I read a lovely article on the blog for Frictional Games. The argument in the article is that gameplay and narrative are detrimental to meaning in interactive experiences. The terms gameplay, narrative, and meaning are carefully defined, and the argument is important and compelling. However one element of this was troubling which is the intertwining of experience with meaning. All media produce experiences, particularly entertainment produces experiences. The majority of games, though not the games that Frictional is espousing, are entertainment.

Frictional games are interested in horror, which is visceral, so a focus on experience is natural. However, by placing experience foremost, it is easy to fall into the trap of non-interactive media, which is provide a very carefully, precisely crafted experience. In these situations, the meaning is crafted by the author, and we get criticism that hearkens back to auteur theory. This is one of Roger Ebert’s main critiques of games, that because it is interactive, the player can interfere with the author’s precise vision. This is not what is being argued in the article, however, there is something more to meaning in games than experience, which is not clearly stated.

If meaning is not authorial intent, then what is it? Games are unique in that they are systems that a player can interact with. I argue that the meaning is produced by the player’s comparison of the system in the game with the outside. The game can be about an adventure story, and the player could compare it against any other story; the game could be about failed relationships, and the player can compare it against personal experience; or the game could be about moral dilemmas, and the player could compare it against their own personal morality. With games, as in any other medium, meaning is not inherent: it is representative, and it requires interpretation and participation in order for it to work.

I finished Assassin’s Creed 2 not too long ago, and just recently a friend lent me Prototype. Both games have been very enjoyable, especially from the perspective of free navigation of space and the development of an increasingly diverse and complex arsenal of player abilities. In terms of play, the difference that stood out to me the most between the two games is how progress is implemented within the narrative of the story world. Progress in Assassin’s Creed 2 (AC2) is entirely diegetic, whereas progress in Prototype is almost entirely extradiegetic. I found the diegetic development in AC2 to be extremely rewarding, but the choose-your-own ability system in Protoype is also compelling for different reasons. The approaches offer the conflicting goals of narrative integration versus configurability. What approaches could we employ to integrate the desirable features of both systems?

Progress in AC2 is diegetic. This means that the protagonist Ezio gains a new ability when it is granted by the story. The player has no control over what abilities are learned, but each ability is integrated into what is happening in the story world. For example: Ezio gains use of the hidden blade when it is given to him, Ezio learns how to use special maneuvers with other weapons when the player purchases a lesson and Ezio is taught. Every new maneuver (with only a couple exceptions) learned is given by the plot, so the player has no control over the development of progress, it is entirely controlled by the designer. A major positive of this is that challenges are presented to the player explicitly to draw the use of the new skills. Very rarely is the player up against an adversary or obstacle for which there is no way around.

Prototype takes a very oppositional stance: Almost every new ability learned is through an interface in the menu. When the player has accumulated enough of the game’s currency, new skills may be purchased and used immediately. Skills are unlocked as the plot wears on, but typically (or at the very least, in my experience), there are many more skills available than can be purchased. This allows the player to control the repertoire of abilities that the protagonist, Alex Mercer, can use. The player may have a preference for one power over another, and focus development of new abilities on that preferred power. This is empowering to the player to be able to customize and develop the skills usable in the game. However, a tradeoff is that there is no story world explanation as to why Alex develops his newfound abilities. A consequence of this is that there is also very little in-game instruction as to how to use the abilities. Because of the design, a tutorial system would be awkward to develop: The player will not necessarily want to sit through five tutorials one after another after purchasing five new abilities. Because the player can learn abilities anywhere and at any time, there is no way to make sure that there is a suitable way of explaining the abilities after the player learns them. The result (again, for me) is that Alex has a mess of abilities and the player has no way to clearly understand how and when they can be used.

Diegetic progression is useful for both the purposes of instruction and also for the sake of making the player’s progression seem meaningful in the story world. However, diegetic progression often leads to restrictive development of gameplay. It seems like there should be some form of compromising between diegetic progression and character customizability. I would argue that quest based ability gains would be a good way to mediate between these. Another possibility is to use a clear training system, much like in Okami, to let the player learn new abilities, but also be able to practice them at leisure.

I’ve created a more or less permanent section for Painter on the website. That will get the latest updates to the Painter program and include more documentation. Painter still does not have a UI, but that is in the pipeline and should appear relatively soon.

At long last I have a demo of Painter that does something interesting. Click on it below to have it start.

Looks like applets don’t work for you

I’ve got this strange disposition that I have cultivated where my self satisfaction has a lot to do with whether I am doing something productive. I have to keep busy so that I’m focused and positive, but if I spend too much time on work stuff it feels crushing. On the other hand, if I relax and laze about for a long while, I’ll be fine for a little while, but will gradually become very agitated. This presents a problem for when I already have a lot of work to do, because I’m doing work, but it’s not my own. The answer to this is independent projects. Normally I’ve got one of these going while I’m engaged with other work, but right now I have a lot.

I’m not sure how it came about, but here’s what I have:

1) I’m working on Painter again. A little while ago I was having a conversation about the project. I introduced it as a spiritual successor to Genetic Image, where instead of generated expressions, Painter uses generated programs. After having this conversation I realized that I did all of the hard work for it: the infrastructure to define the programs, statements, expressions, and so on, but I stopped when it got to the actual drawing. For some reason, this seemed like the hard part at the time.

Admittedly, there do not seem to be any open libraries for Java that give Photoshop-esque drawing capabilities, but that’s kind of a silly thing to hope for anyway. However, there are good libraries for producing straightforward visual effects, especially out of Graphics2D. Normally these are directed towards cutting edge UIs, but I’m sure I can use those tools effectively for painting.

2) POV-Ray. I love POV-Ray. In the years since I first discovered it there have been more and more raytracers and renderers, but POV still holds a special place in my heart. However, a thing that has always bugged me about it was that you don’t have a lot of control over how objects reflect light. Actually, that’s not true, but you only have a few ways in which to do it. In traditional renderers, there are several types of illumination: ambient, diffuse, specular, and pure reflection. When programs start using radiosity, particularly via Monte-Carlo integration, it becomes hard to restrict illumination to the four types given. The light reflected off an object viewed from a particular angle is really something in between traditional diffuse and traditional reflection.

Anyway, I decided to compensate for this by modifying the POV-Ray source to include glossy reflection. It looks decent so far. There are actually a few other ways to get this effect, but mine has some special means of variation that allows quite a bit of customizability. When it’s more done I’ll post a few comparison shots.

3) Gameboard: A new project is a program supplement for roleplaying, that attempts to simulate the tabletop experience while gaming over the internet. This project is hardly unique, but most other programs that aim to do tabletop online run into a few flaws: they are closely bound to a particular system, cutting out house-rules; they prioritize 3d graphics over ease of navigation and use; they restrict users to internal assets and prevent them from being creative with their own. Effectively, they prevent users from doing things with the game board that players can do with a tabletop. I haven’t studied the other products that closely, but I know that a few of these are definite issues. My goal with this is to create a system to get those elements of the tabletop experience that are integral toward holding players’ attention during games.

Gameboard has a lot going for it conceptually, but I’m also at a tricky design situation, where I’m trying to figure out how tiles and layers should be represented in data structures. It’s not an impossible decision, but it’s one of those that is either made correctly, saving a lot of time in the future, or is made incorrectly and needs to be revisited a bunch.

4) Finally, I’m working on some new GeneticImage renderings. I’ll post some pictures later…

I just read this off of Amanda Palmer’s blog. In it, she discusses an experimental theatre project “Sleep No More” being run by the British theatre company Punchdrunk. Sleep No More is described as a combination of “The Shining, Macbeth, and Twin Peaks.” As awesome as that sounds, it gets much more interesting (from AFP’s post):

you don’t sit and watch actors. you wander around the space, alone (and wearing a mask) and you create your own experience.
actors come and go, events unfold. you can follow actors if you wish (they generally ignore you, but they will make contact occasionally),
or you can sit alone in a beautiful room filled with christmas trees until someone walks by you.
you can discover rooms nobody else is in and rifle through dusty papers and books.
there are rooms in asylums filled with bathtubs. there are fully landscaped gardens, there are rooms filled with dirt.
there is full nudity. there are lots of tuxedos and ballgowns. there is insanity. there is sexiness.
there is murder. there are moments where everyone winds up together and moments where you can watch the most intimate scenes play out between characters.

It’s not game-like in the sense that there is no “interactivity”, though there definitely is presence on the part of the audience. So, despite a lack of interactivity, there is still participation. Moreover, there is exploration and role-taking. Using classical definitions (say, Chatman), this can hardly be classified as narrative. So what is it? Well, it is performance art, but that ignores the problem.

We can think of types of games, performances, and stories which require some degree of role-taking (eg, clapping for Tinkerbell in Peter Pan plays). We can also think of performances which have an anonymous audience that wanders though a space in which some scene plays out (eg, spectator mode in some FPS games).

I have been lagging on writing, and there is list of things I ought to be writing about which is growing ever larger. However, I wanted to bypass that to describe something that has been on my mind recently. Last week there was a panel here on games and narrative. Cleverly entitled “What is Narrative”, and it featured Espen Aarseth, Fox Harrell, Janet Murray, with Celia Pearce and Ian Bogost moderating. (This is of particular interest to me, what with my thesis committee either on or moderating the panel.) There’s a recording of the thing online. It’s all intensely academic, and is oddly political. Not political in the sense of policy, but in the sense of power and authority. The whole ludology-narratology thing goes far back and does not seem like something that will ever get resolved. I am reminded of a notable quote by Wallace Sayre: “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” This is something of a digression, but it raises the question of what is this whole conflict about, and why do we seem to care about it so much?

One argument concerning the emergence of ludology is that when academics started studying videogames, many scholars looked at games from the perspective of narrative theory and film theory, frequently bypassing the importance of rules. A problem with this explanation is that it is something of a straw-man. It is hard to imagine this perspective as being unjustified, but I’ve never seen any sources to back it up. Whatever the cause of this frustration, scholars have been arguing about the differences between games and narratives, and arguing over whether the rules are important or the story is important, and so on. Lately, by Aarseth’s most recent talk, the question has become one of “How are some games narratives?” My favored response to this is to turn this question on its head: Yes, some games can be understood as narrative, but many stories and story worlds can be understood to operate according to rules; so, how are some narratives (or story worlds) like games? Much of what I am going to say is reacting to Aarseth in particular, but the idea that I’m proposing runs a bit deeper.

The problem that’s at the root of this debate is seeing games and narrative in opposition. The classical argument is that there is an opposition between stories (which are fixed), and games (which are interactive). However, as anyone who has spontaneously come up with a story and told it to a child will know, stories can be flexible. Cases such as oral storytelling, tabletop roleplaying, and improvisational theatre all refuse to fall into the oppositional structure of games and narrative. Each of these examples share qualities with both games and stories. Instead of seeing pure extremes which create a spectrum on which any given example must fall, we must acknowledge that the reality of the situation is much messier. Opposition does not effectively describe the relationship between games, stories, and all the ambiguous and edge cases.

There is also a distressing tendency for some scholars to perform a bit of ambiguous metonymy and substitute parts for wholes. I’ve heard Chess described as narrative because its structural resemblance to European monarchy in the layout of its pieces, because of its simplified and idealized representation of gentlemanly war, and because of the fascinating history of the most powerful piece on the board. However, in cases like these I think I have to agree with Aarseth, that to call this narrative is to dilute the term beyond meaning. However, while characters and history do not make the game into narrative, they are still important in thinking about Chess as a game, particularly as a game whose rules say something about its players and the culture which produced it.

To borrow from Barbara Stafford’s work Visual Analogy: We are too caught up in thinking about differences. (And I might add, we are too caught up in thinking about categories.) We should pay attention to how things are similar. This is notoriously hard to do, as we are naturally disposed to think in terms of comparisons rather than likenesses. What is missing from this discussion is the matter of how are games and stories similar: what they have in common? What do games have in common with stories, and what do stories have in common with games? Naturally, we should not look at them universally or as poles, but rather as collections unified by common ground.

For instance, suspense novels are frequently organized into chapters which structure the flow of the reader’s tension and anticipation. Tabletop roleplaying games are organized into sessions which often tend to have similar patterns of anticipation and conflict. Action games are typically organized into levels which have their own arcs of anxiety, tension, and resolution. This is not to say that these three examples should be made out to be the same thing, but it might be fruitful to consider how they are similar, and what that says about them. Games might use a common narrative construction, such as “character”, but use them in a variety of ways. We can look at differences within a group, and then find similarities across media. For instance, games might have very shallow characters, or maybe caricatures or stereotypical characters. Characters might be introspective, or not. There might be some allusion to inner lives, or there might be only surfaces. Novels and film too use these varieties of characters. We can borrow from Scott McCloud’s treatise Understanding Comics to understand how the depth of characterization affects identification, and apply this to characters in fiction and in games. We can look at the types of rules involved in controlling characters in games, and see how they resemble the methods used in film and fiction.

We should move beyond essentializing arguments about what is narrative or what are games and focus instead on the important properties that they share in common.

Genetic Image needs to be able to do things like this. I just discovered Andy Gilmore today, and a lot of his abstract work is extremely applicable to the Genetic Image project. While it’s not really feasible to put a lot of organic shapes into the program, especially not with the pictures that are hand-held pen on paper,  some of the more abstract shapes and the principles behind them could be induced algorithmically. It’s possible to get more process based stuff into a system like Painter, but that needs so much work.

School of Seven Bells were playing at a nearby venue “The Drunken Unicorn” last Tuesday. Naturally, we got tickets. The Drunken Unicorn is a tiny but cozy little space nestled away by a few bars and restaurants. The audience appeared to be a hip, young student variety. We got there around 9 in the evening, and the show lasted until about 1 in the morning. The opening act was Tea Lights, a fascinating and complex group native to Atlanta, which used an impressive diversity of instruments. Most pleasing was their use of a cello alongside drums, electric guitars, and electronic samples. I’ve recently been thinking that cellos are entirely underutilized as band instruments, and Tea Lights showed just how effective one can be.

After Tea Lights, another indie-electronic group, Phantogram, began their setup. This setup involved assembling a stand full of equipment, including a keyboard, a mixer, a strobe light, some sort of voice processor, and a number of other devices I couldn’t recognize. Phantogram consisted of two performers, Josh Carter, who manned an electric guitar, and Sarah Barthel, who controlled the hub of electronics. Both sang, and used the voice system to create intense, ethereal, reverberating effects. The music itself was layered and distorted, but pulsing enough to be quite danceable.

When Phantogram finished, School of Seven Bells began setting up, and started their set. They sound very differently live than in their album. The sound is coarser, the vocals were covered but not drowned by the ambient guitar noise. The upside of this is that the songs are more energetic and danceable. Particularly satisfying was “iamundernodisguise,” which is introspective and even reserved on the album, but was played with vibrant force and pulsing energy. The band played several new tracks as well, which suggests that there might be a new album in the works, so we have something to look forward to.

Much earlier, over the summer, Audrey and I got tickets to see The Decemberists, who were going to be playing at the Fox theatre. We were notified of the tickets in an email from Ticketmaster, which knew we were in Atlanta, and knew that we liked The Decemberists. Unfortunately for us, the particular theatre being advertised was the Fox in Oakland, California, not the Fox here. Fortunately for us, The Decemberists were playing in Georgia this past weekend. Not in Atlanta, mind you, but in Athens.

So, we got a couple of good friends together and decided it was time for a road trip. There was some sort of massive sporting event taking place at Georgia Tech that Saturday, making transportation around the area rather difficult. The weather was also rather nasty, with a intermittent light rain that lasted throughout the early afternoon. After getting coffee for the road, we set out and made it to the highway. Immediately thereafter, the light rain turned into a downpour, and we plodded along the normally very busy interstate 85 at 45 miles per hour as waves of water poured over the car. Despite this, the car ride went smoothly and we arrived in Athens around 7:00. We were surprised by the amount of traffic, and also by numerous banners with very particular coloring. As it turns out, there was yet another massive sporting event taking place in Athens. Parked cars lined the roads as every available space accessible from the road was occupied by large SUVs and minivans. We faced a difficult parking situation. The venue itself was full, so our options seemed to be finding a parking spot some some great distance away in an unfamiliar residential neighborhood, or alternately forking out the exorbitant $40 for a parking lot. Instead we decided to drive around and find dinner.

Dinner worked out without too much hassle, and we miraculously found a lone parking spot for the duration of the meal. When we returned, there were parking openings in the venue at a convenient $5. So we went in and got ready for the show. This was another numbered-seating show, so I am reminded of the Death Cab show earlier in the spring. We started off having seats in the top row of the theatre, which had a good view, but was so far back. After seeing that the seats at the side (which I guess are the box seats) were unoccupied, we stealthily maneuvered over and took them, hoping that no one else would come by and kick us out. Fortunately, that never happened, so we had a great view of the performance. The opening act was Laura Veirs. Her songs had a folksy-but-ominous feel, and the spelunking song was particularly delectable. Afterwards, The Decemberists came on and played the set from The Hazards of Love, which was strung together to create a solid but continuous performance. Having read more about the album afterwards, it is a single continuous story, almost operatic in nature. Each of the songs linked into the next, and there was nary a pause between them. They played Audrey’s favorite, “The Rake’s Song” and recurred with powerful performances of “The Wanting Comes in Waves”. What was impressive about this was not just the seamless integration of the songs, but this compounded with a surprising diversity of styles and genres in the songs themselves.

Once they finished the Hazards of Love set, they came back and played something more like an ordinary set. The band seemed to loosen up after this, did a few rounds of call and response songs, and concluded before the encore with a surprise cover of “Crazy On You.” When all was done, we wandered over to the green room and milled about waiting for any of the band members to drift out. This was Hank’s idea, as he is used to visiting green rooms, but none of the rest of us had done anything like that before. There was very little in the means of security, so we just moseyed on over there. We didn’t see Colin, but we did see a few of the other members, and we talked to the organist and acordionist Jenny Conlee for a little while, which was fun. When we finally filed out it was around 1:00, and we got on the road to go back home.