I’m a game designer, and before that I was a game player, and I have died a thousand deaths in videogames. More than that: many thousands. And I wanted to think a little about what that has meant: what those deaths have meant, if anything. And, because games are an interactive medium, not just think about the noun death, but also the verb dying.

What is confusing is that game death is not at all the same as real death.

Death is completely different in the world. Death seems to suck meaning, seems to suck purpose away. Videogame death is nothing like that. It has no cost, no permanence. If anything, I am rewarded for dying – rewarded with knowledge of how the game works, of how to beat it “next time”. Death in games quite literally gives meaning to life.

Permanence and absence are death’s key values in the world. How can games, with their INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE, replicate that?

They can’t. But they shouldn’t necessarily try to. Death in games has always been a metaphor. Has always HAD to be a metaphor. It can’t possibly be real.

Some games have tried, though. Tried to put a cost on all this failure – create worlds where the value of life is inestimably lifted through how they treat death.

Capcom’s mech simulator Steel Battalion directly linked the life of a pilot – a player’s avatar – to their progress in the game. Eject from your walking tank before it takes too much damage and you faced the costly in-game penalty of replacing the vehicle, but lived to fight another day. Fail to eject in time and your pilot died. When the player’s pilot died, their save file was immediately deleted. No second chances; value given to a virtual ‘life’.

The vast controller for the game placed a plastic cage around the eject button: it was too expensive in the game to hit that button by accident. But the button was huge and flashed bright red: it was too important to miss in the heat of a firefight. Some players I know removed the cage to make the button quicker to hit at a moment’s noticed. The weight of death in this game is signified through its interface. And it might have been more so: at one point, the development team mooted a glass cover for the eject button that would have to be smashed. By giving life such value – and death such permanence – it begins to take on meaning.

It takes on even more meaning in Zach Gage’s Lose/Lose. It looks like Galaxian: a simple scrolling shooter. But each alien represents a random file on the player’s hard disk. Killing an alien deletes the file; being killed results in the game program being deleted. You might delete a worthless image file; you might delete a critical system file. What’s the point, you might ask?

Gage explains:

“Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?”

“The game explores what it means to kill in a videogame,” says Gage, and to do that, he has to give death a real value, and murder a real penalty.

How many have I killed? How many monsters squashed, bad guys shot, monsters blown up. Countless. But just as videogame death is not real death, this is not real killing. It is overcoming obstacles; doing what is asked of me to “win”.

In Uncharted 2 I kill hundreds of mercenaries and not a single character raises an eyebrow. In a non-interactive scene, a single bullet fells an ally and characters hurry around and mourn. It’s what game designers have called a “narrative bullet”: one that has significance for no rule-based reason, but simply because it makes the story better.

Metal Gear Solid 3 undermines those narrative bullets in the battle with The Sorrow. This is not a traditional, epic boss fight. The Sorrow appears standing in a river, a man in a soggy raincoat. Snake, our hero walks down the river towards him – and coming along the river walk the ghost of every character killed so far in the game. It’s a sneaking game: you’re not meant to kill people. Commit a slaughter early in the game and this sequence takes around an hour; a discrete player, that has been sneaking and knocking foes unconscious, might do it in minutes. (And of course, at the end, how else can it end? The Sorrow kills you. But it’s not a real death; you revive yourself with the “revival pill” you’ve been carrying around, and carry on. The franchise, as ever, wants to remind the player that they’re in a game; no death can be permament in that, and so the game reminds you of that – whilst making the player consider what they’ve done; making them consider this metaphor I’m exploring).

Games are so often about conflict: not necessarily war, nor killing, but struggle – and the outcome of that is catastrophic loss. That might be death; but even when it’s not, it may as well be. Chess pieces knocked from a board; a Pokémon that “faints” when it runs out of health; a team knocked out of a tournament. Games are a space where the metaphor of death runs deep, even if the reality doesn’t. Players will use the words “dead”, “killed” even when the game fiction suggests they shouldn’t.

The player gets to choose what death means, and that is an informed choice. I may be shooting a lot of things in this game, but these deaths are meaningless, like numbers in a spreadsheet. Or, I may choose to sacrifice a character i’ve developed over weeks or months; only one death, but so much more significant.

We choose what to make of the metaphor that we’re engaging with.

When we play, we get to ascribe our own meanings. So don’t underestimate players ability to create meaning where there may not have been any – and don’t undermine the value of that meaning.

One more personal story to end on.

It’s 2001, and I’m playing Capcom’s 1998 survival horror game Resident Evil 2. It’s a pastiche of the classic Romero genre movies: fighting off the undead in a city with limited resources. There’s never enough ammo.

I’m descending to the underside of a train station to fight the corrupted, now mutated scientist William Birkin. I think i’ve killed him, but he mutates again, and attacks me. U have a handful of ammo, a knife, and no herbs to heal with. He has absorbed everything I brought down with me, and there’s no ammunition in the room, no going back. I attack him with everything i’ve got, until I’m reduced to just my knife. I hack away, but he’s too strong. Leon Scot Kennedy succumbs to his wounds.

And that’s where I left it. I had no chance of survival: I was already too low on equipment in the previous save game. So it became the pessimistic, appropriate 70s horror movie ending: there were no survivors. I rejected the story of survival the game was fixated on, and let my actions speak for themselves. Leon was dead. He had never had a chance. No-one was coming. The city was overrun.

I left his body there, and I’ve never played the game again.

I had made my own narrative bullet.

So close to the end, but deliberately unfinished. For me, Leon is dead, and to try again undermines that. It makes his death less meaningful. And I mean that: this mess of low-resolution textures and polygons means more to me when I can’t play it again.

Death in games is not death in the real world, but it was never meant to be. This is confusing because “death” in games shares a name with something bigger, stranger, both more and less meaningful. The purpose of death in games is to tell us about life. To remind us to try things we don’t know. To push when we’re afraid to. To see what we can be. To investigate how things work. To fight for the best path through the one world we have. To understand that to change the past – to have another go – might not always be as meaningful as the single path we chose with no do-overs.

And why do we play these games? To visit other worlds, to live other lives. In that sense every game is an extra life. And in those games we navigate a branching multiverse; some paths are cut short by this thing we call “death” that is not, and we rewind, take another life, and take another path, until we get to a canonical, critical path where the game ends successfully, and another virtual life is well-lived.

To make a medium that is so often about living other lives must be to make a medium that is somehow about death. But not this airquoted “death” I have dwelt so much on; rather, the death when we step away from a game and return to the real world. A little death as we leave a life behind, and are left richer for it.

Trumpet hero, Crispian Steele-Perkins

Instruments evolved into the current form they occupy in a standard symphony orchestra. We all know that the concert grand piano is an evolved version of instruments like the harpsichord, but it might be less clear that instruments like the trumpet had a similar genesis. Without going into the details, the history of trumpets starts with a basic hunting horn and evolved into a family of instruments that can play all of the notes in tune at very high speed. Bach’s time came about halfway through that process.

Until the twentieth century, Bach was always performed on contemporary instruments, and often substantially rewritten to suit the tastes of the day. More recently, the idea of ‘Urtext’ or ‘authentic’ or ‘historically informed performance has been in vogue’, musicians returning to the original scores and historical material to try and figure out how Bach would have done it himself. Including, finding or remaking ‘period’ instruments that might have been around at the time. Now, feast your ears on this 1985 recording of the Gloria, in which the players use period instruments. Listen out especially for the trumpet part. (nb – they don’t sound like modern trumpets, it’s a much softer tone quality, about halfway between a flute and a modern trumpet).

The Monteverdi Choir – J.S. Bach: Gloria in excelsis Deo

Here’s the thing about 18th-century trumpets – they are really, really hard to play. And in 1985, when they were still relatively new to the players using them, they were even harder. And, Bach wrote music that was at the limit of technique for any player on any instrument, let alone a 20th-century player on an 18th-century one. If you look at the picture opposite, you’ll see there are no valves. Crispian Steele-Perkins, playing lead on this recording, had to cover a tiny hole instead. I had the privilege of singing in the choir once for this piece when he was leading the trumpet section, and let me tell you, they didn’t nail it every time in rehearsal. Risk becomes an essential component of performance in this context.

Now, listen again to the recording, especially around the one minute ten second mark. Crispian goes off with and exquisite piece of ornamentation – a trill. I think you can hear in it all the tension of a brilliant performer wrangling an unreliable piece of kit into a moment of beauty. It makes the entire performance fizz with energy.

The implication that this has for me as a game designer is interesting – rather than designing perfect interfaces, I’d like to think about how imperfect ones can be vehicles for play. I feel this runs against the current design orthodoxy that interface must be perfect, seamless, invisible. Rather than the joystick, things like Doug Wilson’s installation version of Bennett Foddy’s marvellous game MEGA-GIRP springs to mind.  I love the high-octane potential, and the freedom to celebrate the occasional spectacular wipeout as a natural consequence of the interface in use, rather than a failure to realise a perfect score.

Mega GIRP! from doougle on Vimeo.

I think, as Hide&Seek further investigates technology as a material and games with audiences, so this question of how we make interfaces that can act a vehicle for play and performance will become more and more central. Rather than overcoming the awkwardness of designing certain kinds of game for interfaces like a smartphone touchscreen, maybe we should foreground that awkwardness and build the play around it.

Finally, I wonder whether the predictable unreliability of an 18th-century trumpet can be recreated in digital form. The balance between risk and reward for a player clearly comes where it’s possible, with diligent practice, to consistently master it in the heat of the moment, and the way a piece of analogue technology wraps all the elements in a consistent system enables that. When digital interface and digital technology are often much more separate, can we achieve similar systems?

Mostly, just go and listen to the whole of that recording, it’s still the best there is.

On 1 January 2011, Hide&Seek and Unique Events ran the New Year Games. Somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 people played. You probably weren’t one of them.

Usually, our live events have a core of people who know us: people who’ve been to a Sandpit or a Weekender before, people who like games, people who know a little about what to expect. Of course they’re often outnumbered by newcomers and passers-by and people who saw the brochure lying around and didn’t have anything else to do, but the familiar core is still there. On 1 January, though, our audience was people who were wandering around Edinburgh: residents out for a walk; visitors who’d come up for Hogmanay and couldn’t leave because the trains weren’t running yet; people with hangovers; wandering families. People who are almost guaranteed not to be reading this blog post. We weren’t really sure how many of them to expect. It turned out there were quite a lot.

It was a silly big game and hundreds of people were involved in making it work, on the day and in the months before: stewards and producers and drummers and actors and guys who put up Helter Skelters and Heads of Games and a samba band and the Lord Provost of Edinburgh and a poet and people on New Year’s Eve  stapling sheets of cardboard at 9pm or printing out stickers at 4:30am. I’ve been trying to write it up and it’s just too big, there’s too much of it. But I can at least write down some of the things I want to remember for next time.

Team loyalties kick in straight away

Everyone who played chose to be either an Uppie, living in the north of their home town and loyal to the silver eagle, or a Doonie, living in their home’s south and loyal to the Red Stag. Every part of the game had a potential reward of tokens; the team that won the most tokens over the afternoon, and brought them back to their team’s sculpture, would be the winner.

Photo by Chris Scott

The idea was based on a traditional Scottish game,  and it turned out to be absolutely key to the success of the event as a whole. We’re used to dividing people into teams for games, but we’re really not used to having a thousand people screaming “UPPIES” or “DOONIES” when a few hours earlier they’d never heard of either. The combination of choice (your team was up to you…) combined with a level of predestination (…but most people do feel like they are more north or more south) seemed to create a really strong sense of belonging.

Sound is really important

In the National Museum of Scotland, there was a game of Dreadnought, devised with the artist spotov. Players with elaborate headpieces tried to safely navigate a field of obstructions – without being able to see. Their partners gave them instructions over a radio. Oh, and some of the headpieces were worn by two people at once; these were “wreckers”, chasing after the rest of the players on the field.

It was a gorgeous, gorgeous game, with spotov’s meticulous paper sculptures looking amazing in the huge museum atrium, but the thing that surprised me was just how important the sound was. All the radio instructions were relayed to headphones worn by the headpiece-wearing players, but also emerged from speakers around the space. This meant that if you were watching you could either listen to the wash of sound, or choose one radio controller and watch them, matching up their lips to their voice and picking out one thread of instruction.

For players, this didn’t make any difference, but for spectators it was the difference between something that was interesting look at in passing, and something that was interesting to actually watch. A lot of live games are interesting to look at, but because there’s no sound giving context or making it possible to understand what’s going on, that’s where it ends. As a result of Dreadnought, I’ve added “could the sound be doing something more interesting, or helping to make the game comprehensible to passers-by?” to my mental checklist of things to run through for any live game.

Player elimination is a mean thing to do, and you should have a really good reason to do it

Scotch Hoppers, made with choreographer and designer Brian Hartley and running in Dance Base, was a hopscotchy twistery movement game. Players had to navigate increasingly difficult courses, each covered in “foot”, “head” and “hand” spots. Each spot had to be touched once – and once only – by the appropriate body part. Some of them were on the ground, but as the courses got harder there were more and more in the air as well.

Hopping around is intrinsically pretty good fun, and the courses Brian designed were phenomenal: we spent a happy six hours hopping up and down one of the very simplest courses, mostly feet in only two dimensions, in the middle of the playtest process, coming up with ever more ridiculous ways of getting from one end to the other. And yet, until a week before the game began, I’d somehow decided that people would get kicked off the courses once they’d failed – and, worse, that once you’d been kicked off one course, you wouldn’t get to go on the next.

I’ve made worse game design decisions, but maybe not many. Imagine slipping over on the first course, and having to walk through the rest of the game watching your friends play on. In the end we awarded tokens on a per-course basis, so if you slipped up early on you could still make it up later. Of course, a lot of players chose to sit out of the later, more convoluted courses, or give up partway through. But why on earth should they be forced out because of a mistake, when there’s the built-in mechanism of “get fewer tokens” to penalise them with instead? No reason at all.

Fortunately players in the final playtest spent so long wanting to play every course they could – many times over, if we let them – that it finally sunk in that probably they should be allowed to do as much playing as possible in the actual game as well.

Photo by Brian Hartley

People are really good at things, and that matters

“Resonate the Labyrinth” was a game for St Giles Cathedral devised with composer Pippa Murphy - a Grandmother’s Footsteps-style sneaking game, with players navigating a maze in St Giles’ cathedral, trying to reach the minotaur at the centre without being caught in motion. Different elements of the gameplay – the number of people in the maze, the speed of the minotaurs – shifted alongside changes in the soundscape that Pippa had created, with moments of relaxation or greater tension or extra danger.

Photo by Chris Scott

I’d run the game dozens of times in the real world and in my head; we’d listened to the music Pippa had written, and had phonecalls about the minotaur head and costumes; the minotaurs had rehearsed with Chris, and there’d been a lot of discussion about the maze with scenery-builders B Scenic. And of course I knew all these things were as important as the mechanics of how the game actually worked, but it wasn’t until I walked into the cathedral that I remembered just how good people are at things, and how transformative that can be. The difference between trained actors in costumes, and a member of Hide&Seek in a plastic mask, is obvious; the difference between a huge maze of woodwork in a cathedral, and a mass of tape and plastic chairs in a rehearsal room, means the two versions aren’t “basically the same game”, even if they have the same rules. People don’t just feel like it’s different: they genuinely play differently when there’s stone and light above them, and sound and singers all around, and a six foot four man with a bull’s head staring them in the face.

Photos by Chris Scott

Players aren’t interchangeable units

Throw Things At FOUND was a game in the Hub from arts collective and experimental pop band FOUND. Players found themselves on a balcony, looking at three spotlit instruments on the other side of the room, with nothing but a pile of dayglo paper and instructions on how to make a paper aeroplane. If they made aeroplanes and threw them at the instruments, then each time they hit an instrument (or went through its spotlight), they’d trigger a short burst of noise. Get all three playing at the same time, and they’d break into the chorus, with a rousing cheer from an invisible audience; then they’d fall silent, and the players would try again, triggering a song as many times as they could in ten minutes. It’s a really lovely challenge, right down to FOUND’s illustrations (of bottles and tomatoes) on the paper, and the genuine sense of triumph that kicks in with the applause, and the accumulating drifts of aeroplanes that piled up over the afternoon.

Photo by FOUND

The thing that surprised me most about Throw Things At FOUND was how different groups of forty people, in identical circumstances, could differ so much. Some groups co-operated instantly; some had someone take charge and boss the others around; others required nudging from a facilitator to start co-ordinating throws, or didn’t do it at all. We’d assumed that groups would all behave in a roughly similar way – that the group of everyone involved was homogenous enough, and groups of forty players at a time large enough, that groups would all be pretty similar. It turned out that just wasn’t the case: the facilitators could never settle into a comfortable expectation about how people would behave, because all the groups were different.

All the things matter

The physical heart of the game was the Grassmarket, a big public square: it was the location of the two wicker sculptures, and the finale, and outdoor games throughout the afternoon. We had street bands roaming around; giant boardgames at one end; a fair in the middle, with Helter Skelter Bingo and hook-a-duck for tokens; and at the other end a stage and a really big screen, home to our brilliant comperes Gary McNair and Eilidh MacAskill and Scott Wilson. Through the afternoon, Scott kept everyone updated on the progress of the game and coaxed passers-by into joining in, while Gary and Eilidh ran games for crowds: Gary’s pom-pom-waving quiz, Eilidh’s game of great big chains of people, silly things about unrolling balls of wool, even sillier things about the crowd humming songs to bewildered team members on stage. The screen was huge, constantly tended by Margaret and Tim Franklin, dominating the space even above the Eagle and the Stag.

You know how sometimes, when a project is getting near the end, you can get caught up in little things, and wake up in the middle of the night thinking “it’s the WRONG SHADE OF PINK” or “but what about the three people who might be on the staircase” or whatever? And then the next morning someone says something like “it really doesn’t matter, you’re just too close at the moment but you’ll feel silly you ever worried about it, later”?

That person is wrong.

All the things matter. All the different parts are important. All the surrounding experience, not just the games: what are people doing while they’re in queues, for example? We didn’t quite solve queuing, though we had some queue games to help pass the time. And if the artists and venue managers and producers hadn’t worried about it and made sure the flow of people worked, then it wouldn’t have mattered whether the games were great or not; nobody would have been in the mood for fun by the time they got that far.

And there might be games at very different scales, but players don’t have less fun because a game is smaller; people who are knocking over giant Jenga onto wet flagstones might enjoy themselves just as much as the 4500 people playing the massive ball-and-flag game that Tom invented for the finale.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t have a conclusion in mind, but now that I’ve got to the end, the thing I want us to remember next time is just that: all the scales matter. Every part is important. The two days Sarah and Brian spent moving small pieces of vinyl, Ivan’s 4am printing-and-cutting, FOUND’s jumping-up-and-down to see if crowd movement broke their tech, last-minute shopping trips for slightly larger balls, all the things. Worry about it all. Fix everything.

The Doonies won, in the end. Not all of the 300 people who worked on the game got to be there at the finale, to see the pyrotechnics go off and the the confetti canon explode, but a lot of us were, in the crowd or on the stage or standing under the big red stag statue and grinning like idiots and holding a red flare. It was pretty good.

Uncredited photos by John Need

We’ll be at the Southbank Centre from 12 to 5, and you can drop in for board games or parlour games, plus we’ll be running a different game on the hour, every hour, from 1pm to 4pm.

There’s also an awful lot of other interesting things going on at the festival – talks and workshops and readings and more – so do come along! Entry to the festival is £12, and then you can wander along to whatever events within it you feel like.

We’re excited to announce latest version of Tate Trumps – our iOS game that pits works in the Tate Modern’s permanent collection against one another.

The big new feature in this release is Anywhere Mode. Until now, the only way to play Tate Trumps was in the Tate Modern gallery itself. The latest version adds a new gameplay mode: Anywhere Mode. Now, you can play Tate Trumps wherever you are. Pick works from the virtual gallery wall, and pit them against two other players – human or computerised. Both “Anywhere” and “Gallery” mode are included in the same app, so you can take the game you know well from home and play it when you’re at the gallery proper.

This is a free update to the existing app – so if you’ve already got it, you can update to the new version right now. Tate Trumps is entirely free, and available from the App Store right now.

From Sunday to Wednesday, we’re going to be trying out four brilliant new games from Scottish artists. They’re all going to be part of the New Year Games event – but for now, we need to try them out in the venues, and see how they work. There’s a sonic maze in St Giles cathedral, a navigational challenge in the National Museum of Scotland, a reimagined Hopscotch in Dance Base and a paper aeroplane challenge with an invisible band in the Hub. They’re all free, and they’re all going to be a lot of fun, so if you’re around, do drop in to one or more and have a go.

The games will be running:

• Sunday 4 December, 3-4pm: Throw Things At FOUND, in The Hub, Castlehill
• Monday 5 December, 3-4pm: Scotch Hoppers at Dance Base, the Grassmarket
• Tuesday 6 December, 5:30-7:30pm: Dreadnought at the National Museum of Scotland (please call 07855 673 689 in advance for this one)
• Wednesday 7 December, 4-6pm: Resonate the Labyrinth at St Giles, the Royal Mile

[This post follows on from part one, which explains the genesis of the Dreams Of Your Life project. Links to the film, and to our digital project, are at the end of the post]

The power of games is the problem of games. As Tom wrote earlier in the week, games gate progress: if you want to feel successful or find out the end of the story or have better stuff or see wilder worlds, you need to do what the game asks of you. This makes them powerful motivators, and people operate – well – dishonestly in their presence.

Carol’s film handles Joyce’s story with not just honesty, but delicacy & discretion, and we wanted our experience to cover the same emotional territory in a way that felt personal to everyone who encountered it.

It turned out, in fact, that starting by asking players to act honestly meant we couldn’t ask them to be players: chasing after goals and overcoming obstacles were actions that we didn’t feel appropriate in this context. So we had to look outside of games for our inspiration, to an interactive structure that operated on different terms.

We found it on the floor of Chartres cathedral.  The 13th century labyrinth inlaid on the floor has been a tool for contemplation and self-examination for centuries. Labyrinth and maze used to be words I’d use interchangeably: not any more.

Mazes are games: junctions and choices that stand between you and the exit. In other words, goal, motivation, choice. Labyrinths are entirely linear. There is only one path, looping around and inside and alongside itself. There isn’t even a goal: on reaching the centre, your job is to turn round and come back the way you came, till you arrive back at where you started, having accomplished nothing.

And by walking a copy of that labyrinth for ourselves, we found was that within that no-choice structure, lots of tiny choices lurked, elevated to greater significance by the choice-vacuum in which they existed.

When to start? How fast to walk? How to walk, even? Slow, measured paces? Smooth perpetual shuffle? How long to wait at the centre? What to do at the centre? Sit? Stand? Facing in? Facing out? Arms folded or not? What to think about? Oh boy, what to think about.

And even though all that you were doing was walking and thinking, the doing of it was critical. Labyrinths are extraordinarily tricksy. All you’re doing is starting here and going five yards over there and then coming back. But the route you’re given takes 30 minutes to pace. When you pass a person coming the other way on an adjacent track, you have no way of telling if they’re ahead of you or behind you – and if they’re 30 seconds ahead or 10 minutes behind. Labyrinths fold time and space, and the doing of them is all. It’s not interactivity the way games mean interactivity, but – having walked one – I couldn’t call it anything else.

And it was with those thoughts that we started working with photographer Lottie Davies writer A.L. Kennedy, and programmer Phil Gyford. The third and final post will explain how our collaborators transformed our ideas into the experience that’s now online.

This multiplatform commission was designed to be approached from multiple angles. You might like to start with an essay about Joyce, or a review of the film, or a trailer, or by booking for a screening, or by playing the thing we made. We’d love to hear what you think.

Image of the Chartres Labyrinth by Flickr user Dumbo.

Here’s why. In a few days, Carol Morley’s extraordinary documentary, Dreams Of A Life, is released in cinemas. You might have been lucky enough to catch its debut at the London Film Festival or seen the admiring reviews that followed. You may have found your way to Carol’s haunted and haunting piece on the event that it explores in the Guardian. It’s a film which tries to unfold the life that lay behind a single, terrible discovery: the skeletal remains of a 38-year old woman in a flat in Wood Green in 2006. She had been dead for nearly three years, but was found only when the bailiffs broke in to evict her. The television was still on.

You’ll notice that I didn’t link to the film – there are links to all of the above, at the bottom of this post, but I wanted to give you a chance to click on them out of choice, rather than reflex.

Film4, who co-produced and co-financed the film, commissioned us to deliver a digital experience to support it: the hope was that we could create something which sat meaningfully alongside the film, but that could be approached either before or after seeing it, and stand on its own. So – you may want to start with the film, or with Carol’s essay, or with the digital thing we made. It’s entirely up to you, although the release dates – 1st December for the interactive piece and 16th for the film – may sway you.

You’ll also notice I called it a ‘thing’. That isn’t an accident. Our assumption, what with us being a game studio and all, is that we’d make a game. We didn’t. We made a something else. I’ll post more about that later this week.

But before we realised we weren’t making a game, we spent a lot of time thinking about what a game drawn from Joyce’s story might be. Working for Hide&Seek – indeed attending any H&S events – you’re pretty intimately aware of games’ power to make you Do Things. At Sandpit and Weekenders, it’s usually silly things, but still things that are substantially outside your comfort zone. What things might we want this game to make people do?

This isn’t a question that other mediums encounter in quite the same way. Films and books and poems can be inspiring, but they have no way of knowing whether or not you’ve acted on that inspiration. But the very most fundamental element of interactive things is that there *is* a return path. The experience can ask you to do something and refuse to continue until you do it – or at least until you claim to have done it. That’s a powerful tool to wield.

And Joyce’s story feels primed with calls to action. I’m yet to meet anyone who isn’t shaken by her story, who doesn’t lapse almost immediately on hearing into some kind of internal inventory-taking. But it very quickly became apparent that we had no business pulling on the levers that Joyce’s story offers. We invented and then dismissed missions that asked you to pick up the phone and call a family member. What if you have extremely good reasons for being estranged from your family? We thought about clever things we could do by scraping social data from your Facebook account, and then dismissed those, too – Facebook is a very one-dimensional slice of you social life, for a start, and then what meaningful conclusions can we draw from any kind of analysis of that slice?

My hope of finding some kind of universally acceptable bedrock that we could aim for was finally scuppered by a conversation I was had with a working mother of two young children. I was maudlin, thinking about how long I might have lain dead for, especially during my itinerant freelancer years. ‘Three weeks.’ I said, lugubriously. ‘I think I might have lain there for three weeks before anyone missed me.’ And she looked at me with naked envy. ‘Three weeks? Lying down with no-one bothering you? Count me in.’

And so that very explicit benefit of interactive started to become a burden, not an opportunity. We became increasingly wary of designing missions which passed mechanistic judgement on who you were in touch with, or how often, or by what means. And we found that missions where we stripped out that specificity became so wishy-washy as to have no real hook.

And that was before we discovered that missions of any type were fundamentally inappropriate. Next post I’ll explain why, and talk about labyrinths and catechisms, which both turn out to have more to do with game design than you might think.

In the meantime, if you like, you can read Carol’s essay about Joyce, or a review of the film, or watch a trailer, or book for a screening, or play the thing we made. We’d love to hear what you think.

Last week I went to see The New World Order, a production by Hydrocracker that adapts several short plays by Harold Pinter into a promenade format. As a designer playing it, I quickly became fascinated by its approach to managing the audience’s progress through space – and how similar it was to games.

Originally performed in Brighton’s Town Hall in 2007, it’s now been adapted for performance in Shoreditch Town Hall. Starting in the well-lit upstairs rooms, for a press conference, the production slowly moves the audience behind closed doors to ministerial offices, and ultimately into the basement of the building, where the reality of the fictional government’s actions is made viscerally clear. In Brighton, the building’s basement housed the town’s old police cells, likely giving these scenes a vivid reality. By contrast, the Shoreditch basement, is decrepit and run-down, and feels like a more metaphorical space: are these cells and prisoners literally in the basement of the building, or, in a less literal reading, are they just in the basement of the system, of society, and of the country?

It isn’t an interactive piece, though there are times when an audience might want to intervene. The passivity of the audience is handled subtly: it’s made very clear we’ve been invited to the events we’re witnessing, and yet we have no agency over them, nor do we have a role to play in them. We have to stay silent.

This is, of course, deliberate. Through the performance, my desire for agency was managed – not being drawn too far in to interrupt or disrupt a performance; not being allowed to hang back too far and just “watch”. I was pushed and pulled from role to role.

But, most interesting to me as a game designer, was the careful management of the audience throughout the experience. As I dwelt on it, I realised it brought nothing to mind as much as Call of Duty.

Bear with me.

Shortly after the start of Charlie Don’t Surf, an early level of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the player character disembarks from a helicopter, and is instructed to run towards a TV station building being held by militants. (around 0:32 in this video, the rest of which you needn’t watch)

The player charges down the street of an unnamed Middle Eastern country. In front of them, two marines drag a coil of barbed wire across the street, and so they turn left down an alleyway, still running towards the TV station. When they get there, their squad assembles outside a door, and another marine plants a charge to blow the door open. Then, they can move into the building.

They’re not really moving through a town, though. They’re moving down a very carefully pre-determined corridor. The road isn’t blocked by barbed wire to stop them going down it; it’s blocked so that they don’t discover it goes nowhere. It’s an illusion of a road. The barbed wire is drawn in front of it as a form of gating: a narrative excuse as to why they can’t go that way. Indeed: an excuse as to why they can only go one way.

Why can’t the player open the door? Why do they have to wait for another marine? Not because their character lack hands, or explosives to deploy at contextual moments with the X button. No, it’s because the player can’t be trusted to open it at the right moment given the drama unfolding.

That’s not a pre-determined time, though; this isn’t a movie. The canned animation of another marine opening the door is displayed as soon as all the actors – canned animations on AI NPCs, really – are all in the correct position for the scene to continue. The player’s interactive desires are put on hold by the demands of passive narrative.

The reel of barbed wire and delay outside the door are forms of gating. Gating is a tool for managing player progress: stopping them advancing until they’ve achieved specific criteria. Those might be narrative – not advancing to the next level until this one is complete – or mechanical – not advancing to an area until a particular technique has been mastered or skill acquired.

Regardless, gating is about managing players’ progress: through space; through narrative; through skills. I often describe Infinity Ward’s Call Of Duty games as “rollercoasters”. They encourage and reward relentless forward movement, often relying on endlessly respawning enemies to force the player to take a risk and push forward, rather than holding ground. This relentless push couples well with the frenetic, bombastic scenarios the games place the player in.

And yet, if you pay careful attention to your surroundings, the facade falls apart and you realise you’re not in a beautifully detailed world: you’re just on a ride. Look at all the doors closed off to you; all the alleys that lead nowhere. Look at the many ways the game stops you moving backwards: falling from a height you can’t climb back up; closing a door that you’re suddenly powerless to re-open; placing a friendly NPC in your way. Strip the world down to what it, functionally, is: a corridor.

Infinity Ward’s gating is fairly obvious when you start looking for it. Many players discover it by accident: often, when lost, hunting for how to ratchet the pace back up, and instead finding locked doors and grumpy NPCs.

But their gating is detailed, comprehensive, and carefully designed. There are rarely ways to get around it, and even though it may be obvious, it’s almost always explained by logical narrative. For the majority of players, the hectic forward pace is maintained, and this pace is part of the appeal of the Call of Duty franchise.

Hydrocracker’s show reminded me of Infinity Ward’s game through its masterful gating – herding fifty Real Human Beings around such a show is hard, and they never missed a beat. But what it also showed was how effective, and non-artificial, gating can be when implemented by human actors.

I encountered my first such human gate after the first couple of major scenes. Moving onwards, some of the group through a doorway to the staircase; the rest of us were redirected into the conference room where we found a caretaker, fixing a broken door.

“Won’t be a minute.”

We chatted amongst ourselves, waiting for our next in-narrative instruction, and watched the man in a grubby brown overall fix an automatic door-closer. He wrapped up, got of his ladder, and let us out, whereupon we were led downstairs: a classic example of gating. Later, he’d be used in a more directional capacity – walking through the group whilst we were still on the stairs, indicating the end of a scene, and hinting at the direction we were to move in.

The show was overseen omnipresent black-clad security guards. They act as ushers and colour – and as gates. Often, having entered a room, they subtly move to block the exit, leaving an obvious direction to follow another actor. In one memorable occasion, they blocked the sides of a four-way junction, only to lead us in a loop around it – and as we passed through it in the other direction, blocked the ways we’d come without even acknowledging we’d been down there. Their reaction to our attempts to explore or comprehend the topology of the space served to strengthen the illusion: was it really the same corridor? Were we just misled? We had to keep moving forward and doing what we were told.

The security guards weren’t just human gating tools; they were good gating tools because they were human. A marine in a doorway in Call of Duty has a couple of repeated “barks” to explain why you can’t pass him. But a human actor can improvise, responding sympathetically and organically to the situation in front of them. The gates feel much less forced when you can have a dialogue with them.

As we move forward through the show, the group is split into increasingly smaller numbers, and the guards purpose is not only to pace the experience, but also to stop the audience finding other groups. It stops congestion in the corridors, but also adds to the suspicion that your fellow audience members are disappearing. And then, emerging into a corridor to find familiar faces, the guards bark at us, pushing us on, as if nothing has happened.

As a game designer, this was all so very familiar, and yet it was a reminder how something that seems so frustrating to the ludic brain can be used so effectively in a linear, performative space. As the caretaker fiddled with his screwdriver, I saw two marines lugging barbed-wire across a road in front of me.

If you’re interested in gating, Steve Gaynor of Irrational Games gave a particularly insightful presentation on it at PRACTICE in New York last month. You can view the presentation on Slideshare here, and it’s well worth your time (do make sure to read the “presenter notes”, which contain the meat of the talk). Gaynor explores how to implement gating whilst giving the player as much agency as possible – and how to make that gating as subtle and unobtrusive as possible. There’s a lot to be gained from that, be it for designers of complex open-world games, or interactive theatre.

The New World Order is on at Shoreditch Town Hall until 11 December 2011

Images by Hydrocracker, myself, and Natalie Maynor

We’re proud, delighted and honoured to announce our latest project, for Film4. The press release follows – as we build up to launch on December 1st, we’ll be writing about it in earnest. If you’d like a sneak preview, drop us a line in the comments!

Film4 has commissioned a unique and innovative multiplatform experience to support the release of Carol Morley’s feature film Dreams of a Life.

Dreams of a Life, which is co-produced and co-financed by Film4, movingly pieces together the true story of thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent, whose skeleton was discovered in her bedsit three years after she had died.  The accompanying digital commission, www.dreamsofyourlife.com, (please note: site launches December 1st) has been developed by interactive agency Hide&Seek, as a thought-provoking and immersive experience which engages users in the themes explored by the film.

Award-winning writer A.L. Kennedy has crafted the absorbing and sometimes unnerving narrative, which prompts responses to questions on society, friendship, love and loneliness.  This is played against the backdrop of beautiful and haunting time-lapse imagery, created by photographer Lottie Davies.

The launch of www.dreamsofyourlife.com will also be supported by a mobile touring installation, allowing audiences to interact with the experience on iPads at selected venues in the cities where the film is playing.

www.dreamsofyourlife.com, commissioned by Hilary Perkins, Channel 4’s Multiplatform Commissioning Editor for Drama and Film, launches on 1^st December 2011.  Dreams of a Life is released in selected cinemas on 16^th December.