Storytelling with Game Consequences

In this article, game designer Sande Chen reports on Jason Rohrer's session at the 2019 Taipei Game Developers Conference, in which he gave his thoughts about storytelling in games, games as art, and how his game design processes have evolved.

Independent game developer Jason Rohrer, best known for his game, Passage, debuted an open source image selector (available on GitHub) at the 2019 Taipei Game Developers Forum on Thursday, July 11, 2019 to go along with his non-linear, spontaneous presentation about storytelling in games, games as art, and the evolution of his work.

His latest effort, One Hour One Life, is a multiplayer online survival game in which players can spawn either as a helpless baby, a woman, or a man, and as the title implies, one hour corresponds to one lifetime. Cooperation is key to survival. 

Rohrer took a roundabout approach in explaining why permadeath was necessary in the design of his game. He wanted the players to feel like their choices had real game consequences and so if players allow babies to die, then there's no Undo or Rewind. There will never be a playthrough where the babies live and the players will never know what would have happened if the babies had lived. Since it's multiplayer, all the players are witnesses to the babies' deaths.

One Hour, One Life

Rohrer explained that storytelling engines haven't quite advanced to the point where he didn't feel like the storytelling was forced or fake. They either take the branching narrative approach or AI a la Facade. He's skeptical of AI ever producing great creative works and jokingly asked if we wanted HAL to tell our stories. As for branching narratives, even when there are a multitude of options, he still felt that because the player can replay the choice, the consequences don't feel impactful.  

Rohrer acknowledged that he's usually associated with the genre of games known as "art games," or games with artistic purpose. He thinks about what it is that games can uniquely do and how games can tell stories. None of his games are like Choose Your Own Adventures (CYOA). With Cultivation (2005), it was about building a mechanical system that allows the player to make and reflect on choices within that system. With Passage (2007), the game mechanics are metaphorical as if they were lines of a poem. He continued in this mode until he began to feel like this was like a high school English class where students write essays about what something means. No one goes to the movies to look for symbolism, he pointed out.

Now he thinks about creating "unique aesthetic experiences" that can only occur within video games. For instance, Inside a Star-Filled Sky is an infinite, recursive shooter. One can enter a monster and find another world with monsters and enter those monsters and find another world, etc.  It creates this feeling of diving in so deep that one forgets what one was doing in the first place.  

He mused about whether or not the game industry would ever produce that "Citizen Kane of games" a game so powerfully meaningful it's a transformative experience. He argued that there hasn't even been a game equivalent to the film Titanic, let alone Citizen Kane. He put up a list of games like Shadow of the Colossus, the first Zelda, and Metal Gear Solid II and said that even these amazing games paled as culturally relevant experiences when compared to masterpieces like the novel, Lolita.

Whether or not games are culturally relevant has been a subject of debate for more than a decade.  A watershed moment occurred in 2009 when industry watchers proclaimed with great fanfare that the video game industry had surpassed film because Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (CoD: MW2) had earned over a billion dollars.  Yet, as Rohrer showed in a graph, CoD: MW2 only sold around 20 million units whereas the film Avatar sold 360 million, Titanic sold 400 million, and the classic Gone With the Wind moved a billion units.  Therefore, the average man on the street probably knows Gone With the Wind or Titanic or Avatar, but what about CoD: MW2?  Even if that average Joe were to go play CoD: MW2, Rohrer argued, that person would not say, "OMG this experience has enriched my life! I'm in tears because CoD: MW2 has so deeply changed my life forever."

Rohrer acknowledged that there was a skill barrier to beating and winning at video games. Perhaps, he said, this barrier is so great that video games will never be as accessible as movies, books, and other mainstream media and therefore, cannot achieve cultural relevancy.  Another issue is that as technology marches on, classic games are no longer available, since the hardware becomes obsolete. This didn't occur with other media. Analog TVs still work with converters. CDs from 1983 still work, but a game like Quake was originally designed for specific hardware and emulators don't always capture that original experience. Rohrer had no doubt that engineers could make gaming systems backwards compatible if it were an industry expectation.  

For about 15 years, Rohrer has been creating games that are insightful and innovative. Mainstream media press have found his work to be deeply moving and complex, even tear-inducing. Despite his intellectual ponderings on whether or not video games can be considered masterpieces of art, others have already decided that Rohrer's work fits that description. In 2016, he became the first video game creator to have a solo retrospective in an art museum.

[Jason Rohrer's recorded session will be available on IGDA Taiwan's YouTube channel soon.]

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 15 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG., 

Braid Behind the Scenes

In this article, game designer Sande Chen summarizes Jonathan Blow's session at the 2019 Taipei Game Developers Forum, in which he gave a behind-the-scenes look at the development of his game, Braid.

Speaking to a packed audience at the 2019 Taipei Game Developers Forum last Wednesday, July 10, 2019, independent game developer Jonathan Blow detailed a three-year struggle against naysayers during the development of his game, Braid. The 2008 runaway indie hit, considered by many to be a masterpiece, obviously defied its critics when it sold 55,000 units in its first week on XBox Live Arcade and earned Blow more than 4 million dollars in revenue.

Blow took the audience back to the very beginning with his Super Rough Draft Version, a bare-bones prototype featuring programmer art made in Paint. Despite the simplicity, this early playable level encapsulated the design principles he intended for the game. He had been thinking about the Rewind ability, in which a player is able to rewind prior actions  This had been implemented in previous games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time so that players could rewind and fix mistakes, but hadn't been groundbreaking. Blow wondered how a game would change if a player had unlimited Rewind and did not have to worry about dying.

Moreover, all the puzzles in his game would be tied to this Rewind ability.  It would be about realizing mistakes, seeing the puzzle differently, and taking a different approach.  Because this was an untested concept, he wanted the game genre to be one that was simple and familiar so that when things got weird, players would not get confused.  He chose to do a platformer.

Finally, he was purposefully aiming for a game with "artistic attitude," even though at the time, it was controversial to consider games as art. Film critic Roger Ebert would famously say that video games can never be art. Blow explained that because there was no concept of art games or a big enough indie game community, it was very hard for him to recruit an artist to work on his game.  He would send prospective artists his demo and get shot down.

He read segments of an e-mail from one such artist who gave lots of unsolicited advice on how to make the game better because "the video game industry is very unforgiving." Blow speculated that the artist thought he was a confused newbie who didn't know anything about game design. The Independent Games Festival (IGF) judges in 2006 thought otherwise. Braid won Innovation in Game Design.

Encouraged by this development, Blow resubmitted Braid to IGF the following year, hoping to win a grander prize, but it didn't even become a Finalist.

Steam, which in 2007 was a heavily curated storefront, would be another dead end.  Steam projected that the game would sell less than 5000 copies and rejected the game. Blow even tried a back channel to Valve, which did not succeed.

Still, despite all the negativity from outside sources, Blow's friends maintained that Braid was something special and that they really liked it.

Blow persisted and got the attention of someone at XBox Live but even then, Braid was almost canceled twice by Microsoft and his art outsourcing company lost interest in the game.

Thinking back, Blow wondered why people, especially people paid to find future hits, didn't see Braid's potential.  He concluded that it's really hard for people to look at a work-in-progress and see its finished form.  Because of this, a lot of times, feedback will be wrong or at least conservative.  Therefore, it's vital that a game creator be able to communicate the future vision to team members and others.

In 2008, Braid won numerous awards, including XBox Live Arcade Game of the Year, and a decade later. is considered a transformative work that changed the market landscape by proving that independent games could be financially successful.

[Jonathan Blow's recorded session will be available on IGDA Taiwan's YouTube channel soon.]

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 15 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Pre-K Apps, Screen Time, and Infants

In this article, game designer Sande Chen reviews current guidelines on screen time and discusses what this means for Pre-K app developers.

Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) revised its guidelines on screen time, recommending severe limits for children under 5.  The guidelines state that infants less than 1 year old should not be exposed to electronic screens of any kind and that children between ages 2-4 should only have one hour of sedentary screen time.  This largely echoes the current guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 2016, which state that children under 18 months should avoid all screens except for occasional video chat with family members. As more research emerges on how screen time disrupts normal brain development in infants, it is expected that the AAP will update its guidelines as well.

So what does this mean for app developers in the lucrative Pre-K market?

While most Pre-K app developers target ages 3+, there is a subcategory of educational games and programs known as lapware, ostensibly targeted to the non-verbal child sitting in a caregiver's lap.

We already know from survey data that despite these guidelines, parents routinely expose infants to electronic screens.  Some parents even admit to leaving smartphones and tablets in the crib overnight, perhaps leading to this invention of a crib with a multimedia tablet dock.

While we could abdicate responsibility to parents for making the choice to use electronic babysitters, we can instead choose to address the concerns that screen time is harming child development.

How can we do this?

As I argued in "What's Wrong with Pre-K Game Apps," we should be developing apps for co-use by a caregiver and child.  Children under the age of 3 learn through social interaction and it's important to retain this face-to-face aspect.  Furthermore, we need to tone down the bells and whistles not only because the overstimulation of screen time seems to lead to hyperactivity, but also because young children don't learn very well when there are too many distractions.

Of course, in regards to infants, if parents choose to limit children's screen time, that is all and well, but parents should also remember to limit their screen time too.  A recent 20/20 report entitled "Screen Time" showed clip after clip of babies and toddlers trying to catch the attention of distracted parents with smartphones.  Even young children under the age of 3 are aware when a parent's attention wavers.

Overall, as an industry, we are facing increasing pressure to take responsibility for limiting screen time. By June 2019, apps sold in China will be required to have a "youth mode" to allow parents to limit screen time and prevent children from accessing the app from 10 PM to 6 AM.  This follows similar regulations and fines in South Korea and Taiwan.  Before the regulators come for you, why not show that not all screen time is inherently detrimental to children's health?

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 15 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.