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.