Professor Drew Davidson, Ph.D., Director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie-Mellon University, can be a little intimidating when seen from across the room. A big bear of a guy with a beard and long dreads, he doesn’t match the traditional vision of “college professor.” I’d be quite surprised to learn Drew owned anything with elbow patches.
I first met him at SIGGRAPH several years ago, when I was sitting on a panel and he was giving some papers. We happened to share a table at the evening’s drinking and snacks networking event, and as we got to know each other I found that while he may look intimidating, he’s one of the nicest, most sharply curious, and most intellectual people you’ll meet in this field. He loves discussing games, chewing them like gummi to break them down and find their meaning. It’s no surprise that he’s the mad genius behind the Well Played series, which thanks to him I had the honor to be part of. In this Celebrity Guest Editorial, Drew remembers the time before the end of secrets, and what it will mean for game design. Take it away, Drew!
— S
Post-Secret Game Design
by Drew Davidson
We live in a post-secret world. In this day and age it’s hard to say if there even are secrets anymore. This seems true on a both a personal and global level, with Facebook actively enabling people to overshare, WikiLeaks releasing classified documents and cables, and Gizmodo scooping an iPhone4 before its official release. Thinking about our post-secret culture, I think it has three particular aspects; and that these can have an effect on our experiences of playing games, which I believe could be considered in the design of games.
First off in our post-secret exposé, let’s consider personal privacy and how much information people (and players) are willing to share. Facebook enables and encourages us to share information about ourselves (to a fault even), and people will even buy Facebook followers to grow their audience. And with Flickr and YouTube, we can post all the pictures and videos we care to share. Heck, there’s even sites where you can post your secrets (starting with PostSecret.com). What’s interesting about this is not only that we’re getting extremely comfortable sharing, but that we’re getting more accustomed and acclimated to being an active “star” in our daily lives. We can easily check out pop culture and entertainment media to see what celebs are up to, and we can just as easily film and photo our own exploits, mashing up our own music videos and pro-am fashion shoots.
Our pop culture, and the 24/7 media coverage, makes up the second aspect of our post-secret world. Think about it, when was the last time you discovered a game (or movie, or comic, or TV show) that you hadn’t already heard about online or from a tweet? Just think about music in particular: it’s ridiculously easy to find new music now. Once upon a time (pre-internet), you were stuck with what was playing on the radio (and then there was MTV) but all and all, it was mainstream music that you had access to (unless you were lucky to live in a city that had a good music scene). And going to college was this rite of passage where you could get exposed to a larger variety and diversity of music (from independent to international). Nowadays, you can just hop online and find music from all over the world, and with services like Pandora, you can easily find even more. And it’s not just music, it’s amazingly easy to find whatever you want now (and plenty of it). So, we’re all already in the loop on what’s going on in pop culture.
This leads me to the third aspect of this post-secret world, and it’s the most revealing of all. And it can be summed up in one word: spoilers. It’s not just that we’re always already in the loop, we can also find out what’s going to happen before we even have the experience. You have to make a conscious effort not to be exposed to all the secrets and surprises found in our shows, movies and games. And if you want, you can go to GameFAQs to solve a puzzle, or to IMDB to find out about the twist ending , and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s really ridiculously easy to always know what’s going to happen before you even have the experience.
And so, these three aspects of our post-secret world have an impact on our gameplaying experiences. We live in a world where players are more comfortable sharing ourselves in tweets, photos and videos. Social games are one of the hottest segments of the industry, and almost every game comes with multiplayer features, and now everyone’s talking about the gamification of everything. In this day, players (can expect to) see screenshots, free downloadable demos and lots of coverage around the games they’re going to be playing. And the coverage is so diverse thorough they can just as easily find out about AAA titles, as they can about social games and mobile games, and niche indie games. On top of this, players can find out as much as they want about a game, how to solve a puzzle, the twist in the story, the trick with the final boss, etc. This is the current post-secret world in which we’re playing games.
That said, I think this post-secret world opens up some interesting game design opportunities. Take the idea of being the “star” of your photos and videos, and think of how easily that translates to being the “hero” of the games you play. And we could make the most of players’ willingness to share, and get them more involved in actively creating crucial content for games. Spore and LittleBigPlanet are just two examples of this, while many games provide level editors and there are more great modding communities just waiting to be born.
And we can make the most of players’ immersion in pop culture and game media coverage. This can get them excited to get involved with a game. Thinking on a cross-media level could help share more information in more creative ways. Backstory could be provided in a comic or website, and related minigames could unlock more content to encourage fans to dig deeper. World of Warcraft has excelled at this, but it’s not the only game with good supporting content developed in other media. So you can not only get them creating content, but you can get them engaged by rewarding their attention by giving them even more access in the world of the game itself.
The ubiquitous digital distribution channels for games, enables us to patch any bugs and add features, and it can also help us think of serialized content that, while not spoiler-proof, at least continue offering new experiences, while also expanding the overall experience of a game. This also opens up the ability to more actively listen to your players and explore how best to get them engaged in shaping the experiences for themselves. Jason Rohrer’s game, Sleep is Death, takes this idea to an amazing extreme, and we can also see how Steward Butterfield and some other Flickr founding employees are trying to make the most of this with their upcoming game, Glitch. The very act of playing the game helps to expand what the game is.
This post-secret world affects how we experience playing games. It’s hard, if not impossible, to play a game completely fresh and be joyfully surprised by all that you experience. Instead, the pleasures of play can come along with all the information we have so readily at hand. So while there may not be many secrets, there can definitely be surprises to be found as we actively shape the games we play together.
If we’re very nice to him, Drew might stick around for a while to respond to comments on this thought-provoking article. Thanks, Drew, for sharing your contributions!
Too true, sir. Thanks for your article!
One game I can remember being genuinely surprised at, knowing next to nothing about it, was Beyond Good & Evil. That sort of thing doesn’t happen nearly enough.
Nice article, Drew! Makes me think of the disaster that was Uru — an MMO based on puzzles! I remember asking one of the designers, “Aren’t you worried that people will just post all the answers?” And he said, “We hope that won’t happen.”
Great stuff, Drew.
It will be really interesting to watch game design continue to develop in this new post-secert world. It should be a really fun toy to play with for the right creative minds.
Looking at your various examples as to how games have already begun to implement things, I can’t help but realize how reluctant I, as a gamer, am to accept any of it. Other than certain perks, like DLC, insta-patches, and hand FAQ’s to help me get out of troubled spots, I really don’t take advantage of any of this.
I don’t play MMOs. I rarely download mods of any kind, mainly because I feel I lack the technical know-how to get them working right (but, in honest, it’s just laziess). Despite being a huge comic book fan, I have never read any comic or book related to any games I’ve played, even the ones in which I’ve really enjoyed the world/story/characters, such as Dragon Age or Mass Effect.
My gaming world is still grounded pretty soundly in the pre-secret (or would that just be “secret”?) world? The only on-line game I’ve played was “Left 4 Dead” and even then I would only play with my friends.
I am sure that they will come up with something that piques my interest. I definitely feel like there is a ton of potential there. I really love the whole on-line/multi-player aspect of “Demon’s Souls” for example, with the leaving of messages and ability to get help, people invading your game, etc. Despite the fact that I found the game to be particularly annoying and awful, I really thought that aspect of it was incredibly interesting and ripe with potential.
As for spoilers, like with movies and TV shows, I have found that, given just a little bit of work, more often than not, I am able to avoid things I want to avoid. It takes a little self-discipline, but can be done.
Someone – it was either Clint Hocking or Steven Poole – wrote recently in EDGE that the whole idea of play has changed, that much of it has become a shared and/or social experience, and that ties in with Drew’s post-secret thesis. The argument, grossly reduced, was that “it’d break the story” is no excuse not to put two or four player co-op into a game like Bioshock or Crackdown. That the story is experienced differently now because we communicate differently.
While I think there will always be room for twists and surprise endings (an etiquette beyond “spoiler alert!” will organically develop), the evolution of how people are playing together right now versus even just a few years ago is a socioludological earthquake. Yes, that’s a word!
Thanks for your great contribution, Drew!
first of all, thanks for the thoughtful comments…
@xtal – i’m with you on beyond good and evil, i had no idea what i was getting into (just had heard that it was good… so it was a blast to play.
@jesse – yeah, that was tricky for uru for sure… what’s cool though, is that it developed a fan community that continues to host the game online for people to play… so some interesting social dynamics have evolved in the player base…
@ajax19 – i should have mentioned that i also try really hard to avoid spoilers while also reading up on all the coverage to find out about new and upcoming games that i’d like to play… for some reason it doesn’t bother me as much if i stumble over a spoiler for a tv show, and if i really get stuck in a game, i will hop over to gamefaqs for help… but i still find it exciting to find some great game to savor (i’m waiting (im)patiently for the last guardian (although i think penny arcade is spot on about the ending – spoiler alert?:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/8/
@steerpike – i agree, i think stories are experienced differently as we can get so much easily engaged in discussions around something we really like… i remember reading the watchmen comic issue by issue (so there was the wait! plus there was only one other person i knew who was into it as well… so i didn’t really discuss it with anyone at the time… compared to the release of the watchmen movie where you could easily dive into as much discussion as you wanted…
thanks! drew
I’ve begun to notice that in regards to spoilers, the longer a single spoiler is out there propagating, the more it replicates and the harder it is to avoid it. Eventually the amount of energy required to duck the spoiler is greater than the amount of pleasure the secret or twist will give you anyway. A kind of diminishing returns thing. I will usually give up after a while and just spoil myself to get it over with. And you know what. It’s okay. The world doesn’t end.
@mike gust – i like the idea that there’s a tipping point with the effort it takes to avoid spoilers vs just getting the twist and enjoying the experience nonetheless… also makes me think about the time it takes for a spoiler to no longer be a spoiler… if it’s a fairly new movie or game, it’s fair not to spoil it for someone… but would it really be a spoiler to reveal that darth vader is luke’s father (ok that’s a dated example, but still…
and thinking in particular about easter eggs in games… often i’d never find them if i didn’t find out from someone else… my recent favorites are some of the ways to get the stars in braid (someone sat there for hours for that ssslllloooowwwww cloud to figure out how to get that star…
That’s an interesting point, Steerpike, about how the whole idea of play has changed. As someone who has been playing table top role-playing games since he was six years old (30 years now), a lot of my play has always been part of a shared/social experience.
That said, as time has gone on, I have found that really only enjoy sharing my “play time” with a very select group of people. I have carried over this same view (prejudice?) into gaming. I love co-op games and enjoy multi-player games, but only if I am playing with that same select group. While I certainly don’t mind playing with strangers on occassions, it doesn’t add that much for me and eventually some jack-ass pops in and spoils the fun.
I think this is way, outside of playing with my friends, my computer gaming experiences more often than not tend to be a very solitary endeavor. I don’t mind that at all.
Ajax: I’d recently gone to a release party for a hand drawn calendar a local man does that’s pretty popular in Los Angeles. He’s been doing it for 25 years, and he gave a little speech with the history of the whole thing.
He was talking about starting off writing zines back in the 80’s and how Zines bought all the nerds, punks, scifi people, and social outcasts together… “before the internet made us all normal.”
Your comment about playing tabletop RPGs and the thought of how now even “normal” people play RPGs like WoW just once again solidified that speech for me. I know it’s kind of off topic otherwise, but you know, changing times and all…
Great read Drew. Very insightful stuff, brought home all the more by my finally giving in and creating a Facebook account yesterday. Now to just resist the urge to try all the games they keep advertising on the sidebar.
@armand – i have to be honest and confess that i’m not on facebook myself even… i still hold out in order to manage my time (farmville = time sink… i guess it would be fair to say that i’m a bit analog in how i social network to keep up with stuff (and people…
Restarting WoW yesterday brought all this home. I’d played four years straight, not only reading spoilers and guides but creating them. Always the guild go-to guy for every finicky detail.
Now it’s oddly canted, new but not.
It’s extremely tempting to dive back into the resources and play optimally from day one but it feels like there ought to be value in resisting. Deferring the urge; if I do start playing seriously again I’ll doubtless cave.
@finkbug – oyeah, i also can cave into getting as much info about a game i’m having fun playing… so in some ways i guess this could “spoil” the experience… but getting into all that info really adds to my enjoyment of the game…
Thought provoking article there Drew. I think ready access to spoilers/guides is a good thing. What bugs me is when you’re unprepared for a spoiler.
As a huge fan of the original Tron, I was checking out some shots of the character models. Beside the pictures there was some flavour text, and before I knew it my eyes ran over a spoiler for one of the characters which I didn’t want to know. Very deflating – and you can’t lose that info no matter how hard you try.
So, as long as spoilers are clearly labelled, I think it’s great, and I like the freedom to access that information when it suits me.
Also, I think people’s patience with games has decreased at the same time as access to spoilers/guides has increased. I know many friends who play games almost exclusively by using walkthroughs. Sometimes they won’t even be stuck, and they’ll seek help. I lovingly remember ye olde C64 pre-internet days where you’d work on one boss for weeks seeking their weakness.
Now games often have built-in help/guide mechanisms (which are great (and should be optional), but I think a lot of people, particularly younger generations, look up guides at the merest whif of resistance.
@jarrod – oyeah, even though i usually like the idea of crossmedia connections to help provide more info… often though, this can surprise you with an unexpected spoiler or two…it’s like the line of action figure toys for the new green lantern movie (which gives away some of the characters in the movie…
WoW dismantled many of its own surprises when achievements were added. While all the locations of odd corners in old zones could have been easily researched online their existence was not obvious.
That was the perfect balance.
An achievement flashing neon 14/15 explored drives people to the out-of-game sources and undercuts the game world. Blizzard started building their game world around achievements starting with Lich King and is the weaker for it.
In an ideal world, achievements would pop up as a nifty surprise for doing something the player was going to do anyway but that is not possible in the era of spoilers. As soon as that quantification is added it becomes stamp collecting.
[…] Post-Secret Game Design by Drew Davidson (ETC at Carnegie Mellon!) discusses ways that our hyper-public internet lives will impact game design. […]
Fascinating article Drew and as I was reading it I thought about Braid and all the threads me and my girlfriend poured over to decipher the story and find the locations of those pesky stars. A few of them were in very suspect places (and because of these I’m glad I didn’t get looking for them all) but some ie. the ones that were subtly hinted at (like the slow cloud one) were really clever and what I’d deem ‘findable’. Since playing Braid I’ve had this internal struggle where one side of me is saying ‘The stars are a secret and supposed to be difficult to find!’ while the other side is saying ‘But that one’s in a bloody ridiculous place, how the hell am I supposed to find that?!’ so secrets are a fine balance for me. However, what I was going to say was: I like to think that Jonathan Blow laughs himself to sleep because there’s a secret in Braid that nobody has found yet.
An issue with finding secrets without the help of the media is that because of the media explosion over the last 5-10 years there’s much more stuff to read, watch, listen to and play so my time has to be spread so much thinner than before. As a result, I’ve simply not got as much disposable time to discover things myself. Which is a shame.
After writing my review for Penumbra: Black Plague I can safely say that trying to keep a review spoiler free whilst criticising the game while at the same time trying to be informative and entertaining is a tough act indeed. I’m really sensitive to plot and mechanical spoilers and love nothing more than going into a game with a totally blank slate — there’s nothing better than a good surprise.
And finally, being a seasoned games veteran and one that likes to look closely at their make-up can sort of destroy the magic of it all a little (I remember a friend telling me that he hated it when he learnt how magnetism worked because to him that was pure magic). It’s remarkable how quickly we as experienced gamers discover the limits or boundaries of these virtual spaces; within moments we know what we can and can’t do. Which is kind of deflating. That’s why games like Dwarf Fortress (and Minecraft, natch) really excite me: they’re constantly evolving so there are always secrets to be found and new things to discover. Not that I’ll have the time to sink into them :-S
Excellent article!
The last game I went into totally “blind” was BioShock. I knew nothing about it, but it came out in the UK on the same day as the Xbox 360 Elite, and being in the market for a new 360 anyway, I took the plunge. The whole experience blew me away.
Was that because I had absolutely no pre-conceptions, or just because the game was awesome? I’ll attribute it to both. Going into a game knowing nothing about it was pretty unique for me at the time, but it was a bonus that I loved every second of actually playing it too. BioShock is the only game from this generation I constantly name in my top lists of all time. It’s never happened since, mind. I’m on a media blackout for Infinite, but even then because I played BioShock, Infinite won’t be the total surprise that BioShock was.
Nowadays I wish we didn’t know so much about the games we buy, but when I was younger and first started gaming I used to pour over every last page of the gaming mags for even the slightest bits of information. It’s funny how things change.
@gregg b – i agree, jonathan definitely keeps his cards close to his vest around his intentions with braid (which makes it fun to dig even more…
and i think both dwarf fortress and minecraft are great examples of games that make the most of our contributions to keep the game continually fresh…
@mat c – i went into bioshock with a lot of info… it was still fun to play, but it does make me wonder if it would have been even more cool to have it all new… and yeah, we used to have to really work hard to find little scraps of info… it’s just so much easier now… david sedaris has written an essay that a positive effect of how easy it is now to find info, is that it helps people find their tribe… but still, there was something rewarding in having to make the effort…
One of the things about Drew’s article that really made me contemplate our world is less the realization that we are post-secret, but that post-secrecy means pre-newness. While it’s certainly true that some privacy has been lost – a major issue for a man such as me, who is very private – I’m nonetheless fascinated by what it’s meant to our world.
Take a look at this site, even. Of all our writers, I’ve seen exactly two in person. The rest I only know exist through today’s post-secret communication. All the people from faraway lands – Gregg, Lewis, Mat, xtal, Helmut, Meho, Jarrod – I would never have known those guys existed had it not been for the world we live in today, and I would have been less for it. And those are just the ones with funny accents. The Jens and Scouts and Yaps and Togers and Armands, them I’ve known and loved for TEN YEARS in some cases now, without ever hearing a voice.
The post-secret world has taken our secrets but in return has brought us closer together. In time we’ll fully grow into the new paradigm, as people always do.
Of course you and all Tappers can hear any of our voices if you join in on Left 4 Dead 2! Yes Left 4 Dead 2, the official new multiplayer game for Tap Repeatedly.
…well, maybe not official, but it should be.
@steerpike – you just reminded me of some books by dick hebdige, _subculture_ and _hiding in the light_… it’s been awhile since i’ve read it, but it focuses on pop culture and i recall that he talks about how subcultures (he looks at punk) can hide in pop culture as their style goes mainstream, but they move onto what’s next… it’s a constant evolution as “cool” things get commodified, and people move onto something new… and so, i think you’re right… this post-secret culture is rather mainstream, but we’ll see a new culture evolve (i.e. private could become the new “black” as it were…
My girlfriend who works in a cinema told me this morning to avoid anybody talking about Danny Boyle’s new film 127 Hours because they would undoubtedly spoil it. As it happens my dad got the book for Christmas and it all but revealed the ‘punch’ of the story in the synopsis. My girlfriend found it out through her colleagues at work who hadn’t even seen it themselves!
I think because of how saturated with media our culture is people have to be pulled in and products have to stand out in any way possible so rather than subtly teasing people, marketing tends to shotgun blast everything and hope something hits. Film trailers seem to be revealing more and more these days and there are so many exclusive documentaries and features on tomorrows blockbusters so its unsurprising that we’re well and truly gorged on information by the time we sit down to enjoy them.
“the evolution of how people are playing together right now versus even just a few years ago is a socioludological earthquake. Yes, that’s a word!”
NOW ITS A WEBSITE
socioludology.org
[…] the mystery? Drew Davidson, writing for Tap-Repeatedly, explored the idea of our modern post-secret world where spoilers are part of the cultural machine. David Fox also touched on this, convinced that it […]
[…] never particularly happy with writers arguing that we were all so post-spoiler in the age of the permanent electronic connection. But I’m mellowing in my old age. As long no one reveals who dies in the next series of Game […]