Transcript Failure in Games Elizabeth Losh University of California, Irvine Arden at Indiana University A $240,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation announced in October 2006

Failure in Games
Elizabeth Losh
University of California, Irvine
Arden at Indiana University
A $240,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation
announced in October 2006
The initial blog entry on Terra Nova
“It's been a bumpy road. We've learned lots of
lessons, mostly that this is very hard to do, and
especially hard to do in an academic context. I
have new layers of respect for the world-builders
out there.
What now? Work continues, with an uncertain
time frame. I really enjoy writing systems in
NWN Script, so I will keep tinkering. But - there's
no telling when there will be anything to report.
Based on the current direction and progress of
the project, I should downplay expectations.
Think "small Dungeons-and-Dragons world with a
Shakespeare layer," not "World of Warcraft but
with Hamlet." When we have built a small world
that people like to play in, we will do some
experiments. Small, limited objectives. The
bigger objectives of the Arden project are on
indefinite hold.”
Scrolling down
“You're all correct in guessing that there's more
to the story. I made some awful mistakes as a
manager, which I don't hesitate to admit
because, well, I am not a manager. And the
project wasn't funded at a level where hiring a
manager was feasible. As manager, I did a lot of
stupid things.”
And down
“[T]he object is and remains to do experiments.
Emphasizing Shakespeare was a mistake. The
burdens of a license! Everyone thought it was
World of Hamlet and the point was to teach high
school kids 2B|~2B. But teaching Shakespeare
has always been an ancillary benefit, not the
point. I thought it would be cute. But putting
Shakespeare in the game, I found, took away
resources from fun. Lore, by itself, did not make
a fun game. Shakespeare also loaded us up with
an entire community of expectations, people who
dig the idea of a digital Shakespeare.”
The postmorten in Technology Review
appears in The Chronicle of Higher
Education
“You need puzzles and monsters,” he says, “or
people won’t want to play. ... Since what I really
need is a world with lots of players in it for me to
run experiments on, I decided I needed a
completely different approach.”
(Castronova also appears in this month’s Wired.)
‘Speare
Prospero’s Island
Orson Welles and Chimes at Midnight
Hazlitt’s Prohibition
The Multiverse Plan
What’s in a Game Engine?
Revolution and Neverwinter Nights
Why these avatars?
Why not these avatars?
Contingency
Why druids and ogres?
Why not witches and ghosts?
What are the rule sets of Shakespeare?
Rule Sets Shakespeare Seems to Violate
The Unities
Unity of action
Unity of place
Unity of time
Rules about representation
Other endings to his King Lear
And other endings in Arden with MacDuff going to
England
Shakespeare Mash-Ups and Game Mash-Ups
“There were a few MMO junkies on the team. The
lead programmer is a HUGE fan of Final Fantasy
XI. I really can’t stress how infatuated he is with
that game. The lead designer and the project
manager are both fans of EQ2. The rest of us
play a hodgepodge of MMOs. I tried a few
different games but I eventually settled on Lord
of the Rings Online. I can’t say that there was a
single favorite amongst all of us.
I think that EQ2 had a bit of an influence on
Arden. Like EQ2, Arden had an immensely
complex crafting system.”
Questions about Adaptation
Do games need to have the same stories or
characters as the original sources?
Could a game be about a counternarrative that is
repressed in the original work or a seemingly
marginalized character?
Could the rhetorical purpose of the work of
literature be better accomplished in a game
through other means?
How do you adapt a rule-based procedural logic or
ideology to a different genre?
To what extent do literary experiences imply
winning or losing?
Ian Bogost and the Translation metaphor
A role for Comparative Literature
GDC 2005
Translating Games to Videogames
Rule sets as integral to game play
Programming and Play
Other Stagings
The Globe in Second Life
Failure and Affective Computing
Rosalind Picard
SimEarth (1990)
What did
McKenzie Wark
say about this
game in GAM3R
7H3ORY?
Ian Bogost on “the rhetoric of failure”
If procedural rhetorics function by
operationalizing claims about how things work,
then videogames can also make claims about
how things don’t work, that is, how and why they
are broken.
As it happens, this technique has been especially
popular in political videogames, perhaps because
such games are often conceived as critiques of
dysfunctional political practice.
New York Defender
New York Defender
Kabul Kaboom
Genre and “the rhetoric of failure”
Shuen-shing Lee relates the strategy to tragedy:
“A ‘you-never-win’ game could be considered a
tragedy, for example, a game with a goal that the
player is never meant to achieve, not because of a
player’s lack of aptitude but due to a game design
that embodies a tragic form.”
But tragedy also carries historical baggage,
especially that of the very particular linear
narrative of tragic drama. Rather, I want to
suggest that such games operate by a common
procedural rhetoric, the rhetoric of failure.
September 12 (2003)
AntiWargame (2004)
Games from Persuasive Games
The McDonald’s Video Game (2006)
Darfur is Dying (2006)
I Can End Deportation (2008)