The Identity Distance Scale

It feels like just last week (actually it was a week and a couple of days) I was reading an article about Chris Hecker's keynote on how to keep games out the "Cultural Ghetto" that comic books have slumped in to. Chris spent a lot of time talking about artistic intent, and how the current game development culture hardly, if ever, discusses it. While technically speaking, many prominent members of the 20th century literary community have kept their intents and ideas out of the spotlight (Salinger, Pynchon, etc.), I think what Hecker is really driving at is that most games these days simply lack obvious artistic intent. Why is that?

A few days later, Randy Smith gives a talk asking Do Games Need to Be Fun? While it's not an original question, it's seems still worth discussing. Do games need to be fun? I can tell you the obvious answer: no, they don't. Unfortunately, given the mainstream's current view of games as technologically advanced toys, a game not being fun is a death sentence.

How can we bring games to the realm of high art that has been reserved for the high arts of the past? Well, as music theorists have laid out foundational tools for analyzing music, we must also begin laying out foundational tools for analyzing games. I have been formulating various tools and intend to discuss a critical and foundational one today.

Modern game genres are mostly a practical joke. The basic genres we have today (puzzle, fighting, action) were derived from the iconic, genre-defining games of the past. Modern games however, incorporate mechanics from varied genres, blurring the lines to the point that "rhythm" has become the only genre clearly identifiable (and if mother 3 has anything to do with it, that will be over with soon as well). I propose a different method for classifying games. Up until the creation of video games, games were placed into two polarized classes: Roleplaying games, where the players assume roles and make judgments based on the characters they or the game generate(See: Dungeons and Dragons, Fallout, Final Fantasy), and what I shall arrogantly call "Pure" games, which are games with explicit rule sets, goals, and mechanics, that the player adheres to(Go, Poker, Chess).

The fundamental difference between these classes is the player's distance from his identity. In Pure games, the distance is zero, the player is the player. They have entered the game world, exchanging their goals and world for those of the game. Pure games in a lot of ways are sports rather than art. The player is responsible for his actions and must improve himself to improve his game. For example, consider Go: the player does not have a presumed identity, his goal is to place his pieces in as to force the opposing player to place their pieces so that he can gain more space. As someone fascinated with mechanics, I find this kind of game enticing, especially given the emergent mechanics that evolve out of the few simple rules of Go (I believe there are maybe 5 rules of Go, and several dozen concepts derived from them).

Role playing games on the other hand, put distance between the player and herself. In Role playing games, the player assumes a persona with its own personality, body, and weaknesses independent of her own. The player's actions are dictated not by her own morals, skills, and situation but by those of the character she has become. Because of this, many people find Role playing games very enjoyable. It's a chance to become a person in an exciting story, something many secretly long for. As an obvious example, think of any of the later Final Fantasy games. The player assumes the role of the protagonist (Cloud, Squall, Tidus, etc.) and the protagonist's skill set (stats, limit breaks, weapons) and makes decisions from there. The ultimate problem with Role playing games is that the player is disconnected from the story. It's not about the player, it's about the character. And if things get too intense, the player can easily emotionally disengage. Of course, random samples from any medium can affect the consumer profoundly. Players can get connected to the characters they are playing, but this is an event common to all creative mediums, from trashy romance novels, to silly action movies (there is a special place in my heart for Die Hard 3, for example) and should not be confused with high art; to rise to the level of high art, gaming must immerse players with elements of Role playing, but move them with rules.

And so we come to the Identity Distance Scale. The scale is not a strictly quantitative scale, (I can't conceptualize a meaningful way of measuring a player's distance from their own identity) but a mental tool for examining a player's relationship to a game. Imagine a one-axis line between the most pure game you can think of (such as: Rock, Paper, Scissors) and the most removed game you can think of (LARPing Dungeons and Dragons is a nice extreme) with pure games being on the left, and LARPing being on the right. We can place any game on this scale, and crystallize how we interact with it. Puzzle games are almost entirely pure games (Tetris, Bejeweled, etc.). Most Action games fall about a quarter of the way from the left: you are certainly taking on a role of some sort, but otherwise the results of the game are completely in your hands. Fighting Games are interesting in that they initially lie almost exactly in the middle. Your choice of character is almost as important as your skill. You can make up for deficiencies in one with the other. But as you get better and better, the game's roleplaying value diminishes further and further, and the player's personal style appears no matter what character they are playing. Meanwhile Dungeons and Dragons sits pretty comfortably near the right (All mechanics in D&D are completely malleable at the Dungeon Master's whim), with most JRPG's falling a bit to the left of D&D, and Bethesda's works falling even closer to the middle.

This scale is easy to apply but what is its ultimate application? With this tool in hand we can centralize a "genre" for artful gaming. We can now ask, "Where do artful games fall? How disconnected from himself do we want the player? Do we want a perfect balance of pure and RPG gameplay?" No. The ideal point is just off the center, leaning towards pure games.

Pure games are wonderful, not because they are "Pure" but because the player is himself. He is the player, with whatever skills he brings. On the other hand, RPGs have characters, which enables easy storyline progression. We need deep stories to reach the player, but the more towards the RPG side a game leans, the more a player is detached. By favoring pure gaming, but still including prominent RPG elements, we can slide the player into a character that is barely removed from themselves, and then manipulate that character for our own purposes, impacting the player more deeply and richly.

This perfect balance of purity versus Role playing is exemplified in Atlus' 2007 title: Persona 3. The game's genius lies in its protagonist. The protagonist of Persona 3 has three important traits: Almost everyone in the game's world likes him, he is good at everything he sets out to be good at (track team, photography club, etc.), and he is the most "gifted" persona user the game's characters have ever seen. The last trait is actually a matter of gameplay mechanics, but is acknowledged by characters in the story. With these three axioms in place, the player is free to mold the protagonist to reflect himself (sorry girls, the PSP version is all yours). They can become friends with whomever they choose(the jock, the foreign student, the student council president), they can acquire whatever skills they desire(join the swim team, the music club, or do karaoke), and the way they arrange their party is completely up to them (the protagonist can make up for any deficit in their preferred team's roster, including running the game solo). In the process of working the different systems in place, the player and the protagonist become one.

As a result the game world feels dynamic and engaging. The player becomes attached to the characters and the world because they choose whom they want to be friends with, pursue whatever goals interest them, and "play" the game however they feel. I can personally say that I identified with my Persona 3 avatar more than I have to any avatar since. With the Identity Distance Scale in mind we can find that elusive balance between pure games and roleplaying games.

Once you find the balance, you have the player engaged. Everything that happens to the character affects the player. Suddenly we can easily materialize rich worlds of experience, and by extension emotion, that the player can't avoid by disengaging. Being able to consider quickly how a player will identify with a game is a vital tool on our road to high art.

Learning to use the Power Button

A popular opinion has begun floating around the net, making its way into the brains of gamers who like to think more than they like to play. These gamers enjoy games the same way you and I do, for the most part. The difference is that these gamers have a hard time meeting all of the challenges popular games present them, the same challenges that you and I fail everyday. But there's a difference between this gamer and us. When this gamer fails, he gnashes his teeth and begins to construct why this and that is a poor design choice in his head. This player needs some explanation for why he can't succeed. He grinds away and finally pulls through, but his ideas are settled, this is no longer fun, and it certainly hasn't been. These gamers are everywhere, writing and talking, and now they've begun to discuss the challenges presented in games as though they are slavery.

This slavery manifests itself in a couple of different ways. The argument I am most concerned with complains that game designers are forcing us poor gamers to complete various unnecessary challenges, many of which resemble work, for measly rewards. These gamers feel that games are monarchs, who command them to complete absurd and arbitrary challenges on a whim. These poor gamers are tragic victims really, victims of plastic discs.

This argument strikes me as alarming. To me, bemoaning a game for supplying you with challenges is to yell at a chef for giving you food, to kick a dog for fetching a ball. You can't knock a game for giving you a challenge. Even beyond that, to call these challenges "work" shows a staggering lack of perspective. Why are games work? The argument reads: because they are a set of goals that are difficult for you to complete, are menial, and are accomplished for no significant material gain. Much like every hobby known to man!

Why do people play music? The act of playing music is one of the most easily equatable activities to playing games that I know of, and any musician will tell you: in order to play music with any skill at all, one has to practice. Besides dreams of becoming a professional, is there any reason at all to play music well? Or by extension, practice? No practical reasons, but there are too many amateurs with fine musical abilities for it to be "too much work".

Any hobby or activity you can name becomes work if you look at it though the right(wrong?) lens, because all activities involve challenges that a person must work to overcome. But does that mean that all activities are work? Maybe it does! Maybe that isn't such a bad thing. In the words of George Santayana, quoted in Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: "Work and play...become equivalent to servitude and freedom". Did you catch that? The only difference between work and play is that one is at the behest of your boss and/or your stomach.

So if work and play are nearly indistinguishable, this becomes a matter of freedom! Are we free when we play games? Is there any way to escape the commands of our ruthless dictator? I think there's one, if I remember right. Something on the front of every game console. You use it turn the game on, and I believe you can (At any time you choose) press it again to turn the game off. Our savior: The Power Button.

That's all there is to it! At any time you can liberate yourself from a game, because of the most important characteristic of games:

A game, of any type, is a voluntary withdrawal from the rules and goals of the world, in favor of the more simplistic rules and goals of the game.

This feature alone makes the argument about games as work ridiculous. Games may resemble work, but not only is that not a concern(Some studies have found that people are actually at their happiest when at work), but it's also clearly false. If at any point the player has lost interest in a game, or doesn't want to complete the challenges laid before them in it, they can turn it off, and play another game. Or maybe switch to a whole new activity! You can't do that with your job.