Jeff Watson
Assistant professor, USC Interactive Media & Games Division
Jeff Watson is an artist, designer, researcher, and assistant professor of Interactive Media & Games in the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Situation Lab. His work focuses on investigating how game mechanics, pervasive computing, and social media can enable new forms of transmedia storytelling, participation, and civic engagement. His design credits include the award-winning Reality Ends Here (2011), an innovative educational intervention, which has been running at the USC School of Cinematic Arts since 2011, making it one of the longest-running ARGs ever made.
How did you become a game designer?
I spent a lot of my childhood making up little role-playing games for my friends to play. As I got older, I got into other things like writing and cinema, which ended up taking me on a circuitous route back into game design. For a long time, my primary interest was in filmmaking. Sometime in the late nineties, I started to get curious about how I could use new media to extend stories across platforms and contexts. The web just seemed like this amazing new territory for storytelling, and I wanted to explore that. Eventually, this exploration led me into alternate reality games and other kinds of practices that would later be called “transmedia storytelling.” However, the more I got into all that, the more I realized that what was most interesting to me wasn’t just all the clever ways I could deploy story material into real-world contexts, but the various methods through which I could structure the creative participation of active audiences. And that naturally led me to study game design, because for me that’s what games are all about: providing a structure for people to creatively engage with a system and with each other.
On games that have inspired:
Probably the most direct influence on my work is SFZero, a DIY maker game that involves issuing and responding to creative media-making challenges. It’s a very simple game—indeed, some people might not even want to call it a “game” per se—but at its peak, it produced a constant flow of fascinating creative projects and some really intense social engagement for those who were involved. One thing I really like about SFZero is that it leaves a trail or record of play, and so it’s both fun to play and interesting to watch unfold or browse through after the fact. I call this sort of thing a “participatory spectacle,” and I think there’s a lot of room for more projects like this, especially in light of the predominant role social media now plays in our lives. Plus, I think everyone’s an artist and a maker deep down, and the more that we can facilitate these impulses, the better.
I’m also really inspired by some of Sid Sackson’s party games, like The “No” Game and Haggle, both of which are described in his great little book, A Gamut of Games. These games, like Werewolf (also a huge inspiration for me), facilitate a kind of endlessly variable creative social play via a very simple set of rules and game resources. More recent storygames like Fiasco and The Quiet Year work in a similar way, focusing social creativity on the generation of fiction. For me, the emergent stories produced by these kinds of games are much richer than the pre-scripted story networks or trees that characterize how a lot of video games these days approach narrative.
On exciting developments in the industry:
While I enjoy single-player games as much as the next person, I think it’s important to remember that such games are a kind of historical anomaly in the context of the broader history of games. Before digital games, the vast majority of games were highly social multiplayer experiences—think of board games, card games, sports, and parlor games. Even one of the very first video games, Tennis for Two, was multiplayer. Technological limitations—such as the absence of standardized networking protocols and infrastructure, and market forces related to the manufacture and distribution of video game cabinets, consoles, and software in the 1970s and 1980s—focused a lot of the energy in the first few decades of the video game industry on making single-player games. While there is of course a powerful social dimension to single-player games, just as there is with painting, sculpture, television, novels, and other media, games have a special power to directly shape and facilitate social play. I’m excited that more and more games are exploring new approaches to multiplayer interaction, and building multiplayer elements into their concepts from the beginning, rather than just tacking them on as a bonus feature.
On design process:
There is a lot of mystery involved in any design process. Many people will insist that there is a distinction between art and design, but I see the two as being interwoven with one another in ways that make them impossible to separate. Making a game is a way of making something happen in the world, and so whether I’m commencing a given project as a purely artistic endeavor, or as something that is addressing a very constrained design brief, my approach always goes back to the question of what kind of situation I want to generate for my players to inhabit and creatively explore. If there is any one thing that I always try to do, it’s to establish this basic purpose from the get-go. We could call this a “mandate” or even a “thesis,” but those words somehow don’t seem active enough to me. Games are about doing things, not saying things. So I try to frame the purpose of my game in terms of what it is that the players will do while they are playing, how this play will affect their relationships with each other and their world, and how, if at all, it will give rise to new and unpredictable forms of play. Of course, figuring this out is actually the result of a much more fundamental process that underlies the whole operation, which entails looking at the world around me, identifying opportunities for new kinds of creative play and social engagement, thinking about what forces are preventing that play and engagement from happening, and imagining the kinds of things that need to be in place to facilitate it. This process is really just a part of being a curious person and wanting to make the world a better place, and I think the more I can tap into those very basic motivations within myself, the better games I will create.
On prototyping:
I extensively paper prototype. For me, the most useful tools for developing a game idea are things like index cards, dice, action figures, and game boards. I don’t design first-person shooters or platformers, so I can’t speak with a lot of authority to how helpful the paper prototyping process would be in terms of, say, coming up with a great new deathmatch level or inventing a clever jumping mechanic. But my intuition is that for whatever kind of game design you’re doing, if you can make it work on a tabletop, a street, or a soccer field, you’re going to have a lot less trouble making it work in digital form. A playable paper prototype is going to need to have a kind of elegant simplicity to it that will make it possible for human players to execute the rules, manage game resources, and determine things like winners, losers, and other outcomes of play. If you can make a prototype that a bunch of friends can play without the assistance of a computer—and if you can make that play experience interesting enough that they want to come back and play some more—you will have the strongest possible foundation upon which to evolve a digital version.
I’m most proud of …
Right now, I’m especially happy about the impact that Reality has had on its players. Seeing the creativity and community spirit that the game has unleashed reminds me of why I got into this kind of work in the first place.
Advice to designers:
Hitchcock famously advised the aspiring screenwriter to first write their screenplay, then add the dialogue after it was finished. His point was that the dialogue should serve the story, not the other way around. I would say a similar thing about games with regard to their relationship to technology. Design your game first, and then add the technology necessary to make it happen. Whatever platform or engine (or combination of platforms and engines) you are using, you should select them to serve your game. Open yourself to the possibility that your game may not use any digital technology whatsoever, may use a technology not traditionally associated with games, or may use a mixture of multiple technologies. Put differently, don’t let technology lead your design process—that’s your job.