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Historicity and sociality in game design: adventures in ludic archaeology
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Historicity and sociality in game design: adventures in ludic archaeology
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HISTORICITY AND SOCIALITY IN GAME DESIGN: ADVENTURES IN LUDIC ARCHAEOLOGY by Joseph Carter Osborn A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS (INTERACTIVE MEDIA) May 2012 Copyright 2012 Joseph Carter Osborn ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Vikingr has had a long and troubled life, and I have learned more about my own foibles from it than from nearly any other project. It reminded me repeatedly of the importance of a phenomenological approach to game design. When I shut my ears to block those reminders my ever-patient wife dared to tell me what I needed to hear: that the game was incomprehensible. The success of the project and the development of the method described in this thesis are owed to her earnest wishes for my success. Special thanks to Steve Anderson, my committee chair. His work and perspective on historiography deeply influenced my attitudes towards the same and his seemingly- anarchic approach to classroom discussion will undoubtedly shape my philosophy of teaching. I would also like to thank my committee members: Anne Balsamo, who along with Steve convinced me to pursue a Ph.D.; Jeremy Gibson, who helped me through some difficult design problems; Vincent Diamante, discussions with whom helped form the germ of the game; and my advisor Lou Castle, whose pragmatic advice I failed to comprehend in the fall and finally understood in the spring. During the past three years, I have learned as much from my peers as from my faculty members; I would like to thank the Interactive Media class of 2012 for helping me overcome my programmer-ism in time for my upcoming computer science Ph.D. Thanks to my good friend Andy Matuschak for always wanting to talk about my latest design plans, dense and scrambled though they were, despite how busy he was. Finally, I thank my parents for their unwavering encouragement and support. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii List of Figures iv Abstract v Introduction 1 Motivation 3 Social games versus social network games 3 Social systems and game systems 4 Literature Review 5 Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics 5 Social Mechanics 5 Asynchronous and Social Network Games 6 Vikings 11 Sources 11 Experimental Archaeology 12 Vikingr 14 Social and Ubiquitous 17 Visual Style 19 Mechanical, Historical, and Aesthetic Fidelity 22 Selective Simulation 24 MDA For Adaptation 28 Results 30 Conclusions 31 Towards social games on social networks 31 Ludic Archaeology 31 MDA For Adaptation 31 Works Cited 33 Appendix: Social Mechanics 35 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: “You have 250 witches” 9 Figure 2: King of Dragon Pass 10 Figure 3: Household Management 14 Figure 4: Sailing 15 Figure 5: Raiding 15 Figure 6: Visitation Results, Options, Feast Supplies, and Household Policy 16 Figure 7: Vikingr (Vikings carrying items) 20 Figure 8: Vikingr (Viking traits and job scheduler) 21 iv ABSTRACT Vikingr is an asynchronous multiplayer social game that adapts Viking Age (700s-1000s C.E.) social practices and structures in the hopes of producing a synthetic Viking society. Players manage Viking households, sail the open seas, raid Viking and foreigner households, and develop economic and political relationships with other players to ensure their own survival and prosperity. To successfully prosecute this project, the author came to devise: a semi-formal method for adapting historical situations to interactive simulations; a set of criteria for evaluating the quality, internal consistency, and historical fidelity of such simulations; and a technique for constraining the scope of adaptation to only what is necessary for the player’s enjoyment and the designer’s aesthetic goals. The method, MDA for Adaptation, is grounded in Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek’s Mechanics, Dynamics, & Aesthetics (MDA) framework (2). It comprises four steps: First, the available sources must be matched onto the elements of MDA; second, the designer must select a few primary aesthetics on which to focus their design effort; third, the actions, rules, and material reality described by the historical sources must be rephrased as game mechanics in pursuit of the chosen aesthetics; and fourth, selective simulation must be applied to balance mechanical, historical, and aesthetic fidelity with respect to each other and to the project’s scope. Applying this method to Vikingr vastly improved development speed, the player experience, and the comprehensibility of the historical message. v INTRODUCTION Vikingr is an asynchronous multiplayer social game that adapts Viking Age (700s-1000s C.E.) social practices and structures in the hopes of producing a synthetic Viking society. Players manage Viking households, sail the open seas, raid Viking and foreigner households, and develop economic and political relationships with other players to ensure their own survival and prosperity. The project’s goal is to encode the historical systems and processes of Viking culture in a multiplayer game so that players will, for a time, live out at least some of the ethics and mores of settlement-age Iceland. The everyday meaning of the term social game suggests parallel single-player Facebook games with some exchange of tokens. Vikingr expands on this simplistic approach to sociality with systematically modeled social obligation and social gameplay between players. The problem of selecting and implementing interesting, aesthetically appropriate interactions is nontrivial, especially when adapting real-world systems and historical situations. The central contribution of this thesis comprises a design process for this type of adaptation. The methodology behind Vikingr was devised to solve the challenges faced in the project’s development. Grounded in historical sources, it extends the practice of experimental archaeology into game design via the Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics (MDA) framework (Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek 2). This framework has been extended for adapting historical situations and general works by means of a key insight: Since any simulation or account necessarily abstracts and simplifies its source material, the key is to 1 adapt and include only what is of value to the overall aesthetic goal. Complexity, depth, and fine-grained historical accuracy should only be added to the simulation when simple and shallow approaches do not satisfy the project’s goals. This is a rephrasing of Procedural Minimalism (Osborn 9-10) in the language of MDA. During the project’s early development, an ad hoc adaptation process was employed; the more successful second half leveraged this new, more formal, and more theoretically-grounded approach. 2 MOTIV ATION SOCIAL GAMES VERSUS SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES What do we talk about when we talk about social games? The modern sense of the word may be better phrased as social network games, since it has more to do with word- of-mouth advertising than social interaction. Certainly, there are social elements to social network games—gifts of clicks in various guises, reciprocity of those gifts, strategy guides written by interested players, signifiers of status, ways to enact identity, and friend lists that serve as leaderboards—but the limited breadth and depth of these interactions makes them basically single-player games with a sprinkling of social interaction on top. To illustrate how impoverished modern social network games’ concept of sociality is, consider Dani Bunten Berry’s 1983 video game M.U.L.E. A four-player game around a single shared computer, M.U.L.E. systematically provides for (or supports) leaderboards, auctions, gifts (via a collusion option in the auction interface), zero-sum resource consumption, handicapping of odds, secret information, helping other players, the writing of strategy guides, verbal attacks to influence other players’ performance, deception, ganging-up on players, ostracism (the many denying common resources to the few), the tragedy of the commons (the depletion of public goods), teamwork, arbitrage of resources, and tournaments spanning several play sessions. Not only are these mechanics tightly integrated into the game’s design and broader in variety than in social network game design, they also confer tangible in-game benefits to players who can master them. 3 Is there something intrinsic to games on social networks—or asynchronous multiplayer games—that makes them poor vehicles for actual social play? This is one of the questions I hope to answer with Vikingr. SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND GAME SYSTEMS The word “social” suggests “society”. Especially in long-burning games without a clear delineation of matches, the population of players can better resemble participants in a society than players in a game. Different games are surrounded and supported by different communities of practice with different norms and mores; but why? Can a player community be designed in the same way a game is designed? Vikingr represents an extension of and elaboration on my longstanding interest in questions of structuration and agency in games. By encoding some actual social rules and practices of Viking civilization as game systems, I hope to turn players into digital reenactors—a parallel society which lives out a limited version of Viking life in its own frame. How could such practices be realized in a game? This encoding and testing process draws from and contributes to the body of knowledge on the roles of structure and rules in the formation of societies. Game designers could also pursue research on the influence of a game’s mechanics on its player community to better design for certain types of social interaction and to support their community management efforts. 4 LITERATURE REVIEW MECHANICS, DYNAMICS, AND AESTHETICS To address the challenge of selecting and configuring game rules in pursuit of a higher-level experiential goal, Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek put forth the Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics (MDA) framework (2). The three terms correspond to a game’s rules, its runtime behavior (the interactions of those rules), and the emotional responses of the game’s players, respectively. This produces a kind of mediated communication: designers trying to evoke a certain aesthetic will first consider which play dynamics could produce the desired feeling and then devise mechanics that support those dynamics; players experiencing phenomena will indirectly observe the game’s dynamics and try to master the underlying mechanics to influence the system’s results. MDA is a useful lens for viewing design problems. The central question to this thesis is adaptation: how can real social practices be adapted as gameplay? One approach suggested by Koster is to analogize mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics to Giddens’s notions of structure, modality, and interaction (29) respectively. Vikingr takes a similar tack, with an understanding of these elements of Viking Age Icelandic society from the law-books and literature of and shortly after the period. SOCIAL MECHANICS In an update of his 2010 talk, Koster describes a catalogue of some 40 social mechanics. Koster pulls from sources as diverse as the Game Developers’ Conference and Derrida, offering a useful taxonomy with some basis in network theory, post- 5 structuralism, and the practice of game design. While some of these may be better termed “dynamics” in MDA parlance, the list is a valuable starting point for social game design. This paper will use Koster’s terms when discussing social mechanics; they are provided in the appendix. The specific definitions of the social mechanics are not of great importance to this thesis; the existence of the catalogue as a resource from which designers can draw is enough to describe the process of adaptation that this work concerns. ASYNCHRONOUS AND SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES For a representative survey of games to which Vikingr refers, four titles will illustrate general trends and specific points of divergence: Zynga’s Castleville, Airship Studios’ Skyrates, Gogogic’s Vikings of Thule, and A Sharp’s King of Dragon Pass. Castleville is a 2011 Zynga release wherein individual players expand and enhance a castle town, spending resources to unlock new land for development and executing both free-standing actions and chains of character-associated quests. A rough linear narrative accompanies the main series of quests and characters. Occasionally, enemies will appear in the player’s town and prevent the extraction of resources within their areas of influence, and these enemies must be defeated to restore productive capacity. Castleville is best considered as a massively parallel single-player game of status-seeking. The main social mechanics employed by Castleville—and social network games generally—are gifts, reciprocity, signifiers of status, leaderboards, and the enactment of 6 individual identity. Leaderboards emerge in the so-called neighbor bar, which tracks the relative status scores of a player’s friends. This bar is also the nexus for some of the types of gifts available in Castleville: by clicking on a friend’s portrait, a player can visit that neighbor’s town and give a limited number of clicks per day to aid the neighbor, which immediately and automatically provides points and resources to the helper. This mitigates the time and attention expenditure involved in the gift-giving and provides an incentive to give gifts, but it should not be confused with reciprocation. There are three more primary interfaces for gifting in Castleville. Players may give one item per day per player to their Facebook friends, players may broadcast gifts using their wall feed, and players may broadcast a request for a gift of attention for various purposes. Notably, none of these gifts—even things like energy and production resources—come from a player’s own inventory; what a player is giving up is the limited resource of the gift-giving opportunity itself. On receiving a personally-targeted gift, players are given a chance to reciprocate; but again, this comes at no cost to the reciprocating player. This gives some of the social feeling and benefit of gifts and reciprocation, but with little or no personal economic cost in game terms. It is my opinion that a gift without a cost has limited social value. Even seemingly zero-cost exchanges like compliments and salutations could be said to rely on scarcity and reciprocity for their value—and in any case, a robust representation of a society would seem to demand a richer transactional grammar than Castleville offers. 7 Airship Studios’ massively single-player game Skyrates launched in 2006 and still hosts a lively player community. Skyrates supports sporadic play without resorting to the daily turn limits or energy mechanics common in asynchronous games by mapping in- game travel and related actions to real time. Vikingr borrows its asynchronous gameplay from Skyrates along with the general concept that a player’s attention can influence the outcome of an otherwise mostly automatic process. Social play in Skyrates is generally either indirect or mediated through the game’s chat or forums. The primary social mechanics include signifiers of status, arbitrage of resources, leaderboards, helping of other players, player community, the writing of strategy guides, guild-versus-guild pursuit of signifiers of status, and user-generated content. A 2011 release by the Icelandic game developer Gogogic, Vikings of Thule—shut down in 2012, presumably due to weak revenues—was one of the few games that earnestly attempted to represent a historically grounded Viking fiction. Players, represented by an individual Viking chieftain, managed a county’s population of farmers, employees, and kin. On top of the numerically-oriented household management game, Vikings of Thule supported both single-player quest gameplay and player-versus-player duels (a reference to the holmgang duels portrayed in the sagas). The overarching goal was to accumulate the most influence (status points) and rise to the top of the leaderboards. Vikings of Thule had a few drawbacks that limited its quality as a producer of Viking societies. In order of increasing damage to the Viking ethos: the simulation 8 overemphasized the individual chieftain, it centered on combat rather than politics, it focused on the Viking ideal versus the actual, it introduced a variety of supernatural missions and quests of a more mythical than historical nature, and it put a very high level of abstraction on the Viking household. Figure 1: “You have 250 witches” Since Vikings of Thule is no longer playable, my understanding of its social mechanics is limited to an appraisal of the game’s documentation. The addressed mechanics seem to include status, leaderboards, adversarial zero-sum resource consumption in combat, non-zero-sum resource consumption in exploiting the land’s resources, gifts, reciprocity, identity, trading, and strategy guides. Surprisingly, the best extant Viking social game is A Sharp’s single-player iOS game King of Dragon Pass. First released in 1999 for personal computers, King of Dragon Pass is set in the fictional world and history of Glorantha. It combines an abstract 9 and numerically-oriented politico-economic simulation (as in Vikings of Thule) with a series of parameterized random event chains. These events are illustrated with full-color images and the player may select one of several options, advised by a ring of advocates. The simulation is made relevant to the fiction by fulfilling prerequisites for and persisting some of the effects of the choices made in these events. Figure 2: King of Dragon Pass What makes King of Dragon Pass a more satisfying Viking-like experience is its emphasis on ethics. Playing like a modern Westerner will produce outcomes that are suboptimal or even actively harmful to the clan’s chances for survival. In this case, the ethos is that of a fictional social group; but this group’s practices and beliefs are clearly inspired by those of the Vikings. Whereas Vikings of Thule could be called a social network game about Vikings, King of Dragon Pass is a game about enacting a Viking (or at least a Viking-like) society. Social mechanics, even in this single-player game, include helping other players, writing strategy guides, and community involvement. 10 VIKINGS It is common to use the word Viking to refer to the ethnic group of Scandinavians in the Viking Age. Even so, it is worthwhile to remember that the word’s original sense is that of an activity or an occupation, not an ethnicity (Simpson 25). While it is convenient to refer to medieval Scandinavians as Vikings, it is important to remember that they were primarily subsistence farmers, landowners, blacksmiths, traders, merchants, politicians, and poets—and only raiders on occasion. SOURCES Our knowledge of Viking societies is limited and fragmentary, but there are three main types of historical sources that I have considered for my thesis (and one set of modern practices). First, it is important to consider the Viking ideal: what, in myth and legend and proverb, a culture interprets as the best way to live. One excellent source for these legends is the Poetic Edda, a catalogue of the Old Norse poetic oral tradition recorded sometime around the 13th century. In addition, I feel that the idealized and sensationalized accounts of love, battle, and mythical weapons in the heroic Völsungasaga provide valuable insight into the sacred values of the Vikings. The Icelandic family sagas (the Íslendingasögur) were also recorded around the 13th and 14th centuries. These depict historical events of the 10th and 11th century concerning families which settled in Iceland. They also describe valuable mundane details of the interactions of Vikings, although they retain some sensational attributes. 11 The final source to which Vikingr refers is Grágás, a compendium that reflects the 12th century Icelandic code of law. Grágás was composed post-Christianization (as are most of the written accounts of Viking myth and saga), so its accuracy as a representation of the Viking Age is uncertain—yet its tenets are likely based in matters of practical utility to the Icelandic settlers (laws govern everything from the height and maintenance of pasture walls to the penalty for knocking a hat off a man’s head from the front and behind, with or without chinstrap), and the material difficulties of living in Iceland did not change significantly post-Christianization. EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY Since reliable documentation of the Viking Age is hard to come by and rarely complete, the tools of experimental archaeology have been deployed to try to verify hypotheses and fill in gaps in our understanding of Viking artifacts and practices. Examples of experimental archaeology include reconstructing Viking ships from preserved examples and documented practices; cooking using ingredients and techniques that would have been available to Vikings; or ice-skating on bone skates as described in the sagas. While experimental archaeology has limited utility in constructing new hypotheses or explaining the reasons behind material culture, it “can contribute an otherwise unobtainable familiarity with material culture and a range of possible solutions to problems of archaeological interpretation” (Carrell 8). The design process and overall sentiment of Vikingr are indebted to the spirit of experimental archaeology. Vikingr uses a computer-arbitrated system of rules to create a 12 toy universe where players can participate in Viking-like practices and become ludic archaeologists of a sort. By giving players a set of rules and feedback mechanisms that roughly mirrors some elements of Viking Age life, Vikingr could help validate our understanding of Viking society and social structure. 13 VIKINGR Vikingr features three primary game modes with distinct gameplay: household management, sailing, and visiting other households. In the household management game, players assign their Vikings to household tasks. These tasks take real time to complete, but they may be hurried or enhanced by the application of player attention to task-specific mini-games. Players also allocate resources to their larders to give to visiting guests and set policies for how well to treat visitors of varying relationship status—kin, friends, strangers, and enemies. Two special household tasks, guarding and entertaining, provide extra defenses against raiders and better social interactions with friendly visitors, respectively. Finally, the household mode is used to launch sailing expeditions with sets of Vikings and loaded goods. Figure 3: Household Management The sailing mode begins by showing the player a map of known locations. Sailing takes a set time depending on the distance to be traveled, but players may use a multitouch gestural interface to manually sail the ship to speed it to its destination, to take advantage of special features in the environment, or to explore the open sea. The player 14 may switch between sailing and household modes at will, or quit the game and return later. This mode also provides a map which shows locations the player has previously visited. Figure 4: Sailing When arriving at another household, the player is given certain options depending on whether it is a Viking home or a Skraeling (foreigner) settlement. Skraelings may only be raided. On a raid, players rapidly tap the goods they wish to carry away to their longship; tapping their own characters will make them run a little faster. Once the desired number of items has been taken, the player may escape with their loot. Figure 5: Raiding 15 Viking households may additionally be granted gifts, traded with, or offered political dealings. Notably, Viking homes can greet their guests with hospitality, food, and gifts of varying quality. Munificent players will quickly accrue many friends and allies who will come to their aid if another player raids or unfairly treats them. Figure 6: Visitation Results, Options, Feast Supplies, and Hosting Policy Deaths and injuries during raids are inevitable, but if a raider happens to wound or kill the defender’s Vikings, wergeld must be paid. Sometimes, the deaths of the raiders can be set against the deaths of the defenders, but at a lower effective exchange rate. Failure to pay wergeld against a Viking clan with friends willing to bear witness can lead to legal action at the Althing—higher fines, or possibly outlawry (a state where exiled outlaws can be killed without compensation if found in their native lands). 16 Since it is unreasonable to expect that players will research Viking customs before engaging in play, the game’s systems provide contextual feedback to reinforce the system’s processes. For example, if a farm owner has not set aside sufficient goods to host visitors to their household, the farm owner and the visitor will each see a summary of the visit that paints the owner in an unflattering light. Another example: if an enemy Viking is killed or crippled on a raid, the attacker is provided a button to offer wergeld; if he fails to offer it, the defender is provided the option to demand it; and if the attacker refuses to pay, the victim is encouraged to bring a lawsuit alongside their own allies, set against the enemy’s relations (forged through trade, feasts, and other positive transactions), which could result in outlawry for the attacker or an embarrassing outcome for the victim. These actions are encouraged by presenting them with a bit of informative and suggestive text. SOCIAL AND UBIQUITOUS To help players understand and live out a Viking ethos, Vikingr had to capture the social processes of the Viking Age as game processes. I could have followed in the footsteps of King of Dragon Pass and devised a lot of pre-authored content that encouraged players to act like Vikings, or I might have invented AI agents that acted with and against the player to develop a sense of membership in society. Since either of these would have taken a lot of time—and since both would merely simulate sociality—I decided that I needed players to form Viking societies with real people, and that I could encode Viking social processes directly as the means by which players interact. From 17 there, the design question became: “How can I help players feel like members of a society?” The natural place to begin answering that question was Koster’s list of social mechanics. Guided by the Viking aesthetics of being a gracious host and a good guest, treating others as you are treated, and pursuing legal solutions to inter-clan problems before resorting to bloody vengeance, I perused Koster’s catalogue for relevant mechanics. To satisfy “being a gracious host”, for example, I selected mechanics such as relative measures of status, gift-giving, reciprocation, iterative interaction and trust, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and ostracism (as a punishment for refusing to participate in this social activity). Other social mechanics I made use of to various ends include trade, contract, and supply chains. In order to develop the sense that players were part of a separate, technologically- mediated Viking society, I thought it was important that players always have their Viking life ready to hand. To encourage players to interact with their Viking peers frequently, the design had to support low-engagement gameplay as well as more intense sessions when players are new to the game or have the time to spend on it. Skyrates provided an exemplar here in its use of attention economy and keyhole gameplay. Vikingr expands the means by which players can incrementally and opportunistically provide input to long- running asynchronous processes, and as an iOS game that requires only occasional Internet connectivity it is suitably ubiquitous and accessible for play while using public transit or waiting for elevators. 18 VISUAL STYLE Vikingr was a difficult game to describe to potential teammates. The setting was unusual, the project’s goals were lofty, and the design itself was poorly understood even by its creator until halfway through the game’s development. The author’s own expertise in computer programming made it possible to implement the work as a solo developer. An animator was involved early on (though he could not continue to work pro bono after the first summer), and a composer provided several music tracks on a profit sharing arrangement. The combination of poor access to domain experts and difficulty in describing the game to outsiders for the first six months of its development led to a self- sufficiency born of necessity in the game’s visual aesthetics. Although the low-resolution art was born of hardship, it was created with care. Vikings and Skraelings are assembled from sets of parts—helmets, hair, heads, beards (for men), bodies, and arms—so that each can be visually distinct while fitting a consistent style. Foreground and background are delineated by occlusion as well as relative brightness, with color coding deployed to match stockpiles with their neighboring work areas. Visual metaphors are deployed where possible and where the development effort has been spent. Goods pile up rather than merely increasing a number somewhere. During the project’s first half, goods were represented first as abstract numbers and then as items extracted from a bottomless bin of supplies; both approaches made the household’s property feel too distant and unrelated to the act of play. A select few of the 19 icons that represented various types of goods in the original production-chain household simulation were repurposed as tangible elements: the goods themselves, rather than mere decorations on a numeric readout. Figure 7: Vikingr (Vikings carrying items) As Vikingr shifted from its inception as a simulation game to more action-oriented gameplay, the role of visual representation shifted too. At first, an isometric 3D representation was employed. This was selected for schematic purposes and to enable combat strategies such as hiding behind buildings. The focus of the game shifted away from combat and into household management, but the perspective remained. Vikingr accumulated more and more text and interface elements, at one point boasting a complete inter-Viking relationship and family history definition interface. I had hoped that accumulating vast quantities of player-derived information would enable me to generate sagas dynamically—but all of this content quickly overwhelmed players. 20 Figure 8: Vikingr (Viking traits and job scheduler) 21 MECHANICAL, HISTORICAL, AND AESTHETIC FIDELITY Clearly, something had to give in Vikingr. Faithfully and completely representing Viking culture and relationships within a single game proved infeasible, and either breadth or depth had to give—the simulation was too deep and too inscrutable, the historical realism was stifling, and the game was full of conflicting motivations. Discussions of adapting a work—or a socioeconomic system—inevitably must consider the fidelity of the adaptation. But fidelity is a complicated concept, and simulation and interactivity make it more complex still. I consider three different types of fidelity with respect to recreating a historical situation as a playable simulation. Mechanical fidelity is the completeness of a simulation on its own terms. This could also be seen as realism with respect to physics, biology, and chemistry. Do Vikings age and die? Do they get sick? Are there winds when sailing? Does food spoil? High mechanical fidelity can help produce emergent outcomes and provide mappings from players’ human experience onto game rules. It can also overcomplicate a game’s rule set, requiring ever more detailed interfaces and input/output mechanisms to help the player understand causal relationships between player action and game feedback. Historical fidelity is the game’s concordance with the historical record. Games with high historical fidelity accurately represent and model the real-world system under consideration. While high historical fidelity seems like an intrinsic good, there may be places where too much historical fidelity could complicate either the game design or the player’s willingness to accept the behaviors required by the game: Can players live in 22 towns? Must they practice religion (and if so, which)? Can they choose to be primarily farmers, or traveling merchants, or raiders? Can players take slaves? When deciding whether to include or to omit a historical fact or system, the main concerns have been technical and scheduling feasibility, reinforcement or disruption of the desired aesthetic, and the risk of rejection by the player. If the goal of this project were only to accurately reproduce the circumstances of Viking Age life, systems like the slave trade would certainly need to be reproduced. Vikingr aims instead to leverage the social systems and constraints of the Viking Age to produce player-to-player interactions that reproduce the ethos of a proper Viking landowner. In the case of slaves, the risk to player engagement presented by the slave trade— seen as morally unacceptable to modern Americans—was greater than the incremental benefit provided by a more accurate representation of trade goods. In other words, a broader variety of goods to trade serves a similar economic purpose to the exchange of raid captives, since there was no significant trade of slaves who were themselves Vikings. This design choice should not be read as an attempt to sanitize or whitewash the medieval slave trade in which Vikings played a substantial role; but the effort required to introduce that system faithfully and the risk of players rejecting the game outright was disproportionate to the marginal benefit of including slaves. As a less controversial example, it can be seen that working for a powerful king (e.g. that of Norway)—a vital plot device in many of the sagas—is not an option in Vikingr. The effort required to represent this transaction is incommensurate with the 23 benefit to the social landscape, since no player will be a powerful king. The most that could be hoped for is that players’ characters would meet up and become friends while working for this powerful figure, but there are many simpler ways to introduce strangers to each other. Finally, aesthetic fidelity—using aesthetic in the sense of the MDA framework— is the game’s compatibility with the desired player experience. Subsistence farming may not make players feel like Vikings; focusing on managing the homestead’s stores can combine the disparate roles and aesthetics of the household manager and the raider in the player. If the game design is too numerically-oriented, it may remove elements like a sense of wonder or immediacy; overly abstract representations damage immediacy and the sense of being there. SELECTIVE SIMULATION Earlier prototypes of Vikingr simulated the personal characteristics, skills, tastes, and foibles of individual Vikings in great detail. Vikings had relationships and histories with each other that were situated in time and logically consistent. They also faithfully reproduced production chains and economic activity in the household. So much effort was put into home life that the sailing and raiding games were barely explored. Furthermore, placing so much systemic emphasis on personalities, relationships, and household management hampered the overall aesthetic—players did not feel like Vikings. In adapting real-world systems to video games, it is important to balance mechanical, historical, and aesthetic fidelity via selective simulation. Any simulation will 24 abstract and simplify its source material; the key is to simulate only what is of value to the overall aesthetic. Complexity and depth should be added to the simulation only when simple and shallow approaches do not satisfy the aesthetic. As an example, the initial prototypes of Vikingr tracked changes in relationship status over time; the final version only tracks the current status. This makes the new system less interesting from a simulation standpoint, but from the player’s perspective this weakness has little impact on the experience of managing relationships in flux. Similarly, a designer could choose to implement trade winds, ocean currents, shipwrecks, sea worms, and storms in the sailing mode; but these implementations could range from simple numerical bonuses to environmental features all the way up to physical modeling of weather systems. As a rule, designers should do the minimum amount of work necessary to evoke the desired emotional response. Players are influenced much more by immediate feedback than long-term control (Klimmt, Hartmann, and Frey), and signaling—what a player expects to be able to do given the game’s signs and signifiers—is integral to a player’s sense of agency and goal formation (Wardrip-Fruin, Mateas, Dow, and Sali). In other words, a player’s perception of the system is more important than the system’s actual capabilities and behavior. Beyond balancing mechanical fidelity versus aesthetic and scheduling concerns, historical fidelity must sometimes be compromised for the sake of gameplay or accessibility. Just as detailed simulations of household production chains and 25 relationships could damage the sense of being a Viking, the inclusion of historically accurate systems could evoke conflicting aesthetics or, worse, induce a severe simulation anxiety that causes the player to reject the game outright (Bogost 131-132). Some inaccuracies or omissions—the balance of farming versus herding in Icelandic settlement, or the practice of slave-trading, for example—are made to streamline gameplay or accommodate modern Western ethics. In cases where two historical rights could make an overall aesthetic wrong, it is best to cut or elide the truths that are less integral to or conflict with the desired player experience. For example, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar tells of Vikings trading with non- Vikings (ch. 46); but in Vikingr, the only social interaction with the Skraelings is raiding. It was important to establish the otherness of the Skraelings in Vikingr, since all the game’s Vikings are player-controlled and all of the Skraelings are AI-controlled. Furthermore, Skraeling clans are not owed wergeld when their members are killed, which reinforces the sense that the Skraelings are sub-human (or at least sub-Viking). Other omissions include service in the courts of kings or chieftains (a popular way to earn fame in the age of the family sagas), the establishment of new households, religious practices, and the seeking of centralized political power over one’s county. Most egregiously, the prototype’s art refers to horned helmets as a shorthand for Vikings versus non-Vikings—this despite the fact that the horned helmet was a bronze age ceremonial artifact, completely disused in the Viking Age! Still, its value as a cultural token of Viking-ness along with dragon-ships, thick beards, and hand axes makes it a 26 useful way to nudge players into the right frame of mind. This and a few other strategic anachronisms are key to evoking the Viking aesthetic initially, and they impinge only slightly or not at all on the subject under consideration: the social practices of Vikings. 27 MDA FOR ADAPTATION These specific concerns and decisions, taken in the context of the MDA framework, hint at a general process for designing a game that aims to mimic some aesthetic qualities of a real-world social system. Vikingr serves as an example of a game which was first prototyped without regard to this process and later redesigned from the ground up with the Viking ethos in mind, rather than merely modeling historical facts and processes naively and directly. The first step in any process of adaptation must be research. In addition to conventional research activities—reading texts, visiting locations, et cetera—adaptation towards a video game should also consider the underlying structures and processes that are depicted by and encoded in primary texts. This consideration should be guided by a coherent design framework such as MDA. To take Viking culture as an example, the three main types of Icelandic sources identified earlier—the law, the family sagas, and the myths— respectively align roughly with mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. Grágás describes the rules of Icelandic society and material culture, including some of the physical realities of living in Iceland. The family sagas mention some of these realities in passing, but are mainly concerned with the feuds and social dynamics of the great families of early Iceland—they are catalogues of events which tell about behaviors that emerged from the rules and material properties of the island. Finally, the Poetic Edda, though it is phrased in dialogues, exhortations, proverbs, and some narrative sequences, is primarily a celebration of the Viking aesthetic. Proverbs speak directly to ethical concerns 28 both sacred and profane, and the stories which are included are morality tales or epics like the Völsungasaga. This ethos was constructed for and from Vikings who lived as the tales in the family sagas recount, according to the rules of the law books. From the laws of the land and some of the material culture unearthed in the course of archaeology (experimental and otherwise), we can take certain mechanics; we select the ones most likely to lead to the dynamics we identify in the family sagas; and we decide which dynamics to represent and emphasize based on the aesthetic we want players to experience. The second step in adaptation, then, is selecting a few of the adapted system’s aesthetics and rephrasing them as play aesthetics. In the case of Vikingr, this means recontextualizing the Viking ideal from “The Sayings of the High One”— munificence, bravery, reputation-seeking (“the words of praise will not perish when a man wins fair fame” (stanza 79)), stoicism in the face of death, community, physical strength, measured speech, moderate wisdom (“a man’s heart is seldom happy if he is truly wise” (stanza 55))—as play aesthetics. In adaptation, it is best to pick a few of these —community, munificence, and reputation-seeking, for example—and think of how players might experience them. The third step of adaptation is to find game mechanics that enact the historical rules and material realities that contribute to these aesthetics. When at a loss for a suitable next step in pursuing an aesthetic, I have referred to Koster’s catalogue of social mechanics. Selective simulation, the fourth element of the MDA for Adaptation method, is an invaluable filter and final arbiter for deciding what to put in and what to leave out. 29 RESULTS In the absence of long-term observation of players, it is hard to say whether the game’s goal of emerging a parallel Viking-like society was satisfied. Fortunately, the great progress made in first three months of 2012 relative to the slow going of the second half of 2011 suggests that the process described herein is both non-obvious and helpful for practicing designers. As described earlier in this paper, playtesting was key to the evolution of Vikingr from a simulation game towards an action-oriented social game. During the fall, iterations creeped away from numerical simulation and towards representation of emotional and interpersonal state, but a week before the winter show the author’s fiancée pointed out the incremental nature of those changes and put forth a challenge: to design a game that made her feel like a Viking. Dozens of players have since tried the resulting prototypes on this new evolutionary branch, and as the breadth of the social vocabulary has widened, engagement has improved. Players set aside goods for feasts, explore, raid Skraeling households for livestock, and treat other Vikings well. Unfortunately, players do not always realize that “other Vikings” means “other human players”; disrupting the historical fidelity of era-appropriate names and permitting players to reveal their social network usernames could help here. Player feedback also inspired the decision to change sailing from an overhead to an over-the-shoulder perspective, and to introduce a sea chart that obscures unknown locations—although historically, Vikings did not draw maps. 30 CONCLUSIONS TOWARDS SOCIAL GAMES ON SOCIAL NETWORKS Social network games have an impoverished view of sociality limited solely to relative status, identity, and the gift. Real-world social systems and already-catalogued social mechanics provide two valuable sources of inspiration for social network game designers. Should these designers continue to treat sociality as a means to monetization rather than a valuable end in and of itself, I believe that their games will continue to suffer from high player turnover rates, and in time their audience will leave them. LUDIC ARCHAEOLOGY Digital reenactment provides new opportunities for experimental archaeology in synthetic worlds. While the material conditions of a society can never be perfectly replicated in a game, slivers of historical systems can be represented by way of analogy. Games can do more than merely educate players on their subject matter: while players act out the purported rituals, processes, and systems of a society—possibly even in virtual spaces appropriate to that society—observers can assess behavioral outcomes to judge the accuracy of the simulation and of underlying historical hypotheses. Effectively, ludic archaeology enables the reconstruction of archaeological hypotheses as player-behavioral hypotheses. MDA FOR ADAPTATION Given the project’s reconceptualization and redesign a week before the winter show, Vikingr lacked the full schedule that might have fulfilled the promise of its 31 experimental archaeology-inspired design process. That said, it is unclear whether this process would have been invented had not the desperate need for a set of clear design questions forced the project’s reconsideration. MDA for Adaptation extends the conventional MDA framework for use in adapting historical circumstances by embedding it in a semi-formal process. First, the available sources must be matched onto the elements of MDA; second, the designer must select a few primary aesthetics on which to focus their design effort; third, the actions, rules, and material reality described by the historical sources must be rephrased as game mechanics in pursuit of the chosen aesthetics; and fourth, selective simulation must be applied to balance mechanical, historical, and aesthetic fidelity with respect to each other and to the project’s scope. 32 WORKS CITED Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Print. Carrell, Toni L. “Replication and Experimental Archaeology.” Historical Archaeology 26.4 (1992): 4-13. Print. Castleville. Zynga, 2011. Game. Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. Trans. W. C. Green. 1893. Icelandic Saga Database. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print. Hunicke, Robin, Mark LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek. “MDA: a Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.” Northwestern University. Evanston, IL, 2004. Lecture Slides. King of Dragon Pass. A Sharp, 1999. Game. Klimmt, Christoph, Tilo Hartmann, and Andreas Frey. “Effectance and control as determinants of video game enjoyment.” CyberPsychology & Behavior 10.6 (2007): 845-848. Print. Koster, Raph. “Social Mechanics.” Game Developers Conference Online. Austin, TX, 2011. Lecture Slides. Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás. Trans. Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, and Richard Perkins. 2 vols. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 2006. Print. M.U.L.E. Ozark Softscape, 1983. Game. Osborn, Joseph. “Supervision match: Procedural Minimalism.” Digital Games Research Association Conference 2011. Hilversum, the Netherlands, 2011. Lecture Slides. Web. 18 Mar. 2012. <http://universalhappymaker.com/Osborn- Procedural_Minimalism-Presentation.pdf> “Sayings of the High One”. Poems of the Elder Edda. Trans. Patricia Terry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Print. Simpson, Jacqueline. Everyday Life in the Viking Age. New York: Dorset, 1967. Print. 33 Skyrates. Airship Studios, 2006. Game. Vikings of Thule. Gogogic, 2011. Game. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, Michael Mateas, Steven Dow, and Serdar Sali. “Agency reconsidered.” Proceedings from the Digital Games Research Association Conference 2009. London, UK: Digital Games Research Association, 2009. Web. 18 Mar. 2012. 34 APPENDIX: SOCIAL MECHANICS (Koster 189) 1 V. SELF/SYSTEM 1. Helping 1 V. 1 (PARALLEL) 2. Status 3. Races 4. Leaderboards 5. Tournaments 1 V. 1 (OPPOSED) 6. Flower-picking 7. Dot-eating 8. Tug of War 9. Handicapping 10. Secrets 1 V. 1 V. 1 V. ... 11. Last man standing 12. Bidding 13. Deception and bluffing 14. 3rd-party betting 15. Prisoner’s Dilemma 16. Gamesmaster GROUP V. GROUP 17. Roles 18. Hot potato 19. Rituals 20. Gifts 21. Reciprocity 22. Mentoring/twinking 23. Identity 24. Ostracism NETWORKS 25. Iterative interaction and trust 26. Guilds 27. Exclusivity 28. Guild v. guild 29. Trade and contract 30. Elections 31. Influence and fame 32. Public goods 33. Tragedy of the Commons 34. Community 35. Strategy guides 36. Teamwork 37. Arbitrage 38. Supply chains 39. User-generated content DECONSTRUCTION 40. Griefing 35
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Osborn, Joseph Carter
(author)
Core Title
Historicity and sociality in game design: adventures in ludic archaeology
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Interactive Media
Publication Date
04/30/2012
Defense Date
03/26/2012
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University of Southern California
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experimental archaeology,game design,game studies,historiography,ludic archaeology,OAI-PMH Harvest,social games
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Anderson, Steven F. (
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), Castle, Louis (
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joe.osborn@me.com,josborn@usc.edu
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Tags
experimental archaeology
game design
game studies
historiography
ludic archaeology
social games