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Ardum: a project about the player-designer relationship

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Ardum: a project about the player-designer relationship

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Ardum
A Project About the Player-Designer Relationship

Andrea Benavides

Master’s Thesis
Advisors: Peter Brinson, Andreas Kratky, Brian Sharp
April 1, 2014
Table of Contents
About and Project Objectives 1
Goals and Relevance 3
Original Intentions 6
Feedback 9
The Terminal 13
Player Relationship with Ardum 15
Narrative System 16
Navigation System 18
Developer Commentary 20
Miscellaneous Complete Misses 24
Prior Art 25
Seven Psychopaths 25
Stranger Than Fiction 27
Adaptation 28
8 ½ 29
The New Journalism 31
The Stanley Parable 33
Thirty Flights of Loving 34
Game Developer Commentary 35
Conclusion 36
Works Cited 38
Benavides 1
Andrea Benavides
April 1, 2014
Ardum
A Project About the Player-Designer Relationship : by Andrea Benavides

Fig. 1. Mood board for Ardum. Alyssa Haskett. October 2013.
Committee
Chair & Faculty - Peter Brinson
Faculty - Andreas Kratky
External - Brian Sharp

About Ardum and Project Objectives
Ardum is a game about the relationship between a player and a designer.
When someone plays Sim City, they learn about and engage with Will
Wright’s socio-political views on economics and urban ecosystems. Playing
Papers, Please teaches the player about Lucas Pope’s personal experience and
thoughts about immigration. Players can experience the shock of moving to a
new country and culture in Paralect, which mirrors Loan Verneau’s
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experience growing up. Every game is inherently a reflection of the thoughts
and beliefs of the people who made it, and a player is forced to understand and
(at least temporarily) adopt those beliefs in order to play the game. Players
have to act according to those beliefs, and in this way games are unique from
other art forms. Games are created by people for people, and in allowing the
player to do something, allowing them to become an actor in the experience,
the making and playing of games becomes an exercise in empathy. Games
allow us to celebrate our shared humanity and to bond with another person by
understanding them. By making a thing for another person, I am saying “I
understand you. We share common fundamentals, and I care about that.”
When a person uses something that was made by another person, they are
completing the conversation, they are engaging in this essentially human
dialog.
Making and playing games is just one more way to talk to each other, to
feel with each other, to celebrate one another. But games are complicated.
They are hard. They are never the same twice, and they are as unique as the
people who make them and play them.
This idea of a player-designer relationship can be found within any
interactive artifact. In a way, every game exemplifies this idea, but very few
games are about this idea, and even fewer have a positive attitude about it.
Ardum is completely dedicated to this notion of the player-designer connection.
Ardum puts it front and center, expresses an opinion about it, and seeks to
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invoke within the player a sense of appreciation for their role in the game
system. But Ardum is not just about the link between a player and a designer. It
is about what I, Andrea Benavides, think about that relationship. Ardum is a
subjective notion about what I think about my connection to the people who
play the things that I make.
The intention for Ardum is to create a short but dense experience that
has high replay value. Games like 30 Flights of Loving and The Stanley Parable
are easy to play over and over again because they are short and interesting
enough to warrant a second or third look. Ardum will be of similar length,
about 30 minutes long, and will have enough content and meaning to
encourage more than one dive in.

Goals and Relevance
Self-exploration was an integral component of the Modernism art
movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernist artists sought
not only to reflect current ideas and images, but they sought to examine the art
itself. Just as important as the depiction of modern life was the Modernist
artist’s expression of and reflection on art production. Expressionism,
impressionism, cubism, surrealism and others brought attention to the medium
and its components rather than trying to hide them behind realism.
This transparency and process-oriented form has since existed in every
medium. In 1921, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote a play called Six
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Characters in Search of an Author: A Comedy in the Making. The plot explores
the relationships between theatre practitioners, actors, and their characters by
interrupting a play rehearsal with a group of characters (literally named by
the roles they play) who desperately want to teach the actors how to perform
the drama they are living. The characters say that “the drama is in us, and we
are the drama,” (Six Characters in Search of an Author, act 1.) In literature, L.
Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky (1940) is about the relationship between a
character and its author. A man finds himself written into and living out his
friend’s novel (which may have inspired the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction by
Zach Helm.) Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) is a novel
about the nature of reading; the chapters switch between telling the story
about a man reading a novel called If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and being
that novel he is reading.
As a self-aware digital creative work, Ardum will explore and give
commentary on my ideas about the relationship between the two most
fundamental components of any game: the player and the designer. When a
designer is creating a game, she is thinking always of the player, but rarely is a
player motivated to think of the designer. The player tends to view her
relationship as being with the game, and she might never feel touched by the
designer. Ardum seeks to divert from that pattern by forcing the player to face
the designer and acknowledge her existence. In Ardum, that relationship is the
most important and celebrated thing.
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One of the more difficult goals of this project is creating a sense of
intimacy between the player and designer. Actions or gestures shared between
two people can be indicative of trust or fondness, and two people who share
such a bond tend to listen to each other more closely than otherwise. These
tendencies are automatically present between two people who are physically
present with one another, but they are much harder to create when
communicating through a digital and asynchronous filter like a computer
game. If, in Ardum, the player can be told “thank you” with a sense of genuine
sincerity, then the Ardum design team will have achieved the most difficult but
most important goal of the game.
This type of intimate sincerity exists to great effect in other artistic forms
of creation. The Dutch Dans Theater at one point had three dance companies,
each with dancers of a different age group. The choreography was specifically
designed with the talents of each dance company in mind: the dances for NDT
II, comprised of the youngest dancers, tend to have more physically demanding
choreography, and dances made for NDT III, comprised of dancers aged 40 and
older, tend to have more emotionally sophisticated and skillful choreography.
In each case, creating the personalized choreography was the first act of
giving, but when the dancers performed the choreography the work was truly
complete. Ardum will strive for a similar tone of intimacy.

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Original Intentions
Ardum has evolved greatly over the course of production. The ideas that
were originally so core to its conception are still present in the current design,
but their influences have morphed over time. The important ideas have been
distilled over and over again into their most essential parts. We took our most
essential inspirations, left the rest behind, and then created something new
with whatever was left over. This process is evidenced in the storytelling of the
game, in the philosophies behind the player-designer communication, and in
the presentation of the message of the game.
The original intent was for Ardum to have three acts, but not in a typical
three-act structure. Rather, each act would have its own intensity and
narrative arc, but would build upon the ideas of the previous act to culminate
in the final and most important message.
Each act has its own “mission statement” to convey to the player, and
conveying these messages is the objective for each act. Everything about each
act works toward achieving its objective. The three acts are (addressing the
player):
1) You are not just a character, you are also the player.
2) This game is a construct, created by individuals who have uniquely
affected their creation.
3) This game world was created for you, but it is completed by you.
The purpose of the first act is to prompt the player to think of their role in
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the game as being outside of the game, to think of herself as a person playing a
game as opposed to a diegetic character. The second act’s purpose is to get the
player to understand that the game was made by another human being, and
that while it is an independent artifact, the game is also inherently reflective of
its creator. Finally, the third act will try to deliver the most important message:
that even though the game system was initially created without the player, it
was created with the player in mind, and the play session itself is the most
important result of that effort. The third act is a celebration of the player and
what the player and designer can achieve together.
The game is comprised of three acts, as follows:

Fig. 2. Narrative structure of Ardum. Author’s creation.
The original plan was to use the defamiliarization of the familiar to
create contrast and meaning, to encourage the player to trust, relax, and
engage deeply with the game and then reflect on the things that changed and
grabbed her attention. The familiar concepts that we ended up using are less
familiar to the layman than originally intended - instead of setting the game in
a grocery store or on a highway, the game takes place in a spaceship. I can
safely suppose that most of Ardum’s players have never been the Commander
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of their own spaceship, but by using the conventions set by popular media
before Ardum, such as Ridley Scott’s Alien, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space
Odyssey, and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, we tried to
create our own version of a very understandable science fiction paradigm. The
developer commentary schema used in Ardum borrows mercilessly from
Valve’s style of commentary for their games like Left for Dead and Half Life 2.
We stood on the shoulders of these giants in order to take advantage of the
prior knowledge they established among the general population, but also
because those media are popular because they are well designed. Valve
consistently uses their own commentary paradigm because it works
extraordinarily well. If someone who has never watched science fiction movies
or played any of Valve’s games with the developer commentary on, those
references will still be well understood because they were adapted so easily by
the general population in the first place. And naturally, as soon as Ardum’s
player has acclimated to the way of things in the game, we change them in
order to surprise and create meaning.
Other mediums have used hybrid forms of truth and subjectivity in order
to communicate an idea. The Cinematic Essay is a blend of documentary and
fiction that allows the director place her own voice in the true story she is
telling, despite the fact that the story is not about her. It is not an
autobiographical genre, but rather the films are self-aware of the person
narrating them. They are personal while still relevant to the real world. The
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New Journalism movement is similar in this way. By inserting the writer’s self
into the subject matter (both physically and within the writing), New
Journalism writers avoided the strict objectivism of traditional journalism and
replaced it with first-hand accounts of subjective experience.
If the bond between a designer and a player is a worldly truth, and the
gratitude for that bond is a subjective notion, then the two ideas can be
combined in the same way that Hunter S. Thompson combines journalism and
diary (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) or Morgan Spurlock combines
documentary and snarky opinion (Super Size Me). Ardum will ask players to
think about their role in the designer-player relationship and hopefully
prompt them to appreciate it. The game will show them that it is something
worth appreciating.

Feedback, or “Ooh, that’s a good idea.”
Winteractive

Fig. 3. IMGD Winteractive Show. Author’s image. December 2013.
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For me, the Winter show was a rough time, and the culmination of a lot
of things going wrong with the project that semester. Not only was production
going a lot slower than I had expected, but I still did not really feel like I was
truly in production, and the result of this was an incredible amount of stress
weighing on my shoulders and a prototype with some pretty bad bugs in it.
Ironically and sadly, Winteractive was the only “playtest” I’ve ever had with a
game-breaking bug in the game, and I generally felt really down about what I
had managed to accomplish for that incredibly important milestone.
I learned some very important things that day, and it has had a dramatic
impact on the trajectory I have carried ever since. In talking to people about
the game, especially after people had played it, I found that people were very
intrigued by the ideas behind the game, and some they were really excited by
it. People liked talking about the meta concepts, and they expressed interested
in knowing where the game was going next. People liked the tone of the game,
and some people played through the prototype more than once just to explore
the very limited amount of content we had. Ardum was intriguing, but I didn’t
see any evidence of people understanding the core concept of Ardum without
talking to me. The game was not speaking for itself, and while that failure hurt,
it wasn’t surprising to me. We had achieved towards what we seeked to create,
but it was not there yet.
Everyone that I spoke with loved the wheat field introduction (although
they didn’t understand it, more on that later). It did a great job of hooking
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people immediately, and I consider that to be one of the greatest material
successes of Ardum at that time. One of the greatest failures was my design of
the physical layout of the environment. I had created an idealistic space that
was composed by many of the iconic features of films greatest spaceships: long
gently curving hallways, geometrically-shaped (but not rectangular) rooms,
hanging walkways, and a central space that led to all other parts of the ship. At
the beginning of Fall when I was creating the environment, I did not have
much to go by when designing so I tried to make a ship that was functional but
attractive and easily understood as a spaceship. What I accidentally made
instead was a vessel with unused rooms, hallways that were never useful, and
long treks from point A to point B without anything interesting happening in
between. It was disappointing to the player to find unfulfilled promises around
every corner, and disappointing to me to see my design so woefully misguided.
In the weeks after the Winter show, I redesigned the entire ship based on
functionality alone. I figured out the player’s path for the entire game, and
then arranged the rooms in the ship so that the distance between tightly-paced
moments of gameplay was as short as possible, and so that the ship would
naturally open up when there was time for the player to explore. I made rooms
that the player spent more time in larger and more interesting, and cut rooms
that were unnecessary. The current build of the ship is a lot more blocky and
simple, but it I find that players still read it as a spaceship because of the
context provided by the gameplay itself. There are very little navigation issues
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(besides the ones mentioned later) and players tend to spend an appropriate
amount of time in each room given the intention of the game. We have
tweaked the Engine Room a few times to work with the mechanics of the game
in that space, and in the next few weeks we plan to rebuild the ship modularly
with more spaceship-like assets to improve the general aesthetic.
The most important thing I learned that day is how proud the Ardum
team is to be the Ardum team. The support of my team did not just get me
through that rough day, and it did not just refill my motivation for the next
long haul, it gave me new perspective and allowed me to take greater
advantage of my resources for the second part of thesis year. The Winter Show
was a time of rededication, enthusiasm, and gratefulness. It showed me that I
had more good things going for me than I had initially realized, and it gave me
the confidence to use what I had to great effect.
Everyone was so excited to see the game demoed publicly, to watch other
people enjoying their hard work, and to talk to me about how the project was
going. They wanted to know about more than just how the show was going,
they wanted to hear about what the plans were for the Spring push, and to see
if they could be of any help over the December break. People on the team
recommitted - the sound designers talked with me about doing VO in the game
the following semester (a huge task), the production assistant expressed
interest in ramping up her responsibilities on the project, and the designers
discussed how we could improve the game based on feedback from the Winter
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show. It was so encouraging to see how much the team cared about the project,
and to see how proud they were to have worked on it, and how enthusiastic
they were to work on it more. My exuberance for the project was not just
renewed after the show, it had increased in capacity. I have worked even
better with the Ardum team this Spring than we did last year, and we have
produced much more high-quality content recently because of it.

The Terminal

Fig. 4. “Terminal in Ardum”. Author’s screenshot.
The main mechanic in the game involves conversing with Ardum, the
ship’s computer brain and the game’s namesake. In each room of the ship is a
computer terminal, and the player communicates with Ardum through these
terminals. When Ardum has something to say and the player is within range of
the terminal, the camera locks onto the terminal interface and Ardum types
out her dialog. The player talks back by using one of four buttons, any portion
of which are activated at each point in the dialog depending on the player’s
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possible reply options. The buttons, symbolically, stand for “Continue”,
“Positive”, “Negative”, and “Inquiry”.
The affordances of the terminals in Ardum have improved greatly in the
last six months based on playtester feedback. After implementing changes in
interface design and camera and player control, players are now able to easily
interact with the terminal systems. Things that used to be challenging, such as
adjusting the camera, knowing which buttons to press, or reading Ardum’s
dialog, have been corrected: camera adjustment is now automatic so that
players can always see the terminal and it’s interactive components clearly
and all at once, active buttons now look significantly different from inactive
buttons and their location on the terminal is more attuned to their usage
patterns, and Ardum’s text displays in a dynamic and smooth rhythm. The
problems we now face have less to do with simple usability and more to do with
the underlying interactive conversation system. The terminals currently allow
a very prescribed mode of conversing with Ardum, and players sometimes
express feeling stilted or unsure of what their options of reply actually mean.
We plan on correcting this by changing the writing so that the players desired
replies better match their capabilities given the simple four button system
Ardum employs.

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Player Relationship with Ardum

Fig. 5. Concept for Ardum’s face in Ardum. Alyssa Haskett. October 2013.
Defining and then sculpting a relationship between the player and
Ardum has been difficult, but the suggestions from my thesis advisors and
other members of the IMD faculty have especially given me direction in this
goal. Their suggestions have made this part of the game what it is today. Recent
player feedback shows that Ardum largely comes across as “sassy”, “helpful”,
and as having a compassionate, caring, or symbiotic attitude toward the
player. Unfortunately, she also sometimes comes across as “bossy”, “creepy”, or
“stilted”. We are still refining the dialog, and I believe that having Ardum’s VO
tracks throughout the game will help immensely with getting players to
empathize with Ardum.
One of the primary goals of Ardum is to create a sense of intimacy
between the player and Ardum, and therefore between the player and the
designer. We want the player to experience a sense of closeness, and we
started trying to create that by modeling the player-Ardum relationship after a
close and intimate relationship that already exists: that between me and my
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little sister. I love my sister immensely, and so by using an experience of my
own as a reference, I am able to make decisions about how the player and
Ardum should act toward one another without having to worry about realism
or whether or not something makes sense. I do not have to make up the
intimacy because it is already there, and I am just mimicking it in Ardum. By
putting the player in the role of a person who’s already in a relationship,
Ardum creates an effect like that of novels of similar purpose. When reading a
novel with a love story, the reader is given access to the most private and secret
thoughts of the protagonist. This creates an empathetic link between that
reader and protagonist, such that the reader is able to experience the thrill,
the warmth, and the closeness of that relationship just as the protagonist is
able to. In Ardum, the player experiences the caring relationship between the
Commander and Ardum first-hand, and I attempt to make that relationship
feel caring by modeling it after one that I personally know well.

Narrative System

Fig. 6. Script for Ardum. Written by Hamish Tildesley. “Terminal.cs” by Andrea Benavides.
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In Ardum, the story is delivered in bite-sized nodes. The player interacts
with a terminal, and by the end of that piece of conversation she has something
to do. Then the player goes to the next terminal, and so on. The choices made
by the player at the terminals are unimportant; they do not affect what
happens in the game, they only change how the player gets the story, and what
sort of conversations they have with Ardum.
For weeks last semester I tried to figure out how I could implement a
story system for Ardum that was as robust and flexible as possible. I knew how I
wanted the narrative mechanics to work (through interacting with the
terminals, using a prescribed set of buttons, lightly branching dialog, etc.) and I
wanted the technical system to let me to tell the story while still allowing the
player all possible freedoms. I thought it was important for the player to be
able to visit any terminal in the ship to get certain nodes of dialog, and I
thought that each terminal would have to handle multiple different possible
aesthetic and functional states depending on which node of story they were
delivering. For example, everything about the lights, screen, and text on the
terminal would changed based on the tone of the current story content.
I designed three different narrative systems for Ardum in an attempt to
find something that was perfectly robust while still easy enough for a mediocre
programmer like me to implement quickly. I wasted a lot of my own and others’
time before it was finally pointed out to me that I was going down a tortuous
path. My mistake was assuming that things needed to be fancy, when all they
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really needed to do was work. I had assumed that players would want ample
freedom of mobility, but it turns out that they are perfectly happy a prescribed
order of terminal visitations, so long as they are still free to wander the ship in
between visits. I thought that the code needed to be neat and highly reusable
so that my team could expand upon it as necessary, but in reality almost no one
has needed to see the code that I wrote. Making something that functions was
the biggest favor I did for my team because then we were able to move forward
with a working main mechanic. My code might be ugly, but Ardum works
without a hitch and that is the only thing that matters for a project of this
miniscule scope.

Navigation System

Fig. 7. “Ardum hallway and elevator.” Author’s screenshot.
Players have consistently asked for a navigation system in Ardum. They
want to understand exactly where they are at all times and where the game
expects them to be. No one has ever asked for a minimap or tooltips or anything
like that - I guess even my non-designer playtesters can tell that it is just not
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that type of game. However, I have had multiple people ask for a guidance
system that would lead them to the next place that they are expected to go. The
system we ended up building is actually very similar to what some playtesters
have described specifically: a narrow band of light on the floor that draws a
line between where the player is currently and where they should go next. The
line is static in that it does not readjust as the player moves throughout the
ship. We have found that this does a pretty good job of grounding the player in
the space, and it allows the player to bravely divert from the path without
worrying becoming disoriented. No one (yet) has accidentally traced the line
back to its origin, mistaking it for their destination.

Fig. 8. “Ardum elevator UI.” Author’s screenshot. “Wayfinding System for Denver Children’s
Hospital”. Tom Klump.
Player feedback has demanded a couple of additional features as well.
The elevator in Ardum now uses sound effects and strategic button lights to
signal to players when they are moving, when they have arrived at their
destination, what floor they are currently on, and what floor they are heading
to. We have yet but plan to implement a visual system that lets the player know
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what floor they are on while they are wandering about. Hospitals do a great
job of having wayfinding aids, and a few times players have specifically
referenced them as exhibiting the type of environmental navigation solution
they would want to see in Ardum. The rooms in Ardum will be labeled, and each
floor will be labeled as well.

Developer Commentary

Fig. 9. “Developer Commentary in Field in Ardum”. Author’s screenshot.
Back when we were still trying to figure out how the designer’s voice
would emerge through Ardum, it was suggested to me that we use the tried and
true paradigm of developer’s commentary but with a simple change: instead of
leaving it as an optional choice for the hyper-interested gamer, it would be an
integral part of the game. Ardum would be partially comprised of and
inseparable from its own meta-narrative.
Ardum has a very specific message, and at first we were planning on
conveying this message by using a series of specific vignettes and clearly
demarcating transitions. Each vignette would be a short experience that was
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hyperreal (in order to achieve quick understanding) but with a singular
subversive property (like a surprise or twist) that would contain all the
meaning for that vignette. However, using developer’s commentary seemed
like a much better solution. Nothing is more straightforward than saying
verbatim exactly what you want someone to understand, so it would allow us to
be much more explicit with Ardum’s meaning. Also there was a fundamental
conflict between the idea of using subversion to convey meaning and achieving
a sense of intimacy in a game. Subversion and plot twists push the viewer or
player away and create distance, while intimacy is a feeling of being close.
Using developer commentary gives us more of a chance to create a feeling of
closeness between the player and the designer. We quickly transitioned and
adopted the idea of using commentary to meet our goals for Ardum.
The Ardum team made another significant transition while actually
implementing the developer commentary. There were plenty of times when, on
the brink of implementation and in the face of design documents, charts and
graphs, the design team would realize that we still were not on the same page
about really important concepts. This was one of those times. One plan was to
implement the developer commentary flexibly from the beginning: instead of
using the opt-in floating clickable items that usually pervade the game space
when in commentary mode, I wanted to use Ardum’s terminals to deliver the
commentary content from the beginning. This way, when the player
approached a terminal, they would occasionally get commentary talking
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instead of Ardum. There was a lot of resistance to this idea from the Ardum
team. Using terminals for the developer commentary from the start not only
severely limited the Player’s opportunity to receive commentary, but it also
stilted our opportunity to change the way the commentary emerged from the
game and, in calling attention to that change, inject meaning into it. This led us
to the idea of defining not only the developer commentary, but the progression
of the entire game according to diegetic vs. nondiegetic features.

Fig. 10. “Weekly design meeting”. Author’s images.
We drew multitudinous charts trying to explain this idea to each other,
but the concept remains easiest to explain with language. We decided to make
the story arc of the game progress along a convergence of the diegetic and
nondiegetic narratives. As the game experience progresses, the diegetic
narrative evolves as one would expect. The diegetic narrative is the story that
we use to sink the player into the experience, it provides the role that the
player is engaging with while she is playing the game. At the beginning of the
game, the nondiegetic story (as delivered through the developer commentary)
is the opposite: it is being told outside of the diegetic story. It happens alongside
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but externally to the space opera, it is on the outside looking in, it is breaking
the fourth wall and addressing the player precisely and commenting on the
things that the player is doing on a meta level. However over the course of the
game, the nondiegetic narrative scoots closer and closer to the diegetic
narrative until at the end of the game they are one and the same. The
commentary breaks away from the confinement of the tiny “DevCom Cookies”
and starts emerging from Ardum’s terminals instead. One of the defining
moments of convergence happens when the player must rely on information
from the commentary in order to continue playing in the diegetic world. This
merge is our attempt to force the player to look at one thing, and then continue
looking while we swap it out for something similar. We want the player to
become enthralled with her relationship to Ardum, to trust her, depend on her,
care for her, and then realize that her relationship with Ardum is very similar
to her relationship to the Designer. This philosophy for how to teach the player
a complicated concept is now the basis for Ardum’s design, and it has changed
how we approached the details of the game ever since.

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Miscellaneous Complete Misses

Fig. 11. “Field in Ardum”. Author’s screenshot.
By playtesting with people who know nothing about the game, we have
learned that there are certain things that do not come across at all, and we are
currently working on solutions to those problems.
The first problem is that players have no idea that the wheat field they
start out in is a hologram. In the 20+ playtests so far, only one person with no
prior knowledge of that design has been able to deduce that fact. Our plan is to
use additional sound design and visual cues to help the player understand
what’s going on. For example, we will implement a voice clip of Ardum saying
“Hologram complete” that plays before the hologram fades out. We also want to
have a grid over the sky in the wheat field that matches the grid pattern lining
the walls of the holodeck (or as Ardum calls it, “Simulation Chamber”), but so
far that feature just reminds people of The Hunger Games movie trilogy.
The second occluded aspect of the game is Ardum’s name. An extremely
observant and detail-oriented player will often read the label on Ardum’s
terminals and see “Ardum” written there, but most people never see it and if
Benavides 25
they do they do not recognize any importance in the label. Players are
therefore able to play through the entire experience (as it exists thus far)
without ever learning the name of the character they are speaking to. Since
Ardum and the Commander are supposed to be extremely close companions, it
does not make sense for the Player to not be able to think about that character
on a first name basis, especially since she will be learning the names of the
developers through the developer commentary throughout the game. I believe
the solution will have to come through environmental design, and perhaps the
writing. Ardum could be self-referential at some point (which seems tricky to do
without being hokey), but there could also just be many more references to the
A.I. throughout the ship (such as on the terminals themselves or in the Ardum
Room.)

Prior Art
Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Fig. 12. A scene from Seven Psychopaths.
Seven Psychopaths is a self-aware film about the process of writing a
Benavides 26
screenplay and creating a story. The “fiction” created by the protagonist is the
same as the fiction of the movie itself. At first, each story proposed by the film is
revealed to have already been true within the film, but eventually the stories
proposed become real after their introduction. The film seems to be written
from within itself. The main character - a writer, an actor, and a psychotic
religious man - all create the story together and gradually become aware of
their meta-roles in the movie.
The setting of Seven Psychopaths is very much a character in the film as
well. The scenes are all very colorful, bright, and sunny, and the characters
spend a lot of time squinting in the sunlight. The opening scene is the
Hollywood sign, and the scenes proceeding take place in iconic Los Angeles
neighborhoods and Joshua Tree National Park. The plot involves the Hollywood
“scene”, and just like Los Angeles itself, the whole setting of the movie feels
hyperreal.
At first, Seven Psychopaths served as a goal for the tonal aims of Ardum.
The silly and lighthearted ways self-referential comments are made, and the
oversaturated and iconic environment was a perfect example of what we
originally hoped to achieve with Ardum: our goal was to create spaces that
were remarkably recognizable and therefore easily subverted, and we wanted
the extradiegetic conversation to be easily noticed, approachable, and friendly.
At this later stage of development, Seven Psychopaths has maintained its
influential status, but for different reasons. We left oversaturated and
Benavides 27
hyperreal environments for a single, tamer one. The shock-factor education of
the player was abandoned for a more immersive experience with gradual,
shifting surprises. With the toning down of the stuff, we toned down the stuff.
Seven Psychopaths remained a solid reference for the structure and content of
a self-aware narrative, and the pacing of a reveal to the viewer (or player).

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Fig. 13. A scene from Stranger Than Fiction.
Stranger than Fiction is another film that has a meta layer. It is not a film
about making a film, rather it is a film about writing a book, but in this movie
the creator and “player” come face-to-face, if you consider the protagonist of
the author’s novel to be a player. The author is writing a book about a
character named Harold Crick, but Harold is also a character in the film and
he can hear the narrative voice of the author. Everything that she writes
actually happens to him, and in his desperate attempts to understand what is
going on, Harold learns about literary devices in order to cope with his
situation.
Benavides 28
Harold’s role in Stranger Than Fiction is a great model for the player
experience in Ardum. The player comes to understand the role of the game’s
“creator”, but she will not become a creator herself. Rather, knowledge of how
the system works enhances the player’s understanding of the world at large,
provides structure for the narrative, and prompts the player to question her
own role and boundaries. Furthermore, the player learns about the thought
that goes into the creation of the game but not so much about the mechanical
skills required, just as Harold Crick got to witness the creation of a story
without understanding the mechanical work that the author endured in order
to write her story. In Ardum’s case, the player comes to understand the role of
the game designer, and, just like in Stranger Than Fiction, the ending of the
game is important and satisfying for both parties.

Adaptation (2002)

Fig. 14. A scene from Adaptation.
Adaptation is, once again, a film about making films. Charlie Kaufman is
both the writer of the screenplay of Adaptation and it’s protagonist, as played
Benavides 29
by Nicolas Cage. In Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman is writing an adaptation of
Susan Orlean’s book “The Orchid Thief”, although it would seem that in reality
he is writing Adaptation itself as the film seems to unfold as he figures out how
to write the story. It feels as though the viewer is watching the film as it is
created.
Adaptation is probably the best example of how I would like to use a
meta narrative to convey meaning to the player. There is a diegetic but 4th
wall-breaking dialog between Kaufman and the audience throughout the film,
and this will be used as a model for how the designer’s voice can come through
to the player in Ardum. Adaptation has two layers of narrative: the story of how
Kaufman comes to write the screenplay, and the story of Orlean and the orchid
thief. In this same way, Ardum will have two layers of narrative: the story of
how a designer creates a game, and the science fictional story of the spaceship
Ardum.

8 ½ (1963)

Fig. 15. A scene from 8 ½.
Benavides 30
Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ is about a filmmaker’s struggle to create artful,
meaningful films while also living up to high expectations, meeting tight
deadlines, and dealing with difficulties in his personal life. The film has many
autobiographical references for Fellini, but autobiographical references are
also part of the narrative as the protagonist of 8 ½, a famous filmmaker named
Guido Anselmi, is creating a movie that reflects strongly his own life, and he
struggles to keep his work out of his personal life and his personal life out of his
work.
Ardum will be reflexive of the process of creating its own medium, but 8 ½
is also a great example of using surreal, dream-like transitions to convey
especially subjective meaning. The famous opening of the film shows Guido
struggling to escape a smoking car in traffic while onlookers watch him suffer.
He escapes and flies away through the sky, only to be dragged back to earth by
his work associates. The rest of the film is occasionally interrupted by Guido’s
daydreams, which are wishful reincarnations of his real life. In Ardum, I would
like to use similarly surreal moments to convey the message of the game. For
example, a weird, dream-like, interactive sequence could help reinforce the
feeling of designing a game for someone besides yourself, or a surreal
non-interactive sequence could convey tone and break up narrative beats.

Benavides 31
The New Journalism

Fig. 16. A scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The New Journalism movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s embraced the
subjective as a viable filter for describing worldly truths. New Journalism is a
combination of truth and fiction, personal and universal, art and
documentary. In pieces considered to be part of the movement, the writer
abandons the objectivity of traditional journalism, and instead inserts their
own personal opinions and experiences on the subject matter. New Journalism
writers often completely submerge themselves in their subject, becoming a part
of the very thing they are writing about. They become a piece of the truth they
are discovering, and by telling their own story they are also informing the
public about the larger context.
Like the writers, filmmakers, and others of the New Journalism
movement, Ardum seeks to look at reality through a subjective lens. It will tell a
story about a very real thing, but it will tell this story as it exists through the
eyes of the designer. In addition, and as an interactive piece is uniquely able to

Benavides 32
do, Ardum will bring the player into the story and allow her to be a part of this
truth while simultaneously learning about another’s experience of it.
At first I wanted to use the New Journalism movement as inspiration for
the way in which I conveyed meaning to the player. I wanted to make them
experience my idea in an exaggerated and hyperreal way, to help them really
get the essence of an idea as subjectively experienced by me, and then to show
what it all means, and why I wanted them to see what I see.
A big difference between what I wanted to do with Ardum and what the
New Journalists did is that I did not actually want to make the players make a
game. New Journalism is about truth in the starkest sense - the journalists did
not just report on their material, they lived it and then told their audience
what they did, what they lived, what they felt and experienced. I wanted to tell
the players a subjective and true story, but I did not actually want to make
them do what I do in order to understand that story. I did not want to make a
game about making a game, rather, I wanted to make a game about a feeling, a
relationship, an abstract concept. The fact that this idea is centralized around
the creation and playing of games is incredibly important to the overall story,
but it is not important at all to what that idea is in the end. The emotion, the
noun, exists because of a verb, but the noun is not the verb itself. For me and
therefore for Ardum, the idea is more important than the verb within which
the idea exists. I think that is why I did not want to make the player have to
actually fill my shoes in this game. Making a game is incredibly difficult and
Benavides 33
filled with minutiae that would not be interesting in the scope of a game that I
am working with.
The idea of using New Journalism to inspire this project distilled into the
concept of teaching someone an idea by letting them experience that idea first,
and then allowing them to reflect on it. An abstract concept is hard to get
across in an interactive narrative.

The Stanley Parable

Fig. 17. “A common player’s choice in The Stanley Parable”. Author’s screenshot.
The Stanley Parable is a self-referential game created by Davey Wreden
about the power of the narrative voice in games. The designer’s ideas are
represented by a strong and blunt narrative voice. The fourth wall is broken as
the narrator comments on the player character’s choices, but the player’s
actions are so directly addressed that the narrator is basically speaking directly
to the player. The intention behind the whole game is to provide commentary
and open questions about a particular style of narrative delivery, and it does so
by providing both the subject matter and the conversation.
Benavides 34
Ardum will speak directly to the player in a similar fashion, however by
delivering a nondiegetic message through diegetic means, Ardum can be a
game about making games without being overly didactic or completely
dependent on monologue to convey meaning.

Thirty Flights of Loving

Fig. 18. “Drunk people in 30 Flights of Loving”. Author’s screenshot.
Thirty Flights of Loving is a great example of how Ardum will be scoped. It
is a complete narrative arc that takes less than 15 minutes to get through. The
length makes it easy to replay, and the intrigue created by the story makes you
want to replay it. It is polished, deliberate, and unique. While there are many
aspects of Thirty Flights that are unrelated to the goals of Ardum, it is a perfect
example of the density and size that Ardum will seek to achieve.
The Player is an active participant in the story, they live the idea, but the
game is more about using filmatic jump cuts in an interactive space than it is
about the story itself. I would argue that the narrative is actually pretty dense
and hard to comprehend, and while the tone is clear and the presence of a
Benavides 35
world with a history and a future is easy to grasp, exactly what that story is is
hard to figure out. However it is an excellent experiment in the usage of film
technique to put a story together in an interactive way, to specifically constrain
the player in ways that let them remain an actor in the story without ruining
certain aesthetics commonly used to great effect in movies, such as framing
and pacing.

Game Developer Commentary (Example Commentary: http://tinyurl.com/kk5sg3s)

Fig. 19. “Developer Commentary in 30 Flights of Loving”. Author’s screenshot.
Just like DVDs will often have Director's Commentary, video games
sometimes have Developer Commentary. In 30 Flights of Loving, for example,
Brendan Chung places widgets throughout the game, and the player can click
on these widgets to read the developer’s notes about artistic decisions or
inspirations in that particular location of the game. Valve does the same thing
in their games, such as Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal, except their widgets
produce audio recordings of the developers rather than text popups. Valve’s

Benavides 36
commentary is also different in that the various members of the team create
the commentary, as opposed to Blendo Games’ singular developer.
Ardum will turn this optional content into a primary feature. The
gameplay in Ardum will feature developers’ commentary that can not be
turned off. The commentary will be about the development of a game,
described by the developers of Ardum, but the game Ardum is the only real
experience that will exist. Ardum is the game that the developers will describe.

Conclusion
At this stage of production, the way I talk and write about this project has
changed, but my most basic objectives for Ardum have remained the same. In
playtesting the game and discussing its concepts with peers and professors, I
realize that I have maintained my idea about what this project is about at it’s
heart, but my path to the finish line has been challenged, morphed, and
refined by the conversations and experiences of its making.
I used to say that this project was about the exchange of gifts between
the player and designer, but when the natural inclination of that discussion
was to demand an explicit swap between designer and player, I decided that it
was the reason for the gift-giving, it was the feeling behind what it means to
want to give a gift, that was more important. Exchanging gifts was a metaphor
for the true feeling, and I did not want the core of Ardum to be a metaphor
(even though it’s outermost shell is currently definitely a metaphor.)
Benavides 37
When I started to say that this project was about gratitude and
validation, that was closer to the mark. I still think it is about gratitude, but it is
the reason for the gratitude that is most important. What I believe now is that
this project is about communication and intimacy. It is about the feeling of joy
that comes from connecting to another human being, and I think that
designing games is a way to propagate and share that kind of joy. Making and
playing games is a way to communicate with another person in an especially
empathetic way. I hope that Ardum helps people to think about and appreciate
that fact, so that we may enjoy it more fiercely and earnestly. Games are good
at nothing if not encouragement to wallow in the good things that it means to
be human together.

Benavides 38
Works Cited
Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Print.
Chung, Brendan. 30 Flights of Loving. Blendo Games. 2012. PC, Mac.
Fellini, Federico, dir. 8 ½. Cineriz, 1963. Film.
Forster, Zach, dir. Stranger Than Fiction. Columbia Pictures, 2007. Film.
Gardner, Helen, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A
Concise Global History. 2nd Edition. Stamford: Wadsworth Publishing, 2001. pg.
364
Hubbard, L. Ron. “Typewriter in the Sky (Part 1 of 2)". Unknown Fantasy
Fiction. John W. Campbell, Jr.
Jonze, Spike, dir. Adaptation. Sony Pictures, 2002. Film.
Klump, Tom. “Wayfinding System for Denver Children’s Hospital.”
Photograph. Portfolio. InkTank Design, 2014. Web. 10 March 2014.
McDonagh, Martin, dir. Seven Psychopaths. CBS Films, 2012. Film.
Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Comedy in the
Making. Trans. Edward Storer. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922. Print.
Pope, Lucas. Papers, Please. 2013. PC, Mac, Linux.
Spurlock, Morgan, dir. Supersize Me. Kathbur Pictures, 2004. Film.
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to
the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1972. Print.
Vin PM. “Left 4 Dead 2 Developer Commentary 1 of 6.” Online Video Clip.
Benavides 39
YouTube. YouTube, Nov 17. 2007. Web. Sept. 19. 2010.
Verneau, Loan. Paralect. 2013. PC, Mac.
Wreden, Davey. The Stanley Parable. 2011. PC, Mac.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Benavides, Andrea (author)

Core Title Ardum: a project about the player-designer relationship

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 05/01/2014

Defense Date 05/15/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag design,designer,diegesis,meta,metanarrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,player,Relationship,Science fiction,Surrealism,video game

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Brinson, Peter (committee chair), Kratky, Andreas (committee member), Sharp, Brian (committee member)

Creator Email benavandrea@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-409562

Unique identifier UC11297306

Identifier etd-BenavidesA-2483.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-409562 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BenavidesA-2483-0.pdf

Dmrecord 409562

Document Type Thesis

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Rights Benavides, Andrea

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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