The Politics of Appeasement

Time for another fascinating BoRT topic!

Turning Over a New Leaf: February's BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month's Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.


The Source

Last month's post that I'm choosing to work with is Chris at ihobo's entry on Pride and Prejudice. You really should take a look at it before continuing - after all, that's the point of this month's topic!

What I really like about the design of the game is the simplicity of the mechanic: A engages politely, B engages rudely. This allows for a lot of fun in anticipation. You know you want to engage rudely, say, but you're excited to see exactly what form that rude interaction will take. Will it be a barb-tongued statement? I disrespectful hand-gesture? I've always enjoyed this element of thematic dialogue trees where the general tone of your options is presented but the specifics aren't revealed until after you make your choice (a la Indigo Prophecy or Mass Effect).

So much for the mechanics, what about the theme of the game? While Chris isn't specific as to the theme it seems that the game is more of a sandbox for exploring various interactions with people in high Victorian society. At the end of the day the point is in the interactions themselves and playing it might give you the feeling, qua the novel, that there really is no ultimate point, that the rules of etiquette and games of intrigue played by the characters are just shallow ends in themselves. It's enjoyable, yes, but serves no purpose beyond its own enjoyment (despite what purpose the characters may think it serves).

What kind of game could I design with the same mechanics and theme? Call me a bitter cynic - I am, depending on which philosopher I last read - but one thing enters my mind when I think about people engaging in varying polite/rude interactions and taking themselves all too seriously when at the end of the day none of it really matters. Politics.


The Thought

Ian Bogost's phrase "procedural rhetoric" is foremost in my mind with this project. You can read a great hashing out of the concept here but in short the idea is that the way a game's mechanics are designed and how we ultimately master them to drive the game forward tells a story in itself, often a very loaded story. Much of the recent dialogue about Far Cry 2, for example, concerns the idea that its mechanics portray imply that seemingly meaningless violence is the only solution to even fairly mundane problems. As a developer one has to be very aware the story the mechanics of the game tells, not leaving such things up to mere chance. Not that you can't portray this underlying mechanics-driven story any way you want, you just need own it and be aware of shaping it (hence the rhetoric).

With that in mind I figure that a game about politics developed by a political cynic like myself would have to very much express through its game play the utter futility and meaninglessness of it all. (Perhaps that's a gross exaggeration but hey it'll be a Wii game so it has to be grossly exaggerated and not taken seriously anyhow! Oh, did I mention I'm a Nintendo cynic as well?) The game would follow you as a newly elected Congressman embarking upon your brief two-year term with the only directly expressed goal being re-election. In fact this should be so explicitly stated so early in the game that it makes the player question the entire logic: "You've just been elected to US Congress, now what are you going to do?" "Get re-elected!"

That's the general theme and the mechanics enhance this by pretty much giving you little control other choosing which members of congress to talk to and whether you want to act politely or rudely towards them, or in the parlance of the game, appease or displease them. You're trying to get re-elected, but in the context of the game the interests of your constituents are irrelevant to you. Building relationships and coalitions with with senior Congressmen is what will get you re-elected, not trying to gauge what your constituents want. Of course building bridges with some Representatives invariably burns bridges with others. . .


The Game

The Politics of Appeasement begins with a brief cut scene which shows your Mii avatar (in a nice suit of course) barely winning the race for Representative of your district. The incumbent which you have defeated congratulates you and offers you the following piece of advice: "Make sure you meet the right people and ignore all the rest. Otherwise you'll end up like me." It's never made quite clear what state, let alone district, you are representing.

After the intro you are given control of your Mii using the same point-and-click interface found in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the Mansfield Engine). Your new secretary is showing you around your office in Washington and explaining the control scheme: generally A interacts with objects and people positively, B interacts with them negatively. Instead of politeness and rudeness, however, your interactions are meant to appease or displease and to this end only really have an affect when others are around. You are promptly introduced to the congenial Representative from a neighboring district and instructed to appease her. Pointing your Wiimote at her and pressing A brings up a short quip congratulating her on winning re-election and making a passing remark about the clear-headedness of her constituents. This invokes the appearance of a Sims-style happy face above her head and an increase in her attitude towards you (detailed below). Interacting with A on objects in the room causes somewhat obvious but awkward interactions with things that would appeal to the Representative: pointing out a recent photograph of you with a well-liked Senator, making her aware of congenial literature on your bookshelf.

After his departure your secretary announces the visit of another Representative, one which she clearly indicates as your rival, a man a bit disgruntled by your predecessor's defeat. Before the meeting you are given instructions to use B to interact with him in a displeasing way. Doing so presents dialogue that is very cleverly dismissive in a way that seems cordial but contains undertones of hostility and the corresponding angry/unhappy face above your rival's head. Similarly you may interact with the objects in your office in a manner that promulgates displeasure: putting your feet up on the desk or straightening pictures (an indication that you aren't playing full attention to the Representative).

After this intro you are left on your own to peruse the Congressional directory and make a few calls to fellow Representatives. Much like the Sims you can chose to simply talk or invite them to to an event (mostly fundraisers) for more detailed interactions, all of which involve use of the appeasement/displeasement mechanic. On any given weekday (when Congress is in session) you may only make a set number of calls (say 5), attend 1 fundraiser/function, and, if available, cast a vote on a Bill (more below). Each Friday new poll numbers are released indicating where you stand with your constituency. It must be noted that in addition to there not being any direct line of connection between you and those you represent (indeed, the player has no idea who they are!) these poll numbers are the only visible indication that they exist, though it provides the one structured goal of the game.

In addition to it not being clear exactly where you are from nor who you are representing it's also never made explicit what political party you align with or what your campaign platform was. These details seem extraneous to game play - you re-election depends upon the relationships you make with other Representatives (and maybe the occasional Senator) rather than on pushing a specific agenda. With that in mind you proceed making calls and visits to other political figures. At any point you can press 1 to call up a window showing your relationship to other Representatives (for simplicity's sake the number is limited to 50 or so rather than the full 435) and a handful of Senators. Below each face/name is a scale from -10 to +10 (replacing the Notoriety meter from Jane Austen). A good number of Representatives are neutral with you from the outset, though you can get a sense of who may be a member of your or the opposing party by noting trends in positive and negative associations.

By selecting a specific Representative you can pull up more details about them including humanizing touches like their personal likes and dislikes as well as their political leanings (bills they've recently authored or voted for/against, more on that below). Most importantly you can see a graph tracking the changes in their relationship to you. By comparing days when a particular Representative's attitude for you shifted to your interactions with them or others you start to get a sense of who likes whom and who you may need to appease or displease to influence more powerful figures that you may not be able to directly interact with (depending on the specific Representative and their attitude towards you they may not take your calls).

The core mechanic of the game is a complex logic puzzle that represents a system of relationships. The design needs to be such that feedback is obvious yet the underlying threads are obfuscated enough that the player needs to put in work to discover them. For this reason there may not always be an immediate cause/effect relationship between my actions and the attitudes of others. For those directly involved yes, it should be immediate, but for others it may take a day or two for word to spread and attitudes to change. Ultimately, of course, even the logic of these connections is tied into the weekly poll numbers in a somewhat more inscrutable way. Figuring out having who on your side makes for good numbers and in turn figuring out who to go through to appease those people is where the real strategy comes in. Then again there's no need to appease everybody or even anybody. I hear tell sometimes being a maverick can pay off...

Now this is a game about politics so eventually we will need to actually do what the legeslative branch is supposed to do, namely craft and pass new bills into law. As a first-term Representative you won't have the power to craft a new bill (there's always the second-term sequel/expansion for that) but you may occasionally be asked to sponsor one by a well-liked colleague. Sponsoring a bill has enormous consequences, and the biggest shifts in others' attitudes toward you comes from agreeing or refusing sponsorship. Voting, which happens more often than sponsoring, also affects attitudes greater than individual interactions do.

As for the bills themselves it's important that they not engage the player's personal political leanings. In the spirit of the game these bills avoid anything resembling a hot-button issue and instead are light-hearted and comical as well as mundane. One bill might mandate that all federally funded schools use green chairs in their classroom. Another may levy a tax on people who keep walruses as pets. Again it should be unclear what, if any, interest the player's constituency has on these bills, though conversations occurring before the bill is put to a vote will indicate where particular Representatives stand on the issue. Also you vote yay or nay on the bills from your desk at the end of the work day - it becomes obvious by its omission that at no time do you actually sit in Congress and debate politics or cast your vote.


A Second Term?

Well that's it. Reading it over this definitely represents a very narrow and cynical view of politics but I suppose that's the point! At the end of the day, if done correctly, the game should leave the player feeling a certain sense of exhilaration and fun at the politicking yet be consciously aware that they're not really doing anything in the interest of public-service. Playing the game is an end in itself. If it's a means to anything it's merely a means to re-election. Why be re-elected? That's obvious: so you can continue to play the game!

I'm a Leaf on the Wind. Watch How I Soar.

Though I've recently read and largely agreed with a post by L.B. Jeffries about the benefits of blogging for the long tail rather than the game du jour, I've actually been looking forward to trying my hand at the latter. Over the months that I've been reading gaming blogs I've often felt a bit out of the loop and unable to legitimately formulate my own thoughts because I lacked either the time or the tools (still a Sony-only household) to play some of last year's most discussed games. With all the critical hype surrounding Flower I'm excited to have a chance to throw my tam in the ring during the early stages of what looks to be one of 2009's most talked about experiences.

There's already been some discussion out there in the blogosphere. Michael Abbot's initial shoot-from-the hip impressions have spawned a deluge of comments which I've intentionally avoided for the sake of forming my own critical opinion before having it blown in other directions by my fellow bloggers. So after 2.33 playthroughs here's one PEEGers impressions:

Flower is a game about symbiosis. The hyped up notion of zen-gaming actually works in the game's favor by swaying players' expectations. Before booting it up you expect to accept the simple grandeur of the landscape as a way of turning the game into an exercise in relaxation. It rather reminds me of Cloud, a game I was introduced to back in 2006 as an academic attempt to create non-violent and non-exclusively-goal-oriented play in video games.

The stage progression is what really makes the game. The first dream is 100% natural, bright and airy, free and merry with some random rocks breaking up the landscape and a spectacular tree to capstone the experience. The second flower's dream might initially be seen as more of the same. While there are hints of human interference - the intentionally constructed stone circles - they are non threatening enough that one might not even notice them on the first play through, despite the obvious counterpoint they make with the randomly placed stones from the first dream. The desaturated color palette - an idea that seems to be gaining more purchase lately - doesn't even negatively affect one's mood because it provides a wonderful canvas to paint on.

I probably wouldn't have felt any tension between the natural and artificial elements of the landscape in the third dream if it weren't that I have a friend with a unusual fear of windmills. We've seen the windmills in pre-release videos of the game and, being that you control petals flowing on the wind, they seem like a perfectly reasonable and non threatening addition to the landscape. But as elegant and appropriate as they may be they still represent the beginnings of a tension in the game between nature and technology. This isn't just a narrative tension either. In the third dream you encounter for the first time some constraints on the hitherto free flowing game play. Once you've activated the windmills and enter the canyons it becomes nigh impossible to escape them and re-entering them to search for more petals is a might frustrating as the wind, seemingly generated by the windmills, constantly tries to push you out.

I'd like to stop here and think about this for a moment because in light of where the game goes I think the third and fourth dreams are the game's apex and best represent the symbiosis I mentioned at the outset. Though it doesn't really hit you over the head until the fifth dream there's a steadily building dread - literally an approaching storm - of technology encroaching upon the idyllic meadows and canyons of Flower. At the climax of the fourth dream (what I consider the second act) this becomes very obvious and I was a bit put off by it. I've got more than a little of the tree-loving hippie in me, but I just wasn't excited about being subjected to another trope about technology's deflowering of poor, innocent nature, nor with the rest of the game being a struggle to overcome the evil monoliths of electricity and steel. Not to mention the irony of such a story being told on as bloated a piece of technology as the PS3!

Fortunately Flower doesn't do this. While you may feel, particularly in dream five, that technology is the enemy and must be eradicated, by dream six you start to see how wonderfully nature and technology can get along. The sixth flower's goal isn't to return to the human-free meadow of the first dream but to achieve harmony through balance, a balance that had, in fact, already been achieved in the third and fourth dreams. Your primary goal in the sixth and final dream isn't to destroy the city but to repair it. It's an interesting critique in its own right of the idea that too many games equate "realism" and "grittiness" with drab and colorless landscapes. The solution isn't a full reversal to the land of dandelions and roses, the solution, in true zen fashion, is to find balance and harmony.

Still I have to admit that I've not successfully sat down and played all six dreams in one sitting because I simply can't stand the fifth dream. My poor flower has yet to be resurrected from that nightmare; it sits bowed over and pathetic despite the three bonus leaves resting in its pot. I don't even know if it's possible to make that flower bloom and I'm not sure I'll ever find out - I simply hate that dream! I hate trying to thread the needle, re-living the torture I experience years ago at the hands of Irritating Stick. I hate the way that stage interrupts my calm. In fact after getting literally sucked into the darkness and kicked out of the dream I've needed to "calm down" by playing some Street Fighter - at least there I know to expect tension and how to deal with it. How's that for harmony!

That said the fifth dream is an integral part of the experience. While I'd prefer the chilled out experience of the first dream to the fifth, both of them are extreme ends of a spectrum that needs balancing, a balancing that was present in the third and fourth dreams but that the sixth dream helps you re-discover. The first act is more play than game, the last more game than play, but the real genius is that thatgamecompany has taken the tired debate over what is most important in a video game - set goals versus tools for free form play - and distilled it into an experience that makes you appreciate the symbiotic relationship between them.

Ultimately that makes Flower a wonderful game of self-discovery. To which set of stages are you more apt to gravitate? The first two (Act I) where you can forget entirely about humanity and technology and just flOw, freeform, through the wondrous scenery? Act II (my favorite) where a careful balance is struck between push and pull, control and being controlled, set amongst a backdrop where nature and technology not only coexist but seem to feed off each other? Or the final act which is much more goal oriented, much more tense and dark but, subsequently, may offer a more gratifying feeling of accomplishment?

Time to go poke my nose in on other people's thoughts.

The Metaphysics of Persistent Worlds

While not exactly post-emo-existentiell (the post about which is coming tomorrow, I promise!) I figured hey, might as well get as much mileage as you can out of your written work, no? So below you will find the abstract I've just submitted for the planned World of Warcraft and Philosophy book. Even though the book has just been announced and the articles not yet written nor finalized I'm betting this book will come out before Final Fantasy and Philosophy (which I'm in!) because they've delayed the sodding thing to coincide with the next Final Fantasy game. That's April 2010 in the States, for those of you keeping track.

Bits of Ogres, Bytes of Orcs: Is Azeroth Metaphysically Real (and What in the World is Metaphysics)?

Philosophers have some strange conversations. I mean really strange. The kind of conversations that would cause the average person to question how we’ve managed to survive this long. You get a couple of philosophers playing World of Warcraft and you can rest assured that both the intelligibility and practicality of their discussion will taper off dramatically. But as you’re reading this book you’ve probably done your share of face melting and gold farming so I’m going to assume you’re okay with that.

I got involved in just such an obtuse conversation once after killing an orc outside the badlands. “I’ve slain an orc!” I proudly proclaimed to a colleague. “No”, he replied, “you initiated a computer program that displayed an animation of an ‘orc’ ‘dying’.” Yes, those scare quote gestures were included.

“Orcs aren’t real”, he declared. In true philosophical form I responded with a question; “what does ‘real’ mean?’” That question is the heart of the field of metaphysics. What in the world is metaphysics? Metaphysics is what’s in the world!

Specifically what are the key components of the universe? The ancients came up with the idea of dividing the world into four categories: earth, air, fire, and water. Modern scientists will say the universe is composed of atoms and not-quite-understood subatomic particles. But the term atom, in fact, was coined 2500 years ago by a Greek philosopher named Democritus to describe the smallest building block of the universe. Can the entire universe be described as complex interactions between basic physical particles?

Perhaps, but chances are if someone tells you that Warcraft is just a complicated computer program you’ll disagree. There is more to the world than what our five senses tell us, just as there is more to WoW than pressing keys to produce elaborate animations. What about consciousness and emotion? Are they real? Few would deny that they exist in some way, but if you ask whether they are completely separate from the other building blocks of the universe, well, then you’re thinking like a metaphysician. Ask the same question about Azeroth and you’re thinking like a philosopher who loves WoW.

Back to that dead orc. Or rather, ‘dead’ ‘orc’. Is it real? To be more technical I might say that what I did was execute a series of computer commands that interacted with a program stored on a centralized server, made changes to that program, then broadcast those changes to any other computer in the world that happened to be paying attention at the time. More physically speaking I might say I created a pre-defined pattern of electrical currents racing through a circuit board, a pattern that is recognized and replicated by other computers in the world.

How would my colleague, the Azerothian non-realist, describe an orc? He would say an orc is a pre-defined identifiable pattern of atoms - patterns that we recognize as biological and would include, among other things, green skin and large teeth. However there have never been examples of such patterns of atoms existing so orcs aren’t real - and certainly can’t be slain!

But now we’re arguing over semantics. To put things a bit more simply he might say the orc doesn’t really exist because it’s just a computer crunching numbers. But that leads us to the granddaddy of metaphysical questions: are numbers real?

By now this may all sound like I’m beating a dead orc. Philosophers have been arguing over this stuff for millennia and now we’ve got Azeroth and other persistent virtual worlds to add fuel to the debate. Actually, we’ve got 200+ Azeroths to add to it because each server hosts a different Azeroth, a different possible world. What happens on Uther stays on Uther - unless you transfer your toon to Kalecgos.

So even if Azeroth is real, which is the real Azeroth? Well, now you’re beginning to see how much fun metaphysics can be. . .

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Post-Script: The abstract has been accepted!