The Plush Apocalypse

In writing, there’s a general distinction between a plot driven story and a character driven story – the events in the former are driven by external causes, while the events in the latter come about because of characters’ internal motivations. Many times, the plot driven story is looked down upon by writers because it doesn’t provide any additional character depth. A character driven story can have the same dramatic highs and lows of a finely structured plot driven story, but it also fleshes out characters’ inner lives to resonate more deeply. It’s just harder to apply both constraints.

In games we certainly suffer from the lack of character driven writing, but have our own unique form of failure in writing – the spatially driven story. In this, the characters exist soley to provide rationale to place gameplay in interesting locales (either visually interesting, mechanically interesting, or both).

Assassin’s Creed 2 suffers more from this than any other game I’ve played as of late – Ezio clothes are far richer than his personality. What do we know about Ezio? He has some family, he’s a bit of a playboy, and he’s out for vengeance. All of these are used, to varying degrees, to give the player reason to move through the space as the fiction behind mission objectives. (Jorge Albor covers these flaws well at Experience Points). But what else do we know about Ezio? Not much. Granted, I’m only halfway through at this point, but I’m not going to hold my breath for them to animate cardboard cutout Ezio with some life.

Avatar manages to take these elements of video game writing (to be fair, they do have their roots in action blockbuster writing), and singlehandedly disproves the notion that games are not fit to tell stories. It shows even in film, when you start with context sprung from a teenage boy’s mind to take place in fantastic locales and look awesome, you end up with the same exact result, regardless of the medium. It is essentially a video game storyline, albeit a finely overwrought one. Even Ebert turns hyprocrite, often criticisng movie plots for being game-like, loving it. You like space marines, Rog? Really? We can hook you up.

In its details, it is almost textbook in the application of Hollywood formulae. Payoffs abound, from the moment of realization Sully has waking in his human body after sleeping with Neytiri, to the final fight where Sully in Na’vi form defeats Colonel Quaritch in his mech. However, while the Na’vi are immediately likeable as the underdog, it takes Sully three months and the better portion (in size) of the film to finally change his mind at the last possible moment, when he finally realizes that the Na’vi and their home are worth saving. There’s is no worthwhile character justification given for such wild shifts in behavior. Sully is either dumb as fuck or temporarily psychopathic. The decision and its timing only serve to create visual drama.

Uncharted 2 attempts to apply the exact same formulae. Yet while the levels also take place in one amazing location after another, their flow comes from and represents Drake’s internal conflict between hedonism (money and sex) and virtue (information or truth, and love). He alternates evenly between desiring treasure, wanting to find the historical truth, saving Chloe (lust) or saving Elena (love). Even trying to save Chloe (since you do it so many times) oscillates between motivations of purity (to actually keep her from dying) and impurity (when’s she’s double-crossed you and you need her to get back to the treasure).

In this way, Naughty Dog externalizes the conflict that makes Drake a likeable reluctant hero. The purpose the other characters serve isn’t to bring you to a specific location, it’s to change Drake’s motivation for going somewhere. Story elements that at first glance seem like they are there to superficially highlight exotic locales serve a deeper purpose to communicate internal character motivation (as cliche as it may be). 

These works obviously have more positive and negative aspects, these are only criticisms of their overall storylines. Games can also achieve so much more with emergent story structure, but in writing story elements for The Unconcerned, with it’s more traditional storytelling methods, these are unavoidable problems. I want to incorporate key locations like Baharestan Square, Tehran University, or the Grand Bazaar because they afford opportunities to include the subtext I want and provide visual interest. You do spend more time looking at game environments than you do parsing story context; it’s not inappropriate to make sure level locations meet these kinds of requirements. What should be be discouraged is assuming that is enough. Storytelling in games will never avoid the morass of juvenile discussion the topic naturally encourages if we only settle for the highest priority requirement – we gotta do it all.

You may have noticed the severe lack of updates on the blog lately. Blame my 6+ day work week involving multiple projects, I suppose. While my Kickstarter project may have tanked, I am quite happy to keep working on the game under my own devices – I especially appreciate the support from everyone who backed the project. I may not get your pledges, but knowing people are interested in this kind of game is actually more motivating than money in the bank.

Here’s my three part series on Gamasura’s Blogs about my process using Kickstarter:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3 (where I also interview indie game makers Daniel Benmergui, Deirdra Kiai, and Vince Twelve)

You can check me out this March at the Serious Games Summit at GDC talking more about the prototyping process for the game and my attempt to combine engaging gameplay with serious themes. I’ll also be helping out at the AI Summit, giving a rant and taking part in a panel on middleware use.

And now, for those of you looking for New’s Year’s resolution ideas, here are a few:

• The only time I will mention Citizen Kane is in critical analysis of the work of Orson Welles.
• I will not tell anyone what kind of games they should make, or what kind of games are the future. Because you will inevitably be wrong, so the only thing you really are saying is “I have an ego the size of the landfill they put all those Ataris in”.
• I will play an interesting, thoughtful indie game and tell as many people as I can about it.
• If you are a games journalist: I will not try to impress people with how smart I am. This includes inserting <laughs> when an interviewee laughs out of pity at your poor joke, attempting to use terminology from film or game development without actually knowing what it means, and doing pieces on how games could be meaningful instead of actually talking to developers that already do so.
• If you want to, or do, design games: I will not use chess as a primary game design example (because you’re kind of full of yourself  if you think you can make chess, a product of a longer time period than you will be alive).
• If you are a game developer: I will attempt to put well written characters that are not buff white straight men in my games.

And for you game of the year list making types, I think my offical game of the year is Every Day the Same Dream. Maybe I’ll even write about it – probably not though. The blog will most likely be on hiatus till March given all the work I have.

So have a good holiday and see you on the other side of 2010. It will hopefully be a good year for games – let a thousand flowers bloom!

IndieCade was awesome, and I highly recommend it to anyone for next year. No conference I’ve been too has such an interesting spectrum of creative people all doing really neat stuff. Even if some of it’s not your thing, the thoughtfulness and artistry behind all of the games, their creators, and all the other participants, should be. Only downside for me was being too tired to go to the final party, which by all accounts summed up IndieCade’s awesomeness appropriately.

Also, I’ve been meaning to post this link (forwarded by a friend a little while ago – thanks Bijan!) for those developers who work for big companies that want to pursue developing their own games outside of working hours and using their own resources, and are in California: California Labor Code Section 2870-2872.

Here’s part of it, entailing the legality of clauses employers force employees to sign that give all their work away to the employer:

2870.  (a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides
that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her
rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an
invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time
without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or
trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
   (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of
the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably
anticipated research or development of the employer; or
   (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the
employer.
   (b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports
to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from
being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision
is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.

A number of folks have been helpful enough to write about the game & it’s attempt to use Kickstarter as funding method.

Simon Ferrari writes about it at the GaTech News Games blog.

Eric Caoili writes about it at GameSetWatch (and reminds me I must work extra hard to make “EA vet” not the simplest way to describe my background in a title).

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, put up an interview with me me on the Kickstarter blog.

And last but certainly not least, L.B. Jeffries wrote it up for PopMatters.

Thanks all! And thanks to everyone’s who’s pledged! I can’t possible express my appreciation enough.

Oh, and in other Kickstarter news, there’s a very cool game mag called Kill Screen looking for some funding to publish its first issue.

Watch as I marshal the power of teh internets to get word out about the Kickstarter project for my serious game:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1566255659/video-game-set-in-iran-during-the-post-election-ri-0

I’ve started blogging on Gamasutra about the process, which I thought might be helpful to other indie devs considering using Kickstarter:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BorutPfeifer/20090912/3004/Kickstarting_a_serious_game.php

Hopefully in doing so I will have helpful insight to share with people, and not become an obnoxious shill. Fingers crossed.

However – $836 already pledged after less than a day! W00t!

Thanks all. :)

In research for my game set in Iran, I’ve been reading a number of books. Most recent is Cruel and Usual Punishment, by Nonie Darwish. It’s a breakdown of Sharia, Islamic religious law, and how she thinks its laws enforce a culture that strips women of their rights, create other human rights violations, and breed terrorism.

While aspects of her personal life, growing up in Egypt as Muslim and eventually converting to Christianity, are prominent in the book, it’s most interesting when she’s tying historical context to laws and their effects over time. That part is fascinating not just for the analysis of human nature but how it is affected by systems design. (On a side note, every systems designer should try to create a religion.)

I wholeheartedly believe that in practice, outside of any particular system, the majority of people will act in a morally positive manner. The exceptions are then psychopaths, the roughly one percent of of the population who have no internal moral boundaries, and those that live under systems that cause the dehumanization of other classes of people. From there almost any evil act is easily rationalized by otherwise compassionate people (see also The Lucifer Effect).

Islam was started in the 7th century by the Bedouin, a nomadic desert tribe. That life and its requirements for survival dictated a number of elements of Sharia. Living in tents without much shelter, in a tight knit tribe, the large open robes of the burka afforded women privacy (especially to, say, go to the bathroom). As natural protection from sun and sand, its use predates Islam.

To encourage an Arabian fighter to vie for the survival of his tribe, status, wealth, and his pick of women were afforded him. While Christianity holds the notion of marriage being a bond between a single man, wife, and God, here you have a structure meant to deal with harsher circumstances. The women of Arab culture at this point were more likely to have a better chance in life as one of many wives of a successful warrior, as opposed to being the wife of a man of lesser power and status.

As times changed, those in power sought to maintain their privilege. Sharia has rules to ensure that it spreads and that those in power remain so. It requires proselytization, allows brutal treatment of non-Muslims, mandates lying to non-Muslims in order to ensure the spread of Islam, and punishes apostasy (renouncing the religion) by death. It is these aspects of Sharia that Darwish argues are responsible for the determined spread of terrorism.

While Sharia is religious law, it is typically implemented in the secular law of most Islamic countries (at least those in the middle east). Article 4 of the Iranian constitution declares that all laws must be based on Islamic criteria. Articles 19, 20, and 21 would seem to grant equal rights protection to all groups, whether based on race or gender. Kinda contradictory, especially in light of existing women’s rights in Iran.

Women can’t be judges and their testimony is worth half a man’s testimony in court. A man can have up to four wives, while a woman can only have one husband. A wife can’t contest a divorce if her husband wants one, but her husband can if she does. Husbands automatically get custody of children after a certain age. Most directly worriesome though is the practice of honor killing – if a woman is found to have done something against the honor of her family (such as sleeping with a man that is not her arranged husband), there have been cases of male family members killing the woman, without punishment. While the latter may now be illegal according to secular law, there are many cases where killers still go unpunished.

Polygamy, while not the worst violation of rights compared to honor killing, has interesting systemic effects – if another wife is brought into the household, the existing wife’s children have to compete for resources and attention (especially since she is forbidden from having multiple husbands). It’s in her children’s best interest to be the sole wife. She can’t really do anything directly about it though, but if she spends as much of her husband’s money as possible, he may not be able to afford another wife. Even though your average middle class Iranian household may only have one wife/one husband, simply the possibility throws a seed of discord into the act of marriage. Neither party can rely on the institution to afford trust in the other.

And then there’s the burka/chador/hijab; women must be covered when going outside. Shirin Ebadi, Iranian feminist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work advocating women’s and children’s rights, said, “If my husband can no longer marry up to four wives, take automatic custody of my children, do violence to me by right; if I have equal access to jobs, to professions, to study; if my legal standing in courts and my value in society is equal to that of a man, then at that point we can discuss the hejab.”

Certainly no one could disagree with the priorities expressed in that statement. But, how can you try to negotiate for those things while wearing a symbol of your submission on your head? Surely if the littlest of progress can’t be made, can you expect the rest? The Broken Windows Theory applied to gender equality, if you will.

As in any religion, obviously supporters range from those requiring strict interpretations to those who realize such works are the product of people in a historical context, and open interpretation to consider the value of human rights, science, and other modern issues. Darwish’s point is that the core of the system is corrupt, and even though significant numbers of Muslims may not believe all aspects of Sharia, it brings negative systemic effects to modern Muslim cultures (and will bring negative effects to Western cultures as more Muslim emigrate). Granted, Darwish’s conception of Christianity is somewhat misguided here, in that she holds it up as solely reinforcing love & compassion, while there certainly exists in the Bible arguments for a number of the same acts we would consider violations of human rights. And it certainly has its own fundamentalists that pick and choose what aspects to interpret literally.

Considering all this, and that games are best suited to exploring systemic effects, a game meant to look at the effects of a core piece of a culture’s value system like Sharia would be of unimaginable scale, perhaps not feasible. Looking at pieces of it in a game is perhaps a more tangible goal. Something about the topic though, finally after many years of upholding the dynamic, plastic nature of the medium and the evolving semantics behind the word game, makes me queesy. There’s something that rings hollow when using “game” and “human rights violation” in the same sentence. This doesn’t reflect on the form, as it stands today, which is certainly capable of dealing with that, but just the connotation of playing at something so vile. However play remains at the core of understanding, so it might as well be used to understand some of the most difficult problems before us.

The relevant links:

• Anthony Burch’s rant on Destructoid
• David Jaffe’s video blog response
• Anthony Burch’s post in reponse to Jaffe
• Jaffe’s post summing up his thoughts
• Anthony Burch’s attempt at making an “art game” and his post-mortem of it

And now you know, as those who know me in person, I clear my throat and sniffle a lot (allergies). Sigh.

So, as of last Friday, I’ve left EA.

I greatly enjoyed most of my time there, working with incredibly talented people like Doug Church, Randy Smith, Jeff Lander, and the whole amazing team they assembled. Yet the chaos, layoffs, and project cancellations of the past few months have been too much for me to take.

As I went around talking to folks to see what other work was available, I slowly came to realize even the projects that I might have found some nugget of interesting-ness in, earlier in my career, no longer did anything for me. They no longer aroused that same flurry of creative ideas that I know drives me all the way through to complete the product. I just felt I really needed to be captain of my own destiny for a while.

So, I’ve got a couple game ideas, and a few weeks before I do anything else to get them started. I’m going to be pursuing some contract work to pay the bills, like helping Dave Mark at Intrinsical Algorithm with some AI consulting. 

I’m going to attempt to finish at least one of the games even if I’m full time contracting – one of the demotivating factors working on something in your spare time while at a big company is that they typically own all your work. It’s funny how just formalizing the relationship between studio & worker such that it is clear I am working on someone else’s game, and afforded all the rights implied, can feel incredibly freeing. I’m also talking to a handful of promising startups, so it’s possible I’ll be someone else’s employee again, but we’ll see.

Regardless, moving forward I’ve decided on two things I will insist on in formal work agreements to:

• I own the work I do in my spare time, or I own a piece of the profit from the game. I refuse to give up the former without getting the latter.
• Any contract will include a very simple crediting requirement for work done. I’m not sure yet how this would fly with an employment agreement, but I think it’ll be easy to get for a contracting agreement.

Batting around a few game ideas, but there are two at the top of the list currently. The main requirements are that they deal with at least one issue I talk about on the blog, can take a short timeframe to make (2-5 months or so), and allow for a distinctive art style:

• A top down game set in the streets of Tehran during the election riots. It’s not about the politics directly per se, you play a parent looking for their lost child. So some stealth, a little bit of combat, and some hand-holding Ico-esque mechanics. 
• An emergent narrative experiment, for a lack of a better description we’ll call an adventure/RTS hybrid. It takes place in a SoCal diner.

While I leave behind a host of talented, great people at EALA, I know for me, for the foreseeable future, smaller is better.

I’m late in linking this, but it’s been a chaotic week - Last weekend Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer kindly had me on for part of episode 24 of his regular podcast, discussing authorship in games with Clint Hocking and Manveer Heir. It was a total blast, and I wish we could have had an hour long conversation on each question.

More news to come shortly, for those of you who don’t already follow me on twitter.

Real quick, some lighter fare – it’s a blog meme! Shane started it, Darius followed suit, and now here’s my list of my 10 most impactful games.

The most interesting thing is trying to define impactful – whether it’s affected my personal life in some direction, affected my design sensibility, or just sheer number of hours played, it’s tough to define and these games cover all those reasons and then some.

• Landstalker - If I wasn’t such a Sega fanboy at the time, this might have been a Zelda game, but this game helped cement my love for the intercoupling of story & action, and showed me games can be funny, too.
• Toe Jam & Earl – My friend Jason & I spent months playing this game. It is even today a pinnacle of co-op gaming. And its sequel also serves as another fine example, of just how bad a sequel can be.
• Facade – While the procedural storytelling elements are still innovative today, I just loved the feeling that when I typed in whatever curse word riddled nonsense I picked, they stared at me awkwardly like real people. It made me want to stop talking like a crazy person to them.
• Ghouls n’ Ghosts – This was the first game I properly got hooked on. I’d come home from school everyday for several weeks and play it for hours on end. It was what made me realize the power of the medium, that a game could keep me that transfixed for so long. I knew from then on what I wanted to do was make games, because you could really effect people. Then that shit with having to repeat the game at the end happened, and my faith that I could design better games was forged.
• Ocarina of Time – both for the briliance of the structure & the amount of time I spent with it.
• Planescape: Torment – the writing, the themes, amazing.  A staking point in the argument for the occasional depth of pop culture.
• Diablo - this one falls under sheer time, including both single player playthrough and cooperative play throughs. Co-op story games ftw. I remember playing it for 24 hours straight, stopping only to pee. At some point I was driving somewhere (with a full night’s sleep, I swear), and my gas tank gauge morphed into a half-full red health globe. This is why I’ve never played WoW. 
• Nitrous Oxide – Technically Rez is the better game, it’s just Nitrous Oxide came out first and I played more of it. But it gave me a fascination for synesthesia, which Rez furthered.
• Resident Evil - Horrible translation, but when those dogs jumped through that window, you were scared. Don’t remember that happening before then.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines – While very buggy, the game featured some mind blowing moments. I almost had a heart attack playing the hotel level (there’s impact), and it was my escape from some other personal life stresses at the time.

Chronological Order:

• 1988 Ghouls n’ Ghosts
• 1991 TJ&E
• 1992 Landstalker
• 1996 Resident Evil 1
• 1996 Diablo 1
• 1998 N2O
• 1998 Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• 1999 Planescape: Torment
• 2004 Vampire: Bloodlines
• 2005 Facade

Metacritic: Actually only 1 game is on Metacritic, Planescape: Torment at 91.

Various stats:

• 5 Action/RPGs 
• 2 platformers
• 1 adventure(?) game (Facade)
• 1 Shooter/Racer
• 1 Action/Survival Horror
• all 10 games involve navigating an avatar around a 3D space
• all 10 games feature action in that they rely on reflexes to some, even slight, degree
• 5 American games, 5 Japanese games
• 0 puzzle games (although 9 could be said to have puzzles)
• 2 ”open world” games (3, I guess, TJ&E kinda is too).
• 4 PC games
• 6 Console games (Genesis: 3, N64: 1, PS1: 2)
• 1 game that is a continuing title in a series (G&G), unless you count Vampire (not really)
• 4 games that kicked off a series
• 3 games that stand alone
• 1 game that loses a lot of value on replay
• 7 games with strong story elements
• 3 multiplayer games
• 4 years since the last entry on the list. I think it’s a matter of my tastes having changed a long time ago & the industry not really catching up, but I could just be a snob. Or worse, nostalgic. Ick.

Interesting. My list is much less varied, but at the same time I like a lot of other games in different genres, many of which I would put in a list of my favorite games over these. It was actually pretty hard to define impactful. Part of Shane’s definition helped, that you would prosletyize these games to anyone who hadn’t played them. Or being able to summon strong personal memories of the time playing them.