The Cat and the Coup

An excellent representative of this philosophy is Walden, a project currently in development. Rather than simulate all-to-common videogamey feelings of exhilaration or horror, Walden expands the emotional spectrum of  play to moments of calm reflection. You, playing as a Thoreau-like hermit, are invited to be patient and contemplative, moades of play brought on by the self-sustaining tasks of wilderness life you perform. Building on the methodical and introspective environmental meditation of the art-game Night Journey (produced via a collaboration between video artists Bill Viola and GIL), Walden changes the pace and focus of gaming.There’s nothing to shoot. No points to get. Time slows. The player looks inward. She reflects.

Walden is an ambitious project. Technically, Walden has a first-person perspective and a 3D engine rendering the lush forested environment and pond. According to designer Todd Furmanski, there are extra layers of complexity yet to come. He hinted at a host of practical tasks like fishing or chopping wood available to the player as well as an optional system of monetary accumulation and consumption (cleverly meant to confront the player with encroaching capitalistic requirements and desires). Procedurally, Walden is particularly challenging because it eschews the tired and ineffective literature based edu-game template which teaches players by having them read blocks of text. Instead, Walden leverages what makes games great, their ability to model and simulate environments and experiences. Rather than reading about Thoreau, or listening to him, we participate in his style of life, a process of living defined and coded, which, if all works as planned, will end with the player intuiting the virtues and pleasures of Thoreau’s life at Walden pond.

Given the obvious educational value of the project, one would expect Walden to be one of the more attractive GIL projects to funding agencies. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Fullerton admitted that Walden exists solely as a passion project for the team members; every funding source they pitched wouldn’t back it. It exists now only because team members love the project and are willing it into existence.

It’s frustrating for sure, but a simple issue to diagnose: the “educational value” of Walden, which is so obvious to game designers and critics, is unfortunately not obvious to funders. Edu-games that get funded, and which I won’t name here, have been a disappointing strain of game culture. Funds get dumped into the wrong projects, and what gets spat out the other end? Uninspired and ineffective husks of games which might look the part, but demonstrate no understanding of how mechanics underlie play. Just as exploitationware (think Farmville) reduces the expressive beauty of games to tedious repetition and accumulation, edu-games (and many well-funded) often squander the demonstrable abilities of games to educate. Instead of Walden’s compelling simulation of the intellectual and affective journey of Thoreau, we go to an island in Second Life and read excerpts from Thoreau’s writings because that’s literary. It’s familiar; it’s comfortable, especially to people who don’t play or understand games.

The games GIL has developed prove that academic and indie game development are an indispensable and increasingly important avant-garde running counter to an industry struggling with sequelitis and gamification. Games like Walden aren’t only potentially great educational tools, they force videogames to progress, and they provide a space for risks not motivated by quarterly earnings. We need to protect these projects, and protection comes from funding.

So what can we, the pennyless masses, do?

We need to take procedural literacy beyond the classroom and into the boardroom.

Included here below are my introductory remarks and links to his presentation and Q&A.

Last year the Mellon workshop on Affect, Technics, and Ethics, your hosts today, presented a talk by Tracy Fullerton, game design professor at USC. Her presentation situated videogames within a historical lineage of play from board games to sport and beyond in order to expose the rather limited and reductive set of thematics, motivations, gameplay mechanics, and narrative concerns of contemporary digital games. These restrictions are often a product of a fundamental mischaracterization of who exactly a “gamer” is or should be and thus games often appeal to this stereotypically masculine, competitive, and immature “hardcore” gamer. The phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii and DS, however, demonstrate that interest in the excessively hardcore, that is, complex, realistic, and violent gamic structures with difficult to navigate interfaces and control schemes, is not only alienating a large portion of players but also does not make good business sense.  It seems now that videogames are on the verge of a creative evolution facilitated by a full-scale revision of their expressive possibilities enabled by intuitive technological design married to the exploration of their affective possibilities.

In order to demonstrate the potential for disrupting what she termed the “hegemony of play,” Fullerton proudly demoed a product of her students’ efforts at USC that was based on a simple and relatable playful mechanic – creating shapes in the sky. That game, Cloud, was the first of three extraordinary releases from the developer, thatgamecompany, including flOw and Flower. Our speaker today, Jenova Chen, is the creative director and one of the principle visionaries behind these games which have garnered numerous awards and resounding critical acclaim from both enthusiasts and academics. But beyond their success in the market, Chen’s work is quite literally opening up new expressive space within videogames and forging ahead into new counter-hegemonic frontier. His daring and refreshing violations of the hegemony of play in a work like Flower refashion the gamic act as a predominantly affective and emotional experience. Flower rediscovers that play doesn’t have to be destructive or competitive but instead can be patient, reflective, poetic and meditative. And what his efforts yield are deeply ethical games that are environmentally concerned, bearing striking similarity to the legendary animator Hiyao Miyazaki’s films. And it is the way in which Chen’s games tap into the gamer within everyone through the discourse of progressive politics that will have a welcome influence on the future of game design and culture. Cloud, flOw, and Flower each have productively revised the field of possibilities for what games can do and what they feel like. And if what critic McKenzie Wark says is true—that it is not games which represent the world but the world which is becoming more gamelike—then we are all lucky to have Jenova Chen making games.

It is with that that I am pleased to introduce to you our guest speaker for this afternoon Jenova Chen, creative director of thatgamecompany. 

Video Part One 

Video Part Two 

Video Part Three 

Video Part Four