The Success?? of Christian?? Games

My favorite talk of the conference was the last one, a roundtable discussion that led with a question about the perceived lack of success of Christian games compared to other media. I just came across a post by John Hanan about it, which inspired this post.

To me, the panelists’ answers mostly avoided the issue by trying to challenge the question – you see this a lot in politics – with rebuttals like “What does success really mean?” and “What does a Christian game really mean?”

LAME. At that point, my passions started to stir (and they are still stirred as you can tell by my last post!). To me, exploring definitions is much less important at this point, if you look at the progress made – or lack thereof – in game design that is deeply meaningful at all, let alone that is Christian specifically.

We Need More Shotguns

Now, do I believe we’re in a golden age of videogames? Of course! But that doesn’t mean we’ve made a lot of progress in making them meaningful. The exciting part is that we’re shotgunning new game ideas due mostly to the Internet, and in part to more-open-than-console mobile platforms. But I want to make something clear: we need a hell of a lot more shotguns.

And so, just like I asked at the end of that panel, I ask it here. And just like I prefaced this question at the end of that panel, I preface it here:

I do not want any cop-out answers. I want real examples. How do we, as game designers, actually design a meaningful game? FOR REAL. Like actually design one that is actually meaningful. I am looking for resources to do this, and I have found very few. It seems to me like we should be holding 10 game jams per year trying to figure this out.

Unintentionally, I asked it rather accusingly, so what followed ended up being mildly embarassing. But I probably would have exploded had I not asked this, so it was a fair trade.

A Sense of Urgency

The answers? It seems that no one really knows at this point. And that should be a Really Big Deal™ for all game developers interested in designing games that are intended to deliver a meaningful experience. It should be our #1 priority to figure this out. We should all be running to our laptops and feverishly creating experiences that attempt to explore this issue, and then sharing the results.

And yet… I can only find a handful of other designers with a sense of urgency about this, and most of those few are not sharing results in a way that progresses game design. Including me! Shame on me. I don’t know, maybe a sense of urgency is the wrong thing to look for, but I guess that’s what tends to inspire and motivate me. I keep remembering a conversation I had with Greg Wohlwend where we likened a sense of urgency in creating something to being chased by a lion. I think it is a beautiful picture.

It scares me that I, as a wannabe videogame designer of meaningful experiences, am starved for resources on how to actually do this. The important thing is that if that’s the case for me, then it is most likely the case for many others.

My Solution: A Meaningful Gameplay Game Jam

I love game jams. At this point, I’ve been involved with roughly 9 or 10 of them since 2007, most of which I helped organize. I think they are a savior of sorts for videogames as a medium. And so naturally I turn to the game jam to solve this problem. I’m probably biased, heh.

I have a vision for a game jam dedicated to exploring meaningful gameplay. I think it can be structured in a way to help solve this problem. And I think it deserves its own post, so I’ll save that for next. Sit tight.

Software licensing has hurt innovation in the video game industry — with social game maker Zynga being the exception to that rule — thanks to large game companies like Nintendo, said Electronic Arts founder and social gaming company Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins.

Zynga. Zynga?! You gotta be kidding me. They don’t make games, they buy game companies. Zynga is a company that consumes instead of creates. To use a food analogy, Zynga is a glutton, not a chef. The ridiculousness continues:

I think we actually had our golden age when game development was using floppy disks and it was an open free platform when we could all make games like we wanted to make

That’s a bunch of crap. That golden age has re-emerged in the last couple years and is happening TODAY. It’s called indie games. Anyone, at any point, can make the game she wants to make. And she actually does in the indie games community. That’s basically the whole ethos behind indie games.

Where has Trip Hawkins been? Is he really that oblivious? Of course he isn’t. It’s strategically disadvantageous to mention the beauty, the diversity, the life of the indie games community. It’ll threaten his sales.

So don’t listen to guys like this. Videogames are alive and well. The very identity of videogames is constantly expanding and morphing. We are in a golden age. Enjoy the sunlight!

NOTE: Trip has generously taken time out of the conference to defend himself below, please see the comments.

This is another one of those posts that’s been sitting on my hard drive. Pity I didn’t have the motivation to release this with the other indie game-length posts, even though it’s half finished. In this case, I wrote it almost 2 years ago. I actually still agree with it, although it makes me laugh how academic and logical I am with my argument. Maybe others will find it interesting, and since I will likely not finish the second half any time soon, I’m sharing it now…

Oprah’s Game Design Wisdom

A while back, Oprah had a show about simplicity.  I don’t really watch Oprah, but as I came home to grab some food, I walked in at just the right time to clearly hear her closing remarks, which included something along the lines of “the goal for this year is less stuff, and more meaning.”

Oprah isn’t explicitly providing that as a Christian message, but having a simple and efficient life just makes sense given my experience in life so far and more importantly, it’s a biblical principle that’s mentioned in several different places. It struck me, and naturally, my next thought was “How can this be applied to videogames?” What first struck me was how similar that statement was to how Rules of Play defines good game design.  But I realized that she started with “less stuff,” and the more I thought about it, the more important the concept of “less stuff” became.

Effective Game Design is Meaningful

Rules of Play states “the goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play.”  This assumes several things.  Design is intentional (has a goal) and design can be measured in terms of success (how well it achieved the goal). Agreed. After that is that game design creates play – as in what you do with a game is play it. Lastly, it assumes meaning can also be measured in terms of success, with more meaning being more successful. Agreed, although meaning is difficult to measure.

So if a person is describing the value of a game, the person who says “this game has better design” would really be saying “this game creates more meaningful play to me.” That makes sense, so it seems like a sound definition. However, when you consider the concept of efficiency, there are cases where the definition creates problems.

Here’s an example. There’s a game that gives you a certain amount of meaning – let’s call that amount m – in 3 hours of play. There’s another game that gives you m meaning in 5 hours of play. Which game is better?  According to Rules of Play, neither is better. Both create meaningful play, since the definition never addresses time.

Effective Game Design is Meaningful and Efficient

If time spent on this earth wasn’t limited, then that would be ok. But time spent here is limited, so a person can only play so many games. Therefore, if a person plays a game with the same amount of meaning but in a shorter time, the person can play another game in the time that was saved. That leads to more meaning experienced over a game player’s lifetime, which, according to the assumptions, is better than less meaning. I think this makes sense, since players already do this by seeking out and playing the games that are most meaningful to them.

If all this is true, then successful game design is the creation of meaningful play in the shortest experience. And consequently, the success of a game design is measured by an average representing the amount of meaningful play per a length of experience.

Implications of Game Design Efficiency

The addition of the concept of time to the definition of effective game design, and its subsequent affect on valuing a game, has wide-ranging implications, and also describes several game-playing behaviors.

…

Aaannnnd that’s all the further I got, sorry for the cliffhanger.

God at play
418 6th Ave
Suite 1210
Des Moines, IA  50309

There’s an open house November 16th from 4pm-7pm. If you’re interested, come check it out, the space has a cool set up. Here’s the sign you see when you come in, how internet-y.

More pics; moving in, some views from the offices.

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.

I found this comment to be particularly poignant:

For a society that seems to love tolerance, we sure seem to hate Christians a lot.

The Left Behind games obviously aren’t helping things.  I’ve never played one, but based on my research, they seem to be poorly crafted and a little mixed-up theologically.  This, of course, is based on the theology of the Left Behind books themselves, the first of which is dissected in incredible – though often over-the-top – detail at the Slacktivist blog.

If I were to unfairly distill Fred Clark’s analyses of the books down to a statement, it would be that the Left Behind series represents an anti-Anti-Christ perspective of the world which is not always pro-Christ.

I was having a recent conversation at my bible study lately involving the fire-and-brimstone preaching that you would hear on the street corner (or at the Des Moines Farmer’s Market).  To be clear, we didn’t agree with that behavior and concluded that neither would Deitrick Bonhoeffer, author of Life Together, which we’re currently studying.  I often wonder if this is what the Jewish authorities of Jesus’s day were like.  You know, the ones he had the most trouble with.  The ones that conspired to have him executed.  Not that what’s being preached on the corner is never true.  I think it can be, but so can swinging at a stranger’s head with a baseball bat in order to smash a fly that had landed there be technically “true.”

Nevertheless, I’m encouraged to see Walmart’s willingness to be open to more Christian games.

I still long for the day when I can play a game that is actually meaningful and says something about my faith.  Something real that actually represents the message of Jesus; “the last will be first,” “whatever you do to the least of these,” “love you neighbor as yourself,” and so on.  I guess that makes me just another game developer that is trying to make the kind of games I want to play.

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…

I’ve taken a few minutes here and there in the past few days to play Star Guard by Vacuum Flowers, after being introduced to it by my partner Mike via twitter. It just got frontpaged on TIGSource. Here’s an excerpt where Xander mentions his one qualm about the game:

Where as typically mines/traps would require caution and dexterity, these will simply not respawn so even if you die you can just get through the section without worrying about the consequences.

One of my favorite things about the game is Xander’s problem – i.e. it’s not a big deal at all when you die. To me, that made dying in the game fun in itself. I reveled in the fact that I could carelessly blast forward with glee, knowing that if I would die, I’d come back to the same spot in a matter of a couple seconds.

The character design is amazing, considering they’re expressed in just a few pixels.  The player has a surprising amount of life through the animations, and the Zomboid and charging rhino characters have a very distinctive personality.

Also, the game’s sound design is superb. I’m not saying that just because it’s created with SFXR, but because the sound choices made within that 8-bit limitation were very tasteful. Jumping is noticable, yet not obnoxious. The explosions are just right, the lava sounds are charming, and timer-based platforms give you a perfect feeling of urgency before they blow up.

The character design, sound design, and effects combine to form a polished feel from an otherwise minimal, low-budget aesthetic. For the past few months, I’ve been trying to take the same perspective on art direction. Vacuum Flowers has nailed it and made it look easy.

The story is presented in a minimal and pleasing way. As the image above suggests, it is simply displayed in the background of the level. There’s rarely more than 12 words to read. And the level design usually suggests what the words of the story are trying to express. It works so well that I’m sure we’ll see more of that in the future.

It’s an excellent game all around, with solid tuning to the platforming. I just wish I could get to the 8th and 9th level since there’s a random level-loading bug with the OS X version.