playing
Between 1999
and 2001 I worked on the Massively Multiplayer Online Game project initially
known as BigWorld, and currently known as Citizen Zero (the name BigWorld still exists, but as the
name of the technology used to design the game). This was a perfect case
of being in the right place at the right time. I had just met and befriended
Rob Bartel, a game designer now famous for his work on Baldur's Gate and
Neverwinter Nights, but also, like myself, a playwright (and a lovely guy,
I should add). I cold called MicroForte, the first local game developer I
came across, to see if they could use my skills, and it just so happened
that they could. I became a game designer and lead writer, responsible for
such things as character dialogue, characters, scenarios, handling the generation
of player missions, and also some website content.
Citizen Zero was, and is, a massively ambitious project, in the growing genre known as Massively Multiplayer Online, or MMOG, an internet based gaming world in which thousands of players from all over the world may play simultaneously (read the transcript of my Biennale talk to learn more about what this is ). Not only was a game itself planned, but the technology to run the game would be written from scratch. It wasn't easy, and it took several years and millions of dollars of investment before Microsoft came onboard to publish the game (which happened after I left the project), which is still in development.
At the stage where I left it (and it is considerably different now), Citizen Zero was set on a prison planet in the distant future. People would be sent there, their memories of their previous life erased - including whatever crime they were convicted of - and were forced to make a new life for themselves. Overseas observers were amused that such a concept was thought of by us, residents of a real former penal colony, but this was a complete coincidence.
As most of the design staff were of a more technical bent, I was able to look at problems less analytically and more artistically. Often, a narrative or conceptual decision solved certain game design problems, and assist in covering up the mechanisms of gaming that we regard as invisible but do in fact require a suspension of disbelief - much like the laughter track in a sitcom, or even the convention of film editing. For example - how would you explain a character's miraculous recarnation after being run over by a herd of wildebeast? Easy - a mechanism has been set up to prevent them committing suicide to escape serving out their whole sentence. While MMOG developers generally take traditional role playing games (such as Dungeons and Dragons - more on this also in my Biennale talk) as their model, I found my experience in improvisational theatre much more valuable. Ultimately, an MMOG is not much more than a massive game of Theatresports (of the sort seen on the TV show `Whose Line Is It Anyway'?) - a carefully directed form of improvisation that gives the protagonist a feeling of freedom within guidelines which must seem looser than they really are. The thing I find most exciting about MMOGs is that they provide a place for collaborative storytelling - and I do think such a thing exists.
I left the Citizen Zero project in early 2001, but not before developing an intellectual interest in the idea of interactive games and hypertext fiction as a legitimate art form. Hypertext is not new, but has found its ideal expression in the internet age. Any child who has read a `Choose Your Own Adventure' book knows this. Vladimir Nabokov's uses hypertext to startling artistic effect in his book `Pale Fire'. It is interesting to note that Nabokov also wrote in a fashion that we now take for granted, writing on small index cards that could be shifted forward or backward in sequence, in exactly the way that we `cut and paste' a section of text in a document composed using a word processer. However, few high profile writers indeed have embraced hypertext, let alone gaming, as a new genre of great potential.
For this we should take our hats off to Douglas Adams. (We should take our hats off to him for many reasons. I would take off as many hats as you like if it would bring him back :( ), the only major author to serious consider the artistic potential of computer games when they were literally just words on a screen, or `text adventures' as they were once known. Adams' text adventure version of `Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy' is still legendary in gaming circles, not the least for the mindbending difficulty of some of its puzzles, which Adams later admitted was a flaw. The text adventure is like a hypertext fiction with a motor attached to it - artificial factors such as puzzles and point scoring compel the reader/player to move through the text; but an even balance must be struck between challenge and outright stalemate, as Adams discovered.
Sadly, the rise of graphics, and then of twitch-based gaming (i.e. those which require hand-eye co-ordination) led to the near-extinction of the text adventure, a high point in the history of hypertext and, in my opinion, of gaming as an artistic genre. In the early 1990s, Sierra's text adventures and later its strategy games such as `Space Quest' and `King's Quest' were the top selling games in the world. Only a few years later, Adams released a second game, `Starship Titanic', but by this time, the gaming climate had changed so much that it was unable to compete.
Computer gaming has, in my opinion, undergone a de-intellectualisation. We forget that early gaming machines such as the Commodore 64 were often originally bought for children as educational tools, and that puzzle based and narrative based games required a good deal of mental engagement, rather than the physical engagement required of twitch-based games. In much the same way as silent film, the way that early computer games were forced to overcome technical shortcomings - that is, slow computers, poor graphics, tinny sound - became what distinguished them. I still believe game design was far more innovative in the period from 1980 to 1995, because it wasn't forced to rely on graphical wizardry, but good, solid, gameplay. The massive success of `The Sims' is an interesting case in point, as it indicates many things: people are not worried about playing within a non-linear, more or less non-narrative environment (again powered, albeit very lightly, by the `engine' of puzzles), people are comfortable with telling collaborative stories in three dimensional form - that is, the enjoyment of the game is based partly on the story the Sims `tell' you, and partly on your ability to manipulate that story by making them fall in love, take up a different job, and so forth - and also destroys the long standing myth that women do not play computer games, as almost half of all Sims players are estimated to be female.
The mainstream computer game world is pretty stagnant at the moment. Graphics and sound are no longer enough to carry a game, and now that the mainstream business is a multi-million dollar one rather than operating out of some guy's garage, publishers are unwilling to risk anything innovative, plumping for sequels and games based on pre-existing franchises instead. It's pretty depressing stuff, and I hate having to tell people who contacted me with their million dollar idea for a game and bundles full of idealism and enthusiasm that their chances of taking it to a publisher and selling it for a million dollars is infinitesamally small. But despite this, let me emphasise that, the outlook is nothing but bleak. The rise of the independent development scene (see for example Garage Games and Sumea and the dawn of serious intellectual considerations of the computer game mean that the genre still has ample potential for further development. Long live the Internet!
Citizen Zero was, and is, a massively ambitious project, in the growing genre known as Massively Multiplayer Online, or MMOG, an internet based gaming world in which thousands of players from all over the world may play simultaneously (read the transcript of my Biennale talk to learn more about what this is ). Not only was a game itself planned, but the technology to run the game would be written from scratch. It wasn't easy, and it took several years and millions of dollars of investment before Microsoft came onboard to publish the game (which happened after I left the project), which is still in development.
At the stage where I left it (and it is considerably different now), Citizen Zero was set on a prison planet in the distant future. People would be sent there, their memories of their previous life erased - including whatever crime they were convicted of - and were forced to make a new life for themselves. Overseas observers were amused that such a concept was thought of by us, residents of a real former penal colony, but this was a complete coincidence.
As most of the design staff were of a more technical bent, I was able to look at problems less analytically and more artistically. Often, a narrative or conceptual decision solved certain game design problems, and assist in covering up the mechanisms of gaming that we regard as invisible but do in fact require a suspension of disbelief - much like the laughter track in a sitcom, or even the convention of film editing. For example - how would you explain a character's miraculous recarnation after being run over by a herd of wildebeast? Easy - a mechanism has been set up to prevent them committing suicide to escape serving out their whole sentence. While MMOG developers generally take traditional role playing games (such as Dungeons and Dragons - more on this also in my Biennale talk) as their model, I found my experience in improvisational theatre much more valuable. Ultimately, an MMOG is not much more than a massive game of Theatresports (of the sort seen on the TV show `Whose Line Is It Anyway'?) - a carefully directed form of improvisation that gives the protagonist a feeling of freedom within guidelines which must seem looser than they really are. The thing I find most exciting about MMOGs is that they provide a place for collaborative storytelling - and I do think such a thing exists.
I left the Citizen Zero project in early 2001, but not before developing an intellectual interest in the idea of interactive games and hypertext fiction as a legitimate art form. Hypertext is not new, but has found its ideal expression in the internet age. Any child who has read a `Choose Your Own Adventure' book knows this. Vladimir Nabokov's uses hypertext to startling artistic effect in his book `Pale Fire'. It is interesting to note that Nabokov also wrote in a fashion that we now take for granted, writing on small index cards that could be shifted forward or backward in sequence, in exactly the way that we `cut and paste' a section of text in a document composed using a word processer. However, few high profile writers indeed have embraced hypertext, let alone gaming, as a new genre of great potential.
For this we should take our hats off to Douglas Adams. (We should take our hats off to him for many reasons. I would take off as many hats as you like if it would bring him back :( ), the only major author to serious consider the artistic potential of computer games when they were literally just words on a screen, or `text adventures' as they were once known. Adams' text adventure version of `Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy' is still legendary in gaming circles, not the least for the mindbending difficulty of some of its puzzles, which Adams later admitted was a flaw. The text adventure is like a hypertext fiction with a motor attached to it - artificial factors such as puzzles and point scoring compel the reader/player to move through the text; but an even balance must be struck between challenge and outright stalemate, as Adams discovered.
Sadly, the rise of graphics, and then of twitch-based gaming (i.e. those which require hand-eye co-ordination) led to the near-extinction of the text adventure, a high point in the history of hypertext and, in my opinion, of gaming as an artistic genre. In the early 1990s, Sierra's text adventures and later its strategy games such as `Space Quest' and `King's Quest' were the top selling games in the world. Only a few years later, Adams released a second game, `Starship Titanic', but by this time, the gaming climate had changed so much that it was unable to compete.
Computer gaming has, in my opinion, undergone a de-intellectualisation. We forget that early gaming machines such as the Commodore 64 were often originally bought for children as educational tools, and that puzzle based and narrative based games required a good deal of mental engagement, rather than the physical engagement required of twitch-based games. In much the same way as silent film, the way that early computer games were forced to overcome technical shortcomings - that is, slow computers, poor graphics, tinny sound - became what distinguished them. I still believe game design was far more innovative in the period from 1980 to 1995, because it wasn't forced to rely on graphical wizardry, but good, solid, gameplay. The massive success of `The Sims' is an interesting case in point, as it indicates many things: people are not worried about playing within a non-linear, more or less non-narrative environment (again powered, albeit very lightly, by the `engine' of puzzles), people are comfortable with telling collaborative stories in three dimensional form - that is, the enjoyment of the game is based partly on the story the Sims `tell' you, and partly on your ability to manipulate that story by making them fall in love, take up a different job, and so forth - and also destroys the long standing myth that women do not play computer games, as almost half of all Sims players are estimated to be female.
The mainstream computer game world is pretty stagnant at the moment. Graphics and sound are no longer enough to carry a game, and now that the mainstream business is a multi-million dollar one rather than operating out of some guy's garage, publishers are unwilling to risk anything innovative, plumping for sequels and games based on pre-existing franchises instead. It's pretty depressing stuff, and I hate having to tell people who contacted me with their million dollar idea for a game and bundles full of idealism and enthusiasm that their chances of taking it to a publisher and selling it for a million dollars is infinitesamally small. But despite this, let me emphasise that, the outlook is nothing but bleak. The rise of the independent development scene (see for example Garage Games and Sumea and the dawn of serious intellectual considerations of the computer game mean that the genre still has ample potential for further development. Long live the Internet!
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