Design: June 2006 Archive Page

Adorno once wrote "it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz". Based on what we previously described, it seems that it would definitively be barbaric to create videogames about Auschwitz. However, if we could find a kind of environment where actions are irreversible, some of the main obstacles for designing "serious" videogames would disappear. -- Gonzalo Frasca --Ephemeral games: Is it barbaric to design videogames after Auschwitz? (Ludology.org)

In this article from 2000, Frasca asks why it is that the only computer games to deal with the Holocaust are neo-Nazi propaganda games. (I haven't seen or played any such games, but the Anti-Defamation League has an article on hate games in general.) In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Ralph Koster dismisses the idea that plot and moral context does not affect gameplay. He imagines a game that is played entirely like Tetris, except that "You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber... they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well.... I do not want to play this game. Do you?"

Graham Nelson's 20th Century time-travel romp, Jigsaw (a game from the early years of the post-commercial interactive fiction renaissance), features a brief non-interactive narrative sequence in which the player is placed in the role of a Jewish child watching what appears (to the child) to be a parade. In an interview with XYZZY News, Nelson described the creation of Jigsaw: "I felt that overmuch social history would be undramatic. But the largest element I (mostly) omitted was genocide. The Holocaust was not fair, the victims had no winning line."

Certainly playing WWII military strategy games would have little entertainment value if the winner of the simulation was always the winner of the historical event being simulated. The same can be said of the instructional value of such a game.

According to a widely-distributed set of teaching guidelines from the U.S. Holocaust Museum:

Even when teachers take great care to prepare a class for such an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound. The activity may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson, and even worse, they are left with the impression at the conclusion of the activity that they now know what it was like during the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses are among the first to indicate the grave difficulty of finding words to describe their experiences.

I agree completely that asking school kids to role-play guards and concentration camp victims would be problematic. The guidelines I quoted above do recognize the value of simulations that focus on general concepts (like solidarity and altruism), rather than specific Holocaust scenarios. But how much can we really learn about the holocaust from reading a story or watching a movie? Any representation of the Holocaust is going to be simplified. The question is, what do you choose to simulate, and is it possible to move from that simulation to a discussion of what the real system (the one being simulated) is like?

We have more vivid, first-person Holocaust stories from people who survived than we have from those who died. Might that fact give a skewed impression about survival?

A few years ago, blogger and columnist James Lileks recalled the joys of shooting bad guys in the morally unambiguous, simplified world of the first-person shooter, but used it in order to frame a different, more subtle question:

In "Wolfenstein," every room you enter has Nazis. You never enter a room full of startled film editors piecing together an anti-Jew screed, family men who've been incrementally co-opted by three years of occupation. You never find that room.

And what would you do if you did?

Regarding poetry in the aftermath of Auschwitz, Adorno later had second thoughts, writing in Negative Dialectics "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living - especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living."

(I'm going to have to end this in progress and get back to it later...)

It's a few hours later...

On the same blog entry, Lileks says about realism in games: "I came up with a good definition of a 'realistic' war game: they ship 45,000 copies, and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed past the beach. That's it. No refunds, either. You get off the landing craft; your screen goes black; your computer seizes up and cannot be rebooted. Game over, man."

A little Googling brings me to an update, of sorts, as Frasca reflects on Remember the Children: Daniel's Story from the US Holocaust museum (a spatial narrative for children, in which the visitor walks through a series of representations of life under Nazi Germany). Of Martin Niemöller's famous "First they came for the Jews/and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew," Frasca writes, "Right there, you have the rules for a simulation that analyses how your everyday actions affect the system, the big picture. In such a complex system like the Holocaust, the key element for understanding is how minimal discrimination may allow the emergence of the ultimate horror. And that'swhere simulation can be an excellent rhetorical tool. Museums generally deal with the past, but just because we want to look forward."

Frasca has elsewhere invoked Augusto Boal's distinction between oppression and aggression, and the Theatre of the Oppressed (which is designed to simulate oppressive acts, and to invite the audience to interrupt, forcing the actors to improvise their way towards a collaborative solution). (Next on my reading list -- Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed.)

This class is unique in many ways, the most prominent is that students learn how to create new media resources for education. As Gee noted, "When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy" (2003, p. 16). In this course students must develop an instructional game where all game elements are integrated with stated learning objectives. This theory of "alignment" is both a design requirement and guideline for the design and development of the game. We will use a design experiment approach to study how students follow this theory, how it manifests itself in the IF game, and the process of how instructional designers build an educational game around specific theory. --Teaching with Technology: Using Interactive Fiction to Teach English Students (Creative Learning Environments Lab @ Utah State University)

Sounds like an awesome project.

The whole idea of episodic stories was born in the 19th century when the printing press made cheap magazines possible. Writers like Charles Dickens hit upon the idea of delivering a big story in weekly chunks, each with a cliffhanger to keep the audience in anticipation. (The cliffhanger is essentially a technological invention -- a direct result of the movable-type press.)

Dickens soon discovered that he could now do innovative things with his story. His characters' personalities could be developed not through single, central scenes, but through a dozen glimpses over a long stretch of time. Serial narrative also changed the way audiences relate to characters. When we focus on movie characters for two solid hours, they become epic heroes; when we encounter TV characters every week for years on end, they become old friends. There's an intimacy to episodic stories, and it's all the more intensified in a game because you literally go through hell with these folks. --Clive Thompson --Tune in Next Week for Gaming Fun (Wired)

I'm watching this closely. Last summer I had time to play a whole bunch of video games (well, four or five commercial titles, which is a lot for me). But I got stuck in HL2, and though I've read few walkthroughs that tell me what I should do, I just simply haven't felt motivated to get back into the game. HL2 taxes my computer system pretty heavily, and although I want to use the HL2 mod creator as part of my "New Media Projects" course this fall, I'm worried that the hardware requirements will make the project more stressful than it should be. (While I definitely want to use the HL2 engine to create my own educational mods down the road, I'm still not sure whether this is the 3D platform I want to introduce to my students.)

Because Valve is experimenting with selling games online, bypassign the retailers altogether, I'm not surprised that the company is putting out more frequent episodes.

Hollywood knows that it needs new ideas. The games industry doesn't know. Hollywood goes out of its way to provide itself with a seed stock of new talent and ideas, the games industry doesn't. Hollywood spends an enormous amount of money supporting colleges and universities, and training programs at those settings. The games industry does not. Hollywood has a system for honoring weird ideas that aren't necessarily commercial. The games industry really doesn't. That is, Hollywood actually backs these things up with real money.

There's an awful lot of Hollywood money that goes to supporting oddball ideas, because Hollywood has learned the hard way that entertainment is a high risk business that requires innovation. --Chris Crawford --Video Games are Dead: A Chat with Storytronics Guru Chris Crawford (Gamasutra)

I'm definitely curious about Crawford's concept of Storytronics, but it's hard to get too excited about something that isn't available even in an alpha release.

This image, modified from John Speed's map of Yorkshire, England shows the walled city of York -- the site of the brilliant annual spectacle known to its medieval performers and spectators as the "Corpus Christi Play".

Dozens of short plays, mounted on pageant wagons, began with a performance at the Trinity Priory (red dot, lower left) and moved through the city streets, stopping at pre-arranged performance locations known as stations (white dots). --PSim: York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator (jerz.setonhill.edu/(Re)Soundings 1997)

According to the liturgical calendar, tomorrow is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi (the body of Christ). During medieval times, it was an important feast, especially in England, where the colder climate didn't exactly encourage outdoor celebrations during Easter.

This site, the first version of which was published in the online journal (Re)Soundings in 1997, presents a Java simulation of one component of the outdoor celebrations that the medieval town of York, England used to present during the late middle ages.

I'm pleased to see that -- on my version of the Java Virual Machine, anyway -- the program still seems to run just fine.

I had originally written the simulation from scratch, for a PC, as a final project in a course on the York Corpus Christi Play. I ported it over to Java as part of a non-credit course I took on humanities computing. My first presentation at an academic conference and my first peer-reviewed publication both came from this project, so I have a special fondness for it.

The York Corpus Christi Play (also known as the York Cycle) is a series of short religious plays that were performed as part of a very complex outdoor festival in the late middle ages. They were wildly popular in England until the Protestant Reformation. Performed back-to-back, the cycle takes about 12 hours. Since these plays were performed at staggered intervals along numerous stations in York, the whole event from start to finish took about 19 hours.

There are lot of variables to consider when you try to estimate something that complex, which meant that

Vaporizing VR Hardware (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last year, my brother-in-law asked me what I would do with a bunch of virtual reality gear his employer had packed in crates in a warehouse.

VR headsets, sensors, software to get them working together, and computers to run them all -- enough to fill "a big closet."

I started seriously thinking about all kinds of things, from working with a facutly member who teaches a mind-and-body class, to perhaps seeing whether the athletics department was interested in using such equipment to get athletes to study their form, or perhaps working with dance students on some kind of VR-ehanced interactive new media project. Thinking about what I might do with this equipment led me to put more effort into Half-Life 2 modding (and I've been pleased with the results).

The long and short of it all is that, unfortunately, that company was recently burned for releasing comptuers that contained sensitive client data. They were only willing to release the equipment if the computers were wiped clean. Andy couldn't find any CDs that contain the required software, and the VR company itself has gone out of business.

I'm sure the right techncial team wouldn't have any problem hacking something together. But because I don't have any contact with the CS majors at Seton Hill, and Seton Hill doesn't have an engineering program, I don't think the situation looks very hopeful -- not with the resources that are available to me, as a generalist (journalism, new media, literature, freshman comp) working at a small liberal arts college.

So I thanked Andy for his time. I know he jumped through a lot of hoops before getting that final answer.

As it happened, when Inform 7 came out last month, pretty much all of the spare time I'd been putting into Half-Life 2 modding got sucked into familairizing myself with Inform.

It's just a cruel shard of reality working its way into the soft tissues of my dreams.

I've already got more enticing leads than I can juggle right now, so in a way maybe I'm like the kid in the candy shop who's been waiting in a long line at the soda machine only to find that it isn't working. Yes, there's momentary disappointment, but then the kid notices that the lines for all sorts of other goodies are actually moving faster.

Onward!

Programming games is an activity. A programming language is a kind of thing. Inform 7 is a kind of programming language. It is either the single-most important advance in interactive fiction in a decade, or an interesting idea doomed to fail. --Liza Daily --Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7 (OnLamp.com)

I've been teaching myself Inform 7 by translating, room by room, object by object, conversation tree by conversation tree, a work-in-progress that I started in Inform 6 in 1998 (when my CD-ROM drive died and I had to go retro in order to have any fun).

I've been taking a break from my Half-Life 2 modding, having first played with The Games Factory and Game Maker (point-and-click tools for creating arcade games).

One of the early benefits of interactive fiction (during the 80s) was that a company's back catalog of text adventure games didn't go stale as quickly as the arcade/graphics-heavy games, because the new year's text adventure games looked pretty much like last year's, at least to the customers in the store.

That was also part of commercial IF's downfall, since improved parsers and a more realistic world model didn't necessarily always translate into an obviously better product (or better sales). Infocom and Adventure International streamlined the production process, so that their designers could churn out decent products more efficiently (reusing code and architecture). But a brilliantly-executed NPC, a greater number of in-game objects, more complex behavior -- these developments in the IF medium weren't immediately visible.

By the mid 80s, text-adventure games were regularly incorporating images, but the point-and-click graphical adventure made the hybrid obsolete.

In the best history of Infocom I've seen, a student project from MIT, the authors note that Infocom's developments were evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Consumers simply didn't notice improvements in IF as quickly as they noticed improvements in graphics and sound.

TADS is an adventure programming language that includes support for hyperlinks and a robust world model, an Inform game and a TADS game and a Hugo game and an Alan game all pretty much look the same.

While I haven't seen what kind of an IDE these other folks might have come up with recently, Graham Nelson's Inform 7 is a beautiful piece of work.

Recent developments in interactive fiction -- more complex NPCs, self-conscious tension that works against the conventions of the medium (and explores new ones), and literary aspirations -- still depend on textual transactions that occur in a world in which the game can say "there is a bunkbed here" but refuse a command such as "examine bed" because the author didn't think of "bed" as a synonym for "bunkbed."

Computer users today are used to textual chat sessions with real people who understand typos and emoticons. They're not as willing to work hard to make the computer understand them. Short of dumbing down IF games though the inclusion of a "Clippy" character who tells you exactly what you should do (Nick Montfort beautifully spoofs that idea in his game "Book and Volume"), there is little an IF author can do to get around that barrier.

Novels are long, heavy metal is loud, operatic performance is bombastic, and text adventure games force you to think. Of course, some novels would be better if they were shorter; but IF games that include random puzzles (such as the obligatory maze) can be downright annoying. I like dialogue trees and long NPC conversations, but only when the "He doesn't have anything to say about that" messages, or other features within the game, give you some hint as to what you're supposed to be doing. Other IF players prefer puzzlefests, and dismiss the more literary works as pretentious. One-room mind-benders that call for numerous replays, rich landscapes, and the quality of the error messages are among the other criteria IF players consider.

Will Inform 7 inspire a rush of great new IF games? I don't know.

IF design requires both writing talent and programming ability. An extremely well-written game that didn't ask the player to do something interesting and unusual would be very boring. And, while it should be very easy for non-programmers to create rooms and scenery to explore, you sill have to think like a programmer in order to add any complexity to a world built with Inform 7. Further, I7 is in beta right now, so there's a real possibility that code I'm writing now will be broken by the time the final release comes out. (I'm more than willing to risk that.)

On the surface, contemporary IF looks exactly like the classical stuff (from the 1980s). And a significant handful of amateur authors is today producing IF works that easily outshine those created by professionals working during the medium's commercial heyday.

Those professionals didn't have Inform 7.

We do.

I'm still only beginning to understand all the features of the new system.

Daily puts her finger on a problem I've been facing: "Note also that there are no procedure names; there is no reason to name a function when you can instead describe the conditions under which to call it."

So much of the code I wrote for I6 is simply there to produce pretty paragraphs of prose that describe events in the real world. But in Inform 7, you can make complex decisions right in the output text, like this:

After dropping the priceless fragile vase:

say "The vase shatters into a zillion worthless pieces. Scattered amidst the shards are [is/are list of things in the vase]."

Of course, you'd still have to create the code that handled destroying the vase itself, and moving its contents to whatever place the vase occupied before it was destroyed, but that's easy. What takes so much time in IF is presenting, in human-readable prose, a representation of the changing status of the game world. Here, the "is/are" automatically chooses the right verb based on whether the "list" results in one or more items. (Though here, Daily's example is incomplete. First, there's an "are" that's hard coded in text, so you might get "is are" or "are are," and further... what if the vase was empty?)

I can't wait until I've finished translating my existing code, so that I can get away from thinking in terms of the functions and procedures that make up my I6 code, and start really exploring the close connections between the output text and the code in I7.

The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:

1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It's reporting.

2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.

3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.

"Doing journalism through computer programming" is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible. --Adrian Holovaty, in an interview by Robert Niles --The programmer as journalist (Online Journalism Review)

Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a "book cover" of sorts for her work, which is automatically displayed when the player begins the game. Thumbnail versions of this art could also be displayed in another application that has aroused considerable discussion in the community, even if it is a project still far from fruition: the creation of a sort of IF "I-Tunes" application that would allow the player to browse the Archive's immense database of games, and to open any one of them on her computer with just a couple of clicks. A meta-data standard for IF is under discussion which could make this dream a reality by providing a standard format for storing basic information -- copyright date, author name, brief description, etc. -- about every game to facilitate easy searching and browsing. These projects have a long way to go, but the community seems increasingly committed to shedding the retro-gaming label once and for all and embracing the future. I believe a larger audience for IF is out there, and I believe an improved presentation for the genre as a whole is the best way to reach it.

Some see IF as suffering something of a directional crisis in the last few years. The wild experimentation with form that marked the late nineties has now largely subsided. One could argue that we have a pretty good sense of what the genre is capable of now, at least unless and until we see some quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology, or until something else occurs that shifts the paradigm of IF development. This is does not mean that the exciting phase of IF's history is over, however. It may in fact be just beginning. Authors are now free to use the techniques that the experimentalists pioneered not as formal exercises but in the service of the stories they are attempting to tell. Some recent games, such as Jason Devlin's Vespers and Chris Klimas' Blue Chairs, have displayed just this ascendancy of substance over form that is the mark of a mature artform. There are many, many stories still to tell, and I believe that a substantial upswing in IF's popularity could be just around the corner if the community stays the course with current efforts, even as increasing academic interest brings the genre a respectability it could never have dreamed of in the days of Infocom. Interactive narrative will be the literary form of the twenty-first century, and IF has every chance of continuing to be an important part of that movement for years to come. --Jimmy Maher --Chapter 11: The State of IF Today (Let's Tell a Story Together (A History of Interactive Fiction))

In the US, "Chapter 11" is the section of legal code dealing with bankruptcy, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Especially notworthy is the "Suggested Works of Modern IF" page, which includes a brief essay on canon.

The codes, called captchas, are also showing up more often amid a boom in new Web services, ranging from blogging tools to social-networking sites. The trickiest ones "make you not want to go to those sites anymore," says Scott Reynolds, a 29-year-old software architect in Ocala, Fla., who lambasted the devices on his blog last year. --David Kesmodel --Codes on Sites 'Captcha' (Wall Street Journal)

I've been considering adding a catpcha to the blogs.setonhill.edu website. The anti-spam protection there is pretty good, but the site is hit with so many spam attempts that the spam-filtering software sometimes crashes the server. (My ISP has been understanding and creative about it, though.)