OMG, you guys. What took me so long?

You have to be reading this stuff. It's incredible. I am totally obsessed with it, even beyond past obsessions with such other high-quality webcomics as Gunnerkrigg Court.

MS Paint Adventures is a gamelike, massively collaborative webcomic. Originally, the artist did one panel a day, in which the main character would perform and action that had been suggested by an audience member. Now, the comic has become so successful that its original model doesn't really work anymore; the whole forum crashes whenever the suggestion box is opened. Still, the artist, Andrew Hussie, does take heavy inspiration from ideas brought up in the fan community. (He has also abandoned the pretense of using MS Paint; the most recent adventure makes liberal use of Flash and even incorporates music.)

If you've got no plans this weekend, I recommend you dive into Problem Sleuth first; it's a complete story, and will give you a fair grounding in how the comic works, plus insight into a lot of inside jokes in the current work in progress, Homestuck.

Read it. Love it. You're welcome, darlings.

Thus far they've only done a couple of games in-house. In Choice of the Dragon, you get to live a titular life of treasure-hoarding and wizard-eating; in Choice of Broadsides, you're a young commanding officer aboard a naval vessel. 

Their approach to gender in their games is very, very interesting; in Choice of Broadsides, they essentially created two separate versions of the game -- one with a traditional patriarchal structure for men to play, and one with a gender-flipped matriarchal society for women. It's well-intentioned, to be sure, but the idea ultimately leaves me a little uneasy. 

I'm Not a Man But I Play One on Xbox

Here's the thing; in Choice of Broadsides, the male half of the game happens in... let's face it, in the real world, or in an historical variant thereof. The female universe is fictional. Never existed, never will. So the woman's version becomes a work of fantasy rather than historic fiction right off the bat. But more, swapping the gender roles and power dynamics to put the female in the more powerful position is... well, in a way, it's denying me a legitimate female experience in that world. This makes me sad.

A lot of games -- I am looking at you, Fable 2 -- give you the choice of playing as a female character in the same exact world. But that choice is basically a choice of avatar, and for the most part, the world doesn't react to your female-ness in any meaningful sense. You might as well be a man with breasts strapped on.

You may all be tired of hearing me talk about Dragon Age by now, but one of the things I found so captivating about that game was the overt sexism of some characters. It was incredibly satisfying to me to have a character take a dismissive attitude of me in the game, because I was a woman -- as in real life -- and have the power in the game to rise above it and prove them wrong, in a way I don't always have the courage or capacity to do in real life.

It bears noting that historical romance is a very popular genre. I speculate that part of the reason is the underlying power dynamic, where a woman in a position of relatively little social power nonetheless manages to get her heart's desire in the end. This is a very powerful fantasy.

Socially Just Fiction

Well then, what's the right way to do it? There are three basic approaches to dealing with sexism in fiction.

1. Telling your story in a sexism-free, utopian society.

2. Mirroring the gender-soaked world we live in.

3. The novel Choice of Games approach of reversing gender roles. 

Each of these has a terrible disadvantage. The utopian society won't feel true and can't address difficult issues; mirroring our world supports the notion that our current state of gender affairs is just how things are, and how they will be. And reversing gender roles can ultimately leave you with a series of games where you never really get the experience of playing as a woman, because the world never really lets you be a woman; it lets you be a man with some hand-waving around babies and pronouns.

It's not easy to be an activist and put yourself on the hook to speak out when you find injustice. But as difficult as that is, it's a lot harder to try to write good interactive content when you're trying to do the right thing, because there is literally no decision you can make that will leave you free of criticism -- well, short of just not making anything at all. And who wants that?

Walk a Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

There's a compelling counter-example to my criticism in the upcoming Choice game, Choice of the Consort. As I understand it, the default experience of the new game is actually the woman's experience, specifically as a woman who has attracted the attention of a philandering king. And so the flipped universe is the reverse of the Choice of Broadsides situation -- men are being placed in the shoes of the less-powerful sex. 

It definitely takes the tooth out of a lot of my criticism, because creating games where the initial or intended play experience is that of both genders is way less problematic than creating games where the default is always for men. Does the switch rob the men of the experience of playing as a man? Yeah, kind of. But at least both genders are getting the shaft in equal measures.

I find that far more interesting than building a matriarchal navy, in terms of ingenuity and ambition. As with the controversial FPS Hey, Baby, by putting a man in a woman's shoes and stripping him of gender privilege, it may shed light on something he never thought of that way before. Maybe it'll even subtly change a few hearts and minds against casual sexism. Stranger things have happened.

And finally: Kudos to Choice of Games for taking steps to address gender concerns in the first place. Indeed, they go a mile further, and are working hard to account for gay relationships, as well, which require additional layers of thought and world-building in their historical settings. 

And all criticism aside, every time we have this conversation, it helps a little more, and we all get a little better. I'm glad they're out there and taking this stuff seriously. 

This is a shorter, more ARG-focused version of the talk I delivered at SXSW this year. If you'd like the whole thing, the slides plus notes are up on Slideshare, or you can listen to the audio of the SXSW talk cut in with the slides on Vimeo.

It was a great audience, and I think what I had to say really resonated. I got a lot of feedback from people who were happy that I spoke so early, because every single time a girl in distress came up for the rest of the conference -- and it came up in more sessions than not -- it got a chuckle and reinforced my point. Though I have a sinking feeling that everyone is going to be calling me "cupcake" for the rest of my career.

ARGfest was amazing all around, though, for reasons having nothing to do with me -- the sessions and attendees were absolutely perfect. I couldn't have dreamed up a better event if they'd put me in charge. Big, big thanks go to the organizing committee for their hard work and excellent taste.

Thank you, too, to everyone who hoisted a mai tai and rocked out to Tongo Hiti with me, or who spoke candidly about how the heck to earn a living, and extra-special super mad props go to Jonathan Waite (he knows why). Man, I love you guys so much. Never leave me!

After ARGfest every year, I say, "Wow, that was great! But given the time and money... I don't know if I'm going to make it next year." This time, I'm not saying that. There is no way I would skip ARGfest next year. Not after this year. 

I'll see you there, too, right?

We hate to admit it, but this AMAZING event is DESPERATE for sponsors! We’ve received a great deal of support, but it is just not enough to cover our expenses.  

... 

We have until July 18 to pay the bill and need a minimum of $6,000 to cover the difference (we hope to have more exact figures on Wednesday). If you can help out, please do! If you already have, THANK YOU!

I'm even speaking this year, about hot brunettes in the ARG space. And the organizers have very kindly put me in an early slot on the schedule, so I won't spend the whole time addled by nerves. (Thank you so much, Brooke!)

I suspect a lot of you out there reading this on the internets will be there, too. If so, please, don't be shy, come and introduce yourself -- I'd love to meet you! If you're new to the scene, I'll even do my best to introduce you around. But make sure to say your hellos early in the conference -- I'm leaving Saturday afternoon, and I'd hate to miss you.

Hope to see you in Atlanta!

No, seriously. It totally sucks, and it does so on two completely independent axes: personal desire and social pressure.

Desire

So there was this whole big racism thing with the movie The Last Airbender, right? The thing is, I really wanted to see that movie. My daughter really wanted to see that movie. I'd long decided not to go, but as the release date grew closer, the quiet inclination to give myself a pass and not walk the talk grew in my heart. I rationalized: Well, maybe I should at least support the franchise of something I loved so much... plus how could I disappoint my little girl? And anyway, who would ever know if I didn't tell them, amirite?

I was relieved from this particular round of soul-searching and second-guessing when the movie came out and all reports were that it was pretty awful. But I'm sure it's going to come up again. Will I live up to my completely self-imposed principles? ...I dunno. 

These inconvenient choices come up nearly every day. Buy the expensive fair-trade item, or save your hard-earned clams and get the cheap one that's just as good, or better? Suffer the heat and save the environment, or pump up the air conditioning? 

Sometimes, doing the right thing is going to mean denying yourself things you want. Bucking the status quo is always, always going to take time, energy, and money. The status quo is, if nothing else, comfortable. That's why it's the status quo. 

But hey, if it were easy, it wouldn't need doing, right?

Social Pressure

Comfort is a funny beast. It keeps us in patterns of behavior, even painful, self-destructive ones, because the agony we know is so very much easier than change, even to something better. 

This scales across the vast spectrum of human experience. It's easier to keep smoking than quit, even if you know it's killing you. Easier to cope with an abusive relationship than DTMFA. Easier to let an offensive comment slip by than piss off a friend or relative or colleague; easier to let injustices stand because fighting it is so much work.

But there are other reasons, too. Fighting the good fight opens up a lot of trouble that life is, frankly, a lot easier without. One person's trying to do the right thing is another's humorless or preachy or boring or too sensitive. You can't say "I think X is racist/sexist/homophobic" without encountering some measure of "Wait, did you just say I'm racist/sexist/homophobic?" 

Too often, that leaves you with another no-win choice: Abandon something you really believe in, or hurt a friend. 

And while Jay Smooth's advice is overall excellent in theory, my experience is that once a conversation gets to that point, telling somebody that you're addressing a behavior and not them as an individual is a losing strategy. They're going to think you're annoying at best, and a pompous pedant at worst. 

But if I may paraphrase Yatima, I'm a chimp like everyone else. I want people to like me. I don't want people thinking I'm pompous or humorless or whatever today's undesirable adjective for activists might be. That's why I call myself a strident feminist -- that's me dismissing my own feminism so nobody else can beat me to the punch. If I say it first, it hurts less when somebody else repeats it, right?

Resolve

I come into the fight for justice and equality from a position of tremendous privilege. Sure, I'm a woman, and there is still sexism in the world. But I'm also white, well-educated, fairly affluent, heterosexual, cis, conventionally attractive, nondisabled... I'm something not too far from the privilege jackpot, frankly. So it's relatively easy for me to talk about issues that don't really impact my life. Because they don't really impact my life! 

But that's what makes it especially important for me to fight the good fight, to the best of my ability. If it's hard for me to say "I think that's kinda racist," how much harder must it be for someone who's actually in the throes of an encounter with racism? And for whom the stakes are likely to be very much higher.

My conscience tells me that I have to do whatever I can to make the world better for everyone -- even if it won't benefit me, even if it might hurt me, because I'm defending the basic humanity of others, and they're in more pain than myself. Gandhi and the King of Pop made the same point -- be the change you want to see in the world.

The good news is... look, I don't have to be totally perfect, and neither does anybody else. The times I quietly let something slip past don't erase the times I speak up. All you can do is your best. Some days your best won't be very good; but something is always, always better than nothing.

Every little bit, drip by tiny drip, helps to change the status quo, and remaps our social comfort zones just a little bit more. It's a slow game -- generational -- but every moment in the game instead of on the bench counts. All we can ever do is try to be a little better than we were before. 

In the meanwhile, it fucking sucks sometimes. Sure, it's easier not to fight. But I don't want to be that person, and I don't want to make that world. So I guess I've got to cope, huh?

It's not something I talk about very much, or very loud. It sounds a little ridiculous, doesn't it? An artist. I am an artist. Gives me the shivers.

Talking about yourself in the language of making art is fraught with peril. It's presumptuous, arrogant. It also creates mighty expectations, painfully high to fall from. It's so much easier to talk in terms of work, and even of craftsmanship. So much less dangerous.

Admitting I think of what I do as art also makes me vulnerable to criticism. 

Famed movie critic Roger Ebert has famously said that games are not, and can never be, art. Today, in an inspiring act of humility, he said that while he still feels this way, he simply does not know enough about the medium of games to reach such a conclusion. But there are tens of thousands who feel that what I do is not, and can never be, art. So making any such declaration is opening myself up for unfavorable judgement, perhaps unnecessarily so.

Honestly, it would be easier to think of the work I do as anything but art. The language of marketing and technology provide easy measures of success: registered users, depth of engagement, press coverage, hours or dollars or clicks. But if you consider yourself to be making art, then you must ask harder, less quantifiable questions to measure success. Did I say anything about what it is to be human? Did I shine a light on society, or open hearts or minds? Did I move anyone?

These are the successes that matter most to me, but also the hardest to gauge.

Art has a difficult place in our society, and so, then, do the people who make art. Art is a luxury for those who have an excess of mental and economic resources, yes? Artists could be spending those energies on more practical pursuits, such as curing diseases or caring for the elderly. Accordingly, the artist who makes a comfortable living making art is rare.

And yet the output of all of our combined artists are what make a culture -- film and music, games and fashion, even the creative tsunami on sites as diverse as I Can Haz Cheezburger and Stuff White People Like. Culture is our tool for telling one another resonant truths about ourselves, as human beings and as a society. Art helps us understand each other.

And art -- now more than ever -- is an individual's way of staking a claim in a culture, to belong and shape it to their liking. So it shouldn't be ridiculous to consider myself an artist. The distinction between whether someone is (or is not) an artist isn't one of technique, skill, or even intent. It is the mere act of creation that matters. Indeed, it should be ridiculous to think that anyone who contributes even a single LOLcat to our cultural discourse is not an artist, however fledgling.

So should I be embarrassed to think of myself as an artist? For good or ill, I probably always will be. Socialization is hard to break, even when you know better. But if it's any comfort, I almost certainly believe that you are an artist, too.

Moral Ambiguity 

Does the classic ARG or transmedia experience have the capacity for creating decisions charged with moral ambiguity? Of forcing the players to pick sides in which neither one is strictly correct? As it happens, yes, we do indeed. At their best, this tension creates powerful controversy that drives an experience to new heights of drama. 

Weephun's betrayal of the Sleeping Princess in ilovebees springs to mind as one such moment, followed by the Mann Act II vote in the Beast. These were unforgettable decisions. Indeed, we have a rich tradition of requiring players to navigate tricky waters of who to trust with what information. 

And sometimes, as with life and as in Dragon Age, an ARG manifests unintended long-term consequences -- even from decisions you didn't know you were making at the time. In Dragon Age, how you handle one particular conversation with Alistair changes his personality subtly but significantly for the rest of the game. In Perplex City, the players unwittingly helped a murderer get to his victim, which kicked off the Helena Frye cycle -- meant to be an exercise in ambiguity from start to finish; she was a double agent, but was it on behalf of the police or on behalf of the shady religious cult?

That's not to say that you always get intense moral ambiguity from an ARG. But examples aren't hard to come by -- which means we're on the right track, from a narrative point of view. 

Meaningful Choices 

The choice framework in an ARG is fundamentally different from a traditional video game, because you aren't restricted to the few choices preprogrammed by the developer. In an ARG, the sky's the limit. The players can theoretically make any decision they can dream up. 

Indeed, it's theoretically much easier for an ARG to offer choice than a video game. Providing a meaningful choice in a video game means the dev team has to create an ever-increasing tree of content. Each additional branch makes it increasingly less likely that any one piece of content will be seen by any one player; you get diminishing returns on your development resources, the more choice you offer.

The classic ARG doesn't need to create a vast volume of content for paths not taken, though. In a pervasive online experience, the developer can create or adapt content on the fly, altering the course of the game to accommodate unexpected plot twists and player decisions. This is the ARG at its finest. 

We ARG writers and designers often lie awake nights trying to think of how to handle every conceivable choice, because the ones the players make will often be those you didn't think of (and therefore plan for). Murphy's Law would say they always make the decision you didn't think of! Yet you, as the developer, have to find a way to roll with it, even if that's to say "sorry, but no," gracefully and in character.

That said, providing the opportunity to make a truly meaningful choice on an individual level in an ARG is very, very hard. (And here I link to Dan Fabulich's fantastic post on what it means to provide a meaningful choice, anyway.)

It's a question of scale. The classic ARG is a community-played experience. It's easier to offer a meaningful choice to a few dozen people than it is to offer a meaningful choice to hundreds of thousands, when everyone plays in the same instance of the game. 

So how do you do it?

Methods

Dragon Age is a single-player experience, so you don't need to be concerned about the choices other players are making. They simply don't affect you. 

There's an increasing movement toward creating single-player ARGs, too. Fourth Wall Studios and their Rides platform have made great strides with this. The ability to track a single player's progress through the game and serve content accordingly definitely gives agency back to the individual player. And it makes the game about the player, whereas in most ARGs, the individual player is supporting cast -- which in turn robs the experience of impact. 

But it also increasingly locks you into the same branching problem that classic video games have; a single-player experience needs to be preprogrammed from start to finish. And you do lose the collaborative community play ARGs are famous for.

In a classic ARG, you have two basic options for providing meaningful choice points: allowing individual players to make meaningful choices on behalf of everyone else (like Weephun); or allowing choice based on community consensus (the Mann Act II vote). (The secret third option is to provide the illusion of choice, where none ever truly existed; this is a dirty secret I should address at length another day.)

There are pros and cons to each approach.

Allowing a single player to make a meaningful choice on behalf of the community is amazing for dramatic tension, especially for your decisionmaker. But it means that you're actively removing agency from the bulk of your players. Weephun chose to betray the Sleeping Princess (or if you prefer, chose to be truly loyal to the Operator); but thousands wouldn't have, and were forced to play a result not of their own making. Is that a truly meaningful choice, then? Hard to say.

Consensus-building and voting allows more players to have a voice in the outcome. But the polling mechanism can rob us of drama. The act of voting in an online poll is something we can do frequently and casually. And there's still a risk that the choice won't feel meaningful on an individual level, particularly if your scale exceeds thousands of users. If the vote is on a morally ambiguous topic, and you can incite tension in the community around it, then it becomes a more powerful narrative vehicle. But it's not a mechanic that will serve every game.

There is still another way... but it can get expensive. You can provide choice of alliance. Create a morally ambiguous choice: Red team or Blue, for example. Then build out a game structure that accommodates these individual-level choices in the context of communities of players working together in opposition, where each single player can make a contribution on the team level, but the drama plays out primarily as the result of the conflict between teams.

This requires some pretty solid player management, and for a large player volume, a technology build that tracks individual choices (just like a single-player game would). But it also creates a dynamic situation where players can make individually meaningful decisions, and yet aren't restricted to predetermined branching.

Conclusions

Design is hard. Even the best of intentions can be difficult or impossible to execute, due to limitations of budget or time or skill or scope. The design process is rife with those meaningful choices I keep talking about -- a delicate balance of opening some doors and closing others.

But assuming the basic goal is providing compelling narrative... we've gone pretty far, and we can go further yet. Dragon Age shows the best the single-platform video game has to offer to date. Let's see if we can top it, shall we?

But I want to go back to Dragon Age. And not just because I have a mad crush on Alistair, whose endearing combination of sweet, funny, and kind of awkward reminds me of... well, of my husband, actually. (Shh, don't tell him!)

Playing Dragon Age again could be a substantially different experience, depending on what I put into it. Almost, but not quite, like playing an entirely different game. That''s because the game is an exquisite work of craftmanship on the part of the writers. I need to play it again to see how the trick was done, to know how it works, to do it myself.

This is the rare gem in the game world:  a game that presents to you meaningful and morally ambiguous choices, which effect the outcome of things small and large through the rest of the game. It has sparkling dialogue, deep characterization, and it delves into racism and takes strides toward gender and sexuality inclusiveness with uncharacteristic grit (though that's been covered extensively elsewhere.)

Let's take a look under the hood and see what we can learn, shall we? There will be spoilers ahoy, so beware.

Moral Ambiguity

In the world of Dragon Age, it's rare for you to see one clear, correct path forward. But this isn't the Fable faux-choice of two basic modes to play the game, the "good" mode and the "evil" one. No, these are true dilemmas, where there is never a win without a loss. Every choice you make, as in life, opens one door and closes another.

An example, from early in the game. I played through as a mage, because... well, because I'm like that. Something about hurling lightning from my fingertips appeals to me.

In the mage origin story, you're almost immediately confronted with such a moral dilemma: your best friend is accused of practicing forbidden blood magic. He is soon to be punished for it -- forced to participate in a ritual that makes him functionally a robot. He asks for your help escaping.

You have to make a choice. You can help him, or you can turn him in. But do you trust him? He's already been deceiving you on one front... he's been engaging in a forbidden romantic liaison. Might he not also be deceiving you on whether he practices illicit magic? But can you really allow the self to be removed from your best friend, a repugnant punishment at best? Anything you choose to do is a gamble and a betrayal. Do you choose friendship or justice, knowing that either may be flawed?

These choices crop up again and again. Who do you trust? How much mercy do you temper your justice with? Does it change if it affects your relationships with those around you? Do you choose what's you've been taught is morally right, what you believe is right in your heart, or what's needful in the moment? What if the life of a child is at stake? What if it's the life of your beloved? 

(On that note: Playing through the ending as a female Warden in a relationship with Alistair is vastly more compelling romantic drama than I have seen on film or in text since... ever. More powerful than the same story on any other medium, because it is me grappling with the potential consequences, and me making the final call.)

The stories that touch us deepest are the ones that look at people making these morally ambiguous or personally difficult choices. This is the heart of drama. This is quite possibly the greatest weakness of games writing. 

Creating Meaningful Choices

And yet this should be the greatest strength for stories in games. That's simply bringing the interactive, isn't it? The place where games should naturally excel is in allowing you, the player, to make choices that feel significant in the moment. 

This is the alchemy of gaming. This is its power. A game introduces an interesting plot point, and increases its power an order of magnitude over other media. Because it feels like it's happening to you, and not a character who you might be entirely sympathetic to, but who you are not actively driving.

Games are, by and large, filled with clear and simple definitions of good and evil, or hard-wired choices where one path leads to certain death. You rescue Zelda or you lose the game. You kill the zombies or you die. The moral judgements you are called upon to make are often peripheral, or few. That's if you even get a choice at all -- often the only choice you get is simply not to play the game.

But Dragon Age doesn't just put you in the position of making choices; these choices have genuine ramifications throughout the course of the game, in how people treat you, in paths opened or closed, in long-term consequences. The amount of writing effort that has gone into this game is just mind-boggling, and I feel like I need to buy a round for the team because they did such a great job on such a monumental task.

Methods

The specific technique Dragon Age uses appears to be limited branching. For many of these knotty moral choices, you're ultimately fulfilling the same basic game mechanic no matter what you choose. In the mage origin, that's going through the motions of helping your friend escape -- either out of legitimate friendship, or because you're forced to through the political machinations of your mentor. Maybe it's destroying a criminal cartel on behalf of a politician, to give your chosen ally additional popular support -- but which ally is up to you. 

It's a clever way of repurposing the same content. You create a different charge of meaning based on a fine web of intentions and consequences that exist mostly in the mind of the player. You'll clear the same dungeon, but do you parley at the end or do you just kill? Well, that's up to you. And changing the meaning of your actions depending on the choices you have made creates a depth that is frankly impossible in non-interactive media.

This is where games should shine. This is where all interactive media should shine! And yet so few experiences have the overarching depth or sense of choice found in Dragon Age.

In the next part of this blog post, I'll take on the ARG angle and examine what we as writers and designers can emulate from Dragon Age, and grapple with the particular problems we face that make it more difficult to provide a player with meaningful choices.

This post is continued in Part 2.

I'd like you to meet Annabelle.

Annabelle is my first (somewhat hastily constructed) doll from Haley's killer-awesome new project, Sew By Numbers. Here's how SBN works:

1. You download a pattern from the SBN site
2. You print it on a sheet of printable fabric (make sure it's not transfer paper!)
3. Peel away the fabric backing, cut the pattern out, and stitch!

The result is a hand-sized plushie that you can customize however you desire. With Annabelle, I went simple and sketched on a face with a Sharpie. 

But the beauty of SBN is that Haley has placed the whole thing under a Creative Commons license, and she'll be making the template available for you to alter -- and then you can print your custom doll directly onto the pattern. Sky's the limit, folks. I've already been privy to some of the amazing creativity SBN is catalyzing, and this is definitely a project to watch.

Go on. Go do it now. Stitch, stitch. You know you want to! I've already done it once, and I want to do a whole bunch more.