Making Gestures Matter
Train offers an important lesson in physical design: the way a player responds to a gesture is at least as important as the way the game responds to such a gesture.
But Train is a tabletop game, not a digital one. Is it even possible to translate the gestural ambiguity of such an experience into a video game?
The answer may lie not in Train's form, but in its method. The game embraces ambiguity at every turn, refusing to connect any dots. It never makes an argument about the Holocaust.
It never even takes a position on whether or not the efficient movement of people from station to terminus ought to be praised or condemned by its players, whether they should adopt the role of Nazi officer in order to grasp his plight or if they should reject it as morally reprehensible.
Instead, the game creates a circumstance in which the gestures a player performs -- lining up passengers, loading and unloading them, moving trains to a death camp -- are allowed to reverberate uncomfortably.
One of Will Wright's contributions to game design is his elevation of ambiguity to a first-order design principle.
Even in simulation-heavy games like SimCity and The Sims, players are afforded tremendous interpretative freedom as they imagine what's going on behind the walls of their buildings or in the minds of their sims. In simulation, abstraction doesn't just simplify implementation, it also affords richer experience.
The same might be true of gestural interfaces. While increased physical realism might allow actions to become more faithful in their specificity, compelling significance doesn't necessarily come for free. Indeed, by abstracting a game's response to gestures, games of all kinds can allow the player a richer interpretative field. And in many cases, interpretation is more interesting than responsiveness.
Consider a much less politically charged example: Dance Dance Revolution. DDR's success as an arcade title comes partly from its honed responsiveness to simple player steps. But its life as a venue for public performance was born from the spaces the game didn't measure between steps, spaces players felt compelled to fill with improvised maneuvers of their own.
Train might then invite questions about the mad dash toward new and improved gestural technology. Wii MotionPlus, PS3 Wand, and Microsoft Natal all assume that higher resolution, greater fidelity inputs will result in more compelling games. And they will, in part; certainly the precise physical properties of Train are intrinsic to the gestural meaning they impart.
But the speed of development and release of new hardware platforms also offers excuses not to explore the tools we already have.
Perhaps the souls of our games are not to be found in ever-better accelerometers and infrared sensors, but in the way they invite players to respond to them. After all, Brenda Brathwaite was able to plumb the depths of dread, exploitation, and complicity with wooden tokens and plastic trains.
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When I hear about serious games like Train, it raises a lot of questions for me as a designer. Not so much about the holocaust but the motivation behind the serious games movement. I register many serious games as noble efforts, but there is a set of serious games that trouble me.
To the casual observer it may seem like many serious game designers are simply using tragedies to attract attention to the serious movement. IE: "If I make a game about the holocaust, it HAS to be important." I know isn't the spirit of the movement, but I'm having trouble figuring out the true purpose.
Is the idea to prove the power of games? If so, designers are evoking a very real tragedy to make what seems like a mundane point. As an industry, don't we all already believe in the power of games as an expressive medium?
The best motivator I can reverse engineer is the challenge of a "difficult subject?" If that is the case, I wonder if Train is really respecting the profound nature of this challenge? If that is the motivator, I'd like to read more about the process Brenda took on to address such a sensitive issue. This is perhaps the most profound design problem I can think of to the point where design failure could be considered a human travesty. A failed design here is a mockery of the holocaust. Do serious designers take responsibility for that?
With much respect,
Michael
I won't speak for Brenda's process, even though I do know something about it. She may or may not choose to do so here. But I also don't think she should have to speak for herself. The work is comprehensible, if ethically challenging, in clear ways. What I will say is this: I don't think this is a "serious game," nor that Train is "simply using tragedies to attract attention." I think it's an earnest work whose earnestness can be seen when it is played. How is that more worrisome than creating a zombie gorefest to attract attention?
I have the sense that you're invoking (without invoking it) the old, tired argument about ineffability, the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, the one so many misunderstand based on Adorno's old quotable. I think this is a retrograde idea. We must try, even if the risk is travesty.
Michael makes an excellent point: that there is a fine line between a game interface that highlights the mechanism (in this case, the use of gestures as representational of agency) and one that highlights the rhetorical exigency (in the case of Train, the seeming complicity of an entire industrial complex in the deaths of millions). Take, for example, the aforementioned Manhunt 2, and let's compare it to God of War: Chains of Olympus. Is the act of moving one's hands in real life to execute a digital person any more a sign of agency and complicity in the imagined act than rapidly pressing the X button in GOW:COO to force Kratos away from his one love in life, his daughter? Unless Manhunt 2 gives the player a chance to make very real associations between the gesture and the act--to use the Wiimote to interact in a way that can ONLY be accomplished through gesture--the presence of the gesture can be taken as mere gimmickry that marginalizes the perversion inherent in the act.
To put it another way, in Trains, you are actively planning as those complicit have planned. There is no separation between semantic agent and semantic instrument. You, alone, are agent and you use the instrument (the set) to act. In Manhunt 2, as with GOW:COO, the instrument is still the agent: "It's not me executing that person, it's the controls, and through the controls, it's the character."
If there is a way around this on the Wii, I'm not sure what it might be. The Wii's controls always take center stage by the very nature of the paratext that surrounds every game ("Now with motion controls! Wowzers!"). Perhaps a game that invites others to act as witness to your supposedly heinous interaction with the game and then somehow report their opinions interactively?
The Eyetoy, Project Natal, and the PS3's forthcoming Eye-based motion control wand may be able to break that one dissonant step by crafting imagery in which the player is indeed making 1:1 connections between the interface and the act. By seeing oneself onscreen, acting upon others, the agency produced by gesture will not simply be a *facet* of the gameplay, but the focus.
Is the idea to prove the power of games? If so, designers are evoking a very real tragedy to make what seems like a mundane point. As an industry, don't we all already believe in the power of games as an expressive medium?"
Michael,
There is a difference between "believ(ing) in the power of games as an expressive medium" and actually using them as such. Ask any game designer and most game players if they believe that games are an expressive medium and almost all of them will say "Yes." without question. But if you follow up by asking what did the last game they created/played (respectively) express and almost all of them will draw a blank.
There is no real "purpose" to the serious games movement beyond that of the game's designer. I know that doesn't really answer that question, but it is true. But there is a general consensus that the idea is not to just tell, or show but actually involve the audience in the learning process. Some people can learn by reading, some by watching, but there are many who learn better by doing. Yet there are somethings we cannot do such as the holocaust. We can read about it, watch movies about it, but when was the last time you took part in it? Train gives you an opportunity to take part on a certain level.
From personal experience, I can tell you that being an independent in the state of Oklahoma can be hard. Oklahoma is the hardest state to get an independent candidate on a Governor or Presidential ballot. We have the strictest ballot access laws in the country. I can tell you these things, show you stats give you articles to read, but in the end, you will not truly know how frustrating it is. Yet if I were able to hand you a simulation of the ballot access process an independent candidate has to go through to get on the ballot, you will come out with a better understanding.
Is the idea to prove the power of games? No. The idea is to USE the power of games. There is no need to prove the power of games. That has already been done and is recognized.
To reframe the thrust of your thesis: Imagine a computer chess program built with gesture and physics engines. Yes, you can play chess with it but you can also slam your queen on the board in victory, tip your king so it falls in sullen defeat or sweep the pieces off the board in disgust.
Physical, "reality based" games like 'Train' have what Douglas Hofstadter calls "spontaneous intrusions into a creative process." Or as Daniel C. Dennett explains, "All creative algorithms... it's very important that there be a lot of junk, a lot of noise.
However, traditional computer games are the antithesis of noisy, tending much more towards clean abstractions and explicit rules. And indeed, the problem is inherent in the technology of computers. To quote Dennett again: "In the real world if you make a hotel you have to go to a lot of trouble to insulate the rooms so people can't hear each other in the neighboring rooms. In a virtual hotel, it's just the other way around. In a virtual hotel you have to go to a lot of trouble so they can hear each other. They don't overhear each other for free, you have to add this."
Gesture based engines, physics engines, ray tracing engines -- all of these introduce noise and thus freedom and creativity. However, gesture based input is special because it places this freedom explicitly on the player, forcing her to take emotional responsibility for her freely chosen virtual actions.
Of course, this freedom must be somewhat limited or else the designer's message is lost. 'Train' without some rules is just a bunch of toys on broken glass. 'Train' with too many rules and not enough noise, is just a game.
Interestingly, this sounds like an argument against hyper-efficient interfaces for certain message games.
But what I really want in video games as far as gestureing goes is much broader. I want to feel what it's like to stick my hand through a stargate, Is it cold, hot, dry, wet, does it feel like liquid mercury, does it smell, how heavy is it? I want to ride a comet and feels the tears in my eyes from gettiting hit by the wind in my face.
I want the physical sensations, not to just act out a scenario. I want to smell the fish spawning.
Your article reminds me of a couple board games I worked on in my MFA portfolio. The act of gesture and the feel of the pieces as you place them on the board is something that may be easy to overlook in favor of rules and visuals. Gesture as well as the weight and feel of the piece can help give these tokens a sense of preciousness that rules and images alone cannot communicate. Isn't the feel of moving a chess piece or placing a stone on a Go board along with the accompanying sound an important part of the game?
There are some analogues to this in game studies through ergonomics, force feedback, unique control interfaces, and natural mappings (most of these articles should be on Gamasutra...). Digital games can allow a sense of gesture, and a feel of weight from acceleration of a digital object (such as the dual analog sticks in Katamari or acceleration in Super Mario Bros.), but not a sense of touch and weight beyond a piece of plastic - a feel that is universal to all games using the interface. For instance, you cannot replicate a pinball table in a digital game - though you might be able to come reasonably close with a very mechanical and well-designed control interface. That physicality and sense of weight is something that can only be SIMULATED in games, not enacted. Maybe this is an area for expression and emotion in games that is easy to overlook, but even has some potentials in the digital world...