Since I quietly reopened this blog, I've been kicking a thought around in my head. It keeps coming back to me, even when I think I've given up on it, so there must be something there. I think I've had trouble figuring out how to write about it, because it seems to touch a lot of things. But I'm going to try.
There's an ongoing question of what drives us. It's been a part of writing this blog over the years; it's part of any deep examination of ourselves and what we do; our behaviors. Games are behavior. Making them is behavior. What's begun to interest me is not so much what games "are," or what they "should be," or why we're compelled to play them or make them, but, being so compelled, what values we uphold when going about these behaviors. What I keep coming back to is the value of respect.
Respect, I think, is at the crux of every interaction we have in life. Respect toward others determines whether a child is bullied or not; whether someone is robbed or not; whether a discussion becomes an argument, or an argument an altercation, or an altercation a murder. Respecting others is seeing yourself in them. Mutual respect between peers is the foundation of a healthy and long-lasting relationship, which leads to everything else. The golden rule. So on and so forth.
These observations are nothing new, but they seem to be at the center of everything in our lives. They determine how we interact with the world, and therefore who we are. And so conducting oneself in a way that shows respect to others would seem to be the utmost value one should uphold in all things. It's worth considering what this means, not just in big, overt interactions like those mentioned above, but in small, indirect ones, too-- how we impact people through what we do, even people we might never meet.
Games are made up of interactions. And the game itself, the artifact, is an interaction between the designer and the player. What is respectfulness in this sphere?
One aspect concerns the rules of the game itself, and how they regard the player. If there is any resource in our lives that has value above all others, it must be time. Time is something we never get back. We live, then we die; how we spend the time in between is the only thing with real, irreplaceable value. All other resources-- money, energy-- are means to the end of spending that time in a way that we find rewarding.
And so any game mechanic that willfully wastes the player's time inherently disrespects the players themselves, by stealing away something they can never get back. This exploitation takes many forms: "grinding," wherein the next gameplay milestone is delayed only by repetitive, meaningless action (a "timesink," as opposed to a meaningful decision or display of skill.) Or unskippable story sequences, requiring the player to watch for minutes just to get to more play, whether they want to or not (this lack of the ability to opt-out serving the storyteller's ego, not the player.) Or the "energy" mechanics in "freemium" games, whereby you can only perform so many actions per hour before you must wait to play more... or spend money to be able to play more right now. In other words, trading your money in exchange for your time. Clearly one of those resources is more inherently valuable to the player than the other; these freemium games exploit this dichotomy willfully, to their own ends, not the player's.
That is what it comes down to: making design decisions in the interest of the player, not the developer. A fair exchange of value is respectful; creating a play experience which is inherently valuable to the player, and requesting a fair price in return is respectful. Taking someone's money with the promise of a valuable experience, then wasting their time or trying to extract more money once they've already paid is just the opposite. Everyone wants to be respected: you, and your players. Uphold your end of the bargain.
It's kind of absurd to have to come all the way back around to this conclusion. All I'm describing is commerce as it's existed for thousands of years. A valuable product for a fair price; any less is a swindle, or robbery. But in this day and age the form that a "product" can take, and the methods by which value can be compromised, are constantly expanding and morphing. It's worth remembering that any decision made expressly in the interest of the developer's personal gain-- "this is so the player will pay more in microtransactions; this is so the player will keep playing longer instead of trading in their game"-- compromises the core value proposition, the thing they've paid for, and breeds a rightly suspicious player. Respect, on the other hand, breeds respect-- customer loyalty, through trust not coercion.
We can show respect to others through many aspects of our lives. In our personal relationships with friends and family, clearly; in our interactions with strangers in public; in supporting equal rights for all people, whether they're exactly like ourselves or not; and, if we're going to develop games, in the experiences we craft for players, and what we ask in return. The respect you give your players will come back to you; it will make having made the thing worthwhile.
2.18.2012
Respectfulness
1.17.2012
1.13.2012
What if things were different
I'm currently reading Uzumaki by Junji Ito, a horror manga where supernatural phenomena revolve around spiral patterns. I find it to be more of dark humor than truly frightening, but that's okay. It's a fun, strange, and often really gross read. But aside from the specific content, I appreciate the approach Ito takes in creating his own twisted take on the modern world. It's a technique used often; this work just brought it to mind.
Uzumaki is a series of stories that take place in a small Japanese coastal town where people go about their lives and everything functions normally-- except that the town has somehow mysteriously been "infected by the Spiral." One man becomes obsessed with the spiral, until he is drawn in so deeply that he contorts his body itself into a spiral form, losing his life in the process. When he is cremated, the smoke rises into the sky, causing a spiral in the clouds that transfixes the town's residents. Unsettling whirlwinds spiral through the town; locks of girls' hair spiral and take on a life of their own; the spiral stairway of a lighthouse leads residents to their death. The spiral is everywhere, and it makes life in our world different, scary, and surprising.
It's a way of thinking that many artists possess, and that leads us to follow them into their imagined works: the power of visualization, not to take the world around them for granted, but to picture, "what if things were different?" It connects straight back to how we see the world as children. Before we know how everything around us works, and we settle into static assumptions about our surroudings, the possibilities are endless. It's the fertile ground in which imagination grows. Could there be a monster in the closet or under the bed? No reason there couldn't be, so maybe there is! Could aliens come down out of the sky? Could dogs and cats talk to each other when people aren't around? Could there be ghosts and angels everywhere, that we just can't see? Could another world exist on the other side of the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole? Before we knew it couldn't, it could, and we imagined, "what if this IS the way the world works?"
This kind of functional question, explored in fiction like Uzumaki, engages directly with the rules of our world. It disrupts them, adds in a variable, and explores the implications. In that sense, this sort of imaginative journey maps directly to games. It changes the ruleset of ordinary life, and games are all about rules. The sense of discovery is the same, when you first get your hands on a new game and explore how it works: what do the buttons do? What can I pick up and climb onto and go inside of and affect in this world? How does everything work? Once you've become comfortable in that gameworld, and all its possibilities are exhausted, the newness and sense of discovery fades away.
But the artist continues to see new possibilities. And in that way, game designers can take the world we know, imagine if it worked differently, and then by abstracting and implementing those rules in a game, allow players to experience the possibilities they've imagined. Working backwards, having come in contact with this new and unexpected vision of our own world, the player can return to their familiar assumptions, and question them just a bit more.
If you've read Uzumaki, you probably didn't think about spirals the same way for a while when you encountered them in your daily life. And if you've played Katamari Damacy, maybe you had trouble driving for a while without thinking about rolling up traffic cones. Maybe you enter the lobby of the public library and think what you'd use for cover if the Covenant were to attack, or start noticing great hiding spots for GTA's Hidden Packages as you wander around the city.
All of us should be so lucky as to retain our sense of wonder and infinite possibility from childhood; the best games show us possibilities we never would've imagined, let us play with them, internalize them, and bring them back into our own world, imagining, "what if?"
In small but important ways, contact with inspiring gameworlds transforms our everyday into something just a little bit less ordinary.