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.  

hiatus

Apologies for the brief hiatus.

My final week in Brighton was taken up with the writing of my artist talk, which was in part a summary of what i have been writing about here and drawing these points to a conclusion of sorts.

This doesn't mean that i am done with these preoccupations, far from it but they have been drawn to a practical head, so to speak.

I am still trying to draw the lines of connection between what i have been writing about, the practical exercise i began in my final two weeks in Brighton and the game i submitted to the Ludocity website.

One of the most interesting things that arose from the talk was a game designer called Dave Dow who quoted Will Wright as saying (and i paraphrase) "games are the only medium that can make us feel guilt".

This singular power that he attributes to games resonated quite strongly with me and the thinking i've been doing.  Guilt presupposes interaction and player activity within a configurable space of play.  Guilt assumes player activity having consequences that affect the world of the game, guilt assumes narrative and emotional involvement.  Guilt means meaning.

Guilt is also quite tricky though.  I already touched on this of sorts when talking about Fallout in a previous post, about the almost binary set of choices offered to players in games that strive to attribute meaning to actions.  Do action A for immediate reward and negative effect of the games world, or do action B for harder effort on your part but clearer conscience and often but not always richer narrative development.

Guilt is a strangely effective emotion.  I have recently been playing through the original Fallout, partly inspired by conversations i have been having about guilt in gameplay and some of my own thoughts about technical prowess overshadowing content in digital games, which is of particular interest to me as someone exploring forms of play such as board games and performative interaction, and also because of a retrospective article in Edge magazine.

Most of the instances of meaningful play in Fallout are generated through choices, which present you with a series of decisions designed to generate of assuage the player of guilt.

The game is set in a post nuclear apocalyptic world where the player is part of a community of vault dwellers, humans who have survived the nuclear war by hiding in vaults.  However your vault (Vault 13) 's water chip has run out and with it the supply of drinking water is dwindling.  So the initial mission that you embark upon is to find a water chip.  You are set loose into this wasteland that has adapted and developed its own new lawless society.  The world is incredible richly textured and written, and although the game feels old fashioned in its look the fullness of the world and the sense that as a player you are impacting upon it is striking.

Such was the agency that i felt to find the water chip that although i was given 120 days to find it, i rushed through and returned the chip to the Vault within half the time.

i discovered the water chip deep below a city knows as Necropolis.  An abandoned zombie infested town inhabited only by Ghouls, humans disfigured by radiation who attack you as you pass.  Down in the sewers however i stumbled upon a colony of nice ghouls, who informed me that they live in fear of a tyrant who controls them through the heavy rationing of their drinking water as he controls the flow of drinking water with his water chip. The nice Ghoul then implores of me as to whether i am going to take their chip? i told him not and he said that if someone could fix the water pump then everyone could have water again and they would not need the chip, freeing it up for me to take and liberating them from the tyrant in the process.  And it is with a little shame that i confess that upon finding the chip i legged it back to my vault rather than stay and see the fixing of the water pump through to the end, condemning the colony of ghouls to death in the process.

I've not picked the game up for a couple of weeks now, but i am curious as to what repercussions my cowardly actions have had on the game world.  Has the colony of Ghouls since died of thirst, or is the unfinished task in my checklist a constant reminder of my failures as a traditional game hero?

I shall have to play more and find out, guilt in this case is created through the richness of the world and the fullness of the story telling within the game, and is only as effective as the game's ability to allow me to keep playing.

I have never really played GTA, and tend to find the game itself a bit tiresome.  However on the occasion where i have picked it up i have been messing around in a friend's game not really playing per-se just exploring and blowing things up.  However it strikes me that the game itself does not allow for the creation of an emotion such as guilt, mainly due to the narrow palette of interactions it offers, most of which are basically violent.  Although other interactions occur these are through cutscenes and prescribed, in Fallout the fact that the game allows you the option to talk your way out of a situation, manipulate or sneak about, or do the bad thing and grab a water chip and leg it allows for guilt which in turn in this case allows for meaning.

So this led me to the game i have begun to prototype as a result of my Blast Theory residency, a subversion of traditional war games, one that focuses on the narrative of the almost forgotten civilian victim rather than the narrative of the hero combatant which we are most accustomed to.

Where is the room for guilt in this game.  Train which i have touched upon at length seems to want to generate guilt and only guilt, which is in itself incredible powerful but an equally limited emotion when presented on its own.  To create a game that sets up an initially difficult premise, such as playing the role of a small child in war zone, and then continues to ram it down a player's throat does not strike me as a game that creates meaningful play in any real sense of the word.  Or at least not in any progressive manner.  Games that 'teach' and do so through condemning the player at every turn (literally) are in my view single purpose.  Likewise interaction that presents but does not allow for modification or reconfiguration does not truly hold meaning as interaction, just as sculptural presence and observation.  So how can guilt be leveraged and what richer emotions does it lead to.

A game that creates guilt can have real world repercussions, and prompt players to take real world actions out of the sense of guilt, but it is presenting what is basically a binary: you feel it or you don't.  And there is something unsatisfactory and slightly cheap to my eyes about guilt a a key catalyst for action.

When designing configurable spaces the emotional consequences of actions is as important as the physical and strategic ones,

In Sniper's Alley the player in the role of the Sniper of the title is, i think, put into a difficult position.  The in-game repercussions of successfully shooting a civilian leads to a potentially gruesome (in game terms) outcome, as well as the two roles of the players of the receiving end of the 'shots' is used correctly will create tense moments of gameplay, and i hope some sense of 'meaningful' play.  Although i have not designed as a game to teach, or in any way a real life illustration of the Sniper Alley during the siege of Sarajevo, i wanted it to create moments of difficult conflict as opposed to fun 'bag bang you're dead' war play.  Where guilt sits in this, is up to each individual player and context in which the game is played i suppose.  I have not yet been able to play test it.

So a final thought.  Is the context of the action undertaken completely dependent on the expected outcome of the game?  A friend described playing monopoly with his young daughter as a grueling experience that neither enjoyed as he felt horrific guilt at constantly taking vast sums of money from her, the only interaction that that particular game of Monopoly allowed was one which resulted in a player feeling horrible guilt at the unstoppable train of the 'win' hurtling towards the inevitable conclusion.  Now this may well be a fault of the game itself, and monopoly is largely derided amongst board game fans (partly out of fashion i think, but also because i'm sure we've all been in that terrible situation where it becomes evident you are going to lose but it somehow takes two whole hours to actually get there).  But in Monopoy for example it is the single outcome of the 'win' that drives the game and defines all of the interactions.  In Fallout 'winning' became a more complex experience, the ticking clock of my fellow vault dwellers survival led me to betray the subjugated Ghouls.  There is a win, and a lose incorporated in there, a more complex design and interaction, winning is perhaps more closely described as an enriched experience of extended narrative, rather than a metric.

Does the Sniper in S'sA wait to pick off the injured civilian where they fell, and rack up the points?  Or do they develop a code based on their own inherent morality?  The game puts you in the position of a military character shooting non combatants, an inherently 'evil' position to find yourself, how as a player do you begin to reconcile this with your guilt at what the game asks of you to win?  The mechanics do not allow for the sniper to aim to simply shoot the 'legs' of the civilians stopping them from crossing the finish line.  Perhaps a system that would allow for a sniper to chose where to shoot, and a die roll resolves whether they do in fact succeed to incapacitate or end up killing them would pose a new and different sets of moral questions?

What does it mean to win?  And how much do we want to? When i used to play Monopoly as a child i would get bored relatively quickly and try and convince my fellow players that adding new rules such as 'bank raids' would be a lot more fun (i'm sure i'm not alone in this), and this would inevitably lead to absolute anarchy, as the mechanics of Monopoly do not allow for a heist plot to be tagged on.  So a game that instills guilt in you, but gives you no avenue, no potential for configurable interaction that resolves it, no 'heist' is a game lacking.  And likewise an interaction or an experience lacking in true meaning, it has only the illusion of it.

No pictures or videos in this one sorry, its all a bit off the top of my head.