Hello and welcome to the Mozfest session with the most verbose title.
I am Matteo. You can find me on the Web under the nickname Baddeo (which is very humbly Matteo with the sniffles) and during the week you can find me at Milo Creative, where I design and develop apps and games to engage and educate people of all ages.
This session is about hacking games, using a tool we are all familiar with: verbs!
Whether it is running or collecting, shooting or trading, games are driven by verbs: they determine what you can do in a game, how you can interact with its characters or other players, what you should do to win it, and what you simply can't do. Ever tried to talk to a monster in a first-person-shooter, instead of shooting it?
So, we will look at classic videogames in terms of verbs and explore how these verbs express messages and values, ideas and ideologies.
Then we will modify these games, changing the verbs so that they express our own messages and values.
Let's starts from an unpopular assumption, which is: games can convey messages, they can be expressive and even when they are not designed for that, they embody certain values.
Games are cultural products made by actual people (typically white male nerds).
People with their own background, culture, systems of values, beliefs.
These backgrounds will inevitably affect the design of the game.
Between a real city and SimCity there is a person who decides what to include and what to not include in the simulation, how the game elements interact, what you (as a player) can do and what you cannot do.
A simulation is an abstraction of real life, which necessarily eliminates some of real life's complexities to focus on certain aspects only.
Like a scientific experiment, a simulation game creates a simplified model of real life, which variables can be manipulated by a scientist, or a player. Who designs the experiment, or the game, decides which variables to include and which to leave out.
You don't find racial tensions in SimCity, yet they were a major factor in the development of North American cities, on which SimCity was modelled.
In military themed first-person shooters you generally get a fantastical, propagandistic representation of war, reflecting a simplified vision of the world that was divided into goodies and baddies, where enemies are clearly distinguishable, dressed up with balaclavas, and civilians are nowhere to be seen.
Even apparently innocuous and non-violent games like Farmville simulate business and productive processes in a problematic way.
They are generally based on a principle of endless accumulation, endless expansion, whilst excluding the negative byproducts of industrial food production: pollution, deforestation, deterioration of labour conditions, and so on.
These are systemic problems, and games can be very good at describing systems.
Nowadays a lot of games rely heavily on stories, which can be problematic too.
Have you seen the trailer from the forthcoming Tomb Raider, that includes a sexual assault scene? We don't know whether you will actually be able to prevent the rape as a player, but we like to think you will.
However, this was heavily criticised as a tasteless move and sloppy writing. If you have a female protagonist, the most cliché narrative device for character development is a rape or sexual assault.
But there was a reaction, because we know how to deconstruct these narratives: they are not too different from the stories we see on TV or in films.
There are a lot of representational issues in videogames.
Women and minorities are rarely featured, and we can spot that quite easily. But we need literacy for the more subtle implications, not just whether or not you can play as a black girl, but how is the experience of playing in this role.
Take the Sims, which allows all sort of skin colours and some gender orientation outside the binary norm. Yet these differences are irrelevant to the gameplay, as the system of the game doesn't really take them into account: you have the same career and friendship opportunities regardless of your identity. Your ethnic background is flattened to a single, insignificant variable.
More often than not game propose questionable representations, embracing and reinforcing the dominant systems of values, also known as ideology.
We are still not very used to analyzing and deconstructing the unique properties of games. While linear media (films, novels) typically create meaning through storytelling, videogames create meaning through their rule system and the audiovisual assets that are governed by these rules.
So, games (not just videogames) are primarily systems of rules.
In game design, the dynamic relationship between rules and players is called gameplay.
In this session we will try to break down gameplays as verbs (because we are familiar with verbs) and then envision different forms of gameplays: expressive gameplays.
Another important property of games, that sets them apart from storytelling media, is roleplay.
You don't just empathize with a character, you immerse yourself in that character and take decisions for her in the simulated world.
Most mainstream games use roleplay in function of escapism, and they tend to be power fantasies.
But it's possible to expand the scope of roleplay, challenging players to experience the world from a different perspective. There are some experiments, like Darfur is dying in which you play as a Darfur refugee, or Spent, a simulation of daily life below the poverty line.
Awkward roleplay strategies can be used to create moral dilemmas, forcing the player into disempowered, embarrassing, unusual roles. Reversing the tendency of mainstream games to function as power fantasies in order to push the player to reflect on power relations that exist in the real world.
This is a workshop about videogames, but it is not our aim to build a videogame in one hour and a half.
We are used to considering videogames as technological objects, but before becoming software they have to be designed as rule systems.
You can actually design videogames without computers. That's what videogames designers and developers often do at the very beginning of the process: sketching, visualizing, moving pieces of paper around.
In our case we are going to remix existing games, just to take out some of the variables and focus on the mechanics of the games, rather than producing visuals and thinking about characters and stories.
We are going to use old, classic games not because we are nostalgic but for a few good reasons:
- they tend to be more broadly known than contemporary ones
- they are simpler, so if you never played them you can figure them out in few seconds
- they are 2D and that helps a lot when you are working on paper
- they are to some extent archetypes, in that they introduced some of the most basic elements that are still present in contemporary videogames (besides the technological advancement modern FPS are still based on shooting and dodging, like Space Invaders).
Break down the game mechanics into verbs and think about the implicit or explicit messages that they entail:
- what verbs are used in the game?
- can you think of any other relevant verbs that could have been included in the game?
- what messages does the game communicate?
- what values does it embody?
We will give you an issue and a game.
Redesign the game so that it is about the issue: do this by using a different set of verbs that reflect the values and views of your group.
Verbs will be the building blocks of your new game, but consider also how you can change the gameplay (its system of rules and the way players interact with characters and objects), the game goal and its narrative.
Your finished game may look similar but will play very differently than the original!
Mario sets on a mission to collect and bring food to a hungry neighbourhood, whilst fighting Bowser, who controls a monopoly of restaurants and sends out Goombas to destroy the food.
Pac-Man is a student, bullied by ghosts. Some of them pick on his skin colour, others on his insatiable hunger. In order to defeat the different types of bullies, you needed different skills (fruits)
Space Invaders turns into a multiplayer game, using a Lemmings-like guidance mechanic to infiltrate the G20 meeting. You can play cooperatively or competitively.