May 18, 2012

Transcending the Toolset

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about the work of Nicolau Chaud, Brazilian freeware developer and psychotherapist, but it’s hard. I’m having trouble for a couple of reason. First off, other people have already pulled it off, and pretty well. In his 2010 write-up on RPS, Kieron Gillen called Chaud’s Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer “the sort of disturbing which one can defend and recommend.“  Wow. The sort of disturbing that you recommend to people. That’s exactly what Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer is. Which leads me to the second reason I’m finding this difficult. Chaud’s work defies every metric games criticism has set up for determining value in games, and in doing so, it highlights one of the biggest problems in games criticism: the fact that it still relies so heavily on metrics. Really, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer is one giant middle finger to metrics and conventional games criticism.

Because the game really isn’t fun. It unceremoniously drags the power fantasy element that’s prevalent in videogames to the forefront by making you play as a man who orchestrates torture sessions and posts videos of them online. And it makes you get to know this character more intimately by telling a love story. You could call the game tasteless, but if you did you’d probably be one of the ones that didn’t play it in the first place. Because while you’re playing, interacting with the thing through the lens of its SNES-era sprites, it just feels too earnest to be tasteless. It doesn’t play like a gag, meant to shock and awe. It feels calculated. I almost want to describe it as the videogame version of a psychological thriller, but “thrill” isn’t what it does. “Thrill” has Saw connotations of popcorn, carbonated beverages and escapism. Dungeoneer doesn’t thrill, it unsettles and unravels. It assaults the player’s psychology. It makes you question your own stability. You think “Why am I still playing this?” But then you keep playing. And then when you’re done, you go and tell someone else to play it. Because Dungeoneer just isn’t like any other game. I’m writing about this thing, months after I played it, and I still don’t really know how I feel about it. I can think of other games that have tried to do something similar, but I can’t think of any that have succeeded. And Dungeoneer does succeed, in its own weird way.

Stick with me as I change gears for a bit. In 2007, Justin Vernon released his debut album as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago. Vernon wrote and tracked all of the songs for the album in a few months while he was staying in some secluded cabin in Wisconsin. That’s interesting in itself, but the thing that really sets Vernon’s recording process apart is that he tracked all but a few of his vocals with a Shure SM57 dynamic microphone. This is unusual because most artists don’t restrict themselves to a single microphone, but also because in contemporary, professional recordings, pretty much everyone uses condenser microphones. Vernon, however, opted for a microphone with a much more limited capacity for reproducing soundwaves. So instead of relying on a condenser mic’s vocal clarity, Vernon constructed a unique soundscape by alternating the placements and angles of his more limited SM57. The result is a distant, murky falsetto that sounds nothing like anything else.

Like Vernon, Chaud takes an unconventional approach. He makes games with RPG Maker 2003. Not only does he take on premises that no one else would touch and approach them with the most audaciously straight face, but he does so with a development tool that’s arguably much less flexible than many of its contemporaries, like GameMaker or Stencyl. And he doesn’t even use the latest version of that tool, RPG Maker VX Ace. He attempts to implement high-concept ideas with a program designed for making retro, turn-based, role-playing games. Furthermore, the games he produces have little, if anything, to do with the sort of game RPG Maker is designed for, aside from their aesthetic.

Every artist is limited, to some extent, by tools and the capacity to use those tools effectively. With Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Chaud has proven that he can transcend the toolset and make his ideas work.The fact that you don’t have to be a whiz programmer to communicate in this medium is catching on. There are lots of gamemaking tools out there, and budding developers could spend a year just trying out different tools with the hope of finding that “perfect fit.” Chaud’s work suggests that if you find a tool, master it and stick with it, limitation can be a catalyst for innovation.

Chaud just finished development on his latest game, (This link is not safe for work or younglings) Polymorphous Perversity, which is in testing and should be unleashed onto the internet any day now.  Chaud’s latest ambition is a sex game, based on Freud’s concept by the same name, which hopes to teach players “about all dimensions of a human’s libido.” Whether or not Polymorphous Perversity succeeds in its ambitions, I think there’s already a sort of victory in Chaud’s efforts to continue to push the dimensions of game development. His games might make us uncomfortable, but that’s precisely why they’re important.

11 Comments

Filed under Robust

Tagged as ,

May 12, 2012

What’s Loved Got to Do with Mechanics?

I recently spotted a thought-provoking aside from the esteemed Harbour Master, Joel Goodwin, over at Electron Dance, where the comments section has recently exploded into a wonderful cacophony of discussion. The thought that particularly sparked my interest was nudged between parenthesis towards the end of the thread in A Theoretical War, Part 2: “I’m torn over whether to call the graphical flair that occurs when you disobey a mechanic or not.“

Now there’s a conversation worth having.

HM is referring to a game he wrote about a couple of years ago called Loved, a browser game about an abusive relationship. Alexander Ocias’ platformer has something to say, like Shift or Continuity or Depict1 or One and One Story, and like its art house platforming brethren, and like pretty much every other videogame ever, Loved heavily relies on visual representation to communicate its conceit. The game is dark and challenging. It doesn’t like you, but you play it anyway.

I’ll bet there’s some super-specific academic definitions of rules and mechanics somewhere in game studies, but as I haven’t seen those articles yet (please link me if you’ve read them) I’m going to stumble along like a stubborn drunk and try to talk about this semantic issue anyway. Besides, I feel like most games writing I read these days calls every interaction between player and game a “mechanic,” regardless of whether or not they’re referring to the player’s interaction with a game’s underlying system of rules or his effect on the visual representation of that system.

So what happens in Loved is a break-down in aesthetic structure that stems from the player’s refusal to comply with a narrator’s demands. The narrator tells you to do something, like avoid a checkpoint or jump into a pit of spikes. If you disobey, then the world you’ve grown accustomed to navigating gradually disintegrates from this clean, black and white interface into a chaotic abstraction of colorful squares. If you take the more compliant route, you’re rewarded with a more detailed, aesthetically pleasing portrayal of your surroundings. From what I can tell, the mechanical rules of Loved remain the same, regardless of whether you obey or disobey. The physics of jumping around doesn’t change, but the way you perceive your environment does.

You could argue that the aesthetic changes that arise from a disobedient play-through increase the difficulty of Loved because they make it harder to distinguish between what you’re trying to jump on and what you’re trying to avoid. So the system of rules that’s under the hood isn’t directly affected, but the player’s interpretation of that system is.

Graphical representation is how a videogame communicates with a player, so those of us who write about games have a habit of calling all of a game’s changeable elements “mechanics,” even if the we’re just talking about an aesthetic response to player input. I did this when I wrote about Flight to Freedom, when I said that its portrayal of illiteracy through blurry in-game text is a “mechanic that really shines.“

Furthermore, we often use the term “game” as shorthand for “videogame,” because videogame is such an awkward term. You feel kind of silly when you say it, and when you write it, it’s not clear if it should be one or two words. In Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Anna Anthropy devotes a section to explaining why the “video” in videogames matters:

“In digital games, the computer keeps the rules. The computer tracks all the numbers. Digital games therefore have much greater control over what information that players have access to, making videogames capable of much greater ambiguity than board or card games. What’s ambiguity good for? Telling stories!” (52)

According to Anthropy, videogames are especially skilled at conveying ambiguity because the player can’t see under the hood to a game’s system of rules. Her analysis implies that aesthetic, the “video” part of videogame, is just as important as the “game” part. Aesthetic is how the game talks to the player. Sure, a game is ultimately a system of rules, but in a videogame, aesthetic affects the player just as much as the underlying algorithms. And it’s videogames that most of us are talking about, right? Furthermore, she distinguishes between “authored” games, which teach us about an author and “folk” games that teach us about a culture. So Loved is an authored videogame that uses aesthetic to communicate its message.

In these things called video games, graphics are our window into a game’s soul. It is through the lens of aesthetic that we interpret a system of rules. Semantics are an easy way to get tangled up in discussions of videogames or folk games or whatever we’re talking about, but it seems like a necessary evil if the goal is to move the conversation forward. After all, we are using words to talk about these things. So should we always talk about mechanics and aesthetic as separate entities? If Loved responds to a player by changing the graphics, do we call that a “(videogame) mechanic?” Any thoughts?

9 Comments

Filed under Concise

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 4, 2012

The Desolate Hope by Scott Cawthon

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why The Desolate Hope got under my skin and held my attention captive for the entirety of its ten hours of gameplay. The first thing to point to would be the game’s aesthetic, which others have done. Adam Smith says the game successfully taps into a certain cyberpunk nostalgia, and that it boasts a visual style “that feels like it went out of fashion years ago while also feeling unique, new and as fresh as a sassy cat.” I agree that the game communicates a kind of perfect dissonance. It looks dark and silly at the same time. It merges melancholy loneliness with wide-eyed, childish exuberance. The disparate tones of the visuals sound nothing alike, but they’re both there: simultaneous, affecting and immediately noticeable. Jeffrey Matulef goes into a bit more detail as to why the aesthetic feels this way, citing the pointedly retro contrast between “hand-crafted 2D backgrounds” and “3D character models and claymation.” This is a different kind of retro than pixel art, as it “hearkens back to the era of games mixing and matching different visual effects before we had homogenized engines like Unreal 3 that made everything look similar.” Hear hear.

Anyway, it wasn’t just Scott Cawthon’s aesthetic achievements that hooked me. The Desolate Hope isn’t just a bunch of pretty pictures disguised as a game. There’s something else there that kept me coming back. You play as an AI that inhabits the mechanical body of an usually sophisticated, yet unpleasant, coffee pot. As the only remaining inhabitant of the abandoned space station, Lun Infinus, with the ability to move around, Coffee has taken it upon itself to keep the station operational. Lun Infinus is inhabited by four magnificent robots, originally sent to the station by humans to run simulations, investigating the prospects of colonization. The Derelicts, as they are called, remain at the station long after they’ve been forgotten by their creators, their simulations deteriorating, as they serve as gods and idols in bizarre, warped philosophical fantasies. The station has enough power left to last fifteen days. Your job is to work with Coffee to enter the simulations and oust a virus that has been plaguing the Derelicts.

That dissonance we were talking about operates on more than one level, as the gameplay is a strange mash-up of exploration, platforming, shooting, and party-based RPG mechanics. The different modes of gameplay distinguish between the different realities in the game world. In the real world, wandering the station’s corridors and the surface of the planet, there’s not much to do except collect a couple of trinkets. You can’t jump around or shoot anything, since this is reality and you’re a coffee pot, and the only other inhabitants of the station are a handful of immobile robots. Once you enter the simulations, you have a greater range of abilities at your disposal, and the various simulations reflect the function and personality of its Derelict. Most of the action takes place inside of these simulations. You’ll platform around, shooting mildly threatening enemies and collecting brightly colored eggs, until you find the virus. Once you find the virus, there’s an abrupt transition into an RPG style boss fight. In this fashion, The Desolate Hope constantly plays with the very idea of playing a video game. Unlike many modern games, it is hyper-aware of its gameness. There are games inside of games, simulations inside of simulations, mini-games inside of boss fights. And the fact that you’re playing as an AI that developed from a computer game is a very hard wink at the exhaustive level of metagaming that’s going on.

In my quest to understand why this game spoke to me, I kept returning to this time I spent an entire night cycle watching a dark planet with orange veins rise up and usurp the horizon. I watched as one might marvel at a sunrise, but it was a sunrise full of blackness. My coffee pot protagonist just stood there against a dark, lonely backdrop, as I watched the planet crawl upward. It made me feel small and full of wonder. I talk and think a lot about how games should make statements, and they should do so with their mechanics. But for me, the most memorable and affecting moment in this game was a moment in which I did absolutely nothing. It wasn’t a cutscene or anything, but it was a moment of passive observation, and it was a moment to which I actively returned.

John Polson mentioned that the game’s day and night cycles contribute to a sense of urgency, and I agree to an extent. During the day, you’re compelled to rush and get everything done, but at night, your tasks only take up a fraction of the time. In addition, you can’t access any of the simulations, the meat and potatoes of the gameplay. Your only task is to wander the surface of the planet and pick up sentimental gifts (toys, clocks, paintings, snow globes) for the Derelicts, which serve the game’s non-traditional leveling system, boosting loyalty and combat effectiveness. You’re only allowed to carry two trinkets at a time, and it only takes about a third of the cycle gather them. So you’re left with this period of time in which there’s nothing to do but watch the environment breath. There’s no pause menu in the game. The night serves as an intermission, a moment of respite, and the game excels at dotting these moments like stars across the landscape of your gameplay experience, jamming them in between all of the game’s overlapping systems. You know you’re about to go do something, but right now you’re content to just stop and look.

Within these intermissions, the game’s mechanics sit in your immediate memory as you drink in your surroundings. The active mechanics frame the moments of rest and fuel your appreciation of the environment. You don’t need to directly engage with the game’s active systems all of the time because the universe encourages all of these different ways of existing within it. The absence of mechanics becomes its own game mechanic, reenforcing the fact that you’re in a videogame by giving you a break, championing the idea that this time spent staring off into space is just as important as all the jumping and shooting and clicking. During the day, you’re expected to get down to business and make your way through the story. The flashy-frantic RPG combat sequences vividly contrast the rest of the game, so in this sense, The Desolate Hope combines different design philosophies, in addition to its genre mash-up. The further down the rabbit hole you go, the more hectic and exciting things get. But eventually, the night always comes, and the horizon always beckons. So no, you don’t always have to be doing something in a game, and sometimes when you’re not doing anything, you pay more attention. Thank you, Scott Cawthon.

4 Comments

Filed under Robust

Tagged as

April 27, 2012

Thematically Thrown Together

I’ve been sifting through Ludum Dare 23′s haystack of games. Indulging at random, I haven’t made much of a dent in the 1,400-plus catalog, but I’ve been having some fun thinking about theme and how it works itself into game design. Ludum Dare games are an interesting species: so many half-baked ideas, feverishly realized, trudging onward through sleep deprivation and frustration to a relative state of completion. It’s even fun digging into the broken entries and trying to decipher what the developer must have been getting at. It really is a window into this chaotic, collective game design soul. It’s like getting to listen to an album before it’s properly mixed and mastered, or maybe even before most of the songs are finished. There’s not much polish, but the idea is still there. The wide range of quality in these games must hinge on a number of different factors: coding ability, artwork availability, motivation, outside constraints, etc. But regardless of quality, all of these games are united by a single theme, which must be both frustrating and limiting from a design perspective. I love reading the postmortems, as well. Here’s one from a guy who works with robots at his day job.

In games, a theme can be literal, metaphorical, or even just referential. It could be applied in a setting, perspective or an interesting design constraint, or it could surface in all of these elements. The theme for this round was Tiny World, and it seems that many of the entries attack it from a player perspective angle. I guess that’s why I’ve seen a lot of 2D views from space with a guy running around on a tiny little planet. I’ve also seen multiple entries that incorporate a shrinking mechanic. Sometimes it’s a direct skill that the player can access, and sometimes it’s applied to the environment as the story progresses. Some folks took on a psychological bent, their games set within the confines of the human mind. And then, some implemented the theme as a characteristic of the protagonist: a scientist who specializes in microbiology or a mischievous elf.

Now that the boring, wordy stuff is out of the way, here are my favorites out of the entries I’ve played so far, in no particular order:

In-Delusion: There’s something not quite right here.

Soul Searchin: You can shrink, but it’s all in your head.

Astro Break: One of those cases of guy-running-around-tiny-planet.

Lililput: When’s the last time you played a typing game that told you to spell badly? FIGHT THE MACHINE.

Mayor vs Aliens: Really takes off, once you abandon your deteriorating plot of land and start bouncing between aliens.

8 Comments

Filed under Concise

Tagged as , , , ,

April 23, 2012

A Game About Slavery

In a recent post on Play the Past, entitled Playing the Powerless in Videogames about the Powerless, Mark Sample poses the following questions: “What are the limits of playing the powerless? What is lost and what is gained in portraying—and playing—a situation that has been well represented in other media? And what considerations should developers and players alike have with regards to responsibility and accountability?”

Sample asks readers to use Flight to Freedom, a free browser game, as a reference point. Flight to Freedom is part of a compilation called Mission US, which aims to “immerse players in U.S. history content through free interactive games.” In Flight to Freedom, you play as Lucy, a 14-year-old girl who escapes a plantation in Kentucky, a slave state, and journeys to the free state of Ohio. The game seems to target a middle-school age demographic, providing an alternative to traditional textbook approaches to learning. It’s geared for a classroom setting. Throughout the game, the player is given a series of choices meant to encourage debate and analytical thinking, instead of fact-memorization, and there is a significant variety of outcomes.  The Mission US website cites a study showing the game has been successful in facilitating this kind of learning.

I could provide short answers to Sample’s questions in the comments section of his post, but my immediate instinct is not to provide any answers, but to burden the discussion with more questions. What Sample’s post did for me is spark internal dialogue and allow a number of related questions I’ve been wrestling with for a while to resurface.

  • Can games portray victimization without trivializing the victims?
  • Does the portrayal of a historical atrocity as an obstacle that can be overcome trivialize that atrocity?
  • Even if it does, is it equally insensitive to portray an atrocity as insurmountable?

Any work that attempts to communicate the experience of something as abhorrent as slavery in the American South faces steep odds. Slavery is a thing that defies logic. The words we use to attempt to describe it feel meager and flimsy because it eludes the grasp of human language. Flight to Freedom takes on the unfortunate duty of relating something that defies communication. Sample’s questions are excellent because he accepts that videogames have limitations at face value. This may seem like an obvious thing to accept, but since games can encompass so many different forms of expression (prose, poetry, drawing, animation, interactivity), it’s easy to get swept away in their potential and forget that there are some things games just aren’t very good at. Getting better at recognizing these limitations could prove enormously liberating, as developers learn to work within and around them.

Flight to Freedom is a point-and-click, graphic adventure that allows players to explore and make decisions from Lucy’s perspective. The presentation includes competent voice-acting, artwork and animation and implies a kind of personal connection. The game could have opted for something with more distance, but instead makes it clear that it’s not just a vocabulary quiz or memorization game, or even a resource management exercise like The Oregon Trail, though all of these elements are present in the complete package. The game tries to invest players in the plights of its characters by allowing them to make affecting choices, just like you would in something like Mass Effect. Flight to Freedom is not a difficult game. Most of the gameplay involves selecting different dialogue options, clicking on things and deciding where to go next. The game offers some moderately trying dilemmas and setbacks throughout Lucy’s journey, but despite its attempts to facilitate some sense of emotional investment, the experience remains starkly impersonal. The result is something that’s not particularly affecting but just engaging enough to provide a nice distraction from your standard middle-school history textbook.

Empathy would be an enormously helpful, if not essential, emotion to tap in creating an experience that allows one to “play the powerless.” Empathy is one of those things that videogames aren’t very good at, even though it seems like something they should be best at. In games, the protagonist is supposed to serve as a vessel, through which the player is transported. But empathy is a difficult thing to convey. Humans are pretty cynical, so it’s not an emotion that can be taken for granted. Cart Life is a game that understands empathy, intentionally frustrating the player with time constraints and lack of direction. The characters are exhausted, yet resilient, and the same is expected of the player. Empathy is the result. There’s this nagging insecurity that keeps most games from even taking a stab at this kind of mechanical connection. They’re terrified at the idea that we might fail to figure out how to do something for ourselves and just give up. As a result, we’re coddled and given limited access to the compelling results that well-executed failure or hard-fought victory can produce. Granted, Cart Life is a game for adults, and it probably wouldn’t go over too well in a middle-school classroom, but maybe there’s a happy medium somewhere.

There’s a mechanic in Flight to Freedom that really shines, or perhaps it’s just its potential that shines. Lucy’s illiteracy carries over to the player. When you pick up a letter or look at a flier, the text appears blurred and illegible. The player can improve literacy by making certain choices and clicking on highlighted vocabulary words within conversations. The ability to read text is something that nearly every person familiar with this sort of game would take for granted. Flight to Freedom uses this expectation to create a sense of vulnerability. When you see one of these walls of text, you can make out just enough letters to begin to speculate on what it says. The effect is maddening. It drives home the idea that literacy is power, and the withholding of this power is part of what perpetuated the institution of slavery. The literacy mechanic is closer to the game’s periphery than its center, and I can’t help but wish it were more heavily emphasized, or that the game had incorporated more elements like it.

In Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison, the protagonist, Sethe, chooses to murder her children to prevent their recapture into slavery. Throughout the novel, Sethe is haunted by her past and her daughter’s ghost. In a foreword, Morrison writes about her approach with Beloved: “The figure most central to the story would have to be her, the murdered, not the murderer, the one who lost everything and had no say in any of it. She could not linger outside; she would have to enter the house. A real house, not a cabin. One with an address, one where former slaves lived on their own. There would be no lobby into this house, and there would be no “introduction” into it or into the novel. I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population–just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense.”

Morrison intentionally deprives readers of a clear introduction into the world she presents. She wants her audience to feel “kidnapped,” in order to better relate to the characters. She takes expectations of how a novel is supposed to introduce itself and uses them against the reader, and as a result, the reader feels confusion, discomfort and eventually empathy. So there’s the impersonal exposure to slavery that we get from textbooks, which Flight to Freedom does pretty well, and then there’s Toni Morrison’s portrayal. Morrison’s slavery is a dense, suffocating cloud that follows its victims even after they’re no longer under the institution’s direct supervision. Faced with something like that, one can only feel powerless. I have many, many hours of playing videogames under my belt, but I can’t think of one moment in a game that made me feel “kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment,” even though games specialize in making us feel like we’re in another world. If a game wanted to achieve some sense of “playing the powerless,” then Morrison’s approach could be helpful.

So why are we talking about Toni Morrison in the same breath as Flight to Freedom in the first place, when the end goal of this game clearly isn’t artistic merit? It would be reasonable to call that an unfair comparison because it is. Beloved is a personal, challenging literary work, while Flight to Freedom is an educational tool; an interactive textbook. I hope I don’t come across as saying “Look at what Morrison does! Why didn’t this game do that?” My hope is simply to continue and encourage the dialogue that Sample initiated. “It’s not a game” is an expression we use to mean “It’s not trivial.” The expression emphasizes the fact that we’re talking about something serious, so in a way, a game about slavery defies an indoctrinated system of logic. Most games are power fantasies about starting from nothing, mastering a set of skills and emerging the victor. Powerless still feels like something that contradicts the medium. But is the power fantasy something truly inherent to the medium, or is it a limitation we’ve placed on games by thinking about them in a certain way?

Flight to Freedom doesn’t really challenge this notion because it doesn’t try to make the player feel powerless. In the first few minutes of the game, you’re presented with a check-list of tasks and allowed to complete them in any order. This list is comprised of Lucy’s day-t0-day chores around the plantation, as well as some personal assignments from family members. On plantation chores, you’re given the option of cutting corners or doing a thorough job. On my first chore (doing the wash), I elected to do the job well in order to test out the system. Would the game make me choose between family and plantation owner, or would it let me please everyone? After finishing the laundry, I was confronted en route to the next chore and scolded for working slowly. From then on, I cut corners. Before long, I was rewarded with a “Resistance Badge” and an encouraging message.

The game clearly encourages resistance. There’s almost a sort of can-do attitude that permeates the atmosphere. The subject matter is as bleak as it gets, but there’s not much bleakness in the game’s bright, colorful presentation. I had to make some tough decisions but completed the game without making any real sacrifices. I felt vulnerable at times, but never powerless. The game’s title implies victory before you even start playing, and the badges you earn throughout the game aren’t just for decoration. Once you complete all five chapters, an Epilogue unlocks, and you can use the badges to affect Lucy’s fate. If you make all the right choices, it’s implied that Lucy lives a rewarding life to the end of her days. It feels problematic to criticize the game from this angle because the approach it takes is probably necessary for the story it wants to tell. And it’s not as if all slaves were completely powerless. They were oppressed, but they found ways to resist. Sure, the game could have more heavily reinforced a sense of powerlessness, but to what end?

There’s a comment in one of Sample’s earlier posts that asserts “for better or for worse, no one really wants to play a hopeless game.” It’s an interesting point, and it might be true. Last month, the Brainy Gamer examined a project in which developer Margaret Robertson failed to deliver a game that was supposed to address an immensely serious topic. The game was meant to serve as a companion piece to Dreams of a Life, “a documentary about a woman named Joyce Vincent who died in her flat and lay unnoticed there for three years, her television still on.” Robertson said that the failed project “wasn’t really a project about death, but about ‘a death,’ which is a much harder thing.” As Robertson suggests, perhaps it’s an issue of specificity; of biography verses history. When it comes to tragic historical and current events, perhaps games should only work in broad strokes. Playing as a fictional slave isn’t inherently problematic because a variety of outcomes are historically plausible, but allowing players to alter the fate of Frederick Douglas or Harriet Jacobs is another matter entirely.

For the sake of coming full circle, I’ll return to Sample’s original questions:

  • What are the limits of playing the powerless? Games generally present an experience in which players can learn a skill set, master it, and eventually achieve victory. But confined within certain circumstances, skill, persistence and determination just isn’t enough.
  • What is lost and what is gained in portraying—and playing—a situation that has been well represented in other media? What is lost is a sense of complete authorial control. What is gained is player agency. 
  • And what considerations should developers and players alike have with regards to responsibility and accountability? Developers and players might consider that certain topics defy logical systems, and in some conditions, a traditional, clear-cut “win condition” might not be appropriate. Some problems can’t be solved by leveling up.

In Beloved, Sethe’s memories are complex. She is haunted by the memory of “Sweet Home,” the plantation where she used to live and work, its “shameless beauty” sprawled out before her: “It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.” Sethe remembers a beauty that is full of ugliness. We expect games to be logical, and if their systems don’t appear logical, then we consider them poorly designed. But some experiences defy logic. Most works that deal with these sorts of issues include some redemptive quality. If a game’s win state could be presented in a way that felt less like victory and more like finding that redemption or glimmer of hope, then perhaps it could start to address this issue of “playing the powerless.”

3 Comments

Filed under Robust

April 13, 2012

The Mysterious, Mystical Molydeux

“You are a Pigeon who must go around the city trying to persuade business men not to jump off buildings by retrieving items from their home.”

A Serious Jest

By now, it’s a story that’s made the rounds: There once was a game developer, called Peter Molyneux, who was very serious about his games. Molyneux had many fans, but one came to love him so much that he decided to make a parody Twitter account in his honor. The account was for laughs, of course, but the Fan took it quite seriously, and it was a great success. This entity came to be known as Molydeux, and eventually, Molydeux became so popular that people began to mistake it for the real Molyneux. As a result, Twitter became nervous and suspended Molydeux’s account without warning. The people were heartbroken, as was Molydeux, but soon, Twitter came around and reactivated the account. The people were ecstatic, so inspired by Molydeux’s resurrection that they organized a game development jam in his honor. In a single weekend, hundreds of games were made, all thanks to some thought-provoking chuckles inspired by the mysterious, mystical Molydeux.

Molydeux is one of those rare jokes that’s so good it has turned into something else. It has become a force that straddles the line between an idealist’s passion and a fool’s hyperbole. It inflicts creative types with bouts of amusement and then inspiration. By telling a good joke, Molydeux has managed to become something important.

Context and Perspective

From what I’ve gathered, there are two schools of freeware game development:

  1. It’s done when it’s done, no matter how long it takes.
  2. Just make it work as quickly as you can.

Molydeux’s brainstorming sessions lend perfectly to the second school. Of course, its ideas are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, but the philosophy is still strong enough to create genuine inspiration. Many of Molydeux’s game ideas simply present an unusual premise, “You are a scarecrow in a world with just 1 bird,” implying that once you’ve got an interesting premise, you’ve got an interesting game. The mechanics can challenge the player’s intellect, but the premise will provide emotional context. Molydeux suggests that it’s not enough to settle for the same, tired settings. Sure, we can have games that reward us in a purely mechanical sense, but we need to move beyond that.

Sometimes, it feels like the philosophy is about upending the way we think about narrative structure in games: “Game in which you create the end cinematic. Then you work your way from the start of the game to make a perfect connection into that ending.” Don’t just play to get to the cutscene. Start there, and then do everything else. If you fail to lead up to that cinematic, then maybe you’ve won, in a way.

Perhaps, more specifically, the philosophy is about perspective. Games should let us defy the roles we’re expected to play. “Have you ever played a racing game and wanted to play as the road rather than the cars? I know I have…” You’re the narrator, so you should be able to narrate the experience of absolutely anything, be it animal, mineral or vegetable. According to Molydeux, game developers shouldn’t settle for typical perspectives. They should extend their reach.

The First-Person Problem

In Episode 26 of the excellent A Jumps B Shoots podcast, Michael Abbot discusses a problem that game designers face: (Around 1:09:40) “Designers can’t ever overcome the primitive first-person nature of every game…that even if you’re playing as Nathan Drake, you’re still first-person.” He goes on to discuss how we always narrate our experiences with games in first-person, even if we’re given a fairly fleshed out character, like Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston. If I talk to someone about what happened in an episode of The Wire, I’ll say “Omar did this” or “McNulty did that.” But if I tell someone what went down last time I played Red Dead Redemption, John Marston may frame the narrative, but I’ll end up talking about myself. John Marston said some stuff in a cutscene, but I’m the one that hogtied everyone in town. John Marston had nothing to do with it. It’s the nature of the medium.

The Molydeux philosophy takes this inherent, first-person “problem” of game narrative and attempts to approach it from every conceivable angle. “Imagine you’re a dove. Or a teddy bear. No wait, a punctuation mark! How about a single tear, running down someone’s cheek?” Theoretically, you could narrate the perspective of a tear or a punctuation mark with words, but this approach would quickly become befuddled. The interactive experience is a more effective way to communicate this sort of perspective. Molydeux’s jam suggests that first-person doesn’t have to be the problem with game narrative. It could be the solution.

4 Comments

Filed under Concise

Tagged as , , , ,

April 6, 2012

Epic Sax Game by Pippin Barr

When I first starting playing Epic Sax Game, I thought “Shit, this is really hard.” Then, I thought, “Wait, no, this is absurdly difficult. It’s like the keyboard doesn’t even really understand what I’m trying to tell it.” Then, I finally made it to the Eurovision level, and I was like “Wait a second, there’s a YouTube video?” Then, I watched the video, and I was like “This game is brilliant.”

There’s something beautiful and provoking in Epic Sax Game’s absurd difficulty. The way the notes come in a step too late or inevitably hold out a millisecond too long. It’s a difficulty that highlights the cold, impersonal, yet strangely comforting nature of our internet culture. It’s as if we’re trying to communicate–trying to say something genuine or personal, but all that comes out is this pale imitation of some long-forgotten phrase. See what I just did there? Whenever I find a game difficult, I decide it’s making a philosophical statement. That way, my ego remains unscathed, and if anyone else pops up and says “Hey, I didn’t think this game was that hard!” I can just shake my head dismissively, and sigh: “Sorry man, you just don’t get it.”

But seriously, Epic Sax Game won me over. The difficulty adds a layer of absurd mechanical humor to what would otherwise be a fairly straight-forward wink at an internet meme. The game isn’t difficult in the sense that it’s impossible to get good feedback, as the game is pretty forgiving when it comes to dishing out ratings. What I mean is, it’s nearly impossible to play the correct notes in correct time. In a comment on Free Indie Games, the developer chalked this difficulty up to tech limitation rather than intent: “Sorry! It’s one of those Flash + MP3s things to do with encoder/decoder delay that I simply wasn’t smart enough to fix up. I tried for a while and then figured it worked well enough to still get the idea across.” At first, I found the difficulty frustrating, but now I think that the game is more interesting than it would have been, had it achieved a perfect mechanical responsiveness. Since you’re allowed to play the notes in any order you like, the lack of response ends up encouraging improvisation. Later in the game, I spent most of my time wildly mashing keys or holding chords out for sixteen bars instead of playing the riff I was supposed to, and it was a good time.

The other thing that’s really striking about this game is its premise. It attempts to recreate a viral event, experienced specifically through the YouTube lens. In this way, it reminds me of Rara Racer, a provocative, weird little game that’s difficult to describe. Both games blur the fourth wall by playing with YouTube culture, but they resonate differently: Rara Racer in an unsettling, creepy sort of way; Epic Sax Game in a kind of ecstasy that says, “let’s embrace it.” And while Rara Racer invents a video based on an existing YouTube presence (the “Let’s Play” series), Epic Sax Game invokes two specific videos: The first is a recording of a live performance, which the game recreates as a live performance. The second is a meme, which consists of a clip from the first video that loops for ten hours, and the game reimagines this as a live-streaming, ten-hour internet performance. It all gets very meta. 

Anyway, I’m not sure how the equation ends up looking here, but I do know that the sum of this thing’s parts is brilliant. The game subtly bridges the gap between its fiction and our internet reality (whatever the hell that is). But forget everything I said here. Once you’re done playing, the developer has his own wonderful write-up that you can, and should, peruse.

6 Comments

Filed under Concise

Tagged as , , , , ,