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[des201-blog1]

Lazy Sunday

For my final Twine game, I spent a good deal of time debating what topic to cover. Writing narratives isn’t really something I’m comfortable with - in fact, in high school I was so uncomfortable with it that I just refused to do any. Eventually my English teachers both relented and let me write descriptive pieces and scene settings while the rest of the class did short stories, and to write discursive essays while others did reflective ones. So it’s safe to say that I was a bit trepidatious when it came to this coursework. After taking some time to think it over, I decided that it would be better to walk before I try to run, and leaned towards the kind of themes we discussed in week three, in relation to the game Everyday Racism.

The week’s reading examined Everyday Racism, an “empathy game” which tries to put the player in the shoes of a regular person experiencing discrimination in their day-to-day life. The reading contended that, while the goals the designers had in mind with the game were admirable, there were still inherent issues with trying to codify something as serious and complex as racism in a game, “[...]the treatment of racism as a game (and thereby something that has rules) is problematic, not least because it makes the player responsible for managing moments of racism, often from the position of the target of racism – this in turn leads to the player being partly responsible the situation” (Apperley, Fordyce and Neale, 2016). In terms of how it felt to play the game, ultimately it ended up feeling a little flat and a ringing a little hollow for a lot of the class. My discussion group concluded that, while we generally understand the message empathy games are conveying, it is hard to really feel empathetic with the situation, and as a result these games often end up feeling preachy and insincere.

As a result of this, I was reluctant to tackle a super serious issue in my Twine game. Instead, I looked for inspiration in simpler, more general feelings. One of my biggest gaming inspirations of the moment is Tru Luv media, and its founder Brie Code. Code is known particularly for her critique of games as being male-dominated power fantasies, which cater to one kind of reaction and ignore the other half of the population who tend to favour a different kind of experience (Code, 2016). Tru Love Media focuses on making games which feel warm and lived in, and which centre around caring for the player, rather than scaring or thrilling them. This is an angle I really appreciate. For a long time I toyed around with making a “tend and befriend” game, but in the end I struggled to get over the fear what what I was writing was trite or twee. I don’t think I’m emotionally intelligent enough yet to emulate their design philosophy.

In the end, though the two projects may seem very dissimilar, the biggest inspiration for Lazy Sunday was the recently released (in the UK) film Lady Bird (Universal Pictures, 2017). Lady Bird’s titular character is an emotionally charged, stubborn-minded teenager, prone to outbursts against her mother and to sweeping mood swings. The film got me reminiscing about what it was like to be that age, and to be a slightly (very) self-involved teenager. I started to think about how I could convey that sort of feeling in a text based game. I was thinking of a text-based game but in the same kind of vein as the microgames we played in the tutorial, such as Interruption Junction (Squinky, 2015) and How Do You Do it (Freeman, 2014).

My final concept is a short, silly game about being an obnoxious teenager who knows better than anyone. I leaned more towards a humorous direction than a serious one - I felt more comfortable with the idea of the people who played it but didn’t “get” it coming away thinking it was weird and silly than with the idea of them coming away thinking it was trite and melodramatic. The premise is something which I didn’t realise was a relatable situation until I was an adult and I saw other people making memes about it: when your mother tells you to take something out the freezer for dinner, you forget about it until the moment you hear her car pull up, and you scramble downstairs to apologise while she hits the roof. While I know that it’s silly and maybe a little specific, this is the kind of game I enjoy making the most. My hope with the game is that maybe for at least a portion of the people who play the game, it will evoke some kind of nostalgia, and hopefully a chuckle to boot.

Code, B. (2016) Video Games Are Boring, GamesIndustry.biz. Available at: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring (Accessed: March 6, 2018).

Fordyce, R., Neale, T. and Apperley, T. (2016) “FCJ-199 Modelling Systemic Racism: Mobilising the Dynamics of Race and Games in Everyday Racism,” The Fibreculture Journal, (27). doi: 10.15307/fcj.27.199.2016.

Interruption Junction (2015) Canada, Squinky

How Do you Do it? (2014) United States, Nina Freeman

Lady Bird(2017). United States: Universal Pictures.

[des201-blog1]

Week 5

Week five’s lecture centred around the idea of games based on historical events. The reading covered Adam Chapman’s (2016) theory on the different ways in which history can be presented through games. He outlines two styles of recreating historical events in video games: realist and conceptual. Conceptual historical games aim to demonstrate a particular time period by simulating on a grand scheme level. They fare typically grand strategy games, and, rather than relying on set narratives to teach history, often use procedural rhetoric to accomplish this., The realist style tends to focus on a smaller area: perhaps centring around one person, or one group of people’s, experience during a certain period of time. Realist styles, generally speaking, purport to show the past accurately, and to give a realistic impression of lif at that time. This may be implicit, or, in the case of recent release Kingdom Come: Deliverance, explicitly stated (Gamasutra, 2018).

To me, this poses problems: alleging to show history “as it was” is a big claim, with heavy implications. For one, I feel that it’s difficult to represent more than one side of a historical situation in a game. A realist simulation, particularly a first person one, generally uses its main character as a lens through which to focus the world. This could lead to seriously biased perspectives: for example, a game set during the early colonisation of North America would play very differently depending on whether the main character was native or European. The recent release of Kingdom Come: Deliverance has been an example of this issue, too. The game is centered around a Czech character, and seemingly every “foreign” character is painted as a villain, or something to be feared (McCarter, 2018).  While this portrayal may be accurate in terms of how the world might have seemed to Henry, the main character, it remains a biased viewpoint and it runs the risk of skewing the player’s understanding of the historical events covered in the game.  This isn’t to say that this issue is unique to games. History books can be biased, too - how much do British children really learn in school about the atrocities committed by the empire?

To further complicate the issue, you have to contend not only with the bias of the main character, but also with the developer’s personal biases. Kingdom Come: Deliverance has been the subject of intense debate and many, many hot takes over recent months, with the lead developer, Daniel Vávra taking a lot of the heat.  This is particularly in regards to his personal views and the way he may have allowed them to affect the “reality” he portrays in Kingdom Come. He has been criticised by bloggers and journalists who believe that his rejection of the possibility of people of colour existing in 15th century Bohemia stems from racism (Totilo, 2015). To me, this links back to a discussion I had with my group in the tutorial. We were asked to choose an historical battle, and brainstorm how we would go about designing a game about it. My group chose the Battle of Isandlwana, which was an 18th century battle  between the British army and Zulu forces in South Africa. I felt uncomfortable about the idea of making an entertainment-based game about such a terrible act of colonialism. Initially, we agreed that making a game where the player controls the British side would be particularly inappropriate, particularly if we allowed the player to “win” the battle as Britain. This made me feel uneasy in a similar way to some of the scenarios available in Civilization 5 - you definitely wouldn’t see me opting to play as the South in the American civil war. I thought about some more sobre, educational-style options. One idea I had was to have the player play as a Zulu in first person, fighting British soldiers, and to have the Zulus come in neverending waves, so that each time they died they would respawn immediately. This would serve the purpose of showing just how much life was lost in these kinds of battles, and also to demonstrate the facts of the situation: the British forces were hugely outnumbered and disorganised, and that led to their defeat.

Ultimately, no matter what I came up with, the idea of making a game about a real, specific historical event still rubs me the wrong way. I’m not a total video game pacifist - I just think that certain aspects of history can’t be explained in a way which is a) factual and b) sensitive. It’s not an area of game development that I can really see myself getting into in the future.

Chapman, A. (2016) Digital games as history - how videogames represent the past and offer acce. Taylor & Francis Ltd.

McCarter, R. (2018) Deliverance: Myth-making and Historical Accuracy, Unwinnable. Available at: https://unwinnable.com/2018/03/02/deliverance-myth-making-and-historical-accuracy/ (Accessed: March 8, 2018).

New Kingdom Come: Deliverance Video Details Adventure's Key Mechanics(2018) Gamasutra . Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/313619/New_Kingdom_Come_Deliverance_Video_Details_Adventures_Key_Mechanics.php (Accessed: March 8, 2018).

Totilo, S. (2015) My E3 Meeting With A Pro-GamerGate Developer, Kotaku. kotaku.com. Available at: https://kotaku.com/my-e3-meeting-with-a-pro-gamergate-developer-1715511964 (Accessed: March 7, 2018).

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Week 2

A key aim of many video games is to give the player the chance to live a life outside of their own. As such, it seems only natural that these lives should be more interesting than the average player’s. Video game characters (particularly in AAA) are usually extraordinary in some way: born into a great birthright, or maybe just really in the right place at the right time. Generally speaking, this serves to make the character more interesting and more compelling to play. Nick Jones (2017) puts it well: “ Work out who your audience is and give them what they want when it comes to empowering them. [...] They want to feel epic, make them feel epic”

This week’s class discussion centred around the concept of power, both in games in general, and how power can (or must) be used in a compelling game narrative. Power is an integral part of most stories, in games or otherwise, because it is a driving force behind conflict. It is difficult to create conflict in a situation where the parties concerned are all on even footing with one another. It can often seem like the best conflicts arise when the protagonist is working against a powerful foe - little Frodo Baggins standing up to the might of Sauron’s army, or Luke and Leia fighting to free the galaxy from the Empire. But having said that, if the player character is too powerful, the game isn’t interesting - is this why nobody has yet made a decent superman game? As Evan Scholnick (2014) put it, “A player wants to succeed and win, but the game adds  complications and challenges that must be overcome first. A game with no challenges, goals, or obstacles can hardly be called a game, any more than a story without conflict can be called a story”. So how does this fit in with player empowerment? In order to empower the player while maintaining a power balance, do we have to just keep upping the capabilities of both sides, just to keep it fresh? This does seem to be what happens in the kind of superhero movie series that I hate. Can we think of a better way?

Along these lines, we looked at the idea of panopticon. Foucault believed that power isn’t possessed by individuals or groups, and instead flows between groups, resulting in a self-governing society. I liked this idea: I think it’s an interesting way to give the player (or the game) power, without having to rely on tropey “big bad” characters. This kind of more subtle, complex power dynamic could present opportunity for conflicts within narrative to arise which are more fleshed-out and satisfying to play through.

There are few games about the law: interesting considering legal dramas have been a tv staple for years. There are plenty of games revolving around vigilante characters, but few based in a court or a police precinct (notable exceptions include LA Noir and Phoenix Wright) . This could be because a character operating within a system, and within the rules of that system, possesses too much power to really struggle and for the narrative to be compelling. Still, interesting that that issue doesn’t seem to be a problem when it comes to television.

Perhaps in that kind of situation it is better to look within the player character for conflict, rather than to an external villain or antagonist. A protagonist who is struggling with a moral decision can make room for a conflict to drive to story. In this case, the big scary villain can be replaced by a set of circumstances which might prompt the character into going against his beliefs. In the case of the law and order example, an interesting concept might be a Papers, Please style game where the character plays as a judge in a courtroom. The player would balance being fair in terms of the law and behaving in a way which is likely to further his career faster when handing down sentences. He may also be pressured or bribed into making decisions during the trial which could affect the decision made by the jury, e.g. choosing to strike evidence from the record. In this case, while the player would technically be still the most powerful person in the court, the power that other people have through connections or through manipulation would be enough to cause conflict within the game.

Jones, N. (2017) The Empowerment Fantasy – How To Write A Successful Video Game, The Punk Writer.Available at: https://burnttongueblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/17/the-empowerment-fantasy-how-to-write-a-successful-video-game/ (Accessed: March 6, 2018).

Skolnick, E. (2014) Video game storytelling: what every developer needs to know about narrative techniques. New York: Watson-Guptill.