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
No comments:
Post a Comment