Blips: Try Your Luck

Source: Rage Against the Machines
Author: Ian Bogost
Site: The Baffler

Listen, if you're up on your Ian Bogost, the professor's new essay in The Baffler covers relatively familiar territory. He asserts that free-to-play games follow in the tradition of coin-op arcade games, built with the specific intent of continuously extracting money from players' wallets. Not only that, many F2P games include social hooks that encourage you to spread the games' cultural capital in exchange for virtual goods. It's still a very interesting essay, even if you're already sold on the idea that many game executives in the F2P sector are basically swindlers. Bogost calls out Zynga and King specifically; both claims that are difficult to contest. If you're looking for a quick abstract of what the piece is all about, I'd suggest the second-to-last paragraph, which comes after a declaration that Silicon Valley operates as a kind of mafia.

"And in this sense, free-to-play games are a kind of classic racket. They create a surge of interest by virtue of their easy access, followed by a tidal wave of improbable revenue that the games coerce out of players on terms that weren’t disclosed at the outset. The game knows more than you could ever hope to about the stakes it presents, and it uses the logic of its own immersive environment to continue generating reasons for you to pursue its skewed stakes. The creators use your attention to build collective value that they cash in before anyone can see inside the machine that produced it. Like free digital services more broadly, the real purpose of the videogame business—and, indeed, of American business writ large—is not to provide search or social or entertainment features, but to create rapidly accelerating value as quickly as possible so as to convert that aggregated value into wealth. Bingo!"

Yep.

Blips: Flap Flop

Source: The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird
Author: Ian Bogost
Site: The Atlantic

Ian Bogost's treatise on mobile game zeitgeist Flappy Bird isn't the only one worth reading (I quite enjoyed Yannick LeJacq's take on the game too), but it is the one that assumes the widest angle on the game, framing it within centuries of gaming history. As Bogost states early on, Flappy Bird is a stupid game. I haven't played it, and yet I'm still comfortable stating that as fact. I've played enough eerily similar endless runners over the years to know a time-killing mechanism when I see one. The game itself is a visually different version of Copter, where you have to continually tap to prove your helicopter or bird with enough lift to avoid obstacles and navigate the gaps in between. Flappy Bird is exactly that, except it doesn't even have the progressive difficulty curve of Copter, it just is what it is.

This is one of Bogost's main points: unlike masocore games that are a hard-swing reaction against the gradual casualization of difficulty in games, Flappy Bird just "is." It's a game that exists outside the conversation, and is seemingly unwilling to join it despite its astounding popularity. Flappy Bird is a game that makes the mundane actions of game playing grotesquely apparent. Where Kinect games often literally show you how dumb you look playing them, Flappy Bird's stupidity shows through in it's very design. There's nothing to the game other than repeatedly tapping on a small glass rectangle. There's no sense of group effort, story progression, or artistic insight. Flappy Bird is a video game stripped of facade, and it's as pure as is is disgusting.

Blips: The Lovin' Spoonful

Source: UX Week 2013 / Ian Bogost / Fun
Author: Ian Bogost
Site: Vimeo (Adaptive Path)

At this year's UX Week conference, game designer and professor Ian Bogost gave a talk about the meaning of "fun." The context is worth noting here, which Bogost does early on in the video you can see above. This is a conference for "user experience" designers, which is seen as a separate industry from games, except where game companies hire UX designers to work on parts of their games (i.e. the menus). The backstory is that because of gamification initiatives and the creeping notion that making anything into a game makes it more fun, folks from non-game industries are looking to game people to show them how to make their products more game-like and thus more fun. Sounds pretty good, if things actually worked that way.

Bogost's core analogy is how the old Mary Poppin's jingle, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," is like when a company applies game elements (fun) to something that is perceived as not fun. A spoonful of sugar with medicine doesn't make it seem like you're just eating a bunch of sugar, at best it just makes the medicine taste slightly less terrible. It doesn't make taking medicine something that you enjoy, and it might even sour your taste for raw sugar by association. The same goes for gamification. If you're told that the menial task you need to accomplish is now a game, your mind might be distracted enough by the game elements that you forget that you actually hate what you're doing, but the notion that that task will be miraculously transformed into something fun is highly unlikely.

I'd encourage you to check out the whole presentation where Bogost goes on to dissect what we're actually saying when we call something "fun." It's a shorthand, often delivered as a formality for identifying something as satisfactory, but unremarkable. It's a word with an ambiguous referent, the same way saying "I'm fine" doesn't, on it's own, tell use very much about your current condition. Ultimately fun is born out of a respect for what you're doing and being allowed the space to be playful within that activity. If one behaves as if "at play," but they have no respect for the activity or the greater purpose for which they're doing what they're doing, then that person won't have fun doing it. The larger lesson is not to make things games to make them fun, but to present things as what they are, in hopes that the respect for the medium at hand can be fun for those who elect to make it so.

Games For Change 2013: Speaking of Fun...

Before we get too far away from this year's Games For Change Festival that took place in New York City a few weeks back, I wanted to write about the two seemingly conflicting threads that I saw running through the keynotes. On one hand was the now-regular manta "make sure your game is fun." This sentiment comes about because most "serious games" are more concerned with delivering accurate information than probiding a fulfilling gameplay experience. On the other hand, there was also a new sentiment this year that declared "your game doesn't necessarily need to be fun." This notion was not born out of a regression from fun, back to sterile infotainment, but rather that fun gameplay might not be the best way to convey every idea a developer may want to express.

There have been an increasing number of game reviews that use the term "fun" in quotes, or describe games, as "not fun in the conventional sense." The first instance of this that I noticed was in reviews and essays about the game Cart Life, a Games For Change favorite and Hall of Fame recipient this year. Cart Life pushes players to empathize with the struggles of the main characters by carrying out tedious chores and making choices between options that have no correct answers. These characters' lives are difficult, grueling, and most definitely not fun. Wouldn't it be a dissonant, if not downright dishonest, experience for those games to be a blast to play?

Journalist and critic Leigh Alexander pushed for increased exposure of games from individuals on the margins, whose voices are rarely heard in popular and even indie game spaces. Many of these "personal games" don't play like the console staples we've grown accustomed to, and instead use accessible creation tools like Twine to expand the concept of what a video game can be. Personal games are acts of expression and palettes for interpretation. The game only needs to be as fun as the underlying concept requires, not as a prerequisite for being labelled a "game."

Prior to Leigh Alexander's presentation, professor Ian Bogost reflected on the nature of "games for change, " and whether those types of games are really the one's having a significant impact on players. He made a push for the creation of "earnest games" instead, games that though-and-through embody the concepts and systems which developers seek to express. These games would express earnestness through what Bogost terms "procedural rhetoric,"the language of games as presented through systems. All too often, games that aspire to social change feel disingenuous, as if the developers are only presenting information in game form so that the commissioning organization can show that they helped produce a game (how progressive!) about subject X. Bogost contended that most "serious games" are not fun because they fail to be fun, not because they never intended to be.

Robin Hunicke managed to both agree wholeheartedly with Bogost's plea for "earnest games" while also espousing the virtues of fun gameplay. While this may seem to put Hunicke in a hypocritical position, her company Funomena is focusing on games that use fun as a central conceit, making them earnestly fun. Hunicke is interested in the kind of fun that comes from play, as in the free-form, childlike play that few video games offer, least they be deemed "not-games" and cast into the abyss. Funomena's goal of creating games that are earnest in their campaign to be fun and socially conscious is ambitious, but their formula, not to mention the involvement of Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi, seems promising.

There still remains a risk in "earnest games," especially those seeking to be "not fun" on purpose, of relying too much on empathy in directly simulated outcomes. Designer and academic Eric Zimmerman spoke of this concept as design literalism. He gave the example of a game that was in development for a school, where ultimately the endgame was that your character stays in school and learns about the virtues of doing so. In other words, it's a game set in a school about staying in school, meant to be played by students in school to detract them from not staying in school. Bored yet? He countered this by listing off games that already carry out the mission of keeping kids in school, though their content has nothing to do with that goal, such as chess club and sports teams. Zimmerman suggests that getting students to form a Starcraft team would be a much better "stay in school" proponent.

Zimmerman's theories about design literalism brought me back to Cart Life, a game where you learn to empathize with individuals, whose stories could easily translate to the struggles of innumerable people in the real world. Cart Life avoids design literalism through the player's embodiment of the struggling protagonist. A literal design choice would have been to see the characters falling on hard times from an outsider perspective and then deciding how to interact with them. For such a game it would be easy to assign the moral of "be nice to others," but it would always come off as the game telling you something instead of letting you figure it out for yourself. Playing Cart Life, you go about the banal day-to-day activities of individuals struggling to keep their head above water, and as someone who's playing the game from a position of privilege, I'm getting a perspective on life that I would not otherwise be exposed (this is the "change" part). Cart Life is a game designed with the utmost earnestness, and it's not "fun" in the traditional sense. It doesn't need to be, and would likely betray its original concept if it was.

You can watch all of the 2013 Games For Change Festival keynotes on the organization's YouTube channel.