Screening of Video Game Clips

STARR: My name is Christa Starr, and I headed up a team to create a short video for this conference. We were given the task of creating a 30-minute video about video games. We decided to approach it from several different angles, historical, genre, community, and just try to give an overview of all the major issues that are going on right now with regards to video games. My team did a very good job and worked very hard on this. I'd like to personally thank Christian Baekkelund, Carlos Cantu, and Francisco DeLaTorre, who spent way, way too much time playing video games for this project [LAUGHTER], and I know it was torture for everybody else, and I see some people in this room who were subjected to our experiments as well. So thank you too, and hopefully the film speaks for itself.

JENKINS: OK. So, fire when ready. [LAUGHTER]

[VIDEO PLAYING]

[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]

JENKINS: We've asked Austin Grossman from the game industry to come up and give us some reactions and thoughts about the video you've just seen and hopefully open this up for some thoughts from the floor. Austin Grossman entered the game industry in May of 1992 by answering a classified ad in the Boston Globe. He was hired by Looking Glass Technology as the lead writer on Ultima Underworld Two and did the initial design and story for System Shock. He's also contributed to Terra Nova and Flight Unlimited. At Dreamworks Interactive he was lead designer and writer for Trespasser. He's currently working at Eon Storm, writing dialogue for the upcoming action and role playing game Deus X. Austin.

GROSSMAN: I'm now wired. Well I thought that was a terrific video, and I thought that looking at it gave us a nice broad run-through of the 25-year or so history of computer games. And in fact it only recently occurred to me that a lot of people who like games now didn't actually live through the entire history and didn't actually play through the entire history. I guess the most obvious feature you see there is rapid and transformative technological change. I mean, that's very, very often commented on.

I thought one of the things that I might cull out from looking at it is the point of continuity as you go through those 25 years - how as technology changed how everything looks, how certain things seemed to stay the same over time. I thought that could be an interesting point of entry into speculating about the nature of the medium and the future of the medium because if you go to E-3 over repeated years, for instance, you see amazing new technology every year. Every year you're blown away, but you see a lot of the same stories. You see a lot of the same themes, the same characters, the same genres, and that's one of the things we saw especially in the cross-cutting that we had here. I guess I'm leaving out the sports and the strategy, also persistent types.

I'm going to point to a couple things that occurred to me really with the RPGs and the stories that explicitly attempt to launch a narrative. Why do we see the same narratives over and over again? There's a couple of reasons. One is that the people who have to make money from these games are conservative. What worked last year, we'll try to launch again. But one of the interesting things you can look at is the formal constraints that arise from the nature of the medium, from the fact that they're run on computers. In fact the computers, of course, are not a magic box. They run on certain principles. You know they have certain limitations even as they get faster, and this shapes the medium. This makes the nature of the machine imprint itself on the medium, particularly when it comes to story-telling. Telling stories in games is hard becausecomputers are very good at some things and they're poor at some things. They'll give you a great game of chess; they'll give you a great death match, It's really hard to make them, you know, have a conversation with you or have a character show emotion because you have limitations of computer graphics and you have these kinds of rule-based models, which tend to seem robotic, automatic. You probe them and you get the same thing back, and they start to not feel human. So, these basic limitations have shaped the stories we've seen and given us our characteristic narrative. You tend to end up fighting the robot army alone. You tend to end up exploring a static map.

One of the easy ways we discovered early on to tell a story using a computer game is to create a virtual map and have you start at the beginning of it and walk through it and try to find something at the end, and that gives you what we recognize as a narrative. It has a beginning and a middle and an end. It's a journey, it's a quest. It has lots and lots of antecedents back over time. Dante's Inferno was a kind of dungeon crawl. We have the Aeneid, the sense of the underworld. We had Gilgamesh before that. Very, very old story forms that the computer actually happens to be able to tell exceptionally well. So that's one of the things that you can point to when people complain about the formulaic nature of computer games. They're simply going with the strength of the medium and telling the story that computers can tell well.

I think it's also interesting to learn to look at thematic continuities over time, and this is part of the narrative continuity over time that we saw [in the video]. People, because of the kinds of stories that the computer is good at telling, always end up exploring static structures, like in Myst. People are always going into the haunted castle or the dungeon or the space station after the demons have taken it over. There's a certain repetition over time of people exploring human-built structures that are now deserted or taken over by monsters. That's the kind of thematic continuity that we built without realizing it, built out of the narrative restrictions of telling stories in computer games. I think if we're going to look to the future of computer games, (barring some, radical technological breakthrough), we have to look at learning to use the strengths and weaknesses of the interactive medium better. It's something that we saw [artists] learn in film, and it's something that we're learning in computer games. People are learning what to try and what not to try, and people are becoming at home within the limitations of the computer technology.

I guess that's the main thrust of my remarks - that if you look at a historical sweep like that, you see the continuities and what you see from that is over-repetition. You see underlined the characteristics of the medium and its restrictions, and you also see the way the computer itself, the machine, the way it's built, what it can and can't do, imprints itself on the stories we tell with it and the things that we express with it.

JENKINS: OK. Why don't we open this up to the floor. We're interested in your thoughts, what you saw, what you heard, what you're thinking about games. Does someone want to jump in there?

PARTICIPANT: This is more just a comment really. There are genres that aren't represented here, and that's probably at least partly because in any given culture where you would try to make such a review, you would review based on that culture's understanding of games. Just as an example, sports management games are not played in the U.S. Sports management games are very big in Europe. It is like playing a spreadsheet. It's a quite different kind of experience entirely, coming from the U.S. and going there and working in a studio there with the whole group of people there who design these games that I fundamentally do not understand.

PARTICIPANT: Well I was at the Rotterdam Film Festival the other week which had a display of Japanese games, many of which had not made the opening market, the American market. One that struck me as very distinctly Japanese were cooking games. You were a short-order cook. You had to serve noodles. You had to chop vegetables. They had an enormous rush of customers pushing around you, and you had a limited time that you had to do all of this in. It was fascinating to me to see this game, but it's hard to imagine what an American market would make of it, and I think we often, you're right, see these things from one national perspective and don't get a feel for the diversity of what's out there as games have responded to different national contexts.

GROSSMAN: If I may also briefly respond. I think there's a danger in approaching games from an academic perspective in that we tend to focus on things that we have the tools to understand already, like narrative. I think we tend to look for content that we understand as content, and that's particularly a focus on narrative and leaves out games that don't highlight that or approach narrative in ways that we don't understand.

HALL: Hi. My name is Justin Hall. I'm from Gamers.com and it's a great site. You should go there. But I wanted to respond to two things. I wanted to respond to your mention of Japanese games. One of the things that I was able to discover working at my company is Japanese games. They have an entire genre of game called the dating simulator, and the dating simulator is a game where you play a high school male. You play through four years. It's a year-round school year, and you determine 52 weeks a year times four, 208 turns you go through, and you choose: Are you going to work on your academics, your appearance, your humanities, your arts, your social skills in order to attract the right type of girl. There's an entire pantheon of women that you can date. Of course choosing the appropriate gift to give them and knowing their biorhythms and when they would want the present is also very important. The depth and the detail of these types of simulators hasn't caught on in the U.S., but it's an amazing type of game to have somebody who knows how to speak Japanese sit next to you and play for a couple hours.

But I was going to respond to the film and say that I thought it was a wonderful film. I wish MIT had better speakers, because much of the sound was inaudible, and I thought they did a fine job on interviewing some people. I'm sure those little girls had wonderful things to say, but I just couldn't hear them.

The history of video games is well documented. You see so many console histories. You see Pong, you see Donkey Kong.You see the arcade classics, but I so seldom see computer game classics. Where was Star Flight? Where was Railroad Tycoon? Where are the progenitors of today's historical fiction games? I mean, these were games that were so seminal. The early EA games, the early Activision games. I don't know, I love those games, and they're seldom represented in the history of video games because everybody saw Pong and everybody saw Pacman, but if you mention Star Flight to the right person, they'll start salivating. It's a great game. Anyhow, I just wanted to reflect on the fact that computer game history is under served.

JENKINS: Well on behalf of the students who made the film, I have to say that we saw more than 100 games represented in this documentary, and it says something about the complexity of the games field, that we can now all immediately come up with things not represented. We have an incredible array of works here, and I know the students were struggling with each title. How many can we fit into 30 minutes because there's so much more going on there, and part of it is the imprecision of the word game, which I often comment on when I'm talking about this. You know, if we restricted everything we did recreationally in the real world to the category of game, there would be an awful lot we left off. Some of it out there is play, some of it is toys, some of it is games, some of it is sports, some of it is narrative. The field of games includes such a broad range of activities that our category of game doesn't adequately contain what's going on there. So I mention that not so much as an apology but just as a recognition that how exciting it is to see 100 plus games represented and realize that there are huge areas that are not included in this documentary, that we also should be paying attention to at a conference like this. Yes?

RODBERG: Hi. I'm Alex Rodberg from Impressions Games out in Cambridge, and I wonder if you'd speak to, as far as narratives, the fact that most stories for most computer games are written with probably a 14-year-old in mind when in fact most of the audience is actually over 35.

GROSSMAN: Well how unfortunate. [LAUGHTER]

It is true, I mean it's difficult to pin down why that is. It's certainly true that early computer games ended up as adapted stylized versions of likeolder fantasy epics or romances or Arthurian stuff. They got stylized in particular ways and they became very simple. Because they want to make them interactive, (I'm making this up) they built them around certain game-playing conventions. It was just easy to model violence and conflict. It was easy to represent that. You couldn't really do Henry James so well. You couldn't really do the sudden changes of character and dialogue. So I think within the culture of computer-gaming, they went with what could easily be represented as a play dynamic. That's a stab at why we are where we are with computer-game narratives.

JENKINS: OK. Let's see. Over there.

KOHLER: My name is Chris Kohler. I'm a student at Tufts University. I'm teaching a course this semester with the experimental college at Tufts University, the history of video games, and so the history aspect of the video was of interest to me. I thought that, expanding on what Justin had said earlier, that you seem to haveyou seem to have sacrificed chronology in some places in terms of putting, say, Super Mario right after Donkey Kong Country, when in fact Super Mario was released in 1991 and Donkey Kong Country in 1994. That's a huge span of time,. Also showing Pong, showing Breakout, and then putting up a big, black screen that says 1982 through 1984, the great depression of video games. A lot of people would consider that the golden age of video games because so many new and exciting products were coming out. Yes, there was a gigantic crash that nearly crippled the industry [LAUGHTER], but there was a lot of great stuff coming out too. It seems that was really an important time period that was just sort of left out of the video. I understand, as Henry explained, how much can you fit into 30 minutes, but overall I thought the video was excellent. Nice choice of music, especially at the beginning.

STEVE: A couple of observations. First of all, this is like being on the Ricki Lake Show. So it's kind of cool for me. [LAUGHTER] A couple notes. That was awesome. I feel really old now. I'm Steve from Looking Glass, by the way. As far as showing older games on the PC, it's a hell of a lot easier to show old platform games than to get old PC games running. So I can say that much for the platforms - go to garage sales for old PCs.

What else was I going to say? Oh, for story-telling, certainly our industry is at odds with itself as far as getting away from linear story-telling when that's how stories have always been told. To get a certain dramatic curve, you have to have it structured. So this happens; then that happens and that happens. We have the technology to break up stories into components that can depend upon the way it's thrown out by AIs, I suppose. It's really difficult, and kudos to the first person to really do it, but all I hear, and I've done it too, is to scream out loud, why do stories have to go this way? And yeah, sure, we have branching now. So you have three different possible endings, but for the most part, if you can break out of the non-linearity, total kudos.

JENKINS: I think it's a serious question. How do we construct narratives that are more compelling in an interactive form? And one answer may well be to shift from interactivity to participatory design. That is, create space where people construct their own stories through their own interactions, to tap into the wellspring of creativity that everyday people have. It doesn't mean all those activities are going to be satisfying or they're going to be great stories, but they're ways of constructing. The online obviously has real advantages in terms of tapping that participatory design feature, but I think it is one way of moving out of that choose-your-own-adventure cycle that one can get stuck into when you talk about narrative. Ted?

FREEDMAN: Hi. I'm Ted Freedman from Duke. I just wanted to make a point about the Japanese games, which is that I think the issue may not only be what games may not catch on with an American market but also the difficulty of marketing games that may not fit into a genre that's already been marketed in the past. I was thinking of Pokemon and the fact that Pokemon is represented in the media today as the sort of marketing-driven phenomenon that's shoved down little kids' throats. In fact I can remember a year ago when the original Pokemon marketers had to buy time early in the morning on independent TV stations because no TV network would show the Pokemon show. The game was a game that started very slowly and slowly caught on. It's an example of something that maybe the marketers couldn't figure out how to sell at first. It caught on because of some of the inherent merits of the game, that the kids turned out to have more cross-cultural interest in them than might have been assumed. And I was curious to hear from game developers to what extent you think innovation may be limited not only by what you can technically do but what you think you can sell.

GROSSMAN: Pretty much. You know, it's hard to convince somebody that many, many, many people will buy this new idea that's never been tried, and it's easy to fund a game that gives you the same thing that sold last year. It's pretty straightforward. Then again, it's also hard to make money in the gaming medium. It costs a lot to make a game. So you can understand why people don't take risks like that. There's an economic logic to it. It's not just narrow-mindedness. You need to keep in business.

Oh, I just want to point out other thing for people. In dating simulations there's one translated I know of called Graduation by Mixed Software that's quite a lot of fun. I don't think it gets into biorhythms but it has just about everything else. [LAUGHTER]

JENKINS: I think we'll get to one on this side, so you, go ahead.

ISAACSON: Hi. My name is Aaron Isaacson. I work over in the computer graphics group at MIT LCS, and I'm interested in portable electronics. We haven't really looked too much at games that run on cell phones, games that run on CE. I think that's a very different direction. It's not about pushing how many polygons can you render in a second and how good is the sound, but how fun can the game be and be as small as possible. I guess that's a different sort of design space. It's just interesting to talk about.

GROSSMAN: Well it is a good point. The portables are this amazing harking back to two-D game play, which was always great and always fun, and when they decided to make portables, they didn't have to compete to try and work out how to have fun in three-D anymore. They could go back to the renaissance of the '80s,like the Apple II style stuff. So it's an excellent point. The portables have great stuff that's just non-technologically flashy.

PARTICIPANT: On that point, you said there was two-D. I think Crash Bandicoot that was shown here is a great game because you don't have to choose which direction to go, this way; there's a path. I really like two-D games because you can kind of zone-out much more. You don't have to explore. My day is complex already. I don't like nonlinear games, for example. So go back and do old thrillers. [LAUGHTER]

JENKINS: Linearity and passivity have worked very well in the media for thousands of years. [LAUGHTER] OK, over here.

PHILIP TANG: Hi. My name is Philip and I'm an undergraduate at MIT, and that was really amazing. I was just wondering, though. A lot of it referred to consoles and PCs, but when we're talking about computers, computer games and video games in a social context, that's also the phenomenon of the arcade center, which wasn't really featured. It is still prevalent, especially in non-western countries. So I was wondering, there's still an esthetic of you playing with a crowd of strangers around you watching you play, which you don't get when you're playing at home, and do you think that's an important esthetic or it just wouldn't work in America or something?

GROSSMAN: It's curious. It was massively popular for a while. It's the kind of thing that may come, that sort of comes back in online death match play. Again, you're matching yourself up in front of strangers. Again, you're going to this other space to play. You're not doing it in your home again. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people my own age really miss the arcade setting and the dark room, the wall of sound. That was fantastic. I guess it's mostly a matter of economics.

JENKINS: We've got two questions left and then we'll break. So go ahead.

MONFRIT: Hi. I'm Nick Monfrit and I write about various things including video games. I wanted to ask about the advance of technology. Henry had mentioned something about a technological explosion that we're seeing today, or sort of a continuation of a 25-year-long technological explosion probably is an equally good way to put it. So from the media history standpoint, I was wondering how this compares to the state of other incipient media like radio and cinema?

Also, I'm wondering if the effect of this is in some ways to draw attention away from creativity within the form of the video game, not just bringing in new narratives but new game forms as well. There's so much attention of how do we learn the development kit for this new console game? How do we ramp up and do something that a few years ago, we would have used very different tools to build but now we're working with a 700 megahertz computer. Is there a [downside] to the advance of technology as well as enabling a lot of neat things? Is it also drawing people's attention toward technical aspects instead of worrying about some of the creative ones that they could be devoting their energy to? What's the case in the industry?

JENKINS: Well, when I was in grad school, I was once subjected to an extremely long lecture on sprocket holes in early cinema, but the reality is that the platform of cinema became stable remarkably early into its history, and no one learning to make films had to learn to adjust to different delivery technologies, different platforms, different kinds of cameras. There was the stabe technology that enabled rapid growth of the art of visual story-telling in cinema. My heart goes out to game designers who are rapidly trying to exploit the potential of technology that becomes obsolete before their game even reaches the marketplace. Because of the rapid growth technologically, it has been much harder to stabilize genre types and visual style in games to achieve the full potential of this medium. I think that's a challenge that games have faced that cinema hasn't faced over time. I don't know if there's anymore you want to add there.

GROSSMAN: Oh hours and hours. If you're a designer at a technologically progressive company, it's a basic dilemma. You start the project. You talk with the programmers about what the game engine is going to be like that may get on its feet a year from now. So you start designing for something that you can't see and you can't play. So that's the dilemma of pushing technology. I was sort of hoping that with the increasing trend of licensing engines, licensing Quake and Unreal engines, there would be kind of a stable platform for people to work with, to start flexing their creative muscles and getting to know the medium a little bit better while it stands still for a bit. I've seen some incredible stuff that was Quake engine stuff that was produced without economic pressure - by people who just messed around with that engine and tried stuff, but the point is clear. As technology moves forward, as a designer, one doesn't have much leisure to explore the medium as it exists at one point. You're always trying to hit what's going to happen two years from now.

PARTICIPANT: The graphics are really beautiful, and the music is slick and everything, but it seems like we're imprisoned by the history of passive media. Play is essentially physiological. We're obsessed still with some twitching interaction while watching a two-D TV screen and not getting that full immersion, that full interactive, body interaction with games in video where it's fully possible, especially here at MIT doing a lot of experiments with that. Where's that? That's one thing I didn't see, and that seems to be the real future of video games and also arcades, which I think will have a renaissance after the industry stops driving it and the customers do.

GROSSMAN: I'm sorry, say that again.

PARTICIPANT: I'm wondering about the physiological interaction with games because that seems to be the true sense of play.

GROSSMAN: -- When a six year old plays a video game would you say that it was simply in the thumbs that the activity was taking place? There's a huge amount of physical bobbing and weaving that's taking place there. The question is how do we tap that for an interface? How do we exploit that to create a more physically immersive environment for games?

PARTICIPANT: Yes, the desire's there, but we don't allow it to flow through. That's exactly right, and how do we see that coming into the future of video games?

GROSSMAN: Yeah, I think, I think we're going to see more and more work in that direction, if the early experiments that I've seen are any indication. It's a weird subject because it involves stuff that people have never really tried to have happen before. I'm a big fan of computer games on some levels as they happen now. You have one dimension of input, or a couple dimensions of input, and you know those are a limitation that you play with to try to accomplish your goals. I've tried some of those where you ride a bike, or do the kayak thing. Often it's the case that despite the fact that you're using your body differently, you're still handing a fairly simple set of control inputs into machine. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone did a standup that took a lot of control inputsfrom the way you moved your body, rather than just being a much larger two-dimensional joystick. I don't know. I tend to think that most levels of technology have like a good spot of immersion that they can hit. I loved games in 1980 - when people didn't really talk about that kind of technology. So, I don't think that kind of change is necessary for the medium to become mature. I do think it's going to be very, very interesting though.

JENKINS: OK. One quick comment.

PARTICIPANT: I just wanted to respond. I keep track of trends in part by watching the people I work with (the average age of is about 22). They hook onto things, and get rather excited about them, and right now they're playing DanceDance Revolution with a fervor, which they've ordered from import stores in Hong Kong. They've got these pads that they hook up to the PlayStation at our office, and every lunch time you've got guys going like this The really good guys in our office can jump back and forth to control the dance moves and the people on the screen, and can use their hands and do kind of break dance moves on these pads which are mapped to the directional controls of the PlayStation. And, people in my office download videos off the Web of people competing in Dance Dance Revolution tournaments in Asia, doing stunts and break dancing on stage, on pads mapped to things on the screen. You want to talk physiology or whatever of video games, this is a whole other level.

GROSSMAN: Can I just say one more thing? (This is going to start to get like the Jerry Springer Show.) That's not what I think of when I think of play. Just because you have a bike and you bike on it, or you jump on pads, as opposed to using your thumb, that doesn't change the essential game. When I think of play, I think of learning through design. I think of building. Seymour Papert, over at the Media Lab talks about learning through play. He uses a turtle, and he uses a turtle to express something that's a very abstract concept. The concept of programming, \ whether it's on the screen, or whether it's a mechanical turtle moving around on the ground, it's still representation. But, the effect is the same. It's a positive effect, because it's a different way of characterizing something that's very abstract and complex. So, I would suggest that we shouldn't really be looking at different interfaces if we want to integrate play. We should look at issues of game play, and issues of design that cause kids and adults to think in different ways, and to construct their knowledge based on what they're doing. And, I'll be really radical, and say I think that a really good PDA game, or a Game Boy game, with different kinds of inputs could be much better than the most advanced game. I think, it really comes down to good design, and putting a lot of thought into what you're trying to have the game accomplish.

JENKINS: And on that note, we have to end the discussion section...