This post is part of a series: “unfinished posts I wrote a year ago that are collecting dust on my hard drive.” Most of them are about videogames and/or storytelling from an artistic perspective. I’ve been waiting for certain points where I’d be inspired enough to dig them up, and a recent article by Ian Bogost about Heavy Rain and how it relates to cinema inspired me to dig this one up. You should check out his article. Also, I realized something new while writing this, so I’m happy to have made some progress.

In my dusty post, I was writing about storytelling, and I tried to think of artistic mediums. I realized that in the context of making art or telling a story, it would be very helpful to define them by what made them distinct. I’m probably not doing any of this incomplete list the justice it deserves, but hopefully this will make the point.

• Oral tradition – dynamic, three-dimensional, using language spoken orally
• Music – dynamic, three-dimensional, using the sound generated from the structured series of contacts of objects
• Live-action role-playing – dynamic, three-dimensional, using live actors playing roles in a defined space
• Token-based role-playing – dynamic, three-dimensional, using tokens playing roles in a defined space
• Light painting – static, two-dimensional, using a single image represented by the placement of light on a surface
  
• Painting – static, two-dimensional, using a single image represented by the placement of colored pigments on a surface
• Literature – static, two-dimensional, using written or printed language arranged on sheets of a semi-permanent surface
• Photography – static, two-dimensional, using a single image of a real-life scene captured by a camera obscura and transferred to light-sensitive paper
• Film – dynamic, two-dimensional, using a sequence of images and audio of a real-life scene captured by a camera obscura, cut into a linear series of arranged segments, and presented on a screen
• Animation – dynamic, two-dimensional, using a sequence of images represented by the placement of colored pigments on surfaces, cut into a linear series of arranged segments, and presented on a screen
• Software art?? – dynamic, two-dimensional, using a sequence of images and audio stored on a computer, programmed into an interactive system, presented on a screen

As you can see, artistic mediums are technological in nature in the sense that the technology being used (or not used) makes one medium distinct from another. For each of these, you will want to artistically use one of those properties in order to create an artistic experience through that medium. With literature, you’ll want to use language, arrange the language, or use the surface in some artistic way. With film, you’ll want the scene, the capturing of the scene, the arrangement of the segments, or the presenting of the images on a screen to be artistic.

None of these mediums have any mention of storytelling or games because both of these things are completely abstract structures for meaning. They don’t rely on technology at all; they’re basically systems created by thought. Therefore, in order to be expressed in a way that can be artistic, a story or a game must be presented through a medium. Storytelling presented through live-action role-playing gives you theatre. Storytelling presented through light painting gives you shadow puppeteering. Games presented through token-based role-playing gives you board games. Storytelling presented through painting gives you graphic novels.

That means videogames are games that are presented through the last medium. And what makes them distinct is that medium. It’s based on an interactive system that is virtual (computer-based) and fictional (artistic, not functional). EA probably put it most concisely in the manifesto promoting their indie game collective, calling it “software art.”

To bring it back around to Ian’s article, he was suggesting that in the same way film has editing at its core, videogames might have extension or prolonging at its core, which is basically the opposite of film. And after looking at what makes videogames unique, I can see how that could be true in part. Because videogames have at their core a computer, and computers are good at simulating, so they could be more about continuity than the breaking up of continuity.

However, I think a better way to put it might be that the use of editing is at the core of film, as opposed to the use of fast editing. In the same way, the use of simulations would be at the core of videogames, as opposed to the use of continuous simulations.

That means good artists in film would use editing (among other things) to provide meaning, whether it was fast or slow.  In videogames, good artists would use simulation (among other things) to provide meaning.  In the case of Heavy Rain, that simulation was used for everyday actions, which gave the experience a distinct feel.

What is Interactive Visual Worship?

Interactive visual worship is a form of worship where people can use videogame technology to worship visually along with a band that’s playing music. It can be hard to understand at first if you’re not very familiar with forms of both Christian worship media and videogame media. I don’t blame you, so I’ll try to elaborate on both!

Christian Worship Media

During a modern Christian church worship service, on the surface level you will see a band playing music on a stage in front of the congregation, and the congregation sings along to the music. These days people know what to sing by looking at white words on black projected onto screens above or to the side of the band. Some churches have also begun using abstract animated backgrounds behind the words (or on different screens altogether), referred to as “motion backs.” Other churches even try to include less abstract animations, such as video clips of nature or people interacting in a meaningful way. In terms of the media that’s going on, it’s similar to live visuals at a rock concert.

So the goal is to express some faith-based message through film/animation during the musical part of worship – this is visual worship, or rather a specific form of visual worship. Since it is about expression, artists are needed to express that message. They choose the clips and fade between them live to the music in order to create meaning, similar to how a DJ works with turntables. Therefore, these people are referred to as worship VJs. So you could say that these worship VJs are worshipping visually by creating meaning from video clips in sync with a worship band playing music. Again, like VJs would at a rock concert/club. And there’s almost always only one worship VJ doing visuals, just like you usually have one DJ playing in a band or at a club.

Videogame Media

Interactive visual worship takes that idea, combines it with videogame technology and media, and allows a group of people to worship visually at the same time. Now when I use the word videogames, you might think of Tetris or Doom or Halo or Peggle, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about. I think of videogames as a mixture of two unique mediums – a specific medium that doesn’t really have a name yet, and games. At the heart of this unnamed medium is a virtual, fictional, interactive system running on a computer.

This system takes input, computes it, and displays an output that changes based on the input given. It’s fictional in the sense that the system represents something artistic; it’s not tax software, but a virtual world created by an artist that you can explore and learn from. It’s a world that speaks to you on a very human level, but because it’s interactive, some videogame designers describe it as a world that you can have a conversation with.

Interactive visual worship uses this unnamed medium. Keep in mind that it’s a unique medium that’s distinct from games, so it does not include winning & losing, game-like challenges, or points. But it still uses interactive systems or environments. These could be made up of a series of scribbles that move around, geometric shapes that appear to be alive, or an earthly world that looks like a painting or photograph.

What is it Like in Practice?

In the real world, where culture exists, this takes the form of using wireless devices like a Wii remote to interact with videogame-like environments during a church service. And the visuals appear on a screen for the congregation to see, just like existing visual worship media.

I can hear it now…”What?!  Playing videogames during church?!” Well, kind of. Though it’s not that different than mixing beats during church or painting during church. It’s a medium, just like other things that are experienced on Sunday morning. For interactive visual worship, it’s designed to be a communal activity for at least 6 people, like adding a visual band to the music one.

I’m working on a demo video that I’ll post soon; hopefully it will be provide some clearer idea of what this is all about. Basically at this point I have a few environments that I can switch between. It’s a polished prototype. More info to come.

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.

Greg just wrote about Why do we do what we do? and eloquently summed up the hard-to-define reason for why we at Intuition create art:

These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them.  Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me.

I really like how he put this because it can be difficult to put into words.  He makes it look easy.  The only other thing I can compare this to is something from Judeo-Christian culture – the psalm.  This compulsion is why I created MEHC.  It’s not the kind of game I like to play, but I just needed to make it somehow.

Alec Holowka was kind enough to respond to Greg’s post and suggested we check out his recent post Why Art?.  I was inspired enough by both of them that my comment to both of their posts turned into this.  Check them out if you haven’t yet.

In Response To “Why Art?”

I’m very comforted and honored to be amongst such final gentlemen who can present a rational argument.  Alec makes a good point that anger about discussing art often comes from fear or misunderstanding.  I especially like the video he posted – that says as much about his point as the words that follow it.  We’re just a part of the continuum, communicating something about humanity to each other through time.  And because we are unique, the message will be different for each person.  I like that attitude.

What I got from his argument about why games are art specifically seems to be that art gives him something about life to relate to, and because games also give him something to relate to, that makes them art.  I would go even further and say that art is created (it doesn’t just happen), communicates something human (a story/idea/emotion), and is otherwise “non-functional.”  By that, I mean that the thing in question has no function other than the act of communication itself (thus separating the word from design).  And because video games have these properties, they are art, too.

I was a little confused by the statement about art being subjective, though.  Did he mean that the experience of art is subjective?  Or the work of art itself is subjective?  There is a distinction to make here, and it partially forms the basis to my answer of “Why art?”.

I believe that art can be perceived in a subjective way.  But isn’t the work of art itself – the video game in this case – an object?  It is a collection of code and binary data running on a computer of some sort with input and output.  That makes it material, existing in reality, which is objective by definition.

Furthermore, because art “speaks to us,” that seems to make it objective, too.  Something is doing the speaking, and I think the thing that speaks doesn’t really change.  It is we who change and hear different things.

Therefore, I’d say that a more specific argument would state that the perception of art is subjective, based on each of our life experiences and unique brains, while the work itself is objective.  That can explain why we can look at a film several years later and see or learn something different.  The film itself remains unchanged, but our perception of it changes.  It communicates something about humanity in a different way than before, because we understand humanity in a different way than before.

I think this distinction is important because it suggests that a work of art is unchanging, yet communicates on a level higher than normal understanding.  The fact that we can return to an object and subjectively learn something new suggests that we can’t fully comprehend the work all at once.

To me, that gives art a magical quality (in the emotional sense).  That is one of the reasons why I think it’s important to call games art.

Saving the World

In the comments of Greg’s post, Alex and Greg were discussing saving the world with art.  The notion may seem impossible to some, but I’d argue that we are living proof that it can work.  Inspiring people through creation seems to be one of the simplest (though still very hard!) ways to change the world with art.  Saving it is just a few steps away.

By making something of incredible quality that communicates to people and inspires them in a lasting way, you can inspire them to either change or to create themselves.  And them creating will often lead to change later.  Here’s a quote from Eva Zeisel to illustrate my point:

It’s very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good.  But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I’ll tell you.  When making a pot you can’t bring any evil into the world.

Just think about the games we’ve played that have inspired us to make games ourselves.  Those games have done good things because they have inspired us to create, and those acts of creation have changed us.  Those games have changed the world.  Saving it is just a few steps away.

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…

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!

How to Choose a Tool

When choosing a tool, the two most important things you could base your decision on are how a tool fits your goals and how a tool fits what kind of designer you are.  The whole point of using a tool is that it lets you accomplish your goals with the least amount of effort.  And how successful you will be using that tool will be (at least partly) based on what kind of designer you are.  Your end goal is to become intimate enough with your tool that it becomes an extension of your mind, just like an art tool such as a pencil becomes an extension of your mind.  In that way, you’ll be able to be expressive with your work.

Here’s an example:  those familiar with indie games will have heard of Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström, one of the most prolific indie game developers.  He is prolific partly because he uses Game Maker, which allows for rapid 2d game development.  He has committed to using this tool and has become an expert at it.  Furthermore, the tool’s strengths match up with the games he likes to make.  I thought the story ended there.

Cactus Motivational Poster, concept by Petri Purho (kloonigames.com)

However, after talking with him at the 2008 GDC, I also learned that he gets bored with ideas fairly quickly and has a hard time finishing longer projects (don’t we all!).  So he decided to accept this aspect of his character and continue to get better and better at making smaller games quickly, before he gets tired of them.  He has learned about himself and used that knowledge to set realistic goals, and then found tools that work well for who he is and stuck with them.  The end result is that he’s one of the heroes of indie games.

Based on my experience, I could recommend four tools that would be good solutions depending on the goals you’d have as a designer:  Game Maker, Processing, Flash, and Unity.

Why Use Game Maker?

If you haven’t finished and released any games, your goal is just to finish some 2d games, and you don’t mind or even prefer using a Windows tool, then I think Game Maker is one of the best tools you can use.  Game Maker uses drag-and-drop functionality to make developing pretty easy.  It lets you manage your content pipeline and provides support for loading animations.  You can use simple scripts based on a custom scripting language to control the logic of the game.  It even comes with built-in scripts that provide common solutions for games.

YoYo Games provides a ton of resources, tutorials, and even competitions on their website.  The Game Maker community is quite large, active, and supportive.  Many of the resources are for beginners, but you can find a good deal of more advanced tutorials and support if you look below the surface.  Game Maker’s ease of use can make it seem like you can’t do much with it at first.  However, you shouldn’t be fooled; you can do tons of amazing things with the tool, as Cactus and so many other developers have proven.  A quick look at the YoYo Games website shows a 3d GTA clone, a Mario Kart 64 clone, and 2d games of almost every type.  It even supports multiplayer games.

I use a Mac, so I haven’t been able to spend much time with Game Maker, but once the Mac version gets to a more finished state, I’ll probably be taking a look at it again.  I consider it a “get things done” sort of tool, which would make it perfect for prototypes or experiments I want to make.

Why Use Processing?

Processing is a development environment that is specifically designed to help designers and creative types learn programming and interactive technology.  The environment was developed by people at MIT who were focusing on teaching visual thinkers programming and interactive concepts.  If your number one goal is programming education, or you’re interested in creating interactive experiments using a variety of media and inputs, like generative visuals based on sound input or applications using Wii remote input, then Processing would be a great choice.

Another interesting result is that you can share your Processing programs directly on the web since it outputs Java applets.  But unlike Flash, there’s no real industry surrounding Processing, which is why it’s best to use it for educational or freeware purposes.  I’ve used Processing for educational purposes and to make an animation for my church.  For that project, I modified a particle system developed by Robert Hodgin and set it up to create particles dynamically based on a song my friend Paul Gratton composed.

Why Use Flash?

Flash’s greatest strengths as a tool for game development are its content pipeline, its ability to use animated clips very easily, and its install base as a web platform.  You’ll have to do your own programming with ActionScript in order to create anything more than a simple button-based game, but there are a lot of resources out there that can teach you how to program with ActionScript.  That makes it a great platform to learn on.  You can find contract work using Flash, and there’s also the Flash game sponsorship space if you’re interested in making a living creating games that fit the sponsorship model.  An important detail to keep in mind is that it’s not hardware-accelerated, so you’re limited to a certain level of game complexity.

If you’re familiar with Game Maker but interested in Flash development, keep in mind that every hour you’re spending learning ActionScript is an hour that could be spent working on a game with Game Maker.  That makes sense as long as your goals for creating Flash games are more important than your goals for creating Game Maker games.

Up to this point, the Intuition collective has used Flash for everything.  It was a great choice for us since we had a team that wanted to create games quickly, we had experienced programmers who could quickly program things in ActionScript, and we saw opportunities that could allow us to get paid for doing it so that we could develop full-time.  However, as Greg pointed out in his post about why Flash sucks, many people expect a certain type of game with Flash, and if you’re interested in making games different from that, it’s worth considering a different tool.  Some of the games we want to make will still fit that expectation, but for those that don’t, we’ll be using a different tool – most likely Unity.  I have begun using it myself recently.

Why Use Unity?

The fastest way I can think to describe Unity is that it’s like a larger-scale, 3d-focused version of Game Maker, but with a more polished interface and wider support for platforms.  Unity is a full 3d game development environment – a fully-featured engine with a built-in editor.  Like Game Maker and Flash, it has a library for asset management and even allows you to edit files outside the tool and come back to see them updated immediately.  It lacks Flash’s animation system that supports game development so well, but instead it adds great 3d scene management tools.  However, members of the Unity community have created tools to load SWFs inside Unity, allowing you to utilize the strengths of both.  Also like Game Maker, it includes a set of built-in scripts that let you quickly implement common input/control systems.

One of it’s greatest strengths as a development tool is it’s ability to play your game in the editor and modify parameters during play to test the game.  Based on my level design experience working on Darkest of Days, I know that this feature can speed up development exponentially.

Unity is best for 3d games, and that plus all of its features make it a little more complicated than Flash.  It’s not limited to 3d, so with a little extra work you can make 2d games with it just fine.  In fact, many popular iPhone games made with Unity are 2d.  Unity supports JavaScript and C# for scripting, so it’s similar to Game Maker or Flash in the sense that you’ll have to script the logic for most games.  However, unlike Flash, since it’s a proper game engine, you don’t have to do as much programming to get an actual game running.    Thanks to the built-in scripts, I’d say the level of programming knowledge required to make a simple game is somewhere between Game Maker and Flash.  One last big plus:  the Unity Web Player is hardware-accelerated, well-optimized for performance, and supports a large number of video cards.

The thing that excites me most about Unity is using it as a release platform.  As of right now, you can publish a Unity game as a web-based game for OS X and Windows (obviously it doesn’t have the install base of Flash, though), or as a downloadable for OS X and Windows.  With an additional license and tweaks to the Unity game and content, you could publish to the iPhone.  With an additional license, tweaks to the game and content, a Nintendo developer license, and a dev kit, you could publish to the Wii.  Some time in the future, you’ll be able to publish to the Xbox 360, too (this was paused a while back to finish up support for the Wii and add support for the iPhone).

The Ultimate Goal

My tool of choice is changing from Flash to Unity, but only because I have specific goals for my games that match Unity’s strengths, and I’ve tried Unity and feel it fits the type of designer I am.  In the end, I hope to be comfortable enough with Unity that development becomes expressive.  To me, that’s the ultimate goal of any tool – to be able to “sketch” an idea quickly, and then iterate on it until completion.  The tool you choose should be able to do the same if you stick with it.

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.

Butterflies & Hurricanes Lyrics

I’ve always enjoyed Butterflies & Hurricanes because of its inspirational mood and appealing mix of rock and classical style.  I could never fully understand the lyrics, and for some reason, I was moved to look them up today.  They are excerpted below:

Change everything you are

And everything you were

Your number has been called

 

Fights and battles have begun

Revenge will surely come

Your hard times are ahead

 

Best, you’ve got to be the best

You’ve got to change the world

And use this chance to be heard

Your time is now

 

Don’t let yourself down

And don’t let yourself go

Your last chance has arrived

 

Best, you’ve got to be the best

You’ve got to change the world

And use this chance to be heard

Your time is now

I’m no musical expert, but to me Muse is creating a metaphor based on chaos theory.  Among other things, the song is drawing a parallel between the ability of a butterfly to change weather patterns and the ability of a human to change the world.  Let me explain.

What is Chaos Theory?

Chaos theory is a field of scientific study dedicated to studying the behavior of complex and dynamical (i.e. chaotic) systems.  It’s absolutely crucial to realize that the word chaos used in this context refers to a deterministic system.  In other words, given the right formulas, one could determine how the system will behave over time.  However, the system is complex enough that its outputs appear to be random over time – even though it isn’t purely random – hence the term deterministic chaos, or just chaos.

The Butterfly Effect

One of three core properties of a chaotic system is that it is sensitive to initial conditions.  This means, roughly speaking, that the points that are close to each other at the initial stages of a system will be greatly different in the future.  This implies that small changes in the points early on will result in very large changes later.  In 1952, Ray Bradbury illustrated the concept in a book about time travel, where he explained that the death of a butterfly during prehistoric times could lead to a much different reality in the future.

Edward Lorenz later reported scientific evidence of this concept while running a weather simulation.  To make things easier for himself, he shortened the decimal .506127 to .506 while inputting values into the simulation, which resulted in a much different output in the weather system.  After doing further study, he reported his findings in a talk Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?, choosing a butterfly as a nod to Bardbury’s book.  Ever since, the butterfly effect has been used to illustrate a core component of chaotic systems.

Using the Butterfly Effect in Game Design

The basic concept behind the butterfly effect is that a very small change early on can have a large impact later.  Because the changes made early on have a large impact, they are meaningful.  However, because the changes made early on are small, they seem meaningless.  This creates a dichotomy where the changes made to the system seem to have much less meaning than they actually do.  In addition, the difference between the perceived meaning and actual meaning is not realized until later.

The game designer can use this dichotomy as a tool in several ways.  If the player makes a wrong choice early on, the player could feel regret later.  If play continued after that regret, the player would be more careful about his decisions the next time around.  This tool is used in the game Jumpman to good effect.  The avatar in Jumpman has little friction, so a small movement causes the player to slide easily.  This is like creating a miniature butterfly effect every time the avatar moves.  As the player progresses through the game, he learns to be very careful about his movements, because one small error could lead the avatar to instant death.

Another way the designer could use this dichotomy is as a way to create hope.  If the player knew the meaning of the actions he made early on, he could gain hope that later those actions would have a large impact that would give him an advantage.  Chess is a good example of this.  Players must move the pawns first in order to free up the more powerful pieces.  This makes the first few moves in a Chess game pretty important.  In fact, expert players will be able to recognize a particular play style by watching the first several moves in a Chess game.  Being able to see the pattern early will help them to understand meaningful moves that could be made later.  This gives the player hope that he can overcome his opponent successfully.

A designer can also use the butterfly effect in the story of a game.  The most obvious way would be force the player to make decisions at certain points in the game, branching the story into alternate versions.  This was made popular by the Choose Your Own Adventure books.  Lately, Daniel Benmergui and Gregory Weir have used this technique in their games I Wish I Were the Moon and (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors.  Each game gives the player the freedom to explore the consequences of his actions made to the characters and the environment.  Those consequences are played out in short animations as endings to the game.  The final goal of the game is to experience all of the endings.  Both games are pretty small in scope, so the designers have not created a lot of room for the early actions in the game to branch very far and therefore to cause much impact.  The Majesty of Colors takes the concept a little further, and after playing it, one can see how this concept could be extended so that the stories become even more different over time.

I’m sure the best way to create meaning with the butterfly effect is yet to come.  Until then, these directions should be explored further in games.  Doing so just might change the world. . .

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.