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Opinion: Love, It's Working - Meaning And Action In Games
by Christian Nutt [PC, Console/PC, Mobile Phone, Mobile Console]
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August 27, 2010
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[In this editorial, Gamasutra's Christian Nutt looks at the way games use interaction and escapism -- with real-world parallels -- to see what actions can be meaningful, and what kinds drill down to meaningless button-presses.]
I just got back from Ikea.
I hate going to Ikea. I hate it because the store's design is intentionally obstructive to navigation, and because, inevitably, it's very crowded.
I'm going to assume that the majority of readers, no matter what country they hail from, have been in an Ikea. It's a European chain that's huge in the U.S., and there's one right outside Tokyo.
If not, the short of it is this. Most Ikea stores have two floors. The top floor, through which you enter the store, is a maze-like furniture showroom. Finish the first level and you can descend to the next floor, in which you have to wend your way through a dizzying array of household items.
If you make it through that maze, you're rewarded with the self-serve furniture warehouse and the checkouts -- and the exit of the dungeon.
I'm not the only person who has thought about Ikea this way, it turns out. Thinking about Ikea like a video game is not just a fun thought exercise -- it's a practical strategy for dealing with it.
Like any video game, Ikea has its secrets. The first secret you'll learn is that the designers have put in shortcuts that allow you to -- changing genres here -- skip whole worlds. When recently shopping for a mattress, I took a Warp Zone and skipped straight to bedding -- avoiding both Sofa World (1-2) and Coffee Table World (1-3).
The most important secret you will ever learn from playing Ikea is that you can subvert the entire game by taking some advice from Prince: walk in through the out door. That, along with skillful use of Warp Zones, and the recent addition of some needed player agency -- self-service checkouts -- is how I got in and out of the store in 20 minutes, a Gosa Syren pillow in hand.
I think about Ikea this way because I've been playing video games since I was a small child. I also think this mindset is dangerous.
People as Obstacles
Like anybody who plays video games, including many artists, programmers, producers, and executives, I'm an amateur game designer.
Some time ago, I had a thought. What if Ikea really were a game? What if we put those CPUs and GPUs to work on a simulation of the retail experience? If you had to navigate from entrance to exit of the store without touching another individual or knocking over a display, would that be a game?
No.
What if I embellish it with some story -- you're a bored and harried Ikea worker, and you're trying desperately to clock out without being asked any more questions by customers, while also avoiding your boss? (In case you can't tell from this paragraph, I've worked retail.)
Maybe.
Turn the Ikea worker into an Italian assassin, and you have the slip-through-the-crowd of Assassin's Creed II. Turn the worker into an acrobatic courier, and you have the dodge-and-duck of Mirror's Edge.
Why does that make it work? Because -- right now, anyway -- video games are about escapism. At the beginning of this piece I said, "I hate going to Ikea." Why would I spend $60 to go back there -- or even to a thinly-veiled parody of it?
Renaissance Venice is an acceptable setting for a game. A pretty-on-top, ugly-underneath futurescape is an acceptable setting for a game. The mall? Not an acceptable setting -- unless maybe it's been taken over by zombies.
Like I said, it's because games are about escapism. And that's dangerous, too, and I'll get back to that later as well.
Into the Inferno
I think the deficiencies of Visceral Games' Dante's Inferno are fairly obvious. That I didn't discuss them more pains me a bit because I had the perfect opportunity to do so, and squandered it.
Of course, reviewers frequently wrote about how Dante's Inferno is a God of War clone... that isn't as good as the five-year-old game it's cloning. That's typical of game criticism.
Less often discussed is the fact that it has the same premise as Super Mario Bros.
The story is a very clumsy adaptation of a classic poem, and is tawdry and cheap, with cartoon sex and ridiculous violence. It's set against a backdrop of the Crusades that doesn't, as far as I saw, engage that at all (which, given the current state of world politics, seems particularly tone deaf).
And then there's the whole thing where you encounter a famous sinner from history and are invited, after reading a brief paragraph about them, to "Push X to Save, Push Y to Damn". Are you fucking kidding me?
Upon the game's release, I remember reading Gus Mastrapa's review, and finding it strange that he barely acknowledged its sins against literature and history. He did have this to say, however, and it caught my eye:
"The Old Testament morality of Dante's Inferno got into my head after hours of sin and punishment. By the time I made it to the final circle, where traitors, liars, and politicians suffer, I made a mental note to do my best to be nice to others. After centuries, fire and brimstone still do the trick."
My reaction to playing Dante's Inferno was a shrug. His was to perceive hell as a place -- and with that insight, my dismissal of Dante's Inferno is rendered moot. Because the game, at that moment, metamorphosed into art -- for at least one man.
I don't know Mastrapa's religious beliefs. He may believe in hell as an eternal destination, meaning he comes equipped with the mindset to find the creative team's vision chilling. Without getting too deep into mine, let's just say that I don't.
In all the ways that the some at Visceral Games made creative decisions that to my mind actively opposed meaning, it seems that somehow, this game was in fact elevated by others' talents.
For the right audience, meaning bloomed in a desert for ideas.
Parched
Nobody's been writing articles in defense of Heavy Rain. There's been plenty of criticism, but I think that a mixture of commercial success, positive reviews, and personal satisfaction with the game has kept those of us who like it quiet.
But, fuck it -- that ends now.
Of course Heavy Rain has problems -- lots of them. There are concerns with the game and its content, and conversing with really smart people and reading analyses of it have convinced me that they are not trivial.
And, of course, there's Press X To Jason, the satire of the game's climactic mall sequence, in which protagonist Ethan Mars makes a fatal error.
It's apt, of course, if you're not taking the game seriously -- and I've been told by some that it's not possible to take the game seriously. I didn't have that problem. But if you are taking the game seriously...
If you are taking the game seriously, then wait a sec. Didn't Quantic Dream just turn Ikea into a game? They added drama through narrative -- a lost child -- and they did it.
Pull up your chair. Here's what makes Heavy Rain a profoundly important piece of game design.
Yes. Game design.
The game's interface, through which any action can be accomplished using the same controls -- firing a gun, driving a car, tucking in a child, kissing a woman -- makes every game action equally important.
Think about this. Most games that try to sprinkle some sentiment or levity by adding child-tucking-in or woman-kissing hack it in. You push a button. An animation plays. You're not doing those things. You're just tapping X.
And in contrast, what you're usually doing, in those games -- with a tremendous amount of depth and nuance -- is killing things.
No, shooting a gun in Heavy Rain isn't as satisfying as shooting a gun in Gears of War. No, driving a car in Heavy Rain isn't as satisfying as driving one in Gran Turismo. But, in Heavy Rain, kissing a woman or tucking in a child is as satisfying as shooting a gun or driving a car.
This elevation of all actions to the same plane is essential to what makes the game a success from a design standpoint. It is vital in terms of the game's core interactivity; it is also absolutely essential to the way the game tells its story. Each moment -- whether you're making an omelet or fighting a killer -- is truly capable of the same interactive, and thus narrative, relevance.
It's also crucial to the game's accessibility, which -- let's face it -- if we want to sell games that aren't just about killing things, is something we need to worry about. That may be, in fact, part of why the game has sold four times what the developer and the publisher estimated it would.
Of course, there's one more thing I love about Heavy Rain. And that is that it's about real life. Sure, serial killers aren't very real life, but fathers and sons and death -- meaningful death -- and neurotic journalists are. (Trust me on the last one.) This is how a trip to the mall was turned into a game, after all.
And that is so very refreshing to me, because I am, as of this writing, 33 years old.
Here Comes Cathy
Last week, Atlus, developer of the Persona series, debuted the trailer for its latest game, Catherine. Based on this teaser, the game looks confusing and dreamlike, filled with bizarre imagery. It's the kind of thing I like, generally.
But what I like so much about the trailer is not merely its style.
No, what makes Catherine matter happens at the very end of the trailer. The main character, Vincent, sits at a table with his wife, whom he's cheated on. She shouts "There's just no way I can forgive you!"
This is not one line in a storm of scrolling text. This is the sound of a woman betrayed. When's the last time you saw a game do that?
For that matter, when was the last time a publisher had the courage to release a game with a woman's name as its title?
This is the sound of a trailer becoming my trailer of 2010.
Per the official site, the game's an "action adventure". Since the trailer is gameplay-free, who knows if the bulk of it is taken up by Vincent running through surreal dreamscapes eviscerating sheep-men with a beam katana, ala No More Heroes? We can hope not -- because what made the Persona games so good is how they integrated the minds and hearts of their characters to the gameplay and world.
But the fact that it's about a guy who cheated on his wife instantly makes it a hell of a lot more interesting. This year, I went through a horrific breakup. This year, the closest I came to navigating a dungeon was buying a pillow at Ikea.
Back to the Store
When I navigate Ikea, in real life, I think about it like a game, as I've confessed. I see the furniture as obstacles.
I see the other shoppers as obstacles, too.
Whatever some politicians might suggest, this doesn't mean that I've lost touch with reality and will soon shoot up an Ikea because I can't get to the checkouts fast enough.
But here's what is dangerous: gamelike thinking may make it easy for me to navigate Ikea much faster than the average shopper. If games have failed to erode my morals in any meaningful way, which I assert is true, they may have still permanently changed the way I look at the world -- in a very weird way.
And here's what else is dangerous: the more our games concentrate entirely on escapism, the more impossible it is to put any sense of reality into them. Not because you can't have meaningful characters embedded in fantasies, of course. But because, in their attempts to so forcefully escape the bounds of the real world, they deliberately avoid meaning.
But you can't avoid what you're mired in. And therefore, so often, they are simply beautiful -- but boring -- trips to Ikea. We can't leave the world behind; we just clumsily obscure it.
We do not need to lay these empty fantasies on so thick. Look at Heavy Rain! It's not realistic, say its critics. Yes, it isn't. The Origami Killer stuff gets silly. But it's no less realistic than Lost or Inception, and it's more realistic, in many ways, than the average episode of CSI -- which, of these examples, it most resembles.
Where Heavy Rain succeeds is because of the relationship between Ethan Mars and Shaun Mars, the relationship between Shaun Mars and Scott Shelby, the relationship between Madison Paige and Ethan Mars.
Heavy Rain's story was derided for being a toolbox full of blunt tools, and it is -- and it's good that we recognize that, so we can do better. But these emotional tools are the fundamental tools of storytelling. We fundamentally can't throw them out just because it's easier to set a game in outer space and pay the merest lip service to the idea that people there there could be fathers, sons, or lovers.
And maybe its gameplay is also one blunt tool -- but if it's a limited instrument, it's also a versatile one. By mapping gameplay meaningfully onto all in-world interactions rather than just one, meaning comes along for the whole ride.
A friend told me a funny story. When he was playing Dragon Age: Origins, he was, coincidentally, in a very bad frame of mind. At the time he was also going on a lot of dates. He looked at these dates, he says, much like NPC interactions in the game.
When I was going out on dates I wasn't thinking "What do I want to know about this girl?" and "Are the two of us compatible?" or even "Do I WANT to go out with this girl?"
Instead, I started perceiving every first date as an "interaction", and the things I said and she said as obstacles on the way to improving her attitude towards me.
Is it warped that he thinks this way? Yes. Is it bad that playing Dragon Age is like going on a series of bad dates? That's worth thinking about too.
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... that is to say, not very satisfying?
Anime doesn't tend to have a lot of mature adult relationships, either, so again, I don't think comparing it to Love Hina or whatever (that's the generic example I use whenever I try to think of the shittiest possible romance anime) is relevant. I could be wrong, but I hope not.
www.floogin.com
When was the last time you went to the theatre and every movie was placed in some fantasy or action setting? Most Likely never. While there are a lot of movies in the fantasy (Avatar) and action (The Expendables) settings, there are equally as many in the "real world" settings.
Sure they tend to throw in some escapism into the plots and themes, but the basic setting and premise is relatable and thus allow for a greater variety of consumers.
I am not saying every game should be in a realistic setting, I am saying that we should not be afraid to make games outside of current trends. The Wii is the perfect opportunity to do this. The new consumers that have been brought in by it are ripe for marketing new game concepts. What are we waiting for?
Ikea the game could be very popular - slap it on the website or make an app that helps you redesign your house and then bing you get both the bottom line and a coupon. (Like at Bed Bath and Beyond's site)
GE has a game on their site about hospital efficacy. (Talk about lame)
Diner Dash, the simulators about baby sitting and teaching - very mundane and no coupons.
Could it be that games aren't actually about escaping into a narrative or location but about being occupied and that is the real escape? Newton's Apple (one of those match three games) has no story but still I feel compelled to play it. Bejewelled, same thing.
I love narrative but pulling on my heart stings is a little blunt too.
Seriously though, think about the Ikea game.
But remember, that video games are way different than books or movies, and we've seen how trying to move on the other turns out.
No..."
Actually, YES. Adding story to something doesn't make anything a game. Your first example would make a perfectly fine game.
Great article. I agree with you completely, but with this paragraph in particular. A lot of great art is, in fact, made up of really blunt tools - but they're combined in creative ways so that they seem much subtler. King Lear is a blunt story about an inept king combined with a blunt story about a deserving daughter combined with a blunt story about madness vs. kingship combined with a blunt story about a faithful retainer, but the whole play is a triumph of Literature. Although Heavy Rain was definitely a bit heavy-handed, it's the first game that's even approached that level of emotional complexity that I've played, and rather than complain about its implementation of these aspects, I'd rather see it as a step towards a more complex medium.
There is nothing dangerous about it. Ever since computers came into my life the world has gotten more interesting.
If I walk to the store and see people milling about I immediately start thinking about flow patterns and most likely flow directions or bottlenecks.
Sometimes it's just amusing to look at people in public as they move around, herd mentality, or sometimes behave just as oddly as a badly tweaked AI in a modern game. (this always cracks me up when humans behave like that in real life).
Also your Ikea "exploit" is not against the law, does not hurt anyone, it saves you time, you populate the store less, thus reducing crowding in the store by 1 person and indirectly increasing the safety in case of a fire or similar (as you would be out the store much quicker than you otherwise would), you also end up less annoyed which makes you more relaxed in the car home thus increasing traffic safety.
These are things that constantly go though my head all the time, I've become way more analytical and logic based than I was before I started with computers.
For example, "Press X to Save, Press Y to Damn" is criticized as brutally oversimplifying a powerful moral choice. (A view with which I agree.) But on the other hand, simplifying all controls in Heavy Rain -- as opposed to enhancing them to have the same expressive richness as combat -- is applauded. This seems inconsistent.
But the core of this article is what's really interesting. In a way, this is the gloomy Black Hat version of the cheerful Yellow Hat picture painted by Jesse Schell in his now-infamous DICE 2010 presentation. As reality is better represented in games, and games in turn are more reflected in reality, is that a problem? Or an opportunity? Or, like most technologies, can't it be both at once?
Doesn't it depend somewhat on the player?
I have a story I like to tell about the difference between Circuit City and Ikea -- I absolutely despised the former, and loved the latter.
Walk into a Circuit City and you would immediately be swarmed by vulture-like sales reps, all desperately trying to make a commission off of you. Walk into an Ikea, by contrast, and you are left in peace to look around, sit on the furniture, and otherwise shop without being interrupted. If you need help, the centrally-located customer center is easy to find, but otherwise you can shop at your own pace.
And that works for me, because I'm an Explorer. When I go to Ikea, I don't go there looking for one specific thing and expecting to find it, buy it, and leave. I go there with plenty of time and a willingness to poke into nooks and crannies (which is how I found the Warp Zones). Ikeas are optimally designed for exploration, not find/buy/leave. (This is also why seeing the world of Dante's Inferno: The Game as a *place* makes a difference. Places can be explored.)
I would submit that places like Ikea and Central Market and Half-Price Books do not cater to Achievers, but to Explorers, and that expecting these places to support the Achiever model of shopping is the source of the cognitive dissonance that Christian describes. There are plenty of stores whose sales model is nicely adapted to Achievers looking to level up quickly -- what's wrong with there also being places that are fun to browse through?
And that is a metaphor for game design.
The only danger I see lies in the belief that there is but One True Way of design, whether of computer games or home furnishings or architecture or any other functional/aesthetic expression.
I think I addressed this actually.
If anything it has to do with the inconsistency between the two works I'm discussing. As noted, most games that have a deviation for some sort of non-violence-based interaction do so in a very shallow way, and that is the case here.
This mechanic in particular is frankly one of the most laughable examples of this I have encountered. I didn't even get into the fact that all you net out of it is either Damn or Save XP, which you then funnel into learning special moves. So you're making this lofty moral decision, but effectively the only real player motivation is just to pick the flavor of XP that you want to earn. This is what I mean about creative decisions that are deliberately antagonistic to creative meaning.
Heavy Rain doesn't offer these sorts of bifurcated interactions. Sure, tucking in Shaun isn't as protracted (or tense) a sequence as it is to escape from a guy who ties Madison up in the basement, but the point is that they offer precisely the same form of interactivity so it's not as though one is innately more satisfying than the other, and thus implicitly "less important".
Where I persist in seeing inconsistency is that while you criticize DI's moral choice mechanic for being simple -- you see a disconnect between the deep story and the "Press X/Y" mechanic -- you then praise the simplification of all actions in HR. All interactions do have equal weight in HR -- they're all equally trivialized.
I agree that this has the effect you rightly advocate of not implicitly promoting violence over other actions. But making everything equally simple isn't the only choice! What about going the other direction? Why not instead create gameplay systems that give depth to all the meaningful choices that players can make?
Yes, it would probably be necessary to thoughtfully limit the number of actions (for that Holy Grail of "accessibility"). But instead of dragging all interactions with the gameworld down to the excessively simplistic level of a buttonmash to save or damn a soul, decision-making mechanics ought to be designed to have the same or greater depth of interaction as things like violence. This yields exactly the same desired result of giving all choices equal weight, but it has the additional virtue of allowing complex moral choices to be made based on a rich set of variables.
That, I believe, is the better way to eliminate the disconnect between the depth of story and the richness of decision-making mechanics.
More to the point, if HR did have a "Damn or save?" moment, it would have emotional depth and would actually matter from a storytelling standpoint. Several moments in HR do, in fact, mirror this "Damn or save" moment (mostly choices that Ethan makes about whether or not to complete the trials) and they do have emotional weight and caused me, personally, a great deal of discomfort because of the terrible choice I had to make.
In any case, the fact that I was invested in the *whole* experience of HR, emotional as well as gameplay-wise, meant that I found the shootout sequences in that game far more compelling than similar sequences in action games, simply because I felt that these were real people I was shooting, and that I was a real character who was really dedicated to doing this terrible thing, ie. killing people. No other game has made me feel that sort of ethical immersion in terms of killing people, which, ironically, made this game - despite its broader-but-less-deep controls - feel much deeper than any other to me.
Played it again last weekend and lost $570.
All I have to show for it is some Billys and a nice Galant.
I'll be in Burbank this weekend to play Ikea again there.
Wow, Slots in Vegas are cheaper! Grin!
Remember P.T. Barnum and his Menagerie and the signs he posted saying "To the Egress"!
We have become hopeless romantics seeking the ever elusive Egress ever since!
Two things, in no particular order of importance:
1) All fiction is fantasy. And avoidance of meaning is endemic to many artforms. The majority of art condemned as "escapist" is genre fiction, however; the majority of art affirmed as "realistic" is mainstream stuff--i.e., stories of tedious, weak, not-very-bright and not-very-virtuous people and their everyday lives. The breakdown between mainstream and genre art is not based on the realism of the content--it's based on the social class of the producer and consumer.
Personally, I think the value of art which reproduces the lives and tribulations of mediocre human beings and their lives is highly, highly overrated, as is the "danger" of exercising your imagination. But if you can successfully design a game which will persuade the same people who crowd the theater for romantic comedies to buy it and play it? More power to you. Maybe you can get these people off the rest of our backs.
2) The majority of art which is reviled as "escapist" is not devoid of meaning--it is in fact only guilty of failing to affirm the status quo, and reproduce the lives and the worldview of people who are very comfortable with it. I never hear the word "escapism" as an epithet from a critic unless that person is safely white, and/or safely middle-class, and always painfully devoid of imagination. Such people wield the lash to punish anyone who imagines a different world. or dreams that humankind can aspire to more than the petty passions and dull miseries of their own everyday lives.
My desire to indulge them in this petty tyranny is less than zero, I'm afraid. Someone else can write stories about creepy jerks who cheat on their wives. If I'm going to all the trouble of creating an imaginary world, I'll populate it with a better class of people--and know that those who call that world "unrealistic" are telling me a whole lot more about themselves than they are about my fiction.
Even if you're referring only to critics as being IYO insufficiently non-Caucasian or not poor enough (all "practical" people are white? being poor makes for better criticism?), it's still an unnecessary slander. The people who don't get why escapism has value are never going to get it, regardless of their skin color or their finances. Reviling them contributes nothing of any worth to the constructive, here's-why-it-matters-even-if-not-everyone-gets-it defense of the fantastic that needs to be made regularly -- not to convince the willfully mundane, but to invigorate the artists.
I think we're in agreement on the basic point, which is that so-called escapist art has value. We also agree that some people just don't get that, but I don't think it helps make the positive case for escapism to verbally spit on those for whom no argument will ever be strong enough.
As for the racist/classist stuff, not only is that unnecessary and unhelpful, it's flat wrong. You are of course free to express it (within the rules of this site's operators); I'm free to disagree, and I do.
My comment is not addressed to people who MERELY lack imagination or taste. My comment is addressed to people who proactively condemn and seek to demote genre literature as somehow lacking and inferior, when genre literature is guilty of nothing more and nothing less than failure to humbly serve the interests of the middle class.
I personally find people who use the word "dangerous" about the arts have an overwhelming tendency, demographically, to be of the race and class that is sitting at the apex of the status quo. If you can't see why such people would set themselves up as the gatekeepers of both art and virtue, you don't understand much about the world OR art.
As for "being unhelpful"--don't project your agenda onto me. I am not "making a case for escapist literature"--I don't think the art needs to be defended. I think the enemy needs to be gutted and exposed as the shamelessly narcissistic hypocrites that they are.
I have no agenda to convince people to share my taste and values. I am more than happy to simply shame people who use the words "escapism" and "dangerous" in the same breath into silence.
But I find that the best genre fiction (and by "best" I mean the fiction which makes me consider what it means to be human and really affects me emotionally and causes me to reconsider how the world works) always looks beyond the bounds of its genre and considers bigger questions. Bad westerns are about horses and guns, but good westerns are about law and order and exploration and whether or not you can have heros. Bad science fiction stories are about spaceships and cool time-travelling plot twists, but good science fiction is about mankind's place in the universe, the desperate need society has to expand and the wonderful/terrible impact of technology on human lives.
One of my favourite authors is Philip K. Dick, who wrote sci-fi. His books weren't about the future: although they were set forty years in the future and some were set on Mars, they were all about his desperation and confusion living in a modern world which refused to behave as he thought it should, mainly due to technology and advertising. His books took this and made it comprehensible to other people through the medium of sci-fi. Now, you might not agree with me but I think that his books are some of the best sci-fi around not because they are more imaginative than others (though that's a worthy thing to strive for) but because they express something about the world he lived in which can evoke those feelings in others and make them reconsider the world around them in a new light.
I don't want all games to be realistic or serious. That'd be a great loss - look at Grim Fandango, it's not very serious and one of the most brilliant, wonderful games I've ever played. But I do want some serious games which evoke deep emotions and make you consider the human condition. You can do that in genre games and in realistic games, it depends on the game, obviously. But I think that, since modern environments are more immediately recognisable and more familiar to gamers, a story set there will have more emotional impact. If the king of some fantasy kingdom loses his only son then that's sad, but if a father in a mall loses his son it's much worse because the gamer can see that the father is a person like himself in a situation he could be in, which makes the gamer able to relate to the situation that much more easily.
as for the rest of your article it brings a very interesting question to mind, games attempt to provide realism within a gameplay model, but does that model actually cheapen our real world interactions? I mean let's be honest here to some extent The typical date process most games have you go through is fairly realistic. You take the woman or man of your preference out on a date a few times, they tell you a little more about themselves each time, and eventually you get to experience the hot coffee !
It';s an interesting thing, and if you are a developer or even a gamer who has played for most of your lifetime it's a hard thing not to do. I know mathematicians that think about the world in mathematics, I know Teachers and librarians who think the world can be explained in words and books....so why wouldn't us, the people who make games for a living thing about the world like a game ?
as for games offering a social commentary I have no opinion on that, I play games to enjoy them, not to learn new things or ponder my existence, their are other avenues for that and the last thing I want is somebody bashing me over the head with their point of view within a game world .
Anyway, like some others, I must disagree with you about the IKEA game. You don't need a narrative to make a good game. Poker and Chess and Go do fine without them. Instead, a good game (besides good mechanics obviously) has a theme. And whether that is political/military conflict, boundary disputes, or shopping efficiently, as long as the conflict reflects these themes you can have a great game.
@Arinn: I don't think Christian was using the word "dangerous" the way you think he's using it. If I understand him correctly, he's not saying viewing the world through a gaming lens may lead to violence, but that every lens channels our thoughts. Just look at the way you see the world through a racial/economic lens that leads you to categorize and judge huge swaths of people. You mind is being channeled. That is the inherent "danger" to choosing a favorite lens and sticking to it. I think what Christian is advocating is including a broader spectrum of themes and ideas into our mental processes as we design and live our lives. It's good and healthy to look through a racial/economic lens as we encounter new ideas and consider the big questions of life. Not so much if that's the only one you look through. And if we game creators are only looking through a lens of previous game design, we are likely to fall into the "dangerous" trap of the echo chamber. We will see the world through game theory, and then interpret that world back into games in a less artistic way as a result. Am I reading you right Christian?
Johnathan Jennings: "I know mathematicians that think about the world in mathematics, I know Teachers and librarians who think the world can be explained in words and books....so why wouldn't us, the people who make games for a living thing about the world like a game ?"
I was thinking the same thing.