Breaking the Grip of Dominant Ideas In Games: Introduction Serious game projects give us an opportunity to revitalize the creative dimension of entertainment game design. They give us a chance to break old notions – entrenched in commercial game culture – of what games should be so we may do truly new things. Serious games should be on the drawing board of every major game studio – even if only as prototyping exercises – because they force the flabby functional game design muscles of producers, programmers, artists, playtesters, actual designers, and even the players themselves – used to resting on the laurels of their assumptions of what is fun – to tighten up once more. Beyond the opportunity to provide excellent education and training, they offer us a chance to take entertainment games in new directions, with new topics and new ideas of what fun can be. Edward de Bono, who in the 1960s gave us the term “lateral thinking”, teaches us about the stifling dimension of the dominant idea. A dominant idea, while at one time a breakthrough, has become old and now impedes progress because it is extremely difficult to think past it. The dominant idea, or practice, may still be very useful, and a field or community may rest on its pillars, but it polarizes all progressive thought around it – even new ideas that venture outside its “box” are still measured in terms of that box. In fact, the more thought and work invested in the dominant idea, the more stifling it can become, the harder to escape from. In his book The Use of Lateral Thinking, de Bono said, “In many closed communities, be they scientific or industrial, ideas tend to get very inbred.” De Bono was not really the first to voice this opinion, but he seemed to be the first to explain it as a universal principle, detached from any specific field. I think many would agree the commercial games industry is now very inbred in its thinking, with constant rehashes of old ideas, a reliance on “brand-focus”, movie tie-ins, sequels, technology-for-gameplay, meaningless (as opposed to meaningful) violence, and other surrogates for creative vision in game design. De Bono also says “It may be so difficult to escape from a dominant idea that it becomes impossible without outside help.” The field of serious games – with its intrinsic creative encounter of game developer and non-game professional – the latter involved in the real strategies and “games” of business, military, medicine, education, science and so forth – could offer itself as a form of “outside help” to entertainment game creators, even if this is a secondary effect. We game developers would be smart to take advantage of the opportunity. Many people today in the game development (and other) industries see ideas as cheap. You’ve heard it said “Ideas are a dime a dozen.” This is not true. In fact, the idea that ideas are a dime-a-dozen is itself a dominant idea. What is true is that gimmicks – or little ideas – are cheap. Gimmicks are what is a dime a dozen, and everyone can think them up. True ideas, though, are exceedingly rare and extremely valuable. True ideas are visionary. The Growth Of Revolutionary Ideas Here is a true, revolutionary idea that came about in the game industry: the idea that instead of looking down at a two-dimensional map or board at a number of objective tokens that represent impersonal soldiers or other people, you were to look instead out of the eyes of a single character from a subjective, first-person perspective into a detailed sensory representation of the world. Now that was a breakthrough idea. It was invented in the early 1970s, and crystallized in the first role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons and Traveler. At first this breathtaking new game-type lived only as a construct of the imagination of its creators and players (a barrier to mass appeal), typically played out on a rec room table. But after 20 years the technology people, working in a parallel field, built a manifestation of it through a series of their own breakthroughs in the field of computer graphics and physics simulations, to give us the first- and third-person perspective digital game genres. We all know the story from there. It has also been said there are no new stories. That may be true, but it does not apply to games. Stories revolve chiefly around the existential dimensions of human beings, and always will and should – and so you can say with certainty you can’t invent a new one. Human beings will always meet success or failure, win love or be broken-hearted, seize the prize or lose it, find their calling or descend into tragedy. The time and place changes, but those underlying threads do not. Stories have an eternal quality, as they should. Games, on the other hand, are ever-changing; are as wide and infinitely varied as the universe and the ways we find to do things in it. We will never stop inventing new games, either as individuals or societies, consciously or unconsciously, singly or collectively. We play them every day. The first lesson of serious game design is that you must abandon the notion that games live inside a computer or on a tabletop. You must see, rather, that games exist everywhere in the world around you and become a student of them. You must cease to be a game designer and become a game discoverer. In the serious game field, these games you see in life are played by your clients. The objective of the game might be to save the lives of trauma victims, maximize the efficiency of a business, overthrow an oppressive government, build new civil infrastructure, or research a scientific breakthrough. Your clients are experts in these games (though they will never admit what they do is a “game” because it is a term not respectable, even though it is the most accurate term for the activity described – something I have written on elsewhere). Your clients will usually tell you the rules to win are constantly changing, and new key actions and dominant strategies continue to emerge (often called “trends”). When you encounter your client’s game – the one played at their work – you must do so with an honest interest in it. Otherwise you will be haughty, regarding it as tedious (maybe it, like real life, lacks cool graphics), or not worth your time (maybe it’s not overtly “fun”) – and then you’re doomed to failure. Being open to it then allows you to break your own old assumptions of what is fun (though in serious games we use the term “engrossing” or “compelling” instead of “fun”), how the real world works, and what it means to win or lose – something you need to do. You must let yourself be changed by their game so that together you can build a new kind of product. The thing about your clients’ game is it has no single designer – it was “designed” by society, or nations, or nature – and so no solitary one of them will know any sure-fire dominant strategy (experts always disagree). And beyond providing them a product for training, what you build together may also serve as a catalyst to help notions they have about their work crystallize. There is an opportunity for real exploration here. Why would any real game designer pass it up? New Ideas From Serious Games Let’s get down to earth. Here is an example of what I think is a new idea that came from a serious game project. There is a dominant idea in games today that the 3D things you see in play must be “real” physical matter: animal, vegetable, mineral and so on. If you see it in 3D it must be a real object: a wall, window, gun, car, person, monster, tree, and so on. Why? In other, older games, the “pieces” you manipulate, the “board” you play on, had sometimes been a set of symbols of key moves to make and states to be in instead of a physical entity. Think even of Monopoly: the spaces moving around don’t represent literal streets. That objects in 3D games represent physical things stems from the overwhelming focus on making a realistic sensory experience for the player; an objective 3D graphics programmers have aimed at for the past two decades. This focus is now, I’d say, a dominant idea, blotting out other ways of looking at what your 3D world could be in a game. This unquestioned assumption might get in the way. Could we try something different? In serious games you might face this question in a practical context. You might need to question the assumption that graphics must represent physical things. In a game on disaster management at the hospital level, for example (game design I’ve been involved in), you might want to pick up and drag personnel to different parts of the hospital from a high-up 3D map view. Problem is nobody in that profession sees healthcare providers that way: as little physical 3D units to manipulate with a primary view to their geographic position, as in a wargame. It’s their skill, their professional dimension, and their reputation that’s important. Who they are more than where they are. They know Dr Smith is an expert at trauma, but she is 10 minutes from arrival; Nurse Michaels is good at burn management, and we need him here now, but is not on call. Tell these clients they are to pick up and drag little 3D people like ants in an art farm and they’ll look at you sideways: maybe it’s fun to you, but you haven’t listened. That’s not what the “game” of personnel management in a mass casualty incident is about. What the game is about – if you can capture it – is much more engrossing. A few years ago I met a potential client – an institute for chartered accountants – who needed to attract high school students to their field. (I’m about to reveal what I think is a cool new idea…) I pitched to them what I saw could be a really fun and educational 3D game about accounting. (A fun game about accounting?… I see you looking doubtfully at this.) The thing about accounting is it really is financial reconnaissance (that’s why it’s called “accounting”). It’s not just about “bean-counting”; it’s about gathering financial “intel” – and “recon” can be an exciting thing: think about a scout behind enemy lines, or a forensic crime-scene unit doing detective work. What I saw was a 3D graphic world like a Rube Goldberg machine, where pipes and tubes connected amount different vessels to carry little packets of money, showing the matrix of a company’s financials in a visual way – a way that fostered understanding of how this machine was behaving. The 3D things you saw were not physical matter: people, monsters, buildings, et cetera. Rather they were your accounts: income and expenses, assets and liabilities. In this moving 3D world you would see them interacting in real-time (since time is an key dimension in accounting).
There could be different looks and feels to your Rube Goldberg financial machine, depending on how advanced your accounting “technology” was: in the early 20th century, packets would move between entities clipped to wires on pulleys; in the mid-century, there would now be pneumatic tubes in an art-deco world; in the late-century now your vessels have an electric, neon look to them, the funds glowing liquid substances moving through clear pipes in the cyberspace world. Included is a “film strip” of stills from a brief demo animation I mocked up; the objects are obviously value bars (two of their three dimensions mean different things) but you can’t see the most vital thing in the stills: movement. The repeating movement of these bar-entities was what helped the user see in AccountoVision. There were other symbolic aspects as well, which I haven’t time to go into. The project could have been funded – it still could be – but that was back in 2002, when serious games were young. Leveraging Serious Games Into Entertainment The point is there is an opportunity here to break the mould, and have it retroactively feed back into entertainment games. Take this accounting case again: in certain entertainment games you always have perfect accounting. But that’s the problem: it’s too perfect. There are never errors, omissions, or even bold-faced deceptions. You always know precisely how much you’ve made, where it’s gone and so forth, and it’s always been shown in a standard, clean format. Come to the professional world, and you suddenly see how accounting is a game unto itself – you can restructure the books to emphasize (or de-emphasize) certain things, or even “cook them”. It is well known in business that management practices are a key factor in the success or failure of any entity or organization; that fortunes can be made or broken by accounting practices (I need only say Enron): but this is simply ignored in games such as Sim City or Railroad Tycoon. Why? Tell a publisher you can make a fun game about accounting they’ll laugh at you. Let’s say you get the gig to do a serious game about accounting, using it as an opportunity to really visualize it in the way I described. How could you leverage this in your entertainment games? Well yes, you could put it into your next Tycoon game, but is that all? I once read a homicide detective say about investigating murders on the mean streets of his inner-city that when you began to penetrate into the life of the victim, the alleys and tentacles that might lead to a perpetrator would branch out into a confusing, ever-changing maze, such that it was nearly impossible to solve on your limited resources. What if you used your 3D Rube Goldberg accounting construct to lay out this web of relationships and interactions in an investigation game? A three-dimensional web that moves? Aside from the ability to provide forensic training (yet another serious game), now you have a new kind of entertainment game. Then what if you are able to fine-tune it so well you can now repurpose it for your game about spies penetrating into the back channels of power and intrigue – through Geneva, Madrid, Berlin and so forth – in the years leading up to World War II? Or that game about intrigue in the courts of ancient Rome or medieval Japan? I think you see my point. Of course, another argument entrenched entertainment game developers will throw at you is they don’t want something that is realistic, they want something that is fun. To me, that’s a cop-out. An assumption the two are mutually exclusive. They aren’t. (Television figured this out: if you told a cop show producer some years ago a show about forensic crime-scene scientists doing lab experiments and gathering microscopic evidence could be a smash hit he would tell you you were crazy.) I heard that realism-isn’t-fun argument posited recently by someone who said we would never want to play Half Life 2 if we couldn’t unrealistically carry all 16 guns at once (as we can) – oblivious to the fact that in many fun and popular games (Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, et cetera) you are not allowed to do that very thing. Okay, there is a grain to truth to view, but its proponents haven’t really penetrated it: what they really mean is that poor execution is boring, and it happens that many “realistic” games, being the hardest to design, are poorly-executed. They mean you can make a game with all the realistic facts thrown in, but taken as a whole, it can be tedious, dry, unplayable. But I would say this is not realistic at all. There are many games about real-world subjects that present lots of realistic detail yet are unable to capture the essence. Poor execution. Myopic design. A computer game in which you micro-manage a squad of soldiers – taking, say, 20 minutes to do 60 seconds of scenario action; or drilling you on whether you know all the ”right answers” in the platoon-attack drill – might be claimed to be “realistic” because it lets you control every footstep, trigger-pull and grenade-throw. Well, a squad leader simply has no time to micro-manage like that in combat: what is realistic is you come as you are to the fight, the stuff hits the fan, and you yell a few key orders. The realism can be very exciting and a game about it should reflect this. As the editors of Esquire once said, there are no boring subjects, only boring writers... or, in our case, game designers. Getting Back To Basics “The defeatist explanation for the extraordinary elusiveness of new ideas is that they are a matter of chance,” Edward de Bono also said. He means people often dismiss the possibility of truly new ideas because they don’t understand where they come from – the creative process. They are focused on the way things are, not on how they can be. They may not have what, in his book the Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye called the ability to delay judgment. Think of the manager of the US patent office in the late 1800s who proposed shutting down his office because everything that can be invented already has been. These pessimistic views are an unfortunate reality that makes life difficult for those of us with fertile imaginations. When you have a gift for starting new things, you are often seen as suspect because for every new one you come up with the cynic only sees a thing unfinished. I can only say that if you hold this view you misunderstand the creative process, which is really the entire point of this article: to invite entertainment game developers to once more directly talk about the process of designing a truly new game: designing the what the game is about – its core strategies and game play. Game development dealing with new and unusual topics, the kind you find in serious game projects, needs prototyping. Prototyping is messy (though there are inexpensive ways to do it), takes money, and often leads to things that look unfinished. It requires openness to, and trust in, the process of building. Quite a few times I’ve seen clients and developers try to go from zero to a hundred by slamming the pedal down while in fifth gear, skipping the critical work of shifting up from first – the client seeming to want an awesome-looking game at no risk and little expense; the developer saying yes yes yes just to get the gig, having a graphics engine in mind, but without understanding what is really required for the game play. The client thinks the developer is the expert; the developer thinks the client will tell them “what they want”; nobody proactively takes charge of the design, rather they react to the other party’s input. People run off and start designin’ and codin’ stuff (translation: dig themselves into a hole, which may, or may not, be in the right place). The usual result: spinning wheels or a lurching, burnt-out wreck. Game development, having gone into a space of beautiful 3D graphics, has done itself an inadvertent disservice: by showing flashy graphics to the decision-makers everyone has become lazy. The developers rest on their laurels of technology and graphics development, and assumptions of what games must be, leaving them ill-equipped to tackle new and unusual subjects. The clients, on the other hand, adopt the mentality of car buyers when they have forgotten that they really need to think like car builders. They are used to seeing a real, physical thing; finished – kicking the tires, smelling the leather interior, sitting in the bucket seats, test-driving it – before laying the money down. What they need to see first is a little wooden model sitting on a table. The imagination muscles of all parties are weak, unable to comprehend new and different but unbuilt things. Not good. Henry Ford did not see a finished car. Rather he saw a vague dream, a vision; he worked this down to a specification, and then he built it. Conclusion The serious games field offers a way past the barriers thrown up by cynics in entertainment game development. In my experience serious games clients are willing to entertain new ideas and to explore – something entertainment game principals can learn from. They are oblivious to entrenched and assumed notions entertainment game makers have of what is or is not compelling (they usually think what they do has interest). In my most recent project the client wanted me to see the trauma room at high speed, following a car accident or multiple shooting – they wanted me to see that high action, to understand the tension and pace in that life-and-death zone. They knew how understanding that impacted the reality of their work and their training needs. Our clients have practical needs to achieve, sometimes gravely serious ones, and are seeking imaginative new contributions. That’s why they’re darkening your door to begin with. They live in worlds outside the assumed (and limited) imagined reality of game industry people – worlds where the stakes are real and the rules often change – and so you must see there is genuine excitement in what they do. Listen to their stories, figure out what their world and work is about, and if you can capture it in a well-executed design, aside from making the product the client needs, trust it will lead to fresh new understandings of what games can be.
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