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Last year at the Montreal International Games Summit, Jonathan Blow gave a lecture entitled ‘Design Reboot’ that stirred a bit of controversy.

It’s been available on his blog since last November as an mp3 download (with the PowerPoint slides he used) but for some time now I’ve been wishing it was written down somewhere. Because I have a wedding to organise I found the time to put something together that approximates a transcript.

I say ‘approximates’ because it was never my intention to transcribe word-for-word the contents of the lecture. The mp3 is there if you want that. Instead what I wanted was something like a transcript but that was readable as a written piece. As I’ve indicated in the title of this post, I think it’s kind of worthwhile.

If you’d like to discuss this lecture I suggest hitting up his blog. The ‘transcript’ and images are reproduced by permission of the author.

Design Reboot

by Jonathan Blow

I’d like to start with a quote. This quote comes from Daniel Radosh speaking in The New York Times this September. He was writing a review of Halo 3 and he said:

The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player’s desire for mastery in favour of enhancing the player’s emotional and intellectual life.

Then he went on to say from there:

The first 35 years of motion pictures, from 1895 to 1930, yielded a handful of films that are considered masterpieces for their technical innovations, but the following decade is when cinema first became the art form that we know today. As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain.

Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age. But the first step is not Halo 3.

And I find myself thinking along the same lines these days. I don’t tend to think in terms of film analogies so I don’t see it quite the way Daniel does but I have a similar dissatisfaction with games. I’m finishing up a project right now, deciding what I’m going to devote the next three years of my life to and I’m finding that games I would have been excited to work on five years ago I’m no longer excited about. They’re no longer good enough and I’m playing around with concepts, trying to find the thing that is really worth three years of my life. I’m trying to break away from what I feel is this huge body of assumptions that we are steeped in from decades of games industry tradition and the hundreds of games we’ve played through in our lives, just reinforcing these assumptions over and over. So I’m going to try and talk about my viewpoint and my thought process here.

I’m going to start at square one with the question ‘What are games?’ to begin with (for our purposes here I’m going to be talking about software running on computers mostly). Games are where you’re trying to achieve a goal and there are some rules governing the actions you can perform and their effects on the game world and also what the game world can do back to you. It’s basically a running program and the program implements a bunch of rules.

And the way that I’ve started thinking about it recently that’s a little bit less dry than that and a little more meaningful to me is that games create a sort of temporary world, a low-stakes subdomain, simpler than the real world, where there is an explicit meaning of life. There’s a point to be there, whether its maximising a score, or getting to the end of the story, or rescuing the princess or something like that. You know why you’re there and you know what you’re trying to do. Even in sandboxy games there are explicit objectives. Suddenly that created a shift in my viewpoint. It’s like, ‘Wow.’ The meaning of life in this existence is something that I really care about. It’s something that’s been tugging at me for my entire life and to people throughout the ages and I don’t think I’m alone in this. This is part of why games are compelling to me.

So games have these goals that you’re trying to achieve. Before you play a game you usually don’t know exactly what those are and you learn how to achieve them because the game trains you as you play it. You build a mental model of what’s in the game world and how the game works and the game communicates back to you how you’re doing and this feedback helps you to win the game.

Here’s a screenshot of Super Mario Brothers 3, and because I’ve played this game a bunch I now know that there’s a bunch of things I can do. I can walk over to the left and jump on that monster’s head, I can walk to the right and jump on this platform, knock that turtle over and throw his shell. I can jump under this question block to get a reward. I know that it’s a question block even though the bitmap is kind of scrolled right now and you can’t see the question mark. And maybe I can climb into that pipe over there. These are things that a normal human who has never played Super Mario Brothers would not know. I learnt a lot of specific, weird things by playing this game.

What I mean to say is that all games actively teach; not just edutainment games, not just serious games but all games teach you as you play them. This teaching can happen at many different levels. It can be a very explicit rules of the game level, like this is a monster and you jump on his head to kill him, or they can be more broad and general, you figure out what kinds of strategies will serve you well in different situations. In a Mario game maybe you figure out that you should look before you leap.

I’m not going to go too much more into this idea of games as a teaching mechanism but here are two books that you can read if you would like more information on that. The one on the left is A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster and the one on the right is Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost. They’re both very good books.

So now that we know what games are the next question is ‘What can they provide?’ What can they do for me? And why would I play a game? Why do people play games? Well we already know one of the answers; it’s pretty obvious. Games can provide entertainment, fantasy and escapism. I think that’s fine. We need some of that in the world and we get a lot of it from games already. But if this is all that games were I would intensely dissatisfied because fantasy and escapism is not fulfilling to me. At the end of the day I want to feel like my life has some meaning. If you’re only escaping all the time you don’t get that. I think a lot of other people are dissatisfied with that, too, and it’s not something that we really talk about in the industry. I wish that we would a little bit more.

Another thing that games can provide is meaningful artistic expression. Where you express something that you care about communicating and your audience cares about receiving. There still seems to be some kind of debate about this–about whether games can be art–so I’ve put up some examples to sort of show my point.

Before I do that I’ll say that if games were just an avenue of expression maybe that too by itself would not be too interesting. But what is interesting is that when we develop the medium to where we can express competently and consistently through it, then those artistic expressions are going to come at a different angle, or from a different perspective, than they would through other media. That’s why I have these examples.

In the upper left is a still frame from a film. We know that in film ideas and emotions are often conveyed through moving compositions of objects in the scene coordinated with sounds and things. In the upper right is a poem. In poems the entire form is based on presenting rhythms and patterns of words in a way that is peculiar only to that medium. I didn’t want to stop here and play a song for you guys but the lower left is supposed to represent live music like in a concert. As we know music doesn’t feel like a movie or a poem. In fact, if you have a song that is sad and a poem that is sad, the sadness from the poem is going to feel fundamentally different than the sadness of the song. They’re different things; even though we call them by the same word they’re different.

As human beings our life experience is enriched–it’s made broader–by the fact that we have these different forms to communicate with and to feel by. What games can do is add another one down in this corner where this question mark is. The reason why I’ve made it a question mark is that I feel we haven’t quite developed games to the point where we really exactly know what their special contribution is. That might take hundreds of years. Really. But I think that we’ll get there eventually.

So because of this debate about whether games are art I thought I’d put forth two examples of games that are clearly art. The first one is Everyday Shooter by Jonathan Mak. This was recently released on the PlayStation Network. You can download it for the PlayStation 3. It’s an eight-way shooter like Geometry Wars or Robotron but it’s–aside from being a shooter and presenting a challenge to you as a player–also about expressing audiovisuals and gameplay.

If you haven’t actually played this game it’s hard to communicate because as I said what this game has to tell you only can come through games. I can’t quite say it in a speech. Lots of games show you audiovisuals but what this game does is that it’s really giving you a composition and it’s a composition that works with the gameplay. The gameplay of Everyday Shooter is the way it is, not just because it’s supposed to be challenging or fun, but also because the author wanted to express that specific gameplay to you. And it makes this game feel different from a lot of other games.

Here’s another one. It’s called The Marriage by Rod Humble. It’s a free download for the PC over the Internet. This one expresses things also but it does it differently. Whereas Everyday Shooter is about expressing sensations this game is about expressing the author’s life to you. He’s trying to tell you here’s what it’s like to be in my marriage with my wife and encountering all these social situations and different people that we do. And the way that he does this is through the rules of gameplay, the rules of interaction.

So when you sit down to play The Marriage you don’t really know very much but then you start that process that I was talking about of building the mental model of the game in your head, of learning the rules. And as you do that you move your mouse around, you interact with those pink and blue squares and the little circles and you notice what happens and how they interact with each other. As you learn the rules your mind also builds an interpretation of those rules, like ‘Oh, this means that the man doesn’t really like spending too much time with his wife; he feels a little bit stifled or something’ but it doesn’t come across in words, which is the brilliant part, it comes across as gameplay. It’s a very interesting and fascinating game and everyone should play it who wants to design games.

The third thing that games can provide–and this is going to be a hard one to convince some people of but it’s true–they can provide a means of exploring the universe in two different ways. One is for the designers of the game, by exploring different designs and their ramifications, and another is for the players of the game, by being in this space that’s given to them and by seeing what it’s like to move around in there, what happens and what the results are.

There’s a very interesting aspect of games that’s different from all other media that will contribute to that question mark, which is that games are formal systems. They are software running on a computer and that’s rules that take input data and process it and generate output data. Systems like that are biased to producing truth or at least consistency unless you mess them up with lots of bugs or deliberately corrupt them.

To try to put forth a simpler example to make that more understandable you can think of mathematics. You start with some axioms that are defined or assumed as true and then you have some rules that you can use to combine those axioms, put them together into equations, rewrite that over and over and you get different and different equations until eventually you end up with something that must be true that you didn’t know when you started. And that’s how mathematics proceeds.

Games are like that but in a messier, more complicated way. Instead of axioms you have the state of the world, some objects sitting around. Instead of rewrite rules you have your program that manipulates those objects in the world either via a physics system or by logical rules or AI rules or whatever and it flows that world from time step to time step until you end up with a result. And it’s up to the designer how much veracity there is in that procession. But that’s something I’m going to talk about in later slides.

As an illustration of understanding the world, here’s a picture of a well-known board game, Go. It’s famous for having these very minimalistic rules; they might be the simplest rules of any game. But it’s also very profoundly respected. Many think it may be the greatest game ever made and the reason is, despite the simple rules, the situations you can get into are very complex and subtle. You can learn a great deal by trying to become good at Go and trying to win against a good player. Many players report that after playing this for a long time they’re kind of learning things about the universe, about strength and structure, and life, from the patterns of the stones. There are Go proverbs you might have heard. A famous one is don’t throw good stones after bad. That comes directly after common advice for a new Go player.

The next part of my talk is just thinking about the ramifications of this statement: games are going to be huge. By which I mean that a lot of people are going to be playing them. We maybe think that a lot of people play games now–they’re pretty popular–but as we’re always happy to see every year the market grows. In the past year we’ve seen some extra growth due to some very interesting hardware and software moves. So for example, Nintendo came out with the Wii and the DS has exploded in popularity and they’re reaching audiences that we wouldn’t normally have considered to be gamer audiences. That’s very exciting because we’re going to have more people playing our stuff than ever before.

What that means to me is that games are going to be moving more and more to becoming central to our culture. They’re going to heavily impact the patterns of human thought and thus help define what it means to be human. A hundred years from now what it means to be human is going to be determined in a significant part by video games. And that sounds like a kind of weird, risky statement to make but it’s obvious. It’s obviously true because we have other media now that have already done this.

So books, both fiction and nonfiction books, are a fundamental part of what it means to be a human today. Think about what your life would be like if there were never any books. You never could have learned out of books at school, you wouldn’t be literate, you certainly wouldn’t be sending email on a computer. We would be in a totally different situation, certainly not at this conference. So books have been important and the development of that medium has been important.

Film, to a more subtle degree, and it’s a newer medium, but yes, that also. Most of us have seen a large number of films and a lot of hours of television and that visual language of composition and proceeding through scenes informs us. When we visualise things on our own, apart from a film, the way that we visualise has been informed by what that film showed us or what all that history of films that we’ve seen have showed us.

I’d like to come back to the point that all games teach and if games are going to be one of the foundations of human thought in the future we really need to think about what those games are going to be teaching all these people that we’re selling them to. Again, the question is not if it’s teaching them something because games, by definition, teach. The only question is ‘What? What do they teach the audience?’ And I have a concern here.

My concern is that game designers of today lack discernment when we’re thinking about whether our game is good or bad. The way we evaluate a design, usually, is by looking at whether a lot of people want to play our game. If they play it and they report that they’re having fun we’re like, ‘Hey, that’s a good game.’ If they say they’re not having fun maybe we sometimes say, ‘They just don’t understand it’ or something. But in the scope of the larger industry that’s the metric. It’s like if it’s a fun game a lot of people want to play it and it’s a good game. Otherwise it’s probably not that good of a game.

As designers we don’t tend to care why people want to play our game. We certainly don’t apply any method of critique to that. And I’m going to claim that that means that we don’t show concern for our players’ quality of life. Here’s what I mean by that. We have a number of tools to keep players playing our game. The majority of them fall into one category and that is scheduled rewards. We give players things to mark their progress. And this is part of that communication process that I was talking about earlier. A game communicates to you that you’re proceeding toward a goal by giving you rewards as communication that you’re doing well. But sometimes those rewards can be gratuitous and extraneous.

Some examples of rewards are collectibles (gotta get all of something in a game), unlockables (you play the game enough and it gives you new characters), advancement of the story (maybe there’s gameplay and then there’s a plot and you want to play through the game and beat the boss monster so you can see what happens to Joe when he goes through the next door). And now we’ve got these achievements which are like an extra layer on top. Where you hand someone a little medal when they beat the boss monster so they feel extra good about it and can show that to their friends.

Sometimes we take this really far. Massively multiplayer games, for example, are notorious for having relatively empty gameplay but also being very addictive. They keep players hooked with constant, fake rewards. I say ‘fake rewards’ because an MMO will give you gold, or experience points, or extra levels, or nice equipment or something, but we all know that as soon as you have enough of that to have advantage over the monsters you’re trying to fight then it’s going to make those monsters not very valuable to fight. Now you need to fight stronger monsters that exactly match your new power. The rewards are actually illusionary and this creates what designers and players call the treadmill or the grind. The rewards are a way of lying to the player so that they feel good and keep playing our game when in fact nothing real has changed.

This can get really extreme. We’ve all heard of guys in Korea and China dying from playing MMOs for five days straight or however long. That’s certainly not good but I’m also going to say that this element in a less nefarious way pervades all of our game design. Even in cases where gamers aren’t dying. Even when they report that they like a game, I’m claiming that it’s still bad.

There are a lot of different ways to make a game fun but because we don’t understand games very well as designers we usually pick one of the easy ways to make a game fun. That easy route involves sacrificing the player’s quality of life. So we keep players hooked by giving these rewards and as long as they’re hooked it doesn’t necessarily matter what the quality of the core gameplay is. The gameplay can be not very good but as long as they want to collect all the little achievements or get the nicer sword and the nicer armour then they’ll still play the game. And as long as people play it’s all the same to us designers. We’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a pretty good game, you know, a lot of people want to play it. They say they like it.’

I’m sure that at this point a lot of people think that I’m kind of needlessly babbling on about this point. But maybe to clarify it I want to put forth this question at the bottom of this slide. Think of any game that has a lot of rewards in it like this and ask yourself if you took out all of the scheduled rewards–the power-ups that didn’t directly affect gameplay, the ever-escalating weapons and armour, if you took out the story unless the story is necessary to play the game–would players still want to play your game? Would they still want to do the same fundamental activity without all the whiz-bang particle systems and things like that?

I’m not saying that wouldn’t damage a game. That would damage almost any game that we’re talking about. Any game is going to be less compelling if you take out those extra rewards. What I’m saying is if you take all that stuff off, if you strip it and just have the gameplay, does your game fall below a certain threshold or not? Does it fall below a line where no one wants to pay attention to it any more? Or is it still something that a lot of people would want to play? That’s what I’m getting at here. We need to build that kind of discernment about the quality of gameplay.

I’ve been saying this kind of thing in public for a few months now and a lot of people say, ‘Well what? You’re saying rewards are bad. That doesn’t make sense.’ But I’m not saying that rewards are bad; I’m saying that they can be divided into two categories. Some rewards are like food in that they’re naturally beneficial to you when you consume them and they help increase your quality of life. And some rewards are like drugs, where maybe they’re fun and they taste good but they don’t really give you any nutrition and if you do too many of them that’s actually detrimental to your health.

As game designers we don’t understand food. We don’t know how to make food. So we resort to drugs all the time. And that shows. That shows in the discontent of many people with the state of games they have in front of them. For example, Daniel Radosh, who gave that nice quote at the beginning of this talk, he was hungry, he wanted some food. But Halo 3 was just giving him cheap drugs and he didn’t want that.

The game industry is chasing bigger and bigger player bases every year and I claim the industry exploits them in an unethical way. We as designers usually don’t see it as unethical but I think that’s only because we refuse to stop and think about the ramification and the magnitude of what we’re doing. And magnitude is the key.

Here I’ve got three pictures of things that are not necessarily bad. They’re not bad if you do them as an individual a little bit at a time. You could smoke once in a while, you could have some fast food, you can play World of Warcraft. I’m totally serious when I put World of Warcraft in that line. When you talk about these things at a societal level, it becomes a societal problem. People die from smoking all the time even though you’ve probably smoked some cigarettes individually and it’s no big deal. People’s quality of life is tremendously lowered and their health is damaged by fast food. And I’ll talk about World of Warcraft in upcoming slides.

The thing I want to get at is that I’m not trying to blame players here or anything. I’m not trying to say you should feel bad if you eat McDonald’s or anything. What I am trying to say is that if you’re the CEO of McDonald’s or you’re an exec at an ad agency whose job is to put a hamburger in the hand of every child in America you should not feel good about your job. You should feel ashamed. You should. We don’t have that in the games business. We don’t have that sense because we feel that games are just entertainment; we don’t really have the sense that we could do things that we might be ashamed of yet. If we’re powerful people, if our medium is powerful, we should have the capability to do things that we should be ashamed and then make the choice about whether we’re going to do them or not.

What does World of Warcraft say? I just picked a few things of the many things I think it says. Like I said earlier, the rules of a game, the kinds of interactions that a game puts you into, is the meaning of life for that game. And the meaning of life in World of Warcraft is that you’re some schmo who doesn’t really have anything better to do than sit around pushing a button and killing imaginary monsters that are meaningless. It also says it doesn’t really matter whether you’re smart or adept at trying to get ahead in the system because what really matters is how much time you sink in (because of all the artificial constraints on you). That also says you don’t need to do anything exceptional because to feel good, to be rewarded, all you need to do is run the treadmill like everyone else.

Now I’m not saying that World of Warcraft teaches you those things explicitly and logically. You don’t come away after playing World of Warcraft with those ideas in your head. But what I am saying is that those things take root subtly and subconsciously. It’s like advertising impressions and brand identity. Lots of people say, ‘Oh advertising, it doesn’t work on me. I see ads on TV and it doesn’t affect my purchasing decisions.’ Well those people are wrong; it does. That’s why advertising is such a huge business because people have been doing it forever and they know that it works. Our minds are impressed upon by these things that we see all the time and even moreso by these things that we do because in games we’re active participants.

People identify with their activities. If you work at a really horrible, boring job and you’re just there for the money and you do that for years and years that becomes part of your identity. It becomes difficult to separate you from all this time you spent at your job. Same things with games that you play. People are products of their origins and their environments and we’re giving people these environments that they’re ostensibly having fun in, these games. We’re helping determine what they’re going to be.

To finish up this idea about natural rewards versus artificial rewards, I thought I would give a positive example of what I think is a very natural reward. This one came from a posting on Clint Hocking’s blog and it’s about the game Portal which I’m sure many of you have played and enjoyed. It’s a great game. Manveer Heir wrote:

The brilliance in Portal lies not only in its simplicity (and excellent humour) but also in the moments of realisation when you figure out a puzzle.

No puzzle stumped me for more than five minutes in that game yet I went from being completely dumbfounded one moment to feeling like a genius the next as I realised what I was supposed to do.

His own brain rewarded him for solving puzzles in Portal. I would claim that that means that the activities he was performing were somehow intrinsically worthwhile for him. He got a reward out of it without the game needing to jump up and down and sing Ode to Joy and launch fireworks every time he solved a puzzle. It didn’t need to say, ‘You’re a genius!’ for getting to the exit. No, all the game had to do was set up situations to challenge him at his pace and for him to succeed genuinely. I think that’s important and I think that’s something we could really learn from.

So I’m not sure that I want to keep harping on this… but I will. Because I say this kind of thing about game design being a serious problem and everyone’s like, ‘Whatever, dude.’ Like you’re smoking something. So I want to frame this, and again it’s a matter of scale. Games are going to be huge. We’re selling a lot of them. And what I see as the primary challenge for mankind in this century–and this could change because we’re still early in the century–is to understand and deal with the fact that despite all these enterprises that create good things for us (things like human rights, safety, leisure time and fast transportation–those are pretty good things) we do these things at such a scale that we cannot help but affect the world.

On the left there are some things, some of them at least are unintentional side-effects of these good things that we’ve created. We’ve come to understand this but we haven’t really effectively dealt with it yet. In this next century, as societies, we need to understand that long-term sustainable existence is a lot harder than just doing the basic things. Having fast transportation in a healthy world that exists and lasts for a long time is a lot harder than just having fast transportation. We engage in these enterprises at such a magnitude that our actions heavily influence, almost to a point of creating, the environment (whether or not we intend it). We don’t intend to harm players but we might be harming them.

When tens of millions of people buy our game we’re pumping a substance into the environment. And I don’t just mean the packaging; I mean the mental content of that game. This is a public mental health issue and that’s kind of scary if you take it seriously but it’s also kind of cool. It means that we have the power to shape humanity. It means that we in this room are very powerful people. And how are we going to use that power? What are we going to do with it?

And what I see right now is that we’re kind of doing this. We’re cultivating a style of gamer that is ‘I want more of that because it tastes delicious and that’s all I know.’ What’s the world going to be like if we do this? On the food front and on the mental front? I haven’t actually seen Idiocracy but something like that.

A lot of you might be thinking, ‘Well, I work on this big game and I don’t have that much power to control the design. It’s being made by a publicly-held company, certain things have to happen.’ All I have to say there is if you can make one small improvement in that game to somehow make it more worthwhile and more beneficial or less meaningless, if you can win one argument in a meeting one time or convince one programmer to do an extra thing for you, think about the multiplier. Your game goes out to millions, or tens of millions, of people and that small improvement has affected all of them. That’s pretty cool. You can even make a difference on a 150-200 person team.

Enough of that. Sort of. I’m going to go onto a new point which sort of hooks into what does it mean to create meaningful or interesting gameplay and how can I find that kind of gameplay? Part of the problem is that we have assumptions about what it means to design a game that are a little bit incorrect. I think that we have this presumption of architecture right now. What I mean by that is that we start with a plan and go top-down and the process of game development is about imposing our will on the art assets and the code. Often our plans are ambitious and two-thirds of the way through the project we can’t get it all done and we have to cut features and it’s all painful. But this is the way that we do things.

Through my past couple of projects I’ve become acutely aware of another way to do things which is exploring. You can be adaptive and nonhierarchical. You can start out with a cool idea but then just start developing it and see where it goes. And adapt and accept it and find the best thing that’s there. And this is related to what I was saying earlier about using games as a method for exploring the universe. You can develop a really good game by exploring the ramifications of a concept. I’ll have some examples of that later.

First I want to talk about how architecture can fail us and to do that I’m going to talk about how much BioShock sucks. I’m confident that a lot of people in this room played BioShock and really liked it. And I could probably convince you a lot better if I picked a game that nobody likes. But that just seems too easy and kind of cheap. So here we go.

As the PR people for BioShock spent a lot of time hyping to the press prior to its release, one of the big things that happens in this game is there’s these creatures called the ‘Big Daddy’ and the ‘Little Sister’. The Big Daddy is really tough to kill and he protects this Little Sister who has this valuable resource that you want to get to buy upgrades. What you’re supposed to do in BioShock is kill the Big Daddy and capture the Little Sister and then decide at that point do you want to kill the Little Sister and steal all of her resource (which you can’t do without killing her) or do you rescue her (which is kind of altruistic because you get less of the resource)? It’s supposed to be this big ethical dilemma and they played this up as a unique selling point of BioShock.

So you would think thus the meaning of life in BioShock is about this moral choice: do I save the Little Sisters and be weaker in the world or do I kill them and be stronger? But as players figured out very rapidly after the game was released that’s not actually the meaning of life in BioShock. As it turns out it doesn’t really matter whether you rescue or kill the Little Sisters because the game throttles the rewards either way. So the very idea of this save or kill moral dilemma is a kind of architected idea imposed from the top: ‘Let’s make a game with this moral dilemma in it.’

There’s this other architected idea imposed from the top which is that a shooter needs to be well-balanced. No matter what path you choose we need to ensure the difficulty matches the player’s skill level and stuff. These two things conflict really badly. As I was saying before, the game’s rules determine the actual meaning of life in the game and the game rules in this game say the Little Sisters don’t matter. Whatever you do to them you get a slightly different flavour of upgrades, that’s all. Yet the game is trying really hard to convince you that they matter; there’s all these animations and they go, ‘No, no!’ when you grab them (which you pretty much have to do), there’s all this dramatic lighting and stuff. The ultimate message ends up being like a meta message which tunnels up one level and says the designers of this game are trying to manipulate your emotions in a clumsy way because they can’t get the story together. They’re obviously not trying to give me an authentic experience about what it means to be altruistic because there is no altruism in this game. But it gets worse than that.

When you really start looking at it, not from a gamer’s perspective, it is a really weird game. It’s supposedly about altruism and humanity but it actually teaches you to headshot everyone without warning from as far away as possible. Because you’re supposed to shoot every creature in this game. They even start out and there’s a couple of guys–they’re supposedly like drunk people having a domestic dispute or whatever–and it turns out that they’re splicers and they kill you. Anybody that you can shoot in this game you’re supposed to shoot with the exception of one. Everyone else is bulletproof.

The second interesting point is that the only people who are bulletproof are women and pre-teen girls. Which is weird. I guess they pretty much presumed that the average player was going to be male and that they would think that the sexy, ex-Nazi chick was kind of hot and the pre-teen girls, you give them another 8-10 years and they’ll probably be pretty hot, so you understand why they’re valuable. The Little Sister is supposed to be valuable but you’re supposed to shoot the Big Daddy. Yet he’s actually much more sympathetic. He’s a very protective character; he walks around, he makes these sort of mournful moans like a big whale or something and you’re just supposed to kill him without even thinking about it.

This game screws up in so many ways. If you put this game in front of somebody outside of games, somebody well-steeped in philosophy and said, ‘Here’s what games have produced. This marvellous ethical dilemma of altruism or not.’ They would laugh at you. They would would be like, ‘What are you talking about? This is so weird.’ You couldn’t show it to your Mum, probably. Your Mum would be like, ‘Wow, you really need to get out and meet some nicer people.’ And she would be right. That is the hard part of this. She would be right.

BioShock only makes sense to us, so many people in the press and so many gamers on message boards only bought into it, because of what I was talking about before. We’re steeped in this tradition of games that don’t have this level of humanity and don’t have respect for human life or thoughtfulness about what they’re doing. We have been conditioned by all those games so that as soon as a game comes along that does something a little bit different, or purports to do something a little bit different (even though it does it very badly), we’re like, ‘Woah, woah, humanity, woah, woah.’

A game that did well is Portal, and I would claim that it had a healthy dose of exploration in the design but it was also augmented by architecture. The idea behind Portal is that you have this little gun that, instead of shooting bullets, makes dimension doors on various walls and you can walk through them and you can see through them. It’s basically then what are the laws of physics like in this world where you can create portals? What kind of interesting situations arise? And then there are puzzles that they architected but those puzzles are largely about showcasing these natural results of having portals. It doesn’t feel contrived. And so Portal is kind of magical that way. I could say a lot more about it but I’m skipping ahead.

I want to go to this issue of humanity and empathising with a character in a game. BioShock has the Little Sister who you’re kind of supposed to empathise with as being helpless. It’s this very architected choice: do you save the Little Sister or kill the Little Sister? Portal has the Weighted Companion Cube which is not even a character, it’s a box with a texture map on it. But it happened in an explorational way. The way it happened was that the team decided it would be cool to have a level with a bunch of puzzles where you carried a crate from one end to another, using it in different ways and with the portals to circumvent all these puzzles. And they did that and they saw that because there had been crates earlier in the game players didn’t quite understand that they should bring this crate all the way. So they said maybe we should mark the crate as being special and they got the idea of putting this heart on it. They noticed that people felt kind of weird of getting rid of their crate at the end of the level after doing all that stuff so then they contrived this whole great situation where the narrator/computer pretends that this is your imaginary pet rock kind of friend and you cannot exit the level without throwing this crate in the incinerator and being accused of murdering it.

This actually works really well. It works at least as well as BioShock. Here’s mkozlows on the Quarter to Three forums saying:

It’s a measure of BioShock‘s quality [he disagrees with me, he actually likes BioShock, but we'll go on] that killing little girls actually made me, a jaded and manipulated gamer, feel guilty and slightly uncomfortable.

But Portal made me guilty and slightly uncomfortable about throwing a crate into a pit.

That’s pretty damn impressive.

And it’s true. I had exactly the same reaction. I tried for 20 minutes to outwit the computer and open the door without putting the crate into the pit. It wasn’t possible and I eventually gave up and murdered him. But what else are you going to do?

What I have to get from that is the idea that this traditional way that we think when we try to design a game for people to empathise with–the Alyx Vance kind of thing or the Little Sister kind of thing–where we try to make this very human character that interacts with you a lot, maybe that’s the wrong direction. Or maybe it’s not the only direction and maybe gameplay itself can give us some other things.

My last topic is listening skills. This is a topic actually from the martial arts and there it refers not to listening with your ears but with your body. So you’re fighting somebody, they’re going to punch you and you block them. Then what are you going to do? You can fight back by pulling their arm down and punching them in the head. You could do that but it takes a lot of energy and it has a high probability of failure. But there are other things you can do. Since you’ve got this point of contact you don’t have to watch them do something and then react when they’re going to come at you again, you can feel them. And as they move their arm, they move their body and you can follow that and then at a chosen moment just react in a way that takes advantage of the situation, that’s harmonious with what you want to do and what they’re trying to do but that achieves your agenda. What I want to say here is that we can apply this kind of idea in game design.

I was talking before about how do you merge architecture with exploration. Portal started with exploration and added architecture but I think we can also go the other way with games that are largely architected. The problem is that it’s hard to listen if you’re shouting all the time. If your game development process is always about fighting fires and enforcing this design from the top-down, hammering the code and art into doing what you want to do, then you blind yourself to the possibilities that are being revealed. I want to illustrate some of those possibilities now.

Here’s an old game called Smash TV, which hopefully a lot of you guys have played. It’s another eight-way shooter. Basically, it takes place in this arena and guys come through these four doors on the side, try to attack you and kill you. It’s very important in Smash TV whether these doors are open or closed. If they’re closed you can sort of stand around them and feel safe. But if they’re open you can’t really be safe there because guys are going to rush through at any minute and kill you. Notice that because of the camera perspective chosen for this game (which was pretty much an arbitrary, artistic decision) you can’t see the door on the south side of the screen. You can’t tell if it’s open or closed. But it’s super-important for gameplay.

What that does is that it makes the bottom half of the screen this extra danger zone which I’ve coloured in red. You don’t want to be standing around the bottom of the screen in Smash TV because you don’t know how safe it is. You feel extra nervous. It’s this extra little ripple in the game design that makes it more wonderful to play. Without that red zone the screen would be pretty much this flat surface of equal danger everywhere in its steady state. Here in its steady state it’s uneven. There’s more variety for gameplay. When you would die sometimes in Smash TV–some prizes show up towards the bottom and they’re really tempting and you run to grab them and you get killed–it feels fair because you knew that was the situation. You learnt through play, your mental model contained the fact that you can’t know what’s down there, there might be a landmine or whatever and you knew what you were getting into when you went down there. It feels fair.

Now interestingly Smash TV had a sequel called Total Carnage which starts out in a jungle. What would happen in Total Carnage, and this happens very early in the game, is that there are landmines placed that you have to avoid. Some of these landmines will be placed behind trees exactly in the way that things could be hidden behind that wall in Smash TV. But there’s a difference. And the difference is that in Total Carnage none of that is random or the circumstance of gameplay. The level designer specifically put that mine there to kill you when you walk behind the tree. But the problem is you want to search behind the trees because there are things you need, there are keys you need.

So you feel totally screwed. It feels like this sadistic situation where the level designer just wants to kill you; it doesn’t feel fair. This is a really interesting case where you have something that arose out of exploration, that felt natural and improved the game, and it was reused in the sequel in a more architected way without sufficiently listening to the effects on the player and it was a detriment to the game. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that while Smash TV was a huge arcade hit not that many people have played Total Carnage. It didn’t really have that much success.

Another one: Pac-Man Championship Edition (which is a wonderful game). It’s a sequel to the original Pac-Man of course. And in Pac-Man these ghosts are chasing you and trying to kill you but you can eat a power pill and the ghosts turn blue and run away. You can chase them and eat them if you want but you’re safe for the duration of that power pill. How do you know how long you’re safe? Well when the ghosts are about to turn mean again and be ready to harm you they’ll flash. They’ll flash blue to white, blue to white and then they come back after you. There’s this interesting interaction where in the original Pac-Man if you were to eat all four of the ghosts then you no longer have a visual indicator of when that timer is going to end.

In the original Pac-Man that didn’t necessarily matter too much but in Pac-Man Championship Edition it’s very important because you can eat chains of power pills and drive up the bonus multiplier by eating more than four ghosts; you want to eat as many ghosts as you can in a row. So there’s this wonderful sort of interaction where you want to get a power pill at the last minute so you can maximise your ghost-chasing time. You want to effectively know very accurately when that last second is but if you eat all the ghosts, which you want to do to maximise your score, you have a much vaguer idea of when you can go and eat the next power pill. It’s a very interesting interaction that was actually improved from one game to the sequel.

I find that remarkable given the large number of things that were changed between Pac-Man and Pac-Man CE. The original Pac-Man had cut scenes. How many games that had cut scenes eliminate cut scenes for the sequel? It’s crazy. If you look for delightful little design ripples that happen like these, you’ll see them all over. Not only in older games but in newer games, not only in other people’s games but in your own games.

Now if you’re working on a big game–it’s AAA, it’s got 200 people working on it, it’s very story-based–in story-based games it can be hard to do this kind of exploration. You’re trying to create believable characters and any time something weird happens you have to squish it because you lose suspension of disbelief. What can you do? It’s not my preferred environment to work in but I would say that if that’s your job, to fix those design problems instead of capitalising on them and exploiting them, then you could at least notice those little things you’ve explored before you squish them. Feel what they feel like and feel maybe where they could go, even just for a minute. And then squish them. But you’ve built a little bit of listening skill and over time you build it stronger and stronger and someday when you go start your own studio you’ll have an advanced sense of listening and that’ll be very useful.

So here’s my conclusion inasmuch as I have one. Going back to that quote at the beginning: ‘As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain. Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age.’ As a designer, I want to see that golden age. I want to see us harness this power to transform society that Daniel also wants to see. I’m a designer now because once a long time ago I was a gamer. I was a little kid who loved games; I played a lot of games. And I feel like I’ve grown up, I’m a smarter and wiser and a more experienced person now. Games are a lot bigger but they haven’t really grown. They haven’t kept pace with me. As a player I have this desire to be transformed like Daniel mentioned but I’m not getting it. At least not most of the time.

I get very frustrated by games. I’ll go to the store and I’ll buy ten games for $60 each–that’s $600, that’s a lot of money–I’ll go through the stack and I’ll start playing them one at a time and I’ll play them for about half an hour and I’ve gotten pretty much all that game has for me. Because it doesn’t have anything fundamentally valuable to me that any other game hasn’t already given to me. I still love games but it’s frustrating and I think we can do a lot better as an industry.

So I’m encouraging all of us to make things that are worthwhile (or deep or interesting) but what is worthwhile? That’s a very subjective question. Surely your ideas about that are different from mine and games that I would make left to my own devices would be very different from what you make. But as designers there’s an entire community with all of our different ideas about what’s worthwhile. We can at least hold the intention to make our games embody those ideas, to be worthwhile, and to respect the player’s potential to live a high quality life (not treat players as somebody from whom we’re trying to siphon money or attention or fame). I think that if we do that for a while and get good at it and we’re diligent, players will feel it; they’ll feel the difference, I think we’ll broaden our market, and if we get good enough at it then someday we’ll be able to see where that next step is to build games up to their full potential.