Making it Matter: Lessons from Real Sports

[Music] all right hi everybody my name is Bennett Fadi I'm a philosopher at Oxford University and I also make games at Adi dotnet and on iOS and I'm gonna be talking a little bit about the relationship between games and real sports video games are played in a simulated world with arbitrary rules for imaginary points players aren't harmed when they die and for the most part they don't have any money on the line so I think the most fundamental of all design challenges is to make the events in the video game world matter to the player in particular the player needs to care about how they play the game there's no if there's no need to play the game well the player's actions become lazy and then routine and at some point the only thing that's keeping them playing is a

story that they're passively consuming for the art or the Xbox achievement points a game where player performance doesn't matter might might still be enjoyable but ultimately disposable you know it's a simulation of a simulation it's like a movie where you have to wiggle a thumb stick in order to keep the projector running this is what players do to get the frequent-flyer achievement in Superman Returns they're so disengaged that they're not even looking at the screen not even touching the controller anymore I think it's designers if we can get players to care about the outcome of our games they'll be more engaged more focused and the games will ultimately be more meaningful to them but it's a pretty hard problem since the events in a video game are ultimately they don't matter at all in any kind of practical sense so what I want to talk about is how this probe this problem is addressed in the world of real non digital sports

now real-world competitive sports you have to say I mean first of all it they're not designed usually in the same way that video games are they they evolved as a set of shared social or cultural practices so American football we think evolved from the ancient Greek game a pisco rose which is pictured here which in turn surely evolved from even more ancient game probably involving throwing rocks at other people in order to hurt them but if you were designing a new sport like when frisbee golf was designed you'd face the same basic design challenges that we face when we make video games like games sports are basically enjoyable or fun activities but the outcomes in any sporting activity are fundamentally pretty pointless and arbitrary you might play a sport for enjoyment but there's no inherent reason why you should care about who wins who loses and how people played the game despite that sports have been far more successful at video games

at making their performances and their results matter both to the players and the spectators and football and basketball stadiums routinely filled to capacity more than a billion people watch the Olympics every four years and athletes are prepared to sacrifice everything to attain the highest possible performance they train day-in day-out suffering painful and even disfiguring stress injuries they collapse at the finish line crying or fainted they take life-threatening doses of performance-enhancing drugs even in sports where the financial rewards are tiny like in the Olympic race walk I think of liuxiang and his crippled hop to the finish line in last year's Olympic hurdles and that kind of commitment would be ridiculous in a video game player even though video games basically and no more silly no more pointless than real sports of course part of the reason why a fleets cares so much about their sports is that there's a huge amount of money and fame on the line you know and put and part of it is that sports of course you're just

older than video games I guess if we play Street Fighter continuously for over a hundred years and give people a million dollars when they win it Evo people probably care about it a lot more that's true but those can't be the only reasons why people care more about sports you know basketball was shown at the Olympics just 13 years after it was invented the street fighter for comparison is now 20 years old even in sports with relatively small audiences and no prize money like Little League baseball people care much more about the outcome than they do in the case of video games almost never hear of people taking a game as seriously as this even though sports are fundamentally just as in essential in arbitrary as video games nope no competitive video game fills a big stadium or is televised on a major network there's no bands of violent Starcraft hooligans no halo player trading cards there's no back page column in the local paper this is how evil looks biggest tournament for Street Fighter note that

pretty much everyone in the audience here is also a competitor and not just a fan and that's how the Superbowl looks so clearly real world sports are doing something right that video games aren't managing to do and I think as designers we can take a lot of inspiration from what sports are doing so that's what this talks about I'm going to talk about a few of the things that we can do I should acknowledge up front that we already have things that we call eSports I think legitimately I take it that a genuine eSport really only differs from a non-digital sport in that it involves a computer and has a lot going right for it so what makes sports or eSports different from games I think that part of the answer is that all sports including eSports are heavily steeped in performance two senses of the word first in sports there's a big difference between knowing what to do and being able to do it you have to perform your moves in a way that's not trivial to do it's not easy to reproduce the same movements twice in a row and that's one

of the things that make Street Street Fighter a viable sport while a game like chess isn't you know performance in the sense of high performance or performance enhancement but the second dimension and performance is that sports unlike many games are performative your actions within a sport convey meaning to the audience sometimes they convey some of your character your personality or your feelings to the to the people who are watching you and the presence of the audience in turn imparts meaning on your sporting performance and it makes it matter more both to you and to the audience here's a simple way of looking at it Usain Bolt probably broke the world record for the hundred meter sprint dozens of times in training even in competition against his teased friends and his teammates on the Jamaican track team but it doesn't count and doesn't matter and it's some in some sense it's not even really a sport until the grandstand is full that's when it goes from being training to being a sport

when you play FIFA over an internet connection with nobody watching except you and your opponent it's nothing like a sport so it's not as though only sports themed games automatically get to be eSports you have to directly support it in your design here's one that does I think counter-strike is more like a sport because even though you play it alone in your bedroom over the Internet it's set up so that the people who lose when you die you form part of a peanut gallery that's forced to watch the surviving players compete for the win right so the win matters more in counter-strike because your teammates and your vanquished enemies are watching and cheering and booing but you know I think they could they could make it matter even more if they altered it so that the players could see or hear that she is and booze of the ghosts looking on and not many people know about this but in I want to be the guy Gaiden which is a single-player game the developer

Michael O'Reilly has the ability to visit your game drop in and without you knowing at first give you hints even manipulate variables to make it harder or easier for you to kind of mess with you right so the point I'm trying to make here is this if you make sure your game has a physical performance aspect like Street Fighter even if only in the thumbs and if you make it so that it's played in front of some kind of audience then you can pretty much guarantee that the outcome of the match will matter more to the players and to the onlookers and that's part of what I think it means for something to be a sport to perform in front of others to be watched cheered booed human rituals in general whether we think of weddings funerals executions or football matches don't mean much unless you have participants and witnesses and the same is true of video games you can make your game matter just by designing it to be performed in front of a simulated crowd if you like in front of a single human being is in this case or you can build your game out from the ground up so that

it's designed to be watched by a crowd played at a party design your game so that gives the spectators something to watch for right so you also have to be aware that anything that happens between the player that players thumb and the gamepad is probably invisible to anybody watching so yjs works well all of the motions are out there for everybody to see some of the ways that sports make themselves matter to the players come out of that public performative aspect so for example one crucial aspect that is basically missing from games next to sports is drama right this focus on human suffering frustration striving that's absolutely core to the spectatorship experience in sport sports a dramatic because the stakes are higher and of course you get higher stakes for free when there's spectators right spectators make you embarrassed if you play badly or proud if you play well but sports are also often explicitly

designed to bring out emotional and physical suffering to the maximum allowable degree right so in the in the race walk at the Olympics or in the Tour de France from the Tour de France it pushes the the human body to the absolute limits of physical endurance baseball is structured in such a way that it puts one solitaire away side batter in the path of 9 guys who oppose him and tens of thousands of local fans and in the bleachers who hate him and want him to die and I think there's a kind of pressure that comes out of that something something really interesting can happen under that kind of pressure and athletes puke athletes cry athletes spit the dummy and it generates feelings of drama and emotional investment in the players and in the fans and in the press making sports matter in a way that video games usually don't in video games do their best to undermine the sense of occasion and a sense of drama that's present in every big sporting

performance right you quickload you make a little bit of progress and then your quicksave a player erases every mistake and they keep every lucky break and I think this is one of the worst and most pervasive failures of game design even in games where there's no quicksave we designed them systematically so that they avoid that we avoid the chance that someone will be frustrated or humiliated you know and thereby we also avoid the chance that someone will feel really seriously proud or accomplished but we can easily reverse that we raise the pressure on players by drawing inspiration from things that lend drama to real world sports right so one example is it's embarrassing to screw up in a real sport because the crowd is watching your every move right and parlour games like pool especially those that aren't played with an audience are more like video games than sports in this sense right because the audience is very small or non-existent but with parlor games they've also found we've found some ways to compensate for the lack of the the

audience the lack of public shaming right so in Australia the tradition is that if you lose a game of pool without getting a single ball in a pocket you have to pull your pants down the table [Music] [Applause] with that on the line I think then your performance matters a lot right in a videogame you could roll out a ready-made crowd using Twitter by Auto tweeting the poor performance of the player did bit to publicly embarrass them you can design your games with controls that are designed to be physically exhausting like our game mega group in this case you have to play efficiently or else you'll get like a very painful leg cramp but maybe the most effective way to raise the stakes in a video game is to take the most basic thing that makes the results of sporting events matter right there is no do-overs in competitive sport you can

create a sense of occasion by designing levels that can only be played once or only once a day or you could let the players play anytime but only challenge for the leaderboard once every four years like an Olympics maybe that all sounds a little bit too radical I want to say that you can also raise the stakes of a game in more subtle metaphorical ways in competitive sports especially boxing we've developed this kind of complex language around challenging winning and losing that includes trashed all the [ __ ] talking the other players my style is impetuous my defense is impregnable and I'm just for roaches I want your heart I want either children praise be to Allah are you saying now make the bike so that language is used to invoke like deeper social concepts like honour and pride in in sporting results and I think it increases the stakes both metaphorically and in reality we increase the stakes of a sport metaphorically by saying things

like I'm going to bury you right or I crushed you even the basic term you know I beat you is a violent term we borrow the language of deadly combat and violent crime in order to make losing sound a lot worse and more important than it really is now obviously you can get all the trash dogs that you want if you play an online multiplayer shooter but I think you can also use it in single-player designs where we face the toughest challenge to make player's performance medow an example would be Devil May Cry [ __ ] talks you if you do poorly tells you that easy mode is unlocked I did this more explicitly in my game clop has his antagonist called sherrod who literally insults you every time you lose there's no real life audience in this case but in this case the there is this NPC character who forms a kind of a peanut gallery observing and reacting and criticizing your performance it doesn't really matter what sherrod thinks of your running style but it kind

of starts to feel like it does it more often in games we use a visual metaphor for high stakes instead of a verbal one so if you think about it this is the reason why so many games use the player advertised death as the failure state in fact I think that's the best or most legitimate reason that justifying reason for the amount of violence that we have in single-player games and that's why there's something so unsatisfying about games that bend over backwards to avoid a dead state and if the player is invulnerable there's no metaphor for high stakes and the outcome of the game starts to feel predestined and meaningless you think of LA noire where it's they made it almost impossible to run over pedestrians okay if there's no danger of a penalty the stakes are lowered the outcome matters less and the player stops trying to drive well of course in sports in real sports apart from martial arts I guess the penalty for failure isn't injury or death it's just humiliation and

frustration and shame but that's deliberately designed into sport as well again making heavy use of metaphors for example sports make heavy use of the concept of nationalism by forming teams around countries so there's this idea in the players head if you're playing for your country you know everyone in the country is is watching you and depending on you and I think the TrackMania guys realize that when they made nations where you can compete to push your country higher up in the ladder again like in the Olympics now it's not a real way of raising the stakes you know there's no actual benefit to your country to be higher in TrackMania nations but it's a metaphor for something that matters just like trash talk all right so one final point in real-world sports there's this strong ethic of player integrity which i think is an essential part of what makes the outcome of a sporting match mattered to the players and the fans we spend billions of dollars every year testing athletes for this long list of illegal

drugs right we have an international panic when Tiger Woods cheats on his wife or when Lance Armstrong turns out to have been doping the whole time and sporting organizations have cited incredibly heavily against things like match-fixing especially in in soccer and boxing in the sporting world the reason we object to to fix games or performance-enhancing drugs is that they violate an ethic of integrity in sports so integrity is important because it's part of what gives the result of a game legitimacy and importance if you win because the other team wasn't trying or because you paid for an unfair advantage then the results of the match own interest so integrity is part it's like an important part of what makes the outcome of any sporting event matter it's really difficult to give single player video games the same legitimacy when there's no spectators no human referees and no one will ever know if you've used a trainer or a cheat code but I think certain reward structures

that we put in our games undermine the ethic of integrity even more even if you're not cheating paid a win I think is the video game equivalent of match-fixing for doping if you can pay to improve your performance by purchasing upgrades or unlocks and doesn't matter anymore how well you're playing even when it's sanctioned by the developer even when it's provided by the developer buying progress undermines the player's integrity I'd also argue that any game that lets you just exchange progress for time time for progress Without Really Trying is it is essentially suffering from the same problem so grinding is just paying to win with a different currency time if you're grinding it doesn't matter how well you're playing at all I mean you can obviously speed up the grind by playing well but but you can get more efficiency by playing eight

copies of the same game at once now it's true I mean one of the things that may jump to mind is that in sport you have to do something that's a bit brined like which is training if to train in order to play well it's not just a matter of showing up on matchday and focusing hard but training also has to be done skilfully you know you can't just exchange time for victory in any sport and people always tell me that they beat QWOP they're really proud and they're really happy they come and they say they say that they beat co-op and I inquire a bit further and it turns out that they did it this way by kind of tapping the keys as fast as they can and scooting along on one knee now I would feel pretty ashamed to admit that I was playing a game with so little dignity but I'm in the van or I'm in the minority there right you know we that's the minority view because we don't have a norm of integrity in video games so it's designers what can you do to foster that norm of integrity in your game well

if you approach your game in the same way as you approach a real-life sport the first thing that you do is you do your best to maintain a canonical record of the players performance especially in single player right so that might mean doing your best to make sure that the scoreboards are secure or that high schoolers are validated it might mean doing your best to make sure that updates to the game rules don't invalidate previous scores it might mean making sure that players can't pay for better equipment or grind mindlessly to achieve better stats or progress through the game but if our games don't explicitly reward and support integrity in the players then I think that they're basically doomed to be disposable entertainment rather than something more alright so in this talk I've argued that the biggest challenge that we face as designers is to make the events in our games matter to players and I've argued

that we can meet that challenge in a number of ways taking inspiration from real sports if we're making a mall to play a game we can give it performativity by placing it in front of live spectators either online or in live performance spaces and you can raise the stakes of the game by running one-off tournaments where the player only gets one chance to do well in the event gaming scene at baby castles wild rumpus huevos rancheros prince of arcade and so on we've been doing these things as much as we can and I think in single-player it's harder but there are still things that you can do you can utilize social networks or NPCs to build real or simulated audience you can enforce permanent consequences to bad player performance you can have one-off game events to build a sense of occasion and you can even jump in and shit-talk the player either automatically or as as in I want to be the guy gaiden by hacking

their game and you can make sure that they can't win unless they're trying their hardest and I think it's super rare to see single-player games or even private multiplayer games that do all those things at once but games that do will be engaging and they'll be memorable and I think they'll matter a lot more to the players and to the spectators just like real single-player sports thanks very much we've got a question from Chris just can you talk about the the cultivating integrity and the norm of integrity versus like hacking as kind of a meta game thing for games like you know figuring out a solution to co-op that doesn't require you to play the way you want it can you talk a little bit about the conflict between those alright so okay so the question is you know is

there a tension between cultivating a norm of integrity and allowing players I guess so I guess in co-op I didn't do anything to start players from from scooting along on one knee and even after I realized that they were all doing that I I could have I could have I mean I published it on my website I could easily have just gone in and made some kind of rule that stopped people from doing that and didn't clot and I actually one of the one of the things about this is that I I think that if you enforce too hard if you try too hard to force players to play with integrity there's a risk that it no longer is integrity right they're not making a choice to play with dignity that maybe there is less dignity after all I've been trying it both ways I actually think that it's better in co-op that I didn't I didn't enforce it too much but what I've been trying to do as a developer is going around and ridiculing

players who do that I'm trying to publicly shame them that's my way as a developer of trying to foster that norm of integrity look I do believe that games shouldn't shouldn't be too strict with their rules so but but you know hopefully hopefully if I put up enough of these slides people will feel bad about playing that way all right next hi my names my name is Roy and I'm developing right now a local strictly local multiplayer competitive game and we had an event at a local bar back in Vermont in the states where we had people off the streets play play the game and we had a tournament and largely it was pretty successful but I'm there were still some people in the crowd who was like oh why is there a video game here so my question to you sorry is how large of a role do you think the decreasing yet prevalent stigma against video games plays apart in the popularity of video games versus sports

yeah it's a real problem right I mean we were at the Sony event at IndieCade last year and and you know it's they rented out the the Bharat but at some point it was no longer like completely private and regular people started coming in and they were mad at us because we were sitting playing samurai gun in a big group everyone's having a good time you know they're ordering drinks it's not like we're not you know doing that and then you know waitresses start to shut us down and we've got like these kind of guys in suits and ties who've come from the picture Studios like making fun of us for playing video games in a bar and I can sort of understand it in a way we've got a whole bunch of cultural norms about those spaces about what people are doing and I guess video games are constructed as as not being part of that right look and that's something that's going to take some time to change we need games that are designed for those spaces I mean part of the problem is you know we're sitting around with this laptop it's like 15 inch screen it's four of us huddled around it

there's really it's very difficult to kind of get the spectatorship aspect going because nobody can see it except for the people who are playing it right and nobody actually knows what we're doing because we're sitting here with these controllers and our thumbs are just sort of barely moving and so to somebody who doesn't know about video games and who doesn't want to get up really close to us there's nothing in it for them except that we're sort of taking up space and kind of killing their vibe but when we play when we run Doug Wilson's game Johann Sebastian joust in the same sorts of spaces people don't seem to object right suddenly that's something everybody wants to get involved in so it is possible I think we've got two jobs to do one is to design games that can be played within the kind of context of the existing spaces and then the other one is that we have to try to support the establishment of new spaces you know like I was supporting la game space and I've been contributed to baby castles for many years silent barn there it's so there are emerging some spaces where we can start to kind of create our own

culture in those spaces and and not be kind of like harshing the vibe of these these millionaires who've come down from the picture studio is trying to have a regular bar experience hey totally fascinating I really like the idea of what sports can bring to games I was wondering what you thought about about what games can bring to sports design I'm thinking a lot about like current debates happening about rugby rules that are like kind of broken and soccer rules that are kind of broken and what the video game world can bring to sports it's an interesting question so when you have like the electronic linesman in tennis or in in soccer it decides whether the ball has gone over the line there is definitely a blurring of the lines between video games and real sports right I'm all for that I think that video reason I'm interested in video games rather than just playing

or making sports is that I think that there is something special about video games that you can't get with tabletop games with with parlor games or with real sports right I think there is this kind of tight pairing between a system that can react instantaneously and you know a human brain and a human body that that allows you to have experiences and to produce engagement that sports can't at least as they're currently envisaged so I think there is absolutely a lot of room to bring the kind of benefits of video game technology to real sport and maybe we can have like a best of both worlds that would be fantastic okay so a lot of what you're talking about is certainly relevant to like competitive games and multiplayer games and talking about like you know at raising the challenge and raising the stakes and so that's that those kind of things certainly appeal to people that are really into those sort of competitive

games but I'm I would wonder to what extent do you feel like that some of these prescriptions that you're offering would apply at like outside of those types of games because obviously a lot of the reason why a lot of games are getting easier or less punishing are to in the interest of you know widening the potential audience do you see that potentially working in a mass market or would it always have to be kind of that niche competitive kind of yeah okay so the answer to that is that it's really easy to explain in a kind of multiplayer competitive scheme how to make it more like a sport because sports are kind of often like that but I think that there are kind of things lessons that you can take from sports even if you're making single-player games that are not even designed to have that kind of adversarial difficult competitive thing right so if you think about a game like Proteus which it doesn't even have goals Proteus by ed key so it's a game where you basically just walk around a

beautiful landscape and you experience some sounds and you see some things right that's that's the sort of description of the game it's amazing now that's the kind of game which is nothing like a real world sport but we've had very good results sort of showing it in public to large groups of people because there is a kind of performance aspect using the music and the visuals and so it's possible to bring out that kind of experience performance even without the competitive thing even without the multiplayer thing you know you if you're thinking about how this will be perceived as a performance even if it's not you know a big public space with a huge audience even if it's just the people in your household who are watching you play over your shoulder while you're playing on the couch you can design for that so I think that it's harder in the case of single-player games especially single-player games that are not sort of super competitive but it's still possible to think creatively about this and I think still you can take some some inspiration from

real from real sports for sure okay we we're out of time so thanks very much everybody you