Hackbot inspiration

I’m a Teals volunteer, which means that I volunteer to teach high school students computer science. On day 1, we have the kids load up this game called Light Bot. It’s a pretty short introduction to programming and it’s never really referenced later in the curriculum. I think we can do better. I recently streamed myself playing a similar puzzle game called KnotBot. KnotBot is a puzzle game designed to teach you the absolute basics of programming. It does a good job of introducing if statements as well as loops using GoTo statements. It’s a really elementary game but would be an awesome introduction to kids who have never programmed before. The game is really colorful and cute and provides an awesome visual representation of how a computer works and can definitely be referenced back to when we introduce those concepts in Snap!

This posed two thoughts to me which inspired this post. The first is, wouldn’t it be cool if we could use games as syllabus items in school? Similar to how you are required to read certain pieces of literature in an english class. How interesting would it be if you were a kid and you were assigned to play through the first section of a video game for homework?

The second thought I had was, games that I played as a kid were really just about having fun. This was great, I loved running around Princess Peach’s castle in Super Mario 64 or exploring all of the nooks and crannies of the worlds in Gruntildas castle in Banjo Kazooie. But as an adult, I feel the need to protect my time. When I read a book, watch a movie, or play a game, I really love it when I feel like I get something out of the experience.

For example, this is one of the main reasons why I loved the first season of Westworld but could barely get through the second. I felt like I learned something philosophically about myself and the human condition in the first season but the second season left that behind and focused on character relationships.

I’d like to share some of the game experiences where the game has earned permanent real estate in my mind. Specifically, the moral decision making in The Witcher 3, the seesaw of introversion and extroversion of Persona 4, and the satisfaction of cooperation and collaboration in World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft

This section can almost entirely be summed up by this video from The Office.

World of Warcraft is the reason why I switched majors in college. It is the reason why I like group projects. It is the reason why I learned how to use data to solve problems objectively. WoW is the most influential game I’ve ever played in my life. WoW’s replayability comes from the fact that every dungeon, raid, or pvp experience is different because of the people you choose to share that experience with. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to focus on the player vs. environment content of raiding.

Raids are collaborative puzzle solving exercises. In order to defeat a raid boss, your team of 10+ individuals must come up with a strategy that fits their strengths and weaknesses while also managing the unique combination of mechanics and timing that a particular boss has. In order to clear a WoW raid, you must do this for 8 different encounters over the course of 6 months. A WoW raid tier is essentially a semester long group project where you can fail in so many ways that the fact that groups have stuck together for 10 or more years is baffling to me.

In high school, I played so much WoW that I related to the guy from South Park a bit too well. I played at such a competitive level that our group was the first on our server (of 1000+ groups) to complete the raid tier at the hardest possible difficulty for 4 tiers in a row at the height of WoW’s popularity. The Death’s Demise, Celestial Defender, and Grand Crusader all represent experiences that will stick with me until I die.

In order to do this, I had to understand my character’s strengths and weaknesses, I had to have the mechanical skill of a whack-a-mole grandmaster, and I had to offer up some insight in how my character would fit into the solution of defeating each boss. We had to work with other members of our healing team to help assign roles to conquer the challenges presented by each boss. We all had to overcome hundreds to thousands of failures over the course of a few months, until we had one success.

In order to do my job well, I have to understand my strengths and weaknesses as an engineer. I have to have experiential skill and knowledge to solve problems that are so small, they’re sometimes only a semicolon in size. I have to provide insight that someone with 10 years, 4 jobs, and 1 degree can offer to solve customer problems with deadlines where we CAN fail to deliver. Our team of engineers works together to build solutions individually that total up to a product greater than the sum of its parts. We all overcome hundreds of small failures individually, some failures collaboratively, and hopefully as few as possible failures in the grand scheme of our entire team of engineers, managers and designers. We do this in order to achieve one success in our careers.

Collaboration is a requirement in WoW. I like it so much, I actively chose a career that allows me to do it everyday. I don’t think WoW is the only thing that can give you this thrill. I also played in an orchestral and jazz band in grade school which can develops the same set of skills. But that being said, the accessibility of collaborative online games like WoW cannot be undervalued. Our bands were fine, but our parents would clap even if we played every note wrong. Our raid group was awesome and in the sphere of online we only acquired those achievements because we did something that was genuinely hard.

Persona 4 Golden

I wrote off Persona games. As someone who doesn’t view themselves as an anime afficionado, anything that’s come out of Japan that didn’t require collecting orange balls OR have a red hat never really piqued my interest.

I come to you now as a reformed man. I see now the error of my ways. Persona is no more of an ‘anime game about teenagers’ than Mario is a game about plumbing. Persona is actually a game about time. In fact it’s a game about time management in life. Persona takes the harsh truth of life, that time is linear and that you can never go back to this moment, to heart. Every day in Persona, you are confronted with the opportunity cost of every action. Doing something means that you’re NOT doing something else.

For the uninitiated (like I was), in Persona, you may have to pick how to spend your time twice per day, on most days where there are no story elements or ‘events’. This feels like life. Most of your days allow a big swath of free time to do whatever you want, but you can’t actually do EVERYTHING you want. Persona has four categories of choices, introversion, extroversion, doing nothing, or working out. All of these options, sans ‘doing nothing’, have an element of self improvement and bettering oneself and ultimately improving your game experience. This is that introversion, extroversion seesaw.

I think in my life, I’ve found that introversion might be something like reading, watching a movie, or playing single player games. Extroversion is hanging out with friends by going somewhere, playing a game together, or just chatting on the phone. ‘Working out’ would be actual work, it’s what you need to do to keep the game of life going, but sometimes it can feel grindy and sometimes it can be incredibly rewarding, depending on the situation. Doing nothing is watching hours of youtube videos or reading the 4th+ page of reddit.

All of these pieces interweave together in Persona. You need introverted skills to unlock the more interesting dialogue options with your friends. You need to build your friendships to improve your ability to handle harder combat situations. You need combat to actually advance the plot. Grinding introversion skills, doesn’t really get you anywhere without context. Friendships become tough to build without internal skills that make you an interesting person people want to spend time with. Friendships make the ‘work’ more tolerable and interesting. It’s all just a nice balancing act that puts the opportunity costs of life into perspective.

The Witcher 3

The Witcher’s original source material comes from books and has been ported to a TV series each respecting the morally ambiguous dark themes. But both of those mediums are ‘on rails’. You, as the participant never actually get to make the decisions, sometimes you don’t even know that there was an alternate option. In The Witcher 3, that option is shoved in your face and YOU will pay the penalties for that decision. This really gave me some respect for games as a medium for storytelling.

The fact that the game will take almost 60 hours (about 2-3 months of my free time) to complete makes me feel like the decision is effectively permanent and there’s no taking it back. This is what I believe separates a game like The Witcher and similar pieces of ‘choose your own adventure’ media, such as Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch. Both focus on decision trees, but the fact that you can observe every branch in Bandersnatch in a 3 hour sitting diminishes the experience of permanence.

Let me explain.

In as few Witcher 3 spoilers as possible, there’s a part where you’re in a swamp and the witches of said swamp tell you that you need to get rid of an evil presence that’s killing the people of the swamp. They ask you “Yo dawg can you take care of it?” So you go ahead and learn more about this presence. Eventually you meet the presence which explains that it was trying to protect itself from the witches and it basically makes a case for it’s existence. At this point you have to make the decision between two evils, help this presence out and team up with it, or complete your task given by the witches and defeat the presence. You have to choose what you hope is the lesser of two evils, there is no good choice.

At this point I had to put the controller down and walk away and think about it. I genuinely weighed the pros and cons of this decision. This felt… different. From the outside looking in this is just a basic decision tree that one of those pick your own adventure tales like Bandersnatch has explored for years, this felt much more real. It felt like the decision I made here would have a permanent impact on this community. This was not some pseudo decision where it didn’t matter which option you chose. The story and community would change with my decision.*

Now imagine that you were in an english class in high school and you had to play The Witcher 3 for homework. The next day you would all have a similar experience of the decision. You would be able to discuss HOW and WHY each person made the decision, and talk about the different consequences that came out of each decision. This game gives you the sandbox to understand and decide on morally grey decisions that are posed in life. Outside of philosophical thought experiments, which never actually require you to live with the consequences of your decision, I can’t particularly think of another medium that can do that.

Conclusion

At this point in the evolution of the art of video games, gaming culture and game development have matured to a point where we can get things out of video games to the same degree that we can get things out of books, movies, or really good television series. It feels like guilt is a big driver of people not playing games as adults because they feel as if they are a ‘waste of time’. But I would ask you to think, has anyone ever told you that we shouldn’t read books or watch movies because it’s a waste of time? If we reframe how we think about the games we play and why we play them, that guilt falls off as we learn to appreciate games for what they are and not loathe them for what they’re not.

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This post was heavily inspired by a presentation that legendary game designer, Jonathan Blow, recently put up on youtube about using video games as an educational medium.

One thing that I noticed about these games is that, when I was coming up with this initial list, I hadn’t actually BEATEN any of these games. I think that’s ok and I might explore this more in the future.

*I recently stumbled on a video by Avarti on youtube that actually goes more in depth on this particular scene. He explains the outcome of both choices and uses this case as a way of using utilitarian philosophy for ethical problem solving. Note, this will fully spoil both decisions.