Those of us presenting on my panel were tasked with offering our thoughts in a micro-presentation format that translated into a provocative but often frustrating six minutes and forty seconds per speaker. Unfortunately, I had prepared a longer talk and had to trim my content down to three minutes since I was co-presenting.

Therefore, I went ahead and recorded the full length version of my talk.

Link to video.

You can also view the presentation itself here.

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 

Crossposted on Gameology.

Read part 2 here.

Interactive media artist Erik Loyer, perhaps most well known to academics as Creative Director of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology visited the University of California, Riverside earlier this week to give a talk titled “Stories as Instruments.”

Loyer explained his design philosophy that games should break free of the restrictions of plot-centric progression and character focused instrumentality (his recent innovative iPhone game Ruben and Lullaby is a particularly illustrative example of this trajectory). Loyer points to the genre of the musical as an important influence and model for new forms of storytelling in games. Musical arias feature characters that step just outside the world in moments of intense expression. Loyer analogized this as a blend of first and third person perspective. The singing character in the musical is locked into the narrative space contextually yet elaborating that context. The best games, according to Loyer, allow the player to assume this role: doing things as they should be done logically in the world but also knowing what one is doing.

In this way, the best moments in games happen when a player does what the developer wants them to do, without explicit narrative prompting, and does it in a way that fits within the context and expressive aims of the game. He cited an example of his own experience with the N64 classic Goldeneye where, after having just learned to use the sniper rifle, he was presented with a situation where he got to surreptitiously eliminate a few targets from afar in a building. The revelation was that he had done exactly what James Bond would have done and that’s what made it so exhilarating. He was simultaneously doing something and knowing what he was doing. He was character, fan, and player all in one.

Loyer’s central critique is of the obsessive push in game design toward large branching plot-driven stories centered on the freedom and autonomy of a character (think: Mass Effect) which often denigrate the Goldeneye experience. He argues that the focus should be on the potential for dynamic experiences of subjectivity, affect, and emotion rather than thousands of potential choices. Characters and stories should be considered the facilitators of these experiences not the ultimate focus or endgame as in plot-centric design.

I think this point is provocative and worth exploring. In both game design and theory, we are still affected by the nagging myths of cyberspatial freedom (or lack thereof) as well as neoliberalism and its interest in consumer empowerment. In terms of design, each new game or iteration needs to be bigger, more varied, and full of options for story, character, and customization. In terms of game theory, we study the oppressive logics of algorithmic technical objects and theorize methods of subversion and resistance such as cheating, performance, countergaming, and so on. The subtext to politically progressive game theory is often that games need to counteract these power problematics by being as open as possible.

But what about embracing limitation, restriction, and prescriptive design?

Why not create games that box in the player and why not study how restriction can be productive?

Design can constrain space in order to open up new modes of perception and attention as well as expose the illusory nature of freedom in all games – even those marketed as boundless (GTA anyone?). By directly confronting the inherent logics of control, by bringing them into stark relief, we can perhaps finally move past the reductive myths of liberation and empowerment that mischaracterize interactions with digital media and network technology and provide potentially illusory resistant formulations.

Here is a game that could be considered an extension of Alexander Galloway’s countergaming project. It allows complete visibility and modification of the code of the game.

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