The Gamification of Death

[Music] it sounds like I'm on lovely to see you all thank you very very much for making the inexplicable and possibly ill-advised choice of starting your GDC key with the talk about death I appreciate it more than I can say so thank you very much because that is what I'm here to talk about so I call this the gamification of death partly because I'm a little bit of a troll and partly because I couldn't think of anything better but I should probably say up front I'm talking here about gamification not air quotes gamification and I don't really want to get bogged down into that debate I think it's already unfolded quite interestingly at various other summits earlier this week but I think it is worth just making that

distinction between a process of trying to make something into a meaningful game into something that operates in the way that we understand games work with risk and rewards and objects and constraints and whatever particular definition you best like as your definition of the game and the other equally interesting but different process of using some of the language of games some of the furniture and paraphernalia in terms of point structures and badges to apply to other circumstances and both are interesting but what I want to talk about today is the first one is about this process of trying to make something real into a real game so I'm going on the no arrow out front and the thing I was gonna make into a game was death and I and my team at hide and seek have spent on and off quite a lot of the last 18 months working on a project about death from which we learned a lot and I wanted to come and share that with you guys here and this being GDC I thought I should do

that in the format of takeaways because we all love a takeaway I mean something quite different in the UK you know it really skews our perspective of this whole event but yeah I wanted to share my takeaways from that your of working on a game about death and so these were my kind of top three takeaways was pretty much it it was a hard year and a half and you know I don't I did tell you you were coming to a thing about death and and I'm sorry that this is how your day starts and it may sound like a major overstatement write games about death not that hard games have a lot of death in them we've all seen and played and some of us have made probably really interesting projects game projects proper game projects about death whether you know some of our examines early game design challenge sessions or a playing passage or the path or whatever it is that you go to in your head when somebody says

games about death so why did this drive me to the brink of my take away slide when it seems quite straightforward so it's worth saying that this isn't really a project about death it's a project about a death and that turns out to be a much harder thing so this was a project that was based around this film a film called dreams of a life and this film tells a story that I still struggle to tell about the discovery of the body of a woman named Joyce Vincent dead in her North London flat in 2005 she was found by the bailiffs he had broken in because of a buildup of unpaid electricity bills and they found not her but her skeleton she'd been lying there for nearly three

years despite the unpaid bills the electricity had remained on so for that entire period her television had been on broadcasting BBC one for all of that time her neighbors didn't know her no one had ever reported her missing in the end she was only identified or formally identified by comparing her teeth against holiday photos that they found in the flat in which she was smiling enough that they could make that secure identification when she died she was 37 years old and it's a story that I think everybody or everybody I've ever told it to responds to you very strongly yes it's unthinkable and horrible that somebody could fall through the cracks to that extent and this was somebody who had friends who had a successful career who had family still living who had a father still alive at the time of her death and sisters it was briefly

reported in the in the UK press but the stories that have went nowhere because nobody could find out anything about her she she dropped so far from kind of the way that we normally keep people in our social lives that nobody had any stories to tell so Cara Morley and acclaimed venturi a filmmaker from the UK just couldn't let the story go and so she spent the next five years trying to dig through what she could to try and find out both more about how giorious have come to die but also how she lived and who she was and what we'd lost in in losing this woman that none of us knew or none of us knew had died the film was primarily funded by film for in the the UK who you may know from some dog millionaire and a bunch of other things that you might like and they were really keen early on to make this a a

commission that went beyond film they they knew that there is not necessarily an infinite market for people who go and see your house documentary particularly at the cinema there's often not opportunities for people to see that work depending on where they live and where the film is screened so they wanted to Commission something to sit beside it that would be more accessible to a wider audience and that would provide an opportunity for people to explore their own reactions to the film and to Joyce's story so they knew they wanted it to be digital and interactive which meant they basically knew they wanted it to be again so they came to us and said might you be the guys to do this now if you you may or may not know how to seek if you do know how to seek that may seem like a weird thing because quite a lot of what we do is silly quite a lot quite a lot of what we do has comedy songs in it and involves people running around in streets and reinventing clue so that it's got zombies in it and monopoly said

that it's about divorce and doing film work but often phil work for big entertainment projects like Sherlock Holmes or Green Lantern as I'm sure you have clocked already but another half of our work that's maybe not so well known is with more serious and kind of our house project so hinterland was a was a playable poem that we ran on the streets of Edinburgh last year we've made games with tape modern integrating with with all of the artwork in their permanent collection which in Tate Modern is a pretty eclectic and challenging a bunch of stuff and we've done series of projects aren't project with various kind of national theaters so film for I thought it would be a really great idea to involve us we thought it would be a really great idea to involve us because this is the kind of stuff we like doing and I thought it would be an especially good idea because I've spent a lot of the last 10 years some of you have been on the receiving end of it talking about the potential of games talking about their ability to tackle any subject to

stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any other or an entertainment forum and and make things of worth and of weight so I thought this was a brilliant idea it really wasn't and and it really wasn't because the minute you start poking at this at this proposition you start to find all kinds of really difficult constraints and challenges that affect how you approach the design so in in kind of no particular order I thought I'd take you through a few of those just so you could kind of see how the thing stuck together in our head so aesthetics is a is a place to start this is a this is a project that has to sit next to you a film feature film and not just any feature film but a documentary and so we kind of very early on were asking those sort of big principle questions of what do we think this looks like hippy did it is it gonna feel right if it looks like a video game is that going to sit well next to the film is it gonna feel right if it is

illustrated because while you have some fantastic animated documentaries we had some questions about what happens when you put an animated game against a film documentary and whether or not you kind of trigger any interesting questions about kind of hierarchy of reality and truth in kind of those two things and so we immediately found that we were kind of being laid in interesting directions about what our aesthetic approach this thing might be and part of the reasons that's so hard is as any of you who've ever worked in a film project know is that timing is incredibly tricky that you're probably trying to make a thing that needs to be ready for when the film comes out that means you've got to start work before the film is finished and that's hard enough on a kind of blockbuster film where you can make a bunch of assumptions about how the thing will come out and probably where you know you've got hundreds of versions of the scripts assuming you can get hold of them to kind of see what's going to

happen and you can maybe even get on set for some of the shoot or see some of the production design stuff coming through and those are experiences we've had before with Carol's film this is a documentary based almost entirely on interviews with people from her life which meant that right up until the last minute new information was was kind of emerging and thinking about how the finished version might look so when we started conversations with her she had not made any firm decisions about how the film will appear we knew there would be some moments of recreation of Joyce's life in it but we didn't know at all what format they would take and so both you have no access to that information and you also probably have no access really to the creative team working on the film this is a this is a you know a low-budget passion project for a documentary maker they are working 18 hours a day in Dublin on this stuff and don't necessarily have a whole lot of time to work with you on the questions you have about how you want your game to look and that relationship with the film also gave us another

interesting problem which is the incredibly arresting thing about this project is that is the story of Joyce and all of the questions that her life and her death trigger and that's where you want to store it but that's what the film is doing that's what Carol is doing she's the documentarian she's the the person who spent five years immersing herself in in every detail that she can find and building relationships with all of the the people who did know Joyce he were he were willing to contribute and for us to present our own version of that story for us to make her own effort to recreate Joyce's world it seems both like unnecessary duplication and also really a pretty substantial impertinence right this isn't I make video games I'm not a documentary and I have no business rocking up to this and three weeks later

going hey we made a explorable replica of Joyce's flat that we invented you know from not very much so although you you you want to star there because that's clearly the kind of the center of gravity of this whole thing it becomes a very difficult place to be and it becomes literally a very difficult place to be and I think I think film for had had initially considered some approaches that included things like recreating Joyce's flat as a apartment as an explorable environment annex instantly apparent that that's that's kind of a macabre but inappropriate thing to do because because Joyce was there Joyce's body was there and I think you have to include that in that replica of what you do which is macabre and difficult you have to exclude it which is sort of even worse and finding a way

to put you there that didn't feel intrusive inappropriate was something that you know I think we very very early on decided that we didn't want to do so although Joyce was this huge starting point we realized quite seen that she actually wasn't going to feature very largely in the work that we did at all which interesting place all of this it's worth saying is happening against what I think to be fair is probably the best funded or hives transmedia digital gaming project ever which is to say you know this is not a triple-a cycle all right this is you're trying to do this within a within a kind of very particular set of constraints but do work that's going to stand up credibly next to something designed to be seen on the big screen but also because of the nature of that funding you have a bunch of other really interesting questions and problems

Joyce's story touches on some very difficult issues touches on issues of suicide such as on issues of domestic violence at the time when we started working on this wasn't clear whether or not we were going to be dealing with issues of drug use and obviously touches on this central issue of people who go missing of what that process is and what it can mean about the people who do go missing and what it means for the people who are left behind and feel for is pretty fearless about tackling all of that stuff they you know they weren't looking to to mark off any particular taboos for us but they have a very well-established set of compliance guidelines and some very well-versed lawyers who have you know good guidelines and opinions about how you might tackle these things about how you make sure that you don't include you know trigger points for

self-harm or where you have to think about putting in safety nets and contact points for people who might be having suicidal thoughts and you very I mean these are these are very sobering conversations very very fast that you don't necessarily have there's also a whole bunch of legal issues here about questions of libel I guess in terms of suggesting if there was kind of a any direct negligence that led up to Joyce's death and the failure to discover her body you know because these are all this only happened a few years ago all the people involved in this story are still alive we're gonna play this thing and so you're you're very quickly aware that you're navigating in this in this kind of very complicated space and we've got a lot of help from from for in doing that we spend a lot of time talking to people like missing people which is the big missing person's charity in the UK

to try and kind of get our heads around all of these issues because the problem with a project like this is it's not just about keeping the lawyer is happy it's really a lot of fun not being an this because you hear the story and everybody has their own immediate reaction to it and I think quite a lot of people had a reaction I certainly had reaction where you go oh god I should ring my brother I don't spoken to my brother in like three months that's inexcusable I should fix that I should do that I should call my granny I should do this thing I should you know and bang on my neighbor's door and introduce myself because I still don't know their names or whatever it is and you very quickly started having ideas about how you might structure a game experience that revolves around doing those kind of things and possibly revolves around doing those kind of things in machine-readable ways so you started to have overexcited ideas about scraping people's Facebook accounts for a whole bunch of information about the you know the size and richness of their

friendship group and looking at how often they contact people and prompting them to get in touch with people that they haven't contacted for a while and all this kind of thing and then you realize that you have no business doing that you have no idea who these people are that the machine-readable portions of their social lives are only ever apportions and none of you have lives that are fully and wholly represented in Facebook or on Twitter or whatever it is that you're that you tend to be there's people who are there there's people who are not there there's maybe people who are there here it looks like you never interact with but that's because you've seen them every day or you I am them every day or you know whatever else is going on and trying to reconstruct a true reflection of somebody's degree of connectedness from digitally straight people sources the again the minute you poke at it for more than two seconds is clearly not a good idea even if you remove the machine-readable portion and just say how long is it since you you

know called your mother you may have a really good reason for not having crossed your mother I have no business my game has no business telling you that you ought to do that and what you find is you so you step away from that specificity and you you try and find something that is gentler and more open to interpretation and then you end up with something that is so wishy-washy and so vague that nobody carries it's like hey maybe you should think about a thing that that you don't think about if you'd like it's not like you know that's not that's not hooky that's not that's not kind of what you want so that you know that became really important to us I think particularly when we talk to people like the missing people charity you start to realize lots of the things that I hadn't perhaps thought about before as much as I should that you know sometimes people go missing because they want to go missing sometimes people are isolated because they enjoy solitude they're happy working that way that that it sometimes people like mediating nearly all of their friendships in social life digitally and that doesn't

mean there's anything deficient in that doesn't mean the same deficient if you don't want to do anything digitally and you want to do everything down the pub in real life it was it was very difficult to find any firm ground of a thing that we felt we could say that didn't involve being an and that led into another realization that really affected kind of the development direction of the project the one of the saddest things at the heart of Joyce's story is she was found by accident no one no one knew she was there no one was looking her neighbor had become a bit frustrated at the previous year the noise from the television and had banged on the wall a bit but when it hadn't worked be given up and and that felt incredibly important to me that this this reality that this terrible thing had happened and we just didn't know and nobody did anything and nobody was looking and there was no sense of

quest there was no sense of mission was a really interesting thing to take into a game design context because so often that sort of structure I mean arguably it's always a structure but there's a thing you're trying to do this point you're trying to get see there's a you know there's some kind of mission statement or or a goal objective and you know obviously we didn't want to do crass ways to do that we would I think we would have felt that all comfortable kind of making a game where your job was to save Joyce or you know find her earlier or you know whatever that could have been but even if you make it oblique it just started to feel totally and thematically wrong putting you in a structure that was about go hey you know your job is to is to do this stuff and that will work just felt to be a structure that was everything that the film in Joyce's story wasn't about and it was probably about this point that we started to get quite scared because it's like okay so now now we can't even kind

of have that structure so we're not we're not going to use Joyce's narrative we're not going to use that kind of conventional game mission structure and then the difficulty is even when you start looking on a systemic level it's really difficult so a lot of and certainly a lot of the work we've done in game misfiring with no air croch things and a lot of what the other people have done is is looking for those essential systems it's looking at how you boil something down to something revelatory and interesting about the kind of interplay of of key elements within that system that's great because games thrive on those structures but I'm not I think this is interesting because we've talked here often enough about you know whether or not it's a realistic goal that will ever be able to model the muddier elements of the human condition in that

kind of a way and George the story just seemed like you know this incredible object lesson in how functionally impossible that is that the the systems there are systems that set under Joyce's story all kinds of systems there's administrative and institutional systems it was clear that it became clear from from Carol's research that there was some history of domestic violence there and that had put her into a system which had provided her with safe housing but had probably broken her connections with the places that she'd been living prior to that happening there is terrible administrative details that come to light she she had gone into hospital a few months before she died and had listed on her hospital admission sheet as her next of kin her bank manager which is still one of those things that kind of wakes me up at night occasionally you know and then there's

there's all kinds of social and friends relationship again it's clear I do if you if you have a UK iTunes account you can download Carol's film it's not released in the US yet and it's it's great and it is also not as doleful as it sounds is surprisingly life-affirming but you you can definitely map a bunch of you know friends there of a you know this friend he was jealous and this friend who had a secret crush and this friend who rejected her and there's a whole bunch of kind of professional stuff about where her career took her and and financial concerns there's some kind of systems that underpin her upbringing and the and the the questions kind of a bit of the history of race and racial prejudice or prejudice in London and all of these things are so knotted ly interconnected and produce these imperceptible unpredictable longitudinal contradictory changes and effects on each other even if we could make any kind of statement

on how that had played out in Joyce's life which we obviously can't the thing is just a mess the thing is not navigable as a system and you're left with this choice of you can boil it down but then you boil it down to something that's reductive and misleading or you can leave it confusing and that is just terrible game design because you have no idea why anything is happening or what's affecting what or what kind of meaningful choices you're making or all the rest of it and you know reminder this whole massive thing is to be delivered as a super accessible film for a project that's going to attract any audience to this thing so our kind of goal was to to make sure that people who found he maybe even hadn't kind of converted to Facebook gaming yet would find something here that they were comfortable dealing with audiences who weren't necessarily already gamers so well I started saying we were trying to make your game about death we were really trying to make this game yes

and we took a swing at that right because we'll we'll give it a go that seems like a thing that we that we might try to do so we we turned quite early to text text seemed like a really interesting starting point for a thing - you know - saw some of those aesthetic problems - saw some of the budget problems to solve some of the tonal problems and we thought we could do something interesting and hopefully meaningful for people by kind of drawing on a bunch of interesting fiction traditions looking a bit that kind of text adventure design and graphical sex adventure of design and thinking about oh we were so pleased when we came up with this thinking about if we could create this environment that may or may not be graphically represented that you navigated in the way that you navigate a text adventure broadly speaking so you're moving through a secrets of rooms or spaces and that would present you

with versions of the kinds of puzzles and challenges that you may be familiar with from text adventures so there are a lot doors there were characters perhaps you won't let you pass there are things to navigate but rather than giving you the kind of tools that often those games give you of you know candles and bits of rope and keys and all the rest of it we would ask you to draw those from your own life so there would be a room where to move on from that room you would need to leave something behind that was you know an object that was precious to you or a Dewar probably wouldn't be a door that would only open if you would tell it the name of someone you never told you loved and you wished you had or whatever it was maybe a bit less terribly more cash than that and then the process of puzzle solving would be the process of reuniting and restructuring those things and hopefully finding some interesting perspectives on you know on how those things work together so you would move use space and

you know in the end make progress not by unlocking the blue key with the blue door but in the end by you know giving your grandmother's engagement ring to the to your highschool crush or whatever unresolved thing we had in common uncovers in the course of doing that and we thought that this whole thing might play out big reveal at the end would be that in the choices that you've made in navigating this space you were actually navigating on this map that told you something about yourself in terms of where you situated yourself on on that grid in terms of whether you are somebody who gravitated to grandeur like geo solitude or was somebody who was kind of more digitally or physically native and then that might be a thing that we could kind of map and take out to the world as a whole is kind of something that had arisen from this game there's a lot about that idea not to like quality probably sitting that's looking a lot of those things right now I mean certainly I don't think there's

any kind of great discovery at the end of that to find out whether you like being alone or not or whether or not you're on the internet often I suspect you can probably self-diagnose on those camps quite well and also we started realizing that there were a bunch of problems in giving you that kind of progression structure that even within a game that has no winning that has no kind of great statement of purpose or a sense of potential failure the minute you sense that your progress is being gated or that one thing or another thing is going to happen depending on what you do when we started paper prototyping this we found that it it totally colored people's responses to questions that we hope they would feel able to respond to truthfully honestly you know the thing that I really liked about this structure was there's this kind of confessional space that you form between the player in the game and the

game is a is an inert and anonymous repository of these kind of confessions and information but the minute you know there's kind of two ways forward and you're being asked something you're a second guessing the game you're wondering what you should say what's going to happen to this you become incredibly self-conscious and we we really struggled to kind of find a way beyond that which took us to shark this is the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France we didn't actually get to go there there's a floor cloth replica in North London it's pretty good it's a fiver to get in that's the real thing it's like going on a fairground ride you have to queue up and give a give a lady your money at the front so you guys will all know this I didn't know this because I haven't been paying attention labyrinth mazes very different things mazes or puzzles they have choices you can get lost labyrinths are only ever one continuous line there is no choice there is no possibility to get lost you just walk along and wiggle and that

seemed like a kind of interesting thing that you have a kind of more traditional or game experience something with an implicit challenge and a possibility of failure and absurd choices and you have something there's a classical linear structure and should be boring therefore right where where do you see we're a bit snooty about linear we like interactive we like choice we like challenge walking one of these things blew my mind dohno is anyone ever done has anyone ever walked labyrinth you guys are great so maybe I just like was having a bit of a day but this whole weird thing happens that all you do is you go in one end and you walk to the middle and the middle is like five yards away and you know how far away five yards away is it's just over there you know how long it's gonna take you to walk there it's gonna take you five seconds you know the direction that you're gonna walk together because it's just over there except now suddenly you don't now you have no idea how long it's gonna take you to walk five yards you're walking along this path you don't know where you are the your sense of space and time have

effectively dissolved you meet somebody coming the other way but you don't know if they're coming the other way they might be going on the same journey as you but they're just at a different point and if they're in a different point today you don't know whether they're ahead of you were behind you and so suddenly that made me feel and that's kind of before you get to all of the kind of experiential choices of just how you act within that space and what you do with yourself so we got kind of excited about linear stuff and thinking about whether we could use that as a way to diffuse some of these questions about how to get more pure responses from people in terms of the questions that we the issues that we wanted to think them to think about and the questions we wanted to put to them but we did just keep hitting up against this problem that the minute there was any sense of completion or goal we felt like we were losing people's ability to be honest so we played around with that for a bit we played around a bit with the notion of not setting a win

condition but setting a big number of wind conditions so kind of approaching this in a more semi way so rather than saying hey there's this puzzle or a structure or a space that you have to get to the end of see if you can get that right go okay you can adopt a bunch of different personas and move through this space in different ways so try and make you know the right set of decisions for somebody who's alone it's kind of also gets us out of the being an problem where we're not telling people there's a right way to do it let's go so successfully navigate the space as a loner successfully do it as a you know as a parent successfully do it as an whatever those kind of personas would end up have being I kind of worked a bit there's a bit of game design but it made us really sad because it loses the player being the player what I really liked about the intensity of that relationship between the player and the game was that was you worried knew I liked making games where you or you and that seemed to kind of dilute that to a point where it wasn't interesting anymore another option you have is make

it so that the player defines the wind conditions go hey we're not going to be judgmental we're not going to tell you how to live your life we're gonna let you say what it is that you care about or you're aiming for again the problem is the minute you overtly ask somebody that question even if it's in a automatic way they don't tell you what they think they tell you what they think they're supposed to think and it's incredibly difficult to find a structure that lets people actually answer honestly in those circumstances and then we thought that maybe reflecting the the insights that we'd had about a kind of mission and quest structure being an appropriate for Joyce's story you would secretly not have a winning condition so we would set you up in a in a structure where you thought you knew what you were doing you had a bunch of stuff to keep you busy that you were kind of chewing through at the end of it we would go oh no but look while you were busy doing all of that stuff you really lost because there was this other thing going on that we didn't tell you about but you

didn't know about that he's sad and then I'm again right that's terrible game design so there was this kind of I don't have sign for this but there should be like the sound of massive stone slabs dropping onto bleak rocky ground I'm just thinking you know we really tried but we couldn't find a game that fit within those things that we talked about and that really kind of shook me because I've had long campaigned on the principle that games you know really can do anything so we did something clever it made a thing that wasn't the game and that thing is these dreams of your life calm if you want to go in have a look at it after this and it worked array great news everything ok we made a pretty good thing that isn't a game so we worked with an amazing novelist called Al Kennedy who if you don't know you should

check out who turned out to be a secret expert on all kinds of really interesting sort of Stanley Milgram experiments and boring I'm state Minh sand so I kick codes and stuff that turn out to be an incredibly useful way to try and structure the text of what we wanted we work with his amazing photographer Lottie Davis whose work you are seeing who helped us think about how we might find a way to photographically represents some of the issues that we that we wanted to tackle and we made something that's been pretty well received that we're super proud of and that we think stands effectively next to the film so we should be thrilled right I should be this this session should have a different title because it wasn't a game and I really wanted to pick a game because I like making games and I wanted to find a resolution to that and the thing is it's possible that all

that happened was just those constraints that I took you through we're just too crazy they were they were just too nested too many of them we just boxed ourselves into a corner the fact that we couldn't find a solution to it doesn't say anything about games it just says that we'd that we've overcooked our design process but the thing that makes me less sure about that is this isn't the first time this has happened this is a process that that is now becoming fairly familiar to me so we we did an awesome secret genuine secret laboratory project that I can't tell you about because I'm still nd8 last year that was working with a scientific institution that was looking to improve its energy usage and go greener and one of the things that was preventing it from doing that is they have these huge block of climate control rooms in which they run experiments and they felt that they were probably using that really and efficiently and was there a game that we could make that

would motivate and reward scientists for doing a better job of combining experiments and finding ways that they could share those rooms and use them better we couldn't find one because the minute you set a bunch of game rejected in-game rewards on top of that system you distract them or divert them from the already completely important set of goals and constraints that they have in the work that they do can we make a really awesome tool that makes planning this stuff more fun the is really impactful in terms of improving their energy use that draws on a whole bunch of stuff I've learned as a game designer absolutely but it wasn't again everything science okay what about if it's not secret lot of laboratories what about what about this so this is a thing we did last year as far as the Green Lantern campaign which I really like it was a nice thing Green Lantern you know all about his green ring space battles

bad acting and we wanted to do something maybe a bit more interesting with it then just do a bad org although we did a little cute as well so we hooked up with these guys this the Milky Way projecting you may know they're scientists who operate at Oxford they get real people to look at mm-hmm these are pictures from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope that haven't yet been classified because there's billions of them and there's not enough grad students and just get real people to look through them and see what they can see and what they're looking at at the moment in the bit that we hooked up with is the birth of stars when stories are born they explode there's a pressure wave that sends a a globe of gas and debris around the exploding star you take a photograph of that you see it from the side what you see is a ring and

in the photos they colored them in green so suddenly I have all of these photos of green rings in space but NASA need people to look at just before they green lanten ravit launches so I think that would be a nice thing today so we hooked that into the stuff that we were doing but those guys who are really smart already know you can't put game objectives on top of this observation process that the minute you set people goals a minute you say how many how fast can you classify 10 things how many green rings can you find any of the kind of obvious structures that you might go to to make a game of it corrupts the results changes the loses the veracity of what people do so they have a lovely slick system there's a there's a nice air quotes gamification process going on here in terms of giving you level rewards and giving you a sense of progression in a sense of your place in the community but it's absolutely not a game and then the same thing happened with another secret music products I can't tell you about which was about looking at what we could do with gaming around listening habits and you I mean it's interesting this it's the same thing but another element of the of the

same thing which is there are games you make where the game places a value on the music that you listen to so either we do something about judges the music that you listen to you and says well this band is worth more than that band because they have a higher chart position or they've sold more records that they have more likes on Facebook or however because we think they're better or haven't we draw that data from or we can do a thing that says the more you listen to this you know so Jennifer you played song Summoner on your iPod back in 2007 which is a lovely little Square Enix RPG where your characters are built from songs on your iPod and the more you listen to that so the more kind of that character levels up that's a simplification but the key point is the more you listen to that piece of music the more powerful you are in the game but music is this incredibly important thing in people's life the game doesn't know if you if you just got dumped or you just got a new job or you're going on holiday I mean I find playing those games where my listening habits or impactful in the game that I'm

playing just makes me hate music you just get up in the morning a cold god I've got to put that thing on on repeat for 10 lessons otherwise I won't get my you know spangle when I log in and and I don't I think I think there are things you could do I don't really want to do them because I think I'm ruining people's relationship with music and that's not a nice way to spend your life so what does this prove it might prove this and I'm aware of that I've kind of taken a risk of standing up in a roomful of game designers and going this is an impossible game design challenge nobody you can solve this and you guys already probably have notebooks full of ways to solve it so we might just be rubbish at it you know I'll take that if anybody has better ideas for what we could own I would love to hear them you know I would love to see this problem solved so you know by all means pepper me with those you know but it is worth saying that I worked with a bunch of smart people on this and we tried really hard and we came up blank and maybe that tells us

something important which is maybe this is just really hard maybe you know it's ok that we in the time that we've been spent trying to bolt games into the real world and interesting in important ways that we haven't completely cracked it yet but there's this other thing which is the scary thing which is maybe this just doesn't work you know I the reason I love making games is I see them transform people in this incredible way that the great delight for me moving from working on digital games to also working on on games in the real world is you see face to face people do things they never would have thought they could do or you know become kind of characters that you that you wouldn't otherwise have thought they were but it feels so much to me that the reason games managed to accomplish that has an awful lot to do with the fact that the constraints that game setup or temporary and arbitrary that that's what makes them so powerful and the minute you bolt those

structures onto something that is real and enduring and ongoing there just is attention there there it is horror to do the things I can do in games that that don't have to sustain that that structure that moves against it so this is the you know this is kind of where I hit the that we might we've we may have a problem here or certainly a problem that I didn't kind of immediately know how I saw so I you know low point I refer you back to my take away sleight of going bollocks what do I do hang and I have I couldn't fit all this into an era so I have some terribly highfalutin kind of attempts at structures that I don't think do you work for anyone who has never done before but but may be useful in terms of when you're approaching one of these projects figuring out what it is that you what kind of structures you

might want to use but in the end I isn't actually what I wanted to talk about said I think that's what's interesting about today what I wanted to do was come and be honest about a real project that presented these kind of real challenges because in the end I don't feel nearly as bad about this as I expected to it is all okay I think mostly I've realized what happened is that and this maybe says more about me than anything else I guess this was kind of previously my conception of games games can go anywhere games could do anything games are unstoppable and that that was what excited me about them that I felt like there was a huge new potential that we were only just beginning to explore now I think games are more like that I don't know how many of you played each other the closest but a grows a much subtler and more sensitive creature and the horses in Skyrim he can't go everywhere he has his own idiosyncrasies he's wonderful

I care for more about him in the end than I do about any of the Skyrim horses that I rode over cliffs sorry Skyrim horses and I think that's great that's that's you know I think I think if we start to butt up against hard edges of things that games can't do that shouldn't depress us about games that shouldn't make us feel that the games have failed to make a case for why they ought to be allowed to stand shoulder to shoulder with anything and everything else but they should write us that we're starting to get a sense of what it is that makes them special that were reserving in and what it is that games can do that other things can't be and then you take it on the swing so this is we're taking on the swing this is a safe place is this is this is the live game version of our game about the lady who died in a fur hat which we think might work which is another different approach again probably another game but I've loved having a chance to take another swim in it to take what I learned from the last one and come back and do this and you know what um also this the here

we are it did you see you again and I think a lot of us have experienced that you slog away for a year at this project that whatever it is probably hasn't you close to tears at times and you forget there's all these awesome people who can help we're already doing this and who already know this stuff and I think it's been really nice being here I think having written this talk in the dark days at the end of last year it's to come here now and see everyone I start having conversations I start hearing about the other projects that we heard about at the summit's yesterday and they were here about the rest of the week the start to find other solutions to these problems and start to show ways in which we can refine our understanding of the the theory and prevent those assumptions in practice in a way that kind of resolve all of that so ha got ya not the not Lucas session ever I hope I wanted to leave but we're gonna go to a minute for questions because I kind of felt people want to shout at me and tell

me that we've missed a really obvious thing we could have done that was great so we kind of got ten minutes I can talk more about anything you would like me to or kind of more about structures that we use in this work so far away if we'll go left stage left stage right hi thank you for a great talk I last fall made a game that was kind of a documentary game about some soldiers accused of war crimes and I faced a lot of sort of similar challenges to him she traced and ended up with something that I sort of didn't feel comfortable calling a game something that I'm sure also you faced that was a big challenge was even convincing someone to try a thing like that because when I would say that sentence a lot of people would just immediately sort of like eyes glaze over

back up no that doesn't sound like something I want to do so whether it's a game or not when you have a sort of interactive thing exploring this like very serious issue that sounds like it's going to be a huge downer what do you think are ways to get people to like take a chance on playing something like that so I'm honorbound to repeat the question so that it goes on the tape the question of how you get people to approach games about this kind of super serious subject that aren't necessarily very appealing we tried to work in two things on that front for this so the actual front door to this project is a Facebook quiz which is funny and social and lightweight but just starts to dig into kind of some of those slightly darker questions again I can link anybody out to that he wants it and that has a little kind of link through at the end that goes oh okay so you seem really interesting you should come and have this conversation over here and I think the people who played that had a pretty positive expression experience with it but you just hit the problem that have how you market that thing and how you get that noticed on

Facebook and the other thing is these photos that you've that you've seen and that you'll see if you play the experience there's a time-lapse animation that spits out every day from the game the game I've given up not calling it game what am I gonna do so everybody who plays everything they do every day the choices that they make and the and the routes that they take through this thing or logged and then are used to recreate a kind of unique edit of that thing it doesn't show anything personal that they said or anything individual about them but we hoped would become a little kind of shareable because it takes a minute and it's pretty to watch again that probably didn't have quite the impact that we were hoping to do but I think you're exactly all right you've got to think about how you bring people to this kind of work whether or not it ends up being a game to this not being a game at all were there any other games that you looked at for inspiration or that you thought had sort of blazed that trail

before and if so what were they I mean I think we were looking at all kinds of stuff I mean we we've ended up doing quite a lot of projects about death over the last year and a half so we we contributed to the as a big Art Centre in London that ran a festival of death this year and we did talks there on death in games and there's I mean pages pages and pages and pages of stuff and then also a whole range of things that weren't necessarily about death or about subtleties in this stuff so I don't I don't think we're at all trailblazing I don't you know I don't want to come off as thinking that we're the first people who face this stuff but I think this often the projects that I knew and that I looked at were if they were about death tended not to be there was a very

personal but they weren't documentary and so that that kind of limited their usefulness because they often got to do things that we couldn't get to do and I now can't give you a really good list but I can't afterwards if you ask me sorry oh and I forgot to repression which is did we look at any other guy so it was probably obvious from my answer well do laughter then right yeah so I hesitate to use the word appeal but it seems like a part of the appeal of this project is that this was a real person and so you you're kind of morbid almost a kind of fascination with it do you think you would have taken a different kind of creative direction or found game mechanics that would have made more made it more gamey had it been a fictional person that you created would you maybe not been so gues reverent about it and do you think it would have affected you know the outcome for better or worse so a question here would it wouldn't have been an easier project if the person having fictional oh my word you know I think I mean I think reverence is a is a fair word there I think there is is

maybe a fair comment that we were overly sensitive about these issues you know this is this is the first project had done like this I think one of the things that you face as a documentarian is developing your own practice about how reverent you're going to be about about how how much you work he'd loves when you handle this stuff and we may be over we may be over worried about that I think because we also had this nested thing which it wasn't just what could we do with Joy's history but it was we also had to be respectful of what Carol was doing with her film and we ended up at kind of two removes from that content had it been our own fictional person we would have had a lot more freedom but we also would have had a lot less impact right the thing that gets you in the gut about choices it's true it happened they said you know you can't walk past that block of flats in in in North London now without knowing that unfolded there so easier but maybe less powerful thank you so first of all thank you for an amazing talk and for your capacity to sort of

reveal the creative process it's very informative so awesome in listening to what you were talking about I am unclear where exactly you guys hit the wall can you talk about your expectations around agency and/or appeal because it felt to me as you were discussing that that maybe where you hit was having a particular expectation around that that may have conflicted with like we were talking about the need for reverence I think so the question is where did we hit the wall and was it around the question of agency pricey and I mean yes a lot I think oddly probably one of the things that hurt us on this project was our background in designing real world games that I've seen those be so transformative and I've absolutely seen those be I've experienced those being revelatory where you find yourself doing something or say something that you never would have thought you would but is actually a truer expression of who you are than if you'd had time the way

you normally do in life to compose your reply and present the you want to present and I was definitely chasing that I was really hoping that I could yet but I couldn't find the bait-and-switch that you need to do though which is I need to get you thinking that you're doing something else and focus your agency and focus maybe the constraints or the time pressure or the competition or whatever it is that's going to force you to reveal those things within this context and and truthful structure and god I wish we could it because I think that could have been incredible but I think I think what we have accomplished is the the emotional goal that I set for the project but through different means through non gay means and I would love to have got a few games I want to start by saying I think you might be selling yourself short a little bit it sounds like a really hard problem I I wanted to

ask it you mentioned a couple of times with the astronomy and with the the music game that sort of adding a game mechanic kind of screws up the experience and I wonder if that might be because there's already a game mechanic there and that game mechanic is sort of a part of life and we just we don't know what that is so the question is does it to these is it hard to do these projects because there's already mechanics in place that then conflict with the game accounts yeah I mean I don't think they're necessarily game mechanics they're just mechanics there are a whole bunch of systems that drive the choices that you make in relation to these things and I think they have a whole I have like ham signals now for how I try and think about these things that you know we're always chasing the game of like can make this thing make this thing into a game and that that transformative approach is not necessarily right and

that and that sometimes there's it's interesting looking at kind of two fetuses oversimplified but kind of tea fields you've kind of got the the subject to the narrative and the context of the thing that you're working with and then you've kind of got it rules and objectives and interactions and often where these projects don't work one is when you you try and stack everything on top of those you think I want to stay in that context and we'll work with those interactions and objectives and we'll try and put a game on top of that and we'll just and it doesn't work very well and there are often much more successful approaches where you you turn one of those through ninety degrees you go okay so we'll look at those objectives and actions of mechanics but well actually just change the context will you know this is maybe a game about saving energy but will tell you that it's about parrots or will tell you that it's about space aliens or whatever and that's something you see quite often and there's kind of a good reason for that that helps

release that tension all you do it the other way and go yeah we will keep you in the context of the narrative of this topic but we'll change the things that you're worrying about well maybe invent completely new fictional ones that aren't actually about any kind of real-world behavior change or or you kind of separate both and I mean this is a thing you know where I ended up with is with games I can make a game that uses your listening habits that I have a bunch of problems with or I can make a game that really uses your listening habits as window dressing you know where they they color what's going on but they're not they're not meaningful game tokens they're not really changing the system and that's that's not making a game of your music taste but it may be he's making with your music tastes weak he's a word I've come to use a lot and that kind of side by side looser relationship often feels like a way of dealing with that that very real tension which is obvious the minute you say a lot and I think again there were so many people here who do this ultimately for a living and I'm super aware that they know this stuff inside out but you know

I thought it might be interesting to kind of work through a specific example and see thank you thank you thank you for a beautiful talk it sounds like along the way emotions arose and as we would expect and I'm wondering to what degree at each stage along the way you thought about what emotions you wanted to convey and what techniques or devices you thought about using to convey those emotions so the question of what emotions were we trying to instill in our players I mean again you worry about being a jerk and telling you what to feel but then you also hit this thing that again often in the game projects that I make you don't hit of kind of having to have an artist statement kind of having to go what am I trying to deal with it I like find that scary and I don't know how well I did but in the end what I what it boiled dainty for me was and I think this project has had quite a nice expression for this is that the thing that I felt I could truthfully say to everyone about juicy story is time passes faster than

you realize and things happen when you're not looking which doesn't like much but it felt it felt like an important and universal thing and so this whole project is about those two things it's about time passing faster than you realize on things changing when you don't look and then I leave it up to you to decide how to feel about those phenomenons but without that one of the reasons we even one who decided not to make it gained we were still lost in the reeds for a while until we doubled down all that only needed a core it needed something that we were willing to make an absolute statement about otherwise it was just airy-fairy slate I felt like this photograph conveyed a lot of emotion that was suitable to the project for instance I mean this the work that went into this I cannot begin to it was a 3-day sheet that did a two-year time lapse so we had we had eleven stunt daffodils we poisoned and then baked those flowers to make it look like they were dying that tree behind you is a tree that we buffed up from 200 miles

right all of those leaves are hand wired because we shot this in February when there was nothing there we scouted I think 25 locations to find a window that was kind of anonymous but believable and not too sad but could kind of decay and I hope you know I mean that was just wonderful to hear that because I know huge amount of that came from Lottie and Alison and the team on that to try and convey that thank you okay so bear with me because my original question was technically asked so I had to modify it in line for sure okay so drawing from the experience that you guys had with trying to work with dream of a life say you were to take from that experience and go towards a fictitious route where you did say it was easier to consider that how would you exactly convey the impact of death I mean the impact of death is kind of centered around what was done in life and what wasn't done in life and what you were evil experienced being taken away from you and never

coming back or would you guys kind of go through the carnal instinct of survival just death sucking in general like nobody wants to die I mean I think so how would how would we approach the project if we didn't have the the documentary core to it I mean we've we've been playing around with that a bit I think it's really interesting trying to push it out into the lives of the players as much as possible I'm not really interested in writing a big complex narrative about a fictional characters fictional death I'm interested in poking everybody I hope there and see what happens and I think you know we for the festival death we were looking at kind of live action Conway game of life variations where your behavior in that simulation was dependent on choices that you made that were maybe reflective of your own life and I think we looked now I'm remembering the answer to the previous everyone's question you know we were looking I'd just spent the whole year playing games about death kind of a particularly kind of permit or

relatively promo death games so kind of road like things where death is a really big lox and something to fear and not just an instant respawn and I think there are all kinds of structures there but I think I mean the other kind of really depressing though I could have ended on is that maybe games are the worst place to try and tackle the question of death I mean we have this weird relationship with death not not ever being a real thing in games well there's an indie game I don't know if you've heard of it I can't remember the name of it for the life of me so anybody here totally thought well someone will know it's an indie game where you download it to your PC and literally you just have one chance at it thank you yeah yeah no I mean amazing I mean yeah if I if I could come up with that that I would have been side you look like an idiot for the last hour so I mean I you know I think that's fantastic but I think it's interesting how how abstracted that is um it's what gives it its power but also how

unplayable I mean it's it's it's interesting I've never been brave enough have you been regular I've never I've never actually let it taken that risk I mean yeah so this is it so this is kind of where I am is I think there's a ton of interesting stuff to do here and I think everybody here is in the middle of doing in I just like giving kind of progress on things thank you for the among every time so I have to stop but grab me if you have anything more thank you very much for coming [Applause]