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CH: I can definitely see that in the way his games sort of fold in on themselves and involve different kinds of scales. If you explored the same spaces as a tiny, tiny little thing and as a giant thing, you’d pay attention to the way that those spaces change as your size changes. His spaces are about scale and about things being big and little. They’re also about inverting those relationships and about poking fun at them...that whole feeling of tiny, tiny people walking around and everything's giant. So there’s the exploration of looking at things in a different way which the mechanics force onto the player. Things look different when you're only four pixels high and then four-hundred pixels high. In your lecture, you also talked about Ultima IV as an example of exploring emotions through game mechanics. Have you by any chance played Dave Gilbert’s The Shivah, an indie game which tries to communicate Jewish values through adventure-style decision making?
CH: I wasn't really trying to say we should make games that impart values. I was trying to say we should make games that allow the player to explore himself. I think one of the challenges is the collaborative authorship of the experience, the designer and the player collaborating to make this thing work. There's a risk that, even more than with literature, games can become didactic if we do that. To try and teach someone a specific set of values in games is trickier because what games ought to do, in my opinion, is present the entire space of the problem. Instead of saying, “You should be honest,” it should say, “This is what honesty means” through the mechanics. This is what happens when you tell the truth or you tell a lie--instead of trying to make a game that says “Lying is bad and honesty is good.” That's what literature can do by creating characters who are very rich and detailed and tell a lie and regret it for the rest of the novel and watch how their who lives fall apart. A game I don't think should do that. A game I think should give the player all the mechanics that surround that and figure out for himself whether telling the truth or lying is right or wrong. You seem to refer to literature a lot. Has your background as a writer affected the way you look at the topic of exploration? CH: It's like what Roland Barthes said about the death of the author. Like I said yesterday, I think in terms of literature he's wrong. But he was visionary and ahead of his time in predicting what our new relationship with media would be, especially in the sense that what he says is similar to what Marshall McLuhan says.
If he had been talking about the internet, then yeah, he would have been right. For me, learning what it means to not be an author, learning what it means to give up control, learning to say, “Okay, it's not my job to make decisions about meaning for the player, it's just to give the player the space around that decision,” it's a hard thing to let go of. It's so attractive and sexy. It's what all of our great authors throughout history have always done. But people in our medium, designers, it's not what we're supposed to do, I don't think. We'll still do it. There will always be games that are designed and built that way. I'm not saying we don't say anything. We still makes decisions about how those rule systems interact around honesty. We just need to lead the reader to make his own decisions. Very few readers will read Macbeth will say Lady Macbeth was a good person. It's clear that you're supposed to think that she's a bad person. So what’s your overall message? Is there more room for exploration in mainstream, linear games? That's what I'm trying to get at, that exploration has different flavors. A game can be totally linear and offer no opportunities for spatial exploration and still have rich opportunities for self exploration. I just want to look at the kinds of exploration we have and say there are some ways that we can use these things better. |
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