Strongman Games

All the media attention surrounding “hacking” these last few weeks have made me think. First up, it’s funny how Julian Assange of Wikileaks has been branded a “hacker”, suggesting that whistleblowing facilitated by the digital domain is somehow a crime (or should be). Whatever he did in the past hardly concerns the legality (or technicalities) of his methods.

Next up, I detest the “hacktivism” label that’s used to describe DDoS attacks whether they stem from botnets or actual activism such as Anonymous’ LOIC parties. Again, while it’s a clever turn of phrase, it suggests that congesting the internet is somehow an illicit act and not a feature of the system.

I’m not sure if I see how DDoS-ing a website is any different from a protest march. It commands attention, it disrupts business as usual and it forces some manner of response. Considering the London Metropolitan Police’s response to the student protests against cuts in higher education, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the powers that be has a might-makes-right approach to policing the internet (what a sad, confused article) too.

Game activism & Newsgaming
A few years back, while I was doing my BA, our lecturer talked about Newsgames. He showed us some examples, such as that game where you blow up terrorists in a middle-eastern town, only to find your “preventative aggression” spawning more and more terrorists.

I wasn’t very impressed with that game, mainly because I saw the model presented as little more than a rhetorical trick in game form. However, the concept is sound. A picture says more than a thousand words, but a loop can be infinite.

Game design strikes me as a great idea dissemination tool, potentially more direct and detailed than any pamphlet. Good systems can be stronger than arguments, as their reading is active interpretation. There’s no way to take them literally.

In a sense, Ian Bogost’s Cow Clicker is also an activist game, again so simple that it annoys me, but quite spot on all the same. Bogost underestimates the power of metaphor, but his point about shallow, compulsive systems is very valid.

System determines behaviour, but metaphor gives rise to experience. A system without symbols has little content unless you’re a hardcore system aesthete. Those systems fall into the trap of academia: They become excluding, relevant only to experts.

But, since we’re all experts in games, I’ll have a go at system-driven activism anyway. Imagine a game built around the now-infamous LOIC.

Participative Denial of Service Attacks
It could be really simple. Imagine a sorting game in the vein of Diner Dash or Galcon. The player is given a steady stream of resources, and a number of targets to spend them on. Or something like Pipe Dream, where you guide a flow towards a target.

Now imagine that the resources are TCP packets and the targets corporate networks. This could be reflected in the surface metaphor as well, with branded targets. The metaphor would dictate the overtness of the political action.

Any innocuous-looking match-three game on a games portal could be a concealed weapon, although I suppose portals have mechanisms in place to prevent this. At least I hope they do. Other games could be overt, with freedom fighters chucking molotovs at corporate headquarters.

You could even do multiplayer games. Each player swears allegiance to a number of brands (which will be intrinsically ironic, given the objective of the game) and then sets out to protect them from DoS attacks by expending a limited pool of resources as part of a team.

Each team’s politics would revolve around what brands to protect, with arguments about their real-world usefulness, benevolence, malice and coolness. The teams could also spend resources to mount attacks, with teams targeting each other based on their brands. Or there could be resources to win by attacking, meaning brands could be “innocent bystanders” in what’s really just a raid.

It would all be anti-corporate, of course, a sort of merry dance of destruction, a sort of anti-EVE Online. Or in a sense, it’d be like EVE Online partially overlapping the real world, groups of what’s essentially cyber-opportunists whose primary social mode is trolling, looking out for number one while casually participating in an internet-economics artillery battery.

Keep it simple
It doesn’t need to be hardcore either. Just make it Diner Dash or GalconFusion with team score, and a chat window on the side where players could discuss between rounds. That’s a start.

I recently attended a Games Gone Wild schmoozing and discussion panel event headed up by Nicholas Lovell, the lovable scamp running Gamesbrief. The theme was, as always, social games and the discussion was … general, to the point of being People Saying Things despite featuring a fairly varied and interesting cross-section of the online games biz.

Might have been too varied, as practically every company represented was in different businesses despite all falling under the “online” and “game” umbrellas. In any case, Lovell got to plug his book and I asked a question about middleware, which provoked a bit of chitchat and turned out to be a good way to cast myself in a role so people would later assume I was a Middleware Guy.

I don’t know any Middleware Guys personally, but I assume the term holds ample connotations and implications for certain people. God knows if I’m one of them.

In any case, the question “what is a social game?” arose, an instant flabbergaster because it’s so bleeding obvious to the people on the panel but at the same time the intersection between “social” and “game” is different to each of them because they’re in different businesses.

Since a discussion panel is supposed to yield semi-bitesize-ish thought fodder, everyone acts serious and pro and avoids hogging the mic, giving relatively brief and well-measured opinions without providing any real insight. They’re pretty good at it. The question “what is a social game” leads, of course, to the much larger and sillier question “what is a game?”

This is, of course, different for everyone enjoying videogames. For me, it’s somewhere between the pleasure of the impact and the weird hands-off tangibility of cybernetics. The sense of mental control over a system and all its mechanisms, all its variables.

The moment-to-moment enjoyment of involvement, the zen of motion; the sense of taming/experiencing interacting dynamics where each action ripples across a focused, controlled zero-flub environment that amplifies rather than dampens player agency. Instead of pushing against springs, the player is handed a loud hailer.

In a way, the freeze-frame impact amplifier employed so well in Street Fighter 2 and beyond is a spatio-temporal compression of pushing a wave in a DOTA-alike. The amount of compression of that moment of impact could be said to be inversely proportional of how many agents need opportunity to make a valid contribution to it.

In League of Legends, the moment of impact can last for 20 seconds and it will pass quick as lightning or seem like an eternity depending on circumstance just like that little extended pause at knock out in Street Fighter. The final freeze frame, the exaggerated one that declares winner and loser.

In a similar sense, Diablo and Final Fight is really the same sense of satisfaction, part of the same template-branch in the giant idea-organism-tree of game design. Both are social, as are DOTA and Street Fighter. Sure, not everyone plays them socially, but they facilitate that as well.

What is it that makes them games? Well, certainly tons of underlying mechanisms, some of which are commercial in nature (the spare change chucked into the arcade cabinet, the time spent on Battle.net), but to me it’s the moment of impact.

Social games modulate the moment of impact in certain ways depending on the number of players. System granularity (not complexity) usually increases as well, to “pad out” the moment of impact with resource management, risk-reward loops and tactical considerations/tension builders. That’s why a good Street Fighter 3 match is so awesome: It’s all the compressed impact of agency every few seconds.

I’m not good enough at Super Street Fighter IV to get that same lovely sense of authority over the possibility space that I get in truly great moments of successfully extending my will into social landscapes filled with means and cause for conflict, itself an amplifier rather than dampener.

That’s because I don’t have anyone to play with, and while I can learn the rules of the game, the psychology of their application eludes me as long as I don’t have any social context for them. Their architecture, both form and purpose, brings people together into conflict in the same focused way that alcohol and low lights bring them together into socializing — like the whole Games Gone Wild evening, really.

But I didn’t expect the panelists to say that. The evening was, after all, a sort of investor meat market, something I only really noticed when some pleasantly intrusive older chap, an energetic and eager sort that’s unstoppable rather than rude. He cheerfully interrupted a nice conversation I had with another Middleware Guy who did a sort of story-telling AI that I described as a dynamic foldback scheme system and got a nod for. I’m sure it’s way cooler than just that.

I think I have that guy’s card, and I know he has mine. Another social game — I make sure they all get a nice, pink Zangief business card that sit there like a little memetic time bomb, ready to blow up once an unwitting host is given some reason to remember me. The guy who did the fantastic card game Once Upon a Time, about collaborative storytelling, has a card and I hope he remembers me.

He organizes occasional board game gatherings for dabblers and industry professionals. I believe I might just kill to be there. More social games.

The night ended with a long-ish conversation with another Middleware Guy. He was American, seemed very bright and focused in the serious and slightly overwhelming way that some American professionals do. Like a momentarily friendly predator, a lion laying down with the lamb.

We chatted, he gave me some strangely sage & fatherly life advice, told me a little about his career and was critical but clearly encouraging throughout the conversation. He sidelined me to talk to someone appearing to be a paymaster-cum-chum who I promptly introduced myself to, resulting in a bit of social strongarming. I probed his shabby exterior while mustering a shield of nonchalance, trying to figure out why he smelled of money despite the unshaven face, crappy cargo pants and beer gut.

He soon threatened to kill me, so I finally managed to break into the local wi-fi and send an e-mail to my girlfriend, promising her I’d be home in about 10 minutes. Death threat untweeted, I strayed onto the Long Way Home, cheering up council workers as I completely missed Waterloo Station while the rain kept getting worse with every step I took. Another social game.