 Felly roedden nhw'n gweithio hannol Niclenn, gyda'r gael o'r ysgolion o'r gael yma. Efallai o'n amlwg i fynygwch. Hei, cael ddwy'n! Yn ni'n ddiw'n? Rydyn ni, ddweud i ffwrdd yn gwybod, dwi'n gwybod nhw'n amlwg i fyny. Fel ydynt i gyd yn gynghwyl o'r hanfodolau, o'r ddweud o'r hwnger, yn gweithio. I'm going to say some stuff for like 20 minutes, 15 really if I'm being realistic. You can ask some questions afterwards if you have any but it's not really a questiony thing. I specifically named this where games break rather than how games break so you don't sit here expecting to get some kind of technical lecture from me. Because you're not going to get one. I'm going to say some words. I'm going to say them off a piece of paper because I want to say the exact words I mean. I originally did this for Feral Vector which is a really great festival that David Hayward who sat there runs. And my excuse for that time was that I'd written it the night before. That was a month ago. I haven't learned them this time because learning lines takes time and I don't have any. But I am going to read it so if you'll forgive me because I want to say the exact words that I have written. So this is a little bit poetic if you can bear that. It's a little bit performative but mostly it's me talking about some experiences I've had playing games specifically where games break. And finally I'd just like to thank David for encouraging me to write it. George for me calling him really late at night going I'm not sure what to write about. And also a friend Pat who isn't here who also did that. So is everyone okay? Thank you for being here with me. My name is Hannah Nicklin. I'm a theatre maker, a game designer, a poet and academic. I do other things and today I want to talk to you about where games break. Nine games or examples nine ways games break have broken for me in small and significant and personal and political ways. Games always break eventually not because they are literally broken but many are no because they are finite like spells. They are little pockets of what if in a world of what is. They play with possibility and agency and system. I am interested in where games break. Not just for how games are literally broken though many are but because in the space between what is and what if the infinitesimally big small space between these two things there is transformation. That's the bit that is art, that's the bit that is politics, that is the bit that is a new thinking heart shifting personal thing. A little bit like becoming aware of the fact that you're breathing or that you're blinking. You know we spend six seconds of every minute blinking. I found that out when I was cycling I was listening to an episode of Radio Lab at the time and that's not a useful thing to realise when you're cycling that six seconds of every minute is black and for a while that's all I could see and I was on a stretch of road which is good tarmac, it goes on for a long while, you're slightly down hill not so you'd notice it but you can pick up 50, 60 kilometres an hour and I'm seeing mostly black. It wears off in a bit. What I mean is that we swim in what is and after a while we get to look at it. Games can plunge us into a different material, what if, like salt water into fresh, that space in between where games and reality meet, that's interesting, that's what I'm going to be talking about but I shall give you some examples because that's much more useful. Here are some of the ways that games break. This is a picture of me and my brother, you might want to look at the screens if you can see one because the quality isn't that great there. In this picture I am stealing my brother's tricycle. If you look closely at his face I think you can sort of see that. This photo is supposed to illustrate where games break because you want them to, because you choose to break them and build them again. It's okay, I mean to drop them. You break them because you're playing make-believe with your little brother and somehow you're not winning so you make a new rule that means that you do and somehow that also means getting to steal his tricycle. You're on the hot grass of a July day, all grey shorts and stripy white and blue dresses, red leather sandals and the big hill is the safe place but no, the little hill is the safe place as well but only for five seconds. Games break because you want them to, most often when you are a child or a game designer. It is the ultimate show of agency in a game system, different from turning the board over altogether, different to cheating, all of which acknowledge the original game system. All children are painters and dancers and writers and game designers because they haven't yet gotten use to the feeling of what is against their skin. They often swim into what if, as long as we let them. Because what if is a way of understanding what is. Children and game designers break games to see where they can make them better. Here is a different way that games break. Has anyone in this room played a mid-2000s JRPG called Baton Kytos? That's a whole one person. It's okay. I am your sister from another mother. Because it was a really obscure exclusive game cube release which really didn't help and I bought it second hand off eBay. Each mini CD came in a perspex envelope. I sat in my first student house feeling fully like a grown-up, new stationery, the smell of the university library, a small grey TV purchased on early Amazon in front of me. Late nights following the twists and turns of a genuinely gripping story, it took a while for the crack in this game to break it for me. Because the plotting was great. So many shows and games survived their brokenness for good plotting. It was an aside. A stupid character aside. Some writer or designer at some point probably late at night or early bleary-eyed one morning added a stupid bit of dialogue. I'm a completist. This is a thing you should know about me which interestingly means I'll often stop playing games early. I'll realise that this game is too long for no reason other than perceived value. Someone hasn't thought about what time means, our only irreducible currency and that I just don't have the time to play it properly and I don't care enough to play it properly and if I can't play it properly I won't play it at all. That was part of what broke it for me. But what I remember even now, nearly 10, 11 years later, is searching every cabin in his stupid hometown because that's me. I walk left first on scrollers to see if there's anything that I might miss and I collect all the items and all of the conversation and some tired or bored or unthinking writer decided to have me think and say something horrible about a female non-player character. How they belong in the kitchen, et cetera, et cetera, probably there was a sandwich involved. That's more violent than you think. In a medium that invites you to act through another, the currency of your agency in circulation to have it turned against you, you are thrown hard against what is. This is not your what if. The next break moves on from here to all the games that were broken for me from the beginning. Because you know what, I grew out of being a tomboy. I stopped trying to beat them at their own game. I didn't want to be the one they didn't mean. I was a them, not an us. I tried out complicated thoughts about the possibility of being fucking intelligent and good at sports and occasionally sometimes wearing lipstick. That leads us simply to all of the games that were broken because they made gendered, cultural or control literacy assumptions that meant I never even started them. This game broke where it was supposed to. This game broke because I am racist. Or at least because I grew up in a very big, very quiet, very hard to leave county which is 98.5% right according to recent census. You can look that up on Wikipedia. Hinterland was a collaboration between Game Design Studio Hyden Seek for whom I worked for a while but not when I did this and Ross Sutherland who is a game designer and a poet. Hinterland was a poem you played across a city, the city of Edinburgh. You created a little avatar in an installation in a cafe called Forrest Fringe, well, the Forrest Fringe was held at the Forrest Cafe and you played through several levels, or Canto. Canto is a posh word I'm not even sure I'm pronouncing correctly which means a long verse in a poem. Each Canto was a little booklet and that booklet is a level that can only be completed with the help of a stranger, a translator in fact because half of the booklet is in a different language. Hinterland plays with the people of a city. Much more genuinely than a lot of pervasive games which I have played that make others the background to that play because it breaks the barrier between person who is okay with the idea of playing and general person who doesn't even know what a pervasive game is. Together you and your consenting until now stranger answer the questions in the Canto into the receiver of a mobile phone. You both later receive a call with a verse of a poem that you made together. Your little figure back at the Forrest Cafe moves on a level and you return to collect your next Canto. This game broke in a way that was deeply political. Canto 5, the final level, required me to find someone who was Korean. There were ways to solve this. I could have gone to a Korean restaurant maybe that I looked up on Google but somehow that felt like cheating. I stopped playing then because I knew that I would not know the difference on the street between a Chinese person, a Japanese person, someone Korean. It broke where it was supposed to. It broke in a way that was reflective. This is some money but it is also a picture from a game slash show theatre game crossover world here called The Money. The Money is a game by a company called Collider. The Money is a simple game but with rules so simple that it feels like real life just with a problem to solve. You can buy two different types of ticket to The Money. The first silent witness that cost you 10 pounds, you sit and watch. The second benefactor, 10 pounds plus an amount of your choice. As benefactor, your job is with the other benefactors to decide how to spend the money and the money is the sum of all of the tickets. It's on the table in front of you. The decision must be made in two hours and the decision must be unanimous. Everyone has to decide together that's how they want to spend it. If you do not spend the money by reaching unanimous decision in those two hours the money rolls over to the next group of people. So you might have 100 pounds on your table or if five groups haven't been able to come to a decision you might have a couple of thousand depending on how many people have bought tickets. The Money is fascinating. Fascinating and with rules so simple it just concentrates and shows up the rules we play by in real life but forget exist. And it broke down a little when I decided to ask the question why do we think we are better people to spend this than the next group? And I said that I would veto every decision our group made. That's not fair. It's in the rules. It's unfair to use your power like that. The rules say we all of us have the exact same amount. I'm not doing anything you can't do. I'm fully aware I was quite annoying but it's not a game about money. It's a game about collective decision making. How we decide what matters I decided what mattered to me was the idea that one group of people is any better than another. And I broke some real life assumed rules about democracy and what power is because the game gave me the agency to do so. The rules of the money broke the rules of everyday life a little which is deeply fascinating. Also I am fully aware I was quite annoying. This is a game I don't play anymore. This is about the games that we play idly. Usually these games are safer like counting magpies or stones in plum pudding but they are all games about humans in an infinite universe like to think that they have control. This game is called Go On. Click your ex's profile on Instagram. I mean that's my profile. I don't want to look at his. This game is called Test How Much It Doesn't Hurt Anymore. This game goes well until you see a picture of him with another girl. This game is like playing chicken with your heart. It broke a little. Some games break long. Long after you stop playing with them. Some games stay with you. Some games break over your thoughts like ways, days and days after. Kentucky Route Zero is a modern classic. Its spell is long and complex and its simplicity of form sets aside space for design that is more like life than life looks. And writing so smart that it cuts to deep differences in approach and person and storytelling just by offering you three options and I can't get the shape of Equus petrol station out of my head and I can't shake the taste of America which I only really remember for one trip over there when I was still young enough for a discount plane ticket all over sweet bread, powdered juice drink and long drives over roads by night that still smell of the sun. And I can't get the song of drowned manors out of my head. Even though I never heard it. Some games break long. Triathlon is a game that I play with myself. It's a game that happens between my head and my body for six hours or 12 with the rules stipulating that you're not allowed to wear headphones. Just you, all of you, right now, every moment for a long time. Swimming, cycling, then running. There's a theory about how our bodies deal with endurance effort. It's called the Governor's theory and you may know about it if you either listen to Radio Lab or a sports performance academic. The Governor's theory suggests that there is a part of our brain which tells us when we have run out of energy. It tells us by sending signals to our muscles, fatigue, pain, struggle but much like a car petrol gauge there is always a quarter tank left. That measure is underestimated and experiments suggest that you can trick it. You can push past that Governor. When taking part in endurance sport, there are certain measures. They're called homeostats. Think of the word thermostat, measurements of heat. Homeostats on measurements of your human body. You could also call them breaking points. Energy supply from glucose or glycogen, blood oxygenation, plasma osmality which is a posh word for how much salt is in your body and there's also centrally acting performance modifiers. In your psychology, things such as motivation, self-belief, the presence of competitors that one always gets me. I knock tens of minutes off my time. Sleep deprivation levels, general emotional state all of which govern how long our bodies feel we can continue and even if you mess up that, there is always something left. Triathlon is a fucking stupid thing to do. I fully admit that. But it's also great. It's like using 12 or 6 hours of your time to roar with your body. A body that is not a thing looked at but is a thing for doing. It's like remembering you exist. It's like walking a psychological tightrope. It's about playing with where you break. Everything that is what is about being this woman with a body falls away into what if one more step. Early days of a better nation is my final example. This, by the by, is engraved on the side of the Scottish Parliament. I can't remember the full quote but it's something like live your days or work your days as if you lived in the early days of a better nation. This, however, is a playable revolution from the good folk at the agency of Coney. It's been through several iterations and it's still being worked on. I played an early iteration at BAC in London. You were thrust into the early days following a revolution and our job, all 100 of us, was to form a new government and decide how we would govern. This game broke perfectly, profoundly and personally, just as I won. This game told me what I already knew that I played seriously. This game taught me what I thought I knew that I am good at getting people to listen to me, to follow me. And this game taught me what I didn't know. That I will sometimes choose compromise and pragmatism over what I believe is technically better but so hard as to be almost impossible. That I listen to the central governor of my ethical and moral system. And that I will accept a coalition government if it means that I get to be leader. This game crowned me president. This game made me David Cameron. Games can break because you think you can do better. Games can break in ways that spit on who you are. Games can be too broken to pick up or they can break where you are broken. They can break in ways that ask what are other options. They can break your heart, they can break over you like waves. They can break real and hard and they can break open how you might affect and hurt others. Games always break eventually. Not because they are literally broken though many are, but because they are finite like spells. They are a little pocket of what if in a world of what is. They play with possibility and agency and system. I am interested in where games break. Not just for how games are broken though many are. But because in the space between what is and what if, the infinitesimally big small space between these two things, there is transformation. That is the bit that is art. That's the bit that is politics. That's the bit is new thinking. Heart shifting a little like when you become aware of the fact that you are breathing or that you are blinking. What I mean is that we swim in what is and after a while we forget to look at it. Games can plunge us into what if like salt water into fresh, the taste of one still in our mouths and the experience of the other surrounding us. Where games break is the space between these two things. The space in fact where everything game happens. I am interested in where games break. Thank you for listening to me talk about them. Thank you very much Hannah for talking to everyone about where games break. We've got time for a few questions if anyone wants. Or if anyone would like to share their own experience of where games break. I was thinking it's not really like a question answer thing. But if you guys want to share any similar things that you can think of, or talk about anything like that, that's totally fine. But also if you want to go and eat some food that's also fine. I'll stop. You made the supposition that all games break. And you had relationships and Instagram and ex-relationships there. But what about the ones that don't break? The long happy marriage where the couple have been married 80 years. Surely that's not broken. Bernard Sutes defines the game as the willing undertaking of unnecessary obstacles. And Johann Wiesinger talks about games as aside from seriousness. Not anti-serious, but aside from seriousness. I would take those two definitions and suggest that a game is a thing that, like if a game becomes everyday life, it's no longer a game because it's no longer aside from seriousness. I don't suggest that the relationship is the game. I suggest the game I play myself is whether or not I am okay enough to look at his Instagram feed. You've obviously studied things formally on this. What triggered you to think about where games break first of all and to actually think of it as an academic study? My PhD is in using games influence theatre to bring down capitalism. And what is powerful about games sometimes is those spaces between what is and what if and the friction that the two can have against one another. So what this is is a nice poetic version of three years of my life thinking. Our last speaker here was talking about how to stand for Parliament. So if your PhD thesis was how to bring down Parliament, what would you have to tell our last speaker? I had a lot of things to tell him. I think I should have a conversation with him because I found his approach a little problematic, I have to say. But I think it would be unfair for me to say that out loud, possibly. Democratic? Oh, we have a question over here. Can the rules of a game evolve throughout the game? And if so, can you give me an example? Yeah, sure. Okay, so there are different ways that you can do that. So like the process of actual game design is often one of iteration. So maybe you start with a quite well-known game like Grandmother's Footsteps and you go, well, this is fine, but it's not very interesting. So maybe everyone also has to wear something that sounds loud when they move. Let's try that rule. So you might try it again and again and again. So that's the way that you can reshape games. You can also put it directly into the game itself. So Coney's game, Early Days of a Better Nation, the whole idea was that you'd decide on a system of government if you wanted to and if you could. It wasn't a good enough framework by that point because most people just imitated politics as we already had it. It didn't give us enough of a space to rethink politics at that point. It may have got better. So if it's possible to kind of remap the rules of a game whilst you're inside the game, could you stop it from ever breaking? No, again, because of... I mean, I sit here going, no. In my opinion, no, because the definition of game suggests that... because you stop it when you rework it unless it's fundamentally designed into the game in which you're still playing it. I had an example in my head, but I can't think of it now. So if life is a game, the game of life, do some people just play it for longer than others? Or are they broke it by dying early? Again, I'd suggest that although it's a lovely metaphor to apply games to everyday life and we do use the metaphor game to talk about the game of politics, et cetera, et cetera, they're what I would call formats and not games. They're formalised structures, which a game is, but a game is always a side from seriousness. George might disagree with me. If Grandmother's Pulse Test was Nintendo or PlayStation, then I worked it out. I was just going to respond to that. When a game breaks, that doesn't mean it's the end of a game. A game can continue on through breaking and you can fix it or you can just accept that it's broken. So it doesn't mean that it's come to an end or it can be an invitation to change the rules of it or it can be an invitation to change the way you're approaching that game or it can just be the point of the game. The point of the game is that it's not a complete framework and that's an interesting thing as well when you're playing a game and it doesn't work and therefore you have to step into the breach and fill in where the game isn't. If it was a perfect game, what would be the point in playing it? It already exists apart from you. Right, exactly. Why do you need to play the game if it's already perfect? Arguably, you could also suggest that the obstacles that you put in front of you are necessarily in order to play a game, in order to overcome them, are against efficiency in some ways. So they are breaks in flow. I'd liken that to some of that as well. Thank you, George. Would you say a lucid dream is a game and is that a broken game? I mean, I'm not Arbiter. I would love to be Arbiter on a lot of things. A lucid dream is a game, no, no. There seem to be different ways in which games broken your examples and a lot of them seem to fall into one of two categories. One in the way that you just said of going from something that's not serious to something that's serious. And another reminder me of James Castley's distinction between finite and infinite games. It seemed to be where all the games that you were talking about were finite. Yeah. Also, you seem to be claiming that games are inherently finite. I wondered if you like to that. You seem to be disagreeing with Castley that there's a possibility of infinite games. I haven't read Castley. James Castley, finite and infinite games. Okay. I haven't read that. But I think humans are finite creatures in an infinite universe which is like a big philosophical thing for throwing up. So I would argue that things that we consciously do are always finite. But we exist in an infinite context. You should let me know the name of that writer though. I'd love to read. Thank you. Hey. Thank you. On the subject of infinity and finiteness is sort of doing the same thing in an infinite number of times of failure mode. I mean, I've seen a screenshot where someone's put 2,000 hours into Skyrim and that seems to be broken in a whole new way. Great. I didn't hear the end of it. Was it a thought or a question? That seems to be a failure mode, a breakage where someone's played the same game for 2,000 hours in the saved game. Yeah. I suppose it probably doesn't matter if you enjoy it, right? I haven't quite decided yet whether this is a question or a thought but you talk about games having to be finite because humans are finite creatures. But surely that only applies if the game is being played by one person. For example, if I take an MMO, that is played by hundreds of people across the world. So even if one person drops out, the game will continue going. So you could theoretically have that for the entire span of the human race. It won't happen but it could. So can games stop breaking provided that you have enough people coming in so it could feasibly be an infinite? It depends how you look at a game, whether it's the thing which is the human experience or if it's the artifact that is played. I would suggest that the two together is the thing so the game breaks the second that person walks away from it and has to possibly eat some food so that they survive another day. But you could think of it as a shared experience so that everyone's having the same experience and provided there are still people there to have that experience the experience still remains and the game remains unbroken. Would it make you feel better if I said games are breakable? I suppose. Then I think we should go with that. Thank you very much for your thought, I appreciate it. I had an interesting thought and I thought I would ask what you were saying that games are apart from seriousness which is an interesting idea when there are people who play games professionally and people who farm for money in games and sell it to other people and people who play poker professionally and also games which are serious and have serious implications and make you think serious thoughts. Where's that distinction? It never says that games aren't serious because the whole bit is sort of talking about the criticism it was written in the 50s or something and the critique of games at the time was that they are fun things or they are playful things or they are childish things but actually some games are played incredibly seriously I know that, I am a serious player the amount of time I spend making some character look exactly like me much more than I ever played one of those games I have to say so seriousness is not the same as anti-fun that's what he was trying to get across so aside from seriousness doesn't preclude it from being serious it's just aside from the seriousness that we attribute to adulthood and being grown up Do you work in the games industry now? A little bit What do you do? I've done some game writing like dialogue and scripting that kind of thing and then I also do a little bit of making up how they happen I just did a game with George called Glitch Pigeon which if you go to, it's just Hannah Nicklin on Twitter we just actually released it in the 10th earlier today so you can play it, it's silly and it doesn't work properly Mine was in a question, mine was a personal breakage I don't know if she played Braid which is a sort of game where time travels with you and stuff but it was a point where I got stuck on the game and so I googled for help or whatever and you find the guy who wrote Braid gives you a walkthrough and the walkthrough consists of starting it looks like it's starting to go be a walkthrough and then he tells you, you shouldn't use walkthroughs and that you should keep playing the game and eventually you'll work out how to do it and that's the fun then I carried on and found a walkthrough because otherwise I would have just given up and stopped playing that game entirely which would be no fun going playing the game in my own terms not his terms as the creator of the game which I thought was quite odd That's an interesting thing that game broke for me just because I couldn't stand the artwork it made me feel a little bit sick actually genuinely we act really weirdly to some visuals and I just really didn't like the artwork so that broke really early for me but thank you very much for sharing that with us Is anyone else having any other questions? No, he don't I've found a number of instances of games recently that have been broken not inherently by the mechanics but by the vitriolic communities that play them I was just wondering if you had any ideas how to oppose that Wait, solve It's quite an ask OK, so did bro culture in games gamers, do you know what I'm sure some of you will be aware of the past week in games That's kind of why I said it So women being incredibly harassed for things that should have been no one's business and violent threats and then a genuine calling to arms against game developers who supported this woman against that treatment that's been happening recently and I spent half of this week feeling incredibly scared to talk in public about it in case this thing happened to me as well and I spent the rest of the week feeling really fucking angry that I felt scared to talk about this in public as well and what really helped was seeing a lot of people posting a lot of blog posts and videos and comments and tweets saying this is not acceptable and eventually they will become the oxbow lake of gaming culture and we just need to keep going keep writing, keep making keep helping one another keep creating safe spaces keep inviting people in and looking at the places we do things and saying why isn't someone here not just why don't they want to be here but what are we doing that makes them feel uncomfortable asking those people those kinds of things keep working keep doing buy some t-shirts that say social justice warrior on them et cetera Thank you for your question Sorry Is that going to be on the internet? Am I going to get? Do I need to double authenticate on my own accounts? I just wanted to say it was very nice to know that I'm not the only person who plays the Instagram game Let's cry together later Some very heavy topics very light ones So unfortunately we've got to wrap up I guess Hannah will be around afterwards if anyone else has any other questions Thank you very much for giving me your time this evening Thank you Thank you very much Hannah