Reality Augmented Games

When a designer creates a video game, a video game being a technical product, a designer, like all designers, engineers, or people who make technical products, are critiquing society. They are looking for a gap or a question that isn’t being asked in reference to some technology or in the design of something, In asking this question, that designer creates a new piece of technology, an answer to that question; a bridge. This idea comes from Bruno Latour in his work Aramis.

The designer of a video game, then, is looking to answer some design question; some technological issue that the previous designer of a similar product came up with. It is this mechanism, this process that keeps things changing. It is this process that keeps design in a constant state of flux.

However, money enters the equation at a wide variety of places. Will this design change impact the sales of the new product? How will a precedent influence consumers? Actor-Network-Theory tells us that the answer to those questions lie within the actors themselves. However, those particular answers are measurable. We can tell how much brand influenced sales with two similar products (in moves, for example: 13^th Floor vs Matrix or Wyatt Earp vs Tombstone). These designs almost universally rely on a similar idea; an established norm; an accepted means through which business is done. In movies, it’s the structure of a story, what characters do and do not know vs the audience, etc.

In video games, these processes exist as well. There are a set number of ways we’ve decided video games are. While a new way appears, it is typically couched somewhere in between two previously established types. Any ‘radical’ game will not be so much radical, but a new translation of an old idea, with a twist.

In video games, as Ian Bogost tells us, we rely on procedure. Procedure dictates how machines do things like draw rocks or how fast an object can thrust upward, or how different mushrooms interact with a particular character. There is no part of a video game that escapes these procedures. It is this predictability that allows us to practice, to become good at a game; at other games like us.

These procedures are always based on translations of realistic things. Rocks fall, like gravity. If I jump, I’m also going to come back down. The procedures of nature become the procedures of things. However, in video games, you can mess around with those procedures. Only, you can’t stray too far or it just doesn’t seem believable. While you can put fantastic things in games: Flight, Lazers, Surfing down from an exploding spaceship on a piece of metal inside a mechanized suit being piloted by the president of the united states, and other such things, those things are always couched in reality.

Reality is inescapable. You cannot design something without referencing it. The point of this post then, is why spend time designing things like cities, artificial intelligence, and other such procedures when the data for those things are out there, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Why should a game like GTAIV worry about designing patterns of traffic for its citizens when expansive studies of New York City’s traffic patterns are done constantly?

Hundreds of thousands of hours are spent programming things we already have data for. Census data, ethnic data, demographic data about sicknesses, traffic patterns, consumer spending, public opinion, gun ownership, if guns make you happier, crime data, property values, voting records, salary data for public officials, and more. Social science drowns daily in the data it has unearthed. You have data going as far back as the origin of statistics.

I suppose, as Lucas Zen Hannon put it, what about reality augmented games as opposed to augmenting reality?

Shenmue tried to do this with almanac data and the weather. Grand Theft Auto IV tried to capture the feel of New York City by having research teams watching the sky:

Because we were working in high definition and we knew we’d need a shitload of research, we wanted to be somewhere where we had a foothold. We have a full time research team here off doing things every day, from how one building looks over another or photo shoots of hundreds of different kinds of pedestrians or video in the sky over 12 hours to see if how we make sky move is correct. There’s so much weird research: The ethnic makeup of every neighborhood. The traffic patterns. To try and get a feeling. We’re not trying to be 100% accurate, but we’re trying to capture the essence of the place.
From Ben Fritz's interview

However, imagine if Grand Theft Auto IV contained up to the minute traffic data for New York City? Concurrently, imagine if Grand Theft Auto IV also held events in the same event schedule as New York City does and created traffic patterns based on the location of those events? If game makers want their cities to feel alive, what better way to do it than to augment their game with live data from a live city?

This opens up a whole new realm of escapism (for good or for bad), whereupon you play yourself, in your neighborhood, in your house, with the normal amount of money you make. What would happen if you, living where you do, suddenly gained some sort of super power? What if aliens came to Earth? Instead of a player having to relate to a character through narrative, the player plays themselves in a fantastic situation. Further, friends living nearby could come over and all take part in what is transpiring. The living, breathing representation of the sum total of social science research can be shared by everyone, or just 1 person. Modular game experiences based on proximity and actual travel to that particular city. The game generates maps and buildings based on real life housing data, maps.

A game that took these things into account would quite possibly be the greatest application of statistical data of all times. The only weakness is the reality of sampling and the distortion of data associated with the weaknesses of statistical analysis.

Please steal this idea.