Pacman causes crime! Monday, Nov 23 2009

Actually, what this shows that there is no connection between violent crime and GTA. The trend of blaming video games for violent crime is rubbish.

I’ve been trying to find something on this for a while, but this picture was actually encountered on a random stumble to http://www.kobrascorner.com/images/vgame-graph.png.

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Defining games Monday, Oct 26 2009

I held a presentation on games in the National Seminar for Philosophy Students (Filosofian opiskelijoiden kansallinen seminaari, FOKS in Finnish) last saturday. It was mostly just basic stuff on (the study of) games, with some quotes from Wittgenstein, Suits, Juul and Salen & Zimmerman.

As an ending I presented a loose argument that a minimum definition of games has to include only three points: separation, conflict and rules.

Separation means that a game is in some sense separate from the surrounding reality usually both spatially and temporally. (The line of separation is commonly called ‘the magic circle’.) This can also be extended to cover the concept of artificiality commonly associated with games, and Juul’s demand that games must have “negotiable consequences”.

There must also be conflict. Since there cannot be conflict without opposition, there must at least two participants. These don’t need to be two human players, as a set of rules or a computer can also be a source of opposition. Conflict also presumes that there must be a goal worth pursuing, or else there will be no conflict. Conflict also requires effort from the players.

Games must have rules, or they are simply general play. These rules don’t need to be explicit, but they tend to be or tend to become such. Rules also limit the choices available for the players and participate in creating the magic circle. In doing so they set the temporal and spatial limits of the game, as well telling the players how to pursue the goal, and what counts as winning.

Most of the elements commonly used in defining games (at least the most important ones) can be derived from these three, so they constitute what I’d call a minimal definition of games.

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(a)Games Friday, Oct 16 2009

When reading about games I’ve come across some very peculiar things that may not entirely be called games, but which resemble them very closely. They also differ from games in interesting ways. What makes them non-games (or a-games) differs, but each example is interesting:

Passage seems to be a game of passing through a (randomly generated) maze, but really it is more a story of passing through life. You begin the journey as a young man and encounter a woman; if you touch her, you will begin walking together. If you walk with her, you will not be able to go everywhere – walking with her limits your choices. But at least you’re not walking alone. Passage is more of a work of art than a game (not that they are exclusive categories), worth the few minutes it takes to try it.

Lose/Lose is a game I haven’t had the courage to try. It is a Space Invaders-clone, with an interesting twist: there a consequences to your actions. The aliens won’t attack, but you are armed. Every time you do use your weapon, Lose/Lose deletes a file from your computer. (I say again, Lose/Lose deletes files from your computer. Don’t try it if you’re not absolutely sure you want that to happen.) You have the power to destroy the aliens, but ultimately you are the only one hurt by that violence. One might sense that there is a message intended.

Progress Quest boasts that it is “well worth the time you’ll spend playing it.” I agree. It is an interesting take to computer rpg’s. You create a character (from various, hilarious options) and then embark on quests that mostly consist of killing everything you encounter and selling their stuff as loot. Sounds familiar? What separates Progress Quest from other computer rpg’s is that after you’ve created your character, you are no longer needed. It plays itself, killing and looting away with no player input required (it is what they call a ‘zero-player game’). Grinding has never been this easy!

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The Player of Games Tuesday, Sep 8 2009

I recently read Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games, and besides being a good book it’s got special kicks for anyone into game research.

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Roadtrip the rpg Monday, Aug 31 2009

Yesterday we drove some nine hours to deliver stuff. Surprisingly it wasn’t few hours of talking and then endless hours of being bored. We got company and one of us promised that he would run a game for us while we were driving. I was a bit sceptical about it, but I also knew that they had done it once before. We created characters (took us almost four hours) and then played. The game master didn’t drive; the rest of us took turns. The game was Shadowrun, which is relatively rules-heavy, and very dependent on dice. (Dice in a car, brilliant.) It didn’t slow us down significantly. The person driving kept his/her eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, and the rest threw the dice and made the necessary notes. It did take the GM some time to learn that “so what is your character doing next” doesn’t work very well when the people playing don’t see him. It also meant very little acting out, and more description than usual. The game actually took us a bit longer to finish than the trip did. We ended up playing for almost an hour in a stationary car next to the place we we’re supposed to drop of some of the players. The kids playing on the street next to us did give us some puzzled looks.

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The Mountain Witch Tuesday, May 5 2009

I started a game of The Mountain Witch yesterday. I like this game particularly for being so easy to pick up and start with a moments notice.

This actually describes the situation I was in very well: only a few hours before our scheduled gaming time somebody reminded me that I own the game, and they would like to play it. An hour before the game I searched for all my game apparels and read through the game quickly, reminding myself what this game was all about.

Few hours later we had characters and a game, with players that had never played it before. Next week we will actually start the story. It suits our Monday-gaming-group well because it is relatively short, and easily divided into short episodes. It is normally played in short chapters, so I can have one chapter for each Monday.

The game also suits my current situation very well: I don’t have time or the motivation to plan extensively for our games. This being a player-driven game with the narrative power being mostly in the hands of the players, I don’t have to. I’ll just throw some elements in once in a while to make the game more interesting, and then enjoy the ride.

I wonder if the Mountain Witch ends up dead this time.

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Seminar paper Saturday, Apr 18 2009

After moving into a new apartment and catching the most awful flu you ever experienced I’ve found that trying to keep up any kind of schedule for writing here has been a failure. I’ll try to correct that.

Yesterday I sent my seminar paper to the seminar participants. I was forced to cut several pages to fit the length restrictions, which I still exceeded by few pages. While cutting off the excess, I tried to incorporate the feedback I got from my two helpful commentators. Thanks, jiituomas and Thanuir. The paper was far from perfect when I was through with it, but it was better than the draft I sent you. The parts that didn’t get in the paper will be useful when I continue writing on the subject.

As a sneak-peek inside the paper, there is a part in the conclusion where I join different views of play and game into a single list. Translated into English it goes something like this:

1. Play happens inside the magic circle.
2. Play is a unique phenomenon, but it can also be studied as some other cultural phenomenon.
3. Play exists simultaneously on several different levels, similarly to a work of art.
4. The act of defining something as play or a game tells you something about the definers concept of play.
5. The player assumes a lusory attitude.
6. Playing is autotelic.
7. Research of games tells us something about culture.

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Going of on a tangent: movie-reviews Saturday, Mar 21 2009

I’m going to go on off a tangent here, and discuss movies. This is not something I usually write about, but since it is something I discuss a lot with my friends and think about regularly, I might as well write about it.

The purpose of this post is mainly to complain about the level of reviews one generally comes across when trying to understand and read about thought-provoking movies. (Remember, this is in Finland, and from my biased point of view, so this should be read as “I’ve come across”.) There seems to be a great gap between movie analyses and movie reviews, and I mean a qualitative gap. I’ve read some really enlightening movie analyses that have really opened my eyes to the layers of meaning in some movies, but I’ve also read some reviews that are so amazingly brainless, they should be complemented on the amount of unintentional irony they contain. I’ll give examples of the latter. No worries, no (big) spoilers.

(This first example is of a Finnish movie probably unfamiliar to everyone else. I’ll try to keep this intelligible to nonetheless.)

In the Finnish gaming magazine Pelit, there was a review of the movie Sauna. It wasn’t very long and the main point can be summarized in one sentence: Sauna was not a very good Japanese-style horror movie. This is true. But to be truthful, the reviewer should have also pointed out that it was not a very good romantic comedy, not a very good sports movie or a very good example of a Hollywood action-film. This is all true, because it was none of these. It is true it did loan the image of a dead young girl with her hair on her face from Japanese horror, but I would claim that this is where the similarities end. (One review says that it is a movie of fantasy, horror and magical symbolism. I think this a good characterization of it.) Sauna was really about guilt and the symbolic representation of it. It was by no standards an easy film, but one would think that a (semi)professional movie-reviewer would have the expertise to analyse at least the most obvious of the symbolism represented. This, I fear, seems to be the difference between a movie-analysis and a movie-review.

Another review claimed that because the movie was set in the past, it could not have been a very good horror movie. Even if we disregard the claim about its genre, it still leaves us a very strange argument. It seems the reviewer is genuinely claiming that anything related to the past can’t possibly be horrifying. To top it off he throws into discussion the Nazis. Evidently, no horror movie can ever be horrifying again, because of what the Nazis did. Even if this wasn’t in conflict with the first statement, it would still be idiocy.

I will not analyse Sauna more in this post, because it would need a lengthy treatment, and because it is not the purpose of this post. I hope I’ve shown how not to interpret it.

The second movie I find fascinating is The Fountain. It is a movie about loss and the difficulty in overcoming it, or “a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world” as IMDB tells us. It is told in three different narratives that fold together to tell the story.

Despite the quite easily recognizable symbolism and its role in the story, somehow it is very often (mis)interpreted as a sci-fi movie about time-travel, or immortality (the second is close, because it is about mortality). This does not even make very much sense in the movie’s narrative, unless one is willing to go to lengths in construing a very elaborate interpretation that leaves parts of the movie symbolic and reinterprets the rest as sci-fi. (I will not go into specifics because that would contain spoilers.)

What is most perplexing about this is that even the back of the DVD seems to hold this reinterpretation into sci-fi. Is is really necessary to dumb down symbolic movies so even the most thick-skulled viewer can somehow understand the story, albeit in a inadequate way? This seems to demean the meaningful message the movie really contains about the fragility of living.

Movies that are challenging should be just that, challenging and thought-provoking. If the viewer is not ready to be challenged, then he/she should not watch movies that do just that.

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Political games Wednesday, Mar 18 2009

Last Sunday we played the third game in my series of political games. ‘Political’ does not here mean that they included political action by the characters, but that they had in them political situations reflected from history. Basically, I took historical situations and placed them in a hypothetical future realized in a dystopian cyberpunk-setting.

The first two games were about Vietnam 2.0. In these games Vietnam was devastated by war and still collecting itself after Chinese occupation. The UN was trying to keep peace in a situation where part of the country was in Chinese and part in Vietnamese rebel control. We watched parts of Full Metal Jacket and Rambo to get to mood for a sweaty journey through a hostile jungle. The characters in the first game were independent contractors trying to rescue American construction workers that had been in Vietnam to aid in its reconstruction. The construction workers had been captured for ransom by Vietnamese rebels, led – ironically – by an ex-Chinese general. The company they worked for decided that the ransom was not worth it, so workers’ families collected enough money to hire some mercenaries. The game ended with a lot of dead rebels, a wounded general and rescued construction workers.

The second game portrayed the situation again from the perspective of outsiders. The game was set a few years prior the first one. This time around the player characters were professional soldiers, working for a company trying to secure its foothold in the area. After a brief firefight with some Chinese troops harassing some soldiers sent by the company earlier to the area, the game focused on showing the same Vietnamese rebels encountered in the first game how to defend themselves and control the area. The purpose of this game was to first show how alien the world was to the soldiers trying to cope with the jungle and then to slowly dispel this feeling of alienation. Sadly, the game was never finished. This may have also been a boon; it wasn’t a very successful game, due to bad planning and even worse scheduling.

The third and last game was inspired by the Eichmann trial and Hannah Arendt’s account of it, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. I haven’t actually read the book (yet), but I’ve been reading and hearing both about the book and Arendt. I used the character of Eichmann and how Israel secret service kidnapped him in order to judge him in trial. In my game, set in Bolivia and Argentina in 2060, there had been a Bolivian dictator that had tried to conquer South-America and ethnically cleanse it of the minorities within. He didn’t succeed, and he was sentenced to death for his crimes against humanity. My “Eichmann” succeeded in escaping judgment for 30 years, before being found by Bolivian intelligence. They contracted the player characters, independent mercenaries, in order to capture him while keeping themselves out of Argentina as much as possible. The war-criminal was eventually found and extracted, despite resistance by Argentinian border guard and military.

None of these games actually used the political possibilities in the setting very much, concentrating mostly on problem-solving and combat. It was still inspiring to use a setting with a strong political tone. It made the game more meaningful for me – I don’t know if the players picked any of this up. I didn’t mention the metaphorical relation to history explicitly.

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Using role-play as a research tool Tuesday, Mar 3 2009

A while ago I attended a philosophy seminar where the last presentation was about using science fiction as a tool for research. For researchers interested in culture and society, it may give invaluable possibilities. The idea is to use science fiction as a “what if”-scenario. Most of the elements of society can be kept constant (gender roles, economic structures) while some (ideologies, length of life span) are altered to see what the resulting societies look like. These scenarios are intuitively understandable, as long as they are close enough to our own conception of society.

Most science fiction writers do this, consciously or not. That is why science fiction so easily becomes a tool for political satire or criticism. Some writers who do this on purpose are actually very competent philosophers. Robots are a very popular tool for exploring the limits of humanity.

Role-play is another, at least as effective, way of exploring possible futures and alternate pasts. This is probably nothing you haven’t done in the past. However, you probably haven’t done it with this purpose in mind. The method is almost identical with the one used in science fiction: you create a narrative with enough shared culture to be recognizable to all participant and then use it to explore ideas.

We used this technique in our game Nutopia, which was about anarchism, social criticism and utopias. The purpose of that game wasn’t research, but it is still a good example. We ended up exploring the limits of free speech and what are acceptable methods for (benevolent) anarchists.

Another useful example is the game I wrote of in my last post, Liquid Crystal. It is a game about robots, so quite naturally, it is also a possibility to explore humanity. The game is all about growing up emotionally. In the end of the game, all the robots considered mature enough are accepted into the society, which is depicted as an utopia. It may tell something about the game or the people I play it with, but only two robots have been accepted of all the ten in our games so far. There has also been a slight but very steady undercurrent of criticism towards the games concept of utopia, once voiced by a robot about to be shut down.

In addition to concepts of social justice, emotional growth and such, the game can be used as a tool for dealing with questions in philosophy of mind. What concepts must all robots retain regardless of repeated mind-wipes? How do they experience and use language? Is there a self that a robot retains regardless of the wipes? The game does not give answers, but it can be used to illuminate different strategies for answering. These can help forming meaningful questions, which in turn can lead to meaningful answers. (A bad question is not worth asking.)

The examples I’ve discussed thus far have been about exploring questions posed in social sciences, philosophy, and politics. There is also the possibility of using role-play in handling personal, existential questions. Role-play may be even better suited for this task than science fiction is. When I say ‘existential questions’ I don’t mean something difficult and incomprehensible. These are simply questions about the way we see the world and choose to live in it. Possible questions might be:

1. How do I view obligation and freedom? What compromises do I consider worth making in giving up my freedom?
2. How do I see other people? Do I harbor racist thoughts without realizing it? Is my world gender-biased?
3. Is my view of religion(s) somehow skewed?

Role-play gives the extraordinary possibility of adopting an unfamiliar religion or ideology, even an apparently hostile or offensive one. This potential has usually been used in impersonating elves, dwarves, and such, but there is nothing stopping you from adopting a world-view of a Hindu, Communist, Taoist, Zoroastrian, Christian or an atheist. This will give you a new perspective into the world, one you can use to better understand it. Even the people you normally consider irrational usually have reasons for things they do.

I used this opportunity for testing out the somewhat inconceivable ideology of Nazism. In the game I already mentioned, Nutopia, I played a neo-Nazi in the dystopian future of Shadowrun. This is a world-view alien to me, even though I have studied the subject somewhat. In dealing with things possibly offensive to you, you must remember that there is a difference between understanding and accepting something. I consider the neo-Nazi to be in error, but this does not stop me from understanding them. The same goes for religion: being a devout Christian should not be endangered in trying out, say, Buddhism, solely in the context of a role-playing game.

One last thing: If you choose to try out some social experimentation, be sure to warn the other players in the game. Actually, I recommend that this be done in coordination and all the players participate in discussing the themes in the game and planning them. (This is how our game, Nutopia, was created.) Even if you are the GM with sole narrative (and considerable social) power at least ask the players if they would enjoy playing a game with the themes you prefer. There is nothing quite as annoying as being force-fed alien political ideas.

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