Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers

Back in 1995, two Danish filmmakers named Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg stepped back from their industry, took a hard look, and decided it was time for a change. The film business, they concluded, had become overly dependent on special effects, fancy camerawork, and other techniques of production. Rather than being built on the bedrock foundations of drama - actors playing real human beings in a story - movies were becoming more and more dependent on gratuitous action, special lighting, impressive sets, optical effects, audio engineering, and all the other gee-whiz paraphernalia of showbiz. The vital essence of film, dramatic narrative, was in danger of being submerged in glitz. And as if this weren't enough, they also concluded that the cult of personality surrounding the film director was detrimental to making good films. Movies are not the work of a single visionary, they argued, and too many directors spend time making "artistic statements" to gratify their own egos when they should be concentrating on characters and story.

	A scene from the Dogme film Julien Donkey-Boy.

Von Trier and Vinterberg devised an outrageous challenge to the film business: a set of ten rules, called the Vow of Chastity, which would place certain limits on filmmaking technique. Directors who took the Vow of Chastity would become "brothers" in a new movement called Dogme (the Danish spelling of "dogma") 95 and their films could be certified as "Dogme" films. The vow was as follows:

This vow is clearly impossible to live by using conventional movie production techniques. Hollywood, of course, completely ignored it - after all, they've got money to make, and challenges from art-house film directors contribute nothing to a studio's bottom line. Still, it did cause a great deal of talk. The Dogme Manifesto was written in a very tongue-in-cheek style, and it was difficult to tell whether the authors were serious or just pulling the industry's leg. Is Dogme 95 a worthwhile exercise, or merely a publicity stunt? Regardless of what you choose to believe, nineteen Dogme movies have now been made and there are more in production. Visit the Dogme 95 website for further details.

I believe it's time for a similar debate in the game industry. We, too, have an arsenal of production techniques, and they're getting more spectacular all the time. Yet how many games on the store shelves can genuinely claim to be innovative? They may have innovative algorithms, but very few of them have innovative gameplay. How many first-person shooters, how many war games, how many run-and-jump video games do we really need? We're depending so much on the hardware that we're starting to ignore the bedrock foundation of our business: creativity, especially in devising not merely new games, but new kinds of games.

	How many run-and-jump video games do we really need?

This isn't a graphics-versus-gameplay argument; it's a technology-versus-creativity argument. Over the years I've observed a regular sine-wave progression: every time a new generation of consoles comes along, creativity and diversity drop through the floor as everybody scrambles to learn to use it. Designers spend far too much time trying to figure out how to take advantage of new machinery, adding gratuitous features just to exercise the hardware. Even though implementing the technology is the business of programmers, not designers, it still consumes attention that the designer should be spending on the game's world, rules and behavior. We're just entering another new generation of hardware, so it's very likely to happen again.

Thereore I'm going to issue my own three-word manifesto: Technology Stifles Creativity - at least temporarily. I'm also going to commit a colossal act of hubris and propose my own outrageous challenge to the game industry, Dogma 2001. Although the Dogme 95 rules don't translate directly to interactive entertainment - film is, after all, a different medium - my objective is similar: to reduce the process of game design to its fundamentals, to encourage designers to concentrate on nothing but the vital elements of a game.

Dogme 95's goals were twofold: first, to uncouple filmmaking from technology (by denying it its technological tools), and second, to remind the director that he or she is not a demi-god (or demagogue), but part of a collaborative process whose primary aim is drama, not the aesthetics of film itself.

Dogma 2001's goals are twofold also, but they're not exactly the same two. There's much less of a cult of personality in the game industry than there is in film. Although there are a small number of well-known designers, I don't really believe that they distort their games in the name Art, or to gratify their egos - or if they do, I don't think it hurts the games that much.
The first goal of Dogma 2001 is similar to Dogme 95's, to reduce the emphasis on technology so that the game designer will tend to concentrate on the game itself: gameplay, rules, the user interface, the game world and the player's role. Obviously computer games use technology by definition, but that doesn't mean they have to be designed around it.

	A game designer's primary concern should be inventive gameplay, not gimmicky new technology.

The second goal is quite simply to suppress derivative works. The game industry has become hugely, horribly derivative. There are far too many games on the shelves that play the same way, and there are far too many of them that are set in the same kinds of worlds. Dogma 2001 explicitly forbids certain kinds of games and certain kinds of worlds, forcing game designers to design new kinds of games and to set them in new places.

Herewith, the rules of Dogma 2001, for the interactive entertainment industry. After each rule I've included a justification to explain its presence.

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The Dogma 2001 Vow