GameCulture Journal Blog

[Originally appeared on the Georgia Tech News Games blog.]

The Newsgames Project was begun by identifying a number of areas of inquiry that seemed to address the big picture issues. You can see these in practice through the main categories of the website. One of these, discourse, was identified through Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book The Elements of Journalism. News is social because it affects groups of people and results in a desire for new facts, ideas, and opinions. Kovach and Rosenstiel feel that discourse not only promotes informative dialogue between citizens, but also acts as a way for people to talk to the newsmakers about their news.

When we think of discourse in this context, we are prompted to think about socially based discussions. Newspapers allow readers to write letters to the editor in which they voice their opinions on a story. Of course, this forum isn’t as democratizing as we might hope. It’s been often cited that online news outlets counter this by providing easier methods of feedback and unlimited space for participation, though a quick glance at the comments section of any news story prompts questions of the quality of this feedback. News radio often allows listeners to call in to argue (or perhaps more commonly, agree) with the host. The University of Virginia’s David Golumbia finds this “revelation” suspect, however.

While the Internet has been lauded for giving power to the people–providing outlets for feedback or turning consumers into creators by providing a distribution channel for various forms of citizen-created media–Golumbia wrote that we most commonly end up replicating existing structures rather than creating new forms of discourse. It is not about our newly found ability to talk back that makes digital media powerful–after all, we’ve had feedback outlets long before the Internet. Instead, we should look to digital media for new forms of discourse that do not have their place in the current structure. So how do we handle discourse within games?

When we think of social structures for games, we either turn to multiplayer games or external discussions about single-player games that often rely on support structures outside the game. We can imagine playing a newsgame in which two opponents take opposite sides and (often quite literally) hurl information back and forth. Or we envision tackling a single player game and then talking about it on a web forum or comment thread. Useful, for sure, but I endeavor to propose ways in which discourse can take place internally between the player and the game. I recognize that I am not the first to think of news this way, but having surveyed many newsgames (or related games), I have yet to encounter anything that actually does this. To understand how discourse can function in a single-player video game experience, we must ask questions about the nature and purpose of discourse and find a model which works with the elements that make video games unique.

We have the opportunity in games to create systems of feedback that can reinforce or negate actions. If procedural rhetoric is based on the authoring of arguments through processes, and one of the tenants of journalism is to strive to represents both sides (actually, the many angles) of the story, then designer-journalists can create forms of play that attempt to reveal these issues. If presented all at once, the effect is fairly standard. However, a well crafted news game can become a single player discourse system.

What exactly are the components of a single player discourse system? Most importantly, it does not rely on oral/written discourse in the traditional sense. If the game is based on procedural rhetoric, it’s critical that the player be able to respond in kind. It’s a system that builds in opposing viewpoints, challenges the actions of both the player and itself, and does not seek a single answer. Single player discourse systems within games are based on dynamics that allow flexibility in which the player can convince the software that their points are valid. It is about finding different results that can be juxtaposed to reveal what might have been concealed. The act of playing these games simulates the kind of social conversations we most commonly think of as discourse based around news.

The system is by no means perfect, however. One of the important elements of discourse is that it introduces new ideas. Can a game designer take into account every possibility? Of course not. We might excuse this, saying that our current news structures don’t attempt this either, but we can also imagine a game able to take into account external inputs. Or, we can imagine counter-argument games as Ian Bogost noted in Persuasive Games and Simon Ferarri plans to elaborate on in his future research. In these cases we have introduced social inputs into solitary activities.

By conceiving of these kinds of single player discourse games, we negotiate the issues we’ve had as a research group where so many of the “newsgames” we’ve played are either editorial or are just too dry. We also ensure that our feedback is spoken in the same language as our source, taking advantage of the properties of the medium of choice. Hopefully, the effort required to participate in the discourse will be more stimulating, engaging, and more rewarding. And, lastly, we can use the lessons learned in creating and playing in single player discourse systems to expand our own abilities to argue, reason, and negotiate new ideas and information.

During the course of my thesis research on game cities, I have found that considering spaces as public and private reveals fundamental elements that guide game design. Public spaces are often the result of the medium of the game’s desire or need to adventure out into the unfamiliar world. Public spaces are open to adventure, danger, and the unknown, whereas personal private spaces in general are familiar and safe. In her 1961 tome The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote about the sidewalk as an active place that must be guarded to sustain the pedestrian dynamics of the city. Erving Goffman’s Behavior in Public Places provided a study of personal behavior in public spaces that also contribute to social order (Goffman 1963). Public spaces become safe when there are forces that maintain social order; private space become unsafe when they are invaded when we enter unknown places.

Games play into these dynamics to craft tensions and opportunities. We can see this in play in games of all genres. Players sneak into top-secret laboratories, try to escape from monster-infested dungeons, and venture deep into unknown lands. They also take refuge in private spaces, often protecting them from invaders. A trope of the role-playing game genre is for guards to protect the gates of the town or genre, not only keeping the evils of the world out, but forbidding the player from venturing into the wild before they are ready. Considering these dynamics and that “private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space” (Lefebvre 166), we can see the importance of public and private city spaces.

I would like to illustrate three examples, taken from my thesis research, of this dynamic at play as a part of the narrative environment. The first is the generally public space of Tony Hawk’s Underground. The second is the violation of private space in Max Payne. Lastly, Grand Theft Auto IV is an example of the player as the violator of public space.

The Manhattan of Tony Hawk’s Underground is nearly all public space. Borden chronicled the history of skateboarding in terms of public and private places: from the city streets and the drained pools of California backyards, to the fabricated skateparks and reappropriated public architecture, the place of skateboarding is always in flux (Borden 108). This creates opportunities in the Tony Hawk games much the same as it does in the physical world.

The player rides on every piece of architecture available—storefronts, staircase railings, the roofs of buildings, the sidewalk and street, and even telephone and power lines. Some missions involve impressing pedestrians through the transformation of public property into spectacle. Others involve escaping from security guards or police designated to protect public space from intruders like yourself. The narrative of the game is not just about an up-and-coming skater trying to make it big, but also, as Iacovoni observed, the act of skating transforms spaces public and private into personal places dedicated to the player’s use.

Max Payne opens with a highly evocative scene. In a playable flashback sequence, the player, as Max Payne, comes home to their apartment calling out to their wife as the fireplace crackles. The apartment is cozy—hardwood floors and area rugs provide contrast to the usual concrete and pavement traversed in most games. Immediately this scene is disrupted, as the player catches a glimpse of hanging paintings turned on their side and a large letter V and syringe spray-painted on the wall. As the player makes their way through the house the tranquility of a familiar apartment is violently severed—a series of cinematic cuts show blood on the wall and the screaming of a woman and child are heard in the background. The player regains control over their movement, killing the men who have perpetrated the crime. But it is too late.

Again a series of cinematic cuts show a nursery, a pile of baby blocks, and then the murdered body of Max Payne’s child. After another shootout we see his slain wife on the bed. This opening, which shows the private protected space we most value violently ravaged gives the player motivation for the rest of the game. Here we see evocative narrative environments and elements at play. The elements are the murdered family, the spray-painted logo, and the escaping criminals. The environment is the normally safe private place—the furnished well-loved house—turned on its head both visually and through gameplay action.

There is no danger in Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV walking the streets of the Bronx at 4 in the morning. The player needs not worry about being mugged or assaulted. There is little threat of pedestrians becoming enemies (sometimes they will fight back if you punch them, but mostly they keep to themselves). On the one hand, the narrative of Grand Theft Auto IV is Niko as victim of circumstance just trying to get by in a strange place. On the other hand, the design of the world tells the story of Niko as a public menace. The gameplay of GTA IV is selfish and the world accommodates this. Ignoring for a moment the wanted system which determines police pursuit of the player, they are free to steal cars, kill pedestrians, run red lights, smash into other vehicles, drive anywhere their vehicle will prohibit, possess a range of weapons, and generally pose a threat to every resident of Liberty City.

Public space becomes threatening in Grand Theft Auto IV when missions are engaged because it leaves the player vulnerable. A massive outdoor gunfight might have enemies spread all over the place trying to kill the player, while one false move in front of a police officer forces the player to focus both on the goals of the mission and evading the pursuing police who will throw them off-course or end the mission. Liberty City tells a very different story about the use of space than our normal experience—it is a world where social norms are designed to be broken.

Cited:

Borden, Iain. Skateboarding, Space and the City. New York: Berg, 2006.

Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. Free Press, September 1966.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

My exploration of the topic of representations of cities in video games is viewed through an inter-disciplinary lens that combines cultural studies, urban studies, architecture, and game studies. Researching these fields has produced a variety of theories that can be connected and scaffolded to produce a framework of understanding that negotiates the similarities and differences between the way we experience the city in our physical world and how we understand it in the medium of the game.

Henri Lefebvre’s seminal text, The Production of Space (1974), outlines space as socially and historically produced: it is created through cultural influence and by its own use. While often cited for its insights, Lefebvre’s work has been criticised for its impractical operational application. Cities, as they stand on the Earth and are used by billions of people each day, are so complex that this kind of criticism is understandable. However, in conducting my research, I have found that the medium of the video game is one place where Lefebvre’s observations are particularly applicable. Cities in video games are designed from the ground-up, translated into executable code, and experienced by the player. Unless a game includes the tools to physically alter the landscape of the city, once a single-player game, like those I looked at, is shipped into retail channels and into households, its space remains relatively static—that is, it remains within the scope and context of the original game.

It is here we have a relatively closed system that follows Lefebvre’s triad of understanding space: representations of space, spatial practice, and representational space (Lefebvre 38).

Representations of space refer to the manner by which social and cultural understandings of space guide the conception and function of that space (Lefebvre 41). It is the logical perception of the relationships between objects (physical and non-physical), and is the method by which social and cultural context is brought to physicality. In terms of the video game, this is the realm in which the designers express how the space of their game should function and how they expect that space to be used. It is formalized through the creation of code that manifests their rule systems.

Spatial practice is what we put in the world (Lefebvre 41). It is our rooms, our buildings, our cities. It also emcompasses the actions we take in these spaces; how we live in the world we produce and how our world, in turn, shapes the way we produce it. This is the part of the video game that we see. It’s the design of the level and the environment, the shape of the city, the gameplay that guides our interaction with the system, and the obstacles and goals the world presents to us.

Lastly, representational space is the experience of space. It is qualitative, fluid, dynamic, symbolic, and is culturally and individually situatied in ideology and knowledge (Lefebvre 42). As video game players, it is the point of the triad in which the we experience the execution of the software, participate in the world as actors, and create meaning.

This research has a heavier focus on spatial practice and representational space because these are more player-centric. It is important to press-upon Lefebvre’s note that these three concepts do not exist in a line nor even a triangle. Instead they are constantly influencing and being influenced by each other (Lefebvre 4). The same is true for games and even this research. I have attempted to address the interrelationship of the triad by developing experiences of space through their use. Divisions made in my sections are for purpose of clarity or convenience, but the cities in these games do not exist without people interacting with them—whether that be through play, through discussion of the game with other players, or through memories of experiences and places.

Over the next week I will be posting bits and pieces from my thesis, as my draft is due in 9 days. Nine days! GAH!

Michel de Certeau’s influential chapter on “Walking in the City” from the book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) chronicles the experience of construction place and space in the city from the pedestrian viewpoint. To de Certeau, the act of walking is dynamic and political. This is made possible because the city is operational (de Certeau 94). This operational city is able to produce its own space, its history is made by its people, and the city is used as an object that triggers its own construction through its denizens (de Certeau 94). This provides an interesting challenge to the study of game spaces, which are—in the case of single player games—constructed through only a single individual’s perspective. During the course of my thesis on representations of New York City in video games, I will look at the way the cities are design to be imbued with this property and if those that lack it seem less complete.

According to de Certeau, “to walk” implies lacking place, a record of this movement only indicates that which is no longer, but that movement can be understood as a system. This system, in part, consists of “modalities of pedestrian enunciation,” which reveal the relationship between movement and what that movement means (de Certeau 99). First, the “alethic” modality relate to the mood and intent of the movement (99). Is the pedestrian taking the most direct route from one place to the next? Does their choice of route represent the multitude of possibility spaces? How are they negotiating that movement which is impossible or forced upon them? Secondly, “epistemic” modalities are concerned with understanding the space and these aforementioned possibilities. Lastly, “deonic” modalities refer to the obligations of space, what they permit and forbid, and what they offer optionally. Because these modalities deal with rules and choices, they map well to the medium of the game.

Important to the concept of representative spaces in games are two terms de Certeau uses to describe fundamental stylistic figures of spatial collapse in the urban environment. The first term, “synecdoche,” means using a word in which a part stands in for a whole (de Certeau 101). The second, “asyndeton,” refers to when conjunctions are deliberately left out of a sentence or phrase. De Certeau uses this to explain the phenomenon of ignoring parts of the travel to connect to places, as if, for example, Baltimore and Philadelphia are next to each other. These concepts become especially important in mission-based games in which the player must travel between locales to trigger events. The space traversed is often ignored; the destination is often represented by a single symbolic piece.

The final concept in “Walking in the City” relates to the functions of naming in place-making. De Certeau identifies naming as making place believable, memorable, and primitive (de Certeau 105). The believable place, identifiable by a name, is a habitable place. The memories of a place help construct its evolving identity by patterning the use of the space—that which is no longer continues to act in the present. The primitive quality of naming is related to that which is whole or quantifiable. A place with a name is a basic unit of understanding; unnamed places are constantly seeking the stability of nominative forces. I will be looking at both de Certeau’s functions of naming as a cultural action as well as naming as a practical practice for navigation in games.

As one of my theoretical sources, Michel de Certeau is of utmost importance because his discussion of imaging the city is based on action and the movement of bodies—a significant part of the 3d game environment experience. Expect summaries of more of my theoretical sources to come!

As a part of my on-going research for my thesis, I have been playing a handful of games that I will muse on for the blog. As has been my experience in the past, it is a particularly bad game that inspires me to write. Today I had the displeasure of playing True Crime: New York City for a couple hours. Why did I choose the game? Well my research is on representations of the city in games and my focus is on New York City—a natural fit on the surface. The interesting thing about True Crime: NYC is that the game’s city is a pretty accurate representation of the real Manhattan. But what would seem like a technical accomplishment is actually an example of why our everyday world cannot be directly translated into game. So, besides the glaring technical bugs, bland gameplay, and trite story, why is the space in True Crume: NYC unnavigable and why is the place not compelling?

I present you with a scenario: driving along in your unmarked cop car on the highway, the police dispatcher informs you of a robbery in progress a mile from your position. Seems simple enough, right? After all, the location is practically right next to you. But the problem is that the geographic distance of the target location has nothing to do with the actual route you need to travel to get there. I found myself driving for at least a minute in the opposite direction until I found an exit I could take, and another minute until I was actually on a surface road that could take me back to where I started by the robbery. By then, it was too late–the crime had been perpetrated and the assailants escaped. 

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City defines five elements that can be used to describe the imagability of the city: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. True Crime: New York City fails at establishing all five of these in a game context. In my previous example, I was moving along a path of travel but needed to stray from it. Unfortunately, my vehicle was unable to transfer between paths in a way that supported the game’s goals. Sure, it makes sense that I cannot drive off-road in the real world to get where I am going, but the game demands it and I should be able to do it.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a good example of how the rigid path of the highway can be broken so the player can move between districts. Driving the freeway over Los Santos, the designers included breaks in the barrier walls so that the player can drive straight off the road and fall to the roads beneath. While unrealistic, it serves the needs of the game. Paths are purposely porous in San Andreas so that transferring between districts comes naturally. 

Even comparing the representations of Manhattan’s spatial distribution in True Crime: NYC and Grand Theft Auto IV reveals how missions can be designed to accommodate the grid that is New York City. For one, GTA IV has more linear missions, so the designers can pick starting and ending locations for travel based on the availability of roads. In True Crime: NYC, however, the dispatcher does not care which direction you are traveling when assigning you the side-missions. As a result, I found myself racing down one-way streets against traffic hoping to make it to my destination on time. The traffic patterns and car control just are not up to handling this movement. Even with my sirens blaring I was constantly getting t-boned in intersections (clearly they only programmed it to affect traffic traveling in front of you). 

The problems of the space of the city translate into problems of place-making. It may be shaped like New York City, but that’s about as close as it gets. The strongest city ambience is the fantastic licensed soundtrack which features songs from a lot of NYC-based rock and hip-hop artists. Unfortunately there’s no persistent soundtrack, so getting in and out of a car changes the track, but it at least helps set the gangster-crime theme. The NPCs take the form of only a few model types, meaning it’s possible to stand in a group of pedestrians who all share the same face though different clothes. It might bill itself as a sandbox city alive and breathing, but this is just a facade. The is hardly any difference between Washington Heights and Hell’s Kitchen. Though it includes many New York City landmarks, they only serve to highlight the disparity between the real place and the place of game action. 

True Crime: New York City is a shining example of what doesn’t work in games. If a designer wants to translate a real place into game form, they need to think about the ways the player will want to navigate that space and compare that to the demands they are making of the player. The awe of traveling in an accurate recreation of New York City is diluted by  the fact that there’s no good reason to explore all the space provided. It was an ambitious project for a 2005 game, but it is clear the designers did not aspire (for whatever reason) to meet their ambition. I’m not convinced that the task is futile, but it certainly will require the full attention of a design team to be executed successfully.

Over the New Years weekend I was fortunate enough to participate in my fifth Music and Games Festival. MAGFest, run “by fans for fans,” is in its seventh year and has consistently improved to become a really polished and fun event. If you’re interested in all of the things I did that weekend, you can read my wrap-up entry on my other blog. I wanted to take this opportunity, however, to focus on one of the new events at MAGFest 7: Video Game Improv.

X-Strike Studios, PBC Productions, and we the Virtual Fools (myself and other GCJ founder Kevin), hosted a two hour long block of video game themed improv. An idea kicked around at the last few MAGFests, video game improv has always made us weary. A good improv show relies on the members of the troupe playing off of one another, supporting each other’s ideas, and making the show inclusive. The problem with video game improv is that there’s always a looming threat that it will turn into a bunch of obscure references that make it difficult for scenes to progress or any chemistry to be built on stage. What happens when someone makes a Virtua Fighter 4 reference that nobody else gets? If you answered ‘the sound of crickets’ give yourself a dollar. 

Everybody participating had done improv at some point in their life. The guys of X-Strike and PBC had pretty much all done improv together at some point in their college career, Kevin and I were in the same high school troupe, and Kevin also did improv throughout his undergrad. I hadn’t so much as played Party Quirks in at least five years. 

Despite the odds, it was a rousing success, in my opinion. Though there were a few misses (to be expected), we developed chemistry and even if we weren’t the most talented improvisational actors, we were able to make the show entertaining and creative. We kicked it off with six improv games: vulture, party quirks, slideshow, return department, scene replay (and rewind), and debate. Then we did a longform scene based around the adventures of an RPG party (video will be linked when available).

What I would like to discuss is how video games were deployed in our scenes–what translates from a cartridge or disc to the improvisational stage. 

The first scene, vulture, had very little to do with games. Beginning with a single topic, two actors had to start a scene. At any time during the scene, one of the players offstage could yell ‘flag’ to freeze the scene while providing a reason that they should take the place of one of the actors. Starting with velociraptors, the game worked because it steadily escalated and the crowd enjoyed it because we got in some good Jurassic Park jokes. I think it was important that we didn’t kick things off with games directly because it gave us a chance to warm-up before tackling the more difficult task of integrating games into our routine.

Party Quirks, the ever popular game where a party host has to guess the identities of their guests, was basically a game of references. The party goers were supposed to be Yoshimitsu from Tekken/Soul Calibur, a Space Invader, and Dr. Mario. The Yoshimitsu guest was really an X-Strike inside joke, so it wouldn’t have worked if it weren’t two X-Strikers interacting. I’m not sure how members of the audience who were outside the joke reacted, though it was amusing to watch the physical behavior of Rory. Kevin’s Space Invader worked because he could express the nuances of behavior while expanding the character to have a voice. Juese’s Dr. Mario was a matter of playing down the obvious to make more subtle references to extend the scene. He behaved as if he were Dr. Mario taken from the game and acting in the real world rather than merely placed in the real world. 

I had never played slideshow before, but I liked the game a lot. Brett was supposed to be a kid showing off his trip to Castlevania on a slideshow projector while Tim and Rich freeze in positions in the background. Brett doesn’t know how the actors are posed and the actors don’t know where Brett is going with his story. The dissonance between the narrative and visuals is what makes the game interesting, but the difficulty is in making sure this gap isn’t so large that people can’t use their imagination to make sense of the scene. It’s a difficult game, which is why I’m glad I didn’t play in it. 

I particularly liked return department, in which one person is returning something to a store but they don’t know what it is. It’s up to the return department clerk and supporting cast to help them guess their returned item. Darrin was returning a Weighted Companion Cube and Chad was the rude clerk. After a bit of time, Rory came on stage crying—having built up a relationship with his companion cube. This, in particular, was great for the audience who knew why he was crying. When I came in, I was holding the companion sphere from the Portal advanced maps. Not a great clue for Darrin, but it went over with the audience, and Chad was able to introduce the super-colliding super-button and storage cube dispenser. Portal doesn’t have all that many set pieces, so it was an important addition to the scene. Tim, Steve, and Rich all helped provide clues, though I don’t know at what point Darrin actually figured it out and just wanted to keep the scene going versus how long he actually needed to guess. I have a feeling the former is true.

Steve and I did half-life (and rewind), which was pretty much an opportunity to do a little Game Stop bashing. The scene begins at 1-minutes length and we try to create a rounded scene about someone buying a game and a stubborn clerk acting as Game Stop clerks are apt to act. We then replay the scene at twice the speed, turning 1 minute into 30 seconds. Then again from 30 to 15, 15 to 7.5, and 7.5 to 3 seconds. Oh, and then the 15 second scene backward. Thankfully Steve was good at guiding the trajectory of the scene and I played off of his cues.  

The final game, debate, was another game I had not seen before. Two actors, in this case Juese and Ben, are supposed to be arguing on different topics. The rub is that neither know what their topic is. It’s actually being acted out across from them by two other actors working to lead them to a two-word answer. Ben is trying to come up with Underwater Pyramid, while Juese is in favor of Oakmi Porn. After you watch the amusing pantomime once, I ask you to go back and watch it again while paying special attention to what the debaters are actually saying. It’s the hardest part of the game, making it more than just simple charades. 

Our final piece in the improv show, which was a longform scene about an adventurer set in the RPG genre. We had no prompts from the audience besides some sort of goal, which is to find the MacGuffin Device (so, pretty vague). Thanks to Rich, I was roped into playing the evil villain which put a lot of pressure on me to move the scene along and pay close attention to the details of the other actors. I’m thankful for this, though, as it pushed me to put myself out there. If the video ever gets online, I will attempt to detail its events. But as it is not, there’s little point to me explaining all the events of the scene. The thing to note is that we had to work the conventions of the genre for both our guiding narrative and entertainment factor. 

Video game improv worked out surprisingly well. We entertained our audience and had no screeching-to-a-halt scenes or moments. I loved finally getting the opportunity to work with X-Strike and PBC in a performance space and hope that we can do it again next year. Let me know what you think about the videos—I’d love feedback from people outside the MAGFest circle.

[This was originally posted on the Journalism & Games Project blog.]

Colin Rowsell, a writer for The Escapist, recently posted an article asking a variation of a common question: Why is the games industry so afraid of getting involved in the issues of the day? I understand and appreciate Colin Rowsell’s point and believe it’s worth pursuing further, but also feel we need to approach this question with a different strategy. We’re still in the early stages of the medium of the game.

Answering Rowsell’s question of why there aren’t any commercial games discussing political or social issues is as easy as one word: money. The problem with Rowswell’s article is that we already know this answer. Asking this question leads to an unsatisfactory answer, so we should reframe it. I’m hoping this blog post’s exploration will let us arrive at a better question and encourage people to think differently about the medium’s role in political/social issues.

Pay attention to where you are, or you will miss your stop. Metro drivers only announce the stations half the time, and when they do its usually unintelligible. I personally believe they like to fuck with the people riding the train for their own amusement.
- Z, Everyday Reasons Blog

Bethesda Softwork’s most recent release, Fallout 3, is set in the bombed-out ruins of post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. As a resident of the DC metro area for 23 years of my life, the experience of walking through the Wasteland is my Baudrillardian simulacrum—a mirror construction of a world that never existed. It is at once DC and yet a completely fictional space.

It took a bit of time to connect to this world on a personal level. The game begins in an underground vault, the first major city in the Wasteland is the fictional Megaton (which has no real world referent), and the first quest I went on involved a nondescript supermarket. Exploring the wasteland I saw the outline of the Washington Monument in the distance, but that was a mere landscape landmark at the moment. Much like the suburbs I grew up in, there was nothing distinguishing about the space.

But as I made my way south I had my first surreal moment. I came upon the Falls Church Metro (subway for those unfamiliar) station. As a rider of the Orange Line, the Falls Church stops were just a natural part of the ride to and from the District. This station in Fallout 3 was outdoors, like the real Falls Church, though it was labeled neither East or West (I suppose the creators are allowed a bit of creative liberty when it comes to mapping space). It was also infested with Super Mutants who promptly ended my journey with their assault rifles and sledgehammers. Clearly I was not meant to be there, but it piqued my interest in seeing more of the Metro. It is interesting to note that my desire to explore was curbed by the kind of level-based barring Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Morie, and Celia Pearce describe in “A Game of One’s Own” as a characteristic of male-gendered spaces.

The Metro

I moved in a more guided direction following that incident—making my way across the irradiated Potomac River into the city. I ended up coming across the Georgetown station, going inside, and seeing a familiar walkway but unfamiliar platform. Those who have ridden the Metro system in DC recognize its tall concrete coffered barrel vaulted ceilings, and whatever place I was in was clearly not representative of that definitive architecture. I continued exploring.

I eventually came across the Chevy Chase North area and the Tenleytown Station, which was the metro platform space I was hoping to find. The ceiling, the escalators, the ticketbooth, the rails, the signs–it was all there. But what I ended up finding wasn’t as interesting as the means by which I found it. Fallout 3 lets players experience the Metro in whole new way. When people speak of the Metro, they refer to a few structural things. There’s the rail line’s symbolic color which indicates its path, the trains which are a means of conveyance, and the stops which are the nodes of action. The purpose of riding the Metro is to commute in more or less direct paths that need not adhere to the layout of transportation paths on the surface. It’s supposed to be a seamless transition from one place to the next. This is not so in the game.

Fallout 3 uses the Metro in a number of ways. Though it is a transitional space between areas (some of which are inaccessible over land due to the debris of collapsed buildings), it is anything but seamless. The Metro not only simulates the real life space of mass transit infrastructure, but it also simulates the video game convention of the dungeon. While Fallout 3 does not use the Tolkien-fantasy themed environment that Pearce uses to characterize the most famous dungeon-based game Dungeons and Dragons, it does use some of the structural conventions the dungeon as space of adventure and conflict. In earlier video games “dungeon” is generally a location indicated by some entry point that needs not represent the geography of the space once entered. Think of Dragon Warrior, as an example. A single block on the world map represents a deep multi-level cave in which to slay monsters and collect treasure. The player enters, explores, and either returns to the beginning or makes their way to an exit. The relationships between spaces in these examples are topological.

However, as technology has improved we have seen the dungeon grow into a more geographic space. This puts the Metro of Fallout 3 in a unique position: it can serve the traditional role of the dungeon while also traversing distances. Often cited as an easy example of what topological space is, the London tube map collapses representations of space into utility. Walking into a Metro station in Fallout 3, players can often find a map of the train routes. And yet, these maps are nearly worthless from a game perspective. The player is traveling along actual space with distances that correspond to the surface world, though they can become directionally disoriented.

In a reversal of real life, there is no fast-travel (the ability to jump to a part of the visited map instantaneously) underground. The Metro is an extremely traditional game space. It’s underground, full of monsters, comprised of closed drab corridors, and way to expand the space of the world. Most of the Metro tunnels (which include both the rail and worker service tunnels) look the same. Yes, it makes sense contextually for them to have a consistent aesthetic, but it also is a reflection of the standard corridor space seen in the history of first-person shooter games.

There are very few other people in the Metro tunnels of Fallout 3, and it is most often talking to people that reveals the narrative of the game. Is this a missed opportunity to employ the kind of mise-en-scene embedded narrative describe by Jenkins in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”? Perhaps, though there are a few bits and pieces of narrative strewn about the Metro network. More important, in my opinion, than any sort of narrative imposed on the space, is what the organization of the space actually means.

Metro stations are either stand-alone enter and exit through the same door dungeons, or connected mazes–labyrinths of danger. The layout of the space is supposed to be confusing. In this post-apocalyptic world the purpose of the Metro has not only been uprooted, but it has gone unreplaced. It is the domain of monsters and outcasts. It surprises the player by dumping them out in a part of the overworld they might not have expected, opening up new spaces for more narratively meaningful exploration.

I conclude by reflecting on the opening quote which seemed to be unrelated to the topic of the post. The Metro in Fallout 3 simulates the real space of Washington D.C., the space of travel in the game world, and the spatial conventions of the video game genre. What I have found enjoyable about the exploration of these spaces is that I’m never sure which one I’m going to get, as if Bethesda is the unintelligible Metro conductor telling me that this is Foggy Bottom and the doors open on the right but when I get out I’m in Rosslyn and it’s 15 minutes until the next train. In a good way, of course.

This post addresses a question for my game design and analysis course about real and imagined player-types. We were asked to write about how our play experience of an MMO mapped to the Bartle typology, affordances the game provides for development of identity through gameplay, and how those affordances reflect the assumed demographics.

Travian is a free browser-based MMO which was developed in Germany in 2004. It has been translated into 30 different languages, runs on over 150 servers, and has about 3 million registered players. When a player begins the game they choose a race to play as (Gaul, Roman, or Teuton) and are randomly given a village on one square in an 800×800 grid, starting at the coordinate (0,0) and moving outward toward +/- 400 X and Y coordinates. The game uses graphical representations but is not animated. As shown in the image at right, players spend their time upgrading resource fields outside their village to gain more income, and build and upgrade structures inside their village. In addition, players build military forces to raid other players’ villages for resources, go to war, and protect their own property. Essentially, it is a game about one of two things: dominance or survival.

Travian is played in “real time” and continues even when a player is not actively playing. By real time, I mean to say that actions in the game are given lengthy durations. Building a level 1 crop field takes 2 minutes when you first begin a village, but by level 10 that time shoots up to 9 hours. You can only build one piece of town infrastructure, one resource upgrade, and one type of military unit at any given time. As a browser game, it is generally something that cannot be played for more than a half hour at a time because it’s possible to exhaust all your actions. A “round” of Travian, which is to say the time from when the server starts to one of a few end-game states, is nearly a year. Players expand their empire to include other villages they’ve founded or conquered from other players, form alliances, and wage wars through this minimal interface.

Travian is basically a spreadsheet game. This is a term used to describe games in which success comes down to being able to crunch numbers. A raid (stealing opponent resources is nothing more than a count-down clock which says how long until your units hit their target, a table of result data, and a return-trip clock. Battles are not controlled by players but rather decided by numerical comparisons. Reaching End Game is as much a matter of endurance as skill. Once a player’s final village is captured, their account is deleted and they have to go start a new game on a new server. It’s a pretty serious consequence if you’ve been playing for six months. Unlike the Daedalus observations on EverQuest, death in Travian is the end of the bonding experience.

Why would anyone play this? you might wonder. It sounds time-consuming, boring, and masochistic. Yet, much like a MUD or a 3D MMO game environment, it develops certain types of players who love the game. I never thought I would enjoy a game like this, but I was fortunate enough to be guided by a top 10 player who could explain the intricacies of the game and teach me how to play like a top-100 player in a few short months.

Much like TL Taylor describes, the limitations of the technology and design of Travian create the player types. Players of Travian do not fall into the typical Bartle alignments. There are some similarities, as will be discussed, but Travian is a unique type of game that only allows for certain styles of play. This is a result primarily of its goals, it’s always-on design, and its interface.

The will to survive.
As I mentioned before, Travian is a game that has a real game over. Death doesn’t mean restarting. Death means losing everything with no chance of revival. The consequence of death means all the work the player has put into the game vanishes instantaneously. As I learned from experience, Travian is not a game for someone interested in only casually playing. Because it runs 24-hours, it requires attention throughout the day and players must take care to defend themselves when they can’t be at their computer.

In the first few months of a round, players are more likely to delete their account than get killed by another player. Why does this happen? Because aggressive players spend their time raiding their neighbors to steal their resources. No resources, no building. No building, no playing. And though there are safeguards to help players (you can build something to hide resources in), this time is spent “not losing” rather than progressing.

So how can we describe Travian players? This system I described heavily favors Bartle’s achievers. In fact, there’s very little else to do if you’re not seeking to survive through a round. As I will describe, socialization takes an interesting form and exploration is only a subcategory of achievement.

The player types boil down to achievers, survivors, and losers. Achievers come in all shapes and colors. There’s the ultra-aggressive type prone to starting conflicts (which might be seen as Bartle’s imposition group). The regular aggressive players who raid other villages for resources because it increases their income. The neutral type whose income in derived internally. Different paths of progression/achievement comes through expansion of empire, which involves either settling new villages or capturing them from other players. Regardless, the game is set up such that it’s extremely difficult to work with only one village and players have to expand to survive.

Personal representation.
Travian players have no player-embodied avatar in the traditional sense. They have no “characters.” They have iconic representations of their data tables in the form of villages, which is all the other players can see. One form of representation, then, comes through the naming of these villages. Players with default village names are seen as weak because they’re not choosing the label themselves. Players with numbered villages, on the other hand, are seen as aggressive or seasoned. Labling your first village “.001 Rockland” at the beginning of a game implies that you not only plan on building other villages, but that the numbers are an organizational tool–a form of high strategy.

Seeing the alliance of a player is also a way to understand them. It probably goes without saying, but alliances are groups of players who have chosen to work together. It might just be a scare tactic, to warn possible attackers that there’s the threat of retaliation from other players. It may also say something about a player’s nationality–”CRO”, for example, is an alliance of Croatian players who take the game very seriously.

Players can also keep very limited profiles which tell others their rank on the server, tribe, alliance, number of villages, population, age, gender, and location. One strategy, used by some of the more aggressive players, is to either use misleading information or leave these last three fields empty–you dare not give someone your location because they’ll have a pretty good idea when you sleep and use that as optimal time to attack you. It is not impossible to be social, especially if this information helps you identify others like you who might be good to befriend. It’s difficult to be social for socialization’s sake, but it is beneficial to make friends who can help you.
But with such limited forms of communication and representation, how do people socialize?

Communications channels for socialization.
Communication channels in Travian began quite limited. In the game itself, there were only in-game messages (IGMs), which could be sent to either one player or a group of players in an alliance. They are text only and not in real time. This probably began as a technical limitation, but has persisted as a gameplay convention even though technology has improved. The game runs on PHP and aims to be low bandwidth–both to keep server costs down and to allow players (especially in Europe) to use the website on their mobile devices.

To overcome these in-game limitations, players who wanted to socialize had to seek external resources like forums. The creators of Travian have since implemented discussion forums for players on their website, with topics ranging from feedback and suggestions on game design, strategy, and the usual off-topic discussion like music and politics. However, alliances have private forums to discuss game strategy or other alliance-specific matters. The game of Travian leaves little room for pure socializers as a play type, but makes for a strong community of play. Just because they’re playing the game means they have to be at least as crazy as you.

Socialization, as a strategy, means finding people to help you out. The progression of the game is much like an arms race. Alliances are more about defense than offense. Being a part of a good alliances requires not only playing well but making friends with other strong players. Weak alliances have little communication.

It is important to again note that most Travian players are European, which means there are language and nationality barriers in the game. There are specific servers for different countries (compare travian.co.uk to travian.nl), but players can choose to play anywhere. In my personal experience, when I couldn’t communicate with a player directly because of language differences, game action became our language. A message in Romanian from a weaker player I had been raiding was incomprehensible to me, but their gift of 200 of each resource clearly stated they were hoping for me to back off from my attacks on them.

As an experiment, I would love to see what the game would look like if communication channels were removed. Would it be possible to play the same way? How would strategy change? What sorts of representations would people use to express basic concepts? It would be a remarkable example of how the technology/platform shapes the evolution of play.

(As a side note, I noticed that a new game called “Travians” was launched this past summer, which takes the setting of Travian and lets people play as an actual character inside of a village. I’m going to start playing to see what sorts of niches in MMO play it fills that are absent in the original game.)

I am involved in three projects this semester that deal with games. The first is my thesis work which will span the whole year. The second is Celia Pearce’s game design and analysis class. I’ll be linking to a number of blog entries I have written for her blog soon. But I wanted to focus on my third project–the one I haven’t really mentioned yet.

At the beginning of the semester I was excited to hear that Ian Bogost would be starting a video games and journalism project studio (essentially a research group). I, like most people, assumed it would be on journalism about games. Since I would love to write about games for a living this seemed like a perfect match. But I found out I was a bit off in my prediction. It would not be about games journalism, but rather using games for journalism–the “newsgame” if you will. For anyone familiar with Bogost’s work, you recognize how this fits in with Persuasive Games lens. It’s been an interesting semester in the project studio because we’re basically creating this discipline from scratch. Of course there are examples of newsgames out there, but most of them fall short of their ideals. We are trying to understand how games can be made journalistic, how they can fit into the world of news, and what makes a successful newsgame.

Most of our work has been done on a message board where we can discuss our thoughts privately. Between this research and our discussions in class, we’ve made some reasonable progress over the past two months. It’s a difficult topic–one that leads us back to defining ‘games’ and ‘journalism’ as entry points to the whole discussion. It’s kind of like having the “what is art?” debate that ultimately dead ends in a lot of ideas but no conclusions. But now that we’ve gotten over a lot of the humps, I feel I’m in a place to start discussing the work. We just began our project studio blog and I took up the charge of writing the first entry. It’s about one of the basic topics we’ve identified as being important to journalistic games: discourse. Discourse, at first glance, appears to be the realm of the social: people discussing news with other people or with the producers of the news. However, as a fan of single-player games, I wanted to explore how games could be made to produce discourse between the player and the game.  I have yet to decide if it’s even possible to have single-player discourse, but I’m hoping that putting it in public dialogue will give me some ideas to pursue. So check it out and share your thoughts, will you?

Single-Player Discourse in Games: An Introduction