I’m An Activist

I didn’t actually know I was an activist, not until I was told so in a class at Simon Fraser University in my first semester. I’ve come to discover that I’m naturally an activist by the very nature of my interests and direction of my doctoral research. By engaging in my own community, I automatically take on the activist role—and this is not uncommon for indigenous people. As Choctaw historian Devon Mihesuah states: “The lines between being female, Native, and scholar do indeed blur, and most of us are scholar-activists,” (2003, p. 22).

On Playtesting

Tracy Fullerton provides a helpful overview and in-depth suggestions about how to set up, run, and make use of playtesting sessions as a designer. I plan to adapt these methods into the playtesting sessions of the games made during my doctorate. I strongly believe in the process of iterative game design, as supported by Zimmerman, Fullerton, and other academic/game designer hybrids. I find myself taking a strange shift from game writer to game designer lately in my career.

The Serious Games Front

I’m glad to hear from Simon that SeriousGamesSource.com is making a comeback soon. On that note, the field of educational games is growing past its phase as “edutainment” (please, please, would people stop making up silly merged words that date us?). James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy points to the already-present characteristics of games that lend to learning. Of course, the problem is that most games that set out to be educational often miss these basic fundamentals found in commercial games. Ironic indeed!

Alternate to the Alternate

Prior to working on the design of the Techno Medicine Wheel ARG, I was playing ARGs on and off just out of curiosity. I just missed my chance to go to the live event in Texas for the promotional GUN ARG, since I had to fly out that day, so I’ve never had the opportunity to actually participate in the live event side of ARG play. I’ve broken down some examples of ARGs into rough categories I made up (a call to my ARG people to critique the categories, add to them, and add examples).

On Characters

Very often, centering believable characters in the context of artificial intelligence or architectures for agents goes right over my head (the work of Bates, Kopp, and Perlin). At the heart of it, AI often intersects with emergent play and enriching player to non-player character conversations. I feel as though much of this work is preliminary, since until we have truly emergent and learning AI, all of the options still need to be pre-scripted and anticipated ahead of time. I understand this drive to make characters seem more real, more alive, and therefore overall more meaningful. However, from a writer’s perspective, I find there are other ways to combat this fallout in games until these technologies improve.

Katherine Isbister’s Believable Characters is an extremely helpful and in-depth text on how to design characters that elicit immersive play. But here’s Isbister’s stance: you don’t necessarily need human-level AI for human-level interaction. Instead of focusing on advancing technologies, she emphasizes learning how to leverage human nature for interactive experiences. Ultimately, character responses should serve as feedback to the player about their status in the play. With this in mind, every interaction has a clear purpose.

The Game Empathy blog features a break down of empathy-related research in games (and game characters) that’s being built on by Isbister and other researchers. The hope is to eventually have a taxonomy of helpful techniques for eliciting empathy in games, with special attention paid to cultural interpretations. This is most relevant to my work, since I’m often working with cultural content that may be received and interacted with in a different way depending on the players. I haven’t had a chance to test this, but I do wonder–how would a Native character be perceived by Native players compared to non-Native players? How does the band/tribe/nation affiliation of the character influence the reception in terms of empathy (and interest)?

If only I had a finished prototype to be able to explore this as a related issue in Indigenous game design! I have decided to initiate my own project, which should start paper prototyping in April. I wouldn’t want to overlook making believable characters in the name of only focusing on identifying an Indigenous game design methodology, so looking at interdisciplinary work in character design is essential. So far, I’m leaning mostly towards Isbister’s work rather than trying to develop a new system of interaction.

On Interactive Drama

Based on, admittedly little, of what I have read so far concerning AI perspectives of interactive storytelling and interactive drama as it relates to games, many researchers follow the Hero’s Journey, the Three Act Structure, and the rising action/climax/denouement forms of story. They often divide this structure into a series of beats to program out different possibilities for AI interactions to create a sense of variety and player/user control. Believability in non-player characters is the main goal. Essentially, they’re creating depth by an illusion of emerging interaction that still has to be pre-determined, but gives a lot more freedom than the branching system in many commercial games. (For more, see the references below.)

This structure won’t work for Indigenous games, since it calls out a structure of interaction and story that’s inherently different than Indigenous storytelling. Although I am in no way able to wrap my mind around AI and its possibilities, I do feel that we aren’t even close to truly emergent AI, and thus every system has a structure it follows and calls on pre-created content. I feel my place as a writer is in making the content of a game as rich and involving as possible given the medium. Indigenous storytelling doesn’t follow a branching method either though.

I hope to find a unique way of structuring a game based on purely Indigenous models of storytelling. Here, the concept of drama is dropped. Rather, stories are fragmented, self-growing and continuing, learned by repeated tellings, and experienced as collective knowledge to enrich history and life skills intrinsically connected to belief. Stories are healing and guiding. They have taste and sound and color, and to many peoples, they cross from landscapes into dreamscapes. Because of this, I feel that Indigenous thought on story patterns most closely resonates with the natural properties of the 3D virtual medium. Games add a layer of rules and guidelines, goals and destinations, over the experience of fragmented stories.

Ultimately, the key is to remember that interactive narrative/drama/storytelling is not itself a game, and that games have unique properties. While aspects of this interaction can be used in a game to create more depth in character believability and driving the game goals forward, I am interested in embedding story and culture in a way that doesn’t struggle with the medium, but rather grows from it. There shouldn’t be one ideal of how much code, art, music, or content go into a game, but rather acknowledge a continuum, much like the Indigenous continuum of time and space with no clear rules.

• Magy Seif El-Nasr. Interaction, Narrative, and Drama Creating an Adaptive Interactive Narrative using Performance Arts Theories. Interaction Studies, Vol 8, No. 2, 2007.

• Mateas, M. and A. Stern (2002). Architecture, Authorial Idioms and early Observations of the Interactive Drama Facade. CMU-CS-02-198. Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mellon University.

• Szilas, N.: IDTension: A Narrative Engine for Interactive Drama. Proceedings of the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE) Conference (2003) 187-203

• Cavazza, Aylett, Dautenhahn, et. Al. Interactive Storytelling in Virtual Environments: Building the Holodeck, Proceedings of VSMM, 2000

Touching on Methods

In my own research, I am designing Indigenous games and exploring the process and results of these designs. Game mechanics are emphasized, posing: What mechanics would be unique to an Indigenous game design? The motivating question for me is: how can video games be used for Indigenous sovereignty?

Brenda Laurel’s compilation in Design Methods gives several perspectives on possible design methods, which I’m starting to see as tools and frameworks of research.

Christopher Ireland, in “Qualitative Methods: From Boring to Brilliant,” breaks down numerous possibilities:

Focus groups: traditional, mini focus group, 1-on-1 interviews, dyads, super groups, triads, party groups, online discussion groups

Ethnography: field, digital, photo, ethnofuturism, “real world” enactments, personas

Participatory: development panel, in-home placement

To his Participatory section, I’d add workshops, where community members (or in an industry situation, the target audience) are brought together for participating in the design process during interactive hands-on workshops with prototyping materials relevant to the concept of the project.

Since my research is encapsulated in case studies to derive a holistic viewpoint on the projects, I believe I will employ almost all of these methods, except for ethnography in great depth. I am hesitant to fall into traps of “researcher” and “researched subject.” Ethnographies of our players may be helpful, done in field, digital, and photo form, but otherwise these strategies are too prone to creating a hierarchy. Tim Plowman references Geertz in “Ethnography and Critical Design Practice,” and although Geertz was a colorful and engaging writer, that was really the trick of his research. He also creates a story of “emerging” research although of course went there with an intent of analyzing a culture through its play practices with cockfighting. Further, he entirely ignores gender issues although his wife was mentioned in the start of his story. Where’s her paper?

Researchers all have bias, regardless of how they present the situation. I am very much in support of Action Research, and realize then that I do have a bias that needs to be recognized throughout the case studies.

Overall, the case studies will each follow the story of the process of Inception of Idea, Prototyping, Production, and Validation/Playtesting. This is heavily rooted in iterative design, as described in Eric Zimmerman’ “Play as Research.” Design, test, analyze, repeat. As much as I am researcher and participant, I am also designer and player. It creates an interesting parallel to track during research and design.

Ultimately, one possible outcome of this research is exploring a uniquely Indigenous design method that becomes visible during the process of designing and developing games with Indigenous peoples. I plan to combine methods such as these with methodologies in Decolonizing Methodologies.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Something to keep in mind about the Prince of Persia series overall is the transition of game space from one perspective to another. The series started out as a 2D platformer, which started to change when Prince of Persia 3D came out. At the time, the selling feature was having a game in 3D. Wooooow! 3D! I’m guessing most people know of the first Prince of Persia as the first one made by Ubisoft for consoles–Sands of Time. The space consistently remained a 3D platformer in its design.

So here’s what I remember about playing it when it first came out. “OMG I CAN RUN UP THE WALL!” It’s obvious where games like Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted get their dynamic focus on new moves from, since Sands of Time really serves as a legacy to introducing more interaction with the space around you. It helps to think of the game as a platformer, even though the pretty graphics can be deceiving. I used to ride an exercise bike while playing games (yeah, I would still do that if I had the room in my tiny attic suite for it), and Prince of Persia was one of those games I absolutely couldn’t play while biking. It was way too disorienting to try to wall climb while moving myself. FPS, sure, casual handheld games, sure. Prince of Persia takes concentration.

Taking another look at this game years later, it really stands out for me how classic it is. The “controlling of time” mechanic was implemented to give new gameplay and something new from the typical die/restart/save/restart/save/restart rotation. Very clever, and improved on now. Refer to a past post on the Sand of Time‘s creative director’s perspectives on this mechanic!

Thief: Deadly Shadows

Now, I can’t remember which game it was, but I remember a presentation years ago that described the revolutionary change in level design brought about by being able to place groups of pre-rendered trees. No longer did each tree have to be created on the spot. Wow, what a far way things have come, and even from the Systemic Level Design strategies of Deux Ex senior designer Harvey Smith. Applying properties to object types as opposed to single objects is fairly common these days, but had ironic negatives. If a team isn’t well-organized, good chances are more than one person is modifying master objects/assets and their properties at any given time, without knowing about the changes the other team member is making. Later on, files conflict, and cause a whole mess of problems. To remedy just this very issue, Bungie’s Halo 3 team incorporated an automatic exporter in their art/animation pipeline with details on if the asset was in “checked out” status and by whom to avoid any overwriting of files.

It would have been particularly important for Deus Ex to use this systemic global setting method, given all of the different kinds of gameplay they attempt to tackle. Warren Spector put it well in an E3 interview before Thief: Deadly Shadows’ launch by calling Deus Ex a Swiss army knife and Thief a scalpel. How diplomatic! The only issue I really have here is that Thief‘s claim to fame is its stealthing mechanics, sometimes optional, and too much gloating on being “the stealth game” makes me go–hey, hey, now, don’t forget Metal Gear Solid. Deadly Shadows, built on the same technology used for Deus Ex: Invisible War, doesn’t cut it for me in terms of smoothness for a stealth game, but this is not to say the game is not enjoyable. Maybe it’s just hard for me to switch from current games like Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed back to Deadly Shadows because I keep thinking, “Woah, squarey.”

Thankfully, the game does redeem itself in its use of lighting in the form of shadows (I’d hope so!) and time put into A.I. But there’s just something missing in the overall look and feel of the game. So what happened? A rather pointed interview with Deadly Shadows designer Randy Smith asked just that. Here’s where we go back to his good friend Harvey Smith, who advocates for global object properties and enabling emergent gameplay. Unfortunately, the Deadly Shadows team just wasn’t organized enough to really meet the deadlines they needed to. This is also alluded to in Warren Spector’s interview where he points out that the optional third person view was added quite last minute after the team convinced him to drop more money into it. For me, this was an added bonus and saved a lot of the gameplay for me, since I always prefer third person to first person. I often feel too trapped in a certain viewpoint in first person modes. Side-scrollers and god view games like Diablo were really what made me a gamer, so I always feel more comfortable there.

To end on another positive note, the sound depth in Deadly Shadows is a prelude to games like Halo 3 now. Bungie uses a test level covered in different swatches of terrain tiles to test out anything from walking to bullets hitting the ground to rocks that break off a surface also hitting the ground to explosions and so on. Directional audio is even further improved on in Next Gen games. It really matters where you face and how far you are from the origination of the sound. All of these “invisible” elements really enrich games, and I only see them vastly improving the further technology comes.

Mrrgllllgggglll.

I’m still barely coming out of some horrible head cold thing that lasted from Monday until, well, when am I going to get better?! I’ve felt just awful. I’m keeping up on work in general, but had to miss class on Friday for the sake of recovering and not passing out in public. So, mentally unable to work on my Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs close reading for an upcoming publication, where do I go for mindlessness this weekend?

Ah yes, I am sorry to have deserted you WoW. But you got to be too abusive, and I feel myself now coming back to you anticipating more abuse but feeling like I deserve it for leaving you.