Philosophical Game Design

An advisory: this is a really pretentious one.

Philosophy is one of the most applicable fields. It might not have much practical use, but as the history of ways of thinking it represents something relevant to any intellectual endeavor. Let's talk about how one might use philosophy to make a game.

You might select a specific idea from the corpus of philosophy, and construct a new mechanic (or variation on an existing mechanic) which summarizes the concept. It's been done already, too. Most obviously, any combat-heavy RPG is a decent example of a Hegelian dialectic: the player faces a series of roughly symmetrical challenges between his avatar and another one; after each one, the avatar changes in a manner based on the conflict, and proceeds to the next. Turn it around backwards and you've got Warning Forever; make it multiplayer and you've got a single-elimination tournament. If you explicitly set out to make a game with that philosophy, however, you'll come up with something that pays very close attention to what happens in the challenge, or even combine some attributes of the vanquished avatar into the victorious, rather than genericizing everything into EXP and learning.

To make a game in favor of determinism, construct a low-chaos system in which all player actions lead to the same conclusion; to make a game opposed to it, do the opposite. Pascal's Wager, where the option on which the player bets determines the reward for betting correctly, can easily be modified to represent a gambling game. Peter Molyneux and the good folks at Bioware have already caught onto this idea by attempting to find models of ethics that can function in a game, to varying degrees of success.

Narrative-driven games can employ the techniques that authors have been employing for centuries to advocate any argument under the sun. It's intuitive, though the bolder the idea, the more skill needed from the writer (so the more jack-of-all-tradey among us might want to tread carefully).

I mentioned earlier that games have themes. A philosophically-designed game is one that is intended from the beginning to contain a specific and lofty theme. Since before Socrates, philosophers have constructed hypothetical, highly improbable settings which simplify a new, complex idea. Since these settings rely on a specific set of rules, it's fairly straightforward to use games as a continuation of the practice, with the added option that the audience may learn the idea by exploring it, rather than having it explained to them.

Classical Computer Science

It occurred to me, of late, that there is some considerable overlap between concepts in modern computer science and classical philosophy, in particular the ontological models of ancient Greek philosophers. There is a fairly obvious relationship between class inheritance and Aristotelian taxonomy. The abstract data type is nothing if not a practical example of Plato's concept of ideals (and, although this is more likely to be a coincidence, Plato regarded ideals as the ultimate truth, while in Lisp-derived languages and others, all types inherit from T or True).

And never you mind that any programming language is a formalized system of symbolic logic built upon a set of axioms. You already know that Zeno and Euclid invented those. Mathematical similarities don't count; there's nothing particularly insightful in pointing out that Pythagoras suggested everything could be represented numerically. There are plenty of other pertinent examples. Thales' explanation of change and substance (the fundamental substance of a thing remains the same although its attributes change) is preserved in mutable objects; Democritus' description of the atom is closely related to the discrete mathematics upon which all computer science relies; when Empodocles proposed the four classical elements, he was in fact suggesting the first-order primitives of the universe.

Naïve, low-detail models of the physical world are another common element in classical writing, with pre-Galilean science being what it was. The Greeks maintained such viewpoints because they made intuitive sense and were not subjected to particular scrutiny; modern software engineers do so by stripping away all the data not important to their current undertaking, for purposes of specialization and optimization. Even so, there is noteworthy similarity between classical physics and computing idioms. Of particularly striking interest is classical optics: the notion that vision and light is based on plain rays, rather than the modern model of photons and whatnot. A supposed debate among early students of optics was whether vision functioned by casting rays from the eyes to the objects being seen, or light sources casting rays which entered the eyes. Need I even point out the parallel to different ray tracing methods? In that light (ha!), John Carmack's fascinating work of late rather portrays him as a modern-day... I'm not entirely certain there is a suitable historic analogy for what he's doing right now, but it's nevertheless exciting.

Presumably, all of this mimicry of classical philosophy emerged unintentionally. People perhaps followed a similar thought process to the ancient sages, or, having been exposed at some point to the logical structure of their teachings, repeated them unawares. What might happen if we were to deliberately combine structured classical philosophy and computer science? What about other, later types of philosophy that build upon them? There are millennia of profound thought in human history, attempting to identify the true nature of the world. Since software simulation can present a model of the world which does not need to be accurate, so long as it is mathematically consistent, adopting their efforts to our craft may well introduce equally profound new models with distinct advantages, so that a little knowledge of history may elevate our craft beyond even what our own luminaries and sages have done.

Open for business

Well, I had some issues with my host. Didn't have time to resolve it, since I was all of a sudden quite busy with school. It shouldn't happen again, though.

I'm going to be using this place to showcase some of what I've been working on, just as soon as I bring it to a presentable state.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Music to my ears

Chris Dahlen has made a startlingly good point about games, video games especially, being like music. In a particularly apt comparison, he mentions the importance of technical expertise, subtle emotional effects, and the thrill of listening or playing that games and music have in common, not to mention the spectacular successes that result when the two media are combined. It is a remarkable insight and I hope everybody who's even a little bit important in games takes it to heart. But I disagree with his conclusion about the synergy between games and story. He's right that a game need not have a story any more than a song does, and to expect one is silly. But I think it is worth mentioning that the conjunction of music and storytelling is a prehistoric practice.

The clearest demonstration of this is in the form of the ballad: a narrative poem set to music. A simple, iconic story that resonates with some fundamental component of human nature can remain in the public consciousness for decades, or longer if special effort is taken to preserve it. A well-developed and catchy melody, exemplifying an emotion, has a similar lifespan. The only ones that last longer are those that are really good. If the two are combined, however, they'll last a lot longer, with less effort, even if neither is as masterful. Music being inherently emotional, the tune helps to reinforce the emotional theme of the story. Stories being inherently memorable, the narrative helps to form a mnemonic for the melody. The final effect is that by using these two media in a complementary fashion, the threshold of artistic immortality is lowered considerably.

Music and story have been combined to great effect in other ways. The one that is most applicable to the field of video games in particular is the opera. Opera has been regarded for some time as the single art form which most thoroughly showcases the extremes of human emotion. Their stories and music alike are awash with pathos, and typically focus on love so deep that any real person would be lucky (or unlucky!) to experience, concluding with perfect happiness or ultimate despair. Operatic narratives are rarely more than a straightforward (if occasionally convoluted) love story, and the most memorable music is always found in the dances, overtures, and arias, when the story is not developing. But, especially to a connoisseur of the high arts, the combined effect is breathtaking.

Operas and folk ballads alike have been suppressed by various tyrants throughout the ages, because the power of music to inspire and compel in conjunction with stories is known well. Powerful ideas - perhaps not subtle ideas, but powerful ones - can be made at home in music, although it's quite true that these songs tend to be about something, whereas music and story can both exist in isolation as a testament to their creators' talent. If the combination of music and narrative possesses such potential, and music is comparable to games, then surely there is room for a powerful combination of games and narrative.

However, it's not enough to simply say that it can happen. As game creators we already believe that games can do anything. We need direction. And that direction, I believe, can be found by an examination of how, specifically, musically narrative media is complemented by its components.

Music is an inherently emotional medium. This seems to be a genetic trait shared by all humans, even if disagreements abound as to which music in particular kindles the intended emotions and which just annoys the listener with its droning, grating noise. The stories which have most benefited from attachment to music are, thus, the very highly emotional ones: epics, tragedies, classical comedies, inspiring tales of heroism and love and great deeds, stories that awaken us to the breadth of the human heart, cause us to empathize with the protagonists, and otherwise inspire strong feeling.

A game, on the other hand, is not an inherently emotional medium. Our primal connection with games is not as an emotional device, and emotional exuberance of any sort than intense concentration or Zen-like disconnection tend to be detrimental to our connection with the game or our performance therein. A number of conclusions might be drawn from this: it is, perhaps, an intellectual medium (in that a game engages the intellect), or a systemic medium (in that a game is a representation of a system), or an educational medium (in that a game teaches us something beyond its own scope).

Not only the stories told by games, but also the way in which they are told, need to be told with consideration to the fundamental nature of the medium of games. Thus far, video games have indeed remained closest to film, which, as a descendant of the combination of theater and opera, tends to be either emotional or philosophical in its narrative, and this sort of narrative may not be appropriate for games. I do not think that further meditation on my part will be of much use to answering this question; instead, we should look to games which have attempted different types of story, as well as make more games with that particular intention, and examine which are effective.

The 2010 Device

The big buzzword at GDC was "democratization." Or "democratisation" if you speak the Queen's English. Although a buzzword, this is a fairly big idea, and it seemed to me that everybody who was talking about it (even if they didn't realize they were talking about it) had a different idea about how to approach it. Microsoft, with XNA, approached it from the distribution angle: making it easier for game makers to publish. Raph Koster and Rod Humble, among others whom I regrettably was unable to see, had not merely ideas about bringing development to people like your grandma, but technology for making it happen. And it seemed like everybody had a success story about how customization abilities and social network integration boosted their games' critical and commercial reception.

The lesson to learn from this is simple: people have a voracious appetite for games. They can no longer be satisfied merely with what professionals and auteurs provide, if they could ever be satisfied in this way in the first place. In order for games to survive in the era of YouTube they need to have the variety and accessibility of YouTube; in order for games to survive in the era of Facebook they need to have the connectivity and extensibility of Facebook. And we'll need the organizational power of a Google or Amazon to sort through it all.

All right, so anybody who was at the Conference last week knows it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out, nor to perceive the gears that are already in motion to realize that scenario. By the time the next GDC rolls around we can see how it worked out. I'm looking further into the future, to the GDC after that. The year 2010.

Incidentally, Ray Kurzweil, in his keynote address, had an interesting thing to say about the technology that we'd have to work with in 2010.

The innate advantages that we game developers (I hesitate to use the term "professional," but the ones with more claim to the title than Joe User will after he's learned the tools from The Sims Carnival) possess are these:

• A more thorough understanding of the artistic nature of games
  
• The knowledge to games for people with widely different tastes than ourselves
• The ability to create and deploy larger-scale technologies which more fully make use of our target platforms and the Internet
• The resources to fill our game with huge amounts of deliberately constructed content, customized for our purpose
• A stronger position from which to negotiate the distribution and monetization of our handiwork

Come 2010, we will need to have learned how to make the most of these advantages. Television, here, is the medium which we should study: many television studios are adapting, and many are failing to adapt, to the rise of YouTube. The challenges and opportunities facing them will be the same as the ones facing us, except for one point: because we are creating the new paradigm of amateur game development, we have no need to view it as a threat. And we must be careful not to let it become a threat, by playing to our strengths and helping the amateurs play to theirs.

Once grandma can do it, we will find it impossible to make money by repackaging Space Invaders. Somehow I can't make myself believe that this is a bad thing.

Now let's consider the new opportunities that 2010 will bring us. Extrapolating from current trends, we can conclude that all games will include robust integration with social networking, and that virtually all communication will include the ability to make a game out of it (even if only to the extent that, as Elonka Dunin claimed in her 20-minute panel, Wikipedia editorship is a game). Everybody will be connected to the Internet by default and they will be able to find their location using GPS. Wherever a person goes they will have a Web browser or an equivalent thereto. Techniques for finding new material will use a variety of metrics based on our history, our friends, our friends' histories, popularity, tagging, reputation systems, and who-knows-what-else. Snobs like me will still be having a hard time, but this is normal.

Let's take this a little bit further. Ray Kurzweil maintains that 2010 will see the marketability of a single kind of handheld device which combines all of those features with an augmented reality display and hopefully a better input scheme than a cell phone. Maybe it will be gestural, maybe it will read brainwaves, maybe it'll be based on voice or eye movements. Such a machine, which I will call the 2010 Device because I'm terrible at naming things, raises many questions.

Many people will start off with the question, Will the 2010 Device be open to development? If cell phones are any indication - and I certainly hope that cell phones are never used as a model for anything ever again - then the answer will be No. But the Web will always be open to development, so we see that this device must have totally unfettered access to the Web.

If you're a developer - not even a game developer - then before 2010 rolls around you will probably need to ask yourself, What kind of product could I make for the 2010 Device? What cool new things can exist on a machine that makes "online" the default state of a human being?

Well, don't look at me. I'm still a student. My ideas aren't even half-baked yet. However, it's clear that this is a question which needs to be answered with great force. I think that the future of games may depend on what we do with the 2010 Device.

Let's look at the mistakes surrounding cellular phones. When these little nuisances started to gain the ability to do things more interesting than tell time and make phone calls, what did the game developers do with them? We populated them with the most strenuous things that their tiny CPUs could handle, which started off meaning Arkanoid and Tetris. And we stopped there. And people got it into their heads that cell phone owners didn't really want anything that couldn't be found in a superior form ten or twenty years ago in an arcade.

There's a number of reasons why development halted there and let that stagnant mindset take over. Perhaps the notoriously short-sighted service providers decided that once they had the same games that everybody else did, no further developments were required. Perhaps we game developers were just distracted by our beloved magnum opuses on PCs and consoles. Perhaps we simply gave the people what they wanted, and most people couldn't really imagine the possibilities.

Whatever the reason, duplicating the arcade on a cell phone did the cell phone an injustice. Here we have a handheld, ubiquitous device with a long battery life and which is optimized for satellite connectivity. The game development community, by and large, failed to make games that could take advantage of the fact that the cell phone was a communication device - in short, they failed to make games that could communicate.

People now are realizing that this is a mistake, but it's hard to overcome people's expectations of the device. People expect cell phones to give them isolated arcade games, so there's no demand for anything more, and so it's hard, from a business standpoint, to get them made. Cell phones are locked down tighter than any other consumer technology on earth, so it's impossible for independent developers to buck this trend. If these two factors also apply to the 2010 Device, we may not have another chance to make beautiful games for everybody.

Let's not sit around and wait for the decision to be made for us.

If we have completed designs, completed programs, completed servers, ready to be deployed when the first 2010 Devices start being available, then right from the very beginning we will be able to say "This is what it means to play a game now." The examples that we set will determine the boundaries which the platform's controllers - if indeed there are any, which I hope is not the case - must allow games to explore.

This means that all of the new ideas that we establish for 2009 - taking full advantage of social connectivity and the natural creativity of players - need to be in a form that can be carried over to 2010. This means that we must make sure that no capability of the future technology is put to waste. This means that everything we make needs to be in a form that people will love. It is within our power to determine whether people's most-used technology, and the device with which they connect to the Internet, will be more like a PC or more like a cell phone.

It will be our turn again soon. Let's make sure we play well.

GDC is over

And what a conference it was. My first time, don't you know. I think that I have learned a lot from what I have seen there. I intend to write an overblown and pretentious manifesto about one of the patterns that I observed, regarding what we game makers - not just designers, but programmers, artists, writers, support engineers, marketers, the whole chain - can do to ensure that the future is great.

Ostensibly, "democratization" was the big theme/buzzword for the entire gathering, but I perceived another major trend: everything that is big and promising and exciting has to do with magnifying user participation. I feel like I finally, completely understand what Raph Koster was talking about two years ago.

Up, Up, and Away

I'm off to GDC first thing in the morning tomorrow. Yeah, that will put me there rather early. I'm sure to be busy playing the ol' conference-going game, but I'll see if I can find time while I'm there to comment on the neat things I'm sure run into. In either case, you can expect impressions eventually (for values of "eventually" less than two weeks from the present).