Only a Game

Deck of Cards

I am hard-pressed to identify a technology with a more profound influence upon my life than the deck of cards. I might never have become a game designer without this simple collection of 54 printed cardboard rectangles to open up the possibilities of the design process to me at a very young age… I was designing card games by age 12, although to be fair I was adapting 8-bit arcade games to the playground at age 9 (Joust remains a favourite) so perhaps I was always fated to pursue game design in one form or another.

If a game console is a device designed for the express purpose of executing arbitrary programmatic systems for entertainment, then the deck of cards was the world’s first game console. All previous games except dice had components specific to their design, but this was not the case for the first cards (quite possibly Chinese ‘money cards’, although the history of the deck of cards is rather hard to trace owing to the poor survivability of actual cards). By creating a set of components that were coded into both numerical values and suits (usually four), human-deck cyborgs had a means to create myriad different games – and have indeed done exactly this over the millennia that followed.

Now the question of the cybervirtue of a deck of cards is an interesting one precisely because for much of their history card games were expressly gambling games, and therefore seen as a quintessential expression of vice. Yet anyone who carries a deck of cards with them has the capacity to wile away spare time with engaging solitaire games that cultivate attentiveness (if not patience, per se), and an ability to create a convivial play experience for an arbitrary number of other humans who can be easily incorporated into the same cyborg network more or less at will. The deck of cards experience can be cyber-hospitable, cyber-disciplined, cyber-prudent, cyber-cunning, cyber-creative… the number of positive qualities that can be instilled by playing cards with other humans is far more than I suspect anyone has ever thought much about.

On the other hand, few games encourage quarrelsome behaviour quite as much as Bridge, and overly competitive behaviour is also a debility that can be brought on by using a deck of cards. And while deck design does invite artists to display their excellences, most custom decks are essentially just advertising for the endless river of corporate-owned media that saturates our world today. I know most people in videogame development are more impressed by the latest computer specifications for high powered digital games consoles, but I can’t help myself: the deck of cards trumps all other multi-role game technology for its flexibility, its simplicity, and its potential to encourage virtue.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #20

Painkillers

We have all accepted uncritically a vast legion of the assumptions of contemporary medicine. One that particularly intrigues me is the notion that medication for pain relief is automatically justified whenever there is pain… but this is actually a rather odd state of affairs. To learn to bear pain is to have the virtue of endurance – we may not desire this virtue in ourselves, but we still admire it in (for instance) athletes and dancers.

Painkiller cyborgs (and I include myself here) are susceptible to what might be called cyber-frailty. If we are unwilling or unable to endure pain, if we reach for the over-the-counter pills at the first sign of discomfort, do we not rob ourselves of the chance to learn to endure? Set aside the extreme counter examples (i.e. burn victims, morphine drips for terminal patients) and focus solely on the trivial cases, those where over-the-counter pharmaceuticals like paracetamol (acetaminophen) or ibuprofen are taken for ailments like headaches and scratches. To depend upon drugs in such cases is to remove even the possibility of self-improvement or self-mastery from the situations where our pain tolerance is tested. Although I habitually turn to the medicine cupboard at the first sign of discomfort, I am increasingly conflicted about it.

Should I really prop up pharmaceutical companies profits rather than learning how to endure pain?

A Hundred Cyborgs, #19

The Persistence - Out Now!

This week, Firesprite’s Playstation VR game The Persistence was released – and to great reviews! It was International Hobo’s pleasure to work on the narrative design, script, and voice recording sessions of the game. This was a significant challenge since the roguelike, procedural elements disrupted conventional storytelling and required careful construction to ensure the story did not get in the way of the game. We also worked closely with Firesprite to tweak the world building in subtle ways that will be invisible to players but which significantly improved the final experience. Firesprite gave us a lot more rope than we expected, and allowed us to create a truly unique story mounted as a two-hander theatrical play set against numbingly recurrent death. If you’re a PSVR player, check it out!

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

Reddit

The cyborgs of Reddit, or ‘Redditors’, are frequently maligned in respect of the nasty undercurrent of hate and hostility that accompanies those subreddits that, by their very name, commit themselves to injustice. The recent deletion of r/KillAllJews, for instance, can have alarmed no-one who understood the Enlightenment principles upon which the right of free speech depends.

While cyber-disdain, cyber-cruelty, and indeed cyber-indignance are all amongst the moral network effects of Reddit, the same is also true of all other social networks. But unlike other online collisions between myriad anonymous cyborgs, Reddit also fosters a great many more granular communities, where positive discourse takes place and indeed loose friendships can be formed. I am reluctant to condemn Reddit unduly – not least of all out of an appreciation for where it comes from.

The direct precursor to 2005’s Reddit were the UseNet forums of the 1980s and 90s, which I participated in during my time as an undergraduate at the University of Manchester. Decentralised, self-organised, and self-governed, UseNet also had the same capacity as Reddit to support communities under any arbitrary banner (personally, I spent a lot of my time in rec.arts.startrek and rec.games.rpg). I loved it… at least until fights broke out. One of UseNets problems was that everything flowed down uninterrupted under each group – and arguments were thus often heated and hard to resolve, as often happens when you lock nerds together in the same (virtual) room.

Enter Reddit with its democratised (and thus anarchic) upvote and downvote system. With this, an organic curation of content occurs – and this in at least two ways. Popular content (whatever that happens to mean) floats to the top. Simultaneously, anything anyone finds annoying for even the most trivial and petty reasons is downvoted. I can find nothing cybervirtuous about the downvote system, which is mostly used to bully those you happen to disagree with or dislike. But the upvote system is harder to judge… It is certainly, as Andrew Marantz suggests, a feedback machine. But so is all social media except perhaps blogs. But it is also cyber-sympathetic in a way that is distinct from this element of retweeting, sharing, and liking. A Redditor who upvotes sometimes just decided that someone else deserves to be heard. I am not convinced Facebook and Twitter are as good at this – there are more personal stakes entailed in choosing to place other people’s thoughts into your timeline in these spaces.

Like so much of the internet, Reddit brings out both the best and the worst in its cyborgs. But in that it can and does sustain granular communities, it seems to me that something is happening here that does not happen on, say, Facebook, which is flat and vast. If there is still infinite room for improvement on Reddit, it should also be accepted that in some respects, it is doing better at holding communities together than many rival social networks.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #18

Electric Kettles

When my wife and I went to purchase a new electric kettle a few years back, the one we chose proudly claimed upon its packaging “Special 1 Cup Feature: Boil 1 cup of water and save up to 66% energy.” Imagine our amusement when it transpired to be nothing more than a green circle and ‘Plimsoll line’ showing how much water needed to be added to the kettle to boil just a single cup. The marketing department must have snickered to themselves as they were inflating this tiny modification to the basic design into a ‘special feature’ important enough to be emblazoned all over the packaging.

The kettle-human cyborg is a quintessentially British creature. While I lived in the United States, I was shocked that no-one I knew had a means of boiling water other than putting a pan on a hob. When I did eventually find an electric kettle, it was a nasty green plastic monstrosity that was technologically far behind the fancy glass and steel electric kettles selling in the UK these days. Of course, the trouble is that you want an electric kettle to make tea (the secular British sacrament), and the US is far more about its coffee. And to be fair, US coffee was so much better tasting than the drink that was ‘called’ coffee in the UK at the time (being a sludge of instant granules with an extremely vague relationship to coffee beans), it was hardly surprising that no-one needed a kettle – least of all to make British faux coffee. (Britain has since been invaded by coffee corporations who have forced good coffee upon us…)

Cybervirtue, which these A Hundred Cyborgs pieces discuss, is about the moral dimension of the network effects of technology; the way that a specific design for a tool affects human behaviour, positively and negatively. Earlier, I alluded to the Plimsoll line (also known as the International Load Line) – a feature of ships that shows how far they can be safely loaded. As long as you can see the relevant horizontal mark, there’s not too much cargo loaded aboard. The Plimsoll line is cyber-prudent – it helps ensure that vessels don’t leave harbour so heavily laden that they risk sinking. They save lives. The mark on our kettle just helps save energy, but it too is cyber-prudent in its own way. It is also a reminder that sometimes cybervirtue is as simple as drawing a line, and taking the time to explain what it means.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #17

Dwarf Planets

Sometimes, ‘technology’ is nothing more than the question of what to count, and this is especially true for the term ‘dwarf planet’. This category exists for one and only one reason: to permit astronomers to say they know how many planets there are. This sounds strange, as if the astronomical term ‘dwarf planet’ was primarily about the ego of those scientists studying outer space. But this allegation is not far from the truth, and against this the only response any planet-lover worth their salt can offer is the formula: “Dwarf planets are planets too!” (Although please, be polite about insisting this.)

As my 2011 piece, Pluto and Eris – a dialogue explains, the discovery of the 2,400 km wide rock that bears the name of the Greek goddess of discord created huge problems for astronomers in that it is their professional task to speak for outer space and they desire, as all scientists do, to make ‘reliable witnesses’ (as Isabelle Stengers puts it) out of those objects they have chosen to investigate. But Eris is so very near to Pluto in size, and more importantly the Kuiper belt is so packed full of objects like Eris, the coming to human awareness of Eris-the-rock actually destroyed astronomers ability to say “we know all about the planets”, because it prevented these telescope-human cyborgs from being able to say precisely how many planets there are.

Hence the gathering of the International Astronomical Union to deal with this crisis of knowledge, and the immediate invention of a new tool, the term ‘dwarf planet’, which refers to a planet that ‘has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit’ (the only part of the four-part definition of a dwarf planet that other planets don’t meet). But reclassifying Pluto, Eris, and all the other newly discovered planets as ‘dwarf planets’ – which is actually a very solid scientific term, and carefully agreed to by the astronomers – wasn’t enough to defend the egos of astronomers from the cyber-hubris brought about by having found dwarf planets. So they added an additional conceptual layer to their definition, which was that “dwarf planets are not planets.”

Now poor Eris is used to being messed around, but this was rather cheeky! Indeed, she has every right to be insulted by the suggestion that – despite obviously being planets (often with their own moons!) – dwarf planets are a different kind of object entirely, rather than just a different kind of planet. It’s all so unnecessary, since astronomers are now equipped to give a much better answer to the question “how many planets are there in our solar system?”, namely “there are four terrestrial planets, four Jovian planets, and at least five dwarf planets.” The first five dwarf planets we’ve found are Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris, and they are planets because “dwarf planets are planets too.” Pass it on.

For Anwen and Branwen and everyone else for whom ‘what counts as…’ matters.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #16

Beyond Choice in Game Narrative

Over on ihobo today, an open letter to Caroline Marchal and John Yorke responding to their talk at Develop: Brighton. Here’s the most inflammatory paragraph to whet your appetite:

There are, I think, two main problems with game writing today. The first is that too many of the people working on stories in games have a great appreciation for the toolkit of game design but too little an appreciation for the vast toolkit for narrative… To have experimented with short stories, or plays, or novels, is not a wasted effort for a game writer, but an opportunity to learn vital skills in story construction. The second problem is that there are rather too many ‘carpetbaggers’ (if you’ll forgive the allusion), which is to say, screenwriters who think that the problem with game stories is something that can only be solved by writers with experience in film and TV. Of the two, the latter might be more dangerous to games as an artistic medium, since someone who is game-literate can learn conventional narrative relatively easily (by attending your talk, for instance) but a screenwriter who believes that games must adapt to the conventions of screenplays is undertaking a certain kind of violence against the radical potential of game narrative.

You can read the entirety of Beyond Choice in Game Narrative over at ihobo.com.

100Cyborgs: 1-10

What are the behavioural effects of technological networks? What happens if we stop thinking about technology as shiny machines and start looking at other, subtler tools? Can we design technology to have better effects upon humans? These and other questions are what this blog project, A Hundred Cyborgs, are all about. Here are the first ten posts:

1. Voice Assistants
2. MallBots
3. Calendars
4. Blogs
5. Self-braking Cars
6. Gender
7. Chlorophyll
8. Amazon
9. Firearms
10. Bitcoin

#6 and #7 are ‘line blurring’ pieces – they take ‘technology’ in a wider sense than most people are comfortable with. But these are also the two pieces that I found most engaging in this first block of cyborgs.

I am always interested in discussion, so feel free to raise comments either here (ideal for longer debates) or on Twitter (perfect for quick questions). And if you’ve enjoyed any of these pieces, please buy a copy of The Virtuous Cyborg and support my research into cybervirtue!

More cyborgs next week.

What Players Want: Understanding Player Diversity (Develop 2018)

 At Develop: Brighton this year? Don't miss this essential talk by International Hobo's Founder Chris Bateman!

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What Players Want: Understanding Player Diversity

Tuesday 10th July: 17.00 - 17.45 : Room 4

Everyone who makes games is in the business of designing for an audience, but understanding what players want has become increasingly difficult the broader and more diverse the audience for videogames has become. Combining cutting edge psychological research with practical game design techniques, this How To talk puts player enjoyment into a more concrete perspective by answering three questions. 

What do players want? The ten psychological motives players have for enjoying games, from the victory motive to the narrative motive, provide every possible reason for players liking the emotional experiences of games. The most common mistake game designers make is assuming they are a typical player: they’re not, and neither is anyone else.

Does my game have what players want? The most reliable way of tracking audience preferences is to look at what players are already playing. Here, marketing and game design have to learn to work together to find the all-important balance between the familiar and the original.

Could my game appeal to a wider audience? You can make changes to a game to help it appeal to a wider audience – but you have to be certain you aren’t destroying the core experience just to go fishing for the mass market. Commercial videogames today have to court and keep an audience, and to do that you need to know which player motives your game can deliver, and which other motives are compatible with it.

Don’t guess at your audience: understand them, and yourself, and learn to make better games.

Takeaway

• Understand the Ten Player Motives, and how to design games that satisfy these needs.
• Estimate your game’s potential sales by recognising how to relate your design to games already in the marketplace
• Maximise your audience appeal without destroying your core experience through careful design tweaking

 Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

Traffic Lights

Thinking about the kind of cyborgs we become with traffic lights is certainly odd… we think about traffic lights as part of the road, not as part of us. But whether as driver or as pedestrians, traffic lights are cybernetic systems that control or influence how we behave. The car-human-traffic light system is a cyborg system, one that intersects with the human-traffic light system we encounter on foot in ways that are not always helpful.

While a great many car-human cyborgs respect the signals given by traffic lights (which are effectively traffic control robots), there is a nasty tendency for cyber-impetuousness. As the light turns amber (yellow in the US), there’s a sudden urge to speed through the lights, rather than stop. Even though our journey will only be interrupted by a minute and our final time at destination will be barely affected at all, there is a desire not to be impeded – and then the opposite reaction happens: a potentially dangerous dash across the line.

As pedestrians, the same cyber-impetuousness happens when we face a long walk to reach a designated crossing but could easily (sometimes not so easily…) dash across the road in a break in the traffic. Again, we don’t want our journey to be impeded and we are willing to shoulder a risk in safety, to ourselves and others, in order to satisfy our impatience. In the case of the pedestrian’s situation (although we rarely think about it consciously) the problem is exacerbated since city planners have almost universally favoured the car-human cyborg over the human on foot. In the United Kingdom, pedestrian crossings are not always or often in the places where ‘foot traffic’ flows naturally; in much of the US, travelling on foot in the majority of places is impossible. On foot, there are a great many places where you are simply less important than when you are a car-human cyborg.

The problem of vehicular cyber-impetuousness might perhaps be addressed in various different ways, not all of them practical. I sometimes idly dream of automatic paintball guns shooting those cars which run red lights, but few would approve of this vigilantism. Adding some cost, small or otherwise, to not stopping could make a difference: all car-human cyborgs respect severe damage tire spikes, not all respect pedestrians. Automatic number plate recognition could be used to leverage fines. Given that roads are always smoky, you could even produce a ‘wall of lasers’ when the lights change, creating the impression of a barrier. Sometimes, simple psychological tricks are enough to make the difference.

I find it fascinating that we treat traffic lights as necessary: it shows that we think cars are necessary. And that in turn suggests that we can’t imagine a world without cars. Even as the urban infrastructure problems become insurmountable, we’re not willing to consider giving up or changing this most problematic of cyborgs.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #15