MIKE RUGNETTA: Here's an idea.
Maybe some of us think of video games
as being about their mechanics.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK.
So you're playing Fable II and you just finished working
your butt off at the blacksmith's.
You can finally afford that master katana and mages cloak.
You're ready to hit Vengeance Road looking for baddies.
When you find them, you expertly shift
between surround and targeted attacks.
You fire a few shots from your Flintlock pistol
and end the whole thing with a masterful katana-fueled chain
attack.
You collect experience, drink a potion,
and reward your dog, Bonehead, with a treat
for all his hard work.
Each action and its result in this scenario,
from laboring and spell casting to experience gathering
and potion drinking is connected to a mechanic within the game.
Mechanics are a vague but important concept
in game design.
On gamestudies.org, Miguel Sicart
offers one definition of mechanics
as methods invoked by agents designed for interaction
with the game state.
In other words, a mechanic is a part
of the design of a game that lets you do a thing.
And they are in all games.
Chess mechanics let knights move a certain way
and describe how pieces are captured.
Threes mechanics dictate that cards slide and values
are added.
Magic the gathering mechanics say
that casting costs are paid by typing lands, which
are then unusable until the start of your next turn.
When you add all of the mechanics up,
put them in a context, and give the whole thing an experience,
that is gameplay.
For someone to feel effective and therefore engaged
in gameplay, they have to learn the mechanics.
They don't have to be great at them,
they just have to know what they are.
[CHIMP NOISES]
What I'm wondering, is how learning
the mechanics of a game and getting better at
it can possibly work against the storytelling of that game.
True, certain games like Threes, Chess, Checkers, and Go
are almost pure mechanic.
Unless you read the game as a metaphor
for something else, which maybe you do,
there isn't much beyond the way the pieces
relate to one another.
In other words, Chess doesn't tell a story as such.
However, lots of games do tell stories.
They have characters, and scripts, and themes, and plots.
And when they do have those things,
they necessarily-- no ifs, and, or buts-- also
deliver messages, sometimes even morals.
But especially in big budget AAA games
with huge worlds, massive casts, and the skill trees, abilities,
and menu levels to match, I wonder
if having to play by its rules can obfuscate story aspects.
And I'm not saying that all mechanics work
against all story elements in every game all the time,
but rather that as players of games,
I think there is a common habit of focusing on mechanics.
There are certain games that encourage that habit,
but it is not nearly a fact of gaming.
There's a big and weird tension between what we do as gamers
and what is happening to the characters in the game world.
My reflex as a player of games has always
been to consider more closely what I must do in order
to progress the dramatic action rather than the dramatic action
itself.
DAN: Oh, actually I--
MIKE RUGNETTA: Hey, Dan.
DAN: Oh, sorry.
Is it OK if I do my bit now?
Or should I--
MIKE RUGNETTA: Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
I'll get out of your way.
DAN: Hi, I'm from-- Mike, what is
that thing between your head and your torso?
MIKE RUGNETTA (OFFSCREEN): That's a neck.
DAN: Huh.
So hello.
My name is Dan.
I'm from a show called Extra Credits.
And earlier today, actually, we were talking about a study
that our writer James did, delving
into why we might remember more of the mechanics moments
in our games than the story.
It goes along with a lot of what you were talking about here,
although I think this problem may be as much about how we've
been trained to understand narrative both as players
and designers, as it is about the distracting nature
of the mechanics themselves.
It's about this idea of game literacy.
We're still thinking of games in the way
we've been trained to think through television and film
rather than seeing the unique language that games have.
It happened with films and comics too.
It took a while for us as an audience
to really internalize the new ways these media could express
things.
For example, we all instantly understand
when a cut in film or TV signals a transition in time or place.
But even that was once a new technique
the first time someone did it.
And it probably confused quite a few people in the audience
at first.
That's sort of where we're at with games now.
Anyway, sorry to ramble on your show.
If you guys would like to hear me ramble
on our show about this, then come see our episode
on the extra credits channel once you're done here.
I'll put a link down in the--
MIKE RUGNETTA: Oh yeah, the doobly doo.
DAN: Yes, that.
Thank you.
See you folks in a bit.
MIKE RUGNETTA: Thanks Dan for stopping by.
And if you want to see the extra credits team
talk more about the why of this question,
we'll put a link at the end of our episode
and also in the place that we already talked about.
Anyways, going back to what we were discussing before,
considering why we might think more about what we
do as opposed to what happens.
I remember in WATCH_DOGES that it's about revenge.
That there is the double-crossing guy
at the beginning in the bank, and that Aiden
has to [INAUDIBLE] him because of reasons.
You'll never hear from him again.
MIKE RUGNETTA: But I remember exactly what
I did in so many missions.
Sneak, take out this guy, sneak, distract this other guy, climb,
sneak, sniper rifle, shoot the propane tank
to scare this other other guy.
Why scare the other other guy?
I have no idea.
Because the menu item told me to.
In this all too familiar scenario,
I did so many more things, engaged
with so many more of the game's mechanics
than I did with its story elements.
In playing them, we sometimes make games
more about their mechanics than about their story elements
and therefore messages.
That is the proper reaction to being told
that you've got brain damage.
MIKE RUGNETTA: This isn't always a bad thing
and is true to a certain degree of pretty
much every creative medium.
Dance, movies, music, painting, sculpture.
They're all just as much about how their audience interacts
with them as they are about the ideas that
inspired their creation.
But the audience isn't an active participant
in those other things.
At least, not merely in the same way as they are with games.
Video games, especially.
Turning pages to read "Ancillary Sword" and going to a gallery
to see Dan Flavin are important aspects of experiencing
those things but are different from navigating a menu
to cast a spell in a Final Fantasy game,
or effectively gathering and managing
resources in StarCraft.
For some people, myself included,
the process of getting good at those things
can make Final Fantasy 8 less about how
one is in control of their future only insofar
as they are capable of learning from the past
and not strong arming the future.
And to StarCraft less about the blurry line
between right and wrong during combat, not only
between warring sides but also within those sides themselves.
When games become more about what players do and less
about what happens, talk about story, theme, and message
can start to feel secondary, even unnecessary.
But world-building, character-defining,
action-driving, narrative elements fuel
video games as an art form, experience giver, and vehicle
for meaning, and equally provide a document
of the historical and cultural moment in which they
were created.
Media always reflects the conditions of its creation.
The situations and dramatic action in games
contribute to our understanding of the world, not just games.
Purposefully or not, when we privilege mechanics,
we dismiss the capacity of games to contain
meaning beyond what is found in our practical interaction
with them.
Thinking of games as a collection of tasks
is like thinking of a book as a collection of page terms.
I think it also minimizes our role
as players in the important critical process of the games
industry.
Once we've learned a game, feel expert at it,
it's easy to forget what's beyond menu
items, and achievements, and side quests.
This, I think, is one source of the it's-just-a-game attitude
that occurs in response to tons of games criticism.
It's only a game.
Why you have to be mad?
MIKE RUGNETTA: When games are viewed
as a collection of actions, talking
about the many other elements seems like a waste of breath.
In games, just like in life, it's
only once we've learned to sufficiently perform
the actions, that we are empowered to act out our values
and goals to be, as Sicart said, agents interacting
with the game state.
Those actions might have their own importance, sure.
But that importance is set inside a much more
monstrous structure of meaning, intention, and ideology.
And that's just as true for Fable and StarCraft
as it is for Mario and Katamari.
What do you guys think?
Is there this habit of privileging mechanics?
And if there is, does it stop you
from becoming engrossed in or critical
of other aspects of video games?
Let us know in the comments, and don't
forget to check out the extra credits side of this argument
too.
DAN: Yes, that.
Thank you.
MIKE RUGNETTA: Most internet comments
need to be diluted in 10 gallons of gumbo, but not you guys.
Let's see what you had to say about hot sauce labels.
Jaldaboath Irghen and Sergiu M. Talk about how in Mexico food
is labeled as though it has been prepared lovingly
by your grandmother or mother, which I really like that.
In my experience, I think some Italian food has this too.
But we'll talk more about Italian food packaging
in a couple comments.
Sergiu M. Also points out that on Valentina is not a country
of origin but a state of origin Jalisco, which I knew,
and I meant to fix, and I didn't.
And that's no excuse.
Thank you for letting me know.
Biergenmeblorger writes an amazing comment
that contains the sentence, therefore
all history is the history of hot sauce marketing.
I don't want to read the whole thing.
It's such a great experience.
I think you should do it.
We'll put a link to this one and all the others
in the doobly doo.
Sarah Morris brings up the moral element of food
and the idea that it can be sinful and indulgent.
And actually, I did want to make a point
at one spot in this script about the Puritan idea of turning
food into work so that it would be something that you didn't
feel as guilty about enjoying.
But as it turns out, I learned that food was actually
one of the few things in Puritan culture
that was celebrated, that was allowed to be indulgent.
Because they did live off the land so much,
they felt it was appropriate to celebrate the things that they
got from it.
Which I found that surprising.
I found that interesting.
But yeah, thanks for this comment.
MatthewRFiD points out that Tabasco
is in fact brewed in whiskey barrels-- a thing
that I didn't know when I wrote this episode,
so now I feel simultaneously smart and stupid.
Thank you, Matthew.
Mayowa Adegboyega writes a really awesome comment
about the use of spiciness in Nigerian food,
and says that it isn't used always as a complement
and that it sometimes is about just being really spicy.
But that the difference is in the response to it,
that it isn't about performance or showing off.
That it is just a normal thing that you eat.
And that very, very spicy things are just part of the cuisine.
And includes the proverb, a life without pepper
is not a life worth living.
It seems appropriate.
Emilia A. writes a comment about food labels in Italy,
and says that the eye-catching pretty label might actually
work against something and that it's
more about the tradition-- who has been doing it
the longest-- and that is the thing you're looking for when
buying food items and not just flashy label, which, yeah, I'd
buy that, literally.
Rodrigo Vinholo talks about the packaging for beer in Brazil,
and talks about how it has this very strong connection
to bikini clad women.
And this is the thing, we have this a little bit
in the United States but not nearly as pervasive
as it sounds like it is in Brazil.
And this makes me really curious about what
this says about Brazilian culture, and maybe
specifically, the culture of beer drinking in Brazil.
I think the craft beer scene in America
has really maybe changed the tenor of a lot of beer
advertising, but I wonder if there's a related
kind of thing in Brazil.
This was really interesting.
Thanks for writing this, Rodrigo.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these WATCH_DOGES.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a Subreddit,
which I will remember to get comments from next week.
My apologies.
And the tweet of the week comes from Chockus
who points us towards seehearparty, which I
don't want to ruin what it is.
Just get some headphones.
Go find it.
It is what the internet is for.
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