XNA Community Games and the Skinner Box - Rewards in Games

By now you've heard the news - the XNA Creators Club Online web site is back with the all-new Community Games Beta on Xbox LIVE. I'm proud to have contributed and prouder still to see that games are already coming in from dedicated creators.

I wanted to offer a perspective on why I think community games are important. It's not for the reason you think.

Let's get the obvious out of the way. There's been plenty of discussion about the Democratization of Video Games, and while I like the term and its implications, let's be honest: it's been difficult for the industry to justify so many "pipe owners" on the publishing side with Steam and other digital distribution networks barging in on the space...it was only a matter of time. Distribution isn't the part of the equation that's got me excited.

And, if you put your ear to the ground, you'll hear that everyone's talking Retro. The old new thing, the platformers, the puzzle games, the "casual" space - of course, we're conflating generations; mixing the old with the new. Retro is Casual, Casual is Retro, it's all cool and there'll be a lot more Atari 2600-themed bands playing at the Triangle in short order, I'm sure. That's great, but that's still not it.

I'm scratching these off my worksheet. We've all talked 'em to death. Digital distribution is the future, and Retro is a generational hiccup. As we grow and as we change as a culture, we're hungry for the same things, and community games is the key to getting them faster.

I'm talking about rewards.

Pipe Dreams and Plumbers
If you remember the old days of gaming, you'll find your own examples of games that are timeless. Play them today and they'll appeal. They'll challenge you, they'll enchant you, and considering that they were probably made before you were two feet tall, it's not on account of the graphics.

It's not the quality of the visual or audio elements that defines a game's lasting value to a gamer. Remember - games differentiate themselves from movies and music not just by rolling them together, but by being responsive to user input choices.

In the simplest (some would say Skinnerian) analysis, that it beeps when you press the button is more important than what the beep sounds like.

The beep, the explosion, the squashing the bad guy when you stomp on his head is reward, it is interaction. These moments are what we dream about when we dream about making games that appeal. We are in the business of creating reward experiences, from the simplest user interface rollover graphics to the most elaborate explosion effects.

It is less an academic science in the fields of both the what (a sound? a graphic? a controller jiggle?) of the rewards and the when of the rewards (when the player jumps? when they get a hundred coins? when they build a skyscraper?), than it is an experiential exercise - a trial-and-error usability study of the messiest, most disorganized order.

Why? Because games are fantasy. Any one element that ultimately contributes to a game being a rewarding experience runs the risk of sounding silly on its own.

Let's listen in on an early, one-sided conversation about a popular video game.

...Jerry, Jerry, just hang on and listen. No, don't put it on speakerphone, that makes me feel like you're laughing at me.

...So I got a game idea.

...So there's this guy, alright, he's a plumber...what? No, what does it matter who he works for? The Italians, okay?

...I know you don't know how to speak Italian, Jerry. It doesn't matter. Anyway. Anyway. He hits bricks.

...What? No, they're not on the ground, they're in the air.

...Floating.

...Yes, they float.

...I don't know, about twelve, fifteen feet up, they're pretty up there.

...No, he hits them with his fist.

...No, I don't know if that would hurt. Probably, Jerry.

...Yes, he can jump fifteen feet!

...No, no rocket boots or anything.

...No, the bricks, they - kind of bounce. Like they were made of rubber.

...No, they're real bricks.

...No, they just act like rubber, Jerry.

...Who cares how much that'd cost in real life, Jerry, they're not real, it's a video game, don't you remember?

...No, no, no, see, if he's big, then they don't act like rubber, they break apart.

...Well, he - uh - has to eat a mushroom.

...A mushroom.

...A MUSHROOM, JERRY!

...No, I don't know what kind of mushroom. A magic one, alright?

...Yes, magic out the ying-yang.

...No, look, see, if he eats the mushroom, then he gets bigger!

...Bigger.

...Yep, ten feet tall.

...I don't know, about four-hundred pounds?

...Look, Jerry, I don't know how much lasagna he'd have to eat. That's so racist I don't even want to talk about that. Look. You just have your art guys draft the little Italian man and the bricks and the mushroom.

...Yes, you can call him Mario.

...And remember, he needs to jump in the air and hit the rubber bricks until he grows ten feet tall when he eats the mushroom and then he can break the bricks, okay? You got all that?

...Yeah? Good. Oh. Wait. Unless he eats the flower. Then he can throw fireballs.

...

...Hello? Jerry? Hello?

So, barring that, I have no doubt that some very capable designers can visualize these interactions abstractly, no matter how externally silly. They can weave the web before they lay in one line of code.

But I have even less doubt that we all have the capacity to create these interactions through experience. Through playing around, through quick code and easy prototyping, we can all tap into the feelings we have when playing the games we like. We can identify them, mimic them, and help them evolve into great gameplay that keeps us coming back. We don't have to dream them - we can create them.

New School, Old School
Some of the best designers of the "old days" (and I'm looking at you, Sid Meier), were programmers. They visualized and moved into prototype as quickly as possible, to pour the foundations of their games and each reward system into an experimental mold to play with - to bring it out of the mind and into the world where it could be poked, prodded, and revised.

Big teams with lofty designers have, I think, lost much of that connection, and experimentation costs valuable dev time. First or second-round gameplay tweaks are lumped into horrendously-short "fit n' finish" milestones. The result is little to no experiential reward tuning, no prototyping, no tactile assurance that the game is going to be "sticky" to that spot in the brain that all the great games continue to ping unfailingly.

Community games, by placing prototyping power into the hands of smaller teams, even single, independent individuals, brings the inventor/craftsman mentality of game development back from oversized teams, and the experimentation and reward designs that will be forged by these new, agile developers will, I believe, stand the scrutiny of not only the seasoned early gamers, but the brand-new generation of gamers. The mobile gamers, the Xbox 360 gamers, the cinematic gamers.

Sure, they'll look weird. Yes, they'll be simple at times. But the gamers of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow won't have to call them "Retro". They won't have to call them "Casual". They won't have to call them anything.

They'll pick them up. They'll play them. And because the games reward the players, because the creators could be close to their game, to tweak it, to get it just right, those same gamers won't be able to put them down.

They'll be hooked, and those games that get it right, no matter how small, will live forever.

It's a great time to be a creator.

Games in order: Cannon Fodder, Armor Alley, Airborne Ranger, Inner Space
Graphics courtesy: fabricoffolly.com, abandonia.com, sdispace.com, lemonamiga.com

My Life with Games: Introduction

Note: In light of the New Year, I was giving consideration toward a kind of retrospective, maybe a word or two about where I've been yielding to more recent exploits - something like the traditional Christmas letter.

I realized that there's more here.

Something about where I have been has recently been nagging at me; I am at a crossroads, and taking my life's work further means an exegesis of my past pivoted around a central point, in this case, games.

There are many stories to tell, all for different reasons, all contributing to the person I am now and what I can be in time.

I hope you enjoy these memories - this is the first in a set I hope to expand as the year plays out.

 

January 1990

I am nine years old.

It is cold, but very little of me – save the tops of my ears – seems to care. I am on a mission at the back of the playing field. I am in fourth grade, and in my hastily-assembled kit bag are the gadgets of high-tech spydom. A stocky, blocky semi-automatic pistol. A grenade. A basically-round thing that’s supposed to be a tracking device. Even a little listening device that goes in my ear.

The devices are all made out of construction paper. The gun is purple. The grenade is yellow. The bag is constructed from two sheets of paper stapled hastily together on the edges. This departure from reality matters little to me.

I have discovered Covert Action, a game developed by Sid Meier and released earlier in the year on those big floppy five-and-a-quarter discs. I am acting out the game. It is spying, surveillance, and sabotage, all for the good of the free world.

I am at that critical age that homogenization gives way to the diversity that will define subgroups in later years. We are giving way from being "just kids" to being kids in one group or another. This type of child, or that type of child. Readers, athletes, debaters, scholars, troublemakers.

I don't know what I'm becoming. I am aloof, almost deaf in a way. A year ago, I was running around the playground with my arms outstretched, channeling my innate desire to fly. The slipstream wind over my hands was almost enough for a breath of barely-discernible lift, and with that buoyancy, I fancied being sustained, weightless, forever.

At nine years old, I have a vague sense that, as a child of my age, that sort of behavior is unpopular, even touching the tangent of the symptomatic. My mother and father fight about money, about work, about time. I feel a desire to stay disconnected from their worldly problems, but I am losing the earliest comforts I had - I can no longer fly.

I turn toward video games, by no means a new pursuit, but one recently having gained some social prominence through the development of new VGA graphics, and so, for being there when the need arose, I settled into the simulations of the surreptitious, the underhanded, the camouflaged.

I would become a spy.

One student - Matthew - stays with my evolution. He watches me cut my functionless gadgets from multicolored paper. He listens as I outline plots against world targets, fed by descriptions of nefarious shadow organizations.

And, at his most devoted, Matthew faithfully tags along. Along to the playground, along to the playing fields. We imagine stalking targets in the sewers as we walk in the shadow of the bleachers. We climb fences and pretend to jump building rooftops in pursuit of shadowy masterminds.

Not one tracking device beeps. No grenades explode. I do not shoot any bullets from my gun, because it isn't real. We don’t know how to make guns that shoot. We are children.

But something sticks, something at the core of what we imagined we were. Maybe someone saw us. Maybe Matthew talked - certainly a punishable offense in the clandestine service - but word got around.

I know this, because it is January, 1990, and there sits atop my desk a rolled-up tube of red construction paper. I did not put it there. Matthew did not put it there, yet there it sits. It is adorned with the letters TNT - a child-sized stick of trinitrotoluene. Dynamite. Somebody had made pretend dynamite, for our pretend game.

Someone else wanted to play, too.

Europe, Day 2: Midnight in Milan

The roads are still full at midnight – our driver is speeding up, hugging the center lane to scare off motorists thinking of merging in. He has good reason – we’re traveling at over 160 km/h. Working it out on my phone, I realize that’s about a hundred miles an hour. We’ve been driving for a half-hour already, after the hour-and-a-half flight from Vienna. I need a distraction.

I sit back and think of almost seeing the Alps. It was dark – we fly at night – and they could have been mistaken for clouds on the long, cautious approach to the Milan airport. They played Strauss, and the attendants – red skirts, red jackets, red tights with a blue chiffon – served a midnight meal.

If there’s advice I could give to business travelers, it’s this: eat whenever you can. As the (admittedly early) days go on, opportunities to eat remain far away and few between. So far it ends up as a simple binary choice during a break between talks:

• Eat
• Answer Questions

In a scenario of pure numerical outcomes, the choice of mortal refueling versus knowledge dispersal is easy enough – you need to take in order to give, and the maneuver of presenting should be giving enough to warrant calories paid back to the presenter.

But for me – and maybe this is something endemic to the setting, or to the product, but when people, many of them young people, have not only the courtesy to indulge your teaching style and presentation material –they respect you that far – but that they then have the fortitude to question something they have seen or heard – they worked it into their conscious minds – it becomes the priority to be responsive. Answering their questions is the right choice.

Thus, I remain forever grateful to the small tokens presented by the busy, for the busy; it feels as though in the small silverware and serving dishes of the airlines, in the leftover sandwiches from the conference caterings, and from the snuck-in meals from cafeterias after hours, there is a shared respect for the sanctity of basic nourishment, and it engenders within that culture an ideal – one of courtesy.

It is in the faces of the servers and the served. The same feeling I felt working those early months at the neighborhood hotel, a few miles from where I grew up. Food, beds, showers, souls in need of recharging.

“A hot meal?” she asked. The smile on her face was genuine, warm. A small glass of Riesling. A Swiss chocolate. When these things are readily available, we might refuse them. But I refuse nothing in these hectic days, and learned something in that moment, eyeing the food placed in front of me: I travel, not to increase my isolation, but to learn to be grateful for it, and for the moments that I return home and appreciate it for being there, and unchanging.

Don’t refuse a chance to rest and refuel when traveling. Eat whenever you can. It helps you remember home. It helps you stay human.

Games, Dreamstates, Etc

I don't think it's been the first time I've realized it, but perhaps the first in context - the video games I play influence a particular portion of my wind-down and sleep cycle to the point that I consider them - their challenges, outcomes, surprises - in the course of the day's recollections and recap prior to setting the alarm and settling into a comfy alpha-wave.

At this point you're probably in one of two camps: either you're feeling sorry that a human being can have their "normal" functions sliced into this way by electronic entertainment and feel the usual bit of disconnected sympathy, or you've already been down this road and could probably write your own article about it.

But for both of you, I have a proposal, a vision, a hope.

Setting The Stage

I was playing the World In Conflict demo earlier today instead of heading out for the usual airsoft skirmish in the woods, which was looking to be a rainy proposition.

World In Conflict is a tremendously promising real-time strategy game that has what it takes to be Game of The Year, not least for its immersive sensory experience - you feel you're there - accomplished by a variety of clever audio-visual effects.

It's also a fairly complex game with a variety of strategies and tactics to implement in the hopes of victory. There are an endless number of ways to play, and, if you're like me, an infinite number of ways to get beat up and leave the battlefield thoroughly embarassed.

Point is, I take these defeats to bed, not necessarily in an emotional way, but in a semi-rational semi-visceral mix that ends up being a series of "replays". I might find myself imagining the smoke from an oncoming rocket, or visualising the glowing red chevrons that indicate the fatal flight path of an oncoming airstrike. These feelings, these ideas, feedback on themselves for a while before sleep comes around.

What strikes me is that these revolving scenarios and their constant replaying and reassessing starts to feel like how I approach scenarios at work - my brain is doing the same basic cycles when handling what is ultimately a completely fictional, fabricated situation.

Electronic, yes, entertainment, yes, but to the thinking brain, the line is growing blurry.

Enter Zoolander

I start to understand better why so many people enjoy "mindless" activities, and I'm starting to wonder if we might not consider the same direction for games - a new type of game that can influence mental "cool-down" activities in a new way.

Could we, for instance, devise a game that has an external sense of appeal, but has internalized benefits as well? Something that, instead of manifesting stress or worry in dreams or pre-dream states, can pave the way toward easier, more relaxing, more stress-reducing sleep?

A goal in this endeavor might be to engender certain dreamstates or dream scenarios that the user would like to have. We believe dreams to be metaphorical expressions of conflicts, questions, analysis, and other mental processes, and while they aren't under our control, games may be a conduit to "prime the pump" by introducing the necessary challenges or situations to build a desired dreamsequence.

Want to have a "flying" dream? Play "Game A" for one hour before bed.

The Why and The How

Perhaps this is as simple as introducing games that have no "skill" involved - the idea of "non-game" interactive experiences, such as digital gardening, touch surfaces, and electronic sketching experiences seem to be more in this category - but I think there's a subtle shift on the horizon that may move us toward "cool-down" games in evening activities, even if we don't openly admit - or realize - that we're gravitating toward them.

I'd say as even just as an escape valve for the future's ever-increasing stressloads, transitioning, at least at certain points, from common gunplay catharsis to a more theraputic model of games may be not just recommended - it may be necessary.

Wow.
A switch from blow-shit-up games?
I knew one day I'd say something like that.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm getting old.

Apparently, I Killed The Virginia Tech Students

That's right - according to Jack Thompson, I'm responsible for thirty-two deaths and a suicide in the worst school shooting in United States history.

And it's eating a hole in my soul.

Let me explain.

Monday, April 16th, 2007. Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Friday, April 20th, 2007. Jack Thompson, a medical malpractice attorney who's recently taken up the fight against video games, declares that it's the video game Counter-Strike that caused Cho to massacre 32 innocent people at Virginia Tech.

His tirade is documented on MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18220228/

He goes so far as to write a letter to Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft, in which he states:

Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill.

And while MSNBC got it right that Microsoft didn't actually create Counter-Strike, I must confess, Mr. Thompson caught me in a loophole.

You see - Microsoft Game Studios did publish an Xbox version of Counter-Strike in 2003. And what's worse - my name is on it.

I wrote the manual for that game.

Me. An educator - of death.

I can say now, without fear of doubt, that I have gained a sworn enemy in this world. In the eyes of Jack Thompson, I am the man that trained the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, how:

• To shoot with deadly accuracy


• To gain money by killing the opposing team members


• To not shoot hostages (he sort of ignored this rule)


• To buy weapons by standing in the "buy zone" and pressing X


• And to defuse the bomb by standing over it and holding X until the bar fills up

Yes, if only I hadn't done such a good job on that manual, maybe this would never have happened. But I did. I trained Cho to kill. He read my words and became a stone-cold killer.

Of course - there is hope.
Hope that I can get free of this prison.
Hope that I may somehow have my sentence of guilt and shame commuted.
Yes, there's hope.

There's just one simple thing you have to do. But I need you to all do it.

Believe me, it's simpler than clapping your hands. Quicker than clicking your heels together. Even easier than believing in fairies.

It's this: Don't listen to a single word Jack Thompson says.

While I can't say that Thompson is a liar, because, you know, he's a lawyer and he'll sue me for evilness, just use your heads.

Did a game make the choice for a man to kill? Or did that man make the choice himself? Thompson would have you believe one way. The simple way. The way that's easiest to explain.

And yet, all of your reason, common sense, and gut feelings would have you think the other. I'm telling you: believe what you think is right.

We'll see who comes out the other side.

Read More About Jack Thompson

Virginia Tech: The Answer is Active

My brain works differently than many, I guess. The question I posed as I read all about the recent school shooting at Virginia Tech was not why. It was how.

How did someone kill thirty-three people with a pair of handguns?

What makes me furious is that the aggressor was incredibly successful at his attack. Nobody stopped him. He killed two, mailed off a quick package to NBC, went right back to killing, and then stopped himself via suicide when he was all done.

Something is just incredibly inhuman about how linear the progression was.

Which is why it was a decidedly different voice that I noticed in sifting through the massive media barrage on this most recent tragedy.

Security Consultant Allen Hill: Teach Students to Be Aggressive

Said Hill: "There are things that you can do to take the initiative away from the bad guy, to disrupt their plan and to create a situation that’s winnable for you."

Exactly. Hill's statements are on target here. It is the people who refuse to cower under their desks, who refuse to line up to be shot, who take decisive action, that not only survive, but we award with the title of "hero" anytime we have a tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech.

So why aren't we teaching these "hero" traits?

It saddens me to hear this:

At Virginia Tech, Cho Seung Hui walked into classrooms and simply shot people. There are reports that he even lined up victims to shoot them one by one.

Lined up victims. This makes me the saddest of all. The fear of a possible death leads us to accept an assured death.

There's a self-defense point of view that goes under the simple name of "never get in the car". Don't trust an attacker, don't cooperate with an attacker, always fight.

We may not be able to avoid an aggressor. But we can sure avoid being lined up one by one to be executed.

One student turned the tables.

In one Norris Hall classroom, student Zach Petkewicz led his classmates in barricading the door, saving all inside.

That makes me breathe a little easier. A little.

I know that this isn't the last we'll hear of school shootings. And I don't think it's reasonable to wish for the day that we'll all be nervestapled enough to never know aggression ever again.

But I can still be satisfied and feel safe. When will that be? When I hear that the latest rampaging psychopath got away with zero victims, because the victims refused to submit to the almighty gun, knew their lives balanced on their ability to act, and did so, decisively and without hesitation.

I want to make it clear - the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, was responsible for the horrible outcome. Not any of his victims. Nobody can say for sure that what any of the victims did was right or wrong, because each was acting in their own best interest with what they knew at the time.

I think that's the most we can ask from anyone.

I also think that, starting now, we can give everyone a better chance to know more, do more, and save their own lives and the lives of others. We can turn potential victims into survivors. We can teach this. You can help. Start with yourself and your family.

Read up, train up, fight back.

Start here.