Jonathon Blow has made the full audio and PowerPoint slides from his MGS talk available on his website. You can grab them here. He doesn’t think that the news coverage of the presentation is as thorough as I thought it seemed, and recommends listening to the whole thing before trying to judge the merits of his argument. His presentations are generally good stuff so I’ll recommend it as well; or if you want to wait, it sounds like he might be putting together a video combining the slides and audio.
Category Archives: Culture
Jon Blow on how most games today are junk food
“I say this kind of thing, and everybody’s like, ‘whatever dude – you’re smoking something,'” said Blow. “I want to frame this; it’s a matter of scale. What I see as a primary challenge for mankind in this century is to understand and deal with the fact that despite these good enterprises — human rights, safety, leisure time — we do these at such a scale that we cannot help but have them affect the world, as with global warming, ozone holes, pollutants – we haven’t dealt with it yet.”Carrying over the analogy, Blow said, “We don’t intend to harm players but we might be harming them. When tens of millions of people buy our game, we are pumping a mental substance into the mental environment – it’s a public mental health issue – it’s kind of scary, but it’s kind of cool because we have the power to shape humanity.”
Jonathon Blow has talked about this before in a presentation that was made available via interweb video a few months ago. He does a much more complete job of explaining what he’s getting at this time, and this confirms for me that I think he’s on to something. This presentation makes it clearer what he was getting at; mostly it confirmed the way I took what he had said earlier, but I know in discussing this with others they were jumping to conclusions like, “He thinks rewards in games are bad?” which is pretty clearly ruled out this time. The point he’s making isn’t “games are bad”, but “we’re usually missing out on doing things better.”
I think it’s important to point out that this doesn’t seem to be against well-polished games, which is an easy but mistaken conclusion to come to after he uses WoW and Halo 3 as bad examples. Those games are highly accessible and entertaining because they are well-polished, but (in Blow’s explanation) are using reward mechanisms that lack substance (or worse, teach an unhealthy world view: “It doesn’t matter if you’re smart or how adept you are, it’s just how much time you sink in. You don’t need to do anything exceptional, you just need to run the treadmill like everyone else.”).
As far as I can tell, those two things are orthogonal. A game could have more meaningful mechanics and rewards and at the same time do thorough playtesting and design analysis to make sure that the experience of the game flows smoothly for players. He gives Portal as an example of a game that does things well, which I think proves the point.
I hope that a video of the presentation is made available soon. It’d be great to see it in its entirety. In the meantime, the writeup at Gamasutra is pretty thorough.
Portal’s Feminism
Portal is simply fantastic. The game play is incredibly well-polished; the puzzles are fantastic; the portal gun is tons of fun; the style and writing are hilarious. You really should go finish the game just for the credits alone (no, I’m not kidding, although don’t go digging up spoiler videos because you really need to play the game through to get the full comedy impact). So now that the context has been properly set, I want to dig into something I’m not entirely certain about.
What the heck is Portal saying about gender and femininity?
Spoilers after the break – if you haven’t played and finished the game yet, go do so! Then come back. Continue reading
NYT on Halo 3 in Christian Youth Evangelism
Not once does anyone in the article ask the obvious question – “Why Halo?” If the violence of the game is a concern, why don’t they simply play something else? A church I used to attend had video games in their youth drop-in area, but they deliberately avoided M-rated titles. People still had lots of fun. This was in Canada, so the usual choice was a hockey game, but surely a football game would have the same effect south of the border. But I guess too many of us evangelicals have bought into the idea that we need to ride the hype bandwagons to be “relevant” to kids, instead of teaching them to step back and think critically. Bleah.
The repeated use of “Thou shalt not kill” was also just weird. Talk about what morals the game is passing on, or whether we should be exposing kids to more media violence. Don’t try to clumsily equate killing sci-fi aliens in a game with a literal act of murder. I guess it’s true that the game may be passing on morals and values which encourage violent response, but I don’t see that as a given. Are you even killing humans in Halo 3? I guess in deathmatch mode probably; I haven’t played a Halo game yet, I’ve been too distracted defending the intelligence. (No, TF2 probably shouldn’t be used in youth outreach programs either.)
I’m still a little muddled when it comes to how I want to respond to an article like this. Part of me wants to ask if this would be just as controversial if the youth group was being taken out for a game of laser tag* or paintball**, which are arguably more realistic experiences of gunfighting (especially paintball). I’ve taken in enough gamer culture over the years that it’s hard for me to drop the defensiveness that rises up when it feels like video games are being scapegoated.
But I do believe there are reasons why we should be concerned by what messages and values violent games are bringing to kids. I just don’t think that the outside-perspective analysis given by sources like this NYT article capture the depth of the issues.
For a better example of what I’d like to see more of, in Hartmut Gieselmann’s recent paper, “Ordinary Gamers – The Vanishing Violence in War Games and Its Influence on Male Gamers”:
But when you take a closer look at war games, you will realize that the violent scenes that are shown there are not nearly as gruesome as in fictional games featuring monsters and vampires.
…violence will only be recognized as entertaining for the gamer… when he (much more than 90 Percent of war gamers are male) can draw a strict line between the real world and the non real gaming world – otherwise he would be scared by what he sees and stop feeling comfortable.
…By just pointing at the most violent games, critics overlook that war games have a much greater impact on gamers’ opinions and their world views because they do not show the actual violence.
Which is more dangerous in the hands of our children – fantasy-setting violence which jars the senses, or toned down violence depicted in real-world settings which numbs us to the ugly reality of real warfare? (Answering “both” is fine; it’d be an improvement over most critics and watchdog groups who fixate only on the most bloody games.)
I clearly can’t end this in a way which wraps up my thoughts into a coherent conclusion, because I don’t yet have one. How about I just end off by saying, anyone who buys Halo 3 for a youth group and hands it uncritically to 12-year-olds that I know and care about will probably get a scowl and a talking-to from me. Grrr!
(re: GTxA)
*which is awesome, by the way.
**which, when I played for the first time about four months ago, hurt like heck and left a still-visible mark on my body. Also the masks fog up in the first 30 seconds which is lame. My ideal solution: outdoor laser tag.
post-game art
Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film.
– Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (emphasis added)
And have we asked that question about games yet, or are we too busy debating with film critics?
Getting it
Ian Bogost’s newest Persuasive Games column up on Gamasutra discusses the phenomenon of game industry folk (press especially, it seems) placing the demand on educational or editorial games to “err on the side of more fun” when choosing between fun and educational.
To quote a quote from the column:
There is a maxim I hear frequently in the serious games circles, most recently repeated by Tim Holt in a discussion of the Slate article on Raph Koster’s website. Says Holt:
If you have to make a mistake in the fun versus educational balance, it’s better to be a bit too fun and a bit less educational than the other way around.
It’s a sentiment that seems hard to argue with, if you assume the goal of games is simply education, or fun, or both. If we rephrase this value statement by replacing “educational” with “editorial,” in the case of newsgames for example, it becomes far less persuasive. Education, fun, or other possible experiences might season an editorial game, but who would deny that the latter is its primary goal?
First of all, while I know that both Bogost, Holt and others are generally speaking about which is more prominent in a game design’s mixture of “fun” and “educational / editorial”, it’s hard to respond to this in a way which doesn’t emphasize the this-vs-that nature of the entire discussion. Let me get this out of the way first – fun and educational are not always at odds with each other! There are always design tradeoffs and choices to be made between any number of elements in a game, but let’s not sign up for the “FUN vs. THOUGHT” cage match on next week’s pay-per-view.
That said, what is the role of fun in a primarily educational or editorial game? Not that fun isn’t a self-justifying goal, but it might be worth noting that fun serves a very specific purpose in a teaching or expressive game. Basically, it keeps people playing long enough to get the point. Let’s try expressing that as a nice little theoretical statement:
An expressive game should aim to be fun enough for the player to stay engaged long enough to get the message. (For games which instill player engagement through some means that may not fit your definition of “fun”, substitute “interesting” or “engaging” or what have you.)
Hmm, maybe I should just drop the f-word altogether:
An expressive game should attempt to keep the player engaged in the act of playing at least long enough to get the message.
Hey, now we don’t need to have this “fun” vs “thinking” cage match at all!
So if someone gets bored and quits before they actually receive what you were trying to communicate, then perhaps the game could’ve used some work to make it more engaging. Making it more fun would be the most familiar way to do so.
Of course it’s useful to note that if the point of your game was to communicate that something is incredibly boring and frustrating, then the expressive game doesn’t really need to keep the player around for long. Although I suppose if they want to include a message of drudgery and monotony in there, they could use promised-fun techniques – you know, the ones that keep you playing MMORPGs through the slow grinds. “Keep going, Mr. Kinko’s employee, and maybe someday you’ll be a lvl70 Manager!”
So when someone reviews or critiques an expressive game and faults it for not being fun enough, my question is this: did they get it? If they did, then what obligation is the game under to continue being fun? Or is the real problem that those who review and report on games think themselves obliged to continue playing the game for some arbitrary standard length of time to give a “proper viewpoint” on the game, leading them to continue being bored long after the average player has decided to take what they’ve learned and move on to other fun things?
An accomplishment!
I finished reading through Rules of Play yesterday. No, I'm not done posting here though, as I'm going to spend some time reviewing the last two major sections to take some notes. (For all you high school students out there – no, "reading it" does not really count as studying.) And hopefully even after that is done, I'll be actively pursuing the practice of game design enough so that I can share some thoughts here semi-regularly.
I breezed through the last few chapters a bit quickly, but I'm not sure how much time I'd spend reviewing them. (Games as Open Culture, Games as Cultural Resistance, Games as Cultural Environment) They were good, but I think they felt less new to me as I've already been spending a lot of time digging into how games relate and interact with culture. Plus, let's be honest, I wanted to be able to say I had read the whole thing, so I was speed-reading like a madman.
The last chapter felt a bit deeper, dealing with games that blur the "magic circle" that defines a game's existence and boundaries. Having played ARGs like The Beast (which they use as an example), it was pretty familiar ground, but it was still an interesting analysis.
I definitely think it's valuable to frame games in the context of culture, during design as well as afterwards. Just the word "culture" itself is useful, as it doesn't come with nearly as much undefinable baggage as "art" while still conveying some of that sense of creative relevance. Whether you think games have a message or not (and they do), or whether you think they express something about ourselves (as I believe them to), a game you create is inescapably contributing something to the culture we live in.
What do you want to add to your culture? Laughter, enjoyment, escape, hard questions, the satisfaction of achievement? Reinforced stereotypes, or broken and discarded ones? A place for our nightmares, or for our highest dreams, to come to life? Dark, gritty angst, or colorful, bouncy joy? Fear, love, anger, friendship?
josh g.'s notes 