Each year this GDC thing happens. A bunch of ego-powered developers gather in a room and distribute Knowledge. You listen, you /nod, you /clap.

From here I have to read second-hand reports that, still, are enough to put me in “flaming” mode and get me banned everywhere (as per “disclaimer” above on this site). A ritual. Each year I keep wondering why the technology hasn’t reached that place. You know, I guess it’s too hard to record everything and deliver a well-edited .avi file for each conference or, AT LEAST, an MP3. This is why I wish I could be there and offer at least a REAL content and useful reports. I’d love to provide content in the first place instead of just reactions to it.

This time things are somewhat better. We have already a more complete report of Raph Koster’s speech. As always I have to sit down and parse what is being said. I need to understand if there’s something to learn, if there’s something I already know or if there’s something where I have to disagree. The purpose of this site is again to help me shape my own ideas and this means that I strongly need to put order in the thoughts and list and categorize what’s new, what’s old, what’s wrong. Then I build a “packet” and send it in my memory to be used “later” (or never, good riddance).

As you start reading that second-hand report you notice that it’s directly a live-reading of what Raph put in his book. He explains the process that brought to formulate questions-that-need-to-be-answered:

I blew through all of it, and the game said “You’ve beaten the levels, so we’ll just randomly throw stuff at you that you’ve played before now”, and so I quit. I also wondered why I quit.

I found it BORING. This is interesting. I find it boring when it’s really easy, and also boring when it’s really hard. What’s that space in the middle about?

Both this and the next part are ressuring because they are things I already parsed. Raph believes that everything can be reduced to “pattern-matching”, while I believe everything should be generalized to “learning“. As you can see from this link my ideas were set already many months before Raph’s book. I underline this again not because I believe Raph stole my ideas, nor to demonstrate I’m smarter. I do that just because I agree, so I can move on. Despite the apparent difference about “pattern-matching” or “learning”, the core concepts and the conclusions are the same, only observed and described from a different point of view. We are still looking at the same “object”.

In fact Raph’s explaination of the meaning of “pattern-matching” can be juxtaposed easily to “learning”:

What we think of as ‘thinking’ or consciousness is really just a big memory game. Matching things into sets. Moving things into the right place, then moving on.

Maybe, at this point, you can understand the introduction I wrote above. You can also imagine that “learing” may be just equivalent to “pattern-marching”, where the first is just a superficial term. Raph decided to delve more. What “learning” means? How we learn?

When we meet noise, and fail to make a pattern out of it, we get frustrated and quit.

When we see a pattern that we get, we do it over and over again. We build neural connections. Now this is what I call fun.

Building those patterns is necessary for our survival. If you don’t have a pattern library, you are going to die. You won’t be able to tell an apple from Draino.

The last line is the key. From the “world” point of view a Draino (I don’t know what it is, btw) is like an apple. The REAL world is continuous. Or, if you like academic terms: “analogic”. A table isn’t different than the pavement. The world, by itself, doesn’t justify a “culture”.

Wittgenstein used a simple “language game” that I’ll simplify even more. If I take two notebooks, one with a yellow cover, the other with a red cover, we can easily point to one and say it’s red or yellow. But if the cover fades slowly from yellow to red? Maybe, if this is uniform, we can set the limit between red and yellow near the center. But if this fading effect isn’t uniform? The conclusion is that it is impossible to draw an exact line between two concepts. A tree is a forest? How many trees can be considered a forest? We cannot know.

One of the first principles that you learn when studying linguistics is that (every) language is “arbitrary”. It means that it’s not “set”. It depends on how we decide to agree. It’s an opinion, not science. Another basic principle is that the language works as a “system”. A word hasn’t a meaning on its own. A word has a meaning depending on its relationships and ties between the other words. This is what brought to the concept of “distintive traits”. An “apple” is “fruit” but it contains more specific traits and these traits, opposed to traits of different words build the relationships in the system. The meaning of a word depends on its position within the system. Different cultures define different words with different meanings. They “cut” and segment the world in a different way. Separating things that another culture joined, joining something else. Because another important lesson (Wittgenstein again) is “Meaning as use”.

If you do another step following this line of thoughts you’ll see that the language is an “operation”. An action. It isn’t a passive observation. It isn’t an objective study of the world. It’s completely subjective. You point something. You build a form. You distinguish a shape by separating it from the rest. As you point you build two parts. Always. What you pointed to and all the rest. This is an active operation. It’s an action. The conclusion is that the two parts you have actively created don’t exist in the reality. You shaped that.

The “culture”, in its widest and most comprehensive meaning, is the process of segmenting the world. It’s like taking scissors and cut a paper into pieces. The “paper” is our reality, we shatter it, we segment it, we “know” it. The culture cuts. The culture is “digital”. Not analogic. Not contiguous. The fragments it builds are always an “opinion”. Always arbitrary. But how we communicate? We agree, more or less, about where to cut this paper. Our culture sets the opinion. Our culture defines our influences. It teaches us.

This digression is just to explain that pattern-matching is learning. Learning is how we build a culture. A culture is the sphere where we live. Inside it. We do not know the world. We only perceive it through the filter of the culture. “Pattern-matching” is all we do. Always.

Fun is the feedback the brain gives while successfully absorbing a pattern. We need to absorb patterns, otherwise we die. So the brain HAS to give positive feedback to you for learning stuff.

This reminds me the agreements Homer Simpson does with his own brain. You do that and I release the endorphins. I believe “sex” is “fun” for similar reasons.

And this is the serious games cheer line: I’m’ here to tell you that fun is not only not frivolous but fundamental to human nature and required for survival. Therefore what we do is saving the human race from extinction.

Or maybe we have the money-guys who discovered how to exploit the mechanic to get loads of money. Like the porn industry. Addictive. Dependence. Hunger pains interrupting your game? Moral Responsibilities of Game Creators? (link needs registration)

Let’s move on.

Games are training us to find underlying patterns. Games are teaching us to find patterns in a systemic way.

We have a fundamental disagreement about what games ARE. They are not story, presentation, metaphor. These are all in games, but that’s not what games ARE. The real social value comes from what games are. The distilled cognitive schemata inside games is socially valuable.

What follows now is interesting. He speaks of cheating:

If you can’t choose the battle, choose the battlefield. People are smart. If you follow the rules of duelling.. the evolutionary smart thing to do is count one and shoot the guy in the back. People come to games thinking the same way, which is why we get cheats and hacks and exploits. We try to game the system. We game designers react negatively to this, but it’s a sign we’re doing our job, as game designers. It’s getting them to figure out the pattern, cope with it, deal with it, then reapply it. If a player sees an optimal path – an Alexandrine solution to a Gordian problem – they’ll take it. Under most circumstances we call this lateral thinking and praise it to the skies. In games it’s called cheating.

But it’s the wrong lesson. Cheating isn’t a process working in an open sandbox. Cheating is about breaking rules that are supposedly set. It’s about teaching the wrong lesson. What Raph writes here should be reverted: the players are doing their job, not the developers. This is also why cheating is often a result of bugs or bad game design. This is also why it’s a duty of a developer to solve the situation.
From Dave Rickey:

Fix the game, not the players. Every online game operator needs to print that on signs and paste them all over the office. If neccessary, tattoo it in reverse on their foreheads so they see it every time they look in the mirror.

“Exploits” are the *designers* error, not the players. Fix them. No excuses. If you can’t fix them and the “exploit” is severe in consequence, turn off the relevant content until you *can* fix it.

But this is another digression because Raph’s points is just a demonstration of how everything can be taken back to the core element of “pattern-matching”. But here begins also the limit of this analysis. When you focus and delve too much, you lose track of what’s around. You squints your eyes so much to stare that point that you lose directly the possibility to understand the context. Above I explained that pattern-matching is what builds a culture. But I also said that we live in there. Inside the culture, not by it. The mistake is that the culture isn’t anymore just a tool to deliver “a process of signification” (what I explained about pointing something and separating it from the rest). The culture becomes by itself education. The culture provides directly a “meaning”. Even when the meaning isn’t supposed to be there. This is why, at some point, the kamikaze “are able” to put the sacrifice ahead of their life. Why? Because the culture became more important than its reason of existence. There are concepts that went above all that. Social structures like “god” are so powerful that are able to represent disasters and they also represent the purest form of culture. In all its best and worst examples. Like two extremes.

The same happens with the superstition. We see patterns that do not exist, we put value into stones. We believe in what’s “holy”, we believe that something is magic. That storms are the result of an angry god, that we can see the future in the bowels of an animal. We also believe that World of Warcraft cheats on the rolls for loot.

At some point the culture took the lead and now it provides directly the context, the meaning and the fun. The formal system are indispensable to understand and describe but you cannot start from them to create something without remembering that its the context to create the content and its mechanics. you cannot revert the process. An excerpt from Raph’s book:

The best test of a game’s fun in the strict sense will therefore be playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, no nothing. If that is fun, then everything else will serve to focus, refine, empower, and magnify. But all the dressing in the world can’t change iceberg lettuce into roast turkey.

This is where he is wrong. Escher’s Drawing Hands. He designs from the outside. He breaks the boundaries of the setting. He alienates the purposes from the context, he trivializes the power of the culture. Star Wars isn’t a formal system. It’s not a case that many still bitch about the game betraying the expectations of “being a Jedi”. Because the figure of a Jedi isn’t a formal system. It’s a strong cultural archetype. Same for the problem in balancing factions on PvP. The good faction always overpower the bad guys because those archetypes are stronger in their cultural relevance.

The “fun” is strongly affected by the perception. The perception is distorted by the culture where we live. This is why Ubiq underlines the importance of the localization of a product (despite I disagree on this point). Playing a Jedi isn’t the same as playing a random kung-fu guy, even if the formal system may work in the exact same way. When I was young I imagined about playing Bruce Lee when playing a fighting game. And playing that game was way more involving the day after watching a Bruce Lee game. When the first Lord of the Ring movie was out I noticed a sudden boost in wizards in Emain. Everyone wanted to be Gandalf. They quoted Gandalf. They tried to reproduce those battles.

Games are completely driven by these processes. We not only match patterns, but we chase patterns with a strong cultural meaning. We want to be successful “as” someone else. We live with myths. We live FOR the myths. This doesn’t mean that the formal system isn’t important. It means that the formal system is just a face of a medal. Since it’s a medal it has the other face. This other face is about the culture and its added value today.

The most successful books, the most successful movies and the most successful games are always those that are able to reproduce and anticipate strong cultural values and developments. Think to Marlon Brando, think to “Gone with the Wind”, think to “Generation X”, think to “Blade Runner”, think to “American Graffiti”, think to “Big Wednesday”, think to “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, think to “Happy Days”, think to “Titanic”, think to “Evangelion”, think to “Star Wars”, think to “Grand Theft Auto”. Think to “Sex and the City” and “Desperate housewives”. Think to the music in general. The trends. Think to the cyberpunk. Think to the “New Age”.

This is a “cultural” industry way more than a “game design” industry. The medium is the message. We live for the mythos.

We don’t need modern cognitive schemata. We need edible myths. We need Britney Spears boobs.

EDIT: A better report of Raph’s keynote can be found here.