Level design is very tricky when the physical arena of your game space is laid out in advance for you. Many of the most serious challenges in creating our type of game stem from the constraints of physical space. Navigation, staging, set dressing and crucial game balance issues all arise from location. Different venues take different concentrations of survivors and zombies; they necessitate different objective types; they change the balance between mass play and individual play; they change the ranges and dynamics of combat in many ways. That’s all before you even start on the aesthetics and the safety issues.

Because of all that, each space needs a different approach to the game rules that puts the emphasis in the right place for the venue. (This is also what makes the game difficult to franchise – it doesn’t translate easily across venues without some serious thinking about scenario design.) In reality we’ve built at least three quite different rule sets now, all under the Zombie LARP umbrella, each one tailored to a different sort of space and player base. Now we’re moving again I strongly suspect we’ll end up with a fourth.

These days Zombie is a pretty massive affair, with 130 or so players at each event and more different NERF guns than you can shake a stick at. Way back when we started, though, it consisted of about four of us running around each other’s tiny student digs waving two NERF Mavericks and a Buzz Bee Double Shot, and dying messily in kitchens while disapproving flatmates tried to make dinner.

The process of making the game was, in itself, playful. Fun. It’s fun to run around with NERF guns and pretend to be zombies, but it’s also fun to turn that into a game with rules, like we all did when we were young kids. Making a thing you can play with your mates is its own sort of play.

So, we thought, what if we turned that into a panel? 20 minutes to make a game, with everyone in the room taking part; 20 minutes to play, and then some time to clean up and debrief and work out how to make it better?

We put together a set of questions to act as a game machine – a series of decisions to help a group of people get from zero to minimum viable game in as little time as possible, then iterate quickly between short rounds of play. We stuck with NERF guns as a basic mechanic, because they provide an easy seed for ideas, and because we find their “toy” status makes adults more likely to forget they’re adults and get into playing in the real world. We tested the system with my nieces and nephews while on holiday and ended up with Teatowel Panic, a team-based capture-the-flag-style game with wandering monsters, which we thought was a pretty good sign. The players also developed an unexpected extra mechanic when my dad started wandering around picking up ammo and then giving it to the teams at random.

The folks at Kitacon were brilliant and got what we were trying to do very quickly. I think it helped that we were in a place where normal rules of behaviour were at least partially suspended, with people who were quite happy to play for the sake of playing. We ended up with a game tentatively titled “Make the Geneva Convention Cry” in which players had to get a bomb into each other’s team bases and the best way to win would be to kill as many medics as possible. After round 1 we introduced a couple of new mechanics, and the second one went well enough that we left it as it was for the third game. Team Laser Explosion won the first two, but Team Monkey Pirate were the last ones left alive in the third.

We’re going to do it again, I hope – possibly at Gamecamp as we had such fun with Zombie there last year, and possibly other places. I hope – and I’m pretty sure – we’ll end up with something completely different every time.

There’s an inherent conflict in videogames between lean-back and lean-forward interaction. Generally the game itself is lean-forward. We’re doing something interesting with our hands (or whole bodies) that’s affecting what’s on the screen. We’re physically invested in making a thing happen. But story is more of a lean-back affair – it’s something we want to absorb and be entertained by. Modern video games spend a lot of time trying to integrate the two. Bioshock had partial success with this – make story something you come across as part of the scenery – and some failures too (scattered diary pages are not a good storytelling technique, even if the pages are audio recordings for some reason). Not many video games have much success, and most have a lot of fail.

Cut scenes are the best example of this – they literally make you stop playing in order to absorb the story. Some cut scenes are so lean-back that they make you leave the room to make a cup of tea while the game gets on with talking to itself, so you can come back and do the fun bits. It’s a jarring, completely bizarre experience to go from a big boss battle where you’re really engaged in pushing buttons and seeing Stuff Happen as a direct result, to a scene where you’re expected to just sit there and absorb as control is taken away from you completely.

But story matters. Without a story of some kind, events are just events. Luckily, humans are hard-wired to make stories out of pretty much everything we experience. Pong is fun not just because of its mechanics but also because you can make up a story about playing tennis on your computer. Pacman is fun in part because of the story you tell in your head about getting the power pill and eating the ghosts. But neither of those things are stories told by the game; they’re stories that emerge from the game as you play it – from the intersection of player with technology/rule systems. Emergent stories are my favourite kind of story, because they’re the ones that games sustain really well. (Not just video games either. Live, card, tabletop and more. Board games have been doing emergent story well since Go was invented.)

Emergent stories can be far more engaging than the stories designers try to put into games. Beating your mates at Soul Calibur is a better story than the Soul Calibur story mode (not hard, I know). But emergent stories don’t actually have storytellers while they’re happening. Game designers can’t actually design the emergent stories they want players to have, because those are born from context and from the physical places and ways people are playing and stuff designers just can’t control. You can build a really good framework for generating stories, but you can’t force the stories to happen. Often emergent stories don’t actually get told, in any real sense, until after the events of the game; they’re reconstructed from divergent events in retrospect, not in real time. That’d make the player the storyteller.

What I think I’m getting at here is that story, like all meaning, is not contained within the cultural artefact itself but instead is created anew at every reading at the nexus between the artefact, the viewer and the contextual forces that surround both. The problem with a lot of video game stories is that story is fundamentally separated from gameplay, and often gameplay actively works against story or makes story unbelievable (LA Noire, Uncharted, GTAIV, to name a few). In tabletop gaming one of the marks of a bad session is that the players feel railroaded into taking certain pathways or choices because of the GM’s conception of how things should go. But that’s exactly what most video games do – even those with pretty branching endings and multiple pathways and meaningful choices that affect the game world.

I’m not a ludologist. I like my games chock-full of story, but I want story that’s meaningful in the context of gameplay and delivered in a way that isn’t head-snappingly oblique to the rest of the play experience. I just don’t know if that’s actually something video games can do.

This post is part of an ongoing conversation with Si Lumb and Mark Sorrell, and is written at some speed, because my thinking is slippery and if I stop to think about it for too long I’ll start disagreeing with myself.

Hello.

I’m Mary, and I’m here to talk to you about toy guns and zombies, with the assistance of some state-of-the-art graphics.

With my partner Grant I run a game called Zombie LARP. LARP stands for live action role play – essentially, games that require the suspension of disbelief in real life, where players dress up or pretend to be the main characters in the game, generally with a conflict resolution mechanic relying on a mix of skill and chance. And often large pretend weapons. It’s sort of a cross between tabletop Dungeons and Dragons and amateur dramatics.

What we do, unsurprisingly, revolves around zombies. We run a game in which a bunch of people pretend to be zombies and attempt to “eat” survivors – or tag, because we can’t actually physically represent eating people. And the survivors get toy guns like these, which shoot foam darts at the zombies.

Each game is different, with different numbers of survivors, often in very different venues. We have to tailor the game to different groups, players, experience levels and so on. The game runs on a rotating basis – people take it in turns to be survivors and zombies – which lets us change things on the fly in between sessions and iterate throug. And we can actually change things during the course of the game itself, if it’s too easy or too hard, by moving zombies around or dropping extra weapons. We call that responsive design.

There are a few constants: we work very hard to make sure the player experience is immersive, exciting and fun; we give the players an objective to complete before they can get out; and across most of our games we have a survival rate of about 5%. I take great pride in that.

What we don’t do is create experiences – the players do that themselves. Our job is to create an environment and a system in which experiences occur. Within the game we work to make a system where exciting, dramatic experiences happen organically – and we do a lot of framing work to help forge a unified narrative out of the players’ individual, fragmented experiences of play. There’s various names for this – some folks think of it as procedural storytelling, or emergent storytelling. We use the concept of creating and operating a story machine – a system within which exciting stories are born through the interaction between the player and the rules, procedures and environment we create. We borrow a lot of UX design to help us do this – looking at flow and navigation, thinking about personas, tackling context, considering emotion. Good LARP creators are pretty familiar with all these things – they just might phrase them differently.

So, LARPs are about turning the real world into a game environment. Some require a lot of pretending about your surroundings, while others aim to be as immersive as possible. For instance, we used to run in a university building – we turned most of the lights off, used overhead projectors to cast weird shadows, and (around the time we started getting serious about the game) dressed up the rooms. Now we run in a huge abandoned shopping mall, which to be honest does a lot of the work for us – and players themselves add a lot to the atmosphere of the game with costumes and makeup.

We keep the core mechanics very simple. Many live games that include combat use things like damage calls, which you have to remember along with your character’s capabilities; or magic spells, that you have to remember and imagine. Some even have completely abstracted turn-based combat systems. Our character options and rules are very limited, work with people’s instincts, and understand that if you’re scared or running around, the last thing you need are lots of rules to remember.

But the main mechanic of our game is combat – you have to fight the zombies in order to survive – so we do abstract that using NERF guns & foam weapons.

These form the basic, point-and-click interface for the game. The starter weapon – the Maverick -  has six shots. A fair few other weapons also have six shots, which is the main reason why one of our zombie behaviour rules is that they swarm in groups of seven – there should always be one more than you can comfortably shoot.

There are a lot of different types of gun, now. When we started there were about four, and now there’s a dizzying array varying from the utilitarian to the downright ridiculous. For instance, there’s the Rapid Fire – not sure why it’s called that, because it’s extremely slow to fire and very unreliable. Its main feature is that after you shoot it, it ejects shells onto the floor. That makes it Badass.

And then there’s guns like the Stampede. Fully automatic massive battery-powered behemoths that give you lots of ammunition but balance it out by making it almost impossible not to just charge screaming into the first combat wasting all your ammo.

For the players, this is the primary way they can affect the game – it lets them control their entire experience. So we emphasise it, talk to players about how it works, demonstrate it – all of which helps to frame the experience in a way that’s going to make sense for them. We treat the guns – which are, in fact, exceptionally silly pieces of kit – with a lot of seriousness. All that context helps players to take them more seriously than they might otherwise. It helps not only to make the game itself more immersive, because people are treating these toys as weapons as soon as they get into the building, but it also cuts the chances of people having NERF wars in the middle of our player rooms.

Every type of gun has its own behaviour, its own usability issues, its own play style and its own impact on the game. Much like a first-person-shooter computer game, we can balance the game using the numbers of zombies and the ammunition available, as well as the capabilities of the weapons. For us, that includes the likelihood of guns jamming, the plausibility of the players losing it and wasting their ammo within seconds of the game beginning, and conversely the propensity for people to hoard their bullets till the last possible moment. You’d be amazed how many people save one bullet, just in case.

But in some ways the game’s framework has less in common with modern FPS run-down-a-corridor-shooting games and more parallels with text adventure games: here is a verb we give you with which to interact with your environment to see what happens. This is all implicit, but the effect of rule systems like ours is to constrain potential actions to a limited set. The main verb we give people is SHOOT.

Other optional verbs that move the experience forward are things like HIT, RUN, HIDE, SCREAM, SWEAR, RUN FASTER, DIE. Even with this limited set of anticipated actions, players sometimes surprise us with things like PRETEND TO BE ZOMBIE.

Zombies, get verbs too, though much more limited set: SHAMBLE, HUNT, ATTACK, EAT and a few in response to player actions like FALL BACK, COLLAPSE, DIE and then later on RESURRECT.

For a while, we experimented with a magic system, but it didn’t work very well – mostly because it required people to remember things in a systematic way, when they were under quite a lot of physiological, zombie-related stress. But we did manage to bring in a power that sort of works: in some games, religious characters called Believers can scream freestyle religion in order to stun zombies. During one game, a player decided he wanted to play an atheist Believer, and managed to stun a crowd of zombies by telling them loudly and repeatedly that they were scientific impossibilities.

This is the sort of thing that happens a lot. Players want to use the verbs we give them in unusual ways. They want to try them on everything within the simulation. You see this tendency for users to muck around just about everywhere, but most clearly in video games, because they have the freedom to respond. Text adventures tend to have stock phrase responses for when you couldn’t do something, and as we’ve moved through point-and-click adventures those have gotten more sophisticated. Action adventure games have slightly better ways to deal with players testing the boundaries of the sim, though they’re not always perfect – you could drown Lara Croft; Uncharted 3 has safe areas where commands that would normally make Nathan Drake punch people instead make him wave or shake their hands; but you still can’t set fire to children in Skyrim.

But in a real-life, responsive environment you can’t provide stock responses to boundary testing. You have to make sure there’s a safe way to test boundaries without actually risking hurting people, so there has to be clear communication about where the hard, out-of-game boundaries are. And within the game, players, given a SHOOT option, will attempt to SHOOT everything. Including, and especially, things you don’t want them to shoot, like information-givers and quest-givers and each other.

For a while, we dealt with that by using unkillable god-like quest-givers, but the players didn’t enjoy that so much. People really, really want their boundary-testing to be rewarded by something delightful. So we started introducing things like hideous carnival-style puzzle games in which you could shoot things, but there would be obvious and unpleasant consequences. We started a reward system that built achievements on some of the most startling, brilliant things our players had done – so we have the “Over a man’s head mind you” award for gymnastics under stress, or the Cactus “Bastard” McPhillips award for astonishing bastardry, which gets awarded for things like sacrificing your best friend so you can run away. But only if it doesn’t contravene rule zero. I’ll come back to rule zero in a moment.

There’s delight in the unexpected interaction. In one event, there was a substitution puzzle in which players had to solve a cipher in order to determine which of several symbols they had to write on the walls. We had symbols for angel, demon, heaven, hell, kill, reanimate, and various other things – including symbols for our big unkillable god-like characters Emmerson and Kramer. After the game, players asked what would have happened if they’d written the symbols for “kill Kramer” in the ritual circle. That would have been a fantastic moment to go off-script, do something spontaneous and delightful.

So since then we try to look out for unexpected ways the players might use the tools we give them, and reward them by making it work. In the last game, in order to get out of the complex, the players had to find a demon and lead him through the zombie-infested mall to a magic circle. They could control him if they had a particular occult book. So they got the book, and rather than take him straight to the circle they moved him around the mall getting him to stand in doorways killing zombies for them.

Then there are always people who will push the boundaries of permitted interaction in other ways – changing the objectives, or the parameters of play, or the verbs involved. Part of playful exploration for many people is the creation of arbitrary goals and limitations, in an attempt to see what happens. You see this sort of creative reimagining all over the place, but again perhaps most clearly in games. Speed runs of Super Mario, or the Chronicles of Nondric, where a gamer played Oblivion as a commoner and tried to avoid doing any quests at all. Minecraft is built on this urge to create something amazing, unique and fascinating within a limited system. Zombie too has people who try to get different experiences out of the game by limiting or altering the verbs they use to interact with the environment. My personal favourite example of this: a group of four people turned up to the last game kitted out as morris dancers – complete with jingling, zombie-attracting bells on their legs – and went into the sim only with melee weapons, no guns at all.

They broke the game.

But that’s fine, because next time we’ll balance it more effectively. We’re looking at responding by taking away most of the melee weapons so people who do want to limit themselves in that way get to be a bit more special, and find the game a bit more challenging. And they’re talking about coming as some sort of Highland marching band. The wonderful thing is that everyone has fun.

That’s where we come back to Rule Zero. The most important rule of the game is very simple: don’t be a dick. By framing the whole event in those very simple but quite far-reaching terms we create an environment where everyone gives each other the benefit of the doubt. Rather than making rules that force players into certain types of unfun experiences when they’re applied rigidly, it lets us say: be flexible. If someone tries something unexpected, go with it. React in a way that makes sense in the situation you’re in. If it breaks the rules of the simulation, if it uses actions or verbs you’re not familiar with or you haven’t built in, that doesn’t matter, just so long as it’s fun. And if it’s fun enough, we’ll try and build it in for the next event.

Fundamentally: shooting zombies is fun, and pretending you’re a badass while doing it is even more fun. Everything else is about reinforcing that core mechanic, and trying to make it the most fun possible.

Running through the day were several threads that I want to come back to at some point – most notably for me the blurrings of boundaries between art and technology, between physical and digital things, and between creation and consumption. But the dominating theme was nostalgia – nostalgia for a vision of the future that was born in the 1970s with big-budget sci-fi epics, and that simply doesn’t exist now.

To put it another way: where’s my fucking jetpack?

It’ll come as no surprise, if you saw me live tweeting, that this future-past nostalgia doesn’t resonate with me. I think there are a couple of reasons for this, one personal and one much more general and more interesting.

First up: the personal. The touchstones of the nostalgic middle-aged man don’t reflect me. This isn’t just an age thing – I watched Logan’s Run and Star Wars, albeit a few years late – it’s a gender and a sexuality thing too. My present, as a not-entirely-straight woman, is a hell of a lot more interesting and self-controlled and autonomous than any 1970s sci-fi vision of that life (Alien dutifully excepted). I could be an astronaut, or a prime minister. I can control my fertility (isn’t it weird how few people who talk about humans as cyborgs ever mention that?) and I don’t have to sleep with everyone I meet as a result. I am the star of my own movie, not a sidekick. It’s not perfect, and others have it worse – this future like all others is unevenly distributed – but it’s getting better.

So I like this future, where I don’t have a jetpack but also I don’t have to wear a silver breastplate or high-legged leotard or gold bikini. Nostalgia for those images makes no sense to me.

The other thing – and this is the less personal one – is that trends in technology aren’t actually about the tech. Trends in anything aren’t about what’s technically possible so much as they’re about what matters to people. Trends are about us, about humans and what we want and need from our world. This is true for toys and games and news and jetpacks and flying cars. So one big reason we don’t have flying cars is that the desire for flying cars was never actually a need for flying cars. It was a problem (get places fast, avoiding congestion) that could be solved by flying cars, but also in other ways. Like telecommuting.

It’s the internet’s fault that you don’t have a flying car.

We don’t always think of the web as bridging physical space problems, but it does – so smoothly that we don’t notice. I have my work colleagues in my pocket and a window to my work space in my bag. Now, why do I need a flying car?

(Yes, there are also technological and logistical reasons why flying cars are difficult. The internet isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. But it’s not bad, for an unevenly distributed future. And if it didn’t solve the problem pretty well, I reckon we’d find a way to make flying cars work. We’re clever little monkeys, and we’re good at solving problems.)

What else is in my pocket? I have the biggest encyclopaedia there has ever been, and a satellite view of the entire globe, and a personally curated collection of interesting writing by clever people that expands every day beyond my ability to read and absorb it. I have a direct, fast, simple line out to millions of people, and tools I can use to collaborate with them on any number of exciting projects or toys or games. Oh, and the news, too. All of it.

Something else that ran through many of the Playful talks was a focus on play as an event that happens between an individual and a machine. It struck a peculiar note for me, operating in a space with Zombie where all play is collaborative between humans, and a space at the Guardian where news gathering and consumption are going the same way.

The risk here is that by focusing on the toy at the expense of the needs of the player – the shiny tech, the jetpack, the iPad (it’s the future of news, you know) – we lose sight of what’s actually happening. New toys are solving old problems. We are collaborating more and more, in incredible ways. We are capable of incredible endeavours, playful and serious, because we are connected. The key vision of the next generation isn’t a baby playing with a magazine as though it’s an iPad. It’s social networking on Moshi Monsters and multi-player collaborative world-building in Minecraft.

Sci-fi has always been good at identifying problems and imagining solutions – but usually it’s much better at predicting the needs than the resolutions. Jetpacks, incidentally, have been around since about the 1940s. They didn’t really solve much.

Nostalgia for the promise of a different future doesn’t make sense to me in a world where I can already see the solutions to those problems in the flesh. Why get misty-eyed over the promise of a flying car or newspapers with moving pictures, when we can see the whole world from the sky on Google Earth and join in with news happening at the tips of our fingers on Twitter and live blogs and YouTube?

I would rather get on with playing.

Honestly, articles like this make me tremendously sad. Points and badges are not the same thing as long-term engagement or monetisation, as Foursquare has already amply demonstrated. Gamified activities are not the same thing as play. And if all we have to offer our readers in return for their actions are empty, meaningless “rewards” instead of genuine value, they will – long term – leave. I’ve talked before about the overjustification effect – it applies particularly to news organisations, where we want people to value the activities they do on our websites because they are genuinely enjoyable, useful, interesting, engaging, in their own rights. Blogging, commenting, discussing, sharing, reading, viewing – these things should not be chores. (And “paying contributors with points” is not paying contributors at all, and is intellectually dishonest as well as potentially exploitative.) As Kathy Sierra says in the comments:

I say “may” because the potential demotivating side effects of extrinsic rewards do not apply to areas that have no intrinsically rewarding aspect. In other words, using extrinsic rewards to help me get through something tedious, rote, mundane, painful, etc. — things I would never ordinarily find pleasurable *without* the rewards — is an excellent use of gamification with mostly all upside. But to use gamification in areas like education, civic engagement, or even just participating on a website or forum, we should proceed with extreme caution and thought. Because after the short-term spike in engagement, we may create a permanent motivation deficit. We may end up worse than we were before.

I always feel like articles like this miss the point somewhat. By focussing on gamification and assuming that’s all there is to game dynamics, news organisations are genuinely missing out on real opportunities to innovatively use games for journalism. Indie games companies are already doing this sort of thing. Things like Sweatshop, the many Wikileaks games, the Osama bin Laden Counter Strike map, and innovative data journalism experiments in Minecraft (this year’s Young Rewired State best in show winners) – they all have problems, but they all exist, and this field will get larger as game design tools are simplified and as more people have greater access to the tools for digital game creation. News organisations risk missing the boat.

But the most depressing thing is that by taking to automated systems to assign value, news organisations miss out on opportunities to actually talk to people, to build genuine community. Some gamification systems can work, especially for getting people to do things they don’t already want to do, but automating away reader interaction seems a little like an admission that a news organisation sees little intrinsic value in its readers comments, and expects its readers to comment out of duty or out of competitiveness rather than desire.

If people appreciate the community, feel they belong and want to contribute, why do you need to give them points? If people like your content and want to share it, why would points make a difference? Conversely, if they don’t, aren’t you just incentivising spam? If people feel their news tips are valued and appreciated, why would points make a difference to that? If you want your users to do something, why is gamification the answer? Surely, changing the activity into something they actually want to do would be a better, more effective option?

Google News US has launched collectable badges for reading news stories.

This is stupid. There are several reasons why it’s stupid, and I’m sure you can come up with your own – leave some in the comments if I’ve missed them. Here are my main problems with the idea.

These badges don’t represent anything. You don’t have to learn anything or complete anything or even finish reading the news articles in order to get the shiny reward. There’s no sense of achievement, no mastery involved here. So what’s it rewarding?

They encourage clickspam. Look, most of the people who seriously care about collecting these badges are going to be hardcore completionists. The easiest way to collect them is to CTRL+click your way down the entire Google News homepage a couple of times a day for a couple of weeks. Done. Does anyone benefit from that? Anyone at all?

They’re counterproductive. It’s relatively well established that extrinsic rewards (eg digital badges) reduce intrinsic motivation (eg the desire to be informed about the news). It’s called the overjustification effect. You might get some short-term results in terms of improved participation – but once I’ve gotten all the badges, what then? If the only reason I’m reading the news is to collect the shiny things, what happens when all the shiny things are gone?

They make it about Google, not about the news. This isn’t an attempt to serve me better as a user. We’re heading perilously close to the Foursquare badgification realisation (slide 12 here) – when it becomes clear that certain user actions are in fact of very little benefit to the user, but of great benefit to the company. I’m not going to choose Google News over any other aggregator unless it’s genuinely better. Badges might shift that balance very briefly – but shiny things and Google+ integration are no substitute for fantastic experiences. There’s still no real reason to stop using Flipboard or Zite or Twitter.

They make digital news consumption self-conscious. If I want to make my badges public, they become part of my publicly constructed identity. So if I have a guilty penchant for celebrity facelift gossip, I’m not indulging it through Google News any more, because I want the world to see me in a certain way – for similar reasons, certain classic novels are far more often purchased than read. Making personal consumption data public distorts behaviour.

They’re getting in the way of better ideas. As @betterthemask pointed out when I was getting narked about this on Twitter: this is Google, you’d expect them to iterate. But if this is their prototype, I can’t help but feel they’ve got the whole thing ass-backwards. What if they’d started with the desire to encourage more people to actually seek out news, and then built something that would appeal to folks teetering on the edge?

What if they’d made something that genuinely helped make news consumption more fun?

Here’s what I took from the day.

• We like stories in our games, and we like games in our stories, but not all games (or stories) need both.
• Boss fights interrupt flow, but can be used to build interesting characters. They can be frustrating (Metal Gear Solid), but when they’re done well and foreshadowed properly, they can also be hugely satisfying (Limbo).
• Free play without structure isn’t a game.
• Digital games suck at relationships.
• A lot of digital games writing sucks, full stop.
• Romance and sex in games are two very different things with different problems to be solved.
• Some problems being tackled by digital game folks have already been solved by live game folks, and vice versa.
• When under attack, people seem to instinctively try to get to high ground. When high ground is not available, they use tables.
• Lemon jousting is harder than it looks.
• Mechanically, World of Warcraft and Farmville are (depressingly?) similar.
• We like our extrinsic motivators without coercive social marketing practices.
• Gamification isn’t particularly interesting to people who already make games.
• My working definition of emergent stories – stories created by players interacting with game mechanics without a designer getting in the way – is flawed, hugely flawed, but works OK for demonstration purposes.
• Emergent stories need space to emerge. People make up stories to fill gaps.
• Story can be constructed after experience, collaboratively.
• Someone has already run an art heist game in a museum. I really hope they do it again. Soon.
• Museums, like news organisations, need help making good games with few resources.
• The Keyworth building at London South Bank Uni would be an excellent venue for a full-scale game of Zombie.
• The unconference format just works. No bit of my day was boring or slow or non-interactive. I went to half a dozen really interesting talks, and missed about a dozen more, and that’s fine.
• Always put zombies in the lifts.

One of the biggest changes in the way we live and socialise at the moment is the rise and rise of game structures in everyday life. I’m not just talking points, badges and scores here – I’m talking about all sorts of game mechanics, the sorts of rich, rewarding dynamics that can help make reality better.

Games engage people. They provide the sorts of work that people want to do, using feedback systems and carefully structured designs to make for a fun experience. They provide a sense of satisfaction that’s hard to beat, from completing simple tasks to seeing a narrative through to its end. They let you explore and experiment, providing freedom within limits, and they reward players for developing skills or for learning information.

When it comes to journalism, stories – neat narratives with a beginning/middle/end or an inverted pyramid structure – are simply not sufficient for explaining most complex systems. They can explain a linear series of events, even one with complex factors, but they’re not good at really explaining how things work in a way that gets into the reader’s head. Climate change, or tax allocation, or the financial crisis, for instance.

Game design can be used to help create original reporting, as well as being a medium for its distribution. They can be used as powerful polemic or educational tools. And they can even be used to explore the process of newsgathering itself, illuminating its murky logic through the procedural logic of the game.

It’s not just video games that are important here, though they do have a wider reach than many other forms. Alternate reality games that merge fact and fiction to overlay a game onto the real world, or use real artefacts in a game environment, are growing as marketing tools. Board games have always had the widest reach (chess, anyone?) and are enjoying a niche resurgence. What could we do with them?

Journalists with game design skills are going to be needed, alongside journalists with data skills and journalists who can do video and code and take pictures. I believe that, once the nascent newsgames industry stops dipping its toes into the water and jumps in, newsgames are going to take off. Because a good game makes money. If we assume for a moment that engagement is king, not content, then games will win the war for our attention: doesn’t that look a lot like the situation we’re already in?

I want to see what we could do if we treated a printed paper as a site of play. If we made it fun, and thought about it from the perspective of someone exploring, learning, interacting with a game. It’s possible to be shocked, dismayed, distressed, saddened, touched, moved, and incited to action by good games that don’t dumb down their subjects. It’s possible to treat difficult subjects with respect within a game; there are myriad bad and good examples of this, just as there are of TV and of radio and of print.

And despite some assertions to the contrary, games are not inherently geared towards those who can’t pay attention (seriously, current 50+ hour game lengths of major studio titles obviously contradict this). Instead, games can make news harder, more complex, deeper and richer – and they might just be able to do all that while making money.

But news organisations aren’t there yet, and it’s not hard to understand why – MediaShift has a great analysis of the cultural divide between editorial and games design that’s proving insurmountable at the moment. As indie creators are creating games that explore the news journalistically, we’re in danger of missing the boat again.

So what I want to do, this year, is get some news people and some game people in a room, together, to see what we can do to bridge that gap. If you’re interested in being involved, let me know in the comments here or by emailing newsmary@gmail.com. Let’s build something fun.

This is the third of (I hope) four posts coming out of the Powerful Voices roundtable I attended earlier this month. The first was a resource-dump for concepts we discussed there and the second discussed the digital divide.

Hear me out. This is the culmination of quite a long period of mashing obscure concepts into my brain and seeing what sticks. If it doesn’t make sense, please rip it apart in the comments.

Sim Social is a massive multi-user dungeon (MUD) about building an identity, which you do by making “friends”, “sharing” digital artefacts (photos, videos, links, text), and “liking” things – objects, concepts, individuals, brands, the aforementioned digital artefacts. It’s played in real time with real people, and the level to which you decide to play yourself or a character is entirely up to you.

It functions, in a way, like old-school text adventure games. At a basic level, text games let the player use verb noun combinations – “get sword”, “kill snake”, “drink potion” – to act on the game world and progress the game. The verbs involved tend to be very limited and to have strictly defined fields of action. So for instance “get” is a one-time-only action which only works on a particular class of object. It changes the status of that object from being in the game world to being in the player’s inventory, and it opens up the possibility of further actions – “get sword” leads to “use sword”, or in slightly more sophisticated games, “kill snake with sword”.

“Get sword” and “friend Mary” function in fascinatingly similar ways. From your perspective, “Mary” is lying around in the game space – you might come across her through both interacting with certain things (like being in the same room of the MUD at the same time) or you might go into the game specifically looking for “Mary” because you know that she’s there and you want her to be part of your experience on Sim Social. So you find her, and you friend her, and now she’s in your inventory and you can do other things with her, like tag her in photos or get access to her status updates.

This is not to imply, of course, that people are things. But the way Facebook’s interaction is set up – the rules it imposes on the simulation – does imply certain things about the game world.

That’s not a new thought. Ian Bogost talks about the procedural rhetoric of video games – the explicit or implicit arguments that games make about how something works, simply by modelling processes. And George Lakoff, in his work on conceptual metaphor, argued that the metaphors we use define the potential field of action. The language used to discuss something defines how we think and talk about it.

So Facebook (as a text) argues, increasingly with the Like button takeover of Share functions, that if I “like” or “recommend” something (one-directional relationships, indistinguishable from each other, in which ambiguity cannot be expressed) then I must also want to “share” it. And, with the new comment plugin, it gives site owners the opportunity to argue that if I comment on their work I must also “share” it with all my “friends”; that I must be non-anonymous; that I must want to be notified of responses.

By casting a certain interaction in the metaphorical field of “friendship”, and by modelling the processes of “being friends” in a certain way, Facebook (as a game, as a text) makes an argument about socialisation and about relationships in the real world. So does Twitter. So do most social apps.

Facebook, in particular, lays claim to metaphors of relationship, interest and appreciation through the verbs it uses to describe and interact within the game world; it makes wider arguments about identity and privacy too. It simulates building relationships on a deeper level than SimCity simulates city-building, sure, but both exist on a continuum where complex social processes are modelled with certain assumptions built in.

Mark Sample talks about close-reading SimCity, looking at the rhetoric of its models, and unpacking the underlying assumptions behind the simplistic assertion that tax increases cause crime. I’d like to do that with Facebook, if the code was more open, but there are plenty of open assumptions to unpack – Is “liking” something the same thing as “recommending” it? What’s a “friend”? Can identities fluctuate? Facebook has an opinion on these things.

And a closing, background thought is something half-remembered from Shelly Turkle’s Simulation and its Discontents, which is referred to by Play the Past here:

Sherry Turkle tells us about a 13 year old SimCity player who told her about the “Top Ten Rules of SimCity.” One of those rules was that “raising taxes leads to riots.” Now, if the adolescent had simply understood this as a rule in the model, it would be fine, but Turkle insists that the adolescent did not understand that the simulation was a simplification. Turkle claims that this adolescent had uncritically extrapolated a set of rules she used to understand society from SimCity. The claim is that the 13 year old did not understand the game as a model or a toy but instead saw it as a kind of direct representation of the world. In a world increasingly dependent on simulation as basis of knowledge it is important for us to begin to become literate.