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.

I might as well warn you now, this entry is a string of thinly-veiled excuses. Firstly, it is a thinly veiled excuse to post the classic ridiculous-but-amazing Dre/Snoop as referenced in the title, as it is a relentless (but appropriate) earworm lately. Secondly, it is to plug Kill Screen Magazine. Thirdly, it is an excuse to make sure you have watched one of my favourite talks from Alain de Botton. Lastly (and overarchingly), it is a bit of a sprawling apology for my lack of regular bloggings and such (for the One-A-Day/Week Project). You have been warned. So then, the musical interlude.

Right. If you haven’t ordered the last issue of Kill Screen (it has been out a couple of months now) then you should. Go here and do it now. It is full of excellent writings from my friends and contemporaries, and even I make a tiny appearance in which I write about games academia and existential angst.

The reason I wanted to bring that up (aside from wanting to plug the issue) was that in my opening paragraph, I reference a 2009 TED Talk by writer Alain de Botton, in which he suggests that “we live in an age where our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises; by moments when what we thought we know about our lives comes in contact with a threatening sort of reality.” This TED talk is definitely one that is worth watching. Go do so now. I’m sure that most of you, at the very least, are familiar with this:

“The dominant kind of snobbery that exists today is job snobbery. You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous, iconic question of the 21st century, “What do you do?” And, according to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses.”

So, you should have finished watching by now. If you watched it (you should have), you’ll know that it is about career anxiety. It seeks to gently warn us of the dangers of our meritocratic thinking; of that belief that the harder we work and the smarter we are, the higher we will rise. This is a harsh way of thinking, lacking the nuance that acknowledges that sometimes, things will just go wrong, and we must not always blame ourselves. Tying this to the lessons that we learnt from the Camusian existentialist Hannah Montana last time, we may posit that sometimes, it is okay for things to not go as planned. But, we must keep on trying.

Such as, the intention to keep a weekly-updated blog in the face of other extreme busy-ness, for instance. Or, if you are Dr Dre, you may have changed some of your beats lately, and, being such, you may feel that while “Ladies they pay homage”, one’s “haters say Dre fell off.” We must, however, note Dre’s perseverance as he explains to us that “when I was close to defeat, I rose to my feet.” You certainly did, Dre. And so too will this blog.

No, this title is no exaggeration; this really is about Hannah Montana and existentialism. It is also, in a way, about ambition, achievement and, since it is now January 2011, and these are things many of us think about at New Year, it is implicitly about that too.

Most crucially, this post is about The Absurd. Not indeed, the kind of “absurd” reserved for say, the idea of writing about Hannah Montana and existentialism (ahem), but, for those unfamiliar with the philosophical term, the idea that there is a conflict between the human tendency to seek meaning in life, the universe, and everything, and our inability to find meaning in a cold, impartial universe.

To some, such a notion may seem awfully bleak at first glance, though, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, philosopher Albert Camus does offer a solution. Camus considers the legend of Sisyphus, the mythical King who was doomed  to forever push a boulder up a mountain, which, when it reached the top, would roll back to the bottom; thus it would continue for eternity. To Camus, Sisyphus was the ultimate Absurd hero, condemned to a meaningless task; and yet, he concludes:

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Our lives are journeys, and, within these journeys, happiness and meaning is to be found. This is where Hannah Montana concurs.

“Life’s a climb, but the view is great.” — Hannah Montana, Hannah Montana: The Movie.

Admittedly, these words are originally spoken to Miley by her inevitable cute-teenage-boy-love-interest in Hannah Montana: The Movie, then, once she has understood the lessons to be found within the movie, she repeats them in the concluding scene, before performing the movie’s main song, The Climb. A perfect aspirational, existentialist anthem.

You may read the full lyrics here, but an excerpt is below:

“There’s always gonna be another mountain,

I’m always gonna wanna make it move.

Always gonna be an uphill battle,

Sometimes I’m gonna have to lose.

Ain’t about how fast I get there,

Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side:

It’s The Climb.”

As we can see, this is basically a song all about Camusian existentialism.

While Camus also states that “the workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd”, it need not be so specific (as many readings go) as to refer to the futility of jobs working in factories and such. Absurdism applies to the entirety of our human existence; to the plethora of experiences which make up our modern careers. Indeed, The Climb was originally written by songwriters Jessi Alexander and Jon Mabe, about the obstacles they had overcome, and overcoming the struggles they faced in the music industry, “being underdogs in the business”, and having “record deal ups and downs”.

Our careers, our lives, are Sisyphean journeys; there is meaning and value inherent in these journeys. Always gonna be an uphill battle; the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.

I’m the first to admit that I’ve always been a very ambitious sort of person. I take pleasure in the struggle; in trying to scale mountains, as literal or figurative as they may be. It is, simply, my personality type. For someone like me, Camus/Montana’s existentialism is extremely pertinent, and actually encompasses a number of the platitudes which comes along with trying to reach lofty goals: “fail early, fail often”, for instance. Keep rolling that boulder up that mountain.

At the beginning of a New Year, it seems customary for most of us to reflect upon our achievements so far, and think about our ambitions for the next stage of our lives. The knowledge that “sometimes you’re gonna have to lose” should not stop us from making Big Hairy Audacious Goals. In fact, it is best, for it is the struggle towards these goals that makes the journey more interesting.

I wish you all success and happiness in your own journeys in 2011. Make resolutions, set lofty goals. Know that some you will achieve, and some you will fail. However, keep on rolling that boulder. Happy New Year.

Footnote 1: It would have been very easy to make parallels to playing video games in this, but  I wanted to keep this one short and accessible for now. Back to video games later.

Footnote 2: This was the first of at least weekly posts for the excellent One A Day blogging project. Some of the forthcoming posts may mean I make a whole series of Hannah Montana and Philosophy type posts. Be warned.

Music is brilliant at poignancy. Take, for instance, this gorgeous, gorgeous cover of ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ by Scala, with which I have lately been mildly obsessed. No really, go and listen to it – even if you cannot directly relate to the song (and, I’m sure, at some point we all can), it is hauntingly beautiful nevertheless. It could be any kind of music, from pop to beautiful walls of noise. My own examples aside, no doubt there are plenty of songs which make you feel this way.

It seems trite to say, but music is good at the kind of emotions that we want games to evoke. I wrote earlier this year about games which express the human condition, or more specifically, about the process of designing such games. Designing games which elicit genuine, deep, emotional response is the goal of many-a-game designer (“Can a gaem maek u cry?” aside).

Perhaps, for help with how we can do this, we can turn to father of abstract art, the Russian painter Kandinsky, and his essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

“A [game designer], who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own [game]. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in [games] , for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.

This borrowing of method by one art from another, can only be truly successful when the application of the borrowed methods is not superficial but fundamental. One art must learn first how another uses its methods, so that the methods may afterwards be applied to the borrower’s art from the beginning, and suitably. The artist must not forget that in him lies the power of true application of every method, but that that power must be developed.”

The astute amongst you may have deduced that this is not entirely Kandinsky’s original text, but instead, in the bracketed instances, I have replaced “painter” with “game designer” and “painting” with “game. Also, the emphasis is my own. However, you will notice how this does in large part, if not entirely, make a lot of sense.

Basically, Kandinsky asserts that designers (er, “painters”) who are interested in deeply expressing themselves cannot be satisfied by making games (“paintings”) which are just “mere representations” (in the case of games, simulations?), and must envy the way that music can do this so effortlessly.

We can even read back through the paragraph, replacing “music” with “film”; in fact, in the case of video games, that is perhaps a more accurate summation of what actually happens. Too often, making games designed to elicit emotion, or express some component of the human condition, involves mimicking movies – sadly, as Kandinsky warns, if the borrowing is “superficial” rather than “fundamental”, it falls flat. (For example, a focus on improving graphics, and so on may be superficial – perhaps borrowing structure and form from film is fundamental?)

It is more interesting to me, however, to go back and think about games borrowing from music; I love synesthetic video games – but are these often an example of “superficial” borrowing, or “fundamental” borrowing? After all, other than creating synesthetic feedback loops, they do not arguably convey the same kind of emotional response as music. We do not have a Blower’s Daughter of video games.

Kandinsky has been criticised for not being able to sufficiently fulfil or demonstrate his own theories about art himself. Regardless, he is considered the father of abstract art nonetheless. His own works were synesthetic in nature – one of my favourite pieces is the above. Kandinsky focused one’s “inner necessity”; the term itself merits much discussion of its own which I won’t venture into here, too deeply, except that it is about the expression of one’s own emotional perceptions.

I feel this insight, which I jotted down from an unattributed speaker at some conference earlier this year, is useful:

“Good art is unique and irreplaceable, and cannot be reduced to a message.”

Good art is about saying something you cannot otherwise say; if it can be summarised satisfactorily as a message, then there is no point, perhaps, in creating the piece.

Kandinsky’s compositions were the culmination of his efforts to create a “pure painting” that would provide the same emotional power as a musical composition. If we concede that painting reached this goal – that Kandinsky and his peers and successors saw to it that painting can indeed effortlessly elicit the type of emotion we are seeking to elicit from games – then we can ask, what is it that abstract art achieves that we also want games to achieve? What is it about the “methods” of abstract art that game design can learn? By doing so, we can, as Kandinsky suggests, make sure that “one art learns how another uses its methods”, and not in a “superficial”, but a “fundamental” way.

If we look again at the Kandinsky piece above; while one may appreciate it aesthetically, this is perhaps not enough – we must consider it intellectually; Composition VI is also known as ‘The Deluge’; it depicts the world ending in a beautiful tumultuous crash, much like a symphony. The emotional power of Kandinsky’s work – and indeed, of abstract art in general – arises by observing and engaging with the piece, and forming an intellectual response to the piece first. The intellectual response gives rise to a deeper emotional response. This is one thing that games may aim to do; this is a “method” that games may seek to borrow from abstract art. The question is, how may games, as systems, give rise to an intellectual response.

Skinner Boxes and Intellectual Response

One of the prevalent topics of discussion within the games industry this year is the dichotomy between “social games” and “traditional games”. (This is particularly interesting to me since, as some of you know, I’m working on a location-based social gamey-sort-of-thing myself – more information in due course. However, Leigh Alexander’s excellent editorial on social/traditional games is perhaps my favourite.)

One recent article on this subject features Brenda Brathwaite, Brian Reynolds, and Steve Meretzky, and while all three industry veterans make valid claims about social games and their possible merit, I would, however, like to draw particular attention to Meretzky’s assertions in this piece. He says:

“I don’t want to hear that Facebook games are Skinner boxes… You know, when you come down to it, basically all games are Skinner boxes — meaningless activities where you’re not getting anything out of it other than enjoyment. But in traditional or more complex videogames, the Skinner box core is more buried under a lot of sizzle. In Facebook games, just because they are so stripped down to their simplest, barest elements, the Skinner Box skeleton is just more visible.”

I do agree with this in large part; some mechanism of trial-and-error-and-subsequent-reward does exists currently in most games. Of course, the main criticism of “games as Skinner boxes” is that what makes games good and “well-designed” is the scope for mastery. The fun of games being mastery is advocated by many game designers, including Raph Koster in his excellent book ‘A Theory of Fun for Game Design’. However, this process of trial-and-error-then-mastery is still all about a feedback mechanism. Being so, all such games are good at eliciting shallow emotional responses from players, to varying degrees.

The range of experiences from which players receive feedback varies from Cow Clicker to Ikaruga. Yes, there are differences between the intensity of the sense of achievement between making some ‘mooney’ and clearing a previously-unbeatable chapter in Ikaruga, and there are even differences in the type of enjoyment that arises out of these. However, the point is, perhaps, that both these sorts of games – social and otherwise, if there is such a dichotomy – all reward the player.

There are, then, varying degrees of shallow emotional response which comes with feedback and mastery, rather than an intellectual response. Arugably, it is eliciting an intellectual response first that leads to a more significant emotional experience, like the kind Kandinsky sought to elicit from his art.

If we want to make games that allow us, in Kandinsky’s terms, to express our emotional perceptions – our “inner necessity” to do so, then perhaps true artistic expression involves a lack of reward for the player. Perhaps it is about shunning player-centred design, and instead embracing designer-centred design. After all, the concept of the “inner necessity” to express one’s emotional perceptions is by nature somewhat self-obsessed and individualistic.

So then, what if games were not to reward you? Games which have incomplete feedback loops, perhaps on purpose. Such games would not be Skinner boxes, but they would also not be “good”, “well-designed” games, if “good” equates to fun. However, games need not be fun. They need not be satisfying. By eliminating the shallow emotional responses in search of an intellectual response, then, by definition, are such games bad?

Following on, do the shallow emotional responses elicited from feedback in all “good” games preclude the possibility of an intellectual response? How then, do designers solve this problem, in order to garner “the kind of emotional power of a musical composition”, as Kandinsky sought to achieve through his art.

Of course, an explicit rejection of the structure of games is, I suppose, what we already label ‘interactive art’, and, indeed, there is Tale of Tales’ concept of ‘notgames’. Although I appreciate The Path et al, these things do ‘feel like’ broken games.

The philosopher Nigel Warburton has said that “Everything is art. However, there is good art, and there is bad art.” Quality is the only difference. Similarly, perhaps we can apply this to games. Games mean an increasingly broad range of things, this is akin to Will Wright’s ‘Cambrian Explosion’ concept, which I wholeheartedly advocate. however, even though all of these things are games, there are still ‘good games’, and ‘bad games’.

Lack of feedback may necessarily lead to bad games. However, it may be argued that many ‘interactive art experiences’ may still be representational; after all, this is what Kandinsky suggested that an artist may “find no satisfaction” in. A lack of rewards and feedback may, then, not be enough. Perhaps abstract games are necessary? Whatever this may mean.

If you made it this far you won’t mind if I again plug my very broken self-directed-5-hr-plane-game-jam game, which I mentioned last time. I made Collide, you could say, out of “inner necessity”, if we are to use Kandinsky’s grandiose terms (though it feels silly and cumbersome to do so when talking about my own work). Basically, it was an attempt at something like an abstract game, albeit an early-and-not-very-good one.

Perhaps something like Trent Polack’s “Broken“, or hermitgames’ Leave Home are closer to, and a far better implementation of, the kind of thing I mean by “abstract games”; although I love these both stylistically and thematically, it remains that the focus of both of these are primarily on its ‘gaminess’. Of course, perhaps this is not a bad thing either.

Overall, like Kandinsky suggests, though, it is an iterative process, and one that game designers must go through together. They must learn, through practice, how to make games which can help them express their “inner life”. The only way to get to this is to keep making games.

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:

• Earlier this year, my younger sister and I set up a charitable project, called Arohon (the Bengali word for ‘climb’); our mission is to generally make the world a more awesome place, and for our first endeavour, we’re establishing a new women’s education centre in rural Bangladesh. This is an area where women and girls are not encouraged to pursue their own education and career interests, and we want to inspire this to change. In 10 days, we’re flying to Tanzania to climb Mt Kilimanjaro in an effort to convince you to help us raise £5000 to build this centre. We still have a long way to go, so if you read this, please do consider donating?
• Speaking of Bangladesh, there’s a piece I’ve been wanting to write in here since December, can you believe, when my family and I visited the village where my father grew up. Broadly, it’s about community, and play. I noticed some very awesome/interesting things during my visit. I will make sure it gets written this week. OR ELSE.
• Oh, randomly – there was a Michael Jackson game design competition over at GameCareerGuide.com a while ago. My delirious, cheesy, 3.30am idea was one of the winners, hurrah. I am secretly a little bit proud, but mostly hideously embarrassed. I will, however, proudly publicly announce that I am relentlessly excited about Ubi’s MJ video game announced at E3. I DON’T CARE IF YOU JUDGE ME.
• Also randomly – Jim Rossignol and I started a tumblr blog dedicated to robotic, monstrous, and gigantic poignancy. If you share our love of emo robots and tragic monsters, such, you should definitely check it out: Total Eclipse of the Reactor Core.
• I have a piece appearing in the next issue of Kill Screen magazine. I seem to be in very good company, alongside many of the usual suspects from the Twitter crew.
• Oh! During a plane ride from San Francisco to London last week, I held a little mini-game jam. By myself, of course. I made this game, entitled Collide; it’s a little bit broken (and generally abstract), but I am kind of fond of it. I may write some words about it here later.
• Lastly, somewhere I have been writing words a little bit more frequently, is this sub-blog I created: Mitu’s Awesome World-Saving Blog, dedicated purely to talking about various awesome world-saving efforts, in a bid to celebrate them and inspire readers to do more. I’d love it if you subscribed. :)
• As always, I’ve still been on Twitter.

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

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.]

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.”

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:

• Device I “Fictional Alignment” – this focuses on “expanding the emotional palette of games by aligning game structure and fictional theme”, thus eliciting emotional responses from the player. For example, mapping the goals and motivations of the player to that of the avatar.
• Device II “Procedurality” – this refers to “a games’ potential to make statements about how things work by representing processes with processes”.
• Device III “Experiential Metaphor” – this addresses “the immediate, emotional comprehension of processes through the game’s aesthetics. Recognizing structural similarities between a gameplay experience and an experience from real life can help us understand the quality of these experiences and make sense of them.” (e.g. as Doris explains, being able to say “this game feels like job-hopping”, etc)

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.

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.

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?”

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.”

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?

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 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 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!