Exploded Clown

There has been a lively debate about video games, art, production and consumption in the last few episodes of Hypercritical. John Siracusa has been avoiding the “are games art?” question and instead making the point that, if they are, they’re an odd form of art that requires some skill not just to produce, but to consume. Seeing a painting or listening to a song doesn’t require anything of the sort: although experience and knowledge can enhance your enjoyment of those art forms, no skills are required of the consumer. But playing games is different, John says, precisely because the consumer of the content must have the skills of a game player just to do the consuming.

I agree with John that this is a distinguishing feature of games, but it’s not a unique feature, and you’re proving it right now, because reading is a skill.

I suspect that John’s first reaction will be that reading may indeed be a skill, but that it’s a common enough skill that it “doesn’t count” for his argument. First I’d say that this is moving the goalposts, but moreover I would say that this is simply incorrect. Reading is not something that is common “in the wild”; no one naturally figures out reading on their own. Instead, it is drilled into you from an early age. We send our kids to classes where they diagram sentences, struggle with reading comprehension, and identify themes and motifs. They learn essay structure (or a sad parody thereof), and they practice reading from Dick and Jane to Charles Dickens. Even after all of this a lot of people aren’t good enough at it that they’ll do it except when necessary. But we spend an inordinate amount of time on it because we, as a society, have decided that this is a skill that’s important.

Why is it important? Because words are everywhere in the modern world, with varying levels of benefit. Streets and shops are labeled, which helps you navigate the world, but you could go by landmarks if you don’t need speed. Menus and instructions are written, but you could ask for help if you don’t need autonomy. Magazines and newspapers are words all over, but you could watch the news if you don’t need depth or quality. Poetry and novels and the internet are almost pure streams of words, but you can give them up if you don’t want to participate in our cultural society.

The written word is the fuel that an information society runs on.

So, is gaming as important as the written word? Not yet, surely. But the skills that gaming requires are that important: persistent successive attempts to approximate success, creative use of resources to solve complicated problems, probing complex systems to attain an understanding of the underlying rules, projecting yourself into a virtual world and interacting there with people different than yourself. These are the skills that a society of tomorrow may find of utmost importance, because they’re the skills you will need to survive in a highly dynamic, heavily networked world. Games may be the fuel that that society runs on.

Monte Cook wants everyone to be happy:

It’s become clear to me over the last few years that game players should be able to play the game they want to play, not the game a game designer wants them to play. (That there are game players who disagree with this shows me that there are game designers who are also persuasive marketers, or who work alongside persuasive marketers.) This is particularly true with tabletop roleplaying games, in my mind, because so much of rpgs involves players customizing characters, game options, and creating their own material. (And, even if a player chooses not to do any of those things, they’re still choosing not to, so they’re still playing the game they want to play.)

Games are for fun. Playing a game that someone else has inadvertently made unfun (or has made some portion of it unfun) shouldn’t be a part of gaming.

The problem with this mindset is that it assumes that the game designer can get out of the way, and I just don’t think that’s possible. When I sit down at my weekly game we all mediate the fun by refering to the rules. I’m guessing your table does the same, no matter what edition or playstyle you prefer. If you don’t have a set of rules, I think most people will agree that you’re not “playing D&D” you’re doing something else. You can ignore some rules, or houserule in some extras, or whatever, but the core of “playing D&D” is using at least some of D&D’s rules.

But here’s the thing about rules: they don’t just give you a way to “figure out what happens”. They give you a structure upon which you build everything else. Good game design is about choosing where you need to build structure to be built on, where you need to leave gaps for players to build into, and perhaps most importantly where you need to avoid touching entirely. D&D is a game about fantasy characters doing heroic and even amazing things in a world full of danger and treasure and adventure. It has rules to support all of those things. It does not have rules for, say, office romances. Sure, you can shoehorn in a CHA roll, but that’s kind of the base-level “interact with the world” set of rules. There’s not a defense stat for the heart, and no “burned by an affair with the boss” feat that gives you a bonus to it. And I’m going to go on record that there shouldn’t be; that’s not in D&D’s wheelhouse.

And that’s the thing: the rules show you what’s important in the game. In 4E combat is very important, and so most of the system is built around it. In GURPS skill rolls are important, so most of the system is built around that. In White Wolf mood is important, so most of the rules work hard to play on that level and avoid getting bogged down in details. In the Smallville RPG plot is important, so most of the rules push the plot forward (or sideways, or upside-down…).

Picking the game you’re playing is an exercise in picking the thing you think is important. If you want a great tactical game 4E is a good choice. If you want a game with an awesome character-driven plot Smallville is great. And if you want to experience the lethality of fantasy adventuring then first-ed D&D sounds like a perfect fit. Each of those games was designed by a game designer to emphasize certain things, and they have rules that do a good job of doing so.

But the idea that rules get in the way of playing the game is paradoxical: the rules are the game. What the players do at the table is surround the rules in their game, like bits of moisture coalescing into a cloud around dust in the air. The dust needs to be arranged just so in order for that to work right, but the position of the dust determines the center and shape of the cloud; it has no hope of ever being the cloud itself.

I just sent this to my representatives. You should, too:

Dear Senator, I just got done filling out the latest privacy policy for my bank. I do this every time they send me one in the mail, which seems to occur every few months. Every time it’s the same story: they’ve decided to make some minor change to their policy, this means that I need to accept the changes– oh and by the way if I don’t do so they’ll sell my name and information to everyone in the world so they can send me junkmail and even more offers for credit cards than I already get. The changes are always opt-out: I need to be proactive to make sure they don’t send me crap. But the bank gets to decide how often this stuff happens, and it seems to me that they’ve been deciding that “as often as possible” is the answer, probably because people will eventually forget to go through this rigamarole and end up on the send-me-junk rosters. So I’m writing to you because you should do something about it. You should propose a law making it illegal to default people in to this stuff. Make it so it’s always opt-in; if they want to send me their special offers they should sell me on the idea. The banks may scream, and they probably will, but they’re not the ones who voted for you, so let’s just ignore them on this one. You don’t want junk mail, and I don’t want junk mail, and truth be told the bankers don’t want any in their mailboxes, either, so let’s all just agree that getting less of it would be nice and shut off this one conduit. They can still change their privacy policies as much as they want, but let’s have no more of this nonsense. Thanks! Seth A. Roby

Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs is simply out too soon. The man died less than a month before the book hit the shelves, and the book has the feel of being rushed, with too much recitation and no enough reflection. But for all its failings, it’s worth reading.

Before we begin, let me caveat that I’m not going to talk much about the events of Steve’s life; the blogs are alight with people talking about all the juicy bits, and you can find that elsewhere. I am, instead, going to talk about the book qua book– how the book does its job as a biography and as a reading experience– and about the larger themes Steve’s life can tell us.

As a Biography

Let us begin with the parts it gets right. Isaacson had amazing access and Jobs’ blessing to talk to whomever he needed to, and he managed to do incredibly good interviews with a huge array of people. He compiled a ridiculous amount of information about Jobs’ life, and presents it clearly. He is brutally honest about how brutally unkind Jobs could be. It is a tribute to him that he manages to keep that objectivity even after he had become as close to Jobs as the end of the book would imply, and a tribute to Jobs that he wanted no part in whitewashing what would obviously be a somewhat unflattering biography. The prose is smart and clear and clean, with a few slips into being too-clever-by-half.

But the book falls far too often into chasing the end of the chapter. The story of Steve’s life is told as it was experienced, demo after demo, launch after launch, leave after leave. The chronology is important, but it is the first and simplest step in a biography, and for large tracts toward the end of the book we get nothing more than the chronology. Whereas Steve’s early life is told with a pop-psychologist’s eye toward motivations and internal conflicts, the last decade of Steve’s life runs by with nary a thought about it. You repeatedly get the feeling that Steve’s death came earlier than the publisher expected, and the last few drafted chapters had a quick copy-edit before being sent off to the printer’s.

The book also has some bizarre blind spots. Pixar is a perpetual second fiddle to Apple, which seems to have genuinely been the case but is never addressed directly. NeXT exists as a vaguely-defined wilderness that Steve wanders through during his exile, but its products are barely mentioned and what made them interesting, failures, and ultimately a successful foundation for Apple’s rebirth is never touched on. This contrasts especially oddly with the lovingly detailed story of the Mac team, which is taken nearly wholesale from Revolution in the Valley (Odder still: Andy Hertzfeld’s book is basically a love story to the rest of the team, but in Isaacson’s book every Mac-team story is told from Andy’s eyes, and so it seems Steve and he made the entire computer themselves). There are also huge industry movements that get nary a mention: the Internet isn’t ever important except to give an i to the iMac, and Job’s embrace of and slow distancing from DRM is never mentioned at all. Those two in particular are important for Jobs’ story: they tell of a platform nobody owns as a contrast to the many Apple created and curated, and the tools used for that curation and why they were abandoned.

Both the Internet and DRM share one thing in common with lots of other things given short shrift in the book: software is only ever important because it talks to hardware. This fits the “integrated system” that Jobs embraced and a theme that Isaacson emphasizes, but Steve being painfully obsessive over hardware was no different than his being painfully obsessive about the design of software, and there were a lot more software releases over the years than hardware ones.

The rushing and the blind spots combine to make it harder for Isaacson to present us with big-picture thinking about why Steve’s particular obsessions worked well for him. We hear a lot about painting the back sides of fences and owning the whole widget, which are important lessons, but they’re just supporting points of the real lesson. Let me build up to what that lesson is.

Lessons

The book does a very good job of painting how hard it must have been to be around Steve: he could be mean, he was driven, he often seemed arbitrary, and he didn’t care if you liked him. But between that you can see a deeper truth: it seems like it must have been incredibly hard to be Steve. Everything around him sucked all the time. No one around him cared as much as they should. No one “got it”, even when it was obvious, and even when Steve told them. The world was full of bozos who made crappy products, and Steve had to deal with both all the time. He was literally being annoyed by this stuff on his deathbed.

And that’s because being in tune with the design of everything around him was who he was, and he couldn’t turn that off. A continuing theme was mentors of Steve approaching him and telling him he was being a jerk, and Steve admitting it, promising to be better, failing to do so, and then saying that it was just “who he was”. He couldn’t turn off his design sense, and he couldn’t turn off his reaction when that sense was offended.

So as a defense mechanism he took Alan Kay’s words to heart, and invented the future. But Steve wasn’t the one to do the inventing, so we see a continuing string of people executing on his ideas. The interplay between ideas and execution is an important part of Steve’s life, but Isaacson doesn’t seem to notice the succession of pairings through the years:

• Jobs and Woz create the Apple I; Woz executes on Jobs’ sales idea.
• Jobs and Markkula create Apple Computer: Markkula executes on Jobs’ business idea.
• Jobs and the Mac Team create the Macintosh: The Pirates execute on Jobs’ vision of the future of computing.
• Jobs and NeXT create NeXTSTEP: the company lays the foundation for OS X by burning through mountains of Jobs’ cash.
• Jobs and Cook create an Apple that can compete: Cook makes the company competitive.
• • Compare with Eisner and Wells creating a decade of Disney animation: when Wells dies Eisner flails.
• Jobs and Ive create a succession of products: Ive executes on Jobs’ vision, even keeping new technology from Steve until it’s ready to be useful.

In each case Jobs provides the impetus but someone else provides the technical expertise to make it happen. Jobs, though, was not just an “ideas man” who threw things over the fence: he was deeply involved in every aspect of the creation until the consumer swiped a credit card and took the thing home. His gift was knowing what would make the thing better, and his curse was an absolute inability to be shy about letting you know. So he found people who could take his criticism and use it as it was meant to be: as a tool to refine their craft.

Adding this all together, we see what made Steve great: he knew that every part of execution matters. This goes beyond the back side of the fence; it encompases his aversion to letting “B players” onto the team, and it fits with many people describing his ability to hone in on the weakest part of a design. It shows why he switched sides on DRM (avoid extra steps), and why he thought that integrated systems were superior (the seams always show). He knew and saw that letting a small fissure stay in a design could split the entire thing apart: Woody accidentally became a jerk, the bezel of the iPhone overshadowed the screen, the stores needed to focus on tasks not products. Products are holistic creations and must be thought of that way, or the stray threads are the first things that users will pull at.

Conclusion: Art and Technology

The basic pairing Steve came back to was art and technology. He told Isaacson this again and again, yet it falls behind the Reality Distortion Field in the book’s hierarchy of themes. But this was Jobs at his most self-aware: he saw that where he had done the best work of his life was when he found art and technology that matched, and where he could fuse them together. But a lot of times he missed the intersection: NeXT had art but the technology hadn’t caught up, yet. When the technology finally did catch up, the same art made Apple huge. In the same way, the technology of photorealistic 3D might some day make the Pixar Imaging Computer’s artistic dreams a consumer reality.

Spending so long searching for and living at that intersection meant that when everything starting to become a computer, balancing art and technology became an incredibly valuable skill. Apple suddenly had a head start on industries that they hadn’t even been in competition with a few years before, and that head start grew because most of their competitors weren’t even trying to find the balance.

Many are saying that Apple is Jobs’ greatest creation. I agree, but the measure of their greatness will be in how well they maintain the balance he created, and how successfully they continue to make technology that can truly be called art.

Lots of people have already said how odd it has been processing the news of Steve Jobs’ passing: we didn’t know Steve and the vast majority of us have never even met him. And yet we grieve because he defined our industry is when it is at it’s best, and his example was what many of us have tried to follow.

He managed to take up so much of the horizon. He was the figure a lot of us wanted to be, the guy who saw further, knew faster, and made better. He strove to make the world a better place and succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams except his own. Because as much as we didn’t know him everyone who did agrees that he was never satisfied, was always ready for the next step, and was always thinking about the step beyond that. That he won’t get to take those steps with us is one of the most hurtful parts of the whole thing: when he showed us what was next his smile let us all know how happy he was to have found it, but also how happy he was to be sharing.

I have no doubt that Apple will continue making outstanding products. But I will miss seeing Steve’s excitement, and knowing that there will always be one more thing.