Folding Story is a slick, web based exquisite corpse: writers have four minutes to contribute one line – about a tweet’s length – but are only allowed to see the previous one.
That restriction usually makes for a chaotically funny and random tale. For example:
Sepia toned, haunting lullabies poured forth from a steely guitar while the brassy voice of the singer stirred us. It was our first time actually listening. Before this we would hear it, but we never really listened, now we knew for sure that turning it up to 11 really does make all the difference. 10 just doesn’t cut it anymore. When I visited Stonehenge on the autumnal equinox I had a vision. The giant stones formed 11s and started dancing about. I blame it on the LSD but even so I believe that the vision is a true portrayal of the final battle I will be forced to fight to defend my 12 year old moped.
Jason Rohrer’s Chain World is a slightly more epic version of this same concept, which can also be played with pictures and music.
A particular shout-out to the well executed UI and visual design, particularly the way the progress of a story is indicated with a sketchy progress bar (in keeping with the handwritten roots of this game) and – listen up Apple – an increasingly large stack of folds:
Also well executed is the rating system. When logged in you can ‘Like’ individual folds, which are tallied up to give the overall rating of the story and also each writer. It’s simple and mildly addictive, although I wonder if it’s missing a way to rate the story as a whole, which in theory should be more than the sum of its parts.
A counterintuitive improv tenet is not to try too hard to say funny things, because the humor of the piece comes from players building a strong relationship that they can emotionally react to. This is best done one step at a time, and ‘funny’ lines or jokes can seem forced. In the same way, much of the humor of Folding Stories may be in the interactions between the folds, rather than in their individual quality. But then again, the current system may be better because of its simplicity.
The one hitch in the experience is the login system, which feels needlessly long. Perhaps I’ve been spoilt, but it should really be possible to connect to Twitter/Facebook accounts, although that begs the question – when does a web app earn the right to ask me to create a new account on its system?
Cool, another game that plays with the concept of giving you only one life (see the chuckle-worthy You Only Live Once and mildly traumatizing One Chance).
You start out on a dark rooftop. Heart beating hard. Adrenaline pumping music. You hear traffic and ambulances hundreds of feet below. One tap and you start to run, slowly then harder and harder and with another tap you leap over the void, hopefully with just the right timing to land on the next rooftop. If you don’t make it, that’s it. You’re dead.
(Although admittedly there is a minigame in the credits, where you can earn an extra life. It’s inconvenient though.)
Adding real consequences fundamentally changes your emotional involvement in a game. One Single Life does a good job supporting its premise with a silhouetted aesthetic and dark sound design. It even tries to psych you out by reminding you – constantly – that failure means death (“WARNING 22% of players will die here”).
Ultimately, games are in your head. Take exactly the same game but change the consequences and it feels completely different. It’s the same as subtext in theatre/film/literature, except that instead of providing context to the relationships between the characters on stage, it’s the context for the relationship between the player and the game.
There are sad, real world examples too, such as the North Korean’s Football team’s six hours of humiliation on their not-so-triumphant return from the 2010 World Cup, or the brutal tortures and beatings that Iraqi players faced under Uday Hussain, which led to their being banned from the Asian games and most Arab competitions. It’s hard to imagine what that kind of pressure must have felt like.
On the flipside, poker with real money is a lot more fun with friends. To take it even further: strip poker with the right person has very different implications. Same game – drastically altered outcome.
All games, by design, define consequences in their rules yet most stay within certain boundaries. How far can those boundaries be pushed?
Gamification has been under well deserved fire, not least because so many implementations end up as a soulless retrofitting of points and badges. Sadly, these work well enough that they can be deployed without coming close to the potential of applied game design, while casting gamification as simply manipulative. Hence the derisive and increasingly accurate term pointsification.
Which is why it’s nice to see the Situationist, an iPhone app that dispenses with all these extrinsic rewards. You enter a list of situations that you want to experience (e.g. “hug me for 5 seconds exactly”), upload a picture, and it alerts nearby users of the app so they can make that situation happen.
It was created by artists collective Benrick, inspired by a radical movement called the Situationist International, active 1968-1973, who sought:
“a superior organisation of the world”, the fundamental reconstruction of everyday life away from the passive media spectacle and the instrumental banality of advanced capitalist society. This was to be partly achieved through the construction of situations, which would merge art and everyday life and revive the values of play over the mere “routine of survival”.
It’s reminiscent of Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost’s game Cruel 2 B Kind, a large scale team game where you wield random acts of kindness as weapons:
24 hours before the game, you and all of your registered teammates will receive an email alert describing the weapons you can use during the game. Each live game features a different set of 3 weapons from our secret weapons database. Each weapon is an act of kindness you perform on suspected targets. Example: Praise your targets’ shoes. If you perform this weapon on the correct target, they will surrender. If you perform this weapon on non-targets – well, we have no idea what might happen!
By turning the players into benevolent assassins, the game aims to increase the area’s jen ratio, a measure of the social well being of an environment, devised by positive psychologist Dacher Keltner, which quantifies the ratio of the positive and negative microinteractions between strangers.
Structuring a game to reach that deeper goal is an example of what gamification should be. Both the Situationist and Cruel 2 B Kind could pointsify the heck out of their systems, but the artistry is in the mechanics that make it possible to perform these random acts of kindness – letting you publicize the situations you want to experience or defining what moves count as a benevolent assassinations.
In the end, a game is just a bunch of rules and some props that players agree to abide by. Gamification has exploded, not because of new insights about games, but because we’ve got the coolest props ever. Substitute location based check-ins for a colorful game board, microtransactions for fake money and just forget scorecards and golf pencils, we’ve now got persistent social profiles to hang badges off.
The paradox of gamification is that, yes, you can make immense games with these props, but they are also just crutches, unnecessary if the game rules are good enough. Most of the games of our childhood had no props at all. That spirit lives on in disciplines like improv.
That said, the real skill isn’t avoiding props altogether, it’s using them sparingly and transparently, which is what the Situationist does by implementing only enough technology to make the game possible (perhaps even too sparingly: the interface might have been more playful). It’s also something that struck me about the Metagame. The cards are a very low tech, light, infrastructure, leaving most of the game in the hands of the players and judges.
Pointsification is just another tool. Balancing rules and props: that’s the fun part.
Most sites have a pricing structure much like the one above. You get price brackets, then features which are supposed to justify each price.
Akismet’s sign up is different, funneling you through different usage scenarios and only then giving you a price. It’s a well executed UI, overall.
The really smart part is the personal pricing. Asking the question: “What’s it worth to you”, makes the user draw their own connections between the price and the features. Instead of putting the price up as a barrier to access, a cost, it frames it in relation to the benefit you will receive. Losses loom larger for us than gains, so this framing should soften the blow of payment.
It is also much better than just making the account free. If Radiohead teaches us anything, it’s that some people will pay for something they value, even if they don’t have to. It’s surprising that more freemium services don’t add an optional payment to their most basic plan.
Cars are a perfect example of a product that tells you a clear story its intended user, or more crucially, the narrative that the user is trying to tell about themselves by choosing that particular car. Two campaigns by Mercedes and Subaru show how tricky it can be to support that narrative.
‘Speed Date’ is Mercede’s new ‘interactive road movie’ to promote the SLK. It’s beautifully shot and both the car and girl are gorgeous enough to tempt by themselves, but the interactivity gets in the way.
The setup: your car breaks down by the side of the road in the middle of what looks like the Nevada desert, when a beautiful woman – Ksenia Lauren – pulls up in her brand new SLK and offers you a ride. Cue the interactive ‘adventure’.
Unfulfilled interactivity. What does interactive mean here? Well, you get to decide on such crucial plot points as: roof up or down? music or not? should you do anything about some harmless Easy Rider tropes that ride a bit too close for comfort? Here she is asking you if you want to use the ‘Magic Sky Roof’, the $2,800 option which allows you to adjust the tint of the sunroof.
With every ‘decision’, you get more beautifully shot slo-mo footage of the car or sexy winks from your beautiful rescuer. She occasionally uses different features of the car (here the ‘Airguide’, prompting a pop-up to click to find out more (much like the infamous interactive adult scenes promoting Shai Wear, extremely NSFW, now defunct).
Not everything needs to be hugely dramatic (or as a great improv teacher once described it, dogshit covered in aids) but the interactivity here is misused. The irony of calling anything interactive is that all great media – book, film, theatre or game – makes you feel part of the world, whether you can affect it or not. That’s what made Nike’s first person Take It To The Next Level spot so engaging even though you had no control over the action.
Actual, literal interactivity can engage, or have the opposite effect if it doesn’t support the intended spirit. Stilted clicking to choose between two inconsequential options (“roof up or roof down”) seems counter to the speed and elegance of the SLK itself. The closest it gets is the bikers, but the interaction mechanic still falls short.
Trying too hard to be your friend. The ad uses the tried and tested trick of letting you upload a picture which gets embedded in the movie, but uses it in a way that feels forced. Making you the fictional “Person Of The Year” on a magazine cover feels like it’s trying just a bit too hard to ingratiate itself.
Even more transparent is the repeated attempt to make you friend the main character, Ksenia, on Facebook, first at the beginning, and then later on when she teases you about being friends. It’s ubsubtle, and made me want to do the exact opposite.
It’s such a literal hard sell of the SLK fantasy that you’re pushed away from it.
The counterexample is Subaru’s Mediocrity campaign. First the spot, an awesome parody of Apple’s breathless product announcement videos, the iPad substituted with the world’s most boring car.
It’s witty, sardonic and perfectly executed. Then there’s the website, where you can build your own Mediocrity. Choose your favorite shade of beige (Medium Crumb or Stale Biscuit?) and select desirable accessories – like a floor mat, windshield or hubcaps.
The best part is the game, a top down 8-bit parody where you drive down an empty road for several minutes. Ready. Set. Commute! The interactivity is well used, with game mechanics that mimic the boredom of a real commute.
All of this is a hidden ad for the new Subaru Legacy. The car is marketed as non-conformist, but instead of simply listing the features that set it apart (like Mercedes does) the campaign flips them around to create a hilarious commercial about the crappy features that are its opposite. In theory, the awfulness of the Mediocrity should shine a spotlight on the qualities of the real Subaru.
Unfortunately, the ad does a poor job of turning laughs into interest. Why? Car buyers are comparing the Legacy not to cars like the Mediocrity, but to some equally attractive alternatives. The Mediocrity should accurately symbolize those competitors’ flaws so that it can mercilessly make fun of them, but doesn’t get close enough.
Focus on the product. Ultimately, both brands are trying to create a narrative about how their product allow you to be different. Mercedes hooks you with the setup, but spoils the narrative by misusing interactivity and being too sycophantic. They are rescued because the car itself tells such a strong story by the way it looks and feels. Subaru sets up a great hook by making you react to the world’s most mediocre car, but doesn’t link it to the real world. When you finally see the Subaru, it is framed by high expectation, which backfires unless you immediately see the ways it differs (which you might if you’re a rally fan, for example).
Imagine if Mercedes had given you choices that really matched the freedom and memorable decisions of a real road trip, from Bonnie and Clyde to 1,000 miles with barely enough cash for gas. Subaru could have gone further by identifying exactly where the Legacy surpassed its competitors, and making the Mediocrity a hilarious laundry list of those gaps.
Ultimately, these campaigns highlight one crucial caveat: you don’t need such smart advertising if the product itself has a great narrative embedded within it.
The reverse is also true, except there’s only so much that advertising can hide: just imagine the SLK ad featuring the Mediocrity (or, to be honest, the Subaru).
There’s a famous quote by anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
There’s a concept of culture I espouse, [...] that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
(from The Interpretation of Cultures)
So I just read about Metagame, a “massively multiplayer real-world card game where you argue about games” which launched its newest incarnation at this last GDC. Two players face off, each holding a card referencing a game (from ‘Passage’ to ‘Katamari Damacy’) and trying to convince a jury of bystanders that their game “Tells a better story” or “Is more beautiful”. In the time honoured tradition of Pog, Top Trumps and marbles, the winner gets the loser’s card.
(Serious) games are getting press now because of the increasing evidence that they can make better lives, but as they get bigger they run into the challenge of nailing the balance between rigidly imposed game mechanics and those that bubble up organically. As art forms like improv show, a very loose set of principles can create really awesome stuff, but it takes a lot of practice to use them to the fullest. Getting it right leads to games that spawn awesome communities (for example, Lego, or Minecraft; the mechanics are simple but you can do almost anything with them).
And even with a very loose game, bigger means more work on the physical infrastructure. For example with the Metagame:
Logistics are a bitch. The physical elements of your game, from the materials that you are asking players to cart around to the locations where you are asking them to show up, can make or break a design. Just remember that no one is going to obsessively check an obscure website just to keep track of their team’s score relative to the others. If you need your players to know about the overall game state, for example, make it a spectacle – a huge screen or chart – that can act as an advertisement to potential new players. And keep the required physical materials to a minimum. In the Metagame, we have put the rules on a single card that comes with the starter deck. (from a post about the Metagame’s design principles)
This all reminds me of a talk by Raph Koster from 2006, where he ranted about the way games reduce everything too much, turning everything from history (Civilization) to people (The Sims) into a spreadsheet optimization problem.
Do a thought experiment right now. Shut your eyes. [Silence]. Good, they’re all doing it.
Imagine something that you dream about. A moment of experience. It could be, I dunno, God, laying on your back watching the clouds shake around, it could be the first time that you and your boyfriend or girlfriend, whichever it was or both [laughter] snuck out in the middle of the night and went for making love under the stars. It could be the first time you ever saw the ocean. It could be that moment… you know, I keep pulling nature examples, how Romantic poet of me. But it could be almost anything. The first time you realized that the computer would jump through hoops and do your bidding. Those moments of wonder that Nicole Lazzaro references.
And now here’s the thought experiment. Build me the game system right now, in your head. And tell me if that dream didn’t just blow to bits.
[silence]
And that’s the challenge that I guess I want to leave you guys with. Because it’s not that this way of looking at the world is bad. It’s not. The challenge that I leave you with is whether or not games are irredeemably spreadsheets in this sense. And I don’t mean the stories we tack on top of them, the pretty art. Because the art and the stories, we know they can do this. The challenge is whether games can do it on their own, without being propped up by all this other stuff.
It might be the answer is no, and if it’s no, then the question I leave you with is, OK, then, what does that mean? For those of us who make them, are we all watchmakers? OK, watchmaking is a noble profession…
And think about what does that mean for all of the kids whose brains we currently control. That what we’re doing is teaching them to see the world as clockwork orreries. And what that means.
That’s the challenge I leave you with.
This is not just a problem for game design. I’ve noticed a similar effect in design as a whole, where products get reduced to simple function and lose all poetry (for lack of a better word). A vivid example is the Lifestraw, which so reduces the act of drinking that it forgets that people, fundamentally, don’t like to hunch over and suck up dirty water (more on that here). Tricky.
A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.
Insightful quote, which has attracted some equally insightful comments.
I’ve condensed the first comment from JLM, a CEO with over 30 years of experience. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here it is as twelve commandments:
The CEO is first of all a moneymaker.
The CEO has to set the tone of everything.
The CEO has to set a vision for the company.
The CEO has to be a good thinker, a better writer and a powerful communicator.
The CEO has to tranform the idealistic vision into bite sized specific objectives.
The CEO has to organize the functions of the company to accomplish the vision.
The CEO has to be a trainer.
The CEO has to be a disciplinarian.
The CEO has to recruit, inspire and drive talent.
The CEO has to be able to reduce what the company does to logical processes.
The CEO has to force the company to be “customer centric”.
Most importantly —
The CEO has to face down risk with a steady gaze which inspires confidence amongst the executive team. “Well, if he isn’t scared, then I guess I shouldn’t be scared.”
A CEO is a master salesmen
1) selling a product that cannot be made, selling a service that cannot be provided, a vision is something that has to be described and sold to business owners before it is ever realized.
2) selling the opportunity of taking part in a legendary business to the brightest and most fanatic team
3) selling the product/service and everything else, including shares in the business to keep capital flowing into the business.
And of course the incendiary application to Obama (which triggered its own heated discussion):
Great post. My politics may be different from yours, but if the role of President is like that of CEO… Obama has three strikes.
Has he sets the overall vision and strategy of the country? FAIL (Far too many “top priorities”.)
Has he recruited the best talent? FAIL (Too many academics… And too many life-long politicians.)
And has he ensured that there is always enough cash in the bank? FAIL (Just look at the debt and deficit.)
The Veto Pen
Later on, the comments reveal an additional duty which may be just as important is to be the final authority on the product.
Fred, I like to feel that there is an additional role that good CEOs take on – that of the final authority on product utility, usability and quality. These functions need to be the responsibility of experts but ultimately the buck must stop with the CEO and he cannot run a company successfully if he is not on top of these areas. He should hold a veto on the launch of any product which he feels don’t match up to the standards he would expect in each of these areas. Roshan Silva
You probably can’t be a great CEO without these things, but I think there’s more. Leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Jack Welch, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan all have a rich legacy of getting involved in managing operations beyond just leadership. Kevin Morrill
I agree in theory, with the most obvious example being Steve Jobs, but his model of intense oversight breaks down when applied to companies like GE, Procter & Gamble or SC Johnson where 1) the user base is very different from the CEO (e.g. women’s makeup is harder for a male CEO to judge directly) 2) there are too many products in the portfolio for one person to judge. This is why Steve Jobs decimated the Apple product range on his return: fewer products made it easier to to play the final gatekeeper.
Jane McGonigal from the Institute of the Future at TED. Millions of gamers have a fully fledged education in skills that could help save the real world… if it was more like a game. 10,000 hours “The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing [...]
Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) doesn’t pull its punches. While many museums seek to entertain, this one hits you with beautifully presented information that rewards your attention with real teaching. The first exhibit I’ll mention is particularly relevant for readers of this blog. It’s dedicated to five types of innovation: Alternative: [...]
In their heyday, the existence of Native American Indians revolved around the buffalo. They used every part: “The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, [...]
