Practitioner Interview: James Morgan
Dorothy R. Santos (DS): What was the first game you played that influenced your thinking around game design and development?
James Morgan (JM): That would probably be Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
JM: The initial Dungeons and Dragons was a spin-off of a miniature wargame called Chainmail. It is played with a graph paper grid and players would have to move figures around to create underground dungeons to place monsters and miniatures could move to different spaces based on certain spells. I started dungeon mastering early on and having knowledge of this interactive story and be in control of it. Maybe not completely in control, but driving the direction of it. It seemed limitless. I liked the idea of being able to take my friends on a journey.
DS: Let me ask specifics. What is the difference between game design and development?
JM: The game designer is the advocate for the player and the creation of the game. This person makes sure it is “fun” and as a role on a game development team, the designer is also in charge of the playtesting. Development is much more a process. Typically, for me, it ends up being primarily an artist and a programmer who take on these roles, respectively, and I use the terms loosely. In my classes, we recently started working in digital development and prototyping. Up to this point, we’ve been doing board games and that’s fundamentally important because that’s where the system gets exposed. In terms of development, the focus is on iterative development.
DS: How do you encourage freedom of artistic expression while creating these environments inherently based within rules and parameters?
JM: I also teach in the Arts and every time I’ve come up against a constraint in the arts, it’s been liberating. It’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. In fact, I found the opposite to be a challenge. If there are no constraints, my art students don’t know how to start! We try and as a development process, we play games. This way, you can start to see how things are operating and you start to connect to vocabulary, dynamics, and so forth. The one thing I keep telling my students is to make it smaller. Choose less. Scope down. Pick the thing you want to work on and focus on that so the game can grow a little bit more organically.
DS: Based on your experience, one of your research interests is “coded culture”. Would it be possible to define what you mean by that term?
JM: When I refer to coded culture, I am talking about the culture of the people who coded it, the assumptions that they’ve made, and that gets woven into the way that they build things. Sometimes, it can be a bit more obvious. For example, when Siri has a tough time finding women’s health and other times, it’s built into the base assumptions of the body. The way avatars are created. Sometimes, the decisions are made for cost concerns. When something gets woven a work and the assumptions aren’t challenged is what interests me and how I define the term.
DS: I’m interested in your perspective of interactive documentary and media. Sometimes, they have been pegged as games. How do you think game mechanics might factor into the making of interactive documentary and media?
JM: There are plenty of things that use game mechanics and game-like processes. Gamification is something that can be applied, but it’s not going to create a game. The challenge and the distinction when you’re talking about a documentary is asking yourself if it is a game. It doesn’t matter. It’s like asking, is this art? If we’re talking about interactive media, that is a label you can apply to a game, interactive fiction, or choose-your-own adventure books. If you’re looking for a way to even the playing field, I don’t think it matters if you call them games. I think games can be very important and be about important subjects as well.
DS: Could an artwork or interactive piece employ the tenants of game design, development, and mechanics, and not be called a game?
JM: I would employ iterative design techniques because it would be about the reception of the audience and whether or not you can win or lose a game (which is the definition I’ll use, but I think that’s a weak definition of a game, it’s not just about winning or losing). We can also ask if it is possible to win a documentary? Or do you win by finishing it? There’s also a different perspective the way you engage the media. If you’re engaging it as a game, you encounter it differently. It would be about testing the different pathways and seeing if you can get the good ending or the ending that you like, that sort of thing. That’s fundamentally different from encountering other media.
DS: Looking back, what game has been culturally impactful? This is different from the first question in that I’m asking you as an interdisciplinary scholar and educator since you share such a wide range of media to your students.
JM: Brenda Romero’s Train. It was difficult to watch and difficult to play because you don't know how to play it. Do you try to achieve the ends of the game or do you know what is going on and have a humanitarian or genuine human reaction to it? Do you play along with the game? Does that make you a bad person? The historical significance of it that involves a reveal and the players realize that they’re complicit. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it.
DS: I remember learning about this game for the first time and wondering how someone was able to make a game about the holocaust, which is an incredibly sensitive topic.
JM: One of the things we talk about in the class is ineffability. You can make a movie about the Holocaust, but making a game about the Holocaust seems to be trivializing it until you play the game and realize you role in the game and it becomes an emotional experience. I started out and was complicit and I didn’t understand and all the signs were there. When I realized what was going on, I quit. Train is over when it is over.
DS: I’m glad you talked about this game being culturally impactful. Just a couple more questions. What games are you currently excited about?
JM: I just downloaded Final Fantasy XIV for Windows. It’s 75 GB! It took a day and a half to download on my machine at home. It’s gorgeous. So, that’s on the edge of my brain right now. We’ve been playing a lot of board games in class and I am starting to like the betrayal games, like Betrayal on the House on the Hill, Battlestar Galactica , and Secret Hitler.
DS: What are you currently working on?
JM: I’m not really working on any games right now. But I am working in a game environment. I have been doing machinima in World of Warcraft. I’m working with a computer programmer who has created a machine learning algorithm that writes melodies in the style of Giacomo Puccini. I’m writing opera! We recently finished the first aria and its set in World of Warcraft. I liked bringing in real-world concerns into this other space and this skirts this idea of coded culture and stepping outside of it because you can’t get married or have kids in World of Warcraft. But my heroine has done exactly that and the first aria is about her returning to her family to tuck in her kids, get her epic armor on, and go raiding with the Guild.
James Morgan is an instructor for Digital Media Art at San José State University and is the Director of Ars Virtua. His work involves social interaction, coded culture and democratic structures in game-spaces and simulations. James curates art and games in physical and simulated spaces.
