Growing Ripples

I don't have much to say, except that I'm absolutely thrilled to know that there are people out in the world that I went to high school with, some that I would have never considered close friends by any means, who have donated to the UN project. And others that have found connections to share the story of the project with. It's truly heartwarming to watch those ripples of awareness and support grow and spread. I can only hope that they continue to do so until we have reached our goal of $250,000.

Don't let the ripples die off before it happens!

Many Hands Make the Load Lighter

Just after the crisis in Haiti, I bought a t-shirt from Threadless to donate to the cause. The slogan of the shirt was "Men anpil chay pa lou," which translates to "Many hands make the load lighter." I didn't think much about the phrase at the time, aside from admiring the beauty of such an idea. That idea feels a wee bit more pertinent to me now.

Last week, I almost lost my job. Sort of. Without going into detail, I'll sum up by saying that the project I've given my heart to for almost two full years now may not see the light of day without some serious fundraising. We're talking about $250k of seriousness. That's a big number, but it could come down quickly.

If you're reading this, you probably know me at least a little. Maybe we're not friends that give gifts to each other, and maybe we haven't seen each other in years. But if I bumped into you on the street and asked if you could spare five bucks, would you give it to me? What about just one dollar? Well, I'm bumping into you on a metaphorical street right now. And if you have one, five, ten, whatever dollars to spare, I'd ask you to donate it to my project. Make my project into our project.

You may not have seen the same faces of young boys that I've seen, and you may never have wondered what those boys are being taught by their peers and elders about how to treat a girl and how to love someone. But I hope that you at least believe me when I tell you that they're out there, and that the project I'm working on could give them a chance to question the things they hear, see, adopt, and someday might practice.

If you can't spare that few dollars, or even if you can, perhaps you can instead spare a few minutes. Tell someone else about this project, forward my message, or just share the donation link. It would quite literally mean the world to me.

You can read about the project here, or jump straight to the donation page. Many thanks in advance for your small acts that can make this enormous but powerful load a little lighter.

Pausing the Game

Yes, it's been a year since I last wrote on my blog. What's happened in my life since then? I'll allow those reading this to guess at what level of change in my life would leave me no time to write about it, though reflection time abounds on my walks to and from the bus stop on Cherry Street every weekday. Here are a few hints. Work. Apartment. Exercise. Sunshine. Friends. Family. Cooking. Cleaning. Spontaneity. Reading. Email. EMAIL.

I am yet again on my way to GDC in a week, but that is not my impetus to write. I feel compelled to write because of a little game that just came out on the Playstation 3 called Heavy Rain. There are a dozen fan-girlish things I could say about the game that thousands of other people would say too. I will take a moment to lay praise on the game for merging cinema with gameplay. From the moment one watches the opening credits, included the "Written and Directed by" line that everyone looks for in a movie and no one ever looks for in a game, the experience read "movie" without reading passive. There were passive elements to it, of course - the cinematic cuts and choices made by unplayable characters, but those elements were so cleverly paralleled with interactive content that I truly felt engaged throughout.

There, praise laid. The point that I want to get to is how this game made me think about the work that I am doing right now with games and attitudinal or behavior change. I am quite certain that Heavy Rain is the closest I've ever come to seeing games evoke an emotional response from the player that is strong enough to drive a change in attitude or behavior. I'm not saying that (SPOILERS!) I've decided I'll never kill a man to save my son or that I'm not going to trust private investigators without doing a thorough background check (END SPOILERS), because the content of the decisions I made are of no interest here. What really struck me was the process of decision making.

Keep in mind that this game took about 10 hours to play through, and there was no traditional game UI or mechanical systems such as scoring, time huds, health points, or levels (there were levels, but they felt much more like scenes in a movie). You step into the shoes of four different characters throughout the course of the game, and it's possible for any and all of those characters to die before you finish; these deaths do not end the game, presumably until the fourth character dies and you no longer have someone to control in the storyline.

Although all four characters are trying to accomplish the same thing - catching a killer and saving a little boy - each has a different "flavor" of conflict. The private investigator gets into "wrong place, wrong time" types of trouble that are loosely tied to his mission but entirely coincidental. The FBI guy stands as the voice of reason pitted against a partner in analysis willing to bend the law (though sometimes FBI guy can bend the law too). The reporter faces survival conflict; similar but different to the PI, her brand of struggle is entirely directed at her and serves as a result of her own actions. And last and most important of all, the father faces desperate moral conflict in which he must make choices that will ostensibly impact whether or not his son lives or dies - imagine Saw crossed with John Q.

Now to the meat of the matter: the transition made in my decision making process. When I played as these characters, I felt very strongly connected to their existence, and I knew that these characters could die. This was powerful knowledge. I also knew that time in the game progressed without me. Combine these two thoughts, and snap decisions become abundant. Add to that equation the fact that you may make choices that allow you to survive but also come with a heavy level of regret or remorse for other characters. Now we have one tough decision making process to master.

Most games are about the survival of your character, this is nothing new. But few point out that your survival can be at the cost of another's. Some make you feel regret that you must harm others to continue, but it doesn't usually stop you. Jason Rohrer's Idealism does this in a very abstract way, but it gives you no alternative: create hostility or fail. Heavy rain paved the road to regret by allowing you to fail at surviving, succeed at surviving at another's cost, or succeed at surviving without pushing others down to the ground. It's more compelling because it's more like real life; by making it more like real life, the game is more likely to also elicit real emotion.

At the start of the game, I found myself making a lot of bad decisions. I hurt someone that appeared to be a danger to my life yet turned out to be totally harmless. Why? Because I knew I had to make a decision, and that this person I was playing didn't have much time to do it. What surprises me, and what I can't truly explain, is that it never occurred to me to pause the game. I don't think I ever would have if a friend hadn't prompted me to when we were making an incredibly important decision. From that moment on, the game felt totally different to me. It also reminded me of something I'd discussed recently about the potential of games to create behavior change.

In a passive medium, the audience needs time to reflect on the decisions that the characters have made. This reflection time often takes place after the choice because you need to know what the character decided to do in order to analyze why they did it and why certain consequences fell into line. In a game, that reflection time takes place before the decision because you're the one making it. Heavy Rain made me feel so much like I was part of a movie that I forgot about some of my game player "super powers," like the option to pause time and consider my options. In some ways, it felt like a cheat. When the game wasn't paused, time passed, and that passage of time sometimes took control of the story away from me; choosing not to make a decision was a choice of its own. By pausing the game, I was eliminating that choice.

I think the game could have easily been done without an ability to pause; it would only be one step closer to real life, to have to make decisions with the situation staring you in the face, never looking away from the TV screen to confer with a friend while the menu hovered over the content, blurring out the details. But by adding that menu, I think this game (unintentionally or otherwise) made a statement that decisions you make from moment to moment are important, so you better think hard about what you do. If this game were meant to teach behavior change, it would provide for the player a unique balance between understanding the pressures you feel when making such behavioral decisions and the amount of thought that needs to go into those decisions. If it were a longer game, I'd bet it could even teach you to make the right moral decision without needing to pause.

One last observation and then I'm done. I love the treatment of morality, a subject that has been played with in games to date in such a light-hearted, explicit, game-y way. Here, you don't get good and evil points for what you did. Here, your character won't grow horns or halos. The closest you'll come to receiving quantitative feedback is through trophies, which you earn for making good or bad decisions alike. All that confronts the player is the situations and the story. But, I would also have to admit that beyond the content, I think it takes a very mature gamer to appreciate a game like that. I hope I'm wrong on that part, but I can't really prove or disprove myself unless I abduct one of my non-gaming friends and sit them down to my PS3 for an hour or ten.

Long story short: play Heavy Rain if you think games can't cause the player to question their behavior, their life values, and their decision-making processes.

A Living Cycle

I feel like I'm the only one who hasn't blogged about this yet, but whew, UN orientation...some definite highs and lows, scary and otherwise. I'm excited about the group as a whole, though sad to see that all the familiar faces I've worked with before were drawn away from me. It's not that I don't like new groups by any means. It's simply that every new group has so many quirks, goals, ambitions, motivators, outside influences on behavior, and so on. I often love learning these nuances of people, perhaps as part of the human frequencies I wrote about before, but it is admittedly draining. After having taken all summer to finally crack the last few members of my Info Lit team, it feels like it may take just as long to do the same with this new group, although there are only about half as many students. I think as far as managing other people and driving them towards both productivity and enjoyment of their work, this summer's project has been the most taxing by far. But I feel like it's something I should be comfortable doing, which I am. That said, the school year promises to be one of my most challenging yet, I think.

Now that I've accidentally written part of an assignment for the project, I'll move on to something else that I've been contemplating: the role of women in video games. It's easy to say that they're unrealistic, made to be either objects of male possession or quippy, foxy heroines. Much the same level of fantasy is achieved in most male roles in video games as well. But what about the women that have no names and well-defined parts in games? How often do they come up? How many shooting games have females thrown into the NPC (non-player character) population? Does it change the way you play if there are any?

Most instances of female filler characters I can think of are civilians: random women walking down the street in the Grand Theft Auto series, women carrying pots on their heads in Assassin's Creed. Sometimes there are entire throngs of women without any men, as in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Gerudo Valley. But how often do we really see men and women stacked up against the hero of a game? Why is it that nothing springs to my mind?

There may be several reasons for this, one being that I do not play the plethora of games that other kids my age do. Another reason may be that if you're only going to make one model with slight variations to populate a game, males are to be expected and are also easier to model. That aside, I'm now quite curious to know whether or not making a more balanced population in games, let alone one that might accurately represent the 60-40 distribution of women vs. men on this planet, would have any impact on the players. Would the players even notice? Would they have the sense of something being different without being able to place their fingers on it? Would they pick up on it right away? Would they treat the women computer characters any differently than the male counterparts? Too many questions, no way to study them at this point in time.

This whole idea is just one that I'm not sure has been taken into consideration yet for this project. Yes, video games are popular among young men. But the role of women in these games is often one of low or disrespectful status. As in society, is that what the target demographic will expect in any video game? Is that going to be a difficult hurdle to overcome? My answer is yes, but I also see many ways in which it could be done. The most prevalent in my mind at the moment is only half baked, but I have this overwhelming feeling that if we want to convince these boys that things are not as nice the way they are as they might believe, we must first present them with what they expect to see in a game, and then turn it completely on its head, in steps that are gradual enough that they would not confuse the player or make them lose interest.

Just some things kicking around my head on this first weekend after our commencement of the project. Developing this strategy any further, or developing any strategy for design at all, is still far in the future. However, I cannot stop these thoughts from being a dominant part of my mindset when going into the research. Hopefully that will prove to be a good thing.

Thoughts During the Downpour

My, how time flies. I've been staying away from my computer when I'm not at work lately, and this blog has suffered for it. I can't say that anything terribly exciting has happened in the interim, but I suppose that was the point of straying away from my normal routine - to get some peace and quiet.

My boyfriend has basically moved into my room, and it has created an interesting dynamic for me. Having spent the past two years with a relatively anti-social roommate, I'm not at all used to having people come into the room without the intention of visiting me, and I'm certainly not used to walking into a room full of people I had not invited into the room myself. It's strange to fall asleep alone and wake up with someone next to you, and the morning routine that I was so used to has been ripped from its foundation by an extra body in the room that sleeps until noon. That said, I still get by.

Went to the beach the weekend before this past one and picked up a pretty nice piece of driftwood. It's just a little taller than me and looks like it would make a good walking stick, though it only serves to prop open my door these days. That was the last day I spent outside for recreational purposes, with the exception of today - I've just returned from a walk in the rain. Although it did start to pour a bit while we were out, I didn't get properly drenched. It's possibly one of the things I miss most about home: laying down in our big side yard and letting the rain pour down on me until I know I'll have to engage in a wrestling match with my t-shirt to get into dry clothes. Burlington storms never seem to last long enough for that.

I've actually played a couple of games and watched a handful of movies in last week or two, which may also have contributed to my time away from the computer. The first game, My Life as King, was a WiiWare title produced by Square Enix as a minor continuation to the Gamecube title Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. While the game is nothing like any other Final Fantasy game, and it doesn't take more than a few hours to complete, it was somewhat appealing to me. The artistic direction was certainly strong and well polished. I'm not sure I can say as much for the slightly repetitive mechanics and lacking instructions, but it was still a decent price for the amount of content. The other game, which I'm still playing around with at the moment, is an Atlus game for the Wii called Baroque. The thing that I find interesting about this game is that when you die, it appears as if you've started the game over again entirely. I have also come across two cut scenes that sent me back to the beginning of the game again. The interesting thing is that there is a feeling that you haven't completely started over again. I have yet to discover whether or not this is actually the case. If you truly are starting over every time you die, my interest in the game will be completely nullified the moment I find out.

And just for kicks, here's a brief run-down of the movies I rented:
Enchanted - seen it before, liked it more the first time though it still has its moments.
Amelie - absolutely adored it and am restraining myself from buying it...the little things in life are truly something to be celebrated.
The Science of Sleep - strange, quirky, enjoyable, but not worth another watch in my book.
Atonement - wonderfully composed tragedy, not so well composed narrative.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - too many snarky comebacks, useless references to sex, and ridiculous plot points.
Mirrormask - beautiful art style and imaginative concepts, slightly weak and childish plot (but what's to be expected from Jim Henson anyway?).

I Am The Grower...Just Kidding!

I feel as if I've forgotten to water a plant when I don't write in this space for a while, and in a way, I have. This writing marks my growth, and without any markers, there might as well have never been any growth at all, at least none that can be seen and appreciated. So, here I am to water and grow.

I was trying to rewrite my profile for GIVIT today (which is coming scarily close!), and I realized that while not much has changed since last summer, one very important thing has - last year, I said I had a really boring job that I would love to get a distraction from. The fact that I'm doing work that I enjoy and am committed to this summer, at least in part, is wonderful. I couldn't imagine a better way to spend this summer, at least as far as employment is concerned.

I started understanding the organization of code a little bit better today. Little things were catching me up all over the place, but I pulled through and swept up the loose ends. I also put comments in my code, which always makes me feel better about handing it off to someone else, as is inevitable.

On a note regarding leisure activities, I've become instantly hooked on Beatmania. I'm terrible at it, utterly and completely, but I adore it. I'd only seen the game once before in arcade format at Anime Boston two years ago, and barely remembered it at all until Munchies mentioned that he's been hurting his hand playing it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to develop severe problems with my wrist joints if I keep playing, but it was unsettlingly addicting - I played for four hours straight, and I only played seven different songs! It may have been because I was in the mood for a rhythm game, though. Even if it weren't, I don't have the time to devote to the dear game.

And where does that leave me? Feeling somewhat relaxed into the week. I need to cram some work together, I've realized, so I can go downtown at some point and get a passport (!!!), but I sorely lack the motivation, or the proper means of payment to do it. I'll figure something out.

Happy June, everyone!

Long, Long Weekend

I was really looking forward to this weekend when it started, but I have to say that I don't feel like I've done very much with it. I did some Photoshop that went nowhere on Friday night, and Saturday was full of reading, writing, and Ratatouille. Last night was probably the most eventful portion of my weekend - a kid I went to high school with was turning 21 and came up here to celebrate with his older brother. A friend of mine was planning on going out with them and brought me along, which turned out to be a blessing for the birthday boy, who was not at all inclined to get drunk. After a few bars, with two vs. two on what to do next, it was easier to argue for heading home for the rest of the celebration.

Speaking of birthdays, I also just realized that it's been a month since mine. I can't say that I feel like I've accomplished a ton, but I think I've done enough. I've definitely gotten the time back to explore random ideas, which is probably the best feeling in the world to me. There's a good possibility that if I don't get sucked into a computer game today (I reeeeaaally want to finish Myst IV), I'll be fleshing out the latest spontaneous concept: Oregano Trail. =P