So everyone’s been making a really big deal about Jesse Schell’s DICE talk about the future of games. I’d been putting off watching it, because I knew it was about casual games and Facebook stuff like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, all of which I completely and utterly do not understand, despite being 25 years old and evidently in the perfect demographic for the inexorable monetization of social networks. But I finally watched it anyway, because everyone said it was a work of absolute genius and I just had to see for myself. Here’s the talk, and at half an hour I think it’s a perfectly reasonable length. So take a look, and I’ll join you past the jump:

Before I begin, let me get my personal prejudices out of the way. First of all, I have never liked scores in video games, at all, in any form. Achievements, trophies, scoreboards, whatever: they all smack of compulsion to me, and I already have enough problems toggling light switches, setting speaker volumes to multiples of five and stepping over sidewalk fissures with alternate feet, thank you very much.

Second, as strange as it sounds, I’m not a huge fan of computers for their own sake. I love the things that computers allow me to do – build virtual worlds, talk to my friends in faraway countries, post editorials on my website – but if I can do something just as well without a computer as with one, I’d almost always prefer to remove it from the equation. Unnecessary complexity is one of the cardinal sins in my religion that I just made up, and if I could build a science-fiction third-person action-adventure with a hammer and a truckload of 2×4s, you’d never see me touch a compiler again.

So perhaps I’m exactly the sort of person who would recoil from the future that Schell describes in his talk, and you could ignore whatever I have to say. But I still want to point out a few things, even if only to clarify them for myself.

1. The first thing is directed less at Schell’s talk and more at the industry’s reaction to it. That is: is any of this really that surprising? Most of his points seem pretty self-evident, and I know I’ve been worried about this ever since I first found a Mafia Wars invitation in my Facebook feed. We knew it was coming, we just didn’t think it would so quickly and completely overshadow everything else.

2. Schell’s idea that we will become better people when an all-encompassing record-keeping network puts us all under a microscope for our actions is a lot more cynical than he makes it sound. He’s saying that we only care about the consequences of our choices if other people know what we chose, which is pretty philosophically suspect. It does not in any way account for principles or ideals. Hell, if you really want to get hyperbolic about it (and hey, why not?), the contention that our decisions are based solely on social scrutiny kind of undermines the whole concept of free will (ignoring for the moment the chemical forces involved in the diffusion of neurotransmitters and other such mechanical hoo-hah you have to cope with when you believe in a physically deterministic universe).

3. Schell talks a great deal about reality and authenticity, and with regard to branding he is most certainly correct, but his “point system for real life” actually goes in the opposite direction. Awarding points for real-world actions does not invest us in those actions, it invests us in the rewards. The action becomes even less meaningful, because we’re not doing it for its own sake anymore. Suddenly, you’re no longer brushing your teeth because it’s a good idea and it feels clean and pleasant and all that, you’re just brushing your teeth because it gets you ahead in some game happening in a database on a server somewhere. Now you’ve handed the responsibility for your own dental hygiene over to a boardroom full of people who want your money. And you know what’s really profitable? A root canal.

4. Related to point 3, establishing rewards beyond those inherent to the task at hand can have devastating effects on the task-prioritization abilities of all but the most willful individuals. Think about quests in World of Warcraft. Think about level grinding in any Japanese RPG. Scheduled rewards for mundane, predictable tasks only reinforce the meaninglessness of the tasks themselves, and this lends itself to constant repetition in the pursuit of further rewards. When the tasks themselves are meaningless and the reward at the end is the only motivating factor, the process must be repeated indefinitely to maintain a feeling of satisfaction. The pursuit of rewards through the repetition of mindless tasks is beneath nearly every level of human aspiration I can think of, yet for decades it has been accepted as the status quo by cubicle jockeys and cynical people who don’t think that life is supposed to be a beautiful and fulfilling experience; Schell’s almost dystopian vision of the future is taking this principle to new, compulsion-inducing extremes, and game designers the world over sound thrilled to contribute to this dilution of self-actualization. You know what this means, right? People are going to be grinding in real life. What’s going to happen when a guy gets rushed to the hospital because he drank three dozen Dr. Peppers to speed-level his paladin? Oh, right, he’ll just pay for his hospital bill with the points he gained from eating four hundred bags of Doritos the previous month.

Yes, I’m exaggerating a bit; partly to drive the point home, partly because it’s more interesting to read, and partly because it’s 3:30 in the morning. But this really is something that worries me, especially because I suspected it years ago and hoped that no one would ever decide that it was a good idea. Now I find myself wondering if I’ll even have a place in the game industry five years from now.

In the end, I just want to create self-contained pieces of art. I don’t want connectivity. I don’t want to integrate my ideas into a collective metagame. I want to tell stories, whether they’re linear, interactive or purely experiential. Just for that, maybe I’m already obsolete, but if I’m only going to burn half as long, you bet your ass it’ll be twice as bright.

Thanks in part to the recent Art History of Games symposium, the “games as art” discussion has surged once again to prominence among gamers and developers. The ongoing dialogue facilitated by Twitter is impossible to ignore, especially if you follow enough people in the industry. This is great. I’m glad that so many people are engaged in this debate, even if I don’t consider myself properly equipped to participate.

Lately, however, I’ve discovered something about the issue that had frustrated me, even though I hadn’t figured out what it was: many of the arguments presented – on both sides – are divisive and specious. That is, they try too hard to put games in a neat little box with clearly delineated “right” and “wrong” ways to make a game. Most discussions on this topic simply revolve around deciding which box to put them into, without acknowledging the possibility that games can be all these things and more.

The first thing I should say here is that games as a medium are indeed art. Sure, most games out there don’t necessarily qualify as works of art, but they don’t prevent games in general from being an art form any more than technical diagrams devalue graphic design. It’s simply a matter of degree. But the idea of degrees – of a spectrum of games rather than discrete categories – is rarely acknowledged, at least in most of the discussions that I’ve seen.

Art isn’t really a thing so much as something you do. It’s the act of expressing ideas through some kind of intermediary, be it prose, moving pictures or interactive systems. That’s why we call them media. And most games do express ideas. Even Halo, the oft-used poster child for mindless entertainment, hides a surprisingly compelling statement about the fragility of sentient life, and the fact that Bungie never went out of their way to draw attention to it does nothing to diminish its power. In fact, this subplot is so well-hidden that Halo 3 has an achievement (called “Marathon Man”) just for finding it. Bungie has always had a knack for cleverly hiding the most intellectual parts of their stories to keep them from muddying the simplicity of their gameplay, but this is a perfect example of a popular game that can’t be totally dismissed out of hand. Uncharted is this way too, as well as Metroid Prime and Ratchet & Clank.

Yet the intellectual merit of games that don’t openly brandish the Art Badge is smoothed over by the debate, as those involved lump all games into two categories and argue loudly – sometimes with staggering hostility – that one of these categories is correct and the other is an affront to what games are “supposed to be.”

This is very silly.

In all of this arguing, we are forgetting the most important measurement we can use for any work of art: is it good? I know it sounds self-evident and maybe simplistic, but I’m often surprised by how rarely it comes up. Simply put, whatever a thing does, all that matters is whether it does it well. If it’s a first-person shooter, is it a good first-person shooter? If it’s an obscure treatise on the intricacies of marriage in the form of a game, is it a good obscure treatise on the intricacies of marriage in the form of a game? If it’s something we’ve never seen and don’t yet know how to judge, can we still see its goals and gauge whether it meets them? Categories only exist so we can differentiate, not so we can set guidelines. Otherwise we may find ourselves judging games by standards that they weren’t trying to meet in the first place (“OMG Chrono Trigger is teh worst racing gaem evar made etc.”).

Jason Rohrer and Jonathan Blow, for instance, have clearly defined principles for the games they create, but they both appear to reinforce the sentiment that this is the way all games should be made (NOTE: Blow has clarified to me that this is not the case, which is awesome. Nonetheless, I know the assertion exists elsewhere, so I will dispute that point solely on its own grounds). This is like saying that all films should be shot in the chiaroscuro style, and anything else – Days of Heaven included – is not really a film. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Their methods are perfectly valid and have produced some great games, but they are by no means the only “correct” way to make a game. Gregory Weir’s The Majesty of Colors is completely narrative-driven and doesn’t follow these guidelines at all, but it’s damn good at what it does, no matter what you call it.

We get hung up on terminology. Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn of Tale of Tales have thrown up their hands in defeat, proclaimed that games are not art, and have decided to focus instead on “notgames,” which are exactly like games but are also artistic. What the hell? This is the result of a very narrow perspective and a disturbing willingness to completely disregard anything that does not fit that perspective. Art is a very big place. Gaming is a very big place. But by choosing to look only at a very small piece of each, they have made it impossible for the two to meet. Destructoid’s Jim Sterling, on the other hand, revels in anti-intellectualism and dismisses art games in general as “pretentious,” adding further to our theory that no one quite understands what the word “pretentious” means – that is, being deliberately vague does not correlate to false pretenses of importance. The only thing that’s pretentious about any of these people is their assertion that their tiny subset of the landscape is the only part of it that really matters.

The killing joke is that both Sterling and Tale of Tales have bought into the same misguided principle: that games are only one kind of thing. They merely disagree on what that thing is supposed to be. Theoretically, I could sit here and argue for hours about how Macbeth is a terrible play because it’s a tragedy. You, in turn, could decide that you’ll just give up on stage plays entirely because they can’t all be tragedies. Then you could go write a tragic play, all the while insisting on calling it something else, because you’d rather invent your own category where you’d never have to be associated with work you don’t like. And we would both be completely ridiculous.

The world is really big, guys. The possibilities are endless. Limiting yourself to the parts you can easily categorize is self-destructive. To put it another way, you can make whatever the hell you want as long as you don’t screw it up. That’s all that matters. Baklava might be a Turkish dessert, it might be Greek, or it might be Egyptian. No one really knows who invented it. That does not stop it from being delicious.

And with that, I’m hungry. Stop being silly.

Finally got enough of a break from my fantastic yet all-encompassing education at Full Sail to actually come back to this site and post something. I can only hope that once I’m actually working I’ll be able put interesting progress updates here, but for the next year or so I’ll just have to write whenever I can. For the record, I’ve also created a Tumblr for bits of writing that don’t really belong anywhere else.

That being said, let’s talk about selfish creativity for a minute.

Kotaku’s AJ Glasser wrote an excellent piece this week that made me think about the motivations for creating a game. The gist of her article was that Modern Warfare 2’s complete lack of female characters gave the entire game a sexist slant. This may be true (indeed, after reading her article the entire game just kinda weirds me out, as though it takes place in an alternate dimension where women don’t exist and men reproduce asexually), but I found myself continually coming around to the question of why it was made that way in the first place. Naturally, anyone could come up with an answer for that one. Infinity Ward’s explanation would most likely invoke political correctness and the distastefulness of women getting shot, Heather Chaplin might imply that Infinity Ward are a bunch of macho adolescents (which is neither here nor there), anyone at Activision’s marketing department would tell you that’s what sells to the 18-35 male demographic, and anyone actually in that demographic probably hasn’t even thought about this.

There’s a real discrepancy here. We no longer have the right to claim that video games are a “young industry” to sidestep doubt regarding our motivations. This industry is more than 35 years old. When film was 35, Griffith and Murnau had already produced the first artistically relevant examples of the craft, and film had officially grown beyond the realm of idle distraction into true art. So what’s different now? I’ve heard the argument that the staggering complexity of modern video game production is beyond our ability to effectively control, hence a multitude of development strategies (waterfall, XP, scrum, etc.) and the recent tendency for AAA dev teams to balloon up to 400 members. It could just as easily be claimed that the conveniences of the 21st century have made us reluctant to sacrifice our comfort and peace of mind to the insatiable demands of passion projects that consume their creators even as they neglect their health and their relationships just to see the ravenous beast to completion. To the first, there is enough contrary evidence of small teams succeeding where large teams have failed to halt that train of thought at the station. To the second, solo developers like Daisuke Amaya and Hiroshi Iuchi do this all the time. Yes, I know we all work long hours, but more often it’s for the sake of producing excellent work, not because the great fiery beast of our idea preys upon our dreams until we finally manage to exorcise it and duplicate it across a million discs.

The problem lies not with development strategies, but with the realities of business. Films were made to be dramatic works; like theater, the objective was to create something that viewers would enjoy and appreciate further with repeated viewing. Money was the objective, but the business model was such that the techniques that made the most money – subtlety and emotional veracity that brought audiences back week after week – were also the most creatively profound. Games are not made to be games, they’re made to be products. Get it in a customer’s hands, make your sixty bucks, the end. This is why we have so few passion projects. You only really have to give the people what they want, and if they want something utterly ridiculous, just give them that and you’ll make bank. So what’s the solution? Well, all you really have to do is stop caring about your audience.

“BWAH?!” you say, as your monocle pops out and falls into your tea. Certainly I’m not suggesting that everyone has to do this all the time, because then there’d be no way to stay in business. But think about what happens when developers get to build the games they like, rather than what the market wants. Hideo Kojima deliberately alienated the most obsessive portion of his fanbase with the hostile postmodernism of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty just so he could make MGS3: Snake Eater free of expectations. He did whatever he wanted to while making that game, and it’s a masterpiece (for a compelling theory that MGS4, in turn, was a premeditated attempt to put the whole franchise out of its misery, I will direct you to Tim Rogers). Think about all the love that Fumito Ueda’s games get. That man couldn’t give a rat’s ass whether  millions of people bought Shadow of the Colossus, but there it is, Greatest Hits label and all, popping up in every game design discussion on the Internet. That game has become the Godwin’s Law* of video games, and not for a moment did Ueda ever stop and wonder if anyone would actually like it. Daisuke Amaya spent five years of his life building Cave Story from scratch in DirectX, and the readme.txt for the final release is one line: explore the caves until you get to the end. It’s almost unbearably humble, but here’s the truth of it: he didn’t make that game for you, he made it for himself. It doesn’t need a readme, because if you’ve downloaded a copy you’re already speaking Amaya’s language.

Now that I’ve written that paragraph, I wonder if this is something Japanese developers are more likely to do. Some Russian studios make a point of doing this – have you even played Pathologic? – but off the top of my head I can certainly cite more examples from Japan than I can from other countries. Perhaps it’s because their culture demands a strong self-identification with one’s work? Well, there’s your homework for next time!

Look to other media, even. If Philip K. Dick had even the tiniest bit of concern for attracting an audience, he most certainly would not have written A Scanner Darkly. I have a profound loathing for the work of Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, and I’m sure if you had told them that they wouldn’t have cared in the slightest. My good friend and fellow game design nerd Lynette “Rampant Bicycle” Terrill pointed out that this may very well be the Big Secret of great artists and creators: just build whatever makes sense to you and someone else, somewhere, is bound to like it. In that respect, I feel as though I’m on the right track. I’m oblivious to the idea of having an audience. The only thing I know is that I want to make things because I want them to exist, and I trust enough in the diversity of the human race that there will be people in the world who like what I’ve made.

* I propose a new video game equivalent to Godwin’s Law: “As an online game design discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference involving Shadow of the Colossus approaches 1.”

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly impatient with the game industry’s ongoing “games as art” debate. Until recently, I was fascinated by the topic and would pursue the discussion at every opportunity, but eventually I began to notice a nagging doubt. I couldn’t identify it, but somehow I had the vague sensation that I was wasting my time. Not that the debate is pointless – far from it, in fact – but I began to suspect that I, personally, had no business entering the field to begin with. Then, last week, it hit me:

I don’t have the slightest effin’ clue what “art” is.

Some years ago, a friend of mine came to visit me in New York City, and we decided to spend the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I adore museums; I love anything that exists for the transmission of knowledge and the broadening of human experience. So we visited our favorite spots: the Temple of Dendur, the Frank Lloyd Wright Room, and others. We then took a turn into the Modern Art wing, and it was there that my inability to understand art was thrown into stark relief.

As I gazed at the exhibit before me, my immediate reaction was a thoroughly innocent one. “Oh,” I thought, “The Museum of Natural History must have opened an annex in the Met, hoping to cross-promote the museums and entice tourists to visit both while they’re in town. Why, I suppose the Met must have put an Edward Hopper or two on display at the Rose Center as well!” But as I stood and absorbed the scene, watching other museum patrons scratching their chins and nodding thoughtfully, I realized to my horror that what I had thought to be an intriguing scientific specimen was, in actuality, meant to be a work of art.

I stared, dumbfounded, at Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Basically a shark in a box. As an object of study, it would have been elegant and fascinating. But its purpose was higher, whether I was able to understand it or not. This was art. My left eye twitched involuntarily. For the next five minutes, the only sound that escaped my lips was a barely audible “huh?” to everyone and no one in particular.

I’ve always been a scientist at heart. As a child, I only ever believed in purposes and results. I did not draw pictures, I drew schematics. I played with Legos. I wanted to build things, go places, explore every last inch of the cosmos. I worshipped science – and still do – because I knew that it would one day allow me to do the impossible. Broadly, I am more than capable of thinking abstractly, but my real interest is in the practical application of abstract concepts. It’s easy to make an general statement like “reason is the highest absolute,” but I care only about how that statement should dictate one’s behavior. I can’t work with the abstract in a vacuum; without some form of practical expression, it has no meaning for me. It may as well be another language.

Artists like Damien Hirst live in exactly this sort of vacuum. Philosophically, that world is impenetrable to me. I am unable to deal with concepts purely as such, without trying to imagine their consequences in physical reality. I get figurative art. I get Quent Cordair. I get Bryan Larsen. I understand craft, talent, vision and execution. I do not get conceptual art. I do not understand Jackson Pollock or Michael Craig-Martin. I lack the ability to understand it. It looks and sounds like gibberish to me. I don’t have that little decoder ring that everyone else seems to possess; that unfathomable capacity to look at something that seemingly represents nothing and get a one out of an apparent zero. My mind is too concrete for that stuff.

This is longer than I expected, but so is everything I say.

Back to games: I’ve come to realize that the “games as art” debate is best left to those who understand art. If you know what art is, more power to you. I will leave the discussion in your capable hands. I have chosen instead to concern myself with the more concrete, but no less significant, issue of games as stories. Rather, I care about stories, period; I have no intention of confining myself strictly to one medium, as some of my ideas are better suited to strict authorial control and would make for dishonest and rigid games. But stories are important. They communicate ideas by way of people, through their words and actions. Characters represent ideas, and if those ideas can manifest themselves in fictional people, so too can they manifest in real people. A heroic character can inspire heroism in the reader. A thoughtful character can provoke thought. A writer can express his values by showing imaginary people living by those values and illustrating the result, and the reader can see this chain of events and choose to contemplate those values in regard to his own life. Storytelling is about creating an intermediate context where one’s ideas can be communicated to someone else who does not share the writer’s perspective.

Stories are my alternative to art. And as videogames continue struggling to find their place in the cultural pantheon, I know that I will be in the minority. Designers far more experienced than I am will continue to discuss the artistic merits of games, and I will happily stand aside and tell my stories in the hope that at least a few others will find something valuable in them. I actually prefer it that way. I’d rather not have too many cooks in the kitchen, as they say.

When I think about the games that have made a strong impression on me, a pattern emerges. Games like Myst, Super Mario 64, Pikmin, Cave Story and the EarthBound series all share a common element: The primary source of inspiration for these works came from somewhere outside of videogames. Pikmin, for instance, was inspired by a walk through a garden. The EarthBound games draw their resonance from childhood experiences. Myst emerged from a fascination with the transformative power of literature. These are the experiences that move us, because they’re personal.

Let me say that again: personal experiences are what move us.

Over time, as I’ve become more aware of my creative goals, I’ve also become more sensitive to the goals of others. If you tell me that you want to make a game that’s like Kingdom Hearts, only it plays a little like Ninja Gaiden, I can tell immediately that your heart’s not in it. Or if you say something vague and general like “we want to really immerse the player” or “we want to create compelling gameplay,” that’s the moment my mind wanders off and starts thinking about lunch. Of course you want to immerse the player. Of course you want to create compelling gameplay. Everybody wants to do that. It’s a given. I want to know how you’re going to do those things, and more importantly why you want to.

It is no longer enough for a game to be technically proficient. We don’t give films five-star ratings because the sound is properly synced or because the lights aren’t casting ugly shadows. We’re looking at the vision, at what the film is saying, and whether or not we agree with its message. The Shawshank Redemption, for example, is one of the greatest films ever made, not because it works, but because it features charismatic and relatable characters, an profoundly personal story, and probably one of the most worthwhile statements in the entirety of American cinema. I feel it’s time we judged single-player games by the same standards.

While I’m reluctant to single anyone out, this preview video of EA’s Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii is an ideal example, and was in fact the particular video that got me thinking about this today. Now, I’m sure that Steve Papoutsis is an excellent producer – otherwise he wouldn’t be working at EA – but this is just too textbook.

Now, there’s plenty of marketing jargon in there, but that’s to be expected. Every preview video has that. But one statement in particular got my attention:

“We have a variety of different mechanics that other games don’t have. We’ve got our zero-g, we’ve got branching paths, we’ve got camera control… And each weapon has an alternate fire mode, which a lot of other games don’t have.”

This is where the wheels started coming off for me. There is nothing in that sentence that helps me differentiate this product from any other 3D shooter. Plenty of games have those features, sometimes in exactly the same combination. But the unfortunate truth is that this really is what constitutes originality for a lot of developers. Extraction isn’t necessarily aiming all that high, so it may be an unfair judgment on my part, but I still feel it perfectly illustrates the limited scope of creativity in the game industry.

Indie devs like to say that AAA titles are churned out by a soulless corporate machine, but frankly that’s nonsense. Plenty of the people working on those games are passionate and talented, and I’m sure none of the developers are in it just to milk a cash cow (though the jury’s still out on the publisher side). I think this creative stagnation stems from the fact that the majority of AAA devs are drawing their inspiration from within the industry. If you’ve surrounded yourself with nothing but videogames, something as trivial as turning a third-person shooter into a rail shooter may actually look like a stroke of genius. When creativity becomes that nearsighted, even the best intentions in the world won’t help you break the mold. In some of the better cases, a designer may reach as far as the nearest reputable science fiction novel, but that’s not really much of a stretch. Sure, Dune may be better written than just about any game you can think of, but ultimately you’re just creating a cycle of fiction. Your story isn’t about anything. It’s just a story about another story. This is why I hold HBO’s The Wire as my high water mark for linear narrative; it was one of the first TV shows I ever watched that actually had something personal to say.

This is what we’re missing. Personal games. Anyone who wonders why Cave Story casts such an enchanting spell on its players is looking in the wrong place. It’s because every goddamn pixel of that game bears Daisuke Amaya’s signature. It’s his game. When I play Cave Story, I’m not just poking around some cavernous floating island. I’m romping through the imagination of another human being. And if that isn’t beautiful to you, you might be in the wrong business. We desperately need games like this. I want another designer to show me the way he sees the world, not the way he sees Star Wars. We need games that communicate and illuminate. To put it sharply, we need games that are about shit.

My advice? Go outside. And I don’t mean that in the condescending “move out of your parents’ basement” sense. I mean, literally, go outside. Go hiking in the woods. Climb a mountain. Lie on a beach at sunset. Take a road trip in a convertible with the top down. Walk up to a pretty woman (or man, whatever) completely at random and offer to buy her dinner. Inject some genuine, non-fiction spontaneity into your life. If your head doesn’t begin to overflow with genuinely fresh ideas, just keep doing it. And then if you still have no imagination, I guarantee you’ll end up finding something you enjoy more than game development anyway.

Many thanks to former IGDA executive director Jason Della Rocca for fueling the fire with his parting rant at GDC 2009. It turns out that my amateurish zeal is not misplaced after all.

My associate and fellow Full Sail student Rafael Villar – from whom you will no doubt hear more in the future – has a saying that he has followed for much of his life: “It is okay to do the right thing.” This sentence has been on my mind a lot recently. The videogame industry seems painfully reluctant to seize the reins of cultural influence that have been laid at our feet, I imagine primarily because we’re unwilling to believe that we have so much power.

Case in point, from a comment I made on Jason’s site: For the longest time, I was crippled by a tendency to see the world as an immutable constant that I just had to deal with. I never acknowledged my own ability to change my environment for the better, primarily because the games I grew up with had presented me with only the most limited range of choices. This was natural; games had yet to advance to the point of creating true possibility spaces. But the fact remains that THE WAY I SAW THE WORLD had been shaped by the games that I played.

That is a terrifying amount of power, and it stands to reason that no other art form can reach into someone’s head and reprogram his preconceptions the way a game can.

We’re past the need for power fantasy. We’re past escapism. We’re past damsels in distress and worlds teetering on the brink of apocalypse. We can make games that affect our players in tangible, positive ways. If we had the courage, we could craft an experience that would inspire an aimless young man to follow his passion, pull a timid child out of his shell long enough to ask out that girl he likes at school, or give an insecure woman the strength to rise above her fears and hold her head high, all because we made a possibility space where those behaviors grant victory.

Cultures are shaped by values. But values do not emerge from nothingness. One of the primary functions of art is to reinforce the values of a culture, saturating its intellectual tapestry with the ideas upon which the entire system rests. This is how civilizations maintain their consistency; without art, it would be immensely difficult for a society to prioritize. You can always tell what is most important to a country by the symbols present in its art. From the recurring image of the nuclear family in 1940s American popular art to the obsession with nuclear destruction in 1950s Japanese cinema, a culture’s greatest hopes and fears are invariably represented in its art.

Now let’s not kid ourselves here: videogames are the next great art form of the 21st century. We already outsell Hollywood by a significant margin, and our audience is still growing every day. But what values are we representing? The feverish sensory exhilaration of war? The thrill and luxury of a life of crime? The apparent inability of women to save themselves from, well, anything?

Sounds asinine when you put it that way, doesn’t it?

But here’s the big secret of art: the process works both ways. Decades of western political thought were influenced by novels like Brave New World, 1984 and Atlas Shrugged. Science fiction has a rich history of influencing the developments of real-world science (see: Arthur C. Clarke and the geostationary satellite). Catchphrases from otherwise unremarkable movies creep into our cultural lexicon seemingly effortlessly. Even Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, has a particular affinity for coining pithy phrases and pushing them into widespread usage.

So we know it’s possible for games to change the way people think. We know that games will soon – if not already – wield more power over American popular culture than any other commercial art. And we know that changing the way people think can dramatically alter the course of civilization’s progress. So do the math. Leaving this kind of power in the hands of Grand Theft Auto is culturally equivalent to electing a 14-year-old president.

I’m tired of defending developers like Rockstar for the sake of my beloved art form. The “cool kids” of popular culture aren’t sticking it to The Man anymore; they are The Man, and if they can’t do a halfway decent job of it, then I’ll gladly kick them off their high horses and claim the throne for myself.

We’ve been handed the reins of popular culture. And where culture goes, history follows. Our world may have problems, but what better way to solve them than to reprogram our values as a civilization? If the roots are healthy, the tree will thrive.

Forgive my delusions of grandeur. But trust me when I say that it’s better than a life of self-doubt. Or to put it another way, someone tell Heather Chaplin that some of us are wolves and all we need is a pack to lead.

To which I say: bullshit.

Destructoid editor, indie connoisseur and all-around righteous dude Anthony Burch wrote an article for The Escapist detailing how Half-Life 2: Episode 2 creates an emotionally intense climactic battle using a lot of behind-the-scenes trickery, ensuring that if the player wins, it is only by the tiniest margin. The human rebels are always this close to being annihilated by the alien onslaught, and no matter how perfect the player is he will always destroy the last invader mere seconds before it wipes out the entire human enclave. It’s a harrowing fight, and most players are grateful to have a moment’s respite once the dust clears before moving on to the next objective.

BioShock and Mass Effect, two games whose entire purpose was the advancement of videogame narrative, use similar tactics to tell their stories; the former through carefully orchestrated environmental events, like the collapse of a bulkhead in the first chapter, and the latter through subtly confining dialogue choices, which give the player just enough freedom to create a feeling of control, but not enough to disrupt the main story arc. Granted, these are AAA titles with huge amounts of money and manpower behind them, but I still consider them an admirable first step.

And they are only the first step. There are many ways that videogame narrative can develop from here, and the horizon is a broad one indeed. But of course we have this problem of player agency. “If we have a story that we want to tell,” we say, “and we limit the player’s options in order to tell him that story, then that’s not really a game, because the player isn’t fully in control.” Well, first of all: so what? In the worst case scenario, fine, it’s not a game. We can just call it something else. But not being able to safely categorize these things is no reason to abandon an entire avenue of creativity.

Second of all, how exactly is limiting the player a bad thing? The rules of a game are nothing but limits, and somewhere an arbitrary line is being drawn between acceptable gameplay limitations – like ammunition and gravity – and storytelling constraints like dialogue options. The difference is smaller than it may seem. And after all, are we ever fully in control of anything in reality? There will always be limitations to our choices, and as long as the logic is sound there’s no problem at all.

In videogames, or at least in my perception of them, player control and player freedom are not the same thing. We are right to hate quick time events (the infamous “PRESS X TO NOT DIE” moments) because they strip us of mechanical control. The player should always be in control of his character, because that is how we represent him in the world, and he should always have some way of interacting with his surroundings. That does not, however, mean that the player should have complete freedom to do what he wants. If the player needs to leave a building through a particular door in order to find the jeep/boat/camel that will take him to his next objective, I have no problem whatsoever with locking the other door behind him. What would he do if he went through it anyway? Run backwards through his previous mission? Loot the corpses of his fallen enemies? Graffiti the walls?

It concerns me that we have this Iron Curtain that no one talks about. On one side, we have AAA studios that spend staggering amounts of money on lifelike facial animation and professional voice actors, then use these amazing tools to spin meaningless yarns about angry badasses – that no one can actually relate to – saving the entire known universe from an alien/cyborg/zombie menace so one-dimensionally malevolent that it’s a wonder they hadn’t already killed each other by the time they decided to subjugate everything with a pulse. On the other side, we have an indie scene that looks at these gold-plated fluff pieces and decides that games shouldn’t have stories at all, producing some truly innovative and beautiful gameplay experiences but then dancing in the moonlight and burning the entire concept of narrative at the stake.

So it feels weird to fall in between. I came to videogames by way of film, but I am first and foremost a writer. My head creates reams of fiction on a daily basis, and shaping these fabrications into compelling storylines is one of my life’s greatest joys. Above all, I am so inspired by the possibility of making someone else the protagonist of my story, of transporting another human being from sitting on his couch to actually living through the enriching fictional experience I’ve laid out before him, that I am willing to bend, break or rewrite any rule that prevents me from doing so. Right now, the Berlin Wall between gameplay and narrative is causing me significant consternation, and I’m not going to stop until I tear that motherfucker down.

When considering ways to communicate our intent to our players, we recoil at the thought that we are being manipulative, but manipulation has always been crucial to the arts. We strive to evoke a particular emotion with our work, and our success is judged by how well we play with our viewers’ feelings. After all, Schindler’s List is manipulative. So is Citizen Kane, and Lost, and Battlestar Galactica. When other forms of entertainment manipulate our emotions, we enjoy it. Games can do the same thing, even if it means “breaking” the rules of game design. Everything is subordinate to the goal of reaching the player’s heart and mind, and no single guideline is immutable. As the old writer Erasmus Fry in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman put it, “writers are liars, my dear.” Fiction is simply a way of lying to reveal the truth, and the sooner game designers are willing to engage in a little constructive deception, the better off we’ll be as an art form.

Miguel Sternberg of Spooky Squid Games has proposed one solution: the self-narrating game. Night of the Cephalopods is an experimental game featuring a Lovecraftian hero who narrates the player’s actions as though retelling a story. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time used a similar basis for its narrative, but NotC incorporates the narration into every aspect of gameplay. When I met Miguel at GDC last week, I became so intrigued by this idea that I’ve actually shamelessly stolen it and am now attempting to built a prototype using this mechanic in a different context.

On the execution front, NaturalPoint now sells a facial motion capture kit for $5,000 that may not compete with high-end services like Contour, but still removes a significant barrier to creating convincing virtual actors on a budget. You can bet I’ll be getting one when the time comes.

I’ll be writing more on this topic and building prototypes to prove my point. Until then, give Indigo Prophecy a try!

Creativity is a fickle creature. It’s no wonder the ancient Greeks attributed inspiration to flighty, unpredictable muses; it often feels like a wholly separate organism living inside one’s brain, choosing to alternately bless and curse the craftsman according to its own unknowable whims (I insist on the term “craftsman” because “artist” has a lot of baggage attached to it). Days, months, years can pass with nary a glimmer of the muse’s enchanting smile, and yet the most insignificant thing can trigger a dizzying rush of hallucinatory madness that claws desperately at the inside of its cranial prison until one finds oneself scribbling frantically on year-old receipts at 4:30 on a weekday morning.

This kind of intensity is often associated with emotional immaturity, which isn’t too far from the truth. After all, an individual with more evenly distributed emotional responses would be able to exert some control over the creative impulse, mitigating the nervous energy that drives it and maintaining his composure in the process. Someone without such discipline is prone to flying off the handle, caught in the grip of some otherworldly power that hijacks and subjugates virtually all avenues of thought until the wildfire has run its course. It’s an unsettling thing to see, especially for the man at the epicenter of such temporary mania. For the creative man who holds logic and reason as his highest ideals, the knowledge that his most valuable qualities are contingent on some inner monster raging just beyond his control is a terrifying prospect. It means that the source of his greatness is somehow beyond himself, and he hesitates to seize the reins lest he subdue the wild beast into quiescence, depriving himself of that which enriches his life even as it complicates it.

That was really dense and pompous, but honestly it’s the best combination of words I have to describe it.

This dichotomy has been a major part of my life for nearly a decade, ever since I first hammered out a short story in one sitting as a teenager, without the slightest clue where the words came from. The more I thought about it, the further away it got, and the only way to recapture the experience was to relinquish control to the muse and let the work flow from some place I couldn’t reach through conscious effort. But as a strict rationalist, this was unacceptable to me. How can I allow myself to depend on a part of my mind that appears to run on nothing but faith when faith itself is antithetical to my epistemology?

I swear you guys, I only use big words so I can write shorter sentences.

In truth, there is a logical process governing the strange living fire within the craftsman’s breast, even if its chemical calculations are beyond the scope of self-awareness. Working with this alien creature is not unlike taming a wild horse; you may be able to soothe it long enough to climb on its back, but once it picks up speed you have no choice but to hold tight and hope that it takes you somewhere beautiful. It’s a strange and frightening thing to put so much trust in what is essentially a black box, and yet there is no other way to claim the riches that the muse offers.

The whole business comes with a high degree of vulnerability, however, and this is why we have so many miserable artists, suicidal musicians and creative people who are just a bit too far to the left of psychological maturity to have healthy relationships with their more sophisticated peers. Many creative people are still children, trapped in a halfway stage of development where everything is still enormous and hyperbolic, and the spark of insight that would lend blissful satisfaction in a “normal” individual instead triggers a torrent of borderline insanity that could either produce the ultimate work of an artist’s life or send him straight over the edge into self-absorption and total alienation from the people who care about him.

See? Even that paragraph would seem hyperbolic if I hadn’t actually done it once. More than once, actually. Just ask any of my ex-girlfriends.

It’s a tough thing to work around. After all, I don’t really like being a big kid. Back in high school, I used to drive my friends and family completely nuts with my wild tantrums and incoherent ranting. I think I’d prefer to be more grown up about most things. But all evidence points to a significant barrier between total self-discipline and the freedom to indulge the creative spirit. Striking a balance between the two is immensely difficult, so I hear, but it would be unacceptable to abandon one in favor of the other.

For one thing, I consider this to be the quality that will distinguish me as a game developer. I came to this field in a roundabout way, following an artsy-fartsy path that somehow avoided the necessity for unattenuated logic that accompanies the practices of gameplay programming and engine coding. I’ve gotten by on whatever deliberate reasoning I’ve been able to execute from within a haze of anxiety, and even as I continue to exercise my logical faculties I do not expect the fire to just go out. The beast is more stubborn than that.

Friends have asked me – sometimes with disdain, sometimes with genuine curiosity – why I have chosen the videogame, of all things, to be the vehicle for my creative output. In response, I usually puff out my chest, gesticulate wildly and wax poetic about the power of videogames to empower their audience to face difficult choices firsthand, rambling in dense run-on sentences with a facial expression that everyone in the room except me finds utterly hilarious (I’m told it’s a laugh riot). I can feel my face turning red when I get to my theory of videogames as a highly accessible form of method acting; my ambition to create games that demand genuine in-character participation from players; my mostly-unfounded belief that a well made game can both entertain and help the player grow into a better person in his real life, ending with an exhaustively rehearsed stream of rhetoric about the potential of videogames to shape better civilizations through low-stakes simulation of complex moral issues and ultimately the realization that I haven’t blinked in about five minutes and my eyes are completely bloodshot.

Somehow, it’s endearing and a little creepy at the same time. But these days I’m less interested in changing that about myself. The passion is its own reward, really.

In closing, I will leave you with an example of the kind of person I’m talking about. Here is a video of Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham performing his acoustic piece Big Love in front of a live audience. Anyone who has read about Buckingham’s fiery relationship with singer Stevie Nicks (short version: they’re both crazy) will know what kind of intensity these musicians are capable of. Standing alone in the darkness with only his guitar for companionship, he sings and plays like a man possessed, locked in that peculiar state of ecstasy available only to those with skin so thin that even the tiniest grain of emotion grows to monstrous size, casting long shadows across rational thought until the creative process molds it into a glowing pearl – the end product to be shared with the world – and the tension lifts and reason returns once more to the light.

Okay, I think that’s enough hyperbole for one post. Feel free to tell me to chill out now.