the prisoner’s dilemma (zombie variant)

July 11th, 2008 • research, social gaming, theatre

A few weeks back, I idly suggested a group game based on an attack of zombies, spreading through twitter - joking that it would be a variant on an old Stanislavski exercise. Today those neurons bashed back together and I went looking for the source: an exercise in An Actor Prepares exploring imagination and improvised action.

Here’s the Director on the potential drama of a closed door:

“But suppose this in this apartment of Maria’s, there used to live a man who became violently insane. They took him away to a psychopathic ward. If he escaped from there, and were behind that door, what would you do?”

Once the question was put in that form our whole inner aim, as the Director described it, was altered. We no longer thought about how to extend our actvitity, or worried about its external form. [...] Our eyes began to measure the distance to the door, and to look for safe approaches to it. They examined the surroundings for directions for escape, in case the madman should break through the door. [...] In the end I found myself under a table, with a heavy bronze ash-receiver in my hand.

The job was not ended. The door was now closed, but not locked. There was no key. Therefore the safest thing we could do was to barricade it with sofas, tables and chairs, and then call up the hospital and arrange to have them take the necessary steps to regain the custody of the madman.¹

It’s a strangely genteel approach to threat beyond the door: relatively few horror stories involve merely arranging that someone “take the necessary steps to regain the custody of the madman.” Manners aside, the point of the exercise - or so the Director informs us - is that all action in the theatre must have an inner justification or motive.

It’s also interesting, though, that the imagined threat of the madman triggers a co-operative group response. Do some kinds of motive always summon communal action? The idea that common threats might trigger common responses isn’t exactly unusual - it’s pretty much the basis for any nation which has an armed forces. You could read World Without Oil’s negative thinking as a communal response to the communal threat of an oil shock.

So I’m thinking about the ways in which game designers can wrangle group behaviour, and produce activity based in the formation of groups. Some examples are rather less emergent and rather more heavily structured than others.

For example, the developers of Left 4 Dead - a new zombie survival video game - have been pretty clear about how the experience has been designed to demand team work: survival is only possible with friends watching your back. Accordingly, players who join a group game and play selfishly soon end up dead; the mechanic of the game acts as a kind of social filter to weed out players who want to ruin everyone else’s fun. So it’s not that the game merely rewards cooperation, but that it actively punishes individuals who fail to work with the group. It’ll be interesting to see how that individual penalty balances against the group penalty - how long can you succeed in four-player game with only three willing players?

Is this kind of social logic another variant of the prisoner’s dilemma?

1. An Actor Prepares, Konstain Stanislavski, trans. Elizabeth
   Reynolds Hapgood. Taylor and Francis 1989. p48. [↩]

Hide and Seek ‘08 web coverage

July 11th, 2008 • research, social gaming

My planned visit to Hide and Seek turned into a few hours on Sunday afternoon - missing most of what I had planned to attend because of the magic of theatre - but still enough time to dip into Sleeveface, catch a little of London-as-Tokyo and a too-short taste of the Lost Sport of Olympia.

Congrats to Andy Field - whose new game Checkpoint has been covered in a few different places: Jane McGonigal has a write-up of the whole festival here, as does Kieron Gillen at Rock Paper Shotgun. Hopefully Andy can be persuaded to stage another round during the Edinburgh Fringe..

london weekend, survived

June 29th, 2008 • penny dreadfuls, research

Exhausting but productive weekend: two Penny Dreadful shows at Greenwich, and a very quick visit to the Hide and Seek festival on the south bank.

A proper update to follow, but here are some production photos for Aeneas Faversham Forever taken by our lighting designer and technical director, Neil Hobbs. For gluttons, my grainy phonecam pictures are over here.

playing with the spore creature creator

June 16th, 2008 • research, spore

I’ve been able to play with an early version of Spore’s creature creator ahead of the public launch tomorrow. It’s an unbelivably fluid and fun creative tool (and pretty much the death of my chances of working today). Here’s my first attempt:

The ingenious aspect of releasing the creature creator ahead of the full game is that thousands - if not tens of thousands - of players will generate the creatures which will populate Spore’s universe via the Sporepedia. I really need to finish some reading and editing so I can justify spending a few hours exploring what everyone else has been creating…

playtime

June 16th, 2008 • penny dreadfuls, research

I’m going to be down in London next week to work (The Penny Dreadfuls‘ two Greenwich theatre gigs) and, more importantly, to play - at the Hide and Seek festival.

I’ll be playing Jane McGonigal’s Lost Sport of Olympia on Sunday afternoon, and hand-carrying a secret message to one of the participants (games within games for extra fun). Anyone around in the city want to join me?

copyrighting culture

June 8th, 2008 • research, teaching

Jackson Publick - interviewed at The AV Club about the new series of The Venture Brothers - says something that chimes with the arguments Lawrence Lessig has repeatedly made about the way our culture has evolved until extremely recently:

Our characters were part of the world that we were, and they love and remember and hate the same things that we did, and it’s affected their lives. That’s why it kills me when we get legal notes about some of this stuff, because you’re just like, “I don’t understand why I can’t use that, or talk about that, or reference it. I was bombarded with this on television when I was 6. Somebody spent a lot of money making sure that I would never forget this, and now when I act like it’s a household word, I’m not allowed to use it.” There’s your irony!

The relentless, unthinking pursuit of copyright - unlimited by any time limit or condition of fair use - is the death of culture.