The Pretentious Gamer

I found this video (posted after the jump) amusing – using a gaming icon to illustrate trends covering a few different topics. Also Ratatat as soundtrack!

Commenter response to the video on Kotaku seems to communicate disdain, ambivalence, or utter bafflement. The struggle seems to be with either the lack of a powerful message or the strangeness of familiar game elements used out of context. It is what it is … only using a somewhat unorthodox medium for the subject matter.

Certainly by this point, Mario and other gaming icons have adequately penetrated the cultural/societal lexicon to be used effectively to communicate an out of context message. Will framing real life issues within the vocabulary of interactive entertainment become more widespread with technological accessibility and increased (possibly) cultural relevance? This also has plenty of implications for the serious games movement.

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Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Design Introduction

An approach to classifying early game concept design sees design methodologies classified as either top-down or bottom-up. Gamasutra has a good article on this here: Game Design Cognition: The Bottom-Up And Top-Down Approaches.

The short of it is that one can approach a game from the verbs or use-cases that the player can utilize, proceeding to elaborating specific mechanics for those verbs, moving onto the features and content that makes up the majority of the game itself, before finally arriving at the context and greater thematic content, etc.

The opposite approach starts with developing an overall abstracted concept of the game – answering questions such as what is this game about, what is the meaning, the setting, the ideas at play? This abstract concept is then used to construct a context which the features, gameplay mechanics and specific actions can be ultimately derived from.

Top-Down Design Plus Values Consideration at G4C 101

The first day of the Games for Change festival was focused on the “G4C 101 Workshop” – directed at nonprofits and other professionals new to game design and production concepts and essentially coach them through the processes and concerns inherent in building a social issue game. Mary Flanagan, a professor at Dartmouth and head of the Tiltfactor Lab research group just gave a talk (when I began writing this, several days ago) for the workshop detailing a somewhat altered perspective on the top-down design approach.

She began by laying out some of the challenges for aspiring serious games developers, among which include technical proficiency (programming, art, etc.), business models and sustainability (costs, funding, boards), affordability, and finally design proficiency. Since the audience was in large part new to thinking in terms of game systems, giving a basic understanding of the process of design was the goal of the talk. The main challenges were to incorporate consideration of values in the design process, and how to make rules which support that value.

Led by Professor Flanagan, the Grow-A-Game exercise directed participants through a primarily top-down approach to game design. As injecting a particular human value or principle into gameplay systems is generally a central focus of social issue games, this particular design approach began with examining potentially relevant values, and proceeding from there. Some examples of commonly accepted human values across cultures included privacy, creative expression, diversity, cooperation, group success, community, humility, and so on. The exercise used different color cards to randomly select values, verbs/actions, games, and challenges, which were then used to brainstorm new gameplay concepts using the selected value and other guidelines. One of our early card combinations was security/safety plus monopoly, from which we envisioned a game which had community security performing as a sort of gameplay capital.

It was interesting to see what a diverse group of concepts came together from such a simple exercise, although conceptually it wasn’t much of a stretch in terms of design methodology. Values become a part of the high level concepting, which can complicate matters, but a good gameplay mechanic can be designed for almost anything.

Apparently a number of serious games have been made starting from this method, including Hush (singing + human rights) and Layoff (empathy + security), both of which are worth checking out.

Here I am at West 13th street in NY; the Games for Change festival is underway. Posting soon on the sessions I will be attending.

A quick link reference of some notable speakers:

Opening Keynote – Nicholas Kristof: author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the The New York Times.

Lucy Bradshaw: of Maxis and the Executive Producer of Spore

Jim Gee: Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Chair in Literacy Studies at Arizona State University

Henry Jenkins: Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities, author of Convergence Culture among many others

Ian Bogost: CEO of Persuasive Games and author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Also runs Water Cooler Games with Gonzalo Frasca (of Ludology.org, Powerful Robot Games, and Newsgaming.com).

Heather Chaplin: journalist (NPR, NYT) and author of Smart Bomb. She also gave a pretty critical talk at GDC this year, which I do hope to comment on eventually here.

N’Gai Croal: Formerly of Newsweek magazine and the Level Up blog. Looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

Mary Flanagan: Director of the Tiltfactor Lab

Tracy Fullerton: Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games

Judith Helfand: Independent filmmaker

John Nordlinger: Microsoft Research

Seth Scheisel: New York Times game critic

Eric Zimmerman: CEO of Gamelab and author of Rules of Play

Brenda Brathwaite: veteran game designer and professor at Savannah College of Art and Design

G4C twittering happening here.

Some very interesting conceptual things going on here. A conjunction of art, nonprofits and NGOs, academia, media and new media, and finally… games development – the results of which are still clearly at a very nascent stage. Very glad to meet some people I’ve been reading about for a long time.