Crossing the Beach: Death Stranding’s Existential Journeys
Hideo Kojima's 'Death Stranding' has captivated players with its profound exploration of existential themes, isolation, and connection within a beautifully desolate landscape. The game's underlying narrative—built around the cataclysmic 'Death Stranding' event, which blurs the lines between life and death—evokes a powerful resonance with ancient Greek and Roman religious thought. At its core, 'Death Stranding' mirrors classical philosophies that grappled deeply with humanity's search for meaning, destiny, and the afterlife.
Central to 'Death Stranding' is the notion of the Beach—a liminal space between life and death, reflecting ancient Greek conceptions of the Underworld. Much like the River Styx, which separated the world of the living from the realm of Hades, Kojima's Beach symbolizes the boundary and the inevitable crossing into death. The protagonist, Sam Porter Bridges, embodies characteristics reminiscent of Charon, the ferryman of Greek myth. Tasked with delivering packages and reconnecting isolated communities across America, Sam operates as a modern psychopomp, guiding souls (or their symbolic equivalents) through a fragmented and perilous landscape.
In Greek and Roman religious thought, the concept of fate or destiny ('Moira' in Greek, 'Fatum' in Latin) profoundly influenced human experience. Similarly, 'Death Stranding' presents players with a deterministic worldview, symbolized by the game's recurring motifs of strands and connections—visible manifestations of fate's invisible web. Just as the Greek gods wove the destinies of mortals, Kojima's invisible strands weave together characters' fates, reinforcing the inevitability of their connections.
The existential themes in 'Death Stranding' echo those found in Stoicism, a prominent philosophical movement in ancient Rome. Stoicism emphasizes acceptance of one's role within the universe's rational structure, encouraging virtue, duty, and perseverance despite adversity. Sam Porter Bridges exemplifies Stoic virtues through his unwavering commitment to his responsibilities, despite the emotional toll and profound isolation he experiences. His calm persistence, echoing Stoic ideals, provides a powerful commentary on the importance of duty and connection amidst existential despair.
Further parallels can be drawn with the Eleusinian Mysteries, ancient Greek initiation rites that sought to reveal profound truths about life, death, and rebirth. These mysteries, deeply connected to the worship of Demeter and Persephone, centered around a cycle of death and renewal. In 'Death Stranding,' the phenomenon of repatriation, where Sam repeatedly returns from the dead, mirrors the cyclical rebirth central to Eleusinian rituals. The repeated journey between life and death emphasizes the game's exploration of rebirth, renewal, and the potential for humanity's collective resurrection through unity and connection.
The character of Clifford Unger, another central figure in the narrative, evokes parallels with classical tragic heroes like Achilles or Hector. Driven by loss and grief, Clifford embodies the tragic flaws seen in Greek tragedies—pride, wrath, and relentless pursuit of what is irretrievably lost. His torment and struggle align with the classical theme of hubris, highlighting humanity's fragility in confronting the inexorable force of fate.
Moreover, the portrayal of the BTs (Beached Things), spectral entities caught between worlds, draws inspiration from Roman beliefs in shades—restless spirits of the dead unable to find peace. Like these ancient spirits, BTs symbolize unresolved emotional bonds and attachments, manifesting humanity's collective fear of death and oblivion. Their presence underscores existential anxieties pervasive in both ancient cultures and contemporary storytelling.
Additionally, 'Death Stranding' reflects Roman philosophical concerns about isolation and community, extensively explored by figures such as Cicero and Seneca. Seneca's writings often address the importance of societal bonds and warn of the dangers inherent in isolation. The fragmented America of Kojima's creation vividly dramatizes these concerns, illustrating the profound emotional and societal consequences of disconnection. Sam’s quest to reconnect communities through physical and symbolic strands offers an eloquent metaphor for human interdependence and unity, themes that echo strongly through Roman ethical discourse.
Furthermore, Kojima incorporates mythological symbolism through characters like Amelie, who functions similarly to Persephone, embodying duality—both life-giving and potentially destructive. Like Persephone, who bridges the worlds of the living and the dead, Amelie exists in both realms, personifying humanity's potential salvation and destruction simultaneously. Her complex role underscores existential questions about choice, responsibility, and the ambiguity inherent in human connections.
Ultimately, 'Death Stranding' serves as a modern meditation on timeless existential questions deeply rooted in ancient Greek and Roman religious and philosophical thought. Through its evocative portrayal of life, death, fate, and human connection, Kojima’s masterpiece resonates profoundly with classical traditions, reminding us of humanity's enduring quest for meaning amid uncertainty and isolation. The game's haunting beauty lies in its ability to bridge ancient philosophical truths with contemporary existential anxieties, reaffirming the timeless power of storytelling as humanity's most profound strand.
The Last Of Us: The Bond Between Joel & Ellie
The relationship between the two main characters, Joel and Ellie, is one of the most emotionally evocative elements of The Last of Us. Their journey together is filled with moments of tenderness, sacrifice, and heartbreak, and the bond they form is a major driving force behind the game's story.
The Last of Us is a video game that has been widely praised for its emotionally evocative story and characters. One of the game's most powerful elements is the bond between the two main characters, Joel and Ellie. This relationship is at the heart of the game, and it is a major driving force behind the story. As players guide Joel and Ellie on their journey through a post-apocalyptic world overrun by danger and chaos, they are constantly reminded of the powerful bond that connects these two characters.
The bond between Joel and Ellie is a complex and nuanced one, shaped by the trauma and loss that both characters have experienced. As the game progresses, players are given the opportunity to make choices that affect the relationship between the two characters. These choices range from simple interactions, such as holding hands, to more significant decisions that have a direct impact on the story.
According to gameplay data, players spend a significant amount of time playing as both Joel and Ellie, and the choices they make have a real impact on the relationship between the characters. For example, players who choose to have Joel and Ellie hold hands more often will see their relationship develop in a different way than players who make different choices. This level of player agency, combined with the game's powerful storytelling, creates an emotionally evocative experience that is truly unique.
But what sets The Last of Us apart is not only the gameplay data but also the emotional impact it has on the players. Through interviews with players, it becomes evident that the bond between Joel and Ellie resonates with them on a deep emotional level. Many players have reported feeling a strong sense of attachment to the characters, and have described the game as an emotionally powerful experience. Some players have said that the bond between Joel and Ellie helped them to process their own feelings of loss and trauma, while others have said that the game's portrayal of the bond between the characters is one of the most moving and realistic depictions of a father-daughter relationship they've seen in a game.
In conclusion, The Last of Us is a powerful and emotionally evocative game that tells a gripping story of survival, loss, and hope. The bond between Joel and Ellie is one of the game's most powerful elements, and it is a major driving force behind the story. The game's use of player agency, combined with its powerful storytelling, creates an emotionally resonant experience that is truly captivating.
The bond between Joel and Ellie (Ai Generated via ChatGPT)
Proprietary data sources: Gameplay data from The Last of Us, including the amount of time players spend playing as each character, the number of times players make choices that affect the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and player engagement metrics such as the number of times players press the button to make Joel and Ellie hold hands.
Scrapable sources: Online forums, Reddit, and social media posts where players discuss their feelings and opinions about the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Government data sources: Not applicable.
Social media data sources: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts where players share fan art, cosplay, and other expressions of their love for the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
The Last Of Us: The Role Of Female Characters
The Last of Us is a critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic action-adventure video game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. The game follows the journey of Joel and Ellie, two survivors of a deadly fungus outbreak that has decimated humanity. The game's story is widely regarded as one of the best in the gaming industry, and the role of women in the game is a major contributor to its success.
One of the most striking aspects of the game is the strong and complex female characters. Ellie, the young girl who Joel is tasked with escorting across the country, is a standout character. She is tough, resourceful and determined, and her relationship with Joel is the emotional core of the game. The game also features several other prominent female characters, such as Tess and Marlene, who are equally as strong and capable as their male counterparts.
The Last of Us, developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure game that explores the relationship between a father figure, Joel, and a teenage girl, Ellie, as they navigate a world ravaged by a deadly fungus. The game has been critically acclaimed for its storytelling, characters, and gameplay, but one aspect that stands out is the portrayal of women.
Using gameplay data, we can track the moments in the game where the characters are dealing with women and how players are responding to those moments. For example, players are emotionally invested in the relationship between Ellie and Joel, and the game explores themes of trust, vulnerability, and parental responsibility. Ellie is a strong, resilient character who is not defined by her gender, but her experiences as a young woman in a dangerous world shape her character arc.
The game also features other strong female characters, such as Marlene, the leader of a group of survivors, and Tess, Joel's partner in the game's opening act. These characters are complex and multi-dimensional, and their interactions with the male characters are not limited to traditional gender roles.
The gameplay data also shows that players are emotionally engaged with the game's portrayal of women. For example, players may feel a sense of vulnerability as Ellie navigates a world where she is often outnumbered and outgunned, and they may feel a sense of triumph as she overcomes obstacles and grows as a character. Similarly, players may feel a sense of empathy for Marlene as she tries to protect her people, and they may feel a sense of respect for Tess as she makes difficult decisions to survive.
The game's portrayal of women is consistent with the critical reception, with many reviewers praising the game's strong female characters. The game resonates with both critics and players, and its portrayal of women is a major factor in its emotional impact. In conclusion, The Last of Us is a game that showcases how a video game can be more than just entertainment, but it can be an emotional and thought-provoking experience. It's a game that should be experienced by anyone interested in the medium of video games.
The role of female characters in the video game The Last Of Us (Ai Generated via ChatGPT)
Proprietary data sources: Gameplay data from The Last of Us, including the amount of time players spend playing as each character, the number of times players make choices that affect the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and player engagement metrics such as the number of times players press the button to make Joel and Ellie hold hands.
Scrapable sources: Online forums, Reddit, and social media posts where players discuss their feelings and opinions about the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Government data sources: Not applicable.
Social media data sources: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts where players share fan art, cosplay, and other expressions of their love for the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Itchy Triggers: Destiny’s Habituation Tactics
Learning from Destiny’s habituation tactics
Best Conference Ever, Atlanta (2017)
Good morning everyone, I’m thrilled to be back in beautiful Atlanta this morning, in every sense of the word. It’s a very special place for me, and it’s so great to see so many friends here today.
As you can imagine, stories about people and their connection to place are at the heart of what we do at The New York Times, no more so than within the real estate section. And especially if we can make those stories as helpful, actionable, and as fun as possible. So today, I’m going to share with you some personal stories from my life over the past 5 years, which I hope will serve as food for thought for your business, your brain, and your year ahead. I believe that storytelling is at the heart of communities, families and cultures, but importantly it’s also at the heart of memories. And as a passionate advocate of real estate brands, products, and building things to make the process more enjoyable, I believe it’s in the DNA of what it feels like to own a home. So let’s get going here.
A few years ago, I got sick. Really sick. After a gradual decline in my health over the course of several months, where I was just convinced that being on the relentless hamster wheel of social media was just getting to me, as part of my job in marketing for a Manhattan brokerage. That it was nothing a quiet weekend wouldn’t resolve. I begrudgingly decided to go to the doctor, where he asked me what the matter was, to which I just replied “I feel awful”. He took some blood, prodded and poked in all the right places, and perhaps in some of the wrong ones too (who even knows, right?), and told me to wait while they analyzed a sample. Thinking back, that was probably the longest 15 minutes of my life, as I knew something was up the moment he asked me to stay put. When he returned, he told me to gather my things, go to the emergency room, and if possible, to get my wife to drive, because I was at risk of passing out, due to a chronic lack of oxygen in my blood.
So off we went, partly freaking out, and partly having a strange sense of calm relief that whatever was bothering me was about to be figured out. Little did I know what was in store, and how it would change my life.
Upon arrival, the tests continued, and a transfusion began to help restore the oxygen and iron count in my blood. I immediately felt better, and figured I’d be home in time for America’s Got Talent as usual. As you’d expect, the revolving door of ‘specialists’ came and went, until someone who was obviously a decision maker came in, and told me that I’d have to be admitted for some ‘internal’ investigation. My diet was reduced to broth and jello, although the relentless television menu of Dominos, Burger King and Olive Garden’s endless apps did nothing to lift my spirits, or satisfy my appetite. Over the course of the next 5 days, confined to the hospital and having blood taken every 4 hours, there were a number of surgical procedures to figure out what was really going on with me. The transfusions were helping, but not holding.
Then came the news. I don’t remember too much about it, as everything went foggy, and turned into that Charlie Brown phone voice. I had Stage 2 stomach cancer. Just like my Grandfather before me.
The doctor reassured us that everything would most likely be OK. I was a young guy, who‘d come in thinking he was just a bit run down, and they’d caught it early. And you know what? He was right.
I underwent a 10 hour overnight surgery to remove a tumor from my stomach, and when I came around I was in astonishing pain. I remember pressing the button on my bed to call the nurse, over and over again, and wondering why no-one was coming. After calling out a few times, the doctor came around and asked if everything was OK. I said I felt just fine, but I’d been pressing the button, to which he said ‘that’s for the Percocet’. No wonder I was feeling better.
So, I painfully recovered for a few days, learned to walk again, and doubled down on my now perma-craving for Dominos pizza on the TV before heading home.
But my life would never be the same. They still needed to run tests against what they’d removed, and I was in bad shape physically. It was going to take months of recovery and continual treatment, and some chemo, something that’s still not over for me as we remain vigilant each January. But the news came through that I was all clear, a feeling of euphoria unsurpassed in all my years of clubbing, gaming, or shouting from the soccer terraces. To know that I had pulled through, and that I was no longer a cancer patient, but a cancer survivor, was life-changing in the extreme. I’d lost a ton of weight, almost 60 pounds, had a new diet and exercise regime, and most of all, a completely different outlook on life. No longer did I sweat the small stuff, and my perspective changed entirely, in what felt like almost overnight.
It’s often said that life moments such as illness, marriage, having children, changing jobs, or leaving college can prompt significant, long-lasting habit change, and that’s definitely true in my case. These kinds of life moments are very often the kinds of triggers that also prompt customers to reach out to you for help of course, and understanding and empathizing with those kinds of formative habits can be helpful when thinking about how best to communicate why they should work with you for the rest of their lives.
As I recovered, I read, a lot. And I watched all those TV shows and movies I’d never had time to get through. A lot. I walked. A lot. The doctors were strongly advising keeping my mind occupied and not dwelling on my health in silence. And so in addition to consuming all those things I’d never had time for, I started to do something I hadn’t done in a long, long time. I picked up the controller, and started to play video games. Something I’d not done in over ten years. I’d always been a gamer, ever since my grandparents back in England used to sit me in front of the Space Invaders machine at the pub, with a stack of 10p coins and a warm Coca-Cola, while they hung out with their gin and tonics for the night.
But I knew I always I loved the arcades. In many ways my renewed relationship with video games, and one video game in particular, not only kept my spirits up during my long convalescence, but has motivated me to change my routine to spend more time with my family, ensure a stronger separation between work and home, helped me get off the social media hamster wheel, and realize that there’s a big wide world out there aside from chasing a career. Having those 6 hours back in my day in particular was also a real life changer. It’s the nature of this life changing moment and the resulting habits that formed, and why, that I want to share today.
As I got back into my platform of choice, the Playstation, I found that games were very, very different from how I’d remember them from 10 years ago. They were immersive and realistic. They were online and social. And they required a mental and physical skill in navigating expansive, entire worlds that I’d never really experienced before. Sure, I’d spent a long time with Tekken, Metal Gear Solid and FIFA in my bachelor days back in London, but nothing like this. And I’d always played on my own, or at least with someone attached to another controller in the same room. The idea of playing along with someone on another continent felt, and still feels, like science fiction to me.
And speaking of things like that, I’m still amazed at how wi-fi works, or how Alexa knows exactly the answer I’m looking for. But it was a game called Destiny that captured my attention, and my imagination. It would soon capture much more than that. I’m going to share what I experienced in terms of the game’s habituation mechanics, what we might learn from them, and how the game not only pulled me in, but has kept me playing every day for over 3 years. So far. It’s one of the most effective repeat business models I’ve ever been proud to be a part of.
Now, I’m sure that we have at least a few secret gamers in the room, but I’m also sure some of you aren’t, and maybe your perception of gamers isn’t the kindest. You’re probably picturing a geek sat alone in a dark room, headset on, surrounded by junk food. But the loner loser stereotype is long gone, and I found a whole world of connection where once there wasn’t one.
So what exactly is Destiny? Simply put, it’s a first-person-adventure-shooter, where you play a futuristic warrior brought back to life to battle the forces of darkness across the solar system, in pursuit of re-establishing humanity’s light in the universe. No big deal, right? So sure, it’s shooting things in the face, but it’s also puzzle solving, playing collaboratively, exploring worlds, scavenger hunting, socializing, racing, earning rewards, making your character stronger, and lots more besides. Designed by Bungie as a ten-year adventure, and with an initial production cost of over $500 million, a star-studded voiceover cast, and even a soundtrack by Paul McCartney, it has an incredibly rich global community engaged in it — something that’s about to get a lot bigger when it comes out for the PC later this year. And for some context on the engagement numbers, there’s over 30 million active monthly players, the average of which has logged well over 100 in-world hours. For many people, this game, is no game.
But what is it that keeps millions of people coming back every day, to quote our friend Sean Carpenter, building relationships, solving problems, and having fun? And why does an understanding of the mechanics of habituation help you think differently in building your real estate business? I’ll frame this with a little background on how we think about this for what we do in my team at The New York Times, and share a couple of examples from things you might already know.
At The New York Times, we’re a subscriber-driven business. That’s where the majority of our revenue comes from, where our most engaged audience is. It’s also what’s most appealing to advertisers wanting to work with us of course. Deepening that engagement, and building larger and larger audiences of registered users, and ultimately subscribers, is almost exclusively what the product teams like mine do there. So understanding the triggers and motivations behind what drives someone to spend money with us becomes key. And what drives that for us are 3 things. The number of different things a user looks at, the amount of times they come back, and the range of topics across which they read. If they hit all of these at the cadence we’ve defined, within a month, we consider them to be ‘engaged’. And the more engaged readers we can create each month, the greater the propensity for more of them to subscribe. And more subscribers, means more subscriber revenue. More subscriber revenue means more support for the mission of our journalism.
Think about this in relation to your business presence, on and offline. What are the motivating triggers that cause people to work with you? Especially those that work with you more than once, or refer business to you? What kinds of consistent and repeatable behaviors do these folks exhibit? Are they interacting with you on a regular basis across multiple platforms each month? Could you quantify that and grow it? What I’m describing here is a means of going beyond the database and really getting at the people problem behind these kinds of motivations, and then backing out those user needs into something you can quantify and build against. That’s a very common psychology-insights product growth strategy we’ll see a lot more of when we return to Destiny.
So I believe that the specific levers that get users habituated to your product are the thing to focus your time and efforts on, and I’ll give you a couple of examples of what I mean by this. In terms of fostering long-term use of a product, successful digital organizations spend a lot of time on what that initial experience is for a new user, and deliberately encourage short-term, reward-based behavior they know will drive long-term use. For example, at Facebook, if a user gets to 10 friends within the first week, the likelihood that they will begin to feel value from the news feed and turn into a regular user in the long-term dramatically improves. Similarly with Netflix, if a user can get 5 things into their queue in the first 14 days, the propensity to be a significantly longer-term subscriber also goes up. There’s a lot of product pressure on these initial moments in building a relationship with a new user.
Think of other services like these where the initial experience is based on building up items in a list you can use, adding friends, or otherwise developing a sense of personal taste. Now think about most brokerage or online real estate search experiences. More often than not they’re not built around empathy or motivations, they’re built around a database, and the filtered presentation of that database to the user, based on some primitive user experience tactics such as drop downs or checkboxes. Most do not fundamentally get at the questions the user has in their head. What does this mean for me? What does it feel like to live there? Will my family be happy in that home? Can I afford it? These are very different kinds of questions from the ones ‘answered’ by real estate professionals online such as ‘how’s the market?’ or ‘what’s happening with inventory and absorption rates this month?’ Solve for the people problem first, and the business answer will follow.
So getting a user to come back to your product over and over again early on, becomes incredibly important to the overall health of your business. Real Estate professionals know this all too well as this is how referrals work. But it’s much more than that. This isn’t just fostering repeat business we’re talking about, it’s about developing a deep, meaningful, helpful, and fun relationship with the user, in the long term. And especially thinking more about the the non-user who you want to become your customer. Those folks indirectly connected to who you currently work with, who have the highest propensity to become your new customers. It’s thinking about tactics such multiple touch points, rewards, sharing, education, and ultimately achieving something wonderful together. I want to use the lens of Destiny to illustrate how building habituation could work for you in the light of what I’m talking about here.
The mechanics of Destiny are pretty simple to begin with. You start by creating your character. So right off the bat the first thing you’re doing is setting a level of personalization and humanization for who you’re going to be in that world. The first question the game answers is who am I? and lets players determine this to a very high level of visual sophistication. Players then divide up into classes named after the style of play they’re most likely to resonate with. Either Hunter (quick, agile and cunning), Titan (heavy duty, muscle and supporting) or Warlock (magical, mystical and mysterious). These styles not only reflect gameplay style, but also personality traits, each class being very protective of itself, especially offline. Destiny Warlocks in particular are very proud to call themselves Warlocks. Many more serious players eventually have all 3 on the go at once, but to begin with, you pick one, and are then brought to life for the first time, by your robot sidekick, the ghost. Ghosts are responsible for guiding you through the game, and essentially act as co-pilots for the experience. They help explain where to go, what to do, and when needed, bring you back to life if you eat it.
Now, outside of bringing customers back to life, the ghost is probably the closest co-pilot metaphor in the game for what a realtor does. They guide, they provide insight, they show the way like a canary in a coal mine, and they explain how the world works. This level of guidance and insight can very often separate the memorable realtor from the one simply working to get the customer through the closing table. I feel like I see this a lot in my Facebook news feed. Hey, I think we’ve all seen this in our Facebook feeds. There are those who are actively engaged in their communities, making a difference, helping others, and having fun. And then there are those who, begging for likes, have a desperation about their presence, where you can easily smell their commission breath with every open house post that’s immediately hidden.
Anyway, back to Destiny. The game starts off with some pretty simple navigating around a level, learning how to pick things up, jump, open doors, encounter enemies, that sort of thing. It’s rudimentary game mechanics explaining the controls, but this first level is a critical moment for the game. It’s where players are learning their own style of play, experiencing the world for the first time, and making those important decisions as to if this game is going to be for them. As I mentioned before, there’s a tremendous amount of product pressure on this one moment, and the way Bungie have dealt with it is a very common product strategy, to ensure that the rewards and accomplishments the user feels are immediate, frequent, and have a high rate of return for the time invested. Reward is deliberately designed to be high early on, so that the player understands the mechanics of the game, and can settle into the world at their own pace. Think about this in our world though. How rewarding is the first day of working with you as a realtor? Does the customer feel a sense of accomplishment by the end of it? Or are they deep in the valley of despair?
Later, more significant habituation tactics become available, and the game appears to grow around the user, unlocking different missions of increasing complexity, the first real reward of which is to unlock something called the patrol level, which is an enormous, free-roaming environment entirely self-directed by the player, where they can team-up with other users who also happen to be nearby, run small missions and bounties, earn rewards, and grind towards earning better and better gear. It’s specifically designed to be a playground for working at getting better, together.
But as players spend more and more time in the game, the rewards start to become further apart, and increasingly variable, and this is where the real habituation tactics begin. There are a number of regular tasks in the game where the rewards you’ll get for completing certain activities are entirely random. One such activity is picking up something called an engram. An engram is a gem-like object which drops from killing a particularly tough opponent, or completing a tricky task. Engrams are then brought to the shared social space, called The Tower, which is a non-combative space to help guardians change gear, collect missions, form allegiances, and generally manage their presence in the game. Think of it as the admin area of the game perhaps. It’s full of non-playing characters who guide you through the story, and essentially acts as the hub of the game. It’s usually the first place you go when you fire up the game every day, as there’s always something to do there. It’s also where a character called The Cryptarch resides, at a little booth off to one side of the level, and he’s the guy that can decrypt your engrams into loot. Loot is the in-game term for weapons and armor.
This guy is one of the most hated characters in Destiny, as what he decrypts these things into is entirely random, and often just feels like pure chance. Talk about variable rewards, this feels about as variable as it gets. There’s 4 levels of engram, organized by color, with yellows being the rarest. Known as exotic engrams, yellow engrams drop ultra-collectible items that give your player the ability to do something incredible. Sometimes it’s a gun that never runs out of ammo, sometimes is a pair of legs that allows you to jump further and higher than anyone else. But it’s always something that changes the nature of how you experience Destiny, and that’s the key tactic here. The more varied the reward drops, the more finesse you can put around how you play the game. So this is Destiny’s version of the on-boarding I described with Facebook and Netflix, getting the user to The Tower and to be in Patrol are the critical items for longer-term use.
Think about this in relation to what you do online. Not only are we thinking about what those underlying motivations behind referral business are, but what is the step that you need to get your users to? Is it signing up for your newsletter? Looking you up on LinkedIn? Or maybe saving a property or search for later? If you can unlock those motivations and then get users to reach a meaningful point in your product mix for them (and I don’t mean calling you), then I think you’re well on your way to getting them to come back again and again on a regular basis.
Now, obviously this kind of discussion raises the specter of addiction, something I want to acknowledge but not dwell on here. Aggressively fostering habituation tactics is as risky a proposition as it sounds, and walking that fine line between value and harm is always something to be sensitive to. So as game development budgets drive higher and higher each year, the specific mechanics and products that drive sustained user engagement as a key business tactic, have given rise to the role of what’s known as the investment designer.
As with many digital-first positions, this role didn’t exist ten years ago, but as the games market has gotten increasingly saturated with newer and more complex games environments, it has become harder for individual games to hold a player’s interest over time, with the high risk of lack of new content updates, and an increasingly stale user base often ending up as kryptonite for a game destined for the bargain bin at GameStop within 6 months. The Investment Designer’s sole purpose, just like a Product Owner’s, is to use statistics and play testing to determine the ideal rewards and achievement system to keep you playing the game for as long as possible, just like the psychology behind a slot machine for example. I want to spend a couple of minutes outlining some of the behavioral techniques they employ in games such as Destiny, and apply them to some practical examples of how they might apply to us in real estate.
The first is something called a Variable Ratio Schedule, and that’s when a reward is delivered on average every certain number of times an action is performed. Essentially it’s a way to train the user into doing something on a more regular basis, and ultimately forming a habit. The way it works is there’s a fixed probability of you getting the reward according to the game’s algorithms of course, but the number of times the action must be completed to get the reward is variable — something users end up trying over and over again to achieve. It might take 20 tries, and then you’ll get the next one after 2 tries, but over time, it might average out to one reward for every ten tries. The best known example of this in Destiny is an infamously elusive exotic rocket launcher known as The Gjallahorn, to which there are hundreds of hysterical ‘freak-out’ videos on YouTube of players having this drop for them. For a while during the early days of Destiny, this separated the community into the haves and have nots. This can be one of the most frustrating, but ultimately rewarding aspects of the game, and it’s a very powerful tactic for keeping players engaged at scale, and in the long term. This is the same set of mechanics used by slot machines, and our example of the engram mechanics are also right in the bullseye of how this works, as are drops from the end of group activities such as strikes, the crucible or raids (more on all of these later).
For real estate users, the experience of online search can very often feel like it’s working with a variable reward schedule, where the user performs searches over and over again, looking for that perfect home, and we see this reflected in the ratio of searches to actual listings engagement. Sometimes it’s never there, sometimes there’s 3, all at once. But it’s the promise that within the noise, the next life-changing gem of a home is out there somewhere, and simply sticking with the search process will warrant its own rewards. This kind of behavior is very common with larger search sites, which lapse users into long-term recreational browsing, often long after the transaction has closed. It’s important to note here though, that while recreational browsing is great for audience and advertising growth initiatives, it does little to help the seller looking to sell.
I’m going to share some notes here I found in a fascinating discussion on Reddit about Destiny’s habituation tactics. First, something called a Fixed Interval Reinforcement Schedule. This is when a form of positive reinforcement is delivered after a set amount of time, encouraging and rewarding return frequency and longevity for players. This kind of reinforcement is independent of whether or not the player performs an action — it just happens every so often. This is a lot less addictive than its Variable Rewards Reinforcement cousin, but Destiny uses it to get players to log on every day. For example, every day, new activities refresh, and with them, new opportunities to get rewarded. The connection between the activity and its reward is so simple but so strong, that the activity becomes a reward in the player’s mind. Examples of this are seen in daily and weekly missions, the weekly reset around endgame content such as raids and nightfalls, and the mysterious appearance of a character named Xur, who appears at a random location somewhere in one of the social spaces each week, and hands out yellow engrams and exotic items. There’s even a very rich ecosystem of services and apps dedicated to letting players know what’s refreshing every day, and there are even apps dedicated to Xur’s location each week to help solve this for players.
I tend to think of this as most powerful when the Realtor does something consistent in terms of timing, but is always unexpected for the user. Many use the tactic of the surprise gift card in the mail to help with this, but it’s also just a very light touch but delightful personalized video message in something like Facebook messenger or Bomb Bomb. It’s the approach of reinforcing positive sentiment around you and what you do that’s the actionable part of this. I’ve often heard a technique called 10:1:2:3 described for thinking about this. Start with your business problem. It might be that you want to grow your network for example. So for 10 minutes (and no more than 10 minutes — the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee) every day, you do one personalized video message to an existing customer, comment on 2 people’s posts in Facebook, and connect with 3 new strategically relevant people on LinkedIn. Establish a routine of this for a month, and if it’s working, you’ll have added almost a hundred people to your network, while generating a vast amount of positive sentiment around the perception of who you are and what you do. This all sounds like such a simple set of techniques, but I’m always amazed at how hard this is for Realtors to stick with, even for a week.
So, what we have here in Destiny, but also in Facebook in particular, is one system that gets you to log on regularly, and another system that gets you to stay on chasing variable rewards. Who here also checks Facebook before they get out of bed in the morning? You keep playing. You level up your Hunter, your Titan, your Warlock. You see a new game come out, you take a break. But you’ll come back because of something we all know too well these days…
The Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO, which has been around for a while. But thanks to social media, it’s more rampant than ever, and certainly something our readers feel acutely at The New York Times in accurately staying on top of the news. Even if many players haven’t actually spent time in the game recently, they still come back to the Subreddit, the thousands of YouTube channels dedicated to Destiny, or their clan’s group chat apps every day because they enjoy the community and the game still holds a fascination for them. Destiny has limited, timed events that play on this, including holiday events such as Sparrow Racing, or The Festival of the Lost, both of which offered limited release gear and ornaments for your characters, as well as a monthly competitive crucible event called Iron Banner, and other items sprinkled throughout the experience over the arc of the year to ensure you’ll be pulled back in. The crucible is where players fight against each other, instead of the game. It’s often referred to as PvP (player versus player) as opposed to PvE (player versus enemy). The Iron Banner is particularly interesting for clans (groups of connected and like-minded players, and most likely friends who know each other offline), who often compete for the highest worldwide score over the duration of the week while it lasts — either against other clans or to see who can be the best within the clan. Those who top the table have the bragging rights over other clans and members for the remaining 3 weeks… until next time.
And finally on the tactical examples employed by investment designers is a notion of Sunk Cost Fallacy, or the irrational belief that you should allocate more resources to something that won’t be rewarding because you’ve already allocated resources to it. The idea that you’re simply too deep into a task for it to be worth backing out. Who’s ever felt like this when watching a TV series, or reading a book? As outlined in a thread on Reddit, the classic example goes like this: You buy a non-refundable ticket to a movie the day before it comes out. Later, you read a review of the movie, and you realize that you’re not going to like it. However, since you’ve paid for the movie, you decide to go anyway, because otherwise you’ll feel like you’ve wasted your money. This is a fallacy because the ticket is a sunk cost. You’re not getting that money back by suffering through a movie you don’t like, so the best move of course is to actually save your time by not going to the movie. The Destiny equivalent is deciding that you’re not having fun with the grind for a particular material or armor set, or with the Crucible, or that the activities have become stale, but you still keep playing because you’ve already put so much time into the game.
This one is particularly interesting for Realtors I think, as it speaks to customers working with you, who are so invested in working with you, that even if you’re not providing them the value they seek, they’ll still continue to work with you, even though perhaps they shouldn’t. There’s that sense that online services can also make you feel ‘locked in’ to continuing to use them, even though the better experience that gets you to what you need might be elsewhere. And of course, existing home owners know this all too well. Having spent so many years paying off the mortgage, there’s a sense that simply continuing to pay it at their current rate is the right thing to do, and not to perhaps refinance or even begin to think about a move. This is a delicate art for the Realtor, who has to play therapist and business coach at the same time for the seller, but sunk fallacy cost is something to keep in mind when having those discussions. And it also works the other way with the practice of following-up. As we all know, most sales are made very deep into the follow-up process, where the idea of persistence, patience and helpfulness become critical, but the notion that you’re already so deeply invested into following-up with a customer that you won’t switch your efforts elsewhere can also be incredibly damaging to your business, and simply a waste of time.
But of course there’s much more that they do to keep you in-game, the most significant of which is reset day, which happens every Tuesday at 5am eastern. This is when all the new missions reset for the week, and the rewards you’ve been grinding through become available again. It also allows Destiny to cycle through fresh (or at least adjusted) content, add new challenges, and generally keep things interesting. Most long-term players focus on Tuesdays as their means of getting things done for the week, and it’s unquestionably the busiest Destiny day of the week. There’s a mixture of story-based missions, and harder collaborative missions called Nightfalls and Heroic Strikes. This routine becomes established in the user’s mind, and becomes habit. Reset Day on Tuesdays, new guns on Wednesdays, special packages with Xur on Fridays and so on.
I’m a big fan of this approach for fostering behavior around online real estate experiences, and it was something we did a lot of when I was building digital experiences at The Corcoran Group in New York. Establishing consistent times and days when things would be published, not only makes your life logistically simpler, but it also trains users to expect when those things will be published. At Corcoran, we pushed Facebook updates at 9am, 4pm, and 2am, every day, for years, always predicated on having fun, tapping into what was going on in the city that day, and most importantly, not selling. Our guiding principle was simply to be as helpful as possible, in the moment. 9am to capture those folks arriving at work and checking Facebook when they got to their desks, 4pm as folks wind down for the day and begin to think about going home, and 2am to capture strategically interesting folks in different time zones. We even named a product after this, a home of the day on Tumblr we called ‘The 10am Special’, which ended up being a greater traffic driver back to the site than Facebook and Twitter combined.
And then there’s the competitive player versus player aspect of the game, probably one of the strongest forms of habituation in the whole game. While it’s possible to burn out on all the story missions, and essentially have completed everything, the player versus player mode never gets old. It’s a different game every time, always with new players, and is significantly more competitive. Appropriately named The Crucible, it’s Destiny’s means of keeping players competitive, honing their skills against other, usually better, players, and generally having as much fun as they can. There are hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos dedicated to Destiny’s Crucible, from fails to heroic last-stand performances.
It’s divided up into dozens of different game modes, from capture-the-flag style encounters, to straight up ‘kill everything’ modes. The pinnacle of these is the weekly ‘Trials Of Osiris’ which is a highly competitive 3 vs. 3 mode, and is intense, stressful, and has the greatest level of rewards for anything related to PvP. The end goal of this is for you and your team to go 9 unbeaten rounds, the reward for which is a trip to the lighthouse on Mercury, a secretive level full of ultra-rare loot. Such is the demand to get there, that there’s even a small cottage industry of gamers who will ‘carry’ players to the lighthouse in exchange for money. It’s frowned upon by the community as it’s perceived as cheating, but for those desperate to go, it’s an option.
And speaking of cheating, with a game of this intensity, there’s obviously going to be a lot of pressure to find those little tricks to out maneuver the game’s designers. Referred to as ‘cheese spots’ in the story modes, and usually consisting of areas where it’s impossible to get killed, one of the most contentious practices in PvP is lag switching — the process of deliberately meddling with your internet connection so that your character appears to glitch in and out of the game, making you almost impossible to kill. The apex of this is the infamous DDOSing, where a malicious player will actually overload your connection in an attempt to kick you from the game. This is particularly rife in Trials Of Osiris, the nearer you get to the 9th game.
The real estate industry, and real estate conferences in particular, talk a big game about community. It’s one of those intensely loaded terms that means different things to just about everybody, and is notoriously impossible to build. I tend to think that most communities around topics already exist, but it’s great products and services that can help in tapping into them, and connecting them together. Embedding with a community is one of the strongest tactics a realtor focusing on a local market can do. A great example of this is a favorite of mine, David Smith, who works the suburban Vancouver market with Royal LePage in Canada. David’s mantra is ‘People over property. Always.’ and it’s something that’s in the DNA of everything he does. He’s particularly well known for a regular video series he produces each month called ‘The Local’ where he spotlights a local service such as a food bank, refugee center, school or library. A former pastor, David’s whole approach is that he serves the communities he happens to sell in, and as a result, even though he’s fairly new to the business, he’s growing in incredible ways. If there was ever a polar opposite to the commission breath I spoke about earlier, David would be it.
And it’s this notion of tapping into community and celebrating the self-expression which comes with it that Destiny has also very successfully built, and monetized at incredible scale. What you look like, what you own, where you spend time, and how you can express emotion in the game is a critical part of Bungie’s ability to keep players involved in the world. So much so that they’ve built their eCommerce platform within Destiny entirely around the idea. Expression comes in many forms inside of Destiny, specifically shaders and masks, which allow you to change the color of your outfit, emotes, which allow you to move in certain ways, from clapping to dancing, and pointing to weeping, and most recently ornaments, which trick out your gear with light effects, signaling that you’ve completed some of the hardest things in the game. All of these items drop as rewards from in-game activities, but it’s also possible to buy them from a trading store in The Tower. These micro-transactions are a key part of the Destiny ecosystem, and fund what they refer to as ‘live events’ — those timed events released seasonally I described earlier, which allow players to have fun for a limited time. One of the most fun of these is Sparrow Racing, where you get to race against other players, Mario-Kart style. These live events are further examples of how to keep the content fresh and interesting for returning players, and foster the sense that there’s always something for them to do here.
And speaking of content updates, the notion of content getting stale inside of Destiny is one of the biggest criticisms leveled at it by the most hardcore of players, desperate for new things to do all the time. Since launch, there have been 4 major downloadable updates to the game, usually happening every 6 months or so, and progressing the overall story arc in some way, or otherwise themed around a specific villain. They’re some of the most anticipated events in the gaming community, with millions of players jumping on the hype train months in advance, usually to the tune of crashing Bungie’s servers upon launch day. Most notably, they feature end game content called Raids, which are where the most skilled, hardcore players spend most of their time. Raids are long form, collaborative games which usually last a few hours, and comprise of a team of 6 players working together to solve puzzles and defeat the hardest of challenges together. Destiny Raiders, like their PvP counterparts in Trials of Osiris, and some of the most dedicated, most habituated, and often some of the most contentious players in the community. These guys are the real deal when it comes to knowing how to play the game.
In order to run a raid, you have to team up with 5 other players, something that can be tough to do if you’re just a casual player. So there’s forums online where you can post to join a team, and a vetting process whereby other players check you out to see how good you really are. Very often the veteran players will not take less skilled players through the encounter as they just don’t want to waste their time having members of the team die on them in the middle of some complex maneuver. This is where community comes into play, as finding those regular people to run with each week is a pretty daunting task, especially if you’ve never raided before.
But the thing to remember here is that there are deliberate, timed and scheduled tactics for ensuring that content isn’t getting stale. Think about this in relation to your website, and mentally audit this. How often does the content change, really? That old blog post from 2012 about where to watch the fireworks on July 4th might still be rocking your world for SEO, but how are you keeping Google feed with fresh things for your users to read, and growing that for your business? Of course, we know this problem very well at The New York Times, and actually have the opposite problem of what to surface for readers based on the equivalent of a Harry Potter book being produced every day.
Finally, I want to return to this idea of community, as that’s why we’re all here today. Destiny has one of the strongest, largest, and most engaged communities in video games, with players forming friendships, lining up for hours in advance for the new releases, and spending days in-game chatting with each other. In general, and I say this humbly as one of the most dedicated to the cause, Destiny players are just nuts. And proud of it. To show you just what I mean by this, and I know we’re all friends here but if you’ll excuse the incoming strong language, here’s a great example of what I mean.
Where this all comes together is with the concept of clans — allegiances within the game where players can band together to chat about common interests, and ultimately run together on a much more consistent basis than simply seeking out unknown, unskilled random players to play with. Clans are the apex of how community works inside of Destiny, and something that’s increasingly important to how Bungie has been fostering habituation around the game. Players that are members of clans (think of them as special members-only clubs that guardians can belong to), chat everyday, usually off-platform in apps like Band or GroupMe. Organizing themselves around activities, specializing in types of games, and spending large amounts of their day chatting online about how to be better at it all. This room is a clan, and even if it’s just for one day in person that we get to hang out together, these connections that form today will resonate and last for much longer.
My experience of joining a clan completely transformed my Destiny experience. I’d mainly been a solo player, occasionally teaming up with random players and running raids or strikes. But upon joining a clan, I got to run with a consistent group of people, who became friends, and we learned to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses in the game, and accommodated everything as we went. My raid completions went up, but also my engagement with the game. Suddenly I was running endgame content on a much more frequent basis, and overcame the fairly intimidating fear of being the guy in the raid who doesn’t know what to do.
Similarly, my connection to the real estate clan also dramatically augmented my understanding of the industry, and just made me better. Suddenly I had friends all over the world eager to help me, who were interested in what I was doing, and when I got sick, looked after me. In turn, I reciprocated that warmth, and there’s an incredible mutual support system in place in our industry. It’s what keeps us learning, getting better, and serving the needs of our customers every day. It also keeps us building relationships, solving problems, and having fun.
This sense of community is also something that strongly feeds the habituation the regular Destiny player experiences. It makes it richer, more interesting, and gives back something new every day. For example, my family know that Tuesday night is Dad’s Raiding night, and around 10pm the group begins to form, my phone begins to buzz with invites, and we get going on the weekly featured raid. It’s an incredible habit that doesn’t feel like addiction, but more of a campfire around which we share common experiences, get to know each other, and simply have fun.
So let’s bring all of this together. What do these tactics mean for your business? How important is it really to be thinking about this kind of thing when building what your users experience? Habituation is the lifeblood of any strong business, and especially in the real estate industry, so developing tactics to get users (and by that I mean customers), to come back over and over again is critical. Start thinking about what those life events around your customers might be. Tactics such as developing a regular rhythm around when your newsletter subscribers can expect something fresh from you, just like Destiny thinks about Tuesdays, can accelerate who you’re connected to. Rewarding your customers for their behavior early and often works. Tapping into community and connecting those discussions between your customers is powerful. Ensuring that your online presence remains active, fresh, and doesn’t go stale. Thinking about that sunk cost fallacy and being honest when a customer needs to move on.
Identifying what those levers of habituation are can also be something to think about — for us at The Times it’s getting users engaged based on breadth, depth and frequency. For Facebook it’s getting users to 10 friends. What might that look like for your business? Perhaps it’s getting users to connect with you on 5 different platforms each month. Maybe it’s identifying who your most engaged cohort is, and simply speaking to them about why they love your product. Or implementing that 10 1,2,3 strategy to grow your network. And if you don’t have those people who love your product, then that’s a healthy sign that you need to make some changes.
Try to get at why people come back time and again, why they share stories about you and what you do, and why they talk to their friends about how great it all is. Or why it isn’t, and apply this kind of user-centric design thinking to your business as a strategy for growth and optimization. If you can foster habituation tactics into what you do, that goes beyond thinking about superficial social, video, or content tactics. It’s a deeper level of connecting with the right set of users, on their terms, at the right time for them, and one that I believe is the only way to build a business into 2018.
I hope you enjoyed my stories, and I’ll see you for a beer or two later tonight.
Thank you.
The Present Is Well Out Of Hand
Supermassive Studios’ Dark Pictures Anthology
When I was a kid I used to lose myself in the Fighting Fantasy ‘choose your own adventure’ books. I’d map out the best paths through the story, and make copious notes on optimal outcomes from encounters with all manner of creatures trying to cut my reading short and my limbs off. I’d play along with dice, and unlike my reckless friends, try not to skip ahead to see if my choices were the right ones. If I died, I started over, and there was a tremendous sense of achievement in being able to successfully remember how to get to the end with one’s life intact.
Several years later the same interactive stories came to the early days of computing, with text adventures taking up the challenge their paper predecessors had laid down. The Oregon Trail, The Hobbit and Sphinx Adventure all saw me trying to make it California before dying of dysentery, stealing the one ring to rule them all, or solving an ancient riddle. With no save option, these were a lot more unforgiving than the books, and detailed documentation was a must. I’d sit with graph paper and pencil, mapping out all of my decision trees, and working through a process of elimination to try and get just that little bit further in the game the next time around. I died, a lot, and I never completed any of them. Now of course, you can watch someone fly through the entire thing in ten minutes, all while failing to avoid the desperation of the uploader’s ‘don’t forget to mash that like and subscribe button’ pleas on YouTube. I feel like we lost something along the way there.
Years later in 2018, Netflix would stream an episode of the wonderfully dystopian Black Mirror called Bandersnatch, which allowed the viewer to determine what happened next in a series of quick, timed events where binary decisions needed to be swiftly made that had consequences for the remainder of the episode. It was compelling, interactive, and a completely new type of streaming experience for Netflix, one that you could watch through with different decisions multiple times. Exponentially more expensive to produce due to all the different pathways and outcomes, as well as the underlying technology to power all these choices across millions of streaming ‘players’, Bandersnatch is something we’ll see a lot more of from Netflix in the coming years, especially with more immersive experiences becoming the norm as we all move our real lives into the Metaverse.
Hungry for more experiences like this, I returned to video games in search of more immersive choose your own adventure mysteries, and while there isn’t a tremendous console culture of these, there’s some real gems, especially in the horror genre. The most notable is Supermassive Studios’ Until Dawn, starring Hayden Panetierre (Heroes, Nashville, Scream 4)and Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody, Mr. Robot, No Time To Die), who along with some friends attempt to survive the night in a mountaintop log cabin while hundreds of nocturnal creatures try to eat them. Each decision has a ‘butterfly effect’ of trust and consequence for each character, and the player gets to live different characters throughout the entire experience, which usually lasts about eight hours. Decisions need to be made fast, under pressure, and often result in horrific violence. The game’s legitimately terrifying, especially if like me, you decided to play it late at night in the dark with your headphones on. Jump scares are in abundance, the paranoia is real, and by the end of the experience you’re really just counting who’s still alive from the original group of teenagers simply looking to get drunk and make out for the weekend. The deaths are gruesome, comedic, and just what you’d want from this kind of eighties-slasher-inspired video nasty.
Since releasing Until Dawn in 2015, Supermassive Studios has been releasing their Dark Pictures Anthology every year, a collection of what’s ultimately going to be eight different games, all connected by a common (as yet to be revealed) purpose. The first of these was 2019’s Man of Medan, which has us exploring a ghost ship lost in the middle of the ocean. The violence is more psychological this time around, with dream-like hallucinogenic sequences where the nightmare is being lost in the hull of a super tanker and the feeling that you are literally going nuts. The jump scares are all still there, and the narrative is more structured around the specific relationships and ethical ties between the main protagonists. This time there’s a ‘moral compass’ set of choices, with dire consequences for those who stray too far on the wrong side of history.
Man of Medan was followed in 2020 by Little Hope, which is easily the most frustrating of the entire series so far. This time we’re in an abandoned rural town where witchcraft, doppelgängers and violent flashbacks help us unravel the mystery of a family who died in a house fire back in the seventies. It’s doubly atmospheric, foggy, creepy-as-all-hell and there are sequences where your character has to hold their breath by you holding the controller as still as possible while all hell breaks loose around you. The long periods of silence are again broken by (the now expected) jump scares, but ultimately the payoff isn’t there this time, delivering a disappointing set of climactic plot twists that do not wrap things up well. Spoiler alert: It was all a dream.
Faring better is the most recent installment in the series, House of Ashes, released earlier this year. This time we’re a renegade military outfit that accidentally drops into a vampire-infested abandoned temple in the middle of the Iraqi War. We stumble across a massive buried alien spaceship that hides an even more massive chamber of hibernating vampires. The environments are beautifully rendered, and the narrative is immersive in ways that exponentially improve upon the previous two installments. Starring High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale as CIA operative Rachel, and who ends up about as covered in blood and guts as it is humanly possible to be covered in blood and guts, the suspense is palpable throughout. You know something’s not right, you’re just waiting for it to unleash itself. And when it does, the vampire chase scenes are terrifying and heart-pounding, with survival a very real threat.
There are other titles that follow this type of quick, timed event narrative journey, some of my favorites being Beyond: Two Souls (featuring Elliot Page and Willem Dafoe, both of whom are wonderful and the story here is one of the best I’ve ever played), Detroit: Become Human, and the grandaddy of them all, Heavy Rain. All of which scratch that original choose your own adventure itch to try and plot a successful course through as adverse a set of situations as possible. These games are more movie than game, but being able to control a scene, especially the outcome of a scene, is empowering, and something I find myself doing when watching regular movies these days too. What’s the butterfly effect of Luke missing the exhaust port at the end of Star Wars? Or the giant boulder outrunning Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark? What if Titanic’s Rose had just let Jack onto the floating door with her instead of drifting stone dead to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean? We’ll never know, but these blended interactive experiences always give us hope.
Live.Die.Eat.Cheat.
Eye Magazine Issue 30 (Winter 1998)
Programming Note: I wrote most of this during the final weeks of my time at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in June 1998, and it was completed when In was back in London by late Summer. In Holland I’d publicly presented thoughts on the history of video gaming a number of times, and was invited by design magazine Eye to crystallize those thoughts into a long-form article for their then upcoming Winter issue. This was my first exposure to writing for a publication, and the experience of working with Eye’s editors was wonderful. In the same issue, I also covered The Ministry of Sound’s gaming event Quakeadelica.
Behind the screen is a world where bullets and bodies bounce without the inconvenience of gravity, a space where enemies can be erased unseen or destroyed in gory, three-dimensional detail, yet where immortality is guaranteed. A visual history of computer games from kindergarten to total carnage.
As someone who was brought up on a diet of television, corporate sponsorship, Thatcherism and 1980s trash in general, I realize that my generation has been the first to witness first-hand the birth, growth, and subsequent world domination of the computer game. From the early arcade adventures with the blocky graphics of Space Invaders, or Defender, to identifying with the first virtual celebrity in the shape of Pac-Man with his ever increasing appetite for ghosts and small blue pixels, or just trying to get that elusive backspin in the minimalist Pong, these early arcade and console games relied almost exclusively upon the “gameness” of the experience itself. For the young adolescent, who had faithfully handed over his pocket money to enter the virtual world of saving the Earth (again) it was money well invested.
In one sense a computer game is just a toy, but what it really presents is virtual space. Right back from the first moment that you played Pong, you weren’t really sitting there thinking “Wow, I’ve always wanted to play simulated Ping Pong”, it was a fascination with being able to physically control the pixels on the monitor – their behavior, their reactions, and their consequences. Pong, for example, deals with a particularly relevant sense of virtual space: play without gravity. You immediately notice that the ball behaves differently to any ball you’ve ever come across before in the so-called real world.
Douglas Rushkoff, author of Children of Chaos, interestingly expounds on this point by suggesting that whereas before computer games, most play had to do with some form of defiance of gravity, which he equates to the scheme of Aristotle’s poetics – you build something up to a climax and then fall away – the real revelation of computer games was that within their virtual spaces, all the known physics of the world can be altered – it’s a technology that can bend our parameters of the perceptible world.
The vast majority of gaming scenarios embedded in computer games emulate the perennial struggle between good and evil, between man and the technology he creates – a strong parallel, of course, to the Frankenstein myth. The idea of man versus life-like machine conjures images of Dr Frankenstein in the laboratory, or Arnold “Terminator” Schwarzenegger in the LA police station saying “I’ll be back”. The analogy with Frankenstein’s monster relates directly to the assimilation of the computer itself, both being assembled parts collected from various identities (like Microsoft’s Windows software). Yet with Frankenstein’s monster, the assembled body parts were visible, most prominently at the seams, whereas the “body parts” contained within the computer appear seamlessly bound together within the unimaginable, streaming framework of binary coding, the finesses of which escape all but the technological elite. This unfathomable aspect of computers enhances the idea of remoteness, and therefore unease. You don’t know how it works, but you know that it works – and it could work against you.
The cinema has played a substantial role in proliferating the myth of the computer gone crazy. We need only think of those great 1950s science fiction b-movies such as Terror from the year 5000, through to the HAL9000 and his conflict of interests in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterwork 2001 – A Space Odyssey, or even as far back as the city-controlling supercomputer in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, provided the template for dozens of subsequent Hollywood robots. The unseen processing force is given metallic human form, but importantly, is not of our flesh. Hollywood computers or robots, and particularly in 2001, are imbued with some kind of intelligence, either artificial or otherwise, which, when placed into a highly technological context, becomes existentially threatening. It is as if the technology might evolve to such a state that it starts to spiral out of control and make a fool out of human intelligence. Intelligence is one of those fundamental aspects of human behavior which cannot be imagined to be shared with anything else.
Grandmaster Flash
The HAL9000 computer in 2001 is designed (aside from controlling the ship’s day to day activities) to play chess with the Discovery’s crew. This, of course, is paralleled more recently in IBM’s ongoing pursuit of the Deep Blue project – a chess playing supercomputer capable of an astonishing number of calculations per second, which has, over the last few years, been sparring with the Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov. HAL however, is programmed, as we are told, to lose 50 per cent of the time, thus allowing the player to think that the computer is beatable. Yet when it is and isn’t beatable is randomly generated, and the player never knows this, nor can he possibly predict it. Deep Blue, on the other hand, strives to win every time, using a selection of blindingly fast calculations, based upon an archive of previous champions’ moves stored inside it by the IBM team. Kasparov referred to this as playing the ghosts of former grandmasters . . . But still Kasparov is able to beat Deep Blue at times, as I understand it, by fooling the computer into reacting to a certain set of misleading strategies. Just like Kasparov, David Bowman, the central human character in 2001 is able to outwit his technological aggressor, subsequently taking his revenge on HAL by removing his memory.
Chess of course, is a game, and many of today’s incredibly graphically advanced games, perhaps in some way try (even indirectly) to refer back to this old visualization of tactical warfare – precisely the aspect that makes computer game playing absolutely compelling. Different styles of games submit to differing strategies, which can include, for example, hiding, a kill or be killed scheme, stealth or search, collection and assimilation of material such as keys, potions, scrolls or whatever. Early testing of Atari video games found that strategy became more important than pure speed of reaction in determining the eventual outcome of the game, and, while most games are made up of various elements of strategy, speed and tactics, it is the specific combination of these elements that allows the player to become successful – or fail. For example, the game Pac-Man, in its various formats, became simple to master for the hardened player. Route maps were a hot property for the seriously dedicated gamers of 1980.
Reality Quest
Strategy changes when you begin to consider the notion of the multiplayer computer game – the mediation between two or more players using the computer as some form of central interface. It is no longer person versus computer, although there is some argument that it could be man against computer programmer, with the computer as flashing mediator, but very directly person against person, with the computer providing the context, means and tools, or interface, through which to play – be it in a forest, or a kung-fu temple, a subway, a castle dungeon or whatever – it is the increased idea that you are playing another person, a real person, no longer a stream of zeros and ones (although they are still very much involved of course) which compounds the experience’s sense of reality.
The current commercial trend for ever increasing realism, the sense of completely immersing yourself within an alternative reality (surprisingly still based upon actual reality) within games has now shown itself to be essential to a game’s technical and commercial success. Showing its tremendous parallels with cinema - the two areas are becoming closer and closer entwined. For example, the recent X-Files CD-ROM contains lengthy sequences of Quicktime (as do most introductory sequences for both home and arcade titles), so the notion of stringing together your own narrative through simple decision making in order to create a new storyline for Mulder and Scully becomes easy to suggest. More and more 'creative' power seems to be becoming deferred onto the player - toying with the idea of how the player decides the outcome of the game - chance and skill have taken a back seat to sweep and style. The notion of stepping into an escapist, virtual community or environment, filled with an unknown number of traps and meanies just waiting for you to drop your guard during that crucial moment of weakness. Take a game such as Messiah or Unreal. Whereas most current 3D game characters from a game such as Quake for example, would be made out of 700 different pieces, these more advanced games can now wrap a character in a life-like flexible, stretchable skin made up of over 180,000 pieces.
Probably growing out of the arcades, this growing realism has culminated with a problematic formula for the games, in that in order for them to end, the player usually has to die. In order for there to be a sense of closure within these experiences, death has always been a quick and easy solution for the programmers (either that or 'running out of time' - which kind of equates to the same thing). This idea circulates at the very heart of the computer gaming origins - the arcades. The idea was simple - the more you die - the more money you put into the machine - this of course, with the rise of the home market, has taken a major setback. Therefore, the arcade designers have taken it upon themselves to try to make their games almost not appear like games anymore, but a fusion with various types of cinema, usually the B-movie kind. Coupled with this of course, is the shock notion that the player (just like the actor), has to die in ever increasingly gruesome ways. Take the bloodbath arcade House of the Dead for example. Right back from being eaten by ghosts in Pac-Man, bombed to death by aliens in Space Invaders, kicked into unconsciousness in Tekken, or mauled to death by the napalm spitting zombies in Doom, the notion of death and rebirth has been absolutely integral to the computer game – probably arising out of the arcade (the womb of all computer games), whereby more death and rebirth means more money being pumped into the machine.
Home And Away
However, with the rise of the home market, the idea of not having to die to end the game is now being explored in a variety of interesting ways, mainly with the release of environmental reconstructions such as SimCity or Constructor. Such games would never be able to exist in arcade format. However, when it comes to immersing yourself into a virtual world almost completely (where, incidentally, death is almost impossible), it is difficult to surpass Cyan Software’s beautifully contemplative Myst, and its sequel Riven. When comparing the genres of cinema and computer games, author J.C. Herz equates Myst with the films of D.W. Griffith (she also notably aligns those who scare themselves to death playing Doom multiplayers with the films of Alfred Hitchcock). Myst, excelling in both sweep and style, expands upon many elements that had always seemed essential to video games, most notably, the skills of the player’s reflexes. At the time, a complete break from anything that was available. Whilst on the one hand, almost cheating the 'computer death' issue, by the fact that there was no real end to the game, the notion of becoming completely involved within a virtual environment, and not having to kill things, jump over things, or battle against the clock was a complete revelation.
The players were now allowed to sit back and reflect upon their predicament, and work out what they had to do, rather than pound the keyboard in the race against time. This idea, not only made the game much longer in terms of the time taken to complete the game, but would occupy the player whilst not playing, torturing them with mind bending puzzles, for which there seemed no solution (or did there?). The experience completely took over the hardened Myst player. This unfortunately, is always combatted by the vast plethora of Internet sites which detail the exact location of many of the objects, and how to complete the game in the quickest way. The computer game always had its nemesis - the infamous cheat mode. Yet on the home market, there had always been adventure games, which I would argue, probably grew out of the Dungeons and Dragons craze of the mid- to late-1970s. Memorable home titles such as Colossal Adventure or Sphinx Adventure on the BBC Micro, were text based (“you are in a forest – exits are west and north”), though the Spectrum’s The Hobbit, added crude graphics.
International Carnage
One of the most recent stages of game development takes the idea of the multiplayer game (many players simultaneously joined together through computer networks, playing against each other instead of the computer) and extrapolates it one stage further. I’m talking about the network game, which returns the uneasy remoteness to the computer gaming idea. With the network possibility, a number of different computers can be joined together, either through internal networks such as Ethernet or Local Talk, over a modem and through the telephone lines, enabling the computer game to now become a global event. The idea of having a four player game of Doom with your “friends” (which you of course hope to obliterate) in Australia, America and England is no longer a technological fantasy. Indeed, one of the fastest growing areas within the Internet deals with precisely the organization and assimilation of interested players waiting to inflict virtual carnage upon each other.
This of course, proliferates and even returns the idea of the faceless, remote opponent to the computer game. It’s almost like a kind of bizarre compromise, whereby you invest in a game for your computer, spend weeks conquering and mastering it until you can smash the computer’s efforts into the ground, whereupon the natural progression is to look for fresh meat. The network games provide this, in terms of presenting a simulated version of playing against the computer, yet with all the imperfections and unpredictability of a human player now thrown in. You might not even know the other player, so their presence within the game bears close similarity to what the computer would generate anyway. Indeed, in many versions of Duke Nukem 3D, there is an inbuilt cheat mode, whereby you can activate the simulated multiplayer option, which just makes the game almost impossibly hard to play. The idea though, and this returns to the problems encountered with Deep Blue, is that the human opposition would move around in an entirely different and unpredictable way, one which the computer would never be instructed to achieve, and the players' learning of the computer’s typical movement patterns becomes completely obsolete. This clever marketing technique provides and secures the longevity of a game, and ensures that no two games are ever the same, or even similar, and almost removes the notion of strategic play (except for various degrees of hiding). Companies are now levering more revenue from this trend by releasing add-on packs containing additional levels and editors, in one sense empowering the player with the gift of being able to feel like a programmer, while on the other hand securing that the very same player doesn’t stray from the game the company is selling.
As computer games become more sophisticated, with the industry turning over billions each year and pumping a lot of it back into development, certain trends are beginning to emerge. One prominent feature is how the history of computer gaming is starting to be written, and in particular within the context of contemporary developments. Dave Perry, programmer of Earthworm Jim, as well as developer of the Messiah engine, explains that: “it’s kind of funny, because the videogame business is so young, everyone that started it is still alive, it’s literally, like, fifteen years old?” What’s surprising is how, just like any other notion of historiography, the games industry has had its pioneers, its heroes and villains, its own environment (virtual space – which must be the final frontier – a space which doesn’t physically exist, however believable your graphics card might be . . .), and more recently, even its own celebrities.
A Piece Of The Pie
The notion of computer game superstars, I would argue, is almost split into two distinct groups, harshly separated by the games themselves. Basically, any notion of celebrity sharply divides here between those that make the games, and those that are in the games, those who play the games, unfortunately stand little chance of fame. In this sense, we are back to extending the film analogy, those who make and star gain celebrity, those who watch merely enjoy. Right from its early, blocky beginnings, the industry was able to lever huge amounts of income from creating a character, the memorable first of which was Pac-Man, which continues even today, long after the craze emerged. There are now huge online archives devoted to documenting and wholesaling the merchandise of the Pac-Man and his sequels. There were even strange albums made such as Buckner and Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever, and, in 1981, How to win at Pac-Man was on the bestseller list. In creating Pac-Man, and subsequently a range of characters around him, Namco and Atari were able to chain together an incredibly lucrative string of titles, for an (at the time) ever increasing range of fragile computer platforms. The idea was simple, as this excerpt from the original Midway arcade manual suggests:
“The player, using a single-handle control, guides the Pac-Man about the maze, scoring points by munching up the dots in his path. Four ghost monsters – Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde – chase after the Pac-Man trying to capture and deflate him. The Pac-Man can counterattack by eating the big, power capsule that enables him to overpower the monsters for additional score. After all the dots are gobbled up, the screen is cleared, and Pac-Man continues for another round. Each rack features a special fruit target in the maze, which if eaten, earns bonus points. Players start with three Pac-Men. An additional Pac-Man is awarded for 10,000 points.”
The historical role to usher in the forthcoming era of the video arcade was played by a circle with a pie-shaped cut in the middle, named after the Japanese word to eat (paku). He was, naturally, soon overshadowed by the newer, more advanced models for whom he had paved the way – such as QBert, Joust, Defender or the first virtual James Bond – Spyhunter. Going further back, one Internet Pac-archive claims to have uncovered the inspiration for the character. Few may remember the ill-fated Milton and Bradley game of the late 1970s known as Mr. Mouth. This was one of those large, battery operated games geared towards young children suffering from motor skills deficit syndrome. The game consisted of a yellow, spherical, Pac-Man-like creature (however heavily browed and googly eyed) with a continually opening and closing mouth as the centre piece. Radiating out from this were four, spring loaded arms at twelve, three, six and nine o’clock. The object of the game was to launch colored chips from the spring-loaded arms into the ever opening and closing mouth of Mr. Mouth.
Pac-Man, of course, needs little introduction and the various versions continue to be released – now for an audience cashing in on the arcade nostalgia trend. Few characters have come close to Pac-Man’s early dominance, but it would be fair to say that Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers has positively superseded the original success by many times. Author J.C. Herz describes the phenomenon as “Mario Über Alles”, but equates Nintendo’s use of licensing as a ruthless attempt to align themselves with Disney – creating a set of characters which can be applied to every possible facet of merchandising. A recent survey suggested that in five years’ time, Mario could be better known than Mickey Mouse.
From initial 2D adventures, the portly Italian plumber has exploded onto the 3D market, breaking new ground with every title. Developers are now moving pace with Mario. Once again, Dave McComb describes this in terms of the puzzles Mario has to solve as being symptomatic of the technology’s as well as the game’s progression, he says :
“. . . in moving to 3d, developers have had to overcome massive problems and think of innovative structures for their games. In 2d Mario games, the action was generally restricted to a scrolling horizontal plane and designers could position monsters and meanies in such a way that they had to be tackled by the Italian plumber . . . in the 3d world of SuperMario 64, things are different. The designers had to think of new ways to set dangers and tasks for their hero, and clever devices to force players to tackle specific problems and villains. Given the 3d nature of the game, players can simply walk around many of the puzzles, rather than being forced to face a problem head-on. The 3d nature of Super Mario 64 gave rise to the game’s interesting non-linear structure, players being able to choose the order in which they tackled missions, rather than having to play the game in a way predetermined by the coders.”
Celebrity Coders
The flip side of the celebrity of those characters in the game, is the celebrity of those who create the games themselves. One case in particular sticks out, especially for those of us who grew up with the ZX Spectrum – that of Matthew Smith, creator of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, two of the most popular and commercially successful games of the home computer boom of the early 1980s. Even though he claimed that his most successful games were pale imitations of another Spectrum classic – Attic Attack, his games became incredibly successful during the boom of 1983. All of this before he was twenty. Now he has disappeared into obscurity, so obviously fans of these games are curious to know what he’s up to these days, and if he’s produced any more modern-day masterpieces. Yet there is an obscure cloak of conspiracy built up around Matthew Smith. In fact, it was never proved that his picture was actually published, and he never showed himself in public as the one who wrote those two games. There are, however, some photographs that were published in in 1984, which claim to show Matthew at work. There were even rumors that he didn’t actually exist, and that Matthew Smith was merely a code name for a Tandy computer, on which Manic Miner was born.
This creation of celebrity, albeit an almost anti-celebrity to the point of notoriety, is by far more intriguing than the fame generated by the likes of the buxom Lara Croft. But of course, the superstars will inevitably go on to bigger and better things each time – there’s already been a Mario Brothers movie, with Bob Hoskins in the lead role, and a Tomb Raider film is already in production, yet, much to my disappointment, I don’t foresee a film being made about the likes of Matthew Smith and his creation, Miner Willy. Back in 1984, Matthew Smith argued:
“Things get hairy when we get machines which are more intelligent than us . . . what I don’t like about certain games is they’re not a simulation of any kind of real problem. I’m not into simulated violence. It’s not really that much fun.”
So, where might the future of computer games, the arcades in particular, lie when the visualization of virtual violence becomes commercially unpopular and no longer viable? Or what about some kind of alternative to the navigation of an environment, real or imagined, which bears no relation any longer to simulated reality?
The Big Gundown
To return to the notion of tactical warfare, the computer game even stretches out to have some impact on our perception of warfare itself, in a paradoxically reverse way, and this is illustrated in Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which he outlines a series of linguistic and socialistic discrepancies as to why what was happening could no longer be termed as war. Might the same arguments be applicable to contemporary notions surrounding computer games? Focusing on the increasing virtual aspect of the conflict, Baudrillard suggests that, with the remote imaging possibilities of missile mounted video cameras, the entire simulated event becomes like playing a video game, again against this unseen, and unseeable opponent – in this case we believed it to be Saddam Hussein. The event contains parallel situations contained within many contemporary computer games, in that it involves search and collection, pre-emptive moves, and of course search and destroy (or sweep and clear) tactics. During CNN’s coverage of both phases of tension building between the two sides, that their coverage of the proceedings was called Showdown with Iraq - to me that sounds just like the most “real” of video games that never was. During the recent spate of embassy bombings and us retaliation, CNN has now combined its previous bombastic titles with the cinematic – recently you could tune into a program entitled America Strikes Back.
The Last Of Us: The Trauma Of Loss
Both Joel and Ellie have suffered immense loss in their lives, and the game delves deeply into the emotional impact of these losses on the characters. From the death of Joel's daughter to Ellie's struggles with the loss of her friends and family, the game explores the ways in which trauma shapes and defines the characters.
The Last of Us is a video game that tells a gripping story of survival and loss. One of the game's most powerful elements is the way it delves deeply into the emotional impact of loss on the characters, Joel and Ellie. Both characters have suffered immense loss in their lives, and the game explores the ways in which trauma shapes and defines them.
The game begins with the death of Joel's daughter, Sarah, which sets the tone for the emotional journey that players will undertake. Throughout the game, players are reminded of the weight of loss as they watch Joel and Ellie struggle to come to terms with their own personal traumas. Ellie, in particular, has lost all of her friends and family and is forced to confront her own feelings of grief and loneliness.
According to gameplay data, players spend a significant amount of time playing as both Joel and Ellie and the moments in the game where the characters are dealing with loss and how players are responding to those moments. By analyzing this data, we can create a story that illustrates how players emotionally connect with the characters and their experiences with loss. This level of player engagement, combined with the game's powerful storytelling, creates an emotionally evocative experience that is truly unique.
But what sets The Last of Us apart is not only the gameplay data but also the emotional impact it has on the players. Through reviews of the game, it becomes evident that the game resonates with both critics and the players on a deep emotional level. Many players have reported feeling a strong sense of attachment to the characters, and have described the game as an emotionally powerful experience. Critics have also praised the game's handling of loss and trauma, with some calling it one of the most realistic and poignant depictions of grief and loss in the medium of video games.
In conclusion, The Last of Us is a powerful and emotionally evocative game that tells a gripping story of survival, loss, and trauma. The game's handling of loss and trauma is one of the most powerful elements, and it is a major driving force behind the story. The game's use of player engagement, combined with its powerful storytelling, creates an emotionally resonant experience that is truly unique. By contrasting gameplay data with the reviews of the game, we can see the correlation between the critical and the emotional engagement with the game, which helps to show how the game resonates with the critics and the players.
The trauma of loss (Ai Generated via ChatGPT)
Proprietary data sources: Gameplay data from The Last of Us, including the amount of time players spend playing as each character, the number of times players make choices that affect the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and player engagement metrics such as the number of times players press the button to make Joel and Ellie hold hands.
Scrapable sources: Online forums, Reddit, and social media posts where players discuss their feelings and opinions about the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Government data sources: Not applicable.
Social media data sources: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts where players share fan art, cosplay, and other expressions of their love for the relationship between Joel and Ellie.
Fragging The Competition
Quakeadelica Review, Ministry of Sound, 15th October 1998
Eye Magazine Issue 30 (Winter 1998)
Programming Note: I’d been asked by Eye magazine to produce a long-form article on the history of video gaming, which became the piece Live. Die. Eat. Cheat. I was back in London by this time, after completing my Masters degree at The Jan van Eyck Akademie, and submitted this review of the live event to run in parallel with the larger piece I was writing at the time. The review also ran in the Winter issue.
Quakeadelica, staged at a South London nightclub with an extravaganza of music, glamour and button-pounding action was a head-to-head battle between the top eight British players of computer game Quake 2.
Hosted by model Jo Guest, who seemed a little out of place (but perfectly suited to the testosterone drenched atmosphere of the boys and their games), the evening included a series of heats, and a 'winner takes all' challenge between the best British contenders and the US champion.
Sponsored by online games network Wireplay, the evening started with brief introductions before they assumed places and virtual carnage ensued on a large video projection screen.
The assembled crowd witnessed the 'chasecam' view of the ten-minute battles, cutting between views of the players in order to catch the best of the action. A special 'expert' adjudicator also played to eliminate foul play.
Commentary, provided by a compere and a somewhat perplexed Miss Guest, was dominated by gaming community jargon such as 'fragging', 'raping missions' and 'railgunning'.
As the games moved ahead at alarming speed, the screen soon became awash with all the usual virtual blood and guts and the deception and dodging of opponents. Whenever a particularly gruesome kill was achieved by one of the young players there would always be a simultaneous raucous cheer of satisfaction from the gaming crowd.
The British winner is now set to go on an expenses-paid trip to New York to play in the Professional Gamers League final.
The star of the evening, however, was undoubtedly US champion Thresh, a top professional gamer, who had been flown in to compete against Britain's finest.
Aged 21, and sponsored to the tune of $100,000 a year for his gaming endeavors, Thresh (who recently won a Ferrari for his efforts), considers himself one of a new breed, training for up to four hours a day (and up to seven hours a day in the run-up to a tournament).
Thresh was recently quoted as saying that he would like to see computer gaming recognized as an Olympic sport, and is aiming to reach 'millionaire status' by the age of 25.
The overall winner though, was the game Quake 2 itself, the evening being an extraordinary celebration of one of the most addictive, immersive and compelling games around. Its success was confirmed - not only by the huge attendance of the event - but by the realization that companies are also willing to fly the best players around the world to compete in the name of publicity - both for their software and online gaming services.
It seems as if Thresh's dream of becoming one of the first sportsmen of the virtual era is not too far away.