The Game about Love

Many years ago I was speaking with an Austrian about opportunity. He told me that you should see it as if you in a room surrounded by doors. As one closes you can see the other doors that were hidden behind it. Without closing doors to opportunities, one can never tell what the better options were and what you’ve been missing.

I’ve been closing a lot of doors recently.

Momentum has been lost waiting for contributions and many (if not most) people have wondered what is happening with the game if anything at all. So, with a heavy heart, we are moving on from this stage without them.

Other doors have opened. Hannah Jane Walker has come on board and will provide one of her poetry experiences for the players of the game. This is an amazing coup. Hannah tours all around the country and is an amazing talent and I am incredibly grateful for her willingness to get involved. She has presented lots of ideas about the game and we have had lively discussions about how to run it. Anyone able to see any of her shows should make an effort to go. You won’t regret it!

We also have gaming luminary James Wallis also working for us in the game. He likes the concept and is trying to come up with some storylets for us. He is also acting as an advisor for the game, helping us iron out the bugs and make things work. James has a long history in games design, running several companies his games being nominated for many awards. In 1999 Games Reporter magazine listed him as the 18th best game designer of all time. Two of his games were included in the book ‘Hobby Games: The 100 Best’. 

James is also a former Sunday Times journalist, magazine editor and TV presenter. He worked in movie publicity for several years, and is a visiting lecturer in game design at the University of Westminster. 

The main contributors have been Jodi Crisp and Rufus Cable who have both written storylets and provide great feedback and challenge on what has been written so far. Without Jodi’s help and moral support in particular, the game would be in serious trouble indeed.

What’s next?

We’ve decided that the game will be set in the Twickenham, Richmond area. So I am approaching the local arts groups for help in the material aspects of the game.

I’ve made contacts with some local businesses who are interested in hosting sections of the game.

The storylets are coming together and once we have them in place, we will work on the meta story; the venues  and contacting all the artists.

So, stay tuned for more!

The Game about Love has always been vying between the idea that it is art masquerading as a game or a game masquerading as art. I’ve been pulled in both directions and have reached a decision point only recently. In an earlier conversation with Martha Henson the Multimedia Editor from the Wellcome Institute, we talked about gaining curated stories from curious curators of small museums to use in the game.

Those of you who have been reading the blog will have noted my posting about the experience I had with Hannah Jane Walker. This experience really moved me. It produced the emotional intensity that I am looking for in my game, and yet it was not produced as a game. The focus of the piece was that of sharing the personal experience and views of the artist.

I acknowledge in advance I am about to make a lot of generalisations. I apologise for this, but the paragraphs below would become too complicated with the all the caveats I should be using.

While games are the products of artists and technical people working in partnership, the voice of the author is not definitive and should leave the player with space to develop their own sense of agency in the game and create their own version of the narrative. Their version of the narrative is constructed with others and the author, and is in a sense the ‘shared narrative’ that completes the ‘incomplete narrative’ with which all players start the game.

Some narrative-based computer games do produce some emotional experiences; however, I’m pretty sure it is connected to the 60–70+ hours of interaction that you have to undergo to get there. As my friend James Wallis said:  emotional impact in this scenario is reached through a form of “Stockholm syndrome”. The idea I had for my game was that it should take place over an eight hour period – too short to induce the experiences I have felt in other narrative-based games, so I am hoping a combination of the game and the best traditions of art will help to bridge the gap.

In a piece of art, the idea of the author/artist should be clear. They are presenting their view on the world and the audience has the potential to absorb that narrative and have their views on it. The narrative within the work of art does not change, but the audience respects it and forms their own point of view. The narrative is not shared in the first sense but can be divided between author and audience. The emotional response of audience to artist has been stronger in my experience than my own experience of games. However, the lack of interactivity has meant that they have felt like a game to me. While they ask you to react to the concept behind the art, they don’t ask you to contribute to the body of work and share the narrative.

My current thinking is that the game should feel interactive and ask the players to contribute their stories and react to the artists’ emotional experience that will be present in the game. 

At the London Indie Roleplaying Game I came across a game called ‘What you Wish For’ run by a gentleman called Ashley Griffiths from Damwain Games. Like me, Ashley commented that many of the roleplaying games were of a negative nature, often about exploring the darker side of human existence. Themes of death, murder, and even incest surfaced in the confines of the indie games (despite the fact that most of the people I have met there were really nice people in real life).

His game was an antidote to this feeling, and like the Game of Love, was meant to bring out the positive side of live. The game is based on his own experience of being stuck in a dead end job and thinking about his past and his future and making a choice to break away from his past.

The game is played on a table and a deck of abstract cards are placed in the middle of the table. A player takes one of the cards and describes a scene with him in it inspired by the card. The person to the player’s left can then continue to the story and describes his past in the most attractive way possible. The person on the right can interrupt the person on the left to draw doubt into the situation. Then the person who holds the player’s future gets to continue the narrative based on the player’s future, but the person on left gets to inject doubt into the situation. The player then makes a choice between his past and future. They players on the left and right only get three chances to interrupt the narrative, so there is no danger of one person talking out the others.

In the version I played, there was some confusion by one of the players who instead of creating a positive scene, created a negative one. The inclusion of tokens (which could signify roles) would help sort out that confusion, or perhaps even masks!

There was a lovely feel to the game as the decision you were faced with at the end of the narratives were you deciding that you were happy with your journey and that the ideal over the horizon would be would be a step too far; or that your journey was not a happy one and only a decisive break could liberate you and move you on. I think the game would be enhanced through the making more of the decision point, finding a way so that the player had to think about his emotions more as the first narrative seemed far away from the decision point to be a credible option. Perhaps key moments could be written down and recounted in a list to the player at the point of the decision?

I think what I took away from the game was the need for ‘game’ rituals and ‘game tokens’ in a game. Tokens and rituals seem to be not simply something for games creators to make commercial games from – in my perspective, they take a life (And mystique) of their own. They give us licence to think differently, to chart progress in an imaginary world and be liberated from our egos and fears.

The Game of Love needs tokens. Tokens of love.

Hannah Jane Walker

A night with ‘A Serial Apologist’

As part of the Richmond Literary Festival I attended Festival Salon for an evening with Hannah Jane Walker. A small group of us sat around a dining table in candlelight and spoke about apologies and what they meant to us. Hannah read some of her excellent poetry after exploring some of the thoughts about giving and receiving apologies. We were asked to apologise to the people in the room for things that others had done to them and got the chance to receive the apologies we had been waiting for all our lives. It was an emotional experience for us to share with strangers the things that I had been holding within me for many years. The speaking of the apologies seemed to create some sense of release from things that had been holding us back and realise how little my anxieties really were.

 

At one point we took our apologies and wrote them onto little slips of paper and put them into a small wooden box in the middle of the table. These were then shared out amongst the participants and read back out to feed into (at certain points) a poem by Hannah Jane Walker. It was in turns intimate and invasive but within a controlled environment it allowed people to talk to each other and develop some feelings of intimacy in a short period of time.

I found the process quite cathartic and yet comfortable and wonderfully curated. It made me think that to truly get people to share and trust the game, they will need to have their hand held at these junctures. Perhaps we will need to provide a doula for the pivotal moments of the game…

In all regards, I had a wonderful experience and think I have found a key mechanism for the game!

I recently purchased a Logitech GT racing wheel (which was on special offer) and Gran Turismo 5 for the PS3. It is a racing wheel with force feedback and pedals. This means that the wheel can buck with the track and simulate gravitational forces on the wheel and air buffeting when driving. Having set it up and tried it out, I found the experience completely different from the sensation I had when using the Joypad. It was if I had never played the game before. Turns became unmakeable, the acceleration and breaking became foreign to me. I could barely stay on the track. The track itself was brought to life through the vibrations in the wheel. I was forced to relearn my driving skills and approached GT5’s normally very basic driving licences with renewed vigour as I realised how much I had to learn. GT5 has very short learning sections that make you drill individual driving skills until you get them to an acceptable level before it allows you to be let loose on any tracks.

So, what has this got to do with the game of love?

We will be asking game players to approach game problems that they may be used to, but the mechanisms with which they will approach the game will be new, just as the mechanism threw me and made me far less competent in a scenario that I should be good at. In the same way, we will need to lead the players in the game at a far slower pace than if they were familiar with play in this context. If this genre becomes established, then this pace will pick up in other games, and this game will quickly seem archaic, but on the basis that someone has to be first, we should set out boldly this course and refine the play throughout the day to come out with the faster results.

(Also, if you want to know what the fourth wall is all about, I suggest you go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall)

Yesterday I attended Blast Theory’s ‘A Machine to See with’ in Brighton. Blast Theory have been highly recommended to me by several people. As the opportunity came up for me to try some of their work, I jumped at the chance.

I thought it was great to see someone doing something similar (although not really in the same genre) as the Game about Love. There were many points I could learn from and ideas I wished to incorporate into my game. I’m greatful to Blast Theory for putting together this experience and overall it was a really interesting way to spend an hour in Brighton.

My deeper reflections on the experience are listed below.

Here is a brief description of the story from Blast Theory’s own website: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_amachinetoseewith.html.

‘A Machine To See With is a film where you play the lead…On the day, you receive an automated call giving you the address you need to go to. Once you arrive on your allotted street corner your phone rings. From there a series of instructions lead you through the city. You are the lead in a heist movie; it’s all about you. As you move from hiding money inside a public lavatory, to meeting up with a partner in crime and onwards to the bank, the tension rises. It’s up to you to deal with the bank robbery and it’s aftermath.’ … The work has three ideas running through it. It is about cinema. The artists thought about the city as a cinematic space and considered how screens might be inserted into the streets or carried through them. Their approach was to think of our eyes as the screens themselves: as Chris Hedges says in The Empire of Illusion, “we try to see ourselves moving through our life as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play in our heads.” …

The book is a classic of arid compressed noir. Godard took the story as a springboard for a commentary on the Vietnam war, mixing trashy violence with contemporary politics. The title of the work is taken from Godard’s script for Pierrot Le Fou in which Jean Paul Belmondo’s character says, “my eyes are a machine to see with”.

It is about the tyranny of choice and consumerism.

With the attempted robbery of a bank at its heart, money is a recurrent part of the work. It contrasts the agency of a film star, of a protagonist in a heist movie with the reality of the financial crisis since 2008. It places the adrenaline rush of revenge against the steady impotence of citizens confronted by global capitalism.’

This is an ambitious work which relies on an automated system to bring real live players together to play in the same space through an automated system. Your mobile phone is used extensively and is used to give you the narrative and direct you through the streets.

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My Reflections

The good

Being called and calling up a real number causes you to comprehensively break through the fourth wall [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall].

As heist movies go, it was a good one. It was cinematic and put you completely in the centre of events.

The red herrings worked well to create a state of tension. It made look at non-playing characters in different ways.

Using mobile phones allowed the players to check in when they reached the right geographic locations. This helped to keep the story on track. It is a neat device.

The bad

Going into a public lavatory cubicle to receive messages is cool. Hearing another player on speakerphone in the cubicle next to me receiving the same messages with a few seconds’ delay is not.

I misunderstood some of my instructions and my hapless counter player got dumped. I can’t imagine my actions made him happy, and perhaps I ruined it a bit for him (unintentionally).

The narrative seemed to jump or take a certain range of interactions for granted. I didn’t take them and ended up confused.

I did not reach a state of suspension of disbelief before I met another player. This meant that we giggled a lot and this made the situation worse.

When we did speak with each other, we didn’t have enough time to establish ourselves as characters. So we were a bit rude to each other.

There were other players who I was not supposed to interact with that were a little way off from me. They were clearing in the game as they, like me, were walking around listening to their mobile phone without talking. This made me feel like I was on a conveyer belt of adventure.

The mobile telephone, while essential to conveying narrative was a bit of bind to have for the entire game. I wished I was given enough freedom and liberty to create extra narrative with my co-player, and without it, I felt the experience was a little on-rails.

What did I learn

Just as there is a difference between Theatre and Cinema acting, so there is a difference between the directions in a game that takes place in a controlled environment (a board game) and one that takes place in a city. There is less room for subtlety in an unpredictable game environment.

Using multiple players on different cues and getting them to coordinate is very difficult. Players get out of sync with unpredictable results.

Having two players have different set of instructions can produce interesting results. One player reading the situation in one way, and the others in another way create interesting scenes that cannot necessarily be penetrated by the other player. For example, one player could be asked to find a small object on other people’s lapels, the other is told that the player looking around is looking for them and they have to hide from them.

You are asked at one point to state what kind of person you are in a short multiple choice questionnaire. This seemed to effect the story. However, because of all the other problems with the story, the modifications seemed a little too subtle to make a major change. If things like this are included in my game, they need to have a big effect to be noticed by the player. There is great potential in this mechanism. I can see the players being a choice between two different branches in the character’s life, and being asked to make a choice about what the character would do based on their understanding of the character. This could lead them to one of two music venues where they would go and enjoy the music, be inspired by it and contribute to the story themselves…

Great food for thought!