A Game That Matters

One of the members of the Alliterates pointed me towards this great editorial on The Escapist: How A Board Game Can Make You Cry. It's a really great look at what Brenda Brathwaite has been doing recently in terms of designing games that make you think - starting with a game about the Middle Passage she made to illustrate how horrific the slave trade was, so that her ten-year-old daughter could make an emotional (and logical) connection to the facts taught in her school.

The article then cites a game called Train:

The object of Train is to get a collection of people from Point A to Point B by placing them in a boxcar and sending them on their merry way. Played among a group of three people, players draw cards from a pile that can impede other players or free them from existing obstacles. The first player to reach the end of the line wins.

The destination? Auschwitz.

The "game" didn't stop there, however. The game board ... is an allusion to Kristallnacht - Brathwaite explained that she needed to break a fresh piece of glass each time she "installed" her work in a new location to properly evoke the violence of the experience. She even typed the game's instructions on an actual SS typewriter, which she purchased solely for that purpose.

Nazis have featured prominently in games for a long time, typically as the enemy, whether it was Wolfenstein's chaingun-wielding Hitler or the recent flood of World War II shooters on the market. Nazis are kind of like zombies in that they've become sort of an abstract enemy, relentlessly evil and fodder for headshots.

Very few, if any, games featuring Nazis ever touch on the Holocaust, and if they do it's usually some muscle-bound mook with guns liberating a death camp where you don't actually see the victims.

What makes Train - and, I would argue, any game whose mechanics make the audience think (Braid, I'm looking at you) - so interesting is that the connection it creates to its subject matter is both rawly emotional and rationally engaging. In the example about the African slave trade, a game mechanic involves the players arranging groups of slaves by tribe and family, and then picking up slaves by the fistful, so that the full impact of separation is both observed and felt. All that hard work - to work of building a life and a family - is laid to waste, and then the true 'game' begins.

There is an argument about whether games can be art. Things like Train and designers like Brenda Brathwaite prove beyond a doubt they can.

ARGs and the Changing Face of Fiction Online

A fascinating pair of posts ran recently on two separate websites about the ARG (alternate reality game) marketing techniques around The Dark Knight (which, as it just came out in the UK, I have not yet seen.) The first post on Movie Marketing Madness describes in excruciating detail every piece of 'alternate reality' created by the Dark Knight’s agency. It is an amazing and exhaustive list: I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that this is probably the most complex and involved ARG to date.

The second was a post labelled [RANT] on sci-fi blog io9 called The Argument Against ARGs. I wouldn't even call it a rant: the author does a good job summarizing the basic history of ARGs (although the excellent ARG for Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero album isn't included, and it beats the socks off iheatbees) but outlines a very real problem with ARGs. Money quote(s):

I see nothing wrong with making advertising more fun, and there's no doubt that a lot of people enjoy playing ARGs. What I do have a problem with is the way ARGs seem to have no lives of their own – they feel like they exist solely to advertise another story. At least videogame tie-ins to movies are marketed as their own, standalone items.

With a few notable exceptions, ARGs are basically treated like walk-in commercials a lot of the time. But commercials can't really masquerade as games: It's foolish for entertainment companies to assume that they can get audiences to forget that they're being virally marketed to. And yet I think ARGs are temping as advertising campaigns because their structures inspire so many of the fan behaviors that media companies translate into instant dollar signs. But getting people to run around and do things is not the same as inviting an audience to enjoy a compelling narrative with a bunch of pals. So with an ARG I get a crappy cell phone instead of a cool fan community? ...

… [w]hat I'd like to see are ARGs for their own sakes — ARGs that involve fans not because they give away posters or free showings, but because they are genuinely compelling tales that you actually want to interact with. A best-case scenario for ARGs might be that they ditch parent stories altogether, becoming their own entities.

Emphasis mine.

This is exactly my problem with ARGs and why they may very well be the next great form of entertainment.

Allow me a digression for a moment. One of the best books I've read in the last five years is Mark Z. Danielewski's stunning House of Leaves, which is many things to many people: a very unique horror novel, a satire of literary criticism, and potentially 'just plain fucking weird.' The book itself is a labyrinth of footnotes that lead to more footnotes, different colors of text that may or may not have meaning, size and positioning of text, stories within stories and stories within footnotes. There's even a 'soundtrack' of sorts – the author's sister is indie music artist Poe whose album 'Haunted' is essentially a soundtrack for the book. Many of the track names mirror chapter titles in House and the title track specifically mentions 'this house of leaves' in the lyrics, and has other references to the book as well.

As I read House I began to wonder: how would this book work as a movie? Is there any way to translate these disparate elements, many of which are intended to be clues to discover the underlying plot, to an entertainment medium? My answer at the time (keep in mind, this was 2002 or so) was to release it as a DVD and include the footnotes / secondary stories as extra features accessible during the movie, or as a commentary track.

Which really isn't a bad idea, but doesn't really account for the full breadth of the book's rich puzzle and mystery. House of Leaves is essentially a mini-ARG in that it combines several elements to form a mystery with various clues. It follows a tradition of literary 'puzzles,' most notably modernist works like Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's poems, and takes it a step further by introducing a different world of magical realism and strange happenings, where houses can be bigger on the inside than the outside. A mini-ARG.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cathy’s Book, an actual ARG and bestselling book by Jordan Weisman and others (full disclosure: I worked for Jordan's old game company, WizKids, and many of my friends for his new company, Smith and Tinker.) In fact Cathy's Book is exactly what the io9 writer was talking about: an ARG for its own sake, not selling a product. But even Cathy's Book just scratches the surface of what's possible with the myriad variety of content deployment mechanisms the Internet provides.

My job forces me to think about how to bring those mechanisms together to 'tell a client's story.' Storytelling is what PR really is, when you get down to it. Except online those stories are less about shouting at people or performing a play for them and more about involving them in writing the story yourself. Kind of like (nerd alert) running a roleplaying game. Although you have a goal in mind, the way in which you get there is based as much on player input (community input) as it is your own 'story.' The nonflexible gamemaster sucks, as does the nonflexible PR storyteller.

But it also affords massive opportunities to do exactly what Jordan did and what the io9 writer proposes to do. If 'all media is multimedia,' surely we gamemasters and storytellers should discover new ways to tell our tales online? And surely, purely from a storytelling standpoint, we can do that with ARGs for their own sake?

I pose this not as a marketer but as a writer: if literature is already becoming more gamelike and games are becoming more literary, doesn't it make sense for us to be thinking of this space not as a way to sell tickets to movies or things only tangentially-related to the ARGs that marketers create but as a new and unlimited canvas for us to start telling engaging tales to audiences who clearly want this sort of thing?

The ARG's future and its literary possibilites and implications are something to watch indeed.

Photo "Art Is Resistance - London" (from the Year Zero ARG) from Jennaphoenix' Flickr stream.

Fallout 3 Community Questions

The Fallout 3 Blog posted a list of 25 questions about Fallout 3 generated by the fan community. Bethesda has taken a slightly different approach to the Fallout community with this game than I might have taken, but it's great to see that a) Bethesda is making a good effort, and b) the questions are really good and really responsible (not a single instance of "rape the franchise.") In other words, company and community have met on a middle ground, and I hope this is the start of a good relationship.

I'm not kidding anyone - I'll be picking up a copy of Fallout 3 on the day it's released even if it's nothing more than Brahmin dung in a box (which I don't think it will be.) But I'm very curious about the questions the fans asked. It's also interesting to note how many of the questions relate to gameplay mechanics and interface. Game companies, take note: release fewer trailers and more videos of gameplay in action. Rockstar, I'm looking at you.

How To Design A Shitty Game [UPDATE 1]

1. Create a reward that is only possible for completing a level without dying.
2. Create a level based around vehicle combat.
3. Spend zero time implementing intuitive vehicle combat controls.
4. Make an unskippable three-minute cutscene before the level.
5. If the player dies and doesn't get the reward, force them to go all the way back to the menu before replaying the level - and of course watch the cutscene again.
6. Repeat three times.

[UPDATE 1]"I swear if I don't get it this time, I'm going to murder a hobo."

"Honey, it's just a game!"

"But it's just a hobo!"

Jack Thompson should never read this, ever. What have I become? Damn you Lucas for licensing your IP to shitty game designers! Damn you to HELL!

The Way I Game

I've been playing a lot of Oblivion lately (again) so I can mop up the last achievements for it, and a couple things have struck me about how the game works - or more appropriately, how responsive it is to me.

Doing the quests for the thief's guild, I had to (in game) steal 1000 gold worth of items. I have a feeling that I may have lost some of my readers with that statement, but if you're still there, this post was for you anyway.

So 1000 gold. In the game, you can accomplish this in any way as long as you're stealing and selling something. The most valuable things to steal are weapons and armor and such, but being me, I went a different path - I stole wine. And nothing but wine. No wine cellar in Cyrodil was safe.

But the game had no built-in mechanic to recognize my role-playing or decision-making. Not that I really expected one; I've been playing computer RPGs since Starflight, Might & Magic, and the Bard's Tale, so this isn't anything new. Part of the allure charm weakness of C-RPGs is that you kind of have to make up some of the roleplaying elements on your own - say, restricting yourself to stealing wine to complete a quest. Or making up a backstory for a hero who's really nothing more than numbers. In fact, I'll openly admit that I preferred Icewind Dale over Baldur's Gate for that reason. I liked playing with characters that I wrote a story for in my head, rather than run "my" character through some other character's background story.

But some games do have built in systems to recognize those kinds of decisions. Fallout 2 is the example that comes to mind. If a character kills a child, or robs a grave, or kills an entire town, he earns a special "perk" that makes other characters respond to him much differently.

Granted those are extreme examples, and are something that's likely within the framework of the game. And as I discussed with Seth a few days ago, it's just not feasible for game designers to adapt to every yahoo who decides "hey, I'll steal wine to complete this quest!"

But those kinds of adaptive game elements, especially in the so-called sandbox games, would certainly be awesome.

You know I mentioned Fallout 2 earlier, and Bethesda made Oblivion - and is working on Fallout 3. It's almost like there's a deeper meaning here.

Almost.