University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Ahistoric

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Ahistoric

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Ahistoric

Thomas Cross

CTIN 594B
Part-Time Lecturer Laird Malamed, Visiting Associate Professor Dennis Wixon
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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….3
GAME PREMISE…………………………………………………………………………………3
USER EXPERIENCE……………………………………………………………………………..5
FORMAT…………...……………………………………………………………………………..6
GOALS AND RELEVANCE……………………………………………………………………..6
PRIOR PROTOTYPES AND WORK COMPLETED…………………………………………....8
HISTORICAL FUCK MARRY KILL…………………………………………………….8
PRIOR ART AND LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………………....…10
DEMON’S SOULS……………………………………………………………………....10
MICROSOFT PAINT ADVENTURES……………………………………………….…11
CATHERINE, THE WALKING DEAD, REHEARSALS AND RETURNS…………...12
THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (ISSUES 1-12)…………………………….14
VECTORS: JOURNAL OF CULTURES AND
TECHNOLOGY IN A DYNAMIC VERNACULAR…………………………...………15

DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y…………………………………………………………………....15
ALTERNATE REALITIES……………………………………………………………...16
GRAFFITI/PAINTING GAMES…………………………………………….…………..17
“LIVING” WORLDS………………………………………………………………….…17
CHANGES THAT OCCURRED DURING PRE-SPRING 2014 PRODUCTION……..18
FALL 2013 INFORMAL PUBLIC SHOWINGS AND INDIVIDUAL FEEDBACK….21
USER TESTING AND FEEDBACK…………………………………………………....24
PAST AND FUTURE DESIGN CHANGES……………………………………………25
CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………………...27
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Abstract
Ahistoric is an absurdist game that merges the characters, art, and locations of revolutions
and revolts from different places and times. The game world is a fractured urban landscape that
takes place in time as much as in space, drawing from cultures and conflicts from Occupy and
the Arab Spring, to the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, or the October Revolution.
Play takes place inside a ghost city, populated only by the player and the memories of previous
players. Every element of the game will be saved as the game ends. The next player explores this
new world. Every playthrough – like history itself – is an act of historiography, rebellion, and re-
writing. Players can ignore, overwrite, compliment, or combat the beliefs and movements of
previous players. Everything each player does will be replicated for subsequent players to
witness and interact with. Only when players embrace a creative, irrational method of play and
story creation will they be able to escape from the confines of “accurate” history and begin to
reshape the past in accordance with their own interests.

Game Premise
Ahistoric is designed to make people think about historiography, without bringing up
such a cumbersome word. In Michael Bentley’s Modern Historiography: An Introduction, he
defines historiography in two parts, first, that “At its highest level of originality, an
historiographical statement may attempt an enquiry which former generations would have been
happier to call ‘philosophy of history’ in an applied form,” and second, that “At a less elevated,
but no less original level, modern analytical historiography has produced instances of deep-
structural enquiry which has brought to the surface important aspects of a particular writer or
school of historical writing” (Bentley, iii).
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While the game does not provide players with sources and references, it will encourage
this kind of thinking. A colloquial and more modern way of putting it would be to say that
historiography is how a person “does” history. Ahistoric is designed to make users assess a
world, write historical events, locations and tropes into that world, and to play through a
constantly overlapping set of time periods. The game asks them to take a second, critical (though
by no means humorless) look at their own struggles and their own history. It is a game that will
make players tell, retell, and change history. It will invite players to reconsider what we think of
as unquestionable historical truths (or unquestionable ways of thinking) and reward strategies for
subverting them. I hope that these lessons will be transferable to the real world. The game
constantly reinforces its own existence to the player, and the continuing existence of all player
actions and created artifacts. The player will be taught that everything they do will persist after
they have quit the game. Implicit in this lesson is the idea that all players will eventually “speak”
to each other through the game world, to one degree or another. There is no way to destroy the
city and its history, only add to and comment on it. The only way to hide the past is to overwrite
it. The fact that this history-making is only possible through the acts of all players – before and
after the current player’s playthrough – will encourage the player to think of the game, its
community, and the making of history in the same light. This is how I hope to instill the virtues
of a flexible and humorous approach to history and historiography in players – by making it clear
that this is an effective way to communicate with others, and that this communication requires
the constant reinterpretation and modification from strangers and friends alike, within the game
world, and after play has finished.

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When each new player starts the game, they will be informed of their power to change
things, and of the lifeless state and city within which they will exist. The game will explicitly tell
them that the only hope for a different, better future is for the player rewrite, or augment the
world around them.

While the first player will explore a world created for the project, that world will not be
empty. The first “ghost” that they see will be a representation of the only previous playthrough
of that game instance, completed by me. Thus, they will see a ghost avatar with my name,
pasting graffiti and laying out archival videos. Subsequent players will never see that first mostly
unaltered world (unless players continuously refuse to change their environments). Several
instances of the game will run at the same time, on separate computers, so that multiple people
can play without simultaneously overwriting each other’s changes. This will lead to multiple
unique instances of the game, and multiple histories. New players will only be able to start
playing once the previous player has quit the game.

I want to use this “play-by-mail” structure of indirect communication to foster an artistic,
irreverent, and historically-informed dialog between players. What will happen when a player
comes back to the game 5, 10, or 30 minutes after their last playthrough? What will have
happened to “their” game world?

User Experience
Ahistoric is designed to catch players off guard and then keep them off guard. The
architecture and look of the city will be tonally cohesive in that it is simple and nondescript.
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However, the art and representation from different locations and periods will still clash, and as
player videos and graffiti build up, the game will sound and look increasingly chaotic.

From the first playthrough, high resolution textures that look like streets and buildings
will rub shoulders with video and audio clips, and graffiti. The world will only become more
unfocused, more written-over, as players take their turns changing it. These artifacts, and the
constantly moving ghosts, will encourage the player to explore and alter her surroundings. As
players watch. Ghosts will paste graffiti, choose videos to place in the environment, and follow
each other around the city. All previous activities will serve to introduce the player to potential
avenues of interaction.

Format
Players will interact with the game using a mouse and keyboard or controller. For the
Thesis Show, our goal is to have all instances of the game running on laptops side by side for
demos and shows. It will be designed and built in Unity. It will be a first person game, rendered
using sprites, video textures, and photo textures in three dimensions. As a result, two
dimensional graphics and textures will dominate its visual aesthetic. It will be built for Windows
and OSX.

Goals and Relevance
This game is intended to be a light-hearted reminder of the power of a creative approach
to engaging with history. While only some of its players will be aware of the meaning and events
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surrounding May 1968, Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and other conflicts, the game’s
quick, unstructured play will educate players on what they need to know while immersing them
in sights and sounds from other times and places. Ahistoric uses these events, cultures, and
people as a means to an end; if players learn something of the narratives and points of view
surrounding these revolts from this game (or have their interest piqued), it will be in service of
the game’s drive to teach them a fun, radical method of historical thought and action, but it will
not be a requirement. This method of historical interaction will focus on the seemingly
unconnected, or “irrelevant” points that can be arrived at when people create collages of images,
videos, and sounds in a shared space. The game world will encourage players to respond to one
point of view with their own, whether that point of view is explicitly related to the former, or is
tenuously related to it (if at all). The separation from past and future players will force each
player to find a way to use their limited tools to say something of meaning, something that can
be interpreted by others. If this game succeeds at as I intend it to, players will be more open to
communicating about anything (but especially history) using improper or less-than-topical
language. I want them to become comfortable with using “bad” tools, mismatched vocabulary,
and oblique references to talk about topics that they find interesting. I want players to have new
or unheard of topics suggested to them in a similar fashion, by all other players.

This game will encourage players to rearrange, destroy, or at least question their
particular conception of history, and the ways they talk about that history. The game’s view of
history, its turbulently inaccurate historical representations, and the ways it teaches players to
break accepted wisdom about time and history are all designed to leave the player with a lasting
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sense of unease and distrust for established historical narratives, and with a humorous, self-
critical approach to historical thinking and cultural memory.

The mutability of history and our production of history and memory is central to this
project. Dominant narratives that leave no room for subversive ones are only slightly worse than
those that selectively foster toothless ideological opposition. If this game simply stated that the
Occupy movement was efficiently denigrated and marginalized by the mainstream media and by
citizens with power, it would fail to add much new to the dialogue surrounding Occupy. Instead,
it will use the juxtaposition of these different movements to invite players to recast those
struggles in a new light. At a time when we are constantly, fearfully rewriting the history of our
interactions with each other and with other countries and cultures, a little critical thought can go
a long way.

Prior Prototypes and Work Completed
Historical Marry, Fuck, Kill
This prototype is a short guided experience played between me (as the Dungeon Master)
and a player. Players are asked to take the three historically significant people I name for them
and decide what they would do with them. Specifically, they were asked to decide which of the
three titular verbs they would apply to the famous people.

The exercise was designed to quickly get people to make up history, history many of
them thought of as crude, meaningless, or disrespectful. It was also designed to test the player’s
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willingness to make up fiction on the spot, to take a very simple prompt (would you marry Julius
Caesar or Mark Antony) and spin a miniature narrative out of the process.

This prototype demonstrated three things: first, people have an immediate and strong
response to the name of the game, and more relevantly, to the kind of judgment call (however
superficial) they must make over and over when playing rounds of the game back to back.
Second, most players do not know that much about history (from the obscure to the “universally”
known). Players are not comfortable making things up about facts they know nothing about. This
is, after all, weighty, important Historical Fact they are being asked to meddle with. Finally, even
when people did know the historical figures in question, a variety of factors hampered their
involvement in the game. Some people simply did not want to go beyond giving the three
required answers, while others were often uncomfortable having creative control of these
miniature stories completely ceded to them.

I created a modification for Historical M, F, K that I tested, to similar results. In this
version, I asked people to take important historical turning points that they knew well, and
pretend that those turning points did not happen. This was slightly more successful (not having to
utter the word “fuck,” and not having to create imaginary historical liaisons emboldened
players), but I still ran into the same stumbling block: people felt uncomfortable making things
up on the spot. This made clear to me an inevitable problem with my game. People don’t like
being asked to improvise things unless they’ve been prepared to do so, and interacting with less
than serious (or acceptable under everyday standards of conversation) versions of history makes
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people feel like they are transgressing. The former is still a problem. The latter is a purposeful
byproduct of my game.

Prior Art and Literature Review
Demon’s Souls
Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls are third person action games developed by From
Software that use the same mechanic to connect players through separate single player
campaigns. Both games consist mostly of single player campaigns in which players combat
different kinds of enemies in different locations. However, players can leave glowing messages
on the floors of these environments. These messages then appear (in that same game-world
location) in other player’s games. Players can enter a room and look at a message on the floor,
left by someone else in North America. Players must pick from a short list of words (like
“danger,” “ahead,” “water,” or “dark”). This is not the only method of cross-game player to
player communication and interaction, but it is the one relevant to my Thesis.

Messages in the Demon’s Souls series tend to fit into four categories: helpful, malicious,
antagonistic, and completely irrelevant. Many messages are helpful, directing players away from
danger and toward hidden supplies. Some do the opposite, lying about what’s ahead, or
describing nonexistent treasures or enemies. Some are simply insults, and some are completely
irrelevant to anyone focused on playing the game.

These messages fade over time, and different messages appear to different players; no
one has quite the same series of messages – no one has quite the same game world. The tight
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control exercised by the designers in this case is an important example to learn from. If they had
let players freely chat with each other, or leave messages using a keyboard interface or drawing
interface, most messages would quickly leave the topic of the games behind. By keeping these
asynchronous messages pared down, and forcing players to use a vocabulary mostly focused on
game play and environments, they fostered a focused, varied, and mostly diegetic
communication system and environment for new and old players.

Microsoft Paint Adventures
MS Paint Adventures is a web comic that, during its earlier issues, structured its plot
twists and developments using suggestions and requests drawn from the comic’s forums.
Eventually, the creator of the comic, Andrew Hussie, decided to stop taking reader requests, so
that he could more carefully guide the comic’s narrative development.

The very first issue, named Jailbreak, was actually designed and written as a “forum
game,” and all plot developments were taken from the first, often ludicrous, suggestion sent in to
Hussie. The series soon became less and less interactive. However, at its earliest peak, it pointed
the way toward a form of crowdourced storytelling that was unfocused, irrational, unsupportable,
and to its fans, incredibly engrossing.

MSP Adventures is a template from which I will borrow sparingly, but I believe that its
mixture of quick and highly specific community involvement is something worthy of emulation.
It both solved and embraced one of crowdsourcing’s oldest facets: they descend into
incoherence, at the slightest provocation. Instead, Hussie and his readers managed to use
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Jailbreak (and to a lesser degree, its descendants) to cobble together a narrative that was
engaging to its fans specifically because they had helped make it. It did not matter to them that it
was an unwieldy and scattered narrative, because they had made it that way. This does not
defend against a common criticism of crowd sourced content, that it is poorly written and
constructed. Instead, it reveals that even a “bad” narrative can be relevant to the right people,
especially that narrative’s creators.

Catherine, The Walking Dead, Rehearsals and Returns
Catherine is a puzzle and story game developed by Atlus, while The Walking Dead is an
adventure game developed by Telltale Games. Both games focus on their stories to such a degree
that they allow players to alter the flow and outcomes of the game’s story, to different degrees.
They both share a mechanic whereby at a chapter’s end, players are given relatively current
information about other player’s playthroughs. Both are single player games, but both developers
believed that inviting players to be aware of (and possibly discuss) the differences in what they
thought “should” happen would be beneficial to the play experience.

In Catherine, players are asked to answer a simple either-or question relating to the
game’s reductive representations of love and sexuality. Players are asked “Does life begin or end
at marriage?” after the first level, while another level’s question asks “Has being embarrassed
ever turned you on?” Once a player has answered the question, the game shows them how many
players chose yes, and how many chose no

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The Walking Dead uses a similar mechanic. At the end of every episode, players are
shown the decisions they made, and the decisions that everyone else who played the game has
made. Since The Walking Dead has more decisions and branching narrative points than does
Catherine, this display is not as clear and focused. Still, it immediately reminds players of what
they’ve done, and asks them to consider how their responses relate to everyone else’s responses.
If games often convince people to reconsider their own play and decisions, then The Walking
Dead and Catherine clearly (and before the game is even complete) asks players to contextualize
their actions within the greater community of players.

Rehearsals and Returns uses the same technique, but with a vocally, obviously historical
bent. As you travel through Peter Brinson's game, you encounter famous historical figures, and
everyday people from your past. You can go from talking to Gandhi to complaining to your
Dentist or a hated childhood school teach. You collect bits of “Wisdom” (anecdotes from various
historical figures) along with hateful and loving statements. Statements range from mild – “you
could have done better,” or “I don’t dislike you” – to extreme – “you are disgusting,” and “you
mean everything to me.”

At the end of the game, it tallies what you’ve done and then spits it back out to you,
telling you how many other people said hurtful things to Gandhi, or how many people didn’t say
that mean a thing to their high school principle. This act of turning the mirror on the player (and
implicating them in the wider community of players) is an effective way of making people
confront their own actions, however inconsequential or unserious.

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The Situationist International (Issues 1-12)
The Situationists was revolutionary and artistic group formed in 1957. It initially focused
on artistic endeavors, but as the ‘60s wore on it became more radical and political. The
Situationists derived much of their political framework and ideology from Marxism, especially
Marx’s theories of alienation and commodity fetishism under capitalism. They published The
Situationist International for 12 issues, before halting work on the publication in 1972.

The Situationists were part of the occupation of the Sorbonne in 1968 that was one of the
catalysts for over 10 million striking workers across the country, and more occupations and sit-
ins around Paris, and the rest of France. Their combination of Marxism, Surrealism, and their
reliance on the politicization of everyday life make them an important predecessor of the Occupy
movements, and a bountiful source of theories and practice for Ahistoric. Their practice of
“detournement,” taking capitalist manifestations and turning them against themselves would lead
to the concept of “culture jamming,” and has a lasting effect on political resistance and anti-
advertising efforts across the world.

Despite this debt I owe to these people and activities, their exclusivity, their focus, and
their socio-political makeup are all open to critique, as is the efficacy of their movement. The
changes in French society associated with the ‘68ers and the Situationists are not quite so far-
reaching and empowering as we often make it out to be.

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Vectors: Journal of Cultures and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular
Totality for Kids is just one entry in a digital journal, Vectors. Vectors brings together
various artists and creators and publishes only work that “needs” to exist in multimedia. While
Totality for Kids will obviously be helpful to my investigation into multimedia representations of
history, other entries in Vectors are also useful. Technologies of History is a multimedia-centric
approach to history that melds video, audio, and hyperlink connections as it explains past events
and people. Digital Futures mixes a Google Maps-like interface with more hyperlink
connections, to track the places and people relevant to one person’s life. Unmarked Planes and
Hidden Geographies uses a simple GUI to track unmarked military flights across the Southwest
United States.

Aside from their multimodal qualities, these projects also focus on the ways we perceive,
create, and recall. The name of the journal is no accident, as the design and structure of its first
issue shows – this is a journal that often focuses on history and time, and how we construct and
view those things. Its quirks, successes, and failings (especially with regard to graphical
representations and interactivity) will inform Ahistoric’s design.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is Johan Grimonprez’s documentary of plane hijackings of the 1960s
and 1970s, and the changes in how mainstream culture viewed such hijackings as the 1990s wore
on. It is remembered for foreshadowing 9/11, but it is its methods and tone I will be borrowing
liberally from. Grimonprez mixes hijacking TV broadcasts, interviews with pseudo-celebrity
hijackers of the 60s and 70s, home video, and a variety of unmoored, banal everyday video clips.
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He ties it all together with a memorable score and a relentless habit of cutting from
unrelated clip to unrelated clip, tricking his audience into drawing connections between the
murder of lab rats, fast food, foolish airplane pilots, and excerpts from Don Delillo’s work. Dial
H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is often purposefully incomprehensible, yet it creates and sustains a sense of
dread and disgust, muted by a tired amusement at the irony of the people it skewers (who are, of
course, us).

Alternate Realities
The Lathe of Heaven was important to the restructuring of Ahistoric over the summer of
2013. Le Guin’s vision of the creation and destruction of realities is compelling. In the novella,
one character learns how to dream in such a way that his dream reshapes reality. Only people
present at the moment (and physical location) of dreaming are aware of the “old” reality.
Everyone else remembers nothing but the cohesive and whole “new” reality, stretching back for
as long as they can remember. As the novel ends, another antagonistic character discovers how
to dream “effectively” he instantly unmakes the world, creating an unstable, indescribable
miasma of different realities.

Le Guin’s characters and their instantly created realities provided me with most of what
will make up Ahistoric’s model of history and time manipulation. Every player will start the
game with a knowledge of what came before. They will also (if they have already played the
game at least once), understand the way they are interacting with the game’s history, and with
the worlds left behind by other players.
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Graffiti/Painting Games
These games are all important to a large slice of my gameplay, the painting and rewriting
section of the game. As the player moves through the environment and pastes over what used to
be there, they will have to be able to clearly understand what they are doing, what they are
pasting, and what they are replacing. Likewise, the response from the world (whether
antagonistic, supportive, or indifferent) must be instantly legible. The games above all provide an
element or to that I can learn from. Unfinished Swan’s aimlessness, Jet Set Radio’s
overwhelming atmosphere and sense of being somewhere, and De Blob’s simple cause and effect
gameplay all have lessons to teach Ahistoric. I want to make this game pleasurable to use, on a
very basic level, and I want the player’s low-level interactions to be simple, and potentially
gratifying. I want the barrier to playing (and thus re-creating the look of the world) to be low.
That should never be what players spend time grappling with.

“Living” Worlds
Ahistoric is designed to be played in sequence (it cannot be played simultaneously, not
within the same instance). It is not a static world like a persistent MMO, nor is it a collaborative
persistent world like one saved onto a Minecraft server. Instead, like Jason Rohrer’s “Chain
World” (which uses Minecraft as its base), it is designed to take its meaning from the amassed
activity and output of its many players. Where Rohrer intended to create a religion-informed
experience I want to create one defined by the limitations I set, and the artifacts my players leave
behind. Instead of a cult-like set of demands or rules, most rules will come about through simple
simulation limitations. The culture that springs up within the game and as part of the game’s play
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will be driven by the players. I will attempt to set its tone from the beginning, and use the content
available to guide the conversations people have across playthroughs, but I will not be able to
control much else.

Changes that Occurred During Pre-Spring 2014 Production
The original pitch document for Ahistoric proposes a game not unlike an old fashioned
adventure game. Set in a surreally intertwined world of Paris during May ’68 and the Occupy
Wall Street movement in the early 2010’s, that game was focused on two times and places, and
relevant events and people. The player would talk to characters, learn about the two historical
periods and places in question, and make decisions that altered the game’s alternate history.

Its menu was to be a synthesis of the previous players’ responses to the game’s branching
choices and dialogue, which would be presented in a format similar to that of a GameFAQ or
technical document. All of these elements would instill in the player a sense of fun, especially as
applied to the rearranging of history.

Starting in the spring of 2013, I prototyped this blend of gameplay, storytelling, and
historical revisionism. While some relevant prototypes seemed to succeed in their goals, and
point the way to more advanced prototypes, I quickly discovered that the genre of interactive
project I had chosen was at odds with the tone and pace of game I wanted to make. As I created
dialog trees and game design documents, the game felt more and more slow-paced. I was
designing a game that encouraged trite either-or decisions, required a large amount of exposition
and scene-setting, and asked players to observe and judge, not create and respond.
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I began to prototype a different project, one that would use a first person viewpoint, three
dimensional world, and systems and assets focused on creating volumetric, spatial experience.
The question was – how could I maintain the strong textual and archival elements from previous
designs, while meeting my new experiential goals?

During September of 2013, I began to work on prototypes that used the same assets and
archival footage, but in 3D worlds created in Unity. I created prototypes that let players turn
images and sounds on and off based on which Time Period they wanted to manifest most
strongly in the game world. I also broadened the scope of the time periods used. Instead of a
game world split between Occupy and May 68, I added the Arab Spring and the October
Revolution. My goal in this expansion of scope was to create a broader pool of cultures and
revolutionary practices, and ensure that many of the assets from each would look and feel
completely different from their counterparts.

During the same period, I began to develop a different virtual space for the game to take
place in, and a different primary mechanic. Instead of straightforward time travel comedy, or a
more serious melodrama involving colliding worlds, I designed a virtual city. This city was
designed to be timeless and faceless, a drab representation of alien, inhuman modern spaces
across the world. The new tone was that of rebels, graffiti artists, fighting back against an
encroaching sense of uniformity and urban control, using graffiti.

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Unfortunately, this was also the beginning of one of several missteps I committed. In
focusing on the look, feel, and interactions in this world (and the graffiti players would use to
talk back and forth between playthroughs), I stopped developing a new version of my “playful
historicity” design imperative. The game stopped being about history, and became about
historically-inspired graffiti.

Over the course of the Fall of 2013 I continued to develop the game space, graffiti
mechanic, and tone of the game. I developed different ways of presenting the game as being
“about” history, and prototyped different ways to emphasize the importance of previous players,
but I continued to neglect the historical elements of my project.

In the first months of 2014, I am pushing forward on two fronts: first, I want to make the
communication and sense of community between players inescapable. Second, I want to
reintroduce the historical language and judgment calls of the original pitch.

To accomplish my first goal, I have created a system of ghosts-like game objects that
perform the same acts and graffiti as did previous players, and do so in a way that encourages
communication from player to player, through graffiti choice and player movement. To
accomplish the second goal, I am lowering the total number of graffiti available to players (down
from the current 64), and introducing a large number of video and audio assets. By allowing
players to choose a graffiti to paste as a "subject" or "topic" of a sentence, I hope that they will
finish these "sentences" by picking a video to be attached to that graffiti.

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Fall 2013 Informal Public Showings and Individual Feedback
I didn't test Ahistoric on players outside of our Thesis class until the mid-semester open
house. On that day, for 4-5 hours, a series of undergrads and graduates (most of whom had not
heard of the game, let alone seen it) played through the current build. At that time, the game was
set in a large city, with several central squares, and too many overly-wide boulevards. Large,
white, monolithic "Chasers" would spawn as the player pasted graffiti, and would then chase the
player down, ending the game. All of the music in the game was temporary (it was all music
produced in, during, or about the conflicts in question), and while the systems were mostly in full
effect, many of them were only partially finished, or were stand-ins for more complicated or
refined systems and assets.

The feedback I got that day can be roughly placed into three categories - grunt work that I
had not yet done, irrelevant tonal comments, and deeper critiques of my goals and methods. One
always receives a lot of the first kind of feedback. When a screen takes too long to load, or music
doesn't quite overlap properly, even a disinterested player or tester will notice. I took notes for
every single player that day, and especially for the players not versed in interactive design, their
feedback tended to be focused on polish and surface level mistakes.

For example, players consistently broke the chasers, by placing so many graffiti into the
world so quickly that the game spawned close to a hundred of them. The minute those players
got to close to the horde of chasers, the game would crash. While this led me to put a cap on the
chasers' count, it also led me to more important realizations - players could past graffiti into the
world too quickly. A player who wanted to sprint through the world, avoiding chasers and
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pasting as much graffiti as possible, could do so. These users often had the most fun (and said so
afterward), but they also revealed a weakness in my design. People could place graffiti quickly,
and they were always aware of being hunted. As a result, the game became about running from
chasers - the thrill of being chased, breaking rules, and getting away with it for as long as
possible.

This was the opposite of my experiential goal - I wanted players to take their time, to
consider their environments and act in opposition to or accordance with their own views, and the
views they saw in the graffiti of previous players. I knew that I needed to focus the game, slow it
down, and give players meaningful choice when it came to their graffiti and messages.

The second type of feedback (tonal), I listened to, but ignored unless it was in some way
relevant to my game. A player who said they would have rather had a game "just like Jet Grind
Radio," or "more like GTA" was not giving me enough feedback. I attempted to read between the
lines and get at the reasons for this feedback (they didn't feel like the music was snappy enough,
eg), but I did not allow it to significantly alter the design of my game.

The third type of feedback was often the most useful, and would often be given to me by
designers or creatives. In one case, a fellow IMGD student and I talked for half an hour about the
current systems in place, and the ways that they could be developed in the future. We both
agreed (and this was corroborated by several other users) that the game was too fast-paced, and
that the graffiti didn't feel connected to history or previous players. Only one out of twenty
players recognized and responded to (even after I mentioned this fact to every player) the graffiti
Cross 23
she knew had been left by previous players. More importantly, even for that player who realized
this fact, they didn't care about this element of the game.

As a result, I have designed a smaller set of graffiti, with the aforementioned video assets,
and the previous player ghost system, to increase each player's involvement with the last player.
Now, when players start the game, they can watch the actions and graffiti choices of every player
who came before them, and put names to actions.

The Winteractive show reinforced my decision to add video into the project and cut the
number of graffiti. It also forced me to prioritize the ghost playback system. Several people
explained exactly how they had felt disconnected from previous players. For them, the graffiti in
the environment could easily have been placed there by the designer, not previous players. Both
before and after I explained where the graffiti really came from, it was obvious that this did not
matter to players. They did not treat previous players’ work as if it belonged to other players.

This feedback, combined with one specific suggestion (that the missing dynamic I
desired could be produced by more communication between players, of any kind), convinced me
that my next task should be developing a system that constantly reinforced the agency behind all
world elements, especially those created by players. I also repeatedly heard people say that the
graffiti would not matter to them even if they could communicate. This was only the latest input
that caused me to reassess what did and did not work as graffiti, and what place graffiti had in
my game. Finally, the excitement created by the chasers again proved to be overpowering.
Cross 24
Certain players actually did want to send messages to each other, but once the thrill of the chase
was introduced into the game, they quickly forgot that initial, creative desire.

Currently, there are no chasers in the game, I am redesigning graffiti to be more iconic
and expressive (and lowering the graffiti total), and historical video will soon be players’ most
flexible and powerful method of commenting on history, and sending game-to-game messages.
Between now and May, we have no plans to bring back the chasers, or their controlling
“Authority.” The game has been refocused, and thankfully current players show a greater
willingness to engage with the game as history and art production, not as a game of cat and
mouse.

User Testing and Feedback
This is the one chapter of my thesis I have yet to complete meaningfully. The closest
thing to industry-standard user testing I conducted this year were the qualitative question set I
used for the mid-semester open house. Following the kind of procedure I learned about in Dennis
Wixon’s research-oriented class, I spoke to my 20 or so (completely new) testers about the game
in a frank manner, inviting them to feel like their input was important to the design process of the
game. Instead of silently listening and recording, I conversed, following up on different topics
when I felt it was necessary, but also allowing the players to lead me to surprising or new topics.

I plan on continuing to introduce new players in this manner, while also conducting
standard, rigorous, user testing, in the next two months. I do not believe that my project’s rough,
elemental state (at the time of the mid-semester show) was conducive to standard questionnaire
Cross 25
format testing and faceless observation. I plan on using that kind of testing as a tool, but not as
my main testing tool.

Past and Future Design Changes
Between September 2013 and May 2014, a lot will change for Ahistoric, more than for
the the goals set out in my original paper. As I stated previously, my goals are still to make
improper history a fun, attractive prospect, to take some of the deadly serious out of “doing
history.” For most of the fall of 2013, I was focused on creating a three dimensional, first person
expression of my original thesis pitch. For the winter of 2013 and the spring of 2014, I have
refocused the project, bringing its archival and footage-based history-tweaking elements back to
the fore.

I have explained what was important to my process at different points. Now I will explain
the work that remains to be done, to create a project that satisfies my original goals, along with
my current ones. There are two main holdovers from last semester’s development – the way
music is implemented in the game, and the appearance and shape of the city itself. Both of these
need to be refined and made less heavy-handed to effectively communicate the game’s themes.

The elements that I have recently added and will continue to define are: the “ownership”
of each players’ graffiti, the clear message that this graffiti was left by a specific person, and the
sense, on the part of the player, that what they are saying matters. These goals are being
supported by the ghost system, the color coding and signatures used when ghosts “paste” already
existing graffiti, and by the final significant additions to the game: videos.
Cross 26

In early March 2014, I designed a system for placing, playing, and manipulating videos
in Unity. This is the last significant addition to the project. Now that videos are in the project,
and working properly, everything that remains to be done falls into the realms of finessed system
impact and interactions, and more effective player-to-history relationships. During this period, I
also integrated a GUI system with the game, and have been working with a UI designer to refine
the look and feel of the game.

The bulk of the next two months will be given over to finding, processing, and
implementing around 64 video clips, and making sure that all necessary refinements are made to
the city, art, GUI, and pre and post-game experience. The systems for saving the game and
communicating between players and playthroughs are all in place. They just need the
aforementioned additions to become convincing and evocative, to reach the goals I have set for
the project.

As such, I am practically ordering the first phase of development – I need to get enough
video content into the game that I can test its use and player feedback, before I finalize the video
apparatus. Everything else, from GUI finalization to menu and city tweaks, are of secondary
importance. The way the videos are implemented, and the control players have over those videos
will be what pushes the game from its current “

Cross 27
Conclusions
It does not surprise me that there are several proposed systems that will not make it into
Ahistoric for the May show. I knew that I wanted to create a cohesive and complete work, and I
accordingly labeled several aspects of the project as being less than necessary. It is unlikely that
there will be a statistical roundup at the end of the game, letting players know what they pasted
and how. Instead, this “compare and contrast” function will be filled by the graffiti/video
sentence structure, ghost movement and graffiti placement, and the ebb and flow of the music. I
would love to add this feature, but it does not seem this realistic, at this point in time.

I knew that changing the project so significantly over the summer was a risk, but I am
glad I took it. The vibrancy and immediacy that this game possesses would be completely
different (or perhaps nonexistent), were I to create a 2D adventure game, or non-real time game.
Likewise, I am very grateful that I am not spending my production time writing fake historical
personages, or altered historical events – that I am not creating a game where the fiction is more
important than what the players are saying. The point has always been to make people look
askance at their own serious history, while encouraging them to continue making and studying
that history. I cannot think of a better way to accomplish that goal than to make player creation
and player-to-player interaction important to the game. The game as I originally conceived it
would have been some kind of historically silly interactive fiction game. That would not
necessarily have been a bad game, but I believe that it would have been untrue to the tone and
goals of my thesis, of my desires regarding how other people approach history.

Cross 28
The most difficult part of this project was (and remains) the creation of a meaningful
relationship between players, contextualized by and contributing to a common historical
conversation. Each step I take toward giving players more iconic and meaningful historical
building blocks, the closer I get to this goal. Yet I believe that I will spend the next two months
struggling to reach this goal, and I am not sure if I will reach it. It will be a delicate balance of
simple, recognizable imagery, expressive player-to-player systems, and meaningful historical
dialog that will make Ahistoric into what I want it to be. I think that getting there will be a matter
of near-endless tweaking and refinement.

Cross 29
Bibliography
Books
Bentley, Michael. Modern Historiography: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Dikkers, Scott and Loew, Mike. Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines
from America’s Finest News Source. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Avon Books, 1971. Print.
Steve Anderson. Technologies of History. Hanover: Dartmouth. 2011. Print.
Interactive
Atlus Persona Team. Catherine. Atlus, 2011. PS3.
Blue Tongue Entertainment. De Blob. THQ, 2008. Wii.
datatragedy. Memory of a Broken Dimension. 2013. Windows, Web.
From Software, SCE Japan Studio. Demon’s Souls. Sony, Atlus, Namco Bandai, 2009. PS3.
Giant Sparrow. Unfinished Swan. SCE, 2012. PS3.
Rohrer, Jason. Chain World. 2011. Windows.
Mojang. Minecraft, 2009. Windows, OSX, 360.
Smilebit. Jet Set Radio. Sega, 2000. Dreamcast.
Telltale Games. The Walking Dead. Telltale Games, 2012. Windows.
Journals
Debord, Guy, Raoul Vaneigem, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Alexander Trocchi, Ralph Rumney,
Asger Jorn, Michele Bernstein. The Situationist Internationale. 1957-1972. Print.

Cross 30
McPherson Tara, Steve Anderson, Erik Loyer, Craig Dietrich, Raegan Kelly. Vectors: Journal of
Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. (2005-2012). Web.
Serial
Hussie, Andrew. Microsoft Paint Adventures. 2006. Web.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Cross, Thomas B. (author)

Core Title Ahistoric

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/30/2014

Defense Date 05/15/2014

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

Tag game,Graffiti,historiography,History,interactive,OAI-PMH Harvest,projection,virtual

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), Anderson, Steven F. (committee member), Brinson, Peter (committee member), Fortugno, Nicholas (committee member)

Creator Email romain47@gmail.com,thomasbc@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-406021

Unique identifier UC11296052

Identifier etd-CrossThoma-2440.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-406021 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CrossThoma-2440.pdf

Dmrecord 406021

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Cross, Thomas B.

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...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA