Digital Bards: Interactive Media and the Evolution of Storytelling

Updated onJuly 13, 2026

This was a talk given as a Distinguished Speaker at the University of Alabama Huntsville in October of 2016.

Digital Bards: Interactive Media and the Evolution of Storytelling

Print media was itself a revolution of earlier oral storytelling practices, and today we see digital media and videogames in particular challenging traditional notions of what storytelling even is. New paradigms have been developed over the last few decades of game development many of which have not filtered back into academia, and new interactive structures are causing debate within games themselves as well. In this talk we will discuss how games have approached storytelling in a variety of frameworks ranging from linear narratives to telling massively multiplayer stories for tens of thousands of interactive participants simultaneously, and we’ll look to the future that is rapidly taking form on a tablet or phone near you. Writing will never be the same — again.

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Let me tell you a story, if I may.
The story I am going to tell you, ranges widely. I hope you don’t mind if we venture into a bit of legal history, a dash of graph theory, a diversion into musicology, a very brief discussion of audio engineering, and so on.
It’s a story about long ago, when we huddled, rather like you are huddling here with me, in this auditorium around this lectern which I shall shortly chop up and burn to make a campfire. Trace the shape of storytelling… oral forms, and what they implied about authority and dialogue Rhyme as a way to provide structure and memory Storyteller as authority but give and take and responsiveness Think of telling a story to your children
The fixity of writing allowed a very different structure… one used by the church, for example to define orthodoxy. Early print culture was about authority cemented.
But of course, over time what it permitted was many voices, as technology democratized who got to make an unassailable narrative.
That implicit authority of print was important in many ways. It reflects a process of containerization that was gradually set into law starting with the Statute of Anne and the birth of copyright. Copyright laws because with the advent of the printing press, it was easy for someone to take something someone else had written, copy it and print it up and sell it as their own, and profit in a way that gave no revenues to the original publisher (or the author).
Originally, the Stationers’ Company had a monopoly on copyright; whoever entered the title of a publication in the guild’s ledger first was held to have the exclusive right to make printed copies. Later, the Statute of Anne said that in fact it was the author who controlled the rights to make copies, and ever since, authors have negotiated away said permission in order to allow publishers to publish their work.
In the case of the book published back in 1710 when the Statute of Anne went into effect, all the way up through the last book you bought, what copyright controls is who gets to make a buck. The book is a container. Under the Doctrine of First Sale, which was first enshrined in US law back in 1908, you can resell the container (or in fact, sell the container for the first time), and the original author of the copyrighted work has no say whatsoever over what happens to it. There’s little question that the copyrighted work within the container essentially boosts the value of the container; try selling a blank book for the same price as a first edition of Dante’s Inferno. However, you cannot profit by taking the copyrighted work and doing something else with it, say by issuing an audio recording, or creating a new edition of the copyrighted work and printing and selling that instead. The doctrine of first sale is about reselling the original containers, not making new ones.
There’s two big exceptions: phonorecords
And software. The exceptions are about leasing, lending, and renting the container objects, not sale. And these exceptions, frankly, have zero to do with logic and everything to do with who had better lobbyists in Washington DC at the time. (Ever wonder why you can rent movies at Blockbuster, but not audio recordings?) In the muddled case of software, publishers rely on EULAs and shrinkwrap agreements, not copyright.
Why is this relevant? Well, quite a lot of stuff is getting containerized digitally these days. I use container as a word because of what it says about the relative value of what is transmitted versus what form it is fixed in. When value of containers is high, we see an apogee of powerful voices telling us what to think.
Think of illuminated manuscripts, the gorgeous printed books of the 19thc, and, eventually, the lushly produced music of the 20th and 21st c.
In contrast, small voices have historically not been able to afford container polish. Zines,
mix tapes, three chords and the truth. These have been the tools of outsider voices.
t us consider another box: story versus narrative, plot versus myth. When we reread old myths and fairy tales up through early forms of the novel we are often struck by the way in which the plots are erratic, poorly structured, etc. They are shaggy dog stories, they are picaresques.
LeThis is not because the folk of those days were less sophisticated, though certainly the form of the modern plot wasn’t fully developed in the early novel; Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Jonathan Swift, weren’t really following the dictates of
Save the Cat (for those who don’t know, this is a book purporting to offe the perfect movie structure, down to the minute.most Hollywood blockbusters follow it rather slavishly these days).
We can think of plot as predetermined story structure… a skeleton of incidents with causal or symbolic relationships But narrative is what the storyteller thrives by; the process of mythmaking is less concerned with a preset structure
Dependingon the theorist, we may see story, plot, and narrative given different twists and definiteions, but let me offer up this notion: that the difference is largely about authorial ownership and who gets to go first in the storymaking process. Does an author select, create, and order events, and a reader decides their meaning; or does a reader select the events and their connection?
In cases where there is a skeletal structure first, a plot, we can term this authorial control… the reader is undergoing a process of immersion, willing suspension of disbelief, we might even call it imposition or brainwashing
The structure of a plot does not admit of contradiction, generally, and we even have terms that indicate how authoritative this is supposed to be: unreliable narrator, for example.
In cases where we have events first and we shape a myth out of them, we explain it to ourselves, we might term that the process of mythmaking. The resultant stories are diffuse and oft-disconnected Both about lessons, but one is about lecturing, the other about negotiating an understanding
This is not to say that the folks who love plot have always been entirely comfortable with their power. There’s a line to trace, particularly from impressionists into modernists, a decided break from prior We can think of art as that which embraces ambiguity; the contrast between the writing f a Dickens
and, say, a Woolf, is quite distinct. Where one attempts to portray ambiguity in their plot, the other simply builds it into the structure, as in Jacob’s Room, a novel where the protagonist is already gone
From there it’s a short hop to Borges, who argues every plot is always happening;
to Pound or Eliot, for whom every word was ambiguous because it was always a hyperlink into the depths of the entire canon;
to Stein, who implicitly argues that even the structure of word on word can give way;
to Cage, whose chance writings basically state that Stein didn’t go far enough
In storytelling, we struggle with the desire to still get across our plot. One thinks of Rayuela, where the control is simply is giving us larger pieces of story to rearrange. This reintroduces the ability for us as reader to find narrative meaning, something which we maybe lost right around Stein. In a sense, we pull away from the tiny atomic bits of text and the very formalist point being made about the fungibility, unknowability, towards giving the reader some of that power back
So the progression was – authorial surrender, followed by the careful granting of power back to the reader. We can think of this as a struggle over the notion of interactivity. The game theorist Marie-Laure ryan makes a distinction between the common form of interactivity, which might be called “exploratory”; and what she calls “ontological interactivity,” wherein the reader’s actions actually change things
or heck, even J M Barrie
or Ayn Rand’s efforts at fourth wall breaking, are an attempt to restore that agency that listeners had in those live scenarios Ayn Rand, of all people, with her play Night of January 16th. In this courtroom drama, some audience members join the jury and vote on whether the accused in guilty. The play has multiple endings.
But that’ an uneasy place to sit. Remember containerization. The very structures in which we hold stories are designed towards fixity. Consider film, with its tyranny of the advancing frame
In this, the history of music is illustrative Music has undergone two significant revolution akin to that of the press… one indeed caused by the press.
The first was the transition from folk process, a dynamic method of transmission, whereby structural qualities were what allowed a story to be transmitted from medieval melody to Child ballad to Appalachian mountain song to Lomax collection and thence to the American folk vernacular. Here we see some of the cousins of “Scarborough Fair” – “Do you know the way to Selin” “You must make me a fine Holland shirt” – “A cambric shirt with not one stitch of needle work”
These stories remained intact not because of the container in which they were fixed, but because of the rhyming structure and the power of the incidental mythmaking they represented. The result was a tree, not an object. \Until sheet music.
Sheet music placed a central gatekeeper on the proper form. For music, this meant that there was a silent, factual gatekeeper present. Melody and harmony were no longer to be changed by performers But that was nothing compared to what happened with the record.
Today we can look back on sheet music as a form of fixity that offers great flexibility to the interpreter – the reproducer. It suggests but cannot enforce an instrument. In the case of guitar (and its predecessor in the American parlor, the banjo), it cannot enforce a fingering, and therefore a timbre. It cannot enforce musical dynamics, a fortissimo, a pianissimo, the precise degree of staccato.
But the recording changed all that. Now the container took true primacy, slowly at first, and then more and more as a science of music production and engineering came into being.
Today we have loudness wars, which are about fitting the perceived dynamics of a piece of recorded music into a narrow enough decibel band through the use f compression. The result is music that demands to be heard, cutting through other ambient noise. You likely haven’t heard truly quiet music in a long time. This example is Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” Most ears don’t perceive the fact that you are being manipulated in this way. The process of containerization does this. These is now a true layer of imposition, of control, layered atop every piece of media we consume. Music producers, who shape the sonic qualities of the sound wave, are now in a position of primacy over the song’s melodicist and lyricst, because the container matters more than the content.
Does this look like normal skin tone or a proper spectrum to you? Probably not,
and yet here we are with this being the palette of most film, because we have found that the contrast of blue and orange is simply punchier, something that exploits the physics of our eyesight.
You’re probably expecting me to talk about video games at some point, aren’t you. Games a bit like sheet music. But really, they’re more like a musical instrument.
The thing is that games do not arise out of a narrative tradition. The oldest games have served very different purposes. A game of Senet or Ur is more likely to have been a form of mythologizing, of creating a systemic understanding of say, the afterlife.
Every player of Ur, or chess, or indeed of Monopoly or League of Legends, is working within a machine, one which generates chess stories, or Monopoly stories.
Long gao, a poet said that poetry without rhyme was like tennis without a net. Now, far be it from me to claim that free verse and its many children are without structure – they simply use structure that is more difficult to perceive to the layman – but the underlying point has some interesting merit to it. If earlier folk forms of storytelling worked in part because they had implicit structure – like various formal structures in verse – and if the efforts to surrender authorship from the Modernist period on fomward were effectively about structural qualities of the work… well, games are, in their final analysis, about structure, about systemic constraints.
The earliest games were often ones of chance, whereby people grappled with the realities of th world and with fate. Random number generators such as dice were seen as manifestations of the gods. The progress along a path to exit was seen as a crude simulation of life, and its aftermath in an afterlife.
In these early game structures there is an element of acceptance, of a submission to class structures and one’s place in the world, deeply reflective of the ways in which societies themselves were stratified. If one applies a class consciousness lens to chess, one cannot help but see pawns as conscripted peasants pulled awaom from subsistence level farms merely because they were peons on their master’s estates – indeed, in Romance languages, the pawn is actually the word peon. One imagines that their poor wives and elderly and children and crops are just the squares on the boards, lands left untillable and bloodied, crops destroyed, lives too insignificant to even merit a piece on the board.
This sort of structural modeling of a very real world has always been a hallmark of games. The tafl family of games in Nordic and Celtic countries is a modeling of the jarl and his men.
The mancala or oware family of games in Africa, a modeling of crops and rotation. Indeed, the oware variant even enforces a cultural notion that you may in the game but not by a lot, lest others starve.
Games have always been a form of practice, then, on the player’s part – but also on a narrative level. Created as they were through the folk process they challenged the notion of the authorial centrality of what we might call media or print culture. You can tell any story you want, as long as it follows he rules, In that way, a game is like a sonnet. It enforces very rigid structure, but leaves the scope to the player, like the sonnet leaves the scope to the poet. Chess is a sonnet-making machine, and to write a sonnet is to play a particular sort of game.
A brief discursion into how we think of games is probably worth engaging in. Games, broadly speaking, are made of rules. It typicall sets forth a goal of some sort, and
Talk about game structure, yadda yadda, like always
Then talk briefly about play, set the context
It should be clear that some structures are more rigid than others…. Discuss games that are impositional, use the tools of rhetoric in order to get across an authorial viewpoint.
This should echo for you the feeling of the medieval morality play!
Discuss games that are impositional in terms of mechanic, and proffer entrainment – training towards reflexes, acceptance, rote results for stimuli
Some might argue – those who make the case about games and violence, for example – that this is what games do, and why they are dangerous. And yet – even these are deeply deeply open to subversion by the player, because Doom is still just a sonnet machine.
Speed runs, glitch runs, and the like as valid sonnets for a game And these are in games designed to be impositional spaces! Our ability to build closed systems is pretty lacking. The human mind turns out to be way more powerful than we thought, in terms of its apprehension of systems.
But what of games that are designed to be less deterministic? Less impositional? What of games that are created to be expressive spaces? There is debate whether such things even exist,
but we needto look at aparticular moment in the mid 70s as the moment when everything we know about narrative and literary structures was upended by a bunch of people in Wisconsin.
Talk about the history of wargames, and thence to D&D Von Reiswitz to HGWells and Little Wars, to science fiction writers in NYC
The notion of the collaborative story circl with a master storyteller and autonomy. Still hugely bound about rules – no free verse here!
The scope of roleplaying with rules, in this fashion, was fascinatingly different from the kinds of simple roleplay and just plain old “play” inherent in the basic modeling of earlier folk games such as cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, or playing house. Those were games circumscribed around with social rules, more rules than any typical boardgame ever offers. Roleplaying games, despite the voluminous rulebooks, have less rules that the myriad social rules implicit inall of Victorian society, as expressed via a tea party.
Roleplay was a revolution. Games promptly began to explore the narrative forms that simulation. Today, we see its fruition in the Nordic LARP…talkabout that. But to rewind… In short order, we got the choose your own adventure, the adventure book, and hypertextual narratives. And in order to discuss this, we must venture briefly into the realm of graph theory. I do hope you had your multidisciplinary hats on today.
Cover the basics of graph theory
The choose your own adventure book is basically a hypertext, with a directed graph This preserves the authorial structure. Ths lets you pick a path through the carefully prunes part of Borges’ infinite tree.
The adventure book introduces a game, a simulation layer that exists at the point of choice.
Finally, the hypertext, once it reached its first flowering via the Storyspace software by Eastgate Systems “Storyspace,” explored the possibility of structures more likelthe rhizomes of plants, the structures of webs. Mention Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop
This had been prefigured by computer scientists like Vannevar Bush, as well as by the Modernists. But here, at last was something that could take the place of Cage’s simple I Ching randomizers. Eventually, these concepts begat the web
And indeed, while media became more and more about the containers, games dove headlong into an exploration of the full breadth of this space. Consider what even a very simple game today might offer: the ability to move back and forth inside of a small space for hours on end, without ever advancing plot or narrative in any fashion. What sort of story is that? And yet, even the narratively focused games will typically offer this freedom.
At the higher end, games like The Sims, which is at core a simple simulation of eight variables to model a human consciousness, and a pile of props with some simple physics sims, was proven to be an incredibly power story-generation engine.
Turns out the Sims rule structure is very like a twelve bar blues, or a sonnet’s rhyme scheme – neat infinite generativity, enabled and aided by the rules. – Alice and Kev
Oh, containers were stll incredibly important. It turned out that doing what is termed “cloning” or “reskinning” is a highly prevalent trend in games. And it’s an undeniably container-centric one.
Today, the business-savvy thing o do is to build IP – which means, to find mass market appeal impositinal structures to ceonvey very familiar stories. To re-use simulation structures that are known, and to constrain them to fit the dictates of the IP rather than permitting the player to truly explore the possibilities.
From this come game structures like string of pearls.
There was, however, a vein of games that is far more simulationist even than these. Sim City.
Dwarf Fortress.
Minecraft. Here are worlds operating more by rules of physics.
In the case of the online RPG we not only have a game structure, but we have human behavior fully imported into the world. An this means the chance to re-examine our own structures, to conduct gedankenexperiments. Alternate economic structures, The reinvention of political structures. We’re a far cry from chess and its assumptions.
When the first MUD was created the creators chose to break class barriers, and chose to break gender barriers, quite intentionally. The children of the roleplaying game set into the form of simulation a social revolution.
With games for thousands came entirely new storytelling forms, ones that hybridized the notions of authorial control and centralized media, and the notion of participatoy storytelling. The deat of Lord british, stories of GMs
Achaea and the mod.
Rebirth of hypertext, with greater authorial emphasis.
Environmental storytelling and the first person experience.
Proteus
Dear Esther
Gone Home
Adr1ft. We might think of these as the games that try to be print media; strongly authoried spaces where the primary messages cannot be subverted, but the discretion is in the player’s hands… ironic that they come from small indie team because they have to be so container centric, authrially imposed. On the other hand, this is VRs sweet spot. FPX
In pure sandbox games, often not in the hands of the game designers at all, we saw the tools for players to build their own worlds. Using one ruleset, we saw the concept of modules or levels. More, we saw the nature of storytelling itself changed by these sorts of videogames, as central game concepts migrated out into by now fairly staid and authrially controlled media.
In games like American idol,
in Survivor
and MTVs pioneering reality shows, we saw the flow of gam ideas outwards to narrative. Reality producers attempt to channel the actions of independent agents, much ike a game master does.
In television shows like Lost, we saw the rise of easter eggs
a digression explaining them
and explorable story space, reinventing the hypertextual narrative into a new form knows as transmedia.
As the loop closed on data gathering and metrics, we see that the once far removed sorytellers of big media are having their actions shaped and controlled by the increasingly prompter feedback of audiences. There is now another hand on the pen.
You may have seen HBO’s new show, Westworld. Upon watching it, I experienced the thrill of familiarity, because was depicted was exactly the storytelling process of an online game operator from 1985.
Is this a return to oral culture? Well, no. For the increased digitalization of culture has meant that more and more we live in a media landscape, and a communications landscape, that is informed by the rules of games. And this means two things: more of a web-like structure, as in the way that games themselves have evolved, with decentralized authority; and more of a landscape to game. To play. To bend to your will.
These days, the commonest use of the word “narrative isn’t the one from the halls of academia,isn’t the one from game studies either. Instead, it refers to constructed meme realities. It refers to selective interpretations of supposed facts. As in “the narrative from the MSM, the narrative from the alt-right.”
Make no mistake, these are authorially created as well, by those who have learned to play the new simulation game of how many clicks and likes and retweets. There is a new form of mythmaking, of storytelling once again shaping our fundamental understandings of the world, and it’s bein executed by a new type of author who use mmes as their novels, the Internet as thir pen, and people as their very ink.
Thus have games wrought in the end; the internet has no gamemaster. But it does have rules. The great virtue of games, the fact that they teach us to see systems as tractable, and situations as challenges to overcome, and the environment itself as arbitrary constraints, is also contributory to the internet discourse we see today.
Games also have solutions to offer, in their notions of fair play, of sportsmanship, in their ideas of game masters and referees, and in their resolute faith in the rules that hold something together.
These are challenges that games people have had to deal with, running online communities larger than cities, with a heck of a lot more fairness and focus on the fun than say, Facebook.
Either way, the digital bards are here, singing their siren song. Their storytelling structures are now the new paradigm, a change as large as the printing press or the audio recording. I am reminded of another time when a mix of the advnce of technology and social upheaval led to another medium being born. Superman was an immigrant from another planet, with a name ending in –el; created by children of Jewish immigrants as World War II was brewing.
Wonder Woman was based on Margaret Sanger’s niece, created by a polyamorous trio committed to woman’s suffrage and feminism. We’ve all seen what the comic book turned into, with its far simpler storytelling structures…
Here we are now, facing a true upheaval in the nature of what a story even is, the kind of change that hasn’t happened in half a millennium. It happens slowly when you live through it, doesn’t it? But by a historical scale, it’s fast.
This is your world now.
May you write it well.

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Transcript

HOST: All right. Good evening, everyone. I’m Vinnie Argentina from the Department of Art History and Design. I teach animation and game design, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you here tonight.

My colleagues Joy Robinson, Gaines Hubbell, and Ryan Weber from the Department of English are also sponsoring this talk tonight. I’m thrilled to introduce our speaker.

Raph Koster is a veteran game designer who has been professionally credited in almost every area of the game industry. He has been the leader and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, a venture-backed entrepreneur heading his own studio, and he has contributed design work, writing, art, soundtrack music, and programming to many more titles, ranging from Facebook games to single-player games and handheld consoles.

Koster is widely recognized as one of the world’s top thinkers about game design and is an in-demand speaker at conferences all over the world. His book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, is an undisputed classic in the games field. In 2012, he was named an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online.

Please help me welcome Raph Koster.

[Applause.]

RAPH KOSTER: Hi. So I guess I have to tell you some stories, huh? We’re going to talk about storytelling. That’s what we should do.

That means the first thing I need to do is take this lectern, chop it up, and set it on fire so that we have a nice little campfire going here in the middle.

I hope you don’t mind if this turns out not to stick just to the English Department or, for that matter, the game design program, because I’ve prepared some stuff here that covers a little bit of legal history, a little bit of graph theory from mathematics, a bit of musicology, audio engineering, and a few other topics. You all cool with that? Awesome.

Whenever we talk about storytelling, we really need to start way back at the beginning—clear back there around the fire.

Stories are intrinsic to how we learn as humans. They’re how we communicate and convey moral lessons. They’re how we acculturate people. They serve an incredibly powerful role in our lives.

It’s hard to imagine any memory you have that you have not actually transmogrified into a story in some fashion. Memories by themselves are kind of incoherent until you file the rough edges off, clean them up a little bit, and turn them into a narrative.

When you trace storytelling all the way back to this earliest oral form, it’s actually almost unfamiliar, because we are so surrounded by more modern versions of stories. The earliest stories, improvised around the fire and reactive to what the audience was saying, were very, very different. We can use the highfalutin term “oral culture.”

When you look back at, for example, the works that have survived from oral culture, poetry is intrinsic to them. Why? In large part because it made things easier to remember: rhyme structures, the whole “wine-dark sea,” and kennings out of Old English storytelling—technically not literature, right?

The interesting thing about that old form is that it doesn’t ever really survive its own telling. It’s always evolving. It’s always changing through the folk process. It always modifies itself because somebody says, “Skip past this part. It’s really boring.” Somebody else says, “Oh, tell that part again. It was really cool.” And next time, the storyteller makes that part longer.

So the storyteller around the campfire—kind of like me up here at the lectern today—is an authority, but it’s really premised on responsiveness: a kind of give-and-take, a swapping of ideas.

I’m here to suggest that that form of story is making a comeback. It’s not just because it’s the kind of story you end up telling your kids. Those of you who don’t have kids probably remember being told those kinds of stories. There are a lot of forces bringing a new kind of storytelling back to us, because, frankly, we haven’t had oral culture for a really, really long time.

And we can blame one thing: pen and ink.

Once there was the word. And you know what? If you knew how to write, you were a magician.

If you go far enough back in religious traditions, you’ll find constant mentions of the idea that just knowing how to write conveyed magical powers. In the Jewish tradition, the golem, for example, is created by writing the name of God on a piece of paper and putting it into the clay creation.

The word has always been incredibly powerful. But even more powerful than eloquent words is putting them down on paper and fixing them in place, because once you fix them in place, it’s pretty hard to challenge your authority.

The Church, for example, used that for centuries to define orthodoxy. As soon as they were able to write things down and say, “Only the priests can give the sermon, because only they can read,” you didn’t really have a lot of choices about whom to listen to regarding the word of God or how to behave. What they told you was pretty much unassailable because of the fixity of writing.

I’m going to use that word again: fixity. It’s about cementing stuff.

That’s what the earliest print culture did. It made things concrete and didn’t let you change them. You couldn’t argue with the author in the same ways anymore.

Eventually, technology came along and made that even more powerful, thanks to the printing press. The printing press took power that had solely been in the hands of those with armies of monks and eventually gave it to everybody—well, everybody with money, anyway. Pretty soon, you ended up with books everywhere and even more voices, until sometimes it feels like we’re drowning in voices.

But that authority of print became important in a whole bunch of ways. This was the first moment, really, when our creative content became in some ways less important than the container it was put in. All of a sudden, the actual book became important.

This containerization, if we want to call it that, had a whole bunch of interesting consequences. For example, it led to the invention of something called copyright: this crazy new idea that an idea you had might belong only to you. That was new. That idea did not exist prior to about 1708.

It had been too easy for somebody to take something you’d written, copy it, sell it, and profit. What ended up happening was that the Stationers’ Company had a monopoly, thanks to something called the Statute of Anne. The Queen gave them permission; they controlled copyrights and had the exclusive right to make printed copies in England.

Ever since, we’ve had copyright law thanks to that one ruling. And ever since, authors have had to negotiate away their ownership in order to get something published. That’s how the world works today.

It made this thing—the book—into a container. And the thing about that container is that it can be moved around. It can be sold to somebody else. There’s this whole thing called the doctrine of first sale, which says the author gets paid the first time, but after that we can sell it through endless used bookstores and the author doesn’t get another penny.

The stuff inside the book matters. A blank book does not sell for as much as a first edition of Dante’s Inferno or something. But it turns out that the container itself drives a lot of the economic value. That’s an interesting place to be, when the wrapper for ideas can end up being more valuable than the ideas inside.

That’s one of the things the printing press did. And it didn’t happen just to books. It happened in all kinds of other things.

Records are an odd exception in a bunch of areas of copyright law, and so is software, for reasons involving lending, leasing, renting, and all these things. They all have different rules, and all the rules have nothing to do with logic, by the way. They have to do with who had the best lobbyists in Congress at the time, because it boils down to who’s going to make a buck off whatever this embedded story is.

If you’ve ever wondered why you can walk up to Redbox and rent a DVD but cannot rent an album, it’s because Hollywood had better lobbyists. That’s why Blockbuster, when there was a Blockbuster, couldn’t rent recordings.

Software, which is most relevant when we’re talking about games today, relies on crazy stuff like EULAs. Did you know that video games now have First Amendment protection? They’re recognized as an art form and protected in terms of free expression. But game systems are not protectable under copyright law. If you design a brand-new game system—if you invent chess—you can’t copyright it.

So every one of these new kinds of stories isn’t protected in the ways print culture has set us up to expect.

Why does this matter? I’m sure you’re wondering, “Wait a minute. What is he talking about? What does this have to do with digital bards or whatever?”

A lot of stuff is getting containerized digitally these days. I’m using this word “container” because I want us to think about the value of what we’re transmitting—our little piece of culture—versus the form it is in.

We could take a book and turn it into an audiobook, and all the aspects of copyright law that affect it change right then and there, which is interesting. But in theory, it’s still the same content inside.

The thing is, when the value of containers is really high, powerful voices are the ones that get to make the containers. That means they get to tell us what to think.

Make no mistake: whether you’re talking about something like the Book of Kells, which took I don’t know how many monks to make; the beautiful printed books of the nineteenth century; or the latest Rihanna track, it takes a lot of money to make awesome containers. And it doesn’t necessarily change the tune of that Rihanna track.

That means specific people get to have that voice. Specific people get to have this incredibly polished container because they have the money, and then they are the ones who get seen and read and heard. Everybody else, with smaller voices, ends up in the land of zines or the land of punk rock, with three chords and the truth and generally no audience: outsider voices.

All right. Hold that in your mind for a second, because let’s think about something else.

The storyteller around the fire was thinking in terms of responsiveness. When your kid complains, “No, no, no, no—tell the part about the python eating the elephant again,” you have to be responsive.

I remember visiting a friend. They had a guitar there, and I was noodling around on it. A nine-year-old girl came up and asked for—I don’t remember what it was—“Can you play the latest Beyoncé song?” I’m like, “No.” She basically looked at me like, “What good are you?” and left.

If you can’t be responsive to the audience right then and there, you’re done.

When we look back at early fairy tales, old mythology, or, for that matter, early forms of the novel—this is Lazarillo de Tormes, one of the early Spanish-language picaresques, or you could go to France and look at something like Gargantua and Pantagruel—how many of you have ever read any of these?

These are not fun reading for people today. They have no plot. They’re basically one shaggy-dog story after another. Here’s this kid, Lazarillo, and he’s basically a beggar kid. He wanders around, bumps into a random person, they have a conversation, stuff happens, then they leave. Then he falls in the river, climbs out, steals a chicken leg, and you read it going, “This doesn’t go anywhere.”

It’s not because people back then were less sophisticated. It’s because their storytelling modes were more like oral culture. They were more free-form. They expected interruptions. They expected digressions. And when they sat down to start writing some of this stuff down, it meandered a lot.

A good example some of you may have read is anything by Jonathan Swift. If you’ve tried reading Gulliver’s Travels, there’s a reason the movies change everything. Cool ideas, but it would not pass muster in Hollywood these days.

Hollywood instead follows the dictates of Save the Cat! For those who don’t know, this is a book that claims to offer the perfect movie structure down to the minute. In fact, pretty much every Hollywood blockbuster you’ve seen in the last five years follows this structure to the minute. You can set a stopwatch by it. It’s kind of terrifying.

We’ve gotten better at figuring out the box into which to fit stories because it turns out that it works. It manipulates us very effectively.

And who can build these? The people who can afford those nice containers. Again: the people with the money.

This plot is not going to be responsive to somebody interrupting and saying, “Wait, wait, wait—rewind. I want to see John McClane jump off the top again with the helicopter going, ‘Yippee-ki-yay,’” right? The movie keeps playing.

These days we’re getting some of that power back, but if you’re in the theater, you don’t get to say, “I want to hear that part again,” or, “Tell me more,” because there’s no bard around the campfire for you. Instead, there’s this rigid structure, inside a rigid container, telling you what to think.

The storyteller around the fire thrives on narratives. They thrive on mythmaking. They’re not worried about this preset structure.

Depending on whom you talk to in literary theory, they might chop this up as story, plot, narrative, and a bunch of other terms. I’m just going to offer this really big simplification, which boils down to the question: who gets to decide, and in what order?

Who is king: the author or the receiver of the story? Does the author get to decide in advance what you think, or do you get to quarrel, change, modify, and interpret?

If we go back to what the Church did, they used the medieval morality play—with very rigid structures and big budgets for the time—to tell us how to think and behave. That’s the power of a centralized print culture. They had control over the stories.

I keep using the word culture. “Cult” is a root in culture, but so is “cultivate.” They all share the same root because they’re trying to accomplish the same things. All three are about indoctrinating—even brainwashing.

When we speak of our culture, we’re talking about this shared set of assumptions into which we indoctrinate people from a very young age. This has been one of the primary roles of story forever.

If you like, our medieval morality plays today are I Love Lucy, Friends, and Modern Family. Most comedies are about reinforcing notions of culture. Dramas are often about challenging them. That’s why fewer people watch.

Now, this doesn’t mean print culture always just tries to control you. But it’s interesting when you look at print culture like, say, Lolita. How many of you have read Lolita? More people have heard about Lolita than have actually read it, right?

In Lolita, the book is narrated by a predator. You see through the eyes of the predator, and the book tries to make you realize that you cannot trust anything he says. He’s the unreliable narrator.

It’s interesting that even when print culture does something more like oral culture—in oral culture, think about the game of telephone. We all know you cannot trust somebody else’s story in oral culture. It gets whispered down. It changes. We take that for granted.

But when we see something in a book, we do trust it. We have terms like “unreliable narrator” precisely because such narrators are the exception.

That’s very different from what happens in the process of mythmaking. When we mythologize, we’re taking a collection of facts and trying to arrive at pretty much any story that could explain why lightning struck my neighbor’s house and not mine. We’re trying to account for the unaccountable, and that’s where myths come from.

When we tell the random story about that weird incident in the grocery-store parking lot—“Gosh, that person almost hit me”—there’s really no plot arc or character development. We’re just trying to account for the randomness of life.

That’s the interesting thing about that different oral storytelling pattern.

Both forms are about lessons. Both are trying to teach you. But one is lecturing you, telling you, “This is how it is,” while the other is more about negotiating and understanding.

Print culture eventually ran into the fact that you have to negotiate.

You can see a line beginning with, say, Charles Dickens. He starts lecturing his public, telling them, “The print culture you’re reading in the newspapers isn’t entirely accurate. For example, child labor is bad.” So he starts providing counter-lectures, so to speak. There’s a long tradition of that.

But if you follow the line through what happened as writers became more modern, you start running into people like Virginia Woolf, who writes an entire book about Jacob. Jacob is not in the book. Jacob died in World War I. We never meet Jacob. The whole book is about what everybody else thinks of Jacob after he’s dead. He’s not there.

All of a sudden, the structure itself is starting to say, “Maybe we can’t actually know what’s going on.”

Take it a little further and you start running into writers like Jorge Luis Borges. Borges wrote these amazing, awesome short stories about things like a library where everything that could ever possibly be written, in every possible order, exists—including, of course, the short story he just wrote. At the end, he kind of dares you to find it.

He’s telling you maybe the world isn’t knowable, implicitly saying maybe this whole print thing is a scam. Maybe nobody has these authoritative answers.

If you keep moving forward, you start running into poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who start saying maybe every word is connected to every other word. Their poems were basically the web before there was a web. Every word and line was a hyperlink to something.

The amount of stuff was insane. They were saying, “In order to read my poem, you need to be fluent in ancient Greek. You need to have read Italian philosophers. You need to be familiar with written Chinese pictographs.” They were making the assertion that you cannot cram all of this down into one convenient, linear answer.

Eventually, people started trying to create writing and print culture that even said, “Well, maybe you can’t connect words to words.”

Does this make much sense to you guys? This is Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons: quintessential modernism.

Modernism is about the idea that we just can’t figure out the world, and maybe the world isn’t quite there anyway. So: “I’m just going to try creating things as confusing as the world.” If you’ve ever gotten stuck on modernist writing, now you know why.

But it got crazier from there.

How many of you have ever heard the musical piece 4′33″—or not heard it, as the case may be?

There was a composer named John Cage. To make his very modernist point, he composed a piece called 4′33″. The instructions to the pianist are: rest your hands on the keys, and don’t do anything for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

[Pause.]

So you listen to the chuckles. You listen to the shifting, the coughing, the sneezing. His point was: maybe that’s music. Maybe I’m not in charge here.

In fact, he went so far as to use the I Ching to write poetry and music by randomizing it. He basically said Stein wasn’t going far enough.

Novelists started doing things like Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar. He said, “Maybe I can write a book that you can read in any order.” He wasn’t the only one.

There were people who wrote their books on loose-leaf pages and said, “How to read this book: take the box, throw it in the air, pick up the pages, and read them in whatever order you want.”

These people were rebelling like crazy against the idea that they were in charge. They were fighting against the very idea of something like a printing press or a monk with an illuminated manuscript. They were trying to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe print culture isn’t all it’s chalked up to be.”

The problem, of course, is that if you take a random book, chop it into tiny pieces, and throw it in the air, odds are pretty good you aren’t going to find any meaning at all.

There are a heck of a lot of possible arrangements of every word in the dictionary, and most of them aren’t going to add up to anything for us. So even though these writers were making the very intellectual point—which I promise I’m going to stop making very shortly—about the unknowability of the universe, their attempts to give power back to the reader didn’t really work.

For one thing, do any of you read this stuff for pleasure?

Not even the English professors.

So we had this progression: almost an authorial taking of power, followed by an authorial surrender, followed by carefully trying to grant some power back to readers. It’s almost like a struggle over how interactive storytelling should be.

See? I told you I’d get around to games eventually.

This is Marie-Laure Ryan. She makes a cool distinction between the common form of interactivity—which is, “Here’s a piece of text, and you can interpret it any way you want.” That’s kind of, well, the English Department. Only they’ll tell you, “That interpretation is worth a C, and this one is worth an A.” But it’s still in that realm.

Pretty much everything in our world is like that. We can interpret stuff. We get our own brains. We get to decide what we think of things.

But Ryan also says there’s ontological interactivity, which means cases where the things the reader does actually change things. Actually change things.

At first, authors flirted with this in one way.

J. M. Barrie, when he wrote Peter Pan, first as a book and then adapted it for the stage, started doing things like breaking the fourth wall and saying to the audience, “The fairy stops here unless you clap. I’ve got a gun to Tink’s head.”

Barrie wasn’t the only one. There’s a play written by, of all people, Ayn Rand, called Night of January 16th. It’s a courtroom trial, and at the end twelve members of the audience are pulled up to be the jury. They have to decide the result.

Like all of Ayn Rand’s writing, it is turgid and impossible to read and enjoy—but it does exist, it has multiple endings, and you can watch it.

This is really different from the tyranny of film, where you don’t get a vote on the next frame. But it’s still an awkward place to go, because the structures in which something like Peter Pan is held still encourage that kind of fixity.

It’s hard to imagine giving people choices in a movie. They tried—along with Smell-O-Vision and Sensurround. They tried giving people buttons in the arms of theater chairs. It didn’t work very well, because the structure itself doesn’t allow very much of it.

It’s worth looking at the history of music as a point of comparison. Music has undergone a very similar revolution—not once, but twice.

One of those revolutions was also caused by the printing press, and that was sheet music.

I’m sure many of you could probably sing along if I started going:

“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?”

You all know that one. Go ahead.

“Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.”

That’s right. You probably know the Simon and Garfunkel version, because most people do.

But here are some of the cousins of “Scarborough Fair.” You can’t quite read them, but this one in the middle says, “Do You Know the Way to Selin?”—not Scarborough Fair. The one up in the corner says, “You Must Make Me a Fine Holland Shirt,” and the one down in the other corner says, “A Cambric Shirt with Not One Stitch of Needlework.”

By the way, if you can read sheet music, these are all different tunes, too.

That is what an oral model of transmission does. It creates this amazing branching structure of variations, changes, and differences.

That’s very different from what happens once you get into fixity again.

“Old Mr. Johnson had troubles of his own. He had a yellow cat which wouldn’t leave home…”

Any of you know this one? Today you all know it as this fun kids’ song, “The Cat Came Back.” It started as an appallingly racist minstrel song in 1894. Truly, truly racist. Eventually it landed on The Muppets with a different melody and somewhat different words, although Mr. Johnson was in all the different versions.

The story remains intact because that rhyming structure, inherited from before print, helps carry this stuff forward.

The folk process in music led to a tree instead of an object: a family of stuff.

Then sheet music stopped that dead. And boy, did the recording industry kill it off. It crushed it.

All of a sudden, if a cover of Beyoncé’s latest tune doesn’t sound anything like Beyoncé’s tune, you don’t even like the cover. Let’s be honest. Everybody wants the actual original version.

Sheet music became a gatekeeper for the proper form of something. Melody and harmony were suddenly locked down by fixity. Performers couldn’t change them anymore. The bard was screwed over. He couldn’t do the cute little variations and loops and repeats and drop things out.

And with the record? Forget it. You had to reproduce the record.

Eventually, guitarists who used to improvise solos instead wrote one solo, like a composer, and replicated the version on the album when you saw them live, because that’s what the fans expected.

We’ve gone so far down this road that Beck put out an album in sheet-music form only a couple of years ago. We’ve gone so far down the road of assuming fixity and the primacy of the container that we now think sheet music has flexibility because we’re so used to recordings—even though sheet music locked us down in all these different ways.

At least sheet music can’t enforce the instrument. It can’t enforce the tempo. It can’t enforce a fingering on the banjo—or the guitar; banjo if you go back a hundred years, guitar these days. It can’t enforce the precise timbre, the dynamics, fortissimo, pianissimo, or the amount of staccato you use.

But it sure can tell you what you ought to be doing.

We can’t force it. But now, of course, if you go learn a recording, you probably do it with a cool little looper device that lets you hear the solo exactly. People pass around the precise numbers you should use to tweak your amp and your pedals in order to replicate Stevie Ray Vaughan’s tone.

That’s the power of fixity. That’s the power of containers.

Recording really took the container and made it more important than the melody.

Now we’ve created new art forms about the container. Today, an awful lot of our stars in music are producers rather than songwriters or performers. Their art isn’t the art of melody; it’s the art of sound engineering. They’re working on the container alone. They almost don’t care what the music is.

One of the biggest ways this has taken form is the loudness wars. Have any of you heard of this?

On the bottom, we have Adele’s original recording of “Rolling in the Deep.” The size of the waveform tells you when she gets quiet and when she gets loud. Those are called dynamics, and they’re what make music interesting: variation.

Unfortunately, you’ve mostly heard the mastered version. In order to make “Rolling in the Deep”—and pretty much every other song you’ve listened to in the last thirty years—punch through the sound of your car, punch through your absolutely shitty headphones, punch through conversation, and punch through the fact that music today is not listened to with attention but is instead a background utility, audio engineers have figured out a way to make everything sound louder without actually turning up the volume: compression.

So we see that everything in “Rolling in the Deep” is now insanely loud.

This is actually a fairly mild example. If you take the average pop hit, the waveform looks like a solid blue bar, a rectangle where even the quietest moments are very loud to the ear.

This isn’t something people generally notice unless they’re trained. People have trouble noticing that they’re being manipulated this way.

That’s the power of containers.

If we think of the oral mode as a form of expressive storytelling, and we take the medieval morality play—the culture, the authority telling you what to do—as a form of imposition, this is ultimate imposition.

Containers are now actually telling us how to think and how to react because we’ve learned a lot about human physiology and psychology, and we’re able to leverage those tricks—even down to using the right font on packaging to get you to buy package A instead of package B.

Pretty much every layer of media we consume today has this imposition on top of it.

How do you feel about these colors? Does this orange on the left look like any human being you know, except that one? Is this the normal range of colors when you step outside into the world? Or is it only this way when you go to any goddamn movie ever?

It’s because we’ve figured out, as part of the container, a way to make this visually more compelling without actually adding anything to the value of the content inside.

So this is one of the pitfalls of print culture. Isn’t that interesting?

Of course, you’re all here hearing me say this while I’m standing up here epitomizing it. I’m telling you what to think right now.

But that’s the thing about authority. For better or worse, most of us don’t question it.

Well, you were probably expecting me to talk about video games.

Was it okay to digress a little? You didn’t mind that, right? All right. Good.

Here’s the thing: games are a bit like sheet music, but they’re actually much more like an instrument than they are like sheet music.

Games do not arise out of a narrative tradition. The oldest games served very different purposes, much more like mythmaking.

Take the Game of Ur. This is actually my personal Ur set. The Royal Game of Ur, played in the city of Ur in ancient Babylonia, was most likely a form of mythologizing: a way to figure out one’s process of moving through life and into the afterlife.

That’s a very different way to get a message across.

In the Game of Ur, you start at one end. You have these little pyramids; those are dice—really old-fashioned dice. You throw four of them, and the white corners tell you the number. You have markers. Mine all look like they have five on them because they’re modern dice, but ignore that; they’re just markers.

You start at the inside corners on the big box—here and up there. You roll the dice, move forward, and have to get out at the two flowers. You share the middle track, then bend to the left or right, and you have to get out with a perfect die roll.

But you can move any of your markers. If you roll the dice and can land on somebody else, you knock them off the board and send them back to the beginning—reincarnated.

So here’s a cute little summary of a very vicious description of life: your advancement depends a lot on luck, you might be killed at any time, you have to compete for the scarce resource of space, and at the end whether you get to go to heaven depends on a roll of the dice.

I now know so much more about the worldview of the ancient Babylonians than I would have expected—but it’s not done through story.

Isn’t that interesting?

Every player of Ur, chess, Monopoly, or League of Legends is really playing with a machine. Which, by the way, is the reason games aren’t copyrightable. Instead, they’re patentable. Monopoly still has patent number whatever written on it, because the thought was: there are no ideas in games, but they’re neat machines.

Every player is working with a machine—a machine that generates chess stories or Monopoly stories.

I assume you all have a Monopoly story. It usually involves anger.

Long ago, a poet said that poetry without rhyme was like tennis without a net. Okay, that guy was clearly on the side of structure.

It’s not really a fair claim. Free verse has all kinds of structure in it; it’s just structure that laypeople usually can’t see. You have to learn how to see structure in free verse.

But his underlying point is interesting: a lot of earlier folk forms relied on structure being there. Rhyming structures, the shape of a twelve-bar blues, those weird Old English kennings—those things that help us remember—are constraints.

Constraints help make messages transmissible. By having structure, it becomes easier to get things across in a way that experiments with randomness—throwing all the pages into random order—didn’t actually do.

Structure helps transmit this stuff.

The earliest games were mostly about chance because people didn’t understand why the world did these horrible things to them. Cholera cropped up. They didn’t know what it was or where it came from, and then they died. They’re like, “What just happened?”

Life felt full of randomness, and so the earliest games are full of randomness.

Over time, games acquired more structure. Instead of dice being manifestations of the gods, you could move along a path.

This is Senet, the oldest board game we know of. We don’t actually know how to play it, but we’re pretty sure it involved moving through life and getting to the afterlife because it’s in all the Egyptian tombs.

Then you can look at something like chess.

Chess has this huge element of “accept your role in the class structure” built into the game. It’s really reflective of how society saw itself. It’s a model of how very powerful feudal kings and queens thought the world worked.

And it’s clear that one of the things they thought about how the world worked was that ordinary people were tiny and disposable: conscripted peasants pulled away from subsistence-level farms because they were peons on their master’s estate.

In Romance languages, by the way: pawn, peón. Literally.

You look at this board game and go, “Wow. Wait a minute. If those are the poor soldiers who were conscripted, that means their wives, their parents, their kids, and their crops are basically the stuff being trampled underneath the squares. They weren’t even worth noticing. They didn’t even get a piece on the board.”

Then, once a few queens actually managed to seize power from their dead husbands, queens showed up in the game and were given primacy on the board, with the greatest power.

All this implicit messaging tells you, “This is how the world works”—but not through a story. It tells you by replicating a system.

Not all of them were quite that creepy.

This, for example, is the tafl family of games—Hnefatafl and others—played in Nordic and Celtic countries. This is a Viking game.

This is literally a model of a far more democratic society, with the jarl and his men. Unfortunately, it turns out that other jarls always want to kill you, so the task is to defend your jarl while all the other marauding mobs come in from outside.

In Africa, for example, we see the Mancala or Oware family. This is a game about crop rotation.

To this day, it is played with dried seeds in little wells. In many African traditions, it even has a cultural norm: you can win the game, but you can’t win by too much. All the losers still need to have enough seeds to live, because the game is implicitly teaching a social norm: you don’t hog all the crops, and you don’t take all the best fields. Everybody must survive.

Wow. This feels a little bit more like the campfire.

We’re back at the roots of history with some of these. They feel more campfire-like in a lot of ways, which isn’t surprising, because games are really, really, really old.

In fact, games not only predate human written history; they predate humans. Anybody who has a kitten knows that.

The thing about games is that they’ve always been a form of practice. That’s why kittens play. That’s why dolphins play.

They exist on a narrative level only as they are interpreted. Originally, they’re created through a folk process. At the same time, they somehow challenge the notion that there’s an author.

I mean, somebody authors the system, but everybody has their own run through the game. That’s a very different way of thinking from being dictated to through a book.

You can tell any story you want, as long as it follows the rules.

It’s kind of like the structure of a sonnet. You can write any sonnet you want; it just has to rhyme this way. Chess is a sonnet-making machine, and to write a sonnet is to play a particular kind of game.

That’s probably the biggest point of commonality.

When we think about how games work, you start with this mental model over here. This is a two-player game, so we’ll start on the left.

I have some idea about how this system—this world—works, so I’m going to form an intent. I’m going to decide to do something. I don’t know what it will do, but I’m going to try it.

Then there’s some way I can poke at the model. I might actually be really bad at poking the model, as any of you who have tried playing with an unfamiliar game controller know. It can be hard to poke at the model. There’s a whole separate little game there.

Whatever I did goes into this mysterious, not-understood black box: the rules of the system, the whim of the gods, whatever it is.

Then I get told, “Oh, well, if you do that, I’m going to do this.”

I go, “Oh.”

Then I update my idea of what’s in that black box. I say, “Well, I just learned something. I poked it this way and it spun a little. Therefore, I have enhanced my mental model.”

If I’m doing this with another person, I’m actually forming a mental model of what goes on inside their head.

In that sense, a game is literally a communications medium, because one player’s ideas are being translated into rules, fed through the machine, and spat out the other side—and I have to figure out what they mean.

You can walk through this and say: I have intent. Then there’s an affordance, then an input. I get haptic feedback, which means the controller vibrates, or I get the nice sensation—the thunk—of putting down the queen and toppling the pawn. There’s an action inside the black box. There’s a state change.

The interesting thing about this—which is a basic diagram of interactivity, not that different from what you might find in an HCI course—is that the world is full of things that look and act like games.

We can design a game, and we can even play chess in our heads. We don’t need a board.

That means a game is actually a mathematical structure that exists independent of any container. That’s kind of like stories, too. They don’t have to be in the form of a book.

Games are interactive experiences. But there are a lot of interactive experiences that aren’t games.

It turns out they become games when we choose to play with them.

If I make something and say, “It’s a game,” and you say, “No, it isn’t,” you’re always right—because anybody can choose not to play something, and then it isn’t a game for them.

On the other hand, it’s always a game for me, because I said it was.

So games involve voluntary participation instead of the mandatory relationship that books and morality plays force on you.

That means we improvise games all the time.

Games are jam sessions all the time. Very different from print culture.

Games tend to have four big kinds of problems for you to figure out.

The first is the one we all learn as kids: how exactly does my body work? How do I move? How do I perceive? We get feedback through our own vertigo.

The second is what most people think of when they think of games. Lots of games boil down to complex mathematics. You think of Sudoku or chess and go, “Oh God, brainy stuff.” Most of these do boil down to mathematical problems in the realm of PSPACE-complete to NP-hard, for those of you who are into complexity theory.

But an awful lot of games are about figuring out other people: figuring out your relative standing in the world, mentoring, and gloating. That’s a huge part of games.

And, going all the way back to the roots, lots of games are about chance: the system we think we understand and really don’t, because our brains have a bug in them. Everybody thinks they’ve got a system for the ponies, and they’re all wrong.

We literally have a software bug around chance. We can’t handle exponential curves. We can’t handle stochastic distributions.

When we look at games, then, they start looking something like this. They boil down into a collection of verbs, a collection of quantitative statistics or scalar variables, and a set of simulated objects in a system.

This flow diagram is the machine you’re actually poking.

If that sounds crazy and alien to you, consider how many of you play a musical instrument.

The graph for music looks awfully similar, because there are standardized chord progressions we move through. They make sense because the rules of harmony are fundamentally driven by the rules of vibrations in air. Well, they’re rules.

When you play inside that structure, there’s a huge amount of space to explore. It turns out these machines can have a lot of play to them, and I don’t think the word is entirely an accident.

Now, plenty of structures are super rigid. I don’t want to claim that video games are somehow a radical departure from print culture. They’re not.

This game, for example, is all about a game developer suddenly realizing he has a daughter and therefore needs to abandon his past sexism, so he’s going to make a game about protecting a thirteen-year-old girl. It’s got zombies in it, too.

But it’s fundamentally an imposition narrative structure.

This game has a story to tell. It has a moral to the story, and it’s going to tell it. You get to shoot stuff, but honestly, it isn’t going to make much difference along the way.

That means it uses all the same techniques the medieval morality play did. It uses rhetorical repetition, anacoenosis, and all those other big, fancy Greek words.

You replay it for achievements. What does replay do? It’s like being forced to watch the same episode of Friends twelve times.

It is full of framing and labeling. It forces a worldview on you because it gives you a viewpoint character and doesn’t let you escape it.

It’s full of othering. For all we know, zombies have a thriving and intelligent civilization, but as far as we’re concerned they’re just brain-eating maniacs.

Think about the genocide in pretty much every RPG that has you slay orcs.

Above all, it’s full of high causality: this happens because that happens.

That’s an awful lot like the stuff the preacher said from the pulpit. These kinds of games preach at you.

Because games are often physical in nature, you have games like these, which are more like sports. But you know what? These are imposing things on you, too.

They’re still imposition, because now the mechanics are about training reflexes, rote behaviors, and repetitively performing an action exactly the same way ten thousand times so that you can do it without thinking.

That also sounds like the kind of thing you’re told from on high, from a pulpit: “Do this without thinking about it. You must obey.”

These games are full of stagecraft and cutscenes. They’re full of choice architectures that aren’t really choices.

We use techniques out of education, like scaffolding: jump now. Jump higher. Now jump over something. Now jump over something and grab something.

That, by the way, is World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros.

They’re full of choices that aren’t really choices. Tropes, in short.

This is why people worry about games a lot of the time. They make the case that games are just training you to obey blindly in a whole bunch of ways, and therefore might be dangerous.

But this is actually kind of a terrible argument, because it forgets the amount of play in the machine.

The number of times we have seen games come along—after all, Doom is a sonnet machine—and be redesigned by players into a new game on the fly is truly astonishing.

One recent development is that players looked at all those lovely, carefully structured story games and said, “Huh. I’m going to set myself a new challenge. I wonder if I can play that game in three minutes and twelve seconds.”

Thus was born something called the speedrun, which none of us designers anticipated. We did not put this in the games.

The players answered us and said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait. We’re around a campfire here. We get a say, too,” and subverted the design.

Even in imposition spaces, our ability to build closed systems is pretty terrible, because there are always these players in the mix.

Remember: that interactivity loop loops. Stuff is always moving back and forth.

There are some people who think games are one hundred percent deterministic, and in a way they’re right. In theory, we can compute every possible chessboard. We can compute every possible step in every possible game of Tetris.

But this leaves out the fact that many games have rules that are themselves designed to be expressive structures—to be campfires in their very rule sets.

To talk about that, we have to talk about the single most important development in the entire field of literature in the last, probably, six hundred years:

Dungeons & Dragons.

A particular moment in the 1970s literally upended everything we know about narrative and literary structure.

A bunch of geeks in Wisconsin, in a basement.

Okay. We have to think about where that came from.

It was born out of war games, which were pure mathematical models: von Reisswitz doing Kriegsspiel as a form of training for the Prussian military.

Then a guy you may have heard of, because he wrote this story that spooked a bunch of people about aliens coming from Mars—H. G. Wells—thought that was the awesomest thing.

He said, “Well, I’m not interested in training soldiers, but I love the idea of playing with toy soldiers all over my living room.”

So he wrote a rule set called Little Wars.

Little Wars was gradually taken up by a bunch of science fiction fans hanging around New York City during World War II. They loved H. G. Wells and said, “Why don’t we play this stuff?”

So they did, and in the process they accidentally founded the first government think tanks.

I know. Weird, right? True story.

Along the way, they started writing and publishing rules for miniature war-gaming with little plastic soldiers.

A bunch of folks in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, said, “That’s cool,” and started playing. Then they made a version with dragons in it, because they were geeks and loved Fritz Leiber and Tolkien.

They said, “Wait a minute. It’s silly to have these armies. When I read Tolkien, it’s this tiny group, and there are these heroes. Maybe we should change the rules so that instead of managing an army, I just manage one person.”

Thus was born the role-playing game.

At the beginning it was still very much systems math. It was very mathematical. Frankly, it still is to this day. You buy the books and they’re full of tables of numbers.

But the big innovation that arose here was this very campfire-like notion of a collaborative story circle, with a master storyteller who had to adapt to everything the other storytellers did.

Truly collaborative storytelling inside a very rich and rigid rule structure.

That is the difference. That’s what was different from the Victorian tea party.

Victorian society had all these social rules implicit in it. God, Victorian society was full of rules. But they weren’t written-down rules. They weren’t mathematically quantified rules.

Games quantify things. They turn them into a machine.

Dungeons & Dragons is not like cops and robbers. It’s not completely free-form. It can accommodate free-form play, but there’s a simulation structure around it.

That’s the thing that’s really different, because we couldn’t truly perceive simulation structure until notions of computation and mathematics had grown sufficiently developed in our culture.

Math, by the way, was the other skill those wizards had way back when. The shamans could actually do math. No one else could.

Today, role-playing has led to a revolution.

A lot of people like to make fun of people hitting one another with foam swords in parks. But one fruition of this is that in countries like Denmark, LARP—live-action role-playing—is used to teach classes on teamwork, fighting classist and racist behavior, and social skills.

Third-graders learn social lessons through role-play in a form known as Nordic LARP, and it is a standard part of the curriculum in many schools across Scandinavian countries today.

But let’s rewind for a minute, because role-playing immediately led to a whole new tree of literature that a lot of people like to look down on.

In order to discuss it, I have to briefly diverge into graph theory. I did warn you about the multidisciplinary stuff.

Have any of you heard of the Königsberg bridge problem? Some of you.

The question is: can you walk through this whole city while crossing each bridge only once?

A mathematician eventually solved it—Euler. He solved it and, in doing so, created a whole branch of mathematics known as graph theory.

Graph theory is full of things like nodes, which are the dots, and edges, which are the lines. Edges can be unidirectional or bidirectional. They can be weighted, so they can be heavier in one direction than another, and all that other stuff.

I’m not going to go into it too deeply, except to tell you that the place where literature meets graph theory is where we get the Choose Your Own Adventure book.

This is basically hypertext with a noncyclic directed graph. It lets you pick a path through that library Borges described.

Gamebooks came along shortly afterward and let you not just pick a path, but add game systems along the way. On page twelve, you might actually have to play a game with dice to see whether you beat that orc.

Developing in tandem, at roughly the same time, was the field of hypertext literature, enabled by computers and unlocked early on by Eastgate Systems with software called Storyspace on black-and-white Macs.

As people explored hypertext, they discovered that you could have narrative structures more like webs than lines. You can see that in some of the ways the arrows work here.

Probably one of the major early works was Victory Garden, by Stuart Moulthrop. This was a hypertext you walked around in, because every paragraph was a place.

This may sound an awful lot like the World Wide Web, to use an antiquated term. And sure enough, there are a lot of commonalities.

Stuff in the World Wide Web had been prefigured by computer scientists like Vannevar Bush. This is a diagram of the Memex, which was supposed to be a hypertext means of accessing all the knowledge in the world.

This is the kind of thing that later became the intellectual inspiration for the web.

Computers, games, and literature were converging in a unique and fresh way. Here was something that could take the place of John Cage using dice to write his poetry: systems that provide unpredictable outputs, but within an interesting balance.

As media became more and more about the container, games started diving into this space.

Even a very simple game like this lets you move back and forth inside a single screen for hours if you want. It’s up to you whether you want the story to move forward, because you’re in control.

That’s not what we usually think of as a story.

But even in narrative games like the ones I showed earlier, you can sit in the first level of The Last of Us for as long as you want. You’re the one in control.

Then, of course, there were games that said, “Who cares about building that straight structure?”

A game like The Sims simply creates a simulation of how humans work.

Will Wright is a very interesting guy. He concluded that people could be boiled down to eight variables, one of which is how full your bladder is.

Take that, add a whole bunch of props with really simple physics, and what you have is a powerful story-generation engine.

In fact, the primary use of the original Sims was not to play the game. The primary use was to build screenshot comic books, like this one about Alice and Kev.

This is what happens when a player deletes the house in The Sims. It’s a lengthy comic about two homeless Sims and their adventures.

It turns out The Sims is a lot like a twelve-bar blues or a sonnet. It’s a structure that permits players to express themselves and write the sonnets.

It’s more like an instrument than a story.

Containers are still crazy important, right?

It turns out we spend an awful lot of money making nicer and nicer containers for the same thing. Eventually we figured out that branding was important, and that’s the business-savvy thing to do.

If you have money and power, you do want to take advantage of container control, branding, IP, and all of those things. They’re shorthand forms of mind control, in a way.

But these are just reuses of one simulation structure. The first-person shooter is one game in that sense.

Out of that tradition, you get structures like a string of pearls, with false choices. They look an awful lot like the kinds of choices you get to make in a movie or a book.

In a movie, you get none. Well, I guess you could close your eyes or leave.

In a book, we do require you to take an action: you have to turn the page.

In a game, we often give you a false choice, but we’re still charging through that story about the zombies and the little girl.

That’s so, so different from simulationist games like SimCity, which attempted to take the book written by Jane Jacobs about urban planning and turn it into a model you could play with.

And it’s quite different from this work of mad genius called Dwarf Fortress.

Some crazy guy—you aren’t going to believe this—decided, “What if I simulate the life of a family of dwarves, starting when the lava first cooled into plate tectonics and moving all the way forward?”

In such detail that if a dwarf is at the bar drinking, they will spill some beer on a cat. The cat will lick its fur, get drunk, stumble into the river, drown, and clog the sewage pipes, resulting in the flooding of the entire dwarf cavern and destruction of your civilization.

He actually simulated to that level of detail.

He’s been working on it for almost a decade now. It’s amazing. It’s like this infinite story generator that looks like nothing.

Or, of course, there’s the one everybody knows: Minecraft.

These are worlds that generate stories because they operate as though they’re setting up physics.

That wasn’t the only branch.

Online worlds add other people. That means they import all of human behavior into the setting, which adds an entire new dimension of problems to examine. It allows us to create thought experiments and new narratives about who and what we are as humans.

As one terrifying example, as a result of games like World of Warcraft, we’ve learned that if you play a hobbit or a dwarf in one of these games, you get fewer experience points per hour.

Why is that relevant? Because in the real world, if you’re short, you earn less money.

Somehow, we made a simulation good enough that we imported that bias into the virtual world and discovered something about our innate prejudices.

It turns out people don’t like grouping with hobbits.

Alternate economic structures. Alternate political structures.

This is really far away now from something like chess and its assumptions.

In fact, the earliest online worlds were text-based: multi-user dungeons, or MUDs. Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw created the first at the University of Essex in 1978 or 1979. They were graduate students at the time.

If you talk with Richard, don’t make fun of his accent, because England is still a pretty classist society and there can still be resentment. He doesn’t sound like Received Pronunciation from London. He didn’t go to Eton or whatever the proper schools are.

So when he wrote MUD, he said, “I’m going to eradicate the notion of social class.”

The world simply didn’t simulate it.

He allowed people to become wizards. He said anybody could go all the way to the top of the game, and if you were good at it, you got godlike powers. Who cares who your parents were?

He went further than that.

The first column here is each person’s real-life name. The second is the name of the character they played.

You might notice that Richard played Polly.

People came to him and said, “You’re playing a girl.”

He said, “It’s a virtual world. What does that matter?”

1978.

This is one of the most powerful feminist statements in terms of actual impact on human culture over the last forty years, because today we take for granted that on the internet you can express whatever aspect of yourself you like.

Literally simulating social revolutions and allowing us to try new narratives.

Sometimes we screwed up.

Here’s Ultima Online. Standing in the middle of that crowd somewhere is the god of the world, Lord British—Richard Garriott, second-generation astronaut and famed game legend—being burned to death because he forgot to set the invulnerability flag on himself.

We suddenly had to cope with the fact that when players answer back and seize the controls, they can seize far more control than we thought.

As a result, we had to develop entirely new modes of storytelling.

How do you tell a story to ten thousand people?

How do you tell a story to two hundred thousand people at once and let them have control?

We figured out ways.

We developed models in which we asked: do we control the context, or does the player?

For example, we might say, “We’re running an event about the slaying of a dragon.”

But when 9/11 happened, the players got to set the world’s fiction. That night, the world was full of flags and memorials.

We said, “Sometimes we get to decide who has control, and other times the players do.”

In the online world known as Achaea, once upon a time there was a game master who was fired.

What did they do?

They said, “Well, the game master played the deity of nature,” or something like that. So they simply wrote into the game the fact that Nature had fallen. None of the druids had any power anymore, and Nature was basically out of the game until a player became good enough to take that employee’s place—and be hired by the company.

That’s a very different kind of mythology from the kinds we had long ago, painted on the sides of Greek vases.

We’ve also seen a rebirth of hypertext, particularly coming out of Brooklyn, thanks to a tool called Twine.

It’s a new form of web-based hypertext that is leading to really strong artistic statements—and, yes, a lot of interesting authorial emphasis.

Even the imposition narrative is getting reinvented through games.

Then there is a form of storytelling called environmental storytelling.

This is from a game called BioShock: the idea that you can have a space you simply wander around and explore, and it’s up to you to figure out: what is the history here? What is the narrative here? What is going on?

This one featured shooting reskinned zombies of different kinds.

But plenty of other games coming out of art circles—such as Proteus, Dear Esther, and eventually the multi-award-winning Gone Home—developed the notion of environmental storytelling into a whole new realm.

Instead of saying, “I’m playing a first-person shooter,” you’re playing a first-person experience.

These are things that now have systems and rules circumscribing them, just like a game, but they don’t really have any goal other than: go mythologize with these pieces we’ve put in front of you.

This one here is actually ADR1FT.

These are almost trying to mimic elements of print media: strongly authored spaces, but all the discretion is in the player’s hands.

The interesting thing about these is that this is the sweet spot. This is the natural home genre for virtual reality, because more active games do not work that well.

We’re going to see an awful lot more environmental storytelling happening.

And, of course, as soon as you give players the ability to modify things in sandbox games, you start getting all kinds of ideas put into games completely outside the hands of the game designers, as players are allowed to build their own worlds.

They’re still obliged to fit inside the same rule set. It still has to follow the structure of the sonnet.

Interestingly, these ideas have grown out of games and into standard, authorially controlled media—and into your living rooms via genres like American Idol, which is the largest MMO in the world.

Once upon a time, games like Survivor and participatory experiences like The Real World on MTV were reality-show producers trying to channel the actions of independent players. They were trying to shape them very much like a game master does in D&D, and we were just observing.

It’s like we’re watching a game of D&D.

And, of course, in TV shows like Lost we saw game tropes like Easter eggs popping up.

Do you all know where an Easter egg came from?

Long ago, people wanted their game container to actually have their damn name on it, because they deserved the credit. So they hid their name away inside the game, and players found it.

A story that depended on player agency in order to be read.

One of the most fundamental stories of all: “I made this.”

The outputs of that are things like this: for those who don’t remember, in Lost it was Oceanic Airlines that crashed. You could go to the Oceanic Airlines website. You could actually book travel on it and choose seats.

Games led to the creation of a new form of storytelling termed transmedia, where game tropes were exported into websites, alternate-reality games, and games that called you on the telephone.

And, of course, even if you think you’re in authorial control, you still have to answer to Hall H at Comic-Con.

The players are now telling us there is another hand on the pen. They’re telling us creators how to write.

So even the once-far-removed storytellers of big media are getting dragged back to the campfire, because the feedback loop is now so fast that it is becoming game-like.

I don’t know how many of you got to see the premiere of Westworld.

Westworld gave me the thrill of the utterly familiar, because Westworld is exactly like an online game in 1985—and it is a drama about running that game.

So to me it was like, “It’s a show about me.”

But is this really a return to oral culture?

Not really.

We live more and more in a media landscape—and I think we all know that—and it’s a communications landscape deeply informed by games.

The design of eBay is heavily influenced by games. Amazon has things like star ratings partly because of games. You have friends lists on Facebook partly because of games.

There were social networks in games before there were social networks as standalone websites. The idea of online profiles at all is an online-game thing.

Our entire media landscape is now full of little feedback loops and rewards and stars and “Yes, you should do this,” and achievements and badges.

It’s absolutely everywhere.

The result is that we’ve started layering all these rule structures onto our communications media and our daily lives, so much that we’re now kind of living in a game.

Not everybody knows the rules. Not everybody knows how to play them.

In fact, this has upended even the word “narrative.”

If you go out and look for the most common use of the word narrative today, it isn’t going to be in literary theory. It’s going to be about political narratives: alternate myths, alternate understandings of the world, practically religions, shaped through selective interpretations of alleged facts.

The point here isn’t to pick one side or another.

The point is to get across that the world we live in is now so game-like that we’re all playing in it, and people who are good at the game can shape our very perceptions of things.

There are people good enough at the game to set themselves up at a lectern, on a pedestal, and give you a morality play—and you might not even know what’s real or not.

This is not a widely known fact, but I’ll share it with you: Pepe the Frog was a troll operation from 4chan.

They are thrilled that they managed to trick a national campaign into having a web page about a green cartoon frog.

Every article you read about this was somebody really good at the game playing you—and playing our democracy.

Which is scary.

This is authorially created. It’s not real.

It was authorially created by people who learned how to play a new simulation: games of clicks, likes, and retweets.

A different form of mythmaking. A new form of storytelling that is once again reshaping our fundamental understanding of the world.

Authors who use memes as their novel, the internet for a pen, and people as the ink.

In the end, this is what games have wrought.

There is no games master online. But the games and the rules are there to be played.

Here we are looking at graph theory yet again.

Not that long ago, after the first presidential debate, we saw “Trump won” trend.

Guess what? All sides do it.

The virtue of games is that they teach us to see systems as tractable. They teach us to see situations as challenges to overcome and the environment itself as an arbitrary set of constraints.

But they also teach us to treat the environment as not being very real.

So maybe I can speedrun the election for lulz.

It’s contributory to what we see in internet discourse today.

Games do have solutions to problems like that. We had to deal with all of them: notions of fair play, sportsmanship, the idea that maybe there should be referees.

We took it seriously enough that during the 1990s we held legal conferences about how to handle these new forms of storytelling, where we are persuading one another of our worldviews.

We had legal conferences at places like New York Law School, and we wrote law books about the problem—with a heck of a lot more emphasis, frankly, on fairness and fun than Facebook has.

Either way, digital bards are here, whether they’re game designers or hanging out in some obscure corner of Reddit, and they’re singing their siren songs to all of us.

These storytelling structures are now a new paradigm, and it is a change as large as the printing press or audio recording.

I’m reminded of another time when a shift—an advance in technology combined with social upheaval—led to a different medium being born.

We had comic strips, but along came this notion of the comic book. It started as a business thing.

What it enabled was this idea that an immigrant from another planet, with a name ending in “-el,” could be created by the children of Jewish immigrants as World War II was brewing.

Or that Wonder Woman—based in part on Margaret Sanger’s niece, connected to the woman who founded Planned Parenthood and a famous suffragist—could be created by a polyamorous trio in order to push women’s suffrage, and then feminism.

When these kinds of shifts happen in our storytelling media, they can have enormous power.

Those two little superheroes in kids’ funny books turned out to have a lot of long-lasting social impact in ways we didn’t even perceive at the time.

Comic books are frankly pretty simple compared with what we can now do through digital modeling of reality—which is really a better phrase for the strength of games.

We’re facing a true upheaval in what the nature of a story even is.

We haven’t had a change like this in half a millennium.

It might feel like it’s happening slowly when you’re living through it, but on a historical scale this is really fast.

We thought this was our picture: print culture.

Print culture is dissolving into pixels awfully quickly.

This is our world now.

We are here, around this campfire.

And it’s not just me.

I leave the question with you.

May you write it well.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

RAPH KOSTER: Now I can take questions, if I can see anybody.

I was so overwhelming in my authorial intent that nobody has any?

Yes. Do you have one?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question inaudible.]

RAPH KOSTER: You disappeared. You’re back. Yay.

As for what I think the next big shift in interactivity is: our computational power is rising at a ridiculous rate, and games have, by and large, not fully explored the possibilities of rich and deep simulation.

There is actually way, way, way more to come. Far, far more.

That’s going to have impacts on us all over the place. It’s already emerging through social media and online. Through the use of big data, we’re seeing stories revealed, so to speak, that we didn’t know were there.

It won’t be that long before we’re able to put that kind of information into games. Before long, you could be playing SimCity with Detroit, and that’s going to lead to whole new kinds of stories and whole new kinds of interactivity.

We’ve spent far too much of our computational power on pretty graphics. But it won’t be long before we really start diving into the things computers are actually good at, which is modeling.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you think there will be any big shifts from virtual-reality headsets that are coming out right now?

RAPH KOSTER: Yeah. I’m a bit of a VR skeptic for games.

The real virtues of VR are exactly in that modeling realm. They’re going to be most powerful for training and various forms of simulation.

Ironically, that means they fall on the authorial-imposition side. They’re great for entrainment. They tie back into your limbic system really strongly, which is why so many people puke if they’re not tuned correctly.

We’re going to see a lot of applications along those lines, and those are probably where the real power of VR is going to emerge.

The thing I don’t think people appreciate is AR, and the degree to which augmented reality is going to change absolutely everything about the world within the next five years, to a degree that frankly sounds like science-fiction magic.

Imagine being able to look at any object and pull up the full database and history—not only of that class of object, but of that particular one.

Walk up to your dishwasher and look at it. The manual is floating there. But not just that: its repair history.

Or I look at you, and, for all I know, your professors may have given me access to your grades.

What does that do to social interaction? It’s massive. It’s world-altering.

What happens when we’re able to leave annotations? The recording of this lecture might sit on this stage forever, and anybody could walk in here and re-experience it as though they were here, superimposed on reality.

You’re going to buy furniture in a VR setting and then project it through AR into your living room to see whether the colors fit with your wallpaper.

All of that is just like self-driving cars killing trucking jobs within the next five years. This is within the next five years.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Microsoft put out a trailer about a headset like that, with little things popping up that you can work on.

RAPH KOSTER: Yes. That’s HoloLens.

But if you want a better glimpse of the insane potential, at the most recent Facebook developer conference they released a video of what they called social virtual reality.

You have to see it to understand.

From the stage, Mark Zuckerberg put on the headset and met two people who were back at the office. They went underwater. They went to Mars. They went to Facebook headquarters. They went to his house and got a live video feed of his dog.

Then he got a phone call, held it up in virtual reality, showed the dog to his wife, took a selfie inside VR, and had it show up on Facebook.

Place was obsolete.

Think about a world where place is obsolete.

It’s going to be a really, really massive upheaval, and it’s going to be very, very game-like. In fact, game developers are the ones building it for him.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned self-driving cars replacing jobs in the next five years. Where do you think we stand politically with all this change coming? How does our economy hold up?

RAPH KOSTER: Well, that’s kind of the singularity thing.

One of the ideas behind the singularity is that the rate of change becomes so fast that we can no longer forecast it.

It’s a real problem for science-fiction writers. They’re actively complaining that the world is catching up with their predictions so quickly that before their novels hit the street, things have already come to pass.

The example of trucks is really important. Trucking is the number-one job in, I think, thirty of the fifty states in the United States.

And self-driving vehicles are being built on top of a model—a simulation—from Google Earth and Google Maps, which all of you are avatar clients of.

If you own an Android phone, you are an avatar in a Google Earth MMO that uploads your movement traces all the time.

You guys know that, right?

Okay. In case you didn’t: your phone is telling Google where you are all the time. That’s how they tell you that traffic is bad.

Google Earth was kind of built by some MMO game designers, because there is no difference between building a model of the world that happens to look like Azeroth or Britannia and building a model of the world that looks like Earth.

They’re both just a big MMO server.

It turns out game developers are building that.

Self-driving cars have already reached the safety level of your average sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. They don’t yet have the same number of road hours that humans do, but they’re picking up road hours incredibly quickly.

As soon as they hit, let’s say, a billion road hours with a lower crash rate and a lower loss-of-life rate, it will be morally unconscionable not to turn over the keys to the robot, because we would be killing more people than they would.

So the answer is: politicians are completely clueless and have no idea what’s about to happen.

That’s the short answer.

There have been efforts. A lot of the people who were on that slide about the law textbooks did end up on things like Obama’s Technology Council over the last eight years. People are trying to listen.

But I don’t think people understand the degree to which this stuff is falling on our heads. It’s coming really, really fast.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned a trend toward the campfire method of storytelling within games—people wanting to interact with things—but there’s also the competing trend of people wanting a cycle of rewards and a sense of character progression, which also reflects an aspect of reality. How do you see those two interacting?

RAPH KOSTER: There will almost always be somebody at the pulpit, right?

You can go to any number of phrases, but probably the best-known is, of course, “the opiate of the masses.”

That’s a very real risk. But it isn’t a risk just from games. It’s a risk from all forms of mass media giving us those kinds of feedback rewards.

At this point, film, television, and music have all been tuned to give us little bursts of dopamine in exactly the same ways.

The saving grace of games is that, at the very least, you get to kick back.

I like to say that games are implicitly a conversation. It’s structural. You can’t make a game that is not a conversation.

That is a very small saving grace in the face of an awful lot of oligarchic money, power, and control—but it’s at least something.

So game designers are on the side of the angels in that, I think.

I hope.

There are some.

Culture, cult, acculturation—culture is a valuable thing.

The intent of a culture, speaking really abstractly and anthropologically, is to build a game system of rules that everybody signs up to so that we can all play and kind of have fun.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, let’s say.

And it kind of does take a game master enforcing that.

If people can arbitrarily break the game rules and flip over the table, that’s an issue.

By and large, games have relied on structures in which somebody does have control and power. It might be driven by consensus: “I’ll be the game master today; you be the game master tomorrow.” But games typically have those kinds of structures.

So does society.

Taking away all rules—or even changing the rules too quickly—can lead to real issues in games and in the real world.

Games offer us a lot in terms of exploring those changes without having to make them, and in terms of practicing and playing through things in a way that is safe before we apply them when life and limb are at stake.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How much fun did you have working on the Star Wars Galaxies project? Was it exhausting?

RAPH KOSTER: It was exhausting and not all that fun.

It involved incredibly long hours on an incredibly short timeline. We built it from scratch in less than three years.

There’s a term in the game industry called “crunch.” It means working twelve-hour days. We crunched quite a lot.

I basically missed multiple years of my kids’ lives.

The other aspect was that the politics around doing something that is a major media property like Star Wars are crazy: approvals, documentation, and all that stuff going back and forth. Really exhausting.

And, of course, I didn’t think the game was done, and we launched it anyway.

So: painful.

On the flip side, I started working on that game sixteen years ago. The game closed—ceased to exist—eight years ago.

And you’re asking me a question about it now.

Total win.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What other games have you particularly enjoyed working on?

RAPH KOSTER: A lot of my personally enjoyable game-design experiences have actually been on games you never saw.

A typical game designer, much like a typical writer or musician, has ninety-five percent of their lifetime output never see the public eye—not necessarily because they didn’t want it to, but because it never managed to come out.

I had a lot of fun building Ultima Online. I was a lead designer on that. That game left a little dent in the world.

I mentioned some of the impact on social media. Ultima Online is in part to blame for the microtransaction business model becoming viable. That has infected pretty much every aspect of internet commerce, so it was a powerful thing on that front.

Ultima Online and the text MUDs before it helped lead to the notion that maybe we need rights structures online. That’s what several of those law books were about.

So that’s kind of cool.

I wrote the “Declaration of the Rights of Avatars,” and it’s in law textbooks from the American Bar Association.

Small dents in the universe, but dents nonetheless.

That was a lot of fun.

I had a lot of fun building Metaplace. I had fun early on with Facebook gaming, until it succumbed to money-grubbing sociopaths.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying designing board games a lot, and I’ve been making a whole bunch of them.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How many have you created so far?

RAPH KOSTER: In the last three years, I think I’ve designed twelve of them.

The first one should be getting Kickstarted with Boing Boing sometime later this year. It takes quite a while to get them out the door.

[Brief exchange while he plugs in his laptop.]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks for Galaxies. I was there in the beta. I guess my question is: were you disappointed by how the game changed over its life cycle? I thought there was going to be a Galaxies 3.0, not an MMO like the others.

RAPH KOSTER: Yes.

If you couldn’t tell, I come from a tradition called sandbox or simulationist game design.

Video game design has been around long enough for there to be traditions and camps, and I am in that camp. I’m considered one of the premier exponents of sandbox design, or whatever.

BioWare, the studio that made Star Wars: The Old Republic, is…

RAPH KOSTER: BioWare is absolutely a storytelling shop. They’re all about the imposition side of games.

So they went and made an online world where you followed a strict storyline instead of wandering around.

I thought that was like putting apples in your carburetor. It’s a weird match.

To my mind, I don’t mind having stories inside a world, but I would not make a world that was just a story in that way. If I wanted to do that, I would make a story-world like Gone Home or something.

So philosophically, it wasn’t really aligned with what I’m interested in.

Was I disappointed? Well, everybody should put tinfoil in the microwave at least once, right? You should put some apples in the carburetor at least once.

Just because I don’t think it was a good idea doesn’t mean it didn’t need to be done. We needed to see whether it turned out to be a viable direction.

When we started making Ultima Online, the other online-game makers said to us, “Wait. You’re going to have tailoring? And fishing? What?”

They actually ran ad campaigns saying, “If you want to pretend to bake bread, go over there. If you want to be a hero, come over here.”

It turned out that tens of thousands of people actually wanted to bake bread, which was kind of cool.

In Galaxies, I got the same thing when I said, “Well, yeah, we’re postponing the launch of spaceships and landspeeders, but hairdressing will be there on day one—and so will coordinated belly dancing.”

Today, every online world has coordinated belly dancing in it.

So yeah, I wasn’t entirely wrong.

But these experiments need to happen, and we need to be open to them as creators—not shut down avenues of exploration.

We can critique. We can talk. We can have arguments on the design side.

What really frustrates me and ticks me off is when players start taking sides in those arguments and attempt to shut down the creative expression of individual creators.

It’s kind of like: look, I’m a creator. I get to have an argument with the creators of Gone Home about whether this is the right direction for storytelling and environments, blah blah blah.

You do not get to tell them not to make this game. Goddammit, shut up. I’m having a craft discussion. You’re just being an asshole.

That’s my general take on it.

So more power to them.

An awful lot of good friends of mine worked on SWTOR. I told them I didn’t think it would work. They made it anyway.

It made a lot of money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What advice would you give to a student who aspires to go into the game industry—especially someone from a place where you can’t just walk outside and see EA or Activision in town? What would you say is the major path to getting started?

RAPH KOSTER: I started my game-design practice—or career, depending how you look at it—somewhere around eighth grade, in Peru.

There were hardly any computers in Peru in 1984.

I started my actual game career down the road in Tuscaloosa.

My answer is: place has nothing to do with it.

It’s much more about the willingness to be an autodidact—to teach yourself and keep challenging yourself.

It’s about the willingness, as you may have noticed, to learn every field on Earth.

It’s about the willingness to keep working, creating, trying things, and maintaining high standards.

If you do that and put the work out there, you will start garnering an audience. If you get an audience, the jobs and the EAs will come knocking.

But—big but—there are an awful lot of people who want to be designers these days. An awful lot of people want to break into the industry.

It’s just like all the people who wanted to move to Hollywood in the 1930s. Most people are going to be stuck on the sidewalk in long lines for auditions. They might land a bit part.

It’s an entertainment industry.

People in entertainment industries—all entertainment industries—have wonderful stories about people who made it big: the Will Wrights, the Miyamotos, the Spielbergs, the Beyoncés, whoever. Absolutely.

But just turn on YouTube. There are millions of people as good as Beyoncé or as good as Spielberg out there.

It’s very clear now that talent is actually very broadly distributed.

Luck has an enormous amount to do with it. Enormous.

The number of spots available in the industry is smaller than the number of people who want in.

So you just have to make yourself into a total badass.

But if you do, you can make it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question about open distribution platforms such as Steam Greenlight and whether they help independent developers.]

RAPH KOSTER: I think they do—or at least they did.

It used to be an amazing, powerful positive, just like Flash was an amazing, powerful positive that let people put games up on any arbitrary website.

Once upon a time, shareware was an amazing, powerful positive that let anybody make a game, put it on FTP sites, and let people download it.

Every time we’ve had a distribution channel like that open up, it has caused an explosion of creativity. Game-development costs plummeted. Distribution costs plummeted. Marketing costs plummeted.

Production values tended to be low, but that was okay because of the creativity.

In every single one of those cases, what has happened is that budgets began to rise, competition began to come in, and production values had to go up. That meant everything got more expensive, which meant that a lot of the people at the low end suddenly couldn’t attract an audience and had to drop out.

Previously, the channels were—what were the names of some of the Flash portals? I forget. But eventually all of those, because they were the distribution point, said, “Wow, we’re a publisher now. Wow, we can gouge everybody. Wow, more people will come to our portal site if we feature only the highest-quality stuff. Wow, we’ll let this volume come in—that’s okay—but really we’re going to curate so that only the top stuff, which makes us the most money, is at the top anyway.” And the indies will all die.

Steam has already crossed that tipping point. Mobile gaming has already crossed that tipping point. The industry oscillates between periods of blockbuster, high-budget, large-team productions and moments when there are blue oceans of innovation and creativity because a technological shift allows low-end developers, like little mice, to come in and steal bits of the cheese.

But at some point, one of those mice gets big, hogs the cheese, and kills the other mice. Zynga was once a tiny indie; it turned into a big old rat. EA used to be a tiny indie; they’re something more like an alligator now. Activision was once the tiny indie that fought against the behemoth Atari. Activision was founded by programmers who didn’t think they were getting a fair cut from Atari cartridges and who felt that their names should be on the games. Today, they’re known as one of the most ruthless business competitors on the planet.

So: cycle of life. We are currently at a moment when mammals are turning into predators. I think it’s a very ugly scene right now for most small developers.

We’re basically at a point now—and I used this line already, so I apologize to those who were in class today—where you can work at the big companies and get to not be creative but eat, or you can be indie and get to be creative and not eat. So it’s definitely getting tougher out there.

You asked something already, so how about you?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: As far as educational background, if someone is interested in getting into games—especially the writing or storytelling aspect—what would you recommend?

RAPH KOSTER: That’s actually a really large question. I would recommend diving into some of the literature on educational gaming and Games for Change. I’ll suggest reading my book, actually. It’s one of the books that straddles the training and education community and the game design community. Other than that, I would start looking particularly into the Games for Change movement. A lot of educational gaming has historically been terrible.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What I really mean is, if someone wants to go into gaming in general, what education or degree would you recommend?

RAPH KOSTER: Oh! That’s a much—that depends on what aspect. That’s kind of like asking, “What education should I get to break into Hollywood?” Well, do you want to act? Do you want to direct? Do you want to do lighting? Do you want to be a best boy or a gaffer? It’s different.

For programming, you should get a computer science degree. Then you should learn as many languages as you can and as many ways to program as you can, and you should pick some aspect of gaming that is interesting to you, be it network programming, graphics programming, or whatever.

If you’re an artist, you should learn 3D modeling—the stuff that’s being taught here—and work on that.

If you’re a game designer, you should go get a liberal arts education and learn every field on Earth. All the big-name game designers have very eclectic, broad backgrounds and paths. You don’t need that if you’re not going to be, like, the director, but there are also only about a hundred directors in the world, so you don’t have to aim that high.

If you want to be a game designer, start making games. You can make games with literally random garbage from your house. Board game design is one hundred percent applicable to video game design. With the availability of tools these days, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t just start.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Putting aside the difficulty of actually making a living doing it full-time, which you covered a minute ago, I feel like we’re seeing more tools like RPG Maker and Super Mario Maker. Do you see us trending toward a future where it might be as easy—not necessarily as economically advantageous, but as easy—to tell your own story through video games as it is to play through someone else’s story? Or do you continue to see a divide?

RAPH KOSTER: It’s an interesting question. There’s a long tradition of games or toys that are about the process of gaming—or toying, so to speak: LEGO, Lincoln Logs, whatever. So it’s not really surprising to see that kind of thing emerging within games. Lots of games—the MUD example I mentioned—have had traditions of graduating you into that process.

That said, if you had to rank the relative fame and power of people in the game industry in terms of audience reach, there’s no question that the people who are winning are the people who are streaming video of themselves playing a game and telling their story to a passive audience.

It is an audience that’s chattering back at you on the Twitch channel, but nonetheless, we’re seeing that the people gaining the fame are essentially broadcasters. I think this trend is not straightforward. Obviously, broadcasting gameplay is going to be different from broadcasting passive media, so it’s already more interactive. There’s more give-and-take. It feels communitarian in a way.

But it has been very easy for games, in the name of financial success, to move away from the campfire and toward the printing press, because it’s more reliable revenue. It’s more straightforward. There are standing jokes about how, gosh, all those creative directors really want to be in Hollywood—and there’s some painful truth there.

So I guess I won’t go so far as to call it an ongoing battle for the soul of games, but it’s certainly a skirmish.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question about increasingly accessible game-development tools and the democratization of game creation.]

RAPH KOSTER: Tools are becoming more available than ever, and that’s a good thing. The tools are hiding the computer from you more. That’s part of the process of democratizing it, but it also has interesting consequences, because it means that you perceive the systemic nature of your platform less than you otherwise would.

Tools also have a way of imposing patterns or norms on your thinking. Pretty much all the tools that are available today—this is going to get a little techy—but if you did a comparison of the ontology of games presented by Unity and GameMaker, in terms of the structure of how they say there are objects, message emitters, receivers, and triggers, it’s actually incredibly similar.

I’ve been an active participant in helping build that ontology. It’s been an ongoing effort of mine for about ten years, trying to figure out the science of how games work on a mathematical, structural level. But at the same time, it’s a valid fear that we’re basically putting games in a box and training an entire generation that this is all games are.

So democratization cuts both ways in that sense. If you democratize music but give people only guitars and no pianos, you’re going to curb the kinds of music you get.

It’s been amazing and wonderful. I love having more people making games. I wish more of them learned how computers worked in the process. I wish more of them learned the history of games so that they understood more of the scope of their medium.

I think, by and large, not just game players but game designers are sadly kind of ignorant of the corpus, so to speak. That sounds so pretentious, but with those top-level game designers, you can say things like, “What if you use the auction system from M.U.L.E., from 1983, but mix it up with CCG-style mechanics out of Magic: The Gathering?” They understand you, because at least there’s a canon there.

Echoing back to the question about whether there is value to structural norms: there is value to canons that help you communicate. There’s a huge amount of game stuff out there that people don’t know.

When the art-game movement started, or when the Twine movement started, there was all this critical material being written, and nobody had ever read J. David Bolter’s Writing Space, played with Storyspace, or experienced Victory Garden. The art-game people had never played Hollywood Medieval, by Doug Crockford, from 1982.

There’s a lot of history out there. Democratization—I guess this is true in political science, too—works best with an educated populace.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question about modding and learning to create games by modifying existing work.]

RAPH KOSTER: Mods are—when you learn to play guitar, it’s probably easiest if you start with a song you know and try to mess around with just those chords. You start with something straightforward.

When you start making a game, it’s probably a good idea to start by cloning a game. Clone it to learn how it works.

When my dad was given his first car by my grandfather—seriously, for real—he took him to the dump and said, “Here’s your car.” It was in eighteen peach baskets. He said, “If you can put it together, it’s yours.”

So cloning is not a bad thing. It’s a good learning step. After you clone, mod. Start modifying. Start with an existing game structure and ring changes on it.

When you start playing guitar and decide to write your own tunes, you go, “What would happen if I threw this different chord in there?” Eventually, you start coming up with your own original chord progressions and your own original tunes, and you’re off.

Mods are just a kind of training wheels. They’re awesome.

[Brief inaudible exchange.]

RAPH KOSTER: Great. I mean, yeah, that’s great. Go for it.

Maybe the last one.

[Applause.]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question about large technology and media companies entering game development.]

RAPH KOSTER: Facebook and Amazon both went and hired a giant pile of veteran game developers. By and large, game design is an art, a craft—it’s all of those things—and people who come in and try to do it without knowing anything generally fall flat on their face in a very, very expensive fashion.

I think there’s been, particularly in American culture, a tradition of thinking of games as trivial—as literally child’s play, not important. I’m biased, but that is so obviously wrong on the face of it that it’s shocking. It’s really a massive cultural blind spot.

That has stretched into business, with people saying, “Oh, sure, let’s buy Atari. We’ll make billions,” with absolutely no awareness of or respect for what was actually going on.

It’s funny, because the U.S. gets sports really profoundly, but it doesn’t get all the other kinds of games. Sports are just a kind of game. Sport is a subset of my field. That’s a dangerous thing to say in Alabama, but too bad.

Usually, they fall on their face. Amazon—we’ll see. Amazon has been trying to make games for at least five or six years already, so we’ll see if they succeed. Oculus is making good traction, so who knows?

But the big one was when all the TV and movie companies started trying to make games. They lost billions. It was kind of great to see.

If I don’t stop now, I won’t get dinner. Thank you.

[Applause. Music.]