Let me tell you a story. I live in Germany. Games here are under harsher restrictions. Protection of youth is constitutional. When I received the German Developer Award, a journalist I’ve never met before gave a heartwarming speech on how TRAUMA shows even to the most jaded skeptics that game can be art. On the same evening, Spec Ops also won. The head of the commission to decide age ratings also gave a speech how for the first time in history of the commission there was a lengthy debate among them if they were doing youth protection or actually censoring art. This is a big deal since by the German constitution, one is mandatory while the other is illegal.

It took us a long time to get there and it was a group effort. Decades of journalists, academics and game developers doing their best to demonstrate the value in games and challenging stereotypes and misconceptions. That evening it seemed like we were finally getting somewhere. Games were discussed in mainstream newspapers in a thoughtful and appreciative manner. Game museums were being established. I applied for tax benefits as an independent artist. I was personally involved in establishing a games studies course at a local university. It took us 5 years to pull it off since the university board was so hard to convince that this was a reasonable thing to spend money on. But we were finally getting somewhere. The tables were turning. The doors were opening. It seemed like games were not for some alleged low life nerds after all. They were for everybody. They were important and valuable. They had been all along. People were coming around.

Gamergate comes in and it is a stab in the back from the very crowd we were working so hard to defend all this time. It is an attack on exactly the same people that were sacrificing careers, families and years of work for. Here were gamers hell-bent at being exactly the thing we fought so hard to prove they never were. We haven’t fought against the Jack Thompsons of this world only to have gamers issue threats of mass shootings. We haven’t been laboriously moving games journalism away from being glorified PR-megaphones only to be accused of bias by our own readers. We haven’t established game studies courses and academic conferences for gamers to denounce them as “SJW Bootcamps”. We haven’t been pushing the boundaries of what games can express for gamers to scoff at or efforts and calling them “not even a game”.

The bright future we were constructing with so much effort and against such resistance is being pillaged by its own inhabitants. You may not care about what other think about games, but we did. We fought for you. We fought because we love games. We fought because we believed in games.

To all of us who have dedicated their lives and hearts to this medium this is a tragedy and a humiliation. But most of all, it is the most crushing betrayal.

FeministFrequency recently released a new Episode of their Series “Tropes vs Women”. This time, they discuss Women as Background Decoration, especially the prevalence of female Sex Workers in Videogames. As always, the critical perspective is welcome and the accumulation of examples is seriously disturbing.

However, I noticed that throughout the episode, the show makes a common argument which continues to struck me as questionable.

Sexual objectification is, of course, ubiquitous in mass media of all forms but since video games are an interactive medium, players are allowed to move beyond the traditional role of voyeur or spectator. Because of its essential interactive nature, gaming occupies a unique and potentially more detrimental position vis-a-vis the portrayal and treatment of female characters.

Variations of the above argument are also common in the criticism of violence or racism in videogames. The idea being that detrimental aspects of media are especially harmful in videogames because of their interactive nature. Here is why I find this argument debatable.

Great Resposibility Without Great Power

To begin with, the argument is used almost exclusively to argue AGAINST videogames – to justify harsher restrictions, a more scrutinous treatment. If the argument was true, the opposite should also be true. Games ought to teach more effectively. Games ought to makes us more virtuous by portraying morally positive themes. Games ought to convey stories in an even more griping way. Games ought to make art even artier.

However, this argument never seems to be made. Even in the Games for Change movement, the understanding is that games need to be specifically designed for tease out the positive effects. Meanwhile the negative influence seem to be always there whether intended or not.

When listing the positive ways in which games influence people, even the most avid games proponents seem to come up with tamely pragmatic ideas like “improved hand-eye coordination” – as if our society was suffering under an epidemic of bad hand-eye-coordination.

It would be ridiculous to claim that interactivity made games the overall superior medium. So why do we seem to accept the flip side so easily – that interactivity makes games overall the more dangerous medium?

My Medium Could Kick Your Medium’s Butt

In fact, we can distill a universal form of the argument and apply it to any other medium.

“Negative aspects in [medium X] are especially harmful because of [what makes medium X distinct]”

• Literature – Literature is the most harmful of all media because literature engages the imagination of the reader. Problematic content is not merely perceived but actively re-constructed in the mind of the reader. There is no way for the reader to distance themselves mentally from the material. Problematic ideas are confabulated with the reader’s personal memories and experiences and have therefore an easier time to take hold. By analogy, horror authors know well that the most terrifying monsters are the ones that we merely imagine ourselves.

• Cinema – Cinema is the most harmful of all media because of its overwhelming, immersive visual nature. Through editing, pacing, camera perspectives, sound and special effects, cinema creates a reality that surpasses the real – a hyper reality. Every moment is orchestrated and fine-tuned to be more intense and vivid than reality can ever be. Visual communication is also a non-verbal communication – one that happens subconsciously. The openly desired result is a surrender of critical thinking called “suspension of disbelief”. As the old proverb goes, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. And a movie is a 1000 pictures in rapid succession.

• Theater – Theater is the most harmful of all media because unlike cinema, it actually happens. The events on stage are not the result of special effects and clever editing, they physically happen between real human beings. This difference is what Walther Benjamin calls “Aura”. The inherently Auratic nature of Theater makes it the most authentic of all media. Its negative effects are the most intermediate because there is no screen to separate the audience from the portrayed events.

• Music – Music is the most harmful of all media because of its engrossing and seductive nature. Nietzsche singled out music as the art of Dionysus, the god of madness and ecstasy. The loss of control and disregard for ethics is inherent to what music is. Music works on humans in insidious ways they often have no control over. Pop music is capable of making us remember and repeat the most trite lyrics over and over again, without being able to stop. Music is also capable of crossing cultural boundaries. Its potentially harmful and subliminal messages can be universally received and internalized by all humans.

… and so on. Of course, all of the above statements are true. That’s because the initial argument is actually as a kind of tautology. Of course each medium has their own, uniquely effective means of communicating ideas. If the ideas are problematic, they will be communicated in a way inherent to that medium. It is no excuse to single out a specific medium. You could just as well single out any other medium. It is also not practical to measure and compare the effectiveness of different media. They work in inherently different ways. Apples to oranges.

I think games are often singled out here because of different reasons. Maybe because they are just the newest kid on the block? Maybe because they are so popular with younger audiences? Maybe because games don’t offer enough positive counter-examples? Whatever the reason is, the “because they are interactive” argument seems more like an a-posteriori rationalization. It should be contested and never is.

Is this Necessary?

Going back to the original Feminist Frequency video – what also strikes me is that the argument is actually not necessary to the line of reasoning there. Yes, the series looks at the problematic portrayal of women in videogames. It is not necessary to reason why it does so. It is the premise of the series.

A frequent argument against the Feminist Frequency series is that sexist tropes exist in other media. The obvious answer is that just because other media use those tropes, it doesn’t mean it is ok to use them in games. But conversely, if sexism is clearly harmful in other media, it shouldn’t be necessary to emphasize that it is harmful in games.

I’ve been playing Netrunner for more than 4 Months now. I have caught up with all of the released expansions so far. I went to some major tournaments. I started recording my games. I met some really great people. The game has been good to me.

My initial impression of the game has evolved a lot during this time and I started to notice some interesting patterns. I’ve been paying attention to the meta-game and dominant strategies. It seems like a lot of them seem to focus on disrupting or avoiding what the implied structure of the game is. And some of that is even intended. Let me explain.

Netrunner is a game were Runners hack into a Corporation’s servers to steal the Agendas within. Corporations install Agendas in servers to advance and score them. They try to keep the Runners out by using ICE. Runners break the ICE by using Icebreaker software. This struggle is to me the implied structure of Netrunner. This structure is something a lot of strategies seem to want to get around.

Fast Advance

“Win the game without the trouble of having to deal with your opponent.”

One of the most dominant strategies by Corporations is the so-called Fast Advance. It’s an umbrella term for various combos that allow Corporations to score agendas without having to install them into servers. Most Corps nowadays use the identity NBN with Astroscropt Progam and SanSan City Grid. But you can also go with HB and Biotic Labor or Jinteki and Trick of Light. The most agressive Fast Advance decks use a combination of them.

By not having to install cards into servers, this strategy effectively eliminates a huge portion of the game. Runners may put a lot of cards in their deck to get into Servers. But if there are no servers for them to run on, a huge portion of their deck becomes useless.

Now, it’s not necessarily that bad. Even without external servers, there are still other places for the Runner to run on. They can hack into the Corp’s hand, deck or discard pile to search for agendas there. And in fact, this is an effective strategy against Fast Advance. However, going fishing for agendas in the Corp’s hands often comes down to pure chance. Fast Advance tends to eliminate a lot of strategic nuance in favor of lucky draws.

Scorched Earth

“Win the game if you have more money than your opponent.”

One very old strategy is for the Corporation to kill the Runner with Meat Damage using Scorched Earth. It’s a cad that has been out since the Core Set. It proved to be so effective, it has become a mainstay of the game. In order to kill the Runner, the Corp needs to give them a Tag. Players have been very creative in finding out how to do this. The most successful strategies are using SEA Source or Mid-Season Replacements – both of them require the Corp to have more money than the Runner.

It is no wonder the first expansion ever printed included Plascrete Carapace, an armor for the Runner to defend against Scorched Earth. Every Runner deck has to include at least 2 of them ever since. But since they can’t be tutored (yet), this defense is still quite unreliable.

For a Runner, this can feel very frustrating. You might be on your way to unravel the Corp’s security system. But then suddenly they show you 3 cards and you lose the game. No question about it. No ar percentage bars called “Passsions”. Each NPC has multiple Passions. The player’s actions raise or lower the percentage bars depending on if the action improves or runs against a given Passion. So if an NPC hates Orcs and the player kills an Orc, that Passion bar increases. This, in turn unlocks narrative paths. Hilariously, these basically boiled down to various forms of “Combat Buffs” and we are led to believe that Ken had also smarter ideas but hasn’t mentioned them because of reasons. His ultimate goal is using this system to make a game narrative repayable and systemic like a game of Civilization. I immediately saw some fundamental issues with the presented system.

“I think we gonna need more of the “Fetch Quest”-pieces to complete this model of Ulysses.”

Living it down

The most immediate problem is that the proposed system is actually not at all different from the systems we already use in games. The karma system in Fallout 3, for example, is a global Passion percentage bar that judges player’s action on a good/evil scale. Many games implement similar systems. Mass Effect, Infamous, Black & White, you name it. Ken’s suggestion is merely to have more percentage bars instead of just one (not unlike GTA2) – to introduce more variety in the way different characters react to your actions. However, this doesn’t actually change the fundamental problems with judging the player’s actions on a linear scale.

To illustrate those problems, here is something that happened to me in Fallout 3. I decided once to actually nuke Megaton, an peaceful village. Naturally, murdering a whole community caused quite a hit for my karma rating. I lost 1000 karma points to be exact. NPCs all around me started treating me like the mass-murderer I was. So far so good. Later on, I found myself in a situation where I needed my karma rating to improve. I went to Carlos, a thirsty beggar and gave him some purified water. Each water bottle I gave him resulted in 50 karma points. Good thing I was hoarding them. Just 20 bottles set the record straight. And with that, the fact that I destroyed an entire town wasn’t a big deal anymore. The debt was paid.

“Don’t worry about that, Hank. I have a stash of water bottles to make up for it. Soon, nobody will even mention it.”

Of course, one could argue that this is just a matter of balance. Killing so many innocents should be weighted more heavily against giving away a bottle of water. Or maybe donating water bottles should yield diminishing returns. This is all true and good, but I think there is more to the problem. I claim that even if we found the “right” way to offset the moral debt of killing dozens of innocents, the fact that this is something I did should still matter in the way people interacted with me. I should not be able to live down an action like this. The fact that I can is an effect of using percentage bars. It is the effect if quantifying. We say “money does not stink”. Neither do karma points or Passion points. They don’t have a memory of how they came together. They reduce the actions of the player to a numeric value where killing a village and donating a bunch of water is the same as doing nothing. It is not a side-effect that can be tweaked out. This fundamentally the way they work.

Be My Vending Machine

Another criticism of this approach often brought up in the past is that it essentially models characters as vending machines. Characters accept favors and dish out rewards in return. It is a tragically simplistic, even sociopathic way of thinking about human relationships. It basically elevates the fetch quest to the basic building block of human interaction. How this model fails is evident in the current Friend Zone epidemic. Turns out, showering a person with favors doesn’t actually result in deeper relationships.

21st Century Character Design

Interestingly, this has been the default model for depicting romance in games. Especially Japanese interactive novels follow the same formula since ages now. Players max out a hidden “Love-meter” by paying attention to what their potential target is interested in and picking the right lines in a dialogue or making the right narrative choices. It communicates to players that in order to be successful at romance you need to to be glib, spineless, manipulative creepers. Say the right things and you’ll get in her pants. Christine Love is currently working on a game that aims at addressing and exposing those mechanisms. I’d be more interested in the kind of LEGO she builds with.

Upside-down LEGO

What applies to romantic relationships also applies to other types of relationships. But question of why the percentage bar is not a good model for human interaction is not an easy one to answer. I think a major aspect is that actions are only understood in a social context. If a stranger on the street stopped you and gave you a cake, would like him in return? Hardly. We would be probably not even willing to accept said cake. Without any further context, it is impossible for us to judge the intent of that kind of action. If anything we would be suspicious that there is something fishy about the cake. This thought experiment suggests that to some extent, Ken got it the wrong way around. It is not necessarily our actions that manipulate the status of our relationships. It is the status of our relationships that allows us to act towards each other differently.

“OMG, candy is my Passion!”

For a couple that has been together for years, expensive jewelry as a present is a way of acting out the relationship. For two teenage classmates that barely ever spoke to each other, expensive jewelry is creepy and inappropriate (even if the recipient has a “Passion” for jewelry). Buying doughnuts and coffee for your colleagues at the office is a way to live out that relationship. Buying doughnuts and coffee for the anonymous cashier at the supermarket is weird creepy and inappropriate (even if they are currently thirsty).

Everything is 0-sum

I think another way of framing the issue with Ken’s model is his tendency to think of relationships as zero-sum games. A zero-sum game is an exchange where one participant gains what the other loses. The total sum of value hasn’t changed after the exchange has been made. Ken mentions this when thinking on a global scale – his goal is to create a system where it is impossible to please everybody. Being friends with one person should make other people dislike you. But he inadvertently also implemented this system in the way he models the relationship between two people. You give me favors, I give you X (X being mostly “combat buffs”). Note that this is not how relationships work. In fact, if a partner starts treating a friendly relationship as a zero-sum game, it’s a good hint that something is going seriously wrong. We understand somebody, who marries just for money as being a manipulative asshole. Once such motivation is revealed, it can be a very good reason for divorce.

Um… does Mrs. Levine know about this?

A healthy, friendly relationship is usually something both participants draw gains from – something that creates more value where there was less before. Inviting a friend over for dinner is pleasurable and desirable for both parties. You learn about each other, you share stories, ideas, gossip. Yes, one person has to prepare the food. This investment is usually seen as insignificant compared to the value of companionship. Also, note that the size of that practical investment doesn’t necessary relate to the gains from the encounter. A more opulent meal doesn’t automatically result in a more friendly evening. It’s not something that can be maximized this way. Sometimes even the opposite can be true – a spectacularly botched-up dinner may be a bonding experience for the parties involved.

The Speed of Rumors

We already discussed how the percentage bar system doesn’t have a “memory” of the player’s actions. A related issue is that implementations of such systems often also ignore the details of information acquisition. Something that is vastly important in the way we live out relationships is careful management of appearances. We pay attention what kind of information we share with what people. Sometimes, the mere act of sharing information can actually have significant impact on a relationship. Sharing on gossip can bond two parties against another one. We are usually more sincere with people close to us, but we also feel the need to pad our relationships with “white lies”. Withholding significant information or even giving false witness is the fundamental tool for intrigue and deception. Of course, it also carries the risk of being exposed and having that knowledge being used against you. Ken showed a screenshot of Game of Thrones in his presentation. I wonder if he actually watched the series.

Oh cheer up, Sansa. Just do some fetch quests for Joffrey and he’ll love you again.

Here is a common example of how games fail to take this into account. Again, in Fallout 3, I sneak into a village. It is nighttime, nobody knows I’m here. I sneak up to an NPC and kill him in his sleep using a silent weapon. Immediately the entire village is alarmed and starts attacking me. In spite of various stealth and assassination skills, it is impossible in Fallout 3 to hide your actions or deceive characters. Every NPC in the world has instant and perfect knowledge about all your deeds. This completely eliminates all opportunity for intrigue unless certain dialogue options are specifically provided to do so.

Ken’s system also fails to reflect that. His presentation also assumes an objective truth about the player’s actions. Of course, we could easily conceive of a more complex system where the player’s actions need to be reported to NPCs before they can affect their Passion percentage bars. So after I killed some Orcs I have to actually go to the Ork-hating Elf and report to him that I killed 12 Orcs since the last time we met. Such a system exposes the opportunity for a different kind of interation. What if I just told the NPC I killed Orcs without actually killing Orcs? In most cases, there is no way for him to catch me on that. Or even better, I wouldn’t even need to lie – just having a long conversation on how I share his hatred for Orcs should be enough for him to realize that we share Passions, right? So what is this Orc-killing business even good for?

It’s not the AI that is the problem. Killing Orcs simply is a poor way to build relationships with.

3th Wheel Is The Fun Wheel

Finally, a last issue I have with Ken’s LEGO is the fact that all Passions are tracked just towards one person – the player. If another NPC kills Orcs, it won’t affect the Orc-hating Elf. Since the game is supposed to react to the player, this seems like a logical solution. But in reality, the relationships between the player and the NPCs often turn out to be the most boring ones in games.

This was an insight I had from playing the Mass Effect series. Especially in the 2nd and 3rd installment, there are some smaller romances going on between NPC team members – EDI can hook up with Joker, Tali can hook up with Garrus. To me, interacting with those relationships felt a lot more interesting than whatever Shepard had going on with his potential romance targets. Naturally, playing cupid with other people is a intriguing activity IRL. But I think there is more going on here.

She gets it!

First, manipulating a relationship you are part of within the framework of a game ALWAYS carries with it the sense of success or failure. This is especially true when it comes to romantic relationships. In games, you don’t so much romance NPCs, you game them and win them like trophies. Romancing an NPC and failing is not an attractive option. If you fail, you reload. However, when it comes to influencing the relationship between two NPCs, unsuccessful or unexpected outcomes seem much more acceptable because you are not directly affected. Urging your buddy to ask out a girl in a bar and watching him being turned down can be equally interesting as watching him succeed.

Another advantage is the symmetry of 3rd person relationships. A relationship between a player and an NPC is bound to be less detailed because the means of communication are stunted. The player can’t just talk to an NPC like they can talk to a real person, they have to use some kind of awkward interface – a multiple-choice menu in most cases. On the other side, the NPC never really understands the player, they only fire off certain pre-programmed reactions. It is a far cry for how it feels to talk to a real person. On the other hand, watching two NPCs interact with each other feels natural. Sure, the dialogue is pre-written. But it perfectly emulates how it feels like to watch to real people interact. The relationship feels more genuine because we model and perceive other people’s relationships differently from the way we model our own relationships to other people.

Finally, there is a simple technical reason for why 3rd person relationships may be more rewarding to focus on – because as the storyteller, you don’t have to show everything. Just one or two scenes between Tali and Garrus were enough for me to fill in the gaps what is going on when I wasn’t watching. At the same time, scene after scene of dialogue between Shepard and Miranda about her daddy issues have utterly failed at conveying anything close to what romance feels like.

Movies, Theater and Literature always involve the audience as a witness rather than an active participant. This may not only be a function of those mediums missing an input channel. It may be also a choice grounded in narrative affordance.

Hand Down LEGO

Multiple aspects of Ken’s narrative LEGO have been implemented for years in games. I found it quite baffling that instead of actually dealing with the issues those systems caused, Ken chose to present yet another iteration and label it as some sort of new idea. More to the point, people like Chris Crawford have been working on EXACTLY those kinds of systems, tracking multiple values across various characters to generate procedural narrative. Crawford’s Storytron was the result of experimentation with such systems for years.

Another example would be the AI engine of games like Crusader Kings 2. That engine actually exhibits a lot of the features if Ken’s proposal. It tracks opinions and personal goals of a huge number of procedurally generated NPCs. It would be worth looking into how Crusader Kings 2 gets around the fore-mentioned issues. For example, the nobility of the medieval ages is a convenient framing for a system that rewards being a scheming sociopath.

We Can Build It

I don’t know if a universal narrative LEGO is even possible. I don’t have a superior alternative ready. But since Ken’s talk is supposed to start a conversation, let us start by actually learning from existing systems instead of repeating the same mistakes. I think an improved way of modeling relationships in games should consider the following issues:

• Remember Actions – If characters are to react to the player’s actions, they need to be able to identify and remember them. It’s the only way the player’s action can be an actual talking point. Just a percentage bar that averages away all the details doesn’t cut it.

• Quality over Quantity – Instead of tracking linear values, a meaningful narrative model needs to find ways of expressing quality. Not every friendly relationship transitions smoothly into a romance like a linear slider suggests. We have differentiated opinions of each other. A successful system needs to be able to reflect hat.

• Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen – A fetch quest is a very limited way of forming and manipulating relationships. We need to come up with better verbs to improve the model.

• Acting Instead of Winning – Modeling relationships as something to level up and win is a problematic way of portraying them. A more useful way of thinking about them may be as something players can “act out”. In this framework, the player’s actions are not means to level up relationships, they are the narrative payoff in themselves and are enabled by the relationships. Relationships shouldn’t be tied to tangible rewards. They are only meaningful if there are no ulterior motifs