The Three Rules

We talked about how goals and narratives make games what they are, but we need to include one last important ingredient: rules. A game is, at its most fundamental level, a system of rules.

The simplest way to explain why this is true is to invoke the term 'win condition'. One wins a game upon meeting its win condition, a rule that demands a certain requirement. Not every game, as we already discussed, can be won in the classic sense, but to avoid losing certain requirements must be met. You have to keep your last city, your last citizen, you have to keep the Tetris blocks from reaching the top of the screen, you have to stay alive.

These requirements are dictated by the overarching rules system that create games. You are only playing chess if you respect the rules. If you let rooks jump over pawns, if you capture the enemy queen and declare victory, no one will play with you, or at least no one will play chess with you, because you are no longer playing what we have agreed to call chess. The rules and the game are more than cosubstantial, they are synonymous. A modification of the rules, the institution of house rules, all variants are recognized as variants. Even such factors as the physical state of the game are sometimes negotiable; if you lose your knight you can substitute it, but it will still behave as a knight will behave, will still obey all the rules though its physical appearance may deviate. But the rules of play must never change if the game itself continues to be the game it once was.

There are three kinds of rules. The definition of these three rules is the basis for much of what I have to say about the ethics of the game and gaming. I'll list them just to give a brief overview:

-Rule of Prohibition - A rule that tells you what you may not do. (e.g. in chess you cannot castle out of or through check)
-Rule of Consequence - A rule that tells you if you do one thing, something else will necessarily result. (e.g. in Halo if you teamkill you will have an extended respawn time)
-Rule of Allowance - A rule that tells you what you may do. (e.g. in Settlers of Catan you may play a victory point card at any time)

There is a chronology you can create from these rules, and I have listed them according to that chronology. I want to stress that this is a false chronology, a narrative I'm going to tell to express the significance of their distinction. It's useful, but not 'true' in the classic sense.

Rules of prohibition come first. They are the 'thou shalt not' rules, and share the ancient roots of the ten commandments. They are the first kind of laws, the ones that tell you what you aren't permitted to do. For you Freudians out there, it's closely allied with the primal father's 'no', and is often closely allied with paternal authorities. They feel the most restrictive, because they are just that: restrictions. The oldest despots, the most primal rulership structures, are based around this breed of rule. Civilization itself is inaugerated by saying 'no'. Private property is created because you must not steal. Family is created because you must not commit incest. Personhood is created because you must not kill. And rape is rape because no means no.

These rules come into existence because the forbidden action is, in fact, possible. No one needs to be told not to turn lead into gold, because no one is able to do it. And any time a law is made to demand the impossible not be permitted, it's because it is believed it is possible. A rule of prohibition is made because it can be broken, and can only be upheld if there are consequences for breaking it. And so the next kind of rule is born, that of consequence. The first rule makes crime possible, and the second rule creates the assigned punishment. The fact that the second rule is often allowed exception from the first rule (death penalty for murder) is worth investigation, but we'll skip that for now. What's important is that rules of consequence come after the prehistoric rule of prohibition, because consequence inaugerates history itself. The idea of causality, that one thing follows another, is intrinsic to the rule of consequence. Narrative is born out of the second rule, and along with it the possibility of the win/loss conditions.

The final rule is the most complicated, and will be discussed further in the next post, where we'll talk about 2K's 'BioShock' and it's remarkable commentary on the rule of allowance. For now, however, I'll point out the paradox created by the appearance of the third rule, the most (forgive me) 'postmodern' kind of rule, and the rule (I maintain) that has greatest prominance in modern life. At face value, rules of allowance seem like the most liberating kind. They tell you what you can do, they point towards freedom. They seem antithetical to the paternal restriction of the rule of prohibition. But I'll ask you to enter a thought experiment with me. Let's play a two games.

Game #1 - Rules:
-Don't step on a crack.
-If you do, you lose.

Game #2 - Rules:
-Step on cracks.
-Whoever steps on the most cracks wins.

The first game relies on a rule of prohibition and a rule of consequence. The second on a rule of allowance and a rule of consequence. The first game tells you that you cannot step on any cracks at all, is restrictive in that respect. The second game leaves it up to you, you can step on a crack or not. However, any step you do not take that lands on a crack is a step away from winning. And if we care about winning, we want to make every step we take be on a crack. So hidden in the rule of allowance is a much stronger rule. Assuming you want to win, the rule should really be written 'Step only on cracks'. While in the first game you can do whatever you wish as long as you don't break that first rule, the second game requires that you constantly observe its first rule, to the exclusion of all other actions.

This demonstrates (clumsily, I admit) that rules of allowance are radically more restrictive than the rules of prohibition. In a game state with only rules of prohibition, all action outside the prohibited ones are assumed to be permitted. In a game state with only rules of allowance, all actions outside of those explicitly permitted by the rules are assumed to be against the rules. Rules of allowance carry prohibition against all paths not described.

So we discover that there is a hidden, much more restrictive imperative within the ostensibly liberal rules of allowance. And in the next post, I will use 'BioShock' to explain the implications of this in detail.

Until then!

As Foretold!

This is my first post in a long time, as a quick date check will make abundantly clear. I could go on about the reasons why, but this is a blog of intellectual discourse, not twitter, so... screw that!

I promised to write about rules this time around, and I'm a little scared, because this is my first post in a long time; I feel out of practice, and rules are a huge deal in my conception of 'game'. So big, in fact, that I'm going to back out of my previous promise, and write about something a little easier first. But fear not! I'm finally going to talk about a game.

Today we are going to talk about Portal. If you're not familiar, your life is a sad sham, and you have my pity. Go play it! If you are familiar, let's rehash details. Okay, and those of you who I told to go play it and are still reading, I guess you can use this rehash as a reference point.

Much has been said of Portal's simple game play premise, its profound creativity in execution, and its general tone of black comedy. The game's sales speak for itself; its super fun. But I want to talk about the game play insofar as it is informed by, and in turn informs, that funny-horrible tone.

Now, I'd love to properly cite the person I'll be grossly paraphrasing here, but I simply have no idea how to track down their work right now; if anyone recognizes it, please tell me. I want to give credit where credit is due. But a very clever analysis of Stephen King identifies three kinds of fear used in literature and art.

-The most basic is horror, which relies on visceral reactions, blood and guts, the grotesque, the vile. Dead Rising and other zombie horror works rely on horror.
-Next is good ol' fear, which is based around suspense and release - a tense, shivering violin, a dark corridor, then POW something jumps out at you! Resident Evil employs this kind of scare tactic often, as does (appropriately) FEAR.
-Last is terror, which relies on the fear of the unseen, unknowable or truly alien. It's the most complicated category, one that is closest to what Freud calls 'the uncanny' which is the feeling a familiar thing made suddenly unfamiliar.

Terror is the most interesting, and is what I'm going to talk more about. Freud's uncanny is actually, in German, 'das Unheimlich', which literally translates to 'un-home-like'. It is the realization that something you thought you know well contains terrible, hidden depths, or has somehow been replaced. Dopplegangers are his favorite example of an uncanny terror.

How does this relate to Portal? One of the most unsettling forms of uncanny terror is that which carries a hint of humor. Black comedy is, by its nature, tied to the uncanny, just as it is tied to parody, because it takes a familiar thing and points out qualities that we don't often think about. And Portal's scariness is invariably run through with humor.

Take what may be the game's most memorable line 'The cake is a lie'! Scrawled by deranged test participants, it's chilling, certainly, but it's also absurd. That anyone would consider risking serious injury and death for the promise of cake, however delicious and moist, is patently insane, but the reward of cake is the only motivator that exists in the closed world of the Enrichment Center. The betrayal of trust in the cake being a lie serves to underline the unspoken betrayal of the cake's very inadequacy. And, ultimately, it's not like you even have much of a choice. Look forward to the cake, because what else have you got to look forward to? The philosophical implications are broad: how many cakes are we offered in our own lives, a diploma, a bonus, a raise, even the afterlife? Portal isn't heavy handed with it, though. It's funny, and its dark, and it leaves it at that.

But the aesthetic doesn't end there. There are so many other particularly funny/dreadful lines, like the particle field 'emancipating' teeth, the idea of 'truth enhancement', the 'companion cube' which is, much as I try to make myself forget, just a weighted storage cube with hearts painted on it. And the dreadfulness comes from that most uncanny of idioms, the euphemism. Each creepy turn of phrase is a gloss placed over the more honest, grim truth of your predicament. And rather than making the glossed danger less frightening, it makes it more so. Or, rather, it makes it more complexly frightening. It stops being mere fear, and evolves into terror, because we all know the motives behind our own government's 'emancipations', and we all know what 'enhanced interrogation' really means. We'd like to think that we are cleverer than the labels and lies, too, but I know I felt genuine guilt when I destroyed my companion cube. Who made me bond with an inanimate object, and who made me feel like a callous beast for overcoming that bond?

The answer, in Portal, is GLaDOS, one of the most brilliantly conceived AI characters since System Shock's Shodan. Your only real companion throughout the tests, she is the funniest and more terrible part of the whole funny, terrible game. The question I have, though, is what is more awful/funny: her implacable, cheerful, saccharine corporate euphemism, or when that facade breaks down and you see the seething, passive aggressive insanity underneath it? What's more unsettling, the droning 'cake' module, or the snarling 'rage' module?

The answer is neither: they require each other to create the unique terror of Portal. GLaDOS is most frightening when you realize that the hyper-rational, inhuman and heedless structure of corporate euphemism is inseparable from the all-too-human aggression that necessarily lies beneath it. The system GLaDOS maintains, in the lifeless halls of the Enrichment center, is so rational and clean that it is crosses over into the pointless and irrational. What is the purpose of any of these tests? What would they even demonstrate? Is it the device that's being tested, or the test taker? And what would GLaDOS learn from either? Machines frighten us because they lack emotion, because they perform their task without knowledge of that task, and that is why they do it so well. But the result is an irrational excess of rationality, a droning recipe, a seething rage, that is more human than humans like to admit. GLaDOS is terrible, uncanny, not because she is unlike a human being, but because she is much too much like humans all of us know. The senseless tasks of the Enrichment Center is way too much like the bullshit desk jobs so many modern people perform. And why do we keep at them? Because we're promised cake at the end, along with grief counseling, to help us recover from the loss of our own lives.

Is there any other option? That'll be next post's topic, the promised discussion of rules!

What is a Game?

  If we're going to talk about games, we need to know what 'game' means.
This is actually a remarkably difficult thing to figure out, though the difficulty is often so exceedingly technical as to seem pointless. Mostly people seem to agree if something is a game, and the common element seems to have something to do with fun. Games ought to be fun. That is the intention.

  Obviously, some games are not fun, or at least not as much. I may, in fact, hate playing a certain game find it is almost the opposite of fun, but will still recognize it as a game because I understand it is meant to be fun. Recognition of intent, regardless of execution, seems to usually be enough.

  This isn't always the case. In a blog post on Penny Arcade, Gabe pointed out that the as-yet-unreleased Spore does not, in his eyes, constitute a game, but instead the parts to make a game. This somewhat controversial assessment hinges, I believe, on the presence of goals. The fancy term for this is telos, but since I'm not shooting for academic cred I'll stick with the simple term. It works just as well.

  What Gabe is saying (I think) is that Spore doesn't appear to be a game because it contains no concrete goals. Now, that is not all he is saying, since such a criticism would necessary apply to all open ended (read: all Maxis) games. What (again, I think) he is saying is that Spore is so open ended as to require goal creation on a scale not asked of by previous games. But, I read that sentence and notice that I'm being vague. I'll use a concrete example.

  SimCity 2000. That was a hell of a game. My grandfather played that game. He was awesome at it. He was in his late fifties and kicking ass left and right. Arcologies from horizon to horizon, all carefully named using Greek letters. Pristine subways. Criminals kept in line by a vigilant police force.

  I admired him. Particularly because I sort of suck at Sim City 2000, which is a weird thing to say because Sim City 2000 has no win condition. It, like almost all Maxis games played straight, keeps going, is 'open ended'. So why do I say I suck at it? Because even without a goal specified, I was able to indentify the goal expected of me. I, too, was meant to create a glittering modern paradise of steel and glass, with massive tax revenues and civic monuments that would proclaim what a totally kickass mayor I was. The (unstated) goal of Sim City 2000 is prosperity. Or at least that's the unannounced expectation. But I wasn't able to meet that expectation. When riots broke out over unemployment (or sometimes traffic issues, because I designed the streets that poorly, no joke) and I didn't have the police force necessary to contain them, I felt punished. I felt like I was losing, losing a game you can't even win!

  So instead I would load up the Hollywood scenario, and watch a giant eyeball monster tear across downtown LA. To give it some help, I cracked open the San Andreas fault and shook things up a bit. Next I kicked El Nino in the ass and soon I had tornadoes blasting down Mulholland drive. I decided to produce another goal: pound the shit out of tinsel town. And by God I succeeded. But no one will call me a skillful player for it. But, at the same time, I don't think I was alone in redirecting the game's goal towards that of destruction rather than civic harmony. Just like I wasn't alone in creating a crucible of trails for my poor, innocent Sims in the similarly goalless game The Sims.

  Every Maxis game asks you to create your own goals and, specifically, your own narrative arc. We've talked about narrative before, and it's time we added a new element to our working definition. It's not just a sequence of events that create a feeling of sense, it is sequence of events heading towards a logical conclusion. That's Creative Writing 101. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. Origin, journey, destination. And we need that destination. You'll read a book or watch a movie you don't like just to find out 'what happens'. We want, we need, the goal. Games, being volitional, require often considerable input from the player to reach that goal. Beating a game is one of the big motivations for playing them. Maxis games require that much more work, and that much more volitional involvement, because you not only have to choose which way to reach your goal, you also have to choose the goal itself.

  This is particularly clear in a game like Spore where the goal is harder to understand that in Sim City. There is a less distinctly understood goal-system for Spore. I, for one, know the goal I'll be setting for myself when the game comes out this September: galactic hegemony. And the fact that this is my natural instinct and, I imagine, the instinct of many others, is a whole other discussion. Another time.

  Gabe is, by my reasoning, both right and wrong. Spore is 'not a game' in that it has no goal, but rather gives you the tools to create your own goals and thus your own games. But, at the same time, games are distinct because they demand volitional input from players, so necessarily the more volition a game demands, the more 'game-like' they become, since they ask more of makes games distinct. So Spore is, in this sense, more a game (more volitional) than side scrollers which provide a single direction (right, the direction in which we read [like we read stories {and also draw time-lines (and let's not forget the fact that 'right' also means correct)}]) to go in.

  So now we have two elements distinct to games and gaming: volition and goal. Without the former, a game would play itself and we'd really be watching a movie. Without the latter, we'd have a toolkit, like a map-designer or mod-maker or even just a programming language.

  The aim of my next post will be to discuss the ethical and philosophical implications of these two elements, as well as bring up a third element of gaming: rules.

I promise it'll be less boring than it sounds.
But that's for next time.

Volitional Narrative

I'll begin my trek towards legitimizing video games by coining a term: volitional narrative. Pretty much any long term discussion requires a certain short hand, but rather than employ secret handshake terms I'd like to build a new vocabulary that any new reader can catch onto.
So what is volitional narrative?

It is a narrative whose content, telling and progression is controlled, in part, by the one experiencing it.

But first, let's start simpler. What is narrative?

A quick search suggests narrative is 'a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious' (Dictionary.com) and/or '...a construct created in a suitable format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events.' (Wikipedia)

Which means, essentially, that narrative is the glue of causality. It describes the passage of perceived time, where events follow one another in a distinct sequence. One things leads to another.

I need to impress on you the fact that narrative rules our entire lives. History, memory, logic and even identity rely on the sequential production of events, one coming after another. Even in the absence of a bridge, a 'non sequitur', we feel it necessary to note the absence of the expected bridge. Non-relation itself becomes the relation between events, and that events can be 'mis-sequenced' points to a steady belief in the validity of narrative. We expect things to come in sensible sequence. We feel confusion if they don't.

Narrative, in short, makes sense. I mean that literally. It produces the experience of sense. This is not unlike the 'cooperative principle' that's so well summarized in Dinosaur Comics. We connect the dots, fill in the blanks, find a statue in the block of marble, always assuming it was already there and we are just putting together the puzzle.

So I'll start by criticizing my own proposed term. All narrative is volitional in that one must necessarily consent to experiencing it, and accept/produce the sense that goes along with it. Not everyone is capable of this. Schizophrenics and others suffering from a so-called 'thought disorders' experience loose association, the practical upshot of which is that the narrative building power of the individual breaks down. Their words and writing don't make sense. And even amongst those of us who are not psychotic, interpretations of any given story vary widely.
Narrative does not occur without our involvement, so all narrative is, to some degree, volitional.
But there is a spectrum. And video games inhabit the far end towards true volition.

What does this mean? It means that video game makers rely heavily on players to create their own experiences, to guide the story, to make key decisions and interact directly with the process of narration. It provides a level of involvement not just in the interpretation but in the actual execution of the story.

Video games aren't the first notably volitional narratives. If anyone scours a young adult library they'll probably find a collection of small white books promising a reader the chance to choose their own adventure. But video games come much closer to the simulation of actual real time experiences, come closer to life experience, and will only get closer. A film can show you what appears to be a real space, with seemingly real people within it. A video games actually lets you move about in that space and converse with those people. They are all of them, even those not labeled as such, simulations, experiences we immerse ourselves in, or want to. And, often times, the better the game the more fully we immerse.

So video games promise to tell us a great deal about our relationship with narrative, and thus our relationship with the whole of our lives and ourselves. What better way, after all, to have art bring out truth in people, than to have those people reflect themselves in that art, to participate in its creation?

And that's just for starters.

No, Seriously

Okay, so I ask anyone reading this to bear with me, because this'll take a little explanation.
First, I'll introduce myself. I'm a recent college grad, with a totally unemployable BA in English. I love video games, and have noticed that, for years now, these games have been delving into deeper and deeper territory, growing more complicated, more layered, with more daring plot lines and fuller characters.

I'm not a visual artist, which is a shame, since the very nature of the video game is that it is highly visual. That the visuals in games can be considered art is a pretty easy claim. You need look no further than the popular Baldur's Gate II, or the fascinating Ceremony of Innocence to see this. Exploring the way in which directly interacting with visual art changes our relationship to it is a fine goal, but not one I'm qualified to chase.

Instead I've been trained in Literary Theory, an obscure, hyper-pretentious discipline ridden with jargon that, all to often, comes in french italics. I love Theory, but unless you've spent at least a full year having it ground into your skull, it's sort of hard to approach.

But it's my goal to use my insular training and impractical degree to carry out my statement of purpose. I'll be using all the tools I've been given, all typically applied to books and film, to treat video games as legitimate texts that raise important ethical questions. I hope to make what I say readable, approachable and largely french-in-italics free.

Ultimately, I want to confer upon the games I examine the well deserved and long overdue dignity that real art, passionately conceived and skillfully executed, is granted.

If you're interested by that goal, read on.

Statement of Purpose

It is my hope to promote and defend the use of video games as works of art.

It is my belief that interactive media open new boundaries for ethical exploration.

It is my mission to enrich the experience of gaming with honest, in depth intellectual inquiry.