Alexander Jhin
21, January, 2003
Chris is a Game Designer. Ada, a filmmaker, is his girlfriend.
Ada: Do you ever think that computer or video games will ever be as popular as movies?
Chris: They already are! The gaming industry makes about as much money as movies.
Ada: Well, that’s not really what I meant. I meant popular, like mainstream. Take newspapers. If you can make it into the papers, you’re mainstream. They review movies all the time. Heck they even review music, plays, and novels. Occasionally, they’ll even talk about museums and galleries. But games don’t really get that kind of press.
Chris: Well games are new. Give them some time, honey.
Ada: When you think about it, games are not really that new.
Chris: Huh? Ralph Baer created Pong in 1951. That’s new.
Ada: Chess originated in 531 A.D.
Chris: Well chess is not really what I meant by game. I meant computer games.
Ada: There are computerized versions of chess, aren’t there? They’re considered computer games, right?
Chris: Ok. So what’s your point?
Ada: Well computer games are like board games. And board games just aren’t very popular. What’s the last board game you’ve seen reviewed in the L.A. Times?
Chris: Give me a break! Video games are so much more than board games. They have interesting characters, creative artwork, and cool stories – just like movies.
Ada: Do you remember Battle Chess? It had interesting characters and creative artwork. But, in the end it was still Chess – a board game!
Chris: Ok, forget about games like Chess. I’ll even offer the fact that games like Tetris are similar to board games. And since we are drawing the one to one comparisons, I’ll even surrender the fact that computerized sports like Madden Football, High Heat Baseball, and NBA Inside Drive are more similar to sports than movies. But most other games are more like movies!
Ada: What about Unreal Tournament 2003? They even advertise UT2003 as a sport. In fact, it just became part of the CPL, the professional games league. If that’s not a sport, I don’t know what is. Or look at Counter-Strike? At first that feels kind of like a movie, then it quickly becomes like a sport. You forget you’re a counter terrorist and instead just care about winning. It’s just like a sport.
Chris: Ok, ok, fine. Multiplayer games function on the sport like mentality of proving you are better than somebody else. Winning basically. So, let’s narrow it down. A lot of single player or cooperative multiplayer games are similar to movies.
Ada: No, no, most single player games have the same problem as CS. At first, you are sucked into the world then it just becomes repetitive. The story and characters lose their meaning and instead, become abstract objects on your way to winning. Just like a board game or sport. Take Diablo: at first you enter this cool new world and you feel something, you understand this cool idea that the designer is sharing with you. It’s a different world! But, by the time you’ve killed your five hundredth Elemental, you are no longer conscious of this idea. You are simply playing for the rewards – gold, new weapons, new abilities.
Chris: But that’s the sign of a good game. You just get lost in the game play. It’s fun to keep getting new items and abilities.
Ada: You play for the rewards. Gamblers also play slots for the rewards. Gambling is not very popular in society – people view it as kind of a mindless addiction. It’s not hard to draw the same comparison to games.
Chris: Ok then, Miss Smarty Pants, how do we make games more popular, like movies?
Ada: Well, what’s the main draw of a movie?
Chris: It’s entertaining.
Ada: A slot machine can be entertaining. Watching paint dry can be entertaining, if you’re in the right mindset (usually with all the windows closed to keep the fumes in.) How are movies entertaining in a way that different from games?
Chris: Well, movies are not interactive. They tell amusing stories.
Ada: What’s my favorite movie, honey?
Chris: Uh… shoot. Uh… La Reine Margot! Whew! Dodged a bullet there…
Ada: Was that movie “amusing?”
Chris: Well not really. A movie about Catholics slaughtering Protestants in the streets is not very amusing.
Ada: So why do I like that movie?
Chris: Well it’s emotional, if I recall you cried at the end. It also presents some interesting ideas about clashing religions and hope …
Ada: Close enough. To the point: Movies, on a general level, are interesting because of the compelling ideas they share with the viewer. Actually, when you think about it, the same holds true for any art, whether it be novels, sculptures, or paintings. People don’t experience these arts for the rewards or sense of competition like gamers do for games. People become involved for the ideas.
Chris: I know where you’re going. You think games will never be as popular as movies, because games draw people in just because of the rewards they offer, not because they portray any ideas through their game play.
Ada: Exactly! However, have you played the first level of Medal of Honor?
Chris: Of course.
Ada: Well anyway, remember how the first level of Medal of Honor has you storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day? The level is very short but unlike any of the other games I’ve played. Its main point is to get its message across – the horror of that invasion.
Chris: I love that level. However, I’ve always found that level kind of odd. It goes against everything that game designers are taught is required for a good game. You have no freedom and not much control. If you run too far left or right mines blow you up. Half of the level is basically just a cut scene where you can’t do anything but look around. You can’t prevent your mates from being torn up. You can’t shoot the machine gunners firing at you. And, the level is not very re-playable. I think I played it once or twice then never played it again.
Ada: You’re right on. If you are trying to make games more like movies you need to motivate the player not by rewarding the player, but rather by communicating an idea. In order to communicate the idea, the designer needs to be in control rather than the player. So it’s ok to take a lot of control from the player. Fate, or the inability to change the future, is one of the most powerful characters in movies. I’d like to see more games with sad endings. Tragedies, you know? Also, players don’t really need re-playability. Most movie goers don’t go and see the same movie over and over again. They watch it once, absorb the interesting idea, and leave satisfied. The same can happen with games.
Chris: Games that express an idea…
Ada: “Expressive gaming.”
Chris: I’ll bet you the guys who made Medal of Honor spent more time on that level than any other. Expressive gaming will certainly be more expensive and time consuming than normal game play.
Ada: Make games shorter. I mean, look, an average movie runs under two hours. A short game runs ten hours. Do you really think you game designers have five times as many ideas to express as us movie-makers? Get to your point and spit it out already!
Chris: Shorter games mean that they will have to be sold for less, which means designers won’t be able to spend as much on technology or large teams.
Ada: Shorter, cheaper titles mean more sales. The cost of technology can be amortized across a handful of titles.
Chris: And a lot of titles will mean less risk for the publishers, as their investments will be distributed. Also, shorter titles mean less development time and more turn over – thus developers would have to worry less about cash flow. Do you think the industry can do it?
Ada: Of course. Every other of medium has figured out how to best communicate ideas using that medium. Games can do the same.
Chris: I’m trying to think… how do we, as game designers, communicate ideas through game play?
Ada: Well, the first thing is to ask yourself, “What am I trying to communicate? Have I succeeded? Do I need to communicate it again?” Second, is exactly what we talked about – stop thinking about games as games and think of them as forms of expression. Right now, games work only to feed the player the next reward. Get rid of any type of reward – cut scenes, treasure, points, or frags. Don’t offer payoff, as it will obscure the effectiveness of your message. Your message alone should be the reward. In fact, I don’t think games should even be called “games” anymore. When I think of a game, I think of football, bingo, slot machine. Those are games. Games are mindless. Maybe we should call computer games “interactive stories.” Why the sour look? Ok, “interactive stories” is not so great, but anything but “games.”
Chris: And we already talked about shorter games. Shorter games have more expression packed into a little bit of time. And hey, short games will be more accessible to non-gamers – they won’t have to spend hours and hours killing orcs to get an emotional payoff.
Ada: And don’t forget – stop going for the silly idea of re-playability. Slot machines are infinitely replayable, yet they do not communicate any ideas. If the user keeps playing your game over and over again, either your idea is very interesting and deserves revisiting, you are not communicating well, or you simply have the user addicted. Either of the last two possibilities means you have failed to communicate.
Chris: Wait, wait. So we are trying to express this idea. How do you both give the player control and express the idea? It’s not possible. This is something that game designers have talked about forever.
Ada: Who cares? Take control. Remember, you are now motivating the player to play because they want to experience your interesting and compelling ideas. Take control. Dang, if you ask me, force gamers to lose, if it gets your point across. Remember Wing Commander? The most emotional mission involved fighting off infinite waves of Kilrathi, in a desperate mission you cannot win. Or think of it this way: would Shakespeare’s Hamlet be interesting if you cast the player in the main role? No. The play is good because we get to hear Shakespeare’s philosophies. Quite frankly, I would rather not hear the average game player trying to spout philosophy.
Chris: Yeah that was a great mission in WC. Of course you couldn’t get to that mission unless you lost like every other mission…
Ada: Yeah too bad, not many gamers saw it. It was the best mission in the game.
Chris: I don’t know if many game designers will go for this. I mean, the status quo is making money. What’s wrong with staying with our current style of play?
Ada: Well for one thing if you actually focus on getting a message across instead of being “just a game” you’ll be protected by the First Amendment.
Chris: You’re talking about the Judge in St. Louis now.
Ada: Yup. He ruled that games are not sufficiently expressive to be speech and thus can freely be censored by the government.
Chris: What a crock of sh…
Ada: Actually, he was mostly right. We already talked about most of this. Some games are like chess and some games are like football. Football and chess are not protected forms of speech. Then you look at most other games. Sure they have interesting characters and stories, but the majority of the game play is just that – game play that expresses nothing. Look at First Person Shooters. All they actually express is how to blow fifteen hundred identical looking men to smithereens with a machine gun. I believe what the judge argued was that baseball is surrounded by expression – they sing songs between innings, fans carry creative signs to jeer each other. However, these expressive elements do not change the core game into a form of expression. Plus, like I said, games are so repetitive that any expressive elements become lost and those elements simply become an abstraction standing in the way of reward or winning. Do chess players really imagine their knights as men on horseback? No. They are abstract tools within the construct of the game.
Chris: Whatever. The judge made that ruling after having only seen four games, without having played any of them.
Ada: Having expression in game play will also make games more like every other art form, which will buy games status as “art” and gain mainstream acceptance. If you agree to be expressive and take control from gamers, then the artist, you the game designer, can have more freedom to say what you want to say.
Chris: Show me the money.
Ada: The expressive game play model is sound economically. We talked about this already.
Chris: I know, I just wanted to say, “show me the money.”
Ada: Plus, doing this will silence all of those critics who say that game play is addictive. If you can point to a game and say, “That game is fascinating, because it makes me wonder about the true nature of existence,” people will finally shut up about games being nothing more than addictive toys.
Chris: I don’t know. All this expressive game play talk makes me think of adventure games. I mean in those games, everything you did was the embodiment of some idea. Every action was unique. There were few rewards to string you along and the characters and game play were expressive with some purpose… I mean that sounds exactly like what you are saying, but where did that get adventure games? It got them an early grave.
Ada: Adventure games had a fatal flaw. They basically stopped every five seconds and asked the user to guess what should happen next. It would be like a novel that asks you, “What do you think the main character should do next?” and kept asking until you guessed exactly what the author was thinking of. Adventure games managed to make an expressive media not, “Hey, I’m going to tell you this cool idea,” but rather, “I’m thinking of a cool idea. Guess what it is?” That’s not an expression. That’s torture.
Chris: Still not sold on it.
Ada: Well think about it. In the mean time, download Dueling Machine from the indie game jam. The game was made in four days and play never lasts longer than three minutes. That game is like a great short story.
Chris: Ok, all this talk has made me hungry. . .
Ada: for expressive game play, huh?
Chris: Uh, no. How about a steak?
"The play's the thing, Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." – Hamlet (Pun intended.)