This can’t work. In fact, I’m certain it can’t, because if it could, someone would’ve proposed it already and I’ve spent at least 5 fruitless minutes googling it. There are millions of people working on the amorphous collection of technologies we call “the internet”, a few of them are even quite clever, so the odds of me, an intellectual, yes, but far from a cryptography or internet architecture expert, has stumbled across a workable solution to stem the flow of both AI-generated and artisanal, small-batch misinformation, isn’t even worth finishing a sent

Despite this certainty I am haunted by not knowing why it can’t work. Thus, you are reading my proposal to address many of the modern internet’s key problems with misinformation by way of cryptographically assured attribution.

Or, put another way, what would change if you knew the origin of any piece of content on the internet?

Granted, even if this did work, it wouldn’t stop the world from ending. It just might end for all the human reasons we already know about (though continue to ignore) and not the Skynetesque uncertainty that nascent generative AI promises. The devil you know, etc, etc.

So I offer unto you this unmissable opportunity to prove me wrong and not even have to feel guilty about it afterwards since I’m practically begging for it.

Internet Suckage (The Problem)

The internet sucks. This is so well-established it was on Moses’s goddam tablets, so I’m not going to belabor this section as much as I’ve stretched this sentence beyond all reasonable comprehension.

You’ve used the internet lately, right? Phishing emails, social media scams, misinformation WhatsApp groups your cousin invited you to, deepfake videos of Biden raising his pinky while drinking a latte. All of these go from “be careful what you believe online” to “my god, I’m in the Marianas Trench of misinformation” when generative AI gets involved, eliminating the inconvenient and costly use of humans to generate all this “content”.

There’s just no love trust. Who really sent me this email? Is this Facebook message about a $30/hr online job really from the Geico gecko? How did Biden raise his pinky when I saw him lose the same digit last week on TikTok?

So what if we solved the problem of trusting content online with math?

* If you’re already familiar with cryptography, key-pair signing, and TLS communications, skip ahead a bit. But you will miss out on a few feeble attempts at humor.

Cryptographic Attribution (The Solution)

My desire to use (or invent) fancy technical jargon outweighs my desire to make this approachable.

Look, it’s not much different from your signature on a cheque or your fingerprint to unlock your phone. You are using elements of yourself that are unique attributes demonstrating your physical involvement in a transaction or process.

But signatures can be forged or ignored (ever sign a cheque as “Mickey Mouse” and watch the bank honor it? I have!) and fingerprints can be… relocated unwillingly. Also you have a maximum of 10 of them.

Cryptographic attribution uses extravagantly fancy math to do the same thing without the limitations. A letter signed with a sufficiently modern cryptographic cipher allows for perfect trust that it came from the only person capable of creating that signature. Any change to the letter permanently invalidates the signature, signaling to the recipient it can’t be trusted.

Allow me a self-indulgent demonstration. You can download this essay as a PDF which I have sign with my personal cryptographic key, the proof of which is in the associated signature file, which proves attribution and that the PDF hasn't been tampered with. No one else can generate this signature because only I have the key to do so and you can be certain the contents haven’t been altered since the signature is intact.*

* Yes, yes, quiet in the back, I’m well aware this is a savage simplification and your kind hate simplicity even more than you hate Hitler. Your feelings are valid but I will not respond to them.

The Good News (We Have the Technology!)

Thankfully, none of this is new technology. This isn’t the Web 4.0 Blockhectachain, it’s fundamentally the same technology you use to make sure your bank website is actually being sent from your bank.

When you visit an HTTPS website, which at this point is virtually all of them, your browser will display some sort of lock icon next to the address bar. You can click on this to verify that the content being served to you is coming from the organization it should be. Much like my PDF, you can verify that your bank has “signed” this website and it has not been altered on its way to you.

Ok, so when I see Biden defeat Trump in a Macarena dance battle as a sponsored tweet or shared with me on WhatsApp with a snide message about Trump’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the 45-degree hop, why can’t I see the signature proving it did, in fact, come from CNN? After all, the AI that created it is smart enough to include the CNN logo, plausible news ticker, and insufferable tie choices closely associated with mainstream news media.

Sadly, in the scope of this discussion and common internet use, we really only use cryptographic attribution to establish trust between your web browser (or app) and the server delivering the content. In the case of our feisty Latin tweet, the content is signed by Twitter. You can be certain it came from Elon’s personal meme collection but you have no way of knowing where he got it from (let’s pretend for the sake of the example it’s not already a certainty he stole it from 8chan).

Dream Bigger (By Getting More Granular)

So let’s dream a bit bigger. Why not sign individual pieces of content? If everyone has a cryptographic key they can sign anything they distribute online, even the dankest memes. Let’s go through how this would work, step-by-step:

1. Jake has a bad idea for a meme so he opens Photoshop, scribbles something that is somehow both incomprehensible and deeply offensive to Yemenis, and clicks Save
2. After choosing a location and format to save the image Jake is prompted to provide a key to sign the image.
3. He can sign it with any key in his possession, generate a brand new key, or simply leave the file un-signed
4. Jake uploads the image to Twitter and immediately Likes his own post (that last part’s not cryptographically relevant)

Now, when an unfortunate soul such as yourself comes across this meme, you can inspect the content to see what’s called the chain of trust:

1. The file was first signed by <JAKE’S DARKWEB MEME KEY>
2. The signature was verified by and then also signed by <TWITTER KEY>

You now have trusted attribution. Since public-facing organizations like news media want to be recognized online, they will provide their signature publicly for validation (this is called a “public key”, capable of verifying the authenticity of a signature (also called a “private key”) but incapable of producing the signature). In the case of our jiving presidential candidates, a user could inspect the video to see what key signed it and use CNN’s public key to confirm it is inauthentic.

Over time, it’s likely that, much like HTTPS and the lock icon, browsers will provide built-in tools to automatically authenticate and flag content that can be cryptographically attributed. Social media sites like Twitter could even do this themselves, potentially boosting the visibility of content attributed to legitimate organizations to discourage misinformation.

As attributable content is inherently more valuable* (especially to advertisers who continue to run the internet’s economy), established internet megacorps will be incentivized to adopt and support trusted attribution and content creators also benefit from their content being attributable*.

* For example, Google boosts the search rankings of HTTPS websites because they’re trusted since SesameStreet.com is unlikely to distribute malware

* Mailing yourself your manuscript to establish copyright may not be a real thing, but cryptographic signatures could contain the signing date, providing proof of who created a piece of content and when, which will sure speed up copyright lawsuits

The Best Part (Be True to Yourself, Dear Internet)

This proposal is, in all the most important ways, truly an extension of the internet that already exists. This isn’t a radical reinvention of how information moves around the internet and no new fiber cables need to be laid. The government doesn’t have to know which keys are yours and your real identity is only tied to your key(s) if you proactively make it so. If you wish to have no association at all with your content, simply don’t sign your content or use a randomized key.

This approach is based on established concepts like chain of trust which we already use for many forms of secure communication and the history of HTTPS laid the groundwork for browsers recognizing, authenticating, and highlighting trust signals to give users confidence in the safety of their interactions.

What I’m saying is, all this has happened before (on the internet) and all of it will happen again (on the internet).

One Colossal Caveat (The Part Where the Politicians Have to Do Something)

I haven’t talked about AI-generated content as much as I expected to by now.

Why wouldn’t AI-generated content just be unsigned and shared freely? Or, since generating keys is effectively free, just sign every image with a random signature?

Yup. So for the sake of the stability of society, our political systems, and my rapidly deteriorating sanity, regulations must be enacted requiring commercial generative AIs to register their keys publicly and sign all generated content with one of them.* 

Once in place, this regulation means that AI-generated content can be identified by anyone, especially as web browsers like Chrome and Firefox will rush to add features highlighting provably-AI-generated content to the user.

This will not be perfectly enforceable. Already there are open-source generative AI models that can be run on a home PC and would be impossible to regulate (and I would argue we shouldn’t anyway). However, running these models is relatively expensive and requires specialized knowledge, dramatically reducing the outfits who could use them effectively at scale.

The Part Where I Find Out This Is Being Attempted

As it turns out, between writing this and publishing it, I've discovered that the C2PA standard has been created in an attempt to address this very problem in a similar way to what I've proposed. I guess I will take that as a win.

Overview - C2PA

An open technical standard providing publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media.

C2PA

I didn’t grow up with video games. My friends and I grew up in games. Games were the medium we expressed ourselves in, they were how we built friendships, how we self-identified and settled into peer groups. Asking us to consider how gaming as a whole has shaped our lives is like asking us how our lungs oxygenate our blood.

We don’t know. We don’t care. We just keep breathing in and out.

That said, the last decade has brought with it earnest progress in the study of game design as a discipline. We are in the process of building the language to discuss games and today, we are much more likely to center the human playing the game than the game itself.

This is a sign of healthy self-awareness. But as with any healthy introspection, this comes with a necessary reckoning with how these experiences have helped shape our attitudes and expectations in life.

A common term used to describe the experience of playing games is the ‘flow state’ - “an optimal mental state characterized by deep absorption during challenging tasks”. While this state is observable in other areas of life, both professionally and recreationally, it is perhaps the purest distillation of what the experience of playing a good game is “supposed” to be.

Achieving this flow state is a careful balance of designing games that are exactly difficult enough to fully engage and challenge the player without dipping into frustration or boredom. The best game designers know how to dance along this razor’s edge, a tango made infinitely more complex when you must account for players of wildly different skill levels and experiences.

Virtually every game offers some form of challenge for the player to overcome - a sort of meta-theme every player has internalized. Games are designed to be beaten, and eking out a victory that feels earned and meaningful in the context of that game’s world can bring us a sense of satisfaction, joy, and even a glimmer of self-efficacy in a world designed to make us feel insignificant. We’ve raised, and are raising a generation of kids primed to tackle challenges in innovative ways, think on their feet, work together as part of a team, and believe in their ability to practice and master skills.

This perpetual state of challenge evokes the Greek tragedy of Sisyphus, a man who angered the gods and was condemned to eternally push a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back into the depths.

Sisyphus, by the nature of eternity, is shouldering the burden of that boulder today. It is surely a task he finds himself deeply absorbed in and challenged by. Is he in a flow state now, the same as we are? Like him, we are held suspended in time by this confluence of tension and determination.

Where our experience of the flow state diverges from his futility is in the plateau.

Remember that flow state diagram from earlier? Here’s the problem. That line plateaus. Sooner or later you find the 120th star, you can’t keep up on the leaderboards, and you’ve optimized your farm for maximum profit and marriage potential.

The problem is mastery. No matter how challenging the game is, the challenge is finite. And we devour this sensation of mastery. No-hit runs of Elden Ring, galaxy braining every puzzle in the Talos Principle, drifting every corner at 200cc, the pacifist run of Undertale, one-cycling the raid boss etc. Short of giving up you will always find yourself slipping into the peaceful ennui of the 89th Starfox 64 run where you know where every enemy will be and how you can save every ally from harm.

I’ve spent most of my life chasing that plateau. Never content with where I was, I pursued mastery not for its own sake, but so that I would never be challenged again. For a long time I thought I’d find the plateau after high school. Then after I fell in love. Then after I found a good career. Or maybe after I got my next promotion, bought a house, finalized my divorce, retired. Maybe I’ll reach the plateau when I’ve died and there’s nothing left to master.

I lived only to reach my plateau. Maybe when I do I’ll know where every enemy will be, and I can save every ally from harm.

Sisyphus and I will never reach our plateau. Instead, we inevitably lose our footing, and watch our boulder roll back down into Tartarus. French philosopher Albert Camus wrote at length on the brief moment when momentum shifts and gravity pulls apart our progress.

“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me … That hour, like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”

Undeniably, games hone our ability to master a collection of skills as varied as the incredible minds that design them. They teach us to congratulate ourselves on successes, and how to find comfort in learning from our mistakes. But they can also teach us that all challenges are finite, and that all challenges are designed to be overcome. Through the repeated process of mastery, we understandably expect to become masters.

And that’s not really how life works. Some challenges you aren’t ready for, and some failures have no lesson. Some challenges you wake up with every day, no matter what you do to overcome them. Some challenges will outlive you.

Our boulders will always roll downhill. And we will always chase after them.

So as Albert Camus said, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

We are all storytellers. Every day we write a new chapter and recite it to ourselves until it is indistinguishable from reality. Our stories are often confusing, disjointed and contradictory, and sometimes impossible to reconcile for ourselves, let alone for someone else. So we borrow the words and experiences of others to fill the gaps.

When I encounter a game that resonates with me and helps me better understand my story, I think it’s worth talking about. Before Your Eyes by Skybound Games is a game about the stories of our lives, how they can fail us, and how easily we let others write them.

(Full spoilers for Before Your Eyes follow)

At a glance, if you'll excuse the expression, Before Your Eyes is a game with only one game "mechanic" - blink. Cleverly using a player's webcam to detect their blinks, the game moves between a series of vignettes, a pastiche of youthful experiences and pressures as a child grows up.

The thematic focus of the game is on the passage of time and the impermanence of memory. Using the player’s blinks to suddenly and involuntarily thrust us through minutes, days and years of young Benjamin Brynne’s life, we have to fill in the gaps we missed, just like he does. After all, when we are near death, the story of our life will be partial, tied together by sheer force of will and fear of the ambiguity behind us and the void ahead. Our story is all we leave behind when we’re gone.

So Benny remembers his life. His first day at the beach. Video games with his best friend. His first pet. His parents’ struggles at work. Overhearing difficult conversations. His first time playing a piano. Demands to perform and succeed. A late night phone call that made his mother cry.

So, like Benny, we have to make up the rest of our stories after the fact, bridging the gaps with who we think we are. What we think we would have done.

And, at the end of his life, that’s what Benny does. Facing judgment, he tells the story of how he grew up under pressure to perform. How he succeeded beyond all expectations. How the source of those expectations, his mother, suddenly left his life and how he turned even that pain into greater inspiration, even greater works of art.

It's a compelling story.

But it's a lie. It’s the story of a life where all the gaps are filled with the expectations of others. It’s not really his story.

In reality, Benny’s story is not one of clarity and fulfillment. In its place is cruel, random chance. A child who wanted nothing but to make his mother proud is instead silenced by agonizing pain and an excruciatingly finite existence.

And as his sickness and overwhelming sense of failure overcame him, he did what always feels impossible. He began to rewrite his story. Full of fear, and loss, yes, but also full of incredible love, play, friendship, and creation. Benny’s story became his again.

I’m not going to tell you Benny’s final story and who helps him write it. Before Your Eyes is about an hour and a half you should experience for yourself, but more importantly, it doesn’t matter. His story is his own, and yours will be different. What matters is that Benny did find peace in his own narrative. What matters is we can too, no matter how short or painful our story is. No matter who else it satisfies.

So maybe my story is enough for me.

Maybe I can find peace in it.

When talking about what it’s like to play a game it’s useful to identify the verbs it offers the player. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of games use the verbs jump, shoot, and slash primarily, if not exclusively, but this verb-oriented analysis of games centers the interactivity of the game and the ways players engage with the game world and its inhabitants.

While a great many games explore the potential of alternative verbs - like the delightful Beyond Eyes where your character’s lack of sight teaches you to use the uncommon verbs listen and feel your surroundings to progress, there’s a reason for the ubiquity of jump/shoot/slash verbs in games. They’re immediate actions, they’re instantly recognizable, and they all have impactful consequences that align with male gamer fantasies of freedom, power, and glory. Video games are very good at this - perhaps it would be better to say they’re very practiced at this, with tens of thousands of developers around the world becoming increasingly effective at modeling these verbs. One could say as an industry we’ve perfected Mario’s jump, Valorant’s headshot, and Dark Souls’ parry and riposte.

But there’s another common game verb that we struggle to make impactful - talk.

Interactive and non-interactive dialog has been part of games since the beginning, with text adventures blowing up the early PC gaming scene. The ability to type a command or phrase with natural language has always been a powerful idea. Anyone can swing a sword around, after all, but to convince a troll to leave its bridge is a special victory indeed.

The limitations of contemporary text engines left a lot to be desired, however, and most speech in gaming’s history has been handled with a variation on dialogue trees, a set number of branching choices in what your character can say and the pre-programmed responses from the target of your speech. Unlike traditional non-interactive cut-scenes, dialogue options let players choose what their character will say, either focusing on specific lines of questioning or letting them choose what tone or emotion to convey, shaping the demeanor of the character they are role-playing.

It’s a functional system, and allows for more expressive role-playing than a simple cut-scene, but while it completes the strict requirements of the verb talk, this isn’t how humans actually dialogue with one another. It’s more akin to giving an actor a choice of which lines to speak, not letting them engage in conversation with another human.

Why Do We Talk To Each Other?

At the best of times, speech in games is combative and binary. Your character is trying to achieve an objective and is met with a challenge. Perhaps you, the player, pick the “correct” dialogue option to achieve this goal, or some secondary attribute (like a ‘Charisma score’) influences the outcome - but you either succeed or fail to overcome this obstacle - perhaps talking someone out of a heinous act, gaining access to information or restricted space, or demoralizing an opponent in preparation for the inevitable shooting and slashing.

Even games that devote entire systems to dialogue, like the excellent card-based roguelike Griftlands by Klei Entertainment, uses its dialogue as a form of combat - an adversarial exercise where one will is triumphing over another.

These might be a few ways humans use language, but they simulate the power dynamics of relationships, not actual conversation. The verbs at play are bluff, deceive, and diplomatize. Not converse or connect.

Signs of the Sojourner is a game about how we actually use language and how important language is in defining who we are.

Mechanics of Language

I’ll give only the briefest of primers - you and your best friend Elias are young adult orphans desperately trying to save your late mother’s curios shop in a small town on the border of civilization. To find interesting objects to sell in the store you travel from town to town fighting monsters, saving princesses, slaying dragons, enacting colonialization on presumed empty lands and…. No, no, that’s all wrong... This is just a game about talking to people.

And it’s the most interesting game I’ve played this year.

As you play and meet more and more characters, you develop a deck of conversation cards. You alternate placing these cards with your collocutor, one side of the card connecting with the prior card and setting up a connection for the next card. By the way, I use the term “collocutor” because there are no opponents in this game. There is conflict, sure, but every single encounter is about two humans engaging in a collaborative act of understanding. The victory condition is always two people learning to understand each other better through dialogue.

See, in most games, understanding is binary. When Commander Shepard speaks, everyone understands exactly what is being said. I don’t mean that there isn’t a language barrier (there never is) - I mean there is never confusion or misinterpretation about what his intent is.

Signs of the Sojourner dives headfirst into the muddiness of human communication. If you’re older than about one year old, you’ve probably noticed that communication is really hard. You can speak the exact same language as someone - even use the same words and phrases, but you just can’t connect.

This is the core of the game - connection is hard, building relationships is harder, maintaining those relationships over time and through struggles and great change is… well, no one keeps every friend they’ve ever made.

This challenge of connection manifests in every facet of the game’s design. Each card has two  symbols aligning with the start and end of your turn in the natural back and forth cadence of conversation. The symbols themselves represent different approaches you take to the conversation, such as “emphatic”, “diplomatic”, and “curious”. If you’re speaking with someone with a deck full of “compassionate” cards, you won’t get far talking to them with “thoughtful” cards. To them you come across aloof and uncaring. So the key to successful understanding is speaking to people with ideas they relate to, not just with words they understand.

The trouble is your deck is a set size. You’ll never have the diversity of ideas that will make sense to every person you encounter out in the world. You’re going to encounter people you just don’t have the ability to connect with. And that doesn’t mean a game over or demoralizing defeat - it just means a missed connection, a missed chance to understand another person better.

Just like in real life.

It’s uncanny how well the game conveys this - if you fail to “understand” your collocutor because your hand doesn’t contain a matching card, they’ll make a comment about how you’re “getting the wrong idea”, but if they fail to understand, possibly because you’ve carelessly played a card they simply can’t respond to, they’ll usually blame themselves, just like we’re prone to do. After all, if we don’t understand what someone is telling us we must just be an idiot, right?

And understanding is all that matters in this game. While fascinating in their own right, and well worth more discussion, the characters and story faded into the background as I became increasingly enamored with what the mechanics of the game have to say about language and how we construct our identity with it.

Conversational Complications

Signs of the Sojourner says some very clever things about communication with its card game mechanics. In addition to standard cards with an opening and closing symbol, some cards have special modifiers. One of the first you encounter will be the accommodate card which simply replays whichever card was played prior. This is the conversational equivalent of rephrasing what was said just enough to pass as a continuation of the discussion. We’ve all been in that office setting where you throw out a “Oh yeah, there are way too many video subscription services now!” moments after Karen complained about having to sign up to Amazon Prime to watch Little Fires Everywhere.

Another special card is clarify, which allows a card to be played retroactively in the conversation. Everyone's been in the position where they've had to back-peddle a seemingly benign comment to turn back the conversational clock and avoid engaging in the deeply problematic direction the discourse is heading.

These, and many other special card modifiers give you more tools in your conversational tool-belt, and just like how real-world conversational skills develop and mature over time, so does your deck, never growing, but diversifying.

But not all cards in your deck are helpful. As you travel the region you will unavoidably pick up fatigue cards. Mixed into your hand during conversations, fatigue cards have no symbols - using them will always result in misunderstanding. Just like in life, fatigue takes up mental space, choking out your ideas and limiting your language options.

Even more thematically nuanced are grief cards. For reasons like poverty, broken relationships, and sudden natural disasters, many characters you encounter hold grief cards, representing the challenges tying up their emotions and cognition. However, unlike fatigue cards, grief cards can be played against - but only by other grief cards.

Only the grieving can relate to the grieving.

(Except dogs. A dog’s love matches all card symbols.)

Importantly, after every discussion you have the option of taking a new card from your counterpart’s deck - an opportunity to learn and adapt to the people you spend time with (though not the dogs, sadly). This means you have the option of taking a grief card for yourself.

When you encounter a real person in grief you have a choice of whether or not to help carry that grief. It means connecting with them on a deeper level, maybe a level they really need in their time of pain, but it means adding a grief card to your deck and leaving another card behind. Humans can only carry so much in their hearts and minds. Picking something up means putting something down.

And as you wander further and further from your hometown, each trip stretching you a little further, encountering slightly stranger people and slightly stranger ideas, you have a choice - do you adapt your deck so you can connect with these people on your journey?

During my first time through this game I tried desperately to build a “perfect” deck. I wanted to connect with everyone, hear all their stories, help them through all their hard times… I swapped cards constantly, an ever-shifting montage of ideas borrowed and quickly forgotten. I met many incredible people on these journeys.

But then I would come home. And my lifelong best friend would greet me. I would have a deck full of fatigue, strange ideas, and other people’s grief. I had forgotten how to talk to my best friend and all he could say is how much I had changed.

My Language

I left the small town I grew up in after high school to make my way in the big city. The utmost of cliches, I was a big fish entering the ocean, and the enormity of its depth shook me.

I chose to hold tightly to the values I had, the limitations I committed to, inflexibly. I kept my words the same and so held onto the same ideas. Language became a prison and human interaction was a painful exercise of missed connections and uncertain intentions.

I held my deck of cards close to me and kept the world and its people alien and distant. The people I claimed to care about had no choice but to relate to me through those ideas and that language, never having room to contribute their own.

And grief - my own and the grief I carried for others - locked my language in place, unable to adapt, unable to mature. I didn’t know who I was and so I feared how new language would change me, and that I might return home a stranger to my friends and to myself.

Ending the Discussion

Signs of the Sojourner is about deciding who you want to be and making the best relationships you can as that person.

Do you stay close to the familiar and deepen the relationships you have?

Do you explore far and wide, adopting new language, ideas and values, making friends and seeing things you never dreamt possible?

Do you accept the grief of others to show them compassion, even if it means giving up a small part of yourself?

Do you do what I did? Do you fear the unknown so deeply your language becomes inert and a burden on those most important to you?

Or do you decide who you want to be and choose your language from there?

One Last Thought

There are many endings to Signs of the Sojourner, but the first time I completed the game you could say I failed - my mother’s shop shuttered. But Elias and I moved on into the future together, our friendship surviving the turmoil of maturity and social change.

The story picks up 10 years later for one last conversation with Elias. He talks the same way - reading the text on screen you’d hardly notice he wasn’t the same little kid anymore. But his deck has changed.

Instead of a simple deck with only compassion cards, he’s adopted a wider, mature deck of language, with a range of ideas. He’s grown up, had his own adventures, learned who he was, and built his values around that.

And I’m going to do the same.

INTRODUCTION

Everything you create will be interpreted, and you’ll interpret all media you consume. This relationship between creator and player is just as potent in games as any other form of media, and it’s true whether or not either side intends it.

Games Speak is about this conversation, helping game creators speak meaningfully to their players, and helping players consciously and critically examine the games they’re playing.

OVERVIEW

What separates truly memorable, exceptional game experiences from the forgettable ones are the titles that succeed in giving you something to take away from the experience. Something that sticks in your mind, makes you reconsider long-held beliefs, or exposes you to an experience you never could have had in your life, era, social status, or geography. The successful ones do this by threading together the tools at their disposal to extol a coherent, provocative message. Games use three primary methods to convey messages to a player:

1. Literal Text – The explicit story, text or voiced dialogue in the game
2. Aesthetics – The stylistic choices like how the game is rendered, what perspectives the game uses, and how music and other audio is used
3. Mechanics – The choices the player gets to make and how the game reacts to them

It doesn’t matter if you’re playing FIFA, Street Fighter, Mario, or The Sims. If a game doesn’t consider its themes and how it will be experiences, it will fail to impact the player, or worse, convey an entirely unintended, and possibly harmful, message.

Make no mistake - games can still be fun even when their themes are only lightly hinted at or are outright harmful and conflicting. But the games that stick with us as memorable experiences for the rest of our lives do so because they had something they desperately wanted to tell you.

Creators need to be thoughtful about what their games say, and players need to be insightful to hear that message and evaluate it critically. And like any other form of art, these messages are interpreted. While I make a case for specific themes in my writing and videos, it should be taken as a given that different people will take away different lessons, further cause for developers to carefully consider how their art may easily be misinterpreted.

TEXT

Text is more than words on a screen, it is any part of the explicit story of the game as it’s explained to the player. Sometimes this is an epic tale spanning hours of reading or cut-scenes. Sometimes this is nothing but the word ‘FIGHT!’. Both can message something important to the player!

Let’s look at an example – Into The Breach, the 2018 strategy game by Subset Games. This is a game with very little text, most of it is descriptors of mech abilities and explanations of game mechanics. What little story is explicitly conveyed tells of a dying Earth and a team of 3 mech pilots trying to save as much of humanity as possible across endless timelines. There’s no true dialogue in the game , only occasional interjections by your mech pilots, survivors, and the leaders of four corporations that comment on your successes and failures.

If you succeed in routing the giant bugs and destroying their source inside a volcano, your victory is short-lived. It’s time to move onto the next timeline where humanity is still in peril. No matter how many people you save here, endless more remain in danger. Even in failure your work is not done – one of your pilots can always escape to a new timeline in hope of a better outcome the next time around.

In my reading, Into the Breach has one clear and overriding theme. Everyone is worth saving, but you can’t save everyone.

As your three mechs deploy, crashing to the ground, ready to tackle the insect horde, you will see the reactions of the nearby survivors. They’re counting on you. But sooner or later you will be forced to decide – how many will you let die to save your pilots or to complete your larger mission? You must decide for yourself and live with the consequences, both mechanical and emotional.

Everyone is worth saving, but you can’t save everyone.

Perhaps most telling, if you decide your mission is going poorly and you’re tempted to restart, your menu option isn’t “Restart Mission” or “Retry”. It’s “Abandon Timeline”. You don’t get a do-over, you don’t get to fail and pretend your failures didn’t happen – make no mistake that you are abandoning this Earth and every surviving human to death. This is a very intentional textual choice, punctuated by your pilot’s dismay as they jump to a new timeline.

Games have been using minimal text to say a lot since the earliest days of gaming. A classic example is Missile Command’s “Game Over” screen which, contrary to the norm, said simply “The End”, driving home that your failure wasn’t the end of a game, it was the end of everything.

Careful use of text, however minimal, can help deliver a powerful message to the player.

AESTHETICS

Much like in film, a game’s message can be conveyed by the way it is presented visually and audibly. The aesthetics also do the heavy lifting of conveying tone and giving texture to the literal text of the game. They are also one of the most challenging and subjective components of a game to evaluate and range from user interfaces, to visual FX, audio, camera perspectives, animations, and everything in between.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Civilization-building games like Sid Meier’s Civilization VI put the camera at the continental level. This makes the player feel like a god, directing the course of history and clashing against the other deities of the world while Interface elements evoke global stakes and momentous cultural events, lending weight to themes of small decisions having immense consequences for a nation.

Real-time strategy games like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 want you to feel like a general, putting you in control of a large number of troops one skirmish at a time. Bringing in the camera to this scale brings the human cost and scale of war into sharper focus. The weight of your decisions feels different when you can see the individual soldiers dying on the field. Games in this genre tend to evoke militaristic stylings, emphasizing themes of loyalty, sacrifice, and unity in the face of overwhelming odds.

Games within the genre that bring the camera even closer, like Relic Entertainment’s Dawn of War series, aim to make specific characters the focus. These games tend to give your soldiers individual names, personalities, and even cinematics. These games emphasize themes of individual abilities and the strength of an individual’s will to overcome much larger forces.

In each case something as simple as the camera perspective and interface style choices say a lot about the themes the games are trying to convey.

It’s important to keep in mind that the same visuals and audio can mean very different things to different cultural groups. This can be as simple as white symbolizing holiness in Western cultures but death in many East Asian cultures. A more complicated example comes from The Division by Ubisoft where the player, part of a post-apocalyptic police force, maintain order by killing lawless “thugs” wearing hoodies.

As a white, west-coast Canadian game developer, I wouldn’t have picked up on the problematic aesthetics, but to many people, especially in the current political climate, this clearly reads as cops killing African-Americans on the street simply for existing and wearing a hoodie. This hits too close to home for too many people.

It’s a cautionary tale on the importance of having your game user tested by a diverse audience and in recognizing that people with different backgrounds may experience the identical game very differently from you.

MECHANICS

Games possess a unique tool for building their themes – mechanics. Every button press, every input the player makes can result in one or more reactions from the game’s systems. This is how players exert their agency over the game , in other words how they feed their choices into the game. While endless pages and YouTube analyses have been written on the importance of ‘good’ gameplay, it’s equally important for games to know what their mechanics mean. The choices developers make about what forms of agency to allow and when to disallow control are especially telling.

An excellent example by 11-bit Studios, This War of Mine, created in partnership with War Child, is a masterclass in using mechanics to force you to wrestle with difficult decisions with no “right” answer. With a civil war raging around your small group of civilian survivors, you will be visited by two young children desperate for some of your meager supplies to help their sick mother.

Unsure if they are truthful, desperate, or both, you might give them your last bottle of medicine. But that night thieves wound one of your survivors. With no medical supplies you might risk your own raid on another survivor’s camp, but are spotted by the survivors there.

Do you run and hope your friend will survive the night? Do you pull out your makeshift weapon and take the medicine by force? In my most recent session one of my survivors attempted to sneak into a nearby military base for supplies and was gunned down after a desperate and failed attempt to silence a guard. The other two survivors, both of whom were previously injured, succumbed to their injuries and hopelessness.

No matter what you choose This War of Mine never lets you forget the consequences of your choices. If forced to steal and kill to survive, or to watch their friends starve and die, your decisions will take a mental toll on the survivors. You objective isn’t just to stay alive, it’s to want to keep living.

Another sterling example of mechanics delivering the message of a game is the 2018 city-building survival game Frostpunk, also by 11 bit studios. In this alternate history the world is overtaken by a 19th-century ice age, leaving the few human survivors huddled around a giant furnace, the sole source of warmth. You’ll be forced to make hard decisions to keep the fires of both warmth and civilization burning. One of the first choices you’ll make is, given far more work than there are hands to perform, should the children of your small camp help in gathering the wood and coal that keep everyone alive?

With their help perhaps your engineers could improve the furnace, or scouts could search the wasteland for other survivors instead of shoveling coal. Without their help the fires may grow dimmer, the sick will get sicker, and desperation will spread quickly as temperatures drop.

The choices only get harder, and you’ll soon find yourself considering fascist propaganda, turning away asylum seekers you can’t afford to feed, let alone house, and frequent 24-hour shifts in the mines, all in the name of survival.

These two games share a strong theme: Survival at the cost of humanity is not survival.

Reading about the consequences of your actions is hard, especially as your populace frequently chimes in to protest or praise. But what Frostpunk and This War of Mine can do that no book or film can do is force you to deal with the consequence of your actions.

Some games will pop up a “Goodness +1” alert upon doing “the right thing”, a well-known convention from Bioware titles like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. My greatest criticism of Frostpunk is that, upon surviving the final cold snap of the initial story, you’re explicitly told whether or not you “crossed the line”. This is a good example of when the text of a game can interfere with the message the mechanics were already effectively conveying.

CONCLUSION

These are just a few examples of games that effectively use their text, aesthetic, and mechanics to say something. But it’s easy to watch a movie, read a book, or play a game and not engage with its themes. And as a developer it’s easy to just focus on ‘fun’ and assume you have nothing to offer your players.

But the games you make and the games you play have something to say, and you always benefit by listening critically to what your entertainment is telling you. If you’re a developer, let your games say something personal and meaningful about you, and if you’re a player, be open to what your favourite games are telling you. Don’t just listen to the story, look at the graphics, listen to the music, and beat the game. Pay attention to what this experience is telling you.

Thanks for watching!

I want this series and channel to be first and foremost a celebration of games and the powerful ways they can affect our lives. For that reason I don’t like to focus on games that fail to do so, but as an introductory series to themes in games I think it’s necessary to see how an otherwise good game can fail to be memorable and impactful due to mis-messaged and contradictory themes.

So we’re going to take a deep dive into 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the latest title from long-time Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics. Focusing on Lara’s struggle to avenge her father and an epic journey throughout Central and South America, to stop the villainous Trinity organization from ‘remaking the world’. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an excellent example of a game with very strong aesthetics and mechanics, but doesn’t bring them together with it’s text into a unified experience. While many of its themes are well conveyed, they are often only half-realized or outright in conflict with other themes.

A disclosure - I was the project manager for the Xbox One version of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition reboot in 2013 and worked closely with Crystal Dynamics to bring their recently-rebooted franchise to the next-gen console.

Spoilers ahead for the entirety of Shadow of the Tomb Raider!

Aesthetic Themes

Much like Lara, Crystal Dynamics has an obsession: creating the most beautiful art the games industry has ever seen. They are the industry leaders in creating nearly flawless visual spaces in video games, both in action and when you take a breath just to look around. For that reason we’re going to start by looking at the aesthetic themes of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This is where I believe the developer spent the bulk of time and budget, and that reflects the importance it put on what the art in the game should mean to the player.

Every single scene of this game has been crafted with extreme care. I can honestly say that no other developer puts such careful attention to detail at a premium as Crystal Dynamics. It’s clear that an enormous amount of research, iteration and polish went into creating the regions that Lara visits. While many studios ensure their cinematics are well composed, Crystal Dynamics puts the craft of proper framing and juxtaposition into every single camera placement during gameplay. Not only does this serve an important mechanical function (guiding the player to the next platform using light and color), but it makes moment to moment gameplay look like a masterfully shot film. Even in the many set-piece chase and escape sequences, with the player narrowly avoiding hazards, scampering up walls, escaping floods and dodging arrows in benchmark-setting action sequences, the virtual cinematographer keeps pace, ensuring you always have an epic view of the action taking place.

As mentioned, almost the entire game takes place in Mexico and Peru. I claim no particular knowledge of either region, and certainly can’t speak to the accuracy of the mythos Lara recites so frequently (many other experts can and have written at length on this), but I can attest to the amount of work that went into the creation of these spaces. Game developers have mastered ways of obfuscating the need for one-off art models and animations when it’s convenient, but Crystal Dynamics takes no shortcuts.

All that said, it’s clear that the art direction couldn’t resist playing up common tropes of the region. You’ll see dozens of bodies on spikes (and be caught on many yourself), endless human sacrifices both in action and after the fact, intense body piercings, and more. Along with a near obsession with claustrophobic tunnels, the game can’t help but get caught up in the associations these cultures have with horror in the Western world.

There’s an interesting focus on Lara Croft blending in to this culture. As part of the storyline she frequently changes outfits in order to appear inconspicuous among the locals of the town or village she’s visiting. On its own this would show a degree of deference for local customs and the inevitable distress that seeing a white outsider might cause to an otherwise isolated populace, which is why it’s so strange that Shadow of the Tomb Raider has such an unusual relationship with language. Despite Lara clearly speaking the local languages (even being able to decipher ancient dialects) she only speaks English. Even stranger, all the other characters seem to switch between English and Spanish without a hitch. Why is a drunk Mexican telling a disguised Lara to scram in English? Why is the passphrase to the cult prison in English? Why don’t the guards notice the disguised Lara is saying the passphrase in an upper-class British accent?

Shadow of the Tomb Raider wants its aesthetic themes to encompass respect for these cultures, acknowledgement of their value to real people living today, fueling the player’s and Lara’s desire to protect these things from Trinity’s plans. But it frequently undercuts these values with a confusing approach to language and by tightly integrating these cultural artifacts with horror.

This horror is most prevalent in the group called the Yaaxil. Teased as violent boogeymen for most of the game, when you finally encounter these seemingly feral “monsters” you’ll spend 10 minutes shooting them with your newly acquired shotgun, and likely be brutally murdered by them a few times too. Nothing’s quite a dehumanizing as putting someone on the other side of a powerful weapon your player has just picked up for the first time.

Much later, in the game’s finale, the Yaaxil leader is portrayed as a sort of counterpart to Lara, but the audio and animation portrays them far closer to disposable orcs than human beings with self-determination and conscious reasoning. The Yaaxil hew far too close to the tales of “savages” Western colonizers would tell their children to keep them wandering off.

On the topic of Western colonizers, let’s look at the Croft family. Shadow of the Tomb Raider includes a very revealing flashback for Lara, taking us back to her childhood minutes before she finds her father killed. Two things are immediately clear, Lara Croft has always been Lara Croft, even as a child - she even has her ‘instinct’ ability in her flashback. And two, the Croft’s are fabulously wealthy Britons, with at least her father being obsessed with the collection of relics from ancient cultures around the world. This is a man who keeps an ossuary of human remains in his study (along with many other antiques).

This is not a family that respects other cultures, it’s a family that collects them and uses them to empower themselves. This is something that the game’s villain, Dominguez, recognizes early, and kills Lara’s father to stop him revealing his isolated tribe to the world.

Textual Themes

The story of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is pockmarked by macguffins but manages to stay coherent, minus a detour into rebel monarchy politics, and benefits from strong characterizations in Lara, her best friend Jonah, the aforementioned villain Dominguez, and Unuratu, the deposed queen of the isolated Paititi village. Unuratu’s arc is laser-focused on one theme - everyone is responsible for choosing their destiny, but fails to find purchase on any of the other story elements. Few characters in this story feel bound to a destiny, and those that do embrace it willingly.

Thankfully Lara, Jonah and Dominguez share a stronger central theme. Obsession blinds you to your own weaknesses and consequences of your actions. Lara Croft is obsessed with vengeance for her father’s death at the hands of Trinity, and as is later discovered, Dominguez himself. This leads her to desperate sacrifices, both her own and those around her. In perhaps the best moment of the story Jonah shouts down Lara, who despite having seemingly unleashed a tsunami on a Mexican town, is desperately trying to leave immediately to chase down Dominguez.

“Not everything is about you, Lara”.

In fact there are a handful of excellently acted and voiced scenes that make Dominguez more than a villain, they manage to make Lara’s actions appear at least as villainous. After all, Dominguez is actually a native of Paititi, the village he’s trying to protect from being annihilated by outsiders. He’s seen the world and knows full well what happens to isolated civilizations when the world discovers them.

Lara, on the other hand, is entirely unconcerned with anything but stopping Dominguez and his Trinity organization. Ultimately, that boils down to looting the supernatural treasures before Dominguez has a chance. The truth is that Lara doesn’t really care about the ancient cultures she’s quite literally raiding the tombs of. While Lara definitely becomes close with individuals of these groups, she is wholly uninterested in protecting and preserving their way of life. The people actually living in the places Lara visits are never actually benefited by her, she is not their protector, she is an avenger blinded by obsession. According to Dominguez, her father was similarly blinded by the possibilities of revealing Paititi to the world.

This contest of wills ultimately comes down to who can obtain a dagger and a box. Dominguez will use these items to “remake the world without weakness or fear”, the specifics of this are never especially important, while Unuratu and Lara want to use it to “bring back the sun” after the coming eclipse, largely leaving everything the way it is. If neither achieve their goal, the world will be destroyed by the Maya god of creation and destruction.

It’s difficult to relate to Lara when Dominguez, by all rights, has far more at stake in his quest than she does. Nevertheless, Lara eventually succeeds in defeating a nearly god-like Dominguez and is tempted to remake the world to bring back her family. This is a powerful moment for the character, but deeply undercut by the fact she completed her quest for vengeance just moments prior. Foregoing resurrecting her loving, but deeply problematic father, Lara acquiesces to her own human sacrifice at the hands of her Yaaxil counterpart, and is inexplicably saved by… white light, negating the need to find a new lead for the next game.

I’ve no doubt that many elements of the story and mysticism are expanded upon with in-game lore and artifacts scattered around as secondary quests, but this content is best used to enhance a story, not as a means to make an incoherent finale make sense the first time it’s experienced.

Lara has one final moment after the credits roll. Her vengeance complete, she has fully taken on her father’s inheritance and settled into the Croft home, added her own relics to the pile of cultural theft, and thanks her upstanding British butler for tea.

She says “You can’t live your life if you’re trapped in the past”. It’s just a shame that the life she’s now choosing to live is her father’s.

Mechanical Themes

There is a singular, overwhelming theme to Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s mechanics. Everything in the world exists to make you stronger. Enemies exist to be brutally murdered for XP (almost all of which are local people of color, by the way), living creatures exist to farm resources from, artifacts exist to complete metagame challenges, treasures (in the homes of the living and the dead) exist to be collected, and tombs exist to reward you with new skills.

This is a difficult problem that many games face. Players want every action to result in forward progress, this makes players feel like each action they take is rewarded. However it means developers must sprinkle activities, challenges and loot everywhere like breadcrumbs the player hoovers up. The end result is that no action the player takes is ever for its own sake.

This can be mitigated by careful placement of these rewards and consideration for the verbs the player uses to interact with them. For instance, in an early mission the player is given a challenge (which are additional goals the player is given for extra rewards when playing through a section of the game) to destroy 5 “death whistles”. In other words, the player is traveling through a tomb with the explicit instruction to destroy the delicately crafted chimes someone put there centuries ago. Even the game’s many puzzles usually involve destruction of cultural artifacts to progress.

In fact, virtually everything Lara does causes destruction. Practically every jump, climb, and interaction results in something crumbling or falling into an abyss. Ancient Maya bells be damned, Lara needs to reach that next checkpoint. These crumbling objects make each player action feel impactful as if you’re navigating a real, threatening world that you’re vaulting through by the skin of your teeth, but this trumps the themes the aesthetics of the game are trying to convey.

This heightens Lara’s apparent lack of respect for the cultures she visits as the player is encouraged to loot precious gems from tombs, sell them to the local merchant, and then buy a military assault rifle. It doesn’t make any sense to the text or the aesthetic the game is otherwise messaging, but that doesn’t matter because it’s part of the player-empowering feedback loop.

Mechanically, the players verbs are collect, traverse, destroy, kill, upgrade and little else.

Conclusion

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is successful in using its tools to convey some themes, but fails to integrate them together in a meaningful way. The aesthetic themes extolling the value and relevance of ancient and modern cultures different from our own are deeply undercut by Lara’s explicit indifference to cultural preservation and the game’s insistence that the player destroy, loot and shoot their way through them. The textual themes of moving past an obsession with vengeance falls flat when, through gameplay, the vengeance is achieved anyway.

Had Shadow of the Tomb Raider weaved together these themes in an internally consistent way, left behind the harmful tropes, and focused on a single core theme, the game could’ve been far more resonant, allowing the incredible artwork and solid gameplay to be a memorable experience worthy of the cultures it cribs from.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a good game that I enjoyed playing and studying, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to fans of the genre or devotees of the visual arts, but it’s important that we can critically analyze the games we make and the games we play. These criticisms come from a place of great affection for this medium and a strong desire to see it improve!

Becoming a game designer is a common dream for many young gamers, so much so that dozens of schools have sprung up in Canada and the United States hoping to train recent high-school graduates all the tricks and trades of an industry that has almost no common understanding of what it means to be a videogame designer. The role of game designer takes on a huge range of forms and even within a single studio a designer could be anything from a LUA scripter creating AI behaviours for enemy encounters to an attribute database manager managing game balance to a narrative writer creating a vivid world and characters to populate it. Thankfully there is one activity that game-design hopefuls can take part in that includes almost every one of these roles: the Dungeon Master of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

Dungeons and Dragons is a game that takes place in the collective imaginations of the participants and is guided both by the structure and rules of D&D and by the design of the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master (“DM”), also called the Game Master, has the role of creating the game world, content and experience that the players participate in. Since the events of the game take place within the shared imagination of the players the DM’s options for creating a game experience are nearly limitless, not unlike beginning pre-production on a new videogame – the limiting factor isn’t imagination or creativity, it is the amount of complexity that can be delivered to the players in the time (and budget) available. Because of this becoming a Dungeon Master and running a D&D campaign is excellent preparation for becoming a game designer by almost any definition and many skills a DM learns on day one are notably absent from modern game design theory.

Handling Player Agency
The Dungeon Master’s job is to create the interactive content of their game world. Every character, quest and piece of dialogue the players encounter is created by the Dungeon Master, and often being forced to improvise while doing so. Since players have nearly limitless agency in an imaginative world it is up to the Dungeon Master to adjust to player decisions on the fly while maintaining a consistent and mechanically sound game world. This is a constant problem for videogame designers as well – what if the player goes left instead of right? What if the player shoots his ally instead of the enemy? How does the videogame designer create a consistent world and still allow for player agency? The prevalence of games that artificially and obviously disallow the killing of innocents and allies is a ubiquitous example of when games fail to find this balance – something a good Dungeon Master must do on a nearly constant basis during a D&D session. This experience is invaluable and forces the DM to develop comprehensive and expedient problem-solving skills.

Many well-planned D&D campaigns have been ruined by a player obtaining and exploiting an ability overlooked by the Dungeon Master. Consider this scenario: the player obtains a divination spell that allows them to spy on their arch-nemesis instantly learning much more than the DM intended them to learn at that point in the campaign’s progression. The Dungeon Master must choose to either let them learn what the spell allows and re-plan a large portion of the campaign, or find an excuse to disallow the spell. The former is a lot of work for the Dungeon Master, but the latter can be a transparent ploy that the players will usually see through and immersion will be broken. Dungeon Masters learn how to blur the edges of these choices and maintain campaign cohesion without making the players feel like their ingenuity is being punished. In this case the Dungeon Master might propose that the arch-nemesis has a magical item that prevents the players spying on his plans and that the players must steal it before their divination is successful. This strategy gives the players a compelling reason for the decision and gives them the opportunity to overcome it later, giving the DM time to plan around the players’ new abilities.

The same scenario exists in modern videogames. No matter how brawny your hero is he can’t break down a locked door or step onto waist-high walls intended to block progression in a certain direction. Another common example is disallowing certain equipment to be equipped in an RPG game due to level requirements. These “gamey” mechanics break immersion and experienced game designers learn how to avoid them. Experienced game designers find ways to reward players for thinking outside of the box without compromising the integrity of the experience.

Finding Your Scope
The temptation of first-time Dungeon Masters is to build an epic world with monstrous villains, intriguing characters, massive dungeons, clever traps and heart-wrenching twists and turns. Similarly, if you ask a prospective game designer in high-school what their videogame would look like they’ll tell you of epic fight sequences, endless player choices with branching consequences, limitless progression and ambitious game mechanics. In both cases the designer’s failing is not only in scope but in understanding how player choice and player options increase design complexity exponentially. Inevitably the Dungeon Master in this example realizes that their planning in any given area is far too shallow and must improvise – usually badly – to compensate. The videogame designer in this scenario will find themselves constantly trimming features until very little of their original vision remains.

Every time a Dungeon Master adds a new “feature”, such as a world economy or a new technology he or she must fully understand how every other feature of the game is made more complex by the inclusion. Understanding how to create an immersive and fully-featured game world within a manageable scope is critical to the success of a D&D campaign just as it is critical to the creation of a videogame.

Letting the Player Tell the Story
Most Dungeon Masters love storytelling and often get caught up in creating elaborate plots that an untold number of characters will relate to the players. This makes sense as creating a narrative with the players is a critical element of immersion and in encouraging player investment in the campaign. This is no different in videogames that use a story – even if it is just a macguffin – to push the player forward and offer a more satisfying conclusion than a high-score screen. However it is easy for the storyteller to begin sacrificing player participation for the sake of their craft. This is counter to the intent of both Dungeons and Dragons and most videogames. A good Dungeon Master will learn how to tell a compelling story while letting the true “actors” – the players – play out their part in the narrative.

Games that intend to deliver a good story must attempt this as well. Titles like Mass Effect 2 are successful in their storytelling because the player has an active role in the unraveling of the story even if they can’t (or better yet don’t want to) change the ultimate outcome of the tale. No one understands this concept better than an experienced Dungeon Master.

Failing
Failure is a part of any game and Dungeons and Dragons is no exception. Without the ever-present threat of death there is very little tension or sense of challenge since D&D campaigns don’t have savegames. Death in Dungeons and Dragons is usually permanent and the player is forced to create an entirely new character if they wish to keep playing. The best Dungeon Masters learn to make the players question whether every enemy encounter will be their last. Failure shouldn’t only apply to character death either, it should apply to the game world itself. If the players fail in part of their quest there are real consequences – perhaps a village is burnt to the ground and the residents massacred. The players must then cope with this failure and carry the regret of their failing long after the DM is done describing the horrors that they failed to stop.

Most videogames since Mario have had only one penalty for failing: time. If you die all you lose is the time it takes you to reach that level again; Princess Peach isn’t in any more or less danger than before Mario’s death. In the case of many modern first-person shooters, especially on PC, the quicksave button is just a reach away resulting in every bad choice or encounter being immediately erasable and retried. Dungeon Masters never offer this luxury to their players and the players’ choices are immensely empowered.

Learn Videogame Design Now
This is not in any way a comprehensive list of overlapping skills between Dungeon Masters and videogame designers. Other topics such as encounter and enemy creation and balancing, storytelling with environments, creating a “living” world and maintaining a sense of realism are other skills that an experience Dungeon Master can transfer to the world of game design.

That being said what are you waiting for? If you’re interested in game design as a career find a group of friends who want to try something new and start your own D&D or other role-playing campaign. Start small at first with one of many pre-made modules for D&D that guide a new DM through the first few dungeons and adventures. Also, Dungeons and Dragons Edition 3.5 has been made into “Open Game Content” which allows the rules and content to be published freely on websites like the D20SRD making the fairly expensive core rulebooks unnecessary. As you play take note of your design decisions and consider why some failed and why some succeeded – this level of analysis is critical in game design on all levels.

Running a D&D campaign isn’t the same experience as designing your own videogame and serious designer hopefuls should definitely investigate game schools, but Dungeon Mastering undoubtedly teaches many core elements of what makes a game entertaining and immersive. The lessons you learn will put you above other candidates and may even help push game design itself forward.