The above is a picture of a piece by Niklaus Rüegg, set in a village on the border between France and Belgium.

I want to make a game with this idea, handing out the same 16 frames to teams with cameras and imagination and seeing what they bring back. Everyone gets a “Suddenly..!”, a “POW!” explosion, a “Meanwhile, back at base..”, and a “But – “, and maybe a few dry-erase speech balloons, and an afternoon to go and use the city as their source. Maybe commuters crowding onto a train could be recast as henchmen rushing to their stations. Or a flock of pigeons could be accompanied by a single “Fly, my pretties!”. Or a frame could be strapped to a bike for authentic speed lines.

I’ve got no idea how you’d judge it. Perhaps you’d get credit for smuggling in certain locations, or for particular themes, or for managing to subvert comic convention, or just for running around town in spandex dressed as Captain Super. Perhaps the best one would be from the team of film students who make a comic out of other people making comics, though that could just as likely be the worst. Maybe the most popular one would be a collaboration between a six-year-old and their grandpa.

Anyway, I’d like to see it, and if I make it back to Bristol in time for the next Igfest I might see if I can do something about it.

Recently I keep coming across things (articles, posts) like this, in which people suggest that we could use points and progress bars to help children (never adults, strangely) learn better. People who enjoy games, and have done so for a long time, are the last people who should offer opinions on how games could be used for education, because we’re the sort of people who genuinely like collecting points and achieving targets, and that’s what games have historically tended to be about. We’re an unrepresentative minority: everyone else has known about games for ages but as long they’ve been about points chosen not to join in. If games are going to be used meaningfully in education we’ve got to work out how else they might motivate people, beyond simplistic behaviourist approaches.

Morris Minor dancing

Wearing fake Morris minors (Bernie Clifton ostrich style) players reverse park, move off and negotiate a mini-roundabout (playing the part of a maypole, representing the sacred circles of a more pastoral England), to the sound of the pipe and tabor/picnic hamper, while a fool dressed as John Betjeman recites directions to the nearest out-of-town Tescos in rhyming couplets.

Tam Lin

Following the script of the ballad Tam Lin, players have to hold on to something they love as the opposed faery team change it into a roaring lion, a black biting dog, a black hissing snake and a bar of iron (or other modern variants).

Knights asleep under the hill

Players have to creep through the circle of sleeping knights, to reach the chalice without sounding the bell that wakes the sleepers.

Mayhem!

Players run through neighbourhood in spontaneous fashion, carrying flaming torches and hurling stones at foreigners. Winner is the last person hung at the county Assizes.

Smugglers Moon

Two teams, smugglers and customs, each have to infiltrate the other team by dressing in their costume and passing themselves off as something they’re not. Only problem is there’s a limited number of costumes, and they all start the game on someone else: your task is to persuade one of the opposing team to swap costumes with you, or leave them no alternative (bribery, threats of harm, etc.) Winning team is the first team to be swapped, at which point the customs agents (previously smugglers) arrest them all and ship them off to Exeter for the hangings.

Knights of the Conference Room Table

Players are seated around a circular table and each try to add an agenda point (recent decrease in chivalrous acts, increase in littering e.g. swords left in stones all over, lack of virgins for unicorn hunts). Winner is the first to persuade the anonymous Green Facilitator to call a comfort break.

Exscallybur

Find the lady hiding a sword down her tracksuit.

All yours! Looking forward to seeing the Igfest pictures, sure it’ll be another fantastic time.

Russell Davies suggests we need to steal other things from games than leaderboards:

…we’re going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they’re going to be no fun. They’re going to drive us all mad

Caroline McCarthy on “Social-media games: Badges or badgering?”

“Game mechanics,” as this sort of points-and-achievements gimmick is called, is tough to get right: Turning everything into a contest may grab some extra attention at first, but it can easily veer into the annoying

David Hayward at Gamasutra: “System Fatigue”

Mechanics and meta-game systems applied to everyday life are at risk of being so repetitive they never achieve any kind of worthwhile structure, let alone a peak.

Brad Hargreaves on “Cargo Cult Game Design“:

Ultimately, you’re better served by building something from the ground up. Start with the basic principles of psychology and game design and build them into your product at a fundamental level. Otherwise, it’s just an elaborate cargo cult ritual that mimics the process but fails to understand the underlying truths.

And there’s a really comprehensive round-up of critical responses to Jesse Schell’s talk (the one that set me off in the first place) from David Carlton here: “Critical Compilation: Jesse Schell, ‘Design outside the Box’“.

Really cheers me up to see so many people taking the time to respond thoughtfully: makes it easier to make the case that games are interesting not because of the technology or number-crunching, but because they let you play.

Jesse Schell should know better, actually: his book on game design is a fabulously sensitive journey through the complex and ephemeral things that make a game a game. Maybe I misunderstood his talk. But the thing that no-one’s saying, out of all the people who know better, is that games that depend solely on accumulating points are rubbish games. And there are lots of great games, games that inspire and transport, games that show you a different way of experiencing the world, that have nothing whatever to do with points. Points are for people with no imagination.

This is part of a wider tendency for people to overgeneralise when they talk about games, to take one part of it for the whole domain, to imagine that the part that grabs their attention most readily is the defining part. For a while now I’ve been talking and working with people in education who have an interest in games, usually because they see the way players devote their attention and focus to them and imagine that presenting their learning content in a game-like way will lead to that level of engagement being replicated. Frequently, it becomes apparent after a few minutes conversation that they think the game lives in the technology, and that as long as a screenshot looks game-y it’ll magically engage their students. They’re normally wrong, obviously, having never considered the structure of the experience, the careful thought that game designers (good ones) put in to keeping the level of challenge appropriate, or any of the other things that make games so much more than a mode of presentation. People who believe that assigning points to actions make an activity a game are making as large an error.

There are a few sources I can think of for the mistake. Firstly, it’s unavoidably true that points are frequently found in games, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they must be an important feature of games. Points are found in most early games, and when you’re working with a system as simple and limited as those early games, points are a pretty good reflection of what’s going on. There are only a few things to do, and usually one clear aim, and it’s easy to mimic a narrative by coding a repetitive mechanic, tweaking the difficulty and using points to provide a temporal structure (no points = “the beginning of time”, some points = “later”). Certainly there’s no room in a Pac-Man or Space Invaders cabinet for different maps, or new challenges. Points are good for keeping track of simple things, and when you don’t have many complex things they do fine. It’s noticeable, though, that there are fewer games released now that have the accumulation of points as a central mechanic.

The second root that springs to mind is the construction “to game”, in the sense of someone “gaming the system”. Huizinga offers a fascinating exploration of the etymology of play-related words like “game” in Homo Ludens, which makes clear that these words have a complex lineage, and the long history and central importance of our oldest parts of language can lead to misleading similarities. In short, where attributes are ranked numerically, people work to make themsleves appear higher in the ranking through actions that might not be what was being assessed. That is, they maniuplate their score: they game the system, in English. But, although this sense of “game” is related to the sense of “structured playful activity” via the card-tables and stock markets of renaissance Europe, it doesn’t actually mean the same thing. I have an idea that the association of this sense with scores, tables of achievement, ranking and so on makes it easier for people to elide the distinction and think they’re using the same word. But they aren’t, and a system that can be gamed is not necessarily a game. Metaphor is slippery, and hard to keep track of, and here I think it’s misled some people.

The third factor that occurs to me is our deep-rooted compulsive behaviour. People are good at behaving repetitively in search of some kind of chemical reward, whether it’s hammering mistakenly at a traffic-crossing button, or checking email again and again. Game designers are well-aware of this, of course, and make regular use of the principles of irregular reward that keep lab rats pressing buttons and hoping for sugared water: will there be a fuel dump there? Should I try walking into that wall? Using this sort of primal psychology in the service of the wider game seems more justifiable to me, somehow, than basing an entire game round it.

So none of these are so very important when considering actual games. What’s worrying, what makes it so vital that we clear this up now before it gets out of hand, is that there seems to be a wider enthusiasm for turning a lot of our online gardening into point-accumulation opportunities. People have noticed Xbox achievements; we’re familiar with the race to accumulate friends or followers on new online network tools; prototypical gaming forays into new forms of media (the first Facebook, or GPS, or AR games) tend to use the simplest possible game mechanics in the proof-of-concept stage. These seem to help to convince people of the supposedly increasingly playful nature of society, proof that games have won and that in the near future all our interactions will earn points. And it’s this that’s so worrying, this idea that it’s right our actions in the world should be quantified so thoroughly.

Play is dangerous and subversive. It’s a frivolous, unproductive, trivial waste of resources: these attitudes have been around for a long time (though perhaps not as long as play has). But the last hundred years of industrialisation and standardisation have made it even harder for activity that appears meaningless to be condoned, more difficult to sanction behaviour that seems not to be directed towards a particular goal, more important that effort be directed towards a clearly-defined outcome with economic value. Numbers are a big part of this. Nothing is usable, no information is meaningful, nothing can be recognised or acknowledged without it being quantifiable. Turning human interactions into opportunities to amass scores is just an extension of this way of thinking: ultimately, quantifying our relationships with people, or our driving habits, is something that serves advertisers much more than it serves us. It might be true that we’re finding more ways to award points for more of our activity, but this doesn’t mean that society is becoming more playful. It means that play is becoming more socialised.

Seeing the accumulation of points as the central, defining characteristic of games means we’ve taken the worst bits of games, the parts that we’ve nearly grown out of, the features that speak to the least human and most animal parts of us, and I don’t think we should do that. Computer games originally used points because they had to: with limited memory and little experience in designing games, it made sense to use points. Later, points were a way to reflect progress in a wider narrative, a way of quantifying progress that acted in the service of something larger. Now, it’s possible to design games that offer reward and track achievement through more subtle means than numbers. Chasing numbers is dehumanising and humiliating. Now computers have grown out of having to use scores to track our progress, shouldn’t we?

Right now I’ve just booked a place in the airport car park (am off to the coast near Málaga for a few days) and I’m transferring Tito Paris to my phone for the flight. One bid for something interesting to get off in the morning, and I’m done for this week. And when I get back I should talk about some of these things in a bit more detail.

I’ll probably start with the Ghosts of Birthdays Present, though. If you’re in Bristol over the next couple of weeks and fancy helping out some of those marooned in the hereafter, let me know in the comments.

So you’ll need to gather round the wireless and listen carefully to the locations and the sort of weather that’s due to happen there. Then you’ll need to plot a route through the regions mentioned in the forecast, trying to find a path that gets you the greatest number of marks. Do you want to race through a series of consecutive regions that are easy to cover but are pretty low-scoring? Or are you going to race between the two regions at the opposite ends of town to pick up the high marks from squalls, turning to gales later?

Once you get to a region, if you’ve arrived in good time, you’ll see a Commuter. Your job is to do the correct weather to the Commuter and take a picture as proof. You’ll need these pictures of Commuters in their sunny handkerchief hats and rain-soaked macs to give to the examiners in order to pick up your marks.

Straightforward, right? Listen to the forecast, choose a route, throw buckets of weather over the Commuters, get the marks and get ready to listen to the next broadcast. But you’ll have to keep an SMS ear out for the odd plan-changing Weather Advisory. And is it your imagination, or is the Forecaster slowly showing signs of having been in his cupboard for too long?

We started in a pub, as did other teams, with the location given to us by text message (“they know who you are and want you dead”), in which we had to find an envelope to get started. Our host was pretty into the whole thing despite knowing less than we thought she did: she was acting like she was playing us the whole time, though we found out later she was pretty much improvising and hadn’t been asked to do most of what she did. Watching us look behind pictures and barrels behind the bar must have pretty amusing for someone who’d been asked just to look after an envelope and hand it over when asked. But I’m ahead of myself.

The game started with a call to a specific member of the group telling them where the cargo we had to safeguard was, and where we had to take it: the envelope had more information. Specifically, there was a boat waiting for us at Castle Park, at 8.45, that would take us to safety if we had a florin each for passage, plus one more for the cargo with some ID. We had to earn the florins for the journey by scavenging them from various locations (hinted at by location-specific photographs) or by busking on Corn Street. Some of us went busking, hiring instruments from Mother’s Ruin with the tokens included, while the rest went scavenging or up to Stoke’s Croft to see about some fake ID.

Long story short, running down St Nicks Market playing your own chase music is pretty much good times, even if hanging out with an assassin wearing a Homburg called the Moose and trying to pass yourself off as some other people can get a bit nervy. After calling it a day busking, and taking a rain-soaked detour up to Trenchard Street to hang around the car park in a fruitless search for fake coins, we regrouped ready to storm the ferry point with our cargo protected by our sacrificial flanks. The thrill of being ambushed by the Moose, the diversionary conversations about Florence and shoes and who you can really trust, the sense of achievement when we finally reached the boat with our cargo in one piece – these were things left untouched by the constant rain. Good game, and tightly planned, though there were the usual first-run glitches. Nothing major, though, and it finished with a Watershed full of wet happy people talking about how much fun it had been.

What always amazes me about these sorts of games is how well they reveal the willingness of people to pretend and join in with make-believe: how ready everyone is to down tools and play as if they were in charge of themselves again. There was a real sense of jeopardy within the teams, a fear in those marked for death that’s hard to say is pretend. But more important than the thrills was the way it bent the line between what was real and what was not. Our landlady had handed us a coin we assumed was a game florin but was actually a florin from elsewhere that had found its way into the till. Boundaries between real and pretend are pretty fragile when you test them, and the ways coincidence or happenstance take on new meanings when you give them a new context are pretty unsettling.

Good times, as always from iglab and simon, and if you get a chance to play in February I’ll see you there.

Despite the differences between them, there are still things that are prized by both sides, of course: money, influence, knowledge. It was in pursuit of this last item that agents from ___ia kidnapped a woman known only to you by her codename, the Princess. A brilliant young scientist, her work on macro-scale harmonic resonance led directly to the formation of the elite group of which you are a member. As the government of ___ia have long suspected (but your own has never confirmed), her work is more than purely theoretical — using the discoveries of her and her team, the covert agency to which you belong have developed ways of creating and manipulating special frequencies, frequencies which can be combined together to cause sympathetic vibrations in objects that cause them to move, to change shape, even to shatter.

This last ability is going to prove crucial if she is to be brought back to the safety and protection of ___land. Cruelly imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon, guarded day and night by crack troops sworn to uphold the glory of ___ia, her rescue would still be a straightforward matter for the special forces of ___land, were it not for the cage of solid crystal that surrounds her. If this were broken, our special forces would make short work of the guards and bring her safely home in the time it takes to raise a flag and sing a verse of the national anthem. But the crystal is impervious to all common tools of destruction. The cage’s makers laugh at sledgehammers and chisels, at diamond drill bits and laser technology: the weapon has not been made, they believe, that will release their prize. Such is their confidence that a mood of complacency is even rumoured to have infected the shock squadrons manning her gaol.

Their confidence is misplaced. The agency of which you are a member has the skill and knowledge necessary to shatter the crystal into a thousand impotent shards. All that is needed is for the members of your cadre to align themselves in the appropriate geometric figure for the frequencies you generate thus to sing in harmony with the molecular structure of the crystal cage and so break it into tiny pieces. Your vital mission is to journey to ___ia, arrange yourselves in the pattern designed by the boffins in the back room, and show the Princess that her work has reached its full potential: after which, of course, the heavy mob move in and it’s back to the old country for tea and medals.

Things being what they are, diplomatically speaking, getting into ___ia isn’t as straightforward as it might be, and your team have had to use the only channels available to them. At the time of writing, the only way to travel between the two countries is as part of some sort of cultural exchange programme. You, and the rest of your team, are all going to ____ia on a bird-watching visa, and at your every waking moment will be accompanied by a team of ‘cultural advisors’ intent on steering you towards the rarest and most sought-after specimens.

Make no mistake: this is a tricky business. How are your team going to find sufficient time to align yourselves in the necessary fashion without alerting your hosts to the fact that you may be more than simple ornithologists? Will your minders realise your intent, and double their efforts to make you stand where you don’t wish to stand? And — perhaps most perturbing of all — can the human brain withstand the frequencies needed to see this mad caper to its conclusion?