No More Lives

No Russian

2009-11-16T20:44:57Z

It will cost you a piece of yourself. It will cost nothing compared to everything you will save.
Gen. Shepherd’s briefing before “No Russian,” the airport massacre level, in Modern Warfare 2

The day after I finished the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, I went to move my car and ended up driving around Baltimore, listening to the entirety of President Obama’s eulogy at the Fort Hood memorial service. The most moving part came towards the end, when he named each victim and read short biographical anecdotes about them—their interests, their goals, their commitments. There is no spectacle, within the collective tragedy, when we zoom into the scene—only the value, honor, and decency of the individual remains, which are values Quintin Smith feels the __Call of Duty__ series abandoned with the Modern Warfare iteration. He writes, “I’m just very aware right now that the first Call of Duty promised an emotional depth to this series, and if all sight of that wasn’t lost when they chose to set footage of men dying to an Eminem single, it currently seems very distant.”

The series has always walked the line between war porn and tribute; and the series has marginally stuck to the latter. By making death vicious and sudden, Infinity Ward made players aware of what it meant to be a soldier on the field. The early iterations used set pieces such as Stalingrad or The Battle for Hill 400 to show you the improbability of survival—one minute you’re sniping a Nazi rush to take the hill, next minute you’re on the ground, your vision fading. The entirety of the experience “had the very important side effect of popping the top of your head off and making you realize that, holy s***, men actually did this.”. Therein lay the soul of the game—in the game’s ability to create an immersion and connection between the player and history on a visceral scale.

But running through the entire series and, most prominently in the Modern Warfare iteration, is a tendency to trivialize the cost of war by reducing it to spectacle. And when you reduce reality in such a way, you make it unreal. And I believe that anything that makes human pain and suffering unreal is poisonous.

The fun of the first Modern Warfare came from it being, as Jeff Cannata said it, “a Badass simulator.” Where death is your agent in the earlier games, you are now the agent of death. Human and global suffering is your entertainment. The first-person perspective complicates that issue even more. Reducing historical and global conflicts and misery so that they’re always about the player means ignoring the wider implications of the presented scenarios. When you die after a nuclear blast in Modern Warfare 1, it’s all about your death, while the annihilation of an entire city remains in the background.

The “No Russian” mission calls up similar problems. The day of the eulogy also being the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the level reminded me of this particular passage in Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut visits his World War II buddy to do research for a book about the Dresden firebombing, and to reminisce about their POW experience when their German captors made them dispose the corpses of German civilians after the attack. While they talk, the friend’s wife accuses Vonnegut of trying to write a book that sensationalizes war:

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!”

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

“But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“I—I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

However, I don’t think either the first or second Modern Warfare are entirely about distorting the realities of war. In a game committed to spectacle, the “No Russian” mission is one of the most honest and raw displays of forced witness—it is the moment where I’m no longer the player to the game, but a person aware of the suffering of others. We are, as citizens of the world, culpable by ignoring suffering or by our ignorance of it. The game has shown me the bodies; and the game has taken me beyond the news footage of the airport’s exterior with casualty numbers scrolling at the bottom of the television. There are no numbers here—there are only people, as real as the reaction the game draws from every player.

The two iterations have consistently had such moments of honesty and emotional authenticity, including the first-person nuclear death in Modern Warfare 1. The scene acknowledges that people see in each other’s death only their own—we are selfish, and the only way we accept the impact and meaning of death is if it happens to us. And the game’s perspective allows this to happen. When I’m a gunner riding through the streets of an Afghan city during the beginning of an insurgent attack—the bullets ricocheting off the vehicles, the sound of bullets going past my ears, and the location of the shooters hidden by the urban sprawl—I blindly spray my mini-gun into the neighborhood, not in cold blood or complete negligence, but because I want to survive. No news story, no witness account can ever make me simultaneously empathize with a soldier’s experience and grieve for the innocent lives caught in the fight on such a personal, visceral, and interactive scale.

Both games, as much as they create and contribute to some players’ glib perceptions of war, are also reflections on how America’s perception of war has changed. If Modern Warfare 1 was the first post 9-11 we’ll-put-a-boot-up-your-ass huzzah then Modern Warfare 2, with its labyrinthine (and borderline incomprehensible) plot of military brass betrayal, is the first post post-9-11 game of our disillusionment and fatigue. Where can we go and what can we learn, as citizens of the world and as players, from the bodies piled up on the ground?

One story that stuck with me after the Fort Hood eulogy was the story of the woman who didn’t realize she was shot in the back, because she had been so committed to dragging the injured to safety. After hearing the story, and the eulogy, I was compelled to play “No Russian” again—the Fort Hood massacre changed the context of the level from that of a disturbing simulation to an inadvertent and urgent meditation on a real life tragedy. The elevator door opened, and Makarov’s men opened fire on the first group of civilians waiting at a security line. When I made it up the stairs I noticed for the first time, amidst the panic and gunfire, a man in a maroon sweater dragging an injured man to safety. Oblivious of the approaching shooters, I watched as one of the shooters gunned them down. I, immediately, turned to my right and saw another surprise in the bookstore—a man crouched by the registry tending to a dying victim, despite one of Makarov’s men walking up to gun them down. I felt completely powerless as I watched their murder. Yet, having seen those moments of courage, I realized the massacre itself no longer dictated the mission. Now, only those acts of courage dictated my perception and memory of both massacres.

Looking to acts of courage and goodness as a way to cope with our sorrow has become a tired platitude. But I have to admit it’s a platitude I find hope and comfort in. Sorrow is a selfish and narcissistic trick of relief that it wasn’t you who died. What we feel can never compare to the real impact of the individual loss, because that loss is removed from us through words and images. What gives me hope is that any one of us has the capacity to act as selflessly as these people, both real and unreal.

There is courage in the scripted code. That is what I choose to see.

Clint Hocking: Click Nothing Tour 2009 Interview [1]

2009-10-30T14:48:06Z

Clint Hocking is an award-winning designer, whose work on Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory has cemented him as one of the most unique and intellectually rigorous voices in the industry. His most recent game, Far Cry 2, was both a critical and financial success for Ubisoft. Hocking currently works as a Creative Director at Ubisoft-Montreal and you can find his full bio on his blog.

Clint Hocking started off his Click Nothing Tour 2009 on Day 2 of the GameX Industry Summit with his new lecture titled The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm. As described by Hocking, the talk is “about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.”

The talk focused on the competing approaches to creating immersion between Generation X and Generation Y developers. While Generation X games create content-based immersion using traditional narrative tools (such as story, characters, etc.), Hocking says that the Generation Y model creates context-based immersion by focusing on the game’s framework. He believes that the generational shift, both in the development industry and the consumer population, means that Generation X developers will have to rethink their investment in the traditional model of content-based immersion.

Hocking was very generous with his time, and answered questions about his keynote address, Far Cry 2, and the ongoing ethical gaming debate.

KEYNOTE

You recently participated in an EDGE roundtable discussion about the relevance of authorship in games. Where do you think the traditional role of authorship you addressed in the EDGE roundtable is headed given the [Generation X to Generation Y] shift in the game industry?

I think that’s a big question, and I definitely don’t have the answer to that. I think that, again, a lot of what [my keynote] on what immersion in a game means has to do with things like story, and character, and universe creation and all of that stuff. I think that Generation X, in particular, and thus the industry in extension, has made those things very, very important because they are very important to [Generation X]—because that’s what [Generation X] was raised on.

The importance of those things is changing. I don’t want to say that it’s diminishing or that it’s going away. I think that it’s changing, and there’s this other level of authorship, if you want, which is the creation of the entire framework—[it’s] the creation of the context outside of the fiction. That’s becoming really important. And people who play games are becoming aware of it. They’re not aware of the cultural change that’s happening, [but] they are aware that those other things are important. I believe it’s going to de-emphasize the importance of having a really richly immersive story and scripted characters.

Games that allow you to escape and forget about the exterior world are always going to be popular, the same way films are always going to be popular or novels are always going to be popular. But, just because of the nature of what a games is, we’ve gotten to a point where we’re trying to almost deny the existence of the framework reality in which the game exists. And that’s not a sustainable model for the new audiences that are starting to appear.

During that roundtable you talked about Grand Theft Auto IV and the disconnect between how you felt as a player and how you were told to feel by the game. Were you addressing that as a failure of traditional authorship?

I don’t think that GTA IV ’s story and world and characters are a failure. Compared to your average TV show about the same thing, it’s on par, right? It’s as good as that stuff. The issue is that the stuff being embedded in the framework is so ludic and has so many things going on that there’s a conflict, at least for me anyways, between who I’m being told I am and the things I’m being told are important and the things that are, in fact, actually important to me as the player, right? If it’s important to me to find yet another pigeon or to do another stunt jump [then it’s], “Oh I didn’t see that stunt jump before, and I’m in the middle of this really important mission but I’m probably going to fail it anyway, so I might as well hit that jump while I’m here.” I mean, imagine if a character did that in a television show. Imagine if the bad guy was trying to chase down the guy who killed his cousin and was about to catch him and a truck pulled in the way and he went, “Fuck, that looks like a rad jump!” and just did a left and just jumped. [You’d] go “Dude you were just chasing someone! It was really important for the plot, this is the climax and you just went and did a rad jump—what the hell?” Yeah, actually, that would be a really great TV show (laughs).

You’ve talked in the past about how film, in its early stage, [borrowed heavily from] plays, and used that as an example of how each artistic medium has to find its own footing outside of the influence of other artistic mediums. This new Generation Y model almost sounds like your way of moving towards that goal. What to you is the purest state of what a game medium can be?

I think it’s fundamentally ludic. I think one of the main points I’m trying to make that I never said explicitly in the talk is that games fundamentally are something that you play WITH, not something that you play IN. I think we really have tried for too long to force them to be something that you play in, to try and get rid of the notion that the game itself is something that can be manipulated by the player.

But it can’t be gotten rid of. No matter how immersive a game is people WILL stop and play WITH it. They may switch back and forth between playing WITH it and playing IN it, but when that’s the case it’s always the case they are still playing WITH it. So I think we’re better off acknowledging that, and getting on with it. To me it almost feels like Generation X is ashamed of that. It’s like we need to make our games more immersive so people will start taking them more seriously and stop playing with them like they’re toys. And start playing IN them in these things that we have created. I think we should stop taking ourselves so seriously and let people play WITH [the games] the way they seem to want to.

How do you see social games or MMOG’s, where the play is purely contextual within a social setting, come into play [in regards to your keynote]?

Yeah, I think it’s critical. Again, I think it’s something that we’ve neglected too long. Even just looking at the console platforms [and] the comparative absence of cooperative play in any deep meaningful way compared to Facebook, what do you have, like a dozen [Xbox 360] games that can be really enjoyed in a cooperative way? And maybe two or three of those games are fundamentally about co-op, like Army of Two or Left 4 Dead? And even in those cases they are about co-op among very small groups. Compare that to Facebook where you have social play on the scale of hundreds and thousands of users – it’s much more distributed, it’s much lighter. The amount of person-to-person contact in a Facebook game is infinitesimal compared to the amount of person-to-person contact you have in Left 4 Dead. Shooting the tongue that’s wrapped around someone, and picking them up off the ground and healing them, you are not physically doing it to me but our avatars are doing it through direct high agency input, from me, that’s affecting you. That feels very very personal. You don’t have that level of connection in Facebook [games] but you have one ten thousandth of that [experience] with ten million people in Facebook. It’s a different model, and a different way of thinking about it. I think it’s very important for the future.

You seem optimistic about this generational shift. Do you have any concerns about this model?

(laughs) Just that I don’t understand it. I’m talking about it, and thinking about it, [because] I don’t get it. It’s a problem I’m thinking about all the time that I don’t know the answers to, that I don’t know the solutions, the why’s, and the what’s, and the how’s. I don’t know if anybody does. Probably some people do (laughs). [So], I think it’s really important that I wrestle with these problems and understand them, because this is the beginning of my obsolescence if I don’t kind of figure this stuff out. That’s what worries me.

FAR CRY 2

When you were setting Far Cry 2 in Africa, I, personally, felt extremely uncomfortable playing the game itself, because it’s something that’s happening now, it’s a [real world] problem, and I’m having a negative effect on that world. I haven’t felt that way about a game for a long time. Did you have any concerns placing the game in that kind of setting?

No, actually, we wanted to make people feel that way. One of the challenges of games is that those kinds of feelings are not part of our vocabulary. You can make a movie that’s scary, but you can’t make a car that is scary to drive. You’re just not allowed. It’s not permitted in the design vocabulary of what a car is allowed to be, that it would be terrifying to operate. There’s good reasons for that, because people can die and cars are dangerous and all that kinds of stuff.

Video games, [like films], are not dangerous except that they may give people ideas. But that’s a healthy kind of danger. So, we shouldn’t be making games, like cars, that shouldn’t be about certain things. I think games should be allowed to be about things that are disturbing, things that are uncomfortable, things that are frightening, things that make you question, you know, your own world view and perspective. If we’re not doing that then we’re not just neglecting a piece of our medium but we’re neglecting like 50% of it. Imagine if every movie had to be a musical comedy—that would suck. We like scary movies, and it’s okay that they’re scary, and that we feel weird and scared when we watch them. We like depressing political dramas about corruption and stuff like that to make us realize how fucking broke this real world is; and yet for some reason we only want games that are just sort of peppy, drively entertainment. I think we can do much better.

I understand that point, but what is the ultimate [value after] the initial effect of placing [the player] in that kind of situation? Not to make a moral or ethical dilemma out of the whole thing, but is there anything beyond than just that initial effect?

Well, it goes to the idea of dangerous ideas—it’s good to have dangerous ideas. I mean if people are playing a game like Far Cry [2] and they’re being disturbed about the political realities of the violence in Africa, [then] probably people need to be more disturbed about that than they currently are! There’s a billion fucking people who live there and they don’t have what we have here; and it is because guys with AK-47’s can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want a lot of the time. If I made someone uncomfortable… then good! (laughs)

The funny thing is that [the game and its play] are more immediate to me than what I see on the news.

Well yeah, for sure. It starts the conversation and it gets people thinking about it. We’re exhausted by all the horrible shit that goes on in the news all the time that we just don’t pay attention to it anymore. If this is a new way to talk about a problem that people have gotten very good at ignoring for a very long time, [then] that’s probably more than just a good thing—it’s probably a great thing. It puts [the problem] back into your mind in a different way.

This is something I’ve wanted to ask for a long time—what was the design decision behind limiting terrain exploration in Far Cry 2?

You mean like not allowing the player to go over different mountains?

A lot of those mountains seemed scalable to me, and given the [game’s focus on] dynamic play of the game I found that [restriction odd].

There were some technological constraints—obviously that was one part of it. But that wasn’t the reason. We actually didn’t want Far Cry 2 to be open like Oblivion or Fallout. We didn’t want the player to have complete free reign over the height map, because as a shooter we did want to channel the player through corridors, intermittently. So you would have large open areas to make decision about how to do it, corridors for chases, and sort of have little bit of planned encounters going on. So it would switch back and forth so it wouldn’t be just completely open all the time like Fallout is, for example. And even Fallout isn’t even completely open all the time. Sometimes when I get inside a building the doors are blocked in such a way that I have to go through [the building] like a linear level, but nobody complained about that. But for us, because it was the terrain or something… I don’t know. That bothers me. There is no question that we underestimated the strength of people’s expectations that they had toward being able to go anywhere in the terrain.

It’s probably better than the grocery carts blocking the doorway, and you go, “Oh, looks like I’m going another way now.”

It’s a good point. You see the grocery carts and you go, “ah, it’s a game.” They’re telling me I have to go that way, but when you see this very organic mountain that doesn’t look any different [than the] rocks and trees and bushes [at the bottom] and you shoot a rocket up into those trees and they still explode and catch fire and [then you think], “That’s part of the game—why can’t I go there?” You don’t understand the “why” the same way as you do when you see the pile of shopping carts in the stairwell. [You can’t go in there] because the game designer put carts in that stairwell, [as opposed to] I don’t know why I’m not allowed to go on top of that hill.

ETHICS IN GAMES

You recently engaged in an online debate with another developer, Manveer Heir, about ethical gaming. When you hear the words ethical game design, what are some of your larger concerns regarding that phrase?

What I’m concerned about is just the idea of “New Chocolate Covered Coco Puffs—with Ethics!” I’m concerned about an industry that’s going to make into bullet point features the idea of the ethical decision as though it’s something that adds game play value to your game and is also, somehow, socially responsible.

I just don’t think it is [that simple]. I’ve never encountered an ethical problem, which was cut and dry and had an interesting set of solutions [where] one of them was good, and one of them was evil, and one of them was neutral.

By their very definition, ethical decisions and moral life is unbelievably complicated. We’ve been talking about it for millennia and no one still has any answers. Or even for the simplest things. So turning those things into little game design challenges that make the game more clearly differentiate between black and white is sort of weird to me. And I’m not against doing it. I’m just against certain implementations of it, and against the sort of featurization of it as though it’s something that every game needs to have. […] It’s like the health food stamp on the box of cereal—in order to sell more copies you need this, but it actually doesn’t mean anything. In some ways it works against the things that it’s supposed to be proposing. Fundamentally morality and ethics is about having a life of self, and thinking about what your actions mean in consideration of all the complexities, right? But it’s not about being able to make choices to have more fun.

COLLECTORS VS. COMPLETISTS: ETHICAL GAME DESIGN

2009-10-20T19:22:11Z

[Collectors] want to achieve personal recognition, [to] preserve and understand the past of their collections, [to] share their efforts, experiences and stories, [to] connect with people with similar interests, and most importantly, to express themselves through their collections.

Wei Zhou, U.I. designer.

One of the highlights at the Baltimore Museum of Art is the Matisse catalogue in the prestigious Cone collection. The Cone sisters, through an inheritance amassed from the textile and grocery industry, collected over 500 works by the artist. When the surviving sister, Dr. Caribel Cone, passed away, she left the entirety of the coveted collection to the museum.

A tour through a replicated room of the sisters’ home shows a sample of their vast collection, a collection that extends beyond traditional fine art and into international bric-a-brac. The sisters converted every available space in their home to display or store their collection—they emptied out dresser drawers to store postcards, keys from the Renaissance to the 19th century, and hand embroidered Turkish towels. However, the aesthetic sophistication of their collection resembles what some may consider a hoarding addiction. Dr. Caribel Cone, aware of this compulsion, wrote,

Now that I stop to reason about it, it is silly foolishness, this collecting of things. But it must have some solid foundation—some foundation deep in the hearts of people… it is the craving of beauty that is such a vital foundation of the human soul.

The Cone sisters’ collecting patterns show a personal connection with this “craving for beauty”—one sister collected prints and drawings because of her interest in the artistic process, while the other sister focused on an artist’s main body of work. This personal stake in their collection made the Cone sisters collectors, not completists.

A collector seeks meaning and self-expression through the treasure, and, therefore, is discerning about what he or she collects and displays in the treasure room. The collector skips the buffet, and opts for the menu. The treasures were selectively chosen by the player because of an intimate and personal connection between the treasures, the world, and the player.

A completist, unlike a collector, gathers without meaning. The tasks and trophies have meaning only in the completion of the task itself—an impulse to hoard for the sake of hoarding. It is about satisfying an addiction.

So, whether a game is ethical must be determined by how and where the game places its players in relation to its goal-reward system. Does the game’s goal-reward system treat its players as collectors or completists?

There is something morally and ethically questionable with an interactive experience that devalues the intrinsic value of life, by reciprocating substantial investment of human hours with empty and story-less tasks. Part of the appeal for these games, and the case that can be made for them, is that the interaction allows players to feel omniscient over a world that was meant to be a plaything to begin with. Philosophically, some people will disagree with the collector vs. completist distinction because they feel that story is a secondary concern over the actual game play. Or they agree with Margaret Robertson’s position that games don’t need extensive stories to be fun, appealing, and ultimately, successful. On a practical scale, video game stories serve a less central role than in the other established mediums. Knowing the story enriches one’s understanding of the purpose and meaning of the game’s play, but a story is not a requirement to experience the joy of the play itself.

Many of the recent sandbox games, however, are focused on story-less tasks and achievements. All the goals in those games either consist of a series of repetitive tasks that exist for completing achievements or for obtaining power-ups and points for additional abilities needed to complete main-story missions. For example, in Infamous, Prototype, Red Faction, and Assassin’s Creed, the player is asked to participate in a limited number of repetitive tasks. While they all involve taking care of a problem in the game-world, the tasks exist not only as an excuse to demonstrate the various game mechanics, but also as story-less tasks that involve no genuine human and intimate connection to the world—there is only the thrill of completion.

To put a human face to this issue, as of June 2009, Red Faction and Prototype have sold 199,000 copies and 420,000 copies respectively. The average life expectancy of an American male (not purposefully excluding women here, but picking one demographic for the sake of simplifying the math) is approximately 78 years, and there are 8,765 hours in a year. If a player on average spends 20 hours on the game and its completist and story-less tasks, then Red Faction has wasted the equivalent of six human lives and Prototype has wasted the equivalent of 14 human lives.

A successful collector game gives its players quests instead of tasks—every goal has a unique and involving story that creates an intimate and empathetic link between the player and the game world. When you create that link, the player pursues the play out of a personal conviction and emotional investment that he or she can make an individual impact on the game world. By completing the quest the player creates meaning for the person that he or she is within that world.

The best collector games, such as Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto IV, commit involving and engaging stories to all of their available tasks. These stories define the world and its characters, and place you within a context where your actions and rewards have consequences and meaning. They are games that understand that side-quests, like diverging episodes in a TV show, must be more than just simple tasks—each side quest has to have its own life, its own lore—just like the real world, the stories in our periphery have a life of their own, but games can make those stories accessible to us.

The addition of stories should not be read as a push for authored and directed games that wall in the player into specific and preordained experiences. Stories should serve, not as walls, but as boundaries; and boundaries allow player created narratives to happen as players subvert and exploit a game’s formal structure. Story structure should properly define the context of the required player action with believable characters and scenarios, which makes player created narrative prosper within that story space. Story gives context, and it defines the player’s purpose and motivation.

Within that discussion is a deeper spiritual and human question: why do we do the things we do, and what is the ultimate worth and purpose of those actions? Gamers often demand a large number of tasks for longer hours of gaming, but the available hours of game play should not, and do not, define the overall value of a game’s experience. While our own personal compulsions and psychological make-up determine our susceptibility to addiction, developers can take practical and holistic steps to avoid creating completist games. Otherwise, everything that players do becomes a meaningless and perfunctory task.

The irony of the Cone collection is that as the museum dismantled and reorganized the collection to provide the Baltimore public a carefully curated guide through Matisse’s career, the personal motivation and expression of the sisters became moot. Who they were is ultimately unknowable—but their pursuit, given to the world, is returning an interactive aesthetic experience gratis to an entire city.

Unlike the Cone collection, what we gamers gather is deeply ingrained in competition, and embedded in self-promotion. But I believe story can act as a redemptive tool to make us care about things and issues that exist outside of our achievements. That is what I look for in every aesthetic experience: to find a way to exert myself beyond my limited perceptions, and to be thrown forward into the lives of the universal feelings and thoughts shared by people. Collector based games, for me, maintain the illusion that games are not about systems or tasks, but about other people.

Information about the Cone sisters taken from a Baltimore Museum of Art brochure titled, “Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Matisse in the Cone Collection.”

Thanks to Jason Labbe, who pointed out the distinction between completists and collectors, and Kristina Drzaic for her correspondences on the joy of play.

Sticks And Stones

2009-09-23T16:31:04Z

There are many feelings that rise up when I think back to the first racial slur that was directed at me—but none of them, strangely, are malicious or sad. At the time, my family and I lived in a mid-sized town in the northwest region of Germany, near the Netherlands border. Even though we didn’t live in a metropolitan area, my first grade class represented the changing racial demographic in the German workforce and society: there was the Korean kid (me), the half-Turkish kid, and one of my best friends whose parents immigrated from Portugal to open an ice cream store. Like those kids, almost all my friends were Germans—my best friend lived three blocks from me above the bicycle business that had been passed down in his family for generations; and my first girlfriend came from a tight-knit German family that had a big backyard for all the messenger pigeons they raised.

The slur the kid used actually had a catchy rhyme, one that I heard occasionally wherever I went while we lived in Germany:

Ching Chang Chong Chinese
Eierkopf und Kase

(rough Translation of the last line: Egg-shaped head and cheese-colored skin)

I don’t think the slur had an immediate effect on me. As a child, you react from the gut. Insults are insults—there is no sociological or racial theory that a child can conduct in his or her head to yell injustice. But why didn’t I say anything at the time? Here was the problem: how do you make fun of someone who bases the normal and ideal off his or her features? How do you, as the stranger looking around and seeing that you are the anomaly, take away his power to define you in those terms? How do you mock “perfection?” How can someone not feel powerless in that kind of situation?

I tell this story to make a point—words are never merely words. These ordinary words, “egg” and ”cheese,” are meaningless and powerless until you give them meaning and context. If you come from a position of power or a position of majority, then you have the power to define a word. And if you have the power to define a word, then you have the power to define the person at whom it is directed. Through that word, you can own and control the other person’s identity.

In a measured and thoughtful response to the Scribblenauts “sambo” controversy, Ian Bogost, while expressing his disapproval behind the use of a word loaded with a history of degrading and institutionalized racism, asks his readers to consider the game’s purpose: that “Scribblenauts is a game about what words mean and do when mustered in particular situations.” More importantly, he asks “what if this is the experience? What if messy quandaries about the ambiguity of “sambo” is precisely the sort of thing that Scribblenauts was meant to bring us?”

Subsequent interviews convinced me that this was an honest mistake. Regardless, the discussion, like all discussions concerning race, can get defensive and hostile. That’s why I liked the way Bogost’s question rose above the heated emotions, and calmed and shifted the issue so that readers could consider the overall theoretical intent of the game. However, as great as that sounds, I want to remind Ian that there is a real person at the end of that question. To quote Olliemoon, “[we] don’t exist for your personal intellectual growth.” I am a person, Ian, and not a question to be parsed.

I think this controversy, and the discussion leading out of it, is analogous to the recent Game Critics discussion on race and gender in games. Physical representation of race and gender, again, deal with the identical power dynamic. Once again, there is a vocal segment of the gaming world that isn’t willing to consider the implications. That is unfortunate, because until there is a genuine understanding of this kind of power dynamic, we are not going to see a proper, sincere, and respectful mainstream representation of minorities.

All gamers must understand that the industry’s ability to shape their perception of gender and race is pervasive and ubiquitous, especially when a gamer lacks a personal relationship with someone who is different from him or her.

When I moved from Germany to Korea at the age of nine, one of my favorite activities was going to the movies. In the 90’s, the theaters used to put large, hand-painted, kitschy billboards of the films on top of the theater. When you bought a ticket, you had to sit in the assigned seat—a policy to deal with overcrowding and sneak-ins.

Theaters mostly played American movies. Again, when I wasn’t seeing African Americans on the screen, the times they appeared they were either homeless, criminals, loud-mouthed comedians, or athletic superstars. Living in a racially homogeneous country like South Korea, where we have no interaction with African Americans, those films were the only source we had into the African American life in America. I still remember when an African American soldier walked into a record store and everything became very quite as people whispered and moved away from him, or the time when my African American tutor from the U.S. State Department left our house and got mobbed by a bunch of kids asking him if he could dunk. I don’t think there was anything inherently racist in that—that is simply ALL we knew.

When we moved to North Carolina, my anxiety over interacting with the African American students amplified when one of them was shot and killed at his home. Add to the mix the three African American bullies who made my life hell for not speaking English very well, and everything I learned from the movies went from perception to fact.

It wasn’t until a Nigerian kid in my neighborhood became my friend, and took me to his friend’s house in a trailer park, that I got see him and his friends as people apart from those distorted representations I watched as a child. I still remember when he bought the PlayStation and we sat in his room, playing Resident Evil without a memory card. As we huddled in the dark, screaming and laughing in unison as the dog jumped through the window, there was nothing but the glow of the screen, the whir of the disc, and the opening sounds of doors.

As long as we have gamers dismissing this power dynamic it won’t matter how many minority or female characters make it into a game. What you developers say, and do, and show makes a difference. What you do shapes perception, and you have the power to define how we are perceived. Remember that.

Stephen Edwards: Indie Game Composer

2009-09-21T19:24:45Z

Gustavo Barcena – Systems and Gameplay Coding, Scripting, Design
Stephen Edwards – Art, Music, Design
Tom Tantillo – Systems and Gameplay Coding, Scripting, Design

Back in May, I was invited to attend the IGDA-Baltimore indie game showcase and ended up meeting a number of talented and passionate student and indie game developers. I have been continuously impressed by their hard work and dedication, and have enjoyed the resulting conversations over the last few months. Cutting past theory and discussing directly the practical processes involved in making games, I learned a great deal from what they’ve had to say about their work. While some of the games are not publicly available, I think each game and each developer communicated ideas and responses in their games to concerns that I hadn’t paid much attention to in the past.

Take, for example, Diorama and its art and music designer Stephen Edwards. Introduced as a “hand made” game, Diorama was the most aesthetically inspired game at the IGDA Baltimore showcase. With characters and environments rendered from actual grade school art materials, the game focuses on you, the player, awakening as a “drawn figure on a piece of yellow paper on a desk.” Using the [w], [a], [s], [d] keys and a point-and-click projectile combat system, you explore “small and enclosed” handmade environments while battling enemies. Your objective? To find the fire to light the darkened lighthouse on the southern shore.

The game, however, de-emphasizes action and shifts the player’s focus to exploration. While I found the play functional and uninspired, the aesthetic presentation—from the inspired minimal character and environmental designs to the appropriately lush and graceful score—elevated the game’s purpose and execution. The score, which sounds like a Carter Burwell track produced for an imaginary Spike Jonze children’s game, added a layer of whimsy and wonder lacking from the play. The game succeeds in pushing and motivating the player to explore the world in pursuit of the pleasures derived from the aesthetic presentation. Moving through Diorama is constantly compelling, if only to hear the rest of the score, or to dwell on the texture and design of each room.

The importance of art direction as a story telling tool is not a new idea, but it’s something that I had been thinking about after reading commentary from a year-end round-up from prominent developers about the games they liked and disliked. In the round-up, one developer from the Warhammer series mentioned that he found Bioshock exceptional, not for its story, but for its art design. While most game theories or blogging tends to focus on the theory of play and design, there is a genuine lack of attention as to the peripheral aesthetic structures that create a sensory and tactile feel for a game’s story-world and internal logic.

I spoke to Stephen Edwards, through a series of e-mail exchanges, about Diorama‘s art and his role and approach as the game’s composer. Through our conversations, he gave insightful comments and thoughts on approaching a video game score. He seems to have, at a young age, grasped the path with which to make the music and the art direction immerse the players and encourage the players to engage in the game’s repetitive tasks. I also think it’s useful to see the accidents and practical necessities (such as deadlines) that influence the final outcome of a game.

What is your personal relationship to games and gaming? How did you fall into it?

Growing up, I did most of my gaming on the PC and the Game Boy systems. My family didn’t really like the idea of video gaming, and forbade us from getting consoles. The first game I ever played was Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy, and I still view it as the absolute perfect mix of everything a game should be – a brilliant, complex story, smooth, intuitive, and fun game play, rewarding progression, and captivating and beautifully written musical themes. Holding up other games to Link’s Awakening standard was kind of hard, and I mostly found satisfaction in other Zelda games and PC adventure games like King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and Torin’s Passage.

I like games the most that have a feeling of personal immersion and accomplishment. I think that one of the most important things that the Zelda games (and others, like Half-Life) do in this regard is to make sure that you are the character – the character never speaks or does anything that you wouldn’t do yourself. For the longest time I didn’t know that Link was the main character’s name in Zelda – the manual never mentioned it and I was very young, so I just figured it was me. In the genre of action/adventure, I also like the Metroid games for similar reasons. As far as RPGs go, I was a Pokemon completionist (I caught and raised them all in Red and Silver – twice), and I really liked Golden Sun.

I’m a huge fan of Real-Time Strategy, and I think that the Total War games are sort of the zenith of that on the large scale. I like being entirely responsible for a massive campaign, from every thousand-man battle to the aspects of my economy and troop movement. Again, with the personal accomplishment thing. I guess all in all, I like games that I feel proud of myself for completing, either for satisfaction of story, character, or simply being happy that I commanded victorious battles. My favorite games these days are The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Medieval II, and Rome: Total War.

So, what should a score accomplish in a video game?

For me, the best music for video games is part of the world, not the action. When one writes too close to the story, one risks becoming canned. [So], I like video game music that is part of the world. Not background or foreground, but just ground – it’s what you’re moving through just as much as the real ground your character walks on. It should be impossible to ignore, or to separate from the surroundings. If you turn off the music, you shouldn’t just be missing something from the game – you should be paralyzed.

What are some general video game scoring tropes you try to avoid?

In my opinion, almost no one has written a good “battle theme.” Most are annoying and hyperventilating at best. The best ones are the ones that ignore the battle entirely, and focus mainly on the concept of the enemy. One thinks of people like Uematsu Nobuo, who have written amazing “boss themes”. These work because they call to the mind specific moments and characters and environments. However, I can’t think of a single standard “battle” theme (for things like random encounters) that I didn’t get sick of. It’s a difficult thing, to be sure, to make a piece of music that has to be good after the 200th listen. I think minimalism might be the ticket here. Steve Reich and John Adams have the answers.

Is there a particular videogame soundtrack or composer that you look up to?

Kondo Koji is a favorite of mine, especially for his work in Link’s Awakening. I think that that game has near perfect music, particularly the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” and the “Tal Tal Heights” themes. I’m a sucker for a good melody. I also find Minegishi Toru’s work in Twilight Princess to be another watershed of game music – nearly every track in the game is a variation on one of two strong leitmotivs. With the exception of the “enemies are near” track and the somewhat weak “Hyrule Field” track, I find the music in that game to be stellar.

The old Castlevania stuff is [also] admirable. The cool thing about old video game music is that they had usually only a few midi tracks to work with – I know Castlevania had only three. You know your counterpoint, and you know it can be hard to get solid harmonies out of just three independent lines all the time.

I also like the music from Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, particularly the theme for Juste Belmont by Hokkai Sōshirō and Yamane Michiru. The theme is filled with a lot of distinct character and dramatic, yet not overdone, gestures.

Why is Kondo Koji your favorite composer? Why, in your opinion, do you think Link’s Awakening has near perfect music?

Well, he’s not quite my favorite composer (right now that’s Saariaho) but he is my favorite video game composer. More than any other game composer, Kondo Koji makes music that the player instantly links to experiences. He’s also just really, really good at making exceptionally memorable melodies (a quick jaunt through most mainstream games will tell you that this is a rare gift). In Link’s Awakening, “Ballad of the Wind Fish” accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do- it’s a musical offering, essentially, and incredibly memorable without being annoying. The village themes in that game are in my opinion the best of their genre, with the “Mabe Village” theme being both comforting and a little quaint. Basically, I think that he completely succeeds in making the music a character in the game, in making it part of the world. When you walk into an area and hear the change in music, you feel what kind of place it is before you even explore it. “Tal Tal Heights” is filled with energy, and it’s and exciting and edgy remix of the classic Zelda theme. The moment you walk into the Mysterious Forest, you know what kind of place it is, even if you forgot to read the sign. He avoids a lot of “mysterious” tropes in that piece as well – it’s practically a rock track.

What about Minegishi Toru’s work in Twilight Princess speaks so strongly to you?

I suppose watershed might not have been the best word, as other game music has accomplished similar things before. However, I think that Minegishi Toru had a crazy difficult task ahead of him, and he pretty much nailed it. By this point, Zelda fans have a lot of expectations for Zelda music. They have their favorite melodies (like the “Hyrule Castle” theme from A Link to the Past, or “Zelda’s Lullaby”), and these are linked to very specific experiences. A new game has to, of course, create new “classic” melodies, but also address these expectations. There are two main motifs that dominate Twilight Princess – there’s “Midna’s Theme”, a heavy, meandering ballade, and the overall game theme. These motifs pop up everywhere, are varied, with the world theme deftly crafted to fit almost every circumstance appropriately, which was a risky move that I think paid off. (Not all tracks were winners – as I’ve said, I think the “Hyrule Field” theme was kind of weak.) However, he was also able to address the expectations of players to create some truly great moments – as is the case with most modern Zelda games, the original Zelda theme doesn’t pop up very often. Toru calls it up only a couple times during the game – it’s the “Hero” theme. Usually, Link doesn’t have much of a stage presence – Zelda games are about you, after all, not Link. When Link draws the Master Sword for the first time, the theme echoes and weaves through the main game theme. Also, in Hyrule Castle, a quiet, labored remix of the old Castle theme echos appropriately. The most important thing, though, is that he doesn’t overdo it – he makes the classic themes his own, and uses them extremely sparingly. I’m very pleased that he didn’t just appropriate the extremely popular “Title Theme” from Ocarina of Time for the Gerudo Desert, and instead wrote his own, which I actually prefer.

I love the theme you created for Diorama. Can you talk about the process of creating the score?

Well, this is a little embarrassing – although I originally signed on to do music, I ended up spending so much time and energy creating the art for the game that the music didn’t get worked on until very late in the process.

The first piece of the two I made for the game was “Ice Waltz”. My teacher at the time, Derek Bermel, was unfamiliar with game music but had written lots of film music. When I asked him for some general advice (he never saw the music I made for it – this was during our last lesson of the year), he advised that “for background music, consider simple motives and let them develop”. So I made my main motive from a simple two-note cell, expanding as it increased in pitch. I wanted to create an icy atmosphere without the tension usually associated with dungeon music in games. I used a glockenspiel, celesta, piano, and pizzicato strings to achieve this effect – it’s a cheap trick that plays on a pre-formed expectation, but it works and I was in a hurry. As the piece developed, I gradually worked in my bi-pentatonic language and added arco strings, building up to a fuller statement of the original theme.

However, I wanted to maintain a separation between the music and the player – the music is a part of the world, not the action. This is to maintain the theme of exploration and wonder. The music doesn’t much care what the player is doing in the world (The game is hardly about action anyway). As time ran out, this piece became the “underworld” theme of the entire game, playing whenever the character entered an indoor area.

Now for the “Overworld” theme. I rarely actively use minimalism – I like it a lot, but I just tend to do other things. However, I discovered that process music works when one is in a hurry. I wanted the music to reflect the whimsical nature of the world, without a big strong theme that would go with an epic story, but rather the continuous sounds of a world that knows that it is beautiful and wants to sing to you. I sat down at my piano and played some riffs to that effect, making use of a purer pentatonic language that the player would find slightly exotic (I am a bad man) and accessible, familiar and unfamiliar. I scored it for familiar (piano, strings) and exotic (marimba, soprano) instruments, using quasi-minimalist techniques to create a wash of sound.

A double degree student, Stephen is earning a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School and a B.M. in Music Composition from the Peabody Conservatory composition.

Download and listen to the Diorama Snow Cave Theme, the Overworld Theme and excerpts and full recordings of his other works on his website.