Dynamics: The State of the Art

[Music] stuff so um and we're just going to kick this off and this is going to go pretty quickly um so yeah thanks for coming my name is clint hawking and today's talk is about dynamics but uh before we get started i feel it's important to warn you that by the time this talk is over everyone in this room is going to think i'm a communist so we might as well get that out of the way right now over the course of this talk i'm going to espouse you the virtues of contemporary cuban urban agriculture i'm going to mesmerize you with images from the proud history of soviet cinema and i'm going to convince you that some of the most beloved american heroes guys like ernest hemingway and thomas edison are also communists um i might even talk about some communist games like tetris and by the time i'm finished you're all going to be signing up to join the party and await the reanimation of our once and future leader in revolution you've been warned um i'm also going to talk a lot about elephants for some reason um dynamics why do i want to talk about dynamics well mostly um this is a talk that i've been

wanting to give and actually trying to give for a long time but it's really difficult talk um also because dynamics are pretty central to games i really wanted to make sure i was going to have the time to do it right and the last few years have been kind of mental for me um i got married i shipped far cry 2 i went on honeymoon in africa where i had absolutely no problem with responding guard posts um but i did almost get killed by a rampaging elephant um i [ __ ] up my back i got better i lost 50 pounds i left my job at ubisoft i took a job at lucasarts i immigrated to the u.s and i had a kid all in two years um so the good news is that now that i have like 15 years worth of like crazy life changes all packaged up and out of the way um i finally feel like i have the time to give this talk the rigor it deserves the bad news is um my son must be part hobbit or something because he has these really big feet and i have all these jammies with feet in them that don't fit and little baby shoes that he's never worn and so if you're looking for maybe shoes check on craigslist um anyway the thing that really kicked my ass um to buckle down and tackle this talk finally uh was back in 2009 chris hecker gave a gdc talk

and that picture is not actually from there but where he said he felt one of the most important near-term questions for game development and for game researchers um was to answer the question how do games mean right and i'm not a game researcher guy but i'm going to give that a shot anyway when trying to understand games as a cultural form we often talk about the meaning of specific games we ask like what does thief mean or what does go mean or what does far cry 2 mean and you know putting aside for a moment the fact that the answers to those questions are definitely subjective the problem with even asking them is that we haven't even come close to agreement on what the sort of power plant of meaning uh generation is in games in general right um you know some people will say thief is about territory control or domination or collection others will say it's about a thief named garrett caught in the midst of a conflict between like progressive industrialists and like anarcho-naturalists or something and some will say it's both and some will say neither and until we have some kind of consensus on how games can even be about anything at all um we're kind of wasting words right we

need to understand how games mean uh before we can really talk in a sophisticated way about what a specific game means um so this is topsy the elephant um back in 1903 uh tossy got in some trouble for like trampling to death a bunch of trainers you know at um four paws circus out on coney island um this was right around the time that thomas edison was leveraging sort of his many patents to try and push through this uh national infrastructure that would see a network of dc power distribution uh bring electricity on demand into every home in america um unfortunately for edison nikola tesla who is the dude who invented the [ __ ] tesla coil um had patented a polyphase system and was doing some work on rotary magnetic fields and ac transformers and was promoting this system of national infrastructure uh for ac power transmission um that rivaled innocence um so this boiled over into what we now call the war of currents or the ac dc war um and the long and short of it was that although edison had a head start because sort of all the core technology

that his system required was sort of proven um the um the infrastructure demand that would have um called for a dc power station every three to five kilometers um was due to this sort of extreme power loss that's incurred when you try to transmit dc power over long distances um tesla system on the other hand required some sort of fancy mapped hearing and and some new inventions like step up and set down transformers and all this stuff um but uh once that was all figured out the ability to centralize electrical power generation at coal-fired plants and you know massive hydroelectric dams like the one at niagara falls to like transmit energy over long distances with little to no loss kind of tip the scales in tesla's favor um so edison sort of fought back by launching this smear campaign against ac current he even went so far as to sort of covertly fund the invention of the electric chair and you know see it brought into use for the meeting out of capital punishment like here in the u.s um his goal was actually to just terrify people about with the dangers of ac current uh and show them how dangerous it was um so poor topsy the elephant was a was a casualty in this war um once

it was basically over and the push towards sort of a national uh ac distribution system was underway edison presided over and filmed the execution of top seed elephant which is performed by coursing like 6 600 volts of ac current through her body i'm not going to roll the film electrocuting an elephant uh 1903 because it's kind of gross but i will point out the irony that the laptop that's displaying this image and the projector over there and you know the the the speakers that are amplifying my voice and the mixing board at the back and and the lights and the heat and everything in this convention center everything in this city everything in this country basically is running off of tesla's ac power distribution system so even though edison's film was seen by like thousands of americans uh it didn't have the horrifying effect that he had hoped uh it basically didn't work right so about a decade after poor autopsy was executed in the 19 teens russian filmmaker lev kulashov conducted an experiment where he filmed matinee idol ivan mazukin staring into a camera looking intense right he also filmed a

bowl of soup being eaten and a dead child in an open coffin and an attractive scantily clad woman uh he then sort of you know popped up with final cut pro and he added together his footage and cut back and forth between the actor and the suit and the child and the woman um um this is the final film that he showed to audiences now it's gonna work oops i have to do it the clumsy way where'd it go sorry why is it not working i tried it before and it worked now it's not working there we go that sucks i'm sorry it's over here yeah i should just act it out and i can't find the [ __ ] button okay well

okay it cuts back and forth from his face to the woman to the soup to the child to his face okay that's how it goes um come on i can't hit the space bar um so that was the final film he showed to audiences um after seeing the film he sort of pulled audiences about how mizukin was feeling in each shot and the audiences reported that he appeared hungry when he was looking at the bowl of soup and he appeared sad when he was looking at the dead child in the coffin and he appeared lustful when he was looking at slave leia um mizukin was even praised for his acting ability and probably nominated for an oscar whatever um what's awesome though and so that's the film right it goes from there to there to there to there to there to there in like 15 seconds that's the whole film um so what's awesome though is that not only was mizukin not looking at the soup or the dead child or the hot chick as actors aren't often looking at the things that they're acting to when they're being filmed um

it wasn't even three pieces of footage right kuleshov was actually cutting back to the exact same frames of the exact same footage of mizukin after each shot so what the audiences were reading as emotional responses from this actor to these uh things he was looking at actually just didn't even exist we call this the kuleshov effect and we interpret it to imply that at the lowest and most fundamental meaning in film at the lowest most fundamental level meaning in film is generated not by the moving picture itself really but by the juxtaposition of the images in fact by the editing thomas edison did not understand the importance of editing to generate meaning and thereby move his audience um had he intercut the footage of topsy elephant's execution with like footage of a little girl crying um i pretty much guarantee you that instead of like an ice rink down the street right now we'd have like a solar power station um so um what's interesting um is that i want to point out that sort of how the moving recorded image generates meaning at its lowest level

um still leaves us sort of miles away from from you know between ivan mizukin and feeling lustful sad or hungry and the sort of complex layering of images and emotions that we get and that intertwine and evolve over the course of a film like um like tampopo for example um tampopo or indeed sort of any modern film has a meaning that arises out of the harmony of many different techniques sort of all acting in concert right um the lowest level meaning of the edit gives us the sort of raw emotional sense of the adoration and compulsion shared by the gangster and as a young lover while they're playing lawfully with their food in each other right um the music and the lighting and the staging kind of all work together um to to give these extra layers of meaning and make the scenes sort of more meaningful and give us a sense of how the raw emotions develop and interconnect over time and um and at the highest level the story and plot kind of ties these actions together allowing us to witness the sort of uh profound like evolution of that

relationship and experience the sort of beautiful tragedy of its conclusion in the end um but let's imagine for a second that instead of traveling back in time and killing hitler so that tesla could rise to power um albert einstein instead went back in time and killed kuleshov right um and as a consequence we never really figured out how film meant at its lowest level um there would be sort of no method underlying how we edit together film and no way to generate that lowest level meaning that that sort of core um meaning generation that happens in film um that acts as a foundation upon which the sort of rest of these higher level meanings are synthesized and put together so our films might have these great high level stories but these stories would effectively be sort of um randomly in harmony or discord with the emotional noise which is effectively what it would be being generated at the level of the edit because editing wouldn't have any uh sense to it um if we were even able to identify this effect we might begin to think that filmic meaning and narrative meaning were somehow irreconcilable right we would say that film as a median suffered uh from a

dissonance uh between its narrative and its editing if we wanted to be pretentious we could even take the greek word for cut which is temenos and the latin word for narrative which is narrativist and name this inherent defect of the undeveloped medium temno narrative dissonance right and oops we've got to slide ahead here um and and then we can sort of try and figure out ways to fix that problem right you know one way would be to sort of minimize the ways in which accidental and poorly understood uh meanings generated by cutting and editing interfered with the meaning of the narrative right we could take um movies where the high level story um and plot were was where all the meaning lay and we could reduce or eliminate camera cuts that seem to make people feel something that didn't reinforce the story you know for example we would probably shoot everything wide right we'd never show character faces in close-up uh we wouldn't want to cut between character reaction shots and actions or objects because we wouldn't know what those cuts were meant right we wouldn't understand why people felt sad when we were trying to tell a joke um because we were cutting to like a

corpse and back to someone's face right um we'd probably also try to avoid opening and closing scenes um on a character right we'd have characters sort of exit frame and then we cut from establishing shots of environments to establishing shots of new settings scenes would get longer they would get more stagey in fact what we're really talking about is making movies that are essentially like stage plays right you would strip away all the inherent meaning generation elements that are native to the medium of film and rely on the meaning of generating elements of tools from a different medium the problem with this approach i think is obvious right i mean i hope if you make a movie by pointing a camera at the stage play right the resulting work is going to be less good than a stage play and it's going to be less good than a movie because it's missing something fundamental about both of those sort of experiences once upon a time it must have been an amazing feeling to go to the world's fair and watch like edward maybridge's or uh my bridges uh running horses or fred ott sneeze and see pearl tops of the elephant being electrocuted and marvel at the cool

things that this new medium of film could make us feel right but eventually those like simple random snippets of decontextualized feeling uh must have began to feel hollow and weird right and people began to look for the bigger picture right and laying the foundation for understanding how film means um kuleshov enabled us to kind of step forward from the early days of film as curiosity uh into the 20th century where film would become sort of possibly the most important medium in human culture right so sadly um i think this is more or less where we're at in terms of the development of our own medium today um an entire generation of people who have grown up alongside games as curiosity are now starting to sort of look for the bigger picture and in order to do that the very first thing we have to do is understand what that core meaning generation element of video games is and how it works and in order to do that we have to answer checkers question right um fortunately i happen to think

the answer is really easy and obvious okay i think the answer is that games mean via their dynamics so thanks for coming he's got questions no um um asserting that games mean via their dynamics is like asserting that film means through editing right we need to go a lot deeper than that and you know while i believe that games do mean via their dynamics the rest of this talk is going to be about sort of how games mean via their dynamics and why it matters to you with examples yay um well first of all what are dynamics so in like 60 slides or less here's the one-on-one part of the lecture back in 2004 robin hunnicky mark leblanc bob zubeck published a paper called mda formal approach to game design research mda stands for mechanics dynamics aesthetics mechanics is defined as the particular components of the game so i'm just spewing this out you should know this at the level of data representation and algorithms dynamics is defined as the runtime behavior of mechanics acting on player inputs and each other's outputs over time aesthetics is defined as the desirable

emotional responses evoked in the player um when he or she interacts with the game system right to make that clearer i like to think of mda as being rbf because that's those are better letters mechanics are the rules of the game dynamics are the runtime behaviors of the game player system and aesthetics are the feelings that the game evokes right uh so that's enough theory how about some examples finally okay so this is spelunky right so stephen uh stephen lavelle uh also known as incrapare and i'm not sure if that's greek or latin but it doesn't matter um because the dude has made over like a hundred games in the last three years okay um you know he said this um at one point um he said as with using a whip in real life attacking with the whip in spelunky is not an immediate action it has to be raised before you can hit this slows the game and makes hitting airborne creatures harder and thus deadlier than if whip strikes were immediate the extra layer of layer of timing you must factor in the game makes it less pew pew and more dash deliberately in whack and dash out it encourages a certain degree of premeditation and creates an overall

atmosphere of deliberation so what's interesting here is that even though he's not talking about the mba framework specifically his natural discussion of spelunky draws him to point out that the rule that the whip animation must be played before it can do damage makes the game slower harder and deadlier and causes the player to adopt certain ways of playing thus giving spelunky the unique aesthetic signatures of being premeditative and having an atmosphere of deliberation all right ultimately i think that's the question when we're asking how do games mean i think we're asking from where do aesthetics such as pre-meditative and pre-meditative and deliberate originate in games and i think it's a tricky and elusive question does the meaning of spelunky right come from the rules governing the whip or from the way the player uses the whip right in the end i think the question is difficult because there's a really ambiguous verb that lives at the center of this debate at least in english maybe if you speak another language

games are way easier to understand that verb is play um it seems fairly clear that at the most um fundamental level the aesthetics um of film come from editing um but the verb edit only has one meaning right and play has several meanings right for example instead of saying if instead of playing splunky uh steven lavelle played a piano and created a piece of music there would be no argument about where that meaning came from right it comes from steven playing the piano right from the dynamics um if however i came along and recorded that music and burned a cd and gave it to checker and checker played the cd and checker played there's the other play the cd and appreciated the aesthetics of music there would again be no argument about where the meaning comes from right whoops um but it doesn't come from the act of playing the cd right from the dynamics it comes from the data on the cd which is like the mechanics in this system right it's like the code that's embedded in the in the system um so you know games it

are not like pianos right and they're not like cd players either right they're sort of they're a thing that you play but also a thing that you play um use to play things um games are actually kind of both at once um they're kind of actually like player pianos does everybody know what a player piano is um player pianos are basically um uh the player piano was in 1905 what guitar hero was to 2005. okay um i love these two pictures they're like identical the chick on the left even looks like the chick on the left um the player piano is a piano that has a machine in it that you wind up right and it unrolls this giant punch card kind of thing um across like a like a music box across the inner workings of the thing and the piano plays itself right so just plays its little music you wind it up and let it play however you can also play along with it right so you can obviously get like different kinds of player piano roles to

like you know play part of a duet or play you know things that help you learn how to play piano better or you know things that make you look like you're rachmaninoff or something the only real difference between a player piano and a game is that the player piano can play by itself while a game cannot right um and of course if you say yeah but you could make like two chest bots play each other that's not a game playing itself that's two ais right that's a different situation dynamic interaction is a requirement for anything that we define as a game and because of this fact we have a very important distinction to make when we kind of author our equivalent of these piano roles speaking of rachmaninov who apparently wrote um composition so complex that they could only be played by people with 12 fingers um that's not actually true by the way he just had really big hands um i kind of wonder sometimes if his parents had to sell his cute little baby craigslist anyway the point is that game designers have this really important choice to make um when they're authoring their games right we can choose to subscribe to the sort of message model of meaning and if we do

that um we can attempt to sort of heavily author the meaning of our game by putting um say 10 fingers worth of meaning um into the piano roll of our mechanics and and leaving only two fingers uh worth of room in the dynamics um whoops like that uh for the player to play the piano and sort of contribute to the to the overall meaning of the music um conversely we can kind of abdicate our authorship of meaning to the player putting two fingers worth of meaning in the piano role of our mechanics and leaving 10 fingers worth of room in the dynamics for the player to make his own music so i mean certainly there's no right way to make games i personally have a strong preference both as a designer and a player for games that advocate as much authorship as possible to the player but no matter how much authorship i advocate my authoring of the mechanics will always yield some kind of influence over the dynamics in fact you know this is a road that i've been down a couple times already and in order to talk about the sort of range of possible authorial control that we can attempt to exert over the dynamical meaning of the game

by the mechanics that we author i'm going to look at three different games um that live at different places along this spectrum and there happens to be an interesting set of games that i'm highly qualified to talk about um that provide a fairly good um coverage of this spectrum and that's the three games that i've shipped the first two on the original splinter cell and splinter cell chaos theory live over there on the left side where the meeting is fairly heavily authored my most recent game far cry 2 is quite a distance over on the right side where sort of a great deal of authorship has been advocated to the player you could go farther out that side easily just as you can go farther down to the other side and there's it's a complete analog range games live all across this band but how do each of these games mean in their dynamics and how is that meaning influenced by the authored mechanics in the game so back at the at the montreal game summit in 2005 actually i gave a design talk where i spoke a little bit about the meaning of splinter cell chaos theory i talked about how it wasn't really a game about international espionage and covert operations and all that stuff

i said chaos theory is actually a game about chaos theory um it's a game about the sensitivity of complex dynamic systems to minor perturbations it's about the fragility of you know a security system like a simple lock and the uneasy timers that are sort of counting down under the hood as you're trying to pick that lock before a light comes back on or something it's about being in close proximity to like aware and dangerous guards who can detect you and react it's about performing these sort of complex and challenging tasks in close proximity to fragile systems that if they're disrupted can spread their information um to other nearby systems and kind of cause cascading problems that are difficult to recover from and that's what that's what solar cell cast theory is about in fact it's not just splinter cell chaos theory that's about that um the original splinter cell is also about chaos theory um and these id whoops these ideas of sensitivity and proximity and fragility are actually central to what the series um was about in the beginning so it's illuminating illuminating to kind of look at how the meaning changes between these two frankly extremely similar um games

based on only a very slight um change in the balance of authorship that's exerted into the mechanics um in the notorious example from the original um splinter cell the player was sort of tasked with getting through a series of keypad lock doors by closely following a patrolling guard and at each door he would have to use his thermal vision to like read the warm fingerprints on the keypad that the guard would enter before he went through the door uh that would give the player the code and then he could enter um uh but this was sort of forced right if the player was good enough that he could get up behind this guard and follow the guard into the room without being detected you would actually get a game over because you were being forced to use your goggles to read the keypad it was just completely arbitrary and and stupid actually um uh but it put the player in fragile proximity right to this sensitive guard and and by forcing you to do the sequence this way and gating these other behaviors with mission fails you know we can say that the mechanics of the game that we authored forced a set of dynamics that ensured

the game was about this designer authored meaning of sensitivity proximity and fragility it's forced in the dynamics you can't you can't not have that experience you can have the experience of that or you can have the experience of turning your console off and doing something else in chaos theory we kind of loosened up some of these pressures right the player was never forced to tackle specific challenges using specific tools right for example he could still read thermal um fingerprints off of keypads if you wanted to if he sees a guard through going through a door he can go well that's a good way to i'm going to go use my goggles and read his thing and get the code and go through the door pretty cool but he could also just sort of follow the guard through the keypadlock door you know before it closed behind him or he could interrogate the guard and find out the code because the guard if he knows the code he knows the code or he could find the code on a computer and open the door that way or he could just hack the door with his little remote packing device and and open the door that way so by removing sort of a bunch of the mechanics that that were enforcing certain dynamics and by adding mechanics that allowed other dynamics

and then letting the player sort of choose which set of dynamics become the backbone of his play experience what happens well obviously i mean the meaning of the game changes right depending on how you play as a player splinter cell chaos theory is sort of only probabilistically about chaos theory it could be about chaos theory right it could be about sensitivity and proximity and fragility if you play a certain way but if you play another way it could be about the same things as quake right um and i think that you know while most players would still say that despite the range of possible meanings chaos theory is still mostly about um chaos theory what happens if you abdicate authorship even more and you move much much further down this axis towards um towards having sort of less mechan less authorship in the mechanics that are impacting your dynamic meaning so what is far cry 2 about well in our original pitch the meaning of the game uh was supposed to be that human social savagery uh is more disturbing than the simple savagery of teeth and claws

that's literal block of text from from a very ancient document um we often use the example that a bunch of school girls had a greater capacity to be cruel than something like a crocodile and that capacity for social cruelty is what makes us the most terrible creature on earth so basically like far cry 2 is supposed to be like [ __ ] fight with flamethrowers um we embedded this sort of message in the game uh with mechanics that encourage dynamics like shooting to wound um executing people in cold blood uh euthanizing your friends um you know in the end far cry 2 i guess is a little bit about some of these things tom bissell in his book extra lives says at one point far cry 2 is a game about chaos which you enable a bet and are at constant risk of being consumed by he goes on to tell the story of um uh whoops he goes on to tell the story of a skirmish that ended with like a like a wounded enemy that was lying in the grass and calling out but he couldn't see the guy in the grass and so

the guy's taking pot shots at him and he's getting all freaked out so he says um when i put enough distance between us i lobbed a molotov cocktail into the general uh area uh where the supine dying man lay within seconds i could hear him screaming amid the twiggy crackle of the grass catching fire sitting before my television i felt a kind of horridly unreciprocated intimacy with the man i had just burned to death far cry 2 may reward your murderous actions but you never feel as though it approves of them and it reminds you again and again that you are no better than the people that you kill in fact you may be much worse um so maybe tom um was maybe for tom it was kind of about these ideas uh that we were trying to author right maybe it's the case that you know one day we're going to look on wikipedia and see that the early games of clint hawking or something explored themes of chaos right like you know maybe maybe it's a game about chaos but in the end it wasn't me that burned that you know poor bastard to death in that field it was tom right and maybe the chaos that he was struggling with was

you know some kind of like inner chaos that's in him and and it's not a chaos that i authored you know who knows um well i suspect this guy maybe knows um blogger ben abraham uh played the game several times uh one of those times he played the game using iron man rules and he wrote a 300 page journal about it called the permadeath experience in an interview with justin cavern i think that's how you pronounce his name on the groping groping the elephant blog ben said this about far cry 2 he said i guess my approach reflected my desire to have a fun experience so i played it quite safe at first when the initial sense of tension and danger wore off i experimented and i courted danger a bit when playing normally i would stride right up and punch danger in the face trusting luck and skill to get me by but by prioritizing my survival i became much more reserved and cautious kind of boring really practical things that changed how i played include you know picking safe options and utilizing optimal killing strategies basically anytime there was a dangerous option and a boring safe option i took the safe one so and that's an

instance i guess like no um the author meeting that we were sort of going for um didn't really come through so much so does this mean that in the end that sort of the more authorship we advocate the more we leave our game open to being what ebert called a smorgasbord of meaning um let's talk about elephants so in 1927 ernest hemingway wrote a short story called hills like white elephants which is the story of a man and a woman sitting in a bar in a train station in spain having a drink talking it's pretty slow story pretty short feels long a lot of people would say that it would be a better story if at least had some elephants in it or something as ben said about far cry 2 hills like white elephants is actually kind of boring really but it does have an elephant in it in a sense at least it has what we call an elephant in the room right even though what the story is about is never explicitly stated by the author it is entirely obvious to the reader what it's about um although short um feels like elephants is probably too long for us to sort of read together in the middle of this

lecture so we can examine how it means at run time the way we did with tetris we didn't do that with tetris yet oh well um so let's look at another hemingway short story that's sort of similarly powerful so that's the whole story um there's some question about the attribution of this story to hemingway but one thing is clear the story is like a 40 ounce overproof of hemingway's sauce right absolutely every single extraneous thing has been stripped from it and nothing at all remains except for this sort of sinking realization of what that story is about um on the one hand the meaning of the story is sort of irrefutable and on the other hand hemingway did not put the meaning there right the audience brings the meaning to this story hemingway has sort of abdicated every last possible inch of authorship to the audience he couldn't have given you more freedom to write the meaning yourself if he gave you a moleskin and a pencil and there is absolutely nothing else

that this story could be about than what it's about in my mind this kind of goes beyond what we would call sort of minimalism in literature right this isn't sort of um the art of removing everything unnecessary this is the art of showing your audience that they are in fact artists themselves with far cry 2 i think our push to achieve our originally intended meaning caused us to kind of lose sight of an irrefutable meaning that lives in the dynamics in the end i think tom may have had it right when he said far cry 2 is a game about chaos he was embracing it when he threw the molotov into that field while ben's boredom i think was probably his refusal to be seduced by the danger of it right on the dev team we were trying to somehow um tie the meaning we found uh and we were finding in our dynamics to a sort of overarching narrative concept in order to make sure it was being experienced and understood but in reality the meeting was already living and breathing in the dynamics and our sort of direct efforts may have only confused things

now that's going to get me to talking about narrative and you know about that highly narrative game uh tetris um which i guess we're all familiar with you know show of hands how many people in this room have played tetris yeah um actually stupid question how many people in this room have played so much tetris that they can close their eyes and hum and play tetris in their heads yeah that's that's a pretty good ratio um tetris is really simple right pieces fall you rotate them around and fit them in among other pieces and if you complete a row with no holes in it the row disappears if the rows stack up to the top of the screen you lose um if these are the basic mechanic what are the dynamics of tetris right what does tetris mean in its dynamics um well there's a certain amount of dexterity and precision obviously you have to be able to effectively put the pieces where you want them right beyond that there's this sort of great deal of strategy in terms of how you deal with the random chain of pieces being thrown at you you

need to anticipate and weigh the probability of different configurations that you're creating to get them to pay off you need to be removing rows in the short term while at the same time sort of keeping opportunities alive for like multi-row completions and tetrises right in fact tetris is about a lot of really interesting things but because of its abstract nature it's very hard for us to talk about what tetris is about in any kind of larger sense and that's okay by that i mean you know tetris isn't really able to comment on the world at large or on people or on their emotional or psychological reality it's very hard for us to imagine though not impossible um how tetris informs our perspective on the world right tetris is able to be about itself right and it's able to be about who is playing it um but you would never for example say that tetris is immoral or evil because it de-responsibilizes you for participating in a system of institutionalized discrimination right um you know once again i'm not saying tetris should do any of those things i love

tetris the way it is i'm just using tetris because in its abstract nature i want to elaborate on it and talk about how narrative can be used to influence dynamic meaning or dynamical meaning uh this is rod humble's game the marriage um the game is also very abstract right it also requires a certain amount of dexterity uh and precision um you also need to have strategy you need to anticipate probabilities keep opportunities alive all that stuff uh but the marriage is not completely abstract um the marriage is about a marriage it says so right in the title right um oops and more than that the blue piece uh sort of represents uh the man in this particular marriage and the pink piece represents the woman right uh in effect the title the marriage and a couple of the sort of tiny little decisions about rgb values um have a massive impact on the way the dynamics of this game unfold and consequently what it means or the way it means um so what if we decided to add a kind of thin fictional layer to tetris not with the aim of trying to make a better game

that's not what this sort of thought exercise is about that's absurd right it's with the aim of observing how adding or changing a narrative layer to a game can impact the dynamics and thus the meaning even if the underlying mechanics do not change right is brenda here no okay so this is brenda um brathwaite for the last several years she's been working on a series of art games that she calls the mechanic is the message series um perhaps the most renowned work in the series is um a game that you've probably all heard of called train how many people have played train more than i thought but very very few right this is largely because of the the game's nature as an artifact very few people have actually played it i haven't played it either so i can't talk about it specifically i'm just going to borrow from it thematically in our new version of tetris we're going to say that the field on which the pieces fall is a train yard on the edge of the warsaw ghetto in like

yeah back then um and the objective of the game is to pack people into the boxcars and ship them off to camps um of course the people that you're grabbing are scared and are themselves clinging to their family members and all that kind of stuff which rationalizes the fiction of why you get these pieces in different shapes that you have to deal with of course the trains are under orders not to leave the station unless the cars are completely full so if you leave too many trains partially full the train yard will overflow uh with non-optimally filled train cars and stop the nazi war effort game over um now to be clear i'm not changing any of the rules of tetris it's exactly the same game except now under this narrative every line you clear is a boxcar full of innocent people that you are sending away to a concentration camp so with that in mind and the reason i chose tetris is that we can now close all our eyes and evaluate the changes that have been made to the game by playing the game in our head right we can we can emulate tetris and think about what we would do uh if this was the game we were playing right what would you do

well there's a couple of options you can play the dutiful servant of the reich and play the game exactly the way you played tetris before you can try and pack each row full clearing out full rows and preventing the field from getting jammed up so you can get the highest score possible what a wonderful game you could take on the kind of schindler role which is to kind of back up the system as slowly as possible by optimizing the way you lose the game by leaving one and only one spot empty in each and every box car you can maximize the number of people that get pushed through the system while minimizing the number of people that get sent to concentration camps that's an interesting way to play the game or you could play the saboteur if you want and you could immediately just stack up pieces as aggressively as possible and try to get to the game over state without sending anyone to a concentration camp of course if you stack pieces up like this in the real tetris and claim that the game was about sabotaging um and attempting to uh um a game that attempted to de-responsibilize what did they say before it's participants for a system of institutional uh

discrimination that was bent on genocide right i think any sane person would laugh at you and think that you just sucked at tetris right but in this game this approach is actually really meaningful it's a meaningful and important way to play and that's the point that i'm sort of trying to make right by changing the fictional skin the game has new potential meanings that tetris didn't really have before right these meanings don't come from the mic from the mechanics they come from the behavior of the game player system acting under the influences of the narrative right my point here is not just to show that narrative can sort of powerfully influence dynamics but it's also to point out that the claim that sort of a game's fiction is only uh and exclusively a skin it's kind of a greedy reduction um a game's fiction might not touch the mechanics at all but it still strongly influences how we evaluate the field uh how we value game pieces and optimize their interactions um regardless of the explicit value we give these things in mechanics right the fictional skin excuse me

can lead to changes in the way the game is played which fundamentally is how the game means so it's important um now that we've looked at a couple different ways that dynamical meaning of a game can be influenced by the designer or you know in the fiction case of the writer or writer designer or whatever whoever um can sort of modify the dynamical meaning of the game to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much authorial influence we sort of try to exert over over those parts of the game there's another really important factor that can influence how games mean and this one is really really different than the other two street fighter is very obviously a game about reflexes precision timing um pattern recognition anticipation etc um but what's critically important to understand is that um it's fundamentally not about a battle between ken and ryu it's about a battle between two players right and uh more importantly between their sort of um

their perspectives on what the game is about competitive pressure has a massive impact on how games mean in general and also on how a specific game means and a close examination of com um competition also reveals that um unique meaning also exists within specific instances of a game uh when two players sit around and talk about um their beliefs about what a game means right that's sort of one thing right but when they test their perspectives against one another in direct competition their their ideas enter into a kind of literalized debate uh over what the game means um in 1938 uh the respected master honimbo shusai um played a retirement game against up-and-coming star minoru kitani the match was covered for the japanese press by yasunari kawabada who would later go on to win the nobel prize for literature and be recognized as one of the greatest japanese authors taking his reportage of the game and other notes in 1951 calabada published a chronicle novel of the match titled

meijin the english title of the book is the master of go at the heart of the story and at the heart of the match that the story is about um the expression of these two players personalities and their embodiment of a sort of shift in japanese culture from the conservative honorable and sort of artistic classical imperial japan to the sort of you know progressive uh pragmatic and industrious culture of modern japan admittedly these ideas are kind of pretty cliched now but when you take into account the historical context the match itself was sort of played just before world war ii or at the very start and that the novel was written after these kinds of ideas are the real deal it's not sort of like tacky um you know the tacky cyberpunk version of those concepts right now go um is actually a really simple game in one sense it has only nine mechanics uh that's them i'm not going to read them um because go games can reasonably last for dozens of hours however there are also rules for um tournaments that govern how long each player is allowed to consider his move

and rules for how moves are sealed prior to the adjournment of a playstation just like you would have in in chess or whatever right um in the case of the match in question um the way the rules worked was um you know sealing a movement writing it down um and then giving that move to a judge so that neither side would have the advantage of having hours or days to think about uh what their next move would be right my move would be determined and the other player wouldn't be able to know my move until the play started so he wouldn't be able to think about his next move for for days or weeks so uh the question is how do we get from a few very simple and abstract rules uh to a game about the shift of cultural values that took place in 20th century japan i mean that's a pretty monumental theme right and in order to answer that question we have to again um like we tried to do in the tetris example we have to observe the game at run time right so here's how the game unfolded um i'm sorry if you don't understand go at all but we're going to go a bit deep into it um although i don't think an understanding a deep

appreciation of the rules is is that necessary for me to get you through this um around the middle of the game at the 120th move the board looked like this um the master was playing white and it was the master's turn right so he moved right there um now what's important here and i'm not a great go player really but my understanding is that this sort of formation of white pieces is sort of um offensively aggressive but it's defensively weak and as a consequence it sets a tone for a skirmish that is going to happen um in this area of the board right this move is effectively the master saying all right we've now sort of gotten to the mid game if you want and we're entering into the battle that's going to determine the outcome of the entire rest of this game it's a really important move because he's sort of making a claim about what territory he thinks he's going to be able to grab in this middle part of the game and it's going to determine how the rest of the game goes how the challenger is going to respond to this move is just as important and the challenger thought about his

move for over an hour and a half until that day was done and so he sealed his move and they adjourned so two days later when they returned to the match the judge unsealed the move and to everyone's surprise the judge had a really hard time finding where the move was right that's because instead of moving in this really important battleground where you know the the guy was supposed to move and everyone thought he was going to move um and where everyone sort of knows that the climactic moves of the game are about to take place he actually moved up here see that black stone there um at first blush this is a strange move um not because it's a bad move but because it's a bookkeeping move um it's kind of like you know when when tiger misses a putt and then just walks up and taps the ball into the cup and we don't worry about the fact that it wasn't his turn and it's just a little tap in and we're done it's a it's a bookkeeping move it just gets things moving along um uh the point is that these eight stones eight white stones up here belonging to the master are not technically safe from capture but practically speaking any threat to

these stones is immediately answered with another necessary and mandatory bookkeeping move from the master that guarantees their survival the master moved there so essentially what was happening is that by making that bookkeeping move um in in the sealed play he was forcing the master to make his own bookkeeping move in response giving him two days to think about what he was going to do when he moved in that big open battlefield in the middle now because the move was sealed um yeah he bought himself two days and um to us today right we look at that and we go up very clever you know good move dude this is what the master had to say though in 1938 he said the match is over katani ruined it with that sealed play it was like smearing ink over the picture we had painted the minute i saw it i felt like forfeiting the match like telling them that was the last straw i really thought i should forfeit but i hesitated and that was that

to the master the move is ugly right the master values these conservative honorable artistic cultural ideals of classical japan and his play style and consequently the way he expresses himself through play reflects these ideals right he sees the game not only as a competition but as a work of art that the two men are creating together calabada the author uh sort of restated this point and you have to take this as editorializing anyways but um he said that play of black upon white white upon black has the has the intent and makes the form of creative and takes the form of creative art it has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music as of music everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight on his own a masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary the challenger by contrast is progressive and pragmatic and industrious he takes a pragmatic

approach to a fairly obvious problem he does not violate any rules right in fact he doesn't even think that what he has done is in any way wrong right this is just the way he sees the game the way the game player system behaves at run time for the challenger is different from the way the game player system behaves at runtime for the master consequently the master lost the match by five points and was dead a year later now let me be clear go is not about the conflict between conservative honorable artistic cultural classical japan right and progressive pragmatic industrious culture of modern japan right this one game of go however this instance of go was about that and this leads me to make sort of three points about meaning in competitive play first meaning is synthetic um and by synthetic i don't mean artificial like polyester right i mean it's created by the synthesis of two players perspectives on the game's

dynamical meaning uh i mean it in the dialectic sense right one player's perspective on the meaning is a sort of thesis the other players is the antithesis and the resultant meaning is the negotiated meaning that is synthesized in the dynamics at runtime um second meaning is rigorous by this i mean uh that how seriously the two players invest in the ludic contract determines the rigor of that synthesis right uh in a sense the two conceptions of meaning are competing for survival i think is a way of looking at it if the two players are like kids playing badminton in grandma's backyard on the fourth of july and the synthesis is really not very rigorous and the meaning is not very important um if the two players are djokovic and federer then a single shot has the capability to literally make nations question their very cultural identity right um finally meaning in competitive play is instantial um by this i mean that the dynamical meaning of a competitive game is not inherent to the game necessarily but to the instance of the game being played so while it's hard to talk about how go

means for the same reason it's hard to talk about how tetris means we can talk about how a specific game of go means based on how the game is played by its participants all right um so over the last what i don't know seven or eight minutes i've talked about how meaning is generated in dynamics and about a few ways we can influence that meaning as designers um now i'm going to be the first to admit that um this stuff is neither incredibly mind-blowing and it's not really all that useful in a practical sense but you know neither is long division and i think both are really important um understanding long division is important because it helps establish a framework in the developing brains of kids in light grade 3 or whatever that they will build on for the rest of their lives um it's the same with understanding how games mean because that framework is going to shape our industry and our medium and the psycho psychological and possibly neurological structures that we develop to parse it for decades or centuries to come um in 1991 following the collapse of its primary trade partner the soviet union

cuba lost 80 percent of its imports and exports and his gdp dropped by a third uh even worse uh because they were energy dependent on the soviets their oil imports dropped by 90 we now refer to this period you've missed euphemistically as the special period without fuel for farm vehicles or access to petroleum-based fertilizers or pesticides cuba's entire food production industry completely collapsed now since that industry was basically entirely based on growing sugar to trade for soviet oil it didn't really matter that much because the oil wasn't coming anyway and you can't fuel cars with sugar and you can't eat it either contrary to popular belief but between 1991 when food shortages began in 1995 when they sort of started to come under control the average cuban lost over 20 pounds um this was probably the best thing to happen to cuba ever um the cuban people adapted and overcame most of the difficulties but by far the most important adaptation um was the invention of the organoponicos

organoponics are a system of organic urban agriculture that arose from the bottom up when individuals and communities in the urban areas started reclaiming land for use growing food in response to the food shortages today there are over seven thousand um organoponics in cuba and in havana alone over 200 such urban organic gardens provide 90 percent of the fruit and vegetables consumed by the population of two and a half million people this is what happens when massive industrial era networks fail uh their former customers re-appropriate the abandoned networks and start pushing value back up into them this is what happened in cuba and is it is what would be happening here now if time traveling einstein hadn't thwarted edison's plan to put a power station every three kilometers so that pushing energy back up into the grid from uh solar uh um wind or community bike programs or whatever uh would actually be a sort of a normal uh situation um and you know maybe you're sitting

there saying you know this dude's been living in san francisco for too long but um just as organopornicos and distributed energy grids force us to question our aging paradigms of industry and energy and agriculture by showing us the the power of bottom bottom up systems um games are also forcing us to question our aging concept of art and it turns out that's okay because apparently we're all really good at making art dynamism in art and entertainment is not a feature right it's not something that you add to a game dynamism is the fundamental driver of how games mean and why they matter it is the reactor core of what we do and it is already changing the world faster than we can keep up with it dynamism is revolution thanks

so i have more time than i thought i would have for questions so um i guess you guys can mail me to the wall now um are there there's um there's mics there and there yeah so clint uh great talk i'm just interested your tetris example was really striking and yet it seems in some ways to sort of undermine your point as i understand it and that the the story uh shows that the uh dynamics of the the game actually uh can can be subjugated by the story and not you know be the direct meaning of the game uh i'm not phrasing that well but i think you see where i'm going yeah no i don't i don't feel that using the narrative layer um is necessarily subjugating the dynamics um in the way you say i'm i'm trying to draw a parallel between um the the kinds of authorial control we

have uh to influence dynamics one of those ways is by more heavily authoring into our mechanics by authoring rules that can strain the dynamics into a certain set or only allow certain dynamical things to happen another way you can do it is by putting things into the narrative that can strain um the likely behaviors of the player it's so i guess what i'm saying overall is that you know we have this core meaning generation mechanism which is dynamics and like in film you have different elements that you can leverage to change the way that that lowest level thing generates meaning that resonates outward one of those things is mechanics and how you offer them another of those things is um is narrative and a third thing that actually you have absolutely no control over uh is how is when dynamics are being generated between between two players or multiple players

does that clarify that yeah absolutely thanks okay yep hey clint truncasters i was just got a question about uh far cry 2 and the dynamics in multiplayer that arise from the mechanics as opposed to the single player experience and how do you i guess control or track how much the dynamics of the experience from the competitive side because as you've just said it's a much different experience and how do you make sure that you're not just com creating a completely different game far cry 2 was something that i absolutely loved and played to death but multiplayer didn't appeal to me because i felt that those dynamics didn't carry across so um unfortunately the ant so for those who didn't quite hear the question did people over here hear the question or okay because i didn't hear it super well um unfortunately the answer to your question isn't um an interesting theoretical answer about how we should um balance um you know ways competitive meaning and ways you know narrative influenced and mechanically influenced meeting

connect the answer to your question is do a better job of managing your multiplayer dev um in parallel with your single-player dev and i actually i wish i could give you a better answer and probably there is a better answer we just completely failed to do that well um so i didn't i don't understand the problem well enough to to answer the question in the way i would like i apologize i appreciate it and i apologize that it wasn't better you can blame me yeah hey my name is eric i'm an mfa game design student and researcher at parsons in new york just to clarify about your manifesto is this a call to arms to games researchers to forge the new way or is this a call to arms for the industry to change the way or is it sort of a mix and match of both i don't think there's a call to arms here i'm i just think we need to i i think i think we don't understand the way kuleshov understood or the way a modern like like kuleshov figured out how

film means in its in its most fundamental way there's some probably debate about about different flavors of that whatever that's fine um we we haven't had our kuleshov yet no one has really figured out how at the lowest level dynamics generate meaning i'm trying to touch on some of that stuff here and get people to think about framing the problem in the right way so we can try to understand it better and literalize it a little more and learn from it um as a consequence though of kuleshov figuring it out um we now live in a world where like like i guarantee you when when um i don't know famous when george lucas makes a movie my boss right i guarantee you when he makes a movie he isn't thinking about low level editing in this kind of abstract sense as being meaning generating he has completely internalized that process the same way when you see footage uh that's being cut back and forth and edited on a screen you you read it and you understand it right so there's a there's an entire

universe of people who have internalized how film editing generates meaning and it's just part of our understanding of the world right we don't even realize we speak this language um we don't we haven't arrived there yet for games there are people who are i think starting to figure it out and who are starting to experiment with it and illustrate some things that are very interesting but even as professional developers it's um we have a hard time reading this language uh we have a hard time writing in this language um and you know it's so it's not a call to arms it's just a here's here's the domain of this problem that we need to look carefully at from all kinds of different directions i think over the next few years right so the chance to define this vocabulary there's an opportunity and potential too and that's pretty much what you're saying right sorry i couldn't hear um there's there's still a potential in the opportunity to define the these vocabulary absolutely absolutely yeah this is it's still very largely undefined most of the terrain is unexplored and i

think we need to keep exploring great thanks good i there's a guy here been there for a while hey uh great lecture um i uh i may just have not gotten the kushaloft thing i understood and really uh appreciated the um the for game uh for game design the narrative being the skin and the mechanics being underneath i thought that was uh you know i think like that was the whole point for me for this lecture but i didn't quite get um the uh narrative verse editing for film because it seems to me that the editing is kind of a tool of the narrative so i was just curious if you are just wondering if you could maybe re-explain exactly what the relationship was between narrative and editing in film okay um yeah i'm not i'm not a film theorist deeply um i but i don't believe that editing is a tool of the narrative um i believe that editing uh it's i think it's like that would be like saying that um the the lego pieces are tools of the of the lego spaceship right i think that um editing

when you cut a person's face looking at a flower and it creates some kind of feeling that is a building block which we then piece together to create something larger and we can when an editor sits down yes he has a map which is the narrative but i don't believe that i don't believe that um i don't believe that the the meaning comes from the narrative down into the into the low-level editing i believe that there's these there are these raw elemental chunks of meaning and feeling that we sequence together and then we put into an overarching framework um so so i don't um so yeah i just don't believe that that's the case i think editing by itself makes people feel things in interesting ways and having it having a higher arching an overarching story and scenes and stuff like that that we plug this up into allows us to sustain um having these kinds of feelings uh in a meaningful way for a long enough period of time that we can call that a a whole experience that can answer your question uh well so how wouldn't you um

determine how to edit a film based on kind of the narrative and the like what would you call then the what drives the way that you edit the film if it's not the narrative it would be i guess the vision some sort of thing like that right yeah i mean i don't obviously obviously there's a director who has a vision who's trying to make something meaningful i don't think that you i've never edited a film i don't think that you yeah i'm just not an expert on this i can't i can't really speak to to your point sorry uh thanks though yeah um yep uh good talk um so i'm wondering do you have um like an understanding of a generalized way to go from uh like say you know you know what the purpose of the game is that you're trying to make but you want to know where on that scale of authorship you want to place it how do you decide that do you have a like an optimal way of deciding that um there is no optimal way it's a personal

decision i think for for any developer like if you if you're the kind of developer who wants to really heavily author uh an experience you have the tools to do that um and certainly we're actually quite good at that um that's not the approach i prefer to take you may be the kind of developer who likes to give away as much of the meaning generating stuff to the player as possible that's the approach i i like in the games i make and in the games i play how do you do it um so i can only speak to how i do it but i mean you okay to answer the question kind of quickly you give away as much autonomy to the people who work under you and with you on your team and you encourage them to give away as much autonomy to the people who work around them and with them on the larger part of the team and then you encourage that philosophy to spread outward until it

encompasses players um the more it's it's really sounds like a hallmark card or something but it's like from in my perspective and what i believe and what i feel in my experience is that the more you give the more you get back and i just try to give away as much as i can all right thanks yeah don't do that if you want to control everything though because that would then you would fail i guess i guess we're done okay go have lunch i'll take your question