Tag Archives: video-games

See More Skinner, Part Two: Discipline and Punish

Posted on by dconstructions
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I want to really get into the weeds on how players negotiate playstyles and play events, but first I want to stay on the orthogame more, because we’re in a really interesting place with that right now.

I never thought of myself as a game designer until very recently, which is odd for many reasons, not least the patterns you see in the other things I’m interested in: con artistry, education, animal behaviour and probability, the last two which I studied to very high levels at university. I actually spent a lot of time researching games and game design while I was doing my probability studies and was disappointed to find out that game theory, despite the name, has almost nothing to do with games. The definition of game in game theory is one of an abstract mathematical system where there are different choices a “player” can make, or may make with certain probabilities, and which lead to certain outcomes. Although game theory started with the idea of games, and was developed off into psychological concepts, if you pull a book about game theory off a shelf, it will be lucky to feature any games at all in it. It will be about optimization algorithms, which we do now see more and more use of in AI, and the expert systems that came before them. AI is game theory in that it makes choices, runs down those choices, and checks the outcome, and then compares the outcome to a win situation. If it doesn’t win, it then adapts the choice gates, weighting them differently.

I was disappointed, thirty years ago, because I wanted to learn game design and – unlike now! – it was not an area with any academic study. Such things just did not exist before the year 2000 or so. We relied on Homo Ludens and developmental psychology, and the few rare cultural studies like the amazing work by Gary Alan Fine which was the first person ever to go “these gamer nerds, how does their subculture work?”. But then in the 1990s computer gaming became big business and everything changed, and all of a sudden you could get a grant to study this stuff and we started figuring out what people liked in games and how to monetize that hard. It’s important to remember though that we didn’t know these things at all then and we had to learn them through making mistakes. One now-legendary game design anecdote is the story of Golden Ages in the Civilization computer games. Originally the game had Dark Ages, where production slowed down and it was harder to achieve goals and make progress. They swiftly discovered that players hated them so much they would often stop playing when they encountered them. So the designers made Dark Ages play regular play and made what had been regular play Golden Ages. In effect, nothing had changed, but psychologically the game was completely different. This became known as the phenomenon of Loss Aversion.

Nash Equilibrium is a game theory term that has almost no relevance to game design theory, but it’s fun to say.

Most of the study of game design has been in psychology, and understanding human behaviour. But interestingly, so far, not a huge amount of that has actually trickled down into the orthogame space. By this I mean that the design of the orthogame tends to still operate as if we are making chess, and thus operating in a game theory space. A game is designed to be, still, a mathematical and tactical and strategic operation, where the participants make choices with the goal of producing the optimal outcome. Games typically have dramatic win and loss conditions and score tracks around the outside that provide constant feedback, measuring how well you made those choices. This is considered good design – as I said last week, nobody would play a game where your choices didn’t matter.

But here’s the thing: games, we are discovering, are inherently learning environments. They teach you how to play them and how to learn more about them, and they teach you how to master them, and then they also teach you about yourself and the world and the things they represent. Games in fact have some of the best possible tools for learning because of that direct, actionable feedback, and the ability to repeat the same circumstances over and over again, and to experiment and explore different options. Games we now think overlap with educational processes, in that you can’t play a game without learning more than just how to play that game, and games and game elements may be the best way to teach many things. In fact, I’m thinking about writing a book about how games are actually a kind of social learning ritual, more in common with ceremony than warfare. Given those things, it’s worth knowing that education has been going through something of a revolution in the last few decades and is also still a very young science. We’re starting to explore this new idea that making mistakes and being corrected isn’t actually as useful as we thought. Which is to say people respond better to learning that isn’t based on saying “no, that’s wrong” as a fundamental principle.

At first glance that sounds insane – are we going to start saying something like “one plus one equals three, yes, good job, but let’s try and imagine a better answer.”? It’s not that. It’s more thinking that as much as possible we want to give the participant in learning the most chance of succeeding at something before testing if they succeeded, because the more they fail the slower they learn. Mistakes and failure aren’t learning opportunities at all, but rather impediments to learning. Navigating this is the new frontier of education, because even while we’re not entirely sure how to teach this way, we know that our current education system leaves kids good at taking tests but lacking in imagination and often crippled with a need to be correct. I sometimes use the metaphor of expanding what the light can see: you’re not wrong if you hear something in the bushes and guess what it is, but you’re guessing until we expand the light.

I work in animal training and we are doing the same thing there. To return to Skinner, he helped us divide the learning in operant conditioning into four kinds:

  • Positive Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so you shock the rat when it goes on the platform. The word “positive” here means an element was ADDED to the rat’s environment. Contrast that with:
  • Negative Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so the food supply stops when it goes on the platform. It is negative because something good was SUBTRACTED.
  • Positive Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so it gets extra good food when it does go on the platform.
  • Negative Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so the electric shock STOPS (is subtracted) when it goes on the platform.

Note how the terms positive and negative here don’t refer to the consequence: the middle two use only something nice, and the first and last use only something nasty. Of course, there is a fine line here. For a young child, losing access to a toy can feel like a terrible terrible thing but it is a world away (at least experimentally) from giving the child a smack. And here we return to loss aversion: it felt bad when the Dark Ages kicked in, and it feels great when the Golden Age kicked in. This isn’t operant conditioning (because these weren’t causal) but it shows the paragidm above, while also showing how psychology can shade how we see these things. In effect the Dark Ages felt like aversive – something came along and made things worse – and the Golden Age felt rewarding – something came along and made it better.

So the question then becomes: are we taking this knowledge into designing orthogames? And should we?

Let’s take a look at chess. Chess has positive punishment all the time: if you make a poor move, you experience loss. You had a queen, and you lose it. (Some find Go much more relaxing because when you realise you’ve lost territory you can dance away somewhere else and try to come back to that space a different way. It can still feel very punishing, but it’s less direct.) Modern games have, generally, moved away from the chess model though, and try to instead just reward the leader for good play. They are learning this idea of nice for others rather than nasty for you. It can still feel a bit rough to miss out on a bonus card or a combo, but it doesn’t (for most people) sting like losing a queen. Don’t get me wrong, if you have ten points and your opponent has fifty, you are definitely likely to rage quit, but it does (we think) feel different from “this player keeps moving to attack my pieces”.

A lot of game writers say that the “euro” style games tend to have less “head to head” conflict than American and take that games, and that’s true but also not the whole picture. Because getting cut off, penalised or torn down or knocked off your spot is still an attack and still a loss. So euros often actually feel a lot more cutthroat and “mean” than they look (and that some say). Having the Robber on your hex in Settlers of Catan is in theory only denying you resources (you aren’t losing things from your hand but not gaining them) but it feels like an attack and it feels very personal! Something can become an attack by comparison. If everyone else gets cheese, the act of “not getting cheese” becomes a nasty thing, rather than “not getting a nice thing”. Games like Tokaido are said to be “cosy” because you’re just walking along a road and the worst someone can do to you is get a prize before you do, but the game actually feels like musical chairs: everyone gets a good thing and the loser gets shut out. This makes Tokaido one of the harshest games I know as a result!

It’s like a knife-fight in a phone booth.

All of which is to say: yes, we’re trying to look at the orthogame and say “can we remove the nasty stuff” but we still end up in punishment territory a lot of the time, because games are either competitive or they are pass/fail. Not winning reflects and becomes losing. As hard as we try to make everything a Golden Age rather than a Dark Age, it’s hard to make orthogames actually feel nice. That might be because the orthogame is set up to be a ritualised test. In other words, our idea of a game is that it should be inherently educational not experiential: you are here to learn to play well, and if you fail to play well, you will be marked down. And that may not be something we want to change! We might not want to do a crossword that lets us put any words in the box. But I think as education begins to ask “what does education without being wrong look like?” we might wonder the same about games. We don’t know what that looks like. It may be impossible, as in, games stop being games if they aren’t about correction. It may be rethinking games entirely. It may be that this is what play is. It may be why we like play so much, and it may be why we should do much more play and why games are actually a poor substitute! (Look, for example, at how many computer “games” now are just colouring in exercises, or dolly-dress up).

I am not the only one who has argued that games are the primary medium of the 21st century. But I’d like to expand that and make sure it doesn’t just include orthogames. I think PLAY is bigger and more important than game. This is the same as how we know that painting the stairs like musical notes makes people more likely to walk up them, and scoring them for how fast they did it does not. Games really are a poor substitute to play and I think as humans we crave play but are told the only way we’re allowed to get play is through games. We have decided that games are good, and play is bad, because if we’re not fighting or being corrected, it cannot be worthwhile. Maybe it’s time we looked at that attitude as well. Maybe the orthogame is a petticoat allowing us an excuse to be playful, and it’s not always the best one. At the very least, we might want to admit that it’s not the only part of play, and we’ll look at that in subsequent blogs.

Why I Hate Cole Wehrle

Posted on by dconstructions
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I think most of us know and resonate with the prayer of seeking the strength to change the things we can, and the serenity to accept the things we cannot and the wisdom to tell the difference. Few remember that it was coined by Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent 20th century American theologist and political thinker who was trying to construct a kind of middle way for liberal Americans, one that was socialist in its ideas that poor people were not inherently evil and did not need better angels above them in society to direct them, but also one that repudiated the ideas of communism and liberal reforms like anti-segregation movements. You can view him as a fence-sitter emblematic of the worst parts of neo-liberal deference to what they demand is realpolitik, or as an idealist trying to find a straight path in a bent world. I think the fact that he is confounding to some analyses is probably why people like the prayer: stuff feels complicated, and the individualistic sentence of trying to be perfectly moral has never felt harder than today. Our new versions might be “check your privilege” and “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.

Anyway, to get back to games, I think we are always in danger of equivocating and saying “it’s complicated” when it comes to semiotics, and yet often seem to need to. Stuff IS complicated, and never more so than when it comes to signs and signals. Everyone comes to an idea with their baggage and we cannot change that baggage, no matter how hard we wish it were not there. My partner is a lawyer, and Australian judges do not use the term Ms; she cautions her female students that if that is the battle they want to fight, it will be difficult to win, noone will flock to your banner and it will be costly no matter the outcome. She tries to model a positive view but without neglecting the terrain the women will be entering. I tend to have the maxim that you should never believe anyone who tells you something cannot change, they are almost always arguing for their own cowardice. A few years ago I was arguing hard that the term “serious games” was a terrible one and needed to change; a friend of mine said the infamous thought-terminating cliche of that ship having sailed. He was, I was happy to say, 100% wrong, and “games for change” is catching on. He was also the same person who looked at my post about how games don’t have to be competitions and remarked that once again I seemed to be tilting at windmills, and trying to ice-skate uphill, when I should just accept that it do be that way sometimes and it is what it is.

I have another friend who designed a game for the Salvation Army designed to built an understanding of how villages in poor agricultural areas can build themselves out of poverty. I asked him why it wasn’t competitive; his answer was that nobody understands cooperative games. Not in the audience he is trying to reach. He’s right. It hurts me, but he’s right. And I guess that’s what this is all coming back to: we are in a watershed moment in games and that involves dealing with the things that, right now, we cannot change. With the hand we are dealt, to use a gaming metaphor.

Me, trying to explain why everyone else sucks but me

I’m lucky enough to have lived through the revolution in comics when the western world finally caught on that just because a comic had Batman in it didn’t mean it couldn’t be literature. I also have enough historical connection to the 1960s to remember the same arguments being made about rock and roll and stand up comedy. All of them invariably started with a very similar argument: that the art form being derided as not serious was ancient. Ancient neanderthals drew words and images together on cave walls; they played music around the fire; they told stories to make each other laugh. The idea of this was to create a kind of ritual significance with two ends: to help a thing that felt knew seem less new to the mainstream, but also to calm down the academics at the sidelines. Yes we know, academics, that comics aren’t new, and nothing they are doing is new, but we have to PRETEND it is new because to the maintstream audience, it FEELS very new.

The people who remembered the newspaper strips about Peter Parker’s married life and the POW! BAM! of the Batman TV show were having a kind of cultural shock to see people going “no, this shit matters, and is good and is politically and culturally significant”. Some of that was amazement, a wondrous suprise to find more adult depth in old concepts. Similarly, a lot of people’s experience with board games is “we played them as kids and they were kind of … bad?” or “we played them as kids and then we grew out of them”. Wondrous day then, to find games have “suddenly” somehow “grown up” and become “good” or socially acceptable. More and more I see gamers use the term “modern” meaning “good”, with their particular choice of cut off naturally being “a few years before I started getting into the hobby”. Naturally, as someone who knows games have always been here and who has always been here myself, I object loudly from the kitchen. But I get it: for them, the world has jumped a great distance. The first animes (is that the plural?) I ever saw were Astro Boy and Battle of the Planets, the very next one I saw was Ghost in the Shell; that felt like a bullet to the brain and a very silly thing to say they were the same thing, and confusing to me how one got to B from A. Then people tried to “get me into anime” and all failed because it was super hard to get context and nobody inside was very good at giving me context.

I think, more than most folks, I need that context and a sense of a critical language to understand a medium, so I tend to want to offer all of that to those newly arrived. I have always prided myself on being what I call a dragoman. The term is one I stole from colonial history: a dragoman was the man you, a European, hired when you went to the Middle or Far East, who understood the local world and could introduce you to it safely. (A near equivalent is the term indian agent but it has historical problems.) I often remark at conventions how people from one fandom are totally lost when they encounter another, and I love to be the person stepping up to fill that gap. I love being a teacher and an explainer – not least because that’s how I interact with the universe myself. But it is also worth noting to myself that not everyone needs this. The kids are alright going straight to Ghost in the Shell or Wicked City, and it does not matter to anyone that they think the board games now are COOL because they have HOT CHICKS (or I guess trick taking mechanics, in games) and the old ones are FOR BABIES because they don’t.

But it DOES matter as a game designer, because our audience is vast, and expanding, and shifting. But also because games, even more perhaps than comics and cartoons, depend on interpretation. Games need to be swiftly understood and internalized which means the symbols and signification we use has to work with the software available, and that software is the human brain. It is true that a lot of people react violently to the idea of a cooperative game, or any other kind of ideas outside their view of what a game is. We can change that, but slowly; we have to acknowledge a lot of where we are to begin with. I hate that people think games are competition, and I am driving hard to change that, but I also (grudgingly, with no serenity at all) accept that this is a long ongoing process.

At the same time as our audience is opening up, there is also going to be an urge to not have to keep starting from scratch. Previously the game industry was so small and broken up it was difficult to have a conversation about games in game design. It had to happen instead in a critical space or the academic space. I’d argue that Friedmann Friese probably created one of the first real salvos of games about games with Copycat, so-called because he wanted to acknowledge that he hadn’t invented anything in making it. 504 was then the natural extension thereof, a game that was 504 games in one, just add your own theme. I’d also argue that the problem with both games is they didn’t really make sense to anyone but someone deeply immersed already in that conversation about innovation and euro-game mechanics. Games, because they are so dependent on understanding a shared language, are at great risk of iterating ON that language, until it becomes indecipherable to the new player. Of course everyone knows that red is life points and blue is mana points, and so on.

Here’s the thing: although all art exists in conversation with other art and its time and its context, I’d argue that really great art can and should transcend that and be universal and timeless. It’s true that Watchmen is about superheroes as they were as a storytelling medium and corporate property, but I wasn’t reading comics at the time and I can understand Watchmen perfectly without that context. It operates on many many levels. Shakespeare doesn’t always translate but so much of what he writes does, even when he was flipping scripts and commenting on other works around him. Compare that to Undertale: a video game where when you get stuck a kindly character comes and helps you pass a level. That joke only works if you’re immersed in what video games are; worse still, I could not get to that point of genre-interrogation in Undertale because I couldn’t get past the earlier levels. As interesting as a critique as Undertale was, it was not just unintelligible to the average person, it was unreachable. And that’s with nearly 50% of people regularly playing video games.

At one point I spent a few years checking which games explained that AWSD were how to move around. Almost none of them did. That had become assumed language. I wonder if we’re really close to making the same mistakes in board games.

And that – at last -brings us to why I hate Cole Wehrle. Cole, amazingly, brilliantly, is having a deep conversation about wargames and dudes-on-a-map games, and history games. But the problem I have with him is with each new game he makes, he goes further down a line of conversation that started with some central assumptions about what a war game is and why it exists. And every time he iterates on that, the conversation gets further and further away from me, because I don’t have the experience OR ABILITY to keep up with the kinds of games he makes. (Ability is of course something for a whole other column, but I need to wrap this up at least for this instalment). None of it is approachable or accessible. All of it feels like it’s about things I barely understand. At the same time, I love that he’s asking these questions and iterating over and over further down into those questions. I just wish it was about some other part of gaming that I could relate to understand. It’s frustrating to see someone clearly doing great work in this space and not being able to go with it; but more than that it makes me fear that we might, like video games did, end up in a world where we are so busy congratulating ourselves on subverting the dominant paradigms that we’ve forgotten that those paradigms have become walls that the outsiders can’t get over.

Some might look at that and go well, we’re not designing for those people, and that’s fair enough. It is what it is, and some people can’t be convinced to like a thing. I will never be able to understand the games Cole makes and I’m sure he’s okay with that, and certainly I should be. I also don’t mind when people miss the subtle levels in my fiction or game design writing…but I also want to make sure that, to some extent, they have a way in. I pitch high, but I also don’t want to be very careful not to push away. Not that setting a game at any giving difficulty is inherently pushing away! It’s also probably fine to make games where people attack other people with dudes on a map. I’m only worried about going down the silo too hard. And that designers might occasionally forget that not everyone “gets” the idea of a war game. I tried to play Arcs and immediately I was hit with the idea that the setting didn’t give me any reason to attack anyone. The mechanics did (although not strongly), but I still didn’t want to do it. Shut Up and Sit Down talk about Arcs makes its own lore for you; but at least when I’m being the space turtles I know that I’m supposed to hate those barony guys. Of course, not everyone cares about setting as much as I do, either. Twilight Imperium isn’t a better game because of this element. I think my point is, we should always remember that our audience may be seeing this thing for the first time. We can’t always design for that, if we want to go deep, but, like a memento mori, we should keep it in mind. And maybe I’m weird because I don’t want to attack people in games, but I can tell you like I said in the first article in this series: THE MAIN REASON PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO PLAY GAMES IS LOSING MAKES THEM FEEL STUPID AND WINNING MAKES THEM FEEL MEAN.

And I bring that thought to every game I design, and try to design with that as the hand I am dealt. That doesn’t mean I want Cole to stop being Frank Miller; it just means I think we need some Scott McClouds as well.

And of course I don’t actually hate Cole at all. The fact that he’s talking about this stuff in his games is amazing. I just used that title because although I hate clickbait, I also have to deal with the internet as it is. I don’t have the strength to retrain your brains not to click on outrage, and I hopefully have the serenity to forgive myself for playing to it.