Agency Debrief, initial thoughts (or one rambling blog post of many)

The Agency, debrief

 

This is a slightly belated recap of The Agency, our strategy and ‘immersive’ board game experience, that we originally performed For Hide And Seek down in London (at the ICA and the National) and thanks to some money from the lovely people over at Arts Council England developed it for a week in Bradford as part of a residency at the Univeristy.

 

There’s stuff about the game and what happens in it ect in the posts below this one, and they will give you some context if you need it.

 

Over the 15 or so games we played we presented everything from a perfect session to quite ropey fragmented versions.  Every game was a slightly altered iteration and although that was in itself an incredible luxury in terms of the work’s development, it also meant there was never a constant against which to measure the game’s progression, but come the end of the process it feels like we’ve arrived at a version that we are all pleased with and feels solid enough to go out as –is for a while.

 

We spent the greatest portion of out time finessing the rules and the language in which they were presented.  The whole process has been a constant shifting scale of functional V.S texture, and at its greatest moments of success the rules and mechanics have coincided and melded with the texture in such a way that the world of the game demands the rule in a completely organic manner.  One of the key properties of the game that we wanted was for the audience to be able to participate in a deep and complex game of strategy inspired by Euro Games, and other complex board games (of which I personally am a big fan) but to be able to access it through an almost intuitive level as served through the emerging narrative of the game itself.  I try and not to tread too closely to board-games apart from that initial starting point, just because they are very different beasts, and although there may be some mechanical crossover, the core experience at the centre of it all are worlds apart.

 

In fact the experience is at the heart of The Agency, when I refer to the texture of the game I am talking about all of the individual elements that create the experience of being in the situation room of the game.  To al intents and purposes we are creating an immersive experience, even though immersion is a word I am increasingly suspicious of, partly because it is over and mis-used.  Trying to find immersion if a constant struggle against the imperative of rules, not just in the world of games.  We come from a theatrical background where immersion is very much du-jour, and executed with varying degrees of success.  There are a series of political and ethical considerations that are sadly too unexplored within immersion as it is employed in the theatre, often a shorthand for surrender to the experience, becoming part of it, but is rarely accompanied by any true sense of agency or with the creation of a space that is in any way open to re-configuration through participation.  Immersion often represents a narrowing of the rules of engagement as the audience negotiate an uncertain world trying to remain immersed whilst fundamentally remaining passive.  This is largely I feel a semantic issue as audiences, producers and promoters mislabel experiences as immersive when immersion is perhaps not the work’s core property.

 

But back to our game, a structure that demands participation and a group of players to affect the space of play.  The immersion we sought to create was one of narrative and emotional engagement as permitted through the rules of play, and this was created partly though mechanics but also through world creation.  The star of the game in the end became the country of TIGALI itself.  We spent a long time on our various drives across the country making up a  back-story to Tigali, and its 16 regions, giving ecah one some of the texture I keep talking about, and as we progressed the game we offered the information more readily and openly to the players.  As we gradually infiltrated these details into the game (anecdotes and amusing stories initially in there as padding as much as anything else) it became clear that players began to respond very differently to the map, the way in which they talked about the various regions and determined their decisions became more certain, they referred to the regions with greater confidence, and we began to tailor the narrative outcomes of the game to suit the regions more, and gradually the emergent narrative system we were hoping to create was born.  I recently read a short guide to creating emergence in Edge magazine.  And basically to sum it up its all about variables, the more variables with knock on effects you have the more possibility there is for unpredictable emergence.  To use the example of The Agency, the players may not cross a region until they have successfully bribed local authorities to agree to the deforestation, if they chose to pay the bribe, the bribe may or may not succeed, if it succeeds then they may build a road although there is always a chance of strikes, equally once the deforestation ahs happened there are a series of environmental scenarios that can occur, protesters, strikes, landslides which will in turn have repercussions down the line, equally they can chose to not deforest and instead to pursue a more environmentally friendly process, which may in turn win them approval of the relevant regions, but equally may prove problematic if they are chasing rebels or hostage takers who may well hide in the densely forested regions, ect ect ect.

 

So the large variety of possible scenarios and outcome all influenced by a series of tree like narrative structures, doing one thing can lead to a series of potential other things which in turn can each affect another series of things down the line.  The key then is have a lot of things up your sleeve.

 

Within this increasingly large world of emergent story telling the key was working out where the audience fit into the story with their own interactions.  We loved the idea that although the key interactions were clearly prescribed on the various character sheets the players were in fact free to do what they wanted as we then resolved all actions on a series of probability scales and die roles on the fly, adapting the story, and responding to the players.  However finding that line where the rules bleed outwards and their edges become porous in allowing the players to enter the world of Tigali and at the opposite where they exist as rigid unbendable parameters for a narrow set of interactions was a semantic balance that we are still adjusting.

 

In one post-session debrief a player who wished he had realised the freedom that was implicitly offered them said that we should have opened the game by clearly indicating ‘you may do what you want’.  This is a big risk that I feel would lead to the ‘monopoly bank robber’ effect, where as a child I grew bored of monopoly God Mode in a computer game where your character can’t die and has unlimited ammunition, in effect destroying the game and although fun to begin with the lack of limitations quickly strips the game of any sense of challenge or achievement.  So providing an openness that sits comfortable within the parameters of the game’s world became a question of pacing and embedding a tutorial element into the first two or three turns of the game.  After an initial briefing Victoria who has the most direct contact with the players in running the game simply says “your time begins now”.  The team then have five minutes to muddle through a first turn occupying themselves with the overall arch goals of the game.  In the second turn regardless of the outcome of the first turn we begin to introduce secondary scenarios, as soon as these begin the world of Tigali begins to open up, and this makes the difference between a linear singular objective driven game and the more sprawling open world of The Agency, the fact that the events on the board don’t necessarily correspond to any of the predetermined behaviours is suggestion that all is not as it seems when it comes to choice making in the world of Tigali, rising to the various mini challenges that are presented requires the players to reconsider the relatively narrow palette of interaction initially presented to them and eventually move away from the board, using the phone to communicate with specific characters, use soldiers to to search door to door, convince the diplomat to negotiate with rebels and pirates, leak information to the local news ect…

 

The game still needs to present a large amount of information to players and present it very clearly and quickly, and this is the next stage of development. Our crucial statistic screen which runs the engine that dictates the state of the country presents the information in a very direct, I dream of projecting irt down onto the country itself creating an interactive map and allowing the players to reamin focussed on the world itself, rather than splitting their point of focus between loking down and inwards at the board and then changing to outwards and up for the stats.  This felt like the biggest disconnect in early games, but gradually as the regions in the stats have become richer the connection between these and the areas on the map has become more tangible.  One of my personal biggest problems with it at the moment is that regions slip into extinction and this does not necessarily have the immediate effect that I hoped it would.  Initially we ran a population statistic in the corner, where the number of souls in Tigali was monitored, however a number of population is a relatively empty exercise until it is contextualised, so next I intend to include a lost souls figure, monitoring growth and decline, and how many people have died during the Agency’s tenure in Tigali.  This is largely to force a conversation amongst the players as to their responsibility towards the fictional country.  When it comes to choice making within the game there’s often a ‘fuck them’ moment where they decide to sacrifice a dying region or call an airstrike to simply eradicate the pirates rather than negotiate, and often there is at least one voice that stands up in protest, one player was morally offended when another suggested they basically engage in human trafficking to appease some terrorists, and a player in the role of the general when offered the option of ‘village to village search and destroy‘ to find a lost president couldn’t bring himself to order the loss of life.  These interactions I think are symptomatic of the game’s biggest success which is world building.  The purposefully ‘airy’ rules allow the players a wide palette of interactions and through that a greater freedom to interact with the world of the game.

 

I am reading the great series of blog post by Adrian Hon over at MSSV about Civilisation and a further expansion of that over at Phillip Trippenbach’s. In Civilization one of the most interesting elements is how the game allows players to generate stories.  I believe there is a key difference between a game that tells a story and one that allows a story to be told, and Civilization is particular in allowing space for the player to write their own story onto the largely abstracted epic landscape below them.  And there is some of that I think in Tigali, the game itself aims to empower players to affect and participate in the world.

 

I have been thinking a lot about world building recently, partly as part of this, partly as part of some of the other continuing narratives and mythologies that we are building into our adventure games, and I will expand upon them at a later date, but there is a fascinating difference in world creation in a tactile immersive manner as oppose to the freedom and space allowed by a system such as Civ or to a lesser degree Tigali. As with all best things we have arrived here a bit by accident, if you trace back down on these posts you will see that the early intentions and starting piece for the game were very different, but the call of Tigali was too strong…

 

As a final appendage we are also re-contextualising the game’s play at the moment rolling it out into non theatrical and game settings, last night it played in an office to a bunch of recruitment consultants and the tone although not radically different shifted enough for it to be notable.  The game has changed so radically depending on its setting which I will also touch upon later.  But as for a first debrief of The Agency, thanks for playing.

--
ben eaton
www.beneaton.org.uk
www.invisiblelflock.co.uk
07813214235

Coming soon from us: The Agency special performances at gallery 2 Bradford University.  The Happy Project launching soon in a Leeds city center location as well as other games, installations and projects.

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the map comes together

our first attempt at mapping Leeds on a large scale: 300 A4 sheets.

via Pixelpipe

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New characters and new groups of players

Now i realise that i've never really debriefed our ICA play of The Agency in a meaningful way, but things have been busy busy busy.

Be that as it may we're going back down to London on the 10th of July to play it again.

It went great last time, there was loads we liked and the overall core experience of the game works.

Six players played the game at the table  in a brilliant combination of team co-operation, and players choosing to sacrifice their personal goals for the greater good of the country, as well as Diplomat who spent most of the game making back room deals on the in-game phone and ended up pulling off a coup on the last day of the game.

great stuff!

The other thing was the interaction from the 'audience' players.

Originally they were conceived of as a separate team of their own who spent the time rolling die and generally making the background stuff happening.  This worked and was part of the whole "hiding the mechanics' part of the piece, but also didn't work as a straight experience for those players, so at the last minute we changed it all up a bit and instead invited people who didn't get to play the around the table could come  and watch the proceedings and were invited to intervene and come and help with some of the game resolution mechanics as well as help form the plot and scenarios in the game.

And people did.  there was some great interaction and audience members returning over the 90 minutes the game took to see where Tigali was at what they could input now.

We really enjoyed this, partly because it adds a whole element of unpredictability which we love into the game experience.  Everything is still determined on a set of statistics and dice rolls, there is no 'playing god' but the nature of the input and some of the consequences that external audience members come up with in return for the choices the characters are making are different from our own, and it also begins to transform the piece into this game engine over which we have increasingly less control as we gradually cede it all over to players and audience..

So for the next incarnation of The Agency we are going to open the idea up even more, audiences will now be able to watch and join in the game from anywhere in the world on the internet. We're building a webpage that will host a live feed of the game being played and a live twitter feed through which anyone will be able to interact with the live game on the ground.  i will post more details on this as we figure out the parameters of it all, but you can check back here or follow @the_agency_live which will be the feed's twitter id.  This will allow not just for a remote audience to play but for those players to be bel to keep up with the action as well as how their idea played out if it makes it to the board.

today we've begun to redraft, changed some of the game balance to bring out some elements more and crucially we have lost a character and replaced him with another.

The Architect is now gone and instead is replaced with an Emergency Response Team.

The ERT operatives can deliver fast and short term aid solutions to regions of Tigali which are under threat.  The presence of a ERT unit improves a region's general health, meaning that getting a unit in can help to stabilize or even save a region on the brink of disaster.  We have also built in a new Airdrop move for ERT units meaning they can be moved faster and more cheaply.  This increases the speed in which the team can deploy these units around the map, but also only provides a short term solution, and training new ERT units is very expensive, and as ever taking a flight anywhere in Tigali has a 1/6 chance of crashing due to freak weather conditions... We hope the new character is going to spice things up a bit more, the Architect who was in previously felt a bit 'more of the same', a character whose role was only really self serving and was a hangover from when we wanted the Architect to build townships for population control, this means that we have also removed a whole victory condition, which was a bit flabby anyway, and instead created a much more exciting character with t a bit of variety.

A lot of that will make very little sense if you have not played the game yet, but good news the Arts Council have kindly granted us a small pot of money to develop the piece so it will about over the next couple of months.  

The game is exciting and quite tense, and has got players interacting with each other in ways we never really expected, and we're going to be developing that further both for the physical experience and the online element, so please stay in touch. 

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test play and what are we representing?

tonight we had our first playtest of the Agency with a bunch of kind people who have never played the game before.

and i'm glad to say it went well, there was plenty wrong with it, and we didn't finish a game rather played through two hours and got a sense of what we needed to tuck and nip and change up to make the whole thing the experience we wanted.

There's lots of boring nuts and bolts stuff, and a lot to do with levels of clarity and intuitive decision making that we need to improve on.  The biggest thing at the moment is the pace and the feedback to the players controlling the 'fates', the games of chance that determine the events in play and the result of the actions that the players chose to undertake on the map.  We're going to make some pretty drastic changes on that front, letting it be largely performance led although still determined as a result of random event generators and dice rolls.

Players tonight thought the vents were scripted, which is good, because they weren't but the random generators and dice rolls were creating a chain of events  that hung together cohesively as a narrative, and ended up empowering the players, who said that they felt that they had 'power'.  Which was what we were hoping for: a strong sense of action and consequence, but most importantly consequences and actions that matter in the context of the world.

I thought a lot about actions that mean something, we talk a lot about oil in our game, and there are downsides to having an economy reliant on oil, one being that the potential damage when oil spills happen is quite large.  This has obvious real world parallels.  It s late and i  won't dwell on this too long but i have long been obsessed with ideas of representation and iconography, and the language, especially the visual language, that we use to represent events and people.  A lot of this has to do with the stories we tell ourselves and each other about things and moments that have happened, big and small and how we use representation within these narratives.  This seems to be particularly relevant with the rise of all sorts of fundamentalisms the world over.  Particularly the rise of the conservative Christian Right in America, who are rewriting the narratives of evolution and most recently slavery.  By retelling the narrative of slavery and writing out some of its major players and most importantly emancipators is an aggressive use of representation to rewrite truth and in the process our history.

Stories and games are two very different things, many will say that the two are mutually exclusive.  Any of you who read these pages of mine will know that i am not one of those, i believe that narrative and story are compatible, and mutually inclusive on both a meta level and an active level of participation.  Those who don't see it are looking at narratives in the wrong way.

I found this on a blog i follow:

"So what have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way that no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. ... I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough."

-Tom Bissell, from his book
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

 The game as a lens through which to see ourselves.  We talk about this a lot in performance and theatre, the performer presenting him/herself live on stage, in moments of disappearance that at a deep ontological level are fundamentally about the audience members themselves, all acts of performance are live moments in which the audience contemplate their own mortality.  I have got to this place in my practice ironically out of what i see as the  relative impotence of theatre in interaction and in creating meaning through this without positing the performer in a position of heightened idolatry as either sacrificial body or holy untouchable.  So whereas Tom Bissel is writing about video games, i would venture that in games that are collaborative practices of play the game points not just at the one person who is playing but al of them, and points back and forth because games and players are about what you do, they are fundamentally active forms, that point and repoint and repoint each time from a different perspective and position.

So what does this have to do with representation?  Well perhaps at the heart of all of these is how we represent ourselves.  So as we make a game about a humanitarian crisis (although with a darkly comic edge) are we in fact tasking the audience to consider themselves, how they react together and how they are co-represented in the context of the in-game events.

Players tonight all played with a different focus, all were immersed in the world of the game, but some were trying to push their own personal victory, others were so caught up in the greater good they forgot entirely about their individual goals and focussed instead on the island as a whole.  I'm not sure what it says about them all as individuals but it says something.

So we have created a world that works, and one in which the players want to spend some time, we now need to find who they are in it and most importantly who they can become in it over the space of 120 mins as groups and also as individuals.

look out for photos tomorrow 

and a live stream from the ICA

B.

x

     

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Rules rule

its true, they pretty much do in games.  Rules also scare me a little bit, i like the freeform-ness of open play, the messiness of the meandering worlds we've created up until now, the idea of being firm abut what a player can and can't do, and having to stick to that is the most intimidating part of making a game, for me at least.  

These rules are wrapped so tightly in the theme and narrative of the world, so as to hopefully become obvious, and be absolutely intuitive actions that the players expect to undertake as their characters.  So in that sense they're becoming quite easy to get down onto paper, and also the more i tinker and build and finesse them more it becomes crucial for me to stop layering and layering mechanics and remember that crucial to this whole event is the experience itself.

When thinking about them it occurred to me that the addition of the group pot of money in the middle (a suitcase full of cash) has now become the prevalent mechanic of the game, in a world where everything costs money and there's lots to solve what are you going to chose to do, and who will convince the others that they need the money the most... sort of like that reality TV show the Bunker, only with a satirical third world theme and no real money.  But unexpectedly the game has become a game of economic bartering and fast paced negotiation, whereas it previously in my mind at least owed more to an old Avalon Hill board game.  I like this new flavor, mainly because it emerged organically out of conversations between Victoria and myself, and out of the lack of a successful resource mechanic in the game.  And after all money is everything, especially in the third world.  In this version the money is only being spent on the Agency's operations, but in a future iteration i would like a way for the money to flow through everything, and increase the possibility for inter agency corruption, but let's focus on a first rule set then dream up a second one.

look out for a first draft here

B.

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engine-ering live play

just short notes today, 

today has been mostly spent cowering from the sun building and tweaking the central game engine that i'm building in Isadora.  Game engines is a term usually used to describe the inner workings of a computer game's program, the central bit of code that churns through all the data and turns it into graphics and ingame physics ect..

well the Agency has no graphics and physics in that sense although there are plenty of graphs and statistics, but the engine that i'm building is intended to churn through all of the game data as it happens, keeping track of the world's statistics and most importantly the effects that these stats have on the game.

This has become both practical and process for me.  Stripping away all of the procedural stuff (dice rolling checking charts ect..) and replacing it instead with what we hope are a series of intuitive choices and actions means that all of that needs to be replaced with something, and the engine is going to be taking care of all of it for us, driving the narrative forward.  I'm using Isadora to build it, software that i don't normally use for this sort of task, that i normally use to build interactive video environments, however here it's churning through maths equations and spitting them out as graphs and numbers for the players to be able to immediately understand what is happening inside the map (on the ground) so the visual layout of the information is key as well as what information is made public and what remains hidden as 'cogs and wheels'.  That last part is the process part, by having to build the engine and the decide what data to pass through it, patching all the paths and routes together i am making creative decisions as to the feel and depth of the experience, as well as the precise level of feedback the players will receive for their actions. At what point does a box begin to glow red as its population level reaches a dangerous low? how fast do the graph columns rise or sink? how many decimal points do i use to give the players a feel of the depth of their choices but without overwhelming them?  All of these decisions are central to the design, because although they may not alter the mechanics of play they will have a huge bearing on the live experience and the player's ability to interact with each other and the data intuitively (remember the ipad advert: "you already know how to use it"). 

Well the engine will be presentable tomorrow so i will post photos of the interface and perhaps some examples of it working.  Eventually i may make the patch available if people want to dig around in it. below are some photos if you're into that sort of thing, the central patch is made up almost entirely of custom user-made-actors and other custom actors nested in others as there's a lot of data being handled in 16 separate instances and a lot of repeated maths and triggering.

more on the design and feel of the game as well as less techy stuff soon, promise

B.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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game engine

quick shot of our game engine taking shape in Isadora to keep track of live stats ect...

B.

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hide the maths

Yesterday we mainly solidified the six in game-characters and some of the visual feel behind the piece, and its going to look great which will go a long way towards curating the experience from the offset.  

we also got stuck pretty deep into some maths, and working out the relationships between the various elements and statistics and variables.  The relationship between the players and the mechanics in the game is obviously central to the experience, but the whole point of the live experience is that the experience itself is the corner stone of the event and the mechanics are hidden as deep as possible into the theme.  the the book Third Person Matthew Kirschenbaum writes a brilliant essay about table top wargames as emergent story engines.  For him the pleasure of play and the meaning is derived from the undertaking of the procedural mechanics of play (rolling dice, looking up results on charts and tables ect..) so by creating a a game where we set out to hide those very things do we risk depriving the player of some of the key pleasure of game play, and more worryingly i feel the ability to consider their choices strategically and understand what constitutes a meaningful action and its consequence?

The Agency is obviously a live time-based experience, and it is the mechanic that will hopefully allow the live experience to flourish, i'm currently working on the feedback of the statistics for the players as a series of live graphs that adjust as the game plays out and finding a level of immediate clarity so that they don't need explaining.  The same is true of the character sheets that the players are given at the beginning of the game, these are the closets thing to rules that the players will be provided with, without ever actually being rules themselves.

The recent advert for the apple I-pad has a sentence in it which says "you already know how to use it", this is what apple are incredibly successful at as UI designers and it is this level of clarity that we are looking for, the more explaining we need to do the more we reveal the mechanics and the more we take away from the seamlessness of the live experience.  Again this is not a simulation, nor do i believe in the idea of total immersion in performance but in the Agency we hop to take the mechanic away for the players to be able to make emotive choices, character and moral driven choices instead of decisions based on points and scores.

and finally we made a key gameplay decision with which i am very pleased about the resources with which everything it built in the game, the players' financial fund will all come from a central pot the spending of which the players must negotiate amongst each other and all choices happen at once, getting rid of any sort of staggered turn based system, the game instead becomes more of a bartering and interaction driven system with the players all affecting each other, letting them drive the play, rather than the chance game events drive them. 

i'll post some screenshots of the stats screens soon.

B.

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some reference and inspiration images

these are some pictures and visual elements that are going around in my head at the moment, either as inspiration or actual elements i want to try an implement in terms of their texture and feel.

i'm not going to explain them all here as hopefully their significance will become clear as the process evolves.

-

- 

these are for starters

B.

ben eaton

www.beneaton.org.uk
07813214235

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themes, characters, resources and early thoughts

The Agency at its heart is a game of resource management and worker placement, that looks at ideas of choice and consequence.  The third world setting is not a specific comment on a geopolitical situation but rather a broad (and at this early stage very broad) glance at the choice consequence and manipulation on a political and human scale.  Early in our conversations the question of 'what are we saying' by choosing and international aid theme to the game was raised.  And i am still a bit uncertain myself, i know the game is not a direct comment on say Rwanda but equally neither is it divorced from the reality of international politics.  it is important to clarify what the game is and what it is not.

It is not a simulation of the economics of the third world. we are very clear on this, in no way are we trying to recreate or simulate the complicated economic and political web that links western politico-military organizations and third world countries.

the game is not satire, although there are satirical elements within it, the tone and feel are ones of cartoon-ish exaggeration, but these are to encourage gameplay and immersion, and from these hopefully meaning will emerge, rather than being strictly pre-determined.

Although i am very dedicated to the concept of meaningful play we all desperately want to avoid the "Got Ya" type of game, where you pull a card at the end which implicates you in an activity you never ascribed to or planned to undertake (the final card in Train which reveals your destination as being a concentration camp for example).  Although this mechanic has been used very effectively it is an aggressive way of constructing meaning, whereas we feel that a situation that is compromised from the start but that draws you in through gameplay and then ramps up as the game goes on will be more effective, as the consequences of choice undertaken with full knowledge is a far more affecting device than a choice taking under duplicity or with hidden agenda.

And finally in this initial thoughts post is the important question of resources.  What are the resources and what are their effect?  i have a much longer post to write about the concept of resources and how a player interacts with them and how they can be used but the nature of the resource itself is an important question both thematically and practically.  do all players use the same resource? or are there different ones for different units and abilities? how are they collected, how are they stored, how scarce are they ect...

more on that later.

At this early stage we are very much thinking of this like a board game, but gradually the live experience itself will begin to emerge alongside the mechanics and themes, as the players themselves will make the piece as they are the key performers in the country's destiny and the characters they play will become all important.

B.  

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other noise

its worth clarifying here that i will also be cross posting through posterous.com (another online blog-ing service of sorts) as part of a collaborative blog exercise and diary over the next couple of months on the making of "the Agency" and " after the beep" our new show for Lattitude Festival.  So there will be shorter  messier content on here as well as content by other members o the flock.

the practice of emergence

I've always been suspicious that i in fact am not a very good game player.  I've already written on this page about my uncomfortable relationship to the idea of winning.  Winning's position as the main motivator of game play or the game experience always feels to me as an unsatisfactory payoff.

The 'win' (or at the very least its spectre) is needed as an indicator of the border between play and the real, it both initiates the player's entry into the game, and achieving it (or being aware of one's own relative position to it) signals the end of play.  All of the activity undertaken within those two bracketed moments are generally defined as 'play' and are actions that all exist within the frame of the potential 'win'.  What the win is contextualises the actions themselves, and the meaning of 'wining' may not be as simple as "being first".

The problem i find is that winning is often boring, winning requires discipline, and a strict belief and fidelity in the mechanics of play., and most importantly winning means coming to the end and is a much shorter and less rewarding experience than 'play'.

Live play and board games are at their most interesting when rubbing up against that breaking point, putting themselves in negotiation with their players and each other.  Digital games i feel exist in that border land mush less comfortably, partly because the membrane between the real and play is far less permeable in traditional digital games (computer games).

When i played Monopoly as a child without the presence of adults (who do tend to want to adhere to rules) i would get bored and coulld simply not understand why there wasn't the option to rob the bank.  I know i'm not alone in this, but imagine the thrill (and much more exciting game that it would be) of the abstracted urban layout of Monopoly giving way to police chases as you screech your way around the four sided London geography with your stolen money.  The point is you can't, the anarchic break down of rules and abandoning the economic mechanics results a general breakdown of the game (perhaps in and of itself an interesting economic point).  The live nature of play however means that groups of players can create and conceive of alternative rules and interactions, often known as 'house rules' these agreed variants are generally designed to improve play from each individual group of player's perspective as they are often created organically through a completely accidental iterative process.

These are rules designed to improve the play process based on individual experience, less concerned with the idea of winning and rather with the experience of playing.  Live and Board games often play out in a relatively short space of time, four hours generally being considered a 'long' game, although there are exceptions:

But generally these are game activities undertaken to be finished, generally with a winner at the end of it.    But when it comes to digital games i have left more games unfinished than i have completed them.  Partially this is due to time, when a game requires upwards of twenty hours of your time i don't have the time to commit to it, or is it perhaps that the game itself does not keep me interested enough for me to want to put in twenty hours of play? Hard to judge.  I find that my interest is cyclical, i picked up an copy of the original Fallout and played it a lot for a week and it really stuck in my head.

Then it just got to a point where i wasn't interested any more, is this Fallout's problem or my attitude as a player?  I recently stopped playing Call of Duty World at War

I'm interested in how we show and perform war in games, and have written extensively on CoD Modern Warfare on this page.  WW2 is obviously a conflict that is mediated and textually engaged with very differently to contemporary warfare, however the idea of re-performing reality (or at least a version of it) is one that i'm thinking about a lot at the moment, and this led me to a bunch of WW2 games.  But whereas i played through Modern Warfare in a couple of days i just can't stay interested in World at War, and i suspect that its for a very similar reason as to why i lost interest in Fallout, I'm just not that bothered about winning or finishing, i am however bothered about the experience the game puts me through and the story that the game is performing.  When it became clear that World at War was just putting me into another level of jungle with no real narrative or emotional drive to continue other than the opportunity to shoot more Japanese soldiers (whose portrayal the game got in quite a bit of trouble for) i just couldn't muster any energy to continue on with it, it was boring.





the mission in the video is actually still interesting because its still early in the game, but it mainly signals in more of the same.

In his book "A Theory of Fun" Ralph Koster talk about hat we perceive as fun is largely our brain enjoying patterns, recognizing them and processing them.  So did these games simply offer up all the patterns that they had to offer very early on and were no longer providing me with enough stimulation to want to finish them, maybe, or maybe it goes back to why i suspect i'm a bad game player.

I think that the patterns i look for in games and in experiences i interact with are all too often emotive or narrative ones, and i particularly take pleasure from narratives and experiences that emerge through play, or so called 'emergent narratives'.

This often gets in the way of the games i'm playing, or at least means that my practice of play is not the one that was perhaps intended.  A recent example of this is a brief foray on my part into the world of Starcraft.

 
For those of you who don't know about Starcraft it is a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game set in a science fiction world where you control and build armies and basically have to destroy your enemy.

Its very famous as being the best in its genre, having a strong narrative based solo player mission in which you get to play as all three races of aliens and humans, and a notorious multiplayer mode where you play against another player.  It is considered so good that in Korea they play is as a competitive sport:

Now the idea of playing it competitively is completely anathema to the motivations that i find to play.  As part of my "i really should play all the games that are considered genre defining if i really want to engage in a game discourse" i found a copy for mac and had a go.  It is good, its really good, and was up until a point.  I got too caught up in the emergent narrative on the battle field and found myself working against the game's main function.  In a mission i was playing the enemy base was situated just across from a body of water from where i was amassing my troops.  So i loaded a bunch of marines up into a dropship:

And i set off for a quick raid on the enemy's resources across the water.  Now i sent the ship carrying its full amount of marines and backed it up with a couple of fighter planes too, they swept in cleared the landing zone and the slower drop ship trundled in behind them.  The marines unloaded as the fighters provided covering fire protected by their cloaking devices making them invisible to the enemy troops, just as their cloaking ability was about to run out i sent them back to base out of harms way, leaving the ground troops to hold the position, the plan was to send the drop ship back to base and bring more men over and hopefully taking and holding this enemy outpost.  However, the enemy could not see my fighters but he could see my slow and very visible dropship and he sent his own fighters to intercept it and take it down, his ships appeared out from a dark area of the map and took out a dropship full of marines, and a lot of the ground troops who i had dropped behind a bunch of large rocks which were giving them cover and providing surprisingly effective positions from which to defend themselves as they were taking out the enemy troops rushing towards them, they were only a small group of six marines by now and as they are relatively cheap troops to produce i should probably just have left them to it, but the whole thing had been too exciting up until now.  The game was providing me with an emergent narrative unfolding in my head i had never expected.  The situation was clear i had men behind enemy lines and they needed rescuing:

I began the process of building new dropships to send over to pick them up and enough fighters to clear the Landing Zone.  By a strange glitch my stranded marines were insanely well fortified in a way that was simply impossible, so although the computer was pouring troops and robots at them they were maintaining their position incredibly successfully, and although pinned down they were inflicting heavy damage.  But gradually they were being picked off one at a time falling under  a hail of bullets, until there was only one left.  Things were becoming unbearably intense now as i watched the progress bar of the ship build move towards completion, amassed the troops i would be sending over as part of the rescue mission, this was turning into my own Black Hawk Down





The dropship was completed, i loaded up the marines and sent it and a wave of fighters over the water, the fighters piled in first, clearing out some of the heavier opposition and the drop ship dropped its load in the whole that the fighters cleared, a wave of marines who took out the remaining computer skirmishers securing the site.  The last surviving marine was safe loaded into the dropship and taken back to base to an internal soaring soundtrack.

The whole thing took a good ten minutes and was brilliant fun, a great piece of emergent storytelling, which although allowed by the game was really a waste of time in terms of the game's objective as during my rescue mission i'd failed to do any of the task and tend to my army's general development which put me a bit behind in terms of the arms race that is a game of Starcraft and i really had to claw my way back, but i did win the mission.  The problem however is that the one Marine i had fought so hard to save, who had really ben the best bit about my game was now lost within the rest of the relatively faceless army i was controlling on the field, possibly dead i had absolutely no way of turning this into the epic space opera that was burgeoning in  my mind.

And that broke it for me.  Now i had taken most pleasure from my own personal engagement with the game, and developed my own game practice that was in friction with the game's own demands.  I've not really played it much since then as i suspect that i would simply go looking for re-occurrences of potential emergent narratives and would only get frustrated with it.  Does that make my take or practice of Starcraft wrong, well only in the sense that i won't b competing in a tournament anytime soon, but not in the sense that i found my own rules of engagement for the game, and the best interactions should find room for this to happen.  Whereas with World At War i basically became frustrated by the narrow corridor 'fish in a barrel' style of play that left no room for me the player.

I am fascinated by the idea of transgressive play, players developing their own meaning and shifting the paradigm of a particular game through alternative play practice.  Open world games like Grand Theft Auto encourage this just 'messing about' in the world but this is inbuilt into the game, i like the idea of finding your own spatial and narrative practice carving out your own engagement and meaning.

This has long been a key tenent of interactive work for me that it must allow room for the audience/ player to configure or reconfigure the space they are sharing with the work otherwise the interaction is merely a binary gate no more interactive than clicking a button.

We are currently embarking upon making a new piece called 'The Agency', a live piece influenced by board games but purposefully removing the procedural mechanics, in an attempt to create a truly emergent space for the live players to interact both with the world of the game and each other.  The game is the outcome of a lot of the thoughts i have been having on this blog and hope to use a lot of the emergent practices that board games and RTS games employ and bring these to a live setting... please send me any thoughts or anecdotes of your own.

the agency

Welcome to our process blog/diary about the making of 'The Agency' our new game which will premiere at the ICA as part of Sandpit: http://sandpit.hideandseekfest.co.uk/ica-sandpit-2010/

you can follow over to Ben's blog for more in depth posting about some of the thinking behind the piece http://digitalornithology.blogspot.com/ .  This page is a collaborative project and will blur over to other blogs, and hopefully plug into our process as the reception and development of the piece, thanks for reading.

B.

Posted via email from invisibleflock's posterous

there can only be one

I have a strange relationship to winning.  I don't really know what it is, i get uncomfortable around too much competition, especially sporting competition.  it's never an impulse i've ever had, i was an only child an spent a lot of time playing on my own (not in a bad way i had no brother or sister to play with or more importantly against)  but i played a lot, in fact i remember having my action figures out in room long after other friends of mine had theirs packed away in the garage or off to car boot sales (i also still have a lot of them littered about my house although now i can hide behind the ironic 'object d'art' statement).

 

the point is i loved to play but was never that bothered about winning probably because i didn't have to be and i think its translated through into my attitude now when i think about and undertake game like activities.  Recently in Cardiff where we performed the first version of our latest game Follow the Bird, the game was followed through to the end by two ladies who were friends, who kept saying "i bet you haven't met anyone as competitive as us".  Truth is i hadn't ever considered the enterprise as one that could be competitive.  On reflection of course it is.  As i mentioned in my previous post the whole idea of creating a series of success gates that naturally cut down the audience amount down to the final one is of course competitive i just had never considered it through that lens.  We're now designing our Bristol game (on the 8th of May look out for the mini game to get your password to play) and working out how many players we can accommodate and the structure of the tasks, knowing that we need to end with a far smaller number than we started with and ultimately with a 'winner' ( although our last winner ended up putting her hand up a chicken as a prize).

Part of the reason i tend to not think about the competition inherent in these things is because i tend to focus more on the experience of playing.  Looking around me at the games i'm studying and playing i read a description of euro games as games where the winner feels that they won through their superior skill and the losers felt they lost because luck was against them.  This is an interesting definition that promotes the experience of play above that of winning or losing, as a successful piece of game design is one that the loser enjoys as much as the winner, the interaction with the game being rewarding enough for both.  That's why a game such as monopoly can be so frustrating, to lose sometimes means being stuck in a downward spiral that you can't get out of and basically being slowly economically smothered to death, and the game is generally considered a bad piece of design.

So in a live game where we lose players through a series of stages how can we create a sense of play that survives them being eliminated?  I'm not sure yet, i think a lot of it is critical to the stages in which they are eliminated.  In his essay on procedural board game play Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about the pleasure of understanding the mechanics of play, so knowing the result of the dice roll and doing the necessary adjustments and calculating the resulting damage on your troops (in the case of a wargame) can be much more satisfying than seeing them get mowed down in computer game that hides the mechanics from you.  So in the case of players if they are aware of the time based nature of some of the tasks and the competitive framework o the early stages of the game, not only is their participation imbued with the agency as afforded by the narrative but also an added urgency of the player to player interaction. 

In our last game the player to player interaction ended up being one of fierce competition even though we had mainly designed the game as a solo endeavor.  We've opened this one up, small teams can play but i don't quite know what to expect in terms of purposefully fostering competition, especially when it becomes apparent that the players may need each other rather than need to beat each other.  In board game terms 'interaction' often means that you have to trade or beat your opponents and as a rule the competitive nature of play interests me less than emergence or co-operation, as I'm never sure what meaning can truly emerge from the base competitive instinct or desire to win, I'm sure there is one i just need to get more comfortable with accommodating it.  So perhaps a word of advice, if you ever play one of our games remember, I'm not sure i like winners and you too may end up with your hand up a chicken

follow up from Collateral Murder

Just a quick one following up from my post on the Collateral Murder video from two days ago.  I've got some more thoughts to formulate on it, but here is a soldier from the company involved in the killing speaking out in response to the video:

"A lot of my friends are in that video. After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are. If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like. If you don't like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war."—Josh Stieber, identified by commondreams.org as a veteran soldier of the same Company depicted in the Iraq killing video released this week by Wikileaks."

Play to Win? or Win to Play?

This weekend saw the launch of Invisible Flock's new game: Follow the Bird.

Its a live treasure trail adventure, which we designed to coexist alongside other real world events.

We ran it concurrently with a club night at the Cardiff Arts Institute.

i don't want to dissect it here, although I'm sure I will eventually, but we are still postmortem-ing it as we speak, and redeveloping it for its next bigger and better outing in Bristol at the Old Vic as part of Forest Fringe and Mayfest.

One of the key elements of the game is the fact that we do not pre-announce it.  Its hidden from plain view and waits for its participants to come to it, to stumble on it and become gradually and unexpectedly drawn into play.  There's a whole slew of reasons as to why we chose to do it like that.

Partly inspired by an ARG (alternate reality game) aesthetic which revel in their own duplicity and the blurring of the lines, or 'the curtain' as it has become known which is an increasingly useful term when referring to gameplay that takes place within a permeable world.  The curtain is a term usually designed to refer to the curtain behind which the so called 'puppet master' is hiding.

The 'puppet master' in turn a term used to refer to game designers of ARGs who create the events and trails that the players follow.

The role of the Curtain (here with t capital 'c') is an uncertain one.  The players become confronted by it when they stumble upon a game.  Traditionally ARGs are not mass appeal media, or perhaps more appropriately transmedia.  They are stumbled upon, found, discovered ect.. Although they are become more prolific and you could go and join one right now, to be in one from the beginning you need to have discovered it, hidden and embedded in something else. 

The initial moment of exchange between player and game is left almost entirely to the player.  The game puts out its offer and the take up is then up to the potential player.  There is no financial exchange, no deliberate act of going to play, rather the curtain is suddenly erected and the player finds themselves confronted with it after one click on a website too many.

Although it strikes me that the curtain analogy is perhaps not fully exploited as it hides not only the 'puppet master' but also the game itself.  The players of ARGs are in a constant negotiation with the very nature of the games' invasion into reality, the curtain hiding not just the PM but the player's own reason to participate.  To see too much of a game or of its mechanics behind the curtain is to ruin the game and not just your own enjoyment but that of others as well.  

But the mechanics are often obvious, although hidden in mysteries and clues, the players discuss the game's fiction and unfiction alongside each other accepting the immersive experience as one of play and discovery and as they step closer to and then step away from the curtain which not only hides the Puppet Master and his machines but is the game itself projected onto the curtain.  Participation and active play is essential, as is a willingness to suspend disbelief in the mechanics and actions necessary to undertake the game.

I come from a theatre background, and they struggle with that over there.  Matt Truman wrote on the Guardian blog recently about immersion and immersive theatre's inability to take us to certain edges of human emotion and to truly swallow us up.  I often think that this is in part because of people's confusion of participatory and immersive experiences as simulation.  To look for tangible reality in a place of artifice is a lost cause, to perhaps hope for a heightened experience as afforded through participation, interaction, and increased activity (at least compared to traditional theatre) is perhaps better.  Immersion is an oft misunderstood term, or at least the manner in which i understand it.  The act of reading a book or watching a film can in and of itself be immersive.  Immersion does not mean actually doing, it means being drawn in.  Immersive theatre however has become all too often a short hand for simulation.  Expectations of 3dimensional mimetic performances and environments, rather than poetic aesthetics that use the increased sense of presence afforded by interaction to enhance or re-imagine the relationship between viewers and their work.

And this is what draws me to games these days, an honesty in the interaction between player and work, defining them as audience, agent and player all at once, happy to skip between the roles in a fluid transition of participation without getting caught up in the meta conversations.

And the immersion that players of ARGs allow themselves to experience  through the act of play, to engage and solve mass narratives as communal activities was a big inspiration to Follow the Bird.  But we wanted to reduce the visibility of the curtain at the outset of the game.  How can participatory games take up players by creating a permeable membrane between their reality and the reality created by play?  And at what point do they stop being 'civilians' and become 'players'.

There was a key moment in the game we performed last week.  A point where the initial group of people who had taken up our invitations of a free drink found the note hidden in their ice cube and texted the number on it where they consciously or not became players.  From there on in it was a negotiation between them, the game, and the club night they had expected to experience.

By wanting to pick up the players on the night of the game itself through accident and people's innate curiosity we knew out biggest potential obstacle was the friction with the real world.   People coming to a club night with their friends or in couples stumbling upon a curious invitation will constantly be measuring the two experiences up against each other.  The experience of the expected activity compared to the experience of the acquired activity.  The game seeks to maintain them in a border land between the two, and at its best transforms the expected activity (here the clubbing experience) enhancing it, allowing it to be viewed through the prism of a ludic activity, embedding it with a secondary narrative, that of both the story and the meta narrative of play itself.

It isn't that different to pervasive games that take in cityscapes, allowing players to reinterpret their relationship to their environment through the act of play and ludic spatial practice.  In Follow the Bird we wanted to re-imagine not only the participant's geography but their relationship to the act of clubbing in this context.  

In order to do so the experience itself was placed in a constant moment of tension and unconscious comparison.  Put simply either it was interesting enough to keep playing, or the bar and dancefloor held a stronger allure, and for some it did.

This tension was heightened by the fact that most participants had not arrived consciously to play the game but stumbled upon it whilst already in the process of 'being out'.  Mainly this led me to think about why we play?

We talked early on about the sense of agency we would be instilling in our players.  What were we providing them with to make them want to push on through to the end, and stay in play.  I (and everyone else) have talked at length about the culture of achievement points, about the faceless and cynical psychological trick of awarding points for actions, which it turns out is all it takes to motivate some people.  At its worst it is exemplified by financially manipulative games like Farmville, or even this.  The Conservative website Cash Gordon website gives you points for performing simple tasks such as linking to an article or posting the website's campaign message to your facebook profile, which is enough to motivate people to generate 227,980 points.  That's only 1754 members, but still the main motivator is a simple point giving system, that some people have actually described as fun, reading PDF documents and linking to them on your Facebook profile is never fun, unless you get points for doing it.

So what was the motivator for our players and why would they choose to participate.  The most obvious is that the game itself had to make people want to play, building the pace and difficulty of the puzzles and actions they needed to undertake into the game in a ramping scale.  The pleasure for us had to come from the act of playing, from the thrill of being part of this parallel experience to the expected activity.  and that was in and of itself relatively self evident.  But what were they playing towards?  A resolution, be it narrative, or structural in game terms was needed to conclude the experience, and in the end there was a 'winner' of sorts although what she won the opportunity to do was debatably not everyone's idea of winning.  But built in along the way were a series of gates that simply selected and cut off players who did not make it in time.  If you didn't get to a room in time and meet the performer or solve a riddle the game closed around you and that was it.  So in a way the game itself was propelled along by a series of small 'wins' which simply meant that you increased your play time.  

So why do you choose to play?  Is it curiosity, the fact that you might win even though you are uncertain as to what winning means?  In the next incarnation we are embedding a narrative far deeper into the game and hope to use the momentum of human interest to propel the game forward, but we also want to be much harsher with the gates, cutting down from 100 player to 20 within the first twenty minutes of play.  

By not subscribing the piece to a traditional financial and audience model, where people pay to play and turn up expecting a certain amount of guaranteed experience we are consequently freer to mess around with some of the core concepts of play and game.  Part of the play around the game curtain in the ARG world is exactly how deep the game goes and the uncertainty of the expectations is part of the excitement for players allowing them to speculate, experiment and in the end construct a large part of the game experience themselves.   And although that negotiation of game and real life overlapping presents a bigger challenge in terms or retention, when successfully implemented we hope that the rabbit hole will appear much deeper.           

      

close your eyes and repeat after me, its only a game...

Except its not.

Below is a documentary video called Collateral Murder.



This is a slightly edited video taken from the gun camera of a U.S helicopter in Iraq engaging with a small group of men on the ground.  Amongst the eleven men killed were two Reuters staff members, one of them a local driver, the other a reputed 22 year old war photographer.  Later in the video when a van arrives to pick up the wounded men and presumably take them to a hospital the Apache opens fire on them as well, killing the men and seriously wounding the two children inside the van.  The  video has been made public by the important wikileaks.org and the longer version of the video is available on their website as well as a transcript of the exchange and further material.

A U.S Apache helicopter responds to reported small arms fire but fails to positively identify the shooters.  spotting a group of men peering round the corner of building and believing them to be carrying an RPG the helicopters open fire on the group of men killing most of them. The two journalist appear to initially survive and the helicopter opens fire on one as he crawls away.  The camera watches the second one crawl in the gutter, as over the video we hear the gunner saying "come on buddy all you gotta do is pick up a weapon" which would give him license to open fire.  However he doesn't, he never had one, the RPG (later identifed by ground troops as "something that looks like an RPG round" was in fact a telephoto lens camera.  When the van arrives and three men get out to pick the wounded up the helicopter pilots ask for permission to engage and once given they spray the van and the men with machine gun fire.  In the process of disabling the van and killing the men they also hit two children in the front seat.  On a second watch you can clearly see them moving in the front seat.  The ground troops arrive and as they move to secure the area they drive over one of the dead bodies of the Reuters staff member.

In the longer and more complete video there is a sense of the complete context of the day's events, that the helicopter was engaged in a series of contacts around the area, and minutes after the events that led to the journalists' death they attack a building having seen men who are clearly carrying AK47s walk into it.

It is an incredibly powerful video, both moving and disturbing and a powerful documentary in its singular perspective, that of the gunner of the Apache helicopter.  It is both at the same time a truly immersive mediated experience, whilst maintaining the sterile distance afforded to us by a barrier of pixels.

Over at his blog Remediation, Richard Grusin, calls the video a more powerful item of media documentary than even the Abu Ghraib photos.  I would agree. Whereas the Abu Ghraib photographs were illustrative of a singular event (which was symbolic of a general culture of dehumanization symptomatic of a jingoistic post 9/11 rhetoric) this video is both shocking because of its indiscriminate slaughter, but also because of its wider context and sense of common practice.  Sadly the anomaly here is the fact that we have got to see it and that the video was made public.



YouTube has a bunch of AC-130 videos but the one above isgame footage from Call of Duty Modern Warfare, which I know I keep coming back to.  It will take you seconds to realise the connection between the two
 videos.  In one of the games's most realistically rendered and also individual sequences the player escorts a unit of SAS
men on the ground through an enemy infested village, giving them air protection, al the while accompanied by the narration of the operators, in an uncomfortably uncanny similarity to the exchanges in the Collateral Murder video and especially to this one below.



Richard Grusin, whose blog i mentioned above, writes about what he calls the premediation of war through FPS games, as especially illustrated through the similarities of the helicopter attack in the first video and actions performed by the player in the game's chappter called 'death from above'.  He cites many of the actions that the player undertakes within the game as an explaination of the zeal of the helicopter gunner in his desire to engage the wounded man.  Especialy an attribute called 'last stand' which in the game allows for wounded or shot characters or players to fire off a couple of last shots whilst crawling on the floor.  Now i don't particularly ascribe to this, neither to i give much weight to his speculation that the 'pilot' mission in Modern Warfare 2 being presented as a reward therefore elevates the position of helicopter gunner.  I would suggest that the scarcity of the role and the difficulty of getting a position as an aerial gunner are probably sufficient.   He also suggests the gunner's speech style is a the result of mediation through the game which i don't really agree with again, the YouTube video above is an example of footage that was released before the game, instead I would suggest the game is simply an accurate mediated reproduction of the experience.

However within the blog post he also talks about the Collateral Murder video and the game meeting to bridge the gap between reality and war.  How, as a game played by millions of youths, many of whom are the key demographic of army volunteers, and some of whom are soldiers actually fighting in Iraq, it premediates the affectivity of war, and he suggests through networked play the sociability of warfare and soldiering.

This is more interesting to me personally and ties into subjects already touched upon on this blog.  The Collateral Murder video and its uncanny realtionship to the CoD game level only serves to pose the question again: what does it mean to play a game such as MW when its realtionship to reality is so permeable?

Does it amount to watching war through a Baudrillard-ian prism: "the Iraq war did not take place?".  I don't think so.  Where does reality place itself in a game such as MW?  Through the act of play we not only undergo a simulation of an event, or in this case of a non event, but rather perform through it.  The vibration of the controller and increased realism and detail of game such as MW do serve to premediate our perceptions, but the sight of the violence in Collateral Murder was not premediated and therefore reduced by my playing of MW, rather it was uncomfortably contextualized close to home.  I am not a believer in the holy grail of immersive simulation, subscribing instead to the opinion that immersion is a fallacy, and a politically dangerous goal, but the act of performing the AC-130 scene in MW allowed me an uncomfortable proximity to Collateral Murder which ties back into the talk of guilt from my previous post.  I am not suggesting that the act of play is similar to the act of war, or of killing, but the game's attempt to create a realistic experience and my playing through of the in-game level recreates a cognitive proximity between me and the real life video. 

Does playing the game allow me a greater understanding or an insight into the events shown in Collateral Murder?  I think so.  Does the game affect the manner in which the soldiers in the video behave?  I don't know.  I think its a big assumption to make that the pilots in the video have played CoD, although it is very possible that they have, (although the game itself was also not released till at least two months after the event itself took place)  I also think that it is also a big asumption that the game would affect their behaviour over the training and highly authoritarian hierarchical structure that they have to fit into as Army aerial gunners.  I believe games are a product of their society not that society is a product of its games.

But of greater significance is how do games help us to read the events shown in the video?  Do they only serve to dilute their meaning, and continue a narrative of assumed conflict and of a mediatised war happening 'over there', easily assimilated and dismissed through selective one sided mediatised representations, propagating the hero narrative at the expense of the story of the full cost of war?

Perhaps games provide us with an antidote to the passive 'clean' war that the first Iraq war was synonymous of.  I can't quite put my finger on how i feel about the relationship of my game play experience to Collateral Murder.  I feel guilty at the fact that i played the game's level with such enjoyment, although i feel that the continuity between the game and the real life event is not necessarily a negative thing, nor is any feeling of guilt emerging from recontextualised play.   Instead it suggests that CoD4 has the potential to become a critical text in the manner in which we read modern conflict and our relationship to it, as dictated by how we as players read it.

Many of the comments written underneath of the AC130 footage (the real life one, not the game footage) are people reminding others that this isn't game footage but reality, showing that as media consumers the game has almost entirely taken over our reading of this footage.  Previous footage of aerial warfare was demonstrative of the faceless war of 'surgical strike missile cams', 'collateral damage' and generic war on terror broad brush strokes.  The CoD 4 footage allowed for a narrative of participation to be imposed onto these images, allowing for players to feel a cognitive ownership of this imagery.  With the release of Collateral Murder a new narrative has emerged.  It is too easy to condemn to pilots and their chatter (which is what has shocked most), and too easy to blame games (mainly because i don't think they are to blame), although i don't understand the morality of opening fire on unarmed men trying to help the wounded, the pilots believe that they are firing on armed combatants who are putting their colleagues at risk.  Their are military analysts who have looked at the video and say that it is clear that the journalists were accompanied by armed men, i believe the pilots were doing their job, the fact that we as a society allow for that job to be the killing of other human beings is not the fault of 'video game brainwashing' as some liberal commentators are already saying.  Rather i believe that having played the game in question has allowed me a response and insight into the video of the killings that is not afforded to people who find it easier to condemn rather than to analyze.

So perhaps the leaked video will not have the impact of the Abu Ghraib photos (although i am uncertain now what exactly that affect was) because i don't think that it is showing an atrocity as we commonly understand the term, but rather a horrific mistake.  It is showing the kind of violence that we as a society are allowing to take place by acquiescing that 'its their fault for bringing a child to a battle', by not holding events like this to account, by propagating an army centric vision of a battle for 'liberation', by not readdressing our assimilated imagery of this ongoing conflict.  Because this video brings us closer than ever before to the death of two out of 139 journalists who have been killed in the conflict.  A potential 137 other similar events. Or any of the 104,000 civillians since the conflict has begun, and makes us think about our role within that.

And the game, what does it do in all this?  The game is like all media, all books, all films ever made about war, if played or read right it can help change your reading of the events, and the way in which you chose to participate in them.  Blaming games is easy but looking deep and hard at why we allow innocent civilians to be killed by men we claim as our country's heros is harder.  Change the channel.