Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

In a small, dark room at the Sundance New Frontiers exhibit, game designer Eddo Stern has set myself and an opponent up to play his sensory challenging Dark Game. The game itself is laid out on two large screen projections that face one another, each player, facing back-to-back, seeing only the images on their specific screen. Each player wears also headgear, the pulses emanating from which serve as the opponent kill guide.

At this point I'm running in the blind, my screen having gone black. My eyes shut tight, I follow the pulses coming from the game headgear and joggle the joystick to shoot in the pulse's general direction. The pulse signifies the whereabouts of the opposing player, but my kill skill is mostly shooting blank.

Every now and again I hear a crashing sound, and that means I've made a hit. These occur none too often or too fast. The pulses indicate Northwest, West, South, East, Northeast, and they do so quickly, at times confusing my senses. It's by a stroke of utter luck that I win the game, and as I take off the headgear, I realize that my temples throb.

"You're a really lousy shot," a room newcomer says.

"I couldn't see," I reply.

It's not until the next morning that Stern has free time to sit down and chat about his work and his hopes for the coming innovations in the gaming field. "I'm not an elitist artist," Stern says. "I don't think people are idiots. I think people are being undersold by the mainstream."

While Dark Game expands gaming dialogue between communities based on sensory depravation, the foundation of Stern's body of work lays in various areas of innovation from crafting gaming experiences that draw the player more physically and emotionally into the narrative worlds to integrating documentary influenced game designs that impart social awareness. Through all, his work uses big concepts and speaks big issues on an artistic and accessible level.

"The way I think of it is that games are another genre in films. The challenges of making a political genre film--a political horror film, a political sci-fi--are similar to the challenges of making a political computer game," he explains. "If I was a filmmaker, those would be my struggles, how do I add this to genre, and still keep those things that genre films have--this fun, predictability, these familiar models...?"

Using an Apple Two Plus, Stern wrote his first game at age ten. "Old hobby, basically, making little games on the computer," he puts it. That's where we start the conversation, with that old hobby.

SM: Why are you drawn to gaming? I feel like it's ubiquitous now. Especially as a kid, that was the thing to do. But, I always wonder what it is people seek in gaming, what the continued attraction is to it.

ES: People fall on one of two sides of this question. Some people see them like toys, something they did when they were children and then stopped--all games, not just computer games I think, and I think there's a lot of people on the other side of that who in a way don't stop playing games. Whether they get into card games, play chess, Trivial Pursuit or gambling on sports, anything like that, in a way, they are consumed by games all the way through their life. Of course, the perception is different of what's an adult game and what's a kid game. So if you're like 40 and play D&D, that's dorky, but if you're 40 and gamble on the Rams game on TV, you're not dorky; that's normalized.

At least my generation and younger are grown up with computer games, and you see more and more people not letting go of those. It's not seen as a child's toy. It's seen as a medium that evolves. You probably play different games now than you did when you were a kid, but there's enough richness--I definitely believe this for more than just me, that people see enough richness in the medium of computer games--to grow with you.

A lot of my game art and designs are looking at that really. It's not so much games for the market or games for kids, but it's games that expand a little bit, evolve the framework of what games can be. Either they're about more grown up things--political games or games that deal with emotional complexity--or they're harsh games that involve pain and fear and horror, things that are I think a little bit outside the mainstream genre of gaming. What I'm really advocating and working on is independent games and very much in the context of independent cinema. Not so much independent in the terms that the industry looks at it, which is, "It doesn't have a publisher yet and therefore is independent but wants to be in the mainstream," it's more so independent by sensibility and less by scale. So even if it's the same budget as a commercial game, if it's treated differently from a narrative point of view, from a documentary point of view, it can be independent in that respect, in that the thinking isn't controlled by market and by genre. That's new, very new.

SM: Because you're in part pioneering this new area, what have you learned about it so far? What are you hoping to see develop more in this very open landscape?

ES: I just want to see more people do it. I want to see more institutions, something like Sundance, or a games review magazine that doesn't just look at mainstream games. There was one magazine that went out of business this year, unfortunately, called Computer Games Magazine, which had a slightly more independent view. So they would write about gender in games, race and politics, look at independent games and talk about more complex issues in a way evolving the field of game criticism beyond just, "This game kicks ass. The graphics suck," like a lot of the mainstream magazines do. It's very much like TV Guide type of reviews.

That's just one area, and so in a way all the areas need to be developed--the funding models, non-profit money going into games or some venture money that's willing to take more risks with risky games. From things like magazines to things like festivals to archives to distribution models to production companies that work on smaller scales to the technology itself becoming more accessible to the whole problem with consuls and "How do you get independent games on consuls?" Now it's a little easier with XBox Live, and it's actually helping a lot of people to get games on there that you can download for five dollars. But, it's five dollars, and it's XBox Live. It's very controlled by one company. So, there are a lot of problems with platform. Also some fundamental problem is that these hardware platforms are also controlled by three companies--Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, and they also, in different ways between them, control content.

That then gets to the real question of what I'm interested in doing rather than looking for from other people, is working through narrative and experiences that haven't normally been in games...What I do is design the game experience and do the programming with other people, but that's not really my strength, or the visuals. The game designer is sort of like the script writer/director of the game. So I'm really interested in working with writers who I like and saying "Okay, let's try to write a game and have it not come out cheesy." How can you do that? How can you create a game that's dramatic and emotional and not something that a teenager will enjoy but my mom won't enjoy? Can you do that? Does it have to be about violence? Not necessarily. Does it have to be action based? Not necessarily. There's all these questions. I always give a similar example, "Can you do a drama as a game?," and there's been some example of this now. So the field is definitely changing, but we don't have an indie game community really. We don't have a festival, we don't have journals, but, we need them.

Documentary game is the other thing I'm very interested in. I designed the game Waco Resurrection, which is a game where you play as David Koresh, and we did that with a small team independently.

SM: Now when you talk about a documentary game, can you define the parameters? Is this a game that's completely built by artists, or do you also use doc footage for integration?

ES: Exactly. That's part of the challenge is, "How do you do that?" There's a few places where that's fairly easy, so with sound, you can use doc sound the way you would in a film. Actually, instead of having actors, you record real people and then put them in the game spontaneous. The same with photos, so you can take photos on the fly and then map them onto textures and use real people instead of artificial.

Then there's more interesting technologies that aren't quite there yet, like live motion capture. So you'd record how your body moves on film and then map it onto a 3D model. Instead of animators deciding how you move, it would actually just be a recording of this last half-hour of what you did and put it in the game. So you have this strange transference in a way of what can be captured, what can be captured live and how does it translate to a simulated thing. We don't have the camera yet in this field. Maybe we will one day, or we'll have something like it. But, we don't have the audio recorder, the video camera, so the idea of documentary is a little more like writing in a way where you have to observe as much as you can and then reconstruct it. This is a really interesting challenge and a place to look, but there are not many forces pushing towards it right now. The industry has their own methods, and it's mostly fantasy drive--so war fantasy, medieval fantasy, sports fantasy. They're not interested perse in reality although it's surprising because it's a huge trend in our culture to consume realism, all the reality TV, there's a huge--

SM: Yeah, there's a definite shift towards nonfiction and a fascination with it. Yeah, you're right.

ES: Some games have touched on this by processing political events very quickly into games. During the Gulf War II, which now we don't call the Gulf War II but at the time it was, a game came out with that name that you would play. It came out so quickly that even while the war was in its early stages already the game was out, Conflict Desert Storm II. The same with Afghanistan...There was definitely an awareness, but we're talking about the most--one of the most, I'm not sure of the numbers but probably the most-dominant genre of gaming, which is war-action games--or at least in computer games. It's then obviously drawn from recent events anyhow, and they just added some specifics but not with the intent of serving documentary but with the intent of still serving fantasy by just making it fresher.

SM: There is that danger when you do that too of sensationalizing, whereas what you seem to be saying is that, especially if we're hearing real voices and potentially looking at doc footage when we have the live motion capture, that we begin to empathize as opposed to think of our own invincibility within a game. So that'll be a huge psychological shift in the way gamers treat those worlds.

ES: I've worked with that in a few different projects of mine. I did a short video piece, fifteen minutes, called Sheik Attack, which is basically trying to do that exact thing. It's using some shinema [translation from Japanese 'cinema'] piece, so it's using computer game footage linearly. One of the main attempts there was to try and re-sensitize the characters. They're all taken from games, but they're re-edited and contextualized within a real event, so that when you see, for example, this woman in the video getting shot, at the very end, she's already in context as a real person in Lebanon, so that people's reaction has often been a surprise of shock, that they actually feel like they're watching a documentary.

It's kind of like the power of cartoons in a way. If you were to take something horrible that just happened and do a cartoon of it, it has that fact to it too, when it's describing it, in the drawing of it.

SM: In terms of other art mediums that have been considered to be for children and then were re-appropriated or re-envisioned as being for everyone, we see specifically that same thing with Maus in the comics.

ES: Comics is a great place to look and animation to some extent, although I feel they're at not enough examples.

SM: There are more examples from animation of that nature from the 70s, less now.

ES: And, that always raises the question, "Is there a problem with a non-photorealistic medium in dealing with serious issues? Is it possible to empathize with an animation that you know is constructed--just because you know it's constructed-- versus a fiction film, which you know is constructed, but you forget?" Suspension of disbelief kicks in because we see documentary footage and we see a film, and we're able to suspend our disbelief [visually], whereas with an animation or game that process is very different. It's not instinctive somehow.

SM: The art is at the surface, and the art is what we're constantly aware of.

ES: You know it's an artificial thing, and it takes a lot more work through voice and narrative. You have to work against a lot to get to the point where people buy in to the emotions of animation more than [buying into a performance by] a good actor. So, then it becomes about acting too, which is interesting. A good actor does a lot of work for you, and an animated character, in order to turn them into a good actor, is really a challenge. Recently I think Gollum in Lord of the Rings was a really good example actually of one of the first really well acted animated characters...As we see more complex characters done in animation, that concept of acting mapped onto animation is going to help games a lot in their problem with disbelief.

SM:Branching to talk about a technical point, the thing that I really do love about Dark Game, having played it, it that idea that it universalizes the experience for both people who are all sensory and others who have sensory depravation. I was hoping that you could talk about that because I think it's a really cool concept and not one, especially when I was growing up, that was even in the realm of beginning to be a possibility for the mainstream. There may have been pockets of people at universities doing that kind of work, but you would never have seen anything of that nature come out in the mainstream then.

ES: It's almost incidental for me because the original concept, or what excited me about the concept originally, was really game play under stressed physical conditions. I've done a few other projects like that, Tekken Torture Tournaments, a game that gives you electric shocks when you get hit by the other player. And a performance game, we did both Cock Fight Arena where you have to wear a costume, and it's very physically grueling to actually play. So, the idea of the body mingling with your brain when you play and the stress and the real emotions that can come physically--fear in the case of the shocking game--is very hard to simulate in a virtual environment. But, when you know it's physical, fear just happens. Here I really wanted to create the kind of claustrophobia and anxiety that might come from blindness and deafness in a game. That was really my impulse.

Then during my research, I tested a few games for blind people, which are audio games, and I found them really lacking as games. I was like, "Wow, this is such a shame, you know?" Or, I just kind of felt bad, and I was like, "Hm, I'm already going to do this sensory depravation game. Why don't I also make it accessible to blind people and to deaf people? Actually make it a game that is balanced so that blind people, deaf people and seeing/hearing people can all play together in the same world?"...The game is designed to balance those senses so that if you log in as a blind player, the game compensates you for that. But, if you're a seeing player, and you want to play as a blind player, you're compensated in the same way. So, in a way, it's somewhat of an advantage and a disadvantage in the world of the game.

So, in a way, it's two parallel agendas that meet pretty well together. My initial impulse wasn't, "I want to make games that are accessible." It just kind of happened, and I think maybe because of that the gaming experience might become much more interesting for everybody.

SM: Yeah, I think that's absolutely what it'll do.

ES: This whole concept comes from an idea that I've been developing, a sort of theoretical framework for game design that I've been trying to work under. One way to call it that I use is something like an empirical game play--in a way, letting the player's real personality, physical abilities, body, sense of ethics, leadership skills, social skills map onto the game world and have room to play out in the worlds rather than this weak concept that I think often doesn't work in games of forced role play. In so many games, it's, "You are the leader. You have a high charisma, and therefore you are the leader of the group. Or, you have high strength" like a D&D model of creating an artificial character. Or, "You feel afraid," and so your character runs away versus you the player feeling afraid, having charisma, having real moral decisions, having high dexterity versus low dexterity. What does that mean in the game?

There are a few examples in multi-player games that have done this really well, and one of them is--I think it was done first in--Dark Age of Camelot, an online game, and then I think in Everquest as well. It was the idea of playing music. So, you could be a bard, which is a musical character, but instead of just hitting the button that says, "Play music," (the game) checks how good the bard is at music. The player actually has to follow along the notes, and if they are good musicians and have a good sense of rhythm, the bard is actually more effective...Or, another example would be leadership skill that is based really on, in a multi-player game, player feedback. So, like, "This guy is actually a good leader. We're going to follow them not because they chose the leader type character to play but because they are good at this." So, if that makes sense, that can then trickle down to everything. So that's really where I want to design games, trying to cut through role play but allow in a way the person to be connected to the character in a very direct way.

In this case, I'm working with the body a lot and the senses, and I think it's an obvious jump from that that if you're playing a blind player, what would happen if a real blind player is playing a blind player? Are they better at things? Are they more attuned orally?

SM: Part of what we're talking about too, and this is kind of a bigger question, is this idea of re-sensitizing and reconnecting to your characters and using your characters not to whitewash over what you are but enhance what you are, and all that makes me question this idea of why is it that people game in the first place. You talked about the idea that most of the game industry is geared toward promoting fantasy or to promoting some sort of escapism. So, the question that I have is: Why do you play? What is that thing that you get out of it? And, why do you think most people play, just in general?

ES: It's a tricky assumption, and that's part of why I'm interested in focusing in on inverting it, but I don't really feel that it needs to be inverted. The assumption is often that people who play, say online role playing games without a lot of other people, are there to escape themselves or their life, but I think very quickly they find that there is no escape from themselves, that they end up being themselves with slight adjustments. Pretty quickly they become themselves again, and this sort of in a way subversion of fantasy is something really interesting. Whereas Dungeons & Dragons is really about role play initially--you step into a character, that's proven completely ineffective in online games. When you chose what server you want to go into, what rules you want to play with, there are special servers for role playing, which was originally considered what this was all about, but now it's about five percent of all of the servers. So, for every nineteen non-role play servers where you should be cursing and talking about politics and you're able to be yourself, for every nineteen of those, there's one where you're like, "Hi, I am Sir Galahad the Noble." It's already proven itself not to be why people game. They don't play to step into someone else's world. They play to be themselves and in a way to enhance their experience, like you said.

But, people play for very many different reasons. It's really hard to generalize about it. There's been a lot of studies about why people game. Some people play, especially with the trend now-which is really the future of games and we're there already, so it's almost hard to talk about it as a future--games are really now social again; that's a primary part of them. I think we went through an early phase of the Atari and the living room games which have continued all along and have always been social in a way. You couldn't really play Atari--you could play it alone, but it was more fun, I think, to play with other people. Maybe that's not true for everyone, but I feel like the computer gamer in their basement, sitting alone on the computer, is something that is now really again a thing of the past. Now it's a social experience, so more and more games are becoming solely multi-player, which changes the whole thing and in a way cuts that fantasy thing up really fast. Suddenly, there's someone out there calling you an asshole.

SM: And, they're really calling you an asshole.

ES: It's you they're calling an asshole, not your character, so you're immediately implicated--or interpolated, that's the word--into being yourself and reacting. Or, if you have a crush on someone because of something they said, it's not a fantasy character anymore. It's a real person, and that changes the whole dynamic of how people are interacting and using games as dating worlds.

People play for different reasons, but what I was getting at is that I think a lot of people now play for social reasons, which can either be like they need competition against real people, so that's a type of social interaction--which might seem asocial to people, but it's not; it's actually social. There are people who are looking for friends and for community online, and that's what it is. There are people who bond with their children through games. There are people who play to make themselves feel better. That would be maybe closest to the escapist thing. It's a form of fantasy, and people need to consume it. I think a lot of men play, especially in America, for weird reasons, anxiety about masculinity in this culture specifically. So it's compensation or some sort of release of aggression. That's very much part of the game industry.

A lot of TV shows and other IPs are tied into games now. So people who play that in a way are fans, and their reason for playing is really an extension of fan activity. It would be like looking up celebrities on the Internet and then playing the game made about their movies. It's this mega-fan culture matrix that is forming, and gaming is just another place to consume. It's like buying clothes with logos on them, but you buy the game. That's always strange to me too because those are usually really bad games, but they sell. People buy the Lost game...

Big question though, why people play games.

SM: Is there anything that I've forgotten to ask you that you wanted to add?

ES: In this place that we are, it's sort of a crossroads, and we need that indie game infrastructure to materialize one piece at a time. I think it'll be pretty exciting in a few years: where you can go to something like a Sundance Game Festival and hopefully see really mature or materialized games that are different than the mainstream; as gamers get older; and more and more kids also that I talk to want to make games. So just by sheet numbers and variety, you'll have, I think, more interesting games coming out.

For more information on Stern and his work, visit www.eddostern.com/.