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The Ugly, Corrupted, Brilliant Games of Michael Brough - Game
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Ridiculous Fishing is almost done!
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On The Church Of Reason And Punk Game Development
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A Mile in Her Shoes: Teaching Transphobia through Video Games
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Reflecting Reality: I Want to Believe
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the Brindle Brothers: Fuck the Holodeck
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The Space That Games Exist In - Distorted Consciousness
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The Games That Never Were: Dead Space hoch 3

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Stagnation, Aufgewärmtes, Sequels: Wer sagt, dass es bei Games nicht noch Platz für revolutionär Neues, für Unerwartetes, Abwegiges oder schlicht: das Unmögliche geben darf? The Games That Never Were ist ein Gedankenexperiment: Spiele, wie es sie nie gegeben hat und so auch wohl nicht geben wird. Mein zweiter eigenhändiger Eintrag in diese Reihe Games Speculation ist ein Sonderfall: Was wäre, wenn Visceral Games den dritten Teil der Dead Space-Reihe nicht dem vermeintlichen Massengeschmack des Actionpublikums angepasst hätte, sondern tatsächlich den Survival Horror von Teil 1 auf ein neues Plateau gehoben hätte? Angst statt Action, Dead Space hoch 3 statt Dead Space 3 - ein Game that Never Was.

Wenn Spieleentwickler selbst öffentlich Designentscheidungen bedauern, läuft etwas schief. So seufzt  der Autor des ersten Teils der Dead Space-Reihe, Antony Johnston, im Interview, dass der Action-Fokus des dritten Teils auch nicht nach seinem Geschmack sei:

… the greater emphasis on big action in the sequels means they’re not really for me. … [The focus on action is] a necessary evil in order to broaden the fan base.

… otherwise you’d just have the same game on a different ship each time, and that’s pretty dull.

Wer sagt, dass Dead Space 3 nicht auch auf originelle Weise den Survival-Horror im Hochglanz-Mainstream neu erfinden hätte können?

Die Fanbasis verbreitern, das heißt in der Logik des Mainstreams immer Orientierung an den Bestsellern - und somit wohl am Dudebro-Gesocks von Call of Duty und Gears of War. Dagegen lässt sich kaum argumentieren, auch wenn man die selbstbeschränkende Einengung auf das immerselbe Rezept und die immerselbe Zielgruppe bedauern und als Hemmschuh für Innovationen kritisieren darf.

Johnstons zweites Argument gegen eine Rückkehr zum Survival Horror des ersten Teils ist allerdings bei näherer Betrachtung fadenscheinig: Klar wäre eine 1:1-Wiederholung derselben Jump Scares aus Teil 1 langweilig - aber wer sagt, dass Dead Space hoch 3 hier nicht auch auf originelle Weise den Survival-Horror im Hochglanz-Mainstream neu erfinden hätte können? Dazu drei Ansatzpunkte.

1. Die neue Schwäche. Slender und Amnesia haben es vorgemacht, wie Horror im interaktiven Medium frisch funktioniert - und die wichtigste Lehre ist jene der Verletzlichkeit. Dazu müsste Dead Space hoch 3 als Erstes aus dem zur schwerbewaffneten Kampfmaschine mutierten Isaac Clarke wieder einen fragilen Menschen machen, der auch Grund hat, sich zu fürchten. Das in der Dead Space-Reihe fantastisch implementierte Interface, das ganz auf HUD-Elemente verzichtet und sich im Spiel stets als logisches Element des Raumanzugs darstellt, könnte man mit großem Effekt auch mal verschwinden lassen - und das heißt keine Gesundheitsanzeige, keine Stasis, keine Objective-Marker. Zumindest eine Zeitlang sollte man auf der Suche nach Anzug und Bewaffnung den Feinden eher ausweichen, sich vor ihnen verstecken oder weglaufen statt sie schnöde wegzupusten.

Dafür dürfen es dann gern weniger Monster sein; Ridley Scotts Alien und John Carpenters Thing kommen gar mit einem einzigen aus. Für mindestens das erste Spieldrittel wäre es also vielleicht auch eine spannende Aufgabe, ohne Waffen oder Anzug einem verfolgenden Necromorph zu entkommen bzw. die Umgebung als Waffe einzusetzen.

2.Reduktion. Es ist schade, dass sich Dead Space 3 auf mehrere Orte verteilt, diese aber dafür nur im Sinne einer Achterbahnfahrt durchquert. Spannender wäre es, sich auf einen Ort zu beschränken - ob es jetzt bekannt bravourös ein riesiges Raumschiffwrack oder eine verlassene Forschungsstation im ewigen Eis ist, ist dabei egal. Die Charakterisierung der Räume, die Set-pieces waren immer eine Stärke der Reihe; Dead Space hoch 3 könnte gut und gern diesen Horrorarchitekturen mehr Raum zur Entfaltung geben und sie vielleicht, wie in Metroid oder Dark Souls, wirklich nach und nach frei erforschbar machen.

Weg mit den KI-Kollegen: Einsamkeit

macht Angst.

Ebenfalls reduktionswürdig: das Personal. Wer braucht die peinliche Love-Interest-Story oder KI-Kollegen, von denen man nach jeder Cutscene wieder getrennt wird? Einsamkeit macht Angst. Lieber einen einzigen Kommunikationspartner im Stil der perfiden AIs wie Shodan oder GladOS.

Apropos Shodan: Die unterirdische Verwandtschaft der Dead Space-Reihe mit den Klassikern System Shock 1 & 2 könnte auch hier eine Blaupause für eine Dead Space-Erfahrung liefern, die  sowohl über eine Wiederholung der Jump-Scares von Teil 1 als auch den Action-Fokus von Teil drei hinausgeht. Klar wäre dann nicht mehr das - eh schon etwas öde - “strategic dismemberment” Hauptspielmechanik - aber wer derart atmosphärische Settings erschafft, dem ist auch eine Verlagerung des Spielprinzips zuzutrauen.

3. Verunsicherte Wahrnehmung. Body Horror, also jene Horrornische, in der “the horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body”, kann weit mehr als nur Splatterzombies in der Schießbude aufzubieten - schlag nach bei Cronenberg. Die Halluzinationsmechaniken des Koop-Modus würden sich perfekt für ein Single-Player-Spiel eignen, in dem die Angst vor der eigenen Infektion ständiger Begleiter ist. Wahnsinn und körperlicher Verfall bzw. grässliche Verwandlung - die Möglichkeiten, die Dead Space hier in seiner Fiktion anbietet, sind spielerisch nicht einmal annähernd ausgereizt.

Und: Warum nicht den Spieler verunsichern, ihn dazu bringen, seinen Augen nicht zu trauen? Warum ihn zugleich nicht viel mehr auf seinen Körper zurückwerfen - durch die Gefahr von Infektion, stärkere Betonung der Survival-Elemente im Kampf gegen Vakuum, Kälte, Verstrahlung? Warum nicht in manchen Teilen den Line-of-Sight-Mechanismus aus Slender benutzen - oder an anderen jenen aus SCP Containment Breach?

Man sieht: Die Ausrede, Dead Space 3 sei zu einer stärkeren Betonung der Action verdammt, weil in Teil 1 bereits alle Register des Survival Horrors gezogen worden wären und nun nur mehr Wiederholung möglich wäre, zieht bei näherer Betrachtung nicht.

Wer “kaum gute Horrorspiele” sieht, ignoriert den Indiebereich: Hier gibt es fast eine neue Ära des Horrorspiels.

So bleibt den Fans des ersten Teils nur ein Was-wäre-wenn und die Hoffnung, dass sich auch im Triple-A-Bereich der Mut zu Experimenten mit dem Horrorgenre durchsetzt. Denn eines stimmt garantiert nicht: Dass es kaum gute Horrorspiele  gibt, wie Kollege Zsolt Wilhelm vor kurzem wortreich beklagte, ist ein Missverständnis. Vielleicht gibt es kaum gute große Triple-A-Horrospiele im (Konsolen-)Mainstream, dem ja auch Dead Space 3 angehört; im Indie-Bereich hingegen hat man durch die Entdeckung der kleinen Form und festes Vertrauen in eine Spielerschaft, die unter “Spaß” nicht nur den Einsatz fetter Wummen versteht, ganz im Gegenteil fast so etwas wie eine neue Ära des Horrorspiels eingeläutet.

Es wäre an der Zeit, dass sich die großen Publisher dieser Lehren aus dem Underground besinnen - vor allem dann, wenn sie wie im Fall von Dead Space so fantastisch geeignetes Ausgangsmaterial zur Verfügung hätten. Survival Horror im Spiel steht nicht an seinem Ende. Ganz im Gegenteil.

Es bleibt die Vision von Dead Space hoch 3 als Game that Never Was. Schade eigentlich.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 21. Februar 2013 - 15:41

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Frontal21 und was man tun kann

Veröffentlicht: 26.02.2013 | von: earlmobileh | Rubrik: Blog

Ich bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass sich der größte Teil von Euch noch ziemlich gut an den Frontal21-Beitrag aus dem letzten Dezember erinnert. Das Thema war Free2Play, die Art der Darstellung hanebüchen und die Aufregung enorm. Keine Angst! Ich möchte jetzt keine schlafenden Raubtiere mit Stöcken piksen und so spät nochmal inhaltlich auf die Sendung selbst eingehen. Nein, mir geht es eher darum, wie eine Szene mit solch einem Unfug umgehen kann.

Da muss ich mich erstmal setzen!

Wer den letzten Dezember in einem Erdloch verbracht hat, kann sich Pandoras Büchse in der ZDF-Mediathek anschauen. Nun fällt jedem. der ein Herz für Computerspiele hat, ziemlich schnell auf, dass in dem Beitrag einige Dinge nicht stimmen. Meinem Bauchgefühl nach sind die Ungereimtheiten zum Einen bekannt und zum Anderen derart frappierend, dass ich sie hier wirklich nicht aufführen muss. Nur so viel: Es ist offenkundig, dass die Frontal21-Redaktion die ihr zur Verfügung stehenden Stilmittel bewusst so eingesetzt hat, dass die gesamte Videospielbranche fürchterlich dasteht. Es wird ein Bild gezeichnet, in welchem die Gamesindustrie gemeinsam mit Spielhallenbetreibern, Kaffeefahrtenorganisatoren oder Chefs aufstrebender Drückerkolonnen einen Dachverband gründen könnte. Dass das Unfug ist, ist klar, dass Free2Play allerdings nicht unbedingt das beste Thema ist, um für die Branche in die Bresche zu springen auch. Gut!? – Los!

Wenn man heutzutage als Frontal21-Redaktion einen solchen Beitrag verfasst, muss man sich eigentlich im Klaren darüber sein, dass das in der leicht reizbaren und gelegentlich noch etwas pubertären Videospielszene zu Protesten führt. Im Hinblick auf die riesige Anhängerschaft von ‘League of Legends’ würde mich eine stille Hinnahme dieser ungerechtfertigten Berichterstattung gar überraschen. Und das Internet war schon immer – auch – Lebensraum für die wütendsten und undifferenziertesten Haltungen, die Menschen einnehmen können, wie Charlie Brooker beispielsweise in seiner Rubrik ‚Points off You‘ humorvoll belegt. Was mich hingegen wirklich etwas stutzig macht, ist, wenn diejenigen Personen sich überdeutlich zu polarisierender Polemik hinreißen lassen, von denen man eigentlich eine gewisse Sensibilität für öffentliches Auftreten vermuten würde. Wie zum Beispiel der GameStar-Redakteur Fabian Siegismund einst in einer Folge des YouTube-Channels ‚High5‘ (ab 8:28):

Logging In…

Profile

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Sterben im All — KALIBAN (You are likely to be eaten by a grue)

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Drei Tragödien von gestern abend:

Ich fliege in einen Nebula, mit meinem Schmuckstück von einem Raumkreuzer, der “Prospero”. Ein Kampfschiff der Slug teilt uns per Funk mit, dass sie uns “abstoßend” finden und wir bitte aus diesem Quadranten verschwinden sollen. Ein Moment der Wut (“Abstoßend, wir? Den Schleimfressen zeigen wirs!”), eine Fehlentscheidung, der Kampf beginnt. Lasersalve auf Lasersalve schneidet in das Slugschiff, unsere Schilde halten, es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit, bis… ah, wieso haben wir so wenig Luft? Ist hier ein Leck? Verdammt, wenn doch im Nebula nicht die Hälfte der Systeme ausfiele. Officers Ryan und Goodman, reparie…

Knirschen, Zischen, Vakuum, Ende.

Wir folgen dem Notruf in die hinterste Ecke des Sektors, aber statt eines havarierten Engi-Scouts wartet zwischen den Asteroiden nur ein Pirat. Der gibt Widerworte, als ich ihm seine baldige Vernichtung ankündige und beamt 7 Mantis-Soldaten auf mein Schiff, die “Fluffy Bunny”. Die Insektoiden reißen meine Crew in Stücke, während der Pirat Rakete um Rakete abfeuert. In meiner Verzweiflung schieße ich eine Smartbombe auf mein eigenes Schiff, demoliere den Schildgenerator, schaffe es aber trotzdem nicht, mehr als zwei der Mantis-Mörder auszuschalten.

Krachen, Zischen, Vakuum, Ende.

Mein bis zur Unverwundbarkeit hochgerüsteter Föderationskreuzer “Killerwatt” fängt das Flaggschiff der Rebellenflotte auf dem Weg zu unserer Basis ab — und beginnt mit einem kombinierten Laser-/Raketenbeschuss, der erst die Waffen, dann die Schilde ausschaltet. Die Rebellen explodieren… aber durch eine unverschämte Wendung im Game-Design rekonfiguriert sich der Feind und erscheint noch mal auf der Karte. Wir greifen auf die gleiche Art noch mal an, aber diesmal beamt das Flaggschiff ein Enterkommando rüber, während es aus vier verschiedenen Waffen feuert und zwei selbstschießende Drohnen aussetzt.

Krachen, Zischen, Vakuum, Ende.

Damn you, FTL.

Update:

Frische Extra-Tragödie von eben. Der Rebellen-Scout greift an, wir sind überlegen. Wir schießen sie fast kampfunfähig, beamen dann an Bord, um den Schiff intakt zu übernehmen. Die Mannschaft des Feindes liefert uns einen heroischen Kampf, aber wir zerschlagen die Medizinstation und attackieren sie auf der Brücke. Da springt das feindliche Schiff einfach weg, mit unserem Enterkommando an Bord — wir hatten es in der Hitze des Gefechts versäumt, die Maschinen lahm zu legen.

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The Ugly, Corrupted, Brilliant Games of Michael Brough - Game

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Michael Brough has produced dozens of fascinating and challenging games, but are they too abstract to achieve mainstream success? Photo: Michael Brough

I’d never heard of Michael Brough when I downloaded his iPhone game Corrypt, and my first impression of it wasn’t entirely positive. It had stark, surrealist pixel graphics and very little animation. After solving the first couple of simplistic puzzles, I found myself hopelessly stuck on an early challenge involving lots of boxes in a cramped room. Frustrated, I quit the game and quickly forgot about it.

But Corrypt refused to go away. IndieGames.com hailed the PC version as the best free puzzle game of 2012, and another of Brough’s games, VESPER.5, was nominated for the 2013 Independent Games Festival’s prestigious Nuovo award for innovation.

What finally snared me was a glowing review of Corrypt penned by Frank Lantz, creator of Drop7 and the director of New York University’s Game Center. “This small game, with its rough edges and its cryptic, self-consuming topography,” Lantz wrote, “will repay the attention you give it a thousandfold.”

I decided to take another look. Corrypt, upon proper exploration, revealed itself to be a brilliantly designed puzzle game, unforgiving and unwilling to accommodate players who refuse to give it their full attention. Peel back one layer, and it reveals another more surprising one. Then it does that again, and again, then it flips itself inside out and laughs at your expectations.

“The way [it] works, you’re not sure if it’s something wrong with the game, or if it’s something intentional,” Brough says. His smile fills my Skype window. “I’ve had people e-mail me saying ‘there’s a bug in your game,’ and then describing it exactly as it’s meant to work.”

Brough, a 27-year-old New Zealand native, makes games that confound players’ expectations. Brough has grabbed numerous awards and captured the attention of the indie gaming community, but many respected developers say his games are too ugly to catch on with a mainstream audience. His games might be too weird, his style too divisive, for him to make any money in the ruthless games business.

Around the time Brough turned 11, his family bought a Tandy computer with BASIC installed. Brough spent countless hours of his childhood mucking about with the programming language, making text adventures and other simple games that he’d share with his parents.

You won’t have an easy time solving Corrypt’s killer puzzles, but surprises await those who do. Image courtesy Michael Brough

While he tinkered with BASIC, Brough often encountered bugs. He’d make a small change in the code, and a game would break in an interesting way. But instead of immediately fixing the error, Brough became fascinated with the bugs themselves.

“The idea that a bug could produce strange and interesting effects,” he says, “is a mythology that I like.”

“If, when something goes wrong, it just crashes, that tells you nothing,” Brough explains. “If something goes wrong and it keeps going, that reveals something to you about how it works, and how the computer thinks.”

With modern hardware like the iPad, Brough complains that the fun of toying around with computers, “that feeling of being at a low level, feeling close to the way computers work,” is gone. For him, the oft-touted “magical” consumer-friendliness of Apple’s devices is a restriction on learning opportunities.

“Now you have an iPad, and you don’t know what’s going on under the screen,” he says. “It’s basically a piece of magic.”

After completing a degree in math and computer science at the University of Auckland, Brough moved to London and began working towards a Ph.D. He landed a decent-paying gig with his university while continuing his scholastic work, but continued making games, including the beautiful, abstract strategy game Vertex Dispenser, which even Brough admits may have been too esoteric. It combined elements of shooters and real-time strategy games with a complex puzzle system, and many players felt overwhelmed. “I just could not get my head around those concepts at the same time,” said one.

Halfway through the Ph.D., Brough burned out. He quit both his job and his schooling, becoming a full-time game developer. He followed his wife, now the family’s principal breadwinner, to Scotland, and has for the previous year worked tirelessly on his games, producing a diverse portfolio of Technicolor puzzlers, roguelikes and multiplayer games.

Take for example Helix, another Independent Games Festival nominee. It’s a space shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars, but without any shooting. Instead, players defeat enemies by carefully flying around them in circles.

Glitch Tank, an iPad game for two players, is an obvious manifestation of Brough’s lifelong appreciation of glitches. Its fat, stark pixel art pops and crackles on the screen, always seemingly on the verge of falling apart completely. Each player’s controls, a panel of four buttons, is unreliable, with new buttons shuffling in and out with use. It plays like a Game Boy cartridge that’s been dropped in a puddle and trampled by schoolchildren, but it’s all carefully, intentionally designed.

Even the game’s marketing seems glitchy. Brough uses the App Store product description space to describe it as “A digital board %ame⚡⌁ Competitive retro action/strate%* for two pla*ers░.”

Zaga-33, a roguelike with permadeath, is much more subdued, although it does its best to confuse players. Each time the game is played, the effects of all its items are randomized. What was once a teleport skill in one game becomes a deadly laser in the next, and a result each playthrough inspires the same sense of careful curiosity that an entirely new game would.

In Zaga-33, it’s not just the levels that are randomized. Image courtesy Michael Brough

These are only a few of Brough’s most recent, best fleshed-out works, though. His portfolio includes dozens of bizarre titles: Babletron 2010, an abstract typing visualizer; Kompendium an entire “album” of tiny two-player games; and Reverse Passage 2: Mother’s Edition, a sort of faux art game that encourages players to “hold Z to feel emotions.”

For years, Brough produced these games in obscurity, but the recent IGF nomination of Vesper.5 exposed an entirely new audience to his work. Brough’s games have earned the attention of some of the most influential people in the indie games scene, and now a horde of accomplished game designers, writers and artists have played Brough’s games.

Brough’s new audience has plenty of praise for his work, but they also have no shortage of criticisms. Some Brough fans think that the aesthetic elements of the games he makes are, simply put, really ugly.

“If Corrypt had more-polished graphics and sound, and were a bit longer,” more people would play it, wrote Braid designer Jonathan Blow on Twitter, who said he found the game’s color palette “hard to deal with” but loved it just the same.

In an otherwise positive review of Zaga-33, Modojo.com writer John Bedford described the soundtrack as sounding like “a drunk man with a synthesizer [rolling] his face slowly back and forth across the keys.” Greg Wohlwend, one of the creators of the beautiful puzzle game Hundreds, advised Brough that if he “worked on the visuals, the game would then be more accessible to outsiders.”

Many indie game makers collaborate with other programmers, artists or musicians to handle those parts of videogame creation, but Brough does everything himself. One of the main appeals of making videogames for him is that they can be a synthesis of all other media.

“I get to do a bit of everything,” he says. “Some design, then programming, draw a few pictures, try composing some music for a bit, yell into a microphone, write.”

Brough feels that his work gains a personal element by having every aspect made by one pair of hands, even if he’s not the greatest artist or musician.

“Sometimes it hurts a little, because I do put quite a bit of thought into this,” he admits of the criticisms of his art and sound design. His main defense of his aesthetic style: “It appeals to me.”

Even so, most of the other developers criticizing Brough’s games are simply arguing that his style is in need of greater mainstream appeal, and they might be right. Despite increasing critical success and a loyal base of fans, Brough has had little commercial success: He’s only sold about 700 copies of Corrypt, he says. His most successful title, Zaga 33, has sold 2,000 copies.

Sales that low don’t generate nearly enough revenue to live on, and it’s a fraction of what Brough was making in his old programming job.

Still, he has his fans, and not everyone is put off by his glitchy, severe style. As one critic put it, “there is something undeniably elegant about Brough’s brand of ugliness, an ugliness that is somehow pleasing to look at.”

Brough says he spent “far too long” (six years, on and off) working on Vertex Dispenser, but it may be his most inventive game. Image courtesy Michael Brough

Some give less backhanded praise to the signature Brough look. “Love the tactical movement, and the graphics are perfect,” one fan wrote on the release page for Zaga-33.

Tell Brough about your experience with his games, and his face splits into a smile that reveals the genuine joy he gets out of his work. Brough isn’t trying to maximize his profits, he’s trying to create something with value for himself and for those who play it.

Well-designed games, he believes, can teach people how to do some things better. By simulating challenging situations, games can teach us about “managing unexpected situations… making good decisions, thinking about the costs of our actions and dealing with the consequences,” he says.

Brough lists the card game Race to the Galaxy, designed by an economist named Thomas Lehmann, as a perfect example of a game that teaches a concept with a useful real-world application: opportunity cost, which refers to the idea that the cost of any action isn’t just the material cost you pay to do it, but also the value of the other actions that you could’ve chosen instead.

Race to the Galaxy, Brough explains, has an exaggerated sense of opportunity cost. In the game, players have a hand of cards, and there are planets which they can settle. The number of cards you can play in a phase is limited. The catch: To play one card, you have to sacrifice another without using it, potentially losing access to it forever.

“I think having played that game helps me when I’m making decisions with opportunity costs in life,” Brough told me.

“Well then,” I respond, “what do you think the opportunity cost of making these games is?”

Brough sat quietly for a moment. “Massive,” he said, finally, with a grin. “From some people’s perspective it’s a terrible decision, but…” Brough shrugged his shoulders. “I think it’s already worth it.”

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Ridiculous Fishing is almost done!

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“I love the Vlambeer guys and everything they do.” - Kert Gartner

Super Crate Box PC Mac

Radical Fishing Flash

The Random Encounter PC

Super Crate Box iOS iOS

Ridiculous Fishing iOS

GUN GODZ PC

LUFTRAUSER Flash

Dinosaur Zookeeper Flash

…more games

submitted by Rami on februari 25, 2013 |

If you’ve been paying attention, you probably followed the development of Wasteland Kings during our participation in the annual Mojam. We’re extremely proud of the $450.000 raised for charity during the whole event and just as grateful for all your support, the nice comments in the chat and your enthusiasm for the game.

However, Wasteland Kings was not all we were working on: while Jan Willem and Paul were jamming away on Wasteland Kings, Rami, Zach and Greg wrapped up something else over in New York: we submitted Ridiculous Fishing to Apple.

This was a long time coming.

On December 7th, 2010, we started on the iOS version of our debut game Radical Fishing. Things started when Brandon Boyer introduced New York City-based conceptual artist and developer Zach Gage to our little Flash game. Brandon put us in touch and with us being big fans of Zach’s lose/lose and Zach being a big fan of Radical Fishing, we decided to work together on iRadical Fishing.

Within the next two months, the three of us got in touch with Greg Wohlwend, back then best known as the artist for Solipskier. He was instantly sold on the project and quickly added to the roster. We finally reached out to Super Crate Box musician Eirik Suhrke to work with us on the project as well. We had an amazing team and our output was far above expectations. This was a project we couldn’t stop being excited about.

Greg immediately sent us the above image: he had come up with an amazing art style based on 45 degree angles. Eirik sent us some amazingly fitting audio mockups. Zach was coding, Jan Willem was spending time on the Serious Sam: The Random Encounter project while designing Ridiculous Fishing and I was working on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter and the usual Vlambeer stuff. Within weeks, the game was fully playable and we were halfway before we knew it.

Obviously, things were perfect like that until six months into the project. The same Brandon Boyer that put us in touch with Zach Gage notified us of a clone of Radical Fishing, and it was going to launch on iOS before we would be ready to launch. We argued, we discussed and we negotiated – but ultimately it turned out the cloners never intended to yield: they admitted to ‘being inspired’ by our game and launched their game to great success. With that, our motivation and progress suffered a blow we didn’t recover from for far longer that we are comfortable admitting.

Progress on the game was slow for months, all of us being demotivated from working on it. We would’ve killed the project right then and there if it wasn’t for the enormous outpouring of support from fans and press alike. Still, opening the project files would just remind us of the critical and financial reception of the clone – and reminded us that when we’d launch, people would just see Ridiculous Fishing as a clone of the clone. We worked on different projects; Zach launched the absurdly succesful Spelltower, Greg worked on Gasketball and Hundreds, Eirik launched Spelunky and we worked on whatever wasn’t Ridiculous Fishing.

There was a small boost in morale when the game was unexpectedly nominated for the Independent Games Festival in early 2012, but even that couldn’t persuade us to work on the game. We had all gained a lot of new responsibilities with our new releases and painfully struggling through the accursed development of a game that’d be received as a clone wasn’t something we had time for.

We almost killed the project, but we couldn’t give up on it either. So it lingered and lingered in the back of our head. We spoke about the dangers of cloning at conferences, we gave interviews to newspapers and television. Ridiculous Fishing wasn’t moving forward, but it was always there. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Ridiculous Fishing nearly ended Vlambeer.

The ball started rolling again after PAX Prime 2012. Zach, Greg, Greg’s MikenGreg partner Mike and I spent a week in a car driving from Seattle to New York to try and revive the game at Zach’s apartment in New York. Over the course of the week we stayed in Manhattan, the three of us managed to push the game forward just a tiny bit.

That turned out to be enough to slowly snowball into serious progress. A few weeks after our stay in Manhattan – or almost five weeks ago – Greg traveled from his place in Chicago to move in with Zach for as long as we needed to finish the game. Jan Willem and I set aside our work on LUFTRAUSERS to make sure no momentum was lost on the project again. Eirik set aside all of his work to make sure the game sounds perfect. Suddenly everything fell into place.

Two weeks ago, Zach and Greg declared the work on their end was done. Jan Willem slaved away for two full time weeks checking up on final progress tweaks, Eirik worked on additional sound effects. Then, during my recent stay in New York City, Zach and I found ourselves staring at the App Store submission screen: a screen we thought we might never see.

So, this is it. No more talking about clones: Ridiculous Fishing is something we’re too proud of to be discussing its value in terms of another game. It’s time to focus on what we made: Ridiculous Fishing has been submitted. We’ll be back with more news as soon as Apple approves the game.

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On The Church Of Reason And Punk Game Development

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26 feb 2013

Last week, I gave a talk at the first ever New York City IndieCade East. Completely unaware of the expertise level of the audience, I decided to try a talk I’ve wanted to give for a while. Besides at venues filled with peers, I often speak at art- or culture-related events with audiences that have little pre-existing knowledge of the medium. This specific talk (which has gone through an absurd amount of iterations before I felt comfortable giving any version of it) is an entry-level explanation of the ideas and core principles of player agency – without using the words player agency.

Obviously, I needed to introduce Vlambeer and thus I ran with my usual slides – Jan Willem and I met in the train to school and pretty much hated each other right away, but found a common frustration in our game design university. We developed a mutual respect, dropped out because we felt we’d learn more just diving into the big bad world with reckless disregard for reality, founded Vlambeer in 2010 and made lots of games since.

After the talk was over there was a short slot for questions – which one person happily did. This person grabbed the microphone and carefully cleared their throat. This was an academic that ‘couldn’t fail to notice my stance on education’ and pointed out that I might’ve missed a tremendous wealth of theoretical knowledge about my chosen profession. The question that followed this quite frankly eye-opening rant was: ‘Do you know what player agency is?’

For some reason, that rubbed me the wrong way: I had spent a lot of time refining my explanation of the concept, catering it towards less literate people in a way that was hopefully both fun and educational. Here was someone who thought the reason I did it that way was because my assumed lack of formal education likely meant that I did not know the words for what I was trying to discuss.

I am not an academic. I make videogames. I learned how to make videogames by tinkering around with game creation since I was six years old. Somehow, I learned running a company by selling computers at an electronics store; by having a game design cloned and dealing with the supportive yet rough media fallout after that; by realizing I had undersold a game during negotiations because the other party instantly agreed to my opening bid; by having our accountant mail us about a few missing forms.

However, I am completely unsure as to how not having a formal education could be considered a limitation of my theoretical knowledge. One doesn’t need a university to read books or get access to interesting papers. Last year, I visited DiGRA out of sheer interest for the academic side of game development. The notion that the only way to knowledge of a subject is through formal education is mind-blowing to me.

Killscreen decided to write an article about my response to the question at IndieCade, which they framed within a context implying academics might not be relevant to our indie scene anymore.

This is equally mind-blowing to me. Many of the indie developers I consider personal heroes are developers that operate on that fine line between academia or theoretical exploration and practical development: conceptual art as many of Zach Gages’ installations or Douglas Wilson’ purposeful exploration of folk games and incomplete game systems being well-known examples of things that have inspired me over the years.

Thus, the whole framing of Vlambeer as a proof that education is inherently flawed is painful. It becomes even more contrived when one realizes that even though we did drop out ourselves, Jan Willem and I have spent a significant amount of our time on workshops, seminars, classes and talks around the world. Less than twenty-four hours before I presented the IndieCade talk that triggered all of this, I was on a stage at Chicago’s DePaul University presenting to a crowd of enthused students about my experiences with starting your own indie studio. A day after that talk, I would be speaking at the Parsons New School of Design alongside Ramiro Corbetta, Davey Wreden and Fernando Ramallo. Another two days later, I would be presenting another business-oriented talk at the IT University in Copenhagen.

For me that question on player agency perfectly illustrated once more that there tends to be a huge gap between academia and practical game developers. It illustrates a mutual feeling of superiority on both sides that results in two parties not seriously conversing on subjects that might push our medium forward. More than anything, it showcases on one side the tendency to disdain of academics towards the ‘simple, thoughtless banter’ of self-didactic developers. On the other side, it lays bare the mistrust of developers for the ‘experience-less self-referring writings’ of academics.

This status quo worries me. On endless occasions, I’ve argued for games to be inclusive of all expressions – and this is no different. Games can easily include punk games and academic exploration, but phrasing it that way would imply that there indeed should be a divide between the two. There needn’t be. They can just be different perspectives, different approaches to the same thing.

It would be absurd to claim that I oppose education. I will happily agree that I am unfit for education as a student. I will without hesitation state that a lot of institutes are falling short of their intended goals. I have not a single regret regarding dropping out. I will heartily recommend anyone who feels similar to how we felt three years ago to get themselves as far away from the system as they can.

Nobody will ever hear me say that in game development, education is a necessity. I’d go as far as to state that I would consider it foolish to say it is. All the same, education not being a necessity does not make it otiose or superfluous – it just makes it something that each and every person should make a conscious decision about.

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A Mile in Her Shoes: Teaching Transphobia through Video Games

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My students playing games at Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching.

I had tried to teach my students in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 100 about transphobia before. When I unwittingly assigned them a classic feminist essay that contained some transphobic language (including an uncritical quotation of Janice Raymond, the use of “him/her” rather than “her” to refer to a transgender woman, and an argument that transgender people fail to subvert gender boundaries), I was furious.

Using my conventionally feminine high-heeled boots (sorry transphobic feminists!) for emphasis, I stamped around the front of the classroom and loudly complained that the author’s arguments were not only conceptually unsound but also completely insensitive to the experiences of violence and marginalization that transgender people face everyday.

But, in the middle of this display of rage, I was worried that my remarks would be reduced to just that: a display, a spectacle that my students could observe but not one that would require their active engagement. As I fumed, my students could just sit back and think to themselves, “Look at her go!” Once it was over, I worried that I had taught them nothing except that transphobic people made me mad.

So, when we came to our dedicated unit on transgender, I made a last-minute change in the syllabus and took my students to Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT) so that they could play Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia, Merritt Kopas’ Lim and Mattie Brice’s Mainichi—three accessible games that allow players to experience various facets of transgender experience, or at least a specific subset of transgender experience.

In sharing my students’ responses with you, I hope to contribute to an ongoing affirmation of the utility of games as educational tools (see, for example, this article by Merritt Kopas). My students had meaningful experiences with these games; the lessons they learned from playing dys4ia, Lim and Mainichi went beyond what I could teach them in a lecture format alone. The interactivity of the video game medium, I would argue, played a significant role in adding this depth to our lesson on transphobia. As my student Caitlin put it, “[the games] gave me a unique perspective that I don’t think I could have achieved any other way.” The interactive format of the class also required me to shift the way I thought about my role as an educator when teaching with games.

I’ll share my students’ reactions to dys4ia, Lim and Mainichi in turn, highlighting both common themes and exceptional insights. If you haven’t played these three games, I recommend that you do so before reading the rest of this post.

dys4ia

My students learned the most about the specific difficulties of a male-to-female gender transition from their experience with dys4ia. Both Rhea and David described it as “informative” while others, like Matt and Laura, described it as an “illustration” of a personal struggle. Beyond simply absorbing this new information, however, my students were also stunned by the complexity of a transition. Jonathan wrote that it was a “long and complicated” process. Mina discovered that “transition” was indeed a suitable label for it because it was not “a sudden, instant happening.” Carl and Caitlin found the game to be “eye opening” in this respect and Bryan found it to be “unbelievable.” Caitlin reported that she identified with Anna as she went through the difficult process of transitioning: “I felt that I was really in the woman’s shoes while playing through the game.”

My students, generally speaking, did not feel like dys4ia was as “interactive” as the other two games but that sense was offset by a heightened attention to the game’s aesthetic choices. Laura noted how “colorful” dys4ia was while Rebekah and Liz enjoyed the “pixelated, colorful stages” and the “retro style graphics.” Ivan, in particular, produced an astonishing reading of the visual choices Anna Anthropy makes in the representation of bodies:

“ … the human body manifests in abstract, disjointed ways, a visualization that captures the psychic and physical segmentation transgender bodies often undergo. Indeed, transgender people are forced to contemplate individual body parts in isolation and sometimes to reject or alter these parts in pursuit of a sense of ‘wholeness.’”

Wow. And I thought I was the teacher.

Ivan reaches the end of dys4ia.

Students also took note of Liz Ryerson’s soundtrack for dys4ia and its symmetry with the subject matter. Rebekah felt that the music created a sense of “lingering confusion and tension.” And Ivan wrote this dazzling interpretation of the crowd noise in the game’s soundtrack:

“The murmuring voices that follow you through the game never crystallize into clear, distinct messages. The content of the conversations that surround you seem inaccessible and perhaps hostile, and the corresponding sense of unease is palpable.”

If the word “dysphoria” describes a sense of unease, discomfort and confusion—and if that sensation is often experienced as an unresolved and sometimes threatening tension—then Ryerson’s soundtrack, with its distinct mixture of quizzical notes and conversational hubbub, was a particularly effective medium through which my students felt something akin to dysphoria.

Lim

My students almost unanimously described Lim as “frustrating.” As Mina summarily observed: “… it was one of the most annoying games I have ever played.” The frustration of being attacked by the blocks in Lim affected at least one student on a physical level. Liz reported that the experience was “super stressful” and “caused me to grind my teeth.” Carl was “freaked out” and “scared” by the sudden attack of the aggressive squares.

Commenting on the group’s frustration as a whole, Ivan located some sort of catharsis in the mass playing of Lim. Recalling that, when we all played the game together, the room was “filled with exasperated sighs and cries,” Ivan argued that the “din in the room … seemed to verbalize what is usually a secret, inner dialogue within transgender individuals.”

It was fascinating for me to observe a room full of students playing Lim simultaneously. After a few minutes, several students asked me, “Is this a game you can win?” Matt, in particular, was determined to get to the end of the maze only to get knocked out repeatedly.

But each student had different experiences with Lim that I could observe from a distance. Some, like Mina, “gave up” early on when squares blocked their progression. Others, like Rhea, tried to play through the game multiple times to try out different strategies. But even when Rhea tried to stay “on the outskirts” of the course, she “found the other blocks going out of their way” to confront her. About half of my students, like Matt, got kicked out of the maze at some point. But, in Sarah M.’s case, “the blocks continued to follow my block when it was on the outside.” In addition, several students encountered another flashing square in the maze that caused their screen to go black.

Matt (front) was determined to reach the end of Lim.

Students produced rich interpretations of these diverse outcomes. Matt interpreted being ejected from the maze as “feeling like you don’t belong in society.” Commenting on the way in which some squares continued to chase her even after being ejected from the maze, Sarah M. wrote that this “represent[s] how people can ‘police’ the behavior of others and ensure that those who deviate from the norm are not allowed back into the main groups of society.”

But my students produced the most interesting interpretations of the “meet-another-flashing-square-before-black screen” outcome. Jonathan interpreted the black screen as “the end of life.” Others interpreted it more cheerfully as a sense of relief upon meeting a kindred spirit. Sydney was flexible in her interpretation, noting that this outcome:

“ … can be interpreted as a win (finding the person who understands you best / finding your mate / finding an outlet to be oneself) or a loss (getting stuck and losing yourself in the imitation of all other people and never truly winning the game of life.”

My students seemed to be in agreement, however, that this plurality of interpretations was a result of the game’s abstract aesthetic style, at least relative to the more authored experiences of dys4ia and Mainichi. Cody and Jonathan both commented on the “abstract” quality of the game while Laura, David, Bryan and Caitlin noted that it could be read as a pliable “metaphor.” During class discussion, students told me that there was something about the sparseness of Lim that allowed them to project their own experiences into the game. As Laura put it, Lim works “with nothing but blocks, colors, sounds, and a maze.”

On this same note, Camila speculated that Lim could “be molded to fit other things that people are oppressed by,” specifying that “having a disability could have fit in perfectly with the same metaphors.” Sarah M. and Rebekah also commented on the universality of the game’s message. Sarah M. wrote that the game shows how anyone outside of social norms “can be bullied and eventually ostracized from society because they are different.” And Rebekah observed that “people can relate to this game because they all, at some point, felt put down based on their own individual characteristics.”

Mainichi

Mainichi is a game in which the quotidian details of any given day become focal points of stress and anxiety. It was this everydayness of Mainichi that impressed my students the most. Carl wrote that the game showed the “everyday realities of living as a trans* person.” And Rebekah, who noticed that the game’s title means everyday in Japanese, commented on the way in which “small actions such as … paying with cash instead of card” could have a drastic impact on the player character’s daily interactions with others.

Several students identified with the player character in Mainichi as they navigated her through her everyday experiences. But if the division between sympathy and empathy is marked by whether or not a person has experienced another person’s struggle, then Mainichi, by virtue of its interactivity, blurred that division, or at least invited a variety of responses on either side of it. Indeed, my student’s responses to Mainichi ranged from sympathy for the character to an almost physical embodiment of her emotional state.

Liz plays through Mainichi.

Some students expressed sympathy for the character in Mainichi. Sarah H. expressed amazement and dismay at “the extent to which transgender people must plan for the varying situations that may occur.” David wrote that Mainichi “gave you a sense of how even just going down the street … can be a difficult experience.” And Laura, along these same lines, realized that “life was harder and a lot more depressing for my character when others noticed that she was transgender.”

Still others, in an empathetic vein, placed themselves in the character’s shoes. Susan observed that the game “made me think how I would feel if people were whispering around me.” And one student, citing her own experiences with street harassment, said that playing Mainichi was “similar to many experiences I have had going out at night.”

In her reflections on Mainichi, Rebekah revealed how the interactivity of the medium helped to foster an empathetic identification with the player character: “By being able to decide things for the character, it helped build a connection [with her].” Echoing Rebekah, Jonathan wrote that Mainichi “really provided an interactive experience by letting you control your character.”

This interactivity, I would argue, is what allowed Camila to form such a close and affecting bond with the player character in Mainichi. She wrote: “I think the fact that I was the person who was being slandered for being transgender was very striking. I can feel bad for someone all day long, but to feel it in my own flesh was heart-breaking.” When the man at the cafe spoke with her at the end of the game, Camila ignored it because she couldn’t “handle any more rejection.” She concluded: “I just wanted to forget everything about gender, sex and attractions.”

But, for at least one student, the degree of interactivity in Mainichi played against her expectations for the genre. Ruby wrote: “Unlike [other] RPG games that I had played … I did not feel proactive at all when playing the game; sometimes I had the feeling that the main character tried to live her life unnoticed.” She observed that the game made her feel “passive,” as if she had no control over how the day unfolded. For Ruby, then, the expected degree of interactivity seemed to make her experience of passivity even more poignant by contrast.

Concluding Thoughts

I’m content to let my students’ responses to the games speak for themselves as evidence of the effectiveness of this exercise. I would like, however, to comment firsthand on my experience as an educator using games in the classroom for the first time. Using games to teach is, simply put, a profoundly different pedagogical experience.

When I give my students a lecture on a reading, I am in charge of the room. This power dynamic isn’t a completely arbitrary imposition; rather, it’s necessitated by the discrepancy between our levels of disciplinary knowledge: I’ve been working in feminist and queer theory for the last six years and my students haven’t. When I lecture on a reading, then, I have a responsibility to provide a summary of an author’s argument as well as a historical context for that argument. Students can fuel the discussion (when they’re in a talkative mood!) but, at a minimum, I need to be able to provide them with some basic tools for digesting what they’ve read. This isn’t a responsibility I can shrug off entirely; we can’t play games everyday!

But our class at Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching allowed me to take a step back and let my students do some unguided, exploratory and experiential learning on their own. I circulated the classroom to answer some basic questions but, otherwise, I simply surveyed the room and listened to the cacophony of blocks hitting each other in Lim. Now that I have read their wonderfully idiosyncratic and insightful responses, I know that there were twenty unique experiences happening concurrently in that room and that it was best not to interfere. It can be terrifying to give up control—to let your little monsters run loose—but I’m so glad I did.

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Happy Birthday Proteus! « Proteus

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Happy Birthday Proteus!

by Ed

It’s exactly one year since the Proteus beta was released! The original FastSpring store went live on February 26th 2012 whilst Tamsin and I were in the air on the way to GDC, where Proteus was shortlisted for the IGF’s Nuovo Award. Confusingly, some clever people had already bought it by the time we landed, so we only had time for the briefest of high-fives before heading out to meet David for a celebratory beer and burrito in San Francisco.

Beginnings

Like most things, Proteus had lots of beginnings. Perhaps its real birthday is 17th February 2010, when David and I first started discussing the project in its current form. Here are the first two emails we exchanged, which give a good idea of the direction we set out in:

from: Ed Key <xxxx@xxxx.com>
to: David Kanaga <xxxx@xxxx.com>
date: 17 February 2010 12:12
subject: Slow-burn game music project

Hi,

I just read your post "Scenes from Arcturus" (and listened to several of the
mini-albums) and wondered if you might be interested in a project.

It's a kind of ambient exploration game, perhaps with some survival
mechanics. You can see the almost-current state of it here:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6168.0

(BTW the block-colour graphic style is close to "final" but there are a lot
of rough edges that could be improved)
The choice of music on the video clip [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OqQ6-ESp4 ]
is significant... it's probably my favourite album, and is also associated with
exploring virtual forests from having constantly had it on in the background whilst
playing Ultima 7 when I was young.

From your tunes, "Pool" (from The Nymph) and "Lusion Plain" 1 and 2 are
probably my favourites when thinking about this project :)

If you are really looking for something like ElectroPlankton, a "music
game", then this probably isn't it...
However, if you're interested in some kind of gentle reactive ambient music,
I hope this would be a good vehicle for it!
Some elements that might be associated with musical elements/moods/themes:

- entering a forest clearing
- weather conditions and transitions from rain/sun etc
- times of day
- looking out to sea
- climbing through the cloud layer and exploring the mountain peaks above
- discovering ancient ruins, stone circles, overgrown statues, etc
- finding some ambient wildlife
- entering a village
- falling asleep in the forest and waking up surrounded by spirits
(maybe... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Mononoke_Kodama.jpg )

You can see some of these in the video. The rest are planned features, with
the "spirits" being the only speculative one. The main thing missing from
the design at the moment is some motivation for the player to
explore/inhabit the world so that it's a bit more compelling than a screen
saver. I don't have any clear idea for this, but maybe the music could be a
part of it?

If you're interested I can send you a build, although I will do a bit of
cleaning-up work on it first to make it more presentable.

Also, I felt I should qualify it with "slow-burn" as it's not really
progressing much at the moment (injured my wrist so can't do a lot of
computer work) but it is definitely alive and well, just hibernating...
hopefully it will be back on track in a few months.

Regarding money, my plan was to make it freeware. If it seems to have the
potential maybe it could be sold at some point, but that's some way in the
future, it's too much of an experiment at the moment.

cheers!
Ed

------

from: David Kanaga <xxxx@xxxx.com>
to: Ed Key <xxxx@xxxx.com>
date: 18 February 2010 21:54
subject: Re: Slow-burn game music project

Hey Ed,

Your game looks beautiful--I would urge you to not change the graphical
style at all, as it is one my favorite visual designs I've ever seen (no
kidding!) :).

Anyway, I'd definitely be interested in doing some gentle reactive ambient
music for this. You said "I don't have any clear idea for [developing player
motivation], but maybe the music could be a part of it?" -- I definitely
think that if the music is reactive enough to give the player a sense of
"performing the landscape," that it could provide a good deal of motivation
for play. For instance, when I see all the different types of vegetation in
your game world, right away I imagine them having (subtle) musical tracks
which get louder as the player approaches them; flowers could produce some
sort of soft chimes, the yellow trees could have a different sort of musical
character, etc. This sort of detailed musical-play in conjunction with the
larger structures you listed in your game-elements-to-associate-with-music
list I think would give the player the sense that they are experiencing an
interactive musical/environmental composition at their own pace, which I
know is something that I'd very much like to do :)

It was a very inspiring video; I'd love to write music for the game whenever
you feel like continuing work on the project (and I'd love to play a build
of it, which I'm sure would get me even more inspired :)).

Hope your wrist feels better soon! :)

- David

Here’s that old Proteus test video. The “Nodeland” refers to the terrain generation method, but it turns out it’s a place in Sweden too. An inbox search turned up that someone there bought Proteus, which tickled me.

(Another cool thing about the 17th of February is that it was my last day working at my regular day-job in 2012!)

I’m making a note here

We had some great days during the (admittedly slow) beta period. I think the biggest sales (and interest) spike was in August when the boss of 2K games argued that photorealism was essential for “emotions” in games. Watching the editorials pop up talking about Proteus over those few days was amazing and totally out of the blue. Also really heartening to see it used as a counter-example in this discussion. I guess we did something right!

During those 11 months we sold about 5200 copies, 300 of which were preorders for a special physical “Artifact Edition” (more on that below)

So many times I thought “surely everyone who could ever want to play this will have played it or heard about it by now” and that was doubly true in the run-up to the launch in January. I was wrong! It’s now sold about 23000 copies since launch, which seems insane for the odd thing that it is. Maybe it’s proof of that slowly maturing development process where we could feel our way along and only add what felt right, mostly without feeling too much pressure to rush and to add extraneous things. Perhaps a “lessons learnt from Proteus” should be a whole other post. I feel like it needs a lot more thought. For now, the greatest news for me is that I can carry on making games full-time. It’s a very lucky and privileged position to be in.

Current Status

Now I’m in an odd post-partum limbo. I’m finally almost on top of emails. I’ve been doing some patching work with Jon and Alex. Tentative inquiries about ports have been made. A Linux version should be out on Humble fairly soon,  courtesy of Ethan Lee. We’re also recharging: David is writing an essay-cum-fanfiction on Infinite Sketch (hopefully *in* Infinite Sketch) and I’m planning a weekend amongst some hills and thinking about prototypes for future stuff.

Artifact Edition

The major piece of unfinished business from the preorders is of course the production and shipping of the Artifact Editions. We’re going to get onto this in March now, and just want to reassure anyone who ordered one that we haven’t forgotten. Due to CD and printing costs it looks like we’ll produce 500 copies and reopen orders for the remaining 200. They were originally priced at $30 but I have no idea what they should be post-launch yet! The soundtrack album that will be part of the Artifact Edition will also go up online shortly afterward. David is making exciting noises about the soundtrack already :)

Thanks

This post turned into a monster! It’s got me all sentimental now, so it feels like a good time to thank everyone who make it possible: David for the music and design philosophy, Jon Brodsky and Alex May for invaluable coding assistance, Erik Ravaglia for creating the launch trailer, Tamsin for putting up with the ‘joy’ of living with a game developer (I’m transcribing) and everyone who bought, played, critiqued, steered, wrote about, talked about and tested Proteus, especially the hardcore of 4-5 beta testers who really helped push it towards the launch.

Thank you all!

(Coming soon: a reviews and videos round-up post?)

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Reflecting Reality: I Want to Believe

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Realism, much like gameplay, is such a loaded word in gamerdom. It’s the scapegoat of fans for many not-so-great decisions in game design, and yet it’s also the watchword of the gaming industry at large when faced with the question of which aspects in gaming should be further developed. Real, like the many words that convey the same meaning, is good by default. Authentic. Honest. Actual. True-to-life. It’s like being there!

The draw is an attractive one, to be sure. Real means relatable, with wider mass appeal and a bigger potential market. More importantly, realism brings with it the promise — whether explicit or implied — that we may be able to apply our knowledge and skills from outside of the game to do better within its clearly defined boundaries.

ArmA II is a big part of our community. Our guidelines and influences alone make it evident that the big appeal of ArmA is the true-to-life soldier fantasy that it lets players live out: gamers using authentic equipment and applying authentic strategies and tactics taken from sources that are also used by real militaries. Hey, it’s escapist entertainment, and we walk away with the bonus that we did learn something new for our trouble.

What’s so bad about that?

It’s still not realistic, for one thing.

Many gamers, especially people like us who come From the Internet, like to look with disdain at the so-called Hollywood portrayal of just about anything technical. Big red self-destruct countdown timers on monitors drive us into fits of rage, as do commandos who can fire machine guns from the hip while standing on a pile of rocks, and computer “hackers” who can do graphic enhancements on blurry photographs without so much as touching a mouse.

We like detail. We like authenticity. We like it when characters from our shows and games can differentiate a clip from a mag, or — and this is still up for grabs — when they can comment on the anachronism of a font designed in 1950 showing up in a Victorian setting. Geek stuff, right? Gamers live for that sort of thing.

Well, Hollywood and the mainstream gaming industry have just developed yet another way of tricking us into believing that the convenient and over-the-top situations they keep feeding us are in any way real. People are smart, and contrary to what some might think, the guys creating all this entertainment for us are most likely From the Internet too. They know what we want, and they know exactly the kind of experience that we would call realistic: take a rote scene from the archive, and slather on lots of jargon, lots of technical equipment, a little reference to real-world events, and just a dash of inconvenience on our part to remind us that life isn’t all fun and games.

Realism in gaming is a lie. No game is realistic, and neither should they try to be. Even training aids limit their scope to the skills they are meant to develop. Nothing out there is meant to deliver the entire experience of whatever we want to pretend to be in a single convenient package. It just can’t be done — not without going out there and actually living that life.

Perhaps, then, we’re just looking at this the wrong way. We approach new and unfamiliar situations in games with certain expectations in mind, and if somehow the delivery falls short, we then have the self-awarded license to bitch and moan about how a game isn’t as “realistic” as it could have been.

Perhaps, then, it doesn’t have to be as real as possible. Perhaps a game should just be crafted smartly enough to make us believe that it could be real. The difference there is that a good development team can make the most absurd and ridiculous situation totally believable. It just takes intelligence, creativity, and a whole lot of open-mindedness.

Many, many years ago, when Computer Gaming World still existed, I read a column that dealt with the whole realism issue as well, and the writer (whose name escapes me at the moment!) held the same beliefs that I do now. He had a good word for what games should strive for in lieu of realism: verisimilitude. Believability. That’s all that a good experience needs. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that games and the people who make them should never, ever forget about.

Games have a huge advantage over the confines of the real world: each game has its own set of rules — its own laws of physics and matter and energy. Every new game we try is a whole new set of rules to learn to live by. We learned early on that mushrooms slide across the ground while stars bounce off it. Walking on steak dinners and hams can instantly replenish our health. Orange portal entrances lead to blue portal exits, and vice versa. Driving a battlemech into a lake helps prevent overheating. And you may not be able to shoot that Sectoid cowering behind that fence, but you can surely vaporize that fence with a well-placed plasma burst.

We believed all of this, because they made sense in relation to the universes they took place in. In our minds, for as long as these games lasted, they were real. They have the verisimilitude to make them real where it counts. I may not be a game designer, but I am a designer and I know that good design utilizes all of its base elements to form an internal logic that communicates with the receiver. Surely the process of designing games works along similar lines.

The medium has so much more to offer than just interactive versions of our favorite “realistic” daydreams taken straight from our Internet-fueled expectations. Let’s stop accepting the ridiculous on the grounds that it’s supposed to be realistic. Instead, let’s embrace the serious and the ridiculous and everything in between — but only if they can make us believe.

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the Brindle Brothers: Fuck the Holodeck

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There is a spectre haunting videogames: the spectre of the holodeck. Developers, fans and the media are united in doing its work. Janet Murray first summoned the word to game studies, but it has long since escaped her control. In its purest form it is the teleological fantasy that games will one day achieve the status of perfect simulation: computerised experiences of such fidelity that they consume all five senses and immerse the player in a fake reality. But we pay tribute to it whenever we measure our games against it, or imagine that it is the end-goal of the medium; whenever we repeat simple platitudes that immersion is better than distance or the intuitive better than the obtuse.Unlike the spectre of communism, which was a figment in the fevered imaginations of Europe’s reactionary governments, the holodeck is so real you can taste it. It was visible in 1999 when Sony codenamed its Playstation 2 processor the ‘emotion engine’, clear last August when 2k Games boss the “final console” would be “photorealistic”, and it returned with a vengeance last week in the blitz of publicity which launched the PS4. Last Thursday, Heavy Rain perpetrator David Cage that with thirty thousand polygons at his disposal he might finally make games Art. “We try to make players forget they’re playing a game,” Cage said. “We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.” His interviewer gushed in turn: “If PS4 can solve the uncanny valley, and bring true emotion to games, the industry could have its Citizen Kane.” So perhaps I should be calling it a vampire – because it just won’t die. I’m sure I won’t lay it to rest with this post, but somebody needs to. Never mind that pursuit of technological aplomb is the primary driver of expense and risk-aversion in game development. Never mind that in order to emulate the holodeck, you need huge companies with hundreds of staff, working crunch hours to realise visions that must sell at staggering levels to justify the expense of creating them to the expected standard. Never mind that such gigantic projects necessarily make it hard for developers to take risks, try new things, or challenge the status quo. Actually, do mind these things. But go deeper. At bottom, holodeck thinking implies that mimesis is the highest ambition of videogames. But games exist as more than reflections of reality: game places are not only representations of imaginary locations, but , with all the characteristics of space as we know it; game systems are not only representations of life systems, but with their own terrors and joys. This truth acts against the teleological tendency of the holodeck because it implies that a game released two decades ago can be as interesting, complex or beautiful for its own merits as a game released last month. Moreover, it implies that, whatever their specific characteristics and particularities, they are of equal status: equally artificial, equally interesting, and equally ‘real’. They are both and to the same extent things which exist; they are not pale imitations, either of life, of each other, or of games yet to come. Of course, games often represent reality, and are often read by myself and others as doing so. But they do this as an act of speech, which makes claims about the world, and cannot do so perfectly. This is because the systems of which games are composed, whether they are systems of rules or systems of visual or textual interpretation, will always be different from – and certainly far less complex than – the systems of the world. Game critics call this difference the simulation gap, and it can never truly be bridged (what are you going to do, model the whole truth of the ?). But that’s okay, because art depends on our capacity to depict selective truths. Forget the holodeck: artistic speech is often formed speech, weird speech, speech which makes strange, which does unexpected or surprising things sometimes unrelated to ‘reality’ but which may also help us see reality in unexpected and surprising ways. It has shape and character, focus and desire; it isn’t the world and doesn’t need to be. Moreover, ‘immersive’ ‘realism’ risks blinding us to the fact of the simulation’s selectivity, to the unknowns boiling in the simulation gap. We hope the holodeck will be “photorealistic” – but even the camera isn’t neutral. Some film stock, optimized for white skin, is notoriously prone to showing black faces as dark blurs with bright white teeth and eyes. For South African authorities during apartheid this was a problem, so Polaroid by exactly the amount necessary to capture black features. In games, the simulation gap is precisely the site – or one site – of politics, because the abstraction of reality into model is where ‘speech’ resides. It is in this act of selection, where the game defines what’s relevant and irrelevant, that politics happens, and this gap which developers must . George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. Some are also beautiful, or surprising, or provocative – but all are political. Holodeck thinking obscures this fact. For Bertolt Brecht, the 20th century playwright who developed ‘’, naturalism, emotional engagement, and the illusion of reality (which gave us the term ‘fourth wall’) actually prevented us from thinking critically about what we saw on stage. Likewise, what looks like a fully immersive videogame world remains, and will always remain, a selective simulation with just as many unstated assumptions and highly political omissions as a half-hour slot on the Fox News network. Unchecked, the holodeck becomes an ideological terraforming engine, metastasizing across the fabric of our culture. The beliefs and assumptions of the massive corporate institutions necessary to even produce a holodeck are passed off as universal realities; it obscures its own acts of selection with a pretense of all-encompassing fidelity, pasting over fringe and minority perspectives or the huge unspoken third rail truths of this neo-liberal fun-house hell-world Earth. In a long post about sexuality, totalitarianism, and videogames, Liz Ryerson is really “a desire for us to finally realize the complete fantasy of totality within our own world…a perfect world built of perfect systems without disharmony.” She describes an impulse, seen throughout our history, to harmonise the world according to our well-oiled ideas, which has at its beginning the tendency to reduce the particularity of all people and objects to elements of a fissureless unwrinkled system, and has, at its end, the holocaust. Imagine experiencing a VR game with the graphical fidelity of a Brazilian rainforest but the simplified worldview of the people who made . Imagine the crass politics and myopic simulation of something like Homefront blown up to super-size so that we can all be ‘immersed’ in the depiction of a military occupation as one big winnable paintball match. Envision yourself grunting, sweating, shitting your way around a world designed by someone who thinks – who genuinely believes in an Earth where it’s even possible – that the world is divided into bad men with guns and good men with guns, or that women ask for rape, or that 47% of America just doesn’t want to work. Can you imagine anything more depressing? Maybe one day there really will be totally immersive puzzle worlds only distinguishable from reality by careful examination. I don’t know what we will say of these things, or how we will judge them or whether we will call them ‘games’. But I don’t have to because I’m happy to look like a dinosaur to the imaginary game critics of a hypothetical future even less likely to survive the oncoming crisis of civilisation than it is to exist in my lifetime.

So fuck the holodeck. Break the holodeck, smash its walls, fill its perfect screens with glitched-out snow. Cannibalise it for parts if you will; strip it bare and take what you can, incorporating its technologies into idiosyncratic post-apocalyptic doom wagons. But we can all do without the ghost of its four walls hovering over the unbuilt edifice of tomorrow’s games, or blurring the sight of today’s. Let us banish it.

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The Space That Games Exist In - Distorted Consciousness

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The Space That Games Exist In

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February 27, 2013

Much like their older brethren, video games inhabit a space that isn’t the easiest to define. It is even tougher to define exactly how important this space in which the worlds that games exist in is to the medium itself.

It is considered natural for the community to cast a critical gaze at some of these aspects as games progressively evolve as a medium and embrace themes and topics that had previously been considered impossible to encapsulate within the pixels and polygons of a video-game. Such discussions often revolve around whether games are being held back by their by naïve fantastical worlds that are still stuck within “traditional” gaming cliches  when that effort could be diverted in making games a more serious medium.

Escapism has come to be attached with negative connotations in certain communities of late.

Validation from experts of more established medium has become a “holy grail” for many in the industry

But is that really true? Should games focus primarily on the real world in order to push the envelope of “games as a serious medium”? Should we singularly consider our eternal quest is to receive validation from experts of other fields?(read: Roger Ebert)

The Traditionalist’s Imaginarium

At first glance, it would be seem foolish to leave behind the very foundation on which the video-game medium has been built upon. Unlike other mediums that began as a means to express their creators’ opinion or views, games evolved very different in that regard. They evolved primarily as means of entertainment, its virtual domain extending the ability to provide escapism to its players to the extent no other medium could hope to achieve. The human mind finds it easier to escape into a world that isn’t real.

Fantasy worlds are incredible in their ability to draw players’ into their worlds and provide escapism and an “out-of-body” experience

Leaving behind the very foundation of the medium to venture into the unknown for the sake of an uncertain and interpretative “progress” would be foolish and quite frankly a little naïve. Fantasy worlds have time and again shown that they can suspend players’ imagination and immerse them more efficiently than many “realistic” worlds manage to. Games are often that time of the day many look forward to when they can relieve themselves from their worldly burdens and undertake world-saving tasks in a world devoid of stereotypes and pre-conceived notions.

It also doesn’t mean that fantasy worlds are entirely rooted in its creators’ imagination. Many role-playing games based in an imaginary setting like Dragon Age and Mass Effect feature many elements that have been directly inspired from the real world. Its representations of alien/fantasy races, their characteristics and societies mimic that of our real-world cultures. It can result in an interesting reflection on our own world but through the portal of an imaginary one. It is also capable of bringing questions surrounding freedom and ethics – something which many role-playing games center their key decisions around.

Games like Journey and ICO hold a certain appeal because they resemble fables from hazy dream-like worlds that stand somewhere on the line dividing imaginary and reality. They speak as profoundly about the real as they speak in abstract.

In absence of pre-conceived notions and stereotypes, many of these fantasy worlds are excellent means of drawing its players into their world capable of providing an “out-of-body” experience – something we know more commonly as escapism. Suspended in such a state, it is much easier to have a deeper emotional effect on players, which would explain why many gamers of fantasy RPGs often daydream about the world.

Labeling such worlds as naïve and unbecoming of the “potential” of the medium is unfair to what they do manage to achieve.

“The New Real” Movement

Games based in a real setting and focused on real issues, however, possess the ability to drive home a more powerful message with much ease. Without the imaginary world and its lore, real-world settings do not need to concern themselves in unnecessary exposition and can instead directly focus their efforts on surrounding players with issues – interpersonal or international, the player knows are very much real in the world around them. These games haven’t always been around forever.

Let us take a time to distinguish between games based in a modern setting versus games based in a real setting. There is considerable difference between both as one can rightfully take creative liberties with its setting behind the cover of “fictitious representation” while the latter’s very selling point is its realism essentially representing realism of our life and the world –whether it’s told from a fictional point of view or a documentary-styled real view. Molleindustria’s Unmanned was an interesting but brief interactive meditation on a drone bomber’s life as he remotely kills alleged “terrorists” from thousands of miles across – never experiencing the brevity of his actions nor feeling the risk of war – and this disconnection with his own actions was admirably shown. This was a fictional excursion but in a real setting.

Unmanned admirably showed the disconnection of a remote drone bomber with his own actions

Others like the recent Depression Quest weave together interpersonal experiences of its creators and their battles with depression that not only wonderfully weave a self-conscious tale but also make its’ players aware of the very detail of emotions which one experiences in depression. Depression is still very much a taboo in the modern society – and people tend to overreact to it and the game aims at spreading awareness about “Exactly, how does it feel like?” and with its story brings out the possible options to overcome it. Such a personal experience makes games incredibly personal experiences – something which we never knew or even imagined them being capable of of a mere decade ago.

Such “real” games are capable of suspending its players in an odd “in-limbo” of real and the unreal where despite being immersed in a game, they are constantly reminded me of the world or an aspect of themselves. This self-aware immersion is an excellent example to showcase the kind of progress we’ve made as a medium. Add that to such game’s ability to drive home a harsher message on a socio-political issue or a personal experience making video-games an intensely relatable experience – a stark contrast from the escapism of the fantasy world, don’t you think?

I conclude quite predictably, that when it comes to the “Fantasy or Reality” arguments in games, there is no one correct answer. There may be preferences for one or the either but the strength of any great medium isn’t that one needs to give way to other — no matter how archaic or unfitting it may seem to our ambitions to be taken seriously. A medium is marked as mature for its ability to accommodate varied experiences. Literature is adored globally because we can have Crime and Punishment alongside American Psycho with Picture of Dorian Grey as the differing variant. Films can have CGI-effects infused blockbusters and documentaries. Neither holds its medium back.

Likewise, games are starting to offer experiences like Unmanned and Depression Quest. Even AAA games like Hotline Miami and Spec Ops: The Line — two games with a common theme of anti-violence that treat it in different ways — one revels in it, while the other wears you down with it. We have to appreciate this important change — a world where different experiences can live.

Games exist in the space of our mind where the perception of our own reality blurs and that of the game becomes increasingly real

The Space That Games Exist In

Whatever it may be, games based on real or fantastical elements will retain their validity as long as they are successful of taking players out of their physical shell and provide an experience that involves them.

Because at the end of the day, video-games do not exist in the harsh realities of our world nor do they exist in the vibrant imagination of its fantasy world. They exist in the space in our mind where the perception of our own reality blurs and that of the game becomes increasingly real. Some call it escapism, others label it as immersion.

———————-

[Update]: This blog post got a mention in Critical Distance’s February 2013  edition of “Blogs of the Round Table“

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Shenmue: Historical accuracy as nostalgic fantasy

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Featured in February’s Critical Distance Blogs of the Round Table.

This is a work-in-progress extract from my crowd-funded book Dreamcast Worlds. I’ve selected a section that explores photorealism, deliberately moving away from technologically determinist arguments about how better console technology “allows” games to become “more expressive” (yes Sony I’m glaring daggers at you after that pseudo-history you just had to shoehorn into the PS4 presentation) and instead looking at accuracy as a design question: what does it mean for a game to be like a photograph?

Accuracy

The high level of historical details in Shenmue’s recreation of 1986 Yokosuka is as much about setting an emotional tone as is it about establishing accuracy. For one thing, they are not consistently accurate. The Sega Saturn in Ryo’s home is anachronistic – set in 1986, but Saturn released in 1990s. Nevertheless, a slavish devotion to accuracy informed work on all areas of the game, possibly in spite of calls for restraint from higher-ups at Sega.

Yu Suzuki recalled in a 2011 interview that Sega head Hayao Nakayama had wanted to ship games as soon as they looked good on a screen. To enable him to continue polishing games after this point, Suzuki installed a button under his desk that would occlude the graphics whenever Nakayama was nearby. In another interview, main programmer Tak Hirai said that the hardest challenge in making Shenmue for him was programming the movement of the phone cable, an item which, he hastened to point out, was never visible on-screen: “The phone cord wasn’t even showing up on camera, but [Suzuki] insisted on making it look realistic”.

This devotion to accuracy carries through into the way that time itself is represented. Time forms an integral part of the spatiality and worldiness of Shenmue. Time passes in absolute terms, at a rate of about one in-game hour for every real-world ten minutes, rather than only passing in dependence on player action as in many RPGs. The actions and events required to complete the game must be finished in seven in-game months, or else it will fail and the player will have to start again. Even the changes in weather, which affect the response to player interaction for objects relating to certain side quests, are scheduled for particular dates according to meteorological data from the years 1986-1987.

The high accuracy of Shenmue’s Yokosuka gives the game a very stable rooting in what was for many people a real childhood. Yokosuka is special because of the way it connects to the rest of the world through its harbour, but it is also very ordinary, and looks much like most other Japanese suburbs and small towns. For many players buying Shenmue on release in Japan, Shenmue closely depicted the site of their own childhood. Like a photograph, Shenmue captures a moment lost to time.

Nostalgia

Large parts of Shenmue’s interactive elements provide purely emotional payoff – they don’t provide any benefit to progress in the game, but they make the experience richer in ways not covered by rule systems. In the pleasant suburb of Sakuragaoka, you can help a small child to raise kittens by feeding them tuna, or help a short-sighted old woman to find her neighbor’s house. In Dobuita you can buy a thirsty man a drink from a vending machine and play arcade games. None of these actions affect the outcome of the game except by providing a little bit of extra dialogue with the residents of Yokosuka, or a passing experience of enjoyable interaction with a kitten or a vintage game. In this sense, Shenmue is a role-playing game and not a roll-playing game, a term used by tabletop game fans to distinguish between playing a game to tell a story and playing a game to find the optimal solution to a mathematical problem. Shenmue’s lack of many of the mathematical mechanics that define the RPG genre reflects an emotion-led focus in the game’s design. Part of these emotions is the game’s nostalgia for an imagined childhood in Japan.

A bracelet in the V&A collections made from the human hair of a dead relative. 17th Century British.

In the European tradition, nostalgia was understood by the ancient Greeks as a malady afflicting soldiers serving far from home, but eventually came to be seen as a positive form of emotional awareness in the early modern era. If you are nostalgic, you are poignantly aware of the sadness of the human condition. Visual media technologies such as photography have perhaps changed the way that we relate to nostalgia. People have always used external things to aid internal recollections of treasured memories, be it by collecting objects that took on nostalgic resonance almost by accident (such as a baby’s first pair of shoes), or carefully crafting objects that preserve the traces of people or places that are far away or lost, such as jewellery made from the hair of the deceased. Photographs give us a way of instantly and deliberately creating nostalgic objects that aid and mediate our memories, with very little effort required.

Susan Sontag observed nostalgia in the way people relate to photographs in 1978.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

[…]

As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking into the past.

Constructing a three-dimensional, dynamic simulation of Yokosuka in the 1980s takes considerably more time and effort than exposing film, so it is not comparable to `slicing out this moment and freezing it’, but observing Shenmue’s recreation is similarly nostalgic. Aside from the high degree of visual photorealism, it locates accuracy in processes managed by the software, such as the movements and dialogue of people on the street. It lends reality to the image plane by allowing the player to move into it by teleoperating an on-screen character. In that sense it invokes Sontag’s ‘tender regard’ of a past that was already lost at the time the game was made. Writing in 1980, Roland Barthes offered more clarity on this `tender regard’ in reflection on photographs of his recently deceased mother:

The photograph’s immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

The Yokosuka of Shenmue is not a photograph. We know that it was reconstructed in the late 1990s in nostalgic regard of the late 1980s, and carefully designed with gameplay in mind, rather than transcribed from a real-life arrangement of objects and light into the image-plane. Yet the attempt to get as close as possible to photorealism references the emotional significance of the photograph, telling us at once that 1987 Yokosuka may feel real in the game, but it is also entirely lost and completely fictional.

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