Reshuffling Realities

I finished reading one more chapter in Ethics and game design, “Sideways into Truth: Kierkegaard, Philistines, and Why we Love Sex and Violence” by Erin Hoffman. Based on the title, and the first sentence in the abstract mentioning “meta” studies, I expected a philosophical tractate burdened with words, but nothing to say. However, I was engaged into the discussion with the very first sentence of the chapter, where Hoffman says

If we are going to properly talk about ethics, philosophy, and games, we should begin with death, the driver of the fundamental question of human existence, and the impetus for our definition as living beings.

She goes on explaining the early video games where the end of the game was turned from passive machine’s response “The game is over” into active, player’s experiential exclamation “I killed you!” or “You killed me!”, where no death of the character, if any character at all, was present. Hoffman calls it a “functional death”. Later on, the games evolved, from those ones that had characters who could lose or fail to complete a task/finish the game (still calling that moment a “death”), to those games that have had narratives in which the goal is to eliminate other players or NPC by the act of killing. This almost a semantic choice at the beginning has become an ethical question of how we contemplate death, how we present it, what is appropriate to become part of the game and what not.

Hoffman develops her argument through the example of SuperColumbine Massacre RPG (SCMRPG!) where the players have to take a role of Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, the teenage shooters, and experience the game through the eyes of the killers. As the author says, the reaction to the came was twofold. On one side, there were those who were appalled by the very idea of trying to  justify the massacre in a way ; and on the other, there were developers and gamers who saw the game medium as an art form (Bogost, 2006) . The sentence “just because a game can be made doesn’t mean it should” goes back to my personal question from a year ago: Is it all right to make a game about anything?

I am wondering about how realistic is Hoffman’s recommendation in the conclusion of her paper. She claims that

Rather than shying away from contemplating death and violence in interactive media, a more compassionate and ethical approach would be to attempt to overcome our own aversions to reminders of ortality and inspect how this media consoles us, in was that conscious thought cannot.

One thing that Hoffman’s fails to distinguish in this chapter is the difference between dying in the game because you failed to accomplish a task and designing a game where your task is to kill, and only to kill (and very often to kill in sickening and horrible way).

category: reading    

in SL

I took DS’s interview transcript to the meeting today. Out “task” was to compare codes and talk about them. When I sent them to Teresa, I knew there were places where I was not sure what I was looking for, or what I was finding. The discussion about “why” certainly helped. In most cases, our coding matched, but I would say that that was not surprising. The interview was short and pretty straight forward. The interesting pieces were those where I struggled and had no assigned codes. And, since Teresa was using my set of codes, she could not assigned anything there either. Some of the the ideas that I expect to find in the blogs, emerge slowly, almost an inkling to what is coming. DS’s comment on preferring to see someone’s real name and photo when sending a blog post or responding to one, is certainly not a unique thought, but it is an indication of the importance to know at least something about the one “on the other side”. It is not an irrelevant fact, although we may never speak to that person again, let alone have a chance to see him/her in person. Furthermore, DS is completely aware of the possibility that the whole representation is false, but that is the risk of any virtual relationship.

category: research    

Unspoken

category: research    

Game Design Expo, Vancouver 2010

Total score: six different presentation and a panel session. Exhausting at the end of the day, but worth going. I have to say, I felt a bit out of place. All those hard core players around me, and young people who hope to find that magic key to get into the exciting, promising and competitive industry. Leo introduced himself to me before the beginning of the first session and we continued the conversation till the end of the day. For someone who didn’t really like school, and probably never finished as I am guessing, he knew a lot about technology and games. Moreover, to everything he said or mentioned I could put a reference: about attention (K. Hayles), technology as extension of self (M. McLuhan), technology shape our thinking (S. Turkle), there is no alternate reality, every reality is alternate reality (Hansen), what is there in games (intrinsic motivation, feedback, etc.) is lacking from education (J. Gee), about consciousness and awareness expressed through technology and mechanics.

A taste of ModNation Racers

I expected more from the second session Get Your Game Out Of My Movie! Interactive Narrative Design in Mass Effect 2 by Armando Troisi, Lead Cinematic Designer, BioWare, simply because it was about narrative. But it ended up more about the mechanics of the narrative, the presence or the absence of choices players make, and the subsequent set of dialogues.

While I was listening to Chris Whiteside‘s (Design Director, Propaganda Games) talk, The Modern Role of a Game Designer and the Importance of the Team Voice, I was thinking about project management and the similarities between the game design and instructional design processes. Both need vision, team work, feedback and constant reiteration. One of the strategies to help him design is to put himself in a player’s shoes and to say “I wish I could…”. This could be applied to a learner as well. He left us with this nice thought:

It’s not what we know that makes us good designers, it is about how we go about learning and implementing what we don’t know.

The presentation Re-Raising the Dead – Sequeling Dead Rising 2 by Josh Bridge, Level Director & Jason Leigh, Creative Director, Blue Castle Games, made me sick, literally. I felt like throwing up. Based on the reaction from the audience, they liked it and they expressed it clear and loud. It is about killing zombies, but it is violence, violence and more violence, nothing but blood splattering. I could hardly wait to finish. Obviously, I will never be a fan of these type of games. The only interesting part for me was the process of building the space, calculating the sizes of object and making them proportional and as true to reality as possible.

Matt MacLean, Lead Systems Designer, Obsidian Entertainment was the only one mentioning a theorist in his presentation, The Perfect Challenge. He talked about Jasper Juul’s theory of failing the game and finding the perfect balance between making the game who easy and too difficult.

Tyler Sigman’s, (Design Director, Big Sandwich Games) session, Game Mechanic Throwdown – A Nitty Gritty Primer, with his interaction with the audience immediately woke us all up at the end of the day. He demonstrated what he talked, making some points not only interesting, but easy to remember. However, he had too much on his slides, which made him rush through a number of them. Despite his position and teaching in VFS, I found his presentation scattered and lacking in good game theory.

The final panel discussion (The Future of Gaming- Panelists: Jay Balmer (Game Director, BigPark), David Bowring (Designer, Volition Inc.), Josh Bridge (Level Director, Blue Castle Games), Jason Leigh (Creative Director, Blue Castle Games), Ted Nugent (President, Genius Factor Games Inc.), and Trent Shumay (President, Finger Food Studios) brought up a few good ideas, confirming my own thoughts about “the future of games”, that is that social and experimental gaming has been increasing, and the games are becoming “deep not wide”. This is what I call “low tech, high-social” games for everyone, so-called casual gamers. What David Bowring said, “casual gaming is infiltrating the presence, not requiring a special dedicated time” was in line with Jay Balmer’s contribution on changes and omnipresence of games, and everyone having a “gaming moment”. The panel talked about the digital distribution, massappeal approach, copyright issues and many other interesting points, but no one mentioned educational games. I was disappointed that neither these representatives of the booming industry, nor the future game designers sitting in the audience, thought about the huge potentials for designing games for learning. If Vancouver Film School is preparing future leaders in this field, it is quite disheartening that they are widening the gap between them and higher education institutions, such as UBC, instead of making bridges to bring us closer.

category: events, research    

at UBC

I went to UBC to meet with Katherine Hayles. I told her I won’t ask her more than two questions, so I had to keep my word, which wasn’t easy. She kindly cut from her lunch time and set with me. I told her a little bit about my research, my interest in electronic literature and my explorations of narratives. Based on her argument on deep and hyper attention differences, I asked Katherine to talk about the current readers. What is literature today and how do new generations perceive reading process? We always think about the younger students as losing a lot by reading less and less. Maybe we should think about what they are gaining? We, brought up in the print technology era, think about this period as a decline of literacy. It may very well be a progress that we sill do not know how to define.

My second question was an elaboration on the paragraph from her book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary

Like the boundary between computer games and electronic literature, the demarcation between digital art and electronic literature is shifty at best, often more a matter of the critical traditions from which the works are discussed than anything intrinsic to the works themselves.

Katherine talked about the “playable media” (Noah Wardrip-Fruin), and the skills required to be a writer, as well as a reader.

I really hope I will be able to use this recording in my video bibliography. These video clips that I have with J. Murray, A. Arseth and now K. Hayles are so inspirational. It would be pity not to share them.

category: inspiration    

I was going though MIT open courseware to see what is there on games. One link led to another and as it happens, I landed on a Ph.D. students’ theses page. One of them particularly caught my attention. It is called Thesis Presentations 2010. Michelle Moon Lee: “Designing Game Ethics: A Pervasive Game Adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo”

I watched it. Michelle based her theoretical framework on Sicart’s distinction between procedural and semiotic levels of games. One of her research questions was about the possibility of games to bring change, but what happened in the game she designed was not really a change (or education) in ethical behaviour. She realized that herself. The focus shifted on how players behaved in the game. They were more loyal to the character they played (semiotic level) than to the rules of the game (procedural level). They would feel guilty because of betraying Mr. X from the story, not because of not following the guidelines from the designers. This is all interesting and informative, but not exactly what I would like to explore. I am actually glad that we have different foci. That means that we are approaching the game ethics issue from different perspectives.

category: inspiration, reading, research    

I sent an email to HyperResearch team a few hours ago. I hope they will respond. I was ready to buy both HyperResearch and HyperTranscript and then I decided to check a few more things. I asked them two questions:

1. Can the HyperResearch coded documents be exported as XML files or HTML files?
2. Are there any options for visualization of data?

I can do all that and more with Atlas.it. Teresa suggested taking a laptop that she had and making sure in DLC that we do have another license for Atlas. I took that as an option, but I would really rather work on my on computer. Who knows how long I will need those data? There is always a possibility that I would go back looking for something else, even years after the study is done. And I can’t keep her laptop for ever.

I also went to the bookstore to see if they received a new shipment of MacBook Pros. I am getting this message about “the start-up disk being almost full” more and more frequently. I will burn all I have on the research on a DVD today. It is already tons of data.

category: research    

Meeting Katherine Hayles today and having an opportunity to listen to her – what a privilege! I was hesitant with sending her a message about my “video bibliography”. I am not sure why? Maybe because I don’t know whether I will have it in the format I imagined it. I was planning to create a website on my research with a blog as a journal for brainstorming ideas and reflecting on what is happening, with parts of the thesis published in a game-like structure and with this video bibliography. Teresa said it would be too much, and not necessary at all. I agree that the amount of work that awaits me is already piling up and needs careful time management, but I am getting further and further away of my original ideas about what this Ph.D. would mean to me and what it would look like.

Anyway, I still hope that there will be a place for my video bibliography and I sent Katherine an email a few days before her arrival to Vancouver. She responded right away, and today when I introduced myself, we scheduled a meeting for tomorrow at 12:30. I can hardly wait.

I was thinking a lot about the questions I could ask her. There are so many that I am curious about. But I said that it would be one or two questions maximum, so I can’t keep her for hours.  Some of the things she said in her presentation touched on my intended questions, but I want to record her answers.

One of the arguments Katherine made in her presentation is that “materiality is a fusion of physicality and attention.” She talked how our attention, or change in attention, changes the materiality of an object as well. I never thought about attention as a main factor in our relationships with objects. A different “fusion” was evident in her speech, her erudition, drawing from so many disciplines: her science background (in understanding objects, their physical and chemical constitution), cognition (Varela and Thompson, Hutchins and Andy Clark), computer science, game theories, educational theories… It was like a compression of human knowledge. This led the discussion into her argument on deep and hyper attention, which resulted in further questions and lots of comments. This is something I would like to ask Katherine in relation to reading process and literature. She said that “we cannot afford to lose deep attention” and that we luckily have institutions that preserve the practice of deep attention, such as universities. I am wondering how long they will be able to preserve it.  I can only see things from my personal standpoint, looking into my experience with my children. There may be many factors that have influenced their reading practice, but they certainly do not read as much as I did in their age or even today. It may be that I am an exception in the sense that reading and literature are my passion, but still – I think that generationally, they read less.

Deep attention does not necessarily have to be tied to reading. There was a comment from the audience about a player being focused on a game, or problem solving for hours. Isn’t that deep attention? I am not sure. The ‘gaze’ may be focused on screen, but what is happening on the screen is very dynamic and changing.

So many questions…

category: inspiration, research    

As much as I want to get a lot for my research from my participants, I feel I am getting a lot for myself personally. I try to stay disconnected, objective – that is the role of a researcher. However, there is no such thing as being objective. We are all burdened with what the life layered on us over the years. We interpret the world based on what we know and what we experienced. When I find something in my “subject” (so strange to call them that) posting, something through I have gone in my life , and I can see that he/she feels the same I felt, I almost jump from joy. Yes!

The amount of data is growing and I am concerned about sorting, finding the way to analyze them. Teresa showed me some examples from her dissertation, which helps. Thinking about going to WWO and including that as a second study, scared me already. I was so happy, when Teresa suggested to think about WWO as a pilot study. It does make sense.

category: inspiration, research    

“Ethics is more than just making choices. Ethics describes the rationale for the moral systems with which we live.” (p. 2)

The author’s main argument in this chapter is that games can be analyzed from two levels of abstraction: a semantic level, and a procedural level.  The procedural level deals with the game system, rules and procedures, i.e. the mechanic of the games. The semantic level (more interesting to me) is about the narrative, the agent’s interpretation of the game, which depends on player’s background, culture, knowledge, values… all those aspects of human being that are developed or that exist outside of the game. For Sicart, a successful game is one that manages to balance these two levels of abstraction. Despite this split between the two, he believes that procedural level also makes moral statements because of the values embedded in the game.

The semantic level operates on the basis of metaphors, again something that needs interpretation. A player, coming into a gameworld, brings with her her social and cultural values, reflects on them and decides whether to apply them or not on the moral decisions inside the game. Sicart distinguishes between reactive agent and reflective agent. The former being the one acting on the procedural level, and the latter acting on a semantic level. He argues that the ethical gameplay forces the reflective agent to make decisions and those can be in conflict with the optimal decisions for the reactive agent. In other words, in a game with good ethical design, the player will rather do what is morally appropriate than what is easiest. He claims that “Playing is the interpretation of the reactive agent by the reflective agent” (p. 7)

A good game, therefore, is a game that avoids “cognitive friction”, a coherence breakdown between the procedural and the semantic level.

Suddenly, Sicart makes a 90 degree turn, arguing that ethical gameplay should increase cognitive friction. According to him, the players need to be in a position to question their ethical decisions. The challenge should be just enough to motivate them to improve their skills, but not to give up. He critiques those games in which the players have no doubts of what is ethical to do and what is not. In addition, the system that “decodes” morality, and has built-in rewards for good actions is not a good ethical gameplay environment. The players, according to Sicart, need to question and evaluate their own values, their stand in the game, who they are and who they want to be, and those should be harmonious with their values as cultural beings.

I find this relatively acceptable in theory, but I wonder if it is possible in practice. Sometimes, the players on purpose decide to act unethically, and it gives them more pleasure to do so than to do “what is right to do”.  They may, in this case, go through the process of questioning their decisions and reflecting, but the choice they make may not be “harmonious with their values as cultural beings”. If we design a game to teach ethical and moral behaviour, should we completely eliminate a value-based feedback messages, as Sicart suggests? It is almost like a Montessori school system: don’t interfere with students’ learning, provide the environment and let them come to that knowledge on their own. If we believe in this natural way of learning through being, what happens with our role as educators and even parents? Should we stop teaching our children what is right or wrong to do, and not provide any feedback?

It seems that Sicart is arguing for a Montessori game design where designers should create an environment where players will often feel the need to apply their ethical thinking. He calls this “creating an ethical cognitive dissonance” (p. 10), where reflective player will constantly interpret the gameplay.

Sicart gives examples of games that have managed to create that ethical cognitive dissonance: Call of Duty 4, Fallout 3, Shadow of the Colossus and Braid. These games, to Sicart, illustrate a good ethical design where players are “put in the center of a moral universe”, constantly questioning themselves, their role as players, but also as human beings.

At the end of the chapter, Sicar paraphrases Kafka, saying “if the games we play do not wake us, why then do we play them?” (p. 13).  I read Kafka a lot, but long time ago, so I wasn’t sure about the exact original. Luckily, I found the quote on the web. Kafka said:

Franz Kafka

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

category: reading