Just Another Meme Vector

image by Andrew Northrop on Flickr

For a big part of my life, I’ve made and maintained friendships through violence.

Not real violence, of course.

But simulated weaponry and fantasy combat is the glue that binds my gang in Montreal. It’s also cementing the connections between members of the pick-up Halo team that I play with here in London.

Playing together at lunchtime has turned what used to be a bunch of anonymous guys in the next office into my mates. The game’s fast-paced fragging is what we socialize around, to the point where we know each other mostly by our Halo call signs. When I arrive for our lunchtime match, I’ll be greeted with “Hello, Moxie,” (my callsign is Moxidas) and I know the others as Maz, leTang, El Meteor and so on. It can be a stretch if we actually want to use the office email to communicate, because we have to try and remember each others’ real names.

I pwn you because I’m your friend?

It’s not strange that playing together makes and deepens friendships. But it’s something of a paradox that competing against each other seems to strengthen friendships, as well. Especially when the competition is so overtly combative.

You blow up another player with a rocket launcher. His limp corpse cartwheels through the air, propelled by a blooming explosion. You laugh manically. He curses and thumps the couch with his fist in frustration. How can this make you grow together as people?

Of course, there’s more going on here than just the game. There’s a whole cloud of specific social interactions that grows up around playing video games together – team communication, talking about what happened in the last match, and of course smack talk – endless smack talk. This, especially, is a delicate balance, where everyone seems to follow unwritten rules. For instance, though there are stronger and weaker players in our team, no one would ever say to one of the newer players “Wow, killing you was so easy. Shame you suck so much. I’m way better than you!” It would seem to break some rule.

So we pretend to kill each other, but it makes us friends. We talk up our victories and insult those we’ve bested, but not too much.

It’s the testosterone, baby.

I’ve learned a lot about this apparent paradox from reading Dan Cook’s excellent post about this. Playing games of skill or chance, with strangers or with friends, are all wildly different experiences, that give rise to very different emotions.

The game you’re playing may be quite combative, but it turns out that if you’re playing with friends, the pre-existing social patterns smooth out the peaks and troughs of victory and defeat:

Competitive game play with friends becomes less about winning and more about shared experiences. This is a very different emotion. The ability to tell player stories, communicate, discuss and joke with one another are all features that enable the core delivery of value to the player. In some sense, the actual competition is secondary to the bonding that occurs around the activity. The ‘fun’ that comes from playing with friends is completely different than the ‘fun’ associated when playing with strangers.

Playing against strangers happens in the anonymous mode of the internet – the same world that gives rise to forum trolls and flamers. Without pre-existing social ties, all bets are off and naked competitiveness comes out. That’s why online play can be a merciless and disheartening experience. This goes double for skill-based combative games like first-person shooters.

Beating strangers is a guaranteed source of entertainment. If you want a highly reliable, inexpensive means of making your game fun, toss some strangers together in a game of skill (it barely matters what sort). To boost the emotion even further, place the winners on a high status pedestal. Voila, instant fun, at least for the winners.

Yes, for the winners. When you rise to the top of the pile in an online kill-em-up, you get a real fiero boost. But if you’ve ever been in an online game server where you’re always trailing the pack, you know it’s no fun to be the loser when you’re playing against strangers.

One of my favorite games is Call of Duty 4. I play online quite often (my callsign there is Moxidas too, if you want to join in some night). But I always play in teams, because I frankly can’t stand the sort of testosterone-laced smack talk that happens all too often in the free-for-all version.

But when you’re playing with friends, the combat and smack talk tempered by a lot of things, like smiles and other body language – gaming in the same social space is accompanied by really high-bandwidth social communication.

Dominance behavior dips sharply if you win in front of friends. Friends are generally are people you need to get along with in order to live your life. Imagine for a moment, if you were to win a game and then yelled at them to lick your boots (and you meant it). They probably wouldn’t be your friends for very long. Our innate social response is to repress our instinctual dominance urge so as not to damage our friendships. [...] The loser is under threat of being put in a low status position. However, once they receive signals that their trust in their friend is justified, they have no reason to fear a loss of status.

Game dynamics for fun and friendship

This is why combative games can be very exclusive. You have to be good to play against people who exult in their victory, or come in to the game through a pre-existing circle of friends. But it is possible to make a game that’s inherently combative and co-operative.

The game that does this really well is Left 4 Dead. You play against a horde of zombies, but in a close-knit group, where the story and game dynamics conspire to create bonds between you. For me, this is the game’s greatest achievement. You really need to stick together and help each other to survive. Over the course  of an hour-long game, the cumulative effect of this  is so strong that I’ve found myself feeling genuinely fond of people who I know only from their gamertag, even if they haven’t said a thing during the whole match.

There are plenty of games out there that reward collaboration and explore the mechanics of social relationships. It’s something I’ll be exploring further. In the meantime, I recommend Dan Cook’s post. It’s well worth checking out.

I spent a lot of today in Stories From Numbers, a day of talking about data-driven journalism and linked data from the BBC’s Future Now project.

It was a dense day full of interesting talks. Here’s one of the highlights.

More or Less

Richard Vadon, Richard Knight and Olly Hawkins are from the team at Radio 4’s More or Less. They led us on a fascinating trip through the world of statistics. Debunking bogus numbers is one of the things the show does best. And they’ve got plenty of targets, like this video:

It’s alarmist and discouragingly popular (over 10 million views so far!). More or Less debunked the stats with some good primary research, but sadly their video hasn’t been viewed nearly as many times as its xenophobic instigator.

They shared some tips on how to deal with figures:

1. If a number seems bogus, it probably is.

No one is immune from this. Richard Vadon, the show’s editor, showed us some examples of BBC News at 10 stories based on data that turned out to be completely spurious. Where did the journalists get their data?

The Home Office.

Even official government material can contain errors, dubious analysis, or . . .

2. Beware of Chinese Whispers

Just because a number is repeated often, doesn’t mean it’s right. “Bad stats are like zombies,” said Vadon. “They never die and they’re hard to kill.”

Doubly dangerous are studies that quote other studies. The Home Office figures that led to a false News at 10 report were quoting an independent study, which itself quoted a previous study. But statistics are sensitive. With each quotation, distortions can creep in along the way, and before you know it even government policy can be based on completely wrong information.

3. Read the Original Research

It’s oft-repeated that the UK is the most surveilled nation on earth, with 1% of the world’s population but 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras. The average Londoner is supposedly filmed 300 times a day.

It’s bollocks.

These numbers originally come from a 2002 study. A look into that study’s methodology shows us that the statistic is highly questionable.

There are a lot of CCTV cameras in the UK, but they’re not on a central database anywhere. They’re put up by local councils, private landowners, local governments, companies and even privte individual. The only way to find out how many there are is to actually go and count them.

That’s what this study did. The researchers went along Putney High Street and Upper Richmond Road in southwest London, counted the number of cameras they could see, and marked that down. Then they extrapolated to all of London, and from there to the whole UK.

There are some big problems with that logic. Which means that the BBC News story I linked to above is just plain wrong.

4. Ask: Is it a Big Number?

In 2006, one of the top stories was that the NHS, the UK’s state health provider, had a budget deficit of between £800 million and 1 billion.

That sounds like a lot of money, and by most counts it is.

But it’s only about 1% of the total NHS budget.

For comparison, the UK Treasury applies a margin of error of 2% when it assesses the budget of the entire UK government. So if the NHS can accurately count a shortfall of 1% on a scale of £1 billion, they’re actually doing really well.

One of the things I found most heartening about this talk is that the guys from More or Less  were quite candid about their qualifications. “We’re all arts graduates, like most journalists,” said Richard Vadon. It doesn’t take a mathematician to do this kind of journalism – just a bit of applied intelligence. That’s good news for an arts grad like me.

“Journalists as a whole aren’t very good at spotting bad numbers. but we should get better,” Vadon said. Amen to that.

Here’s something really cool. lose/lose is a video game the plays like an old-school space shoot-’em-up. It’s got your vertically scrolling spacescape, full of presumably hostile aliens. It’s got your lone gunship out to destroy them all. And it’s got one hell of a twist.

Each little alien sprite you encounter on your deadly cruise through space is procedurally generated from an actual file on your hard disk. That accounts for the endless variety in their looks. The twist is that the alien sprites are also linked to the files they spawned from – so every time you shoot an alien, the original file is deleted. Watching someone play is a cringe-inducing experience. Every time an alien explodes, there’s a little shower of pixel-debris, leaving behind a ghostly file name that fades into the background.

If you die, the game deletes itself.

I think it’s clever. What do you think?

(via Raph Koster)

BeeBCamp 3 is coming, and man am I excited.

This has been in the works for quite a while. Finally we can let you all know about the imminent innovative awesomeness.

In the wake of BeeBCamp 1 and BeeBCamp 2, BeeBCamp 3 is going to continue inviting people from across the BBC into a roiling chaotic cauldron of creativity. Last time we also tried letting in a few people from outside – I know, I know, it’s a shocking proposition. But it really worked out. Something we’ll aim to repeat this time around.

The big news this time, of course, is that a big chunk of the BBC is moving up north. That’s why BeeBCamp 3 will be a joint unconference, simultaneously in London and Manchester and connected with all manner of high-tech video wizardry.

I’ll be producing BeeBCamp 3 and running the BeeBCamp blog. Head on over there if you’d like to know more.

Why are really good games fun? Here’s an attempt to deconstruct one in detail. PopCap’s Peggle: a Masterpiece of game design.

I tend to like a certain kind of game. Half-Life, Call of Duty, Halo . . . See a pattern there?

A lot of my friends play similar games. You know – hard-core gamer types who stay up nights, pulverizing avatars with high-powered weaponry, bouncing through extraordinarily detailed 3D environments, hearts rapid-firing adrenaline-laced blood through their arteries.

A while back, one of these guys told me I had to play Peggle. This caught me like a blind-side tackle, because the guy is a hard-core programmer and gamer, who also plays linebacker in an American Football team on the side. It seemed more than a little out of character.

Peggle? Really?

Like, this Peggle? With the silly colours and cartoon characters?

I couldn’t believe him. So I got an iPhone shoved into my hand and played the first level.

And I understood: Peggle is a masterpiece of game design.

I love Peggle. If you haven’t played it, I recommend you try the free demo on PopCap’s page. There’s an online version too.

Here’s the three reasons why Peggle is fun.

1. Simple Concept

Peggle is a game where you shoot little balls at a grid of blue and orange pegs. Hitting a peg gives you points. You win a level by hitting all the orange pegs in 10 shots or less. There’s a little more to it – like, if you hit a lot of pegs, you get an extra free shot – but that’s pretty much it. It’s a concept so basic that even my mother, who doesn’t really do games, understood and engaged with in seconds (she has now ditched Soiltaire for Peggle as her new favourite). If Peggle was a toy, rather than a game, you’d see how it worked immediately. That’s a far cry from something like Call of Duty. Unless you’re already used to first-person shooter games (and therefore part of a restricted audience) your first experience of play usually involves getting killed repeatedly until you figure it out. Needless to say, this is off-putting to most people.

2. Playful Design

Hand-in-hand with the game’s simple concept is its playful product design,both visual and sound. If PopCap made frogs, they’d look like this:

While Call of Duty, for instance, looks like this:

But it’s dressing, not function. Whatever the colour, both frogs are eqally poisonous – just as a game can be equally fun, regardless of the way it looks. But the way it looks definitely affects the feelings you get while playing – see Raph Koster on ‘Execution Tetris‘ for an example of this.

In Peggle, the whole design is meant to be casual and happy, not too serious. Not serious at all, in fact. It’s all so silly it’s almost impossible to keep a straight face looking at it. Goofy ‘Peggle Masters’ helping you. Magic powers you can unlock. Trip-happy electronic music. Little bouncy balls that go ‘bink, bink . . . bink bink BINK!’ in an ascending quasi-orgasmic crescendo. And that ridiculously over the top ‘Extreme Fever!‘ sequence with the rainbows and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. When you win, it feels like the game LOVES you.

In Eurogamer’s words:

the PopCap effect is unmistakable, coming on like a descent into a warm bubble bath, soothing and familiar – a combination of simple mechanics gently deconstructed until they feel like second nature, and a lush, colourful presentation riddled with positive feedback and unexpected jokes.

This design was implemented with extreme attention to detail. Even the game’s control menus are fun to manipulate! The designers have added a tone to each option, so scrolling through the menu makes musical notes like running a stick along a marimba. It makes you want to play around with it, to make more fun noises.

And that’s why product design matters: it makes you want to play with it.

3.  Addictive Core Mechanic

Beneath the simple concept and the silly look, Peggle contains a basic game mechanic of staggering addictiveness. It’s addictive because it combines two principles of game design: interesting decisions and variable rewards. Peggle combines skill with random returns in a way that tweaks your satisfaction/addiction response in just the right way.

There’s really only one decision you can make in Peggle (“Where shall I shoot my ball?”) but it’s an interesting decision. You can plan and theorize, and once you get good enough, you can set up some pretty interesting bounces. But really, there’s a great degree of luck involved. That’s where the second principle comes in: variable reward. If you just got the same outcome every time you hit a ball, the fun would dry up pretty quickly. As it is , you never know where your shot might take you.

It’s like rolling the dice, or throwing the roulette ball – only the way you throw can make all the difference in the world. The net effect is that you get to take the credit for all those crazy bounces and slides that set you up with 100,000 points. You get to say “See? That was me! I did that!”

You didn’t, really. You were just lucky.

There’s skill involved, sure – but in Peggle all you can do realistically is maximize your luck. So you’re always waiting for one more shot, just one more – because maybe, just maybe that’ll be the one shot you needed.

Also they’ve added a bit of a levelling-up mechanic (become a Peggle Master), and the all-powerful “Collect ‘em All” mechanic with the challenges at the end.

Taken together, all these features generate just the right kind of experience: funny, casual, distracting, rewarding and addictive.

That’s why I think that as a piece of game design, Peggle is a work of art.

Saturday night I was at a house party in Brixton. I only knew the host, so between nacho-scoops of guacamole, I found myself repeating the opening gambit of ‘The Party Conversation’ (TM) several times.

“Hi, I’m Philip,” I’d say, extending my hand.

Handshake. “I’m Melanie. Hi.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“So, Philip, what do you do?”

Pause.

I used to say “I’m a journalist” at this point. But . . . let’s try something more audacious. Something that feels more honest.

“I’m a game designer.” I said.

This is apparently quite an unusual thing to say, judging from most people’s reactions. The rest of the conversation went something like this:

“Really? So, you do computer graphics and animation and stuff?”

“No, no. I can’t do anything like that. I design the games themselves.”

Perplexed silence, maybe an inquiring motion with a glass of Pimm’s. I got the idea I needed to elaborate.

“Well, take two guys and a ball, and it’s just two guys with a ball,” I said. “But then tell them they’ve got to take the ball from the other guy and put it between those poles over there, without using their hands or arms, and that’s soccer. Sorry, football. That’s game design.”

“Oh. So, what kinds of games do you design?”

“Well, I’m a journalist by background and experience, so what I actually do is use game dynamics to design interactive applications that teach people about the real world.”

Mental note: use less jargon when you talk, Philip. I scramble to explain myself: “What I mean is, video games are a really powerful medium, see, and I design games and stuff on the web that  teaches you about the real world and journalism and stuff.”

Coherency FAIL. Waves of doubt washed over me, emanating mostly from my interlocutor’s raised eyebrows and partly from the concerned look in her eyes. I got the impression she doesn’t play video games much.

“What?” she said. “You can’t teach people stuff with video games. They’re just mindless entertainment.”

“Well, how about chess then? Think that’s a waste of time?”

She took a thoughtful sip of Pimm’s, then: “No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it teaches you strategy and . . . Stuff.”

“Right. Put it on a computer and you’ve got a video game that teaches you about strategy.”

The inquiring Pimm’s glass lowered a fraction, the eyebrows unknotted slightly. I siezed my chance and dove into the breach:

“Imagine this. You want to find out what’s going on in Baghdad? You’re a Baghdad taxi driver. You pick: you’re Sunni, Shia, Christian, Kurd. You’ve got to pick up fares and make ends meet, but you’ve got to keep track of which neighborhood you’re in and which side of the line you’re on – or you might get shot by some extremist militia types.”

I paused for breath. “Nothing would teach you the geography of a broken city faster or better,” I added, pre-empting the response I could see curling off her lips.

She stopped and tilted her head. “But most games aren’t like that,” she said.

“Yeah, but most movies and most of the stuff on TV is pretty crap, too. But you don’t discount the whole medium just because of Celebrity Big Brother.”

At this point she said, “No, I guess not,” with a smile so broad it had to be hiding an awful lot, and went to get another drink.

* * *

When I used to say “I’m a journalist” at parties like this, the first question after that was invariably “Oh, what do you write?”

People would always ask me what I wrote. They would do this even if I’d just said “I’m a journalist and I work for the BBC,” which seems to me to rather imply TV and radio.

At this point I’d tell people that, while I generally write a great deal, most of it isn’t intended for consumption by the general public. Most of my writing is actually design for interactive applications on the Internet.

If you said “I’m a writer” or “I’m a film director,” the next question would probably be: “Oh, what do you write?” or “What sort of movies do you make?”

Journalists have to be writers, though, or filmmakers, or radio producers, as well. You can’t just be a journalist – you need a craft. Journalism is the process of finding stuff out and communicating it to the public. That “communicating to the public” bit needs to be expressed through a craft: film, radio, photography, text . . . or game design.

So I’m a journalist and a game designer.

At parties, though, I think I might keep saying I’m a game designer. It’s more fun.

And it feels more honest.

Video games are still estranged from old media in one sense. There’s no culture of stars in video game design and production. Yet.

There should be.

There are a few exceptions, of course; Shigieru Miyamoto and Will Wright, maybe – but their names are still mostly known by fanboys. Everyone knows who Super Mario is, but few people know that Miyamoto created him.

Huge numbers of people played Halo 3 and Grand Theft auto, too, but few know who made them, either. People know the companies, yes. Halo? That’s Bungie. GTA4? Rockstar!

But that’s because when you pop the DVD in your console drive, a honking big logo animation pops up. It’s like the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the beginning of Star Wars. Hard to avoid.

Try this: who made Titanic? Lord of the Rings? Apocalypse Now? The Godfather?

I’ll bet you knew most of those.

But Grand Theft Auto 4 was easily as significant a cultural event as Titanic. People love it, spent hours -days!-playing it. The same can be said of other games. Call of Duty 4 matched it in impact and acclaim, and it’s a masterpiece of game design. The buzz surrounding the release of the sequel is as big as that for many movies.

But who’s making it? We don’t know. Oh, their names are out there – you’ll find them with a single google search, to be sure. But game designers aren’t bandied about by PR departments like film directors are. Wham the next Coen Brothers movie comes out, it’ll be impossible to avoid knowing that they’re behind it.

I think games designers should be treated the same way. Their names need to be on the posters, on the front of the packages, right on the banner ads online.

Of course, as a recognition of what they’ve achieved.

But also for the rest of us, because having those names up there is a sign that the experience on that disk has meaning and value; that it was crafted and designed by dedicated people to give us, the players, a unique experience.

Beacuse if I start seeing those names, as a game player (and most of us are game players these days), then I’ll feel like the game experience has more value. I’ll humanize the experience. All creative arts are about communication, and games are no different. Knowing who designed the experience I’m having means I’ll relate to it better. I’ll enjoy it on a personal, as well as a visceral, level.

And (you listening, games companies?) I’ll probably buy more games if I can build up a relationship with their auteurs.

Ever find yourself checking your Facebook feed absent-mindedly, on the off chance that there might be something new and interesting there?

Ever follow an eBay auction obsessively, or get a burst of happiness when someone gives you a high seller rating?

Ever spend a day in anticipation, wondering how many views your YouTube video will accrue?

There’s a lesson in all these experiences in how to make an online journalism app successful. We’re talking basic principles here.

All the apps I mentioned above are successful at least partly because they have adopted principles of game design in their user experience.

There’s more to game design than actually making video games – though I think they can be good for journalism, too.

The principles of game design can be most usefully implemented instrumentally, to make other applications better.

Fundamentally, it’s all a question of user experience. Design a winning user experience, and people will want to interact with your site or app, for the sheer fun of it.

I just re-found a post by Paul Bradshaw that I should have blogged about way earlier.

Paul writes the Online Journalism Blog and founded HelpMeInvestigate.com, a very cool 4ip-funded project. In this post, Paul talks about exactly what I’ve been saying about game design as a fundamental component of User Experience in online applications.

“Every medium has its own genres and conventions, and the web is no different,” he says. “You can’t just shovel print or broadcast or campaigning content online. It’s interactive. It’s communicative. The most successful sites on the web know that, and they use game mechanics.”

The take-away lesson, for me, is that a site/application with good graphic design and good UX design (incorporating game design principles) is so attractive on a basic, brain pattern-matching level that users will want to interact with it, and they’ll do what we want them to do there for the sheer fun of it. (This is something I touched on with Five Lessons ARGs can teach Journalism.)

Implementing game design features like customization, social exchanges, collecting, points, and feedback into web apps makes them more engaging, more fun,and generally a pleasure to interact with.

Any app designer that can make people interact with his creation obsessively for hours and hours has clearly learned something important about the way people’s brains work. Implementing game design principles in online journalism is about putting these lessons into practise.

I recommend viewing the embedded presentations by Amy Jo Kim, they’re well worth it.

Six Days in Fallujah, which I wrote about before, is still alive and kicking, despite fierce opposition and lack of a publisher. Its opponents say its very existence as a game belittles the sacrifice of those who died there. Its supporters say it’s an honest record of the battle.

It should be published. Then we can all play the game and decide for ourselves how it treats the memory of the fallen.

A couple of days ago, I ran part of a training session for journalists from BBC News.  It was a day-long course on the new possibilities offered by new media. I told them about the power of using video games as journalism, including Darfur is Dying, Insurgency and Six Days in Fallujah. The people I was talking to are hard-bitten, editorial types. They’re the people who make the news happen, who send pictures from war zones and famine areas to our living room TVs. I could see them stir uneasily in their seats when I mentioned the ‘G’ word.

There’s a prejudice against games as a medium for significant content. On one hand I understand this, because video games are still new, and many people are still likely to think of them as something invented as a plaything for their kids. On the other hand, this prejudice is odd, given that video games are the most popular medium in our civilization and many (if not most) of them deal with one of the most significant subjects of all: death.

I concede that the prejudice is reinforced by the fact that many video games are violent, sensational, visceral fun.

But then again – so are most movies.

Most movies are sensational, entertaining. But that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of significant communication. I think most of us would agree that there’s a way to make movies about difficult subjects sensitively and appropriately. For example: United 93, Generation Kill, Schindler’s List . . . need I go on?

So – why can’t we treat video games the same way?

Know Thine Enemy

Like many unjust prejudices, the prejudice against video games is founded on a lack of understanding.

Dan Ephron writes in the latest issue of Newsweek:

Efforts to document war in new ways have always garnered skepticism and controversy. The first published photographs of dead American servicemen—including a 1943 shot showing three bodies sprawled out on Buna Beach in New Guinea—prompted a public outcry. The effect of television footage beamed from Vietnam directly to the living rooms of Americans was hotly debated throughout the war.

This same prejudice is back, and it has crystallized around Six Days in Fallujah. Opponents say the game is trivializing and disrespectful by its very nature as a game.

But let’s look at the way the game was made:

Peter Tamte [head of Atomic Games, Six Days' developer] says he got the idea to make a videogame of the Fallujah battle from Marines who fought there. Starting in 2003, he worked closely with members of the Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, to make training simulators based on games he’d helped develop. A year later, those same Marines ended up at the center of the Fallujah battle, code-named Operation Phantom Fury. When they came home, Tamte says, several were already contemplating how they could turn their experience into the kind of game they themselves would want to play.

So the very origin of this idea came from the men who fought and lost friends there. If soldiers wanted to write a book or film a movie about their experiences we wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Why should we dismiss their desire to tell their stroy just because it is in a new medium?

From an editorial perspective, Atomic’s commitment to accuracy is impressive:

Capt. Read Omohundro, who led a Marine company in Fallujah and lost 13 men there, acts as a kind of quality-control manager for Six Days. “I’ll say to them, no, that guy has to be facing the other way. This piece of ammunition doesn’t blow up so fast, it only detonates this much. You can’t be standing next to it when it goes off or you’ll become a casualty.”

The game’s makers also appear to have treated the dead with respect, by not including any dead Marines in in-game cinematics. Though this gesture is also the target of some criticism – does that make the game less accurate as a documentary?

Procedural Accuracy

Or: It’s about the way it works, not the way it happened.

I’d say this game can be accurate even with those changes made above. That’s because any game’s accuracy is procedural, not narrative – that is to say, a game is accurate if it works the same way as the real thing did, not if everything in the game happens the same way it did in reality.

If you think about it, it’s impossible for everything in a video game to happen the way it did in reality. There wouldn’t be much point in playing it if you could only follow one pre-set sequence of actions. Then it’d be a 3D movie, not a game.

The whole point of using a video game to convey the reality of the battle of Fallujah is that the player can figure out the way things worked during the battle, and get at least some sort of appreciation of what it was like for those who fought there.

Hell, Abstracted

I’ve never been in the military, and I have the greatest respect for those who put their lives on the line for the rest of us. That includes two of my best friends from Montreal, who are now serving in the Canadian Armed Forces.

I don’t think any media experience can really convey what it’s like to be out there in a battle. But some can get close – and each medium increases our understanding in different ways.

War is something we need to understand, not ignore. If done with sensitivity, in an appropriate manner, this is a gesture of respect towards those who have made sacrifices in battle. From what I’ve seen, it looksl ike the folks at Atomic have made every effort towards sensitivity and appropriate treatment.

Why should we deny ourselves the use of our civilization’s most powerful communications medium as we seek to understand war and appreciate the experiences of our soldiers?

p.s. The rest of Ephron’s article makes for interesting reading and is well worth a read.