About two and a half years ago, my little family went through a pretty difficult struggle.  It was one of the darkest moments of my life and it had to do with how I transplated my entire family to pursue a dream doing game development.  I am very blessed to have a wife who encouraged me to pursue my dream, but it turned out to be a nightmare that almost destroyed us.

I’ve worked for many bad managers, but I have never doubted that they are good human beings.  But my previous boss I made an exception and called him a “bad human being.”

It has taken me quite a while to forgive my previous boss.  But something recently prompted me to write this letter, which I sent to his email.  (I have removed his name and any identifying information.)

Dear Doctor,

I am writing this letter to say thank you for the time I spent there at your company.  Even though we had severe disagreements and departed paths abruptly, had it not been for your company and the opportunity to see what it is like in a game development company, I would not be where I am today.

As you recall, I had left my previous job and took a $20K pay cut for the chance to pursue a dream making games.  I had bought a house and moved my small family even when I had not sold my condo.  All this was done so I could quickly relocate and start working for you.

I had every intention of bringing your company to the next level, bringing your employees closer together, building camaraderie, and creating the next generation of cognitive therapy games.  Yet, I found it odd that everyone I had talked to met my enthusiasm with raw cynicism and sarcasm.

I quickly found out why when after long weeks of capricious hours and unreasonable working conditions, you left me high and dry for not sacrificing my family to comply with your whims.  I had given you a lot of the benefit of the doubt and that I was in the wrong, but that doubt was removed when you denied extending medical insurance for my newly pregnant wife, even at no cost to you.  This all happened at the same time I was paying two mortgages and found myself without a job.

You can only imagine my level of contempt I had for you.  But what had transpired after was nothing short of a miracle.

Because my tenure with you was so short, I still qualified for COBRA insurance from my previous employer.  They graciously extended medical coverage, but I had to back pay over 2 months of insurance premiums which completely depleted any savings we had.  Fortunately, I was picked up by an upstart development company that paid me the equivalent salary that I was making before I joined your company.  And after two months of paying a double mortgage, my condo sold.  We were flat broke, but thankfully we weren’t bankrupted.

In about four months at my new company, I created one of the first major applications built in Microsoft Silverlight, the competitor product to Adobe Flash.  Six months after that, my product was being showcased by Microsoft at Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the biggest technological showcase for healthcare management information systems.  This garnered a lot of market attention.  So much attention, in fact, that six months later, this small upstart company was bought by GE Healthcare.

My time with you has not discouraged me from making video games either.  If anything, I learned I already have what it takes to be a game developer.  Currently, when I have time, I work on the side as a freelance developer for my own clients and I am publishing my second flash game this fall as an indie game developer.

I learned then that a small company of tightly-knit, highly-motivated, experts can outdo even the largest technological firms in the world.  A small crew of barely over 2 dozen can out compete a company of hundreds of thousands.  But this was accomplished because we were working with people we trusted, could synergize with, and even “bull pen” and tease.  I have never worked so hard for so long, but we were given liberties to bring in a foosball table to lighten the stress, and even to shoot each other with Nerf guns.  For as many hours as I worked there I was given a level of trust and respect that I was willing to give even more.  And I would still do more because the company has more than graciously worked around the needs of my family, especially when my youngest son was born.

My son will be turning two in November.  He and his older brother are best friends and my wife and I have been very blessed.  But in the last two years my mother had a stroke and my father collapsed.  Thankfully both of them are ok, but these constant reminders of our mortality and time on this earth has made me pause, which is why I am writing to you.

I wanted to say thank you.  Without you, I would not have been in the right place and time to make such a huge difference for the lives of others.  Without the adversity you gave me, I would not have been able to find in myself the skills and ability to do something extraordinary and see the fruits of that first hand.

I certainly hope that you do not take this as a validation of your management style and I hope that things have gotten better since I left.  But I did want to say that I am truly thankful for having crossed paths.  May God bless you on yours.

Sincerely,
Paolo Munoz

A friend of mine asked me to define what “fun” is in a relation to a game.  In other words, “What makes a game fun?” After giving it much thought, and through observing my children run around and tear up the house, laughing the entire way, I have come up with a working theory of what is generically fun.  In a future post, I will delve more into the subtleties of what makes a game fun.

Passive Fun

WinAmp Visualizer

Watching an infant, you can see how most of what they enjoy is simply passive stimuli.  When they see a friendly face, they react.  When they see colorful lights or a pleasing sound, they react.  A lot of what they derive of fun is merely passive stimuli.

As an adult, the positive feelings of simple sounds and bright colors don’t draw us in nearly as strongly as it would as an infant or young child.  So as we get older, simple sounds are arranged into notes, and chords, and eventually songs.  Bright colors become images, and then motion pictures.  And as we grow in complexity, the complexity of positive stimuli, of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touches become more complex, and arranged in a variety of crescendos, climaxes, and plateaus.

Passive stimulus isn’t limited to just shapes and colors (though I do occassionally catch myself staring at the song visualizes when using my computer music player), but a passive stimulus could be a TV show wherein the story itself is something people enjoy.

There is a delicate balance of overstimulating and understimulating.  Too much color, too much sound can actually create a negative reaction much like too little color, sound and sensory information.  A delicate balance must be struck for having too little, too much and just the right kind of stimulus at the right time.  Whole schools are dedicated to discovering and teaching the right amount of stimulus to create visual presentations, movies, songs, and even stories to tell.

But all of this is merely passive fun.

Interactive Fun

A favorite toy

As an infant gets older, he explores the world around him.  The world isn’t just something that stimulates senses, but is something they can interact with.  My one and a half year old loves to see blocks fall down when he swipes at them.  My four year old wants to throw a ball and see how high it goes depending on how hard and what angle he throws things.  All of these are fun in exploring the interactions of a particular world and getting reactions.

Some reactions are negative, such as touching something hot.  But some reactions are positive like throwing a ball and watching it bounce.  And then there is learning how to create sequences of interactions such as crashing toy cars together, or lining up dominos.  Fun is a series of interactions with positive feedback.

Reading books is a kind of interactive stimulus because it engages the imagination to create images out of words.  So it is more than the passive audio/visual stimulus of movies.  Books and words engage on the plane of an interactive medium because it is an interaction on the imaginary plane.

Game Fun

"Crush the Castle" - a Game of Knocking Over Blocks

After a couple years, a child learns how to string along a series of interactions to accomplish certain results.  But once those interactions are placed into a goal-oriented situation and place limitations on how to accomplish those goals, suddenly you have a “game.”  Instead of merely seeing the ball bounce, you try to catch the ball with your hands and then throw it back.  Instead of just throwing blocks around, try to stack as many as you can and as high as you can before your younger brother tears them down.

Within rules and goals, the physical properties of gravity, elasticity, collisions, momentum start to become meaningful.  And another level of fun opens up – that of accomplishing goals.

Here, there is a delicate balance of goals that are not challenging enough or goals that are too challenging.  A right balance of challenge and skill growth are important to keep a game “fun.”  Also a certain amount of positive feedback keeps the game interesting.  If there is little positive stimulus as a result of accomplishing a goal, or during the process of achieving that goal, then accomplishing the goal can be very boring and can quickly lose interest.  One can extrapolate this to apply towards exciting jobs and boring jobs as well.

Beyond Fun

From here, you can extrapolate social aspects of different kinds of fun.  Social passive fun, is like watching the theatre or listening to a live band play.  A social interactive fun can be talking, conversing, or even dancing.  A social game fun can be competitive or cooperative goal-oriented play like cards, or sports.

Explore the Island of "Myst" OR Blow all the baddies away in "FAR CRY"

There is also a certain tension between non-goal-oriented fun (passive or interactive) and goal-oriented fun (games).  The non-goal-oriented fun tends to be more immersive and exploratory.  It involves absorbing the world and living in it.  Goal-oriented fun in games tends to be an abstraction of the world – a goal and a rules set.  Thus, there is a kind of tension between exploration and discovery versus stimulating gameplay.  No one really takes in the beautiful scenery while being shot at.

Prince of Persia - A moment to take a breath and see

Some games do a very good job of balancing the level of immersion into the world and compelling gameplay.  Prince of Persia does a remarkable job of letting you have moments to breathe and see the world and vast expanses, beauty and heights of the world you are traversing – Ancient Persia.

Another dynamic to consider in the spectrum is that a good deal of “art” games focus more on the immersion and exploration, while there are games that are purely about gameplay and goals.  Unlike movies and cinema, “art” games are interactive, and therefore cannot be easily directed and paced because it relies on the user’s interactions rather than the forced momentum of a movie or narrative story.  However, since an “art” game is more focused on exploration and immersion, it can be more impactful and poetic than something that forces a “goal”.

Lastly, to address a question posed by Brian of JoyfulGames on using “art” games as a means for preaching the Gospel, consider the following:

When it comes to a relationship, everyone loves spending time immersed with one another’s presence, even if it means passively sitting down together and watching a movie.  But no one wants to be made into a “game.”  A game trivializes because it abstracts things into goals and rules – when the goal of a meaningful relationship is simply to “just be with one another.”  Who wants to get into a relationship with an agenda?

A few months ago, I solicited the Escapist Magazine to write an article on the problems of creating “Christian” Games.  Originally, I wanted to write yet another article panning the Christian gaming community for creating yet another set of horrible and embarrassing games in the name of Jesus.  But after I saw an blog post written by Brian of JoyfulGames.com, despairing that “video games may be a completely incompatible medium for proclaiming the Gospel,” the contrarian in me was inspired to write on how Christians may being to approach creating great games, and perhaps even create a whole new culture in the gaming industry.

Why Should Christians Even Bother?

A lot of gamers are simply bored and jaded with their games.  They echo the words of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.  Even the thing of which we say, ‘See, this is new!’ has already existed in the ages that preceded us.”  With this kind of attitude, it is no small wonder that arguably the most popular game critic is a man who became famous for his biting sarcasm, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw.

But this bitterness reveals an underlying anxiety, a deep seated need that claws at the soul: that there is more to life than simply staving off daily boredom which can only seemingly be relieved by what the game gods to bring to us: perhaps a new gadget, another way of playing the same tower defense game, or yet another level of sexual titillation aimed to tease and frustrate you out of your money.

What the Christian brings is a proposal – that not only is there more that Christ can offer to your life, but through good and faithful service to Him, He can transform the gaming industry itself.

To accomplish these ends, the Christian must address the following:

• Mastery of the Craft
• Mastery of Storytelling
• Faithfulness and Service to God

Mastery of the Craft of Game Design

There are a lot of well-meaning Christians in the game industry who set out on a mission, thinking that “all they need is faith” to accomplish their goals.  But no matter how much faith, or even how much money one can throw at creating the ultimate “Christian” game, they will fail if they do not master their craft.  Though young David had plenty of faith facing the giant Goliath, he also had plenty of practice with his sling beforehand, including slaying a lion.

There are plenty of pitfalls on the road to becoming a good game designer.  No matter how much faith you have, if you do not put in the hours and the practice to becoming good at your craft, you will not be able to produce the games that will be a proper expression of the faith.  The Christian blacksmith who spends his days talking about Jesus, neglects his craft, and is late on his deliveries is both a bad Christian and an incompetent blacksmith.

Mastery of Storytelling

Where the Christian game designer can truly excel is in creating games with a compelling narrative.  This means mastering the art of storytelling and delivering a message with both subtlety and respect to the audience.  One of the most compelling conversion stories I have ever seen was the musical “Les Miserables.”  There is no preaching, no altar call, no “confess Jesus as your Lord and Savior”, but the story moves you – it makes you think – and it moves your heart.

There has been an argument that a Christian game must present a moral choice for the player.  I disagree.  Almost every game I’ve played has a story in it where I’ve made no choices on what the protagonist does to the story.  The ones I remember have very compelling stories that are interspersed between gameplay sessions, almost like brief intermissions but I made no choices on the plot – I am just a silent witness and a participant in the “gameplay” portions, but not with the narrative.

As long as the narrative is compelling, the characters are real and sincere, then players have no problem being a “tag-along” for the narrative ride.  I’m pretty sure that if people can tolerate Hideo Kojima’s sermons in Metal Gear Solid 4, and can even call the plotline “compelling” then I would imagine that more skilled Christian narrators who have a sense of plot could do far better.

But even in a sandbox-like game like Grand Theft Auto could be changed dramatically if you could see the consequences of one’s actions.  What if being “wanted” was a permanent state that couldn’t be sugar-coated with a new paint job or a short trip to the police station?  What if the murdering of a prostitute made all prostitutes run away from you, or even call the cops on you?  Those are simple gameplay mechanics that can change how a person plays a game and views the world.  But what if you saw the more human aspects of prostitution, where an impoverished single mother has to make money for her child and takes drugs to live with the guilt of sleeping with countless men since she was a teen?

The Christian can certainly do much more with their games through story rather than simply making a Mario clone with the three wise men hopping through the desert. (I wish that was a joke and not a real game.)

Being a Good Christian

The gaming industry is a horrible place to work if you are a family man.  The long hours of work for little compensation is not the place to foster families.  Could it be that the reason the gaming industry is so full of testosterone fantasies is because the vast majority of people creating games are young single males?

But let’s take a moment and wonder what would happen if there was a game company that made excellent games with compelling stories (not even overtly Christian stories) that was good to their employees and fostered an family-friendly environment that nurtured their workers lives rather than exploited them?  What would happen to that company’s reputation, growth and the talent it would attract?  What would happen to that company simply on account of the fact that the people who ran it, were good Christians who took care of their employees on the basis of their faith and love of their fellow man? 

Would not such a company make even better games, more joyful games, more edifying games than companies full of anxiety, anger and despair?

In the end, it wouldn’t matter if they made Christian games or not.  The very presence of a company that sets an example of how to take care of its people is enough to change the gaming industry whose staple is the exploitation of the worker.

There are many ways to address the problem of creating a “Christian” game.  And I will be sure to revisit this subject again in the future.  But in the end, it doesn’t matter for the Christian game designer to make games on the Gospel.  What matters is that he is a good Christian. And being a good Christian is so much more than spreading tracts – it is being a living example of Jesus for a world that needs Him so badly.