31st August, 2010: Black Hole

This is the title of the M83 track that I currently happen to be listening to; I thought it seemed kind of apt, too!

I realise I unintentionally disappeared for a while. Or did I? Perhaps you can just think of this as an ‘irregularly updated blog’. Either way, I will try to remedy that. I have this new resolution to get over my perfectionism when it comes to things such as writing, and making things. (I am, as you’ll notice, also trying to be more candid on here; that’s another resolution.)

I’ve had several things about which I’ve been wanting to write on here for many months; I’ve seen, discussed, dreamt up, and read so many blogworthy things lately that I’m certainly not short of things to talk about, however, I never seem to find the time, or so I think. It’s true I’ve been busy; I’ve spent the last months juggling many different projects; that is, the doctorate (which has been my “day job”), my stealthy startup project (about which some of you now know), and of course, my charity. However, I’ve decided I’m no longer going to let that be an excuse.

Anyway, I wanted this entry to be a quick round up of miscellany; things which are mostly nothing to do with any of the Mitu-life triad as described. So here we go:

Sigh. Clearly, even in a quick, informal, ’round-up’ sort of post, I have no sense of brevity.

Posted at 9:11 pm | View Comments

26th February, 2010: Scanning the Enlarged Horizon: the Future of Games [Meta-post]

So, I finally wrote my inaugural post over at the awesome Vikki’s new project, GirlGamersSuck.com, and, as a result of many of the concerned musings I’ve read over the past couple of days about Jesse Schell’s DICE talk, I decided to post an editorial on my take on the future of games.

Please do have a read here: Scanning the Enlarged Horizon: The Future of Games.

In summary? Yes, I agree with those (such as Sirlin) who assert that the latter part of Jesse Schell’s talk is quite scary and a dystopian vision of the future – that the pursuit of external, rather than intrinsic rewards can, as George Kokoris wrote, “lead to a dilution of self-actualisation”. I assert, however, that this is not a failing of games which blend game mechanics with real-world activities, rather a failing of the individual game design that Schell presents; such can of course be the case for game design in any format, be it a board game, console game, or indeed, a pervasive/real-life game. As always, good design is paramount.

Additionally, to put some of this in context, I’m actually actively interested and involved in the different games at varying points along this wide spectrum:

  1. The first is a project for my PhD work (my research area is investigating innovations in controller technology, and what happens as we’re increasingly physically embodied).
  2. Another is an ‘abstract’ game, as a kind of personal, self-expressive, outlet (which I alluded to in my previous post).
  3. Finally, the third, is a pervasive game-like project, which is designed to positively benefit people – and importantly, be fun (alluded to a few times on twitter as my #supersekkritproject). You’ll be hearing more about this soon, hopefully.

I’m proposing that the future of games is not any one type of game, of course, but that we are seeing this ever-widening spectrum of what games can possibly be. There is room for all, and that is pretty exciting.

[As an even more personal sidenote, it was an interesting writing experiment too – I’m used to writing academically, or just for myself (as I mostly do here on my blog!). Therefore, trying to write for a more "general audience" for the first time in a long time was interesting (i.e. trying not to get too in-depth/complex, etc). Not sure how I did. But we shall see.]

Posted at 6:17 pm | View Comments

3rd February, 2010: Proust Was a … Game Designer?

Games Design, Research, and the “Fourth Culture”

Firstly, you’ll have to excuse the rather absurd title (the above subtitle is far more accurate), but, I will explain. Despite it having taken me way too long, I recently finished reading Jonah Lehrer’s brilliant debut book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Amazon). I can confidently declare that it has been one of the best, most personally influential books I’ve read for a while.

This is not so much a review of the book, as much as it is a few personal musings on how it has affected my thinking, and, furthermore, how I perceive Lehrer’s central premise to be one which is strongly applicable to game design, and, indeed, games research. Whilst you don’t necessarily need to have read the book in order to  understand this blog post (that is, if it makes any sense at all!), I highly recommend that you do. Again, here it is on Amazon!

Lehrer gives away in the prelude that “the moral of this book is that we are made of art and science”; it is founded on the premise that, when it comes to understanding the human brain, art has quite often “got there first”. Drawing on examples such as George Eliot’s ideas of the malleability of the brain, Paul Cezanne’s work on perception and sight, Igor Stravinsky’s understanding of how the brain processes music, and of course, Marcel Proust’s revelations of the falleability of memory, he shows how such artists have anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. Indeed, neuroscience is a fascinating subject, and Lehrer writes in a brilliant, accessible style. However,  I won’t be getting into these, which is why I strongly recommend you read the book.

Instead, I found this quite an apt read for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’ll preface this with a reminder that I am someone whose own formal higher education has been, more or less, completely technical. I studied  Computer Engineering for four years at university (and obtained my MEng), and prior to that, I did my A-Levels in Physics, Maths, Chemistry – and English Lit. That latter one was not only because I thoroughly enjoyed the subject, but also, due to some vague attempt at ‘rounding out’ my subjects. I have to confess, I’m not sure if I was ever clear, at age 16-18, as to exactly why that was important. I’d say, in fact, that it’s only been over the last couple of years, over the course of my doctorate thus far that this has become apparent. I guess I took a while with my personal journey (and perhaps I’m still on it), in which I eventually conceded to the realization of how inherently interdisciplinary everything really is. Especially, I suppose, when you’re in the realms of video games research, and design.

Games Research and the Fourth Culture

I’ll talk only briefly about this, saving further details of my more recent research for another upcoming post. However, I wanted to draw particular attention to Lehrer’s final chapter of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, in which he provides us with what is essentially an irresistible call to action for the birth of a new, “fourth culture”. This, he argues, should supercede the current “Third Culture“, which strayed from C.P. Snow’s original vision; instead, the current third culture refers to the communication of scientific writing/thinking to the masses (by, for example, those such as Richard Dawkins). Instead, Lehrer writes that a new fourth culture should be one that “seeks to discover relationships between the humanities and the sciences.” In such a culture, “the humanities must engage sincerely with the sciences”, and “at the same time, the sciences must recognise that their truths are not the only truths.”  He states that this culture is much closer in concept to Snow’s original definition. He writes:

“[the fourth culture] will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience… This is what our third culture should be about. It should be a celebration of pluralism.”

I would assert that games research is perhaps exemplary of this kind of pluralism.

When I first set out on my PhD, I immediately found myself in a very interdisciplinary sort of environment. My peers were from all sorts of backgrounds; such is the nature of the School of Creative Technologies at the University of Portsmouth.  Back then, although my broad subject area was more or less the same, (well, very, very broadly, I guess) I wanted to measure things, precise things, and record them. I wanted things to fit into neat, quantifiable boxes. I wasn’t even a scientist by training, but an engineer, and thought, logically, that these could be the only sort of truths. However, I was also simultaneously very aware that ‘Game Studies’ as a wider field seemed impossibly filled with humanities and social science scholars. I will confess, I was minimally irked by this at first, though later, realised that this was probably because I had realised that I had a lot to learn. Two years later, I’ve decided that whilst empiricism is still compelling, I did realise that it is, of course, not the only answer, particularly when we are considering the experiential aspects of playing video games, as I now am. After all, as Lehrer writes, and is, essentially, the very core of Proust Was a Neuroscientist:

“Scientists describe our brains in terms of its physical details: they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not the machine). It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.”

Mirroring this, I am much more interested now in the experience, the way we feel when we play. For this reason, at the same time as I’m hacking hardware and programming and doing practical things, I’m also currently planning research methodologies beyond that of scientific reductionism; that is, of mixed-methods, and of phenomenology. Of course, I am not saying that a strictly scientific empirical approach is wrong; and neither, indeed, is a strictly theoretical, humanities-based approach. As Lehrer states, “Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.”

Which way? Originally from engadget it appears, but I got this from @bokista on Twitter!

Game Design and The Fourth Culture

Just as I’ve found pluralism in my research methodologies, similarly, I would argue that game design itself is also a kind of celebration of pluralism. Or, at least, it should be. Games are, to varying degrees, about taking what are essentially mathematical and logical constructs, and from this, eliciting an experience.

After all, what are games, really? We can argue that they are equally the machine code, the physical or virtual ‘packaging’ they may come in, or the feeling of engagement and fun that they give rise to. Where, in all of these components, does the ‘game’ really exist, after all? A game is the sum of all of these parts. [Indeed, for more on this you should read Ian Bogosts’ DiGRA keynote on the flat ontology of games].

Games are as much science/engineering as they are an experience. Of course, in many cases, this experience may simply be fun, and that is brilliant and perfectly fine. However, in some cases, rather than fun, a game may intend to offer some kind of other experience, and it’s this I wanted to talk about especially.

My good friend, the very awesome Doris Rusch, spoke at DiGRA 2009 about designing video games which reflect the human condition, in a talk entitled “Mechanisms of the Soul” (you can also download the paper here). As Doris notes, few games currently enhance our understanding of ourselves, or address “the mechanisms of our very souls and how they shape our believes, behaviors and relationships towards the world around us.” It is such games, like many, that I like to think about and try to design. Whilst there are increasing numbers of games which aspire to this, in addition to the oft-cited favourites (e.g. Rohrer’s Passage, Humble’s The Marriage, etc), there is still a long way to go.

Doris, in her paper, goes on to ask how games may indeed ‘step up to the plate’, and in doing so, defines three different ways. These may be summarised thus:

These serve as an excellent starting point for thinking about the subject; as Doris herself states, this is by no means an exhaustive list of how games can reflect the human experience. One may also argue that these devices do not necessarily work in isolation, and any game addressing the human condition may fulfil more than one of these devices.

So where does Proust Was a Neuroscientist fit into all of this, exactly? Well, in recent years, I’ve been more and more interested in addressing games which are, as above, reflective of certain personal experiences; I’ve designed (or at least begun to design) many in this way, though they’ve not necessarily been the sort of thing I would want to release publicly. Such design has been largely a kind of personal therapy.

Only a couple of these games have seen me putting cursor to code at all, not only due to the above reasons, but also due to time constraints. However, there is one in particular, that I’ve resolved to see through to completion this year. I won’t give too much away just yet (though a couple of screenshots are below),  but, as I read Lehrer’s book, I was reminded of the process of designing such a game, one that attempts to tackle a very specific aspect of my human experience, at least. After all, such a process necessitates taking “what reality feels like”, and attempting to translate (though not necessarily reduce) it into rules, into logic, and into code. That is, taking an experiential concept, and proceduralising it. All this requires a plural understanding of science and art. Indeed, Chris Swain, even had a chapter in Game Usability (2008) entitled “The Science Behind The Art of Game Design”, and, it was only after drafting most of this post that I came across these slides by Raph Koster from GDC 2005, entitled: “A Grammar of Gameplay – game atoms: can games be diagrammed”, which, in part (sort of), addresses what I’m trying to get at here. That is, the marriage between the experience and the algorithm.

Mitu's work-in-progress game: screenshot #1

Mitu's work-in-progress game: screenshot #2

I suppose I am advocating here that game design is (or at least can be) a great manifestation of this kind of fourth culture; particularly the sort of game design which some may term “meaningful”; that is, those games which attempt to reflect our conscious, human experience, and what “reality feels like”.

So, back to the clumsy and preposterous title of this post: Proust was a  … Game Designer? Well, no, he wasn’t. Neither were any of the other artists that Lehrer talks about in his wonderful book. However, they were all individuals who, through reflection, presciently understood a very real part of  our human experience, and translated this into a form of art. Games offer an opportunity to do the same, and in order to heed this call, one must understand and be able to connect the reductionist facts of logic, of metrics, and of game science to the human experience, and vice versa.

Game design itself is a celebration of pluralism.

Posted at 1:18 am | View Comments

15th October, 2009: Blog Action Day: Climate Change & Video Games – Part 3/3

Some Quick Final Thoughts on Climate Change & Video Games

I hope you’ve enjoyed at least some of the games I’ve linked today. However, on the subject, there are a few things I think are worth discussing.

Games, Climate Change, and Politics.

You might think that some of the games I’ve linked to today aren’t really too helpful to the player in terms of teaching them to mitigate the effects of climate change. In fact, some of them are rather political in nature, some more explicitly so than others.

Mitigating the effects of climate change is, of course, as much about political action as it is about personal action. If you can’t see why, then do play some of the aforementioned games in the previous two posts; they will enlighten you more than any further rhetoric here can. No really, go back and play: post #1, post #2.

This is why COP15 – United Nations Climate Change Conference this December in Copenhagen is so vitally important.  It’s goal is to establish an ambitious global climate agreement for the period from 2012 when the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol expires. “15,000 officials from 200 countries will gather”. Yes, it’s a pretty big deal.

After various internet campaigns sought to send UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the conference, he recently announced that he would personally attend the conference, and urged other world leaders to do the same. Indeed, last month, Brown wrote in Newsweek that:

In just 11 weeks, the world will convene in Copenhagen, under the auspices of the United Nations, to forge a new international agreement on climate change. It is a historic moment: the ultimate test of global cooperation. Yet the negotiations are proceeding so slowly that a deal is in grave danger.

If we miss this opportunity, there will be no second chance sometime in the future, no later way to undo the catastrophic damage to the environment we will cause.

Edit: And it seems, Gordon Brown has even posted a Blog Action Day blog post of his own today!

But Video Games & Climate Change? Isn’t that a little… hypocritcal?

So, video games and climate change. You might think “Hmm, I don’t want to be a downer, but isn’t there a bit of hypocrisy in this? If we want to prevent climate change, shouldn’t we use less electricity, lower energy consumption and not play games?”

Gen-u-wine FB Comment.

Right. Well, that is true. After all, according to this article from February of this year, “Video games consume as much energy as San Diego“.

But also extending that same valid logic, Blog Action Day itself is a little counterproductive; we should, perhaps, switch off our laptops and go play outside. But no, we can understand that it is about creating awareness. Indeed, Blog Action Day is a mass social experiment to get thousands of people blogging on the same day about the same important issue. Thus, the number of readers who have had climate change brought to the forefront of their thoughts today is estimated to be 13 million. If all these people were then themselves to take action, whether it be by personally changing their habits to live more ‘greenly’, or by pushing their local politicians, then the potential impact is massive.

Of course, video games have a collossally huge playerbase; you don’t need me to tell you that. If we, as people who make and think about games, can do something to make gamers take action, then the impact would likewise be huge.

Okay, so it’s about creating awareness. But who would want to play games about climate change anyway?

Okay, so we’ve seen games which are quite openly and expressedly political/environmental. Some of them are really rather good. But, what about the games we play every day, though? What about popular, successful, commercial games? After all, these aren’t about climate change, and if they were, surely nobody would buy them anyway if they were about a ‘serious’ issue?

What if games were to address climate change without being explicitly about climate change, however? This brings me to Clive Thompson’s article in Wired earlier this year, in which he claims that “Flower is about climate change. What’s more, it may be the first — and only — truly good game about climate change.”

Flower

Indeed, Thompson asserts that Flower is “about changing or improving the situation – and making you feel wonderful”:

And what’s most remarkable is that Flower manages to do this without being cloying and preachy. Indeed, the game is amazingly subtle.

He does however address the fact that plenty of other [mainstream] games refer to climate change in that they are set in a “near-future world ravaged by global warming”; however, in such games, “climate change is part of the background”. There are of course many, many games set in some kind of post-apocalyptic environment (whether that be caused by global warming or nuclear holocaust, alien invasion, or otherwise). However, these do not necessarily compell players to think about their real-world environment; after all, what do many contemporary video games tell us apart from the fact that living in a post-apocalyptic environment is kind of “badass” and awesome?

What is it we need, then? Maybe more games depicting a ravaged and destroyed Earth which isn’t quite so… sexy? I mean, that isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be games in which it is that way, but more voices, and thus more balance is what’s perhaps needed?

Or perhaps Flower and the like is the way forward?

Maybe the answer is something else entirely that we haven’t even thought of? (Maybe taking it offline? Perhaps pervasive games & ARGs might be most suitable for thinking about climate change games?)

Why Gamers Would Be Rather Good at Fighting Climate Change and Saving the World

That probably seems like an odd thing to say about a demographic that uses all that power, after all.

However, moving aside from the old “gamers are used to saving the world all the time” thing (ha!), more seriously, one thing that countless years of playing video games does help you with is a) thinking strategically and b) resource management. These are potentially great tools which can be harnessed in the fight to mitigate climate change.

So, as I’ve explored in these brief notes here, we have the pieces, but how can we, as people who make/think about games, solve this problem?

Posted at 10:20 pm | View Comments

15th October, 2009: Blog Action Day: Climate Change & Video Games – Part 2/3

I hope some of you checked out one or two of the games I mentioned earlier. Here are a couple more for you!

Eco Ego

Eco Ego

Eco-Ego is a little Japanese flash game that is, as you would expect, very cute-looking indeed. Also, with a set time limit, it doesn’t take long to play through at least once. Therefore, you should most definitely check it out. Play it here!

ElectroCity

ElectroCity

ElectroCity is another Sim game, in which the player is the mayor of a town/city. It’s particular focus is on New Zealand, in fact – it was funded by a New Zealand energy company, Genesis Energy.

Want to play? You can do so here!

Posted at 6:49 pm | View Comments


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