I got into the game industry and joined Playdom to experiment with interactive drama. I dream of a future where we play or interact with games for the drama more than the game aspect. It’s a lofty goal but very similar to Bing Gordon’s dream at EA to see if a computer can make you cry.

“We see farther”, we crowed. We predicted the games business would develop to stand side by side with the $20 billion annual revenues of movies and recorded music. We foresaw a day when a New Hollywood would be created by “software artists” who harnessed Moore’s Law into a new category of art. We believed that their digital games would one day deliver the kind of emotional experiences we all enjoy in movies, what Stephen Spielberg describes as “sitting back and being washed over with emotion.”

Sadly though EA failed.

But we fell short of the lofty creative goal of “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” because we didn’t develop new models of character and narrative. Floyd, the robot friend in Steve Meretsky’s Planetfall, was a heart-warming sidekick but, no matter what words we typed into the Infocom parser, he died a sacrificial, text-only, death for us.

Bing has since had an epiphany and replaced his dream with a strange amalgamation. Instead of eliciting emotion through story he thinks the answer is allowing people to relive their gaming moments socially, to reinforce and create social connections.

But while we were looking for movies powered by millions of transistors, we ignored the emotions we were creating in games as a new kind of playground. Instead of creating emotion-laden, but passive stories, we elicited emotional moments off the screen, between friends, in the retelling, in the trash-talking. The emotional moments turned out NOT to have correlation with processing power, visual effects, and 3d graphics. The emotion came from who we played with, not what machine we played on. Games help us create richer photo albums of our lives.

So rather than trying to create stories and characters that “wash over” our audience, rather than trying to prove that a computer can make you cry, let’s create play spaces that help us make more and better friends. We are the characters, the heroes, the actors. And we are making stories together.

In that light Bing sees social games as the perfect beast but I completely disagree. I agree that social games help us connect but we aren’t building stories here. We aren’t the character, the heroes, the actors. I think their original goal to have computers make us cry is still attainable even if they failed. When EA started it was a much different environment, but as Bing mentions the playing field has changed with social games. And where Bing now sees social games as a place to make connections I see them as the perfect opportunity to try and make a computer, a game, an interactive experience make us cry.

It’s not a technology problem

Bing starts his post by describing Moore’s Law and how at EA they thought it would do the same for the video game industry. As processors got more powerful so would the game engines and graphics.

For 25 years, the videogame business has counted on Moore’s Law to deliver the promised land of the New Hollywood. We thought more powerful chipsets driving higher resolution pictures, more lifelike animations and bigger production budgets would almost automatically deliver the emotion of movies. We thought that amazing hardware would spontaneously generate resonant characters and heart-wrenching stories, but the highest points turned out to be a robot, a polygonal babe, and a horny swinger wearing a gold medallion.

Though good story has never needed technology to be. Even as movies became a popular medium for story books and comic books remained, even thrived. Story isn’t a technology problem, it’s a problem of creativity. They were led astray by the visual, Bing even admits to it.

They went after the wrong audience

We’re all familiar with the video game industry and its struggle to attract women. Most games are built for men and why not, they’re the ones lining up outside the stores. Listening to Bing talk of the early days at EA I would think them ecstatic if EA could deliver Star Wars in interactive form, with graphics equal to the movie. I would have loved playing that as a kid – fly the X-wing fighter, practice with the lightsaber, all that. But in reality if you handed me the controls I would just wreck shop. I would cut Obi-Wan’s arm off just to see what he’d do. A controller in my hand I could care less about the story.

However if you could create an interactive version of Gone with the Wind I would expect women to treat it very differently. Taken in by the story elements I would expect them to play the parts. Men, boys are the wrong audience to start experimenting with story.

Social games are a new opportunity

Where as Bing thinks the promise of social games is making connections I think they’re ripe for attaining his original goal at EA.

For one, a large percentage of the social game audience is female and they’re looking for story.

They also tended to prefer games that emphasized narrative and character development over combat and preferred solo to group gameplay.

Secondly, social games are easily accessible so if there is a hit the audience can grow overnight. And thirdly, the technology isn’t complex and is already in the hands of artists.