The design space of body games

This year’s proceedings from CHI (the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computer systems) have now made it into the ACM digital library. Elena Marquéz Segura, Jin Moen, myself and Lina Johansson had a full paper together this year. It is called “The design space of body games: Technological, physical and social design” and tells the story of how we designed games with and around the “body bug”, a nicely designed playtool with very small capabilities for interaction.

I am rather satisfied with this paper. At its core, the paper is about how pervasive game design involves designing much more than just a game engine and an interface. In that sense, it is similar to the ‘360 illusion‘ paper from 2009. But where that paper dealt with fiction-heavy and large-scale games (and seems to be read as a paper about larp), this time we apply the same principle to a much simpler and restricted range of games which we call ‘Body games’. These are games that are played by moving and take their main enjoyment from body movement. By restricting the domain this way and by looking at a really restricted playtool, we are able to be much more precise in what the design goals are and how we can bring in physiological and social aspects into the game design.

This paper is to a large extent Elena’s achievement. Most of the work in this paper was  Elena’s master thesis project; and it is now also part of her Ph.D. work. Without her energy, enthusiasm and fantasy I doubt that this project would have gotten far.

A bachelor thesis on Shadow Cities

Last fall, I supervised this bachelor thesis by Linnéa Nordlund and Alex Sjöberg Larsson. Their job was to investigate how players of a fairly hardcore pervasive game, Shadow Cities, felt about the fact that the game uses a freemium model of payment. Linnéa and Alex played the game, scrutinized forum discussions, and performed a small survey.

Their results are rather surprising. In the forum discussions, players either complain about the in-game purchases as they provide play advantages, or downplay their importance in the game. But in the (anonymous) survey, players agree that the in-game purchases provide play advantages and, at the same time, like to use them. There seems to be a difference between the public discourse around the game, and how players actually use the function and play the game.

Linnéa and Alex also made some attempts to find out which players are most positive towards in-game purchases. As they wanted a short survey, they did some shortcuts here and the player classification method they used did not fully work out. Still, they found that players that classified themselves as hard-core players were more accepting towards in-game purchases, something that again contradicts the usual perception of the hard-core player as someone who wants to win by skill alone.

I find their results intriguing and plausible, and it is also a very well written bachelor thesis. Hence, I have asked Linnéa and Alex if I can make it available here. Due to the small size of the survey it has no chance of getting accepted into an academic venue, and my hope is that there might be a scholar out there who’d like to take this work further.

And thanks to you, Alex and Linnéa! You were awesome students!

eriklinnea

A Knutepunkt 2013 report

The Knutepunkt phoenix, in flames during the ending ritual.

This year, I started Knutepunkt in Oslo to speak at the Nordic larp talks. My presentation was the last and shortest one, and I talked about how to study larp. As most previous articles (including those I have co-authored) make this sound almost impossible, my aim was to give a few useful hints that make the task manageable. (I am not particularly proud of the presentation, by the way. Since I always go overtime, I had prepared a script. But as I am not used to speaking from a script I didn’t manage to use it, and ended up desperately chasing my notes. Did I already say this? Oh, I missed that! I think I managed to say about half of what I had planned to say.)

Of this year’s Nordic larp talks, I would recommend Stefan Deutsch’s presentation of serious educational larps. Very interesting and thought-provoking. And of course, Jaakko Stenros’ presentation of a definition of Nordic larp is a must-see.  (Actually, he gave us two definitions.) His presentation is smart and true, but don’t expect simple and easy to use definitions from a die-hard academic like Jaakko.

Next, off to Knutepunkt, situated at a gorgeus Norwegian fjord. I find it harder to summarize Knutepunkt this time than last year. The main reason is that I tried to stay off the beaten track: I skipped the rants to play a small larp (“Autumn of life” by Tomas Mørkrid, a small gem), and I skipped several high-profile workshops and talks of which I have seen previous incarnations. No doubt all of them were worth attending more than once, but I wanted to see things that were new to me. In this vein, I attended a workshop on writing larp Russian style, the costume larp panel, and chaired the panel on political larp.

The larp of the year was without doubt the Monitor Celestra. Johanna Koljonen organised a whole afternoon session discussing the production, with panellists ranging from the designers and producers, over players to game academics who also had played in the larp. In all, I think the session managed to capture both the truly awesome ambitions and achievements of the production, as well as its problems and shortcomings. The only thing the session missed was to discuss why we came to expect so much of the Celestra production. The marketing hype of Celestra was a double-edged sword, which at the same time managed to draw a lot of attention and participants from all over the globe, and raised expectations to a level that is almost impossible to meet. Despite all its production value and the professional experience of most of the crew, Celestra was still a volunteer production with few of the organisers lifting any sort of salary. I am deeply grateful that I had a chance to play Celestra, it is a memory that will live with me for years to come – but I have had stronger larp experiences from much less ambitious productions.

For me, the highlight presentation was again Eirik Fatland, this time talking about how to design characters for larp. (Seriously Eirik, you have to write a book on larp design!) Right after the talk, there was a character design workshop that I most fortunately was thrown out of for lack of space. The six of us that did not get in teamed up, occupied a cottage and sat down to read and de-construct character descriptions from four different larps (material that had been handed out for the workshop that we missed). This analysis exercise was really useful (thanks to you all that participated), and judging from reports by those who attended, more of a workshop than the real one. (And I spent most of the train ride back from Knutepunkt designing a larp together with some other Knutepunkt participants. It might even materialise sometime in the future…)

I also enjoyed chairing the political larp panel. The panel consisted of larp designers that all have designed larps with clear political agendas. It started a bit mellow, but heated up when the audience got involved both with asking challenging questions and answering them. I want to direct a particular thanks to Teresa Axner who was not on the panel, but still contributed with very interesting experiences from ‘LajvVerkstaden’, and the educational larp they stage in Swedish schools. ‘We teach the ethical agenda about democracy and equality that is written into the Swedish school curriculum. We might just be a bit more thorough in doing so.” Kudos!

On a sad note, this years’ Knutepunkt might become remembered as the year of the harassment scandal. It was a bad story that I don’t care to recount, but I think that it also was a sobering moment for the community. (And luckily, I have yet to get laid at Knutepunkt.)

Can Larp Change the World? 2027- a larp that tried

This is a long version of the text that I wrote together with Peter Munthe-Kaas for ‘Crossing Habitual Borders’ – one of the books for Knutepunkt 2013.

PRACTICE – game design in detail

In a coffee discussion with Lorraine Hopping.

I’m writing this on my way home from PRACTICE, a game design conference organized by the game center at New York University. PRACTICE is not your standard academic peer-reviewed conference, but dominated by ‘real’ game designers, mostly from industry, who talk about nitty bitty gritty details about their day job. Speaking is by invitation, so I consider it a great honor to have been invited! I participated in the panel on ‘games and not-games’, arguing for the role of fiction in games and how it connects games with role-playing games.

I found a theme in this year’s PRACTICE conference: many speakers talked about the role of players in inventing their own games. Chris Bell spoke about the emergence of playground games in Journey (picked up by Gamasutra), and Richard Garfield on the role of tournaments in balancing games (his full presentation also picked up by Gamasutra). Dan Cook showed us how a rich player culture emerged within the old ‘Realm of Mad God’ MMOG just from adding a simple mechanic of dropping, and in general advocated an approach where more agency is given over to players in shaping their own game (and just as the others, Gamasutra got him nailed too). I went to the extreme, arguing for the power of incomplete rules and player improvisation in role-playing games, but got unexpected support from Christina Norman, who is the lead designer on League of Legends who argued for a richer and more complex approach to fiction in this otherwise very gameistic game, in order to better support (among other things) cosplay and fan fiction.  And then of course, Minecraft was mentioned sufficiently many times to warrant a drinking game. (And Markus should really take the time to come to this conference, he’d enjoy it.)

From a pervasive game / larp perspective, the most intriguing presenter was David Ward, senior military analyst at the war gaming department. David stages “war games” with a double purpose: to gather data on how to address complex issues in war strategy, and as a means of education. You may consider these games simulations, but they seem a bit too abstract for that. The scenarios are abstracted and players only play strategic command. My interest was spurred by the fact that they  are heavily game-mastered – everything outside strategic command is simulated manually by experts, so that the outcome of every decision is recreated as realistically as possible. One of the key design issues that David talked about was how to push as much as possible of the activity to the players rather than to game masters – “we don’t want to create work for us, but for them”. I so much wish that I could study these games  (but that will never happen as they are classified), because it seems like they see the same advantages and problems with game-mastering as we found for pervasive games.

For me, the conference peaked already with the very first presentation, when Richard Garfield  presented on game balancing. (And I got to shake his hand, completely tounge-tied. Wish I had a bit more guts around giants.) I had expected spread sheets, but Richard talked about game balancing as an art – not because its complexity but because there balancing a game might mean different things for different players. Luckily, Richard ensured us, game balancing is pretty forgiving. For example, adding probability level to an otherwise unbalanced rule can suffice to balance it. On a more personal note, Richard’s talk gave me the explanation for why the ‘reverse drafting’ way that I play Magic together with my youngest son works. It goes like this: one of my sons play Magic competitively, so he buys a lot of cards and builds tournament decks. When those decks have been built, there remains a large collection of cards that his younger brother uses to build decks that he and I play with. Richard talked about how these cards are not meant to be worse than the tournament cards, just different. Our casual decks create a slower game with a compelling dramatic curve: starting slowly, they typically build towards a fierce end game. I think I enjoy that game more than the explosive battles common in tournaments.

The social program was good, especially the long coffee and lunch breaks. Zach Gage (artist/game designer) hosted the conference party in his apartment which doubles as his development studio, which by itself was rather awesome. The party acquired just the right level of nerdiness. I had a long discussion with Michael Consoli about his game ‘against the wall’, an art/game design project that has just the artistic sensitivity to become fantastic and win prizes but seems to lack a sense of direction at the moment. The most amazing fact about Michael may be that he’s doing a master at NY University – what do they do to get the experts enroll as students!?!

Need I say that I plan to go back next year, even if I am not invited as speaker?

REFERENCES

Alexander, L. The ‘immense responsibility’ of creating value for players. Gamasutra, Nov 13th 2012.

Alexander, L. Magic: The Gathering’s Richard Garfield’s strategies for game balancing. Gamasutra, Nov 1oth 2012.

Alexander, L. Beautiful folk play and emergent interaction in Journey. Gamasutra, Nov. 10th 2012.

Jonsson, S. and Waern, A. The art of game-mastering pervasive games. Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology.

The recent Ph.D. Montola

Markus after his defense, flanked by the primary supervisor Frans Mäyrä, and the thesis opponent Mary Flanagan.

My longtime friend and co-author Markus Montola defended his Ph.D. thesis on September 22nd. Since I was formally appointed his co-supervisor about two years ago, it also means that I got my fourth ph.d. student through the system. (Not that Markus really needed any supervision – he was way ahead of both me and Frans Mäyrä almost from start in selecting subject and approach. The only thing he’s needed has been resistance.)

Markus thesis is about role-playing games (with a strong focus on larp) and pervasive games (with a focus on pervasive role-playing games). Hence, his focus of interest is rather similar to mine. Markus’ frames his domain as that of ‘ephemeral games’ – games where every game session is so unique that it might not even make sense to talk about a ‘game’ that exists outside of the individual session.  Role-playing games fall into this category as they leave plenty of room for player improvisation, and pervasive games due to the infinite ways in which the real world can interact with the game. I am probably biased, but I think everyone who is interested in role-playing games or pervasive games should read this thesis.

Markus’ main strength is how he carefully frames every concept he’s working with. He was the person behind the definition of ‘pervasive games’ that framed our book on the subject, and in the thesis he does the same to concepts such as role-play, ephemeral games, and first-person audience. Markus is creating language for us all that are studying this class of games and play activities. His weakness may be method – the thesis lacks a thorough discussion of epistemology and the individual papers represent a mix of descriptive scoping of core concepts and qualitative empirics. The advantage is that the thesis becomes unusually readable – the introduction could be used as a textbook on ephemeral games and their significance in the field of game studies.

Markus is already a quite well-known scholar, in particular for his work on creating an academic discourse around Nordic live role-playing. Markus has already made a brilliant career as a games researcher – and I predict that it will continue, even though he’s currently working as a game designer.

The recent Ph.D. Harviainen

J. Tuomas Harviainen

I am a bit late on catching up on recent game-related dissertations (including Markus Montola who defended more than a month ago). Since I happen to have J. Tuomas Harviainen’s thesis at home, that’s the one that will make it into this blog first.

J. Tuomas’ thesis is about larp, and larp only – a perspective that makes it rather unique. Coming from a background in cognitive perspectives on religion, his thesis lies firmly in the domain of information studies. He shows how larp can be described as information systems, and how larping can be characterized by its information-seeking behavior.

How then, can I begin to summarize the thesis? Let me start with a warning: this is a very clever text. If you want to thoroughly understand what he’s writing, it takes time and I have not penetrated it all. But I find treasures everywhere. The methodology article on role-playing analysis is a gem (although I think that the argument on treating action as text would need more space), and I am also extremely happy for his lucid description of play-space as a “resignification zone”, something he is not the first one to do but by far the clearest. The article where he compares games with rituals is also very illuminating.

J. Tuomas is the most well-read role-play researcher that I have met – I think that he’s read every scholarly text there is to read about role-playing games, and most there are on games in general. His interpretation of this vast landscape of references seems a bit eclectic, but his own contribution remains hermeneutic and at least partially self-ethnographic (J. Tuomas is a well-established larp designer); an approach that is becoming more or less standard in game studies. For this reason alone, I believe that many Ph.D. students in the game domain would benefit from picking up this thesis to read its methodology section – J. Tuomas presents you with the references you need to understand what it actually is that you are doing.

I know that J.Tuomas is planning to pursue his research towards a ‘docent’ – which means that he will have to write a book. I already look forward to reading it!

Storymaking in sports (a brief interlude)

In an earlier post, I argued that stories don’t just ’emerge’ from open-world computer games,  but are actively constructed by players, and that this construction – what Gaynor calls storymaking – requires both a particular stance towards the game experience and some skill. In this post, I turn towards a kind of games where storymaking is done on a regular basis: sports. (For the moment, let’s just ignore that sports may or may not be games – they are sufficiently similar for the discussion to work.)

Just as all journalists, sport commentators are professional storymakers. But where journalists make stories out of real world events, sport commentators make stories out of play sessions. (In this sense, their job is surprisingly similar to that of a game master in tabletop roleplaying.) Sports are in fact better suited for storymaking  than the open-world games that I discussed in my previous post, as the structure of a match or a tournament automatically creates the basic framework of a story (a beginning, middle and end). To add, many spectator sports  have rules that create an interesting dramatic curve (tennis is a perfect example, as the person who seems to be losing always has a chance to turn the match around). The structure of a competition creates adversaries and the adoption of a ’home team’ provides you with a protagonist. There is also rich background material to draw from: players can be rookies or veterans, young or old, recently injured, teams may be leading or losing in a league, etcetera. In all, successful sports provide us with many excellent examples of game structures that support storymaking (which may be a reason why they have succeeded to become spectator sports).

However, sport commentators are not players – they are professionals, creating stories from a spectator perspective. Do the participants themselves tell similar stories? Given the ’story-friendly’ structure of sports, I believe they typically do. But there is one crucial difference: participants tell stories in which they themselves are the protagonists. I’ll give you an example from an interview with Mary Kom, winner of an Olympics gold medal in boxing:

“This is a fantastic day, it is unbelievable for me to be here, very special. I have been fighting twelve years to get to this point, to be at the Olympic Games. It has been my life-long ambition to get here. My victory is very emotional because not only as am I finally here but it is also my twins’ fifth birthday today and I am missing it. This win is a gift to them.”

See where this is going? In every sport tournament, there are as many stories  created as there are players. Sports provide us with the first clues towards how games can support storymaking:

• Game sessions (or tournaments) can provide a basic story structure (identifiable beginning, middle and end points)
• Games can provide access to background material on players, adversaries, and various teams/factions/cultures
• Game mechanics can create a dramatic curve
• Player create their own stories, in which they are the protagonists

But in sports, storymaking is not a major objective of the game (winning is), so the stories tend to be rather similar in plot and theme. In role-playing games, storymaking is one of the core desirable effects, and in Nordic larp it may be considered a major design goal.

REFERENCES

Gaynor, S. Storymaking. Blog post, Jan 31st 2009.

O’Neill, M. Olympic games – Day 1 review from London. WBAN news story, Auguest 5th 2012.

Followup: Will the ruffled props matter?

Gender-Aware Pervasive Game Design

I haven’t written much about pervasive games lately, which is a bit strange since we have spent quite a lot of time during the spring with both designing and testing our most recent design experiment, Codename Heroes. As our first public tests with the game are approaching, I would like to write a bit about its design and how we plan to test it.

This game was designed to be a low-entry longterm multiplayer game directed towards a teenage audience. Most importantly, it has been designed to appeal to young women, girls.

Why would we do that in the first place? Wouldn’t girls play the same pervasive games as everyone else? Our reason could have been as simple as trying to provide a counter example. Now that pervasive games are starting to come to the market, we can note that they are pretty much designed and marketed by the same game companies that make computer and mobile games, a very male-dominated scene. But our main reason was that girls and boys live rather different lives – young girls face a set of challenges that are unique to their gender and that affect how and when they spend their spare time as well as how they move through public space (which in general is not a lot).  Since pervasive games are played intermixed with everyday life, they run the risk of being inaccessible for girls unless they are designed to take their situation into account.

When designing Codename Heroes, we first took a look at ethnographic literature mapping out the lives of   girls in their lower teens. (Btw, this was a rather depressing read. Either the ethnographers were intent of finding as many problems as possible or girls at this age live horrible, horrible lives.) Then, we worked with the game mechanics, in particular those that had to do with spatial and social expansion, to address some of those challenges. For example, many young girls are afraid of getting assaulted when walking alone, which makes them very restricted in how they move in everyday life. Some quests in Codename Heroes asks you to go to new places (to break confinement) but since you play in teams you never need to go there alone. Furthermore, young girls are often very dependent on their friends, for good and for ill as it creates support and group pressure at the same time. In Codename Heroes there is a mehanics of gift-giving to support trust building.

(At this point, I must stop to mention that we have no idea whether our mechanics actually have the intended effects. We know that they work as we have play-tested the game on multiple occasions, and we also know that our women players have liked the game so far. But since we haven’t run the game long-term yet, we have no idea whether the gift giving actually builds trust, for example.)

At the same time, we did not want to design a game that would appeal only to girls. Many products are styled and marketed in a way that marks them out as ‘for girls only’ – if you decorate a toy with pink ruffles you can be pretty sure that boys will not touch it with a ten foot pole. Much of our graphical design efforts have been spent on finding some kind of gender-neutral form of expression. We ended up in a soft steampunk style for props, and a rabbit icon that just might be a little bit too cuddly.

So this weekend, I did a HUGE mistake. We are running a ‘sneak preview’ of the game at the Ung’08 festival  a one-hour adventure nowhere near the long-term game that Codename Heroes is designed to be. I needed to make an additional set of props for this adventure, and when shopping for material I fell in love with – you guessed it – ruffles. They weren’t pink, but they had polka dots and were absolutely lovely. So now I have a set of props with ruffles…

This gives some room for experiment. Suppose we run half of our runs with the ruffled props, and half with neutrally gendered props? Will the ruffles trip the scale and make the whole game girly? Or will the players see the game as girly even without the ruffles? Or will it matter at all – maybe the game appeals equally to both genders with and without the ruffles? My personal guess is that the ruffles will trip the scale, but that boys in particular may see the game as ‘girly’ even without them. (To be honest, there is a quest in the event that encourages some sewing as well, and that alone may be enough to trip the scales.)

Please place your bets! If we get enough players, I will be able to give the results in two weeks from now.

REFERENCE

Back, J., Papadogoula, F.A., and Waern, A. (2012). The challenges of designing a gender-aware pervasive game. CHI Workshop on identity, performativity and HCI, Austin, Texas, May.