Well Played 2015 PDF
Well Played 2015 PDF
Well Played 2015 PDF
Editor-in-Chief
Drew Davidson
Editors
Ira Fay
Clara Fernandez-Vara
Jane Pinckard
John Sharp
Editorial Board
N’Gai Croal Sam Roberts Sean Duncan
Doris Rusch Mary Flanagan Matthew Sakey
Tracy Fullerton Jesse Schell James Paul Gee
Lee Sheldon Katherine Isbister David Simkins
Stephen Jacobs Mark Sivak Shawna Kelly
Francisco Souki Kurt Squire Richard Lemarchand
Stone Librande Brian Magerko Constance Steinkeuhler
Josh Tanenbaum Matt McClean Alice Taylor
Eli Neiburger Greg Trefly Celia Pearce
Caro Williams Arthur Protasio Jason Vandenberghe
ETC Press 2013
IMAGES: All images appearing in this work are property of the respective
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All submissions and questions should be sent to: etcpress-info ( at ) lists ( dot )
andrew ( dot ) cmu ( dot ) edu For formatting guidelines, see: www.etc.cmu.edu/
etcpress/files/WellPlayed-Guidelines.pdf
Acknowledgments vii
Thanks also to Drew Davidson for being the chair of Well Played
at GLS, and to the inestimable folks at ETC Press who made this
special issue possible!
vii
PART ONE: DIGRA
HANS-JOACHIM BACKE
IT University of Copenhagen
Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 København S, Denmark
[email protected]
11
core game features upon the beginning of the closed beta phase
in May 2012 had not yet been implemented at the time of writing
(1).
12
of long-awaited features but would instead focus on creating
an immediate influx of revenue through an elaborate pre-order
model for additional game assets. What is more, the Clan
invasion is a pivotal event in the fictional history of the BT
universe, in which said Clans are an initially invincible enemy
who temporarily unites factions that have been at war for
centuries. One of the features announced in the initial design
documents of MWO, yet never implemented, is ‘Community
Warfare,’ a strategic component of the game that would recreate
the complex political environment of BT prior to the Clan
invasion, and which became partially obsolete by moving
forward the invasion event. And while the developers and a part
of the community debated how the Clans can be implemented
without introducing extreme balancing issues, many voices
raised the question whether balancing should be an issue at all
when introducing an enemy that, according to game-world lore,
is supposed to be overpowered (2).
13
adventures to strategy games and simulators. In the early- to
mid-1990s, FASA’s sister company Virtual World Entertainment
ran arcades featuring exclusively their own battle pods, a
networked set of up to 32 BattleTech simulation booths
(Jacobson, 1993), which impressed players with real-time 3D
graphics and detailed physical cockpits: “It took at least one
gaming session (about a half hour) just to learn what all the
switches did! It was as realistic a gaming experience as I’ve ever
had” (Rogers, 2010, pp. FN 5). Given the tremendous effort
required in creating the simulation booths, it can be assumed
that the impression of realism conveyed by them was intentional,
which would not be surprising at all if the BT rule-books didn’t
disavow the idea of realism for the board game: “Classic
BattleTech is a game, not a detailed simulation. Therefore, the
real world must take a back seat to game play—for simplicity,
length of play, space required and simple enjoyment. […] Players
are encouraged to remember such abstractions and not get
bogged down in real-world mechanics and physics. Just enjoy the
game!” (Bills, 2006, p. 36)
This paper will take a close look at the game design strategies
with which PGI have translated a by-now venerable board game
into a real-time action game. The argument presented here is
that PGI have solved most design challenges in an ingenious way
that is not only adequate, but resolves some issues inherent in
the original game in quite elegant fashion. Their achievement in
game design, however, has only been possible through a business
model which forces them to take unpopular design decisions and
alienate the long-term fans of the franchise who, both financially
and intellectually, made the development of MWO possible in
the first place. As such, this contribution to Well-Played
demonstrates how the very same game can be a best-practice
example in one respect while being worst-practice in another,
ending up in a highly contested middle ground.
14
of both games, as my central paradigm for the strategies of
adaptation from board game to the temporal and spatial logic of
a real-time game in a 3D environment. In doing so, I will draw
on the current official BT rule-books as well as the MWO player
community’s theory-crafting and reverse-engineering efforts
aimed at making the rules of the computer game transparent,
but the core of my argument is formed by my own playing
experience and a detailed comparison between the board game’s
probability-based and the computer game’s skill-based approach
to the same scenarios.
Despite the great variety of games that have emerged from the
BT franchise, all of them share a number of central assumptions
and design principles. All games revolve around fighting in
BattleMechs – walking tanks reminiscent of robots, yet
controlled by a pilot in their head. The rationale for this kind of
warfare is that in the 25th century, weapons of mass destruction
have been banned, which leads to mechanized infantry becoming
the dominant force on battlefields throughout the galaxy. In
terms of unit diversification, Mechs come in four different
weight classes between 20 and 100 tons. They are, except for
a few rare exceptions, bipedal and powered by fusion engines,
use an internal skeleton and artificial muscles, and are protected
by armor. A Mech body is divided into 11 zones: head, both
arms, both legs, front and rear left, middle, and right torso. The
limiting factor for every Mech action, especially offensive ones,
is heat generation by fusion engine and weapons. Mechs use
three types of weapon systems, energy based (e.g. lasers), ballistic
(cannons), and missiles, with every type subdivided into classes
with their unique relationship between weight, range, damage,
and heat. Energy weapons, for example, tend to create more heat
than ballistic weapons, but require no ammunition and weigh
less, while missile weapons generate heat in proportion to the
number of missiles fired at a time, from two to 40, which will
15
spread damage over several body zones of the target. Because
of this intricate balance of co-dependent factors, not only on
weight and speed of a Mech determine its fighting style, combat
role, and preferred tactics, but its exact weapon load-out. That
is why each weight class in BT offers dozens of different Mech
models with numerous variants. MWO has only implemented a
fraction of these, yet already contains 39 chassis with a total of
169 unique variants at the time of writing.
16
and long range. A modifier of +2 is added to the to-hit
probability at medium range, which increases to +4 at long
range. Given that the base value is equal to the pilot’s gunnery
skill (which defaults to 4), these modifiers are drastic, especially
as attacker and target movement also contribute modifiers (see
Table 1).
17
Discrete time and real-time
18
periods: a Large Laser will be ready to fire after 3.25 seconds
in MWO, while in MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, it would take 6.5
seconds. While this gives fights a faster pace, PGI has
counterbalanced this design decision by stressing the
temporality of actual attacks. Laser weapons need to remain on
target to transfer energy and thus do damage, from between 0.5
seconds to one second. Firing this type of weapon thus means
having to face the enemy for the full duration of the shot
constantly correcting for the movement of both Mechs. Shooting
a Medium Laser at its optimum range of 270 meters at a big
Mech like the Catapult, the target is only three times as wide as
the center reticule, which at a standard Full-HD resolution of
1920×1080 is 14 pixels in diameter. At this distance, an aimed
shot at a moving target is possible, yet extremely difficult – the
Catapult’s center torso is only 5 pixels wide. Similar effects have
been achieved with ballistic and missile weapons by choosing
rather low projectile velocities compared to other shooter games.
The biggest ballistic weapon in the game, the Autocannon 20,
has a maximum range of 810 meters, and its projectiles travel
at a slow 650 m/s, so that it takes the bullet 1,25 seconds to
reach its target. While other projectile weapons have a higher
velocity, they are still slow enough to have to lead their target
significantly. All weapon types are thus clearly distinguished by
their respective drawbacks, having to compensate for movement
either before or during the shot, making each weapon type
distinct and none overpowered.
19
(Bills, 2007, p. 207). While the word “most” in the BT description
leaves some room for interpretation, it is clear that, originally,
autocannons are conceived of as firing more than one projectile
per round and that their damage derives from multiple hits that
are only counted as one. Not only does the interpretation of
autocannons in MWO differentiate this weapon more clearly
in its usage and effect from laser weapons, but it revises an
incongruence in the BT rules: As mentioned above, there is a
class of fast-firing Ultra autocannons, which are considered
cluster weapons in the BT rules, distributing their hits randomly
like those of missiles, while the burst fire of standard
autocannons is treated as a localized effect. In MWO, burst fire
autocannons suffer from both the drawbacks of laser and
projectile weapons, making them inferior to other weapon types.
It is in exactly this fashion that Clan autocannons have been
implemented to counterbalance their otherwise superior
capabilities.
20
As mentioned before, there are no targeted shots in BT. The hit
location table specifies which of the 11 body zones of a Mech
is affected by a successful attack. If one converts the absolute
die results in the rule books to percentages based on 2d6
probabilities, the weighted nature of the hit location table
becomes apparent. The probability of hitting center torso is
about 20 percent, followed by side torsi and arms at roughly 14
percent, each leg at 11 percent, and the head at under 3 percent.
These values are identical for all Mechs, regardless of their shape
and size. The rules of BT even stress explicitly that fiction and
illustrations, “though essential in making the game universe
come alive, should never be construed as rules.” (Bills, 2006, p. 9).
When dealing with 3D-models in a virtual environment, this
generalization is impossible to maintain, as the shape of an object
is obviously more than a merely aesthetic factor. Analyzing the
shape and hitzone distribution of Mechs in MWO – which is
easily done in the training portion of the game, where it is
possible to shoot at immobile targets and check where hits
register on their body-zone diagram – the results are somewhat
surprising (see Figure 1). The Cataphract, a common heavy
Mech, shows two noticeable oddities: The visual size of its
cockpit area is significantly larger than the percentage in BT, but
only a small part of this section is counted as the head hit zone,
making the head actually significantly smaller in MWO than it is
in BT. The second major deviation is the size of its legs, which
are almost twice as big than they should be according to the hit
location table.
21
Figure 1: Appearance vs. hit boxes in MWO
22
MWO frontal
BT frontal to MWO frontal Cumulated
Zone surface
hit percentage surface (Cataphract) difference
(Battlemaster)
Head 2,8 % 0,4 % (visual 5,2) 0,6 % - 82 %
Center
19,4 % 20,6 % (visual: 15,8) 16,8 % -4%
Torso
Side 27,8 % (13,9
16 % (8 each) 14,4 % (7,7 each) - 45 %
Torso each)
27,8 % (13,9
Arms 20 % (10 each) 24,2 % (12,1 each) - 21 %
each)
22,2 % (11,1
Legs 43 % (21,5 each) 43 % (21,5 each) 94 % bigger
each)
Figure 2: BT illustration, MWO model, MWO model scaled to BT body zone percentages
23
Figure 3: Forward and lateral firing arcs in BT
Turning a Mech by one hex side, i.e. 60° in BT, comes with a
fixed cost of 1 movement point (MP). The slowest Mechs in
BT have a maximum of 5 MP, the fastest 14 MP, meaning they
could turn as many hex sides. Expressed in degrees, this means
300 degrees respectively 840 degrees, which, based on the turn-
length of 10 seconds, results in a turning speed of 30 degrees per
second and 84 degrees per second, respectively. In MWO, these
speeds are accelerated, slightly at the low end of the scale – an
Atlas AS-7D with a 300-rated engine turns at 34 degrees/sec. –
and more noticeably at the high end – a Spider SDR-5V with a
24
270-rated engine turns at 103 degrees/sec. –, i.e. by 13 and 23
percent. MWO thus not only increases the turn-rate of all Mechs,
it increases the turning speed of light Mechs disproportionately.
As with the shorter cooldown times compared to previous
MechWarrior games, this gives MWO a faster pace, yet it again
further differentiates weight classes by making light Mechs even
more agile and thus increasing the survivability of this least well-
armored class.
25
Figure 4: Torso twisting in BT
26
In MWO, torso-twisting gains additional significance and
strategic value. While it can be used for preliminary target
selection as in BT, its primary purpose is aiming at targets and
following their movement. While in BT, every target in the 90
degree arc in front of the attacking Mech can always be targeted
with all weapons, a Mech in MWO needs its torso-twist ability to
aim within this arc and, as explained above, sometimes keep the
enemy targeted for a significant amount of time. A the same time,
torso-twisting is one of the most important defensive maneuvers
in MWO, because it enables a target to expose less vulnerable
body parts and spread damage instead of allowing it to
concentrate in one area. Both because of these additional effects
and because of logical coherence, each Mech chassis has
individual twist ranges and speeds in MWO. The least mobile
Mech, the 85-ton Stalker, has a torso twist range of 120 degrees
and fixed arms, allowing it to merely cover the forward firing
arc in BT by using its full range of motion. Only the most agile
Mechs in terms of combined torso and arm movement, such as
the 55-ton Griffin, can cover at least part of their rear arc with
arm-mounted weapons the way it is possible for every Mech in
BT. Mechs in MWO thus are more agile and fire more frequently
than in BT, but have a much narrower field of fire, need to
constantly turn their torso in order to aim their weapons, and
thus more than compensate for their slightly higher speed and
rate of fire compared to BT.
27
each individual weapon needs an unobstructed line of fire, which
gives models with many high-mounted weapons a significant
advantage: Not only do they need to expose a smaller portion of
their body before firing, the pilot’s view and the weapon position
are optimally aligned. Only with breast- and shoulder-mounted
weapons, the BT-logic of line-of sight is valid in MWO, while
other weapons are literally ‘shoot from the hip’ and will
inadvertently hit buildings, hills, or allied Mechs. Another
consequential interpretation of BT rules in MWO is that torso-
mounted weapons can only be aimed by moving the torso as
a whole, which limits especially the vertical range of weapons
significantly. This is another case in which PGI fill a gap in
the BT rules in a way that does not contradict them, creates a
coherent spatial logic, and even is a game balancing element.
The Battlemaster and Banshee assault Mechs mount multiple
heavy weapons high on their chest, giving them a significant
strategic advantage. This is counterbalanced by severely limiting
their torso movement speed and range, restricting the ability to
bring their weapons to bear, especially on small and fast-moving
targets which they might obliterate in a single hit. Particularly
the torso pitch range of only 20 degrees forces those otherwise
powerful Mechs to keep their distance from enemies on both
higher and lower ground (see Figure 5). Standing in a steep,
narrow canyon, those Mechs will be barely able to aim at their
attackers, while the same situation in BT would be
unremarkable, as adjacent fields are considered to always have
line-of-sight (Bills, 2006, p. 99).
28
Figure 5: Correlation of topology and pitch movement
By the same logic, light Mechs can effectively enter a safe zone
by staying within less than ten meters of these Mechs that could
annihilate them with a single hit of all their weapons (see Figure
6). In conclusion, it can be observed that MWO creates additional
rules and even derives additional depth from nothing more than
consequently applying physics and spatio-temporal logic.
29
Figure 6: Limited yaw movement creates a dead zone
30
freely playable core game multiplies the number of people who
will have a first-hand impression of the game, providing “market
seeding” (Niculescu & Wu, 2011, p. 3), while a constant stream of
a variety of commercial features (game resources, customization
items, collectible items, and affiliation items) in the game
provides monetization through item-purchasing (as opposed to
restricted access or advertising) (Luban, 2012/2012). Their
thorough understanding of the business model is most apparent
in their recent introduction of high-price prestige items. User
statistics indicate that in Freemium games, the willingness to
spend money on in-game purchases follows not a linear or
normal distribution, but a logarithmic one. In other words: the
few statistical outliers who spend most on the game are spending
so much as to not be statistically irrelevant, but to be the driving
force behind the commercial success of the model. To fully
benefit from this player behavior, a game needs to allow for
extreme purchasing behavior (Lim, 2012/2012). MWO has
catered to this audience through the offering of gold-skinned
limited edition Mechs priced at $500.
31
sound business strategy to keep financing and player-base stable,
the following re-balancings were so radical as to make some
of these previously overpowered Mechs barely playable. Some
Clan Mechs can equip a very high number of energy weapons.
Firing too many of them concurrently is penalized by a
disproportionate surge in heat, initially by a factor of 3. For two
months after their injection into the game, Clan Mechs were
reserved for those who had pre-purchased them. When they
were then released to the general public, PGI waited four weeks,
giving interested customers the chance to buy one of these
overpowered Mechs, before increasing the heat penalty on Clan
Lasers from a factor of 3 to a factor of 12, making the Clan
Nova with 12 Medium Lasers so hot that it will self-destruct
after firing two full salvos (“MWO Forums: Nova Is Dead,” 2014/
2014).
PGI has shown great awareness of the fact that long-time fans
are stakeholders of their game in the development and initial
release phase, but has since then ignored their input and often
taken the game into the opposite direction from this fan-base’s
wishes. It is hard not to interpret this behavior as disrespectful
and exploitative, both towards the (especially long-time) players
and the game itself – which is a shame, given the high quality
adaptation of BT that PGI created with the help of the fan-base.
The constant changes to the game necessitated by the Freemium
business model do, however, also mean that there always remains
a chance that the initially balanced game-state will return at
some point – or even improved upon. Only time will tell.
32
paper; it therefore reflects the game’s development up to July
2014.
References
33
Lim, N. (2012). Freemium Games are not Normal. Retrieved from
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/NickLim/20120626/
173051/Freemium_games_are_not_normal.php
Rogers, S. (2010). Level up!: The guide to great video game design.
Chichester: Wiley.
34
CAUSE NO TROUBLE: THE EXPERIENCE OF
“SERIOUS FUN” IN PAPERS, PLEASE
OSCAR MORALDE
35
paperwork for discrepancies or failure to follow government-
issued rules. Let the right people into the country, and you
receive wages to pay your rent and feed your family; let the
wrong people in, and the consequences start with fines and get
worse from there.
36
thoughtful subject matter? Here I examine Papers, Please by
focusing on the embodied experience of play. That is, I share the
stance elaborated by games scholar Henrik Smed Nielsen that
video games are embodied experiences, and not just those most
obvious examples of Wii and Kinect motion-controlled games –
all games act upon sensory perception, evoke feeling, and make
space for intentional action. In the end, the locus for all of that is
the body (Nielsen, 2012).
37
acts upon the game and how the game acts back. That point
of contact constitutes a world of experience that has room to
produce both fun gameplay and the recognition of a relevant
social reality. Here I examine three salient aspects of that
experience: the booth, the stamp, and the queue.
Figure 1. The main gameplay screen of Papers, Please, divided into three areas: the booth
(left), the inspection desk with stamps (right), and the queue (top).
38
gameplay screen (Figure 1). It depicts the main Inspector
character’s workplace, a checkpoint on the border between the
nations of Arstotzka and Kolechia. Like a cubist painting or
multi-windowed desktop, the screen is divided into three
sections, each a separate vantage point that converges on the
player character’s subjective perception. The lower left corner
is a first-person view of the inspection booth where travelers
step up, present their documents, and answer questions. To the
right is a close-up of the inspection desk, where you can examine
documents in more detail. At the top is a bird’s-eye view of the
border, showing the checkpoint and the queue forming outside.
Although this last section appears at first to be merely ambience,
it plays a complex role in the flow of gameplay, which I will
address later.
39
off, I click on the loudspeaker at the top of the screen, and this
brings a traveler into the lower left booth. Dialogue starts:
“I pass through.”
“Duration of stay?”
I click and hold to drag the documents from the left-hand booth
to the right-hand inspection desk; as they cross the threshold the
objects magnify in size so I can read them more clearly. I look
at the information on the entry permit: “Transit.” I look at the
date on the entry permit, then look at the clock and calendar
in the booth. Clicking on a button to enter “Inspection Mode”, I
then click on each of the dates. “This document is expired,” the
Inspector says.
“I could not come until now.” Unfortunately for him, this is not a
valid excuse. Clicking on another button on the interface makes
a set of stamps shoot out from the side of the screen: green for
“approved” and red for “denied.” On his passport, I use the red
one. Then I drag the documents back to the left and through
the window, and the traveler silently walks away. I click on the
loudspeaker again, and my character’s yell of “Next!” brings
another traveler to the window. The game clock continues
ticking towards five o’clock and the end of the workday.
40
more efficient and precise in the way that they handle each cycle.
Players must be dexterous in juggling the documents and the
ever-necessary in-game rulebook within a limited space that can
become a cluttered mess in the wrong hands. They must also
possess mental acuity in remembering the cities of the region to
detect forged documents, and a keen eye for minor discrepancies
in weight, height, or even a single digit of a long serial number.
This sense is not totally absent from the actual game, but the
game’s aesthetic effaces that sense in multiple ways. The queue
provides a distant and detached perspective where people are
seen as a blob of amorphous silhouettes, and even when they
step into the booth they seem to fade into the background with
their cool colors and muted tones. The most colorful elements
in the game are the passports, which are a bold rainbow of reds
and greens and blues. The game’s spatial structure privileges the
presence of the documents over the people. Not only is most of
the game’s space reserved for those documents, but they are also
41
the only objects that directly cross from one section of the game
environment to the other, and from one section of the interface
to the other.
You must pass the documents from left to right, from the booth
counter onto the desk, in order to read them. As they cross the
threshold, they are magnified and grow larger than life; when
you’re done with them, they go right to left and shrink back
down again. This motion and transformation is visually striking
within the game, and it also happens quite frequently. As you
rapidly cycle through these documents, this transition occurs
forty or more times during an average level. All this motion
is certainly livelier than the people themselves, who primarily
remain in one place with an unchanging expression matching the
ones in their documents.
42
quality of things is paramount, and the game uses a number
of audiovisual strategies to evoke those qualities. Although this
dimension is subtle and perhaps not something one consciously
considers while playing the game, it is key to structuring the
world of the game and the way one plays through it.
The sense of touch here is not a literal one; you do not actually
touch any of the elements in the game, and though one could
conceivably play this on a touchscreen, the game assumes a
mouse and keyboard as the default controls. Nevertheless, there
are objects that, through the correlation between what we see
and hear and how we manipulate the controls, feel more tangible
and more responsive than others.
Again, the documents come to the fore. It starts with the simple
sound of rustling paper when you click on a document to pick
it up. They also have a sense of heft to them, as you have to
hold down the mouse to carry the documents around the screen
and from one space to another. You can position the documents
anywhere on the desk and stack them on top of each other, while
within the booth passports and papers clatter onto the surface
of the counter. Some of these aspects simply speak to competent
and intuitive user interface design, but little touches add up to
create the feeling of these documents having manipulability and
tangibility. In any case, the player’s relation to these documents
could have been designed in any other number of ways.
43
positioning the rulebook and documents on the table so they
can be cross-referenced, as you need to click on both the rule
and the violation to link the two. A player might also need to
compare serial numbers across multiple documents, which may
be difficult to fit in the space allotted and thus would require
shuffling through papers. A poorly-organized space can lead to
a key document being lost under another or left in a corner,
requiring precious seconds to retrieve. These challenges stem
from the documents possessing tangible and tactile qualities.
44
digital paper. One in-game upgrade even gives you a keyboard
shortcut for the stamps, which not only saves precious seconds
but adds a more tangible dimension to the tool, a physical button
to press. All the attention to detail in this part of the interface
(and the detail that draws attention to it) is fitting, as the choice
of stamp is the ultimate gameplay decision in Papers, Please. With
every traveler, all your actions and observations boil down to
answering the question: “Approved or Denied?”
The top of the game screen shows the queue of travelers waiting
at the checkpoint along with the border and the guards patrolling
it. At first, this interface element appears to be mere window
dressing, like the ambient crowd and traffic noise, to help situate
you in the otherwise solipsistic space of the inspection booth.
Indeed, the only element you can act upon in this section is
the loudspeaker to call the next traveler, and because of this
the entire queue recedes from subjective awareness. With your
attention focused on the booth and desk below, the top of the
screen becomes merely a large peripheral button to press.
45
booth’s security shutter slams down. The queue up top becomes
the center of attention, as a silhouette jumps across the fence
and throws a bomb at a guard before being shot and killed.
This scripted event ends the day and the level; at this point the
queue’s “attentional value” permanently shifts. Most of the time
it remains a benign background presence, but it also carries a
latent threat. This comes to the fore in later levels when you
are suddenly asked not to deal with documents below but with
threats from above; you must defend the checkpoint by
unlocking a cabinet, retrieving a gun, and pointing and clicking
in the top portion to shoot someone. In these moments, the game
interrupts familiar routines and brusquely shifts the space of
play; you must think and act quickly in that shifting space.
In other words, when I play Papers, Please, during each day the
bottom portion of the screen is a flurry of activity and attention:
I shuffle documents back and forth, click on buttons, and stamp
passports. As I approach an optimal process of embodied and
hermeneutic relations with the game, that process takes shape
within and through my body in the form of elegant, precise
action. I develop a rhythm that is matched by the game’s
aesthetics. The shuffle of papers, the thump of the stamp, and the
blare of the loudspeaker correlate to my actions. These actions
grow more and more difficult, but usually in predictable ways;
I internalize the process. Yet the queue, which recedes into the
background of my perception, remains. It marks the threat of
something unexpected, something to disrupt my rhythm. It
reminds me there is always something external to the process I’m
enacting. My flow is a fragile thing, after all.
46
criminals, terrorists, corrupt officials, soldiers doing their
job—all disrupt the gameplay with their political signification.
However, the act of disruption is itself significant.
An Attitude Adjustment
47
gives us access to both the rewards of playing well and a sense
of the social reality underpinning that play. The Inspector in the
game’s story wants to do his job well so he can feed his family
and not die; by the game’s rules, we want to do his job well so we
can earn points and overcome challenges. In story and in play,
we encounter obstacles to success. Our embodied intention and
action upon the game links those facets together.
48
to find out more, he merely stamped the denial and handed
back the papers. The reviewer jokingly added, “I don’t give a
fuck about your story” (Scanlon, 2013). It was certainly a valid
gameplay action, and from the perspective of earning money and
scoring points, even the optimal one, because the story indeed
mattered very little when the papers said it all. In the video’s
comments one viewer mentioned having worked a similar job
in real life; singling out that moment, they noted that mindset
as being all too common. Papers, Please provides a gameplay
experience that helps you cultivate and internalize that mindset
yet also gives the space to step back and examine that attitude,
the reasons for it, and the consequences it carries. In trying to
mix the fun of playing games with the weight of social realism,
it’s a strategy as good as any.
References:
49
pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue. In Havi Carel and Greg Tuck
(Eds.), New takes in film philosophy (pp. 191-206). Palgrave
Macmillan, New York.
Walker, J. (2013, Aug 12) “Wot I think: Papers, Please.” Rock Paper
Shotgun. Retrieved from http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/
2013/08/12/wot-i-think-papers-please/
50
PLAYING FOR THE PLOT: BLINDNESS,
AGENCY, AND THE APPEAL OF NARRATIVE
ORGANIZATION IN HEAVY RAIN
FANNY A. RAMIREZ
51
possible moment” (p. 20). Solving the mystery or murder is a
type of game, and like any good game, it is built on rules, in
this case, “fair play” rules of narrative organization (Pyrhönen,
2010, p. ). Works of crime fiction have to give the reader, or
in the case of videogames, the player, a fair chance to solve the
enigma before the narrative comes to an end and everything is
resolved. In literary works, this type of fair play is achieved by
“showing readers the clues needed for solving the case, while
simultaneously confusing [and blinding] them as to the correct
meaning of these clues” (Pyrhönen, 2010, p. 46). Solving the
murder or finding the key to the puzzle should be a difficult but
possible task, and in all cases, the process should appear evident
in retrospect.
52
Figure 1: Screenshot showing the two dialogue options “clients?” and “repair.” (Source:
Heavy Rain; Copyright: Sony Computer Entertainment 2010)
Figure 2: Screenshot showing an example of a quick time event. Players have to hold
down the buttons indicated on the screen. (Source: Heavy Rain; Copyright: Sony
Computer Entertainment 2010)
53
presented with different choice idioms and Heavy Rain “has been
praised for the dilemmas that it presents to the player, usually
through the use of two equally undesirable outcomes”
(Mawhorter, P., & Mateas, M., & Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Jhala,
A., 2014). Although they exert some control over the on-screen
actions, players don’t have full insight into the minds of the
characters and in accordance with the norms of crime fiction, are
repeatedly blinded and misled. In other words, despite players’
assumption that they are playing the game, in the end, the game
ends up playing them.
54
of the game revolves around players’ sense of control over the
development of the plot, the revelation that one of the main
protagonists is the killer comes as a double shock. Not only were
players wrong in thinking that Shelby was one of the good guys,
they were also wrong in thinking that they knew the character’s
motivations. Both the character of Shelby and the actions players
performed while playing him were not always what they
appeared to be.
55
balances agency and blindness, so as to create an enjoyable
gaming experience that involves a certain level of deceit, yet
does not rob players of their sense of control. I’ve identified
three distinct ways in which Heavy Rain successfully pushes back
the final shocking revelation by incorporating the concepts of
distraction and blindness alongside empowering interactive
actions. First, blindness is used together with cognitive
interactivity to divert players’ attention away from the
investigation and towards Shelby’s backstory. Second, blindness
and distraction are used in connection with explicit interactivity
to distract the player from the story of the investigation and
instead emphasize quick time events and Shelby’s hero-like
character. Third, fragmentation is used to make it harder for
players to pick up on the interrelatedness of clues and recognize
incomplete scenes.
56
problem, shapes how players approach playing the character and
sets the tone for the remainder of the game.
Figure 3: Shelby introduces himself to the mother of one of the victims. (Source: Heavy
Rain; Copyright: Sony Computer Entertainment 2010)
57
the narrative and its characters are perceived (Bayard, 2000, p.
19). As a player, one of my first reactions when playing as Shelby
was to make narrative choices and take actions that fitted the
persona of a detective. I selected choices based on what outcome
I anticipated to be most useful to a detective and did so mostly
because of how the backstory framed Shelby.
58
cannot afford to fully surrender themselves to the mysteries of
the narrative. They are constantly left wondering whether they
could have taken a different action which would have prevented
an undesirable turn of events.
59
trying to solve the crime or make progress in the investigation,
but playing with other motives in mind (Mawhorter et al., 2014).
This article takes alternate choices into consideration when
discussing the construction of blindness in Heavy Rain, but
assumes that players are playing with diegetic or semi-diegetic
motives in mind and are trying their best to complete the game’s
interactive components.
60
Figure 4: Fight scene from the chapter Sleazy Place. (Source: Heavy Rain; Copyright:
Sony Computer Entertainment 2010)
In the chapter titled Hassan’s Shop, the player is once again given
the opportunity to play the hero when in control of Shelby. A
number of narrative choices in this chapter lead to a positive
outcome where Shelby saves the clerk either by knocking the
criminal unconscious or by talking him out of robbing the store.
Having the true criminal “conceal [his] oppositional status by
pretending to [be a helper]” or hero is a common trope in crime
fiction and is used to blind not only the player but other in-game
characters as well (Malmgren, 2010, p. 155).
61
Figure 5: Shelby calming down the robber in the chapter Hassan’s Shop. (Source: Heavy
Rain; Copyright: Sony Computer Entertainment 2010)
62
thanks Shelby for his help, placing the detective and his heroic
act at the forefront of the narrative. After playing through this
chapter, I felt that my main accomplishment was saving Hassan,
not finding the shoebox. The series of quick time events in this
chapter built up dramatic tension and focused my attention on
the action rather than the story, thereby deepening the
experience of distraction and psychic blindness.
63
for the player to recognize the relevance of a particular clue
or recall its discovery during the next Shelby chapter. In the
episode Suicide Baby for example, players have to first perform a
series of tangential actions such as saving Susan from her suicide
attempt and feeding her baby, before finally being led to another
clue. However, once they are in possession of the mysterious cell
phone that Susan believes is somehow related to the Origami
killer, no investigation-related interaction is possible. Shelby
tries to turn on the phone and right after this attempt, he exits the
house and the narrative switches over to another storyline. This
scenario is similar to the one in Hassan’s Shop. In both instances
a clue is revealed to the player, but the chapter concludes before
any progress is made in the investigation. Heavy Rain purposely
fragments the narrative in this way to delay the ability of players
to make connections between the clues collected across the
various storylines. By cutting off the experience right before
Shelby should technically begin to realize how the pieces of the
puzzle fit together, the game successfully manages to postpone
the revelation of the detective’s true identity and keeps the
players guessing.
64
example, Madison dies and her character is no longer playable.
This is a very powerful moment in the game and in this instant
the player is indeed experiencing the scene in its totality. By
confirming the player’s agency over the development of the story
throughout most of the game, Heavy Rain is able to successfully
blind the player in a few select instances.
Figure 6: Failure to properly execute the quick time events in the chapter The Doc leads
to the death of Madison Paige. (Source: Heavy Rain; Copyright: Sony Computer
Entertainment 2010)
65
appears the player is in control of Shelby’s actions during the
entirety of this chapter, yet this assumption is false. There is
a second, less obvious, incomplete presentation in this chapter
and it is only when this one is divulged that the player is able
to reorder the story fragments and reconstruct the scene of
Manfred’s murder. Several chapters later, when the player
realizes that Shelby is the Origami killer, a recollection scene
clears up the incomplete presentation from the Manfred chapter.
After watching the flashback, players are led to realize that
during the brief instance in which the camera was focused on
Lauren, they were in fact not in control of the detective’s actions.
Shelby was off-screen during that short moment, which explains
how he was able to sneak to the backroom and kill Manfred.
Figure 7: Shelby is standing in the store with Lauren. He is still visible in the shot.
(Source: Heavy Rain; Copyright: Sony Computer Entertainment 2010)
66
Figure 8: For a few seconds the camera focuses exclusively on Lauren. Shelby is no
longer visible in the background. (Source: Heavy Rain; Copyright: Sony Computer
Entertainment 2010)
67
Conclusion
References
Bayard, P. (2000). Who killed Roger Ackroyd? New York: The New
Press.
68
Jones, S. (2008). The meaning of videogames. New York: Routledge.
69
Worpole, K. (1984). Watching the detectives. New Statesman,
10826-10827.
70
TAKING APART THE PROVOCATION
MACHINE: IAN BOGOST'S A SLOW YEAR
THOMAS H. ROUSSE
71
Introduction
* * *
72
Revisiting A Slow Year
73
capable of more than three decades after the system’s release,
this collection of game poems also serves as a window into the
creative practice of a pioneering games studies scholar and
game designer. Leigh Alexander (2011) identified A Slow Year as
the counter-point to Cow Clicker, a satire of games built for the
Facebook platform: earnest and market-agnostic, where Cow
Clicker dripped with cynicism and found players despite
Bogost’s intentions. As the physical of presence of games has
steadily diminished, from the near-extinction of the monolithic
arcade cabinet to the waning of game packaging and “feelies”
(Karhulahti, 2012) to the rise of digital downloads in favor of
retail purchase, both the hand-made deluxe packaging and the
book with included CD-ROM stand out from increasing
ephemerality. A Slow Year has to be understood in the context of
Bogost’s concept of carpentry, “philosophical lab equipment”
constructed as a “theory, or an experiment, or a question” that
operates in a way distinct from traditional humanist methods of
writing and verbal argument (Bogost, 2012, “Carpentry”)—in
“My Slow Year,” he writes that in order to write about the Atari
he knew he would have to learn to program it (A Slow Year, p. 8).
A Slow Year is the finished product of Bogost’s experiment with
the Atari; Racing the Beam, his book with Nick Montfort is the
traditional written product, and A Slow Year is the fruit of his
carpentry, up to and including the careful razor-blading of felt
required to build each limited-edition box by hand (Alexander,
2011).
74
each of the seasons and paged through the machined haiku. As I
grew more familiar with Bogost’s body of work, my thoughts
and interpretation of A Slow Year (and especially its haiku) began
to change. I begin by contextualizing the platform through
Montfort & Bogost’s Racing the Beam (2009), describe and
analyze each game-poem via procedural rhetoric, discuss the
short-comings of the “machined haiku” by the standards of its
traditional form, and conclude by offering an alternate reading
of the work using Bogost’s foray into object-oriented ontology
and speculative realism in addition to Espen Aarseth’s writing
on the cyborg author.
With Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost literally wrote the book on the
Atari with Racing the Beam (2009), the first entry in a MIT Press
series on platform studies. Platform Studies explores how the
affordances and constraints of software and/or hardware
systems influence the designers who create games for those
platforms and now includes analysis of the Nintendo Wii,
Commodore Amiga, and the Flash web plug-in. The Atari VCS
(later branded as the Atari 2600) is a particularly minimal
platform, requiring all programming to be done in low-level
6502 assembly language tightly coupled to the hardware’s
machine code instructions—“You have to program right up
against the metal,” (A Slow Year, p. 9). The Atari itself used the
MOS Technology 6507 chipset, capable of 8K of ROM, while
cost constraints made many games just 2K or 4K (Montfort &
Bogost, 2009, p. 24). In Racing the Beam, the authors emphasize
the strange nature of the Television Interface Adapter (TIA)
chip, which provided both graphics and sound. The TIA lacked a
screen buffer, meaning programmers were required to “race the
beam” and time the calculations required for changes in the
display to the rhythm of the cathode-ray tube’s electron beam
(Montfort & Bogost, 2009, p. 28).
75
A Slow Year is Bogost’s second title for the Atari. Bogost’s first is
Guru Meditation, a game built for the obscure Amiga Joyboard
peripheral in 2009; he claims that it is a game “you play by
literally doing nothing” (Bogost, 2010, p. 10) but when I had the
opportunity to experience it at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art during the Game Developer’s Conference 2013, I
saw that the real challenge of the game was screwing one’s core
into such a configuration that it was possible to balance on a
three decade old plastic peripheral unsuited to the weight of an
adult long enough to gain points. Guru Meditation shares a theme
with A Slow Year, rewarding patience and encouraging players to
observe and contemplate rather than act (p. 11).
76
Racing the Beam (2009, p. 49), Montfort & Bogost note that early
game developer Warren Robinett worked himself to exhaustion
to create the ground-breaking Adventure (1979). A Slow Year is an
anachronism as both a release for a console long past its
commercial relevancy and a project unconcerned with the
temporal demands of the market.
In his introductory essay, “My Slow Year,” Bogost sets out four
goals for A Slow Year: to “interpret the Atari’s constraints
through the lens of poetry,” to “explore naturalism” by
developing novel techniques of creating full-screen effects, to
“capture the practice of observation,” and to create four game
seasons that are “really games” that “involve rules and processes”
(Bogost, 2010, pp. 12–14). Instructions for controlling the game
and the goal of each season are given in haiku composed by
Bogost (as opposed to the 1,024 machine haiku generated by a
computer program of his creation). I argue that Bogost’s game
seasons meet his goals, in all but one instance.
77
procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007), the persuasive use of process
and computation. Bogost’s procedural rhetoric in A Slow Year is
one of slowness and “sedate observation” (p. 11)—yet while
procedural rhetorics typically make their persuasive points by
demonstrating “how things work” (Bogost, 2007, p. 29, emphasis
in original), the game-poems are not instrumental. There is no
moral or aesthetic valence assigned to the acts of quiet
contemplation the game-poems compel, though in fulfilling his
goal of making them “really games” each keeps score in a vague
and perhaps vestigial manner. I will turn to each of the games in
turn, starting with the trilogy of games played from a first-
person perspective and ending with the problematic fourth
game poem.
Winter
Figure 2: Winter
78
operation of patience: he developed A Slow Year at a leisurely
pace, without the pressure of a release date or publisher
deadlines (Bogost, 2010, p. 15) and asks the player to experience
it in the same spirit. There are no environmental sounds, just a
hissing rendition of a slurp when the player chooses to take a sip
of coffee by pressing a button. The only real challenge for the
player is not to drink the coffee too fast.
The game begins with a full, hot cup of coffee and the darkness
of a cold winter morning out the window. As time goes on, the
sun rises and the color of the sky lightens and warms. If the
player gulps the coffee down in the beginning and leaves just a
splash, it quickly grows cold. A simple thermometer displays the
coffee’s temperature—let it get too cold, and the game ends. To
see the sunrise, the player must sip methodically, pacing the
temperature of the coffee with the reddening sky outside. On a
real Atari joystick, pulling back the stick mimics tilting a coffee
cup to take a sip. In one kilobyte, Winter is a surprisingly
accurate simulation of drinking coffee.
79
Spring
Figure 3: Spring
This game poem is about watching the rain, and given the
humble squawks of the VCS, it does an admirable job of
capturing its sound. There is a deep monotonous fuzz
punctuated by staccato squeals, which emulate the distant roar
of heavy rainfall and the splash of nearby puddles. The screen is
filled with rapidly alternating shades of gray, torrents of rain
falling on a few squat buildings. The player’s task is to watch for
lightning and then press and hold the button from the time of
the flash to the clap of thunder. The yellow line of lightning lasts
for just a moment; if the player looks away, she might not even
know she missed it.
80
Spring the most meditative of the seasons; it required patience
and quick response, but unlike Autumn’s hanging leaf and
changing wind, there was no need to plan or anticipate. The
player is always prepared in Spring. In the long intervals between
flashes, all I had to do was listen and watch, and then react.
Summer
Figure 4: Summer
81
I actually closed my physical eyes and counted. It speaks to the
immersive power of simulating eyelids, and the visual similarity
between closing one’s eyes in real life and within the game world.
Once I started pressing the button and keeping my real eyes open
(to stare into a black screen), the task was easy.
Figure 5: Fall
82
the procedural rhetoric of A Slow Year as a project. While I found
the other seasons meditative, I found Autumn frustrating and
unfair. Furthermore, Autumn is the only game where the player
controls an inanimate object, the pile of leaves. Bogost claims
that all of his season games are presented in the first person
(2010, p. 13), but how can I look onto a pile of leaves and also be
the pile of leaves? Autumn is the only game that makes the player
truly feel the technical limitations of the Atari platform. While
I cannot explain the precise technical detail of this game poem,
suffice to say that the Atari is capable of rendering a limited
number of moving objects (Bogost, 2009, p. 45-47), and to allow
the leaf to fall, Bogost strips the player’s control of the pile of
leaves away at the decisive moment. Because the leaf does not fall
straight down, the player has no way to adjust his or her leaf pile
position, making the game an exercise in luck.
Machined Haiku
83
adaptations of the tenants of Imagism (a modernist movement of
short evocative poems) to the medium of the videogame (Bogost,
2010, p. 3), the machine-generated haiku can be skipped with
no great aesthetic loss to the player. Particularly egregious is
the inclusion of adjectives for each season. Autumnal, hibernal,
vernal, and estival are included in the haiku-machine’s word
bank, or saijiki. Compare Japanese dramatist’s Chikamatsu’s
admonition against labeling, rather than evoking, a subject:
“When one says of something which is sad that it is sad, one loses
the implications, and in the end, even the impression of sadness.
It is essential that one not say of a thing ‘it is sad,’ but that it be
sad of itself” (Yasuda, 2001, p. 4). In addition, the haiku-machine
occasionally reveals its cogs: there are curious constructions,
such as double negative adjectives (“ununtaut”) and strange
plurals (“deers”). Reading even one season of 256 haiku is a tiring
endeavor, and the layout of the haiku one after the other makes
it tempting to simply gloss over each instead of giving it the
moment of consideration that haiku beg for. Too often, the haiku
seem to make little sense, with subjects, objects, verbs, and
adjectives tossed together in ways that are grammatically correct
but fail to cohere into any particular meaning.
84
haiku become much more intriguing. As a creative adaptation
of the object-oriented ontology that Bogost explores in Alien
Phenomenology, the machined haiku transform into an object-
oriented poetry. Consider haiku 117 in the Autumn cycle:
These haiku, if the reader can push past the initial impression
that they are simply nonsense, force us to confront the role of
non-living actors in the construction of each season. They would
have us speculate on what actions might be possible for objects
which have little enough in common with humans, and the
relationships between objects to which human observers are not
privy. As Bogost writes “Wonder has two senses. For one, it can
suggest awe or marvel, the kind one might experience in worship
or astonishment. But for another, it can mean puzzlement or
logical perplexity” (2012, p. 121). That second sense of wonder,
which I argue is produced by the occasionally senseless verse
generated by the haiku machine, allows us “to underscore the
irreconcilable separations between all objects, chasms we have
no desire or hope of bridging” (Bogost, 2012, p. 123)
fundamental to object oriented ontology. In his essay on “How
to Play” A Slow Year, Bogost effaces his role in the creation of
the haiku, claiming “the computer does the poetic work” and
noting that “[w]riting haiku by hand would only impose my own
interpretive ideas” (Bogost, 2010, p. 21). In Alien Phenomenology
(2012), Bogost gently critiques Bruno Latour for his human role
in selecting the objects in his disparate litanies in similar fashion:
85
“the nonsensical aspect of this litany is compromised by the fact
that it had to be assembled by a human being.”
Following Aarseth, we might say that the machined haiku are the
work of a cyborg (1997, p. 134), a synthesis of Bogost’s curated
collection of words that connote each season and instructions
on how to make grammatically coherent phrases adhering to
the syllabic constraints of haiku, with the machine’s ability to
mash subjects, objects and verbs together without any reference
to human-centric ideas about which ones ought go together.
Thus, we might look at these machined haiku “as a separate
class of texts rather than as failed pastiches of ‘human literature'”
(Aarseth, 1997, p. ibid) and judge them accordingly. The haiku
form does avoid the problems of narrative that Aarseth finds
with examples from the mid-1990s (Aarseth, 1997, p. 141),
allowing instead for a form with few constraints and none of the
diachronic concerns of narrative.
Conclusion
86
displace human-centered ways of understanding the objects
around us.
References
Montfort, N., & Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam: the Atari Video
Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
87
Karhulahti, V. (2012) “Feelies: The Lost Art of Immersing the
Narrative.” Proceedings fo 2012 DiGRA Nordic, Tampere,
Finland.
Acknowledgments
88
SPORE’S PLAYABLE PROCEDURAL CONTENT
GENERATION
GILLIAN SMITH
Northeastern University
[email protected]
89
Spore is a game that is broken into five core “stages”. The cell
stage has the player take on the role of a single-celled organism,
fighting for survival and the right to evolve into a more complex
form of life. The creature stage has the player take control of
this fledgling lifeform as it interacts with other creatures in its
world, guiding the creature’s development and evolution to give
it a competitive advantage. The tribal stage marks where the
creature attains intelligence and the semblance of a society; in
this stage, the player must gather food to help grow the tribe
and socialize with other tribes on the planet. The civilization
stage has the player grow their tribe into a larger civilization,
competing with others on the planet for resources. Finally, in the
space stage, the player has become the dominant civilization on
the planet, and ventures into space to meet and conquer other
planets.
90
However, the creature creator also defines some of the
controversy around Spore. Its failure to model evolution in any
way turns Spore into a game about intelligent design, rather than
a simulation of the universe.
91
The gameplay in this stage of the game feels almost meditative
at times, and is heavily exploration-driven. The procedurally
generated environment means that each time the player picks
up this stage, they are experiencing vastly different content that
makes it impossible to memorize paths. The simple rules for play
and randomization of other content do not lend themselves to
developing complex strategies for survival. Rather, the player is
content to float around the pool, seeking out sustenance and
occasionally breaking from this meditative state to either attack
or defend oneself against other cells.
92
Inside the creature creator, altering the cell’s composition. The player drags
components on and off of the main cell “body” to make changes, and is free to
make as many changes as desired.
93
Figure 2. The cell becomes a creature with the addition of legs.
In the cell stage, PCG was used to procedurally texture and color
the creatures; however, this transition phase marks the first time
that the game uses PCG to support the player in creating
functional creatures. A procedural animation system determines
how the cell should walk around space based on where the
creature’s legs are placed.
94
components. When the player is ready to “evolve” their creature,
they click the “mating call” button to find a mate for the creature.
An elaborate (procedurally animated) mating dance occurs, the
creature lays an egg1, and the creature creator loads so that the
player can design the next generation to be born (Figures 4 – 5).
Figure 4. Having defeated her first enemy and found DNA, the
creature goes back to the nest and engages in a mating ritual.
95
The creature creator really shines late in the creature stage, when
the player has found a large number of creature components. The
player can completely strip down their creature and reform it on
each stage of its “evolution”, if desired. This includes an ability
to change the creature’s spine length and shape, to swap out and
add in functional creature components such as limbs and eyes,
to provide the creature with decorative elements, and to alter
its appearance. The procedural animation system reacts quickly,
and the player will receive immediate feedback when altering
limb placement. The creature immediately raises a newly added
limb to stare at it admiringly and make a sound of approval.
After only a few moments of play with the creature creator, its
broad appeal is obvious. The tool provides simple and casual
play—one of the design motivations was to have the player feel
like they are drawing with “magic crayons” (Gingold, 2003):
simple tools that are natural and easy to create with, yet
seamlessly imbued with artificial intelligence so that, as if by
magic, the crayons create an amplification of what is actually
drawn. The creature creator has the player interact as though
they are creating a lifeless, static model, and the computer
provides support to automatically turn that static model into a
real character. The procedural animation and texturing systems
underlying creature creator provide this “magic”. The tools allow
the player to feel creative agency, in that they can make
meaningful decisions about the creature’s appearance and some
characteristics, while relegating the more technically challenging
work of modeling, rigging, and animating to the computer. Spore
kickstarted the growing trend in games to support user-created
content. Games from the Little Big Planet (Media Molecule, 2008)
series and, more recently, Minecraft (Persson, 2011) are built
entirely around user-created content, but neither offer the kind
96
of procedural support that made Spore’s creation tools so simple
and engaging.
97
PCG Analysis
98
Spore sits in an interesting position along this spectrum of PCG
systems. As a design tool, the game provides players with a great
deal of data—in the form of anatomical parts for the
creatures—for the player to piece together using their own
internal “algorithm” for deciding how the parts should fit
together. However, the PCG system itself is highly process-
intensive, using the raw 3D geometry created in the tool to
determine how the creature should act in the world through a set
of complex algorithms (Hecker, 2011).
99
one of the first games to use this form of PCG, letting the player
shift difficult parts of their design burden onto the computer.
100
decision has remarkable impact on the experience of using the
creature creator. Instead of needing to wait until the creature
has been fully fleshed out and placed into the world to see how
it moves around, the player gets instantaneous feedback on the
decisions they have made and how that impacts the creature’s
behavior.
101
understanding the mechanical systems to that make up the PCG
of Spore, where the controversy surrounding Spore’s treatment of
evolution lies.
Mismatched Expectations
102
This is what makes the creature creator so powerful as a creative
tool, and in turn what makes Spore a successful game. The player
can complete forget that the underlying PCG system is present,
and focus only on playing with the creativity toy. The ability for
the system to rapidly produce an animation for any arbitrary
geometry provides the player with the freedom to play with a
wide variety of creature combinations and immediately see their
creation come to life.
Conclusion
103
(1) It appears to always be the player-controlled creature that lays
the egg. Either all playable creatures are biologically female, or
the player is to assume that sex of individuals does not matter for
sexual reproduction in Spore.
References
Hendrikx, M., Meijer, S., Van der Velden, J., & Iosup, A. (2011).
Procedural Content Generation for Games: A Survey. ACM
Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and
Applications.
104
Johnson, S. (2013, September 30). Spore: My View of the
Elephant. Retrieved from http://www.designer-
notes.com/?p=654
105
WHAT HOCKEY WANTS: DRAMA, NARRATIVE,
AND SPORTS
JEFF WATSON
Introduction
106
– and yet, somewhat amazingly, it does not require any kind of
centralized story department or author to spin its yarns. Rather,
like all sports, and to a certain degree like all games, hockey is a
set of protocols that propagates and iterates itself by producing
the kinds of situations that are worth telling stories about.
107
This paper presents an examination of hockey as a cybernetic
system, paying particular attention to the role of narrative. Like
all sports, hockey offers opportunities for individuals to take
part in dramatic situations that would not otherwise occur. As
players, teams, and fans actively engage with these situations,
they produce and consume various kinds of public and private
narrative. These narratives in turn shape subsequent situations
both within and beyond the formal boundaries of the sport.
Through a series of examples from hockey and related games,
this paper examines how narrative emerges in, around, and
among various contexts of hockey gameplay; how this narrative
impacts both ludic and paraludic situations; and how it can
become encoded in the formal structures of the game itself.
Shaping things
108
in exchange for its survival. We may formally define a sport as a
competitive activity, usually but not necessarily involving some
kind of athletic performance, wherein the skill of one player or
team of players is tested, through individual contests or sets of
linked contests, against the skill of one or more other players
or teams of players. More broadly, a sport is a set of rules,
procedures, limits, and traditions that gives rise to specific kinds
of situations, or opportunities to act. Some of these situations
are the direct result of ranging team against team and player
against player, and produce the “beautiful plays” (Lowood, 2013),
strategic blunders, heroic comebacks, gritty campaigns, chokes,
and other sequences we often remember as fans or players. The
interpretation and contextualization of these events play central
roles in whole genres of public and private narrative, from live
commentary and after-the-fact journalistic reportage, to in-
game momentum swings and the autobiographical identity
constructions of individual players and teams. Other situations
are more indirect outgrowths of a sport. These situations can
include everything from a beer league player dealing with an
injury or a “slump,” to fans discussing strategy on the Web, to
Mohawk tribes experiencing changes in power dynamics as the
result of a victory in a game of tewaarathon. Crucially, the
situations and stakes around or “outside” the game can shape the
situations within it, and vice-versa. Known in the parlance of
live action role-playing as “bleed,” this phenomena is common
to all games. As Mia Consalvo notes, “we cannot say that games
are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply.”
Rather, situations of gameplay exist “in addition to, in
competition with, other rules and in relation to multiple
contexts, across varying cultures, and into different groups”
(2009, 416).
109
often very high-tension situations within which to act, and out
of this action, players and fans alike may construct various kinds
of meaning. Put differently, the objectives, rules, players,
mechanics, and dynamics of a sport constitute a shifting field of
breaches and imbalances that is the “[trouble] that provides the
engine of drama” (Bruner, 1991, p. 16; see also, Burke, 1978, p.
330-335). This “trouble” enables kinds of meaning-making that
would not otherwise be possible (or, as in the example of “the
little brother of war,” discussed below, would entail reflection
on very different and much more destructive forms of activity).
As Sartre summarizes, “there is freedom only in a situation, and
there is a situation only through freedom . . . There can be a
free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of
this engagement the notions of freedom, of determination, of
necessity lose all meaning” (1956, p. 621).
110
Further, the greater a sport’s capacity to create drama, the more
“well-played” it will be: that is, the more narrative it will create,
the more widely it will spread, the more formative it will become
to the lives of its players and fans, and the longer it will survive.
We shape our sports and afterwards our sports shape us.
In love, war, and games, danger and risk are the stuff of drama.
It is only when we have something to lose – or, perhaps more
precisely, when we are aware that we have something to lose
– that our actions take on meaning. As is the case with many
sports, hockey places us in situations where both failure and
injury are distinct possibilities. While physical jeopardy is far
from the only source of drama in hockey, any game that involves
the swinging of sticks and the shooting of a projectile necessarily
invokes danger and violence in both its dramaturgical structure
and its broader social function. Indeed, across a multitude of
cultural settings, the histories of territorial stick and ball games
111
like hockey are often explicitly tied to warfare and mortal
combat. The Icelandic game of knattleikr – a 10th century
broomball-like contact sport played on frozen ponds with bats
and a ball – was said to be so violent that deaths would routinely
occur during the course of play. As the Grimkelsson Saga records,
during one game between Strand and Botn, “before dusk, six of
the Strand players lay dead” (Society for International Hockey
Research [SIHR], 2012, p. 23). One of the foundational tales of
the Irish mythological hero Cú Chulainn involves his use of a
hurley (the bat used in hurling, the national sport of Ireland and
a likely ancestor of both field hockey and ice hockey) to shoot
a sliotar (the heavy and compact ball used in hurling, equivalent
to the hockey puck) down the throat of a ferocious hound. The
Mohawk game of tewaarathon, the Choctaw stickball game, and
the Anishinaabe game later known as lacrosse, were highly
ritualized games sometimes used to settle disputes between and
within tribes. So violent were these games that one 18th century
European observer noted, “if one were not told beforehand that
they were playing, one would certainly believe that they were
fighting” (Conover, 1997). Tewaarathon literally means, “little
brother of war.”
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occurs when one team must play “short-handed” (that is, with
one or two fewer players on the ice) for a limited amount of time
due to the assessment of a penalty or penalties. During a power
play, the short-handed team will attempt to gain possession and
“kill” the duration of the penalty either by icing the puck (that
is, by shooting it down the ice so as to waste time, a play that is
legal only when short-handed) or by attempting a weak attack.
However, because possession can be difficult to maintain when
short-handed, penalty-killing teams will often find themselves in
situations wherein the opposing team has control of the puck.
In this case, the short-handed team will tend to collapse toward
the middle of the ice and fall back into their own zone to protect
their goal. The attacking team will then attempt to draw the
defending team out of position by passing the puck around the
perimeter of the offensive zone and by placing their forwards in
front of the defending team’s goalie so as to obstruct (or “screen”)
her view. As they open cracks in the defending team’s defense,
the attacking team will take shots. The very best teams will score
on around 20 percent of their (5-on-4) power play chances
(Sportingcharts.com, 2014).
113
his injury (Beattie, 2013). Nevertheless, as the Penguins
continued to pour on the pressure, Campbell struggled to his
feet and kept playing for over a minute, at one point fearlessly
attempting to block another shot from Penguins defenseman
Kris Letang.
For Boston fans, Campbell’s shot block and heroic (or, depending
on your perspective, insane) refusal to give up on the play became
one of the key moments of the 2013 playoffs, and fed into the
emerging narrative of the Bruins being a tough team looking to
go the distance on grit and hard work. For players, the block
proved to be a crucial turning point in the game – and ultimately
the series. On the Boston bench, Campbell’s sacrifice was a
source of pride that energized the Bruins as they continued their
(ultimately successful) underdog run against the Penguins. As
coach Claude Julien remarked, “when you see a guy go down like
that and the way he went down and what he did . . . the guys
are going to want to rally around that” (McDonald, 2013). Out of
the dramatic situation of a power play, then, emerged a story of
sacrifice and courage that fed into both the Bruins’ own identity
construction processes and the enveloping narratives produced
and shared by fans.
Of course, not all power plays are created equal. The danger
inherent in an NHL playoff game is markedly different from that
in a pee-wee exhibition matchup. However, even in the absence
of the kinds of physical jeopardy described above, power play
situations, like the other situations generated by hockey’s ruleset,
excel at creating drama. For example, power plays can also
produce, amplify, and modulate “scripts” – that is, generic
narrative patterns – that challenge competitors to live up to, or
break with, various expectations. When these expectations are
confirmed or upended, narrative emerges at a variety of scales.
At its most basic level, the power play places the short-handed
team in the position of being outnumbered, and with that
position comes the expectation that they will be scored upon.
114
Likewise, the power play challenges the team with the advantage
to capitalize on a golden opportunity to score. The differential,
or lack of differential, between the expected outcomes associated
with these roles – that is, the drama that unfolds from a situation
wherein the short-handed team is expected to be scored upon
while the team with the advantage is expected to score – can
change the narrative of the game, conferring a psychological
boon to one side or the other. This boon is evocatively referred
to in hockey (and many other sports) as momentum.
Narrative accrual
115
permeable boundaries of the so-called magic circle, identity
processes exterior to the game — such as, for example, a player’s
response to a crisis in her personal life — can impact in-game
performance, and vice-versa.
What holds true for a goaltender holds true for an entire team.
As in all team sports, momentum swings often occur in hockey
as certain narratives take hold, leading to individual and team
identity trajectories that can sometimes spin out of control.
Otherwise excellent teams can have a bad night and suffer a
blowout loss, sometimes leading to multi-game “slumps,” while
mediocre or bad teams can upset stronger competitors and
experience radical turnarounds in performance. In professional
sports, negative team identity narratives can become so
entrenched that management will sometimes find it necessary
to intervene to break the spell, changing personnel or hiring
sports psychologists to inject new scripts into a team’s identity
structure. Some teams, such as the ill-fated Toronto Maple Leafs,
will underperform for decades despite often having reasonably
top-notch rosters thanks in part to what is sometimes described
as a “culture of losing.” Such teams may resort to desperate
measures as they attempt to right the ship. In one notable
incident, Maple Leafs coach Red Kelly installed special pyramid
sculptures in the team’s dressing room and under its bench in
a misguided attempt to refocus psychic energy during a 1976
playoff series (Shoalts, 2013). Of course, such measures tend to
only reinforce a narrative of ineptitude. The Leafs lost that
playoff series, failing to win the Cup as they had each year since
1967. At the time of this writing, despite being the most valuable
team in the National Hockey League — and the 26th most
valuable team in sports worldwide — the Leafs have still yet to
win a championship since their glory days in the late 1960s (Fox,
2014).
116
recreational leagues as they are to the NHL. While the additional
pressure exerted by millions of fans undoubtedly amplifies the
hills and valleys of a team’s narrative topology, the simple facts
of the game having rules, a finite duration, and a quantifiable
and valorized outcome (see Juul, 2003) makes drama inevitable.
A recreational hockey team can choke. A 12 year-old goalie can
get inspired and “stand on her head.” Even I, with my lumbering
gait and bad aim, once, long ago, had a scoring streak. Regardless
of the level of play or its relationship to capital, there is an
undeniable commerce among in-game and across-game
micronarratives and the larger cultural and psychological
contexts of the story of hockey writ large — and of the story of
self. As a child growing up in Canada, it is hard to overestimate
the role playing hockey had in my own bildungsroman: the way I
positioned myself both within it and against it, the way I rejected
it for a time to explore other identities, and the way I have
returned to it in adulthood at least in part in an effort to claim
and understand an aspect of my past.
Encoding
117
What I would like to conclude with is a brief consideration of a
third dimension of narrative as it relates to this feedback loop. If
the dramatic situations of hockey are the source of its emergent
narratives, and if those emergent narratives in turn become
embedded in the experience of playing and watching the game,
redefining future dramatic situations, then we might ask, what
gives rise to hockey in the first place? What gave rise to its rules?
When did hockey begin? These questions address a third
dimension of narrative, a kind of highly-compressed or “lossy”
form – or distillation, or derivative – of narrative we might call
encoded narrative.
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emerged from this branching evolutionary process constitute a
kind of narrative.
Unlike many of the games that may first come to mind to early
21st century videogame fans — I am thinking here of digital
games whose rules are sometimes (at least as of the writing of
these words) literally engraved for all time in optical media —
sports like hockey are constantly changing. The same loop that
can be observed in the relationship between situation and
narrative in a single game can also be seen across multiple games
and seasons, and is in fact integral to the evolving structure
of the game itself. Consider the NHL’s icing rules. During the
1930s, as the financial and social stakes of professional hockey
rose throughout Canada and parts of the United States, teams
began protecting leads by simply shooting the puck down the
ice — a play referred to as “icing.” This tactic would serve the
dual purpose of killing time and reducing the likelihood of being
caught out of position. However, it made for extremely boring
hockey for both fans and players. News reports from the period
describe tedious games where one team would take a lead, then
proceed to ice the puck dozens of times in an attempt to run
down the clock (Klein, 2013). Finally, in 1937, responding to
increasingly urgent complaints from owners, fans, and players,
the league implemented Rule 81, which states in part:
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Rulesets such as the Official Rules of the National Hockey League
(2014) are complex encodings of a multitude of narratives, and
as such become “instruments for assuring historical continuity”
(Bruner, 1991, p. 20). The process of this encoding begins with
the narration of individual events that take place during
gameplay. These narratives become general principles if the
things they describe recur often enough. As these principles
become more widely recognized in the contexts of status,
investment, and attention within which the game exists, they
can become “endowed with privileged status” (Bruner) as new
elements of the tradition. As in the case of the icing rule, if the
general principle amounts to an undesirable game state — from
the player experience perspective, the spectator perspective, the
owner perspective, some other cultural perspective, or a
combination thereof — then a new rule may be created or
applied to change the situational architecture of the game. Thus
amended, the game’s new ruleset will now give rise to new
situations and new narratives, continuing the loop. In the case
of icing, while the added rule could be said to have “patched
an exploit,” it also produced new and extremely dangerous
situations of play. Indeed, some of hockey’s worst injuries were
produced by Rule 81, because, in addition to the passage quoted
above, the rule states:
120
dangerous situations, but it took almost 90 years for the NHL to
do so. Ultimately overwhelmed by the number of cases of serious
injury and the outcry from elements of the players’ union, the
NHL instituted a “hybrid” no-touch icing system for the
2013-2014 season.
Conclusions
121
provide us with additional ways of thinking about games and
storytelling. Storytelling in games has never been exclusively
about what’s “in the game” (pace Electronic Arts) – rather, it is
also, and perhaps most profoundly, about what comes out of the
game, and how that emergence in turn affects the game itself, its
players, and the context within which it exists. This cybernetic
relationship, between the dramatic situations of hockey, the
narratives it produces, and its rules, is at the heart of how a sport
like hockey propagates itself and evolves – that is, it is at the heart
of how hockey gets what hockey wants. And what hockey wants
is to be well-played.
Bibliography
122
identity in professional sport. Qualitative Research in Sport and
Exercise, 1(2), 176–190. doi:10.1080/19398440902909033
Juul, J. (2003). The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for
a Heart of Gameness. In Level Up: Digital Games Research
Conference Proceedings. Utrecht: Utrecht University.
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Digital Games. In M. Consalvo, K. Mitgutsch, & A. Stein (Eds.),
Sports Videogames. Routledge.
124
PART TWO: GAMES
LEARNING SOCIETY
Introduction
127
at war, alongside a narrative for the solo hero’s quest to defeat
Molag Bal, the enemy of all factions. The game has separate
areas for the Player vs. Environment (PvE) and Player vs. Player
(PvP) (please reference Figure 1). The PvE areas are: Ebonheart
Pact – red, Daggerfalls Covenant – blue, and Aldmeri Dominion
– yellow; each Alliance has five areas. Playing PvE leads one
through all 15 areas, providing hundreds of non-person player
(NPC) quests including the hero’s quest line that culminates in
Cold Harbor (not pictured in Figure 1). The PvP area, Cyridill,
shaded green, also has NPC quests but is primarily a massive
game of Capture the Flag with several servers running multiple
Alliance Wars in Cyrodill. The battle for Cyrodiil is fought
among three alliances. When one’s faction dominates an Alliance
War map (Figure 2), players receive a weapon damage bonus for
their characters. Quests can be completed individually or in a
group. Typically, people form groups of four for dungeons (i.e.
an contained area where players cooperatively defeat various
formations of “bad guys”); groups of 12 for timed trial runs
(explained below); the largest group option is 20 and is
commonly formed to run PvP campaigns in Cyrodill.
128
Figure 1. The map illustrates the three PvE areas around the perimeter and the central
province of Cyrodiil, the PvP area. To the north west of Cyrodiil is Craglorn, an area
dedicated to four person group dungeons and 12 person timed trials in dungeons. Online
intearctive map from: (http://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-gb/map/tamriel).
129
Figure 2. Cyrodill, Alliance War: Azura’s Star, dominated by Aldmeri Dominion (note
the yellow).
130
Figure 3. New skill trees are displayed as constellations, similar to Skyrim.
From the time of release in March 2014, there have been five
major updates in addition to the minor patches. The sixth update
is expected in March 2015, which introduces the Justice System,
iterating on Thieves Guild from Skyrim and Oblivion, and the
Champion System, an account-wide character progression,
which is the last phase of the veteran rank redesign. Player’s
options for skill choice will be displayed on Skyrimesque
constellation skill trees (Figure 3, above). In addition, after
finishing the initial quest line within one’s alliance’s region,
players will be free to explore all of the areas in any order. All
dungeons will scale to the player’s ability level rather than the
former loose linear progression through the various areas; it
is expected that this will give players more of the open world
feeling of earlier Elder Scrolls games. In this respect ESO appears
to be the victim of Bethesda’s own success. Updates to ESO
appear to be moving the game closer to the single-player
experience of Skyrim a design-scheme not opposed by players. In
our initial play through of ESO in spring 2014, Eames seemed to
signal the feeling of many players.
Maybe my interest in ESO was doomed from the start. After all, I
was hoping to extract a single-player experience from a massively
131
multiplayer game… I found the presence of so many other players
pulled me out of the immersive experience, especially when I had
to wait for a computer-controlled adversary to come back to life
because another player beat me to it…. I was hoping my experience
was going to open my eyes to the joys of gaming online with new
friends, but so far, that has not been the case. The overriding
emotion I feel when playing ESO is a strong desire to return to my
old stomping grounds in Skyrim. (Eames)
132
gender, character class, voice, and physical appearance. The
choice of one’s race (think species, not ethnicity here) determines
which of the three alliances one’s character belongs to and,
hence, which regional area the player will begin the initial game:
Ebonheart Pact, Daggerfall Covenant, or Aldmeri Dominion.
1. The Elder Scrolls games all begin with the player escaping imprisonment of some form.
133
end-game content for Vet 14s: two 12-person timed trials, and
the four-person Dragon Star Arena (a series of mob and boss
challenges). Since the current Veteran Rank system will be
replaced with the Champion System, we offer this explanation of
what is to come: Dimillian (2014) states that the Championship
system includes some game mechanics similar to other MMOs
such as Diablo’s paragon system for leveling and World of
Warcraft’s experience bonus for players. This is example of how
the developers are continually redesigning the player experience
in response to player feedback.
2. Instanced dungeons are where the game creates a unique, closed copy of the dungeon for
each group running the dungeon.
3. When a quest has multiple parts, the NPCs must respond according to the progression of
the narrative, so two people might be in different “phases” of the quest and thus not able to
see one another until they get to the same point in the progression of the quest.
134
quests have difficult bosses and mobs that make duo questing
more efficient and quick. Dungeons are best defeated with a
group that has a healer, tank (one who keeps the boss focused on
them while others attack), and two damage-dealers. This same
group dynamic is used for the 12-person timed trials and the
four-person Dragon Star Arena area.
Once past level 10, PvP players can travel to Cyrodiil to join
a tumultuous battle for the heart of Tamriel. Many who play
PvP form groups and employ military style tactics for siege and
defense. Players may purchase medieval siege warfare equipment
and kits for repairing the holds. This opens up a new skill line,
achievements, and point system for advancement. Some are in
pursuit of the Emperorship. One becomes Emperor by having
the most alliance points within your alliance and when that
alliance controls all six keeps around the Imperial City.
Even though all players are choosing from among the same skills,
potions, and armor and character-build options, one is playing
against other players who are also calculating how to create the
best character build. Unlike NPC characters, characters
controlled by players can be calculating and unpredictable. It
requires a more concerted effort to monitor how other players
135
are building their characters. This sets up a cycle for people to
develop and try new character builds and strategies in order
to be competitive in an evolving game, especially as new game
updates influence how specific skills function. Many people have
armor sets and skill sets they use for specific kinds of game play
such as PvP or filling the roles in a four-person dungeon, (please
see discussion of dungeons below). Some people build more than
one character in order to better facilitate specific game play.
136
Figure 4. Neon Grind’s home page. From here, players can see all of the member’s names,
ranks, when they last played and basic character information as well as guild activity
(see Figure 5).
137
Figure 5. Two guilds activity logs. Neon Grind’s activity log shows who sold what to
whom and for how much. Epic Synergy’s shows the guild’s Alliance War activity.
There are six crafting skill lines that require collecting, sorting,
and storing of materials which supports developing those skills,
some of which are very complex: provisioning, enchanting,
alchemy, woodworking, blacksmithing, and clothing (Figure 6
below). To gain experience (up to level 50) one either breaks
down items or crafts them. For crafting items in the
Woodworking, Clothing, and Blacksmith skill lines one must
research traits such as durability or increased armor that can be
added to crafted items. Placing an item in a research slot begins
138
a timer and when the research is complete up you have learned
how a particular trait. These traits can then be added to your
crafting of clothing or weapons. It takes anywhere from six hours
to a month of real time for an item to be researched.
Figure 6. Crafting in the Alchemy skill line (pictured left) and the Enchanting skill line
(pictured right). Each offers the player several options to discover different potions. With
alchemy and enchanting, one must make something to determine the properties and then
try various combinations.
139
MOOS they’ve played. It is difficult to say why that is, but
Aubrecht suggests it could be the variety of gaming options,
realistic environments, character creation, and a complex
narrative. For fans of the Elder Scrolls series, ESO is a well-
played game that brings a generous helping of the series’ lore that
provides it a much richer narrative than other MMOs.
Figure 7. ESO game environment (left) and Aubrecht’s Khajiit character (right).
Facilitating Cooperation
140
are in the same space, attempting the same goals. For example,
every area has a few world bosses and dolmans, both of which
are meant to be fought with a group. In addition, each area has
a public dungeon with a group challenge boss. In these spaces,
people are more likely to cooperate or form pick-up-groups
because they are designed for players cooperating to defeat
various mobs and bosses.
141
once completing the initial training area of the game are tied to
that specific faction.4
4. Players who purchase the Imperial Edition may select from any of the nine races when
creating their characters and join the Alliance of their choice.
142
attempt to balance this as ESO moves to a free-to-play model.
Yet where the game may face challenges in the single-player
experience as an MMO, it does make interesting choices in
grouping.
143
Kuhn is a veteran MMO player who, perhaps against the trend,
has never joined a guild in any MMO. This play style choice in
previous MMOs has meant that most end-game content stays
out of reach. Kuhn played solo in previous MMOs which often
meant he lacked the guild support to run dungeons, which
require a minimum of 5 players. In order to experience end-
game content he would run dungeons only after the level cap
had been raised through game expansion. For example, running
Wrath of the Lich King dungeons in World of Warcraft, only after
the Mists of Pandaria expansion had been released. The increased
level cap meant Kuhn would have the damage capabilities to run
older dungeons solo. While an unorthodox style of play, ESO
takes the unusual design approach of accommodating it. The
designers have included dungeon types to engage single players.
The traditional group-centered dungeons adhere to standard
MMO conventions, however the solo and public dungeons take a
different tack. Public dungeons are more akin to adventure zones
where all players can run the dungeon, choosing to group at on
the fly. Personal dungeons allow individual players to solo level-
appropriate dungeons as well. This design choice has allowed
Kuhn to run instances in step with leveling in the game as
opposed to a level-up then backtrack approach that he needed to
implement in previous MMOs.
Economy of Participation
Players not in guilds are able to play all end-game and instance
content in ESO but could find themselves marginalized in the
economy. Individual players are able to buy and trade through
chat window advertising or selling items to NPC vendors that
function as gold sinks5, and interact with NPC guild traders.
However, the economic engine of the game relies on player
participation in trading guilds. One need not be in a trading guild
5. Gold sinks remove excess gold or rare items to keep value in the economy. Items of
significant value or rarity may only be sold to vendors to remove them from the economy as
opposed to being passed from player to player.
144
to buy, but must be to sell. The game actively encourages players
to join multiple guilds, up to five, in order to maximize their
trading profits and access to goods. Zenimax, the designers of
ESO, has decided to eschew the standard auction house model
of game economy, opting instead for guild stores. Each guild of
fifty players or more can operate a guild store where members
post items for direct sale; item bidding is not allowed. Should
the number of guild members drop below fifty all current
transactions will be honored but after that the guild store will
be shuttered. As the game matures unique guilds could develop
tremendous power via public trading akin to the Elder Scroll’s
series East Empire Trading Company.
145
Figure 8. In all guilds with 50 members or more, there is an option to buy and sell items
to members and in some cases, through NPC guild traders. Filters displayed above allow
one to search for desired items. One must set a price and pay a portion of the proceeds to
the guild for using this mechanism to sell items.
146
Glyphs made by others can be broken down to level up more
quickly in the enchantment crafting skill line.
6. Originally the cost was 100 gold, making it much more costly to rebuild one’s character.
The cost was reduced during one of the early updates.
147
Skill Point Source # of Skill Points
Sky Shards (336) 112
Leveling 50
Alliance War Ranks 50
Zone Quest Lines 48
Group Dungeon Quests 16
Public Dungeons 16
Main Story Quests 10
Total 302
148
Figure 9. Gathering a Sky Shard.
Guilds in ESO
149
trials. This is the same as with World of Warcraft, Diablo, and
other games where groups can play together online. Some guilds
have a long history, dating back to games such as Everquest.
These groups usually have guild websites and support members
in multiple MMOs. Some guilds have websites, a process for
joining, provide newsletters, and have team meetings. Guilds
communicate in multiple ways, using out-of-game online talk
channels such as TeamSpeak for discussions and coordinating
group efforts and some just rely on in-game text chatting. Some
guilds have been around for a long time and their members play
other MMOs. Some guilds are specific to ESO.
150
Figure 10. Player-directed guild ranks. Guilds choose the way to describe or identify the
ranks of members. Stormcloak Rebellion is a werewolf-focused group, whereas Neon uses
rank names that signify various sorts of killers reminiscent of Skyrim’s Assassins Guild.
Each rank is allotted permissions selected by the guild master.
151
of materials required for crafting, Aubrecht views guilds as
indispensable for crafters since guild banks can hold up to 500
materials, whereas individual banks hold only 60 items.
However, additional space can be acquired by upgrading one’s
inventory space by spending in-game currency.
Crafting and sharing items is much easier when you join with
others. Aubrecht regularly makes crafted items for people in her
guilds. They help her by providing materials, or likewise crafting
things she hasn’t progressed far enough to make for herself. For
example, one guild member gave her a Daedric Motif book that
could be sold for up to 40,000 gold. Aubrecht regularly gives
him fishing bait. While the exchange might not be financially
equal, there are other economies at play such as time and in game
play styles. Searching for items and finding rare things can be
its own reward. For example, it is rare to find Columbine, an
alchemy flower that is necessary for crafting a Panacea potion
that supports health, magicka, and stamina. Likewise, food
recipes for buffs in two or three areas (magicka and stamina, for
example) always require one material that is hard to find, such as
pepper. This game mechanic is a reward structure compellingly
designed to keep players on the edge of searching without
tipping them to despair so that they give up searching every
nightstand, barrel, crate, and fishing hole (Chatfield, 2010)
After playing ESO for nearly a year, I have found a few guilds that I
enjoy. Within these guilds, I’ve met people who have given me great
advice, helped me further my crafting, and with whom I’ve shared
crafted items and armor. I currently have a small group which
152
whom I meet regularly and run dungeons. One friend, Razor and I
have been playing together since the summer. The guild where we
first started playing is mostly defunct, but we found new guilds to
join. Initially, we did a lot of questing together. Because Razor and
I have a similar attitude toward playing ESO, our playing together
led me to realize what those who have played other MMOs have
known for a long time, which is, when one is part of any group,
success depends upon the character’s class skills one can contribute
in addition to the execution of those skills. As we quested together,
we were able to essentially expand or double our skill sets. Meaning,
each player has five skills to access, plus an ultimate ability. When
one reaches level 15, a secondary skill bar is accessible giving
players 10 slottable skills and 2 ultimates. At the time, Razor played
his Night Blade and me, my Dragon Knight. Each has different
class skills. Together we used those skills to the benefit of both.
Since neither of us had played MMOs before, nor been part of a
guild, we didn’t realize that by supporting one another, we were
really learning how to play roles necessary for group dungeons.
(Aubrecht)
153
character and economic development. In essence, this is about
forced interactions that result from a game support-driven
environment versus one that is player-driven. Gillispie explained
further that in other MMOs, unlike ESO, an icon floated above
player’s heads that represented their guild. Guilds built
recognized and valued reputations and letting people know
about it was a source of pride. Seann Dikkers (personal
communication, 2014) concurred with Gillispie’s point that as
solo play is made easier and there are fewer barriers to entry,
aspects of cooperative play have changed. Dikkers argues that
automated LFGs and pick-up groups have lessened the need for
guild support. Meanwhile in-game scheduling, shorter raids, and
the ability to server jump have reduced the need for out-of-
game communication for MMOs. While these changes to the
traditional mechanics of guilds have been found wanting by
veteran MMO players, they have allowed for newer players to
benefit from guild support faster and with a quicker learning
curve.
Conclusion
154
The ESO community is in the process of defining and growing
itself as players navigate the space, form communities, and find
ways to do what they desire within the created system. The exact
number of players is unknown; various estimates found online
in August 2014 range from 800,000 to 3 million. Aubrecht’s
experience in game is that the user population is somewhat fluid
ranging from people trying it and leaving and to those who stay
and love it; and now, with the forthcoming update in March,
returning to try it again. With the myriad MMOs available,
people are able to find a game that appeals to their specific tastes
for the overall scenario and player options. If you like medieval
structures and a rich environment, ESO might be a good fit.
Classroom Applications
155
amounts of information, using time-tested reading strategies to
analyze and comprehend new types of media is especially
important. “The same techniques we teach students to utilize
when reading novels and informational texts can easily be
applied, as they take notes, make connections, ask questions, and
make predictions” (Gilliespie, 2014, personal communication).
The MMO has the added benefit of being highly engaging for
many students, especially those who already enjoy gaming as a
hobby. In addition to the curriculum guide, they made teacher
professional development movies. Please find resources and
curriculum download of WoW in School – A Hero’s Journey here
http://wowinschool.pbworks.com/w/page/5268731/
FrontPage.
References
156
ACTING IN THE LIGHT AND ON FAYTH:
RITUALIZED PLAY IN JOURNEY AND FINAL
FANTASY X
157
Playing games well is to do so in the context of the separate form
of reality that are games, or “performances, like works of art…
belonging to some special sphere of human activity which clearly
lies outside the normal reality of day-to-day living” (p. xxiii).
Games are not reality, yet as an artistic medium, they reflect
it, and “what unites them with the totality of experience is not
just their metaphorical quality but the manner in which they are
played” (p. xxiii). Thus, to play a game well, one acts with focus
and seriousness but with a spirit of immaterial exploration, both
drives in such balance with one another as to obtain excellence
in goals that satisfy the player far beyond the boundaries of the
game.
158
otherwise (Eliade, 1959). Actions within those boundaries are the
domain of ritual, which, as described by cultural anthropologist
Victor Turner, is not just a formulaic series of actions, but rather
a deliberate performance that, through prescribed or goal-
oriented actions in a specific context, transforms the
participating individuals or group if performed well (see 1982,
1985). Ritual, due to its role in the establishment of the sacred
and the profane, has consequences far beyond the actions
themselves, again mirroring the serious yet immaterial
exploration of play.
159
with text and speech, and was created by a massive and famous
Japanese development team (Squaresoft, 2001). The named
world varies in terrain as much as the large cast varies in
background, motivations, and personalities. The two games
afford different focuses, but each is one of the most compelling
examples yet of video games’ potential as spheres of religious
experience.
For video games, and in many ways for ritual, content necessarily
follows form, but form is often tied inextricably to content
through mechanics, or as specified by James Paul Gee (2012), “all
that a player must do or decide in order to succeed” (p. xvii).
To better analyze the full experience of my case studies, I draw
upon Drew Davidson’s (2011) stages of involvement, immersion,
and investment, which will also be used for presenting ritual
practices.
To Act: Involvement
160
focusing involvement around the utility and enjoyability of the
actions themselves.
161
Figure 1. Movement instructions in Journey.
162
Figure 2. Battle system of Final Fantasy X.
To Explore: Immersion
163
The absence of text in Journey highlights the power of its
audiovisual presentation. Light is the most important visual
element; its shifts in color and saturation mark the player’s
progression and the game’s tone. Early in the game, the desert
dunes shimmer in warm, pastel colors that encourage the player
to explore. Later, the cool blues of a dark cave give the
impression that the figure is underwater, softly gliding through
the air while jellyfish-like creatures beckon the player onwards.
Near the end, the light fades into a deep gray as frost overtakes
the figure, who is no longer able to fly. Each alteration of the light
brings one of sound. The music is carefully composed and played
back to enhance the affect evoked by the light and the player’s
interaction with it. The player can further interact with light
and sound by emitting a communicative glowing glyph that is
accompanied by a chirp, which can be reciprocated by animated
cloth pieces that are found throughout the game. These cloth
pieces help the player navigate the ubiquitous ruined
architecture (see Figure 3). Although these ruins are not fully
explained, part of Journey’s efficacy is that its world is not
otherwise alien. The connections between the ruins’ sandstone
buildings and Mughal Indian palaces, the complex geometric
patterns in the windows and Iranian mosques (see Figure 4), and
between the communicative glyphs and kufic script (an Islamic
tradition of imbuing Koranic phrases with precious materials
in a deliberate calligraphic style; see Figure 5) lend Journey the
cultural associations of their real-world counterparts, especially
from the practices of Sufism, a mystical, esoteric Islamic sect
practiced amongst architecture similar to that cited above. These
associations are those of the sacred and otherworldly, and as
Journey’s world is built around them, the player is primed to
explore Journey much as one would act within sacred space.
164
Figure 3. Architecture in Journey.
165
Figure 5. Comparison: Left, Journey script. Right, kufic script from Beysehir, Turkey.
1. The visual comparisons between real-world ancient and modern scripts and the in-game
text run quite deep, as one player explored in an online blog. The sources are difficult to
verify, but the writer contributed intriguing connections with abundant evidence from the
game. See Helluin. (n.d.) Final Fantasy X symbols and glyphs. Squidoo. Retrieved from
http://www.squidoo.com/final-fantasy-x-symbols-glyphs
166
cathedrals (see Figure 6), while the runes resemble a classical
Sanskrit script used in several Japanese and Indian Buddhist
traditions that invoke deities through their Sanskrit initials
(Bogel, 2002, p. 49; see Figure 7). These Spiran temples are thus
digital reproductions of sacred space in the real world, including
how the characters interact with that space. The sacrality of
other spaces in FFX is fluid, which is also congruent with real
sacred space. That is, other spaces can be made sacred by the
actions, the rituals, of those entrusted with the temples’ sacrality,
namely the summoners. Summoners are clerics who undertake
pilgrimages to purge the world of Sin, the massively deadly
manifestation of Spira’s past transgressions. The main cast of
FFX is one such summoner and her companions, the guardians
that provide emotional support and physical protection during
summoners’ pilgrimages. Thus, a large portion of the game
features the main characters traveling from one sacred location
to the next, performing rituals along the way.
167
Figure 7. Comparison: Left, Glyph of Macalania Temple in Final Fantasy X. Right,
Japanese Buddhist seed syllable mandala.
168
overarching narrative of a place or object or action, a concept to
which I will turn next.
To Transform: Investment
169
In Journey, the narrative at first is no more than the presence
of a mountain that lies in the distance, yet seemingly within
reach. It is set as a vague but inarguable goal immediately and
remains always before the player as he or she continues through
the game. At one point nearly halfway through the game, the
player finds his or her avatar surfing down a billowing slope of
sand. This segment employs a control scheme that is related to
but controls slightly differently than the rest of the game, due to
the nearly constant downwards momentum. Like the rest of the
game, the player can move left to right, jump into the air, and
emit conversational chirps, all of which are easily discoverable
as the figure slides and the involvement stage is again set and
concluded. Here the setting sun blazes across the ruddy sand,
filling the screen with a fiery, glistening gold that overwhelms
nearly everything in sight, excepting the mountain and the
silhouette of the figure. This immersion feels nearly literal,
bathing the player in the golden sunlight and melting away any
complexity of control as the figure surfs onwards. The narrative
in this passage is subtle, balanced on those controls and the
game’s forced camera perspective. The figure surfs down the
sun-drenched dunes to two cliffs. At the first cliff, the player is
merely pushing the figure via the analog stick towards the cliff.
At the edge, any jump or even inaction catapults the figure up
and forwards, aligning its silhouette with that of the mountain.
The figure drifts slowly down from the cliff edge, surrounded
by fluttering, butterfly-like cloth pieces. After a short, simple
environmental puzzle, the player is lifted up again to another
cliff, and the surfing continues. The exhilaration from the simply
controlled but symbolically powerful jump from the first cliff
primes the player for the second one. However, at this second
cliff, the jump does not take off, despite the player’s attempt to
mimic the first one. The figure falls downwards with the player’s
sudden loss of agency (see Figure 9). The mountain quickly rises
out of sight, and the bright gold and red tones fade away into a
cool blue surrounded by darkness.
170
Figure 9. Falling away from the mountain of Journey.
This passage not only shows off the impressive visual design
of the game, but it also highlights Journey’s potent non-verbal
storytelling. Instead of being told that something has gone
wrong, the player feels it. There is a shift in the control’s
responsiveness and thus player agency that abruptly ends the
positive feelings connected to the surfing and the presence of
the mountain. That shift in both mechanics and audiovisual tone
spurs the player onwards towards the restoration and resolution
of the serenity established in the early parts of the game. Yet,
from then on, the player’s further actions are tempered by the
trepidation elicited by the controls’ momentary failure and the
newly established possibility of further failures.
171
a world one thousand years in Tidus’s future. Due to his
displacement, Tidus finds himself outside of Spiran society and
confused by its customs. These “social facts,” or as defined by
seminal sociologist Émile Durkheim (1895), “ways of acting,
thinking, and feeling that present the noteworthy property of
existing outside the individual consciousness,” are “endowed
with coercive power… independent of [the] individual will” (p.
2). However, he befriends an island villager named Wakka, who
helps Tidus adjust to these customs (see Figure 10). Wakka is
in a particular position to do so as the guardian of a budding
summoner. Tidus is completely and controversially unaware of
the teachings of Yevon, the god or institution (not to be made
clear until much later in the game) that is the heartbeat of Spiran
society. Wakka sends Tidus to the village temple to learn more
about Yevon; however, here Tidus transgresses against the
customs he has come to learn. Wakka’s novice summoner has not
emerged from a what can be a dangerous ritual in the depths
of the temple. Rather than respecting the taboo (that is, a
prohibition that preserves social facts and sacrality; see
Durkheim, 1912) of entering the temple’s deeper chambers,
Tidus forces his way in to lend help to the summoner. Here he
encounters the Cloister of Trials, an environmental puzzle that
the player must solve for Tidus to advance. Here the player’s
focus shifts from combat management to the manipulation of
magical spheres that can open doors and unlock objects within
the Cloister. The completion of the Cloister seems to be a
purification ritual; it is only through the psychosomatic actions
taken and decisions made that Tidus (and thus the player) and
other characters can proceed to the inner sanctuaries of the
temple. The Cloister separates the profane world outside the
temple from that which is held most sacred, including in this case
the summoner herself, who Tidus reaches after completing the
Cloister as she did before him. Thus, the narrative in FFX has a
strong effect on both the player’s actions and the space in which
172
they occur, which is made especially apparent in this passage of
the game
The two different ways in which Journey and FFX explore the
relationship between actions, space, and narrative are similar
to those used by various religious traditions. Referring again
to medieval Christian pilgrimage and Hindu puja, the actions
taken by practitioners and the sacralization of the relevant spaces
would make little sense without the conceits upon which they
are built. These traditions are somewhat more explicit, but some,
like the practice of zazen or sitting meditation in Zen Buddhism,
suggest that ritual can occur everywhere, making anywhere
sacred with or without a determinable narrative cause (see
Suzuki, 2003). Ritual, space, and narrative are all still connected,
but with far less specificity and far more fluidity.
Conclusions
173
exercise in understanding the similarities between such versions
and thus what emerges as the most important throughout such
systems. In this case, the comparison of ritual practices and game
design is an unusual but fruitful one. Religion is one of the keys
areas of humanistic research and has been for as long as such
research has existed. In contrast, games studies is a much newer
branch that is quickly rising to meet a large part of today’s
popular culture. By relating established humanistic fields such
as religion or art history to game studies, the popular cultures
represented by games and play are taken seriously, and through
using established humanistic methodologies like those within
comparative studies, this new medium can be “read”
appropriately and effectively for an accurate (and thus applicable)
understanding of contemporary human experience.
174
References
Brown, P. (1981). The cult of saints: Its rise and function in Latin
Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
175
Gee, J. P. (2005). Learning by design: Good video games as
learning machines. ELearning (2.1), 5-16.
Suzuki, S. (2003). Not always so. (E.E. Brown, Ed.). New York:
HarperCollins.
Figures
176
TheGameFanaticsTV (Uploader). (June 30, 2011). “Journey 20
minute game session” [Youtube video]. Retrieved April 29, 2013,
from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH5pnb_uotY.
177
2012, from: http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/8/8e/
Glyph_-_Macalania.jpg
Acknowledgments
Thank you to many for the continued life of this work, but most
especially for this iteration to Caro Williams, Sean Seyler, Barrett
Caldwell, Simon Mortimore, and Shanta Hartsough.
178
WELL PLAYED & WELL WATCHED: DOTA 2,
SPECTATORSHIP, AND ESPORTS
CHRIS GEORGEN
Indiana University
[email protected]
Introduction
179
the potential implications of both? Dota 2 presents a complexity
that begs further study as a space for play and learning in the
one of the most socially-negotiated and economically significant
game genres. Here, I will discuss how the emergence of live
streaming and the new framing of these games as “eSports” work
in partnership with play, providing new opportunities for
engagement with Dota 2 and similar communities of media
engagement.
Participatory Spectatorship
180
Championship, have an unquestionable influence on participation
in the complex media spaces that surround play. Last year’s
international championship, The International 4, was the biggest
event in the history of eSports. Sixteen teams from around the
world competed for a prize pool of nearly 11 million US dollars.
Over the course of the event, The International 4 was streamed
live to over 39 million viewers via Twitch.tv and traditional
sports distribution channels, including ESPN.
181
for productive game demos (e.g., the hiring of Kim Swift, based
on Narbacular Drop, leading to Portal). In both instances, Valve
purchased the intellectual property and hired the developers of
the original modifications to lead the new franchises. While in
the case of DOTA to Dota 2, there has been some degree of legal
contention with Activision Blizzard over the appropriation of
the name “DOTA” (hence Valve’s subtle change of title away from
the “DOTA” acronym to “Dota”).
182
Figure 1. A depiction of the
prototypical MOBA map.
eSports
I see the recent rise of the “eSport” – digital video games that
are played professionally, with LAN tournaments, corporate
sponsorships, and lucrative prize pools – in digital gaming
communities as worthy of deeper investigation. While
competitive games and even professional competitive gaming
(Taylor, 2012) have been a staple of the digital gaming world
for some time now (e.g., Quake, StarCraft), the emergence of the
MOBA and the related rise of streaming services (e.g., Twitch.tv)
have introduced these games to millions of new players. In 2014,
Dota 2 had a total prize pool of nearly 17 million US dollars.
Moreover, the growth in popularity of eSports can be seen
183
through its rise as a form of public, internet-streamed
performance — professional and amateur games from across
the globe are streamed live on Valve’s Dota 2 interface or via
online streaming services, such as Twitch.tv. Twitch (the premier
gaming live streaming service) has reported that Dota 2
viewership has seen an increase in minutes watch at a growth
rate of 508% (Morris, 2013).
184
Image 1. Day one of The International 4 in KeyArena, Seattle, WA
185
The Noob Stream
186
Image 2. Gameplay during The International 4
187
2, reflecting lessons learned and interpreted through watching
competitive gameplay.
I would also argue that, for some players, the viewing of Dota
2 streams presents opportunities for cognitive apprenticeship
(Brown, Collins, & Newman, 1989) at a distance. For novice
player watching a complex game, eSports brings game
mechanics, technical skills, and expert strategies to the forefront,
a level of perception that in other gaming situations may require
hundreds – if not thousands – of hours of practical experience.
In this form, Dota 2 is modeled in real-time and in real-world
(albeit digital) situations, allowing new players to observe Dota
2 as spectators and later enact learned skills and practice in the
form of play. Cognitive apprenticeship at a distance, in the form
of participatory spectatorship, again reinforces that
spectatorship and play are active processes in these media spaces,
and that learning and cognition are situated in a particularly
performative form of gameplay.
188
Conclusion
189
References
190
technology for active spectator experiences at sporting events.
In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human
Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-
Human Interaction (pp. 96-103). ACM.
191
MAGIC THE GATHERING: A LEARNING GAME
DESIGNER’S PERSPECTIVE
DAN NORTON
Introduction
Who am I?
192
hammer on the problems and opportunities of designing games
that are about teaching something in particular. I am also a
lifelong game player, which while far from interesting, is relevant
in the sense that out of all the games I’ve played, Magic has
offered something fairly unique as a played experience, and
hopefully worth articulating.
Once you have chosen the cards for your deck, you take turns
with your opponent playing and activating your cards for the
purpose of destroying them. Some cards are subtle, some cards
are direct, and some cards only reveal their power when paired
with other cards. Finding and exploiting interesting interactions
between cards is one of the joys of the game.
193
them to get started. Some were seasoned Magic veterans (the
game is twenty years old at this point, with new cards coming out
every year), and some were rookies, like myself.
I’ve played Magic for several months now, including the hosting
of some friendly office tournaments. In the world of Magic
players, some people have been playing for decades. I’m by no
standard of anyone an advanced Magic Player, but even now I
feel like I’ve gotten a lot of benefit from my short time with it.
Hopefully the things I’ve learned are of interest to the broader
game development and design community.
194
That’s just one of the countless shifts in rules that take
place over 10,000 different cards, the combinations of
which are simply staggering.
195
winning strategy will change how you decide to use your cards
that support building up your graveyard.
196
does all other good design. Players can conceive of combinations
of strategy that can create local revolutions or arms races
amongst peer players, and players can even go so far as to create
decks to specifically counter other player’s decks.
Players will find that the more they play and test their decks,
they’ll see that their core strategies form a “narrative”, or a story
that they want the deck to tell. My deck of small relentless
soldiers feels, to me, like a raiding army pouring onto the
battlefield. My opponents deck might be a dangerous cabal of
sorcerors looking for ways to wipe out my units in sudden large
attacks. The stories inform deck design, which then informs the
narrative again, creating a loop.
197
An interesting sub-component of this narrative element is that
players can generate ideas that aren’t even focused necessarily
on winning, but instead attempt to do something purely creative
and/or entertaining. Some quick examples are a “Wizard of Oz”
deck composed only of lions, tigers and bears (Oh my!) or a
whimsical deck I’m currently putting together called “Have a
Goat”. Decks like these are certainly not necessarily competitive
(but conceivably could be), but the creation of them is still an
interesting exercise in design and teaches players more about the
structure and system of magic while reinforcing their sense of
creative agency.
198
playable cards (cards that aren’t frivolous or banned outright). A
player is allowed to construct their deck in most forms of play
in a deck size of roughly 40-60 cards, usually with a suggested
minimum or maximum cap, depending on the type of play.
Constraining players into even focusing only on contemporary
cards still gives the player a very large possibility pool to choose
from (about 1000 cards).
199
though, that problem space is turned into a rule-set with a
constrainable (and understandable) outcome. While this makes
for a “knowable” (and thus assessable) terrain for players to
master, quite often in the real world problems are vastly more
messy. Magic is simultaneously gigantic AND intricate, and
offers a problem with enough “mess” that players are often
pushing the edge of what they think is possible, rather than just
fulfilling a rote concept.
Play is Expression
200
essentially boil down into three essential categories of style for
players: players who play to experience, players to play to
achieve, and players who play to express. The subdivisions of
these playstyles inform the development of cards and in turn
inform options for players in deck construction in terms of how
they play, and how they define mastery.
Play is Prototyping
201
might be improved (“Your deck is too low on mana, pull out
some of those fliers to make room”) or whether it was simply a
mismatch of strategy that led to the outcome (“don’t feel bad, my
deck is designed to chew slow decks like yours”).
Play is Debate
202
It’s worth noting that at the GLS presentation I gave on this
topic, I was approached by a professional Magic player who
pointed out that at a certain level of competency, debate is very
rarely part of play, as both players are skilled enough in the rules
to have very few, if any points of contention. But I’d say that
as a component of scaffolding in Magic, debate is an important
part of the mastery trajectory, and in many situations even a fun
element of the play cycle.
Play is Experimentation
The same amount of creative freedom that makes room for decks
like“Lions, Tigers and Bears” could also be bent towards creative
problem solving spaces with learning objectives. Spaces like
design thinking, systems creation or collaboration benefit from
play structures that focus less on fixed “victory” or “loss”
conditions as the only measurement of success. If you can create
learning-objective-parallel systems of creation and
experimentation in your game, you’ll have made a compelling
“safe space” for deep systems learning. For example, if you’ve
made an engineering game that let’s players create unique
machines to solve problems, testing to make sure that players are
able to make widely varied machines that solve the problem in
different ways will help ensure that the problem space is large
enough for players to think of themselves as legitimate problem
solving engineers.
203
How Can These Design Goals be Actionable?
204
depth to give players the freedom to subvert inside the rules
creates a whole new tier of agency and empowerment.
References
205
FOR THE RECORDS – UNDERSTANDING
MENTAL ILLNESS THROUGH METAPHORICAL
GAMES
DORIS C. RUSCH
DePaul University
243 S. Wabash
Chicago, IL 60604
[email protected]
Abstract
206
of our collaborations with people who have lived experience
with the portrayed disorders, how we identified the metaphors
to capture what these disorders “feel like”, as well as an account
of our playtesters’ gameplay experiences, particularly in regard
to cognitive and emotional game comprehension.
Introduction
207
film. Pre-production and development of games and films
spanned Summer 2013 to Spring 2014.
The four For the Records games are: Into Darkness (OCD); It’s for
the Best (ADD); FLUCTuation (bipolar disorder); and Perfection
(eating disorder). The following starts off by sharing the four
game synopses. Then, the discussion will be split into two parts:
the first part is concerned with the question whether the games
have been well designed. By that we mean how well they reflect
the portrayed disorders with the games’ rules, mechanics and
fictional components. We will explore the roles of our subject
matter experts in each of the games before going into detail
about how we identified and implemented the core metaphor for
a single game, FLUCTuation. The second part of the paper focuses
on insights gained from playtesting about players’ experiences of
playing the games, and how those playtesting results informed
design iterations as well as our contextual considerations for
how to integrate the games into the bigger For the Records website
in order to promote game comprehension and post-game
reflection.
Game Synopses
208
representation of the disorder itself. As the player aims to find
the exit (i.e., leave the disorder behind), darkness encroaches
from all sides accompanied by scary music. Performing a ritual
– walking in circles several times by pressing the arrow keys
– staves off the darkness. This provides temporary relief from
anxiety, but at the same time prevents the maze’s exit from
appearing. This models one of the core conflicts of OCD: the
desire to escape the compulsion, but dreading the anxiety that
comes with it. Once the player resists the compulsion to perform
the ritual, an exit appears, allowing the player to escape and win
the game. OCD is a mental illness that can be overcome, which
is why this game has a win state. Other mental issues, such as
ADD or Bipolar Disorder can be effectively dealt with, but the
affliction will always remain, which is why the games tackling
these experiences have no win state.
209
considered “not a big deal” as far as mental health issues go. This
under-acknowledges the troubling feelings of worthlessness
ADD can bring with it and the self-doubt that accompanies the
need for medication to function. By modeling the ADD
experience, the game aims to promote a mindful way of
communicating the need for medication to ADD patients. In
the game, players try to keep up with assignments represented
by papers that flutter onto the screen with increasing speed.
Clicking on papers makes them disappear and is accompanied
by a satisfying sound effect, but the onslaught of papers is so
heavy that one cannot possibly keep up. Unfinished assignments
start to pile up in the background and to clutter up the screen.
Choosing to click the pill featured prominently in the middle of
the screen clears off the papers, but diminishes the experience of
agency and self-reliance. The game is accompanied by unnerving
whispers of “you’re not good enough”. The experience ends after
a certain in-game date has been reached. There is no win state,
since ADD is a life-long disorder that can only be dealt with but
not “won”.
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alienation from loved ones. The game consists of three phases
that have been modeled after three phrases our subject matter
expert used to capture his experience with the different states of
the disorder:
Phase I: The onset of mania: “Why can’t they [e.g. friends] keep
up?” This phase is briefly represented by an introductory party
scene in which the player character starts out as “the heart of the
party” who is first imitated by others, but then shoots off through
the ceiling into the sky, leaving everyone else behind.
Phase II: Mania: (Fig. 3) “It feels like architecting a divine plan.
Everything is in sync and coming together in perfect unison”.
This phase has been implemented as a platformer in which the
player character is catapulted higher and higher up by jumping
onto glass platforms that shatter underneath his feet. The
shattering glass represents the damage done due to bad decisions
made in mania (e.g., irresponsible relations, overspending, etc.).
Some platforms carry people. Jumping on those platforms is
accompanied by rainbow sparkles, representing the intense
gratification of social interactions during mania, but also the
potential damage done to the people one interacts with in that
state. Game control decreases over time. Simultaneously, a
fractal image grows in the background, which represents the
feeling of being part of a bigger whole. Mania ends suddenly and
plunges the player into depression.
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Phase III: Depression: (Fig. 4) “It feels like wading through mud,
lost in the company of others.” The player finds herself in the
deep, dark ocean of depression, where the broken shards from
the manic phase platforms conglomerate to block her path to
the surface. The player’s agency is restricted to painfully slow
up, left and right movement (like wading through mud). The
people positioned to the sides of the screen send out lights that
gravitate towards the player character. These lights stand for
well-meant but overwhelming questions such as “How can I help
you?” A depth meter shoes how far one is from the surface,
but it is unreliable and cannot be trusted. There is no way of
knowing when depression will be over. This last phase of the
game transitions into an ending cut scene that represents the end
of a manic-depressive cycle and return to normality. Each part
of the game is timed to decouple it from player skill. It does not
have a win state, since bipolar disorder can only be managed, not
“won”.
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Perfection (Fig. 5) (http://fortherecords.org/perfection.html) is a
game about the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, a phenomenon
that is often highly incomprehensible to people without first
hand experience and freight with misconceptions (e.g., persons
with anorexia do not eat simply to look better). It aims to align
the player’s mindset with that of a person with anorexia by
suggesting a (false) win state (i.e., perfection) whose pursuit has
devastating side-effects. The game’s core metaphor is the body
as garden. The game suggests that a perfect garden is devoid
of slugs and weeds. To achieve perfection, the player is asked
to eliminate these unwanted elements until only the main plant
in the middle is left. The conflict of the game revolves around
garden saturation. Watering the garden increases its saturation,
the main plant flourishes, but so do the weeds and the numbers
of slugs rise (i.e., representations of unwanted emotions).
Eliminating slugs by moving the mouse over them in a scrubbing
motion (i.e., a metaphor for exercising) decreases saturation, as
does parching the garden. De-saturation further kills the weeds,
but it also damages the main plant. The game is structured in
three stages in which an increasing number of weeds must be
eradicated (i.e., representing increasingly higher weight-loss
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goals). At the end of stage three, when no more weeds are left,
the Perfection ending is reached. This ending, though, has come at
the cost of a healthy main plant and equals “starvation”. It turns
out that the Perfection ending is not a true win state after all.
There is another ending, though – Imperfection – hidden in the
game. This ending represents the true win state and encourages
the player to challenge her previous assumptions and change
her behavior. To reach it, players have to consistently keep their
garden within an ideal saturation range, learn to accept the slugs
and weeds and nurse it back to health. While the eating disorder
may never fully be “forgotten”, there are good chances to
overcome it, which is why this game has a win state.
We were lucky that two of our subject matter experts were game
development students/alumni and they took leading roles in Into
Darkness and It’s for the Best. Perfection and FLUCTuation did not
have a person with lived experience on the development team,
but we conducted extensive interviews with our experts, showed
them every draft of the game design document and had them
214
playtest all our prototypes. Their continuous feedback was
crucial to our design iterations, particularly for the identification
and evolution of the game’s visual, procedural and experiential
metaphors. Experts also had last say in regard to the game’s rule
structure. If a rule did not correspond with their experience,
we scratched it and asked them to help us understand the
relationships between system elements better. E.g., it is really
hard for someone without an eating disorder to gage what the
emotional effects of eating are. What does the intake of food
mean for an anorexic? We learnt that it is about opening the door
to unwanted emotions and that all emotions – bad and good –
are unwanted, because they seem incontrollable. To feel means to
discover needs and there is always the danger that needs are not
being met, so it is better to suppress feelings altogether and strive
for total control.
215
understanding and representing the experience of mental illness.
After all, we were trying to make inner processes tangible and
since inner processes are abstract (i.e. they cannot be directly
observed or delineated from a physical reality), metaphors are
a great way to make them concrete. We follow Johnson and
Lakoff’s definition of metaphor: “The essence of metaphor is
understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of
another.” (1988, p. 5). We distinguished between three types of
metaphors in the design process: visual, procedural and
experiential. A visual metaphor is defined here as an image that
shares certain salient characteristics with the concept it
represents, but without possessing significant in-game behavior.
Procedural and experiential metaphors, while having a visual
component, are more strongly intertwined with the game’s rules
and mechanics and are experienced by the player through
moment-to-moment gameplay. A procedural metaphor
represents a complex, abstract concept through game rules to
illustrate “how it works”, while an experiential metaphor models
a complex abstract concept through game rules to evoke an
experience of “what it feels like”. For an elaboration on these
different types of metaphors in game design see Rusch & Weise
2008; Rusch 2009 and Begy 2011.
216
which started with an in-depth interview with our expert on
June 21st 2013:
217
individual problems you created for yourself in manic form a
huge heap of problems that seems insurmountable in depression.
Whatever you need to tackle you can’t tackle because it’s too
big and has spiraled out of control. It feels like wading through
mud or quicksand. There is a sense of suffocation when stuck in
depression and there is no way of knowing when it is going to
end.
218
depression. This already implies gameplay variables to tinker
with: movement speed and sensitivity to player input. The
quality of movement in each state further determined the
metaphor for the game-space in mania and depression: the sky
is limitless and thus lends itself to be the scenery for the
unstoppable ascent in mania. We wanted to capture the “devil-
may-care” aspect of mania, which is why we used glass platforms
to jump on that shatter in a gratifying way upon impact. This
further enabled us to tie mania and depression together by
reusing the shards of the broken glass platforms as obstacles
in the “down” phase: what was done without consideration of
consequences in mania comes back to haunt you in depression.
We further introduced the visual metaphor of the growing fractal
to illustrate the sense of purpose and synchronicity described by
our expert.
219
questions that are fraught with obligation and only intensify
feelings of guilt, resentment and isolation. Whether you come in
contact with the glass shards or the lights that gravitate towards
you, you are being sent further down into despair, farther away
from the goal of reaching the ocean’s surface. Consequently,
players avoid both of these elements and start to perceive the
other characters in the space and the lights they emit as
hindrance. To capture the gnawing question of how long this
state is going to last, we included the “depth meter”, an interface
element that starts out by signaling the avatar’s progress towards
the surface, but soon becomes unreliable.
Well Designed?
Gameplay Experience
220
structure of the portrayed disorder. Since promoting
understanding about mental illness was our declared goal for
For the Records, we had to design and test for maximum game
comprehension. We did four “open house” playtests during the
development process in Fall 2013. Each attracted about 15
testers (students and faculty) from different schools at DePaul.
We noted two kinds of game comprehension: an emotional
comprehension tied to what game elements and the bigger game
structure made players feel like during gameplay, and a cognitive
comprehension that was needed to interpret the gameplay
experience in the context of the game’s theme (e.g., ADD, OCD).
It turned out that emotional comprehension corresponded well
with our design intentions, while cognitive comprehension
sometimes lagged behind. Before we investigated how the game
as a whole promoted understanding of the portrayed mental
health issue, we first focused on a much more fundamental
understanding of the game’s rules and mechanics: were players
able to discern how game elements related to each other to form
the underlying system? E.g., the questionnaire to an early
Perfection prototype asked: “Was it clear to you what effect
scrubbing had in the game apart from scrubbing away objects?”
This basic understanding of the game’s rule structure is key to
both emotional as well as cognitive comprehension.
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(later replaced by the slugs in the garden metaphor). We asked
players how the increase of objects after pressing the button,
made them feel. Across the board, players’ emotional disposition
towards the objects were negative: “They must be eradicated.”
“Uneasy, I didn’t want to get overrun by them.” “Frustrated /
annoyed. I need to get rid of them.” We then asked how scrubbing
away objects made players feel: “Pretty good. When screen was
clear, I felt good”; “It felt like I was rubbing away something
bad”; “Good, like a kid torching an anthill with a looking glass.”
Reading these emotional reactions to game elements in the light
of their metaphorical meaning indicated that we were indeed
capturing the experience we were going for and that our planned
alignment of the players’ mindset with that of an anorexic was
successful. It was thus really surprising to us that some players,
while having the reactions to individual game elements we
intended them to have, had difficulties to cognitively interpret
them. They knew the objects that appeared in the lab after
pressing the button were “bad”, but they didn’t know what these
objects represented in the context of eating disorders. In
retrospect it seems obvious that one could only know what these
objects meant, if one already had an intimate understanding of
the mechanisms of eating disorders! Most of the players,
however, got the “big picture” and understood the games’ core
metaphors (e.g., garden as body; watering as eating; jumping
higher as mania; struggling to the surface as depression). Only
the visual metaphors we used to represent the less well-known
(and possibly more idiosyncractic) aspects of the issue were lost
in translation: the oil puddles in Into Darkness; the slugs, weeds,
growing garden box in Perfection; the fractal, depth meter and
floating lights in FLUCTuation; and the calendar in It’s for the Best.
With explanation of these elements, though, players’ experiences
really seemed to gain depth and provide valuable insights into
the disorders the game portrayed.
222
players’ was their preconceived notions of what games are as
media. While we told players upfront that the games they were
about to play aimed to model what certain mental illnesses “felt
like”, players frequently just played to win. They had a hard time
adopting the mindset of exploring the game as a means of
understanding the portrayed issue; they wanted to beat the game
and when it was not obvious how to do so, they got frustrated
and confused.
Conclusion
223
can thus provide a first hand understanding of “what it’s like”
to live with mental illness. Metaphors play a huge role as inter-
subjective transformations of subjective experience. They were
used both by our subject matter experts to explain their
experiences to us verbally, and by the design team to make those
experiences tangible to players through gameplay. Making
metaphorical games to facilitate a deep, experiential
understanding of mental illness, however, is anything but easy.
While dialogue allows for mixing and matching of metaphors
to highlight various salient aspects of the experience, a game’s
metaphorical set up needs to be simpler to avoid confusion.
There needs to be one, core metaphor into which all relevant
elements can be embedded and that lends itself to a coherent
interpretation and experience of what it represents. While our
procedural and experiential metaphors that constituted the
game’s core metaphors proved to be successful in evoking the
intended emotional experiences, the visual metaphors often
remained opaque to players and required further explanation.
This confirms that using a game’s structures, rules and
mechanics as main vehicles for meaning is most promising to
get ideas across and that finding the right visuals to supplement
that meaning is an art form in itself. We further found that the
complementary use of different media is most powerful in
increasing understanding and fostering empathy. Games are only
one piece to the puzzle. A game designer’s pride of wanting to
“say it all” with a game might prevent more effective ways of
communicating complex issues to a broader audience. Creating
For the Records as an interactive, transmedia documentary project
shed light on the potentials and pitfalls of each medium and
the strength that comes from a well-orchestrated integration
of film, games, animations, photo romans (i.e. a form of digital
storytelling using photographs and voice over) and written
interviews.
224
References
225
Shattell, M. (2014). Guest Editorial – Critical, participatory,
ecological, and user-led: Nursing scholarship and knowledge
development of the future. Advances in Nursing Science, 37(1), 3-4.
Acknowledgments
226
GAMING A NON-GAME? A LONG TERM
(SELF)-EXPERIMENT ABOUT FARMVILLE
HEINRICH SÖBKE
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Weimar, Germany
[email protected]
Abstract
227
I conclude that they are a noteworthy phenomenon in the field
of video games. They can contribute to the evolution of video
games through some of their specifics both in the negative
(DON’Ts) and in the positive sense (DOs).
Introduction
FV’s game play consists of trivial, basic actions: The player starts
by placing items on a farm – an isometric playground with grid-
bound positions. Items can be plots, animals, trees and
decorations. Plots are used for seeding and harvesting crops.
Animals and trees are harvested by clicking on the item. This
click restarts a timer – often a main game mechanic of SNGs
– when the timer elapses the item can be harvested again.
Harvesting an item results in a Farm Coin reward, which are
an in-game currency. Experience Points (XP) are the level-
determining, accumulating resource: for seeding crops and
placing items on the farm, the player is rewarded with XPs. The
placed items are either rewards for missions or have to be bought
from the market. Currencies needed for market purchases are
Farm Coins and Farm Cash. Farm Cash is the rare “hard” currency
which urges the players to invest real money in in-game
transactions (Kelly, 2010). Missions mostly consist of placing or
228
harvesting certain items. Another type of mission are resource-
gaining interactions with neighbors, often posting a help request
to the player’s FB news feed. The help request is confirmed by
a neighbor’s click. Neighbors are also FV-playing FB users, who
get their neighbor status by an invitation-approval procedure.
In general, this is a rough but complete description of the
elementary rules of play in FV.
Figure 1. FV: Basic elements (Arrowed explanation boxes added by the author)
229
elaborate and costly. In contrast the development of the first
version of FV has been accomplished by a team of 11 people in 5
weeks (Mahajan, 2010). Admittedly costs cannot be compared to
game play, but these figures on their own exemplify why SNGs
are an additional branch of video games. Therefore, it is no
surprise that SNGs cannot meet the expectations of so-called
hardcore gamers. Another point of criticism is the option to
buy progress in the game. From a different point of view, this
business model of in-game transactions could be considered as
an official, publisher-organized and more user-convenient
version of the phenomenon of “gold farming”. This term
describes the paid, work-sharing production of game progress.
For example players in countries with a low level of income level
up game characters and generate in-game items as a business
model. Finally these rewards and high-level characters are sold
using third-party web platforms to players who want to save
time (Gilmore, 2010). In this way those players buy game-
progress as well. However, as this phenomenon is not supported
in the game itself, it is not as obvious as in SNGs.
230
virtual Third Place with ritual playing habits (Burroughs, 2014).
Gruning (2013) investigates the value of virtual goods in FV.
Extension by configuration
231
is configuration (Mahajan, 2010). As an example, adding a new
crop to the game needs only the configuration of attributes as
name, harvest time, seed cost and harvest gain. Additionally
images of the crops at well-defined stages of the ripening process
need to be provided (see Table 1). This configuration approach is
effort saving: it avoids programming work and keeps the game
software stable.
Attribute Crop
Name White Grape
Growing Time 12 hours
Cost 245 Farm Coins
Sell for 360 Farm Coins
XPs 2
Mastery 1200; 2400; 3600 (in plots)
Images [IMAGE]
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They could be removed by adding a certain number of materials.
The removal released an arbitrary item as reward. Now such a
heap-material-reward game mechanic is element of each newly
released farm. In contrast, a not continued example is the
limitation of plots: Starting with farm no.3, Lighthouse Cove, the
player was not able to cover the whole farm with plots. Since
farm no.7, Haunted Hollow, there is no longer such a restriction.
This trajectory results in a set of features, which are assigned to a
currently released farm.
Table 3 shows this (dynamic) feature set as it is valid for farm no.
19, Oasis Garden.
FEATURE
No limitation of plots
Unique kind of plots
Stationary building
Resolvable treasures
Farm specific currency and level
Game changers
1. In FV a Stationary Building is a building with a fixed position outside of the common landspace. It holds no
animals or trees; however it can be harvested periodically for certain random FV items. The value of gained items
depends on the level of the building. A stationary building can be leveled up by collecting a certain number of
building-specific types of material.
233
game changers. These are adjustments or introduction of game
mechanics, which change the game play basically: the player will
probably adjust her goals. Efforts change considerably for certain
actions. Table 4 shows examples of game changers. The existence
of such events often outdates results of planning and estimation
processes.
Game
Impact
mechanic
Introduction Enables the specialization of farms; farm land is no longer the
of farm no. 2 limiting resource
Combine
Less “work“ – more impact per click; introduction of fuel game
(Agricultural
mechanic
machinery)
Search Better overview: items can be located and counted on a farm.
Functionality Specific actions (e.g. breeding) are eased.
No bulk purchase (one click per item) possible any longer. A
One Item Per
purchase requires at least three clicks. A consequence is a better
Purchase
overbuy protection: players are prevented from accidental
Operation
purchases.
Dairy New leading game mechanic for game progress.
Diversification
234
Regular stream of contents
235
side rail. One result of these assistances is a never dry-running-
source of tasks for the players. From the developer’s point of
view, tackling these tasks generates a lot of opportunities to sell
game-progress-easing items (Kelly, 2010). A good example are
the decorating control elements on the main screen of FV (see
Figure 3): in the screen’s left side there are mission icons, each
of these missions consists of elementary tasks. Examples for such
tasks are harvesting a certain number of plots of a specified
crop, harvesting or placing an animal or asking fellow players
for certain items (using post-and-click interactions). A mission
manager was introduced to improve the player’s overview
236
Figure 4. Special offer at the start of FV
The Experiment
237
Figure 5. Decoration-style oriented farm (Wei, 2010)
238
needed information could be found on the web. On the website
www.farmviller.com2 I found the information I had missed so far:
the harvests of animals and trees, and also the space which
certain items require. It was a systematic presentation of FV
related information. This site helped me to start optimizing my
game play: there were lists maintained which showed game-
optimizing calculations already and which made it easy to
discover the most yielding items. The goal at that time was to
level up since the Belted Cow, an animal which delivers a harvest
of incredible 3000 Farm Coin each day, could be bought starting
at level 75. This level was a milestone I reached after almost
5 months of purposeful game play, having taken before the
intermediate steps level 35 (Saddelback Pig) and level 55 (Arapawa
Goat).Saddleback Pig and Arapawa Goat are further animals with a
comparatively high harvest, which is beaten only by the gain of
the Belted Cow. 3000 Farm Coins each day – 4 Belted Cows per plot
– this resulted in 12,000 Farm Coins per plot and day. I measured
the harvest in this way. All other options had to compete with
this benchmark.
Principles of playing
At a later stage of the game the Blue Whale became the most
239
profitable animal – but buying a Blue Whale does not result in as
much XPs, i.e., it does not help on leveling up directly. This is a
difference to purchasing a Belted Cow: whereas a Blue Whale costs
500.000 Coconuts ( which is a farm specific in-game currency of
the 5th FV farm Hawaiian Paradise) and results in 630 XPs, for the
Belted Cow applies the 1:100 default ratio of purchases: it costs
1,000,000 Farm Coins and is rewarded with 10,000 XPs. However,
in terms of earning power a Blue Whale is the better choice: It
results in 5000 Farm Coins (plus 4250 Coconuts) – compared to
3000 Farm Coins of a Belted Cow. Therefore my strategy has been
to buy as much Blue Whales as possible and convert their gain into
XPs by buying Belted Cows.
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Consalvo (2013) I considered any use of external software as
cheating. However, in the first time I used two alternative
accounts in order to accomplish needed interactions. Later on
these accounts became to time consuming. Furthermore, I
(almost) urged a friend to login from time to time in order to
fulfill helpful tasks.
241
Figure 7. Spreadsheet to keep track of progress (overview)
242
constant. So this estimation becomes an analysis of limits, as
presented in Figure 8: In the “short” term the Dairy is the most
valuable game-mechanic, but it will be outperformed by the Blue
Whale in the long run. In short: FV made me exercise a limit
analysis.
243
stacking cows in Cow Pastures. Such a building occupies 12 times
the space of a cow. There have been two reasons not to use Cow
Pastures on this farm: First, the scarceness of building material
for Cow Pastures. Secondly, harvesting buildings necessitates one
manual click per building, whereas all animals on a farm can be
harvested simultaneously by an item called Farmhand. Of course
there is a bulk harvester for buildings, but it is available only for
Farm Cash3. A Farmhand is also a limited resource, but harvesting
this farm from time to time generates more gain than just buying
unproductive decoration items to convert coins into XPs.
Figure 9. Result of optimized game play: farm holding 5000 Belted Cows
3. Harvesters for buildings, which allow harvesting multiple buildings (orchards and animal stables) in
parallel, have been introduced in early 2013. For an optimizing gaming approach they would be very
helpful as they save many clicks. However, they require Farm Cash. This is one of the first exceptions
from the rule, that all game-mechanic relevant items can be acquired by pure game play (Farm Coins,
interactions with neighbors, waiting time) also.
244
my machines as soon as possible to multi-plot machines, which
saved a lot of time. A kind of revolution was the release of the
Combine, a machine doing all three processes (harvesting,
plowing and planting) at one click. It is very helpful for the
ambitious farmer and really worth its price of 500,000 Farm
Coins! I also detected at that time the web browser shortcut
STRG + Left Mouse Click to open a link in a new window. This
made harvesting the FB news feed far more efficient: instead of
clicking on a FV link, opening the FB page again and positioning
it next to the new news feed entry, it allows you to click on one
link after the other.
There is also another aspect of “Time” in FV: the game play needs
to be scheduled as crops, trees and animals are characterized by
harvest times. To be efficient it is useful to establish a rhythm of
play and to plant crops accordingly. On one side the rhythm of
play is determined by the harvest time of animals. Fortunately
the harvest time of animals always is a multiple of a day. So
playing each day at the same time is a good choice. The game
design supports this approach: real harvest times calculate with
duration of one day of 23 hours. Therefore I could start each day
at the same time and integrate game play into my daily routine.
245
ensured a maximum of gain and game progress. In this sense
missing the best opportunity to play (and thus reaching not the
maximum gain possible) felt like a failure – although in fact there
has been progress. This feeling comes close to the phenomenon
Bogost (2010b) calls “compulsion”. Being aware of it I tried to
tune the game play according to the next planned visit on my
farm.
Set of goals
246
Optimization Guided by Time
No. Goal
relevance FV Frame
1 To level up in Jade Falls No Yes Middle
To increase Blue Whale
2 Yes No Long
population
To breed 20 exemplars of each
3 No No Middle
tree species
4 To breed profitable trees Yes No Long
5 Add Belted Calves to farm Yes No Middle
Operate each available farm on a
6 Yes No Short
daily base
One motivation for my game play was testing the limits: what
happens at formerly undiscovered points of the game? At one
particular point of game play there was at least one answer to
this question: The Dairy (compare Section “Optimizing
systematically: An Engineer’s Approach”) is a self-contained mini
game about harvesting and transforming resources, that was
rolled out in January 2013 and maintains its own level status.
The original reward schedule issued 1000 XPs more for each
level reached than for the previous level. It is possible to level up
2 times per day. As a consequence there was once a reward of
more than 230,000 XPs for one Dairy level up. Each level in FV
requires 100,000 XPs, so after 5 months of play the Dairy reached
the same game progress as the result of 3 years of optimized
play before. Furthermore the Dairy rewards increased much at a
faster rate. In this way the Dairy had become the leading, time-
saving, game mechanic for game progress (see Figure 8). I earned
500 levels with this game mechanic. “Unfortunately” – from my
point of view – a nerf of the reward schedule has been made.
Thus the game is open again: it is worth again to focus on Belted
Cow and Blue Whale cultures and to be on the hunt for game
247
mechanics providing a higher gain than these two animals. Such
a game play is by far more time consuming than simply
“operating” the Dairy and receiving more and more rewards for
the same amount of game play. The original Dairy reward
schedule would have marginalized all other possible XP-relevant
rewards. It would have reduced the necessary playing time to
a few minutes per day. This probably could have had a huge
impact on the in-game purchases, which would not have served
the developer’s commercial interests.
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game play can be linked to global leaders, In forums on the
web there are farms of level 200,000 mentioned (Mondal, 2011b,
n. comment dave smitty). However, this player is said to have
used bots. Another player, who presents a farm of level 43035,
demonstrates in a video the handling of the third party software
tool FarmVille Bot. Therefore his level seems to be achieved with
the help of software, too (Mondal, 2011a). As a conclusion I draw
that competition probably has led to either using real money
or software bots. Both possibilities are no elements of my game
play. With the target of optimizing game play, competition may
have an indirect impact, but is not sufficient as a main
motivation: By definition of the approach the performance has
reached a maximum value, considering the given conditions.
Therefore the meaning of competition vanishes: Ok, go at your
own pace – it is the fastest possible!
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Is this game play representative?
Discussion
250
assumption: now an in-game functionality allows establishing
new neighbor relationships without friending them on FB. Even
more convenient, but (almost) no longer social is a recent feature,
which allows the player to add FV-suggested neighbors. If that
action reaches the maximum number of neighbors, FV can be
instructed to replace inactive neighbors automatically.
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perception of the player’s personality traits. An example for such
a question is shown in Figure 11. At least 4 fellow players have to
decide for one of the two alternatives to create a valid answer (see
Figure 12). Once such an answer is available, the next question
concerning player’s preferences gets released. So in theory
players have to reflect about their neighbors and there will be a
personality profile at the end. However, in fact players hunted
the different rewards which are assigned to each answer option
(see Figure 11): when posting the question, mostly there were
commands to the neighbors, which option they should choose.
252
Figure 12. Voting building: fellow player’s view
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Figure 13. Treats available: “Use Treat” button
Figure 14. No treats available: “Buy Treat” button in the same position as former “Use
Treat” button
254
A decisive step in the career of a FV player is entering his credit
card number. From time to time there are charity events which
encourage the player under the pretext of a donation to add this
information. Once this information is added, further FV related
transactions are eased. The same purpose fulfills the Coins-Into-
Cash schedule: To convert superfluous Farm Coins into rare Farm
Cash, payment information have to be submitted.
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Figure 15. $100 offer (Captured: 06/12/2014)
N: Thank you!
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has been “[…] I started to align my daily routine according to FV –
which is bad. Thanks to god I have recognized it. […] I cannot involve
myself only a little bit – therefore I quit FV completely. […]”
Conclusion
257
a developer’s point of view. However, they easily can become
annoying. Consequently the Free-To-Play payment model has
to be observed and developed. Outgrowths as a “$100-Special
Offer” seem to be more than questionable. The used game
mechanics as competition and interactions with fellow players
and the open-ended game style tend to overburden some players.
As delineated by Pixie (2010), who seems not be an isolated case,
quitting the game is often related to frustration. These effects
need game design rework. Harmful effects of excessive play are
not limited to FV or SNGs in general, but in SNGs there is
an easy possibility of technical regulation as there is always a
connection to a central server. Furthermore in the context of
game design, the usage of timers can be and has to be aligned
with affordances of real life. Effects of long-term play on players
have to be investigated.
However, the positive traits of SNGs could let them extend the
set of tools for learning. It has been shown that SNGs also foster
learning processes and the development of meta skills (Söbke,
Corredor, & Kornadt, 2013). Due to the SNG format, they
acquired a group of people for gaming which have not played
before. So accessibility induces usage. It is worthwhile
investigating the game mechanics which are used now
successfully to lure the player into becoming a paying customer:
probably they can be used in educational settings to guide
player’s learning progress. Noteworthy is the temporal structure
of game play which is almost as steady-going as the time schedule
of formal education is.
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are you trying to make them do more?” is the concluding
question of Jason M. (2010) in a response to an SNG-critical
article (Bogost, 2010b).
References
259
Gruning, J. (2013). Good Fences Make Good Neighbors : Values
of Digital Objects in Everyday Life. In DiGRA 2013 – DeFragging
Game Studies (Vol. 2).
M., J. (2010). Why are you trying to make them do more? Ian
Bogost – Cow Clicker (Answer to Bogost (2010), Cow Clicker – The
Making of Obsession). Retrieved July 17, 2014, from
http://www.bogost.com/blog/
cow_clicker_1.shtml#comment-59182
260
Nutt, C. (2011). A Philosophy That Extends Eastward: Social
Games Zynga-Style. Gamasutra. Retrieved February 12, 2014,
from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6280/
a_philosophy_that_extends_.php
261
Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, A. (2010). Cultivated Play: Farmville.
MediaCommons. Retrieved August 8, 2014 from
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-
play-farmville/
Wohn, D., & Lee, Y. (2013). Players of facebook games and how
they play. Entertainment Computing, 4(3), 171–178.
Yee, N. (2014). The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual
Worlds Change Us—And How They Don’t (p. 264). Yale University
Press.
Acknowledgements
262
THE STANLEY PARABLE
Lucky for us, Stanley wasn’t there. He, well…he didn’t show up
(quite unlike Stanley).
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When no further instruction came, Stanley began to feel anxious.
People had expectations.
And so, choice we were granted. At least, it did seem that way.
Stanley would wait. In the mean time, he could take a sip of his
water. Or maybe twiddle his thumbs.
But what of option “D”? Or “E”? Or “H”, “K”, “Q”, and everything
between? Does the mere existence of each alternative in turn
somehow amplify the meaning of our chosen “C”?
Maybe it’s just the belief of an alternate – the illusion of choice that
begets meaning…
Maybe a player need only think she could have done otherwise –
that the judgment she commands bears consequence…
…maybe?
No! Stanley would not sit idle. He would take control of the
situation. He would let his will be known!
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But that didn’t really matter. Not with respect to “what could
have been”, anyways.
But this excitement is fleeting – we’ll just come back and try that
other door next anyways.
It is not the agency to choose one door over another, but instead
the permission to linger in a place of consequence free entropy
until you are ready to be the driving force behind the interaction.
You can pace back and forth, become familiar with the
expectations set before you, warm up to your surroundings until
comfortable. Only when satisfied, you continue onward – you
choose the door on the left, intent and action aligned in
enchanting synchrony.
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Free to engage with the delight that our narrator has planned for
us – on our own terms.
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