The Mischief of Created Things, 2007

Aaron Oldenburg

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My most recent project was a computer game that dealt with images and stories from the two years I spent in West Africa. There's a problem with telling stories when you return from Africa in that people believe what you say, and create their own context for interpreting these stories. You feel like you have to supply an endless amount of background to give them your interpretation. I felt like this project was my way of letting go. Here I created a landscape where I could spread out my stories and allow people to pick and choose what to believe and understand in their own way. My main interest was in creating new images of West Africa, outside of the news of war and poverty, and get at a subtle and mundane sort of magic.

My methods were strange as far as traditional game design is concerned. My second interest was exploring the boundaries of computer games, creating a new type of game that was outside of the realm of fixed goals and puzzles. I was interested in games as creators of mystery rather than solvers. Initially, the concept for the game would have been a critique of the role of charity and international development in the developing world—a game where you are an aid worker with fixed humanitarian goals, who gradually throughout the course of trying to achieve those goals, realizes that they are having unintended consequences. It would have started out as a precise sort of game, with the usual concrete goals, but halfway through the player would begin to question them. The version ended up creating was less overtly political. I realized there was something more important, nuanced, and beautiful in creating these new images of West Africa than addressing something political that's already been argued and written about. But they both had a similar goal in addressing the fact that there was something more important and powerful in the region than anything that could come from the outside.

 

To get to this, I worked backwards from traditional game design methods. Normally, you would create the rules of the game and if these were not fun “on paper”, without any story, graphics, or any other effects, then it would not be a good game (Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play). But to me, the images and narrative were more important, and once they and the environment were established, the necessary rules and games structure were obvious—and this gave the possibility of creating structures outside of the normal game cliches. I think to start with a preconceived game structure would end up trivializing the deeper elements of the narrative.

Eventually, game structure is important to compel the player to move forward. But what is a game? The dominant game definition at the moment tends to privilege “construction and manipulation of opaque objects” (Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality) over role-playing and make-believe. But there is a much wider field of structural possibilities of creating the “magic circle” (Salen & Zimmerman) that the players will voluntarily enter (the extremes of which can even include cross-dressing and drug experimentation). I was drawn to a mystery game format, where play is non-linear but the player begins to discover one or multiple linear narratives as they dig into the background of the game.

As for future projects, I'm interested in artificial intelligence—though I have an alternate version that I call animistic intelligence. This is more concerned with provoking human projection of consciousness rather than mathematically complex algorithms that produce logical responses. It's said that intelligence becomes more real when there's a certain amount of non-sequitur (and artist Ken Feingold explores this in his work as well), as if we project consciousness into the space between what we said and the illogical response of the entity. If there is already a history in a conversation of relatively relevant responses, our subconscious can't help but project our own motives onto the entity for it's discontinuous response. My next project will probably deal with mental illness and the player/artist as caregiver.

 

 

Aaron Oldenburg, 2007

E-mail: pinothefrog at pulledhair dot com