The voice of the
auteur
Game designers are artists
with vision and their own personal voice. If games are experiences where
the most active voice will be that of the players, what opportunity
is there for designers to express their authorial voice? How do we identify
our Steven Spielberg or Orson Welles? Historically, such iconic voices
are rare in the game industry.
Perhaps we are looking in the
wrong place. In games, the voice of the designer becomes less about
having a unique narrative style than it is about using various types
of game systems in a distinctive fashion. In this light, you can easily
observe the unique voice of industry luminaries that extends beyond
simple genre classifications:
- Jeff Minter with
his psychedelic retro shooters.
- Shigeru Miyamoto's
teams and their crisp mechanics of exploration and skill acquisition.
- Will Wright's teams
and their micromanagement heavy simulations of everyday life.
Once you begin looking at authorial
voice from this perspective, new opportunities become apparent. Instead
of asking "What type of characters or narrative do I want to put
in front of my audience?" you instead ask "What are the cultural
values and common emotional touch points that our team wants to encourage
in our player community?" This is most evident in multiplayer games,
but the same decisions apply to single player experiences.
Ron Meiners told a tale of
how while serving as a community liaison for an online game, he always
made sure to talk publically about how the group was surprisingly helpful
and generous. Overtime, this strategy of highlighting and socially rewarding
desired behavior was adopted as a standard practice within the community.
As a result activities such as trolling, griefing and other common negative
social behaviors popped up only rarely.
There are two fascinating aspects
of this example. The first is that authorial intent is exercised through
active social engineering. Again, the designer is playing with systems,
albeit social ones instead of merely mechanical ones. The second aspect
is that the players themselves take an active role in magnifying the
designer's message. The player-base acts as a "greek chorus"
that guides and informs the individual players.
Lesson here include:
- Community norms
shape the players voice. Designers and community liaisons assume immediate
roles of authority and through their actions, set the tone for the community.
- Belief creates behavior.
The designer is in a unique role to codify, promote and reward desired
beliefs.
Ethical
considerations
What are the ethics associated
with the type of massive, intentional psychological manipulation that
we are contemplating?
The Stanford
Prison Experiment: Is this appropriate
game mediation?
Much of what we are discussing
is not so different from the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. In
the 1970's, two groups of apparently well-adjusted students were put
in a simulated prison. Some were randomly assigned as prisoners and
others were assigned as guards. After only six days, the researchers
called off the experiment due to evidence of sadism, depression and
intense prisoner stress. The act of putting good people in an evil environment
resulted in behavior most would deem immoral.
There is obviously a spectrum
of moral behavior possible in a mediated experience. At one end you
have the relatively good-hearted Dancing with the Stars where everyone
proclaims it to have been an empowering experience. At the other, you
have game designer created situations like the Stanford Prison Experiment
where the design provokes the dramatic and life altering psychological
breakdown of the players. Heaven forbid game designers get into the
business of mock human sacrifice.
There are already a few voices
in the game design community, such as Jonathan Blow, that are actively
decrying the game design techniques used in popular online games as
unethical. On the other side, capitalistic forces are pushing teams
to build ever more intense and addictive experiences. The ethics of
mediated experiences is a topic bound to spawn passionate debate over
the coming decades.