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Opinion: The Authorship Conflict -- All For One, Or One For All?
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC, Columns, Exclusive]
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April 23, 2009
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Should a designer's objective be to build an environment where players can drive events and experiences, or should the game determine the objective, with responsibility for leading player behavior in meaningful ways?
This philosophy conflict between user-created experiences and designed authorship is one of the most interesting issues emerging in next-gen games. I first started getting my head around it when I recently heard Warren Spector giving a lecture on his approach to design at NYU. His talk was followed by an informal but fascinating Q&A with Area/Code's Frank Lantz -- if you're familiar with both these guys, you can imagine how interesting the discussion was!
In case you're unfamiliar, Lantz and Area/Code are very well worth reading up on -- Lantz is, last I checked, a professor in the Tisch School’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and heads up NYU's Game Center. But if you're a Facebook user, you probably know Area/Code best for Parking Wars, which played a major if not defining role in turning the spotlight on FB as an emerging platform for social play.
Whether or not Parking Wars is a "video game" is open for debate, of course -- but it is interactive multi-user play imagined by traditional game designers, and it's significant because it reached users where they were already interacting, rather than demanding they enter the designer's world in a traditional way. You also may or may not know that it was created as a cross-media extension of an A&E reality show -- I sure didn't, at first -- which provokes some interesting thoughts on how game design can help IP be media-independent.
These kinds of ideas about games are less-known to the core video game audience, of course, but at Austin GDC last year, Lantz said Parking Wars pulled 400,000 users in its first two months -- close enough to twice what EVE Online has got now, if I'm not mistaken.
 Hopefully you can see why it was so interesting to see someone like Lantz talk with someone from Spector's world -- Origin, Looking Glass, Ultima, System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief -- about the role designers play in the kind of experiences players have.
I've always tended to fall on Spector's side of the fence -- I've never been a fan of multiplayer games, because really, I want to interact with a guided vision, not my pals from the internet. Spector would rather have you talk around the water cooler about the moments you discovered in his game that he didn't plan for, and discuss amongst yourselves the way you all experienced the same thing differently, rather than hear a recounting of what was essentially your group social outing (involving headshots).
I get it. Say what you will about the BioShock "choice," for example, but we're all learning from the differences in one another's experiences of the same event. Meanwhile, the story of your WoW raid is solely personal, and interesting only to you and your guild.
One thing Spector said during the NYU discussion was that he feels multiplayer games are "lazy." This is the designer in him talking, of course -- his theory that in letting players build stories via Left 4 Dead-style happy accidents in open worlds, the designer doesn't have to tackle complex challenges like making choices meaningful, or making characters believable.
 Spector wants to take on those challenges, and he doesn't like the idea that user-driven play, from his standpoint, effectively allows game design to bypass them. It's actually an idea I relate to a lot as a writer -- I was raised in an era of authoritative media, when individual voices drove culture, opinion and information. The internet's changed everything, of course; the authoritative voice has evolved into a conversation between writer and audience, and the writer now leads the community discussion rather than acting as a single determiner, a unilateral judge.
And it doesn't take a professional writer to lead a community -- many feel that the rise of citizen journalism and the core concept of crowd wisdom means that individual authority in media will eventually disappear altogether.
Naturally, as someone who makes her living as a journalist, I reflexively dislike this idea -- is this why I am a Spector-sympathizer? If the game designer insists on authorial authority, is that his self-interest in the way?
Lantz actually called Spector out -- politely, of course, as it was obvious that both gentlemen respected their differences -- because one of the advice items Spector had offered the primarily-student audience was that the design process shouldn't be ego-driven, and that designers shouldn't try to impose their will on players. Why then, should Spector want to fight the apparent trend toward user-governed gameplay in order to build the experience from the game design power seat?
As with most divergent perspectives, it's unlikely that reality will skew solely to one side or another; the rise of social games and user-generated content doesn't mean the author-driven video game will just poof away. But questions of control are still fun to think about -- do you want to drive the community yourself, or do you want to interact in an environment that's been created for you?
Are all of us together as good at game design as one Warren Spector? And what might we see taking place in the games industry if in fact the answer is yes?
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It sort of comes down to the social experience versus the personal experience and open world games versus games with more linear progression. I believe, as you point out, that both are likely to exist as games evolve.
Both approaches offer interesting and unique gameplay ideas and experiences, so it should not be a matter of choosing one over the other. Advancing both so they can learn from the techniques of each other seems like the smarter path.
Great article.
Luckily, the industry has grown to a point where different philosophies can co-exist. Different types of gamers require different types of experiences, and some, like myself, can enjoy different designer's visions. I like generating my own content like in LBP, I like mmo's, I like deathmatch FPS with my friends, and I also like a single player experience that is the sole vision of the designer. User generated content and multiplayer games are becoming more and more popular, so I can see where some designers may see that as (a better word for threat?), but there is a clear need for many design philosophies to co-exist.
What it seems to come down to is the question, "Who is the storyteller?"
To exaggerate the case somewhat, a developer who thinks it's the game creator's responsibility to tell a good story is likely to insist that every moment in the gameworld, every possible aspect of the play experience, must be controlled as tightly as possible. I've played games like that. I didn't much care for them; I like for my choices to have some narrative consequences.
Meanwhile, a developer who thinks that people should be as free as possible to tell their own stories is likely to be equally certain that players should be given storytelling tools and then turned loose. Taken to its extreme, this leads to virtual worlds like Second Life, which is so far from an author-directed experience that it's not even a game. The Sims would be a slightly less extreme example.
I believe Warren Spector enjoys much of his positive (and IMO well-deserved) reputation since the days of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss because the games he produces tend to occupy a smart middle ground between these two extremes. There's a definite story being told in his games, but players are -- by design -- able to approach that story through any of a number of supported playstyles. At a high level, these games are linear; but at any moment of play there's considerable freedom to take different paths in solving story-related problems -- even more so than in, say, Valve's highly-regarded Half-Life games in which the player-character is sometimes literally "on rails."
So why haven't the Spector-type games been more successful commercially? I don't say that as a criticism; I happen to enjoy those games more than any other. But I think it's a valid question from a business-oriented game design perspective. Is something distinctive lost when both designer and player have equal billing as "the storyteller" of a game?
I have only slight familiarity with BioShock, but from what I gather from friends, you can progress through that game following a variety of very different paths. Even then, you are running on rails laid by the game designer. In this case, you have a multi-threaded set of rails, but a set of rails, nontheless.
A better example of user created authorship would probably be Ultima Online. In UO, there were no quests to speak of. There were dungeons to explore, and critters to kill above ground, but these were mostly for resource gathering, not story telling. Origin supplied the stage, and players supplied the stories, and there were as many stories as there were players. Some stories were obscure, and some stories spanned an entire shard, and some became know across other shards.
I have personal experience with a player war between two guilds that involved not only our two guilds on UO Siege Perilous, but featured a web of alliances that formed and broke, included betrayals, heroism, double crosses, victories and defeats for both sides as the shifting fortunes of the war ebbed and flowed. Hundreds of players were involved in this war, either directly or indirectly, and it spilled out of the game and into the UO forums, and various respective guild forums. It lasted for a couple of years. None of it was developed, coordinated, or even acknowleged by Origin, and yet it remains my most significant gaming experience of the last decade.
I can see where Warren Spector may not like the idea of user generated content, but in both Ultima Online and in the late lamented Shadowbane, the stories generated by the players themselves were far superior to any of the thin homogonized, sanitized, repetative gruel supplied by most game developers.
I'm sure developers like Spector have tales they want to tell. Based on recent game failures, many players are not interested in what they have to offer.
Give us a compelling world, and then get out of our way. More often than not, at least in the MMO world, you are an obstacle, not a resource.
But Spector has discovered a new medium. A medium for storytelling that did not exist before. It is only a historic coincidence that this medium came out of games.
This new medium's interactivity introduces an entirely new range of possibilities for storytelling. Authors will develop ways of including the player in the telling without having to give up their role. Such active involvement of the public has in fact been a dream of many artists for many centuries. We have finally developed a technology that is capable of realizing this dream. But it will take some time to understand how to do this well.