Exercises in Style,
by Raymond Queneau

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style,
by Matt Madden

These two books both belong firmly in the “Secret Books” category. Neither book has anything explicit to say about games and you’d probably be hard pressed to find anything immediately useful in either one, but they tend to appear on the bookshelves of game designers with surprising frequency.

Both books have the same project: to illustrate how the same basic story can be told in remarkable number of ways. Queneau’s book came first, telling a simple one page story in 99 different styles, with variations in narrator, tense, language, form, and many other aspects. So that the initial story:

In the S bus, in rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having a tug-of-war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.

Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s with a friend who’s saying: “You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat.” He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.

becomes:

When midday strikes you will be on the rear platform of a bus which will be crammed full of passengers amongst whom you will notice a ridiculous juvenile; skeleton-like neck and no ribbon on his felt hat. He don’t be feeling at his ease, poor little chap. He will think that a gentleman is pushing him on purpose every time that people getting on or off pass by. He will tell him so but the gentleman won’t deign to answer. And the ridiculous juvenile will be panic-stricken and run away from him in the direction of a vacant seat.

You will see him a little later, in the Cour de Rome in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. A froend will be with him and you will hear these words: “Your overcoat doesn’t do up properly; you must have another button put on it.”

or

Glabrous was his dial and plaited was his bonnet,
And he, a puny colt — (how sad the neck he bore,
And long) — was now intent on his quotidian chore –
The bus arriving full, of somehow getting on it.

One came, a number ten — or else perhaps an S,
Its platform, small adjunct of the plebeian carriage,
Was crammed with such a mob as to preclude free passage;
Rich bastards lit cigars upon it, to impress.

The young igraffe described so well in my first strophe,
Having got on the bus, started at once to curse an
Innocent citizen — (he wanted an easy trophy
But got the worst of it.) Then, spying a vacant place,
Escaped thereto. Time passed. On the way back, a person
Was telling him that a button was just too low in space.

Matt Madden takes up this same game in 99 Ways, but his medium is the comic page rather than prose. Again he shows a simple single-page comic and then retells with many different techniques. Some of the variations can be seen on the website for the book.

What makes this book inspiring for game designers, I think, is that it encourages us to consider how we might do the same thing in our own medium. A game could represent the same activity in many different ways. Consider writing an “Exercises in Style” videogame in which each level played out the same situation, in first person, then third, then as an RTS, then as a turn-based strategy, then as a performative Wii game, a team-based multiplayer game, an arcade game, an ARG…

Even as a thought experiment, this exercise raises interesting questions. How would the different styles change the experience? What different skills would they challenge? Which ones would be more immersive? More reflective? More social? Do we even have 99 different styles of play?

One day, when I am retired and have copious free time, I will write this new edition of Exercises in Style. Until then, I read Queneau and Maddon and imagine. And I encourage you to do the same.

Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardruip-Fruin (Eds).

When we come to discuss writing fiction for games it is common to focus on ’story’ or ‘plot’, which leads to the inevitable debate about whether an interactive game can tell an authored story, or whether the two are wholly inimicable. While this may be an interesting debate, it overlooks much of the craft of writing fiction. The plot is only part of what makes a good story; characterisation plays an equal role, as does the construction of a believable setting.

This act of world creation and population has long fascinated readers and writers alike. Tolkein was famous for it. Middle Earth itself was his first love. It was only at the insistance of his friends in the Inklings that he turned it into the setting for a story. Other worlds grow out of the accumulation of many tales, such as the Cthulhu Mythos or the universe of Dr Who. As the result of many hands and many voices, such worlds take on the status of mythologies.

This kind of creation is one of the main themes of Third Person. As a collection of essays by many authors, this volume looks at the topic of “vast narratives” from diverse viewpoints. Some of the essays are directly applicable to game design, such as Richard Bartle’s “Alice and Dorothy Play Together” on the design of MMO worlds or Maathew Kirschenbaum’s “War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives”. Others are more obliquely inspirational, and even those that deal with purely literary texts (e.g. David Kala’s “The Long Arm of Fantomas”) have the feel of a writing-game about them, reminding me of collaborative storytelling games such as Lexicon or Baron Munchausen.

In games the exploration of vast, complex worlds can arguably be our most powerful source of fantasy and is perhaps more important and more achievable than an intricate plot. Third person is a valuable study of this idea from many different directions. I highly recommend it.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods,
by Umberto Eco.

In my recent review of Peter Rabbit I spoke about the dangers of “AI Arrogance” and the embarrassment of Narrative AI research that is done without an up-to-date understanding of narrative theory. Now I must confess that I am not as well informed in this area as I might be. I have attempted on several occasions to read some of the canonical books in this area (Booth, Genette, Brooks) and found them rather dry and hard going. Perhaps it is true of any creative discipline: there are those who are engaging authors and those who are skilled theoreticians.

Umberto Eco is the rare exception, the insightful analyst who is able to express his ideas with clarity and humor. This slim volume manages exactly that. While it is no text-book and will not provide you with a catalogue of current thought, it does provide an interesting and enjoyable journey through several of the puzzles that narrative theory raises: ideal readers and ideal authors, the distinction between fabula, suzjet and discourse, pacing, flash-forwards and -backs, and the role of counterfactual in narrative understanding. For all of these topics it provides references to more comprehensive works, should you wish to follow them further.

I thoroughly recommend this book as a starting place for anyone who wants to start digging into serious narrative theory, or who just likes thinking about story and wants an engaging read. The fictional woods are a delightful place and Eco is an amiable guide.

Jespel Juul and Marleigh Norton presented a paper at the recent Foundations of Digital Games conference in which they questioned the popular wisdom that games should have “easy to use interfaces, but … provide difficult gameplay challenges”. To quote from the abstract:

this paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.

I argue that they are wrong and the reason for their error is that they are regarding games from the point of view of the player, not of the designer. I will be so bold as to claim that it is of critical importance that the designer makes a very clear distinction between the gameplay and the interface and tries to always abide be the “easy to use, challenging to play” maxim.

An important thing when designing a game is to decide what is the experience you want to provide. Often this is some kind of challenge, physical, mental or social. A good design is coherent, fixing on a particular kind of challenge — say physical dexterity — and applying it consistently throughout the game. This way the player knows what kind of play to expect and can quickly establish whether or not to commit time to the game.

A poorly designed game is careless about the kinds of challenges it provides and so is disloyal to its players. It begins as a fast-paced game of physical dexterity and then later throws up a riddle-solving section that blocks all further progress. Players who committed their time to a reflex-based game are now confronted with a challenge they never expected and may not enjoy. This kind of unreflective mismatching is a great way to lose your players.

Having decided on a particular challenge, then the gameplay/interface divide is clear. The gameplay is that which provides your desired experience, the interface is the realisation of that experience on a particular set of input and output hardware. The interface is designed, along standard UI principles, to get as little in the way of the desired experience as possible.

To claim that in some games, such as Toribash, the “challenge is in the interface” is to be unneccessarily fuzzy-minded. If it is part of the intended challenge, it is not the interface it is the game. As a player it may not be clear which parts of the game were intended or accidental, but the designer should know better.

The gameplay of Toribash, as I read it, is in the strategic planning of joint movements in the anticipation of how the physics will play out and the opponent will react. The interface to this experience is the process of clicking on joints to select how they are going to move. Ans this interface is actually relatively poor. The targets are often hard to access on the 3D model (especially using the clunky zoom/pan/rotate controls) and selecting an action by multi-clicking to cycle through a list of options is tedious and error-prone. While I did not design the game, I doubt that this frustration is the experience the designer was trying to convey.

A better UI to the same game might be to have sidebar showing 2D front and back images of a standing fighter. Muscles could be clear, easy-to-select targets, colour-coded to indicate what they are doing with a drop-down menu or a set of key-codes to select a particular mode for each. Macro keys for selecting certain muscle/action combinations would take the drudgery out of constructing common manoevres through dozens of clicks and camera rotations.

Now maybe I have missed the point and the rapid, precise clicking is where the fun of Toribash lies, but my argument remains the same. Just because the gameplay involves what are traditionally considered UI elements does not mean that the two are the same.

Confusing interface and gameplay only leads to carelessness about whether your interface is providing or hampering the experience you desire. This carelessness can only result in sloppy interfaces that interfere with and frustrate play. Only a poor designer writes this off as “part of the challenge”. A good designer fixes it.

All of us who have been struggling to work out how to make meaningful games and interactive narratives can rest easy. The problem has been solved.

Elliot McGucken has applied for a patent for a system which, in his words, is:

A video game method and system for creating games where ideas have consequences, incorporating branching paths that correspond to a player’s choices, wherein paths correspond to decisions founded upon ideals, resulting in exalted games with deeper soul and story, enhanced characters and meanings, and exalted gameplay. The classical hero’s journey may be rendered, as the journey hinges on choices pivoting on classical ideals. Ideas that are rendered in word and deed will have consequences in the gameworld. Historical events such as The American Revolution may be brought to life, as players listen to famous speeches and choose sides. As great works of literature and dramatic art center around characters rendering ideals real, both internally and externally, in word and deed, in love and war, the present invention will afford video games that exalt the classical soul, as well as the great books, classics, and epic films—past, present, and future.

More detail (much more detail) can be found on his website for the Hero’s Journey Entrepreneurship Festival.

Dan Ariely has given another TED talk this time addressing our everyday irrational behaviour.

I have volunteered to hold the Australasian Interactive Entertainment Conference (IE2009) at UNSW this December. Here is the Call for Papers:

[Please forward to your networks as appropriate.
Apologies if you receive multiple copies.]

========== IE2009: CALL FOR PAPERS ==========

IE2009: The 6th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment
14-16 December 2009, Sydney, Australia
http://ieconference.org/ie2009/

*** Important Dates ***
Paper Submission: 21 Aug 2009
Short Papers/Demo Submission: 1 Sep 2009
Author Notification: 1 Oct 2009
Camera Ready Papers: 1 Nov 2009
Conference: 14-16 Dec 2009

The Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, in its sixth year, is a cross-disciplinary conference that brings together researchers from artificial intelligence, audio, cognitive science, cultural studies, drama, HCI, interactive media, media studies, psychology, computer graphics, as well as researchers from other disciplines working on new interactive entertainment specific technologies or providing critical analysis of games and interactive environments.

Previous keynotes at Interactive Entertainment have included the following people:

Kurt Busch, Krome Studios
Adrian David Cheok, Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore
Chris Crawford, http://www.erasmatazz.com/
Kenneth D. Forbus, Northwestern University.
Tracy Fullerton, University of Southern California
Ross Gibson, University of Sydney
Robin Hunicke, Electronic Arts
Elina M.I. Koivisto, Nokia Research Center
Mark Stephen Meadows / pighed, http://www.boar.com/
Madjid Merabti, Liverpool John Moores University
Scot Osterweil, MIT Education Arcade
John Passfield, Pandemic Studios
Mark Pesce, co-creator of the VRML
Caryl Shaw, Electronic Arts
Stacey Spiegel, I-mmersion
R. Michael Young, North Carolina State University

=== IE2009 will accept three kinds of submissions; all
accepted submissions will be included in the conference
proceedings.

Regular Papers – Maximum 10 pages. Regular papers represents mature work where the work has been rigorously evaluated. All regular papers will be peer reviewed for technical merit, significance, clarity and relevance to interactive entertainment.

Short Papers – Maximum 3 pages. Short papers represent novel work in progress that may not be yet as mature as regular submissions, but still represents a significant controbution
to the field. All short papers will be peer reviewed for technical merit, significance, clarity and relevance to interactive entertainment.

Demo Submissions – Maximum 1 page. Technical demonstrations showing innovative and original approaches to interactive entertainment. Demo papers will be reviewed by the
conference chair and the program chair for significance and relevance. All demo presenters are responsible are responsible for bringing the necessary equipment to the conference and setting up their demo at the conference.

=== Topics include but are not limited to:

* Art, Design, New Media, Social games – games as art forms, novel approaches to game design, mobile games and games that leverage from social networking tools, convergence and cross-platform media, cultural and media studies on games, policy and legislative responses to games.

* Artificial Intelligence: path-planning, camera-control, terrain analysis, user-modeling, machine learning, interactive storytelling, NPC modelling, planning and general AI architectures.

* Games and Education: integrating games into traditional computer science classes as well as novel ways of teaching games, curriucula development at university, high-school or middle-school levels, special games based programs for attracting disadvantaged or underepresented groups.

* Game Design and Production – papers examining the game production process from conception to design to prototyping to bringing games to market

* Graphics, Animation and Interfaces – advances in graphics techniques with applications to games, new animation techniques, novel interfaces for games, mixed-reality. augmented-reality applications, mobile games,

* Games Backend – papers that show advances in technical fields that make games work, such as databases, networking, cryptography, security, programming languages,

IE2009 will not accept any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. This restriction does not apply to submissions for workshops and other venues with a limited audience.

Accepted papers will be published in the IE2009 conference proceedings and also published in the ACM Digital Library. Please see http://ieconference.org/ for papers from previous years.

=== For the best student paper, IE2009 will waive the registration fee and provide a scholarship of up to $500 towards travel adn accomodation expenses. There are also
limited spots for student volunteers, please contact ie2009[at]ieconference.org if interested. Student volunteers will get a discount on the registration

General inquiries should be forwarded to ie2009[at]ieconference.org

IE2009 Conference Chair: Malcolm Ryan, UNSW
IE2009 Program Committee Chair: Yusuf Pisan, UTS

As a CS academic getting into games, I am of course concerned with publishing legitimate research and having it recognised by the academic community. Every discipline has its established conferences and journals with their own protocols for publication and standards for what constitutes valid research. As the academic study of games is still relatively new, I have found that we are still trying to find out feet in this area. Games researchers come from a variety of different backgrounds — computer science, critical theory, psychology, education — and the expectations of one group may not be the same as those of another.

This issue came up a number of times in my conversations at the FDG conference last week. It is probably fair to say that FDG is a CS-dominated conference with a selection of game design and game studies papers included. This not only sets the tone of the conference, it also dictates a certain process for peer reviewing of papers which seemed to discomfit some of the game studies attendees. There were calls for a separate reviewing process for this track, based on abstracts only; calls which were met with rumblings about “watering down” from the more scientifically minded attendees.

The fact of the matter is. for the time being games research is not a unified academic discipline. At the end of the day we must each go back to our schools and faculties and convince them that our work in games is “real research”, which means meeting the standards of good publication in whatever our foster discipline might be. Over time this will become less important. We will be our own judges. But until then awkward compromises will need to be made.

That said, I am quite excited by the diversity of research approaches represented in the area of games. One of the most interesting sessions at FDG for me was Magy Seif El-Nasr’s working group meeting Towards Acknowledging the Diversity of Game Research Methodologies which tried to make explicit the different expectations held by different groups. For me, the most exciting part was realising that some unfamiliar forms of research, such as “close readings” of games analysing them as texts, were considered legitimate and valuable. I have been doing such analyses as exercises for my personal interest and understanding and I was delighted to know that there is an audience who would be interested in such things.

My only question now is: what to publish where? What are the different conferences and journals that are available to me? What kind of audience are they directed at? What kind of research do they expect? I am putting together a list of such venues which I shall post here as it becomes more complete. Hoepfully it may serve as a useful service to other academics entering the field.

Even if we agree that we want to make art of some variety, there is a very real question as to whether games can do the things we want to do. Jason Rohrer says he wants to make games with depth, which continue to speak to the audience over many playings and many years, in the same way that a significant piece of literature, theatre or visual art can. Even the best ‘art games’ do not achieve this; they generally don’t offer many different interpretations and replaying the game doesn’t often yield much in the way of additional insight (beyond, perhaps, a second playing).

Are there any example of “deep” games? Rohrer argues (from secondhand experience) that Go is such a game. It has a simple set of rules but a wealth of emergent gameplay which, it is said, provides ongoing insights into the meaning of life over many years of play. I’m not an initiate myself so I’m taking this claim under advisement, but it raises the question: What is it about Go that provides this depth? And, more importantly for the designers among us, can it be done again?

Go is usually cited as a classic example of emergence. A small set of simple rules govern the local interactions of pieces, but result in complex patterns at a higher level. Similar phenomena are recognised in the behaviour of covection cells, ant colonies, and international economics. I’ve been lookng for a while for a good book that provides some insight into this phenomenon but haven’t seen much of value yet, so I’ll reserve a discussion of the “how to” or emergence for another time but I am interested to consider what is means for designers as “authors”.

If Go provides insight into themes of life and death, was this depth designed or accidental? By its very name emergence is recognised as something mysterious that spontaneously arises from a set of rules. We can recognise it when it happens but deliberately creating it is an act of careful balancing. Can we as designers hope to deliberately create such depth and control what messages our game conveys? Should we? Post-modern critical theory would claim that such attempts are irrelevant and that meaning exists only in the mind of the reader. It is certainly true that people are adept at finding patterns and stories where none really exist. Brian Moriarty calls it Constellation — the ability to see pictures in the stars, or the death of a Beatle in backwards lyrics.

Is Constellation the force behind all ‘deep’ art? Can we design for constellation? Moriarty’s advice is to “Throw in some useless particulars.” but I think there is more to it than that. Deliberate ambiguity can often feel contrived. It seems to me that constellation is more powerful when a set of innocuous facts combine to yield a deeper meaning. Individually they hold no mystery, but the whole is stranger than the sum of the parts.

This leads me to ponder whether some strong connection could be made between post-modernism, pattern recognition and emergence. It’s an intriguing thought.

I’ve been to several talks recently at GDC, GDX and various universities about games as “art”. Some say that games are already art, or have always been art; some say that games aren’t yet art and maybe can never be; and there are many views in between. There is a push for game designers to better understand art history and their position within it.

To me the whole term “art” is problematic. It means so many things to different people. There is high-brow, low-brow and even middle-brow art. There is art that ‘merely’ entertains, art that addresses the human condition and even (increasingly) art that makes a statement about art. Different people say art should be one thing or another, and games should (or shouldn’t) do likewise.

That ’should’ really bothers me. I do not know what it means. When a desginer or a critic writes that games “should be more meaningful” what authority does that ’should’ carry? Who gets to say what my games should or shouldn’t be? Perhaps there is a moral argument to say that some (very few) games shouldn’t be made, but I think that by and large the phrase “Games should be…” is being used in place of “I would like games to be…”

Don’t get me wrong, for my own part I would like there to be more games that make meaningful statements about life, and I even think there is a place for games that make a statement about games (although if we go down that path too far, as I believe the ‘high-brow’ art world has, we run the risk of disappearing up our own posteriror). I would like to encourage the creation of more such games, and the fostering of a culture of critical review that can accept, understand and value them. But I would stop short from saying we “should” be making them. That’s going a step too far.