Click through the fold for the content.

First up is context.  Film provides a broad range of experience – from the non-narrative work of Koyaanisqatsi, through the short film made of still images La Jetee, to the massive blockbusters of Iron Man.  Novels are the same – from the epic poetry of Sharp Teeth, through the metatextual work of House of Leaves, to mainstream work like the Da Vinci Code.  Comics take us from the 4-colour world of Superman, through the stark, washed out textures of Jimmy Corrigan, to the allegorical Maus.

And games are the same, stretching from the purely mechanical experience of Tetris through games where the fiction is a backdrop for the mechanics, like Gears of War, to heavily narrative experiences like Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

These are all games though, and what I want to look at is the storytelling strengths of games compared to those other mediums.

When I was younger, I used to go on these caravan holidays with my family, and one of the small pleasures I had then was when I got my daily allowance and disappeared to the park’s grubby little arcade with the hope that they’d have a Star Wars arcade cabinet – and that nobody was using it.

It was my escape.   For as long as I could survive, I got to play at being Luke Skywalker flying through space, shooting down Tie Fighters, destroying the Death Star.

But, I grew up, I stopped going on those holidays, and that arcade game slipped into memory.

Until I went to the opening of the Game On Exhibition at ACMI, where they had a pristine cabinet just sitting there, bleeping out John William’s score, spilling green and red vector light out onto the floor, reminding me of the time I’d spent with it years ago.

So, why am I talking about this?  It’s because the personal experience I had with that game – through play, through identity, and through the moment to moment choices I made, are fundamental to how games deliver narrative, and to their unique storytelling strengths.

One useful way of thinking about story & narrative experiences (for game writers at least) is as a space, with the form you experience that space being a guided navigation of that.  The job of the individual form is to encourage you to explore – to find out what happens next, to dig into the subtext & themes, to empathise with the characters, to raise questions and push forward for them to be answered.

And in a lot of ways, this is the same process that we go through when we learn & play – we form a hypothesis about the rules of the world, we probe the world with that in mind, and then we integrate or reject our initial idea.

Which is mirrored in how we read and internalise narrative.  Stories, good stories, should surprise & engage you, putting you in free-fall, leading you along a trail of breadcrumbs that you can follow and integrate.  Every word you read, every panel you read, every frame of a film causes you to evaluate & re-evaluate the shape of the story you’re experiencing, and form the shape of the story out of that questioning, that learning, that playing.

What games do though, is make that process of play more overt.

One of the ways they do that is by encouraging the player to adopt identities.

Going back to Star Wars, everything in that game was designed to make you feel like you were Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star.  It’s a game that kids had been playing for years before the game was available, but sitting in the arcade, you could immerse yourself in the feedback loop of the moment to moment choices of flying the X-Wing, shooting down Tie-Fighters, and shutting your computer down in the middle of the trench run.

In that cockpit, the player becomes the protagonist, with the same goals and the same level of freedom of choice as Luke in the movie.

If you speak to people about their experience playing games and what they did, it’s always of the form ‘I did this…’, never ‘The character did this…’

Choice is one of the fundamental forces in narrative.  Character want things and make choices to get them, and in doing so they exhibit agency in the world.  By having the player adopt the identity of an in-game character, games shift that sense of agency onto the player, having them make moment to moment choices within the rules of the game.   These choices manifest in different ways depending on the game, with some having limited effect on the narrative, and others causing grand changes in the shape of the story arcs.

The Star Wars arcade game has limited choices in narrative terms – fail or succeed – but moment to moment, you’re constantly reacting to incoming fire, the swarms of fighters, avoiding towers, all in a feedback loop of figuring out the rules of the world and how it works.

A game like Mass Effect by contrast has much larger choice.  Decisions you make in conversation, how you approach combat, and how you’ve chosen to roleplay your character, all affect the steps you take through the larger narrative, crafting a unique, personal, experience.

Different games use these fundamental components of play, identity, and choice in wildly different ways.

Osmos

Osmos is a game where the entirety of the mechanics are embedded in the fiction, and which encourages you to adopt the simpler identity of a cell floating in some space or liquid along with other cells.  You expel some of your mass to move, absorb things smaller than you, and can be absorbed by things larger than you.  Beyond that fiction, the game has no narrative elements at all.

Flower

Flower is a game that, at first glance, appears to be in the same vein as Osmos, but the way that the game’s goals have been constructed, and the presentation of the dull grey city during the game’s brief introductory cutscenes paint a story about the balance between nature and man-made technology, how they can live in harmony, but also how one can overpower the other.  In the simple shots of zooming in on the flower, the suggestion is made that the game is the flower’s dream, and in the taking on of that identity, the player follows the goals of opening up the other flowers and restoring colour to the world.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

A much clearer example of identity and how that shapes narrative and choices is the game Batman: Arkham Asylum, in which you play as Batman (which is cool!). Everything in the game, from the moment to moment gameplay choices, through how you move through the space, to what Batman wants as a protagonist, and to how the linear narrative plays out, is reflected in the player adopting that identity, while still allowing space for the player to express themselves and make choices.

Machinarium

Machinarium is another example of a game that encourages identity adoption of a narrative rather than a character. The player is encouraged to empathise with the character, but the game’s presentation distances the player from him, making control of him indirect.   Its narrative is also doled out piece by piece as you move through the world and solve puzzles. Failing to solve these puzzles stalls the narrative, and it’s only the desire to see what’s next in the story, and to help the little robot out, that keeps the player going.

Uncharted 2

Uncharted 2 (and it’s predecessor) is a narrative best described as a roller-coaster.  The narrative is linear, and the player moves through it at a proscribed pace, performing the necessary actions along the designed path.  While choice is non-existent in the story, and also limited in the mechanical elements, it succeeds in drawing the player through a challenging, surprising set of puzzles and a story full of interesting twists and turns populated with well drawn and acted characters.

Grand Theft Auto 4

Grand Theft Auto 4 is an example of a game where the player is put into a thematic space and allowed to explore the extents of that, both through the linear, twining plots of the multiple narratives, but also in the side-quests & open-world.  The game is an exploration of the immigrant experience, and everything is designed to support that – from watching the absurd shows on the television, to the hyper-bright lights of the entertainment district, to the missions where the character’s past catches up with him.

Grand Theft Auto is at its most interesting when the internal conflicts of the character are played out, putting what the game’s story & mechanics ask you to do – which is to steal & kill & run drugs – in conflict with Niko’s desire to build a better life for himself away from that.  To complete the game, the player has to undertake those missions, just as Niko has to in order to survive, but his questioning of them bleeds out into the player’s experience, causing them to question them too.

Mass Effect

Mass Effect, and its sequel, are examples of games where the player has much greater control over the shape of the story, both in terms of the moment to moment mechanics and the narrative choices. Players control conversations, choose how to approach situations, choose which missions to take in particular orders, and to craft a unique personal experience. However, while some of the details of the story are unique for each player, the key goals remain the same – destroy the Geth race, save the Citadel station. Within that space though, the amount of player choice & impact on the world is considerable – Mass Effect 2 has over 700 hooks into the choices made in the original story, from characters who died, to adverts for movies made of your exploits.

These concept of play, of identity, and choice are part of the fundamental strengths of games as a storytelling medium, one which we’re only just working out how to properly exploit.  All of these games encourage you to take on the identity of the protagonist, with varying degrees of agency, but an interesting question is raised when that sense of agency is questioned in the game itself.

Bioshock

Bioshock is a game that, at its core, is about agency, about a man’s ability to act in their own intersests & change the world.  Based on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the player enters the underwater city of Rapture, built by the industrialist Andrew Ryan as a place, in his words, ‘where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small.’

But it falls apart, because not everybody can be a captain of industry, or a great scientist, or a famous artist – somebody still needs to scrub the toilets.

It’s into this crumbling world that the player is dropped and from its earliest moments, encouraged to approach the city as they see fit, to choose how to move through the space, what weapons to use, which abilities (from pyrokinesis to controlling swarms of bugs) to focus on.  Everything the game does is to give the player a sense of agency for the first 3 or 4 hours of play.

And then it changes that.

It’s revealed that you were grown in a vat and hypnotically conditioned so that every time someone says anything with the phrase ‘would you kindly…’, you do what they tell you.  Suddenly, in flashbacks presented in the game, but also in the feelings of the player, you’re forced to reevaluate everything you’ve done in-game up to that point, and realise that the agency you felt had been a lie.

And that feeling is something you can only get from having spend that time in the game, making choices, feeling in control, piecing together the narrative and the mystery as you did.

This is the unique strength of video games because rather than empathising with a character in a novel or on a screen, you take on their goals and actions, and in response feel some of their successes and failures.  The experience of the game is a personal one, and so when games raise questions and choices, the responses reflect the player and, at their best, reveal something about you.

One of the cornerstones of their argument is that are defined as competitive pursuits built from rules and states and goals, and that within that definition, nobody has produced art.  The call, then, is to reframe what we are talking about – that the word ‘game’ doesn’t properly encapsulate the evolution of the form.

Except neither do the descriptors ‘film’ or ‘novel’ or ‘writing’ or ‘comic’.

Every other form has evolved beyond it’s initial frame of reference and  gone on to encapsulate a wide range of expressions and forms – and games and play are no exception.  Should we stop calling what children do when they play at being firemen or are recreating scenes from their favourite shows ‘games’ because their rules are fluid?  Should we say that the story-driven epic-poem Sharp Teeth isn’t a novel because of its form?  Should we say that Koyaanisqatsi isn’t a film because it doesn’t hew to narrative conventions?  Should we say that Bioshock isn’t a game because there is no score as there is in Pac-Man?  Should we say that Braid isn’t a game because the levels can be tackled in any order?  Should we say that Mass Effect isn’t a game because it isn’t competitive?

The traditional elements of games – rules, states, and goals – are elements of what makes all of the above examples work, but they aren’t the only thing.  Play is central to the experience, but it isn’t everything.   Games (and play) are a synecdoche – where a single element of the thing is used to describe the whole.  Other mediums are inclusive, and are synecdoches in their own right, so it seems strange that games should be treated any differently.

Another argument against games as art is the notion of authorial control – games cannot be art because they aren’t guided experiences, the audience takes some responsibility for guiding the experience.  This presumes that the audience has complete control over the shape of the experience or the story, something technically infeasible, or that control and choice can’t be used in interesting thematic ways.  Taking Bioshock as an example again, its central theme of control, of ‘what makes a man a man?’, and the subsequent mid-point reveal that your sense of control and the choices that you’ve made have been an illusion is an incredibly powerful storytelling moment precisely because the player has spent hours making choices and feeling in control.

A game like Mass Effect, again exploring themse of control and power, works because secondary and party characters reflect various aspects of the themes, and those elements are explorable within the narrative’s overall goals – stop the Geth, save the universe – but by giving the player the ability to explore those themes as they want, a greater engagement with the narrative is possible, and some choices carry greater personal weight because you as an individual make them.  If you’ve spent 20 or 30 hours shaping your character as a reflection of you, the choice to wipe out the last of a species is your choice – not the characters, not the author’s, but yours.  The ability of games to communicate experiences, to explore the inner world as a reflection of the outer by giving the player choice and a level of authorial control is an incredibly powerful tool.

But are these games art?  What separates art from entertainment?

Watching the documentary Indie Sex on SBS the other night, one commentator made the point that one distinction between sex in art and sex in pornography is the intent of the sex and whether it contains subtext.  The same argument can be made for games.  How does something like Bioshock distinguish itself from Doom?  Both are first person shooters, but Bioshock  is about more than just exploring Rapture and killing Splicers.  It’s about family, control, about the danger of unchecked power, and about a world built on a precarious philosophy.  While it could be argued that these may not be particularly deep themes, they are there in the subtext of the player’s actions, the presented narrative, the game’s space, and it’s eventual resolution.  The same argument could be made for many of the other games put forward as art – Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Flower, Passage, or The Path.  They all attempt to be about more than what is presented, and about more than the player’s actions.

Games (in their synecdoche form, not their dictionary definition form) have evolved – as film has evolved, as writing has evolved, as comics have evolved – to contain a wider range of creative possibilities than would have originally been possible.   We should, as a broad creative culture, be inclusive rather than exclusive.  We should look at the creative possibilities of choice and audience authorship rather than dismiss it as inferior to other forms.  We should consider that games are made by adults, with adult concerns, and with aspirations to use these new tools at their disposal to create emotional experiences for their audiences.

In short, we should consider them as being art.

I’m running a 2-hour writing for games workshop with Express Media on May 22nd from 2-4.  Details here.  I’m going to cover the key similarities and differences between games & more traditional media and how to approach the process of games writing.

I’ll also be on the panel ‘Never Surrender’ on May 29th at 1:45.

Never surrender
Writing isn’t all about success stories! Join our writers as they speak candidly about rejection, creative risk-taking and projects that took ten years from creation to publication. Why do they stick with it, and is it all worth it in the end?
With — Paul Callaghan, Elizabeth Campbell, Sean Condon and Dee White. Hosted by Simonne Michelle-Wells.

And 20 minutes before the program launch, I was interviewed for the Arts Alive program about my experiences with the festival and why I think it’s a Good Thing(tm).  (Summary: Writers > Readers for inspiration!)

Thanks to Lisa Dempster, I was at last month’s Format Festival in Adelaide talking about writing & technology on the Non-Paper Publishing panel.  One of the other speakers, Estelle Tang, recently interviewed me about games writing for the Kill Your Darlings podcast.  You can listen to it here.

And lastly, I reviewed The Pleasures of Computer Gaming for RMIT‘s Second Nature Journal.  You can read that review here.

This’ll be different, and way more in-depth, than the 2-hour Express Media workshop later in the month.

And if you didn’t hear – we announced this year’s Freeplay festival too.

Every new medium, no matter how similar to what has come before, has had to deal with the cries of the earth falling or our youth corrupting or the very threads that hold our decent society together fraying and unravelling, and games are no exception, but recently the number of mainstream articles with exactly that form have appeared online in the mainstream news.

First up, in December of 2009, Charlie Brooker wrote an eloquent article in the Guardian titled ‘Why I love Video Games’.  In it, he tried to encourage non-gamers to at least try the medium that he described as ‘the most rapidly evolving creative medium in human history’ and presented a wide range of starter games, from the brilliant simplicity of Canabalt to the desolate future world of Fallout 3.  Later that same month, the article was republished in The Age, this time with the headline ‘Big bang theory: the problem with video games’.  A subtle shift, certainly, but one that primes the reader for a negative appraisal of the medium rather than the original’s far more optimistic view.

Things were quiet for a few months, with much of the reporting focusing on South Australia’s Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, and his resistence to the R18+ rating, until a few hit in quick succession.

On March 14, The Age published a special investigation into buying games headlined ‘Declare ‘game over’ on video violence degrading our kids’.  In it, a 14 year old (who according to the article looked much younger) bought a copy of a video game containing, again according to the article, ‘murder, mass shootings, stabbings, drug dealing, sexual violence and child abductions.’  It also contained a quote from the 14 year old:

“Games like these are becoming more and more lifelike,” he says. ”If you play this sort of stuff regularly, the violence, the killing, the drugs and everything, I guess it just becomes normal.”

The article then goes on to cite an unnamed study claiming that:

Research suggests exposure to violent games makes people more aggressive, less caring children – regardless of their age, sex or culture. A review of 130 studies on the subject – covering more than 130,000 young gamers worldwide – found exposure to violent video games was a causal risk factor for increased aggressive thoughts and behaviour and decreased empathy.

before contradicting itself with

Lead researcher Craig Anderson, from the Centre for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, says such effects are neither huge nor trivial.

”If you have a child with no other risk factors for aggression and violence, and if you allow them to suddenly start playing video games five hours to 10 hours a week, they’re not going to become a school shooter,” he says.

”[But] it’s a risk factor that’s easy for an individual parent to deal with – at least, easier than changing most other known risk factors for aggression and violence, such as poverty or one’s genetic structure.”

Classification is an incredibly important topic, but muddying the waters like this, and indulging in unscientific ‘sting’ operations with such a tiny sample group is unhelpful.  As is misrepresenting the content of the bought game.  While not explicitly named in the article body, the picture does show a picture of Bioshock 2 which, according to the OFLC database, is rated MA15+ and contains “Strong horror themes, violence and coarse language”.  No mention of drug dealing, sexual violence, or child abductions.  And, in fact, if it had contained sexual violence or child abduction, it’s likely the game would have been rated higher and subsequently banned for sale here in Australia.

On March 18, The Age reported on a study by Denison University into the effects of games and student grades titled ‘Video games can disrupt schoolwork: study’.  This study found that:

Young boys who receive their first video game system don’t progress as quickly in school as boys who don’t own such devices, a new study found.

The average reading and writing scores of the young gamers don’t go down, but they don’t improve either, said Robert Weis of Denison University in Ohio, co-author of the study.

“For children without games, scores go up over time,” Weis said. “For boys with games, scores remain relatively stable. You don’t see the typical development in reading and writing.”

They concluded that their experimental evidence showed that video games “may displace after-school activities that have educational value and may interfere with the development of reading and writing skills in some children.”

This study was followed up on March 22nd with a blog post on the Age’s Gadgets on the Go blog titled ‘Young gamers get bad grades’, with the misleading reading of the original study:

To evaluate the impact of computer games on scholastic performance, researchers from Ohio’s Denison University offered 64 boys aged between six and nine a PlayStation II in return for participating in a four month study. The catch was that half the boys received the console up front, while half were forced to wait until the end of the four months.

The result – an immediate drop in the reading and writing test scores for the boys given the consoles up front. [emphasis mine] Interestingly, the PlayStation seemingly had no effect on the boys’ math and problem solving skills, according to the study to be published in Psychological Science.

Nowhere in the original article, or the article linked from the blog, did it say that the effects were immediate or that the scores dropped.

And finally, on March 22nd, news.com.au, published an article titled ‘Wii could be worse than Xbox, says politician’, in which the Home Affairs Minister Professor Craig Anderson of the Iowa State University Centre for the Study of Violence asked the question:

“To the extent that practising the actual motions of killing in different ways actually improves someone’s skill, you sort of have to ask yourself: ‘Do we want a generation of people who know how to kill people with knives and swords and guns?’”

“You want your military to be able to do certain things, certain very unpleasant things. That’s why we have a military.

“But do you want ten-year-olds to be able to do that?”

The article is linked from their main page with the far more strident headline ‘Wii’s worse for high impact, says politician.’

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.  Every new medium is reported on as being dangerous and adversely affecting children and society.  Plato decried the introduction of the written tradition as destroying the purity of the oral tradition.  It happened with poetry, with novels, with the printing press, with the steam engine, with rock and roll, with ballroom dancing, with pinball machines, with comics, with photographs, with movies.  Yet, somehow, inexplicably, we are still here.

What is harder to understand though, is that while other media certainly have their critics, they also have mainstream voices to defend both the form and the industry, which begs the question – where are our defenders who can reach out beyond the echo chamber of the specialist press and online commentary and present games in, if not a glowing light, at least a more balanced one?

It appears that, in Australia at least, they are sadly nowhere to be found.

Imagine a world where Kevin Rudd praises the games industry as Gordon brown recently did in the UK.   Imagine a world where Tim Winton has a conversation about the artistic possibility of games, as Salman Rushdie did.  Imagine our Federal arts minister talking about his gaming experiences or the opposition leader playing a Wii or Margaret Pomeranz talking about her first experience playing Uncharted 2.

And imagine a world where even the positive reports, with culturally engaged and articulate writers, weren’t spun towards the negative.

Endlessly, we hear the same numbers trotted out about games and the games industry: the average age is 30 years old, 40% are women, makes more money than hollywood, 88 per cent of homes have a PC or a console. But if this is true, where are our voices in the media? Where are our cultural defenders? Where are those who understand that games as a medium aren’t the downfall of all that is good and right?

I don’t know.

But I hope they’re out there.

Details from the Express Media site are:

Express Media in partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival presents:

How To Write Computer Games with Paul Callaghan, 2-4pm. The Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.

$10

Games, like all mediums, have their own strengths and weaknesses as a storytelling medium. This workshop takes a look at what makes games tick, what you can learn from traditional forms, and what you should know about the expressive power of mechanics.

link

I’ll be at the Format Festival – Academy of Words in Adelaide on March 13th. Definitely talking about non-paper publishing, but might also be chairing something else. Details here.

I’m also taking part in the next Meanland event – Reading in a Time of Technology – on May 19th at the Wheeler Centre.  Details here.

And, lastly,  I’ll once again be talking at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, sometime from May 21st to May 30th.

And here‘s an article I wrote for Open Forum on the R18+ rating, the proposed Internet filter, and how they might affect the local games industry.

World Congress of Science and Factual Producers

On Friday December 4th, I took part in a speed-networking event at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers.  What was interesting about this was being able to step away from the traditional pc/console space and think about new opportunities to use games and games technology.

In talking to the directors and producers, I had the thought that perhaps games were closer to documentary features than to narrative features.  The topics explored – happiness as a contagion that can be tracked using network theory, or a man who built his own 300-million search-and rescue empire – were built on the film-maker exploring the world, creating theories, and constructing the narrative as they go, which is a clear analogue for what players do in games.

Not to say that there isn’t room for narrative in games, but modelling gameplay & the reveal of narrative in more of a documentary style might prove to be a useful template.

Game Connect Asia Pacific

Or GCAP as it’s less mouthfully known, took place at Crown from December 6th – 8th.  I gave two presentations – one on games and games literacy (which was attended by only 5 people due to a last minute room change) and one on the creative process of writing and how that applies to games.  Due to meetings and general schmoozing (and also pulling together my writing presentation), I saw almost none of the conference itself (other than Tim Stellmach’s keynote & the indie games that I was judging), but came away with the overall impression that from an art & design perspective, the content was unfocused and weak – which is reflected in a single stream that contained all of the art, design, and audio talks.  As design is one of our local industry’s challenges, it would be nice to see an increased focus on it next year.

Details on the presentations after the fold.

Games and Games Literacy

This is a slightly modified version of a talk I gave at the VITTA conference last year on models of interacting with games in terms of their components as well as traditional literacy and numeracy skills.

“Today’s students have never seen a world without video games.  They’re an integral part of life now, becoming a new cultural artifact, a new entertainment medium, and bringing with them a whole slew of new employment opportunities.

But how do they work?  And what are the parameters for having a meaningful dialog about them with our students?

In this session, Paul Callaghan, a veteran game developer, will explore the elements that contribute to games literacy and how that can be applied to traditional literacy and numeracy skills.”

Presentation – GCAP – Games and Games Literacy

What does a writer do anyway?

Standing room only for this session, which was incredibly flattering.  Also set a new record for me – 60 slides in just under 50 minutes!

“Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium.  By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist.  It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.”

Added 17/11/09: Marketing influences games more than ratings

Survey: Game Score-to-Sale Theory Again Disproven

A study from 2006 that concludes no correlation between sales & score.

When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality

This compares metacritic rating to overall sales for 1281 games during the PS2 era.

Each metacritic point is worth 7.7 extra sales per day

Some data extracted from between March 2007 & March 2008

The influence of metacritic on games sales

A more recent study from May 2009.