Entraining For Dummies (and Gamers Too)

AUSTIN - The famous scene from 1903's Great Train Robbery, one of the first narrative films, with the leader of a bandit gang firing his revolver directly into the camera.

A shot from Quake, an armored mutant guard rushing toward the player character, shot down, twitching and writhing, inches before reaching the player character.

The screen alternates back and forth between these two scenes, each a few seconds long at most.

Gunfighter. And Quake. Quake. And gunfighter.

While the alternating images go through their repetitions, Quake and gunfighter, gunfighter and Quake, Brian Moriarty talks about entraining.

"The word has its origin in the Middle French verb, entrainer," Moriarty says.

"It means to draw along.

"To induce into a rhythm.

"To coax into a flow."

(My dictionary defines entrain as "to pull or draw along after itself.")

Moriarty is cofounder and creative director at Mpath Interactive. Author of three of the original Infocom prose adventures - Wishbringer, Trinity, and Beyond Zork - and of the graphic adventure Loom, Moriarty manages and advises on creative issues at Mpath (as well as "evangelizing and giving speeches").

His entraining presentation was given last week at the recent SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas (as well as the International Game Developers Network Roundup, which preceded the conference).

The goal of the presentation, he said, is to "offer game designers a curious and hopefully useful way to think about the significance of what we do. Entrainment seemed like a high-level, nonconfrontational way to talk about the possibility that the games we build have real and mostly unknown effects on players."

He set out to put together a lecture on computer game violence and its effects, but he came to think that a lecture of that sort arose out of a feeling of snobbery. As he put his Great Train Robbery-Quake clip together and started ruminating and meditating on that alternation of images, his thoughts began to turn in other directions.

His company, Mpath, provides a conduit for "massively multiplayer games." And as he began to think about the concept of the multiplayer game - as associations and connections started firing in his brain - Moriarty found himself thinking of Crazy George Henderson.

Crazy George Henderson was a fan of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. He would dress up in outlandish costumes and wander the aisles of Oakland Coliseum as an unofficial A's cheerleader, working to pump up the crowd. According to legend, on Oct. 15, 1981, in Section 331 of Oakland Coliseum, Crazy George Henderson created the most massively multiplayer game of all - one played in sporting stadiums the world over. On Oct. 15, 1981, Crazy George Henderson is credited with inventing the Wave.

And even as Moriarty spins the tale of Crazy George Henderson, the images alternate. Quake. And gunfighter. Gunfighter. And Quake.

"As an example of user-friendly game design, the Wave is exquisite," Moriarty says. "Nobody has to teach you the rules. Anyone over the age of two, of any nationality, can understand the Wave just by looking at it for a few moments. The goal is equally simple and obvious: Keep the Wave moving. It's a pastime that requires no experience, no special equipment, and very little skill. A game that gets better as more and more people join in. A game that everybody wins.

"These would be desirable traits for any game intended for a mass market," Moriarty says.

Which, in a sense, brings Moriarty back to the question of violence in computer games. Is the very violence prevalent in so many of today's computer game titles one of the factors keeping them from massive popularity on the scale of the Wave? Or on the scale of hearts or other card games, which Moriarty says Mplayer added reluctantly to its site, is it the absence of violence that prompted those traditional games to become one of the site's most popular features?

The Quake-Great Train Robbery alternation of images splinters and fragments, becoming a kaleidoscope, a pattern of shifting color and form.

"My suggestion," Moriarty says, "is that if multiplayer games are not inconsequential, but actually serve as meaningful lessons in how to get along whether we intend them to or not, we ought to be designing them with care and awareness."

Nobody really knows the effects that computer game violence has on gamers, Moriarty says, or the effects that playing "massively multiplayer games" will have, or the effects that violence in multiplayer games will have.

But it is worth thinking about. At least it is for Brian Moriarty.