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Why True Crime: New York City Doesn’t Work

As a part of my on-going research for my thesis, I have been playing a handful of games that I will muse on for the blog. As has been my experience in the past, it is a particularly bad game that inspires me to write. Today I had the displeasure of playing True Crime: New York City for a couple hours. Why did I choose the game? Well my research is on representations of the city in games and my focus is on New York City—a natural fit on the surface. The interesting thing about True Crime: NYC is that the game’s city is a pretty accurate representation of the real Manhattan. But what would seem like a technical accomplishment is actually an example of why our everyday world cannot be directly translated into game. So, besides the glaring technical bugs, bland gameplay, and trite story, why is the space in True Crume: NYC unnavigable and why is the place not compelling?

I present you with a scenario: driving along in your unmarked cop car on the highway, the police dispatcher informs you of a robbery in progress a mile from your position. Seems simple enough, right? After all, the location is practically right next to you. But the problem is that the geographic distance of the target location has nothing to do with the actual route you need to travel to get there. I found myself driving for at least a minute in the opposite direction until I found an exit I could take, and another minute until I was actually on a surface road that could take me back to where I started by the robbery. By then, it was too late–the crime had been perpetrated and the assailants escaped. 

True Crime: New York City

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City defines five elements that can be used to describe the imagability of the city: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. True Crime: New York City fails at establishing all five of these in a game context. In my previous example, I was moving along a path of travel but needed to stray from it. Unfortunately, my vehicle was unable to transfer between paths in a way that supported the game’s goals. Sure, it makes sense that I cannot drive off-road in the real world to get where I am going, but the game demands it and I should be able to do it.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a good example of how the rigid path of the highway can be broken so the player can move between districts. Driving the freeway over Los Santos, the designers included breaks in the barrier walls so that the player can drive straight off the road and fall to the roads beneath. While unrealistic, it serves the needs of the game. Paths are purposely porous in San Andreas so that transferring between districts comes naturally. 

Even comparing the representations of Manhattan’s spatial distribution in True Crime: NYC and Grand Theft Auto IV reveals how missions can be designed to accommodate the grid that is New York City. For one, GTA IV has more linear missions, so the designers can pick starting and ending locations for travel based on the availability of roads. In True Crime: NYC, however, the dispatcher does not care which direction you are traveling when assigning you the side-missions. As a result, I found myself racing down one-way streets against traffic hoping to make it to my destination on time. The traffic patterns and car control just are not up to handling this movement. Even with my sirens blaring I was constantly getting t-boned in intersections (clearly they only programmed it to affect traffic traveling in front of you). 

Standing on the Streets

The problems of the space of the city translate into problems of place-making. It may be shaped like New York City, but that’s about as close as it gets. The strongest city ambience is the fantastic licensed soundtrack which features songs from a lot of NYC-based rock and hip-hop artists. Unfortunately there’s no persistent soundtrack, so getting in and out of a car changes the track, but it at least helps set the gangster-crime theme. The NPCs take the form of only a few model types, meaning it’s possible to stand in a group of pedestrians who all share the same face though different clothes. It might bill itself as a sandbox city alive and breathing, but this is just a facade. The is hardly any difference between Washington Heights and Hell’s Kitchen. Though it includes many New York City landmarks, they only serve to highlight the disparity between the real place and the place of game action. 

True Crime: New York City is a shining example of what doesn’t work in games. If a designer wants to translate a real place into game form, they need to think about the ways the player will want to navigate that space and compare that to the demands they are making of the player. The awe of traveling in an accurate recreation of New York City is diluted by  the fact that there’s no good reason to explore all the space provided. It was an ambitious project for a 2005 game, but it is clear the designers did not aspire (for whatever reason) to meet their ambition. I’m not convinced that the task is futile, but it certainly will require the full attention of a design team to be executed successfully.

Posted in Spaces, The City, Thesis.

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By Bobby – January 23, 2009

Video Game Improv

Over the New Years weekend I was fortunate enough to participate in my fifth Music and Games Festival. MAGFest, run “by fans for fans,” is in its seventh year and has consistently improved to become a really polished and fun event. If you’re interested in all of the things I did that weekend, you can read my wrap-up entry on my other blog. I wanted to take this opportunity, however, to focus on one of the new events at MAGFest 7: Video Game Improv.

X-Strike Studios, PBC Productions, and we the Virtual Fools (myself and other GCJ founder Kevin), hosted a two hour long block of video game themed improv. An idea kicked around at the last few MAGFests, video game improv has always made us weary. A good improv show relies on the members of the troupe playing off of one another, supporting each other’s ideas, and making the show inclusive. The problem with video game improv is that there’s always a looming threat that it will turn into a bunch of obscure references that make it difficult for scenes to progress or any chemistry to be built on stage. What happens when someone makes a Virtua Fighter 4 reference that nobody else gets? If you answered ‘the sound of crickets’ give yourself a dollar. 

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Everybody participating had done improv at some point in their life. The guys of X-Strike and PBC had pretty much all done improv together at some point in their college career, Kevin and I were in the same high school troupe, and Kevin also did improv throughout his undergrad. I hadn’t so much as played Party Quirks in at least five years. 

Despite the odds, it was a rousing success, in my opinion. Though there were a few misses (to be expected), we developed chemistry and even if we weren’t the most talented improvisational actors, we were able to make the show entertaining and creative. We kicked it off with six improv games: vulture, party quirks, slideshow, return department, scene replay (and rewind), and debate. Then we did a longform scene based around the adventures of an RPG party (video will be linked when available).

What I would like to discuss is how video games were deployed in our scenes–what translates from a cartridge or disc to the improvisational stage. 

The first scene, vulture, had very little to do with games. Beginning with a single topic, two actors had to start a scene. At any time during the scene, one of the players offstage could yell ‘flag’ to freeze the scene while providing a reason that they should take the place of one of the actors. Starting with velociraptors, the game worked because it steadily escalated and the crowd enjoyed it because we got in some good Jurassic Park jokes. I think it was important that we didn’t kick things off with games directly because it gave us a chance to warm-up before tackling the more difficult task of integrating games into our routine.

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Party Quirks, the ever popular game where a party host has to guess the identities of their guests, was basically a game of references. The party goers were supposed to be Yoshimitsu from Tekken/Soul Calibur, a Space Invader, and Dr. Mario. The Yoshimitsu guest was really an X-Strike inside joke, so it wouldn’t have worked if it weren’t two X-Strikers interacting. I’m not sure how members of the audience who were outside the joke reacted, though it was amusing to watch the physical behavior of Rory. Kevin’s Space Invader worked because he could express the nuances of behavior while expanding the character to have a voice. Juese’s Dr. Mario was a matter of playing down the obvious to make more subtle references to extend the scene. He behaved as if he were Dr. Mario taken from the game and acting in the real world rather than merely placed in the real world. 

I had never played slideshow before, but I liked the game a lot. Brett was supposed to be a kid showing off his trip to Castlevania on a slideshow projector while Tim and Rich freeze in positions in the background. Brett doesn’t know how the actors are posed and the actors don’t know where Brett is going with his story. The dissonance between the narrative and visuals is what makes the game interesting, but the difficulty is in making sure this gap isn’t so large that people can’t use their imagination to make sense of the scene. It’s a difficult game, which is why I’m glad I didn’t play in it. 

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I particularly liked return department, in which one person is returning something to a store but they don’t know what it is. It’s up to the return department clerk and supporting cast to help them guess their returned item. Darrin was returning a Weighted Companion Cube and Chad was the rude clerk. After a bit of time, Rory came on stage crying—having built up a relationship with his companion cube. This, in particular, was great for the audience who knew why he was crying. When I came in, I was holding the companion sphere from the Portal advanced maps. Not a great clue for Darrin, but it went over with the audience, and Chad was able to introduce the super-colliding super-button and storage cube dispenser. Portal doesn’t have all that many set pieces, so it was an important addition to the scene. Tim, Steve, and Rich all helped provide clues, though I don’t know at what point Darrin actually figured it out and just wanted to keep the scene going versus how long he actually needed to guess. I have a feeling the former is true.

Steve and I did half-life (and rewind), which was pretty much an opportunity to do a little Game Stop bashing. The scene begins at 1-minutes length and we try to create a rounded scene about someone buying a game and a stubborn clerk acting as Game Stop clerks are apt to act. We then replay the scene at twice the speed, turning 1 minute into 30 seconds. Then again from 30 to 15, 15 to 7.5, and 7.5 to 3 seconds. Oh, and then the 15 second scene backward. Thankfully Steve was good at guiding the trajectory of the scene and I played off of his cues.  

The final game, debate, was another game I had not seen before. Two actors, in this case Juese and Ben, are supposed to be arguing on different topics. The rub is that neither know what their topic is. It’s actually being acted out across from them by two other actors working to lead them to a two-word answer. Ben is trying to come up with Underwater Pyramid, while Juese is in favor of Oakmi Porn. After you watch the amusing pantomime once, I ask you to go back and watch it again while paying special attention to what the debaters are actually saying. It’s the hardest part of the game, making it more than just simple charades. 

n560751250_2330629_3523Our final piece in the improv show, which was a longform scene about an adventurer set in the RPG genre. We had no prompts from the audience besides some sort of goal, which is to find the MacGuffin Device (so, pretty vague). Thanks to Rich, I was roped into playing the evil villain which put a lot of pressure on me to move the scene along and pay close attention to the details of the other actors. I’m thankful for this, though, as it pushed me to put myself out there. If the video ever gets online, I will attempt to detail its events. But as it is not, there’s little point to me explaining all the events of the scene. The thing to note is that we had to work the conventions of the genre for both our guiding narrative and entertainment factor. 

Video game improv worked out surprisingly well. We entertained our audience and had no screeching-to-a-halt scenes or moments. I loved finally getting the opportunity to work with X-Strike and PBC in a performance space and hope that we can do it again next year. Let me know what you think about the videos—I’d love feedback from people outside the MAGFest circle.

Posted in Crossing Mediums, Social Games.

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By Bobby – January 14, 2009

The Challenge of Political/Social Issue Games

[This was originally posted on the Journalism & Games Project blog.]

shadow_of_the_colossus_2910.jpgColin Rowsell, a writer for The Escapist, recently posted an article asking a variation of a common question: Why is the games industry so afraid of getting involved in the issues of the day? I understand and appreciate Colin Rowsell’s point and believe it’s worth pursuing further, but also feel we need to approach this question with a different strategy. We’re still in the early stages of the medium of the game.

Answering Rowsell’s question of why there aren’t any commercial games discussing political or social issues is as easy as one word: money. The problem with Rowswell’s article is that we already know this answer. Asking this question leads to an unsatisfactory answer, so we should reframe it. I’m hoping this blog post’s exploration will let us arrive at a better question and encourage people to think differently about the medium’s role in political/social issues.

I’ll start by taking an issue from Rowsell’s list. Imagine “DRM: The Game.” Doesn’t sound too exciting, right? Well maybe you could come up with something that convinces the player that DRM is bad and more pervasive than they expected. I can see something like that as a web-based serious game. Now, would you pay $60 for something like that at Best Buy? Can you imagine playing 15 hours of DRM: The Game? Some things seem to be left for shorter formats. Could you imagine DRM: The Movie being a commercial success? How about The Big Book of DRM on the New York Times Bestsellers List? Even if you can come up with something creative, how reasonably can you expect someone to pay money to engage with a political issue? If you were to say that a movie about working conditions would be able to make it in the theater, I’d ask that we think about how successful it would be in comparison to big-budget blockbusters.

I’d even be so bold as to guess that Blood Diamond wouldn’t have done as well had there Leonardo DiCaprio not been in it. How many people would have gone to see HBO’s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” Hurricane Katrina miniseries had it been a feature film? I’m willing to bet not as many. To shoehorn political issues into the medium of the game is to do them a disservice.

Of course, a lot of this is the result of audience. Games are being played by certain kinds of people (though the demographic grows more diverse each year), game cost money, and games require time. As such, the retail disc of commercial video game production isn’t the best way to get across a message. People can’t be forced to care about certain issues, but they certainly be compelled. A good way to do this is to ask little of the player. Don’t ask them to spend money, don’t ask for a large time commitment. I would think this to be true of most forms of issue-discussion. This is why I think that the web is a great place for issue-based or serious games. Not to say we can never do it elsewhere, but it’s a good stepping stone.

“Okay, Bobby,” they might say. “You’re thinking about this all wrong. The game doesn’t have to be about these issues, they should just address them in some capacity.” I’m on board, in that case, but there are still hurdles to face. I don’t think I need to address why games can be good for discussing issues–I think there are books that do a good job at that. But people do need to consider how the issue is being portrayed: is it procedurally? narratively? spatially? audio/visually? Colin Rowsell doesn’t seem to know what kind of answer he’s looking for. Sounded to me like he’d want to play as a character coping with AIDS. But do you just integrate AIDS into the story? Does having AIDS somehow affect the way you play? Does developing AIDS change the world around you? Instead of asking why we aren’t talking about this in games, we should ask about how we would approach it.

We’re in the nascent stages of asking these questions– and, in some regards, the serious political topics Colin Rowsell is looking for are currently being discussed in more metaphorical ways. The film Reign Over Me features Adam Sandler playing Shadow of the Colossus as a way of coping with the loss of his family on 9/11. Shadow of the Colossus is a really fascinating game. You play as a boy trying to save the life of a girl by finding and killing giant colossi scattered throughout the lands. There’s something extremely sublime about taking down these giants–destroying a “monster” which never sought to harm you all for a “noble cause”. I’ll admit that I often felt terrible upon defeating a colossus, but was compelled to continue. It’s a game that’s not speaking about a single political issue, but rather the politics of the soul: making choices and facing consequences, creating metaphors that can be applied to so many things in the world. In some ways that’s much more mature than literally tackling an issue. It’s the same way a good poem doesn’t speak directly about its subject. Granted, Shadow of the Colossus is the exception in the industry, not the rule, but a goal worth striving toward.

Different kinds of games are better vessels for different kinds of discourse. And while the industry should expand thematically, we have to ask ourselves if we really want the kind of “ripped from the headlines” scripts of Law and Order just for the sake of raising issues, or if we would rather see a more evolutionary approach to make games that seeks to take advantage of (whatever we believe) they’re good at. Colin Rowsell does the gaming industry a disservice in only asking (paraphrased for effect) “hey, where all the political games at?” The question itself accomplishes nothing. We can’t just ask for the commercial videogame equivalent of Paris Is Burning or Tuesdays With Morrie and call it a day. We instead need to think about the many ways games can (and do) talk about our world using the strengths of the medium and how we can imagine them being employed now and in the future.

Posted in Posted Elsewhere, Society.

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By Bobby – November 27, 2008

Riding on the Metro: Fallout 3

Pay attention to where you are, or you will miss your stop. Metro drivers only announce the stations half the time, and when they do its usually unintelligible. I personally believe they like to fuck with the people riding the train for their own amusement.
- Z, Everyday Reasons Blog

Bethesda Softwork’s most recent release, Fallout 3, is set in the bombed-out ruins of post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. As a resident of the DC metro area for 23 years of my life, the experience of walking through the Wasteland is my Baudrillardian simulacrum—a mirror construction of a world that never existed. It is at once DC and yet a completely fictional space.

It took a bit of time to connect to this world on a personal level. The game begins in an underground vault, the first major city in the Wasteland is the fictional Megaton (which has no real world referent), and the first quest I went on involved a nondescript supermarket. Exploring the wasteland I saw the outline of the Washington Monument in the distance, but that was a mere landscape landmark at the moment. Much like the suburbs I grew up in, there was nothing distinguishing about the space.

But as I made my way south I had my first surreal moment. I came upon the Falls Church Metro (subway for those unfamiliar) station. As a rider of the Orange Line, the Falls Church stops were just a natural part of the ride to and from the District. This station in Fallout 3 was outdoors, like the real Falls Church, though it was labeled neither East or West (I suppose the creators are allowed a bit of creative liberty when it comes to mapping space). It was also infested with Super Mutants who promptly ended my journey with their assault rifles and sledgehammers. Clearly I was not meant to be there, but it piqued my interest in seeing more of the Metro. It is interesting to note that my desire to explore was curbed by the kind of level-based barring Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Morie, and Celia Pearce describe in “A Game of One’s Own” as a characteristic of male-gendered spaces.

The Metro

The Metro

I moved in a more guided direction following that incident—making my way across the irradiated Potomac River into the city. I ended up coming across the Georgetown station, going inside, and seeing a familiar walkway but unfamiliar platform. Those who have ridden the Metro system in DC recognize its tall concrete coffered barrel vaulted ceilings, and whatever place I was in was clearly not representative of that definitive architecture. I continued exploring.

I eventually came across the Chevy Chase North area and the Tenleytown Station, which was the metro platform space I was hoping to find. The ceiling, the escalators, the ticketbooth, the rails, the signs–it was all there. But what I ended up finding wasn’t as interesting as the means by which I found it. Fallout 3 lets players experience the Metro in whole new way. When people speak of the Metro, they refer to a few structural things. There’s the rail line’s symbolic color which indicates its path, the trains which are a means of conveyance, and the stops which are the nodes of action. The purpose of riding the Metro is to commute in more or less direct paths that need not adhere to the layout of transportation paths on the surface. It’s supposed to be a seamless transition from one place to the next. This is not so in the game.

Fallout 3 uses the Metro in a number of ways. Though it is a transitional space between areas (some of which are inaccessible over land due to the debris of collapsed buildings), it is anything but seamless. The Metro not only simulates the real life space of mass transit infrastructure, but it also simulates the video game convention of the dungeon. While Fallout 3 does not use the Tolkien-fantasy themed environment that Pearce uses to characterize the most famous dungeon-based game Dungeons and Dragons, it does use some of the structural conventions the dungeon as space of adventure and conflict. In earlier video games “dungeon” is generally a location indicated by some entry point that needs not represent the geography of the space once entered. Think of Dragon Warrior, as an example. A single block on the world map represents a deep multi-level cave in which to slay monsters and collect treasure. The player enters, explores, and either returns to the beginning or makes their way to an exit. The relationships between spaces in these examples are topological.

However, as technology has improved we have seen the dungeon grow into a more geographic space. This puts the Metro of Fallout 3 in a unique position: it can serve the traditional role of the dungeon while also traversing distances. Often cited as an easy example of what topological space is, the London tube map collapses representations of space into utility. Walking into a Metro station in Fallout 3, players can often find a map of the train routes. And yet, these maps are nearly worthless from a game perspective. The player is traveling along actual space with distances that correspond to the surface world, though they can become directionally disoriented.

In a reversal of real life, there is no fast-travel (the ability to jump to a part of the visited map instantaneously) underground. The Metro is an extremely traditional game space. It’s underground, full of monsters, comprised of closed drab corridors, and way to expand the space of the world. Most of the Metro tunnels (which include both the rail and worker service tunnels) look the same. Yes, it makes sense contextually for them to have a consistent aesthetic, but it also is a reflection of the standard corridor space seen in the history of first-person shooter games.

There are very few other people in the Metro tunnels of Fallout 3, and it is most often talking to people that reveals the narrative of the game. Is this a missed opportunity to employ the kind of mise-en-scene embedded narrative describe by Jenkins in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”? Perhaps, though there are a few bits and pieces of narrative strewn about the Metro network. More important, in my opinion, than any sort of narrative imposed on the space, is what the organization of the space actually means.

Metro stations are either stand-alone enter and exit through the same door dungeons, or connected mazes–labyrinths of danger. The layout of the space is supposed to be confusing. In this post-apocalyptic world the purpose of the Metro has not only been uprooted, but it has gone unreplaced. It is the domain of monsters and outcasts. It surprises the player by dumping them out in a part of the overworld they might not have expected, opening up new spaces for more narratively meaningful exploration.

I conclude by reflecting on the opening quote which seemed to be unrelated to the topic of the post. The Metro in Fallout 3 simulates the real space of Washington D.C., the space of travel in the game world, and the spatial conventions of the video game genre. What I have found enjoyable about the exploration of these spaces is that I’m never sure which one I’m going to get, as if Bethesda is the unintelligible Metro conductor telling me that this is Foggy Bottom and the doors open on the right but when I get out I’m in Rosslyn and it’s 15 minutes until the next train. In a good way, of course.

Posted in Spaces, Uncategorized.

Tagged with , , , , .

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By Bobby – November 13, 2008

Player Types: Browser-Based MMO Travian

This post addresses a question for my game design and analysis course about real and imagined player-types. We were asked to write about how our play experience of an MMO mapped to the Bartle typology, affordances the game provides for development of identity through gameplay, and how those affordances reflect the assumed demographics.

Travian is a free browser-based MMO which was developed in Germany in 2004. It has been translated into 30 different languages, runs on over 150 servers, and has about 3 million registered players. When a player begins the game they choose a race to play as (Gaul, Roman, or Teuton) and are randomly given a village on one square in an 800×800 grid, starting at the coordinate (0,0) and moving outward toward +/- 400 X and Y coordinates. The game uses graphical representations but is not animated. As shown in the image at right, players spend their time upgrading resource fields outside their village to gain more income, and build and upgrade structures inside their village. In addition, players build military forces to raid other players’ villages for resources, go to war, and protect their own property. Essentially, it is a game about one of two things: dominance or survival.

Travian_3

Travian is played in “real time” and continues even when a player is not actively playing. By real time, I mean to say that actions in the game are given lengthy durations. Building a level 1 crop field takes 2 minutes when you first begin a village, but by level 10 that time shoots up to 9 hours. You can only build one piece of town infrastructure, one resource upgrade, and one type of military unit at any given time. As a browser game, it is generally something that cannot be played for more than a half hour at a time because it’s possible to exhaust all your actions. A “round” of Travian, which is to say the time from when the server starts to one of a few end-game states, is nearly a year. Players expand their empire to include other villages they’ve founded or conquered from other players, form alliances, and wage wars through this minimal interface.

Travian is basically a spreadsheet game. This is a term used to describe games in which success comes down to being able to crunch numbers. A raid (stealing opponent resources is nothing more than a count-down clock which says how long until your units hit their target, a table of result data, and a return-trip clock. Battles are not controlled by players but rather decided by numerical comparisons. Reaching End Game is as much a matter of endurance as skill. Once a player’s final village is captured, their account is deleted and they have to go start a new game on a new server. It’s a pretty serious consequence if you’ve been playing for six months. Unlike the Daedalus observations on EverQuest, death in Travian is the end of the bonding experience.

Why would anyone play this? you might wonder. It sounds time-consuming, boring, and masochistic. Yet, much like a MUD or a 3D MMO game environment, it develops certain types of players who love the game. I never thought I would enjoy a game like this, but I was fortunate enough to be guided by a top 10 player who could explain the intricacies of the game and teach me how to play like a top-100 player in a few short months.

Much like TL Taylor describes, the limitations of the technology and design of Travian create the player types. Players of Travian do not fall into the typical Bartle alignments. There are some similarities, as will be discussed, but Travian is a unique type of game that only allows for certain styles of play. This is a result primarily of its goals, it’s always-on design, and its interface.

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The will to survive.
As I mentioned before, Travian is a game that has a real game over. Death doesn’t mean restarting. Death means losing everything with no chance of revival. The consequence of death means all the work the player has put into the game vanishes instantaneously. As I learned from experience, Travian is not a game for someone interested in only casually playing. Because it runs 24-hours, it requires attention throughout the day and players must take care to defend themselves when they can’t be at their computer.

In the first few months of a round, players are more likely to delete their account than get killed by another player. Why does this happen? Because aggressive players spend their time raiding their neighbors to steal their resources. No resources, no building. No building, no playing. And though there are safeguards to help players (you can build something to hide resources in), this time is spent “not losing” rather than progressing.

So how can we describe Travian players? This system I described heavily favors Bartle’s achievers. In fact, there’s very little else to do if you’re not seeking to survive through a round. As I will describe, socialization takes an interesting form and exploration is only a subcategory of achievement.

The player types boil down to achievers, survivors, and losers. Achievers come in all shapes and colors. There’s the ultra-aggressive type prone to starting conflicts (which might be seen as Bartle’s imposition group). The regular aggressive players who raid other villages for resources because it increases their income. The neutral type whose income in derived internally. Different paths of progression/achievement comes through expansion of empire, which involves either settling new villages or capturing them from other players. Regardless, the game is set up such that it’s extremely difficult to work with only one village and players have to expand to survive.

Personal representation.
Travian players have no player-embodied avatar in the traditional sense. They have no “characters.” They have iconic representations of their data tables in the form of villages, which is all the other players can see. One form of representation, then, comes through the naming of these villages. Players with default village names are seen as weak because they’re not choosing the label themselves. Players with numbered villages, on the other hand, are seen as aggressive or seasoned. Labling your first village “.001 Rockland” at the beginning of a game implies that you not only plan on building other villages, but that the numbers are an organizational tool–a form of high strategy.

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Seeing the alliance of a player is also a way to understand them. It probably goes without saying, but alliances are groups of players who have chosen to work together. It might just be a scare tactic, to warn possible attackers that there’s the threat of retaliation from other players. It may also say something about a player’s nationality–”CRO”, for example, is an alliance of Croatian players who take the game very seriously.

Players can also keep very limited profiles which tell others their rank on the server, tribe, alliance, number of villages, population, age, gender, and location. One strategy, used by some of the more aggressive players, is to either use misleading information or leave these last three fields empty–you dare not give someone your location because they’ll have a pretty good idea when you sleep and use that as optimal time to attack you. It is not impossible to be social, especially if this information helps you identify others like you who might be good to befriend. It’s difficult to be social for socialization’s sake, but it is beneficial to make friends who can help you.
But with such limited forms of communication and representation, how do people socialize?

Communications channels for socialization.
Communication channels in Travian began quite limited. In the game itself, there were only in-game messages (IGMs), which could be sent to either one player or a group of players in an alliance. They are text only and not in real time. This probably began as a technical limitation, but has persisted as a gameplay convention even though technology has improved. The game runs on PHP and aims to be low bandwidth–both to keep server costs down and to allow players (especially in Europe) to use the website on their mobile devices.

To overcome these in-game limitations, players who wanted to socialize had to seek external resources like forums. The creators of Travian have since implemented discussion forums for players on their website, with topics ranging from feedback and suggestions on game design, strategy, and the usual off-topic discussion like music and politics. However, alliances have private forums to discuss game strategy or other alliance-specific matters. The game of Travian leaves little room for pure socializers as a play type, but makes for a strong community of play. Just because they’re playing the game means they have to be at least as crazy as you.

Socialization, as a strategy, means finding people to help you out. The progression of the game is much like an arms race. Alliances are more about defense than offense. Being a part of a good alliances requires not only playing well but making friends with other strong players. Weak alliances have little communication.

It is important to again note that most Travian players are European, which means there are language and nationality barriers in the game. There are specific servers for different countries (compare travian.co.uk to travian.nl), but players can choose to play anywhere. In my personal experience, when I couldn’t communicate with a player directly because of language differences, game action became our language. A message in Romanian from a weaker player I had been raiding was incomprehensible to me, but their gift of 200 of each resource clearly stated they were hoping for me to back off from my attacks on them.

As an experiment, I would love to see what the game would look like if communication channels were removed. Would it be possible to play the same way? How would strategy change? What sorts of representations would people use to express basic concepts? It would be a remarkable example of how the technology/platform shapes the evolution of play.

(As a side note, I noticed that a new game called “Travians” was launched this past summer, which takes the setting of Travian and lets people play as an actual character inside of a village. I’m going to start playing to see what sorts of niches in MMO play it fills that are absent in the original game.)

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By Bobby – October 28, 2008

The Journalism & Games Project

I am involved in three projects this semester that deal with games. The first is my thesis work which will span the whole year. The second is Celia Pearce’s game design and analysis class. I’ll be linking to a number of blog entries I have written for her blog soon. But I wanted to focus on my third project–the one I haven’t really mentioned yet.

At the beginning of the semester I was excited to hear that Ian Bogost would be starting a video games and journalism project studio (essentially a research group). I, like most people, assumed it would be on journalism about games. Since I would love to write about games for a living this seemed like a perfect match. But I found out I was a bit off in my prediction. It would not be about games journalism, but rather using games for journalism–the “newsgame” if you will. For anyone familiar with Bogost’s work, you recognize how this fits in with Persuasive Games lens. It’s been an interesting semester in the project studio because we’re basically creating this discipline from scratch. Of course there are examples of newsgames out there, but most of them fall short of their ideals. We are trying to understand how games can be made journalistic, how they can fit into the world of news, and what makes a successful newsgame.

Most of our work has been done on a message board where we can discuss our thoughts privately. Between this research and our discussions in class, we’ve made some reasonable progress over the past two months. It’s a difficult topic–one that leads us back to defining ‘games’ and ‘journalism’ as entry points to the whole discussion. It’s kind of like having the “what is art?” debate that ultimately dead ends in a lot of ideas but no conclusions. But now that we’ve gotten over a lot of the humps, I feel I’m in a place to start discussing the work. We just began our project studio blog and I took up the charge of writing the first entry. It’s about one of the basic topics we’ve identified as being important to journalistic games: discourse. Discourse, at first glance, appears to be the realm of the social: people discussing news with other people or with the producers of the news. However, as a fan of single-player games, I wanted to explore how games could be made to produce discourse between the player and the game.  I have yet to decide if it’s even possible to have single-player discourse, but I’m hoping that putting it in public dialogue will give me some ideas to pursue. So check it out and share your thoughts, will you?

Single-Player Discourse in Games: An Introduction

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By Bobby – October 26, 2008

Strategies for Analyzing the City in Games

My last post was made during the formative stages of my proposal draft. Thanks to the input of a number of people and some more intense musings on the topic, I’ve already made a few major changes. The first of these is the framework by which space is constructed. Originally I used the terms action, architecture, and culture. However, I’ve been using Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City as my basis for exploration, so I felt that adhering better to his work would help me organize my thoughts. Lynch sees space as being organized by identity, structure, and meaning. It is through these three three lenses that we create mental maps of our surroundings.

Identity
Identity implies an objects’ “distinction from other things” and recognition as a separate entity (Lynch 8). An object can be as small as a box or as large as a city itself and is designated by utility. The distinction between one building and the next might be useful for someone walking a city block but not someone driving.

Structure
Structure is the arrangement of objects in the world. The construction of the game’s world, structure is meant to refer to the layout of objects and 3D modeling of environments. As a kind of architecture, Suzanne Langer writes, “it is the total environment made visible.” It is intended to describe the landscape and the space of play. In the city that could mean streets, building exteriors, building interiors, lampposts and park benches, bridges, hills, water, ramps and ladders, and so on. These are diagetic machine objects rendered by the software for the player to interact with.

Meaning
An environment is brought to life through the context in which it is experienced. In terms of a game, meaning in a three-dimensionally modeled space comes from a handful of places. There is a setting that develops the personality of the space. There is often a narrative which inscribes specific meanings. There is the player as someone who takes action in the environment–whether this be a desire to complete goals on a purely gamic level, the result of narrative triggers, or emergent play.

Action
In addition to these three points from Lynch, I’ve added a term from Alexander Galloway to adopt the framework to games. A term used by Galloway to describe the basic interaction with a video game, action refers to active participation by a player in enacting the software (game) that runs on the hardware (platform). Galloway discusses four types of action: operator, machine, diagetic, and nondiagetic. Operator action is that performed by the player whereas machine is performed by the software and hardware. Diagetic action occurs within the game’s world whereas nondiagetic action might refer to menus, cheats, or other processes related to the game that are outside of the “pretend world of character and story” (Galloway 8). In addition to character and story, I would like to amend the definition to include those processes that construct the gaming plane.  ‘Action’ provides a tangible series of definitions of gameplay, which is often a fuzzy term. The term gameplay, for this research, describes the diagetic operator actions as defined by control mechanisms. It is meant to refer to the range of actions a player can take. Examples include, but are not limited to: moving a character’s body, interacting with other characters, combat, manipulating the environment, and methods of achieving goals.

Beginning with these four lenses and creating a sample of games based in or on New York City, I can begin to explore the ways the city experience is represented in video games. The purpose of this inquiry is both reflexive and prescriptive. The textual analysis of a range of games provides insight into these objects as cultural texts. We can search for common themes, common concerns, and common allusions. I also am looking at the techniques designers use for navigating and reading the city. It provides the opportunity to not only identify well-crafted examples that can be repeated, but also to take critical theory about city and urban design and apply it to game-making.

Next step? Assembling a list of games to explore. Keep the suggestions coming.

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By Bobby – October 20, 2008

Let’s Write a Thesis! Games and the City

On November 3rd my Masters thesis proposal is due.  When the semester began I had no idea what I wanted to do. We have the option here in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech to choose either a project or written thesis. Projects require building something and a programmer I am not. I can make websites! But I’m tired of doing that. I’m interested in teaching and writing for a living, so thesis it is.

So what did I decide on? Representations of the city in video games. I did my undergrad American Studies culminating seminar work in Film Noir, so the city is a topic I’m familiar with thinking about. As I started my thesis proposal draft this weekend, I was plagued by the scope of the project. There are thousands of cities in video games, so how am I supposed to pin it down?

My first decision was to only focus on three-dimensional games. This would at least allow me to compare certain kinds of experiences on more even footing. Unfortunately, this excludes a lot of really interesting games from my study, but I can always make passing reference to them. So then I started thinking about games I’d like to use. The Grand Theft Auto cities, Rapture from BioShock, City 17 from Half-Life 2, the Citadel from Mass Effect, New York City in The Darkness, perhaps something from a Final Fantasy game, and maybe even something from a Tony Hawk game or an open world racing game.

Grand Theft Auto III
I was still left scratching my head with this line of inquiry. These are all interesting places, and I’m sure I could draw parallels in my research, but I’d end up spending too much time trying to make it all fit.  How to narrow it down once again? I decided I really wanted to talk about Grand Theft Auto IV and The Darkness. And, with that, the muse hit me! I’ll do just games that are representations of New York City!

I still need to decide which games I’m going to use, which is where I need your help: In the comment section, can you recommend games that take place in New York City or a NYC-like place?

Why do a thesis about the city in the game? The purpose of my inquiry is both reflexive and prescriptive. The textual analysis of a range of games gives us insight into these objects as cultural texts. We can search for common themes, common concerns, and common allusions. It also provides the opportunity to not only identify well-crafted examples that can be repeated, but also to take critical theory about city and urban design and apply it to game-making.

How do I plan on approaching the subject? I will be looking at the construction of urban space in video games as a product of action, architecture, and culture.  At first these might seem like broad areas, but once defined it will become apparent that they are interrelated.

Action
A term used by Alexander Galloway to describe the basic interaction with a video game, action refers to active participation by a player in enacting the software (game) that runs on the hardware (platform). Galloway discusses four types of action: operator, machine, diagetic, and nondiagetic.

Architecture
The construction of the game’s world, architecture refers to the layout of objects and 3D modeling of environments. It’s buildings, streets, water, interiors–the landscape. As Suzanne Langer writes, “it is the total environment made visible.”

Culture
A three-dimensionally modeled environment is brought to life through cultural context. It provides the components that Kevin Lynch notes as being essential to imaging an environment: identity, structure, and meaning. Culture includes the narrative, the setting, and elements that help root the game in a specific sense of place-time.

I’ll be updating the blog as I work on my proposal, research, and then the actual writing of the thesis. I’m really interested in reader feedback because dialogue makes any written work stronger. So bookmark the blog, add it to your RSS reader, or engage in however you use this thing called Internet. Thanks!

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By Bobby – October 15, 2008

Podcasts and Thesises

Yes, I know the plural of thesis is theses. But it doesn’t look as cool.

The GameCulture Journal Blog is a place for me to not only muse on games but to include links to my other game related work, blog entries, and Master’s Thesis brainstorming. My goal, then, is to do a better job of keeping this thing up to date.  First order of business? The Low Score podcast, which I do with my friend J. We’ve recorded nine episodes thus far and the train keeps a’rollin’. So please check out the Low Score blog and subscribe to the ‘cast. We welcome comments and questions too!

Secondly, I have posted a few more blog entires for my Game Design as Cultural Practice course. Both are related to Grand Theft Auto games, but each uses a different framing question. My Vice City entry attempts to answers questions of gameplay styles and cultural context using values from the Values@Play Grow-A-Game kit. The San Andreas post discusses racial issues, playing as the dominant ideology, and the male-whiteness of the game industry.

For my other course, Ian Bogost’s Journalism and Games project studio, I’m currently looking into using Foucault’s thoughts of discourse as a model for discourse within single-player games. Look forward to that entry in the next week.

Finally, I’ve been researching my thesis topic. I’m going to be writing about the city in video games. From which angle, I am not yet sure.  To start my research I’m looking at books on city architecture and urban design, doing a survey of games that take place in the city for their gameplay and narrative elements, and thinking about play affordances within the city structure. Expect a lot of that brainstorming to go on here, as I’m using this as my Master’s blog as well.

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By Bobby – October 2, 2008

Posted Elsewhere: When We Just Make It Up

Two of my courses this semester feature student-contributed blogs. The first of these, which I am posting today, is Game Design as Cultural Practice. You can tell it’s good becaue it uses the “as” structure. Seriously, though, it’s a class right up my alley and is taught by my thesis advisor.

The best discussions of games come from experiences gained in a play session so that new revelations may be made or old thoughts resurface. We played Monopoly’s progenitor “The Landlord’s Game” the other week and I have written about how it fits into some classical (Huizinga, Caillois, and Suits) definitions of games. While a traditional analysis would normally be a real snoozer, we had an untraditional play session that made things much more interesting. Namely, we made a lot of the rules up. Check it out and either comment there or come on back here.

[Game Design as Cultural Practice]

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By Bobby – September 14, 2008