostly players of the Reaper’s Game become corporeal when they step past a sigil marking the entrance to every store. This is, of course, simply a way to justify the idea of direct communication between the living and the dead, but its implications should not be completely overlooked.

Certainly the game’s reliance on buying clothing and flair to augment the abilities of Neku and his teammates is disconcerting, but the nowhere does it explicitly claim that the clothes one wears are a source of individuality. Rather, the relationship Neku develops with various shopkeepers echoes the thoroughly modern nostalgic desire for locality and community that Pierre Mayol unearths in his exploration of Madame Marguerite’s notebook:

I have known some very crude shops, display windows of dubious taste, but the shopkeepers knew their customers, there was an exchange of politeness and kindness [...] The shopkeepers are unfortunately no longer authentic Croix-Roussians. They have constructed more modern shops, but they have not acquired the native mentality. There are no more friendly conversations, no one knows anyone anymore… (126)

Wistful remembrances of times past are not unique to the great Continental thinkers and poets—Hayao Miyazaki has built his entire animation career upon the Japanese public’s desire for a return to a simpler, more natural way of life (Napier 181) in the face of rapid industrial change (sometimes by feeding it, sometimes by problematizing it).

Even though Neku can develop relationships with the cashiers at larger-scale stores, their greetings and farewells receive markedly different treatment. The cashier at Pegaso, a shop “for the richest of the rich,” tells you to return when you can afford his wares if you leave the shop without buying anything—an experience that anyone who has accidentally wandered into a Bloomingdale’s or trendy boutique looking for a pair of slacks can instantly sympathize with. Although the most expensive items in the game are powerful, the game does include a method of combining rare materials with lower-price goods in order to cobble together the most potent outfit. Despite the regularity of shopping in TWEWY, the distinction between the local and the corporate is no more apparent than in the subplot dealing with Neku’s rescue of Ramen Don.

Saving the Noodle Man
If one sat and watched The Food Network for an entire day, one would likely catch at least one episode of a show where the host visits Japan or China. At some point in the episode, the host will visit an aging male who spends his final years preserving the dying art of handmade noodle-pulling.4 The crafting of a fine bowl of ramen is perhaps most thoroughly celebrated in the Japanese film Tampopo—a cinematic, ramen-specific analogue to the curry-restaurant game CoCo Ichibanya analyzed by Ian Bogost. As an exploration of Tokyo culture, TWEWY would be remiss to ignore this significant aspect of Japanese culinary life.

During the second week of the Reaper’s Game, Neku runs head on into the world of the ramen business. Ken Doi, owner of the neighborhood noodle bar Ramen Don, has fallen on hard times. Nobody will visit his shop, because a popular blogger named The Prince of Ennui has endorsed a chain restaurant called Shadow Don. Manipulated by the corporate forces maintaining his popular image, the Prince does not enjoy the empty, loveless noodles crafted at the restaurant he endorses:

I miss the old stuff… Just noodles and broth. Warm, simple ramen.

Using a simplified version of Reaper Creeper, Neku imprints in Doi’s mind the image of an advertisement he can use to recover his business. Later in the day the Prince enters Doi’s shop, demands a bowl of noodles, tastes them, and exclaims:

Let me guess: a whole chicken in the soup? That, and a hint of pork bone, seaweed and sardines… It all blends together so perfectly! Among the flavors, I… I can taste the love you’ve put in this. Your love of ramen… No. Your love for ramen-lovers.

The noodle is a symbol of long life in east Asian iconography; however, no matter the level of craft that has gone into making a noodle as supple and long as possible, a bowl of ramen is very much a product of the harmony between every ingredient—reflected in the Zen-minded placement of different meats and vegetables in a wheel across the surface of the broth. Furthermore, the Prince asserts that the soup becomes more than the sum of its parts when it has been made in the spirit of sharing with others.

This sequence and its underlying metaphor are admittedly melodramatic, but ramen as a model for a community of individuals is certainly more refined than the American conception of a “cultural soup” (perhaps because our semi-liquid culinary analogues are homogenized stews and chowders). Encapsulated in this subplot we find both the game’s preference for the local and its mandate of mutual reliance—the ingredients of ramen maintain their purity even while harmonizing together.

The Red Pin
TWEWY also distinguishes mutual reliance from Hannah Arendt’s characterization of a totalitarian centripetal force on society. Kitaniji, the leader of the Reapers, distributes a red pin that, when activated, forces everyone to march to the beat of the exact same drum (to follow Emerson). One mission early on the game is to aid in the red pin’s marketing to the living; the designers seem to have thought that one of the best ways to hammer a social message into the minds of players is to make them complicit in the antagonist’s master plan.

TWEWY features a peculiar mechanic that allows this mission to make sense: trends among the living are set by the fashions of the dead competing in the Reaper’s Game. By wearing any given brand during combat, Neku will incrementally raise that brand on an area’s popularity chart. The very absurdity of this mechanic stands as a secondary counter-argument to the notion that the game is overly consumerist—TWEWY posits that trends are less a tangible social phenomenon than they are completely arbitrary flukes of popular taste.
In her study of Nazi and Stalinist regimes Arendt argues that,

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its particular ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. (325)

This idea relies heavily on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aestheticization of politics” that propagandists use to take control of society by popularity instead of force. She asserts that totalitarian governments seek not to control classes, but masses; further, “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships” (Arendt 317).

There is no more perfect connection between the late capitalist environment of Shibuya and the aestheticization of politics than the notion that youth culture can be easily manipulated by the manufacturers of trends. Trendiness begins as a way for a select group to declare themselves as unique, quickly cuts across class boundaries, and finally becomes normalized when it hits market saturation. The game clearly does not consider the bond of common hipness to constitute a “normal social relationship,” but rather a weak grasping at straws in the face of the highly encapsulated social life of the Tokyo citizenry.

The creeping trend of wearing the red pin in TWEWY is a process that begins early in the game as a hip accessory that only a select few possess and surreptitiously gains momentum in tandem with Neku’s three runs through the Reaper’s Game. By the end, Kitaniji has complete control over a population that voluntarily accepted the yoke he crafted for it. Neku, who has become so involved in the Game due to his newfound fellow feeling for the predicament of his previous partner Shiki (she faces erasure if Neku fails, because the Reapers take what is most important from each Player at the beginning of each week), is the only person in Shibuya who managed to ignore the trend. Thus the communal sense, which saves Neku from mind control, is differentiated from a hive mentality.

Pop Matters
Rhythm games have now firmly established themselves across player demographic boundaries. Most interesting for our analysis of mutual reliance games is the recent transition from single-player games such as the first three Guitar Heros to team-based experiences such as Rock Band and GH: World Tour. Notably, these “party” games feature the shared health bar (here a general level of positive or negative audience vibe) that has proven itself to be such a risky move in other genres. Similarly to other mutual reliance games, individuals rack up “star power” that they can use to either increase their own score, boost their audience vibe, or save a fellow bandmate from failure. This is further proof that games in this thematic genre recognize individual effort in-game while allowing players to make a semi-ethical meta-game choice that leads the group to either enjoy or become frustrated by their experience together.

It is notable that a critique of rampant consumerism is relatively easy to build against these games: buying instruments and clothes only provides surface-level aesthetic change. Further, World Tour is the first rhythm game to feature dynamic in-game advertising provided by IGA and Massive, while Rock Band 2 features corporately sponsored events and competitions. Comparing the rhetoric of shopping between TWEWY and these games only highlights how carefully the former handles the matter.

TWEWY makes numerous connections to the world of music through its naming conventions. Joshua, the local demi-god of Shibuya, is known as the Composer. His second-in-command, Kitaniji, bears the title of Conductor. The most common enemy in the game—characterized primarily as being not-human—is called “Noise.” Though not immediately apparent, the ghostly Players of the Reaper’s Game are also players (that is, “instrumentalists”) in an orchestra or band. When Kitaniji invokes the power of the red pin to control the living and the dead, he subverts the natural musical order of Shibuya’s society and replaces it with a Fascist march.

Theodor Adorno famously associated the early jazz of the Tin Pan Alley with Fascism:

The effectiveness of the principle of march music in jazz is evident. The basic rhythm of the continuo and the bass drum is completely in sync with march rhythm, and, since the introduction of six-eight time, jazz could be transformed effortlessly into a march[...] the jazz orchestra[...] is identical to that of a military band. (485)

Further, he observes that “the most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations” (Adorno 445-6). His claim is that popular music, because it must appeal to the aural  inclinations of what the uneducated masses perceive as musically “natural,” risks becoming entirely normalized. Once this process is set in motion, popular music creates a feedback loop wherein both the performers and their consuming public become progressively more regularized in turn. The discussion of whether Adorno knew what he was talking about or was simply biased by his experience with Nazism and training as a classical pianist still goes on today. For our purposes we simply recognize that TWEWY’s red pin story echoes Adorno’s exact fears: the same instrumentalists who compose a completely unique jazz band can one day find themselves following the beat of the same drum.

There are no soloists in TWEWY; like the members of a two piece band (The White Stripes and Mates of State come to mind), the Players of the Reaper’s Game only have a limited amount of actions to perform and tools to use to craft their music (or combat). They pass a puck of light back and forth that increases a damage multiplier if they keep a steady beat. The Player’s pins thus become his instruments, and the price for following the popular trend of wearing Kitaniji’s red pin is the total control of one’s mind and music.

A Biblical Critique?
What we in the West know as the “Christ figure” is in fact a fairly common archetype in many religions and spiritualities—from Amitabha Bodhisattva, to Prometheus, to Japan’s own Amaterasu (the protagonist of the videogame Okami). In TWEWY, Neku himself becomes a Christ figure. Joshua slays Neku, choosing him as his champion in a Job-like contest against Kitaniji; Neku  transforms himself in the land of the dead and is finally resurrected anew.

One might initially assume that Japanese artists have no stake in exploring  Christian mythology; however, Japanese cultural historian Susan Napier writes that,

For most consumers of anime, their culture is no longer a purely Japanese one. At least in terms of entertainment, they are as equally interested in and influenced by Western cultural influences as they are by specifically Japanese ones. (22)

While Napier only explicitly references Japanese manga and anime, the consumers of JRPGs comprise essentially the same market within and outside Japan. Crosses, angels, and demons are common icons in Japanese games, from the winged forms of Kefka and Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VI & VII to the aping of Nietzsche’s famous assertion that “Gott ist tot” in Xenogears. J.W.T Mason explains this by asserting that Shinto, the national spirituality (for it cannot exactly be called a religion) of Japan, is a recognition of the divine seed in all peoples and cultures.

TWEWY inverts the Biblical story of Abraham’s plea with God to spare the city of Sodom. God agrees to spare Sodom for the sake of ten good men, but the angels sent to survey the city can only find one, Lot. Not until the New Testament are the sins of mankind worth forgiving for the sake of one (Jesus). Echoing the God of the Old Testament, Joshua decides that Shibuya has become so vile and imperfect a place that it must be destroyed and composed anew. He bets Kitaniji that the city cannot be redeemed within three weeks, leading the otherwise benevolent Conductor to perpetrate his Fascist control of the populace in an effort to constrain their vices. Joshua murders Neku (he’s an Old Testament God, after all) in order to have a thrall inside the Underground, disrupting Kitaniji’s efforts.

Yet Joshua decides at the end of the game that the otherwise vile city is worth saving for the sake of one man’s (Neku) capacity for betterment. This directly contradicts the story of Christ, who is born and lives without sin in order that his sacrifice might redeem the souls of the imperfect. Neku’s teammate Beat originally died trying to save his little sister Rhyme from being run over by a car. If Christ’s example were meaningful to Joshua, then Beat’s sacrifice would be enough for him to decide that Shibuya could produce virtue; however, it is the transformation of the thoroughly imperfect (selfish) Neku that changes the demi-god’s mind.

One could hold that this celebration of the actions of an individual undercuts the message of mutual reliance, but this would ignore the fact that the very transformation Joshua values is the development of a sensus communis. Christians rely on Christ’s sacrifice for their salvation; in TWEWY it is the bond of mutual reliance formed between Neku and his teammates—forged in  countless dual-screen battles and the twisting little passages through the shop-filled alleys of the city—that saves Shibuya.

CONCLUSION
The World Ends With You establishes the importance of mutual reliance while explaining how to maintain one’s individuality. The game distinguishes between a sense of community and the negative analogue of a hive mentality. It delivers these messages through a tight coupling of its mechanics, controls, and narrative. More so than any other game with a similar moral, TWEWY displays the expressive strength of the rhetoric of mutual reliance. The fact of its relegation to a portable gaming device only makes its message all the more poignant for the player.

In the end, one comment by Croshaw re-emerges to hold true of the experience, namely that the player has been led through the game on a leash. TWEWY, like a raiding guild in World of Warcraft, is such a finely tuned machine that performativity and agency have been robbed from the player. This strikes one as distinctly counterintuitive to the possible goal of allowing players to decide for themselves whether or not to develop a sensus communis. If the mutual reliance game is to mature as a genre, it may have to abandon some of the explicit conncections that TWEWY maintains. Maybe the coupling of two partners is too restrictive to allow true group dynamics to develop. Perhaps an answer lies in the story-free experience of playing Left 4 Dead, wherein game design exists simply as narrative architecture for the team’s emergent story of survival—as great a proof as any that game mechanics, when finely tuned, can carry semantic freight on their own.

REFERENCES
[1]Adorno, T., “On Popular Music” & “On Jazz.” Essays on Music, University of California Press, Berkeley (2002), 437-469, 485-488.
[2]Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston (1973), 308-326.
[3]Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Los Angeles (1998), 91-110.
[4]Certeau, M., Giard, L., Mayol, P. and Tomasik, T., The practice of everyday life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (1998), 126.
[5]Holveck, E., “The Blood of Others: A Novel Approach to The Ethics of Ambiguity.” Hypatia vol. 14 no. 4, Univeristy of Indiana Press (1999). Retrieved online at 21:20, 4/20/09.
[6]Kent, S., The Ultimate History of Video Games. Three Rivers Press, New York (2001), 397.
[7]Manovich, L., The Language of New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge (2007), 33-34.
[8]Napier, S., Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. Palgrave, New York (2001), 22 & 181.

ABSTRACT
Schooled! was created for Michael Nitche’s “Design, Technology, and Representation” class (LCC 6312). Creating the game was a group effort undertaken by Simon Ferrari, Thomas Lodato, and Audrey Whitman. Schooled! is built into Unreal via UnrealEd. The game is a general reflection on the individual’s struggle to create their own identity in an environment that threatens to control that individuation—it is a game about the American Dream. Lighting is decidedly chiaroscuro, and the sound design creates an aura of pervasive mania. The player controls their movement and action in the space with a Guitar Hero controller. By locating sound objects within the game’s level, an elementary school, the player is able to activate or deactivate them in order to create their own personal aural space.

INTRODUCTION
Schooled! is a game about the American Dream, specifically its public education system and impulse toward cultural homogeneity. Education is a struggle between the individual’s need to gain knowledge and the organizational and intellectual hegemony of the board regulating each yearly curriculum. Players move through a 3D recreation of an elementary school with a Guitar Hero controller. The space is almost pitch black, expressively lit by spotlights of different color. The space is inundated by the din of almost 20 audio tracks playing simultaneously. Players set their own goals for themselves by navigating the space at their leisure, deactivating or re-activating sound objects as they see fit to construct their own aural space.

Thomas Lodato took the role of project lead, focusing on scripting, lighting, and object creation/placement. Simon Ferrari worked on level design, texturing, and the guitar controller peripheral. Audrey Whitman drew all the concept sketches and took the role of sound designer, constructing three distinct sound spaces composed of at least six clips each.

Our Concept and Backgrounds
The original concept was to create a completely abstract, black space. A constant, bass drone—representing the drive toward cultural homogeneity—would dominate the soundscape. Players would wear headphones in order to be able to hear slight differentiations of sound levels, cuing them on how to move through the space. Using their voices, players would be able to shoot at hidden objects emanating the drone, thus activating the object and causing it to play a different tune. An activated sound object would create a particle field of light, making part of the level visible and allowing players to orient themselves enough to move onto their next goal. Eventually the sound objects would decay and become de-activated, shrouding the player in darkness and defeat—a cynical ending we later redacted.

Inspirations and Source Texts
Visual inspiration for this concept came from a Battles music video for their song Tonto. The game was also to act as an aural counterpoint to the upcoming game The Unfinished Swan by Ian Dallas, in which the player will navigate a completely white space by shooting black paint at the level geometry. We follow Walter Murch’s assertion that “the most successful sounds seem not only to alter what the audience sees but to go further and trigger a kind of conceptual resonance between image and sound” (Murch xxii). A tight coupling of visual/sound space is what we were after.

Ferrari’s background is in race/gender representation in east Asian cinema. Lodato studied mathematical modeling and North American abstract film. Whitman majored in technical writing, but she also learned quite a bit about the sociology of education as an undergraduate.

Frame Analysis
Whitman drew from Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis to bring sociological considerations to bear on the project. Goffman explains how one understands what is going on in a situated context through “frames,” “keys,” and our reactions to them. A frame is a schema of interpretation that people rely on in order to contextualize an event or space. Keys are prior points of reference that allow one to identify and select from an array of possible frames. We read spaces using the same tools we use to read events and people; a space feels real based on how successfully it conveys its frames to a viewer/interactor. Our game partially dissociates keys and their frames in order to create a deliberately disorienting environment which must be navigated and experimented with carefully in order to be understood. Reading and writing a space is a process of “key” creation.

Sound as Violent Force
Ferrari drew inspiration from Mary Ann Doane’s critique of sync sound in classical Hollywood cinema, The Voice in the Cinema, in order to question the representation of bodies in game space. Doane explains that speech is an individual property right in the cinema. The cinema traditionally attempts to conceal the fact of its constructed nature by always associating the image of a body with the sound of its voice. Voice is thus how one is both contained by and expressed as an individual inside a film. A body anchors a voice within a cinematic space—disconnecting the two is a way to expose the ideology of organic unity in cinematic representation.

Invisible objects in our game emanate sounds, disconnecting the body from the voice. Players control their movement and action in the space with a guitar, an analogue for the voice. We fragment three distinct soundtracks into individual bytes, calling attention to the constructed nature of the game and allowing players to tear it down and rebuild it as they see fit.

Mathematical Topology
Azriel Rosenfeld’s seminal paper, “Digital Topology,” laid the groundwork for analysis of digital spaces through rigorous theoretical and numerical studies of discrete, countable space. In Thomas’s presentation of Rosenfeld, he linked digital topology to continuous topology in order to explore how space is changed, both conceptually and literally. Lodato saw this as a way of bridging the gap between our real world space and the virtual spaces we have created. The term space, and how we use it, is significantly shifted when we begin considering discrete connectedness. Instead of being a dimensional principle, space becomes a factor on connections of parts. While the methodologies may seem dated with our far more vast colloquial dialog with pixels, the manipulable properties of Maya and Unreal would have never come around without them.

The First Roadblock
Our original high concept adequately incorporated all three of these backgrounds, but there was a critical error in our conception of how to depict the problem of cultural and educational hegemony. Nitsche raised the question: “If your game is about combatting the rigid structure of American society, why are you only giving the player one path to proceed through?” Initial efforts to construct an interconnected system of three rooms that could be navigated in any order the player wished conflicted with our amateur abilities at level design. A new iteration on the idea was required.

Level Design
Whitman came up with an idea for how to make the game space both more concrete and more openly navigable: we would design a school. Henry Jenkins describes game design as “narrative architecture”; the school level needed to convey the fact that this was a game about the American education system and its impulse toward control, while allowing players to create their own story through the play experience. Audrey sketched up an initial layout for Ferrari to execute on, but he didn’t find the space expressive or large enough for their needs. Instead he mentally walked through the schools he had attended as a child in order to pick the most suitable model for their project. He decided on his elementary school, Lake Windward.

Unlike most schools he attended during his secondary education, which were oriented along a linear central corridor, Lake Windward was built around a square-shaped corridor intercut by a central library. Considerations of wheelchair accessibility in the school’s construction also led to the creation of strangely expressive ramps—particularly adaptable to the level geometry of a first-person shooter—throughout the school. Players begin in the school’s cafeteria, from which they can head in either direction toward the gym or two hallways filled with classrooms. Ferrari also scaled the level so as to emulate the point-of-view of a child. The end result is a fairly huge space that can nevertheless be traversed quickly due to its central layout and the inner path created by the library.

First Iteration
In Whitman’s original sketch, sound objects were moving actors that would traverse the space along a set course. There would be teacher objects and student objects. The player’s goal would be to figure out which teacher and student went together by listening to a tune emanated by each actor. We wanted to abstract the representation of human actors to avoid numerous criticism about the voyeurism inherent in film viewership, so Lodato created abstract puzzle pieces (to represent the actors) in Maya that would fit together when activated one after the other.

Ferrari was unhappy with the somewhat simplistic puzzle-solving activity this setup would create, and Nitsche criticized the team again for being overly controlling in how they were scripting their interactors (to take a term from Janet Murray). Abandoning the student-and-teacher puzzle pieces, the team moved forward with a more democratic goal: to create a playground filled with sound objects that the player could choose to activate or deactivate to their liking.

Second Iteration
Channeling Plato, Lodato conceived of a unique way to light the level and distribute both sound objects and inert mise-en-scene throughout the school. Maintaining the visual aesthetics of the original concept, much of the school is cloaked in darkness. Spotlights emanate from classroom doors, guide the player through the halls, and highlight corners to prompt turning. Initial playtesting showed that players needed extra feedback on where sound objects were located, so colored spotlights were added directly above them. A text prompt also tells players that they are within activation range of the sound objects. Echoing Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (from The Republic), many of the objects in the school are invisible to the player; one can locate them by looking for their colored spotlights and the shadows they cast on nearby walls. Invisible objects still carry a collision map, so navigating classrooms filled with unseen desks is something of a task; these represent the invisible obstacles to a student’s education.

Sound Design
The original working sound design of the project followed the model of matching two connected puzzle pieces located disparately in the space. Whitman composed two interlocking tracks, which when placed together would form a chord, to accompany each set of sound objects. When the experience became a more democratic affair following Nitsche’s second criticism, Whitman tasked herself with creating three distinct sound zones for the level. Each sound zone is based on a different genre of film, science fiction, war, and the western—these stand as forward-looking, present-day, and nostalgic aural textures, respectively. The experience of hearing all the spaces concurrently creates the feeling of a carnival—a space of pure play that must be explored and experimented with to be fully understood.

Stockburger describes auditory space as being constantly in flux, linking it to “Lefebvre’s notion of lived space, a kind of space that is ‘directly experienced’” (Stockburger 176). Our game follows Stockburger’s and Doane’s call for an understanding of aural space on equal footing with the representation of visual space. The music of three famous movies was used: Forbidden Planet, Full Metal Jacket, and Shane. These were distorted and mixed with industrial and public noise in order to create the final clips. One song was used from each film; Whitman broke each down into six smaller pieces after augmenting the original track. Whitman couldn’t simply cut the tracks down into underlying pieces, so she made multiple min/max passes through each track to isolate instrumental and vocal strings for manipulation. A baseline track was created for each area, which was then submitted to key changes, effects, reverb, and echo—this conveyed distance between the sound zones, which Unreal 2k4 is somewhat unable to do natively.

Player Control
The original concept for control was to allow the player’s voice to steer their navigation through the level. Ferrari attempted to build a patcher in Max/MSP that would convert pitch to MIDI and then send different MIDI ranges to a Java shell that would funnel keystrokes to Unreal. After about eight hours of fumbling Ferrari realized that he was both out of his programming league and wasting time.

Whitman proposed the solution: maybe we could use a Guitar Hero controller? This idea proved to be both  functionally superior and easier to execute on. Using a program called XPadder, Ferrari created a custom keystroke mapping that would function in the desktop background while the computer ran Unreal. Players navigate the space with the colored fret buttons (mapped to WASD). One can jump (space bar) by strumming up on the strum bar and activate objects (E button) by strumming down. Lodato scripted a guitar sound to play when the player strummed down, and Whitman created a crashing tambourine sound for when the player activated or de-activated a sound object.

Lessons Learned
Over the course of our semester in Nitsche’s “Design, Technology, and Representation” class, we’ve learned how to model and animate in 3D with Maya, construct levels and scripts in UnrealEd, and iterate on our ideas about how to depict the American Dream in videogames over the course of three distinct projects (basic modeling, basic level design, and the final group project). We’ve learned that the workflow of creating assets for a game can be trying (modeling in Maya on a Mac, converting the model with axmain on a PC, and then importing it into Unreal on another PC), and that there’s a great need for better documentation on game tools on the web. Overall we’ve grown as critics and designers, and working under someone so passionate about 3D design   (Nitsche) has been a pleasure.

Lodato: Following Kubrick’s candle-power experimentation in the film Barry Lyndon, Lodato explored how to give depth to a space using the lowest possible lighting. He considered the information that a blind person would need to navigate a space: “how many strides does it take to reach the end of a corridor,” “where are doors,” and “how do I know when to turn?” Working on the project, he learned a lot about how to “game” Unreal in order to turn sound objects on and off using scripted triggers. Sound in Unreal cannot be turned on and off, so Lodato managed a workaround by which the sound level of each track could be lowered to zero—he thinks this reflects the fact that one of the only ways to stay sane among others is to develop selective hearing, instead of explicitly ask others to silence themselves.

Lodato thinks that his job as project lead was made easy by the fact that Ferrari and Whitman took their work delegations seriously and always delivered material on time.

Whitman: While Audrey was reasonably comfortable editing sound and preparing it for Unreal, with what she learned in the course of completing this project she feels capable of moving on to more advanced sound design tasks in the future. In the process of placing and laying out the connective sonic tissue between each sound zone, she learned a lot about the relationship between sound design and the scale of a 3D space (the distance, direction, and size of a sound bubble determine in part how big a space ‘feels’ to the player, a perception that can be subtly altered through careful design and script triggering).

She reached a level of comfortability if not proficiently in Unreal scripting by bug-testing with Lodato, and would feel reasonably prepared to do more scripting in that vein. Since so little modeling was required for this level, her modeling skills remained much as they were.

Ferrari: First and foremost, Simon learned to listen to the suggestions of his teammates. On the very first day that he proposed the idea of constructing voice controls in the then-alien Max/MSP, Whitman excitedly asserted that a Guitar Hero would fit our ideas about the voice in a game space while also providing more efficient functionality for the player. Ferrari didn’t heed her advice, and he ended up wasting quite a bit of their valuable time fumbling around in the exceedingly difficult development environment that is Max.

Modeling a school in 3D is actually rather easy; texturing it is another task altogether. Schools are rather boring places visually, so a lot of work went into making each area in the school have its own unique flavor (to compliment the sound design). Ferrari had been highly critical of “game artists” who translated everyday spaces such as art museums into 3D engines, but he thinks that this project works because the form and function of the game achieve a tight coupling. Simon enjoyed the trip back in time to his primary school days, continuing his ludic exploration of personal nostalgia following the videogame mapping of his childhood neighborhood for DiSalvo’s design class last semester.

CONCLUSION
Schooled! is a game about one’s struggle to construct identity in our culturally homogenous home, the United States. Over the course of two concept and gameplay iterations, our team feels that we have conveyed this experience rather uniquely within a 3D space. The lighting design of the finished product maintains the visual aesthetic of the original concept—an abstract, black space that the player must navigate with their ears. Three distinct sound spaces, drawn from three genres of film music, allow an experimental building of a personal sound space. The setting of an elementary school makes for a space that everyone can relate to while exploring the subject of cultural homogeneity in the United States. The team worked effectively together and with Professor Nitsche to fully flesh out their high concepts and show what they’d learned over the course of the semester.

REFERENCES
[1]Battles, Tonto. Music video from album Mirrored, Warped Films, 2008.
[2]Dallas, Ian, The Unfinished Swan (2009, work in progress).
[3]Doane, M.A., The Voice in the Cinema. Yale French Studies (1980) pp. 373-385.
[4]Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Northeastern University Press (Boston) 1986, 21-83, 247-300, 345-348, 496-560.
[5]Jenkins, H. Game Design As Narrative Architecture. Henry Jenkins Publications, 2007, 1-15.
[6]Murch, W. Foreword, in: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, by Michel Chion. Columbia Univeristy Press, 1994, vii-xxiv.
[7]Rosenfeld, Azriel. “Digital Topology” in The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 86, No. 8 (Oct., 1979) pp. 621-630
[8]Stockburger, A. PhD Research into the Modalities of Space in Video and Computer Games. 2006, 175-206.