While at the GDC I had the supreme pleasure to play some of the excellent independent games on display at the Independent Games Festival. If I had to sum up what I saw in one word, that word would be “Delightful.”

If they were cakes, I would call them “toothsome.”

However, since we all know now that the cake is a lie, I’ll just highlight two of them that I enjoyed the most, that made me say “Wow, how can an ARG do this?”

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My father is a sculptor and so several times as a child I found myself in art exhibitions. You learn a great many things when you are a child in an art gallery. You learn to keep your hands to yourself and you learn a great deal about human anatomy.

It was like living inside an alternate reality: here we have our normal cities and towns, our normal every day people. Then, every once in a while we’d travel to these strange buildings where normal looking people put their psyches in physical form and put that out for the world to see.

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Last summer I took a vacation in Walt Disney World, and after riding a few of the rides, it really struck me how similar imagineering is to designing ARGs. The people who design the attractions at the Disney theme parks are called the Disney Imagineers. All of the rides, from Space Mountain to the Tower of Terror, are the result of their work. But what makes designing theme park rides similar to ARGs?

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I ran across a great comment about the difficulties of running an ARG inside World of Warcraft (WoW). The blog entry connected to it was Raph Koster (designer of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and now Metaplace) noticing Christy Dena's amazing collection of ARG stats. Raph pointed to the stats and then wondered why ARGs and MMOs aren't partnering more.

The comment itself talks about the difficulties the author had running an ARG in WoW. Some of the criticisms are about the structure of WoW and could be helped by using a more free-form structure like that offered by Second Life. What struck me was that server size was a real problem for them. Since the game world is broken up across servers (and in any case is a subset of Internet users), it can be difficult to get enough people playing the ARG.

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We've been discussing the topic of cheating here in the Cypherdrome lately. How to prevent it, can it even happen in ARGs, etc. The fruits of these discussions will no doubt get their own post in a week or two, but in a twist of synchronicity, I recently came across the Scrabble for Cheaters charity.

Bascially, teams sign up to compete. Whenever anybody donates money in their team's name, they get more opportunities to "cheat" during play. Cheats range from swapping letters out ($25) to inventing new words ($500!)

This combines gameplay and fundraising in a great way. By using elements of the forbidden (we get to cheat!) along with providing an emotional connection to who wins the tournament (I'm helping them!), they've really hit a great formula.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I read the book "The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness" by Elyn R. Sacks. Ian grabbed it from the library because of its cool cover and its reference to a W. B. Yeats poem.

Turns out it was a very good choice.

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Super Mario Galaxy (SMG) isn’t a casual game, but it uses a lot of casual game strategies to make it addictive. While the basic mechanics are more involved than your average casual game, they’re surrounding by a host of tricks that casual games use to keep people coming back: level selection, variety, a mixture of short- and long-term goals, high scores, and visceral rewards.

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Ever a few years behind the times, I finally got a computer that the interactive fiction thing "Façade" can run on. This program is as close as anyone has gotten to "a story that reacts to your actions."

It’s an interesting concept, which boils down to "You visit your two friends at their apartment. You can walk around the room and talk to them. Sometime during this they will have a massive break down and you must try to talk them out of it… or make it worse by insulting them."

It works via natural language parsing and it’s the best NLP that I’ve seen, but it still doesn’t work that well. You type your text in and they react, but half the time the two characters thought I was talking to the wrong one, or they just wouldn’t understand what I was saying. Or they’d react with "That really helps us right now" without giving me the feeling that they’d actually understood me.

The whole thing feels more natural than a conversation tree but hurts as a game because I never felt like my actions in the world did all that much. Mostly I stood around and sipped my drink while two people sniped at each other. It was uncomfortable to listen to, so they have that realism down.

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We've been passing Make to Stick around the office for quite a while now. It's a great look at an important question: why is it easier to remember things like urban legends than things like mission statements?

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This is a continuation of "Screaming in the Mountains, Part 1"

The designers of Eldritch Errors have said that one of the things they can always count on is Human Nature. It let them get the online community riled up and working at cross-purposes to the campers all while believing they were doing the Right Thing. It was very cleverly done. But while I was there, I learned that while macro level group reactions are important to think about, the behavior of individuals become more and more important the smaller your group is. With only five people, our group was pretty small. Here are some of the things I learned about hosting a live event:

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Fun (and funny) is usually a spontaneous event. Nobody talks about "having fun at 6pm" the way we talk about eating or going to work. How do game designers (and comedians) take a randomly occurring thing like fun and make it a consistent experience?

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The weekend before Halloween, I attended a live event in the mountains of West Virginia for the alternate reality game Eldritch Errors. This event was the culmination of Book 2 of Eldritch Errors, titled "Scream in the Mountains," which took place over the month of October.

Almost the whole of chapter two was dedicated to building up the importance of "The Feast," an event held in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone where players could go and meet several of the main characters in person.

It's not often a designer gets to attend a major live event for another game, so I have quite a lot to say about it (as evidenced by the "Part 1" up in the title). In this part, I'll talk about the things I loved about the experience.

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How do you keep people from getting bored with your game?

From Donald Norman's Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things:

First, the object must be rich and complex, one that gives rise to a never-ending interplay among the elements. Second, the viewer must be able to take the time to study, analyze, and consider such rich interplay; otherwise the scene becomes commonplace. If something is to give lifelong pleasure, two components are required: the skill of the designer in providing a powerful, rich experience, and the skill of the perceiver.

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It really bugs me when I see glaring flaws in a product. Usually you can understand how those problems were left in, perhaps by mistake or under time pressure. Every once in a while, though, you run across something and can't help but wonder if they actually tested with real people or even just used it themselves.

My latest brush with this type of abysmal failure came from an unlikely source: leftover Halloween candy. For those unfamiliar with it, Jolly Ranchers are hard candies about the size of a quarter but much thicker. Recently, I came across a new version that's more like a stick of gum, although still a hard candy. Take a look at the picture and see if you can recognize the problem here. I'll give you a hint by telling you that the first two people who got a piece of the candy complained about the exact same thing.

The company took something that worked really well, a hard candy that you can pop into your mouth and suck on, and changed it so that you can no longer do that. That size is great for a stick of gum because you can fold it. With a hard candy, it becomes impossible to keep in your mouth. And if you pull it out occasionally, your hands get all sticky. What were you thinking, Jolly Rancher?

Video games are often about shooting things because that is an easy mechanic to implement. You make a bullet appear in your world, have it travel across the board, and see if it hits anything. Or, you point the “gun” at an alien, draw an imaginary line between the gun and that alien. If the line touches that alien, pow! Fire off the gruesome death animations and cue the visceral sound.

Guns are often easy to create and fun for the player to shoot off, that’s why we see a lot of shooter games out there. I play a lot of games with guns in them, so I have little to no standing to say that games with guns are bad.

I myself do not design games with guns. I believe in the power of alternatives.

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Currently, I see ARGs (and games in generally) designed for three categories: education, marketing, and entertainment. Educational games tend to be relatively local and small, so they get less attention than the other types. Nevertheless, they're out there. When people talk about games, they sound as if they believe there's a vast gulf between these categories. I often hear comments like "I looked into GAME, but it's really just there to sell PRODUCT," "what's the point of GAME?" and "GAME sounds interesting, but it's educational." From a game designer's view, though, they're all much more alike than they are different.

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Valve Software, makers of the Half-Life series of action games, recently released a very strange little puzzle game called "Portal." If you're unfamiliar with it, I recommend you watch the trailer, because it does a much better job of explaining the game than I could with words.

One of the nice things about this game is that it comes with developer commentary that you can listen to as you play the game, which gives some insight to their design process.

Perhaps the most interesting thing they discussed was that they treated almost the entire game as a tutorial. Which isn't to say that they hold your hand the entire game (quite the opposite!), but rather that whenever they weren't teaching you new gameplay tricks, they were reinforcing the old ones they'd already taught you. They found that if they didn't, players would routinely forget that the old moves were still options.

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Sometimes the makers of alternate reality games want to do something special for their players, and have an event instead of the usual gameplay. These require much higher player involvement while they last, enough that the players should be warned about it ahead of time.

Most developers try to find in-game ways of doing this. We did this with the RUMI and Boat Poker events. A player says "Hey, something big's going down on Friday, try to be around at 7pm, okay?" For most events, this works just fine. But what if you're planning something bigger? Something that people might have to ask for days off work for?

The folks making Eldritch Errors took a rather straightforward approach to this problem, by posting it directly to their out-of-game blog, Schmeldritch. This is a good solution because it gets the information out that something's going to happen, but there's no burden of knowledge on their in-game characters so they don't have to worry about fitting the announcement in, plot-wise. They haven't said where the event will be, but past experiences plus this recently released map suggest northern Virginia, so players in that area know to be prepared.

And while we're on the topic of mentioning future happenings in out-of-game blog posts, I find it oddly apropos that the Schmedlritch post ends with "The train has already left the station."

Serious Games

You could sum up my position as “games have potential not yet realized” and “part of that potential is allowing players to explore positive ways to work around problems.” This fits in to the concept of Serious Games, but I think that concept needs to be made more broad. Not all messages from author to player need to be about a Serious World Issue or an Important Educational Opportunity. Not everyone does, or needs to, think on those levels. I believe that games can teach players about sharing or compassion, and those would be just as much a Game For Change as a game about saving the rainforest.

ARGs as serious games

ARGs are better suited as serious games than most traditional console or PC games. While it is easy to make a game about “hit, punch, shoot” on a PC, it is actually very hard to allow a player to perform any of those actions in an ARG. With the exception of live events, most ARG players will never come in direct physical contact with characters in any way, shape or form. You cannot punch a character through the internet.

Players of ARGs are encouraged to explore and experiment. To send encouraging or hateful emails to characters, and see what the results are. Players’ actions within ARGs are, by necessity, at a distance and not of a violent sort. ARGs are therefore excellent teaching aids and can allow players to experiment in healthy, possibly life-changing ways.

I think that once ARG creators, and video game creators in general, recognize their position as artists instead of craftsmen they will begin to create games that challenge players. This challenge will not just be in a “this game is hard” sense, but it will challenge how a player thinks and interacts with their world.

Covert vs Overt

At least, the goal will be to challenge modes of thinking. I am reminded now about a quote from the author Kurt Vonnegut:

“When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high. “

I’m not calling for video game creators to be a laser beam focused in any direction. One of the big pitfalls of the move towards “Serious Games” is what I think of as “Too Serious Games.” Those games are the ones that come out of the starting gate (sometimes even on the packaging!), trumpets blaring and drums booming, pronouncing to the player that they are going to be Taught a Lesson.

Nothing turns off an audience faster than a proclamation like that.

Game creators must have a softer touch. You have to get off your soap box and allow players to play, to learn and experiment in the world you have created. You also have to allow them to disagree with you, at least a little. Remember: games are a conversation, even if the player never gets to talk directly to the game creator. If I’m a player, and I’m just being preached at, I’m going to tune you out. But if you allow me to experiment, to learn and see your point of view, I might be convinced to agree with you in the end.

In fact, I want to praise World Without Oil as a Serious Game done right. I see very little preaching going on, from game creator to player. In fact, it seems that the creators, for the most part, have stepped into the player’s shoes and are now part of a greater dialogue that is mostly created by the players. The players are allowed to think about the situation, the world without oil, and are allowed to come to their own conclusions. I think that a lot of people will change how they look at the world through this, and the change will come from within, not just from the game telling them they should. That’s my prediction, anyway.

My thoughts in a paragraph: Serious Games are a good thing and there should be more of them. Serious games should be big, but they should also be small. Serious games need to be a conversation, not a lecture… and they should be fun. As game designer Raph Koster says, “Fun is when my brain tells me I am learning.”

This month’s ARG Roundtable discussion topic (started by Brooke Thompson over at Giant Mice is “Serious Games.”

Some would say that games can’t teach players, that games are nothing more than entertainment. I do not agree with this statement. All games have the potential to change players, and more games should.

Potential

The general public has done its best to equate video games with smut of both the violence and sex varieties. Video game “defenders” have not done enough to redeem them, which is something I will touch on below. However, it seems sad to me that videogames even need defenders. We do not need people to defend the novel as an art form, or movies, or paintings. There isn’t even a need to defend “normal” games that have no art in them, such as football or chess. And yet we have a public and oft-times vicious debate about the merits of video games. Why is this?

Unfortunately, video games’ greatest strength is also their biggest potential weakness. Video games give a player agency in a constructed world. This agency allows a player to experiment, to act, to discover and explore. It allows a player to discover ways to help others, or to learn about environments that the player would normally never have a chance to visit. There is power in this. There is a difference between reading about a place in a book, and visiting the place virtually and being able to affect that “world” with your actions. On the same token, depending on the game and the developer, visiting this new place may also involve the player being able to affect this world in some very un-savory and violent ways.

The majority of game developers these days would rather make a game where the actions a player can take-the verbs of a game- only allow them to fight things in the world. ‘Hit,’ ‘punch,’ and ‘shoot’ are all verbs that are very familiar to video game players, partially because it is much easier to program those verbs than it is to create the more nuanced ways that people help and care for each other. Additionally, game creators still reside in a state where they view themselves more as craftsmen than artists, and the concept of authorial voice doesn’t occur to most.

“It’s just entertainment,” those people say. “It doesn’t mean anything.” The problem is that it does mean something.

Just entertainment

It drives me up a wall whenever I hear someone defend video games by saying, “It’s just a game. It doesn’t mean anything,” That defense implicitly agrees with the people who condemn video games for being smut by saying that they can’t possibly have meaning. It’s just a game! It has no message! In fact, it comes close to saying that it is not POSSIBLE for a video game to contain a message.

Nothing could be further from the truth. All video games have a creator. They do not grow on trees or spring fully formed from the earth. Just like books or movies, video games are a conversation between the creator and the audience. If a video game creator allows you to do something in a video game, they are giving the player permission to do it.

It’s fun to fight demons and it is fun to crash cars and pretend to work for the mafia. It is merely distressing that more game creators do not try to give players verbs that are alternatives to hit, punch, or shoot. I will talk about some games and their alternative approaches with my next article.