The slides and the accompanying paper for my GDC presentation are up for anyone interested.
There were three questions people asked after the presentation that I think really contributed to the talk and enhanced even my own understanding of the topic (there were other very good questions too, but these three were the ones I really remembered).
First, someone who I don’t know asked how these ideas applied to multiplayer games. This is a great question, and I had intentionally left it unanswered in the presentation because I don’t play enough MP games to really consider myself qualified to tackle the problem. But I did have the opportunity to notice while I was working in the presentation that there is a certain useful parallelism between the kinds of exploration I was talking about and Nicole Lazarro’s Four Kinds of Fun.
Rougly speaking, I think we can say that System Exploration maps fairly well to Lazarro’s idea of Hard Fun – fun that is about optimization and winning. Spatial Exploration could be said to map to Lazarro’s Easy Fun, which is a playful fun emerging from rewarded curiousity. The analogy is weaker here – but in some ways, my notion of Self-Exploration has some overlap with her ideas of Serious Fun (though Self Exploration as I talk about it seems kind of orthogonal to her ‘plane of fun’ – maybe echoing back to what I was talking about at Futureplay with a new axis of ‘meaning’.)
Anyway if we accept this rough (though admittedly incomplete) mapping, it becomes clearer than ever that there is a fourth kind of exploration that has to do with exploring interpersonal relationships in MP games. This is obviously what Lazarro calls People Fun and what I would call ‘Social Exploration’.
Again – I don’t play enough MP games to really examine this ‘kind’ of exploration. Maybe someone who really gets MP games can use what I’ve done here as a jumping off point to talk about that fourth kind. Ironically, it would also probably be a lot more useful to developers than this stuff, because so many more MP games than SP games seem to offer rich opportunities for exploration.
The second awesome question came from Frank Lantz, who caught the sleight-of-hand by asking if in fact Self Exploration was not just another kind of System Exploration. Frank is right – it is. In fact, in a game, everything is System Exploration. Even the representational 3d space of a game is still a system. If I’m playing Oblivion and trying to get to the top of some mountain but the max climbing angle is 50 degrees and I hit a fifty-one degree slope, my brain immediately stops seeing the world as a space, and starts seeing it as a system. I start wiggling the stick and jumping and otherwise trying to hit that one triangle in the terrain that is at 50 degrees just as I tap jump so I can launch myself over that 51 degree triangle and continue upward. I did a pretty bad job of answering Frank’s question, but the next question kind of helped.
The third question came from Jesper Juul, who was also my teammate in The Metagame. Jesper asked – well actually, he more kind of pointed out – that while everything in a game ultimately distills down to being a system, and all kinds of exploration are really by defintion (or at least by the definition I was using) another form of System Exploration, the reality is that we (as in us pathetic humans) have a whole shitload of hardware (brains) devoted to chunking our perceptions up to look like spaces.
That is why it is easy for us to make a conceptual difference between systems and spaces, and harder for us to see my so-called ‘self-exploration’ as anything other than just another system. But really – space itself is just a system. It happens to be a system that is best perceived at a higher level – as a bunch of solids and gaps, rather than as a bunch of interacting particles and energy responding to a few fundamental forces. If we perceived space as pure physical interaction instead of perceiving it through a kind of higher-order lens, we might be distracted by the noise in the system and not see that the fascinating cluster of organic molecules over there is a hungry tiger about to eat us. In other words – while Frank is right, it all distills down to systems, Jesper was savvy enough to remind us not to lose track of the forest in the trees.
The real question that emerges from my presentation and from those two super-smart comments is ‘how do we really make a forest of self-exploration’. We need to do a much better job of it, because right now we only have a few sickly little trees.
Finally, Chris Butcher nailed me with the dreaded ‘where’s the feedback’ question. That’s a hard one and I know it’s a weakness. It’s probably the biggest weakness of the presentation and the biggest hole in my own thinking on the topic. The best answer I have right now feels incomplete and not very rigorous, but it has something to do with leveraging Wright’s so-called ‘Second Processor’ (the brain of the player). Basically my response to Chris’s question goes something like this:
The game does provide certain elements of low-level feedback – of course. We need to have the animations of a disappointed AI, and his accompanying bark to tell us he thinks we have done a bad thing (or whatever). That’s self-evident (it’s also insanely expensive as the possiblility space around so-called self-exploration gets richer – but that’s another topic). The other part of the answer is that the objective in some ways is not to have the game tell the player explicitly ‘you are bad’ or ‘you are kind’, but to have the game present the output of the interaction such that the player tells himself ‘I did good’ or ‘I could have done better’. It’s about making the game more reflective.
We do this in systems all the time. When I play a racing game, the game tells me I get Gold for 01:00, Silver for 01:10, and Bronze for 01:25. At the end of the race, the game reflects my system exploration back at me by telling me I came in at 01:07.78. Now I say ‘I could have done better’.
But what is important in this example is not that I know I could have done better overall – but that I know I could have beat that one car at that second turn if I had started the turn from two meters further out, and passed him on the outside instead of trying to squeeze past him on the inside when I grinded along the barrier. Yeah there was lots of low-level feedback in the second-to-second when was trying to make that turn – tons of sound and sparks and intensity everywhere – but it wasn’t until I stopped to think about what I had done that the game became reflective and I was able to compare myself as I was to myself as I had hoped to be. The processor that’s providing the feedback here is not in the machine – it’s in the player. Again – I think while interesting, the formulation of this idea is incomplete and it is certainly absent in my talk. This is something we need to figure out.
Anyway – thanks to the folks above and to all the other smart people who nailed me with hard questions. I hope there was material in the presentation that will help you with whatever you’re working on, and I hope the slides and paper over on the right will be of some value to you.
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