Author Archives: Tasha Hutnick

Final Project: Psychopup: A Death Planning Game

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(Note: I’m hoping that the above links work for everyone – please leave a comment if they don’t! You’ll need to click until you see the Psychopup application item (the one with the pink-haired girl.) You may need to extract all files first, and then repeat the process.)
I’m excited to share my prototype of Psychopup: A Death Planning Game. I’ve built this game in Ren’Py, a Python framework typically used for visual novels. I chose this framework since it is light, easy to learn, and works well with choice-based games
I was inspired to build Psychopup from the McGonigal reading.I wanted to take a useful process in our lives that was hard to do or may not be common knowledge and make it more accessible through a game. Then I remembered that I had wanted to work on my own death plan, but always became too intimidated when trying to find the paperwork that I’d need. Death planning was just the process that I was looking for. It’s tedious, scary, and can be difficult to find all of the resources that you need if you don’t know where to look.
Death planning may seem like a strange concept for a game, but there does exist in each of us a curiosity toward the unknown. I was moved when reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle at our professor’s suggestion to find the story of a baby who would drop his toy and retrieving it in a way to mimic his mother’s departure and return each day. He comments that the child had clearly turned this upsetting experience into a game, though whether he did so to familiarize himself with the experience on his own terms or project his frustration at being left onto the toy, Freud was unsure. Yet, I think this experience speaks to human behavior in that we make games out of what frightens us, what is difficult for us. From Resident Evil to Bloody Marie to Ring Around the Rosie, we have this desire to explore beyond our comfort zone. And, since this game is already exploring enough outside of the player’s comfort zone, I made the main character a cute fluffy dog with the rough color palette of Terry Pratchett’s Death from Discworld (the best anthropomorphic representation of the subject).
The game opens by asking the player for their name, their state (currently only New York is available), and what they would like to name their “Psychopup” (play on “psychopomp”, or guide through the afterlife). Rather than guide the player through the afterlife, however, the pup needs to be trained how to guide others in regards to the player’s health care decisions and funerary arrangements at the end of / after their life. The player is then informed that in order for their new dog to be a true Psychopup, the player would need to teach them three basic skills:
  • fetch – allowing the dog to find where the player has put important belongings
  • guard – allowing the dog to protect the players’ death plan wishes. Each section has an impact on the Psychopup, providing them with an elemental power up, armor, extra lives, and additional strength.
  • speak – telling the dog who the player has chosen to take care of their health care decisions in the event that they cannot and to plan their funeral / body disposition. In Speak, the player is also given advice on how to ask their chosen people if they would accept this responsibility

Once the player has completed all three skills, they are able to mark their training as complete and download a text file with the choices that they have made. The file is loaded to the “resources” folder in the game files, where the player can also find the state of New York’s Where Are My Assets, Body Disposition, Living Will, and Health Care Proxy forms. They can use their choice text file to fill out the forms later, and, even if they don’t, at least the player took some time to think about what they would want for their end of life plan. Regardless, they come away from the experience with more than they started. They would have a magic circle in which they could engage with considering their end of life plan to their own comfort level. Unlike Huizinga’s view of play however, the player would carry the fruits of that experience with them when they leave the circle.

One may look at this description and wonder if I have provided the player with an actual game. There is neither any score, nor a true sense of “winning” or “losing”. Yet, the game still fills the four requirements McGonigal lists for a game: a goal, a set of rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The player is given the goal at the start of the game – train your Psychopup. They are also provided with each of the three tricks at the start that they can tackle in any order. For rules, the player must answer the questions provided to them in each trick path. For a feedback system, a player is informed when a skill has been completed, and a path is grayed out when the player has already finished it, For Guard, a more nebulous skill, the player is prompted with a finish button after finishing one section, allowing them to choose when they are comfortable with ending the skill. Finally, for voluntary participation, it is the player’s own choice whether to download and play the game, and they can quit the program at any time. In the rather long Guard skill training, the player is given the option down each path to take a break and select another skill or return to the main menu. Ren’Py’s built in save feature also allows players to play at their own pace and leave at their own leisure.

For this version of the game, I focused on creating a Minimum Viable Product – could I guide a player through the information found in these four forms in an engaging and accessible way? I certainly have a list of what I would like to add to the game now that I have the basic game flow down, such as:

  • Updating the Psychopup avatar as the player completes different sections in the Guard skill
  • Readding the average funeral cost breakdown screen into the Guard skill (technical difficulties)
  • Allowing the player to add in assets in the Fetch minigame rather than working with (mostly) what was provided on the form
  • Allowing the player to disable aspects unrelated to them through a menu with items like “Hide items related to home ownership”, “hide items related to marriage”, etc.in the Fetch minigame
  • Adding in minigames in the Care section that are unlocked with each skill that the player completes
  • Adding in a more robust pet / brush the dog feature
  • Add in backgrounds, perhaps depicting different rooms in a home changing with the game progression
  • Add in options for more states
If you do decide to play the game, any and all feedback would be appreciated – I do plan on polishing this prototype up and proposing it for the CUNY Games Conference!
Works Consulted

Final Project Proposal: Death Planning and Your Own Personal Psychopomp Game

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As the saying goes, there are only two givens in this life: death and taxes. Yet, according to a 2017 study, only one in three people in the United States has an advanced directive – a document(s) including health care proxy form (deciding who will make end-of-life decisions for you), a living will (a document that states what sort of medical decisions you would like for end-of-life medical care), and DNR form (Do Not Resuscitate) – in place to prepare for it. In 2015, the Funeral and Memorial Information Council (FAMIC) found that though most Americans were interested in preplanning for a funeral, only 17% of adults had made the arrangements. This past year, after the unexpected death of my uncle, I witnessed the difficulty that avoiding these decisions can have. My mother, having volunteered to settle his affairs, had to figure out funeral arrangements, burial of his cremains, and the settlement of his estate before she could process what had happened.  

As a proud member of the Death Positive movement, I was inspired by Caitlin Doughty’s introduction of the process of end-of-life planning in her video “Protecting Trans Bodies in Death.”  The process appealed to me, but the idea of finding paperwork according to my state’s law and researching every detail was daunting. Seeing my mother’s experience with planning my uncle’s funeral, I wanted to create a resource to help streamline and destress starting the death planning process. What better way to encourage exploration, learning, and engagement than a game? Instead of sifting through paperwork and extensive Google searching, I figured that creating a dedicated game for the topic could help users begin to consider these questions and begin to make these decisions at their own pace. 

The premise of the game is that you are designing your own death aide – inspired by the idea of the psychopomp, the angel of death, and the character Death from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The player guides the psychopomp through their training on how to best serve the player, learning various skills, attitudes, and customs as they continue their journey to becoming a full-fledged personal psychopomp.  

The game – likely to be developed in Ren’Py (a visual novel Python framework) or as a dedicated JavaScript site – is mostly text-based with an avatar of the aide on screen, evolving with the player’s choices. The player’s choices will affect the avatar’s appearance both directly and indirectly – for example, they could choose the avatar’s hairstyle, and choosing cremation for the treatment of their remains would provide the avatar with a fire elemental motif. The death planning questions are asked diagetically as the psychopomp undergoes their training, rather than presenting the player with an arduous questionnaire to fill out. Before answering these questions, the player is provided with context so that they can make informed decisions. For example, before answering whether they would like their next of kin to be their health proxy, the player would be led through how next of kin is defined and what sort of decisions they would be expected to make.  

The player can choose to explore options for funeral planning and answer questions for health care proxy forms, and living wills, though this minimum viable product will focus on these forms for the state of New York. These types of documents will be introduced to the player so they can make the conscious decision to begin exploring these topics. The point of the game is to educate and engage the player at their own pace and comfort.  

The game also allows the player to add wishes such as a funeral in accordance with a particular religion of their specification, refusal of embalming, what music they would like played at their funeral, etcetera. While some options will be explored through the game, more open questions (such as religious affiliation) will be asked in an open-ended manner, allowing the player to accurately represent who they are and what they want.  

When the player has finished taking their psychopomp on their creation journey, the game ends, and the player is presented with a document containing their choices for download, including how their choices correspond to options on advanced directive forms. The choices document is not designed to be legally binding but to give the player a concrete token of the learning and introspection they have undertaken over their playthrough.  

This game takes its cues from McGonagall’s theory of using game development to improve our everyday lives and Flanagan’s idea of activist games, designed to emphasize social issues (in this case right to representation in death), education, and intervention. Through engagement with the game, the player creates a document with their choices that they can then use to establish an advanced directive and make their wishes known to their loved ones and health proxy / death care representative, thus lessening the anxieties and burdens on themselves and their loved ones in the future. In so doing, they gain concrete benefits beyond the entertainment or experiential value of the game.  

Blog Post 4: Procedures Please: Lucas Pope + Bogost

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In 2013, indie developer Lucas Pope released his cult classic game Papers Please, in which the player becomes a citizen of fictional Arisotzka and is chosen by lottery to work in Border Patrol. The player must follow an increasingly complex set of rules to determine whether or not to accept or reject people trying to enter the country and make enough money to pay for rent, heat, food, and other expenses for his family. This simple and rather bleak game to me embodies Bogost’s idea of procedural rhetoric.

The rules the player faces increase in their harshness – at first, only anyone who is an Aristotzkan citizen may enter – simple enough. Then, each day, more complications are added until the player must ensure that the would be entrant has every detail on their passport valid (including gender presentation matching listed sex, appearance matching the photo, accurate country symbol on the front cover, accurate issuing city, accurate date of birth, and accurate expiration date), has a visa with every detail valid, and is not on any wanted list. If a player finds a discrepancy, then they must identify that discrepancy using their rule book and interrogate (or x-ray) the entrant before denying them. Failure to process someone by the  book results in a citation. Citations dock the player’s pay, risking them falling into debt, or their family starving or freezing to death due to lack of funds. Any of these events result in a game over.

The true story of the game happens in response to the player’s input. Each day has its own plot, yes. After the first day, there will be a terrorist attack outside of the player’s control for example. However, the predetermined plot exists more as flavor text to inform the player’s decision than as a leash pulling the player through the story. As Bogost asserts, “The imposition of rules creates expression” (7). The player is highly incentivized, not ultimately forced, to follow the rules. The player can choose to do whatever they want, (likely resulting in a game over at the end of the day), but they can also work within the game’s system to mount their small rebellions. Interestingly, this game gives the player the option to object. The player can choose to break the rules and let some people through provided that they become good enough at the game to compensate for the pay loss. The players then must choose which cases are worth fighting for. Will they help the masked people of EZIC mount their revolution? Will they let in the woman who’s husband let you know lost their passport after months of travel? Will they refuse to demean entrants whose gender expression do not match the listed sex on their passport with an invasive X-ray scan? The player creates their own story and their own moral code that they will follow and break as they see fit. The simulation gap is where the meat of this game resides.

The simplicity of the game also follows Bogost’s observations. The process of comparing documents, rules, appearances, etc. is the crux of the game, so this is the most detailed that it gets. The only other mechanic in the game is choosing whether or not you will pay for heat or food for your family (if you can afford it), which consists of a simple black screen showing the health of your family members, what you earned during your shift minus your rent, how much food and heat cost, and a set of check boxes allowing you to select what you will pay for. Your home life and your family are entirely abstract. You don’t see your character wake up, eat breakfast, play with their kids, walk to work, none of it. Because that’s not what matters. What matters is that you have lives on the line and that the status of their welfare hangs over every decision you make. Whether the player cares about them or not is irrelevant. The player is responsible for this family. If they die, the game is over.

As an aside, the games tight mechanics and constant moral quandaries evoke the vividness of harsh reality in the player. It counters Bogost’s idea that visual fidelity equals authority as the player will feel affected by the pixel graphics of a person telling you to go to hell when you condemn them to return to the torturous life they were trying to escape because their passport expired.

Furthermore, there is something about the abstractness of the fictitious game world. Set in a clearly Soviet-like 1980s nation, the player must decide whether to let people in from various nations. While some of them may seem analogous to real world regions, the symbols on the passport are ultimately arbitrary in meaning. It doesn’t matter if Aristotzka starts a war with Republia, what matters is that the player is strongly incentivized to act according to rules set in response to a particular political landscape, even if they trespass on  what may be considered common decency. This forced adherence to political bureaucracy and attempt to find a loophole in the system transcends the Soviet-like environment of the game, causing the player to hold a mirror up to their own government’s policies and their own complacency.

So, Papers Please derives its story from procedure (rules) rather than a flat literary plot and gains furthers its affect through arbitrary symbols. But, what is its rhetoric aiming to persuade the player to believe? That we are all under the thumb of bureaucracy? That adulting is hard? I think the game is trying to emphasize the power of choice in the moment. Despite all of your efforts on a large level, the system will prevail. It may change hats through revolution, but you will still be working the border. You can however make an impact on the people you meet. Some will let you know the impact of your decisions, some won’t, and some will prove to be tricking you. But ultimately, you must choose what’s important in this life. You must choose what lines you will and won’t cross. And, though small, you can make an impact for better. . . or worse.

 

 

Corporate Step Challenges – Social Panopticons and Self-Volunteered Health Data

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Every few months, my company announces a (completely optional) step challenge. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find several coworkers to form a team to collectively achieve a herculean amount of steps in a month. The challenge usually has some sort of journey for a theme, such as exploring National Parks or walking the Great Barrier Reef. For a month, each team member will log their steps hoping to achieve this goal. The two teams who get the most steps per major sector of the company will receive a bonus day of PTO. For those who don’t win, each participant will be entered into a raffle, where six lucky individuals will receive a bonus day of PTO. Progress determines how many raffle tickets are entered on behalf of the participant.

The system itself is fairly simple. Once you have formed your team (either by joining people you know or fishing around until you find people you have maybe seen once), you can either link your fitness tracker of choice to the challenge software, or enter your steps manually. At certain step intervals, your team will progress through the journey, as shown by the picture and label when you log in. You can also see a progress bar showing how far along you are (i.e. 1.1 million out of 2.4 million steps). Then, the app will calculate how many steps you take on average and rank your team members’ average steps in a leader board.

Interestingly, when manually entering activity, instead of adding step count directly, you enter how many minutes you spent doing a specific activity. The app includes: aerobics, biking, circuit training, dancing, elliptical, hiking, housework, running, skiing, swimming, walking, wheelchair use, weight lifting, yard work, and yoga. Once you enter the minutes (no decimals allowed), the app inserts the time into an equation tailored for that activity and spits out a number of steps (i.e. 10 minutes of walking = 1000 steps). This system A. leads most users to link their personal fitness tracker and B. drastically simplifies the step taking process. While the goal might be to increase periods of fitness, I just take a look at my step count for the whole day, round up to the nearest hundred, and enter in that many minutes of activity.

From Zuboff, the dynamics of the application may vary, from healthy competition to personal satisfaction to a desire to earn an extra day of PTO (depending on how likely you feel that your team will achieve this goal). The mechanics are simple – log your activity, either automatically or manually. The main components are the milestones of your journey, the step tracker bar, and the leader board.

Aside from a few other features that you can click into on the website (i.e. personal stats, a company wide leader board, how many raffle tickets you’ve earned), that’s pretty much it. There aren’t any reminder messages telling you to shape up and get off the couch. If you miss your goal, you’ll never hear about it again. The app itself doesn’t send any specific nudges. For conditioning, it provides mid journey goals by progressing the background image according to your progress and puts you in competition with your teammates.

As Sicart would say, the journey allows you to “disclose the world” by linking your progress with Earth’s natural wonders, engaging in appropriation by having you and your coworkers take on the role of explorers. It also allows for self expression by providing more eligible activities than walking – it encourages the user to begin or develop whatever practice(s) are right for them. However, the app’s hands off approach in continuing to encourage the user would likely mean that Sicart would not find this a application particularly great source of play.

The trick of the application lies in its second form of conditioning – prompting you to compare yourself to your teammates. The large step goal (in the millions) necessitates users to participate in a team. This creates a panopticon or sense of self-governance of sorts since every member of the team can see where you rank on the leader board. You cannot hide how much (or little) you have contributed to the team. Furthermore, the application prompts you to increase your daily activity since the leader board only shows your average steps. It doesn’t matter much if I do 10,000 steps in two days if I only do a few hundred most days. The bottom participants provide a lower limit (you don’t want to be there), while the upper members provide a goal to strive for. Furthermore, you don’t know who is secretly judging you for ruining their chances of gaining a free PTO day, providing further encouragement.

At least, it would, if you didn’t talk to your coworkers on a daily basis and realize that you are all too stressed out to pay much attention to how many steps you’re each taking. This application very much depends on its members subscribing to the goal to be its most efficient, as do all games and gamified systems. For myself personally, I find myself trying to find excuses to take little trips or walk more throughout the day, though I usually fall fairly short of my goal. After the challenge is over, I mostly return to my old habits – the focal practice has not taken root.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that the challenge is provided by Mobile Health Consumer, a company designed to:

  • encourage self-care practices among employees to improve well-being and decrease healthcare costs for the employer,
  • Provide management resources for chronic conditions to again decrease health care costs for the employer
  • “Aggregate disparate HR, benefits, wellbeing, and healthcare data” so the employer can “can create on-demand cost-control strategies” (their site).

There isn’t a mention of what happens to your step data after the challenge. From Zuboff’s discussion of Surveillance Capitalism, one may wonder if health data from corporate health challenges could be used in determining health insurance rates or other biased treatment toward an individual based on their perceived / self-reported health. To be clear, I am not accusing anyone of using challenge data in this way. I am simply pointing out that given the lack of clear information on how this data is handled, self-volunteered health information could be used as a source of health bias among an organization.

 

 

Despite Everything, It’s Still Alice (or Wonderland) – Gamifying Alice in Wonderland

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One thing that struck me about Alice in Wonderland is that despite its playfulness, it is incredibly rigid. Wonderland is Wonderland, and Alice is Alice – neither will compromise. Carroll will play with conventions and expectations and scale, but his characters are resolute. They will not grow or change at heart (ironically), and that’s where his sense of play takes hold. Alice and Wonderland (both the place and its inhabitants) are the magic circle for the readers, so long as they are together. The White Rabbit is still the White Rabbit whether he reads the indictment or the Dada Manifestos, so long as his appearance is sharp and he fusses and frets over protocol. So, what’s the best way to show the reader the unchanging nature of the outcome and the inevitability of the plot? A Choose Your Own Adventure game, of course!

We were inspired by Murray’s concept of the kaleidoscopic narrative to intrigue the audience with their own entrances and exits, wondering what they had missed. To take it further, by keeping the overall plot the same but changing the specific words the character’s say or the specific actions they may take, we called upon the Lev Kuleshov technique, allowing the reader to juxtapose the same characters and plot with the differences from scene to scene. When faced with variations of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat”, does the original take on new meaning? What if Alice recites the words of Pink Floyd or Rush rather than the text You Are Old, Father William? We use this technique to ask: How can we keep the reader on their toes? How can we bar them from taking the text for granted? Furthermore, we sought to emulate her method of “Simulation and Destiny”, granting the player supposed agency and variation while having the end be inevitable.

In creating this game, we decided to host our own website (https://ahutnick.github.io/alice02/) powered by JavaScript (specifically JQuery) rather than use Twine or a similar software simply because Matthew and I were already familiar with web development and JS, and we wanted to make sure that we had every element of the game easily at our disposal. We each contributed our own chapter, adding our own forks in the road along the way (mine was Chapter VII). My other task was to assemble the backend of the website. I wrote the JQuery script to call the route that the player takes on the screen, bit by bit. Each screen has its own object in an attached JSON file, which contain: if the screen has a random event, the chapter name, the text (including HTML tags), and the corresponding choice or choices for that screen. The choice(s) would populate buttons at the bottom of the page.

If we were to have more time, I would personally love to add a chapter select menu as well as the ability for the player to randomize not only the chapter order, but the screen order, shuffling them like a deck of cards. Imagining hopping from Alice growing in the court room to Bill the Lizard being punted into the sky to the Hatter singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat. I feel like this would be an excellent way to open up the text, but unfortunately, with loading everything in, testing the JS, and deploying the site, I didn’t have the time. We definitely had to narrow scope over the course of this project. I personally had wanted to add in a mini-game of my own with the Dormouse’s story, but the existing structure made it more effort than it was worth. Instead, I looked for ways for the existing choice structure to break apart the storytelling experience.

I was impressed by how differently everyone’s chapter plays out. Melissa’s Chapter IV focuses on Alice primarily being Alice – there is a right and a wrong choice, and the player is mostly led to make the right choice after making the wrong one (so long as they didn’t pick that Alice woke up). Matthew’s Chapter V focuses on not only the advice that the Caterpillar gives Alice, but also Alice’s lack of control over what she can say (along with some amazing musical references). My Chapter VII focuses on the illusion of choice and replay-ability – there are a lot of silly variants and random text, but in the end, no matter what, the tea party will be a disaster. Wiktor’s Chapter 8 mini-game captures the frustration exactly. Wandi’s Chapter XI embraces the chaos of the courtroom with modern and meta references without upsetting the delicate balance of Alice or Wonderland. I genuinely enjoyed playing through everyone’s routes while testing the code.

 

 

Where Would Callois Land the Gummi Ship? Categorizing Kingdom Hearts

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I find myself perversely curious as to how Roger Caillois would have characterized modern video games. While his four categories and two axes are far from exclusive as he himself admits, I doubt that he would have been able to dream up just how intricate these games could be. Granted, Caillois died in 1978, considerably before mainstream adventure games took off. Pong and Space Invaders could firmly be categorized as an example of agôn (competition) with a dash of mimicry as the player clashes in a contest of agility and dexterity against a computer opponent.  Axes wise, I’d imagine he’d classify them as ludus (heavily rules-focused), perhaps giving Space Invaders a dash of paidia (childlike impulse) as players subject themselves to the artificial anxiety and fantasy of facing down unstoppable hordes of alien ships.

While early video games have simple mechanics and conceits which make them easy to categorize by Caillois’s standards, modern video games become much more complicated. For an example, let’s try to sort Kingdom Hearts (the original game, not the whole franchise).

For those who don’t know, Kingdom Hearts is a Playstation 2 era action role playing game in which the player controls Sora, a young boy who with his sword-like Keyblade must fight back the Heartless (and a number of Disney villains) to restore peace to the universe. Mechanically, it consists of button mashing and resource management to progress through various tasks and combat situations to earn more of the story’s plot. For the sake of brevity, I will omit the title’s several minigames.

To start broad and work our way in, the very premise of a role playing video game suggests ludic mimicry – the player is provided with a character and dropped into a new world that both thematically and mechanically has set rules that they must follow as that character. The player temporarily escapes their own identity and circumstances in order to take on the emotional and physical highs and lows of another entity. In Kingdom Hearts specifically, Sora has a set movement style, can only interact with his world in specified ways, and can’t behave in manners outside of his character – no whacking non enemy characters with the Keyblade, and unsurprisingly, no death. The story can’t continue on without Sora, so if he ever fails in his quest, the player is taken to a screen where they can choose to reload at an earlier point.

Interestingly, the player has very little choice in their control of Sora – his voice, appearance, and character growth exist independent of the player. The simulation occurs in the player’s ability to accept the conceit of the game and empathize with Sora, seeing the worlds of Kingdom Hearts through his eyes.

It would be easy to assume that since Kingdom Hearts is an action video game, it should also fall under agôn, or competition. After all, when we complete a video game, we tend to claim that we have “beaten the game”, winning a competition and emerging victorious. In the main storyline, one could argue that the player is competing against the various computer controlled Heartless Hordes and boss fights, leveling up until Sora bests the final form of the final boss. They are then rewarded with knowing how the (first installment) of the story ends, after which, they reboot the system to finish up any end game content that they’ve missed. The competition would hinge upon the player’s hand dexterity and reflexes.

However, one could also argue that the player is merely solving puzzles laid by the developers rather than competing against the computer. Just as Sora is limited in his movements, the game is programmed to spawn x number of y types of enemies at z time and b place. Each enemy has certain strategies that can be used to take them down. The game is designed to be finished, unlike Pong or Space Invaders, which are designed to be played until the player definitively wins or loses. As previously mentioned, Sora can’t definitively lose – he can only be sent back to a previous checkpoint or save state. Furthermore, unlike both arcade games, there is no chance of a high score in the original Kingdom Hearts, no official way to compete with your fellow video game enthusiasts.

The trickiest bit about definitively categorizing Kingdom Hearts is that it requires the player to subscribe to the game’s main conceit. In order to truly be mimicry, the player must empathize with and temporarily embody Sora rather than just puppet him. In order for the above agôn interpretation to be valid, the player must suspend their disbelief and believe that they are competing against the enemies that the game puts forward.

Or, the player can take the rules and constraints of the game and play their own way. Speedrunners can make the game purely agôn by choosing to ignore the story completely and compete with others in order to see who can complete the game the fastest. Imaginative players can indulge in pure mimicry by abandoning the plot progression to explore and role play their own stories in the existing locations. The video game itself can become the playground on which players formulate their own games. I would have loved to have heard Caillois’s thoughts on that.