(Video) Game Theory: An Interview with Eric Zimmerman

Do you miss junior high?  Those golden years of cruelty, cliques, and betrayal?  Whether you're nostalgic for the power and sadism or just want to get even once and for all, SiSSYFiGHT 2000 (www.sissyfight.com) is the game for you. Its premise: in a novel application of game theory, you and several other players pretend to be little girls on a playground, chipping away at each others' self-esteem with carefully crafted strategies.

Personally, I can only take so much of this game's viciousness at once. I couldn't wait for junior high to end, so I could only imagine the worst about someone who would want to create a game that would recreate the heart-pounding panic of a schoolyard fight. Surprisingly, however, Eric

Zimmerman, who created SiSSYFiGHT in a collaboration with Word magazine (www.word.com), says he was never a SiSSYFiGHTER himself, though he was "a very bratty little brother and tortured [his] older sister mercilessly"; he spent his childhood not fighting, but playing and inventing games.

These days, Eric Zimmerman not only invents games, but writes and lectures about them at institutions such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Brown, UCLA, and USC, as well as New York University and Parsons School of the Arts, where he holds Adjunct Professorships.  He is also directing RE:PLAY, a series of events on game design and game culture. His creations rely not on the latest 3-D graphics engine, but on thought-provoking experimentation with the structure and the culture of games.

On popularity

SATELLITE: I'm sure you've been asked this question many times before, but perhaps your opinions have changed over time, so I'm asking you again. What do you think makes SiSSYFiGHT so popular?

ERIC ZIMMERMAN: SiSSYFiGHT 2000 did not receive any marketing from Word.com, so its popularity has to be attributed to the way that it was able to move virally through culture, particularly the culture of the Internet.

There are two aspects of SiSSYFiGHT that primarily contribute to its popularity. First, you can describe the game in one strangely perverse, tantalizing sentence: "It's a multi-player game about little girls fighting on a playground."  This sentence immediately makes you want to go to the site and check it out. Then, when you actually arrive at sissyfight.com, the game delivers. The gameplay, aesthetics, and overall experience of SiSSYFiGHT somehow manage to deliver on the ambitious promise of the one-line description.

Some games fulfill one side of this coin and not the other. For example, many wonderfully designed games are just geeky gamer fare that are never going to be seductive enough to burst out of gamer culture and into pop culture at large. On the other hand, some games, like Dope Wars (that Palm Pilot game about selling drugs), had a great one-liner appeal, but the gameplay was not as approachable and addictive as something like SiSSYFiGHT.

On culture and gender

S: In one of your essays, you propose a three-tier approach to game analysis--the game as rules, play, and culture. How would you analyze SiSSYFiGHT from this perspective (or, if you prefer, from any other perspective)?  I'm particularly interested in what you think its success says about our society and culture.

EZ: To skip to the end of your question, I'm not sure that a particular instance of culture like SiSSYFiGHT "says" any one simple thing about society. Compared to other forms of media--such as the "offensive" lyrics in some genres of rap, the "violent" spectacles of film, or the gloriously extreme perversity found in underground comix, SiSSYFiGHT is quite tame. As a game, SiSSYFiGHT is playful--it is play, in fact. And play is a complex phenomenon that can take place on many levels: strategic play, athletic play, narrative play, etc. One way that SiSSYFiGHT plays that many digital games do not is in and among cultural representations: of childhood, of girls, of violence, and even of computer games themselves. So to turn your question around, SiSSYFiGHT does not in and of itself "say" anything about society. Instead, it is only in and through society and culture that SiSSYFiGHT itself can "speak."

S: Do you know, more or less, the real-life male-female distribution of SiSSYFiGHTers?  Do you think males would be less likely to play this game because of the all-female characters?  Do you think that gender plays a significant role in the politics of the game?

EZ: While Word.com never took statistical measure of the demographics of the SiSSYFiGHT audience, our experience in the community of the game seemed to indicate that the players were split roughly equally along gender lines. And while the bulk of the players were the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings that make up Word's core audience, there was clearly a large portion of teens and also of older adults.

Gender absolutely plays a significant role in the politics of the game. Not only are all of the characters female, which replaces the typical "male gerund" [sic] avatar of the gaming world, but SiSSYFiGHT presents a model of female identity which is starkly different than a typical digital game.

Generally, female characters in digital games tend to fall into the virgin/whore template of princess-to-rescue (Mario's Princess Toadstool, the obscure object of desire which is conflated with the larger goal of winning the game) or action slut (Lara Croft--yes, she's the hero of the story, but she's a hyperreal pin-up). I'm not sure what exactly the bratty girls of SiSSYFiGHT are, but they're certainly in neither one of the two categories I mentioned.

On mischief

S: On a related note, what factors do you think might provoke the vulgar names that many SiSSYFiGHTers choose, such as HardNips or Bjgirl69? You seem to delight in games (SiSSYFiGHT, Suspicion) that create discord and distrust between their players. Do you see that as a measure of success in game design?  How do you measure a game's success? SiSSYFiGHT seems transgressive mostly because of the framework built around it--its rules are not revolutionary. How is it transgressive?  Could you name and/or describe some games that subvert traditional game structure?  Or others, like SiSSYFiGHT, that subvert traditional modes of gameplaying?

EZ: These three questions are related to each other, so I'll tackle them all together. Yes, SiSSYFiGHT is designed to be a transgressive game experience, perverse and pleasurable on multiple levels. And no, that's not the only way that games can create meaningful experiences for players. Chess, for example, creates a fun experience through very different means. However, there are plenty of examples of other games that do operate this way, from Spin the Bottle to game-like activities like a beauty contest. However, for my own work, I do often enjoy challenging players to explore new forms of social interaction and role-playing that they normally wouldn't experience. That's something games can do quite well. The "magic circle" of a game (as Dutch philosopher Johannes Huizinga calls it) is a strange kind of artificial space where players take on roles they normally wouldn't outside the game.

For SiSSYFiGHT, part of the goal of the design was to create an intrinsically social game that made full use of the communicative nature of the Internet. Because of the kind of content of the game, we really wanted to create a social context that was uncomfortable, that encouraged ganging up, that exploited rather than repressed the flaming and catcalling that happens in chat rooms and listservs.

The "transgressiveness" you identify in SiSSYFiGHT bubbles up out of the overall game experience. But it is a result of a particular "recipe" of elements, each of which contains some of that transgression. The formal structure of the game, for example, in which players have to rely on each other to get things done, but can't ultimately trust each other, is crucial. The visual design of the game, narrative content, and larger community all play a part as well. The tenor of the community (such as the bulletin board discussions) is incredibly friendly and supportive. In some ways, the community is the larger "safe space" around the scarier "magic circle" of the game itself.

I also have an interest in the violence and perversity of children's play. One of the things we looked at while developing the game was my (unpublished) card game Fighting Babies. There are many ways to frame play, and contemporary society tends to think of play as a children's activity that makes kids into better citizens of the state by repressing their sexual and violent tendencies and educating them socially, cognitively, and morally. However, there are other models for play as well: I like to think of play as mischief, transgression, or subversion. I think this comes through pretty clearly in SiSSYFiGHT.

On rules

S: You've written about the relationship between rules and play--spontaneous play is created within a framework of rigid rules, and even in role-playing games that attempt to perfectly mimic the real world, the fun of the game comes from its built-in limitations. Do you think there is a definable relationship between the simplicity or complexity of a rule system and the type of play that comes out of it?

EZ: No. One of the things that keeps me continually interested in game design is that there really are no fixed rules on what makes a game fun. Every game presents a new set of problems. For example, I used to think that "less is more" and that proper "emergent play" could only arise out of a very simple set of rules, as in the board game Go. However, recent games like The Sims prove that wonderful emergent play can come out of very complex systems as well. Of course, the social [context] and cultural context of a game are also incredibly important factors in the design process as well. SiSSYFiGHT 2000 engendered unexpected, emergent behavior on many different levels. Players have generated special strategies or defensive and offensive actions. They have also come up with an in-game lingo, such as "TTT" for "Tease the Tattler."  SiSSYFiGHT communities have sprung up, both within the game site and across fan sites as well, such as sissyfightnews.com. A game, unlike most other forms of media, is not passively received but instead is more like a box of tools - it is a set of possibilities which players use to fashion their own experiences. One of the distinctive pleasures of being a game designer is seeing a game being played in ways that you never anticipated.

On personal history

S: How did you get into game design?  How did studying art influence your ideas about game design?

EZ: It turns out that I have been making games my whole life. Growing up in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana, I was lucky enough to have a lot of spaces for play. I would draft neighborhood kids into test-driving elaborate haunted houses I would make in my basement, or play variations of Kick the Can or Ghost in the Graveyard with the kids on my block. Of course

I was an early computer game player (my fifth grade class had a TRS-80 and my best friend had an Atari) and I was a Dungeons and Dragons supergeek in junior high and high school.

But I was always interested in making art too--music, visual art, writing, and theater. I studied Painting at the University of Pennsylvania for my undergraduate degree. I was always making these diagrams about the relationships between the artist, the artwork, and the viewer, elaborate models for the creation and experience of art. After I left art-making to make pop culture in the form of games (during which I received an MFA in Art & Technology at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at OSU), I realized that in designing a game I am able to focus on those relationships to the exclusion of all else. A painter makes an object for passive contemplation. A game designer creates a system which only comes to life when it is inhabited and played by players. Engineering social relationships, as in SiSSYFiGHT, is a very unique kind of design activity and I find it very satisfying.

Something else that lingers from making art is that I always think about what I do as the creation of culture. I think many game developers suffer because they think about what they do as the creation of software, or gameplay, or aesthetic experience, or interactive narratives, or whatever. All of these are valid ways of framing the game design experience, but for me the overall rubric which includes them all is culture. A training in art, a field which derives its meanings so clearly from cultural values, sensitized me to this fact long ago.

S: Were there any games that you played as a child that particularly influenced you?   What other games do you find interesting or exciting?

EZ: I played many kinds of games growing up, some of which I mentioned above. I remember playing chess as a toddler with my father, creating special rules for elaborate games involving plastic army men in elementary school, designing "the digestive game" in fifth grade as a science project (each player was a food particle and the goal was to be the first one to make it from the mouth to the anus), living in video arcades throughout the 80s, inventing pencil-and-paper role-playing games in high school, playing Doom late into the night in the mid-90s, marathon sessions of the strategy board game Settlers of Katan more recently. I could go on and on. I am always on the lookout for experimental and innovative games, something which is more and more difficult to find in these days of big budget genre games and conservative game publishers. Parappa the Rapper was a wonderfully inventive game. The Sims is the most interesting thing Maxis has created since the original Sim City. Jet Grind Radio looks fantastic. But in general I have to look hard to find interesting games these days.

On work (and play)

S: What is the creative process of designing a game like SiSSYFiGHT?

EZ: Designing and developing digital games is a very complex process. Like making a film, it is a radically interdisciplinary and highly collaborative activity. At my company gameLab, a minimum game development team usually consists of a game designer, a visual designer, a sound designer, and a programmer.

My general methodology is iterative design. This means that instead of thinking it all up in advance, writing a very detailed document, creating all of the art and sound, and then plugging it in and debugging it, we try and create a down-and-dirty, playable prototype as quickly as possible during the development process. Only when we can actually play the game is it possible to determine what is and isn't working and what needs to happen to maximize the "fun" quotient for the player. The development proceeds as a process of play testing and refining iterative versions of the game. SiSSYFiGHT, for example, began as a paper game that we played with Post-It notes around a conference table at Word.com. The next version was a text-only game the lead programmer created for an IRC channel. We had to take turns playing it on the same terminal. Then we had a networked text-only version, and only after that did we have an actual, playable Shockwave version that could be played on the Web. Even this initial version of the game was very skeletal and ugly-but we took it around to friends' companies and had groups of people play it after work. We ended up overhauling the interface a number of times so that it was as clear and approachable as possible for players.

S: How would you characterize your games as a body of work?

EZ: My interest in games and game design runs deep, so it is hard for me to generalize certain themes that runs through all of my digital and non-digital game work, for both commercial and art contexts. However, in reflecting on my own thinking process, I would say that there are two primary foci to the way I approach my work.

Much of my interest in game design is purely formal. Perhaps it comes from my formalist, Modernist training as a painter, but I love manipulating pure structure, tweaking rules and variables to see how they play out, crafting an elegant formal system. Some of the ideas I explore in this way have to do with artificial life and emergent complexity, abstracted social interaction, choice and meaning in games, the paradox of freedom and constraint, rules and play. This for me is the core of the craft of game design.

The flip side of this coin is my interest in games as culture. This involves understanding how games relate to other media, how games can create narratives and be representational systems in ways that other media cannot, and how I can play with the cultural status of games. If you look at any of my work, you can usually find these two elements in some kind of balance.

S: Do you play your own games in your spare time?

EZ: Spare time!  Yeah, right. Luckily, in the process of making games, I do a lot of playing. Generally, by the time I finish a game, I've played it so much that I'm kind of sick of it, but I've come back to my old games from time to time to see how they're holding up. With a game like SiSSYFiGHT, it has been extremely educational to stay in touch with the game and see how strategies and the community develop.

S: What projects are you currently working on?  Are you working on any new collaborations with Word?

EZ: Sadly, Word.com no longer exists. But I am still making games. A few months after SiSSYFiGHT 2000 launched, I formed gameLab, a New York game development company, with my longtime collaborator Peter Lee. gameLab is busy making single-player and multi-player online games, in the tradition of SiSSYFiGHT. Our first game, BLiX, just launched on Shockwave.com.

On the future of games

S: You've written that the "future of fun" lies in multi-player connectivity, in games returning to their roots as means of social interaction. What other directions do you see games taking in the future? Do you see these directions as having important implications about the directions our society is headed in?  More generally, in your opinion, what larger importance do games have?

EZ: There are a number of economic, technological, and cultural factors affecting the development of the game industry. While the game industry has grown remarkably quickly (it now is comparable to the film industry in America in terms of revenue), it is like the Hollywood film industry without an alternative film industry.

Games are very expensive to make (a mainstream game typically costs US$ 2-4 million). The equivalent of the "garage band" that can record an album over a weekend does not exist in the medium. Retail distribution is bottlenecked by a handful of store chains that lack sufficient shelf space and have a high turnover rate, which makes it difficult for games without a massive marketing campaign to survive on the shelf. The game industry is a hit-driven industry like Hollywood and so publishers generally are looking for that one hit, rather than experimental or ground-breaking games, leading to hundreds of genrefied, "look-alike" game titles. Games tend to be made by and for "hardcore gamers" and therefore games have been slow to find new audiences. Some hope that online distribution can alleviate some of these problems, but the challenge of making money from games online remains an unanswered question.

A question for me is, considering all of these factors, how will games develop as a medium? One possibility is that they will remain mired in adolescent power fantasies, and like comic books, will never overcome their social stigma, regardless of how much experimentation goes on in the medium.

On the other hand, games might become like film or music, multifaceted pop media in which there is room for both corporate boy-band dreck as well as commercially successful experimentation.

Where will games end up?  Part of why I'm working in this field is to try and answer this question.

Eric Zimmerman on gameLab:

gameLab's goal is to have an impact on the culture of games, to think about games as pop culture, and to bring games to people that don't normally play them. We'd like to be the independent filmmakers of the gaming world. Right now the game industry is all center and no margins and we'd like to change that.

gameLab incorporates a play-based research model into the company's activities, creating a space that integrates academic thinking (such as giving employees research sabbaticals) into the design and development of games.

We're working in New York City, which is a complete wasteland as far as the game industry is concerned--but we'd like to counter the California-based culture of US gaming with new kinds of aesthetic languages, new genres of narrative and cultural content, and (of course) new forms of gameplay.

New York new media is completely vapid culturally. We hope to be the exception. Unlike most NYC new media companies, gameLab doesn't have a work-for-hire or an investment-based model: instead, we're working in a traditional game industry model, where publishers fund content and then also market and distribute it, and then we get royalties. We're the band, not the record label.