Remembering 7th Street: The Virtual Oakland Blues & Jazz game was developed by UC Berkeley journalism professor Paul Grabowicz and architecture professor Yehuda Kalay. Grabowicz, who had been a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, was interested in finding a new way to tell the story of the Oakland jazz scene, which flourished after World War II but was forced into decline only two decades later. In the Fall of 2006 and Spring of 2007, the architecture and journalism departments formed project groups to recreate Oakland, CA not only as a 3D model, but as a game.
You play as a musician looking to make it big in Oakland. The game, built using Torque, recreates the block of 7th Street using models created by the architecture students in 3D Studio Max. The neighborhood is populated with non-player characters who tell bits of the history of the area and send the player on basic quests. The game's script was written by the journalism students and arranged in the familiar fashion of a branching dialogue tree. After talking to "the right people" and buying a special guitar, the player is ready to break onto the scene.
To the benefit of our analysis, Remembering 7th Street is a rare example of a game design project that has been well documented. Grabowicz, Kalay, and the student members of the project have written not only about their research into the area, but the process of constructing the virtual world as well. In a paper on virtual reality and storytelling, they outline the needs of a historical game world as they relate to the theater.
The world, like a theatrical performance, consists of actors, a stage, and the play which guides the progression of narrative. The actors consist of the avatar of the player and the pre-scripted non-player characters (NPCs), the stage is both the historically accurate 3D model of the space and the objects contained within, and the play is the simulation of cultural heritage intermixed with the adventure formed by the game's goals.
Their documentation explains how they arrived at the form of each of these three characteristics. The research involved looking at the space as it currently is, reconstruction of buildings from photographs, the creation of historical characters who had been written about or talked about in interviews, and the stories of how musicians got their start playing the clubs. Attention was paid to the "making of place," those elements that define a specific physical location by social and cultural interaction.
As they write in the paper, "To implement this approach, students in the journalism class wrote a series of interactive narratives, which we called 'quests,' in which the player would interact with NPCs or objects to learn about various aspects of the Seventh Street scene or the development projects that threatened the area." The progression is linear and amounts to what can be describe as a delivery quest. This means that a character in the game gives the player a singular goal to accomplish (now that you have knowledge Y, go talk to Person A about subject X).
This is not an unfamiliar videogame mechanic; not only common in the aforementioned adventure genre, text-heavy games like RPGs rely heavily on this sort of interaction to tell their story. However, this structure gets tiresome quickly if there are no real consequences for the player's dialogue choices. The "play" is merely a matter of selecting the correct option to continue and has no other effect on the world. There are some tasks that require you do things other than talk to NPCs, like play a piano and buy a guitar.
It is not as if decisions were not made without careful thought. In their design document, Kalay and Grabowicz discuss the possible forms their game might have taken. They decided against a simulation game like SimCity because running the neighborhood could have changed the historical trajectory. For this same reason, they also decided against a multi-player virtual world in which players could take the roles of 7th Street residents to interact with each other. This was an important decision because it excluded Second Life, which would have not only provided them the multiplayer infrastructure, but a platform that had 3D modeling and object interaction already built in. Choosing the Torque engine was a concious decision to build on a platform that could import existing 3D models and handle a text-heavy script.
The attention to detail shines in the documentation of the project, but unfortunately falls short in the actual game. Though journalists were doing research and writing scripts and architects were constructing 3D models, there were no game designers on the project to shape the processes, rules, and interactions. Grabowicz wonders, in retrospect, whether it would have been better to have a single group working on the project rather than two teams from different schools. "I think that would have been too cumbersome and not as efficient," he wrote in an email to us, "as creating a general division of labor like we did and then working separately."
Yet when we first played the game as a class, we were immediately able to identify the two groups. The 3D models, though dated, aren't bad and the dialogue has plenty of factual information, but the game never accomplishes the "making of place" identified as one of the project's primary goals. Choosing the metaphor of the theater meant that they put set pieces on a stage and had actors them read lines, but the space doesn't feel lived in.
The problem is that everything in the world feels like it was placed there to service the player. "Place" is not just about the cultural artifacts of the space, it is about what you do in it. These actions are what should comprise the gameplay. As a result, the experience of the space is not differentiated from other dialogue-quest games below (quite literally) the surface.
Regardless, Remembering 7th Street, isn't a failure. It's clear that a lot of thought and effort went into it and, considering the resources of the project, it was certainly a good first step. It points toward the importance of integrating design teams and the value of game designers. I would be willing to bet that if they were able to revive the project, change their team structure, and bring a few game designers on board, the world could indeed become the compelling piece of documentary it aspires to be.
