EVA 2009

.Interview with Ian Bogost

How did you got into games?

I knew for a long time that I wanted to do something that dealt with both computing and culture. For a long time, I thought this would be impossible. I studied philosophy and literature in school (my doctorate is in comparative literature actually), and I worked in the technology and entertainment industries. They were very separate experiences.

By the mid-1990s, I was working primarily in advertising and entertainment, and it was there that I really started to make games—mostly “advergames” and licensed games for film and TV properties. That was fine, but it still felt like an empty, simplistic way to use games. In poetry or cinema you find many different topics and purposes represented. So I decided to figure out if I could think through that same sort of thing in games.

I ended up doing this in two ways, one as a scholar and critic (I research and teach at Georgia Tech), and another as a developer (I make political and social games at my studio Persuasive Games, and other kinds of “artgames” on my own). Now that I think about it, it should have been obvious: I’d played videogames all my life, but it took some time before I saw them as a way to connect my interests in computing and culture.

How do you begin a new project? What are they key aspects you determine initially to get started?

For me, there are a number of different types of projects. Some are writing about games and some are games, for example. I’m imagining you are interested in game development particularly. Within that context, there are still a variety of contexts.

At Persuasive Games, for example, we often do consulting work on games for political organizations, corporations, non-profits, newspapers and the like. Even though those games are based on problems someone presents to us, they can be very rewarding because it forces me to think about a topic that might not seem obvious for a game. This can be a creative challenge, determining how to turn fast food portion sizing or auto sales or customer service into an interesting game.

When I am working on my own original games, I usually start from some inspiration, something I am interested in conveying about my life or my perspective, that I want to share with others. In either case, designing games involves figuring out how the source system that I want to gamify operates. What are its behaviors? How does it work? That’s been my design philosophy, that games make experiences operable, they let players experience how things work. “Things” can mean anything at all, not just airplanes and warriors but emotions, concepts, and ideas too.

It seems like these games are a sort of manual into how something works.

I think “manual” is right… if you imagine that we could have a manual for everything… not just for putting together a desk or running a business, but also for understanding the economy or experiencing a relationship, or whatever.

Have you ever aimed a game into making the player think/create how this “thing” should work? Instead of the way you are exposing it to work.

A number of my games pose questions instead of offering solutions. Often the question comes in the form of a depiction of a system, and the player has to evaluate whether or not they believe in it, and what they think ought to be done.

We’ve worked on a number of games like this that you might call “newsgames” or “documentary games”… including games about food safety, the oil marketplace, airport security, nutrition and obesity, and so forth. My games don’t try to produce fixed, simple solutions to the questions they pose, but I do hope they inspire players to ask more questions about those problems.

How do you consider the audience while designing your games?

When we are making games for use as advertising or corporate training, we have to consider where these users are coming from, what sorts of contexts they will play the game in, how much time and attention they have, and so forth.

But, you know, at other times I don’t consider the audience at all! In particular, when creating art, the purpose is to subject the audience to something they may find unfamiliar or unintuitive or even disturbing. In these cases, it is very important to stay true to one’s own vision rather than pander to audience appeal.

These days, far too many commercial videogames are designed and tested to deliver exactly what players want. We should also deliver what they don’t want, or what they might not yet realize interests them.

In other creative industries, the concept of auteur is very clear: directors for movies, authors for books, composers for songs. Game Designers, specially independent ones seem to be emerging as a form of auteur for games. What do you think about that?

The auteur in film is a subject of some debate still, and big commercial games have very large teams, like films have crews. Pulpy, commercial books and music are often manufactured too, rather than sprung from the bile of some sole author. But importantly, all those media *also* have true individual creators, who produce just what they intended. So overall, I think it’s about time that we see both kinds of approaches in games, along with others in between.

What would you expect to see in a latin american game?

I think if you look at the way Latin America has been depicted in games, you will mostly find stereotypes. Drug-runners in Grand Theft Auto, and banana republic simulators like Tropico, even the serious games Global Conflicts: Latin America oversimplifies politics in the region from a European/American perspective.

What I’d like to see the most from Latin America are games that communicate the ideas and culture of people in the region, the differences and unique perspectives they have on the world, and the new styles or forms that need to be created to characterize those perspectives. Games are a global market, and it is fine to create games that appeal worldwide. But we should also ask, where is the Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges or Eladio Dieste of videogames? Where is the tango or the asado of videogames?

Do you consider interesting the games that show up in the midst of high impact political crisis. Like for instance the Bush shoe game.

At Georgia Tech, my research group has been looking at “newsgames” for some time now, including these small-scale games about current events. Actually, there you have a genre or application of games that was started in Latin America, by Gonzalo Frasca. We are finishing a book about Newsgames that will be out next year.

It seems like they could be a sort of new generation comic strip, if people could do them fast enough.

Yes, that’s one of the problems, how to create them fast enough. We’ve worked on some of these games, including the ones you mention in the NY Times. The fastest we could create them was around 2 weeks. (We have had some developers in Argentina too by the way, on newsgames.) But those are larger games… a cartoon is even smaller. Actually, right now I am about to start some work with a colleague at the University of California on tools and generation systems for these cartoon games.

In comic strips, you find the same trope in several jokes during the year, maybe this sort of tropes vocabulary should be developed for games too?

Right, precisely. You have a grammar, so to speak.

Do you think its crucial for games to have a story, even if a small one, behind them?

Some of the most timeless games have nothing resembling a story. Is there a story in Go? Or in Tetris? What about sports? Is there a “story” in a Boca-River match? All games do have a premise, even if it is allegorical or abstract. Games that are “about” something, in the way that films or books are, are only one kind of game.

It seems weird to talk about a grammar for no story to be told.

Games have behavior instead of story.

What will you talk about at EVA?

If you look at videogames today, you see that people are starting to put them to many different uses, beyond entertainment alone. Not just advertising and learning, but also exercise and socialization and relaxation and more. So, I’m going to talk about a the many ways people are using games, and how game makers can think about new opportunities for what their games can do.

I really like that. This has been a big question for me, why are we doing this game?

Right, and it’s something many people don’t ask! They make games because… they don’t know why. They think they are cool :)