Designed Experiences, Mediums and Genres

My mother is not the first person you would consider going to the Disneyland theme parks with. She’s 66, and she finds even the Dumbo ride to be violently nauseating from the spinning. As a result, when we recently spent two days there with my family, she regarded every ride with suspicion, going on the “experience” rides and avoiding anything twisting, spinning, or flying.

When we made it over to California Adventure, I talked her into going on a ride called Soarin’ Over California. Of course, simply judging by the name, she was dubious. Another flying ride! But I made her go on it anyway.

If you’re not familiar with it: Soarin’ Over California simulates a trip over California in a hangglider. You sit in a big bench seat, strapped in, and get lifted into the air in front of a huge, floor-to-ceiling, 180-degree movie screen. Wind blows in your face. When you fly over the redwoods, you smell pine; when you fly over orange groves you get a faint whiff of oranges. It’s incredibly immersive and maybe the one thing that makes those Parkhopper tickets worth it, at least for one day.*

As we were exiting the ride, I asked my mother what she thought about it. She waved me off. Oh great, I thought. She hated it. I don’t get it! It wasn’t the least bit scary or motion-sickness-inducing! When we got outside the ride, I asked her again, and she took off her sunglasses. There were tears in her eyes.

My mom is 66 years old and spent most of her teen years and adulthood in California. She had memories of every single place we flew over, and the immersive nature of the ride brought them all rushing back. “I just love this state so damn much,” she said to me, voice a bit strangled.

One of the biggest traps we can fall into as designers is to conflate mediums and genres. I never thought a theme park ride could make my mother cry! And, of course, the only reason it hadn’t happened was because no one had tried to do it. This revelation isn’t exactly news in the game design world, thanks to the Wii and the Kinect and the iPad and the Gameboy DS, but it seems like it is a lesson we are resistant to learning. Maybe it’s because people who make games now are people who loved games as they were, and everyone wants to design games that they themselves will love and play.

(Incidentally: THIS is the reason it’s so important to do outreach and inclusiveness to attract women, people of color and others with diverse backgrounds and experiences to design games! Our medium wants to be as loved and respected as cinema, but it will not be until it is embraced by EVERY walk of life the way that cinema has been; and that happened through more and more people wanting to share their unique visions through film.)

Whatever the reason, we limit ourselves when we think that a medium belongs only to a certain demographic: roleplaying games are for dorky guys aged 16-30. Social games are for housewives aged 30-40. Console games are for bros aged 18-24. The Wii is for kids. Has there ever been a video game that made my mother cry? No, but then, I don’t think anyone has designed an experience in a video game expressly to make her cry, either.

This is one of the reasons I’m so psyched to work for Loot Drop. I feel strongly that Ghost Recon Commander is breaking down the idea of “social games” as a genre, and helping them mature into their own as a medium. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it; Ghost Recon Commander goes live soon. If you like shooters, why don’t you give it a spin and see what the medium can do?

* I feel obligated to note that there was one other thing that made CA Adventure worth it for us: front row seats for the amazing Aladdin stage show and a private meet-and-greet  afterward. But that’s not really an experience open to everyone.

Inspiration, Emulation, and Mary J. Blige

Sorry, I know I have been really remiss in posting lately: I’ve been dealing with a lot of crap from my kid’s school district and their inability/unwillingness to provide my high-functioning autistic daughter with a free and appropriate public education. That’s not what this blog is for, though, so I’ve been blogging about it elsewhere. That said— all the furor about social games and copying, and the difference between theft and inspiration has lead to me wanting to say something. This is more of a very polite rant than a well-reasoned, well-constructed post with a powerful point, so be aware.

I’ve heard from seasoned veteran designers that a lot of new designers who are working on their first game want to remake their favorite Final Fantasy game. It’s not surprising; we all have the games that made us sit up and take notice of the medium, the things that made us fall in love. Taking apart and putting back together a game you love can be another way of appreciating it— not just in knowing that you love the game because it’s fun, but deliberately breaking it down and learning about the design decisions that MAKE it fun, the elegance of the code base that makes it run so quickly, and all the other tiny things that equal “fun.” It’s a rich tradition, like taking apart and putting back together a toaster to see how it works.

Thing is, you don’t then commercially release the toaster as your own design.

I think that’s the thing that bothers me the most about the most egregious copies in games: I don’t get the impression that the designers learned anything fundamental about WHY the games they copied were worth copying, other than their popularity. It’s like copying off of a friend in a French exam: you might get a passing score, but you’re not going to be able to find the restroom if you ever go to Paris. If you’re going to rip something apart and put it back together— if you’re a real designer, you’re going to want to think about those decisions and evaluate them, figure out what makes the game go ’round. The exact decisions NimbleBit pointed out in their response to Zynga about Tiny Tower— “Why are there 5 different business types like Tiny Tower? Why do 5 people fit in an apartment instead of 4 or 6?” Those are major decisions with huge gameplay ramifications. A game designer wanting to learn from those decisions would pore over them.

And a game designer who loved what they do would be itching to put their mark on it— to make their own decisions and see what happens.

I think that’s the essence of creativity, and the difference between emulation and inspiration. People who have the urge to create don’t have the urge to remake something wholecloth and call it theirs. My favorite musical artist, Mike Doughty, said a smart thing in an interview recently when the interviewer asked him why there aren’t more stories about “the creative process” in his new autobiography:

Most of them would be like, “So I heard this Mary J. Blige song, and there was something I wanted to rip off from it. But I didn’t want to be too obvious about it, so I changed it a little bit. And then I thought about it and messed with it some more and then thought about it some more, and then I sang it to the bass player.” It’s that story over and over and over again.

And I think that’s it. When I sat down to write Blowback I wasn’t trying to rewrite five seasons of Burn Notice word for word— I took the hook of something I loved, and messed around with it until I got the same feeling through procedural rhetoric as I got through watching my favorite episodes. Creatives are inspired by everything, and anyone who says they aren’t is lying to you. But the thing that separates the artists from the tradesmen is the urge to make something yours.

So it’s hard for me to respect people as creators when they non-critically rip off a whole design belonging to someone else— not just because of the moral repugnancy of that action, but because it says volumes about who they are, or aren’t, as a designer. I’m not saying I’m an AMAAAAZING game designer; I am saying I would rather design a shitty game of my own than painstakingly copy the most brilliant game in the world and pass it off as my own.

The Novelty of Community

Massive multiplayer online games have been a lucrative industry trend for years, but Tarn [Adams] disdains M.M.O.’s. To him, they replace the deep pleasures of imaginative game design with the novelty of community and are invariably oriented toward mass, lowest-common-denominator appeal.

—Jonah Weiner, “Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From?”, the New York Times

I like to think, maybe naively, that my friends from the world of creator-owned, self-published indie tabletop RPGs are proud of (or otherwise pleased with) the fact that I’ve gotten a job in digital games. A friend of mine likes to say that there are two types of indie RPG designers: the ones who wish they were in video games, and the ones who wish they were in a band. I don’t know if that’s descriptive of the people, but it is descriptive of the culture, for better or worse. I clearly wanted to be in digital, and thankfully, here I am. That said, there’s one question I get asked fairly often:

Why social games?

Especially with the largely punk-rock, do-it-for-the-love, fuck-The-Man ethos that pervades indie RPGs, social games seem like an odd choice: the genre appears as hyper-commercialized transactional gameplay, light on story and innovation, aimed at an unsophisticated market new to the idea of video games. In reality, I think that social games are in their infancy in terms of what they ARE and what they can do, but ultimately, they might be the thing that bridges the gap between what we do at the gaming table and what we do at the computer.

When World of Warcraft was first released, was there a single weekly RPG group in the country that didn’t lose someone at the table to Azeroth? There had been adventure games before, and MMOs before, but never had the quality of graphics, game structure and IP intersected in a way that was this accessible to a major audience. Tabletop players everywhere were quick to point out that WoW was not a real substitute for the shared imaginative space of an extended roleplaying campaign, but that didn’t always matter; no one claimed that the positive feedback from WoW was identical to what you got rolling dice with friends, but it was close enough to serve as an acceptable substitute.

I touched on this a bit in a two part guest post I did for my dear friends over at Failbetter Games; the idea of a narrative physics engine— something that does not model as precisely as real life, but gets close enough to provide a similar sort of satisfaction. That was talking specifically about story, which is something I find incredibly important and will no doubt blog your ear off about at a later date. Socially, though, it provided a similar sort of simulation.

On one end of the social spectrum, you’ve got tabletop RPGs, which are the ultimate social game. Often, playing involves sharing a meal and swapping stories about your week; more than that, though, it involves sitting down and sharing an imaginative space and continuing narrative with people whose company you enjoy. It allows us to see sides of our friends we’d never imagine: though I hope it never comes up in real life, thanks to RPGs I know that my friend Vincent can plan a jailbreak on relatively short notice and that Julia can think of great places to hide weaponry where cops would never look. On the other end of the spectrum, you have CityVille: App pages with seas of  ADD ME and a consistent stream of requests: Your Ex-Boyfriend Wants You To Be Captain Of His Navy, Your Mom Built A Bakery Next To Your Prison, That Guy From High School Would Like You To Send Him Some Pineapples.  (I hesitate to call XBox Live “social gaming,” as it’s more the equivalent of an aural fourchan; screaming the word PENIS down a marble hall just to see how many times it echoes.)

The good stuff, as you might imagine, is in the middle.

Minecraft does social brilliantly— multiplayer servers that require ops to self-select participants, creating the same sort of community as a guild or gaming group without the open-to-the-public concerns of getting griefed. This does make Minecraft a difficult place to meet like-minded individuals, however; like sitting around a game table, you’ve got to know someone to get the invitation.

Failbetter’s Echo Bazaar is much less mercenary in their social transactions than your average Facebook game.  It makes valiant efforts to imbue the “social requests” of a mostly-asynchronous, deliberately lonesome game with more narrative significance— but Echo Bazaar still feels fundamentally like a one-player game where you get to send up signal flares: “I’m here too!”

What I’m trying to say is this: I believe in satisfying and intricate game design, but I also believe that the design of a game is infinitely more satisfying to an average human’s needs if the design requires multiple people interacting in order to work correctly. For as long as I’ve gamed at a table, I’ve heard the same argument: “Digital games will never kill tabletop games because they don’t give you the feeling of doing or making something important with your friends.” With games like WoW and Minecraft, those arguments have obsolesced— and that’s left me looking for something more respectful of my time than MMOs, more structured than Minecraft, and yeah, with stories and gameplay that appeals to me as an almost-thirty-year-old mom of two. Shit. That sounds a lot like social games, doesn’t it?

They’re not quite what I’m looking for— not yet. But that’s part of what’s so incredibly exciting about being in this space. I’m not in this because I’m so impressed by what Farmville did; I’m in it because I can’t wait to see where it’s going. And maybe I can drag my D&D group there along with me.