A Definition

Several developers have asked “What does a meaningful game even mean?” This is a very fair question. Here is my own attempt at a definition of “meaningful game.”

Meaningful game: a game that has significance or provides purpose for how one lives life.

Games that are meaningful try to reach outside of themselves. They are about more then their own consumption. Maybe they give players deeper empathy, or sympathy, or comfort, or inspire an action outside of the game world. They are meant to transform, even if it’s just a little bit. A game that’s “only fun” might be nostalgic by referring to past 8-bit games, while a “meaningful game” might be nostalgic by referring to a child-parent relationship.

Earlier I linked to a video of Brandon Boyer’s GDC talk. He mentions the 3 artists he keeps praising whenever he meets people. His reason for continuing to share them was because their art was meaningful to him in this same way. Their art affected how he lived.

There are some games out there that create this effect…as a secondary, often temporary point that serves some other goal. But very few games are completely dedicated to this, and there are even fewer resources for how to make more games like that.

The Problem

So why the disconnect? Part of the reason is that when a designer sits down to try to create meaningful gameplay, it’s simply hard to know where to begin. It’s easier to start designing a competitive fighting game dedicated to gaining coordination skills, or an RPG dedicated to managing stats well or character development in an armor-building or combative sense.

But what about a fighting game that explores the philosophy of fighting? What about an RPG dedicated to character development in an emotional or psychological sense? Let’s get real here. Do we even know it’s possible to dedicate a sizable game to something like that?

There just isn’t that much out there to build on, even for smaller games.

A Possible Solution

Therefore, we need some baby steps. We should hold game jams fully dedicated to meaningful gameplay. It’s a chance for designers to help each other learn how to make more meaningful game experiences and to explore the potential for games to affect peoples’ lives.

What happens at a meaningful gameplay game jam? We each explore a game mechanic or other non-mechanic game element using prototyping tools. That means the intention is not to create an entire game, but to explore an element of a game from multiple perspectives. The challenge is for a developer to pick a mechanic or element that would result in meaningful gameplay and (1) develop several prototypes of it in the first 36-40 hours or so. The last 8-12 hours would be dedicated to (2) writing a critical analysis of the resulting prototypes in a text document and then having a (3) show & tell to share the prototypes and analysis. Then the analysis and feedback would be (4) posted on a website dedicated to meaningful gameplay to share with the game development community. That way we are providing resources for making all these meaningful games that everyone was asking for at this year’s GDC!

An Example Result

When I explain the idea to people, I keep going back to Jordan Magnuson’s Loneliness as a perfect example of this. If loneliness as a mechanic was explored at a meaningful gameplay game jam, you’d have 4 or 5 different versions of where he put his “message” or different versions of how the boxes moved around, followed by an analysis of how he thought the concept was communicated in each version.

Then later, as a developer who wanted to create a game that explored the concept of loneliness, you could go to the website, play through the prototypes, read the analysis of what the developer thought, and then start prototyping your own, maybe completely different, take on loneliness. The resources help you keep in mind something that did or did not work, or otherwise they just give you food for thought.

The collection of prototypes and analyses acts as a scientific journal of sorts for game design that other designers can then use. So you’d have something that’s not only useful for the creators, but also something useful for the game development community at large. That’s a good thing because you will then rely on that community in the future to help you improve.

A more informal version of this is already happening at sites like Experimental Gameplay Project. It’s just that there’s usually less analysis since developers are rushing to finish a game for a competition.

But What About Art?

Some developers have suggested that this sounds like meaningful experience is being reduced to something easily quantifiable, like a mathematical formula. I am very grateful to see this, because as a person who enjoys good debate, I would probably be presenting the other side as well. But that is not my intention.

It would be hard to disagree that there are (at least) two sides to the process of making games: the artistic side and the design side. This is a problem with the design side of games, not the artistic side. I think great progress can be made in game design through more experimentation, critical analysis, and building off of each others’ discoveries, as evidenced by science as a whole for the last 1000 years or so.

When it comes to the artistic side of games, Keita Takahashi seems to have it right when he says that progress can made in games through game developers living a rich and varied life and taking in inspiration from many things outside of the field of games. So let’s assume that a game developer who wants to create meaningful games will fulfill artistic needs in a more personal way, or at least in a way that’s less relevant to a quantifiable design process. Most of us have the life experience needed to at least take games a step deeper, either through trying to communicate our own experience or through creating a “space for searching.”

In the end, this is meant to improve the craftsmanship of design and its process. Its the ability to take what needs to be communicated by the artist and successfully express it through the medium of games, or the ability to build the space for searching. That ability is something we’ll need in order to create more meaningful games, and this kind of game jam could help develop it.

Special thanks to Jerry Shkavritko for suggesting I take the meaningful gameplay analysis idea and match it with a game jam!

The concept behind it is that it watches tweets filtered by a hashtag (I set it up to watch the summit’s #BDSMS hashtag). Every new user that tweets with that hashtag pops into the scene with a physical force, and then the visualizer looks up that person’s friends list. Like most things in infographics, the end result is larger than the sum of its parts. You understand how interconnected people are in a visual way. And (nerd alert) I use a hack for real-time ambient occlusion to shade overlapping squares. B-) The camera auto-zooms on the whole group, and you can switch to view each user individually – controlled in the crowd or on the stage with a Wii Remote, if desired.

As of right now, that’s all it can do. Future features include visualizing new tweets from the same user, and maybe displaying tweets themselves (which every other tweet-stream app does). I could also somehow visualize how active or popular a twitter user is. There are a lot of opportunities to show cool things, really.

I think this is a cool application of the Weiv platform that could be used for events like Justin’s summit, a conference, a church service, or even during the lead-up for a concert. Any time when you have a hashtag and want to visualize connections in a community, and encourage people to actively promote the event through social media. In the future I dream of creating a world through this visualization and exploring it with a character. Ahh dreams…

For the past year, I’ve been working on my own interactive projects that don’t involve game mechanics, so it was very relieving to find out there are others out there wanting to do things that are like games, but not quite games. And when ToT invited developers to join them, I saw an opportunity to be part of a like-minded community.

If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

I’m not 100% convinced that videogames proper are holding back the full potential for expression, but I have the same gut feeling as Tale of Tales that in many cases they are.

I suppose this comes from evidence that some of my favorite “games” lately have been things that actually have very minimal game elements to them. It took some dissection of Small Worlds, Today I Die, The Majesty of Colors, and others on the notgames forum in order to come to an official conclusion on that. But if I follow the trend forward, it could be possible that by having no elements at all, the experience would be even more expressive as a creator and enjoyable as a player.

An even larger amount of evidence comes when I stop to consider the unique elements of art forms (or media if you prefer), and how videogames don’t really offer anything truly unique.  This point is part of a very long-winded essay I have yet to publish, but the short story is that the “games” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames, and the “video” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames.

The “video” part I’m referring to – what I like to call a virtual, fictional interactive system – is what I love most about videogames. Basically it would be fictional media that fully utilizes the computer, including its input, computation, and output. Games would be a fine addition, but from my experience playing and creating them, they often create various forms of dissonance, especially when it comes to the more artistic/story-driven ones. A game system integrated with an artistic interactive experience usually feels duct-taped on top to me.

For example, the fact that I never finished The Dig because the puzzles were hard and I got tired of them really frustrates me. The puzzles are not why I loved The Dig, although they were interesting in their own right for a little while.  To me, it begs this question: If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

Thus, my conclusion is that it’s well worth my time to answer this fundamental question of my experience with games by doing. I will create The Dig minus its puzzles, or more specific to the game I have in mind: “Myst minus the puzzles.”

EDIT: This sounds a little misleading. I sort of got “microwaved” with a vision – a specific story idea – almost a year ago at a game jam. Since then, I’ve come up with a game idea for it, and after explaining the idea to Ted Martens, he told me what I was describing was basically Myst but without the puzzles. I realized the connection to my frustrations with The Dig after the fact.

As a final note, one of my goals as a developer is to make games (and notgames) for a variety of people, including those that are intimidated by or apathetic about games. I found this information graphic to be great motivation toward my goal, pulled from the notgames manifesto:

Make love, notgames.

In gamer lingo, it’s a 3d, physics-y, psuedo-pixel-art cannon-shooting game with a strategic probability management element.  Based on tester feedback, it seems to be pretty addictive, too.  Here’s the “official” description:

As a producer for the Japanese game show Megabank Executive Humiliation Challenge (MEHC), the nation is counting on you to keep them entertained by humiliating the best of the best in Western banking executives. Balance money-making obstacles and hire better executives to make the most profit you can in one season. Don’t let your nation down!

It’s an experiment in many ways, including emotional, commercial, and production..al, but not so much in gameplay. It’s kind of weird to look back at your baby after you’ve given birth. Sometimes you didn’t see yourself making that kind of game, and I can say that about this game.  However, I’m happy with the work I’ve done.  It’s quite a fun game.  I’d also like to thank the Gratton brothers from the Napkin Sketch collective for doing the sound.

Even though I didn’t originally see myself making this kind of game, I think in some ways I needed to make it, at least to just express my frustration with my current feelings on the nation’s economy and moreso on capitalism in general. I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with it as a system lately.  And maybe I needed a break from taking game design so seriously, too.

I’m hoping to find a sponsor for it by the end of the year.  And it should end up on FGL in some form or another soon for auction.  The sponsorship space seems pretty barren when it comes to Unity games, so who knows what will happen…

In this video, I recorded myself playing through the interactive environment, which I created in Unity.  The interactive parts are triggering scenes, blooming flowers, changing gravity behavior of the spheres/particle systems, changing the brightness of trails, and moving the trail thingy during the chorus.  In hindsight, I think I have a ways to go in terms of adding more interactivity in this.  I suppose that’s what prototypes are for, though!  But I’m pretty happy with how it turned out in the end.

The music is Branches by Finn Miles, and this last weekend I performed the visuals using a gamepad while Paul Gratton of Finn Miles played the song live at our church.  Paul is a part of Napkin Sketch, a creative collective of which I am also a member.

I’m really looking forward to the next two weekends.  This coming weekend is TIGJam Midwest #2, which is a game jam event where those of us from Intuition, in addition to other developer friends, try to make games in a weekend.  The name comes from TIGSource, our favorite gaming community.  Rumor has it some of the other guys are interested in making something in Unity, so that got me even more excited than usual.

The weekend after that is the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project, and those of us from Napkin Sketch will be participating in it once again.  That event is where we try to make a film in 48 hours after given a genre, character, line, and prop on Friday evening.  It should be a blast once again.

It has been a big struggle trying to get an acceptable visual style going. I wanted to progress from the pretty rough interactive sermon prototype. I decided to go 2.5D, and by that I mean planes/sprites in 3D space. I’ve also been learning to write my own shaders a little, though at this point I’m mostly hacking ones I find on the Unity forums.

This screenshot was taken in the editor and shows grass dynamically moving away from a cube. It’s based on a script by metervara who kindly provided it to the Unity community. I’ve shared my version, which ports his shader to Unity 2.5 and adds the ability to grow the bending effect radius when you press a key/button. The intention is to allow the player to use that ability as one means of expression for a visual instrument.

The original context I imagined this being used in is during worship at a church. So the band would be playing musical instruments and people could play visual instruments as a complement. In fact, the first usage of this prototype will be at our church. The deadline is July 12th, which I will probably (hopefully!) make. Of course, this could be used in any live music setting, and in fact the three of us are planning to do that for a future project.

Oh! To continue the visual instrument analogy, I was thinking that the Wii remote would basically be like a tambourine in that the primary action would be percussive. This led me to think about other parallels, like a melodic device. And now I have dreams of circuit bending some sort of guitar thing to use for this idea, hopefully with the help of someone more engineering savvy. Just think how sweet it would be to have a circuit bent Guitar Hero guitar that played music and visuals!

I imagine this tool most often being used to help visualize a sermon being delivered to a church congregation. The goal of the tool would be to present an environment that someone on the media team – a “player” if you will – can interact with.  The player would interact with the environment in a way that matched up with the speaker who is delivering the message.  One example would be if that speaker was telling a story.  The player would explore the environment and trigger events to match up with the timing and emphasis of the speaker’s story.  If the speaker was emphasizing a certain part of the story, the player could trigger events to help emphasize that part.  The final result would be an expression of the story experienced simultaneously through the mediums of virtual interactive experience (of which I consider computer games to be a subset) and oral tradition.

Here’s a run-through recording of the prototype.  It’s based on a story given to me by Chris Petrick, Perry Ross, and Richard Webb at Lutheran Church of Hope, with music and sound design by Paul Gratton (one of my partners from the Napkin Sketch collective), and voice acting by Julie Bull.

Here’s a recording from the production room while I, err….performed it during the last of 4 worship services at Lutheran Churh of Hope.  It kind of shows how the whole thing would fit into a traditional Christian church service. In this case, it was between two songs and presented on the screens. I imagine a “final version” being like this, but with a speaker telling the story live up on stage and a more developed interactive environment.

As you can see, it’s quite tempting as a designer to add complexity to the image above.  And yet, this must be the first game.  But I’ve decided most of the games will have more than just this, which will make them “mostly meaningless” I guess.  On top of all this, they should be positive.  I haven’t come up with too many ideas on how to do that yet, so I’m hoping that something will just come to me in the middle of development, hehe.

One of the things I realized I could learn from this whole experiment is how to intensify and purify meaning by separating elements of the game through elimination.  If I define what isn’t in the gameplay, maybe that will help me realize what is.  A nice side effect is a possible better skill in improving the non-game-specific elements of a game.  Let me illustrate:

This first illustration would represent elements of a game and potential meanings the player could get from the game.  If you remove some elements and reevaluate the game, you would notice certain meanings that are missing.  Then you can group those elements and meanings together, which would result in a better definition of what game element creates what meaning.

If I continue this process scientifically, I could get a pretty defined set of elements and their corresponding meanings.  The opposite would also be true:  if I only started with one element – say a title – that could lead to a specific corresponding meaning.  Then I could add elements little by little, evaluating the new meaning created.  By keeping the elements few, I can focus on creating specific meaning using the least elements possible.  This would result in an efficient game design, which I hope to talk about in a later post.

Will it work?  It seems to be going all right so far.  I’m working on a game with a few more elements, and I’ve already thought of an interesting by-product.  Removing some elements can have a meaning in and of itself, and I hope to explore that with this game about rewards.

An overview of meaningful play

The concept states that the amount of meaning play has is the value of the relationship between the action and outcome.  So if an interaction has value to you, it is meaningful.  And in order for it to have value, you have to both understand it (discernable) and make sense of it in its context (integrated).

If that’s the case, then meaning is quantitative.  The qualitative aspect of meaning would refer to its type:  whether it’s positive, negative, or maybe even more specific types like funny, dramatic, thrilling, etc.  For the more math-inclined, the amount of meaning refers to the length of a vector, and the positive nature of it refers to its direction.

A positive, meaningless game?

Therefore, that begs the question:  Can you have a meaningless game that results in a positive outcome?  It seems like in order for you to have a positive outcome, you’d have to have meaning.  So if a game was meaningless, the positive outcome would have to come from somewhere other than the game itself.

Still, without actual meaning in the game itself, it doesn’t seem like there would be much meaning left to get.  Maybe a game would send a message just by its very existence.  Therefore, a group of meaningless games might result in a noticable positive outcome.    Does the very existence of a game have meaning?

To find out, I would conduct the following experiment:  create a series of games that are meaningless to play, but when presented as a group, have a positive outcome.  If successful, each game would result in a positive outcome that is a fraction of the total positive outcome of the group, while still remaining meaningless itself.