This time last week was the excellent GameCamp 4 – an unconference, in which attendees were encouraged to come along and give a talk about whatever was on their mind regarding videogames and non-digital games alike.

I decided to use this as an opportunity to try to elucidate some of my thoughts about videogames, the lens through which I see them, and my personal game design philosophy. I gave a talk in which I asked that ever-trite question, Are Games Astronomy? I’ve decided to write it up here, and better elucidate it where I can.

I should provide the caveat that this talk contains no practical or even useful advice, other than the mad ramblings of a fledgling game developer, on what I think is a lovely way to see the beauty and the wonder and the loveliness of video games.

So, videogames and astronomy, then; I think there exist some exciting, lovely parallels between the two – and, furthermore, that these parallels are made possible, uniquely, thanks to the power of computation.

The former, astronomy – beyond simple observation – attempts to model the universe, its nature and contemplates our place within it. Indeed, Professor Brian Cox, in his companion book to the BBC Wonders of the Universe series says:

“..to characterise the ancient science of astronomy as a spectator sport would be to miss the point. The wonders we see through our telescopes are laboratories where we can test our understanding of the natural world in conditions so extreme that we will ever be able to recreate them here on Earth.”

I believe that the greatest value of videogames also lies within a similar domain. If we’re to talk about how games can, perhaps, make us better at being human – help us become better people – then things like the recent gamification trend are, sadly, missing the point about the value of games. It is, instead about the potential that games have to teach us about our beautiful, flawed, complicated selves. To teach us about the universe, and way things work. Both games and cosmological software attempt, on varying scales, to model the universe. To model all there is, and all there ever will be, and try to understand it.

There are some ways in which astronomy and games can be the opposite, of course. While astronomy deals with the unthinkable vastness of the cosmos, games can deal with the tiny. The minutae of human experience. The complexity of our interactions, of our feelings. Our beauty, our flaws, our bizarreness, and our horror.

Ultimately, our struggle to understand ourselves is also a kind of astronomy. To explain why, I should start at the beginning. The very beginning.

About 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it exploded into being (we think), and has since ended up expanding from a tiny, unfathomably dense seed, smaller than an atom, containing all the ingredients needed to make up the universe as we know it, assembling into all the beautiful complexity that now makes up the cosmos, with its 100 billion-odd galaxies, spread across 45 billion light years.

We’re made of this same stuff, too. The same things that makes all the stars, galaxies, and nebulae, also makes us. As the great Carl Sagan famously said, “The cosmos is also within us – we are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” We are, simply, and yet also, at its most beautifully complex, “Star stuff contemplating the stars.”

Again, this is gorgeously echoed by writer/wizard, Alan Moore, in his beautiful spoken word piece, Snakes and Ladders:

“Through us, the cosmos gazes on itself, adores itself, breaks its own heart. Through us, matter stares slackjawed at it’s own stardusted countenance, and knows – incredulously – that it knows. And knows that it is universe.”

The Heart Nebula (IC 1805). The intersection of randomness and our penchant for pattern-seeking at its most beautiful.

The universe is unthinkably vast; the infamous Powers of Ten video, or this wonderful interactive Scale of the Universe reminds us of what we so often forget. That there is a lot of space out there. Of course, this unthinkable vastness, and our, for now, aloneness here serves to underscore our responsibility to one another.

The Pale Blue Dot - Earth as photographed from Voyager 1, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles.

Carl Sagan once said that “astronomy is a humbling, character-building experience”. The above image of the Pale Blue Dot (also pictured in this blog’s header), the furthest away from which Earth has been photographed, gives us an enormous sense of perspective of how tiny and fragile our existence. By understanding this nature of our existence, we can better understand ourselves, and how to live our lives.

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Astronomy, and videogames can both, from a broad perspective, help us in our dealings with one another. We model the universe in order to find truths about ourselves; about reality. This is why both disciplines are so beautiful.

Also, the reasons that these disciplines can both exist in the way they do, is basically, because we have computers, and we have the power of computational simulation.

As I discussed in my recent(-ish) piece on Digital Romance Lab, entitled “On Simulation, Science, and Love” simulations are, essentially, an embodied model of our understanding of something. As such, there are scientific models – that is, models based on the best scientifically-deduced understanding we have. And, there are subjective models – our own way of seeing the universe, of understanding people, and human systems, and how they work.

Simulations are not objective, and videogames especially are interesting in this respect. As noted by Harvey Smith, “it’s through the interactive systems–as related to the player’s agency–that we see the artistry in video games”. Indeed, this is how games create meaning through the gap between its rule-based procedures, and the player’s subjective response. This is what Ian Bogost calls the simulation gap. Therefore, in playing video games, we are able to critically reflect; to learn something about not just the game’s creator, but about ourselves.

I recently read the lovely little book Form+Code, which is an introduction to computational aesthetics. In it, it states:

“Software is a tool for the mind. While the industrial revolution produced tools to augment the body, such as the steam engine and the automobile, the information revolution is producing tools to expand the intellect…

…If computers can be used to model what we know, then perhaps we could also use them to simulate what we don’t know.”

Videogames are, then, excellent tools by which we can explore what it means to be human; to help us to explore, and unravel our subjective selves.

“We are insensate molecules. chemicals mingle in our sediment, and in their interactions and combustions, we suppose we feel, we suppose we love.” – Alan Moore, Snakes and Ladders

We are formed of a beautiful, subtle interrelationship between simplicity, and complexity, and this too is something that games help us elucidate. Our thoughts, our behaviours, all of our cognition are made up of complex systems. We relate to one another through complex systems. But how do games model this, more specifically? How does the computational simulation in a game work to teach us truths about ourselves, the way that simulations of galactic collisions can help cosmologists learn truths about how the universe works?

"Colliding galaxies, make love not war."

The process of game design is, in part, about breaking down these complex, human systems into their constituent parts. It’s about going from star stuff, to game atoms. To borrow a term from Raph Koster, these are the tiny constituent parts which make up a system in a game, all making up the complex compound which is eventually the whole game.

The Cosmos is rich beyond measure – in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe. – Carl Sagan.

“Theres a mystery at the heart of science, for which, as yet, we have no explanation, and that is that this universe is simple. Underlying all of the astonishing complexity appears to be a magnificent simplicity.” – Brian Cox

Seeing the world as a series of systems, with our behaviour as emergent properties of this, is a part of procedural literacy. To be able to take some part of the human experience, and break this down into a symbolic way of representing the world through procedures, is what game design does. This is important, and lends itself to long-term thinking, also. Perhaps, if we were all to adopt this kind of thinking, the world would be a slightly better place. But, that’s another topic. In a way, while, as Sagan said, “Astronomy is a humbling, character-building experience”, so too is game design.

So, are games astronomy? The answer is yes. Videogames allow us to unravel ourselves, to explore what it means to be a beautiful, complicated human. They allow us to explore what we do not know about ourselves, and to see if the truths we think we do know, can hold up under extremes we cannot recreate in our daily lives.

Videogames, just like astronomy, are about star stuff contemplating star stuff.

[This piece was also cross-posted to Gamasutra Blogs, and the talk was, very kindly, mentioned in PCGamer.com's coverage of the fantastic day that was GameCamp 4.]

I suppose I haven’t really talked about it over here, but I recently made, I suppose, the move to becoming an independent game developer, professionally, which I’m very excited about. (Also, meaning I’m a part-time PhDer instead). So yes, I signed a very exciting thing recently, which means that I’m working on my first official commercial project. It’s all very secretive at the moment, but you can keep up with happenings over at The Tiniest Shark – the name I’ve given to the studio consisting of, well, just me, at the moment. And my tiny, pixelated shark mascot too, of course.

I have another edition of my column out over at GameSetWatch (the title of the column, “Gambrian Explosion”, being a terrible pun based on Will Wright’s assertion of games as undergoing its own Cambrian Explosion of sorts.) This time, in a piece entitled “Games, Randomness, and The Problem With Being Human”, it’s a set of musings about randomness: our perception of it (spoiler: we think about it incorrectly), and the way in which games may exploit and/or educate us using randomness. Thanks very much to Martin Hollis and Luke Dicken for their thoughts and input on the topic.

At GSW: Gambrian Explosion: Games, Randomness, and The Problem With Being Human.

 

I took this picture of some of my dice collection myself for the piece! I'm really enjoying getting into photography as of late. In fact, you can see the rest of my noob photography on my Flickr (also viewable on this blog's sidebar.)

Since writing the piece I feel like I’ve been followed around by articles/other facts about our brains and randomness. That very fact is an interesting result of my pattern-seeking brain, of course, but regardless, I thought it might be nice to offload some of my additional recent fascination with stochasticity (the fancy word for randomness) here.

There’s an interesting set of articles on randomness in a recent issue of BBC Focus Magazine. One such article on the mathematical constant Pi and randomness was particularly fascinating; the way in which, when we look into randomness, there are all sorts of interesting connections with Pi. For instance, when dropping a needle onto a wooden floor, the chances that the needle will bridge the gaps between the floorboards depends on Pi.

The relative positions of stars in the night sky, even, was shown by Italian mathematician Ernesto Cesaro to lead to a value of Pi of 3.12772 – within 0.5 per cent of the true value.

Stars - whose relative position is related to Pi, apparently! Unlike the first photo, I didn't take this one, alas, but I wish I did! This was by the wonderful George Kokoris.

One of the additional interesting quirks of randomness is the way in which it causes clustering. While I talk about this a bit in the Gambrian Explosion piece, it has potentially significant wider-ranging effects too, as this (admittedly grim) example shows:

“Imagine a city that has an average of 12 murders a year, an average of one murder a month. If there’s a spate of three murders in a month – triple the expected rate – it would be easy to believe there’s a serial murderer about. Yet the laws of randomness show that such clustering is very likely. In fact, one should expect a rate of just one murder a month to occur only every 19,000 years. The clustering of random events is behind a whole host of scare stories, from spates of mysterious suicides, to claims of ‘cancer hotspots’. ”

Quite simply, our brain loves to seek out patterns, and additionally, seek out reasons for there being patterns. No doubt this exists for some evolutionary purpose, because we learned to recognise patterns which may lead to danger, or to food. However, our very human tendency to see patterns in randomness where there simply are none (and overdoing it) is known as apophenia. As I discuss in Gambrian Explosion, this sort of thing leads to a mistrust of actual randomness, but also, for instance, leads us to seeing pictures of Jesus in toast:

Jesus in toast? Yeah, I definitely did not take this one. Incidentally, though, I am working on a side-project connected to this sort of thing. No, not Jesus. Or toast, for that matter.

Overall, I find randomness absolutely fascinating, and a wonderful reminder of how unmagically magical are the actual workings of the universe. So too our are beautifully fallible human brains. It is awesome too, to imagine how video games might harness this, and seek to help us better understand ourselves, and the universe. One more link? Here we go.

Fair warning: I wrote this piece in a deliriously over-excited, underslept haze on the plane back from GDC, then decided not to post it due to plain weirdness and/or poor quality. I’ve just rediscovered it and decided to go ahead and post it, with the caveat that genuine bizarreness may hide actual ideas. So yes, in this piece you’ll find crazed musings on a hypothetical game developer’s arcology, and yet more Archulean hand axes. I seem to have been talking about those a lot recently.

Anyway, as I write this, I’m 40,000 feet in the air, on my way home from the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference, processing all the excellent presentations, conversations, and just plain socialising that went on over the past week with some of the best kinds of people in the world. As George put it, we’re in a “passion industry”. Everyone is there because they genuinely love video games, and that is the best feeling. I’m not sure that quite the same can be said of insurance, banking, or yoghurt*.

The week has also left me as exhaustedly delirious as I am excited, and, as such, I’ve just been idly thinking (and/or CRAZILY MUSING) about a hypothetical game developer’s arcology. This was spurred on by a short piece by Jonah Lehrer, entitled “The Importance of Physical Space”, in which he mentions a NYTimes column by David Brooks on ‘The Splendour of Cities‘. You should read both these pieces, but Brooks states:

This is a point Edward Glaeser fleshes out in his terrific new book, “Triumph of the City.” Glaeser points out that far from withering in the age of instant global information flows, cities have only become more important. That’s because humans communicate best when they are physically brought together… Cities magnify people’s strengths, Glaeser argues, because ideas spread more easily in dense environments.

Dense environments! This is exactly what I love about major cities, and for the longest time I could not quite articulate why I felt so much more inspired when I was in a proper metropolis (I grew up in a medium-sized, not very cosmopolitan city). But, it is because cities are all about ideas; about inspiration.

This is also so, so true of the “dense environments” just like those in and around the Moscone Center in early March every year. In a way, GDC is a bit like a microcosmic city-within-a-city.

Lehrer/Brooks’ articles also reminded me of a TED Talk by Matt Ridley last year, entitled “When Ideas Have Sex” (this is where the Archulean hand axes come in again, as he compares the design of the aforementioned axe to a computer mouse) – Matt states:

What’s the process that’s having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution? And I think the answer is exchange, the habit of exchanging one thing for another. It’s a unique human feature. No other animal does it. You can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange. And indeed there’s reciprocity in other animals. But the exchange of one object for another never happens. As Adam Smith said, “No made ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog.” You can have culture without exchange… In this case, chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks. But the difference is that these cultures never expand, never grow, never accumulate, never become combinatorial. And the reason is because there is no sex, as it were, there is no exchange of ideas.

This is precisely why GDC is so very important. It allows for this exchange of ideas. From my own experience, and those of countless others, it isn’t about the discussion that goes on within sessions, but more importantly, those that take place outside of the convention centre. Now, I realise the danger of swinging wildly between earnestness and abject facetiousness in this piece (again, blame the tiredness), but could you imagine if GDC-goers formed an actual city, in which game developers could live, work, play, and engage in a sexy exchange of ideas? A game developer’s arcology, if you will.

As Jenova Chen also noted during the Game Design Challenge session on Friday, we live in an ideas economy. (I also interviewed him about this – and more – to be featured in an upcoming Gambrian Explosion piece/on the podcast). Ideas are the most powerful things we have to trade, and we should facilitate such an exchange as much as possible. I’m obviously being facetious and not seriously suggesting that we round up all game developers and stick them in a massive super-structure (OR AM I), but the sentiment remains true, and shows exactly why things like GDC are so very important.

So, there we have it. Hypothetical arcologies, ideas, game developers, and Archulean hand axes.

* APOLOGIES IF THIS IS THE WORST ASSUMPTION.