Claire Hosking

I'm the Claire that writes for Polygon/Unwinnable, yeah! Thanks, I'm very flattered Long time Idle Thumbs fan, actually what inspired me to write about games in the first place.

dusted off my old account to talk ex machina

Just on why Over-the-top Columbia seems so much less offensive than the Over-the-top of Baz Lurhmann films. I agree that the free camera makes a huge difference, since certain cinematography seems to presume certain reactions and that's insulting. I think it's also that the over-the-topness (glowing letters etc) is in character for Columbia whereas in a Baz Luhrmann film over-the-top is a function of Baz's manipulativeness, not his characters'. Two, I think it's also the style. Columbia's art direction, even when it was laying it on most thickly, had a kind of fineness about it, a delicacy. Baz's chunkiness to it, an aggressive flashiness. Maybe it's the interactivity of video games that make it this way, it might also be the way that art directors have a more direct hand in the construction of assets than in film.

I think it's a pity we settled on Video-games as a term, because otherwise I'd just suggest we drop the games part and call them all videos. It's as if we'd started out calling movies 'film-comedies' (in an alternate reality where just the techniques and tropes of comedy were developed first), then gotten into the habit of just calling them comedies. Then we get stuck without a generic term, meanwhile comedy still holds it more specific & historic meaning, so we end up arguing about how comedy is difficult to define because there are dramatic elements in a lot of comedy etc etc. It's weird to me to have this discussion because in architecture we would regularly make little virtual environments to show tutors/clients or just to express ourselves, and we would call them architectural communications or interactive art. I bet a lot of architects would be insulted if people called their designs 'games'. And that's sort of at the heart of this, no? Some people want to eject TFoL/Proteus from game-land because they want to demote it, insult it. And people are fighting back, saying 'It's a game' in part because they feel it's equally worthy in experience to existing games, and also because they are aware of the negative stereotypes around games & want another arrow in their quiver to shoot down accusations that all games are bad art. (Obviously, not everyone has these motivations, but this feels like the core of the debate to me) I don't think we'd have debates about this if there weren't the two stereotypes; that games are more interesting than mere interaction, or that experiential interaction is more worthy than games. In that respect, I feel like calling Proteus/TFoL games is battle-winning, war-losing. In the long run, we should be spending more time sticking up for the worthiness of pure interaction, rather than this, which buys into the idea that being a 'game' is a mark of prestige. Just some draft thoughts, I could be swayed.

Edit: nevermind.

It's the difference between attributing that stereotypical behaviour to their race or attributing it to societal pressures, maybe? Fitzgerald doesn't give Wolfsheim any of the explanations that Gatsby gets for his behaviour - Gatsby takes on shadiness for a sympathetic motivation, Wolfsheim is portrayed as inherently shady. I think you could have written a character that did exactly what Wolfsheim did and came across the same way, but less racistly. (Mad Men is kinda classic at this - portraying people acting out stereotypes but showing how that was often the best of bad options available to them because of the roles their group was allowed). Then again, Nick is portrayed as being kinda a hypocrite in his belief he doesn't judge, maybe the racism is just part of that.

Or even, if you compare supposed blank slate characters, like Journey's red hoods to say, master chief, there's more diversity between them than between a lot of characters supposedly given a unique personality.

That's true, & I think there's also been a trend towards ensemble casts in movies and TV, deliberately contrasting the many and varied people/roles/experiences possible. It's harder to do in Video games if you're in the mindset that players should play one character from start to finish, since you don't switch around perspectives a lot like in say, Mad Men. Makes me really interested for Double Fine Action Adventure since that seems to be one of the things they're setting out to explore. There's a tiny bit of it in Kentucky Route Zero, and I think once games/players get more accustomed to it, it'll actually solve a lot of the problem of diverse representation. If you make a game where switching perspectives is part of the play, you wouldn't want those perspectives to be identical, it's an incentive to diversify for the sake of making your game as interesting as it can be.

Yeah I'm a bit iffy about it myself, but I think my argument works even without suggesting that the whole mind is a computer. It only requires that a sufficiently complex system can fake it, in one area, well enough for the purposes, on account of the resemblance between creative processes and emergent systems. (which I think is reasonable. Creative processes and emergent systems do seem to have a lot in common.) It doesn't have to be perfectly like the mind, only seem like the mind seems, and only enough to make a satisfying game.

I find "a computer doing it" an odd way to put it, since someone still has to write the software with intentions about how the social interactions will go down - the author of the software puts the same kind of thought into how they'd like their stories to go down as the author of a book. But I totally agree with your point it's horses for courses - procedural generation vs hand authorship have different advantages and disadvantages, you'd use them in different situations. I don't think we're really arguing. I think my idea of procedural narrative can avoid all the pitfalls you outline, though they're possible outcomes. Emergence is exactly what I'm talking about, exactly what I'm hoping for. Emergence is a property of rule-based systems. Yes, very simple rule systems produce unsatisfactory results. But even "don't plot things like an airport novel" is a rule, it's a rule that a lot of great authors have. Every great author has millions of opinions about different things about good prose and character and plot, and they emerge across their body-of-work as their 'style', the unique 'character' of their works. Every author has concerns, preferences, instincts, some kind of internal logic driving their decision making. That's what I mean. Get a program with as complex a set of "low-level interconnected systems" (ie rules) as Hermann Hesse, and you'll get a story worth playing. I sense a little bit that you think that emergence is unpredictable or the outcomes in CK2 are unique. True, Emergence is often unpredictable to us, but every outcome is already present in the possibilities of the system at the outset. Emergent systems can't generate anything that wasn't latently present in the "low-level interconnected systems" to start with. An author can only write a book based on what her brain is capable of. Finally, "the notion that we can reduce human beings to mathematical systems is a dangerous one" only if you think a mathematical system is a demotion! There's nothing wrong with being a system. We already are. All life is the emergent outcome from the low-level rules of DNA. It's only a problem if you believe that being a system somehow precludes one from having humanity, complexity, nuance, personality etc, which we have proof that it doesn't. TL;DR: If your problem with simple systems is they're too simplistic, maybe try complex systems instead?

"Rich people problems" seems like a really odd attitude to this book, since it's a book to me that seems to be satirising rich people problems by contrasting them with real problems. Daisy and Tom's problems are portrayed as melodrama (problems they create for themselves for entertainment and self-pity), & contrasted with the real problems, like Gatsby's inescapable poverty (even when he's rich, he's still tarred, because the only way to get rich was to get a reputation), the tenuousness of Wilson's existence, etc. Fitzgerald does something similar in the short story The Cut-Glass Bowl (rich vain woman makes little melodramas to entertain herself, then has to deal with real problems in the fallout), and I have vague memories of it popping up in his other short stories. Daisy and Tom are the only two characters portrayed as truly rich, (I think I mean this the same way Chris was talking about class) ie rich beyond having to sell-out. Jordan cheats, so does Gatsby, Nick settles for less money because he likes the moral high-ground. The difference between the classes is in one you can either be rich or pure, but in the one Daisy & Tom inhabit you get to be rich and pure. I don't think you're mean to feel sorry for Tom and Daisy for any of their problems or screwed up-ness, in the end. I kinda think that's the point? Maybe?

I just don't think proceduralism is a problem, b/c I don't think it's different to what we've already been instinctively doing. We have the same discussions around authored buildings vs procedurally generated buildings in architecture too. I'll try and adapt the thinking from that realm to here. I could be very wrong but I’ll give it a whirl. It feels a lot like a false dichotomy. Every architect or author has a set of internal beliefs about what constitutes a good windowsill or plot twists in a particular given situation. Their design/story instincts are rules. Very, very complex rules that are built by decades of observing the world & practice at their own craft. Give an author or an architect a scenario, and they’ll tell you what feels right. That logic is what I mean by rules. So every person is a procedural narrative/architecture/art generator. The only difference between them and a program is our programs just aren't nearly as complex. They don't account for as many things about a character, or track as many variables. Authors account for many more things about characters than are typically tracked by variables, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be. I don’t think there’s a real difference between a person making decision about something (for instance, there’s lots of sun so we’ll make the window small) and coding that in a program that can then extrapolate that rule to other scenarios (There’s less sun so make the windows bigger). Getting a generator to replace a good author would be super hard. eg. We know that particular architectural choices generate certain moods* but we don't know which, b/c it's extremely, extremely complex number of interactions between all the different elements. You could spend a lifetime writing a program, playtesting people's reactions to thousands of buildings, accounting for the variables and differences between them and the demographics of the people you're studying etc just to get the program to the point that a first year student is at, where it can look at its own drawing and say 'That looks solemn'.** To me it looks like: Game mechanics are already procedural narrative generators. Just very, very simple ones. Even the simplest game mechanics, say, Chess, creates a situation where each system in the game (pieces) has events happen to it. For us to call it a story, all that has to happen is certain systems become anthropomorphised. At this stage, it’s probably not a great story, at least in regards to the issues you’ve mentioned above - character motivation, character insight, prose etc. You can totally build and add those systems in. You can tie them to player actions. But if you’re just trying to write one story, or even just a handful of story branches, it’s easier just to outsource that to pre-made set of complex rules in someone’s head and say “here, Author, you be the mechanic that overlays motivation and insight and prose and dialogue onto the possible outcomes of players interacting with our game mechanics, so we don’t have to spend the next 10 years writing a system complex enough to do it”. (we can do that b/c we limit system outcomes to the ones we want to write - within a certain range or you’re dead.) If the game has just tons and tons of possible scenarios (or if say, you want to build an entire neighbourhood of houses, but you want each subtly adapted to its site) you might just want to write a procedurally generated narration and character dialogue program. But here’s the thing, whether one outcome, or three, or millions, hand-written or procedurally generated, every game has a finite number of possible stories. Which is why it doesn’t feel that different from traditional game narrative to me. More part of a continuum than an opposite. Either in code or story design, someone has preset the outcomes for every possible player behaviour. Procedural stories are almost more like squishing a thousand games together. Finally, I don’t think you need to worry about soullessness, at least, not more than with having an author. A thousand stories created by the same rules, if they’re good rules, like a thousand stories from the same head, if it’s a good head, will have a certain character to them. I think it’s a bit silly to worry that procedural narrative reduces characters to numbers, or turns a writer into ‘mere rules’. It’s like saying the universal is more meaningful if you don’t understand the rules that govern planetary movements, b/c it all seems like a beautiful mystery. Only if you’re more in love with the feeling of mystery than the feeling of comprehending a complex, nuanced system. My tutors feel that the city is beyond modelling, that the city is beyond the sum of its parts, & to create a digital model of the city is reductive, yet b/c games don’t hold the city sacred, SimCity just went ahead and did it. Like drawings or writing it is reductive, but acceptable for the purposes. Procedural narrative is the same. Devs can have the same attitude to the author’s mind: A glorious thing, but it’s not profane to model some of its systems. * to an extent, while there's nothing that's universally felt the same way by everyone, it's fair to say that buildings tend to have similar effects on similar people, and while there's great diversity in humans, there's also a lot in common. **If that seems like a lot of effort, remember how many failed architects and authors we train in the hopes we can find/train one that's good.

The room escape thing sounds amazing. Reminded me a little of the people who made their apartment into an adventure game for their kids: http://www.nytimes.c...wanted=all&_r=0 Definitely look through the slideshow. Would be my dream brief if I could ever find a client rich and fun enough to turn their whole house into a puzzle.

In that way it's like Walking Dead, it's true. But it's interesting how non-obvious it was. The Walking Dead is very "THIS IS A CHOICE! LOOK! IMPORTANT CHOICE HERE!". Which suits it because it wants you to feel like your choices are stressful, critical. The first time I played through KRZ, it seemed like the dialogue options I picked had no effect on the story anyway, so I assumed they didn't. Whatever question you asked, it seemed like you got info about the other two options anyway, so I felt like it was almost more of a stylistic thing: What attitude do you want to give this character? Are they interested in other characters or on-mission? But replaying though, I realised not just how different the dialogue was, but how many other 'choices' I'd missed. It seems like almost the opposite of The Walking Dead - only a couple of the choices that affect the scenes you see are direct dialogue options, or obvious choices in any way. I think I missed more than half the content of the game the first time just by choosing to do minimum the game has suggested you do, (just going where it tells you, being slightly afraid that diverging from instructions would lead to some bad end), rather than be a bit more curious. So I just missed whole scenes that could have been part of my narrative, missed seeing things that could be seen in other ways. It's great in that it's not a game that's all "AHA! Gotcha!" for trusting the game, but at the same time, it rewards you a lot for being curious (suspicious?) about exactly where you are and what's going on. When I realised that the game was so quiet about choice and opportunity costs etc, it gave me a little whoa moment when I wondered about all the choices in my life that seemed so inconsequential but might have made things go very very differently. I think that maybe explains why I liked Walking Dead's fairly constrained story - I like to think that there are too many over-arching forces on my life for any one little choice to have thrown the overall outcome too much. Yeah, can't wait for the next one.

Just wanna add to that: