You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run a Sweatshop
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2023
- Can games teach us about our ourselves? Can a video game be a statement about the world? Do we design games intentionally or accidentally? This GDC 2023 talk addresses these questions and much more-including Voros McCracken, Ottoman fratricide, fancy hats, Le Corbusier, nuclear holocaust, Mt. Rushmore, and the 1994 Caribbean Cup. Come find out how hard it is to run a sweatshop. Stay for a hopeful and skeptical look at how to make games that say what we want them to say.
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A heavier and different talk from what I expected, but exploring the difficulty in communicating meaning through mechanics, plus the takeaway that one ideology promising all the answers is dangerous on top of whatever it promises, were valuable. Thanks!
An interesting talk overall that speaks to the heart of why I love video games -- their capacity to create empathy and meaning in ways no other medium can. However, a particular shout-out for the discussion of urban planning vis-a-vis "Sim City". I've gotten so used to it being an obscure field to most people, so it was a pleasant surprise to see it brought up so casually in a video game talk of all things.
Anyone else notice a high pitch squeal in this video? Probably the screams of little sweatshop children.
1:00:50 The degree of explicitness in your message should be proportionate to the strength of the belief you want to question. For instance, in Frostpunk, there's little dispute that Totalitarianism is a harmful system, so when the game portrays its horrors, it doesn't challenge many players' views. However, if Civilization IV were as explicit in depicting Capitalism or Communism as Frostpunk, it's likely that people would instantly reject the game's premise, become defensive, focus only on the labels and refuse to engage with the material further.
Amazing talk! Thank you! Got so much out of this.
10:05 While I don't necessarily disagree with the take-away from the information (we'd need a more detailed look at the data), cosmetics that are "only visible to the player themselves" would still hold value to a streamer (or streamer hopeful), where such cosmetics would also be available to their audience.
28:08 A different conclusion could be how people spending most of their time in an executive position with regards to conflict can become desensitized to the conflict in favor of the meta-conflict (meta-game) of it.
This came at the perfect time and is just what i needed. This final statement helped alot 44:07
Fantastic talk!
Funnily, I believe I've played the majority of these titles. Some of 'em to unhealthy amounts, too. (just one more turn)
I agree about most of the things said here. It is a very progressive way of thinking about designing interactive experiences, which I support wholeheartedly. However, considering the old 'product versus art' argument seems to have been lost to the mainstream gam[bl]ing industry over a decade ago, I'm rather pessimistic about the reach carefully crafted games can have for doing actual good. At least on a large scale. The media landscape has changed tremendously since the days when users had a limited offer, with quality ultimately triumphing in the end.
Also, a random thought, but 'tis a bit ironic. Back in the day, when the channel ExtraCredits made videos addressing similar issues with game design (something about evil races and Nazis), they got ridiculed by the vast majority of UA-cam to the point of it becoming a meme. Those essays got both disliked into oblivion and basically ravaged by 'gamers' for even daring to say that designing an experience in a certain way could potentially push across completely wrong ideas to what was the initial goal. Not that it matter much any more but, seeing as GDC videos attract a different sort of crowd, I just find it humorous to recall.
Oh, and the title's clickbaity once again. Won't dispute that it works to reel in the audience, but still… meh.
EDIT: One last bit, about the cosmetics: In case you read this, go search for papers on "Character Customization With Cosmetic Microtransactions in Games: Subjective Experience and Objective Performance" and "Crafting Identity in League of Legends - Purchases as a Tool to Achieve Desired Impressions". A lot of things will become much clearer.
Wonderful, humble and brilliant talk!
Super Interesting re-theming Incan Gold to Fire Fighters
Great talk. I think about this sort of thing often and you still provided some insights.
53:00 The issue is we're not just 'telling players' things through labels on a GUI. But we're telling them through stories, music, sound effects, voice actors, lighting, etc. How do we let the players make their own decision when most modern games require high fidelity, so it's hard to strip all of those message-laden assets away. The only way I can think of to do that is to make it obvious to the player what ISN'T in the game and make them curious about why it isn't there.
I'd like to hear Soren's thoughts on _Kind Words_, which strips away most of the game, but strongly encourages empathy.
I think one important thing is when a player receives a in game reward for doing a bad or evil thing that incentives them to do it more due to the dopamine burst in your head. I think what would be best is to not reward bad behavior's in games that are trying to get the point across that bad behaviors are bad, in such circumstances I feel like debuffs and other negatives would more enforce that. Although depending on the game itself that may take it too far from the level of realism they were aiming for and may break the point. In those situations it's probably better to place your POV in the shoes of someone who isn't doing the bad things, so that as they achieve their goals it gives the players negatives, and as the player stops or counters those bad things it rewards the players. Rewards in games are VERY impactful to how the player thinks about the situations happening in game are.
Think about it this way if I gave you a gold bar(pushing you closer to beating the game/reaching the goal) every time you did something evil, then your mind is going to of course go to "I need to do more of these bad things" No matter you moral base, the game is trying to shift you to the bad things, which is something you want to avoid.
He says SPENT didn't build out its world enough, but also says Papers Please succeeded despite never showing your dead kid. This was a delightful talk, but for me the main takeaways are (1) games that "failed" their empathy goals were simply poorly designed and (2) games are such a rich medium that you can still succeed while failing.
I reckon it's less about building out the *world*, and more building out the system of *consequences* for actions.
The son isn't shown, but his death is still a system that exists independently of the choices themselves. That's a stronger consequence once the player starts to ignore the theming. Even if you don't sympathise with your son anymore, mechanically he's still a valuable resource.
I think he struggled to answer the questions because they missed the whole point of his talk. He found it difficult to condense everything he'd said over the past hour into one sentence.
There's another possibility, something we might not like to look at. Factorio works so well because it acknowledges that the nature of the human being is such that it wants to run the sweatshop at peak efficiency, that it is willing to suppress its empathy for the biters to achieve these goals.
Does putting the player in the shoes of the downtrodden other suddenly make people feel empathy, or does it merely create an unsatisfying experience? Although I appreciate the artistic vision of games like This War of Mine, I feel like they fight my human nature to find the best way to exploit a situation and win. That game feels super depressing to play, which is why I put it down after a few hours. I can't get enough of Factorio because it is the polar opposite of that.
Fundamentally this comes down to your conception of human nature. Do you believe the human being is completely malleable, or do you believe we have a nature? If we have a nature, you must acknowledge that there are certain aspects of our nature you find repellant.
The sweatshop game is a mirror, and we don't like what we see. That's for us to deal with. You can't design your way out of it. Crafting works so well as a mechanic because crafting is core to what it means to be alive on this Earth as a human being. We make a living by exploiting the environment around us.
I know this comment is already 6 months old, but I feel like you raised a great point regarding This War Of Mine. In general, I believe you can definitely create an unsatisfying experience in any game, but that games that as you called it "fight" against human nature may be more prone to suck, cause you're missing the reward system that resembles our "instincts/biology".
owever, I do want to point out that This War Of Mine is very liked, and I think that's precisely for the reason you put it down: humans have a wish to exploit the situation to win even outside of games, but that very often can lead us to exploiting others in an effort to get ahead and win. This War Of Mine therefore simulates the conflict in (what I believe to be) human nature between empathy and getting ahead. The game puts you therefore in a situation where it's supposed to feel depressing on purpose, and in that way it succeeded; even if your experience was unsatisfying, it may have been impactful or at the very least it conveied what it needed. Sometimes following our human nature to win isn't moral and shouldn't be rewarded. The Sweatshop game failed here probably, because it didn't elaborate on its message as well as This War Of Mine did.
@@michaelcavalry8379 Yeah that's the tough part. It was impactful. They got the point across. I think it is well-liked, but more in an academic way, more in a "you should read Tolstoy" kind of way. We know we should like games like This War of Mine, but when nobody is looking we're playing Factorio.
Just look at raw sales numbers. Minecraft is the number one most selling game ever, and by a wide margin. Factorio is consistently among top selling games on Steam. People really really want games like Factorio.
I'm happy some folks are willing to make the "eat your vegetables" equivalent of games, and I myself have made games like that (I made a thinking puzzle game).
But instincts are stronger than the best design.
Civ4 best of all time aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
You need to understand it to do something about it.
It's interesting to watch this talk and note the differences in approach to game design. It seems like there are two main schools. The school that places game mechanics and emergent gameplay at the core (games like Noita, Factorio, Braid, Baba is You, etc.) and the school that gives heavy emphasis to the fiction layer (Old World, games made by Paradox, Rimworld).
Personally, I am more biased toward the former. I like games that explore a truth which already exists, not ones that use arbitrary and contrived rules to guide the player through a story.
The problem with players looking past the fiction layer is the fact that the fiction layer is a facade by definition. If, as you say, the problem goes beyond the facade and lies with the mechanics, then you are merely pushing the facade deeper into the mechanics themselves, and this has the unfortunate consequence of over-complicating the gameplay to pursue contrived storytelling. You're picking storytelling over gameplay.
This is Rimworld in a nutshell. I enjoyed playing it for some time, but I eventually realized it's just a really fancy random number generator that comes up with a bunch of complicated rules to tell a story. I can't make a good plan to "win" that game, and it's frustrating.
I say this fully acknowledging that there is a HUGE audience for the fiction layer games. I wish I liked making and playing them, but they just feel too contrived. I loved the atmosphere of Old World, but I never felt like I understood how to properly play the game. The story events kept interrupting the actual gameplay, making it hard to make good choices to just play and win. The fiction layer made the game unintelligible as a game. The rules were too complex and contrived for me to form a coherent strategy and feel like a "good player".
I'm not sure if I should feel like these fiction layer games are "bad" games, but there comes a point where we've crossed into some new space that's not quite a game and is more like interactive fiction. That's fine if it is presented as such, but it's usually not the case with many of the Paradox games. They are presented as a 4x "strategy" game. Should we be asking if this is deceptive advertising?
If the rules are so complicated that no normal human being could possibly compute them and form a coherent strategy, then it's not a strategy game. It's a random number generator designed to look like a strategy game. And that's how I feel about games like Civ 6, Old World, and basically anything that comes out of Paradox.
Slipways was the last good 4x, and it only succeeded at that by dropping down to more of a 3x.
Will players eventually see past this? Is it the new free-to-play? Do we want this? Is this good?
What I found interesting about this talk was the point about how even simulation games have meanings and assumptions about how the world works baked into them. By playing them, a player is not necessarily exploring any "truth that exists", because no one knows exactly how the world works. Even though life is full of random events, we generally don't accept randomness in fiction or games because it looks like the creator is "playing god" or "cheating". If we accept this premise of this talk and that life events are often random, then randomness in a game like RimWorld might make it more true to life than narrative-free simulation games like SimCity. If a game presents itself as a story generator and/or a strategy sim and the player encounters too much randomness, the player would certainly have a negative response in both cases. Nobody likes stories that appear inauthentic or "contrived". Nobody likes games that have a win condition while defying the logic and consistency we expect games to have and that allows the player to form a successfull strategy. To abstract this idea, consider that a child playing pretend with friends and a child playing solitaire is still engaging in play. Both the pretend/make-belive and solidatire are games...but there's only one game the child can"win", however, the unwinnable and contrived game will probably teach the child more about the world (or at least, a tiny subsection of the people who live in it).
I should add that I have the opposite bias - I really love playing RimWorld. I have also never 'won' Rimworld 😂
@@godot-mouse I will clarify what I mean by "truth" in the context of games. I mean something more like mathematical truth, that given a certain set of assumptions, there follows a logical consequence, behaviors that emerge from the rules but are not stated in the rules. This kind of truth is what makes games like A Monster's Expedition so great and so expansive.
Factorio is so great because it is the Venn diagram of emergent mathematical truth and certain day-to-day realities of the human world we inhabit. The two collide to create something both psychologically satisfying and true.
I hope they can bring Nintendo for the Zelda Totk, I would love to hear their talk about how they made that amazing game!
if it makes you feel better, guns germs and steel has some pretty ahistorical assumptions, mostly about africa
这种还需要模拟啊 中国到处都是😅
Can you tell this to the German government please? The thing about ideology and simple solutions?
Echo chamber much? A how to for replacing designers' naïve assumption that their simulations are accurate...with designers' new and even more naïve assumption that their interpretations of what makes an accurate simulation enables them to simulate an accurate simulation. Heaven forbid they question whether their interpretive assumptions about the reality they want to simulate are incorrect.
Could you clarify what you mean by inaccurate interpretations? I didn't think the talk was saying games should aim for accuracy.
@@ifcoltransg2 yeah i feel like its just an analysis of the intersection of setting & simulation in the history of games & his resulting considerations.