Chris Birk, Kixeye

WARNING

It is said that if you think you are talking about religion, and the conversation does not get difficult, or uncomfortable, then you are probably not talking about religion.  This working topic explores boundaries that may feel problematic, or just plain “wrong” to some readers. It is not the wish of this group to offend. We recognize that we do not have comprehensive understanding of the world’s religions and have often generalized in order to create a workable taxonomy and toolkit to address our problem statement.  It is our hope that in exploring this topic we offer ways to break new grounds in game design and add to the ever-growing palette of colors with which game designers can paint.

Whether you believe that the structures of religion are divinely designed or designed by man, or a little of both, it is clear that the world’s great religions each offer a system that work exceptionally well for user acquisition, reach and player retention.

This working group set out to deconstruct what functional mechanics are at play in successful religions. We wanted to learn what devices and approaches religions use in order to be successful, and then deconstruct the ways in which games may or may not utilize similar tactics successfully.

This topic may appear cynical at first. It is important to note the working groups’ stated agreement of the great value that religious practice offers, and our lament that in today’s modern world, so many individuals are rejecting their religious upbringing and therefore losing hold of so many of the palliative structures that religion can offer.   Can games take the place of religion? Of course not. But perhaps, at their finest, they can help to fill the void left by this modern exodus? Can games provide the modern agnostic a system, structure or community that offers the same access to daily meditative rituals, to the comfort and procedures for life’s great events or to the celebratory meaning of sharing events in the annual cycle? Better yet, can they offer access into life’s great mysteries, the spiritual, the mystical?

The group first attempted to list out all the key components of a religious system they could think of - this list, by no means comprehensive, offered a bounty of rules, rituals and meaning.

We then attempted to map out the overarching structural diagram of a religion system and then overlaid a comparison structural diagram of game systems.

The group quickly noted a similarity to the above diagram for religious systems to the classic game construct of MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics).

We then revisited the list with an eye toward sorting the long list of identified elements into mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics. We then talked through the mechanics list and tried to identify analogs to game design tropes as well as items that, have, to date, only found weak analogs in the world of game design.

It is those elements that we then prioritized, brainstormed and offer examples of below. These examples are meant to be a first toe-in-the-water. They are meant to inspire game designers to find new devices to design compelling play that can aspire to the awesome power and reach of the world’s great religions.

This list represents our brainstorming around the system of religion and the mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics that can lead to success in terms of reach and power.  Lines marked in bold in the “Rules/Mechanics” set are items we noted as powerful mechanics represented in religion that do not necessarily have strong analogues in game design and development. 

Rules/Mechanics

Structural Hierarchy

• Do well: Leveling systems/guild membership hierarchism

• Do very poorly: Rule set about life’s events  e.g. death, birth, marriage
• Do very poorly: Rules of life crisis.
• Do poorly: Rule set about annual cycles/festivals/events that address annual cyclical impacts on human physiological context: harvest, depression in winter, solstice, renewal/rituals that address physical needs

• Do well: Easter eggs, cheats, wikis - super high skill differentials mechanics
• Do poorly: Skills of mental practice such as mediation or practicing forgiveness or thankfulness.  Some work in biofeedback games.

• Do well: anti griefing rules,
• Do very poorly: reputational systems but all in-game only.  Our games also do not have ethical pillars that are built into and referenced in every system.  Catholicism has ‘sin’ which is solved with ‘redemption’ systems. 

• Do well: founder/deity. (admins)  Entirely secular. 
• Do poorly: Some sort of preferenced knowledge could be emphasized more, e.g. the Oracle.

• Do well: Virals, cheap mechanistic word-spreading -
• Do poorly: Organic proselytizing where we facilitate players sharing and training others out of the joy of their hearts.  They do this anyway, but we should help them.  You tube integration, organized.

• Do well: matchmaking, lobbies, in-game events, especially in multiplayer games.

• Do very well: Perma death, point and resource penalties. Moderators.  Data mining for past crimes.

• Do poorly: Judicial system that judges proper adherence to a rule set

• Do poorly:  We don’t generally have this feature.  Forums are mad houses that have tons of question.  Moderation seems to be the primary mechanism.

• Do very well: Icons, loot, status items, hats and helmets

• Do well: In game lore
• Do poorly:  Mythic versions (propaganda) of the development of the game.  See the mythos of Notch for a start of an example.  Needs to reinforce the key ideals of the game.

Who can and cannot become a member and how.

• Do well: Funnel, beta, subscription, payment, guild systems

Faith rules - ambiguous text that cause debate, interpretation.

• Do very well: Local enforcers - community service managers, bug fixing to handle exploits.
• Do poorly: User sell policing and turning in those that do not fit the unwritten (in code) rules of the group.

• Do well: Yes in-game trinkets, celebration in games, but nothing as big as eternal salvation!)

Mass prayer, barn raising, church building.

• Do well: group raids.  Minecrafting group building.
• Do poorly: Group dancing, prayers, mass tasks of execution.

Individual prayer, roleplaying and thus ‘tricking’ your brain into imagining that there is a bigger force.

• Do poorly: There is some chance of to talk to game designers.  In general connection with the divine or those in authority is rare and mostly consists of proclamation.

• Do well: In-game charity promotions.
• Do poorly: Doing social things for people.  Mostly we are limited to donating cash.

Search for unknowable things, label them - evidence, appropriation - explanation of chaos / classifying events as expected, understandable i.e. miracles- knowing the unknowable. Ties into exception handling?

• Do very poorly:  There is an opportunity to for the dev team / high priesthood to highlight surprising and interesting player activities or events and then repackage those as a story that supports the key ideals of the game.

• Do poorly: *animal crossing, in debt from the start. - being saved. re-entry safety hatch. (come back and play)

• Do well: Free/Trial accounts, Registration process
• Do poorly: We start to fall down a little on tracking player performance and inducting players into groups based off performance.  Guilds take up this quite a bit, but there is more room for official support from the game.

Preemptive intervention - before failure, before forgiveness

Mentoring, consultation

• Do well: Wikis, buddy system

• Do very well: Many years of virtual worlds pays off.  Second Life, Realm of the Mad God nexus, gathering place, group formation, guild formation, hubs in MMOs).  We can create concurrency across the geography. Super power
• Do poorly: Meeting up in person.  What if we tied servers to GPS locations and Facebook ties.  Then create meetup so that there is a good chance that when you meetup locally, it will be with people you discover that you’ve been playing with for months.

 Leadership thought, star interpretation - Pope’s official interpretation / stance.

• Do very well: Dictatorial rule changes. On the democratic side: League of legends crowdsourced judicial counsel.  We can pass legislation and deploy it to millions of players multiple times a day with A/B testing.  Cod is law.

Give ties, bonding mechanism for parents to include their children.

• Do very poorly: Kids can be signed up before they have the choice.  Create modes for parents to play with and teach their children.

Evocative stimuli.

• Do well: Intense graphics and sound, kinect, just dance...)

• Levels of initiation: (Moving up through the ranks in a structural hierarchy)
• Authority to control
• Honor charismatic prophet/Founder
• Unlocking “secrets” as you progress
• Indoctrination (of children)
• Regular reinforcement to all adherents
• Ongoing rituals and practices (sacraments):
• initiation
• confirmation
• baptism
• (circumcision/bar mitzvah)
• matrimony
• mass
• Evangelize - doing missionary work - Having your faith tested
• Gathering, community rituals
• Experiencing punishment:
• excommunication
• stoning
• hail Marys
• Application, conversion process, initiations
• process of questioning faith
• physical connection (music, evocative stimuli effect)
• social connection
• comfort in agency
• go out and search, be inspired
• feels like someone is looking out for you
• rituals of life’s cycles:
• birth
• marriage
• last right’s
• Cyclical annual rituals and festivals events:
• Christmas
• Easter
• Rituals that impacts the physical body:
• holy water splash reaction
• baptism
• circumcision
• self flagellation
• (24-hr play sessions)

Meaning/Aesthetics

• Doubt
• Comfort (from imminent death)
• Re acknowledgement of your belief
• The feeling of belonging
• Fear of rejection (and/or rejection of the entire philosophy because I was told I cannot be a member)
• Pervasiveness - the feeling that this system touches all aspects of life
• Feeling of internal mysticism
• Aspiration - aspiring towards righteousness - edification - toward being a better person
• (internal mysticism)
• Recognition as a member in good standing
• Doing service to a higher ideal
• Feel that your faith is tested
• Feeling that you belong and have access to support
• Fear of punishment, guilt
• Feeling of being controlled
• Shared mental model (part of community)
• Feeling supported by the respected community
• Feeling connected, in sync with community
• Charitable, contributing to something bigger
• Increased validation
• Relief after forgiveness
• Ability to rely on rules to help through life’s challenges (death, marriage, birth)
• Sense of structured life (via prescribed annual cyclical practices)

SPECIFIC EXAMPLES

WELCOMING AND CONFIRMATION

The first significant event of life is birth and, not surprisingly, all religions make a big case of it through the ceremonial equivalent to baptism to welcome the new child into the religion. A game that would try to tap the power of religion must therefore incorporate birth events in its design.

Welcoming

When an existing player has a child, he is expected to create open an account for his child. This would trigger a number of sub-mechanisms:

• This account will slowly accumulate a “time as part of the community” value that is useful for some operation in the game and cannot be obtained by any other mean. Therefore if the account has not been created the child will be at a disadvantage compared to other children when he starts to play.
• An automatic broadcasting event would inform all the parent’s weak ties of the coming into the game of the new child
• The parents themselves should be rewarded for performing this act as it is in effect a very effective way of recruiting new members. They will automatically receive in-game rewards directly from the system
• Every player that would make an in-game gift or perform a pre-defined celebration ritual for the parents during the month following the registration of the new account would see his own “positive effect on the community” value (karma) increase.

Confirmation (coming of age)

When the child is big enough to take control of his own account, another in game ceremony takes place where he declares he is now playing his own account. Again this triggers a one month phase where other players may give gifts or perform actions to help accelerate the progression of the child inside game.

Saying Goodbye to a Loved One

What if you lost a friend? A loved one? What if that someone was a friend or family member whom you regularly played a game with? What if that game were able to conjure the digital spirit of your loved one after their passing, and sustain them through ongoing play sessions?

What if a game were to track players play patterns? As players played the game, the game creates a spirit AI, the player’s “ghost”.  Once a player dies, his friends can continue to play with, or against that friend’s “ghost”.

If players want to remove the spirit from the game, grieve and move on, they can “exorcise” the ghost from the game.

Religions have a long tradition of history and stories that creates a common lore and context for adherents.  Everyone  who is familiar with Christianity knows the story of Noah and the animals that marched two-by-two onto the arc, and the story offers a common set of meanings to the religious community that champions this story.  I would like to offer a few examples of how story and lore in religion is a powerful force, and how games can and could begin to co-opt some of this power:

1. Story with room for interpretation: Religious stories frequently are told as parables or as a means to convey specific meanings or ethical systems.  These broader abstractions allow people can relate it to events going on in their own life.  Jonah and the whale, Abraham and Isaac, and Sodom and Gomorrah are all examples of stories with underlying messages.

Game stories that build off of powerful themes and allow room for interpretation can enable players to find meaning in that story for their everyday life.  For example, Braid offers a story of regret, both through the time rewinding mechanic and the text found in the game.  Though certain specifics are given, the player is able to meditate on the idea of regret as a larger concept through their gameplay and their continual interpretation of the disconnected story line.

2. Immersive physicality of story: Many old cathedrals have Biblical stories painted on the walls to enable the frequently illiterate practitioners of the time to “read” the story for themselves.  Biblical stories can also be conveyed through song, and music is frequently an important element of religious meetings.  This type of trans-media story presentation, as well as the embodiment of story in the physical world, lets people engage with the story in a multitude of different formats, some of which they personally may find more meaningful than others.  Alternate Reality Games have taken interesting steps in this direction, spreading story across a number of different media forms including website, source code, audio, video, etc. 

3. Repetition of story:  With a limited set of stories at hand for any given religion, and an engagement period that can easily be the length of someone’s life, people may experience the same story many many times through sermons, plays, festivals or rituals, songs, etc.  This high level of repetition allows people to become intimately familiar with the details of each story, and offers room for varied interpretation with every renewed exposure. 

While religions work on the time scale of thousands of years, and can impact a person throughout their entire life, the time scale of video games is still measured in decades.  Console games may find relevance for a year or so, while social games may only be on top for a few weeks.  Sequels, however, can prolong a player’s exposure to a particular story.  The story of Lara Croft, for example, has been in and out of player’s lives for 16 years at this point.  Consecutive games that provide different protagonists that exist within the same game world that may also provide overlapping stories.

4. Part of something larger: Stories can also be a criteria for defining a particular group - they are part of the shared culture that is part of the experience of being a member of a particular religion.  These stories can point to the values of the group, as well as provide a shared history.  Overall, they can give the individual a sense of being part of something that is larger than themselves, which is empowering and meaningful.  This can be seen with cosplayers at conventions - players are identifying themselves as part of a larger gaming community that highly values the game they are cosplaying from.  They can meet other members of this community (who can be identified because they recognize the costume) and rejoice in their shared membership in this story world.

A powerful component of the success of world religions is their ability to naturally lead existing believers to spread the word to new members. In fact, evangelism can even be a required right of passage.

We identified a number of mechanisms that religious organizations use to encourage evangelism. Some examples:

1. Providing stories of miracles to inspire and give confidence to its believers that spurs organic interest in spreading.

2. Tying evangelism of ideology to the distribution of material benefit (soup kitchens, rehab, etc)

3. Providing literature or frameworks that believers can use to spread the religion.

4. Offering a free and welcoming atmosphere for others outside of the religion to test the waters (anyone is welcome at a church)

5. Tying your standing within the religion to the level of good you do, or people you bring back into the congregation.

6. Tying a member’s standing in the church or access to an afterlife to the standing of those close to you. If your children are not acting appropriately, it reflects on you, so you work hard to help them see the light.

7. In certain religions, members believe that they are literally saving someone’s soul by converting them to their chosen religion.  If the person does not convert, they will go to Hell.  This puts an enormous responsibility upon them to succeed because the price for failure is so high.

Games by contrast have a difficulty with inspiring this organic evangelism, both inside the game world, and outside. Below shows how these mechanisms could be used to increase evangelism in a hypothetical game example.

Imagine a Cooperative RPG that tied you strongly to your starting party. And that party was formed from an existing social group in the real world, such as a school group or online community (reddit, neogaf). You could take the following primary actions: invite another player into your party, forgive a party member, give a material benefit, or tell people about the quests you've completed. The goal of the game would be to exist highest on a leaderboard of karma at the time of death.

Your score would be calculated based upon the sum of points earned by doing positive evangelism. Metrics like:

• How many players above 100 pts ("in good standing") are in your party?
• How many players in your real world social group are a part of this online party? (there would be a component of attempting to bring your social group into the game to improve your leaderboard ranking possibilities)
• How many material goods did you give out that lead to a conversion
• You lose points if any party member leaves the party.
• How many people converted after being told of a miracle?

After death, your next character would start without a group affiliation, and have to choose a group to join.

This heavy incentive structure for evangelism both inside and outside of the game would foster organic growth of the game community.

One of the issues is how we bring the real world into the game. 

Designing The Beyond
In designing to rival religion, we cannot ignore mystical. We must have a way to put that into a game. It is a difficult thing to engage, and the general consensus puts it always over the horizon, but that is the nature of the beyond.

I am sitting with a laptop on the bank of a shallow river somewhere in Texas. Visible only by the sparks and ripples they cast, a swarm of tiny flies is busy at whatever it is tiny flies do. Perch swim below the slow water, and the sun fades in and out the light. The rock upon which I sit is uncut, and I can only assumed no one planned for it to be here. 

It is the mystical. It is the mystical because, even at my best, I can never really describe the truth of what I see in this place. The mystical is the unknown at the moment of discovery, and even our memories of it are only echoes. It must be felt in the moment.

In answering the question we came together to pour over the limits of religion against games. You cannot plan the mystical because you can only express it, and you cannot code it because that first moment of awe will soon a document somewhere. A game wiki with a map of every drop in Wow. A screenshot of Diablo. The guide to all 105 stars in Mario.

But it can emerge. In math there is a place of problems that we cannot solve. Games like go stand opposed to games like checkers because even in a simple set of rules can hide a complexity beyond the all the time and space we've yet found in the universe. It is the metaphysical border where, perhaps, we can still engineer a personal bridge into mystery.

There are many ways to accomplish this, and many names for the ways we discovered. Perlin noise, a simple fractal generator, produces clouds that any human would recognise, but none had seen before. It can be leveraged to create landscapes of mountains and lowlands, or mixed upon itself into a shifting web of lightning and empty space. (That's the force field behind which we've hidden the blue key to level 7.)

True exploration requires a never before seen place, and these fractal procedures are what drive the primitive blocks (unsuitable for any next gen console game) to be the rolling nature so beloved in Minecraft.

Genetic (sometimes called evolutionary) algorithms have evolved characters that stand and walk in games. The drunken stumble of (name here) in GTA4 never looks the same twice because the simple waves those algorithms discovered now blend a complexity that engages the unplanned terrain and remorseless input of the player.

In a way, these algorithms are a pain in the ass. You may never be sure precisely what you'll get, and such results and unplanned effects can be a nightmare of crashes, debugging and player exploits. They are, in a sense, rogue players within your game with the power to code up their unknowable whim.

Our game would seek to leverage the all these techniques of generative algorithms to create content and dynamics that even we cannot predict. Blended with the hand of the designer, they will grow our landscapes and fill our skies with fractal clouds. They will cause unintended effects, and we will call them miracles. Those players who seek out their own experiences will be empowered to find them, name them, and share them to others. Pushed and pulled by our analytic observations, they will create the hidden things. Put in the hands of our players, they will be a divine paintbrush to express their art. Caves without names waiting to be experienced personally, then shared with our world, painted on the wall and shimmering.

In time, a constant folding of these techniques can be explored and evaluated by our players to evolve the algorithms into a world more and more a reflection of their own.

Any game seeking to create an endless world must escape the space of it's own designers (players included) and by careful choice, this approach can grow a bridge across the void. They're precisely the sort of magic we need.

References
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1992/constructing_artificial_emotions_.php

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1. Introduction
2. Workgroup Reports Overview
3. Training for the Game Design Olympics
4. Toward a More Civilized Teabagging
5. Opening the Kimono
6. Divine Design
7. Crux
8. Design Feedback Loops for Successful Independent Productions
9. Game Jam 2012
10. Schedule & Sponsors