The games industry moves quickly, so much so that it can be hard to keep up. Even industry legends miss out on hot new topics such as social games, gamification or tablet gaming, and it can seem like a blizzard of buzzwords and new terminology. It’s the nature of all innovative markets to move in that fashion however, so it’s important to stay current.
A trend that I’m investigating at the moment is impassive gaming. Even as Nintendo brings StreetPass and the next iPhone is rumoured to include near field technology for passive awareness, so impassive gaming may be the next leap forward.
What is Impassive Gaming?
Passive gaming allows the player to effectively have their game console play for them. Impassive play takes this one step further by introducing apathy into the mix. It asks this question: ‘What if players relate to their passive play experiences by actively not caring, deliberately taking the stance that it’s all just so many bits?’
At first this may sound counterintuitive, but the idea of impassive gaming can tie into the disaffected nature of modern culture. Impassive gaming might also be called hipster gaming and top research into non-emotion and non-reaction to games is happening at Kings College London because of the ready supply of test subjects.
Subjects are introduced to a series of self-playing or ambient games and then invited to express their non-reaction. Measurements and brain scans are rated for disengagement, vacuity and ‘boredomitisation’ and the results are highly uninteresting.
This field is so unexciting that it has inspired Jane McGonigal to bring forward the publication of her new book titled ‘Whateverplay’. Tom ‘Fun Inc’ Chatfield has also been engaged in researching this crucial area for a TED talk on the subject of how impassive play maps in the brain. And Dan Pink’s studies on demotivation (or ‘Skive’, the speculative title of his book on the subject) as they apply to play are a soon-to-be must read.
Nicholas Lovell calls the key motivators behind impassive gaming LEG. They stand for lethargy, entropy and gah-ness. Understand how these three elements interweave is, according to Lovell, the key to understanding this new business model. It will become very important in the 2010s and, he says, show doomed publishers how important it is to tap into their own hopelessness as a way to maximise the opportunity.
How Can you Impassify Your Game?
It’s too early to distil impassification into a process. What Games Are will be spearheading a conference some time in May (or whenever really, it’s hard to care) to discuss the key aspects of impassification as they pertain to games.
The key seems to be muting fun. Removing all joy and hope and replacing it with rote mechanisms and sudden random graphic displays of violence is important for desensitising the player’s brain into a hipster state. Chess as played by robots to the backdrop of Slayer videos is a good first step example.
If you look at your game and consider ‘What would Deep Blue care about?’ then this can prove a useful lens through which to analyse. Jesse Schell is developing a whole new series of design lenses for just such a purpose. His ‘De-Fun’ deck of design cards can reduce any game to a series of accountancy exercises, and the use of Ritalin among players to get to what he calls a ‘non-state’ aids the process.
A great design guide for impassified gaming would be to look at insurance websites, tax calculators and the latter day Digg. Bringing players into the state that they honestly couldn’t care whether they lived or died (but please just let me feel something real) is crucial to achieve non-state-ness, according to Schell. Removing colour, attractive font choices, music, intuitive controls and adding so many things that players do not care about is key to bringing forth utter dejection. Ponderous cut-scene makers at studios around the world are watching this trend with close interest.
In my own studies, I have discovered that obliging players to play Mafia Wars while watching The Virgin Suicides and listening to The End by The Doors on a continuous loop for 72 hours induces a virtually comatose player that makes impassive gaming possible. The consequent results are highly yawnworthy, which is encouraging.
And Finally
I’ve updated my consulting page to offer services in this new and unexciting area of game design. Feel free to contact me for a quote or a publishing deal.
players = 0
Posted by: Gavin C | 01 April 2011 at 05:54 AM
I read it to the end wondering "what's the point, there must be a point to this" and it wasn't until "yawnworthy" that i got it. Best april fools i came across today.
Posted by: igor | 01 April 2011 at 06:44 AM