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.  

two pictures

This is a picture of Brighton i took when i went for a ride on a bike the other day. 

and this is the image for the talk i'm working on, that i'll be giving at Blast Theory next week at the end of my residency.

where do pixels go when they die

Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible, but in the end, death is still coming for you. Your score looks pretty meaningless hovering there above your little tombstone. This treatment of character death stands in stark contrast with the way death is commonly used in video games (where you die countless times during a given game and emerge victorious---and still alive---in the end). Passage is a game in which you die only once, at the very end, and you are powerless to stave off this inevitable loss.

Jason Rohrer

The Passage is a beautiful short game that should play.  Its about death and life and over the course of the five minutes of the game you navigate your eight pixel high character through his own compacted stylized representation of his life, choosing whether or not to take a partner, to seek rewards from treasure chests or just to walk through your life which at the beginning of the game spreads out in front of you, and as you near the end of the five minutes begins to stretch behind you until you inevitably turn into a coffin.  You really need to play it, and the developer’s design note can be found here. 

This game got me thinking about these twin games: Death and  Life. 

Both are meta aware games that ironically don’t want you to play them, spending their time instead reminding you that there is a world out there, that life is precious and short and by playing these games you are wasting it.  Death is a simple 2d shooter with scrolling text at the bottom, encouraging you to “go out and look at the stars”.  Life is an un-winable game, where as soon as it starts up you die, basically an unplayable game that forcing you to go live Life.  I like them.  They’re simple and they playfully subvert all the attempts towards immersion that most games undertake these days.

There’s a question within these games that is also echoed by Tale of Tales beautiful game the Graveyard.  In the game you play an old woman.  You control her to make her walk up the path of graveyard to a bench in the shadow of a church.  Once you arrive at the bench she can sit, and a cinematic cut scene plays, a song about death underpins moving shots of her face.  In the free version of the game, the scene ends and you direct her out of the cemetery gates.  In the full version of the game, there is the added feature that the old lady may die whilst sat on the bench.  The game is very powerful and haunting, and this as well the above game question that crucial relationship that is death and the digital game.

Death is the stalwart of most digital games.  Failure is defined by the death of the avatar, most games becoming a competition between the player and the ever present spectre of in game death.  Death is so embedded in the game lexicon that to generally not succeed at a game is to ‘die’ even if that game be something like Pong which does not depict a life/death situation but an abstracted game of tennis.  If all games require conflict to be defined as ‘game’ which is a generally perceived rule, then the resolution or failure of that same conflict has become synonymous with life and death.

Death is also the single most controversial element in digital game discussion. All of longer analytical posts I have written here are in some way concerned with death and its depiction in game and the manner in which we interact with it. 

I think there are two things primarily a stake, one is ideas and concepts of representation and a second is a question of performance in play, and player implication.

The games mentioned at the top of this post are all games that concern themselves explicitly with the representation and undergoing of death by the player avatar.  By playing the game you are agreeing to explore the idea of death and to participate in a performance of it, thus implicating you as player and participant. And although the game itself is driven by death and the promise of it, to achieve death is not a failure, but rather the cathartic agency of the games themselves.

In games that remain in the realm of the abstract such as the classic Mario, death is cartoonish with no in-world implications that are perceivable to the player.  Any immersion that occurs in-game during a session of Mario is wrapped up in a sense of ‘pure play’ that is more closely associated with sport or competition for point and completion.  The video below shows not only Mario but other classic video game deaths:

As games strive to produce more indepth play and immersive experiences for players the representation of death becomes more complicated and also more loaded.  There is a whole satellite debate about age rating and the effect of violence in video games, and I really don’t want to get into that.  However as the trend in digital game moves away from abstraction the role of death as a central mechanic and agency of gameplay becomes greater and crucially not only can the player avatar die in more extravagant ways, so too can it kill.  Compare the above video with the one below (its some pretty brutal stuff, so if easily offended by violence, just take my word for it, it’s nasty)

Quite a difference.  I suppose a key difference is that the second video is a series of increasingly inventive and gruesome ways in which a player can exact death on in game opponents.  There is a moral shift that is required to accommodate these games within our playing experience, similar to the one required to enjoy the violence of action or horror films, but the difference here being the inherently performative quality of gameplay.  The pre-rendered and animated gruesome death sequences are activated by the player by choice, in a closed game system such a computer game you can not choose to walk up to the opponent and try and negotiate, you can only chose from a pallet of pre authored choices, by direct interaction with the narrative.  The fact that the narrative itself is a one dimensional meat churning murder machine, is a different point altogether, the choice of activating the game is one made by the player.  I personally think that the screen below taken from the youtube page where I got the video from is more telling of our society’s unfortunate approach to mediatised death as in ‘related videos’ to a montage of computer game deaths is the execution of Saddam Hussein:

The execution of death in digital game has come to represent not just what is perhaps wrong with an industry that spends more time exploiting pre existing cinematic tropes rather than truly developing its own, but also in parallel a vehicle for perceived ‘meaningful play’.  Games that profess to allow for more meaningful adult play often offer a player a binary choice of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’, a series of action they can undertake to influence the outcome of the game and often their character development.  In Fallout 3 your character is famously offered the choice to explode a whole town with a nuclear device.  Committing mass murder obviously plunges your ‘karma points’ an ingame mechanic used to regulate your behavior as a player and determine how the game world responds to you.

The two video feature the design team talking about the moral choices in the game, and the ways in which you can affect the world and its inhabitants.  The performance of inflicting death in the game is designed to have relevant repercussions, killing civilians will affect your character’s standing, so the dynamic of play/death is affected in a way that is no longer simply a binary progression of fail/win, but rather a branching tree like structure of narrative possibilities.

Returning to Call of Duty Modern Warfare again, the performance of death in this game is different.  The infliction of death is the key motivator for progression through the game.  You kill the moving bad guys and gain their territory.  In the process, you can die too, but crucially are resurrected at the last checkpoint.

However there are two key differences in the performance of death in these games.  On the one hand there is a trivialization of death, both ingame as a player and of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys.  In this screenshot I’ve used before the unmistakable desert cammo of a dead American marine is painted into the scenery, 

as you play your fellow marines drop around you with little in game reference.  However there is a strong narrative performance of death that game also puts you through as a player:

and also the frankly disturbing execution scene, where you briefly play a deposed moderate Arabic leader who is driven through a non specific middle eastern town in revolt only to be tied to a post and executed, all of this performed from a first person perspective with you the player in control of the camera:

The difference here being that the player is performing his own death within the narrative of the game.  There is a strange friction created by the inherent elements of the First Person Shooter and this heavily narrative implicated death sequence (or sequences as Modern Warfare 2 does it at least four if not five times). So ‘winning’ and progressing through the game seals the fate of the characters as their deaths are inevitably programmed into the narrative.  The performance of death is on the one hand trivialized and also at the same time given great weight, on youtube you can find tribute videos made to the fallen character soldiers of the game, which are similar in timbre to the tribute video made for real life fallen soldiers both informed by similar aesthetics. 

The in game deaths that are embedded into the narrative implicate the player in their performance.  The player still retains control of the camera and to some degree motions of the character but is also inevitably led towards their character’s death.  So the dying undergone when trying to progress through the level is not real death, it isn’t finite, because in Call of Duty death is finite when tied into narrative development and emotional progression of the game.

I’m personally a bit torn by this, on the one hand its quite a powerful narrative device that I remember quite clearly experiencing, on the other hand it lends itself to a strange perception of war related casualties.  The high levels of casualties that the generic ‘mujahedin’ characters sustain in a landscape suspiciously devoid of civilians raises some interesting questions about representation of death, comparing the disposable death of the nameless ‘bad guys’ and glorification of the heroic narrative led ‘good guy’.  It’s a shame that these games in no way engage with the other half of the premise that raise.  Death does have a consequence, and when performed by the player is a subversion of the traditional victory achievement: your reward for succeeding at this level is a bit of narrative where you are killed..

These games’ key mechanics are the distribution or reception of death, the use of narrative allows for these to be embedded and perhaps justified or at least contextualized in their representation.  What about game systems whose key mechanics are life.  The Sims for example a game where you maintain a family of Sims, keeping them alive rather than dead.  They can die, but the key emergent features of the narratives rely on their surviving.

there are 18 ways in which a Sim can die and perhaps the most touching and genuinely moving is the last one, dieing of old age, the grim reaper appears along with a suitcase packed and invites the Sim to gently go into go into that good night.  There is something pathetic and futile about the other deaths shown, the mundane ness (apart from the woman eaten by the giant plant or the satellite falling on the stargazer) of it all makes it strangely moving and tragic, in a way that the deaths shown in the action gun toting games weren’t.  The death of the Sims contextualized as existing only within their own imaginary society lacks the piggybacking narrative punch of a Modern Warfare, but in the process gains a true life like sadness.

What then does it mean to perform one’s own death digitally or in a game system?  There is a friction between perceived ideas of life and ‘living’ and digital media, let alone game playing.  In Second Life, an online community where participants create their own online identities and play out ‘lives’ devoid of a game context of any kind (Second Life has no aim, you just ‘are’) there is a struggle with how to accommodate real life death.  Here a woman talks of her grandfather who she taught to use Second Life dying but their choice to maintain his Avatar (his digital identity that presumably can still be played) a strange immortality in a world where a bizarrely large amount of people choose to represent themselves as cartoon foxes. 

The article also mentions a charity setting up a counter that updates the amount of children who have died of poverty since second world was created.  A powerful reminder of the constant friction between digital identity and performance and the mortality and passing of real life.

In performance we talk of the live moment of the performer on stage being a reminder to its watchers of their own mortality.  To watch live performance is to watch the disappearing body, to be acutely aware of shared time passing, and mortality slipping.  It’s a beautiful way to think of performance.  Where does this concept sit in relation to the moment of live interaction.  As makers of interactive work the presence of the audience/player creates the exchange needed for the work to exist, where is the mortality in the act of participation?  For me it is heightened even more as the moment in which we participate is shared and finite in a way that observed performance is not.  By becoming and being we chose to live no longer as observers but as living components of the work, which has the potential to immortalize the moment as well as remind us of its passing once the interaction itself is finished and slips further away with time.  By participating in the digital, the artificial and the simulated we are reminded of the live moment of mortality precisely because we are engaging in its alternative, making the ‘live more live’.  I don’t use the term ‘live’ through some fetishistic attachment to live performance, for me that whole argument died a long time ago but rather in relation to our representations of death.

Death in the live event holds a powerful theoretical hold, that can lead to the conclusion that all live performance is at its core about death.  In a way I agree, but that does also mean all art becomes about death, and in many ways all that we do reminds us of our own mortality.  Is this where escapism comes in?  Games are often written off or justified as escapism.  ‘Its not real violence its just escapism’, ‘games can’t be about important things they’re just escapism’.  As arguments go its about as effective as saying people only go to the theatre or watch films to be entertained.  And although some do, and some games can be about escapism, they can and should be about so much more, I mean even Hairspray’s fundamentally about race once you get past the shiny white teeth. 

So how do we begin to deal with the idea of death in configurable media and systems?  In my pervasive game Sniper’s Alley, I ended up using a game system heavily influenced by some research I did on Sarajevo years ago.  In the game a hidden sniper is monitoring civilians trying to get from a starting zone to a safe zone carrying their shopping bags.  This is influenced narratively (although loosely) on situations where market lines and civilians were repeatedly attacked by Serbs laying siege to the city.  When a sniper gets a target in his binoculars he calls out the name of the target (fake game allocated names written on large signs the civilians are wearing) down a phone to the game master.  The game master in turn rolls a dice to determine the result of the sniper hit, if it kills the civilian outright or if it simply injures them, there is a 2 in 6 chance that they will be killed and the other four would mean the loss of an arm or a leg, which means they have to react accordingly, not use the corresponding leg or arm.  This will I imagine create some pretty intense play for the civilians coming under fire, the way that they use cover, and what they do once they are hit  Likewise for the sniper, although the game is fun and not meant to have an overbearing moral flavor, the choice of finishing off the injured player and the immersive nature of the role (binoculars and hidden position) might well lead to some difficult decision making.  This is further compacted by the use of the human shields.  They are dressed in U.N blue and are there to shield the civilians.  Killing one of them results in a larger point deduction from the sniper, meant to symbolize global opinion, media frenzy, and the biased weight given to life in a war zone.  This in turn will hopefully create an interesting friction amongst the civilian team whose lives are more expendable than those of the U.N shields, and for the sniper again in his decision or not to shoot them.

Like most non digital games Sniper’s Alley relies on a certain amount of abstraction to create its mechanics and its representation.  An equivalent digital game would be difficult.  Sniper games or missions involving snipers tend to involve a lot of sneaking, but the actual shooting mechanics and the targets themselves are generally Nazis or othersuch bad guys.  In Sniper’s Alley there is a clear moral dilemma dressed up in interpersonal interaction.  In the right context the game could even serve as an educational L.A.R.P although I wouldn’t recommend it. In board games or systems that are more open than those traditionally presented by digital media the representation and undertaking of death, both delivered and performed, is generally executed in abstraction the result allowing for a detached immersion in both the gameplay and meta narrative. 

In his essay on table top wargaming Matthew Kirschenbaum talks eloquently about the table top wargame as an emergent and procedural system of narrative creation.  That the rules allow for emergent narrative and gameplay (non determined paths unlike many digital games which tend to limit you to a series of structures) and by participating in their procedurality the player in turn becomes implicit in the flow of the narrative the game creates.  The execution of death as well as the performance of it by the player is undertaken in a transparent and procedural manner, you can see the dice roll, and calculate the outcome, are implicit in your unit’s demise.  Although the performance of death itself is highly abstracted the system of table top gaming allows for an emotional and narrative connection precisely through the abstraction and the act of performing the procedural steps necessary in the creation of the procedural game play.  The large scale hegemony of war gaming’s impersonal units on the large expanse of hexagonal battle fields is later resolved by the use of heroes or characters; individual models and figures with their own rule set and characteristics which in turn led to the creation of the seminal RPG (role playing game) dungeons and dragons, where the player character connection can become almost umbilical through repeated play and long campaigns.  Here crucially the death of a character or player is shared event, contextualized through play and dialogue.

Is the performance of death attributed with greater weight through its liveness or does the perceived immersion of the digital system allow for death and its performance to be more affecting to its player?  Well I think neither.  I think a key issue at play is the idea of representation over enaction.  Controversy surrounding games and polemic opinion is often a matter of representation and contextualization of death.  In the infamous Airport Scene a slightly belligerent youtuber commented on how if the scene was set in America the game would never have been made.  The controversy surrounding ‘real war’ games such as 6Days in Fallujhah is primarily concerned with the representation of the death of real soldiers.  Does the representation of death in Call of Duty trivialize death, no, does it trivialize the death of the ‘other’ the anonymous generic foreign combatant at the other end of an M16, yes.  Can a game such as We All Had Names, mentioned in previous posts, represent the death of 6million Jews in a manner that both appropriate, sensitive and correctly weighted?  These are the concerns expressed over representations of death within narratives that are in some way owned.

We, as a society and specific groups within that society feel a sense of ownership over certain narratives and by proxy over those deaths and the manner in which they should be represented, a similar ethos as demonstrated by some American Media on 9/11 denying the existence of people jumping from the twin towers, as a representation of death that did not fit within the narrative of the day.  The manner in which a game deals with these deaths is a sensitive subject, and the ever present friction of success/failure, death/life in digital games makes for an interesting reading of these events.  This is why the Call of Duty paradigm of narrative performed death is relevant: a rewriting of the association of dearth in combat with failure, and rather death in combat as heroism, accompanied by appropriately soaring string sections and camera work.

But what of the gentler death, the quieter death?  The one that doesn’t happen in a hail of bullets and gunfire, the one that resembles our own deaths a lot more.  Narratives, be they books, films or simply stories we are told, have almost always structured themselves around death.  The death of a beloved character can be moving on every watching, can make us consider our own death, or that of others.  To procedurally participate in that process, by pressing the arrow button in the passage, rolling the dice, or simply playing the game for long enough implicates us in a different way than a game whose key mechanic is violence.  By participating in the game as an act of play and performance we participate in the death of the avatar willingly in the same way we know the ill movie star will probably die by the end of the film, but we still commit to his story.  These games of life allow us to contemplate and perform death cushioned by the artificial and simulation, because in play as the pixels die we become aware of our own cells living.

And as for the mainstream market that keeps into trouble with games like Manhunt, the conversation sadly keeps getting caught up in talk of censorship and moral equity.  In a game market so semiotically focused on death, it’s a shame that energies are being spent thinking about new and excitingly disgusting ways to kill enemies rather than what the killing itself means.  It’s not a question about whether you can show those things, of course you can, but its whether you should.

a way in

This is a way into a treasure trails i'm putting together as part of my residency at Blast Theory.  Its a mini web based game that uses QR codes.

They're 2 dimensional barcodes that computers and mobile phones can scan to reveal a web link or some text or other information.  I'm hoping to leave a trails of them about as an unmanned interactive scavenger hunt. 

Sadly it means that if you don't have the technology to scan the QR code then I'm afraid the game's no good to you, so i've included an embedded one here which is similar to the one that you find in the game:

so give the game a go, see if you can find it then come back here to process the code at this website (copy and paste the code's URL)

Game Night

I really wanted to make something today as i've spent a lot of time recently thinking about work and i wanted to see what would come out if i sat down and focussed on making something and so this evening was largely taken up with the making of a new pervasive game.

It's called Sniper's Alley and is just that:

A team of civilians try and make it from their starting area to a safe zone at the end of a long street, open square or city block carrying as many bags of shopping with them as they can.  They wear large signs on their front and back with a made up game name (preferably something monosyllabic like BAT)  written on it.

A hidden sniper in constant phone contact with a game master watches them through binoculars and when he gets a clear view of a player's game name he reveals it to the game master.  If correct the GM roles a six sided dice to determine the damage the sniper's shot has done and tells the relevant player they have been hit, they then have to behave accordingly: an arm hit means they can't carry their shopping bags, a leg hit means can't walk on that leg, a head or body hit means they are dead.

The game progresses as each team scores points for either getting their fellow live civilians and as many bags of shopping into the safe zone as possible, or in the case of the sniper scoring 'kills'.

Just to muddy the waters there is a third team: the human shields dressed in smurf blue.  They are the only ones who can officially spot the sniper and declare it to the GM, and to further ramp it up if the sniper shoots one of them he will have to deduct 4 points from his own score.

On paper it looks like it will be good fun to play, as well as quite hectic and tense.

There's a lot of elements of various bits and pieces in there that i'm uncertain as to how they'll translate into play.  The whole thing is under a Creative Commons  license over at Ludocity so pop over there for the more detailed rules and the reference sheet that i rather crudely bashed together tonight in photoshop:

Not quite sure what its all about yet, but it all feeds out of what i've been writing about for the past few days.  I have half formed idea about the performance of death in games which i'll get up here in the next couple of days, but in the meantime if you have any thoughts on the game, or want to play it and want more details please let me know.

Contested space of participation

Looking at the map of Zork that I posted the other day, I have been thinking a lot about imaginary geographies.  Spaces that we create in our mind, and the inherent properties of these spaces, as geographies performed, contested or created.

Fictional maps or illustrative maps have long been printed in the appendices or as extra additions to books and works of fiction.  I remember two particular cases from when I was a child of maps that fascinated me. I owned a copy of Lord Of the Rings, which had printed within its first few pages a map of the whole of Middle Earth.  This seems to serve a similar purpose to those reference guides of characters that you get in dense Russian novels, both are harbingers of the impending scale of the book you are about to enter, and a sort of crib sheet of immersion that you can check back on to contextualise the story. 

This Map of Middle Earth was almost my favourite part of the book.  The map was a promise of a large narrative world, and although looking at it at the beginning before reading the book itself revealed relatively little, once the story of LotR got going returning the map you could annotate it in your head, as it became a narrative space that was gradually given meaning, and also when it all gets a bit confusing come the third book , you sort of need it to make sense of everything, and I remember writing on it the events as they happened, the giant spider here, the castle of Saruman there, slowly building my own legend and meaning onto the map.

The second that I remember clearly was the Bible.  The single page map of a geographical region called the Holy Land.  These stories also unfold in clear geographical terms, and a copy of the illustrated Bible that I owned as a child had its own set of annotations of key places, Jerusalem ect…

Aside from the fact that Tolkien’s work is self admittedly a Christian allegory, there are connections in the role of space within the two books. The role of contested space and travel across vast geographical areas are central to stories’ narratives, and the maps therefore remind us of the scale we are dealing with, and allows for the reader to track and place the narratives within geographical contexts.  It is only now that I am older that the significance of the map of the Holy Land becomes truly apparent. The Holy Land of the map is probably one of the most globally of contested spaces now, as centuries of conflict over the meaning of the land that was in the flysheet of my childhood bible have endowed it with a whole new series of meaning that were not marked on the map’s legend that I used to read.  And even though Christianity has largely eschewed its geoculture origins (despite talk of a modern crusade although I think its probably oil rather than spiritual riches that prompted this incursion) politics, geography and religion have scarred that land much more permanently than the innapropriately old world map showed, and although far more inappropriate for a child's first bible, this map might shed a clearer insight into the role religion, and ethnicity and history has played in the region.

Tolkien’s world is invented, using our reference points of feudal agricultural Europe and tales of King Arthur to create its geography in our minds, its topography informed by the maps drawn by Tolkien himself and his son Christopher.  LotR is a story of contested geography, the evil Sauron lurks at the edge in an almost non-space, behind horrific gates that are waiting to open to flood his monsters into the tangible world of our heroes.  A majority of the books are spent in transit, the films are endlessly populated with helicopter shots of the diversely proportioned Fellowship of the Ring running across New Zealand.  The land of Middle Earth and its implied backstory and genealogy becoming as performative in the story as the characters themselves, the lavishly detailed maps allowing for the geography to become an active participant in the story itself.  

So returning again to Zork, a world that is never graphically represented within the game world itself but that has been navigated by thousands and can still be explored online here doing this and comparing your progress with the map is interesting, as the map’s creator states that he has left off the obstacles and some of the conflicts that you encounter, so although the map is the visualisation of an active space that you explore and unlock naratively during play, it is an incomplete picture of the game world, but a complete picture of the game’s geography.  The geography on its own being similar to the map of Middle Earth for someone who is yet to read the book.  In Zork, much like in a book, you navigate the predetermined geography by reading or typing the correct commands which gradually reveal the land to you, and in the process of actually navigating the geography embed it with meaning. In both you are blind, and by activating the textual worlds by playing the game and by reading the book, the world is gradually revealed and drawn for you.

In games experiences that are seemingly the opposite to Zork, photorealistic 3 dimensional game worlds such as Morrowind in Oblivion are complex and lavishly created environments for players to experience.

  The large world of Morrowwind is obviously influenced by the work of Tolkien, as a feudal fantasy world.  The game is a large 3dimensional computer role playing game allowing for an open sandbox style world that the player can explore at will, participating as much or as little as they choose with the game’s central narrative, spending their time instead training as one of the world’s many professions, or simply rampaging around killing monsters and stealing their stuff.  The game is accompanied by a large and crucial ingame map:

And below is an annotated version, which contains all of the information from the game, dungeons, monsters events ect…

The two images reveal both the potential and the actual narrative of the world, to a person literate in the topography of the game the second map especially makes for interesting reading.  It invariably demands a comparative analysis to one’s own inworld experience, did I go there? Did I kill that and steal its stuff? 

the act of playing Oblivion and other 3dimensional open world games becomes a form of interpretive geography, the land mass and sites predetermined by the designers, typically as contested space that the game demands the player occupy, whether in Morrowind as an adventurer by uncovering them on the map and experiencing them, or like in Call of Duty by travelling through and killing the enemy NpCs.

There are two types of game geographies that I specifically want to dwell on: the fantasy and the uncanny.  The fantasy spaces are artificial worlds, those of Morrowind pictured above or Half Life,

 a dystopic future world of alien invasion.  These worlds create geographies and rules that are unique to their fictional universe much like works of literature or television such as Star Wars or the books of Terry Pratchett.  The role of space within these games is often a combination of exploration and embedded anthropological play.  A game like Oblivion contains over 100 books littered about the land in bookshelves that can simply be read to learn about the customs and history of the land of the game. 

Land is generally contested and resolved through conflict, building or trade.  For linear games such as Half Life where the character moves through levels killing bad guys, the character and story function like a narrative tidal wave sweeping forward, leaving dead bodies behind and a land changed to the player’s advantage, there is rarely a sense of the world behind continuing.  Larger sandbox worlds however present contested space in a more complex none linear manner, space gained often has to be maintained, money spent on upkeep or fighting to keep enemies at bay.  The act of travelling across space in a multidimensional manner, so not just forward but with the use of a map North South East and West allows for narratives to develop in a star shape as well, not just on a linear plane.

The second type of play space, the Uncanny becomes a contested geography not just in game but also in the border between game and reality.  Crysis 2 a soon be released game is set in a faithfully recreated Manhattan and the already existing succesful game Fallout 3 is set in a post nuclear holocaust Wshington DC.

In describing an urban based piece by his company Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells describes how on entering the last space of the piece the audience find themselves walking on a giant list of all the street names of their city.  He notes how all the audience emmbers go to find their street and stand on it, or old houses where they used to live, looking to recreate their own personal geography. 

Likewise I don’t know of a single person (myself included) who upon being showed Google Earth didn’t as their first instinct zoom to their own house, then sites that they know, trying to reconstruct their personal sense of place within this vast nonspace of satellite imagery.  And what of uncanny geographies?  A reviewer of Fallout 3 talked about the chilling experience of visiting his own street in the game’s apocalyptic landscape, a vision of our own dark future which although unlikely is not impossible.

 There are now countless horror and disaster movies that show us frighteningly realistic renderings of cities and landscapes that we know and love destroyed. 

In his now almost compulsory study of space and the urban environment the Practice of Everyday Life, deCerteau begins his observations of the urban landscape from atop of the Trade Centre, but in a society where those towers no longer exist and are instead replaced by a large concrete scar in the landscape how de we redefine urban practice?  Plenty has been written about skateboarding and the violation of the rules of ‘walking in the city’, by redefining the way in which we navigate an urban space we are committing an act of rebellion.  But in an age where terrorism threatens to physically alter our geography and redefine our sense of spacial practice through violence and death, how does a game that lets us grab a futuristic machine gun and run around the streets of a photorealistic albeit fictional New York shooting aliens and blowing up buildings redefine spatial practice?  Part of the unease felt by critics about Grand Theft Auto, can perhaps be pinned to the game being set in ‘Liberty City’ a nondescript American town that felt uncannily like New York.  These uncanny play spaces allow us to re-perform our geographies and everyday sites, the contested site no longer being that of the game, but instead one of geographical narrative, to have run around central park chasing zombies is to never quite think of reality the same way.

A divergent practice of game play entirely focussed on geography is the creation of mod maps.  Custom designed game spaces in which players compete head to head in death matches.  It is not uncommon for users to create models of real life settings to play in;  a Leeds based gallery created game map of itself, for players to run around in shooting each other, made available on the internet as an attempt to attract a young generation of gamers to the museum.  But perhaps more controversial was a Half Life mod entitled 911 Survivor.  It featured a replica of the twin towers burning which the players could explore. 

It was removed following death threats and the usual outrage.  Perhaps chasing down another player to shoot them dead suddenly seemed like a much more uncomfortable  activity to be undertaking when confronted with a geography which is now synonymous of real mass murder.  But more importantly by taking such a iconic and loaded psychogeographical site as the Twin Towers under attack and allowing players to explore this site of trauma both personal and global goes against our perceptions of site and untouchable narratives.  In his book Second Lives Tim Guest talks of a therapist who in the online world Second Life, builds a replica of one of the Towers and survivors and others traumatised by 9/11 enter into it and experience the tower collapsing around their avatars, leaving them physically untouched, a catharsis of simulation.  911 Survivor makes us question again what we mean by the term game.  By incorporating this narrative into a mechanic and framework of a game the mod allows us a new perspective on the event itself.  It is not a simulation of the unfolding of the events of 911, the level is deserted apart from the players, but rather it allows for contemplation of a geography once so iconic and now disappeared.  The space of narrative ownership of 9/11 is contested by the game, by violating it as a no go area, both as a space that can be navigated, and by resurrecting the Towers in their last moments the mod confronts to both fully engage with the event and to appropriate it into our own performed geographical experiences.

This in part goes back to what I was talking about in my previous post about the line between a ‘generic’ contemporary war game and one specifically set in Fallujhah.  The uncanny of Call of Duty for treads that difficult line,

which many deam 6 Days in Fallujah to cross, by representing a real space and a real geography and playing out a conflict within it frictions uncomfortably with reality.  The contested space of play then becomes the place that the game holds in reality rather than just in fiction, and this becomes a game map:

What is the limit of a contested reality?  is it the arrangement of the buildings, the imposition of labels and legends on a map that turn it from a series of blocks on a 2 dimensional page into a text to be read as a 3 dimensional space that exists both in and out of the game space?  Is Geography not itself arbitrary, it is maps that endow a series of accidental and purposeful architectural and landscaping decisions into a text with meaning.  In Train (discussed in my previous post) the destinations of the cargo are only given meaning when the game mechanic reveals a legend and its geography falls into place as a text to be read.  Within the context of games, as players we not only read maps, we action them, alter them, and travel across them, redefining our own spatial practice and reading of their texts through the configurable action of play. 

Pervasive game practice seeks to exist somewhere within these boundaries.  Playing itself out within the contested space of the urban environment and the world of the game.  Over at the connected blog Andy Field talks about a new wave of work that seeks to exist transformatively within the site of the activity itself,

...instead of trying to make a blank canvas, they write over what’s already there. Colour it, distort it, obscure it – but never totally efface it. Reality always shows through. It jolts back at unexpected moments. We reflect on where we are not from outside of it or above it, but from within it.




This is a theatre that is not asking us to consider the world as a thing happening outside, away from us – an object of fascination or pity. Instead it is asking us to think of the world as a thing that is happening, or more accurately a thing that is happening to us right now as we’re speaking.




And for me that way of thinking so spectacularly broadens the scope of what is possible in theatre. It suggests that live performance can do more than just comment on our experience of the world, but totally re-imagine it...

This is what is so important and prescient about new site based practices, theatre and performance that uses narratology to affect the manner in which we interact with site, performative game systems that redefine our practice of the urban environment, interactions between audience/player and site/performer that allow for us to not only anchor work in the now and the here but to redefine a site’s emotional geography and significance, putting our own legend to the map.

But these areas of play and performance are still contested spaces: the area between our imagination and reality, the metaphor of participation is a highly contested space. 


 The power of the act of participation in a geography altering activity is huge, and the political ramifications on the makers should not be underestimated.  In the Uk in particular we live in a society where homogenized participation has rendered many of us politically impotent.  As a society we are reliably informed by politicians that we are broken, we live in a society of fear and suspicion where we are caught on camera on average 300 times a day, our greatest acts of communal mass participation and protest fall on death ears, and recent acts of political transgression and non conformist urban practices in the forms of protests have led to brutality and violence from both the establishment and protesters.  We make games and performance that question and reexamine space, and its important for me to not forget that it is a contested space, and this is the society in which we make it:

lets transform this.

Games that mean something.

Not my words but theirs. As in people and commentators writing about a particular game designed and created by Brenda Braithwaite. A digital game designer used to working in large design teams, Brenda’s current project is the design and creation of a series of games inspired by one particular anecdote.

Returning from a U.S history class her young daughter who was studying The Middle Passage summed up slavery and its end under president Lincoln with the emotional detachment that is to be expected from education by rote. Brenda was in turn horrified and uncomfortable at the manner in which her daughter had been taught about this horrific period of human history with such emotionally detachment. At his blog Silveri describes the following events very eloquently:

She decided to do something about it. She devised a simple (non-computer) game for her daughter. First she got a bunch of wooden pawns of various sizes (she has things like this laying around for prototyping things) and pained them different colors with her daughter. A big green pawn and two small green pawns. Two big blue pawns and two small blue pawns, and so on. When she had several sets of these (that obviously represented families), she took some at random and put them on a piece of wood she called "the boat." Her daughter thought her mother was doing it wrong already because she didn't take all the green ones, but just one or two. The colors were now all mixed up and there sets weren't complete anymore because some were on the boat and some weren't. She told her daughter that that's how it was. You didn't have a choice to go on the boat and you didn't get to be with who you wanted. "Will the green one see the other green ones again?" the daughter asked. "Probably not," Brenda said.
Brenda devised some simple rules about making the ocean journey. It takes 10 turns to get to the other side, there are some certain number of food-units, each person needs X food units or they die, there was some dice mechanic somewhere in there to make it less deterministic and a bit harder to figure out.
Half-way through, the daughter said, "Mom, we aren't going to make it." Brenda said that maybe it would be possible to make if farther if we "put some of them in the water" (so there's more food for the rest). Brenda reports that her daughter had a look of understanding on her face, the same look she should have had when talking about the Middle Passage earlier. Her daughter cried, and Brenda did not continue the game any further. Brenda cried too.

I find this story very moving, not least because the act of realization by her young daughter that such an event is possible is an incredibly sad and momentous moment in anyone’s life, after which we see the world differently.

Here the use of the game mechanic and a powerfully simple message conveyed within it demonstrates almost perfectly the fact that games do not have to be ‘fun’. The element of interaction and choice making which defines the activity as a game, as well as the deeply embedded narrative revealed gradually through play seems as I read it almost clearer and more powerful than her more famous endeavour Train.

Train

Train is on the surface a resource management game. Although no rules have been published on the internet from what I can gleam players play cards to advance their trains on one of three tracks, collecting yellow resource tokens along the way and cramming them into their trains, to get them to their final destination card, which it turns out is one the Nazi death camps.

Both games rely on the connection between an abstracted metaphor of gameplay system and the reality of a situation. The abstracted yellow pawns are in fact victims of the holocaust, the pawns on the ship are in fact slaves ect… And the participation in the game system gains poignancy through play and indirect implication. The message of the games is not ‘you are responsible’ but perhaps more horribly allows you a brief glimpse into a dehumanised vision of mankind in which you have participated. Without the tangibility of the game objects and abstraction, the games themselves it would seem would not function in their primary goal, that of emotional implication. A game of management of resources aboard a slave ship would simply never be played like wise a train management game (of which there are several) that explicitly serviced the concentration camps would have no value. It is the dramatic reveal and abstraction of reality that allows for the power of these games.

There is a great deal of debate about Train and specifically as to whether it can be considered a ‘game’ proper. One of the accusations leveled against it is that it does not allow for replayability, as it only really functions in the reveal of its ‘meta-context’ and to play it again with foreknowledge of its system is to Play the game (note the capital P) as opposed to experiencing it. While the replayabiility is an issue I don’t think that this is what determines it as a game. It is clearly a game that functions as a vehicle for powerful meaning, that at the same time exists in a realm closer to performance.

There is only one copy of the game in existence, and the game itself is only ever performed with Brenda present and involves a certain amount of ritualistic preparation before the play session can begin. Namely the shattering of a window. Likewise the making process of the game consisted of the creation of entirely bespoke playing objects, train tracks, carriages ect.. all made by the artist herself including the rules and text which were typed up on an original Nazi typewriter.

The typewriter thing is the bit that makes a definitive statement for many commentators of the game as to whether it’s a game, whether its art, whether its 'just plain sick' (which thankfully and refreshingly there is comparatively little talk of). I like to think the art/game conversation is perhaps put to bed by now as I hope is the game/fun conversation, especially seeing as I am writing this whilst doing my residency at Blast Theory who themselves make beautifully meaningful games, and participations.

In fact the manner in which the work of Blast Theory and Brenda’s is presented strikes me as similar in terms of the context. In both cases the gameplay (although this is perhaps not always true of Blast Theory) is mediated by the artist the play itself being contextualised.
The reasons why Brenda has neither circulated rules or mass distributed the game are obvious, the game’s message for her is one to be understood in context. On her blog she bemoans the mass of criticism her game has undergone without actual play, which she equates to expressing an opinion of a film without having seen it.  Which is true and why I won’t dwell on Train specifically any. However the context of the performance/play of the game seems to me to be heavily embedded within the nature of the system. To play Train around the dinner table would be anathema to it in its current state. Although is that because we do not have a culture of play that we feel allows for us to undertake a relationship of serious play unsupervised. Many other blogs point (and rightly so) to Ayiti a poignantly powerful browser game of resource management where you control a poor Haitian family, and where the goal is to survive a fixed number of seasons with both at least one parent still alive. Its difficult, and its sad. For me the difference is that Ayiti poses itself as a closed system due to it digital nature. Whereas the interaction between players and contextually open system of the board game demands immersion and commitment to function, or at the least appears to demand supervision to complete its goal, both as a game (arriving at the terrible ending) and as a message (revealing its terrible ending). Is there a heightened interaction or involvement that accompanies the tangible interface of Trains? Or is the fact that Train reveals its real-life context as a coup-de-theatre which endows it with greater poignancy or the simulation of Ayitii that wears the potential of death on its sleeve in its rules and mechanics that permits for it to be a deeper and perhaps ultimately more meaningful system of play?

The term simulation is perhaps an important term to consider when looking at games with meaning or in this case “games that make you feel something”. Ayiti is a simulation, in a Sid Meyer Civilisation sort of way;

you make choices for your character, these choices play out according to the game rules which in turn direct you to make the correct choices to learn the appropriate lesson.

its great, and the simulation element allows for a closed system of play that in turn forces the player to really consider choices and consequences. However the blurb for the game shows up a potential problem with the concept of simulation:

What is it like to live in poverty, struggling every day to stay healthy, keep out of debt, and get educated?
Find out now in this challenging role playing game created by the High School students in Global Kids with the game developers at Gamelab, in which you take responsibility for a family of five in rural Haiti.

Now I have experienced first hand that the game does make you consider very carefully the choices that you’re taking and their corresponding consequences. My first response to the game was “its hard”, which might perhaps seem like a trivial assessment on my part of the plight of third world rural families but its true. The game is designed to hightlight that it is hard. The games’ full title is the “the cost of life” and its realisation is not miles apart from the young girl who exclaims “we’re not going to make” when playing Brenda’s early prototype and she in turn realises the cost of human life.  But can simulation really promise to make find out what its like to live the life of a poor haitian peasant? no.  But it does provide me with a series of choices that affect this simulation of a Haitian family.  Simulation should not always mean reality, to simulate is not to replicate but to provide a version of.  And within a game context a simulation when at its best provides that within the parameters of system, which allows for my choices to be contextualized.  Playing Ayiti does not make me feel like a third world rural dweller but it does make me think about their plight.

So where does that leave Train which is not a simulation in any true sense of the word, it does not allow for a simulation of the transport of the holocaust victims. Instead it uses a synergy of gameplay interaction and narrative to create its meaning. The mechanics of the game demand the handling of the pieces and the rough placing and cramming of them into the train carriages in order to participate in the game. The mechanics themselves being the actions that implicate you the player into the meaning. Without play there is no meaning and it is perhaps this which means there is only one copy and the game can only exist in context.

On a RPG forum a Norwegian game developer very humbly asked for comment and feedback on a state funded RPG (role playing game) he is designing which had three distinct chapters all of which address the Shoa in some way. The reaction was not necessarily as measured as those to Brenda ‘s game have been, with sadly many not being able to get past basic issues of game/fun and a whole can of worms that I don’t want to open here of narrative ownership and entitlement of the holocaust. If you are like me and have the patience to trawl through 24 pages of forum posts you can find it here.

Some of the posts are of interest especially the ideas of RPG as simulation and as an appropriate tool for tackling serious subject matter. The conclusion that was reached come the 22nd page, is that the game designer, who himself remains gracious throughout despite the inevitable accusations of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial, is going to change the context of the game, and label it as an educational experience to be undertaken in a classroom or teaching situation. But most importantly he is going to remove the term ‘game’. This was in turn deemed acceptable by all. Most surprising for me about this is that it took place on a site dedicated to Role Play, a form in my view which is potentially incredibly potent. But fundamentally recontextualising the game itself as an activity was deemed an acceptable manner to approach this subject matter. So what was it about the ‘game’ element that offended so?

I remember when I was young Dungeons and Dragons the most famous of table top RPGs being declared as a social virus, a sign of decay in our youth, and sure to rot your brains (or in some notorious cases lead to you to commit murder) similar accusation that are levelled by society against rock music (Marylin Manson and columbine) certain films (Clockwork Orange just in general). However there is a special vehemence reserved for game and simulation. Although the cartoon below is from a hysterical website written in part by an ex witch turned born-again Christian I feel the comic is perhaps illustrative of opinions on role play:

at this point Debbie gets more and more into D&D and the occult, forgetting about her friend, untill:

and the resolution as you can imagine :

this is an obviously hysterical (in all sense of the words) take on role play, but is not in and of itself a million miles from people’s fear of it as a genre and for some games in general.

On the one hand the objection that people have to games that deal with serious subject matter (and here I want to be clear I am not only talking about the holocaust) is an innate reaction and misunderstanding of the word game and its inextricable link in many people’s minds with fun and leisure. I will assume however that this is not a case I need to make here. The second I think is one of representation and configurative action. By this I mean and action/choice inherent to a game or interactive environment that allows for a change in the game state that is then reflected within the system. So for example the implication of making the choice to remove two of the figures from the boat and placing them into the ‘sea’ section of the board is reflected both in the game as a micro-choice with effect on the play’s progression in terms of resources, and as a contextual macro-choice as the death of two human beings. And whereas the board game and the abstraction of Brenda’s gameplay allows for this to take place within a series of very strict mechanics that generate meaning, the playing out and configurative choices available in a RPG are far more broad.

In their broadest sense RPG s are systems for story telling. They present themselves as a series of rules generally in with a core rule book that provides potential players with a system within which to play out their stories/games with the rules providing solutions for conflict or obstacle resolution. These stories are conventionally led by a central player known as the Game Master or GM. The game master is as close to the author as an RPG gets as they guide and tease the players through the story presenting them with the narrative obstacles and conflict and monitoring and serving as referee of the mechanics (often dice roles that are subtracted or added to character profile points, so the GM decides a character needs to score a 10 to overcome an obstacle, a die is rolled and added to the characters’ relevant ability, like strength. So a roll of six added to a character’s strength score of four would result in a ten and the character succeeding in said task and the story then progresses according to the outcome. This is a gross oversimplification of many systems that are far more in depth and detailed so apologies to gamers). The rules however are there to allow for a relatively free style of improvisation and game play, as well as a potentially deeply immersive experience. The rules allow for parameters within which the stories of the games can be told but encourage tweaking and house rules to allow for the experience of play to be as group appropriate as possible. So why do we fear it? Is it its unregulated nature? The providing of a system within which groups are free to make up stories and reconfigure game environments at will? Although thousands have probably played this dungeons and dragons scenario, none of the stories that will have originated through play will have been the same, as the RPG genre by its nature is almost entirely dependent on play for its individual existence in the live moment. There is no prefabricated digital level that will be explored by predetermined digital characters in the manner of a computer game, where even the largest RPG have a finite amount of choices, here the RPG presents an open system of gameplay.

 The famous GURPS (Generic Universal Role Play System) is system designed to provide you with the rules necessary for any world you want to create and play, and provided a huge series of books that detailed rule tweaks and specific additions for relevant thematic campaigns. They released an entire series with a set of WW2 rules, including one set for playing as German soliders. Interestingly this fact is mentioned in the same forum discussion as We All Had Names, and the potential for playing a German Nazi soldier, therefore inherently linked to the holocaust did not seem as controversial a topic.  The focus on combatant characters in this game, reveals perhaps an inherent problem with the perception of what games can be. To create a system in which you can embody a soldier that participated in the Second World War and therefore fit into a paradigm of gameplay of combat and ballistic resolution, an iterative process that we understand as game is OK. However games that attempt to examine a subject matter through a different lens, mainly through that of the victims suffer a different fate.

Elsewhere in the world of computer games a Nintendo DS (small portable hand held device)  game provisionally entitled “Imagination is the only Escape” was a Pan Labyrinth-esque game, where a young Jewish boy craeted a world of imagination and the player guides him to safety. The game was accompanied by haunting art work, and facts about the amount of Jewish Children murdered during the holocaust.

There is the sense of a faux-controversy surrounding the game mainly stirred up by the media, but it is clear that releasing such a title poses more problems than releasing a title such this one:

Where in campaign mode the player is a German General. Now I am not disputing the quality of it as a game, and it is a much decorated strategy game, however the fact that it is a decorated game and mainstream success, and there is still outrage at the prospect of a game that potentially engages with the human loss of war in an emotional manner rather than through a reward and goal orientated system is telling of our view of games in society and our misunderstanding of their true poetential.


Drifting away from the holocaust perhaps and closer to home, the controversy surrounding the rumoured release of “the Battle of Faluja” computer game, poses similar questions about acceptable simulation. The developers maintain that the game itself is made with over 40 marines that participated in the conflict, and with interviews with civilians, marines, journalist and historians. Now much like in the holocaust orientated games discussed above there is a whole load of pro and anti war sentiment that will cloud the conversation about this release, and many war veterans have spoken out against it. This article

talks of the marines wanting the developers to tell their stories and this might well be true, but i suppose there are a series of questions that we have already discussed on this page that the game raises, that are in many ways similar to the reservations for We All Had Names (I am of course not comparing the two historical events). Namely if a game provides a configurable environment that relies on feedback and response to allow the player to progress within it, how configurable is configurable? Will the marines who died in real life also die procedurally as the game progresses or can they cheat their real life fate? The game 6DiF punishes collateral damage yet at the same time features one of the most advanced “destruction” environments of any game to date. Is it the potential of configurable environment that can be mapped and the real world consequences of the in game choice that can be felt and seen that make it seem so impossible for this game to exist? Perhaps. But the war is all around us. The incredibly successful war game franchise Call of Duty does all but fly an Iraqi flag in its Marines Middle Eastern missions. What does playing CoD mean therefore in the contemporary political climate?

Now I like Call of Duty, as a game I think its great, it has the politics of a right wing Jack Bauer but as a First Person Shooter, its excellent. But what does it mean to play this game as opposed to playing 6 Days In Fallujha. The fear, is that 6DiF will trivialise the conflict, and its true it may well, however when a game like Call of Duty becomes such common parlance that a new US surge is named after it and the British Army release this video:



then I think the game is, so to speak up.  Playing these games links us to the real conflict and the choices we make in games are definitely now politically loaded. Therefore does it in fact trivialise the real life event to play a simulation as in 6DiF or is playing an escapist simulation like CoD a greater trivialisation of a real life conflict. Is it a question of context? Is the idea of 6DiF that much like a loaded RPG, or with Train unsupervised play and immersion might lead to an inappropriate response?  Interestingly the developers and marines involved in the making of the game talk about the need to tell the event's story.  The existence of the game therefore as a narrative artifact is all the more loaded, and the action of playing it and the choices mad within it echoes of a real life conflict.  The game still fits neatly within the genre of first person shooter, although the developers refer to it a survival horror, a term usually reserved for bloody romps through zombie infested game levels.  Does this attitude suggest a different approach to a war game?  Can a game that portrays a real life conflict deal with death, real blood, not pixel blood in a way that makes it mean something?  Can we show a perspective on a conflict without mentioning one of the 600 civilians who died in the conflict.

Call of Duty is suspiciously devoid of civilians, its only you and the generic red scarfed terrorists, but if we want to tell the true story of war, should we not perhaps be telling it from the perspective of those who suffer the most.  Not to belittle 6DiF which i think is a brave and potentially important game to make, even more important to get right, but where is the 'game that means something' about these conflicts now.  In the brilliant bbc mini series The Occupation there is a memorable scene where Danny and Leicester, two military contractors on the blag to the US govenrment walk into a warehouse full of US dollars and the Governement official says to them:

" you know what this is, the future of the Iraqi people"

Well if that's not a good starting point for a game that means something i don't know what is

Its also worth noting on the same day Konami announced they were cancelling the release of 6DiF they also announced the release of Saw the game:

which incidentally has had terrible reviews.