“fuck”

That pretty much sums it up.

Here I am ‘x’ months later and that first post, full of joy, youthful gaiety, and bright-eyed good will, still lies on the front page confessing the truth of my ineptitude.

Is this a banner, leading the march towards a new world of regular content? In all honesty, almost certainly not. I got an E in History but even I am able to see that it has shown I am not to be trusted with constant creative output without persistent inspiration/nagging. This, plus the fact that none of my friends are dickish enough to nag at me, and not enough of them live nearby to inspire me, means that my tendency towards laziness has been fully validated.

Still, gross self-pity aside, it turns out that [CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED!]

Anyway, I [STILL CENSORED, HOLY CRAP]

And it was pretty cool.

By popular demand (of one man): something a little lighter this week.

At GDC this year there was a series of speedy 20-minute lectures where the topics were tightly condensed and used to brutally subdue your brain—crumpled and weeping.

One of these was How To Help Your Players Stop Saving All The Time by Randy Smith (given a pretty complete write-up on Gamasutra) which touched on the psychological reasoning that players’ use to decide whether or not to save or load. I mention this because I think it’s worth considering, but it’s not strictly what I’ll be talking about.

As I understand it, Smith was discussing the problem of players feeling the need to repeatedly quickload in order to re-attempt part of a game they feel could have been done better. I, however, have more of an issue with quicksaving regardless of whether you load back to that point because, each time you do it, it gives you a psychological safety net and reinforces a complete lack of urgency or tension. Some games, of course, do not want a sense of urgency or tension, but for the sake of this post they do.

Being one of those who falls into the trap of quicksaving—using them sparingly at first to prevent constant replaying of the same area, but soon, out of habit or a lazy reluctance to have to replay the same area even once, constantly abusing the function from beginning to end—I started thinking about how I might try to solve the problem, and came up with this rough outline:

In a nutshell, I wanted a system which would allow me to save at any time but which discouraged me from doing so. That meant that whenever I saved, it would have to be at some cost to me; to paraphrase Smith, I would have a measurable loss which I could weigh up against the potential gains I might make by saving at that point. However, I wouldn’t want to be flat out punished for wanting to save the game (what if I had to go do real life stuff?) so the loss would have to be short-term; something which would have a small negative impact if I wanted to save and carry on playing, but which would make no difference if I saved and quitted.

The immediate problem with this is simply that it’s contrived. Save systems are almost always abstract features which only connect to a game passively and, as such, would appear transparently artificial if given arbitrary repercussions inside the game world. How would you feel if a precious director, while trying to ensure that you watched his movies in a single sitting, made DVDs that blasted you with five seconds of white noise every time you pressed pause?

So, if the abstract nature of save systems are going to prevent short-term losses from appearing reasonable or even defensible, why not remove that abstraction and make it a physical part of the game world? This is where the problem gets particularly interesting for me, as it opens up to all kinds of creative solutions.

The initial idea I came up with stemmed from a sci-fi viewpoint. Suppose the player has a Gordan Freeman-esque HEV suit but with an added ability to take a ’snapshot’ of the world around it so that, upon loading, the player is literally pulled back in time to the position where the snapshot was taken (substitute the elaborate quantum theory of your choice).

Taking this snapshot would require a burst of power so, immediately after saving, the player receives an energy drop which will slowly regenerate over a certain period of time (or maybe recharges as the player moves around by a transfer of kinetic energy) but will leave their shields weakened for the duration.

This sapping of energy would make no difference to someone who was saving before quitting as the energy would have regenerated by the time they came back for more, but for the continual player it would be a brief hit which would need to be considered before being used, and would definitely discourage constant quicksaving if it meant a constant crippling of the player’s health. Of course, the player could choose to save and then sit for five minutes waiting to regenerate (which they’d be welcome to do) but this would also be a hit on that precious commodity: time, which is always of the greatest value.

That’s all kinds of sci-fi ridiculousness, and I’m sure it could have a billion holes picked through it, but it’s more the theory behind the system rather than the particular implementation that I’m trying to get a grasp on. A friend of mine took a more organic route, suggesting a solution which was based around meditation. What other possibilities would there be?

Emergence is something that seems to be getting talked about more and more frequently these days. It’s a movement towards unpredictable gameplay, where the systems, environments, and components that define the game react to how the player chooses to behave rather than force a type of behaviour on the player. The gameplay, in other words, ‘emerges’ as a consequence of the player’s actions.

That definition, however, makes me question whether games have achieved anything even remotely close to emergence, or if, considering the traditional nature of game design, they ever could. I call this problem ‘design intervention’ because I am too grandiose for my own good, but also because I believe that it sums up the antithesis of emergence: games cannot be unpredictable if they are designed.

What is commonly referred to as emergence these days is in fact non-linearity; it hinges on the degree of player choice and freedom, but the two should not be confused. If I, as a player, am in a locked room with a crowbar and a key to the door, that gives me two ways to get out, but can two designed choices be called emergent? I wouldn’t have said so. Now say I also have a screwdriver, and there’s a window leading out to a drainpipe, and maybe an air duct in the wall (we all know how prolific those things can be), would that be any more emergent? Some might say yes; I wouldn’t.

There doesn’t seem to be any difference between being asked whether I want to make a choice between options 1 and 2 or options 1 to 10. If each of those options is designed, the gameplay cannot be unpredictable and therefore emergent. It’s not reacting to my choices, I’m reacting to its options.

It’s perfectly possible for those options to get more and more complex, more deeply embedded within the mechanics of the game (using the broken door to smash the window, or two pieces of the splintered wood to make fire by friction) but even then, the depth doesn’t hide the designed intent; the physical properties of each component have still been selected at a high level to allow for those choices, and there are still many things the player will not be able to do if they have not been allowed for in the design.

This thinking also applies to artificial intelligence, which is sometimes held as being an excellent example of emergence. However, the logic still stands. The AI entities in the game have been programmed to react to the player and environment in a certain way, and as such can be predicted. Sometimes the AI is simple and barely duck to avoid being shot, and sometimes the AI is more complex and will ‘communicate’ with its buddies or have some rudimentary learning system, but even then it has been designed at a high level to do those things. Clever perhaps, but we will always know just how clever.

What this means is that having a creative influence at a high level (design intervention) seems to be completely at odds with the idea of emergence as defined at the start of this post. Emergence and storytelling can’t coexist in the traditional sense. In order for a game to have emergent behaviour it needs to be unpredictable by anyone, and so the designer would need to relinquish control of it. This is where it all begins to get a bit weird and theoretical.

Say we go back to the example of the room. As a piece of geometry designed for the sole benefit of the player, it cannot be called emergent because every aspect of it is contrived, but as a piece of architecture designed for use as an actual room (which the player happens to be in) the emergence can finally come through. Now if the player breaks a door, or a window, or a wall, it would be in spite of the designer, not because of him.

Will Wright and Introversion have already shown that with procedural generation, randomised but believable organisms, cities, and societies can be created with no high-level input at all if desired. Suppose those organisms were placed in those cities with those communities. Suppose those organisms themselves built the cities and formed the communities because of the depth of their generated personalities and goal systems. Suppose the organisms were not generated directly into their modern state at all, but were procedurally ‘evolved’ for the equivalent of a few billion years based on the environment they lived in during that time. And so on and so on until designers are creating the beginning of a procedurally generated universe which is simulated through the aeons to finally produce a planet and a continent and a city and a building and a room. Which is where you start.

Obviously all that is way way out in the realms of science fiction right now, but I was just using it to illustrate a point (also it makes my brain squeal with joy). By moving down through the levels of design into deeper and more fundamental principles (and leaving the higher levels to be generated by those principles) the designer is creating more and more possibilities for more emergent gameplay.

Of course, as I said before, this would completely throw traditionally crafted games out of the window. A story couldn’t be written because the designer wouldn’t be able to direct the player or create important high-level elements like characters, locations, and events. But who says that games need to be crafted in that traditional way? Imagine the possibilities of exploring and interacting with environments and situations that haven’t even been conceived of. With the procedural techniques that would be necessary to achieve high levels of emergence, more content and depth could be generated than it would be possible to create in a lifetime.

As far back as I can remember, games have always been about fun. Having been weaned on box quotes and the (relatively) mainstream press, their expectations and principles regarding the subject swiftly became my own: regardless of what a game does right, if it isn’t fun it’s not worth a damn.

Even now, I don’t blame myself (or them) for adopting that opinion. At the time it was a noble bar to set your standards by, and I was glad to see that the real core qualities of a game were being held higher than their production values.

All this seems so strange to me now. Trying to wedge my mind back into that narrow perspective. I find it hard to recall all the excellent reasons I had for thinking as I did now that I no longer do.

The exact circumstances surrounding my conversion escape me, but I do know that it happened while talking about ICO. Oh my, how I love ICO; one of the most delightful and emotionally draining experiences in my gaming career. Its effect on me was something I’d never properly considered until a friend of mine, watching me play and being singularly unimpressed, asked why. Why did I find such an empty, bleak and fairly uneventful game so fun?

Being the type of man I am, I rose to this bait instantly, and furiously listed the exquisite nuances of gameplay, the subtleties in character interaction, the story told without telling. ‘Yes’ he said, bewildered and nodding, ‘but why is it fun?’

I think the conclusion to that little interchange was for me to scoff and try to sweep haughtily out the room, but the question still nagged at me. I couldn’t understand why I was so incapable of explaining what made ICO one of the best examples of its kind; what made that elusive “fun factor” so hard to determine. What I finally came to realise was that I was trying to force my way through the problem from the wrong side. ICO simply is not fun, but it is all the more compelling for it.

I think that is the key word here: “compelling”. Fun has been such a mainstay of games for so long, that its absence instantly implies failure. A game that isn’t fun is frustrating, repetitive, and broken. Why? Is that fair? I wouldn’t dream of calling Mulholland Drive, Verdi’s Requiem or Brideshead Revisited ‘fun’, but each of them is uniquely poignant. They don’t have a moral, they don’t have a happy ending, they don’t make me feel good about myself, yet they move me in such a compelling way that, again and again, I willingly seek out the darker and more emotionally complex experiences that they provide.

ICO is the only game I know that has this same effect on me, and that in itself is quite a shocking revelation. Why am I always saving the world, getting the girl, battling with impossible odds and winning through? Because power, adoration, and success are fun, while jealousy, despair, and guilt are not. It is such a deeply ingrained ‘fact’ that a game without fun is a game without merit, that we use that measuring stick to blockade our own creative freedom and refuse to step outside it.

It can hardly be news to you that games as a media are not respected artistically. They are still regarded as toys and meaningless playthings, but angry as that might make us, we really shouldn’t be surprised. The very purpose of a toy’s existence is to provide nothing but fun, and games as an industry do not seem to be setting their sights any higher. If games are ever to show themselves as being a strong media for mature creativity, they need to embrace the maxim of being compelling rather than fun.

Give me a game which tests my morals, give me a game which makes me hate myself, give me a game in which the only way to win is to lose. Compel me.

This year’s GDC was a first for me. Having always been something of an insider-wannabe, I found endless frustration in the fact that all the high profile industry events took place in America rather than my hometown: the UK.

We did once hold ECTS as our proud banner, but that was soon dragged into the swamp of mediocrity, achieving little more than kicking up a few bubbles of ineffectual successors before burying the whole shameful episode without a trace.

Fast forward approximately one puberty into the future and I am satisfied at having at last gained my final prize by pinning a GDC media pass next to one from E3, culled two years before.

It was more than I could have ever hoped for.

This post isn’t going to be a break down of the conference, which has already been rigorously reported to bits, but I would like to stress what a massive impact it had on me in terms of inspiration.

Sharing a building with thousands of similarly impassioned people touched off my brain like a match to a balloon. Ideas swell out of nowhere, arguments rage, theories are expounded, every little thought-nugget is mined and examined for impurities with an eagerness that causes all around you to froth with joy. Probably.

I suffer from that peculiar yet distressing trait of believing that: because I know what I am thinking right now, I will still know it at a later date. This is, of course, almost never the case, but it was my experiences at GDC more than anything, which finally led me to start writing those ideas down in a notebook as soon as they cropped up.

The next few posts on Cumulomentis will stem from those experiences, as they are the most recent in my mind, but the first be on an unrelated topic which has been under my skin for a while now, and which I think gives a good example of the sort of content that you can be expect to find here.

Coming soon: “Making games that aren’t fun”.

So exciting and yet so underwhelming.

On the one hand I’m finally starting a blog which will get past the first entry without being forgotten (by me, anyway), but on the other, I don’t want to just jump out at you yelling “INFORMATION!” without at least giving you a hint as to which ear you should stuff with cotton wool.

Hell, even books that start straight in on Chapter One with no thought to prefaces, prologues, forewords, or acknowledgements have something else to say on the first few pages. I tend to skip over those, myself, but at least they help add a sense of volume­—like when you start work on an impossible 80-page paper and fill the first 10 with the title, contents, summary, purpose, scope, and so on. An hour’s solid work rewarded by the rest of the day off.

So, to business then.

There are two reasons I’ve never successfully started a blog (or any similar social page; livejournal, myspace, et al):

First, I find writing about myself to be blisteringly dull. Talking I can do almost indefinitely—it’s so much easier to dip in and out of in terms of enthusiasm and engagement.

Second, without input from anyone else I find it pointless. I don’t talk to myself in front of the mirror, why do it in front of a monitor? I’m a bit like a rubber ball in that way; I love bouncing ideas off people and smacking their responses straight back (I think I just broke my own metaphor by suggesting the existence of a vindictive bouncy toy). Debate, exchange, learning. Tell me why I’m wrong! When it comes to what I think, I’m the most sycophantic guy I know.

So why is Cumulomentis different? Because I’m not using it to tell anyone anything. I just want to have somewhere I can lay down the kinds of thing I like to think about (games, design, theory, art, current events) and hear what you think, what your spin on the event is, what your solution to the problem might be, why I’m so utterly wrong in my conclusions.

I want to fire up the people who care about games.

I want you.