Jason Rohrer on The Castle Doctrine, Self-defense, and His New Project, Part One

Jason Rohrer is programmer, writer, musician and game designer, husband, and father - and games are a medium through which he explores life, death, and at least a few of the human foibles in between.

Jason and Cat talk about The Castle Doctrine, at its simplest a home defense and robbery MMO, what he values in game design, and his next project.

CAT: More and more of the “gaming population” are parents, can you talk about how having a family affects the games you make?

JASON: Becoming a parent was basically the "it" moment for me in terms of becoming an artist.  I had led a pretty boring and emotionally even life otherwise.  Hadn't been to war.  Hadn't done Peace Corps.  Hadn't traveled much.  Hadn't been the victim of crime.  Been in one car wreck.  Been in a rock band.  If I compare my life history to the history of the artists that I really respect, it's like I have nothing to draw on, by comparison.  I mean, really, what was I going to make art about?  What did I have to say?  But out of all my game designer colleagues, I either had kids way earlier (at 26) or had more kids (three) than all of them.  Having kids brought the bigger picture of my life into focus, made me re-interpret my own childhood and my relationship with my own parents, and pushed me into actually growing up.  My third child was born into my hands an hour before the midwife got there.  I guess this is it:  I'm not a kid anymore.

Three of my first four games were about parenthood, and what parenthood made me think about, in one way or another.  Many years later, I came back to some of those same themes, albeit through a newly-darkened lens, in The Castle Doctrine.  And yes, I think that as the player population ages and has these experiences too, there is a growing hunger for games that address some of the powerful feelings that people like us are feeling.  That's part of the reason that I started making games - I was looking around the game landscape as an almost-thirty parent and finding very few games that resonated with me thematically.

CAT: I was in the room for the first transfer of Chain World. For me, Chain World is obliquely representative of your work - deceptively simple and with a life of its own. So… I’m going to leave it at that. But, hey! You did leave a titanium board game buried in the middle of the desert. Anyone happened across it or is the clock still counting down 2699 years?

JASON: I've heard no reports of success.  I know that at least two of the coordinate sheets were eaten by an audience member and were likely passed in the women's bathroom of the W Hotel lounge.  A successful boardgame-finding expedition may thus have to start in the bowels of the San Francisco sewer system with tongs and a strainer.

CAT: And you never played the game. Are you that confident or indifferent that your most patient of legacies will be, well, good?

JASON: Well, not THAT confident.  I did design an AI to play the game against me, just to make sure that the game wasn't trivially broken.  It seemed to be pretty solid.  It's actually not that hard to design two-player turn-based strategy games that are deep and interesting.  The hard part is making a game in that space that isn't just a slight variation of some other game.

CAT: …and that people, that particular piece of desert, will be around then?

JASON: I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that where I buried it was way above sea level, and even if it flooded, it probably wouldn't get washed very far, being a big, heavy chunk of metal, so the coordinates would probably still hold.  What are the other ways a desert could vanish?  Overgrowth of rain forest?  Tree roots will hold it in place.  Human development?  Nevada is a pretty forsaken place, so that's kind of a "hell freezes over" scenario.  But lets say they decide to build a casino or whatever in that spot.  Here's hoping that the backhoe operator notices a "clang" and then a gleam of metal in his or her bucket.

http://s2.n4g.com/media/11/...
From The Castle Doctrine, going robbing

CAT: The Castle Doctrine is about building defenses and breaking them down, but it’s also about the one thing I think all gamers like to do: break things. Breaking in, breaking the game (I’m thinking 8-Bit combination locks)… are there ways this played out that you didn’t exactly expect or want?

JASON: There was quite a bit of that, from within-the-rules game-breaking stuff like the 8-bit combination locks, which I scrambled to fix, to various kinds of hacking and cheating.  I was able to fix all of the detectable breaches, but the undetectable ones, like giving yourself a slight advantage through the use of multiple paid accounts, were impossible to fix.  There are other vulnerabilities in the game that are fixable but would require a huge amount of work, like a complete overhaul of the whole game, to fix.

As a pathological perfectionist, many of these things kept me up at night for quite a while.  But of course the game is about supposedly-secure systems and how no security is truly unbreakable (the early 8-bit combo lock exploit broke the game by making effectively unbreakable security).  The game itself induces paranoia in players.  The fact that the game software may have these vulnerabilities that are being quietly exploited by some players introduces a level of meta-paranoia which is nicely fitting.  I've received dozens of reports documenting "a robber who knew too much and must be cheating," but all but a few of these were the result of coincidental patterns in static and paranoid minds playing tricks on their paranoid owners.

CAT: The real blood rite, true initiation, in The Castle Doctrine is death by your own defenses. How does this reflect real-life home defense efforts?

JASON: After my wife was attacked by a dog, we started carrying pepper spray.  On the few occasions where I actually tried to use it on a dog, it missed the dog and blew back in my face, leaving me blind, choking, and screaming.  

It's impossible for me to tell this particular story without inducing laughter from everyone, and it is very funny.  Human folly is funny, and there's actually a lot of this kind of emergent, dark humor lurking in The Castle Doctrine.  "Oh wait, I just got eaten by my own pit bull."  I mean, most people probably don't want to admit that they're laughing, and you don't see a lot of reviews that say, "I've never laughed so hard."  But if you watch lets-play videos, you'll catch people.  It's an uncomfortable laughter, for sure - and that makes it all the more interesting.

Returning to your question:  all security has a cost.  Sometimes the cost outweighs the potential benefit.

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What would you choose to kill a pit bull?

CAT: I’ve heard you speak about some of the fears, however rational, that fed the idea of The Castle Doctrine. Is The Castle Doctrine a rational application of irrational fears?

JASON: The Castle Doctrine is a game about the swirling culture of irrational fear that we have here in America.  I've mostly opted out of that culture - leaving my doors unlocked, not locking up my bike, and letting my children talk to strangers.  I've read the stats and realized how rare violent crime, or any kind of crime, actually is.  Even in so-called "dangerous" places, the statistics make it look almost non-existent.

But the application of statistics in this area is a funny endeavor.  How do you conduct cost-benefit analysis when some of the costs involved are infinite?  I do wear a bicycle helmet, even though some analyses show that to be an irrational choice, especially if we try to measure the costs in finite dollars.  Or, what is the cost of not feeling the wind in my hair?  The wind feels pretty great... hmm...

In the case of the seed inspiration for The Castle Doctrine, my family suddenly *was* a statistic.  At that point, the whole statistics-based business gets even murkier.  Was it irrational to be afraid of loose, aggressive dogs in the future after my wife was bitten by a loose, aggressive dog?  In terms of stats, it probably was irrational.  But there's also a "kick yourself" factor when you're in a situation and find yourself to be helpless.  Like, you only get stuck in the desert without water once.  If you make it out alive, you carry water every time after that, even if you go for decades without getting stuck again.  And the game gives you this scenario over and over, as your house is broken by robber after robber, and each security tape teaches you more about what to do next time to stop them.  Eventually, the list of necessary safety precautions grows so long that it becomes untenable.

But yeah, the game definitely falls squarely on the side of "these things are real, and they're coming for you, and how are you going to deal with them" side of the fear spectrum.  After my family was attacked, I had a small taste of that.  Why not sink as deep into that hole as I can and make a game about what's down there.

CAT: What is the role of fear in-game?

JASON: Fear is what keeps you up at night and makes you run to check on your house in the morning.  Oh, you mean your in-game house?  Which house do you check first in the morning?

Continue reading in Part Two… http://n4g.com/user/blogpos...

Day 16 | Jason Rohrer