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.

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.

After lunch, I saw The Art vs Craft panel.  It was interesting structurally – having the panellists debate both sides of the argument against themselves – and the speakers were entertaining – Nathan Curnow wore a bunny suit to speak – but I came away with the same opinion I had going in: both Art & Craft are equally important.

Next up, was me speaking on the panel I Can Say Yes But In The End It Will Be No, talking about issues of collaboration and ownership as a writer with Liz Argall, Angela Bentzien, and Luke Devenish. Both Liz & Luke focused on the positives of the collaborative experience – an opinion that I share.  When it works, it’s brilliant, because other creative people take what’s in your head and make it better than you could have imagined it.  when it goes wrong, as I’ve seen it do, it can be incredibly frustrating though, but I think we all thought that the working with other artists had made us better writers.  Angela spoke about the practical nature of the work and of having ownership of it – especially as a theatre group, and having to come to a creative consensus.

I spoke about the role of collaboration between the author and the audience, and how that relates to ownership.  My theory is that you never really own the work, and that there’s always some form of collaboration, because writing – or storytelling – is about communication, and in order for communication to happen, you need at least 2 people.  In established media – prose, games, theatre, comics – the communication you have with your audience is one way -  it’s a creator / consumer relationship – but with games, you get the chance to turn that communication into more of a conversation.  Games are built in such a way that the audience actually has to engage with the telling of the story, they have to take action, they have to own their own agency, and they have to push through the game’s story.  Done well, narrative games have access to the audience’s emotions in a far more visceral form than the empathic response of prose or film because you aren’t watching someone on a screen do something, or reading about them doing it in a book, the audience is actively making a choice and then acting on that choice before seeing the consequences play out.  That’s something that’s really exciting and powerful to me as a writer, and hopefully I got that across in my allotted ten minutes – at least when I wasn’t suggesting members of the audience were stalking me, telling stories about mental illness, or talking about a girl who got away.

It was a lively panel, I thought.  From where I was sitting, everyone shared something of themselves, and I felt like I knew everyone a little bit better afterwards, which is exactly what I’m looking for when I hear people speak.

Next up, I went straight into my From Here to There session to talk about my experience writing games generally, and more specifically Doctor Who.  I think, a few years after the project ended, that this was a nice way to finally put the whole thing to bed.  I got to talk about how I got my start as a games writer, the greatest creative experience of my professional life (so far), the worst creative experience of my professional life (hopefully ever), and to talk in a bit more detail about the strengths and weaknesses of games as a storytelling medium.  It was tremendous fun, but also a little strange, because at times it felt like I was just having a conversation, but then I’d turn around and there would be 20 people in the same room, all listening to me, and all laughing in the right spots.

The last session was Letters to the Editor, a chance for David Ryding, the festival director, to bring back speakers and ask them questions from the audience.  It was a good way to finish up the festival – funny, insightful, and focused on the process of writing.

And that’s the strength of the emerging writers’ festival – it’s about writing, not writers.  I felt energised and inspired about my own work after hearing people speak.  I was reminded that there are as many ways of working as their are writers and that you need to find not only your own voice, but your own reasons for doing the work, and your own path through that.  I got to speak to some incredibly talented and interested people, who in turn, seemed to see me the same way – which left me with an insufferable ego for the following few days – and who also shared my drive to write and share and communicate and make it work in whatever way we need to.  That for me is the crux of the festival – bringing writers together and building a community, no matter what stage of your career you’re at.

Which brings me to a question I’ve been thinking about since I was asked to take part – am I an emerging writer?  Well, yes and no, I think.  I’m still learning.  I’m still finding my feet.  I’m still bluffing my way through some of it.  But, I know I can do it – at least for games.  So, in that area, I don’t know that I am emerging, but I don’t know that I’m established quite yet either.  Maybe we need another definition – something between emerging and emerged – but I suspect we’d then need two more definitions to bridge those, then 4 more to bridge those, then 8, then it would never stop and our dictionary would contain nothing but words to describe the stages of a writer’s career.

Maybe then, it’s enough to just say, I’m a writer, and I’m doing this work, and that’s where I’m at.  I think that’s what I’ll do.  At least until somebody stops me, takes my hand, shakes their head, and says, ‘sorry son, ‘fraid you’re not a writer.’

And I’ll look them in the eye, and there’ll be a moment between us that stretches out just a little bit too long but neither of us will say anything, and when they’re just about to pull away, their fingers losing their grip, their cold hand retreating, I’ll smile, and then I’ll kick them in the shins and run off down the street!

On Saturday, I wasn’t speaking so I was able to attend panels, get a sense of the space for Sunday, and hear cool people talk about interesting things.

First up was Seven Enviable Lines where the festival’s six ambassadors – Luke Devenish, Kathryn Heyman, Rachel Hills, David Milroy and Pooja Mittal – spoke about the seven pieces of advice they wished they’d been given starting out.  As a fiction writer, I found Luke Devenish and Kathryn Heyman most interesting.  Luke is a playwright & teacher who’s worked on both Neighbours and Home and Away.  He had a really strong sense of the craft of writing and was an incredibly open and personal speaker, both things that I look for and try to do when I’m presenting too.  Kathryn Heyman is a novellist, and again, had a strong sense of craft and willingness to share.  I knew I’d get to catch up with Luke at some point because I was on a panel with him, but I resolved to talk to Kathryn at some point, but sadly only got to shake her hand as she was leaving the bar on Sunday Evening.  She told me I had very soft hands.  I told her I was a writer and had never done a day of hard labour in my life.

I saw two From Here to There sessions – Hollow Fields with Madeleine Rosca, and The Librarians with Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope.  These sessions were designed to give the audience more of an in depth look at a particular piece of work.  There’s something consistently comforting in hearing the stories of how people create.  There are always enough trials – the length of time it took to get the Librarians off the ground; Madeleine having entire pages of her comic rejected and having to rework them – that it reminded me that this is part and parcel of the writer’s life.

The Great State Divide was an attempt to answer the question – is there a regional voice for each state in Australia.  As an outsider, I find the question of an ‘Australian Voice’ an incredibly interesting one, but I’m not sure this session managed to answer the question.  The speakers were diverse in both content and quality – the highlight being Sean Riley who told the incredibly personal story of him growing up in Tasmania and the very clear moment where he realised he wanted to be a writer.

Last on Saturday, before retreating to Fad Gallery in Chinatown, was The Pitch where a broad range of publishers – some established, some independent – let the audience in on what they were looking for.

The day let me put into words something that I’ve thought for a long time but never actually verbalised.  Seeing such a large group of writers, with such broad ranges of experience, I still found myself drawn to particular things – and it wasn’t necessarily what they said, but how they said it.  I’m interested in people who share something of themselves at conferences, who, afterwards, you feel like you know a little bit better.  If they manage to impart something useful, some glimmer of knowledge about how to proceed, great, but I’d much rather hear someone talk who could speak with conviction and passion about why they write, letting their personality shine through.

Sunday writeup coming soon…

I also finished the first draft of the first new content for my novel in over a year.  I’m working on adding chapters to fill out some character development and to stop the main beats of the plot feeling so rushed in the second act.  It’s been really strange to go back and write new content for those characters in that world, especially as it’s a novel that I began 3 years ago and the person I am now is very different from the person who sat down to write it originally.   What’s been most surprising is seeing patterns evident in the book that reflect things I’ve been going through in my personal life, and only now being aware of them.  It really brought home how the creative process is, in many ways, a process of digging through yourself.  It also really brought home how crappy first drafts are.

Other news is that I’ll be talking at the Media and Design School in Auckland at some point in the next few months, and hopefully at the Melbourne Emerging Writers’ Festival in May.

I also received feedback from my two presentations at the Victorian IT Teachers Association Conference.  You can find it here.

Challenge and stories aren’t really pulling in different directions in games.  It may be that we’re trying to use traditional storytelling techniques with games, and that’s where we fall down, but the reality is that with games, it’s just the mechanisms that we can use to tell stories are different than they are in other forms.  Brenda’s example of opera is a really good one, but you can easily find examples in other media.  Comics spring to mind as a form that shares elements with both film and prose, but how you interact with that is different to both.

And, I think that’s one of the key things – interaction, or how you engage and derive meaning from the medium – but games aren’t unique in being interactive.

I’ve often spoke in the past about levels of indirection in story-telling.  In prose, you’re effectively 3 levels seperate from your emotional response to the story.  You need to parse the sentences, imagine the events unfolding, then have your own individual experience of it.  With film, you’re 2 levels away.  You no longer need to parse and imagine, but you do need to form a bond with the characters on screen, and then your emotional response is filtered through that.  Games, or good games, remove the engagement barrier to a single level.  There’s no need to imagine events, they’re presented just like a film, and as the player, you’re the one controlling the characters and, hopefully, engaging in their emotional journey along the way.

As game developers, we believe that we’re unique, but the truth is, all media is interactive to some degree, it’s just the level of engagement and imagination we have with our audience is unique.  Not better though – there are things prose does better than other mediums, things that film does better, things that comics do better, things that music does better – the trick is to work out what the strengths of our medium are and play to those.

One thing that games do better than other media is brought up in Jonathan’s interview when he talks about Fallout 3.  In it, you come across a nurse who tried to hold off a horde and failed.  Jonathan thinks this moment works, but is an example of how the rest of the game fails, because there aren’t other moments like this.  I think that’s important to consider how effective that single element would be without the rest of the game around it.  There may not be a particularly strong central story to Fallout 3, but there is a consistent world, with consistent characters, and the player experience is built around that, rather than on the beat by beat, linear progression.  In this case, the player is encouraged to take on the identity of a post-apocalyptic wanderer trying to survive, and the world is designed to support that.  Story, or at least a linear story, is almost secondary to that identity-adoption.

Testing identities is one of the fundamental things that we do when we play, both as adults and as children, but we can’t do that without construction of some sort of fiction.  However, once we have that fiction, we can tell stories.  Games with stories provide fictions that encourages us to adopt the identities and goals of the characters and to believe that the actions they take and the challenges they face are important.  I believe that challenge alone isn’t important, that actions themselves aren’t important, but that it’s why we take those actions to overcome those challenges that is important. Games connect with us directly, and those that work, enable us to adopt those identities and want to solve those problems alongside the characters.

And speaking of upcoming events, I’m going to be appearing at this year’s National Screenwriters’ Conference in Adelaide.  Session details are:

Writing – It’s More Than A Game

The differentiation between games and films is blurring rapidly. As game graphics and other technical innovations reach a highpoint, games are depending more and more on character, story and plot… and traditional screenwriters are becoming a valuable resource for the games industry.

The major global film market (15-30yo) is spending more time and money on games than cinema – and the trend isn’t slowing. So is there a place for you in game writing? Do you have to be a user to appreciate the form? How do your skills translate to this exciting field? And is the sky really the limit? Find out how you can tap into this exciting writing opportunity from three internationally respected games writers.

In the meantime, this site is still under construction, but you can visit some of the sections that were easier to put together than others:

Appearances

One of the reasons I wanted to start this site was to bring together a lot of the random stuff floating around the web that I’d been involved with. This page contains videos of my appearances on ABC2 and at Freeplay.

Conferences & Presentations

Over the years, I’ve done a bunch of conference presentations.  Here’s where you can find the details of the sessions and copies of the presentations.  Most of the new ones are in .mov format because I bought a mac and fell in love with Keynote.

Game Projects – Old Projects – Current Projects

Here you can find details of what I’m working on now and what I’ve worked on in the past.  Sadly, the current project page is a bit quiet because everything’s early days.

Writing

This is where you can find samples of my personal writing.  It’s a little sparse just now because I’ve been focusing on a novel for the past few years.  That should change during 2009.