I definitely would not attribute conflict in games to a sensational media. Games have been zero-sum and win/loss for quite a long time! I also don't think that the design of a game reflects any particular view on nature. Why do so many people view every creation as a statement about life or morals or something?

Personally, I find the context in which a game is placed (war, space, garbage collection, cooking) to have an insignificant effect on my enjoyment. I'm much more interested in interacting with the rules and mechanics of a game, or with another player within the rules.

Games are about win/lose conditions. But I think Professor Benne sees computer games as very different from games proper. I think game designers and hardcore gamers are often so deeply involved with the medium, that they don't realize that most people do not see "games" when confronted with their work. Instead, they see stories, characters, settings, ideas and opinions about life. You can say that they are wrong as much as you like but that will not change a thing.

Games have "exceeded their programming" and it's about time we learn how to deal with that. As Professor Benne points out, the industry has indeed achieved an impressive state when it comes to technology and representation. Now we need to start working on content. Conflict has its place. But there are many types of conflict (most are non-violent), not to mention many other themes that we can deal with.

Thanks for this article, Simon. Could you post a link to the letter in question?

Hey Michael - this is the full text of the letter, and since we're not running Letters To The Editor on Gamasutra right now, I opted to run it here only.

A game without any sort of conflict would be boring indeed. Even something as simple and innocuous as Tetris could be said to have a conflict: all those blocks are competing for a limited amount of space. That's what makes it interesting. If you could just stack them as high as you wanted, with no regard for the consequences, it would be tremendously uninteresting. There are also plenty of great games that feature exciting and non-violent conflicts, from the earliest text adventures to Phoenix Wright.

To some degree, I think that most games' reliance on shooting things -- or, at least, on such simplistic conflict dynamics -- is nothing more than a relic. In the beginning, there wasn't much more games could do than send waves of space invaders from the top of the screen to the bottom, so that's what they did. It's like how the first motion pictures were literally that: shots of waves crashing on the beach, or of trains chugging along the tracks. Movies became reliably dramatic and interesting only after several years. Games are going through a similar maturation. Shoot-'em-ups won't ever go out of style, and I hope they don't, but there's room for so much more.

I have to disagree with Ross, as well. I would like more games to make statements about life and morals. At least, I would like more people to engage them on that level. Why do we want to yoke our favorite pastime to that belittling phrase, "just a game?" This Salem State professor seem to have a more optimistic view of the potential of games than many gamers seem to.

The good professor is makng a great point...

I don't think that making a game around 'symbiosis' or about competition would mean that a game is challenge-free, or completely unwinnable or unlosable. It's totally possible, for instance, to create a challenge about how to make something work with limited resources, or about how to resolve a competition-- just off the top of my head, Dwarf Fortress could admirably stand in here, in that there's plenty of challenge well before dealing with the threats of sieges or of military conflict.

Admittedly it's not as familiar a model of game (and even the above example just switches from "man vs man" to "man vs environment"), but as Michaël comments above, our experiences of games often involve a lot more than the pure mechanics implemented. Maybe designing more games that put the mechanical challenge in 'how do we cooperate?' is one way to incorporate the prof's suggestion?

Is "I happened upon your site when looking for metaphors on garbage collection" meant to be taken as a compliment??

I'm not sure why this guy deserves such thoughtful deference.

So his first exposure to the field of games is randomly stumbling across this website. Fair enough. So, he's wandered into what is obviously a thriving, well-established field of cultural endeavour that he has no prior knowledge about. What is the good professor's reaction? Does he seek to learn more about this field, where it comes from, who participates in it, how it works, what it means?

No. He immediately fires off a letter to the editor proselytizing his views on the subject. He's gone from complete novice to prescription-dispensing expert without making the slightest effort to learn the first thing about what he's talking about.

Simon, your insightful interview response, and the thoughtful comments in this thread, prove that this pompous idealogue's assumptions are wrong: we are not uncultured barbarians in need of his new age sermonizing. Thanks anyway!

I was looking for a good non-confrontational game that wasn't about projectiles and destruction, so I copped Beautiful Katamari. Lo-and behold it's basically a game about child abuse. The King of All Cosmos turns out to be a total dick.

BK is more about audience abuse than anything. i think it's one of the most shamefully whored-out products i've played in recent memory. it makes me long for the days of tony hawk ripoffs.

Hm. I disagree to some extent, Frank. If games are truly becoming a mainstream entertainment medium, then the face-value opinons of the unitiated are in fact quite important. And let's not pretend that games are so isolated from general culture that they require in-depth knowledge to understand. I think we should try and be a bit more honest with ourselves: many games are about warfare and violence and about adolescent fantasies about heroism. A bit more variation wouldn't hurt.
(oh, and by the way, the good professor is a "she", not a "he")

Thank you, Etchasketchist, for noticing that as well. Katamari is a very unsettling game.

Maybe you should point Professor Benne towards A Tail in the Desert.

Although I am sympathetic with the general viewpoint of Professor Benne, I find how she presents her point comes off as saccharine. I'm of the belief that there is room for social interaction in games to be developed further(although there can be as much conflict in social situations as in physical violence), but I find conflict in all it's forms to be too elemental to be eliminated in games or life.

I think we need to distinguish between conflict as a game *mechanism* (challenge) and conflict as a game *metaphor*.

Sure, a game generally needs to have some kind of conflict mechanism in order to make it challenging. As others have said, even Tetris contains conflict of a sort.

The thing that distinguishes Tetris from the majority of games, however, is the metaphor. Tetris is unlike most games in that it is very abstract. Most games have an explicit metaphor is which the actions of the game entities represent some concrete scenario. Like killing demons, or killing nazis, or killing terrorists, or killing 'monsters', or killing ... er, other things.

I thing the Professor's reaction is not so much to the conflict in the mechanism, but to the conflict in the metaphor. As I suggested above, a lot of our games are about 'killing bad guys'.

What is the relationship between the two? One common mechanism for creating challenge is to create competition between players. From a game design point of view, this has the advantage that an intelligent human opponent can produce a lot more creative challenge than an unthinking game mechanism (as AI designers are well aware).

So if a game involves competition between players, the metaphor will naturally promote the competition. The result is a 'battle' in either a real or (less often) a metaphorical sense.

The professor's suggestions suggest more of a 'player-vs-environment' model of challenge. Even "healing, unifying, balancing, etc" imply an 'opponent' - the force that works against healing, unifying, etc.

I don't suppose that a player-vs-environment metaphor necessarily precludes a player-vs-player mechanism. My class created a fire fighting game once in which one player controlled the fire and the others cooperated to put it out. I wonder what Prof Benne would think of that?

>> If games are truly becoming a mainstream entertainment medium, then the face-value opinons of the unitiated are in fact quite important.

If I didn't think her opinion was important, I wouldn't have bothered responding to it in public.

In fact, I think I am giving her opinions more respect by denouncing them as spurious, ill-informed claptrap, then those who are nodding and scratching their chins and saying "good point" without really listening to what she's actually saying.

Yes, the subject of conflict in games is complicated and interesting. So her opinion mentions something complicated and interesting, is that just our cue to start riffing on this as a topic, spinning it out and seeing where it goes?

No! The Professor is making an argument here. She is throwing down the gauntlet. She is firing a shot across our bow. (oh! the irony!) Let us give her the respect of treating her argument seriously and seeing if it holds any merit (spoiler: it doesn't).

Here is the heart of her argument:

"[I] am shocked by the underlying assumptions of your games. They revolve around win/lose, zero sum, might makes right thinking, and a tooth and claw view of nature..."

Putting aside the problem of what games she's actually talking about, let's just look at the basic assumption expressed here:

Assumption: games that contain X (eg. conflict) as a formal quality or thematic subject are necessarily promoting, in support of, or otherwise propogating X.

If you believe that games are an aesthetic form (as I assume most of us here do) then this is like saying music that contains dissonance promote dissonance, or paintings that have contrast promote contrast or that movies about war promote war, or that poetry about death promotes death.

The relationship between aesthetic forms and their formal qualities and their themes and the rest of the world is convoluted and ambiguous and wonderful and contradictory and fascinating. Yes, some war movies *do* glorify war, but some obviously don't and, if you stop to think about it, some basically do and don't at the same time.

Let's look at a classic zero/sum game like Chess. Clearly, chess is a form of stylized conflict. But anyone who appreciates games should be able to recognize that it is also an amazing act of collaboration between the players in which they produce, for each other, an intense kind of pleasure. A game of Chess is like a complex dance between two minds that requires mutual respect and a unique and strangely intimate form of intellectual empathy.

When played seriously, and played well, Chess, and many great games, have the power to transmute conflict into something else, some hard-to-express higher-level quality that can elevate the human soul the way that a great novel or great movie or great poem does.

The notion that creating, and playing, and caring about zero sum games makes us cave men is absurd and offensive.

(Not to say that non-zero-sum games can't also be great. Knizia's LoTR boardgame, for example, or Table Craps.)

Her argument deteriorates from this point, but that's enough for now, right?

>> And let's not pretend that games are so isolated from general culture that they require in-depth knowledge to understand.

Games *are* general culture. Culture *is* hard to understand. Any subdomain of culture, from hip-hop to tai chi to performance art requires some level of literacy just in order to figure out what the hell is going on. No one is prohibited from having their own opinion about these things, (although in general I think opinions are vastly overrated) but some attempt should be made to establish some basic understanding before making grand, sweeping pronouncements about what's wrong and how to fix it.

>> I think we should try and be a bit more honest with ourselves: many games are about warfare and violence and about adolescent fantasies about heroism.

Yes, this is obviously true. I'm aware of the problem of videogame-as-adolescent-power-fantasy. But equating this problem with the issue of conflict is just lazy thinking.

And imagining that we can improve the world simply by improving our representations of the world is the most juvenile power fantasy of all.

Frank said a lot of the things I was going to say (and said them a hell of a lot better), so I'll just add this, to his greater point:
>>>If you believe that games are an aesthetic form (as I assume most of us here do) then this is like saying music that contains dissonance promote dissonance, or paintings that have contrast promote contrast or that movies about war promote war, or that poetry about death promotes death.<<<

From the deepest darkest recesses of human history, humans have told stories to each other to entertain, teach, etc. The form those stories take has changed much over the centuries, from entirely verbal to written, from poetry to prose, from book to movie to TV, and now, to games. Just about every great work of literature (no matter how far you look back) contains an element of conflict, most of the time as its core element. I mean, come on, is this professor seriously suggesting that Homer and Shakespeare and Chaucer and all the rest were doing it wrong all along?

When Frank Lantz denied that "poetry about death promotes death", I was reminded of Goethe's "Das Leiden dus Jungen Werthers", which is famous for triggering a series of suicides among its readership. And then there is of course Sylvia Plath as well. Or Ian Curtis.

But I'm sure we don't need such extreme examples to realize that art and life are very much connected. If they were not, there would be not point to art at all.

Anyway, while I agree that it is not necessary to remove all conflict from the medium of games, I think it is equally naive to justify all conflict. I'm sure everyone will agree that there is a serious disbalance in the current games offer. And when I support Professor Benne, it is because I would like to see a bit more variety, some alternatives to the endless and tiring stream of violent conflicts that contemporary games consist of.

I do think you are making one mistake. A typical mistake for people who are deeply involved with games. That is to think of computer games as normal games. To think of them purely as rules-based systems that have a sort of mathematical elegance that requires knowledge and skill to appreciate. But computer games have become so much more. And many people enjoy them for much simpler reasons: they like the characters, the story, the sounds, the immersion, etc. So it is important for designers to construct these narrative elements with as much care as they construct their algorithms.

>> Goethe...Sylvia Plath...Ian Curtis

Give her time, once she's cleaned up games, I'm sure Benne will do something about the counter-evolutionary state of poetry and punk rock. Love will tear us apart? Shameful! Perhaps Mr. Curtis was too greatly influenced by our sensationalized media industry.

>> ...art and life are very much connected

We agree. Did you see my paragraph starting "The relationship between aesthetic forms... and the rest of the world"?

>> ...it is equally naive to justify all conflict

I'm pretty sure those aren't the only two possible positions.

>> ...to think of computer games as normal games

Whether it's a "mistake" to consider computer games as belonging to the general category of games is a discussion for another time.

But I would point out that almost anyone's understanding of what a game is involves some form of conflict whether the person is a layman or a scholar, whether the game is analog or digital, and whether it is abstract or highly narrative/representational/immersive.

>> ...it is important for designers to construct these narrative elements with as much care as they construct their algorithms.

I am in favor of designers using care to construct the elements that go into their games. Again, we are in full agreement. Not to be confused with total equilibrium, which is a state I have no great desire to attain, but one at which I fear we all must eventually arrive.

uhm

apart from everything else wrong with the letter

most computer games are actually NOT ZERO SUM

they may be packaged violence, but zero sum they are not