gameslol

(Or: “The movie theater: a place to play games?!”)

This post roughly approximates a talk I did last Friday at a symposium in film theater Lumière in Maastricht. The symposium was organized to discuss the role that new media (and games in particular) could have in cinemas and other cultural venues.

I was the only panelist with a background in games. The other participants were directors of film theaters or otherwise involved in their operations. They were interested in games and new media primarily because of the declining popularity of viewing films in the cinema. While cinemas once had exclusive first-run content, nowadays anything can generally be downloaded illegally on the internet. The cinema’s superior picture quality has also become less significant in the age of HD televisions.

That’s why movie theaters are looking for a new long-term vision, trying to enhance the human experience of going to the movies (making it even more of an ‘evening out together’). A lot of them also believe the cinema must be a place not just to consume films but also anything else that uses a big screen or other audiovisual facilities, including live HD broadcasts of concerts, multimedia and art installations and games.

On a purely gut level, this doesn’t sound quite right to me. Cinemas are for watching movies. The phrase “stick to what you know” comes to mind. I was also worried that a lot of awkward parallels between games and films would be drawn at the symposium — you know, the dreaded “games are like interactive movies!”. Fortunately, it was well understood that the two are completely different mediums. The potential dangers of diversifying the movie theater were also intelligently addressed. While I wasn’t convinced completely, I began to see how games could fit into this new vision for cinemas.

A series of brief presentations showed what experiments had already been done with new media and games in cinemas. I responded in a short talk later in the day in which I covered three major points, which I’m going to repeat in this post.

1. What type of games are suitable for playing on location?

This is the most important question to ask. Using games on a location is very different from using them on PC/console/handheld. It’s like a different platform. People are more apprehensive about playing (others may be watching) and have limited time and attention. An average screen allows one person to be immersed, but it isn’t very interesting for everyone else. Games on location need to involve either a lot of people or must provide a great “spectator mode”. You need to have a good flow of people as you don’t want people hogging a game. Finally, you have to work with a physical space, which is not something games usually have to be concerned with.

Too often I’ve seen game exhibitions where there’s just some PCs and consoles with games on it, shown on small screens. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement.

As was explained in one of the presentations, the Lumière film theater had shown games before as part of a city-wide cultural festival. The Endless Forest was shown on the big screen, while people could play on a few computers in the room. Apparently around 50 people were in the theater at any given time, only two or three of them playing, the rest of them watching. The big screen was perceived by visitors as a big added value.

Other speakers mentioned the genre of serious games or games like Waco Resurrection (which could probably be classified as speculative fiction or indie documentary game).

I think the main criterion for including a game at an exhibition is whether it would be done justice if someone plays it for ten minutes, or is frequently distracted during play. There’s a lot of games that try to show how complex processes work, including almost all “serious games”. There’s also a lot of indie games that attempt to tell a story that require players to really play it all the way through. These are the types of games that should be put online for people to download and played on their own time, not demonstrated in a room, which is actually the way they were originally designed to be played.

Two types of games probably work best in a physical space:

1. Games of discovery (or toys), where you just play around with something and Stuff Happens. When you get bored with it, you can just move on. Since it’s in a physical space there’s no limits to the kinds of interfaces you can use. Most art installations actually fall into this category (though their creators probably would never call them games).
2. Games of social interaction. After all, you’re in a room with different people. Games are excellent at providing social contexts for people to meet and share experiences. This is a unique area that on-location games can do better than the ones you play at home.

Social/multiplayer games are particularly suitable for bringing people together, which fits in nicely with what cinemas want to do. One could easily imagine a type of game played in the bar or lobby area of a modern film theater that couldn’t be played on a regular PC or console (and in fact, many such games exist).

2. How do you put games in a physical space?

It’s saddening how most games exhibitions or festivals stubbornly treat games as if they aren’t games. They hang pictures of games on a wall. They present videos of games as if they are films. Obviously this misses the point. Games are interactive.

The problem is that there isn’t a very deep understanding of how to optimize a room for interactive entertainment. It’s extremely well understood how to optimize a room for viewing paintings; most museums have white walls and neutral lighting, and the spacing between different works ensures that they do not interfere. Sculptures are three-dimensional, so they are generally put on a pedestal in a room, allowing visitors to walk at least 270 degrees around them.

So what’s the optimal environment for experiencing games? I can’t claim to know exactly. But putting videos or pictures of games in a space and calling it a games exhibition makes about as much sense to me as taking photos of a projection of a movie, putting them on the wall and calling it a film festival. Why should games be awkwardly re-mediated when you can show the real thing — the interactive experiences they are meant to be?

I do know this much: a screening room in a cinema is extremely unsuitable for use with games. While you could probably make some good content within the constraints, since having a big screen to work with could be great, all those chairs are definitely in the way. The symposium had a lot of discussion about creating versatile multimedia rooms where a lot of set-ups would be possible, and I think that’s the right direction to go.

In any case, it’s important to learn from mistakes that were already made. I consider one of the worst examples to be the exhibition Next Level of the Amsterdam city museum. It showed things like a looped half-hour video of World of Warcraft. Or a paper wireframe of a car supposedly inspired by Need for Speed. There was also Shadow of the Colossus in the corner, but it was a rolling demo. None of it was interactive.

It may take a while to figure out how to properly exhibit games, but anything that advances even slightly towards that goal should already be considered a success.

3. Can the entire event be interpreted as a game?

I believe my third point really sparked people’s imagination, as all the panelists began furiously scribbling notes.

From the various presentations it was clear that attracting people to a new media or games event can be very difficult. And once people are there, it can be very difficult to get them to participate. The aforementioned The Endless Forest was only played by a small number of players. Often people would stand near the entrance and peek into the room, but had to be more or less lured in by the staff.

Wait a minute…

Games in and of themselves are very good at motivating players and triggering behavior. Once you start playing a game, everything is geared towards getting you to continue. Game designers know extremely well how to grab a player’s attention, encourage new discoveries and control the flow through a level or universe.

What if you think of an exhibition or event as a whole as a game? What if you use game design to attract an audience and get them in the right mindset?

While I was explaining this, we were seated at a long table in the bar/lobby area of the Lumière film theater. In game metaphors, this area is more or less the overworld. In adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, the overworld is where you meet characters, where you prepare for your adventures and where you eventually discover entrances to deeper areas.

So what are the screening rooms? They are the dungeons. You go into them for a time, you finish your “quest” and return to the overworld.

I suppose this metaphor could be applied literally — like a guy in the main area with a huge foam rubber exclamation mark above his head providing quests to visitors — but I mostly meant this as an abstract way of thinking. Game design can give creative solutions to the problems of piquing people’s interest, exploring the entire exhibition/event and even having them drop their inhibitions when playing certain games.

I once went to an exhibition called Art in Games in Hoofddorp that on the one hand felt quite unsatisfying — visitors were shown videos of the history of games on different screens — but also had some good ideas. The whole exhibition was designed as a platform game using large wooden blocks, some with screens inside them. Visitors had to physically explore the space, occasionally walking around or climbing on top of blocks, to discover more screens they could watch. This is a very simple example of what I mean.

Seeing the building or location as a game itself may be the sort of mental framework that is required for including interactive and participatory media in more traditional media venues. There is already some great content available (especially if interactive art installations are included), but if more organizations take the right approach, even more good content will come.

I should note that while all of the above focuses on sort of the art-y segment of gaming, it applies equally to commercial games. I am currently working on a competitive multiplayer game for trade shows and the same challenges apply. If you want to maximize the potential of games on location, you’ve got to design specifically for it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Game Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.