I’m sorry I’m posting this a day late!

Values At Play in Digital Games

When I was a mere week into college, my interdisciplinary seminar professor recommended that I attend a book launch pertaining to digital games, after learning of my intended concentration in game design. Two weeks later when the day came around, I was so terrified I almost didn’t go. Luckily I did work up the courage, and luckily when I got there there were a couple equally nervous looking poly freshman to guide me, and I’m glad they were there because without them it would have just been too much for me and my head would have exploded. It started when I overheard the conversations between other attendees, which pretty much all went something like “yeah, after working on (insert critically acclaimed game here) I skipped around and helped out with (insert studio I have worshipped since I was a child here) and now I’m teaching at (insert famous university here)”. This was casual conversation between titans. And we later found out that the person sitting on the couch next to my new poly friend was none other than professor Frank Lantz, the director of our NYU Game Center.

Now that I have gotten that out of they way, on to the actual book talk.

Values At Play in Digital Games is a book co authored by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum, which discusses the prevalence of human values in videogames from a design standpoint. Specifically, using values as ways to bring about the extra emotional response. I didn’t really understand what they meant until they brought out examples of games that used this.

An example that stuck with me was a game called Hush, created by Jamie Antonisse, Chris Baily, Devon Johnson, Joey Orton, and Brittany Pirello. According to the site for Values at Play  “Hush is a game set in 1994 Rwanda, during a Hutu raid on a Tutsi community. You play a mother who must calm her baby by singing a lullaby. You must type out the words of your lullaby calmly and evenly to keep your child from crying and maintain your rhythm while you are bombarded by the increasingly disturbing sounds and images of the genocide just beyond your window. If you fail to keep your child from crying, you will be discovered and killed. If you can keep your child quiet, you can survive the violence and escape.”

Another interesting example was where some designers wanted the player in their game to have to rape a character in order to obtain information to move forward. This was to create player guilt that would have lasting effects throughout the game (though the game studio was split on whether to adopt this or not). The authors also talked about problems with this approach, as it generalizes individual values.

In conclusion, this book expands on some of the underlying motivations of gameplayers while playing different types of games, and talks about ways that designers can (and already do) consciously incorporate these player values into their games.

All in all, it was amazing to talk to people who are in the positions that I aspire towards. And once I read the book and have a greater understanding of using values in games I will update the post to talk more about it.