Ludica

An Excellent Panel with a Serious Flaw

Every year at the Game Developers Conference, Eric Zimmerman stages a wonderful and engaging panel called “Game Design Challenge.” I’m not certain how far back this ritual goes, but one can pretty much rely on it as a perennial of the event. A few months back, people began to get wind that the Game Design Challenge for 2007 was going to be “Needle and Thread Interface,” a brilliant idea which everyone was looking forward to seeing played out. Here’s the dilemma: Eric has never invited a woman to this panel. This has become progressively more odd, especially when recent themes included “Romance” and Emily Dickenson poems. Cleary Zimmerman was trying to move towards a more gender balanced set of themes (and he has one of the better track records for designing gender-inclusive games), but it has never occurred to him, in spite of the fact the his very office contains one of the most brilliant game designers in our community, to ad an actual female, or “person of gender” as I like to call us, to the panel. Ever since my colleagues at Ludica, as well as other women we know, heard about these theme, we predicted that, once again, no person of gender would be represented among the luminaries on the panel. Monday night, at a dinner with contributors to the forthcoming book “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Combat” (Kafai et al, MIT, 2007), the topic arose once again. All present agreed that it was high time to say something.

Shortly before going into the panel, I ran into a Ph.D. student who I work with at Georgia Tech. She was very upset and told me that she and her boyfriend had just had a huge argument with two young men about women and games. These mean asserted that there were no women game designers, and that women were too hard to design for because they were too complicated. My student’s partner has been having a bit of a career crisis since his firm recently assigned him to design a mobile game for the restaurant chain “Hooters.” I’m not sure if there is a conscientious objector category for this sort of thing, but there ought to be.

The “gender issue” has haunted the halls of GDC for many years, even though, as I’m sure most of its attendants are unaware, the entire conference was actually co-founded by a woman, Brenda Laurel. I’ve had to deal with it my entire career, but it is truly alarming and upsetting when a whole new generation of designers, both male and female, are faced with precisely the kind of…to use an academic term…bullshit…that we have had to live with our entire lives. Now that I am a professor, I feel responsible for this next generation: I’ve resigned to the fact that I cannot expect to see a recognizable change during my lifetime, but I would just like to imagine the possibility of a tiny hint of progress in theirs.

I actually enjoyed the panel quite a bit. The challenge produced an interesting spectrum of approaches. David Jaffe began with his paper airplane game, in which you would create a real paper airplane with a stiff paper-like fabric, then sew along its folds in order to communicate to the computer what you had done. You would basically try iteratively to match the real plane with the virtual plane, which I thought was extremely interesting. Once this had been accomplished you could embellish your virtual plane by sewing on various features, including jet engines, and of course guns, all of which you could test for the capabilities. Finally, you would engage in contests with other players (which would include the ability to shoot at them). I would say this is the closest thing I’ve ever heard to a “trans-gendered” game. It starts out a girl, end slowly turns into a boy by the end.

The second contestant was Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris, I thought a good choice from a gender perspective as the creator of one of the most popular games among women. (An oft-heard comment from men during that period “We all know women love Tetris, but nobody knows why.” Answer: Try asking a woman!) Pajitnov came up with a casual came that entailed players sewing across the fabric perpendicular to each other from one side to the other. It reminded me a bit of the board game Bridges, where you build a series of Bridges across the board while trying to block the other player from doing the same in a perpendicular path. In Pajitnov’s game, the key was that the lines would eventually have to intersect, at which point one player would “die.” It was a little hard to make out any of the details, but the game seemed interesting and fun. This was the winning game in the competition, most likely because of it’s mathematical elegance and “classic” appeal.

The final game, by Harvey Smith, was by far my favorite, and I’m absolutely certain that a roomful of women would have voted it the best. After a somewhat protracted anatomy of his process, Smith arrived at a device that was sort of a cross between and embroidery hoop and a snowshoe, that one would rest on ones lap, in a living room, while seated on a sofa. (I loved that he thought through the context and even the posture of the players.) The game was a kind of story-rich Zelda-style adventure game called “The Tailor’s Daughter.” The basic game mechanic involved the daughter rescuing her father from an evil empire (whose antagonists bore a striking resemblance to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld) by way of her father’s “magic needle.” The examples of puzzles described were really enthralling. One was the ability to sew holes closed, which was a way to escape from enemies, but which also precluded going back through the hole after the escape. Another was sewing clothes that would help you in your quest, such as a pair of stealth socks. This game really captivated me; it follows the pattern of games like Zelda and Ico, which Ludica cited in the paper we recently submitted for DAC (“A Game of Ones Own,” which talks about games and space from a gender perspective.)

At the end of the panel, before the vote was taken, Eric opened it up for questions. The whole thing was incredibly awkward as I was in the far corner of the room. Nobody else rose from their seats as I marched pretty much the full length of the room in both directions to get to the mic.

I complimented the panelists, and commented on the variety of solutions and then addressed by question to Eric: “Considering that sewing has been the domain of females for hundreds of years, I’m curious as to why you didn’t invite any women to participate in this panel.” I was anticipating a hiss or a tomato thrown in my face, but instead there was a burst of applause, which, while not unanimous, was significantly higher than the percentage of women present. Since I was pretty sure I would faint at that point, I walked back to my corner for his answer, which was, frankly, ridiculous: “The panelists were selected through a process with CMP, and gender had nothing to do with it.”

Eric is one of the brightest and most articulate people I know, and this was arguably one of the lamest things I’ve ever heard him say. It also reminded me why I use the term “people of gender.” Apparently, according to Eric, and perhaps most of his GDC colleagues, as well as the staff at CMP, a significant number of whom are women, men don’t have a gender. I had a flashback to “The Second Sex,” and during the rest of the Q&A, I tried to keep myself calm by imagining a short story in which Simone De Beauvoir and Virginia Wolf are somehow sucked into a time vortex which results in them having to spend a week Game Developers Conference. 

I also thought about the early suffragettes. A whole generation of feminists never go to see women get the vote, but the soldiered on regardless because they knew what they were struggling for was right. I am resigned that this point that even if I live to be a 100, it is highly unlikely that any of this is ever going to change. But I also realized that NONE of it is going to change if women are relegated to speak only on panels “about” gender, and other socially acceptable topics, but are consistently elbowed out of discussions on design. It is true there are not a lot of us, and I don’t think that will ever change. But just because we are small in size does not make us irrelevant. In fact, our relevance is disproportionate to our demographics: As the foremother of GDC, Brenda Laurel is 50% responsible for the entire event, regardless of the fact that 1-2% of the attendees are typically female.

I left the panel shortly before the vote, in part because I was verkelmpt and in part because I had failed to eat lunch and was extremely hungry. I was kind of freaking out because I was sure I had committed career suicide, but I also realized that it had to be done, and my doing it I was saving one of my sisters the nausea of having to go through that.

Afterwards I left a message for fellow Ludician Janine Fron, who could not make GDC this year. Within minutes I received a supportive e-mal reminding me that it was International Women’s Day.

When I got up this morning, knowing I wanted to blog about this, I did a quick search on Google to see if anyone else had beat me to it. Anticipating some kind of horrendous backlash, and that I would be a pariah, with perhaps a smattering of positive comments. It’s funny how we always make a bigger deal of things than anyone else. There were about a dozen posts I found on the panel. Only on of them mentioned my question within a list of other questions asked; I could not find a single critique by anyone else of this issue. In other words, nobody seemed to care. Which makes me feel both worse and better at the same time.

I feel like standing in the lobby of North Hall and singing “How Long, How Long.” It’s truly astonishing that in 2007, almost nothing has changed. We continue to be pushed to the margins to the point of irrelevance, in spite of the fact that, depending which genres you count, 40-60% of game players are now women. Which is remarkable considering how little we seem to matter.

Someone in the Indie Game Summit said that independent game designers do what they do not because they want to, but because they have to. I’ve been designing, studying and playing games since I was 21 years old. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. I’ve repeatedly put my head on the chopping block in academia as their champion. But the fact is, there is nothing else I will ever do, or want to do. I think it is safe to say that for women in the game design community, our passion is inversely proportional to our representation at GDC: we have to have 100 times the passion to put up with the nonsense we have endured year after endless year.

Image: A roomful of men listen to a panel full of men talk about a "Needle and Thread Interface" for games and fail to see the irony.

Ludica @ Philosophy of Computer Games

I’m reporting from Reggio Emilia, Italy, where I presented Ludica’s paper, "Playing Dress-Up: Costumes, rolepay and imagination," at “The Philosopy of Computer Games", an interdisciplinary conference dealing with a variety of philosophical issues (I would say fairly broadly construed) pertaining to games. The color poster for the conference, which features a Second Live avatar fyling into the orizon, as well as the program, and origins of the conference can be found on the conference web site.

Briefly, it was organized by a consortium of Norwegian and Italian scholars, who were interested in the subject of philosophy and games. Here is a picture of the opening panel introducing the organizers. The people seated are the Norwegian crew, along with our old friend Espen Aarseth, who is Norwegian but based in Denmark at the moment. Standing are the people from the hosting Institution. The organizer, Patrick Coppock, an Irish chap who lived for many years in Norway, is at the side of the podium.

The facilities, located at the University of Reggio Emilia and Modena, were beautiful: an old building that was recently outfitted with modern accessories.

One thing I noticed immediately was that there were very few women on the program—four in all for a three-day conference. This reinforced for me the importance of our mission; most of the talks concerned first-person shooter and RTS games, so it seemed almost mandatory to infuse some gender balance into the mix. The few women who where there were by-and-large already familiar with Ludica and our work, which was very encouraging.

This it not meant to be a comprehensive report on the conference, but there are a few ideas and threads that I thought would be worth summarizing. A number of presentations, kicked off with Espen Aarseth’s keynote, concerned themselves with existential issues along the lines of “are game objects real.” Espen’s premise was that there are three types of game objects, which can coexist in the same game: real, fictional and simulated. He distinguished between a fictional door which serves as a prop and does not operate like a door, versus a simulated or virtual door, which has behaviors commonly associated with a door. Another example was monopoly money versus World of Warcraft platinum. In the discussion period I mentioned that I thought that example pointed out that there is an aspect of the sociological concept of “symbolic interactionism” in that the World of Warcraft money has no value to someone who does not understand its relative value in the game, regardless of it’s real world currency exchange rate.

A number of talks also dealt with the status of game objects: Are they “things?” are they pictorial representations? Are they “real” or “fictional”? etc. These questions were interesting form the perspective of “the nature of being,” or “existence,” but the variety of solutions and arguments to this problem were somewhat dizzying and to some extent, I felt, inconclusive. Perhaps because of my disciplinary bent, I tend to view these matters from the perspective of the player: so I would argue that game objects don’t really possess any kind of “essential” material qualities outside of their meaning to players. It seems hard to do much more than make a compelling, but unverifiable argument about the material properties of game objects in the absence of the context of use and social signification. I also found it odd that no one in any of these sessions considered the possibility that game objects can also be viewed as metaphors.

Another talk that was quite compelling in its premise was Richard Clarkson (University of Durham), who submitted that games could be used to dynamically solve philosophical problems by testing our intuitions. I thought this was a very exciting idea, however, I felt the games selected as examples feel somewhat short. In later discussion with Richard and others at the conference, it was proposed that perhaps existing games were not up to this task, but that new games could designed with this aim. An Italian game designer present at the conference volunteered to collaborate on this. I did note to Richard, however, about environments where social ideas played out in interesting ways, such as “twinking,” which is a topic covered in our paper: Why do people spontaneously give gifts to newer players, often players they do not know? There is an interesting underlying philosophical question here somewhere.

Day two, which was themed around the player experience, opened with a presentation by Jonathan Frome, a media scholar from the University of Central Florida, who spoke on “The Paradox of Fiction,” which had to do with the fact that we believe in fiction, and it elicits real emotions, even though we “know” it’s not “real.” I spoke with him afterward and posited the theory that perhaps rather than suspending our disbelief, in games we make a decision to acts as if we believe something. I still have to mull this over, but I think it’s an interesting way to think about it. The other thing he mentioned that I thought was interesting was that there is a pleasure in experiencing unpleasant feelings in a “safe” environment, e.g., horror or sadness in a movie or game. He also talked about emotions unique to video games, like a sense of remorse, which also came up in other presentations.

Many of the talks in the afternoon looked at games from a phenomenological perspective, starting from the point of sensory and cognitive experience. Olli Leino, a PhD candidate from Cophenhagen IT University gave a talk about emotions in games and gave some lovely examples. One was about becoming angry when Bismarck took over one of his provinces in Civilization IV. He talked about how one can have real emotions, which may in part be a factor of agency, e.g., that we have some perceived influence on events changes our emotional perception of them.

Hanna Sommerseth from the University of Edinburgh developed the idea that games are, as Jesper Juul says, “half real,” as they combine “real rules” and “fictional worlds.” Later, she and I discussed the idea that maybe players are also “half real” when they are engaged in the game. This relates back to the idea of presence vs. absence in games and virtual worlds that was discussed at Jacki’s Presence workshop at ICT back in October. I know when I present in my avatar, people have commented that my energy or persona seems to shift from my physical person into the computer.

Overall, Day 2 was incredibly intellectually challenging: many of the presentations were either Powerpoint slides with text only, or entirely spoken (often recited), which required a high level of concentration, and shifting of gears and thought processes, and even argument styles.

Knowing I was going to present at the end of the day, I had deliberately used bright colors (lavender text on a violent background) and many pictures to illustrate our analysis of costume play. One thing I noticed throughout the conference was that a number of the contributors, especially those from a more traditional philosophy background, did not use very many specific examples. Ours was packed with them, which I think helped to build our argument, which was particularly oriented towards sociological and anthropological approaches. It was very encouraging that when I looked out into the audience, a number of people had big grins on their faces. The discussion was lively, and there was a great deal of positive feedback afterwards, especially from the few women present.

Day three was devoted primarily to issues of ethics. Adam Briggle gave a really well-formulated opening presentation, which looked at video games as ethical phenomena from a variety of angles, and in particular talked about their role in building character. One issue that this brought up was the question of the correlation between real-world and simulated behavior, and whether or not people played games as an outlet for social constraints, rather than as a model for real-world behavior. Another interesting point he made related to what sorts of mastery is valued in society, and a) are valued forms of mastery developed in video games, and b) does society value the mastery of video games in and of themselves?

Conference organizer Patrick Coppack’s talk, while I won’t go into all its details, had a very interesting starting premise, based on Alfred North Whitehead and others, that all aspects of life are processes of being and becoming. “Objects” which appear static, such as a building or tree, are merely undergoing this process over a longer timeframe. I found this one of the most compelling theories presented because video games are, at their core, processes, and if we think of them as code that is actuated by the player, this notion actually makes a lot more sense than whether or not game objects are “real.” In fact, it could be argued that all game objects are processes, and not objects at all.

Edward Spence gave a talk on morals and ethics in virtual worlds, focusing on the inherent “rights” of avatars. While the argument was compelling, I found it belied a lack of familiarity with the actual practice of lived experience in virtual worlds. One approach to argumentation stood out: It did not seem to make that much difference whether the theory was applicable, as long as the argument was sound. But I felt that the initial premise, that an avatar can be equated in a one-to-one way with a person’s corporeal body, was flawed. Although I agree avatars ought to be granted some essential human rights, I don’t think we really understand enough about the relationship between persons and their avatars to make any sort of definitive statements about what those rights ought to be. I also pointed out most MMOGs are totalitarian corporate entities in which players give up most of their “rights” when signing the EULA (End User License Agreement).

Rune Ottoson gave a lively and highly relevant presentation about video games and military propaganda, in particular, describing the way the visual vocabulary of videogames has been adopted by the news media, and the problematic that most major news services in the U.S. are now owned by entertainment companies. His presentation was lushly illustrated with examples and quotes, and also raised the issue of the way military technologies are becoming more and more like video games.

The event closed with Liz Losh, who gave an excellent case study about the Tactical Iraqui language simulator created by USC’s ISI, and also talked a bit about the work at ICT, where Ludica member Jacki Morie is holds a position. One thing I appreciated about Liz’s paper was that it was very balanced and did not take an extreme position one way or another, but really explored the nuances of the project from a variety of angles, including the perspective of the makers themselves. She also talked about the debate among game scholars, including Gonzalo Frasco, who, in his usual pedantic tone, disavowed anyone involved in creating games for the military. More tempered positions were submitted by Grand Text Auto’s Andrew Stern and my colleague from Georgia Tech, Ian Bogost. Liz made two very interesting points at the end of her talk. One was that, while Tactical Iraqi was only used by a small number of soldiers in actual training, it served a much more important role as a PR engine for both the army and ISI. The other was that everyone she had spoken to at both ISI and ICT was opposed to the war in Iraq.