It’s a bit interesting to me that, while you guys were discussing what was that made games feel alive, I was unable to answer right away because I was, in my way, seeking what made ME feel alive. I read your letters through many balconies in many cities, from the kinda-cold Miramar ocean beach, to the 24th floor view of the Buenos Aires metropolis, to the overwhelmingness of the Iguazú falls and the jungle. I read you at my own pace, and so I’m answering many months late. Somehow, I was also trying to find out “what to do when I am always home-bound, but the home I was bound to no longer feels like home?”.

Before I can get my own thoughts in order respecting these aliveness subjects, I want to start answering some specific parts that called my attention. I took some of these notes while travelling, so putting them in order now makes me nostalgic of the places I visited and the people I shared them with. Funny how brains work. A n y w a y

There is a related school of thought in which being is replaced with becoming — things are not static, but always dynamic”

droqen, in Living Games

I guess when you say “a related school of thought” you mean Aristotle’s potentiality and actuality? Like things being in motion from what they are now to what they could be. But it also makes me think of languages! Of course. 

In Spanish we have two different verbs for “to be”: “ser” and “estar”. It’s usually one of the hardest things to understand for foreigners when they first get in touch with the language. ‘Ser’ is ontologic, it’s what things ARE at their core, it’s the being, the static, it’s the actuality. On the other hand, ‘estar’ is becoming, dynamic, potentiality. 

‘Yo soy’ (I am, constantly) an artist. I’m Mer. I’m emotional. I’m a native Spanish speaker. Those things are not gonna change, or are unlikely to do so. 

But then, ‘yo estoy’ (I am, currently) tired, or hungry, or happy or sad or any temporary emotion, or the place in the world you are right now, or the posture of your body. These are all things that are subject to change in the long or short term. 

My advice to know which one to use is to ask yourself “could this change this condition in, let’s say, a couple of days?”. If no> ”ser”; if yes> “estar”. So I can’t avoid thinking that things that están (are, but due to change the way they are) are more alive than the things that already son something (are, statically). Talking about dynamics, let’s move on.

Contrast the cells in the body (all touching, all related, all communicating) against the rigid and awkward shapes of a modern apartment building (all placed ahead of time, all identical, all part of a contrived plan to fit things into a contrived plan). “

droqen, in Living Games

I would also say that you can compare those modern apartment buildings to more “organic” (haha) way of building. I’m sure you’ve all seen examples of these houses, that belonged to some grandparent, and then they build a thing in the backyard, and then some more rooms on the top of the house for when the kids got older, and then… As the family grew, also did the house, following the need of its inhabitants; it preserves, adapts to, and strengthens existing structure. I know you droqen talked about cities in general in this way, but I thought that just as the tree and the forest, this could be the individual example of a construction being alive.

But let’s get back to games already. My first thought while reading about these terms is that games are more alive the more they revolve around humans and not themselves (games like Bounden rather than a shooter) [I had written”Sokoban”, but then again, aren’t puzzles (even as they are closed systems) also all about the thinking process of the player?]. But then I thought that one of the games that most feels alive by Droqen terms is Rainworld, which is a game that almost exists on its own and does not care about the players (or that’s the illusion it wants to sell). So I’m now more lost than before. 

You say that you like to see the history of a space having been LIVED in.”

jack, in Play to Live

I feel like, regardless of droqen’s (and mine) interest for cities, it must be a pretty common feeling, and that’s why there’s sooooo many games about abandoned places where you explore “the history of it being lived “. And while these games try to show “dead worlds”, they usually end up making the worlds that players feel all the more alive.

And that makes me ask the question: what is a DEAD game then?

Are we talking about LIVING games in opposition to what?

“When you are becoming ALIVE you can feel it deeply.”, Then how do you feel when you’re not? Like when you get stuck at an idle game that you feel like it’s sucking the life out of you?

I’ll leave you with this by now to ruminate, and I’ll come back with more.

I like what droqen stated about a game failing to express itself correctly and making you rage quit out of confusion or just blaming the game for your own mistakes. And then Jack asks himself: 

What is success for the poem? Discovering author’s intent?”

Jack in Designing without correctness

I think success should be “getting to its end”. In non-infinite games, I’ve always felt you “succeed” when you finish it and see the credits roll. ^{_{(Since we’re in a translations convo, in Spanish we say “darlo vuelta” = “turn it all around”, referring to the fact that after the credits you get back to the first “press start” screen; you go full circle on the game back to the beginning)}}. For a big part of my life I’ve felt that finishing a book meant succeeding at it, it felt like if I was winning something everytime I’d finish a big novel. So I guess a book (or even a poem!) that is so obtuse or boring or whatever that makes you quit, would be a text that fails its purpose. 

But, you know, I now agree a lot with Jack and all that Barthes’ theory. I decided at some point that I could abandon a book halfway through and still “check it” in my imaginary list of things I wanted to read. And that experience sufficed. I tried it, know what it is about and how it feels, and my experience is valid. 

On the other hand, my opinion on art critiques is complicated (perhaps because I always hated them and ended up becoming one!). Nobody should tell you how to feel about a piece! But the historical/social context is interesting, as well as deeper readings. I also rolled my eyes on a few parts of the Road Not Taken essay, but it also had a few quotes that left me a lot more than the poem itself. (Namely: ”Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions.” (emphasis mine))

And I think this goes well with droq’s topic:
Translations!

An author might be dead, but a language is not. You might not care what the author tries to say, but the language itself speaks as well, with its nuances and own history. We wrote a couple of things together with Droq for Argentinian publications and I found myself struggling to translate my own English-thought words into my native tongue: that’s how strong nuances are. That’s why your translator’s native interpretation says a lot more than what you can get from a translation (or worse: a translation from a translation; like photocopies that resemble less and less the original on each iteration). 

I loved what Ziggy said, and I don’t want it to get lost in our chat, so I’m gonna quote: 

It’s really just a simple, indisputable, fact: the meaning of a message is in the receiver. If you broadcast a poem into space and an alien race picks it up and nothing else… There is zero chance they will interpret it correctly. The meaning just isn’t there. The work, the message, is a set of instructions for a meaning making machine. (…) Before the death of the author everyone was implicitly claiming that “the text is dead”, right? The text has one interpretation, one intended reading, and this will never change or grow. So maybe we should instead defend “the life of the text” rather than assault the author lol”. 

Ziggy in our chat

This reminded me to China Miéville’s alien language in Embassytown, and also to that joke anthropologists found recently, that, of course, makes no sense to us. I like “the life of the text” because it connects with the life of a language. Languages change and those instructions stop being clear. And at some point, a language dies, and so those texts. 

Rami Ismail talks in A Profound Waste Of Time about how videogames are a language, and how smaller communities taught themselves to “speak videogame” and created their own dialects. And so I wonder, will one day come in which dialects are so far apart than we struggle to understand a game from a very different culture? Or that the language changes so much we don’t remember how to read. Not talking about the text, but about the mechanics. The assumptions, like “red is health and blue is magic”. Have any of you encountered so far a game that is just so obscure that you had to forget your misconceptions and learn how to speak it?

I’m eager to learn new ways of speak game.

P.S: Every time I tried to write ‘text’ or ‘book’, I’d write ‘game’ instead, and then correct myself. Makes you wonder…

Ingredients:

• 3 cups of creativity
• 200g of fresh MDA
• 2 teaspoons of Theme (can be replaced with Meaning)
• 1 or 2 main mechanics, halved
• 1 platonic game, unpeeled
• 2000-3000 lines of code, drained and rinsed (the way of measure this might change depending on your engine)
• 500ml of ego, crushed
• A handful of choices, not distilled 
• Juice to taste

Preheat your expectation to around 150 hype degrees. (°H). You can do this by jamming or pitching your idea to friends. If you have a Twitter-sized oven, be careful not overheat it, or you might get disappointed. 

Knead your platonic game for a while, try to feel its texture and smell. You might want to distillate a bit to use as a compass during the rest of the production. Make a nice shape with your platonic game and let it rest.

Chop your mechanics and mix them with the creativity until you get a dough you’re comfortable with. Brainstorm it carefully, adding small amounts of theme until the mix gets homogeneous (always avoid mixing the mechanics with the theme very roughly, or your preparation might suffer from ludonarrative dissonance when served). Now it’s a good time to remember to put the MDA in practice. 

Scoop the mixture evenly across the lines of codes. Remember to reserve a couple of lines for the menu later. Knead your platonic game again and let it hang out, we’re not gonna use it yet.

Stir your ego until you find your own experiences that you want to add to the recipe. Heat them up and add them here and there. You might not want to add to much tho: they add flavour to the experience, but too much might make it taste cathartic. It’s important to leave space for the diner to include their own condiments. 

Now it’s time for the choices. Place them more or less evenly, but in a way that nobody can tell where they are. Part of the illusion of agency will come out of not knowing when you’re gonna bite a choice. Take another look at the platonic game and put it back in the fridge, we’re not going to include it.

Season with juice and serve with marketing. If you prepared the recipe correctly, diners will connect with the course and will have an unforgettable experience.

I have this very specific memory of waiting at the bus stop and realizing I could get on that bus, or any bus, and just go anywhere I wanted — not only to my destination, but I could choose to travel anywhere in the city. That that’s what buses were for.

Getting on a bus today isn’t charged with the same energy.

(droqen, in Emerging)

This is so interesting and relatable! The realization of one’s actual freedom. I realized at some point in my life that I liked travelling because when I’m in another city, I don’t always have somewhere to go, so I can just go anywhere. Because I have nothing to do, I have no tasks, I can just ride a bus and get down anywhere, I can chose to walk and make a turn wherever I feel like it. “Loving the plot more than the ending”:

I walk through Madrid in your company. (…) With a slow walk, like yawning, like who kisses the neighbourhood when stepping, like who knows that has the whole afternoon to do nothing more that caress sidewalks. 

(Jorge Drexler in La Trama y el Desenlace – Spanish in the original, translation by me; this is the first part, so go listen to how it rhymes)

But then again, isn’t it also scary? If you can just go anywhere, that also means you can get lost. And that’s not just scary in real life, in games it is as well. Minecraft was terrifying for me back in the day. This huge world, where I could just roam without objectives, but what if I couldn’t go back to my home?. And even in less gigantic worlds, having too many options feels overwhelming! 

“Slowly filling the space of your empty hug”

(Jorge Drexler in Eco, yeah, I’m listening to him while writing ^^’)

Another slightly emersive aspect of games is the way that player’s can, when prompted by a game in the right way, consult their own experience and bring in some context, memory, feeling, fact, reason, etc. and so supply some part of themself, something external to the game, to their experience with the game. 

(Jack in What Isn’t Emersive)

This also has to do with the Haiku Games, the emptiness, the Tao, “the silence from where the music is possible” (Julio Cortázar in Hopscotch). Saying just enough to trigger the connections in the player’s head. It’s been a decade (oh god I’m old), and I keep on thinking about this quote:

What would be the use, for instance, in giving the plan of the room that was really MY room, in describing the little room at the END of the garret, (…). If I said more, the reader, back in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe, with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy. Paradoxically, in order to suggest the values of intimacy, we have to induce the reader a state of suspended reading. For it is not until his eyes have left the page that recollections of my room can become a threshold of oneirism for him. And when it is a poet speaking, the reader’s soul reverberates, (…) [this] gives the energy of an origin to being.

(Gaston Bachelard in The poetics of Space, page 49 – French in the original, translation by Maria Jolas)

It struck my 20-ish YO mind this idea of the reader lifting the eyes of the reading to daydream about some new or old thought that the book had triggered. But as Bachelard says, you need a poet speaking. You need the emotional ride Droqen mentioned in a comment. Without the poetry, the craftship, (the gamefeel?) you don’t get emersed. I think you first need to immerse someone, but in an incomplete world, with enough holes so they can emerse through them.

It’s interesting to ask how a videogame might be challenging like a book or movie, but I think it’s equally interesting to consider how books, movies, and poetry might be challenging like a videogame.

I love this! 

I think sometimes poems are not straightforward, they are a bunch of playful words that sound good, that are nice ’cause they have some musicality (either explicit in a song, or just because they sound nice when readed). But they keep the meaning kinda hidden, they don’t point at it, they hint at it.

We discussed the game Gris with Stuffed Wombat and Mut the other day, and Mut quoted Anne Anthropy’s critique, where she said Gris talks about sadness and depression so metaphorically that it loses its meaning. But I think that’s just because it is like poetry. Not that far from your games Droq, or Wombat’s haha. Always Down (I just can’t stop thinking about that game) doesn’t use words, and the gamefeel is great; the musicality of the game is of a joyful, exploring-ful one (wonder-ful? lol). But the message behind it is very sad, and that is also conveyed through the mechanics, but it requires an active reading to get it. Just like a poem does. 

Magical-realism writer Julio Cortázar talked about what he called the Active Reader, a concept that he came around when writing Hopscotch, a novel with optional chapters that you can chose to read or not in between the main ones, and starts with an prologue with an invitation to play (the title is no coincidence).

Literature is not an activity like those streets where cars can only go one way, that is, from the writer to the reader. It seems to me that in the 19th century romanticism tended to consider the creator as a kind of little god and the readers as the faithful who should receive the message of the little god. (…) Currently, between the writer and their readers there is, or may be, a dialectic, a very fruitful dynamic; in that sense you have to be careful that there is not a misunderstanding. It is not about writing for certain readers, because then you can fall into a didactic literature, (…) it is about writing with enough openness so that the reader is already a little bit in the book, is part of the book, has a responsibility as a reader in what they are reading. That’s what I tried to do in Hopscotch. It seemed to me that the reader I was interested in was a complicit reader, not in the sense that they should like my book (…) [but as a] reader that is a brotherly antagonist, a brother who I don’t know exactly who they are, but who is a bit fighting against me in the creative work.

(Julio Cortázar, in a TV interview, -Spanish in the original, translation by me-)

So, yeah, we need active and playful creatures. Because even if games demand interaction, you can totally be a passive player if you’re not willing to question the narrative in front of you. Having the game deliver you a meaningful meaning message is also an act of responsibility.

So, who’s responsible, huh? 

Why do I stop caring about jumping around in Mario’s world? Is it simply the lack of novelty in its challenges? And if so, why aren’t I making up my own challenges? What is stopping me?

(Jack, in What (or Who) is responsible for the Resolution Problem?)

I think there’s a reason why some languages have a different word for playing a game with rules, and playing in free-form, like play pretend, like what we do when we’re kids, or when we’re creating (or playing -with- an instrument? Uuhh languages, again! I have two distinct words for that). When we’re kids we find it simpler to play just for the sake of it, why is it more complicated later in life?

Story time! I remember watching Beyblade anime when I was 11. I’d have killed for a proper Beyblade, but they hadn’t arrived in my country yet, so I had to content myself with other, less-cooler tops. It didn’t matter, I’d spin those things everywhere, creating my own circuits and challenges. A year later, I could finally get some true Beyblades. And… I couldn’t play like that anymore. There is a point in your life when lifting a toy-plane and playing pretend just stops being fun, but we don’t realize it when it happens. Still, I could compete at school: social play. High school passed, and at uni I befriended a guy who told me ‘I still have my beyblades and arena and all’, so I went to his home to play, and… again, that wasn’t fun anymore. We realized it was just chance, and I think adults only find chance enjoyable when there’s money involved. 

Achieving things

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about missions and achievements, and what makes me play (and, like, do any other thing actually). This post was very helpful in that (I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, but I have two friends that have it -one of them is here among us- that told me I probably have it too hahaha). So like. Achievements are really cool to me, cause they give me reasons to play when the gamefeel content (or the novelty) is washed away. And/but, they can change the feel of the game. I thought in particular about Mujo and Wombat’s Ord, and Brin’s Binary Quest. Both are narrative, story-driven games. But because of the achievements, (outside and inside the game itself) they suddenly become a puzzle: how do I get the remaining endings? What could I do in this story to get a weird outcome? 

And I thought that was great, but, is it? If that’s gonna make players play your game more, but not for the wonder of the game itself but for completing a checklist… is it really desirable for every game? 

This Mark Brown’s video has some very good quotes and shines some light into this query. 

In structuring the game as a series of explicit tasks to be completed, we taught the player to depend upon those tasks to create meaning in the game.

(Jamie Cheng, from Don’t Starve)

That one in particular reminded me of what droqen was talking about:

Perhaps the act of giving systemic legitimacy to developer-designed meta-goals has the potential to detract from the perceived value of non-developer-designed meta-goals. 

(droqen in What (or Who) is responsible? Whoever takes responsibility.)

Is that it? Maybe as adults we need… validation? Feeling useful? Is this also capitalism’s fault? I realize that I make more and better art when I have an extrinsic goal, like Inktober or a jam, than if I do art for myself (which I very seldom do). But many people love sandbox games, it clearly depends on the player person.

So…

I think overall, achievements can be of five types:

• The ones you get for doing exactly what you’re meant to, “finish level 1”, yeah, sure, I was gonna do that anyway.
• The game-breaking ones, “spend 10 hours playing this silly minigame”, UGH, why.
• The pro-player ones, “finish the game in a speedrun, without dying, and blindfolded”, whoa is that possible?
• The collectionist ones, “GET ALL THE STUFF”, pokedex-like.
• The funny surprise ones, “feed the NPC’s cat”, ah, lol, great!

These last ones I think are the best ones, especially if they are hinted at but are not explicit, because they split the responsibility in both the designer and the player, and make it a shared task. Because you’re prompted to check the list, but it’s still a slightly different way of playing, and it’s up to you to engage. And it’s you who have to imagine what they could be about, explore your possibilities, mess around with the game and play with it.

I made a small IF for GMTK jam where I wanted to talk about loss and memory. So I played around the idea of erasing thoughts, memories, words; and tho I ended up using that mechanic just for one of the four situations (because is hard af to write), I thought a lot about the idea of erasing as a mechanic. 

In games you always build. You repair, you fill, you paint, you create things where there were none. I could only think of a few games that counteract this. The easiest example is If Found… , a visual novel where your main (and almost only) mechanic is to erase a notepad. Another game that resolves around this is Donut County, where you swallow stuff until you leave the landscapes empty. 

And there are also a few similar situations in Florence. And here I’m getting closer to my point: Florence is interesting because of the way it breaks with traditional expectations and forces you to erase, to un-build, to not-act-at-all and just let go. And games never ask that of you. They ask you to act, to interact; they demand your attention. This is the same reason why I thought Ynglet’s checkpoints were so genius. You don’t have to activate anything, you just have to take a rest; to stand still for a few seconds, to save yourself considerably more time in case you were to fail a jump. But I more often than not would forget to do so; being so immerse in the action, I would not stop. 

I don’t know that I’m coming to any resolution here, just a bunch of insights I had that I wanted to discuss with you and read your thoughts on. 

Is there really an intrinsically more pleasant feeling in repairing than destroying? Is just a moral/ altruistic dream we’re striving for? Is it a childhood thing (to fill the coloring books rather than fighting against the eraser to repair a mistake in our drawing)?

Or maybe there are a lot of games that take advantage of this dynamic and I’m just missing them. (Would love to play them, in that case!)

The real world does not have a resolution problem, and literally any human could spend a decade exploring literally any patch of dirt and grass on the surface of the earth. The real world is infinitely deep

Yes, but is it really? 

I mean, yes, no matter what obscure small thing you think of, there’s a paper somewhere in the world ranting about it. But, at the same time, we have been questioning ourselves the meaning (the purpose, the resolution problem) of life almost since we had a language to articulate those questions with. The fact that for every small patch of dirt there’s been some nerd exploring it doesn’t mean that all of us could do it and definitely not for a decade. 

The world is not deep. We decide voluntarily to look at it in that way. We decide to give importance to some things and others not, and those we don’t know about, is like they don’t exist. We invent meanings, goals, interests, reasons. They’re as fictional as the rules of a game, and just as meaningful (as we let them be). And when we give them meaning (notice the play between “definition” and “something that matters”) we learn about them, cause learning is a way of caring. 

Anyway, enough with the existentialism. 

Really any game that carefully crafts the way it communicates its system so the player may learn it through play, through direct and intimate control of a piece of the system, so they can exploit it, dance with it, FEEL it.

Jack (HAIKU games)

I’m not sure all of the games we play we do because of the resolution. The first time, probably most of them, yes. But in many cases, once I mastered their Gamefeel part, and “I understood them”, I just stop playing, as Droqen says in his “Non-gamefeel content”, so there’s not a second time. Just as many songs I play one day just to try them, and once I get the hang of them, I abandon them. But I keep on singing the same songs over and over. I keep on dancing to the same tunes and playing a few games repeatedly. Because they  ̶G̶A̶M̶E̶FEEL good. There’s no exploration, just plain visceral pleasure. And that’s amazing. 

And also. I always say that Nintendo games only give you back as much love as you decide to invert in them in the first place. They don’t offer super deep content to engage with, but rather an open space where feels good to be, and enough room for you to create your own story there: build, explore, customize shit. So just as with “a branch of math, or a lover’s body, or the 3rd wave coffee scene in Paris”; you can also be bored by all those things, regardless of their depth. Maybe it’s not about running out of things to explore, but of running out of love.

…

I promise I’ll write something less depressing next time ^^’

I don’t know that this is actually “working out more the concept” as you said, but these are the places my mind went while reading you so I’ll lay them out.

[GAMEFEEL] is worth caring about because it’s all focused on what the player is actually doing. GAMEFEEL matters because it is literally real, whereas videogame physics are just a virtual simulation; narrative is just an interesting story; graphics are just pictures you can look at on a screen.” 

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

I like this approach! You’re focusing on the phenomenology of games. In the real actual emotions and actions taking place inside the player rather than in the art product that triggers these responses. I had said once that games only actually exist if there’s someone to play them. I said it in relation to the importance of the player as a fundamental part of the product, in a Barthes-esque or Cortázar-esque framework; but now that you express this, I feel like it relates. The player interaction is indeed the most real part of the artistic experience (is what makes it an experience rather than a product). What makes a system feel alive.

[In Werewolf and tabletop RPGs] I think if you get into the right mindset, you can play along and act as though the story we’re telling together is something that’s “really happening”. (…) Imagination is a skill and we’re all practicing it together.”

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

This is absolutely lovely. But, as you said, I also struggle to engage in those modes as I grow older. I feel like it takes a lot more of effort to imagine out of nowhere and I’ve always felt like I need a lot more energy to play Werewolf than other RPGs with more closed rules/settings. It’s funny, cause I would get the feeling of “I don’t want to think, I want the game to deliver me a closed, finished experience”, but of course, those are not the games I remember later. The games I remember are the ones that, as Jack says:

leave me with some space to find some meaning for myself”. 

–Jack in HAIKU games

Mikhail Bakhtin uses to explain narrative in novels an Einstein’s concept called Chronotope: a space-time continuum, a 4D space in which stories can occur, basically. But I heard Espen Aarseth referring to games as meta-chronotopes, because they produce a new chronotope in each session, and we as players can create our story there. This happens in all games, and I feel that the more weight decisions have in the game, the more meta-chronotope they are. Open world games create completely different scenes each time, and my experience playing Outer Wilds for example will be broadly different from the one of any other player. And this is especially true in multiplayer games, and especially in creative ones. 

We’re more drawn to remember and tell stories of games in which we could live our own stories in, that left us enough space to create. Because:

The other thing that’s really happening is we’re all getting together to tell a story and try to imagine our story is really happening”

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

Praising emersion 

I want a game to exmerse me; by contrast to immersing me in its fictional world, I want to be pulled out of it as quickly as possible, so that I can instead focus on the actual details of my experience and the real people around me, and occasionally, other real systems”

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

This is a topic I’m most interested about! I enjoy both playing and analyzing games that create meaningful situations outside the proper game interface. Specially those that create human interactions and build communities, the reason why Cruel World was meaningful, and I know a lot of people with NAVE Arcade tattoos; the game encourages all this beautiful interactions of players outside itself. But that’s a topic for another letter.

I wanted to bring along two examples of emersive games to discuss.

Bounden is a cooperative dancing mobile game. Two players grab the phone and have to coordinate the movements outside the screen to accomplish some goals inside the screen. I guess all dancing games are emersive, but I had never played a game that made me share such an intimate dynamic with another player. It’s not just cooperation inside the game mechanics, all your attention must be in your partner’s real life body movements. It’s a really beautiful experience. 

Another example is Pokemon Go (and Ingress, but that one I didn’t experienced). The part I would enjoy the most by far was the Pokestops mechanic. Because it wasn’t that much about the game itself but about my real world around me, and the places people would find interesting or worth showing. And as a traveller and urban-spaces lover, that feature would help me pay attention to things that otherwise I might not have noticed.

Are there ways to encourage emersivity in design? To make players more aware of themselves and their actual reality rather than the fictional world presented?

I had been thinking about this many times, but the subject came back after a friend talked to me about Werewolf the other day. I kinda hate Werewolf, and I’m reluctant to engage in games with creative social interactions. Even single player ones but where creativity is demanded, like those parser text adventures where you have to type your actions. But I realized, I used to play roleplaying games and I liked them. And I’m big fan of Dixit. So, what’s the difference?

I analyzed these cases and got to a few conclusions and reflections. 

All games ask you to intervene, that’s kinda what makes them games, and you could say that all interaction is a form of creativity, in the way you have to come up with solutions to problems. But I’d argue that finding a solution within the tools that the game provide is not the kind of creativity I want to talk about here, but the one where you have to bring up your own ideas into the system. 

So, I’ve been trying to find like the parameters of asked-creativity needed for each game and how they are different. I think my problem is that I face a struggle between freedom and constraints. Kinda what happens with any artistic creation moment. The fear of the blank page occurs because of the lack of constraints. It can either be because you have no ideas, or because you have too many. Constraints help you put you in the correct rail. They can either trigger you an idea from nowhere, or limit your infinite imagination into a path of something doable. In games, rules are those constrains. Games that create a constrained and safe space to imagine are easier for me. In roleplaying games, you could argue that you can do whatever you like, but you’re actually restricted to the situation the GameMaster just described, and you have a Character Sheet that puts you back in the box. Yeah, sure, you can imagine all you want, but you’re limited by a (long but still limited) list of abilities and powers. In moments where I’d feel stuck, I could just look at my sheet for ideas, and then be like “oh, right, I can make a spot roll”. I usually say that coding with visual code like Construct is kinda like playing a puzzle game, because it’s creative enough in a way you have to come up with solutions and there are lots of ways to solve anything, but you have a list of things you can do, and they’re all in front of you, so it’s like solving a puzzle where you can see all the pieces. But well, back to analyzing tabletop RPG, I’d say the formula is [lot of (complex) input/ limited freedom (list of choices)].

Games like Dixit give you absolute freedom, to the point where the cards don’t have any text at all, but the input demanded is very small. You don’t need to come up with a huge narrative or interpret a character, you can say a single word or even just a sound and it’s a perfectly valid entry. So, I don’t struggle with those games either, and I haven’t seen any of my less-extrovert-than-me friends (aka most of them) struggle either. Spyfall could be in this category too. Even tho you have to lie (and lying is hard!), because every player is trying to be as succinct as possible, the demanded input is also quite small. So in these cases the formula is [very little input/ lot of freedom]. 

But what happens with games like Werewolf, or Aye Dark Overlord or those “story dices” ones? They ask you to elaborate a whole story, play a character and interact in-character with other players (and even lie!), and they give you in exchange very little to work with. They are anxiety inducers, even for people like me that have no social anxiety at all. I feel the pressure of having to come up with things out of nowhere, and the game can become very boring very fast if not all players are committed to the situation. So, [lot of input/ lot of freedom]

I think a big reason for Among Us to have become such a success, is that it takes back those simple rules of Werewolf/ Mafia/ etc, but it introduces a setting and a whole lot of more gamey mechanics that create a space where it’s easier to interact. The spaciality is a big factor, especially in pandemic times; both droqen and me have written about the importance of virtual spaces in the way we interact. In Among Us, that shared setting provides a safe space to create in. First of all, it creates a lot of real interactions: you need to take care of the ship, you encounter other players, you have to actually kill/being murdered. So when you discuss about who the suspect is, you don’t have to imagine you were doing something, you were actually doing something when the crime took place. And even if you’re lying, it’s easier to lie because you lie inside the parameters of the game. The formula then becomes  [lot of (complex) input/ limited freedom (contained setting)].

I don’t know if these formulas are novel or interesting at all, but it is the way I found to try to understand why seemingly similar games provoke such strong and opposed feelings in me. Would love to know what are your experiences with these kind of socially creative games.

̶L̶o̶v̶e̶,̶ ̶M̶e̶r̶