Critical Gameplay Gone Critically Wrong

Lindsay Grace

Thu., June 16, 10:30–12:00, Browsing Library

For the past two years I have been creating games that exploit alternate game mechanics and verbs. The games include successes like Wait, a game about seeing, Black/White, a game about the abundance of stereotype in games, and Bang!, a game that reveals the fictive history of victims in a first person shooter in shameful montage (Grace, 2010). These games have been displayed internationally at academic and artistic venues in Greece, Brazil, Taiwan, the USA and Canada. But for each of these critical gameplay successes, there is a failure. There is the game about taking the long way home, which in every iteration was either boring or too short. There is Third World Shooter, where I mistakenly tried to invert Tom Clancy game conventions and succeeded only at doing everything an educational game shouldn’t. Did I really think people would enjoy canvassing the locals as a game verb? Even in 3D?

This presentation simply illustrates good and not so good ideas gone wrong in vivid 2D and 3D working examples. I discuss them in academic terms, demonstrating basic fundamental assumptions about what is enjoyable and how a well-intentioned inversion of standards does not always make for more interesting play. It sounds like this should be obvious, but given the enormous space of unexplored game play experiences (Schrier & Gibson, 2011), it is interesting to consider how such games can slip from lofty ideals to steaming piles of c.r.a.p. (code re-purposed, aborted, or postponed). This presentation is a candid demonstration of the game designer’s process, revelations, and reasons for specific project failures. I expect to present at least four games, but suspect I will have fresh failures to share by June.

References

Grace, L. D. (2010). Critical gameplay: Software studies in computer gameplay. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3025-3030). New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1753846.1753910

Schrier, K. & Gibson, D. (2011). Designing games for ethics: Models, techniques, and frameworks. Hershey, PA: Information Sciences Press.