Parallels

Games and Ph.D. Science Have a Lot in Common

Hello everyone, welcome to a very special section of The Impact Factor. When I started this blog I had high hopes that I could pull in my specific perspective as a biomedical scientist in the discussion of video games. As I am now many months into doing this, it’s clear that direct translation isn’t the font of content I thought it to be. I, however, know games and science to be intrinsically related. I can feel the parallels. So I took it on myself to abstract my experiences from graduate school to look for narrative and thematic threads that have shaped my time working towards a Ph.D. And voila. The similarities between Ph.D. science and games took form before my eyes.

Parallels will be a series of articles that explore the similarities I observe that exist between my two worlds. I'll post them in my main feed, of course, but this page will serve as a means to view the archive all in one convenient place.I hope you all find this as interesting as I do. The journey continues.

Overstuffed

Article

Abstract: Abstracting my experience as a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical sciences helped to highlight unexpected parallels between video games and research science. In recent years, the two have become increasingly overstuffed with content. In science, heightened data demands have led to overlong and often diluted manuscripts. In games, the community’s demand for more had led to experiences with artificially inflated completion time and undercooked content. More is better, except when it’s not.

Sometimes it bums me out that I cannot directly translate my experience as a biomedical Ph.D. scientist into my perspectives on games more often. It would be great to link games to phosphorylation events in signaling cascades. Or to a recent study found that mammary epithelial cells throughout organogenesis develop tools for immune evasion as part of ductal elongation, which may correlate with the body’s difficulty to combat breast cancer.

As I get further into my thesis project, direct parallels between what I think about and work on becomes increasingly detached from a generalizable foundation. When I started this blog I had high hopes that I could pull in my specific perspective as a biomedical scientist in the discussion of video games, but as I enter my ninth month of doing this, it’s clear that direct translation isn’t the font of content I thought it to be. I, however, know games and science to be intrinsically related. I can feel the parallels. So I took it on myself to abstract my experiences from graduate school to look for narrative and thematic threads that have shaped my time working towards a Ph.D. And voila. The similarities between Ph.D. science and games took form before my eyes. That brings me to the topic at hand.

This doesn't scream video games to you?

You ever read a scientific manuscript and get to a point where you ask yourself, “Just how many supplementary figures are there going to be?” Or “Well I guess I need to be an expert in molecular, systems and cellular biology to really understand what all these data mean.” What about when you’re playing a video game, have you ever thought, “I feel totally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things there are to do.” Or “I’m 20 hours in, just another 80 to go to beat the game!” It might not initially look like it, but these two feelings share a common foundation.

We currently live in a time in which video games and research science are overstuffed. Packed to the brim with content. For their own reasons, each believe that more is better. I’m here to say that isn't always true. Not for either.

Let’s talk about the science side of things first. Getting your research published is almost certainly harder now than it has ever been. Journals, the place to which you submit your story, are incredibly demanding. Not only does your story have to be novel (i.e. unlike anything before it), but it also has to absolutely packed with data that support your hypothesis. Fair. It’s dangerous to publish ideas without proper supporting evidence. But the content demands have been skyrocketing in the past decade. Scientists have to work for months, even years, to add more and more data into their manuscript during the journal's revision process. The community expects published work to address the question so "completely" that stories often become a jumbled mess of data, an amalgam of several clear ideas into one loosely comprehensible one. And expectations seem to only be getting higher.

I’ll frame this discussion with a recent anecdote from my lab. Due to intense reviewer demands, a post-doc spent the better part of a year adding ideas and figures and data into his original story. Seemingly the more he gave to the journal the more it increased their appetite for supporting evidence. As arduous as his journey to publication was, it’s sadly becoming the norm for research science. What started out as straightforward, but important, study, morphed into a homunculus of three separate stories with dozens of supplemental figures and others in the main text had 15+ panels (that’s a lot). And this is all done in the name of having a more “complete” story, and by the nature of the science community, whose high demands shape this phenomenon.

The data is great but you know there's a problem when
editor demands push you up to 16 panels.

In many ways we’re seeing the same thing happen with video games. The gaming community at large is pushing for more and more. Content demands in games are higher now than they have ever been. Developers, on the AAA side especially, put immense effort into jamming as many things for the players to do into their games. Or work to artificially lengthen the time to complete their titles. Because people demand it. Jeremy Dunham, developer of one of the year’s biggest hits (Rocket League) said in a conversation with the Kinda Funny Games crew that, “The key to video games is to make them fun. And you can increase the chances of having fun by having as many options as possible.” While Dunham is certainly not wrong his mindset, reflective of the industry’s mindset, it has led to video games like research publications to become overstuffed.

MPG might not always be the best idea.

Let’s talk a few examples. 2015 is the year of absolutely massive AAA games. The Witcher 3 has easily 150+ hours of diverse content to tackle. Batman Arkham Knight took what was a 10-15 hour experience in Arkham Asylum and converted it into a 30+ hour game. Metal Gear Solid V is so large that people are reporting only 50% completion after 70 hours of play. And then there’s Fallout 4. Lead producer Jeff Gardiner was quoted saying that, “I have played [Fallout 4] for probably 400 hours, and I’m still finding stuff I haven’t seen.” To say these games are packed with content would be an understatement. Content density doesn’t inherently weaken a game (nor science manuscript), as The Witcher 3 is phenomenal, but it’s still clear the industry is trending towards excess.

Fallout 4 is a game you'll be playing and playing and playing. And playing.

There are plenty of examples where overstuffing a game can be detrimental. First, let’s look at Alien Isolation. As a fan of the Alien franchise and horror games, I was excited for Creative Assembly’s action-adventure, stealth, survival horror foray. When reviews started pouring out, however, one thing became stunningly clear—the game was just too long. I read dozens of reviews saying just how much they loved the first 5-8 hours, but as the game went on for another 12-15 after that, Alien Isolation quickly lost its appeal. While I don’t have any insider information here, I have to imagine the inflated time to completion came about in response to the ‘need’ for more content. The necessity of saying that is game is longer than 8 hours. Crystal Dynamic’s 2013 Tomb Raider reboot is another great example. In their attempt to appeal to as many gamers as possible the studio included a half-baked multiplayer mode that, while it didn’t weaken the excellent single player experience, felt forcefully shoehorned in.

Alien Isolation is a game that by many accounts should not have been 20 hours long.

In both Ph.D. science and games, I understand where this demand for increased content density is coming from. For science, there are many instances in which stories are submitted with glaring omissions or lacking key supporting evidence. Further, highly multidisciplinary studies are reflective of the time, as research continues driving towards more collaborative projects. For games, too, it makes sense. The market is becoming increasingly crowded with new releases. To ensure your best chances at financial success, you need to appeal to as many groups of people as possible, and varied content is one easy way to accomplish this. More games mean less unclaimed consumer money, too. Creating a content dense game that can take hundreds of hours to complete can be presented as an astounding value proposition.

While good in theory, often times this mindset is detrimental to the final product. In science, cramming in as much data as possible can dilute the message of the story. In games, it can lead to weak filler content that artificially lengthens completion time and undercooked modes. No matter where I go, all I see is content density. So when you sit down to play Fallout 4 just think about the scientist who is now 6 months into her resubmission experiments putting together her fourteenth supplemental figure. They’ve got a lot in common.

Evolutionary Imperative: Conserved Building Blocks in Biology & Games

Article

Abstract: Biology and games have a lot in common. Conservation and iteration are at the heart of both. While not necessarily bad, conservation can lead to adverse effects. In biology, utilizing minimal components reduces resource consumption, but results in biological processes prone to perturbations as well as presents serious obstacles to curing human disease. In games, building upon a genre’s well-established mechanical foundation is efficient and effective at creating functional gameplay, but an over reliance on iteration has led to stagnation in new genre creation and a repetitive AAA gaming experiences. Hybrid genres and a rapid evolution in the independent scene, however, has ameliorated some of gaming’s conservation pitfalls.

The world’s most intricate complexity is built upon a simple foundation. When you boil a process, a system, or an object down as far as you can, you’re left with relatively simple building blocks. Blocks that have been long established as fundamental to the existence of the more complicated thing it constitutes. As you my beloved reader know well, I’m a biological scientist first and games writer/podcaster/personality second. I’m always looking for parallels between my two biggest passions, as disparate as they might seem. A particularly stimulating lab meeting prompted me to quickly jot down an idea for parallels. That idea? Conservation. This article will touch on some examples of conservation and potential adverse affects in both biology and games.

Biology, games, and perhaps all life has a conservational imperative—to utilize what has been previously established in a myriad of ways. Speaking first of biology, it is remarkable that life on Earth exists at all. The spontaneous formation of RNA, into DNA, into proteins in the primordial soup of early Earth is one of the most intriguing events in the world’s history. A lot of work (i.e. random events happening in ideal conditions that primed for the formation of) went into the generation of life’s building blocks. All living organisms stem from this origin point: the formation of Earth’s first RNA molecule. The hundreds of millions of years of evolution have operated using life’s most basic building blocks: RNA, DNA and proteins. Human life, if reduced and oversimplified as much as possible, is just the right combination of the three. But even if you were reduce less dramatically, a variety of different biological processes rely upon a simple foundation to enact their complex functions.

You would think would be better images for "primordial soup."
You would be wrong.

My recent experience in a predominantly immunobiology research laboratory offers me a specific perspective on this phenomenon. The human immune system is notoriously complex. The delicate dance between antigen presentation, MHC complexes, myeloid cell recruitment, germinal center formation, and T-cell single positive selection is mankind’s defense against an invasive microbial world. Understanding how our immune cells communicate not only with each other, but with pathogenic material, is essential to our understanding of and fight against a number of human diseases. Studying the immune system is not without its complications, however, not the least of which relates to this notion of ‘conservation.’

Biological processes, immune response included, are based upon the creation, recruitment, and activation of proteins. Cells are made of proteins, signaling molecules are frequently proteins, etc. Proteins are so important that even as recently 80 years ago, scientists believed proteins were the genetic material of life (we now know that DNA is our genetic material). What might surprise you is that there are only 21,000 protein coding genes in the entire human genome.  That’s 1% of our total DNA. Life is excellent at conserving our biological and genetic resources as much as possible—the fewer kinds of proteins you have to make to carry out different functions, the less energy / resources your cells spend to get their job done. It’s about efficiency. What that means in terms of specifics, be they organs or processes or otherwise, is that a large majority of our protein building blocks have multifaceted roles. Sometimes a particular protein will act in a variety of similar ways in different processes, but other times it can be a little bit (read: a lot bit) more complex.

If you think 21,000 proteins is few, what about nucleotides?
DNA is made up of just 4.

There are a number of examples in biology where the same protein can have multiple and opposing functions. This is great for the body as it conserves resources, but can be both confusing and bad for human health. Immune proteins are a perfect example of this phenomenon. Let’s take one of my favorite immune proteins, interleukin-2 (IL-2). IL-2 is a cytokine protein secreted by immune cells, which can bind to specific receptors on immune cells to stimulate inflammatory responses. In fact, IL-2 is just one of many interleukin proteins that are key regulators of immunity, as they bind and activate/suppress immune cell activity. But IL-2 is of particular interest because it was first identified as a potent anti-inflammatory protein. This is important because a number of terrible human diseases occur as a result of an overactive immune system, like sepsis and autoimmunity. IL-2 functions to stop effector T cells, a workhorse cell of the human immune response. It was hypothesized that IL-2 administration would act as a wonder drug for these hyperimmune conditions. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, in nearly all cases, giving patients IL-2 made their hyperactive immune disorders worse. Why? Well, it turns out that IL-2 has more than one function. Sure, it helped to block effector T cells. But it also activated regulatory T cells. Once activated, these “T regs” induce an even more pronounced immune response. Which would then worsen the illness. Ouch. And this phenomenon isn’t unique to immune cells or interleukins. In nearly all biological processes we’ve identified proteins with dual opposing functions, complicating not only our understanding of said processes but also making it increasingly difficult to find ideal approaches to treating human disease. Though biologically efficient, conservation has serious pitfalls.

You do too much, IL-2. Seriously. Too much.

I’ve seen a similar evolution in video games. Certain ideas took hold during the early and primordial days of game development that still act as the basic building blocks of modern games. Games emulate biology in how strongly dependent they appear to be on a limited number of essential elements, whose origins nearly all go back to the earliest days of household gaming. It’s fascinating to see the macrocosm of carbon-based life recapitulated in the microcosm of evolution in a roughly forty-year-old industry. Developers rely on these building blocks in much the same way biology relies on RNA/DNA/protein—they work and they’re efficient. For example, much of the foundation for what a 2D platformer is was laid out in 1985 with Super Mario Brothers and again in 1988 with Mega Man 2. The building blocks for a first person shooter were established by DOOM in 1993. Or adventure games with King’s Quest in 1983. Or real-time strategy with Dune II in 1992. A handful of titles like these indelibly shaped what we perceive of as video games and still serve as the foundation for most games we see today.

Call of Duty has DOOM DNA. DOOM proteins.

Are game developers wrong to repurpose the groundwork laid before them to make their own titles? Absolutely not. That’s nearly as ridiculous as blaming a stomach cell for using the same DNA as a brain cell. The conservation we see in games can be a little disheartening at times, however. Because some of these building blocks are so strong, so good at what they were desigedn to do, we’ve seen decades of the same kinds of games being made. Each game possesses its own identity, sure, but especially on a mechanical level games in the same genre can often feel very similar to play. Gears of War and Binary Domain and Uncharted are all great, but their cover-based 3^rd person shooter combat all left me feeling a certain way. The same way. In part because their gameplay is all based upon the same foundation (Kill Switch, 2003).

Conservation, while not inherently a bad thing, has put AAA game development in a tough (and uninteresting) spot. Big budget game development is totally shackled by established gaming conventions of the past decade or so. While fun and functional, Call of Duty and Battlefield do little to reinvent themselves or the genres they represent. Assassin’s Creed, once established as a brand people care about, has done little more than lightly iterate on the basic 3^rd person action open world foundation since Brotherhood. Exceptions do exist, but playing most AAA games gives the player a sense of sameness, of repetition, that exists in part due to an over-reliance on mechanical foundations.

A little too much conservation, Assassin's Creed. Maybe that is why
the franchise is taking a year-long hiatus.

Innovation on a macro (genre) level has traditionally been slow, in part because games are such an iterative pursuit. Ideas are conserved, ‘improved’ upon, and then re-released. Instead of seeing new genres, you’re much more likely to see new hybrid genres pop up. Or at the very least, that’s what we have seen in the industry recently. There’s the first-person shooter, RPG, loot hybrid with Borderlands and Destiny. The rhythm roguelike hybrid Crypt of the Necrodancer. The rhythm visual novel hybrid Persona 4: Dancing All Night. Or even the real-time strategy fighting game hybrid genre—MOBAs (a topic for another time). These syntheses can create something new, like in biology, though not ‘new’ in the truest sense of the word.

Crypt of the NecroDancer was a combination I had never seen before.
And oh did it work so well.

Unlike biological evolution, however, games have made great strides in the past few years to reanalyze this conservational approach. Game developers, predominantly in the independent scene, have been working to make games that aren’t as reliant on gaming’s long established building blocks. The very definition of games has been evolving, expanding, to include a much wider swath of interactive experiences. Take Robert Yang’s Stick Shift, in which the player engages with homosexual intimacy via operating a car’s manual transmission. Or Fernando Ramallo's Panoramical, a game in which you compose visual art and music simultaneously and in-real time. Panoramical has learned from the long lineage of game development, but has created something we’ve never seen before. As one game personality put it: Panoramical is the future. Many of these experimental games can be found on itch.io, a font of creative work from independent developers who have moved away from conservation & iteration in their titles.

The future? Who knows. But Panoramical has me excited.

Conservation makes sense, but it is not without its downsides. What is efficient and effective may not always lead to the best outcome, be they for human health or creating compelling video games. At least evolution is relatively quick in gaming. Biology is working on that, though. It makes me excited for the future, for both games and biology. There’s a lot on the horizon.