Back on June 12, I wrote about how much I enjoy the game embedded in the dashboard of my Toyota Prius, and especially how the presence of this game has motivated me to optimize my fuel economy. (Quick update: the "summer mix" of gasoline here in Southern California has apparently improved the performance of the Prius's Atkinson Cycle engine significantly, and I'm now getting over 49MPG average.)

I've spent some time thinking about how other simple but compelling games might be embedded in the world around us, using fun as the core motivation to promote desirable behavior by the public.

And I've found one!

Behold, the famous Dutch "pee on the fly" urinal:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_fly_in_urinal.htm

I remember seeing this as a big internet news item several years ago, and it is indeed true. With apologies to female readers, convenient and efficient though urinals may be, they are also a source of significant mess on the floor.

As explained somewhat in this article, the back walls of modern urinals have been carefully shaped to minimize this effect. However none of this is of any use if the user fails to piss onto the back wall. In particular, like it or not, that big deodorizing lozenge that sits in the bottom of most urinals is awfully compelling as a target. It just is, man...

So somebody with a brain said "if peeing on the lozenge is fun, well let's just put something in there that's more fun to pee on. And what could be better than knocking down a pesky fly?!

Have a look at this clever toilet:



Apparently, installation of these urinals has reduced 'splashback' by 80% in Amsterdam's airport. Wow!

Here's a closer-in view:



Notice how the fly is placed slightly off-center, which gives it a sense of authenticity that would destroy the illusion if it was dead center. Note that it's facing downward, such that if you were to startle it, you're less likely to have it fly up into your face. All of this adds to the compulsive nature of the design, or what we might call addictiveness. I know for a fact that if I had one of these urinals at my place of work, I would pee on that damn fly every single time. It would make a very mundane act a little more fun.

The commentary you see on those pics is from engineering professor Kim Vicente, from his book The Human Factor. Process control... sure Kim, great. I call that game design. I love this quote from Vicente:

"what do you think most men do? That's right, they aim at the fly when they urinate. They don't even think about it, and they don't need to read a user's manual; it's just an instinctive reaction."

Sounds like the definition of a good game mechanic to me. The same reason a player will take incredible risks to go for a coin in Mario Brothers, that's the same motivation, fundamentally, for peeing on the fly. It's just fun. Cool.

Leave it to the Europeans, who seem somehow to be more tolerant of the concept of design in their daily worlds, to push the envelope even further on this idea:




That's a little sticker that changes color (better living through chemistry!) when peed upon, revealing, what else, an advertising message:



That techno-pisser is located in the 'technopark' in Zurich Switzerland. (Image from this blog.)

It gets better.

Here's a tech demo made in 2003 by Dan Maynes-Amizade, and Hayes Raffle, a couple researchers at MIT Media Lab:



You can probably figure out what's happening here: piss on the target, interact with a game displayed via the LCD above the urinal.

Here's a screenshot of the actual game they wrote, which they call You're in Control:



Looks fun!

A great quote from Maynes-Amizade and Raffle's paper on the project:

"While urinating outdoors is playful for
many people, bathroom sanitation requires a serious focus
and conformity. You're In Control encourages cleanliness
while reintroducing play to the act of micturition."

In case you're curious, "micturition" just means urination.

I'd love to hear if somebody else has examples of this type of game/behavior merge. As you can see with the fly-in-the urinal, it doesn't have to be high tech, though as with most games, technology can be applied to make it more flashy and interesting (for better or for worse).

Now, I gotta go pee.

The rare brief post.

After some (very brief) conversation, fellow traveler Brian Hook (www.hookatooka.com) has set up a website which is both a directory and a resource for contractors working in the game industry. Or, as Brian has taken to calling us (and I approve): "Gaming Mercenaries".

Check it out:

www.gamingmercenaries.com

Some (though not all) posts here will be echoed at gamingmercenaries.com. But more importantly, it's a watering hole for those of us who are taking a little different path to game creation. Check it out from time to time.

Or maybe you'd like to join us?

We can always use another mercenary.

David Jaffe recently made a blog post in which he said that he's lost interest in creating single player adventure games, and proceeded to get hated on in a really big way for his post.

Dave's blog is read by a lot of fans, so probably the bulk of his hate mail was from those fans. But I'd wager that a fair amount was from David's colleagues in the game industry, and this disappoints me greatly. But then again, it's nothing new.

schadenfreude (n): pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.

As an industry, this is something we're really good at. We seem to resent each other's success so mightily, we're practically unable to acknowledge it. Hell I'm guilty of it far more than I should be. But I'm trying.

I think that schadenfreude is a lot of why people hate on a guy like Jaffe. He made a hell of a good game, he gets some props for it, we can't just let it lie. I'm not saying that Dave should get a free pass for life just because he made one good game - one of the other guiding principles fame in of any entertainment medium is "what have you done lately", and this has some validity. But God of War is a fine game, and Dave paid his dues working on solid stuff like the Twisted Metal series to get there.

As far as David's actual post, well I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. The question he poses implicitly, as to whether or not games are or should be fundamentally narrative experiences, is a valid intellectual question, and though David's blogging style is more personal and conversational, this shouldn't change the question at hand. I think it would be fun to respond directly to David's question, but that's a subject for another blog entry.

At the very least, let's give David props for putting together one of the more entertaining metaphors I've seen in a long time - carving a story in a wall with a trumpet? Man, that is good shit. I love that.

And I saw nothing in David's post that made me think "self-important, pompous ass" either. At least, no more self-important and pompous than a blog like this one. What I saw was a thoughtful expression of a highly personal opinion born of his own first-hand experience. I'd call that pretty legit commentary, whether or not you happen to agree. (Hey somebody's gotta do it. It's not like we have a strong tradition of game criticism out there...)

Indeed if you look at the history of David's blog, he goes out of his way to say nice things about people and their games and movies and whatnot. Sure David has an opinion, and his recent success has given his opinion a platform. But though I have to agree with the 'loudmouth' assessment (as does David), he's had every opportunity to be a prick to the rest of us, and he hasn't done it.

In short, Jaffe is not a hater, and we should learn from that.

I watched a great interview online a while ago that was filmed during E3 I think, and it had Harvey Smith, Will Wright, David Jaffe and Cliff Bleczynski. During the interview, Dave turned to Cliff and told him not to listen to the haters. Cliff is another one of those guys who gets it from the haters a lot, because of his extensive press exposure. But I've read what Cliff has written, and I've looked at his games - Cliff is a real game designer, far from the useless press whore he's frequently made out to be.

So you see this is the problem. It's easy to be a hater, easy to exercise your god-given right to schadenfreude, but when you do so, especially publicly, you're poisoning the well and keeping other thoughtful people, who maybe don't have the thick skin of a CliffyB, from speaking up. Guys like David Jaffe have better ways to expend their emotional energy than absorbing the barbs and arrows of his colleagues, and he couldn't be blamed if he takes his blog dark again as a result.

I'm not saying don't mutter your resentments to yourself or your peers in private - that's not realistic, schadenfreude after all being part of human nature. But when a person says something interesting or controversial in a thoughtful and reasonable way, respond in kind or don't respond at all. I.E., don't be a hater.

Keep it up Dave.

One of my favorite questions right now about games, is "are games art?". Well, of course games can be art, but this got me thinking that it's worthwhile looking at this in a formal way. How can games be categorized in terms of their artistic content/intent? And what is art anyway?

This idea has led me to some very interesting places. But more on that in a bit.

First, a quick definition of art. Any definition of art will be extremely slippery, so I won't try to be nuanced. I'll just say the following:
Art is a creative expression which can change the way in which the consumer of it views the world.

There is one other statement which is not necessarily part of a good definition of art, but is important to this conversation, and that is that to be art, an expression must have an intent of being art. Intentionality is another of those slippery concepts vis-à-vis art, so I'll just let the statement stand. Argue it in private, if you wish. (Though it is an excellent argument, methinks...)

When considering art by this definition, I think it's clear that modern video games are in fact, nearly always art. At least those that we think of as large scale, commercial games, generally use sophisticated fictions, which are a crucial element of presenting the player with a view of a world outside his or her familiar circle. And the intentionality is clear: games fictions are created by designers, writers, and production designers who are highly skilled.

(Please bear in mind that this definition does not encompass issues of quality. Quality, whether art succeeds or fails, is the realm of critics. Though it's something that should always be analyzed, quality should not be considered requisite to the medium being considered art.)

What separates games from being considered an art form by the broader culture (notably Roger Ebert), is in my opinion a confluence of several factors:

1. History of Intent. Games have not historically had a particularly artistic intent. The games that Ebert played as a youngster may have had no artistic intent whatsoever. Whether art emerged inevitably from their desire to engage and entertain is an interesting and fun question. But lack of artistic intent in the early coin-op era makes those games an easy target.



2. Lack of Quality in Traditional Areas. If a film critic were to watch most game cinematics, they'd rightly conclude that it's a bunch of crap. You and I know that this is merely ancillary to the overall art of the medium. But that's difficult to explain to non-players.



3. Lack of a Critical Tradition. Perhaps the only thing more pathetic than game cinematics in terms of quality is the state of game criticism. What passes for game criticism today is more like overrated buyer's guides than genuine attempt at understanding aesthetics or meaning.



4. Diversity of Games. There are a tremendous number of ways that games can be presented, and not all of them should really be thought of together with one another. A first person shooter is so fundamentally different from a puzzle game, it's almost sloppy to even call them part of the same artistic medium. Often, we can't even decide if a product is even a game (such as Brain Age or Trauma Center). Being considered a monolithic medium is a mistake.

All of the above are of course compounded by the fact that games are such a young medium. And, I believe all of them will resolve with time. As critics age and evolve, along with the game makers themselves, and very importantly as academia takes an increasing interest in games, the recognition of the broader community will come. I believe this is inevitable, and I suspect that is a common belief.

I think that one of the above issues however is a bit tricky and best addressed from within the industry itself, and that is the issue of diversity. I'm certainly not suggesting that diversity in games be decreased – indeed I hope for just the opposite. But it seems to me that we will help ourselves greatly by creating tools for defining games into categories which help us to argue the artistic merits of them.

I began this a bit with my 'definition of genre' posts. I think that considering how a game creates a user experience to be primary rather than what it contains is a very useful step in the right direction for the purpose of criticism and understanding.

I'd like to take a completely different step however, which focuses more on artistic intent, and I think presents a way of looking at games that can communicate their artistic nature in a way that's not only useful to developers and critics, but also to the public as a whole. Maybe even Roger Ebert.

I call this tool the "game triangle", and it will be explored in the next post.