[MUSIC]
I'm going to welcome you today.
I'm Martha Russell, with mediaX.
And, I'd like to start
today's seminar with,
a word of appreciation to mediaX
members and sponsors whose funds and
contributions to mediaX have allowed us
to, support the interactive media and
game seminars, this series,
this, this quarter.
And we intend to next quarter as well.
But a very special appreciation
to the folks who have
identified the speakers provided
the thought leadership and
have taken the initiative to put this
new course on the books at Stanford.
Bringing together a group of people who
are interested in not only the science,
the engineering, the human sciences
of games and how they come together.
Ingmar Riedel-Kruse,
Henry Lowood, Sebastian,
Paul, it's a great group of people, and
they have been working very hard on your
behalf to identify and
bring together wonderful speakers.
Two announcements I want to make.
One is that on April 16th the mediaX
2015 Conference will take place.
And online at
mediax.stanford.edu under events,
you can go to that conference and
register to attend.
The theme this year is relevant to what
we're talking about in interactive media
and games.
It is Writing the Code for
Personal Relevance.
We're going to take an inter-disciplinary
tour through natures code and
neuroscience.
Through, to game code and
as our final speaker for
the day, we have Lee Zlotoff who
is the creator and writer for
the MacGyver series, which you may
have seen for many years online.
And he is doing some new things now, has
a new company that he's launching that is
making applications that will allow
people to personalize narratives.
These narratives may,
in fact, be in games.
So, I want to encourage
you to attend that event.
And to draw your attention to
another event on April 20th,
which is oriented to creating learning
experiences to promote engagement.
And certainly games are a part of this,
and this is sponsored by
the Techus organization in Finland in
conjunction with the H Star institute,
Human Sciences and
Technology Advanced Research Institute.
With that, April 16th, April 20th, Ingmar.
>> Okay, welcome everyone.
So I also want to express my gratitude for
to Martha and mediaX, and
kind of really helping
getting all of this together.
As well as the, my esteemed
colleagues who helped organizing.
That said, like we will keep running
this next quarter with another
exciting set of speakers.
We also have a bunch of activities
planned that go beyond the seminars here.
So we really want to establish something,
at Stanford, that really brings games and
interactive media together.
And so if any of you have interest
in participating, organizing, or
just passively participating, contact us. Right?
So there are various ways,
you're very welcome.
Now it's my pleasure to instroduce
today's speaker, Chaim Gingold.
So Chaim has a, a Masters in
Digital Media, from Georgia Tech.
And he has a very interesting career path,
in that he participated in
some very significant games.
For example, as the title of
his talk already indicates,
working with Will Wright at Spore.
But also releasing, soon,
his own game, Earth Primer.
He is a game consultant,
is an independent game designer.
But he also is working now
on his PhD in UC Santa Cruz.
And so I think this exemplifies
also a general trend that we see.
And I mean that many kind of people making
significant contributions in the space of
gaming are actually now also getting
in academia and getting degrees and,
and making game studies something
that gets more appreciated by,
by the academia and really becomes,
comes a field on its own.
And so, without saying anything more,
welcome Chaim.
>> I'm going to say a little bit more
about my background to sort of give some
context.
So I'm going to be talking about today.
So I did, so I worked on Spore,
it came out in 2008.
I was the lead designer for the creature
creator and different editors in the game,
and did a bunch of things on that project.
But that's, I'm going to touch
on that in this project,
but, not talk about it very much.
And then after leaving EA I worked as
an independent game designer for, for
a few years where I started the Earth
Primer project that came out last month.
I'll be showing you during this talk.
And then in that time I started it,
went back to school and did a ph,
started a PhD at Santa Cruz, and
am now finishing that PhD while
working at the communications
design group in San Fransisco.
So, hopefully that makes sense.
Okay so this is the outline for
the talk, so
I'm going to base I'm going to talk
a bunch about Earth Primer that's what,
that's what hot in my head.
Just came out.
And then I'm going to talk a little
bit about my PhD research and
connect it to some themes in
Earth Primer and also in Spore.
I'm going to talk about my research
in the play and design, and then talk
about Sim City, which is one of the case
studies in my, my research project.
So I'm going to first show a demo of,
of Earth Primer.
And then I'm going to talk about
some design lessons from it.
So, so this is kind of a, this project
sort of bends different genres.
And it's not, it's a little bit
hard to summarize and sum up.
So what I'm going to do first is just
show the trailer for the project,
which I worked very hard on trying
to get a sort of coherent narrative
to explain what it is.
And so we'll, we'll begin with that.
[MUSIC]
Okay so that's the, that's the trailer.
I'm not going to do a demo.
I gave this demo last week in GDC and
I had a,
I worked with the, the composer who wrote
the music and did the sound, design.
Cliff Carruthers was doing
the demo while I talked.
So, hopes, hopefully that can get
both of our parts simultaneously
without getting too confused. Okay.
So, now we're, we're not on the iPad.
I'm using my fingers.
Okay, so, the Earth Primer is
structured like a book, and
it has five different chapters.
So we see here, the first chapter
is about the earth's interior.
These different labels refer to different
sections of the, of the project, so
they, you see here different.
Different pages.
So, there's different pages
inside of these different areas.
So let's, I'm going to, let's look from
first at this page about volcanoes.
So what we have is this pairing
between simulations and texts.
And here we're being prompted to to
make some magma and make some volcanoes.
[NOISE].
Okay, so that's, that's kind of,
that's kind of the basic,
so these pages have simulations and
words on them, and
so let's look at some
of the other chapters.
The next chapter's about
the Earth's surface, and
you get to play with things like
mountains and sand dunes and erosion.
And then there's a chapter
about the water cycle, and
what I'm going to do is I'm going to
show you a page about rain shadows.
So, so what, so what's,
what's going on here is there's a, you
know, this is not a, you know, a canned
video, it's a, it's a simulation that's
has comprised of many different layers.
You can see a few of them in here.
That's precipitation layer.
You can see this humidity.
There's, there's temperature and
you can also show the wind on here.
And all of these, so all the different
processes are being simulated in real
time, and we're looking at just a few
of them here on this particular page.
And what this page is illustrating, is
it's illustrating rain shadows, which is,
you see here on the left, the water
is evaporating up, out of the ocean.
It's being blown inland, and then it's
being stopped by these mountains.
And the, the air is forced up and
the water is squeezed out of the air and
it rains.
And so, the far side of the mountains,
it's dry. Okay.
So what we can do,
is we can use the lower,
lower bed rock tool that we have here.
And we can, let's see what happens if we,
if we remove the, the mountain range.
[NOISE].
What we see is that now the,
the desert is, is gone.
Or it's mitigated.
Right now the, now more moisture can
reach, can reach farther inland.
So that's the basic pattern of
the you know, of the, of the project.
The book.
And as you progress,
as you progress you unlock more tools,
and on the next page there's a solid
photograph that shows the same phenomenon.
So we're sort of combining, doing,
and showing, and telling all together.
Yes so as you progress,
you unlock more chapters and more pages.
And ultimately you land in the sandbox
chapter where you have all,
you get all the different
tools that you've unlocked and
learned about throughout throughout
progressing through the thing.
So, here's the sandbox and at this point.
Now you have all the tools
available to you.
And we can do different things.
Like, we can, we can we can lower and
raise the sea level.
[SOUND]
We can use the sun tool,
and we can change the.
The temperature of the whole,
of the whole map.
We can freeze everything.
Oops, that's speeding everything up.
[SOUND]
Make a bunch of ice.
[SOUND]
We can also we can make some mountains,
we can change the size of our brush
that we're going to work with and
just raise the,
we can just get rid of the ocean
completely, now it's totally dry.
[SOUND]
Okay.
So, that's, that's, that's what it's
like to actually play a primer.
So, what a primer does is
it combines different tropes from
games and toys and, and simulations.
Into this thing which doesn't really have
any, doesn't really fit into any genre
neatly and it's kind of like some other
things that are out there that are also
sort of playing,
trying to combine things in unique ways,
another example would Parable of
the Polygons which if you haven't seen it,
I highly recommend you check it out.
It's a really cool interactive web
page about how segregation works.
And, and these are, these are,
this is, these are exploring the theme
of learning through play,
through experiential engagement.
And the way I think about it is, invent,
inventing a new genre is, you know,
when the printing press was developed,
we didn't, you know,
things like the novel and cook books and
so on didn't come about right away.
Those are media forms that had
to be invented and designed.
And so these, so I'll just take,
something like Earth Primer and
Parable of the Polygons are sort of
experiments that are sort of trying to
sort of invent new, collaboratively
invent new, new genres, new,
new design patterns for
the designers to copy and steal from.
And another, so that's one of
the reasons that I, I made this project.
Another one is that I really love
making and playing with simulations.
That's what drew me to Spore,
that's what drew me to this project.
And what I, in developing the genre
what I wanted to do is develop.
A framework for
building a completed experience
that was comprised of simulations.
So, and, not, not forcing those
simulations to live within a game
that has certain conventions about
conflict and progress and, and so on.
So, so my hope is that other designers
come and steal from Earth Primer and
basically take it, and sort of take
whatever they can from it, right?
To make new things.
When I say still find, sort of still takes
time to design ideas that are in there.
So this is available
now you can check out,
check out the website earthprimer.com.
You can download it for
your iPad right now.
So since releasing, since releasing it,
I've had a lot of people contact me and
you know, and sharing their enthusiasm for
the project and wanting to.
Wanted to talk to me about it, and
learn more about and it's basically,
they wanting to copy from it in some way,
and so the, the next question is
what should you steal from this project
if you're going to steal from it right?
What should you copy?
Should it,
should you make it about a geology thing?
Well that, that maybe, you could.
That brings us to the next section of
this talk which I'm going to, to, in, in,
an attempt to respond to,
to these requests I'm going to.
Share ten design principles or guiding,
guiding design principles and, and
design a message from doing this project.
Okay, so number one.
A timeless example of teaching and or
learning that combines telling and
showing and doing.
It isn't someone telling you about
a topic or someone showing it to you,
it's a system you interact with so
you ex, it's all about experiential.
Learning engagement.
Another, another [COUGH] principle is
to share enthusiasm for
a topic and Seymour is a very,
is a seminal philosopher and
designer in digital learning environments.
So he wrote this really wonderful
book called Mind Storms and
developed the Logo programming language.
He wrote that teachers who are fear,
fearful of mathematics do a disservice
to their, to their students because,
that, that, what they do is they
perpetuate that, that fear.
And what the, what the best teachers
do is they actually insp, they sort of,
they are sharing their enthusiasm and
love for a, for a particular topic.
So, when, when a geologist,
or a mathematician, or
historian is doing geology,
or history, or mathematics.
They see things that are not,
that are not apparent to those of us
who are not experts in those fields.
And you know, you, so
you might be passionate about the very
specialized thing you're doing, and
I think what that what something like this
project does is it, is it attempts to
transform something which is
normally sort of, like, a private.
A private love for a topic, right?
And help make it more accessible, right?
So if a geologist looks and sees
the mountains around them they are seeing
things that we don't see, right,
cause we're not experts in those domains.
So thing, I think that these kind of
experiential learning systems can,
can sort of help us share that enthusiasm.
So and, and this, and I contrast
this with the sort of sugar coating,
the sugar coating.
Mode of teaching.
Which is to take something that you
believe is dry or uninteresting and
then try to like, dress it up.
Like, you should find this interesting,
right?
So I'm going to embed it.
But it kind of tastes bad.
It's like broccoli, I'm going to
put chocolate on it or something.
So, I, so for me the, it's really about
finding the essence of what makes
something interesting and sharing that.
Another, another key point is to think
first and foremost about experience and
to design transific experience.
So, usability is part of
experience design but by, when
I talk about design experience I'm also
thinking about things like designing for
a sense of delight, for a sense of wonder,
for a sense of curiosity and surprise.
And to think in terms of the sort of
overall arc of it, of an experience that
you're, that you're producing, right,
that's from beginning to middle to end.
And to think about the pacing sort of the
rate, the speed at which you pull people
through, the way that it, the way that you
stop, whether you sort of subtly encourage
people to continue, right, and arouse
their curiosity to move through something.
And obviously this is a, this is a very,
this is a complicated and
deep craft but I'm going to, so I'm
just going to, sort of, hint at it here.
Part of it is also producing things
that are sort of richly have a lot of
rich feedback.
That have a lot of rich visual auditory
and tactile experience as part of them.
Games are, in my opinion, the best
examples of experiential software design.
They're just, they, video games are all
about, er, computer software that is
intended to, that are designed in terms
of experience very, very carefully.
And while I think that
Earth Primer's not a game.
And I don't think that, and I don't think
that what it's doing is borrowing from
games as much as games are drawing
from the deep well of craft knowledge,
about experience design that
Earth Primer is also drawing from.
So I'll return to this point later, but,
but I want to contrast it with ideas for
gamification, which is the idea,
of sort of, taking tropes,
game design tropes from games and
applying them to some other topic.
Which, sort of, copies the, sort of,
superficial characteristics of games and
uses the instrumentally for some other
purpose, and compare that with some,
which is, which, with something else which
is to look at the fundamental experiences
that make games fun and
playful and engaging and use that.
Another key point is that, is that it,
because I try not to
lecture in the project.
So, in this video loop, what we see
is there's a, at the beginning,
there's a text or a prompt that says,
can you make an island?
Just one sentence, question mark.
And then, and then it waits for
the user to, to make the magma and
create the volcano.
And then after the system
has seen that that's done,
then more, then more text comes in.
So, and I'm contrasting this
with an earlier version,
earlier incarnation of the project
where there was just these, just what,
you'd come to it's like a wall of text and
then a simulation.
And the text would never respond and
you would do something and
the text never acknowledged
that you did it.
So there's this sense of it's not just
this, the thing talking at you, but it,
sort of, tells you,
it asks you to do something.
And then it's listening to you, right?
It says oh, you did that.
Okay, now I'm going to,
now I'm going to respond to that.
So there's this feedback loop within,
within each page.
Another, another design technique that I,
that I used on this project was to
account for
multiple different modes of engagement.
So there are some people who will approach
it, a project like this or a page, and
they'll want to just read everything first
and sort of just make sure they understand
exactly what's going on before they go and
they, and they poke and they play.
Other people and I think about this as
this, sort of, two-year-old factor.
Other people want to just come in and
just, and just poke at it and just play.
And it might be that
it's different people,
it might be that it's the same person
engaging in different moments in time,
in different moods.
So what I wanted to do is
make sure that it, that the,
the experience was enjoyable regardless of
whether or not you are the kind of person
or in the kind of mood, you want to
just kind of want to poke and play.
And just,
you don't even care what it's about.
You just want to have a satisfying
tactile finger painting experience.
And maybe that's all, maybe that's then
what draws you then into the text,
into the, into the some of
the informational content.
Right, on the other hand,
maybe they're the kind of person
that just wants to read first.
So what I try to do is account for
this, this, sort of,
more cautious and
more playful modes of engagement.
And it's interesting is that I've gotten
reports from people who are playing this,
playing Earth Primer and they said
they pla, they play with their kids so
there might be, like, a 4-year-old who
might be too young to actually really
understand the concepts of the text but
then they play with an adults, together.
Which I, to me is very interesting sort
of very interesting design space to think
about, just, sort of, how you can create
things which are sort of collaborative,
for different kinds of players,
different kinds of engagement.
And I would compare this to something
like David Macaulay's The Way Things Were
which, you know, he,his work is
a huge influence on this project.
And in this Japanese version of
a page from The Way Things Work,
you see that there's, you know, he, there
are these images and there's this text and
you can either, you can enter the, you can
enter the page either through the imagery,
right, just kind of get enveloped
into this environment or
into these things that are happening,
or you can enter the text,
or you can enter the page through the
words first, if you're a Japanese speaker.
You could enter it there and, sort of,
read and then go to the pictures to,
to flesh it out.
So it's real, it doesn't,
it doesn't force you to,
to explore each page in a linear order.
It invites you to go in, you know,
however you, you, you feel.
Another, another key design
challenge with this project.
This is a big challenge,
was finding the right.
Amount of balance to,
to guide play through the project.
So initially there was,
the pages were a lot more freeform.
You could go into a page and basically do
whatever you wanted to, just, kind of,
muck around.
And there was no,
there was that wall of text effect,
and there wasn't a lot of feedback.
And, and that was too open for the people,
people would get lost and confused.
But at the same time, I really like
that ability to just go into a page and,
kind of, zone out or, you know,
be a two-year-old, or whatever, and just,
kind of, poke and play.
So, what I want, so what I try to do is
find this, this balance between guided,
guidedness and openness, and closedness,
right, or direction and openness.
And this happens both globally at
the scale of the entire book where you,
sort of, advance from page,
to page, to page, to page, and each
chapter unlocks and a page unlocks and you
get these tools that unlock at the end.
So there's this structure that takes
you through the entire project.
And it also happens
locally within each page.
There's little bit of structure
that gives you a little prompt and
asks you to something.
And then you do it, and
then you return to the text.
So there's these things that, kind of,
pull you through, these calls to action.
And then you, and then it ends, you know,
with the sandbox, with sort of that's the,
sort of, finale of the arc of the
experience is that you've played through
this thing and then you have this sandbox
with all the tools available to you.
And now you can actually
appreciate them and
enjoy them because you
know what to make of them.
Another, another point, another key to
design principle of this project is to
really harness the computational
power of the, of the computer and
not just to, sort of,
show videos or pictures or text but
actually to simulate things,
bring things to life.
I worked really hard to get it
running on the iPad 2, that was my,
that was the baseline machine.
And you know, and I, I think that,
that's something that we can really
take advantage of, in these kind,
with this kind of technology,
we can use the power of computation
to bring systems to life.
Right?
And then once we brought
those things to life,
it's, there, we can, we, we then
want to touch and engage with them.
So in, sort of, the focus on, sort of,
tactile engagement is a big design
consideration with this project.
This illustration is made by Phil Fish
who's the creator of Fez for
the cover of this by
Steve Swingskeen Feel Book.
And I think it does a nice job of, sort
of, of suggesting that kind of phantom to,
touch and feel effects that we
get when we play games, right?
That there's a kind of, it's all,
there's not, you're not really touching or
anything concrete, but when you
interact with a well-crafted game or
a digital toy, you, you get this, sort of,
phantom sensation of, of tactility.
And, in this, a particular case for
Earth Primer.
In taking what, say, a system that
might otherwise be invisible, right,
what's abstract, and
making it very concrete and, and tactile.
Right, so you, you can, you know,
you can paint with wind and
make sand dance, right?
And it feels like you're sort of
running your hand over the environment.
The, the ninth point is about
segmentation which is re,
which is a key,
which is a really key concern for
designers especially
digital media designers.
And just to think about how
you're going to segment.
Your experience or your content,
your material into, into different, into,
into smaller pieces.
And this is something that I'm,
I'm very pleased with how it turned out.
So, in the project, in the beginning of
the project, there's this 2D simulation
with the tectonics and the volcanoes,
if you saw in the beginning of the demo.
There's one simulation, just indicated
by that red circle at the top,
that's used as a template for
multiple and different pages, right?
So I'm kind of like stamping out multiple
pages from the same core simulation.
And then there's also one simulation which
I didn't show you, which is just a little
Pangaea, an active Pangaea diagram where
you can slide the slider through time.
And that's, that's a simulation
that just appears only on one page.
And then, there's the 3D sim,
which is used
throughout the book when [INAUDIBLE] it's
also used in the, in the sandbox mode.
So, there's these,
there's these simulation templates or,
that are sort of reused
across different pages.
And, there's a kind of separation,
a segmentation that's
happening as well as a reuse.
And this seems like such an obvious idea.
And it is, but it's just a powerful
idea that I want emphasized, you know,
that I want emphasized because it allows
one to repurpose and parametrize and
reuse the content of the simulations.
But it's also very liberating for
a designer because it means you don't have
to make one system that does, that or,
everything, everything coexists together.
You can make different systems and
kind of make these one off systems. Right?
And them put them together into a finished
experience that takes
you all the way through.
So it's a, so
the segmentation to these, into these,
into these different,
stamping out these simulation masters.
These different pages allows,
allows for continuity but
also the separateness that
allows me to just say.
Oh, I'm going to invent a new simulation
that's only going to live on one page,
right, and not, which is, which is
counter to the way that simulations and
games normally works.
Where you have with one simulation that
is SimCity or SimEarth or whatever.
So it's very liberating, right, and
it helps solve some of the complexity that
you end up with when you
build complex simulations.
The final point I want to make about this
is the, is going to be the least specific.
And it's going to say that
there's just a kind of,
just a kind of sense of playfulness that
I wanted to capture in this project and
just, and make it a playful experience.
Like in the tagline that I have in
the beginning of the video that
says it's a science book for
playful people, right?
So it does not saying it's for
children or it's for, you know, yeah.
They're for you know, it's,
it's sort of, it's like for
people that are interested in science and
are playful.
And, and like I meant,
like I hinted at earlier there's this,
I believe there's this deep well
of experience that we draw upon.
Game designers draw upon,
when we make games, and
it's to think about aesthetics of
wonder and delight and surprise.
And to me, these are, these
are experiences that are ab, they're,
they're about playfulness.
And, and I'm interested in what
it means to design playfully.
Which takes us to the, the next part of
this talk, which is about play design,
which is, I'm going to, which is part
of what my Ph.D research is about.
But before I talk about play design,
I need to first back up and
talk about game design a bit, and.
And now I and, and contrast and
compare play design to game design.
So, game studies and game study,
which is the academic study of,
of games,and game design, which is
this practical field of game crafting.
Are both, in their modern incarnations,
are both constituted by the same
underlying commitments.
And that, that, and the basic comment that
these, these, that these practices share
is that there are certain formal,
universal structural qualities of games.
Right?
So an influential contemporary
exponent of this,
of this idea is Jesper Juul, and
this diagram is from a 2003 paper of his.
And what, what Juul does is he synthesizes
a lot of the different thinking,
definitional thinking around games and
argues that there are these, how many,
six different qualities.
And the thing in the middle of the circle,
we have things that are strict games,
like Pac-Man, baseball Halo.
And what he does is then there are these
things that are more peripheral and this,
that archology thing is SimCity so
you open it in simulations.
And that's, that's at the boundary
cause it's it,s a, it doesn't have a,
it doesn't valorize outcome.
It doesn't, it doesn't give you
a winning or a losing condition, right?
And so he compares things that are games,
things that are not games, like,
when you're sitting in traffic, right?
Or playing with hypertext fiction.
And so there's a, there's a, there's
a center and then there's the margin.
And SimCity sits, sort of,
uncomfortably at the border, it's like,
something about it is game-like but
it also is not game-like.
And I want to stress this particularly,
this set of ideas that are sort off
crystallize, that are reproduced here.
Are shared amongst game studies
folks as well as game designers,
practitioners and
teachers of game designs.
If you look at the, going back,
if you look at the, you know,
these influential textbooks, Rules of
Play and the Game Design Workshop.
They both which are made by
practicing game designers and
are influential both in game studies and
in the game industry,
they're both highly committed
to this set of ideas.
And the, and the beautiful thing about
this idea is that it links up board games.
Things like board games,
things like sports and
things like video games which on
the surface, would seem to be completely,
like, radically different kinds
of things and experiences.
And it, and it identifies
a common thread through them.
So this is, this is, this is what
allows that, allows that to work.
However, there are limitations
to this approach.
And you know, and
one example of that is the fact that
SimCity is sort of stuck at the,
at the periphery of, of this framework.
So it doesn't neatly, we can't
really use all our game studies and
game design tools to think about SimCity.
So it's, and, and in fact Maxis and Will
Wright have called SimCity a software toy.
And so the, the question that I ask is,
what kind of framework will put SimCity at
the center instead of the margins of, of,
of a discourse of design and and study.
All right, what if what if play things and
playgrounds and playmates were actually
the, at the center rather than,
than, than, than the periphery.
So, and this is really the core
motivating idea behind thinking about
play design is to identify different,
is to identify different set of phenomena
to say that these are the center.
What are the things that
they have in common?
What are the common questions and
concerns that scholars and
designers have about these different,
these different things?
So, I'm not going to, I'm not going to get
too much into this because it's a whole
interesting maze of, of material.
But I will say that some of the things
that we would want to get out of this kind
of, this kind of framework would be.
What is that deep well of experience that
we draw from when we are drawing from,
when we are making playful things,
as well as games?
What creates the aesthetics of wonder and
delight and surprise?
What does it mean to design something
that is going to be playful?
And then, and
a really important question is,
how can you define play in a way that's
useful for designers that isn't just,
that doesn't fall into this,
sort of, the trap?
Of all of the ambiguities and
contradictions that come about when you
try to define play and pin it down.
Are there shared design considerations
that things like toys and playgrounds and
SimCity have in common?
Are there shared aesthetic considerations?
And then there's really concrete things,
like how do you create a sense of
safety and a sense of invitation
to engage with something, right?
Playfully.
And, and one way that I,
that I approach this question is
to think in terms of scaffolding.
Which is to think about
the ways that an experience or
to think about the ways that a playground
or a toy or a, or a cultural practice
might scaffold playful attitudes and
experiences and interactions.
Okay, so how, so
how am I going about this project and
the, the this play
design research project?
The big answer is through case studies.
And a particular one, big central
case study, which is about SimCity.
Which is the, you know luminal
artifact that I mentioned earlier.
So, what I'm doing, a large part of my
research is about undertaking a very
detailed case study of SimCity and
the and the programs and simulations and
ideas that came before it.
And, I'm interested in a few high-level
questions like what makes SimCity
compelling?
What makes the aesthetics of SimCity work.
And where do those things come from and
how can those things be traced
to the code of SimCity?
And in particular, SimCity is a, is a,
is a good target because
because it's liminal.
It doesn't fit into that, into that game
design, game studies framework neatly.
It's a very evocative work.
It's a very influential
object to think with.
Ian Voges just published an,
a piece about it that touches on
it very heavily in the Atlantic.
And use for Sim City appears over and
over again in discussions about play and
games and learning and simulation.
It's like this really, it's like this
really naughty thing that keeps,
it's like this really
philosophically provocative object.
Another reason to pick Sim City is
that it's an open source project now.
It was the original Sim City has been
open source for the one laptop per child
project so we have the original
code available to us to, to study.
Which is especially important in
the case of a simulation game because
you don't really know what's going
under the, on under the hood right.
It's all about artifice and
making you believe and see something
that's there that's not really there.
So it actually would look inside and
see what's actually going on.
Is, is really critical.
It's a very, it's a seminal game.
This is the game that, this is the game
that really launched the whole line of
Sim Maxus titles like SimEarth and
the Sims, and SimAnt, right?
And it's had a deep effect
upon the whole game industry.
And another thing is that it,
it's Will Wright,
as a designer draw upon
many different sources.
So there's a very rich genealogy
of influences to explore in this
particular title.
So if we're going to, so, so
to talk about SimCity, though,
we have to talk about software, right?
because it's a piece of software.
And, and
it raises the question of what does it
mean to think about a piece of software?
So I've put up this
quote by Seymour Papert.
And this quote actually comes from,
he was responding to a criticism to Logo.
Some education researchers were doing this
very quantitative analysis of the effects,
efficacy of Logo as an educational tool,
and he was really pissed off by the,
by what they had to say, and so he wrote
this really interesting essay where he
argues for something he called" computer
criticism", and I'll just read this.
He says, I am proposing a genre of writing
one would call" computer criticism"
by analogy.
With such disciplines as literary
criticism and social criticism.
The computer is a medium of human
expression and if it has not yet
had its Shakespeares, its Michelangelos or
its Einsteins, it will.
We have scarcely begun to grasp
its human and social implications.
So he doesn't, doesn't explain how
to go about doing this but he,
he [INAUDIBLE], he poses this question.
What is it, what would it mean to look at.
Com, at, at software and computers,
as, as a humanist would.
And, and then, and then, the question
that then, that then I wonder,
is well what is software anyways, right?
Like what, and can we, can we define
software in a way that foregrounds
its cultural, and historical,
and social qualities?
You know, that, that would allow
us to look at software
through a humanistic lens.
And a, and so I found this really
satisfying answer in the work of
the historian a, Mahoney,
I'm forgetting his first name right now.
And a, and this is a diagram from his,
from the 2005 paper on
the histories of computing.
And what he, Mahoney's doing is, he is.
He contrast the traditional ways in which
computer history is done which is very
machine centric to say the ENIAC was
invented and there was the EDVAC and
we have this other set of hardware
in these particular machines.
We can look at these machines came
from particular organizations
who were trying to solve specific
problems and then out of the out of that
they get certain fields like
computer science, and so on.
And, he, he sort of invert,
he changes the emphasis, and
he argues for this other model
of computer history, which is,
which puts the emphasis on
the communities of computing.
Okay, so putting the focus really on the,
the cultural and
social practices around computers,
and, and
argues that actually, all the particular
applications we put computers to.
Predate the computer, right,
they're actually are the,
the, these particular purposes people have
in using computing machines are simply
adopting the computer into their
own practices, and then, and
then producing the software and
hardware that we know.
So a specific example that he doesn't use,
but I'll use, because it's about games.
Is, is a specific,
is a Japanese, playing card manufacturer
from founded in 1889 called Nintendo.
And Nintendo means leave luck to heaven.
And after World War II, Nintendo was
tinkering with toys and novelties.
They took up electronics and computers,
and they basically extended their
own playful history with compu,
with early computer technology and
electronic technology.
And ultimately, you know,
created this game and walk series.
And the electronic love tester.
And ultimately, the NES.
So we have,
this is a very specific example of a,
here's a, here's a practice that
predates the computer, right?
This is a company that makes games and
toys.
And they basically, and they,
they encounter the com,
the computer technology and
they just take it.
And they just take it
into their own practice.
Move on with it.
So, so Mahoney makes this
interesting observation that the,
that the computer is an abstract
simple processing machine,
he is not the first person
to point that out of course,
this illustration is from a 1955
Scientific American article, and
this is a representation of a turning
machine, which I really like.
and Mahoney points out that there is this
notion in computer science that, that,
tha, of the abstract processing machine,
the Turing machine is one common form of
it, and that this computer, this abstract
Turing machine can be any other machine,
right, it's sort of the computer.
And software is the thing that
gives shape to this or computer and
makes it into a specific kind of computing
thing that does a particular thing for
a particular community.
So we have the abstract machine
that is then adapted and
transformed into the needs
of a specific community.
And it is software that does that work.
Software is the thing that
takes the abstract computer and
turns it into a specific kind of thing.
Whether it's an ATM or
electronic toothbrush.
Facebook, Google, SimCity or
robot, right, or a war machine, so
it's software that's doing this work of
trans, of transforming and specializing,
and so it's by looking at software we
can really get at, and this is, and
this is a sense of software that is really
oriented around the social practice,
around the communities that are,
that are engaged with the computing.
And then so, and then, and
then he offers that design is the,
if we think about the design of software,
we're thinking about how these machines
are adapted into specific purposes.
So I like this because this
gives us a sense of the,
software as a humanistic,
as an object for a humanist study.
And then I'll end with this, with
a section of this quote from Alan Kay.
Really sums up this idea,
you know, in, very succinctly.
It is software that gives form and
purpose to a programmable machine,
much as a sculptor shapes clay." Okay,
so back to Sim City.
So, Sim City is, if you haven't played it,
this is a very,
the original Sim City for the mac.
It's this simulation game where you,
you are put into the role of some kind
of super powerful city planner and
you, you create different zones and
you lay in different infrastructure, and
in those zones different
buildings spring to life and
there is this sort of inner logic that is
partially exposed to you, but not fully
exposed to you where, how, that guides
when things build, how things move in.
How, how your city develops.
You can see, I don't know if I can point,
but you see that, that C, that empty,
the C with the white box, the C and that,
that's an unbuilt commercial zone, so,
the C planner,
the player of this game is hoping
most likely that someone will
move into that commercial zone.
Right, and to the right of this, we can
see this low density residential housing.
And a really key part of this
whole system is this, is this RCI.
This is RCI metered on here.
And if you've played Sim City, you know
that what that meter is doing, what those
meters do is they tell you they,
they coach you as to what the city wants.
You sort of, it gives you
insight into this opaque system.
So right now we see that the city
really would like more residential and
commercial zones.
And sometimes those things go
negative if there's too many of them.
So that's, that's the system
sort of giving you feedback as
a whole about what the city, this living,
this living simulated thing is desiring.
And it's orchestrating the action for
the, for the whole city, so.
If we look at the code,
we can, we can sort of,
we can see behind into the sort of, we can
look into the logic that's driving this.
And what I've done here is this is as
I've produced some figures from rooting
the original source code to the,
to the project.
And Will had already said that
Jay Forester System Dynamics for
someone to talk about now,
is an influence on this project,
so we're also going to
look at Wills comments.
And if we look at the, the code,
which I've, so I put, I put the code for
a particular function called set in
valves on the right and that's the colors
that appears in the original game or
one particular version of original game.
And at the left, there's a figure,
what I've done is I've taken that code and
I've restructured it as a kind of diagram
that explains the logic of this, and we're
not going to go through this in detail,
but, but you can see things like things
like births and migrations and employment
and the sort of, lower, lower section.
And what this is doing is this is
governing the, the sort of global flow
of population in the city and
it's correlating these qualities, such
as the amount of people living in the city
and the amount of industry in the city,
and it's deciding whether people
should move in or move out,
how many people are unemployed.
And this particular idea comes from
Jay Forester's work with Urban Dynamics,
and this work was done in 1969,
was published, and Will took this,
took this and adapted this,
this idea into into SimCity.
And and this particular idea,
this dynamics idea that,
that Foster worked with was,
has a very interesting history,
which I'm going to just
sketch very briefly here.
But basically Foster began
his career at MIT in the,
in the 40s working with server mechanisms
and and then he was the project leader for
this computer, this [INAUDIBLE]
the seminal computer called Whirlwind.
And after finishing the Whirlwind project,
which was very, very expensive and took,
took took a long time, he then joined, he
was recruited into the MIT Sloan School of
Management, so he went from being
an engineer into this management school.
And in particular and he writes, the
school was founded at MIT specifically,
because they were interested in, people
were interested in what a management
school looked like in ans,
in a very technical institution.
And it was expected that Forester would
do something like information systems or
something like that, but
he wasn't that interested in that, and
what he did instead was, was start
to think about modeling, simulating,
about modeling industries through,
through, through digital simulation.
And you know and, in his early work,
he looks at sup, sort of supply chain,
he looks, what happened is that the,
some managers I think from General,
from General Motors were pointing out
that there was this fluctuation in their,
in their orders that they couldn't
explain, they thought it was,
there was a seasonal change in the orders.
And for, and Forester built a model and
said actually no we can explain the, all
that fluctuation in, endogenously is it,
as a result of simply the organization
of the system itself.
So just looking at, looking at
the feedback loops, he said that,
that was sufficient to give us
these you know those, those waves.
And then he starts to abstract
from this specific economic model,
this business model into a, into,
into a larger phenomenon, and
ultimately that takes them into cities.
And the way that its gets into cities
is that, there was the former mayor of
Boston was, was, was tak,
taking an appointment at MIT and
then he'd had polio as a child and
so he needed, he used a cane, and
Forrester happened to have
a ground floor office, and so, and
his, and his the,
the office next to him was, was,
was vacant, so
he ended up randomly next to this mayor.
And they were talking about the city and
the problems of cities, and this was
during the, you know, the urban crisis of
the, of the 60s in the United States, and
so there was a lot of,
there was a lot of interest in this.
So Forrester basically says,
something like, you know,
as he heard Mayor Collins talk about the
problems he was facing, he recognized the,
the sort of the systemic structures
he'd already been thinking about.
So he's basically taking this template
that he, he had, he had been,
he had been working with for
many years and
just sort of mapped it onto
this problem of, of cities.
And my claim is that, the sort of, the
part of the aesthetic of SimCity is this
kind of oscillating, this fluctuating,
unpredictable sort of bounds in these,
in the desires and growth of the city,
and in fact that, that,
that sort of surprise and delight, then
comes, that comes from that is directly
attributable to the system dynamics
technique that's being used.
And not only, so not only did, did, Will
Wright get a sort of mathematical comp,
computational framework for
modeling social systems on
the computer from Forester's work.
But he also got the sort of,
these instabilities and,
and sort of the general perspective
of sort of artfully and
aggressively abstracting from
the world into, into a computer model.
And it, and it, you know, also has
the effect of giving a kind of overview of
the model to, to the player, as well.
So, that's, that's the talk that I've got.
So just to summarize,
I've shown you Earth Primer, and
talked to you a bit about some of
the design thinking behind that project
that took us in to some questions about,
what it means to design playfully, and
we talked a little bit about
play design and game studies.
And then we talked a bit about SimCity,
and how I'm using SimCity as a case study
for thinking about playful design, and
looking at SimCity as a, as a tech, and
simultaneously as a technical and,
and cultural artifact.
Yeah, that's what I've got.
You can check out Earth Primer
there's the website yeah, thanks.
[MUSIC]
