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The Year Walk-Letters, Pt. 2 : nahaufnahmen.ch

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Games · The Year Walk-Letters, Pt. 2

Von Christof Zurschmitten · April 2013

I Walk The Line (Between Sanity and Madness)

The Year Walk-Letters, Pt. 2

Während die Augen der Welt auf Städten in den Wolken liegen, werden RAINER SIGL und CHRISTOF ZURSCHMITTEN ganz bodennah vom schwedischen iOS-Spiel Year Walk heimgesucht: Viele, viele Gedanken frisch aus dem inneralpinen Assoziationsblaster, diesmal unter anderem zu: Spielen als Artefakten, umzäunten Gärten als Spielwiese, die Intimität von Glasscheiben, und Kinderarbeit in den 90er-Jahren.

Dass ich einig gehe mit dir, zeichnet sich schon im Postscriptum des ersten Briefes ab: Auch ich empfand Year Walk tatsächlich als Geheimnis durch und durch. Leigh Alexander hat neulich zum vermutlich entfernt verwandten The Room geschrieben, das sich hier vielleicht ein neues Genre, ein neues Paradigma ankündigt. Sie hat dies objekt-orientierte Puzzle-Spiele genannt, Spiele, die eine „objekt-orientierte Erzählung um sehr beschränkte Ressourcen“ stricken. Ich glaube, der Begriff trifft vielleicht noch besser auf Year Walk zu: Auch hier schien es nicht lediglich darum gehen, ein Spiel zu machen sondern ein Objekt, oder vielleicht noch besser: Ein Artefakt, und das vielleicht Wunderbarste ist es, wie die Entwickler die gerade im Fantasy-Genre florierende mythische Konnotation des Wortes voll und ganz ausgespielt haben. Year Walk fühlt sich tatsächlich an, als sei es mehr als nur ein Spiel — oder jedenfalls wie etwas, das wir mit unseren simplen, klassifizierenden Vorstellungen und unserem üblichen Vokabular nicht ohne Weiteres bearbeiten können, um rasch damit fertig zu werden.

Und ja, ein Teil davon kommt zweifelsohne von der Weigerung des Spiels, die diesem Medium allgemein zugewiesenen Schranken und Grenzen zu akzeptieren. Mit den von dir angesprochenen Meta-Spiegelfechtereien greift Year Walk aus, über die Vorstellungen hinaus, die wir von einem „Spiel“ in der Regel haben. Auch ich fühlte mich an House of Leaves erinnert – noch so ein Werk, dass aggressiv rebelliert gegen das Schicksal, das ihm als Buchstaben, Wörter und Zeilen auf Papier, als Buch eben, beschieden war. Selbst die Mittel seines Widerstands sind ähnlich. Das Sprengen des magischen Kreises durch eine zeitgemässe Neuauflage der „Herausgeberfiktion“, die den Artefakt-Charakter des Spiels nur noch unterstreicht: Das hier ist mehr als nur ein in 2013 zurechtprogrammiertes Spiel, es hat Geschichte. Erstaunlich erscheint, wie dieser Trick, der schon bei Don Quijote funktionierte, uns auch hunderte Jahre später noch immer mühelos in seinen Bann schlagen kann. Natürlich, Year Walk profitiert davon, dass es bislang wenig Spiele gab, die so dreist ihr Spiel bis in die Ebene vermeintlicher (Mit-)Entwickler getrieben hat – das tut der Wirkung aber keinen Abbruch.

Hier scheint mir übrigens auch die Tatsache eine wichtige Rolle zu spielen, dass Year Walk ausgerechnet auf dem iPad erschienen ist: Die Sprengung des magischen Kreises ist umso irritierender, je enger dieser Kreis ist – und wo könnte er enger sein als im „ummauerten Garten“ der App-Landschaft? Apples Philosophie der Segregierung und Umzäunung ist fruchtbarer Boden für dieses Spiel mit der Durchkreuzung aller Schranken: Apple-Konsumenten sind es sich gewohnt, eine App als etwas Eigenständiges, Isoliertes wahrzunehmen. Dass der Companion separat im App-Store heruntergeladen werden kann (und nicht etwa muss), macht die Entdeckung, dass er direkt ins Spiel zurückgreift, umso wirkungsvoller. (Dass sein Geheimnis nicht eleganter verborgen wurde als mit einem Zahlencode, der von Anfang an offensichtlich der Eingabe harrt, ist übrigens einer meiner Kritikpunkte an das Spiel – es müsste bessere Möglichkeiten geben, ein elektronisches Pendant zur Zaubertinte zu finden. Vielleicht siehst du dies anders?)

Und wo wir schon dabei sind: Auch in einer zweiten Hinsicht scheint es mir wichtig, dass dieses Spiel auf dem iPad erschienen ist: Es geht mir um seine Handhabung, seine Haptik, seine Materialität, die ich im ersten Brief, durchaus nur geringfügig übertreibend, verglichen habe mit einem Grimoire. Ich spürte meinen Zahnschmelz vibrieren, als ich in den Anfangsjahren des Tablettcomputers einen Dozenten von der dem Format innewohnenden “Intimität” sprechen hörte. Year Walk aber hat mir einen Eindruck davon vermittelt, was er damit gemeint haben könnte. Die tatsächlich unmittelbarere, physischere Nähe zum Gerät, der Umgang mit der Benutzeroberfläche im vollen Wortsinn, scheint mir an irgendwelche atavistischen Nervenzentren (ganz zu schweigen von tiefsitzenden bibliophilen Tendenzen) zu rühren, die eine verknappte Distanz zur atavistischeren, mir nahen Sagenwelt bedeutete. Es war nicht ohne Bedeutung, dass ich Year Walk streicheln, auf den Kopf stellen und durchrütteln musste, um ihm seine Geheimnisse entlocken zu können: Auch hier zeichnete sich Year Walk wiederum als ein Fundstück, ein Artefakt, eine klare Analogie zum mysteriösen Holzkistchen, dass sowohl der Spieler im Spiel als auch Theoder Almsten höchstdarselbst in einem schwedischen Wald gefunden hat.

Ach, Almsten. Du sprichst davon, wie du selbst und andere Kritiker sich vom Spiel haben täuschen lassen, zu deinem Vergnügen und Respekt. Auch ich eilte, Berufskrankheit, im Companion direkt zur About-Seite, und auch ich nahm den Volkskundler (wie man dies früher vermutlich nicht ganz unpassend archaisch genannt hätte) Theodor Almsten für bare Münze. Nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil ich glauben wollte, dass in dieses Spiel nicht nur Weltweisheit geflossen ist, sondern auch Recherche. Natürlich verstand ich, dass selbst in den „Fakten“ ein gutes Stück Fiktion steckt, spätestens als sich im Companion Almstens Tagebuch öffnete. Dennoch hoffte ich bis zum Schluss, dass es einen Theodor Almsten, Anthropologe, tatsächlich gibt, dass da ein Akademiker mit Sinn für Kunst und Humor tatsächlich seinen Namen hergab für das Experiment, dass Year Walk, wie du sagst, in der Tat ist. Dass dies nicht der Fall ist, wurde endgültig erst klar, als ich sein im Companion erwähntes Standardwerk zur schwedischen Mythologie bestellen wollte und bemerkte, dass dies nicht möglich ist. Das Internet als grosser Aufklärer – für solche Mysterien ist es Gift. Und um ehrlich zu sein: Ich habe es nicht übers Herz gebracht, zu recherchieren, ob auch die restlichen Figuren dieses Spiels fiktiv sind. Ob es den Kirkengrimmen überhaupt gibt ausserhalb von Year Walk – ob das Spiel tatsächlich “verwurzelt” ist in realen, tradierten Sagen, oder sie nur gerade gut genug kennt, um ihr Spiel mit ihnen und uns zu treiben. Ich will mir das Herz nicht brechen lassen.

Dies aber führt mich zu einer meiner wichtigsten Fragen: Hast du einen Walkthrough benutzt? Und vor allem wie hast du ihn benutzt? Ich selbst hatte, wie gesagt, keinen Internetzugang, als ich mich Year Walk ausgesetzt habe, und ich möchte es nicht anders haben. Denn Year Walk besitzt etwas, das im Adventure-Genre (ob es nun dazu gehört oder nicht) selten ist: Es hat eine meisterliche Rätsel-Dramaturgie. Die ersten Minuten, Stunden sogar, sind ganz und gar verwunderlich, irritierend, schwierig. Das Zurechtfinden in dieser sonderbaren, unvertrauten Welt fällt schwer, die Erschliessung ihrer ludischen Logik, die die irritierende Situation des Protagonisten reflektiert, der auf einer allen Regeln und Gesetzen der physischen Welt entledigten Visionsqueste herumirrt. In dieser Phase war ich frustriert und unendlich froh, keinen Internetzugang zu haben. Ich bin gedrillt auf Erfolgserlebnisse im Sekundentakt, und als ich wortwörtlich wiederholt nicht weiter wusste, war die Versuchung gross, aufzugeben. (Denn nichts anderes ist der Griff zum Walkthrough in meinen Augen.) Ich habe aber, notgedrungen, widerstanden, auch wenn dies bedeutete, das Spielerlebnis auf zwei Nächte statt der geplanten einen zu verteilen. Year Walk ist aber eines jener seltenen, wunderbaren Spiele, bei denen ein verborgener Teil des Hirns weiterarbeitet, selbst wenn man sein Bewusstsein auf andere Dinge lenkt. (Etwas, das ich bislang vor allem von Braid kannte.) Am zweiten Abend war mir, instinktiv quasi, klar, was zu tun war. Und von da an verstand ich auch, wie raffiniert das Spiel als Abwärtsspirale konzipiert ist: Die Rätsel werden einfacher, je weiter man kommt und entfalten so in der Endphase eine unglaubliche Sogwirkung, bei dem die Barrieren, die einem errichtet sind, schneller und schneller und schneller eingerissen werden, während das Spiel seltsamer und seltsamer wird – just in jenem Moment, in dem auch die Handlung suggeriert, dass man an ein Ziel kommt, dass man im doppelten Wortsinn das Geheimnis durchschaut hat, oder, wenn man dem Mythologischen abgeneigt ist, der Walker sich endgültig dem Fiebertrauma und Wahnsinn ergibt: Alles in dieser verschrobenen Welt macht plötzlich Sinn für den Spieler, für den Verrückten.

Du kennst vermutlich das Argument, dass nicht die zunehmende Absurdität der Rätsel das Genre des Adventures (mit dem Year Walk verwandt, wenn auch nicht identisch ist) an den Rand des Todes gebracht hat, sondern das Internet mit seinem Überangebot an Walkthroughs und Petzern. Natürlich ist dies eine falsche Dichotomie; die Walkthroughs sind ein direkter Auswuchs der zunehmend auf Willkür als einzigem Leitfaden ausgelegten „Rätsel“, die selbst die besten Vertreter des Genres oft plagen und plagten und absolut nichts Geheimnisvolles an sich hatten, weshalb ein Walkthrough auch nicht Geheimnisse verraten kann. (Dass die besten Vertreter des Renaissance des Genres mit Spielen wie Walking Dead und Kentucky Route Zero im Übrigen auf Rätsel beinahe völlig verzichtet, ist bezeichnend.) Allerdings hat diese Notwendigkeit und damit einhergehende Bereitwilligkeit zum Schreiben und Lesen von Walkthroughs ein Klima generiert, dass höchst nachteilig ist für ein Ausnahmespiel wie Year Walk, das für einmal tatsächlich sinnvolle, intuitiv fassbare Rätsel und Geheimnisse birgt. Ich kenne Leute, die dieses Spiel besprochen haben und dafür auf einen Walkthrough zurückgegriffen haben – was sagt dies über ein Genre und die Kultur, die sich darum entwickelt hat, aus, wenn dies sogar bei einem Spiel passiert, dass selbst ein rätselmässig Minderbemittelter wie ich in kaum fünf Stunden entwirren konnte? (Und, das nur als Tangente: Was sagt es über Journalisten aus, dass sie ohne zu zögern auf die Art von Information – den Walkthrough – zurückgreifen, die das intendierte Spielerlebnis untergraben, aber sich nicht die Mühe machen, eine einfache Recherche zu den vermeintlichen Entwicklern des Spiels zu machen? Damit meine ich nicht dich, sondern Verge und Konsorten – macht es Sinn, hier Gedanken zu einer verworrenen, sehr spezifischen Art journalistischer Ethik anzustellen?)

Als ich in meinem ersten Brief gemutmasst habe, dass unsere Worte dem Mysterium dieses Spiels nichts anhaben können, habe ich gezögert, den Begriff der „Aura“ zu verwenden. Mittlerweile bin ich aber mutiger: Was Year Walk vor so vielen anderen Spielen auszeichnet, ist tatsächlich, dass es eine Aura hat, die Aura des Artefakts, des Mysteriösen, des Altvorderen. Oder geht da der esoterisch angehauchte Benjamin mit mir durch? Ist eine solche Aura dazu verdammt, immer nur „clever“ und eine „Pointe“ zu sein im Zeitalter des Internets? Gibt es für dich andere Spiele, die eine solche Aura erahnen liessen? Und ist das Geheimnis in diesem Medium überhaupt noch zu retten?

Unheilsschwangere Grüsse,

PS Ich selber habe, übrigens, ein brutal rudimentäres Game-Designdokument in meiner Schublade, in dem ebenfalls die lokale Sagenwelt zum Tragen kommt. Ich beschreibe es gerne als Harvest Moon meets Amensia, und es wird Hüttenkäse darin geben. Was hältst du vom Arbeitstitel Harvest Blood Moon?

PPS Ich kontere deinen Pechtenlauf mit meinen Tschäggeten und erhöhe um ein Beispiel lokaler oraler Sagentradition, das dir vermutlich unverständlich sein dürfte, aber sympathisch – immerhin exorzieren darin Priester Geister, indem sie sich auf Brücken mit ihnen in metaphorischem Sägemehl wälzen.

Year Walk nicht als Spiel, sondern als Artefakt – das ist doch mal ein schönes Bild. Vielleicht sollten wir uns ja sowieso von dem Wort “Spiel” freimachen und andere Worte für unser Objekt suchen. Die bewusste Verdunkelung und Abkehr von vielen spielerischen Erklärungstraditionen erinnert mich an Starseed Pilgrim, das ja anscheinend ebenso die Überforderung des Spielers als Hauptelement hat, aber natürlich auch an ein anderes aktuelles Enigma, das große Antichamber, in dem, wie in Year Walk und The Room, die Ahnungslosigkeit des Spielers mit jener der eigentlich nicht existenten Spielfigur übereinstimmt.

Vielleicht ist hier ein Ansatzpunkt: Besonders Year Walk hebt den Unterschied zwischen uns als Spielendem und irgendeiner von uns getrennten Spielerfigur besser, weil direkt erfahrbar auf, als dies die Egoperspektive mit ihrem Versprechen einer Körpersimulation je konnte. In Year Walk gehen tatsächlich wir selber auf einen verwirrenden Nachtspaziergang, verlieren selbst die Orientierung, müssen selbst die Rätsel lösen, müssen mühsam, eigenhändig die gefrorenen Föten zum Wasserpferd schleppen und sehen am Schluss, in den grandios metaphysisch-abstrakten letzten “Rätseln” in Schwarz-Weiß, die Gewissheiten einer realen, gegenständlichen Welt auseinanderbrechen. Das erste “Game Over” ist dann für sich ein Stachel in unserem Fleisch – hier wird uns das Happy End verweigert, das wir zu verdienen glauben. Wie wir in der Companion-App per Tagebuch dann zu verstehen bekommen, dass alles, was wir zuvor im Spiel erlebt haben, bereits geschehen ist, weil es sich in den staubigen Archiven des ländlichen Schwedens vor hundert Jahren findet – das ist eine Pointe, wie sie schöner kaum einen Spiel gelungen ist. Und ich stimme dir zu, dass das iPad als intimes Gerät dafür perfekt ist. Wird so vielleicht am Mobile Gaming gar die Games-Welt genesen? Oder zumindest: eine davon?

Lieber Christof, ich habe geschrieben, dass ich dich beneide – um dein fast mythisch perfektes Spielerlebnis, das du unter Verzicht auf das ewig lockende Internet haben konntest. (Kleiner Einschub: Ich erinnere mich noch gut an die Zeit, als die Games-Magazine — von Happy Computer aufwärts — viele Seiten monatlich den Spielelösungen widmeten. Ich habe diese Seiten, wie alles in diesen Heften, Wort für Wort verschlungen, und für mich waren diese Beschreibungen von Spielelösungen wie eine eigene Art Literatur – auch und besonders, wenn ich die Spiele nie selbst besessen hatte. Ich erinnere mich übrigens, dass ich damals, irgendwann im letzten Jahrtausend, sogar einen umfangreichen Guide zu Hillsfar geschrieben habe, dessen Abdruck die PowerPlay mit der für mich generösen Summe von 500 Schilling – etwa 35 Euro – belohnt hat.) Also: Walkthroughs. I confess: ich habe geschummelt bei Year Walk. Die Stunden, die du mit verständnislosem Herumirren und Lernen (!) verbracht hast, fehlen meinem Spielerlebnis, es waren nicht ausschließlich eigene Geistesblitze, die mich zum Erfolg geführt haben.

Ich lasse den Kopf hängen. Sind wir trotzdem noch Freunde?

Falls ja, werd ich gleich frech: Ein Lob dem Walkthrough! Als alter Sack begrüße ich es durchaus, wenn mir meine mit jeder vergehenden Sekunde schrumpfende Lebenszeit nicht durch die Hürden schlechten Rätseldesigns gestohlen werden. Das führt, besonders bei Year Walk, zu einer pikanten Frage: Ist das Rätseldesign dieses Spiels, das ich so oder so allein wegen seines Muts und seines Styles liebe, wirklich gut? Du sagst, die Rätsel seien sinnvoll, intuitiv fassbar – dem kann ich nur insoweit zustimmen, als “intuitiv fassbar” und “logisch” nicht dasselbe ist. Aber wie forderte mein Lieblingsautor so schön: Destroy all rational thought – dieses Motto könnte sowohl über Year Walk als auch über House of Leaves angebracht werden.

Ihr, die ihr hier eintretet, lasst alle Ratio fahren! Vielleicht ist just so, wie du schreibst, das Geheimnis des Mediums zu wahren – im Reiz, komplexe Systeme verstehen zu lernen. Insofern: Jawohl, Aura trifft es. Klar: Dark Souls hat sie auch, genau wegen des Mysteriums.

Dein Punkt mit der abnehmenden Schwierigkeit ist interessant: Tatsächlich veranlasste mich das allererste Rätsel – die Übertragung von der Holzpuppe auf die Eulen – schon zum Nachlesen – die späteren Rätsel habe ich dann, bis auf die Reihenfolge der Kirchenumrundung, wieder ohne Hilfe erknobelt. Ich geb’s zu: ich bin schwach. Oder faul. Oder beides. Und wenn ich gerade an das oben erwähnte Antichamber zurückdenke, das ich schon vor Release spielen durfte, also noch vor der Flut an Walkthrough-Videos, dann muss ich zugeben: Das hat was, selbst das Gehirn anzustrengen, ohne den doppelten Boden des Internets.

Hier ist ein Paradoxon: Ich bin es gewohnt, beim Nachdenken über Spiele mein Gehirn mehr anzustrengen als während des Spielens selbst. Bin ich vom First-Person-Shooter verdorben? Sollte ich mich mehr am obskuren Genre der Towlr stählen?

Ratlos,

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Was uns am Herzen liegt

Networks

Von Lucie am 13. April 2013

- Irgendwas mit Medien

- Konsum

Foto, CC BY 2.0 , by Aloha75
In den letzten Monaten, nein, Jahren eigentlich schon, ist die Welt der Video- und PC-Games in Wallung geraten, was Probleme wie Sexismus angeht. Gerade erst in den vergangenen Wochen erschienen eine Vielzahl von Artikeln und Statements, die sich mit Frauen in der Gameswelt, Frauenrollen in Spielen und den damit zusammenhängenden Problemen beschäftigen. Ich benutze hier das schwammige Wort “Wallung”, weil “Bewegung” vielleicht noch etwas zu viel des Optimismus wäre. Grundsätzlich sollte dies aber ein optimistischer Post werden. Wie der Internet-Zufall es so will, stolperte ich dann prompt heute morgen über einen Tweet genau zum Thema:

(“Schnippischer Typ in der Kaffeeschlange mustert mein Bioshock Infinite T-Shirt, meint ich “hätte es sicher nicht mal gespielt”. Also verriet ich ihm das Ende.”)

Ist das jetzt ein Grund für Pessimismus oder Optimismus? Der Vorfall zeigt zumindest einiges auf. Es ist ein typisches Problem in der Gameswelt, dass Frauen mit dem Vorurteil begegnet wird, keine “richtigen” Gamer zu sein – manche trauen ihnen wohl grundsätzlich nicht zu, einen “großen Titel”, wie in diesem Fall den im März veröffentlichten First-Person-Shooter “Bioshock Infinite”, zu spielen. Es schwingt dabei auch das Vorurteil mit, sich nur mit Nerd-Insignia zu schmücken zu wollen, ohne sich wirklich damit auszukennen (dies prägt auch den “Fake Geek Girl”-Mythos – der im Netz bereits wunderbar auseinandergenommen bzw. persifliert wurde). Die im Tweet so Geschmähte, die australische Tech-Journalistin Rae Johnston, war in diesem Augenblick aber offenbar schlagfertig und nahm gekonnte Spielerinnen-Rache. Das freut mich für sie und nötigt mir Bewunderung ab – ändert aber leider das Grundproblem nicht, denn noch schöner wäre es natürlich, sie würde von vornherein als Spielerin für voll genommen. Respekt als Default, und nicht als etwas, was mühsam erkämpft werden muss.

Andererseits stimmen die Reaktionen auf ihren Tweet hoffnungsfroh: Jubel und Gratulationen, Retweets und Favs, die den Tweet laut verschiedener “Trend-Barometer” kurzzeitig zu einem Top-Tweet in San Francisco, Kanada, Großbritannien und Australien machten. Es gibt, trotz der abscheulichsten Hass-Kommentare, die das Thematisieren von Games und Sexismus im Internet meist mit sich bringt, offenbar auch eine große Community, die davon die Schnauze voll hat.

Anita Sarkeesian musste für die Crowdfunding-Aktion für ihr Tropes vs. Women in Videogames-Projekt eine der schlimmsten Hass-Kampagnen der jüngsten Zeit einstecken, so dass kürzlich sogar ein neues “Internetgesetz” nach ihr benannt wurde: “Anita’s Irony” steht stellvertretend dafür, dass Online-Diskussionen zu Sexismus und Misogynie schnell in unverhältnismäßigem Sexismus und Misogynie resultieren. Trotzdem endet Sarkeesian ihren TED-Talk zu Online-Harassment und Cyber Mobs mit der “anderen Seite der Geschichte” – einer gigantischen Welle an Solidarität, die ihr das 25-fache des angepeilten Spendenbetrags und zahllose unterstützende Nachrichten, Blogposts, Videos und Fan-Art brachte. Ähnlich kreativ zeigen sich Fans auch an anderer Stelle: kürzlich erhielt ein Vater im Netz viel Aufmerksamkeit, der für seine Tochter die Geschlechterverhältnisse im Spiel “Donkey Kong” umprogrammiert hatte – doch leider nicht nur in Form lobender, sondern auch hasserfüllter Kommentare. Wie entlarvend es sein kann, wenn diese Hasskommentare laut und bewusst ernsthaft vorgelesen werden, bewies daraufhin Youtuber(in?) Shesellssheshells in einem Video (Warnung: schwer erträgliche Kommentare, Androhung sexueller Gewalt included. Trotzdem ganz interessant).

Ja, in der Gameswelt liegt noch einiges im Argen, was Themen wie Sexismus (oder auch Rassismus und Homophobie) angeht. Aber es tut sich auch etwas. Die Themen werden diskutiert, erhalten Aufmerksamkeit, und es gibt auch Zuspruch für die, die sich unbequemen Themen widmen. Einen guten Überblick bietet aktuell zum Beispiel die Zeitschrift an.schläge, die gerade “Sexismus in der Spieleindustrie” zum Schwerpunktthema hat.

1ReasonWhy und 1ReasonToBe

In der Spieleindustrie rückte im November 2012 etwas ins Blickfeld: Auf die Frage des Spiele-Entwicklers Luke Crane, warum es nicht mehr Frauen in der Games-Industrie gäbe, begannen unter dem Hashtag #1ReasonWhy auf Twitter diverse Spiele-Entwicklerinnen und -Journalistinnen von alltäglichem Sexismus und ihren negativen, diskriminerenden Erfahrungen in der Branche zu berichten. Auf der diesjährigen Game Developers Conference, die vom 25.-29. März in San Francisco stattfand, nahm eine Reihe von Entwicklerinnen dies zum Anlass, ihre Erfahrungen auf einem Panel nochmals zu diskutieren – und gaben ihrer Session den auf den Hashtag bezogenen Titel “1ReasonToBe”. Den Problemen, mit denen Frauen in der Games-Industrie umgehen müssten, stellten sie Gründe an die Seite, die dieses Arbeitsfeld lohnenswert machen – vom Publikum mit Standing Ovations belohnt.

Die Game-Designerin Kim McAuliffe wies dabei darauf hin, dass zwar nicht jede_r offenen Sexismus erlebe, aber ein großes Problem darin bestehe, dass die Industrie immer noch fälschlicherweise von einem rein männlichen Zielpublikum ausgehe, obwohl Spiele wie Minecraft gezeigt hätten, wie vielfältig das Spielpublikum sei. Wenn Mädchen und Frauen als Spielerinnen schon früher ernst genommen würden, würden sie auch eher die Spieleindustrie als eine Karrieremöglichkeit für sich wahrnehmen. Die Wiener Game-Designerin Andrea Schmoll bemerkt im Gespräch mit an.schläge dahingehend bereits Erfolge: “Es gibt zwar immer noch Studios, in denen keine oder nur sehr wenige Frauen aktiv beteiligt sind. Besucht man jedoch Konferenzen, so merkt man, dass die Zahl der Entwicklerinnen jedes Jahr steigt.“ (Wie aber erst kürzlich zu lesen war, verdienen auch im Spielebereich Frauen immer noch weniger als Männer).

Dass die Industrie sich hier schon bemüht, aber mit vielen Vorurteilen zu kämpfen hat, berichtete beispielsweise Neil Druckman, Creative Director des Spieleentwicklers Naughty Dog: für Fokus-Tests des für Juli angekündigten Spiels “The Last of Us” kam die beauftrage Marktforschung nicht einmal auf die Idee, auch Testerinnen einzuladen – sie stellte eine rein männliche Gruppe zusammen. Erst auf expliziten Wunsch von Naughty Dog kamen auch Frauen hinzu. Druckman dazu “I hope this is a relic of the past that will soon go away.” (“Ich hoffe, das ist ein Relikt der Vergangenheit, das bald verschwunden sein wird.”).

Branche im Wandel?

Ähnlich schwankend zwischen Optimismus, Ernüchterung und Kampfgeist äußerte sich nach der Game Developers Conference der Spielejournalist John Walker, der in einem lesenswerten, ausführlichen Artikel erklärt, warum die Games-Website “Rock, Paper, Shotgun” zum Thema Misogynie und Sexismus auch zukünftig nicht die Klappe halten wird. Er sieht sowohl positive Entwicklungen als auch einen weiterhin langen Weg – und beschreibt anschaulich, mit welchen typischen Argumenten und Anfeindungen Menschen zu rechnen haben, die sich kritisch mit diesen Themen auseinandersetzen, Diskriminierungen entgegentreten und sich solidarisch zeigen. Aber er nimmt dabei die Anfeindungen gleichzeitig auch wohltuend auseinander.

Auf der gleichen Plattform interviewt sein Kollege Nathan Grayson (ja, auch der Spielejournalismus ist noch eher männerdominiert), ebenfalls im Rahmen der GDC, den Spieleautor David Gaider (tätig u.a. für BioWare, Autor der “Dragon Age”-Fantasyspielreihe und -Romane). Gaider erklärt unter anderem, warum die Annahme, Spiele mit weiblicher Hauptfigur seien grundsätzlich nicht erfolgreich, viel zu viele Faktoren unberücksichtigt lässt – und diese Annahme zwar als “akzeptiertes Branchenwissen” etabliert sei, aber keineswegs so logisch oder begründet wie allgemein angenommen. Negative Reaktionen der Fans auf zukünftige Veränderungen in der Spielegestaltung sieht Gaider dabei als unvermeidlich – aber nicht als Hindernis:

“We’re talking about the industry at large needing to have broader appeal and a larger fanbase. Yeah, there are some people who don’t want that, because this is their playground. This is their treehouse, get out! But that’s where the industry is going.”

(“Wir sprechen hier von der gesamten Industrie, die eine gößere Anziehungskraft und breitere Fanbase haben muss. Ja, einige Leute werden das nicht wollen, weil das ihr Spielplatz ist. Verschwindet, das ist ihr Baumhaus! Aber in diese Richtung geht die Industrie.”)

In Diskussionen über die sexistische Gestaltung mancher Games falle dabei oft die Argumentation, es sei doch “nur ein Spiel”, das solle man doch nicht so ernst nehmen und nicht so verbissen sehen. Aber im Prinzip wertet diese Argumentation Spiele ab. Warum sollte jemand, der Spiele liebt, so für sie argumentieren? Spiele-Autor Gaider fasst dies in der Beschreibung seiner GDC-Session zu “Sex in Video Games” zusammen:

“Our industry is struggling with a conflict between the desire to be taken seriously as an art form, and the desire to avoid addressing social issues because what we make are ‘just games.’”

(“Unsere Industrie kämpft mit dem Konflikt, dass sie einerseits als Kunstform ernst genommen und andererseits vermeiden will, soziale Fragen anzugehen, weil sie ja ‘nur Spiele’ macht.”)

Nicht nur technische und gestalterische Höchstleistungen zu erreichen, sondern Hand in Hand damit auch soziale und inhaltliche Fragen zu verhandeln – eine Denkweise, die sich hoffentlich noch weiter verbreitet.

Spielerinnen gestern und heute

Die Games-Welt ist dabei, sich zu verändern, und das ist gut und spannend. Sie hat sich in den letzten Jahren auch in vielerlei anderer Hinsicht ausdifferenziert: neue Spielweisen, Settings und Erzählformen sind hinzugekommen. Mittlerweile werden Spiele mit Kampagnen, Trailern und Stories eingeführt, die in Aufwand und Komplexität Hollywood-Filmen gleichen. Gleichzeitig können wir inzwischen quasi auf jeder Armbanduhr ein Spiel spielen. Wir können wild fuchtelnd Tennis simulieren im Wohnzimmer, Singen oder Gitarre “spielen”, unsere eigene Geschichte, unsere eigene Welt konstruieren und uns gute und böse virtuelle Hunde halten. So viele Möglichkeiten – aber Spiele, in denen nur eine Frau als Hauptfigur zur Auswahl steht, werden trotzdem noch von diversen Publishern abgelehnt? Sie verkaufen sich schlechter, heißt es – und die Zahlen belegen dies. Gleichzeitig erhalten Titel mit weiblicher Hauptfigur aber nicht annähernd so viel Marketing-Budget wie Spiele mit einem männlichen Helden: damit wird es zur self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ebenso haben sich die Zielgruppen erweitert und ausdifferenziert und sollten von einer Industrie, die sich selbst ernst nimmt, berücksichtigt werden. Allerdings: die Bedürfnisse von Spielerinnen oder generell einer vielschichtigeren Zielgruppe zu berücksichtigen sollte nicht allein eine wirtschaftliche Entscheidung sein (das ist zumindest mein Wunsch), sondern auch ein bewusstes Aufräumen mit sexistischen Stereotypen. Ein Resultat eines ausdifferenzierten Spielemarktes sollte nicht sein, Frauen bloß die “leichten” Social- und Casual-Games oder lustigen Sing- und Partyspiele (gegen die ich insgesamt gar nichts habe, im Gegenteil), zuzuordnen – und den männlichen Spielern die Triple-A-Titel, die vielen immer noch als die “wahren” und “richtigen” Games gelten.

Es so darzustellen, dass sich die Games-Industrie nun so weit geöffnet hätte, dass auch Frauen beginnen zu spielen, stösst mir ohnehin immer komisch auf. Es ist zwar selten richtig, sich selbst als repräsentativ zu nehmen – aber wenn stets beschworen wird, dass Spiele früher ein “Jungsding” waren und nun “erwachsen geworden” sind und sich daher einem breiteren Publikum öffnen müssen, sehe ich mich selbst als Mädchen unzählige Stunden mit Gameboy, NES, Super Nintendo und PC verzocken, sehe ich mich mit drei Mädels quietschend gemeinsam “Monkey Island” durchspielen.

Andere Frauen starteten ähnlich früh, wie in an.schläge zu lesen ist. Und das Aufseufzen auf Twitter, als kürzlich das legendäre LucasArts-Studio geschlossen wurde, war ein geschlechterübergreifendes (sehr schön dazu: ein Foto-Nachruf mit den vielfältigen Gesichtern des Studios). Natürlich waren spielende Mädchen und Frauen in den 80ern und 90ern in der Minderheit, aber deswegen doch nicht inexistent. Und die Nintendo-Mädchen von einst sind heute erwachsen, haben Jobs und können sich Dinge kaufen. Dies zeigen Zahlen der Entertainment Software Association von 2012, nach denen Frauen von 18 Jahren und älter einen signifikant höheren Anteil des Spielepublikums stellen (30%) als Jungen mit 17 Jahren und jünger (18%). Und sie haben keine Lust, nicht für voll genommen zu werden – so wie die Journalistin Rae Johnston in der Kaffeeschlange.

Was heißt das nun konkret? Die im Internet wütenden Baumhaus-Verteidiger scheinen stets zu befürchten, “ihre” Spiele würden nun verschwinden, ihre Welt in sich zusammenfallen. Dabei bedeutet bspw. die Einführung diverserer Spieleprotagonist_innen nicht gleichzeitig das Verschwinden der bisherigen. Eine kreative, nicht-sexistische Charaktergestaltung muss nicht automatisch in langweiligen Figuren resultieren. Es gibt ja auch schon viele Spiele, die hier neue Ideen verwirklichen, und die allen vielen Spaß machen. Und nur weil es spannend ist, auch mal mit Zelda zu spielen, hat Link ja nicht gleich ausgedient.

Keine Angst. Wir wollen nur spielen.
Von Lucie am 13. April 2013

- Irgendwas mit Medien

- Konsum

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Spec Ops, FC3 Writers On Art, Treating Players Intelligently

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Williams Vs Yohalem, Pt 2: Blood Dragon

By Nathan Grayson on April 11th, 2013 at 1:00 pm.

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When last we joined Spec Ops: The Line writer Walt Williams and Far Cry 3 writer Jeffrey Yohalem, they discussed everything from the problematic nature of modern escapism to Western culture’s disturbing disconnection from real violence. Today: art! Or rather, the process of creating it using someone else’s money when that’s not really what they wanted in the first place. Also, we delve into the notion that gamers (often rightly) assume games think they’re dumb, and how that factored into the receptions of both games’ messages. In the process, the likes of Mass Effect, Shadow of the Colossus, the Sistine Chapel, and Dante’s Inferno (the literary work; not the bizarre EA game) get ruthlessly dissected. NO ONE IS SAFE. Flee beyond the break while you still can.

RPS: There was an interesting phenomenon in both of your games. I think most people who played through Walt’s game got the message, but they had to get through the first part where they really were like, “Oh, this isn’t just another shooter.” That was weird to watch in the initial media coverage. And then with Far Cry, I think a lot of people played it and thought you were glorifying all those tropes. A lot of people said that very derisively – “I didn’t get that message from your game at all. I just thought this was a game about powering up this dude and being super awesome and racist all the time.” Where do you think your respective processes broke down?

Yohalem: I don’t know if it was ineffective as a process, because the French and the British have really gotten the deeper meaning to the game. I get tons of emails from people who say they understand it. I know it felt like people weren’t getting it, but… The idea was to construct a surface presentation, such that if you play the game without looking beneath the surface, the surface is broken. It’s broken so fundamentally that it makes you disturbed. It doesn’t hang together. It’s like the façade of a building where there’s no building behind it.

I think the game disturbed a lot of people… If that pisses you off, it should be a call that you want games that are different.

If there’s anything I can say that I would do differently if I were doing this again, I think I would talk a lot more about what the game was trying to be before it was released. Everyone who I’ve talked to who knew it was a satire beforehand said that it was very, very clear when they played the game. Only people who didn’t know [were totally in the dark]. A lot of people didn’t know but still got it. There were some people who didn’t know who said, “Oh, it didn’t make sense, and then I replayed it knowing that and then it made sense.”

I was trying to hide it beforehand because I wanted people to have this experience themselves, and I still think that’s okay. I think the game disturbed a lot of people, and they take that out in anger at the tropes that are in the game. Some people say, “This game has every negative video game trope ever.” Yes, it does, doesn’t it? If that pisses you off, it should be a call that you want people to make games that are different.

In my mind they’re two sides of the same coin. People being mad at me and saying, “Oh, this is reusing all this stuff”… Well, keep saying that and game companies will say, “People want us to make something different.” Then if they say, “Oh, I get this, this is about where games are today,” it just leads to that call for people to do something else. Then that’s good too. I think that also, it’s not a critique, and that’s very important. It’s an exploration. If the player plays the game and says, “I love this! This is amazing!” then it says something to you about yourself. That aspect of the Rorschach is very important. If you’re disturbed by a game, to me it’s because of something in you. That’s exciting.

There are also references that happen when you’re making a game a lot, like you reference Dante’s Inferno or you reference Paradise Lost, and I intentionally did not put any of that in the game, because I think it’s important that the game be a democratic journey. All these secret things hidden under the surface and lines taken from other places, they’re all from mainstream culture. I was trying to democratize that analysis experience, so that anyone can analyze the game and figure out what’s going on. It’s not like, “Oh, you studied literature, so you can get what I’m talking about.” For me, analyzing literature is a game. It’s an exciting one. You go into this book and you think, “What are the many different things going on here in this work?”

I think as an industry we can do that interactively, where I live something, and then I say, “What happened to me in this experience?” There are resonances and all these ideas in our experiences at different levels. Then I can have conversations with my friends about it. One person on Twitter said, “Thank you. This game gave me an amazing conversation.” That, for me, is catnip.

RPS: But in the aftermath, you outright said you thought people didn’t get it.

Yohalem: You know what’s very interesting about that? I never said that. So that’s based on a Penny Arcade article. If you look at that article, they’re not quoting me. A journalist said that I was unhappy about people not getting it, and then the quote doesn’t say that. Or, no, it was Penny-Arcade. I think it’s Penny-Arcade. But then that one line, which is not a direct quote, was blown all the way out. Someone took that line and did a whole article about it.

Basically, I felt like a majority of people got it. If there was a small group of people that didn’t… I was talking about that. I actually was very happy with the response. I was also saying it would be neat to see more discussion online, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t getting it. However people choose to interpret it, it’s up to them. I think that the writer is one person in the conversation. The work is the center of the conversation. If people say, “Oh, the writer was intending this, what do you think about that? Do you think it was effective? Do you think it wasn’t?” then great. Seriously, I’m thrilled with how everyone’s talking about it. I think that I’m one voice of many. If people say, “Oh, Far Cry proves that I love shooters that have a broken story and are just about punching sharks,” then OK.

Williams: Honestly, I think a lot of the press response that didn’t really get what you were doing with the metaphor, it kind of proves exactly what you were going for with the narrative. I think it showed how much we have allowed ourselves to accept that it’s what we put up with from a game.

Yohalem: They saw the broken game and they said, “Oh, this is just what we expect. It’s a broken game.”

Williams: Or the ones that are like, “This has all the negative tropes, but then I got to punch a flaming bear! That was awesome!” And they didn’t see that connection between the two things in their own experiences that they made with the game. Which perfectly sums up what you were going for on the narrative. That we simply are willing to say, “Fuck the things that make this bad, I am personally having fun within this world. It’s about me and what I’m choosing to do.” In one way that’s kind of cool. When you’re able to look at me like, “C’mon, guy, you obviously get it, you’re just not getting it! It’s right in front of you! You just said it, but you’re not getting it!” It’s cool to see exactly what you’re going for mirrored in those things.

Yohalem: I think that as an audience, there are certain levels of subtlety that we like to think that we want in games and that we can find in games. But I don’t think we’re ready to see them yet, because we’ve never seen them before. That’s really what it comes down to. We see things in some games that we consider to be subtle, and those things tend to be a bit more on the nose than we really think they are. Truly subtle sorts of things, we have a tendency to just miss them completely, because we’re so used to games feeding us everything.

I mean, my whole life, 20-plus years or whatever, I’ve been playing games. Even then, a game is still going to start by telling me what my little controller does. To be fair, some people come into a game for the first time and they don’t know that, so that’s why it’s there. But we’re still used to a game feeding us information step by step by step. It’s more respectful if you open the world up for people to find things on their own. That was always the goal, to create something that respects the player’s intelligence. Players, I think, are very smart, and they can come up with all kinds of ideas about games in addition to what we have.

Williams: But I think players aren’t used to us treating them like that. Players assume we don’t give them the credit they deserve, and so then they expect a certain level of things from us. When they get a game like Far Cry where you can punch a shark – “Hey, badass!” – they’re thinking that you’re treating them like every other dynamic shooter they’ve ever played. They’re not thinking that you want them to engage further with it, because no one else has asked them to do that.

Yohalem: Also, the shocking thing is that a lot of people who were most upset by the game, they never once suggested that they could have turned it off and done something else. I find that fascinating. They’ll say, “There’s no choice! You just have to go through this.” You could just stop playing. That never occurs to them, I think, and that, again, is the addiction thing. But, I mean, we have the power to say “no.”

Williams: That was something I brought up a lot when we were doing PR after the game came out. There comes a point in the game where the ultimate real choice of any video game is not the choice that we’ve given you in the game. It’s the choice of, “Do I want to play a game where I do these things, or do I not like to play that?” Turning off the game is a valid player choice. Some people got what I was saying. Some people did not. Some people said, “What are you talking about? What’s the point if I just stopped playing?”

Turning off the game is a valid player choice.

But it’s about looking at what you’re comfortable with doing and realizing that you’re simulating truly terrible acts. Even though they are simulated, even though they are not in the world that we are in, you are still choosing to do them over and over. Admitting to yourself that you’re not comfortable with that and that’s okay to be not comfortable with that. I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to. Totally valid, and it’s something that we need to begin accepting as valid.

Part of it comes in as you get older, just in general. Over the past couple years, I used to start to feel bad that I wasn’t going out more, partying and going out more with friends at night and on the weekends. I was staying at home and living a more calmed-down life. And then it occurred to me one day, “Look. I’m doing this because this is actually what I want to do. I’m not doing that because it’s not what I want to be doing. There was a point in time where I did want to do that, and then I grew out of it. My life changed, and it’s okay that I’m not still doing the same thing I was doing. I’ve grown and matured.”

We as an industry, and as gamers, have to come to that same realization that there’s nothing wrong with those things at certain times. There are always going to be younger gamers. They’re always going to be exploring games that are more simply entertainment-driven, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Yohalem: We’re not going to steal those games and replace them with mature ones. It’s not like those games are no longer going to exist.

Williams: Absolutely. It’s just that we have such a broad spectrum of experiences that we have yet to explore as a medium. We can start to do that now, particularly as creators are getting older and maturing and becoming different people and doing these things. We can make our medium so much larger and so much more inviting to all people who want to interact with every possible kind of experience.

Yohalem: One of the major inspirations for us, which has never been discussed – I find it interesting that it doesn’t get brought up – is Shadow of the Colossus. Another game that was very much about how you couldn’t turn it off. I think it’s very subtle in that game. I think creators and journalists get it. That game has this idea that you have to kill your own horse to beat the final battle. Then they brought back the horse, but I felt like that was a producer thing where they were like, “No, you can’t kill the horse! Bring it back!” But the part where you jump across the cliff and the horse dies, you think, “Why am I doing this?! I’m winning at all costs, but what does that mean? Why don’t I just turn it off?” That fascinates me.

RPS: But let’s say you message that part or satire or what have you better. That’s still only reaching a small subset of people who will play the game. The rest – unless the message is more overtly expressed in the game – will just assume it’s another shooter with no underlying message. So how do we get past this point? How do we lead players to assume we’re treating them as though they have some modicum of intelligence?

Yohalem: Well, the surprising thing about Far Cry, compared to Shadow, is that Shadow was understood to be a lot more hardcore by us, the people who play games all the time. Far Cry, the mainstream press really loved the game and got that it had a message, because they can just see it as, “I’m playing this game. Maybe I should be outside with my family and doing other things like that.” It’s the hardcore players who find it difficult to look at it that way because they play so many shooters.

I can feel this all the time. You stop seeing the things you’re seeing. It’s just, “I want to feel that feeling again.” I think the difference between a game, like soccer, and an experience like what we’re making is that the game will have certain rules that you’re playing with, and the more that people playing stick with those rules, the better.

Williams: Absolutely. Obviously, as a creator, I really support authorial intent in games. I actually don’t really know if player intent is something that is genuinely true, in those games. Even though we like to think that it is.

Yohalem: I know! Don’t you think we should tell them stuff? That’s the funny thing, it’s the illusion. We’re illusion-makers. There are some games that do [hinge themselves entirely on players]. Minecraft is all about the player. “Here is a box of Legos in the shape of a world. Go fuckin’ wild.” The interesting thing about Minecraft, though, is that it’s also a Robinson Crusoe curated fantasy. It’s about surviving on an island and what you can do, and then it gives you the box. I think that was core to its success. If it had just been a box of Legos, it wouldn’t have have been as interesting.

Williams: Even a game like Mass Effect, it’s a game that is… Whatever you think about the ending or whatever, the rest of it, with the choices the team has created these six variations on the same story. You get to pick whichever one you want. That’s not your intent. That’s six paths where you have fun. It’s basically, do you want to eat your pizza with your hand or do you want to eat your pizza with a fork and a knife? As creators, we have much more power and intent than we like to think that we do. Using that to its potential, I think it makes stronger games. More immersive games.

Yohalem: I think there are different types of people, but when I go home, what I want to play is your experience. I don’t want to play my version of his experience. The more I can see what he sees, the more I’m going to learn about life, and the more we’ll be closer together as people. I think as a society we’re trying to be understanding and empathetic. Issues with stereotypes come about because you don’t understand another person. If that person makes something that causes you to understand something about their experience, that, to me, is what I’m interested in.

Williams: I agree, 100 percent. I think that games, more than any other medium, have the power to do that. Because you really are inhabiting someone else in another world and going through their experience. When the whole Mass Effect 3 ending debacle happened, I was like, “OK, I get that you don’t like it. That’s fine. You’re allowed to not like something.” But the idea of demanding someone rewrite it for you, I can’t even imagine that. I know what’s in my head. I know my story.

Yohalem: Yeah. Why should I want to see myself?

Williams: Yeah! I deal with that all day long. It’s exhausting! I want to see what you see, where you’re going to take me. The games I grew playing were RPGs, Final Fantasy. What I always loved about those games is that every time you picked up a new one, whether it was in the franchise or not, it was going to take you in an entirely new world that you had to completely rediscover all over again. That’s what always drew me into it. What am I going to find and learn this time, within this new place? That’s the way I see it now with other creators. Where are you personally going to take me that I’ve never been able to go before? I get that, from a business standpoint, you want to make a game that can be all things to all people so you can get all people’s money. I get that. That makes sense. And to be fair, we are very blessed that we get to make triple-A games. The only reason we get to do that is we’re spending someone else’s money. But that’s something players have to understand, too.

Yohalem: Say someone in the Renaissance commissioned a Jesus on the cross. If you were going to make a painting that is anti-Jesus on the cross, it’s hidden in the canvas because the person who commissioned it just wants a Jesus painting.

Williams: Absolutely. Things like the Sistine Chapel, that shit happened because Michelangelo had to pay some fuckin’ bills. That’s who was paying for things at the time. It’s a masterpiece of art, but it’s still a commissioned piece of artwork. That’s how artists work, when you’re working with bigger things. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you do it, you have to work within that box to tell something. I also think that, right now, that’s what makes these stories very interesting that we’re able to tell. I’ve seen people ask, “Do you really think a shooter can be critical of shooters?” Only a shooter can be critical of shooters. Especially as an interactive medium.

Yohalem: Yeah. How can I talk about an experience if I’m not living it?

Williams: Yeah. Then I’m just being a hypocrite. Then I’m just being an asshole, to be honest. “How dare you play shooters!” said I in my platformer. With Spec Ops there were a couple of reviewers who thought it was an anti-war game. Which I get. There’s enough allusions to things like Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness that you can assume we were just making an anti-war statement.

Things like the Sistine Chapel, that shit happened because Michelangelo had to pay some fuckin’ bills.

But I’ve said it before, in no way was I making an anti-war game. Because I’ve never been in combat and I don’t think anyone on the design team has ever been in combat. We have no valid firsthand statement to make about what it is like to be in combat and we certainly don’t have anything to say about war. The game is about shooters because we all make them, we all play them, and we have real, earnest statements to make about them that are valid to listen to. Anything we said about war, ultimately, would have been secondhand, if the game was only about war. Things that we had read or had heard from other people. It would have been, while perhaps not inaccurate, slightly disingenuous for us to be the ones saying, “We’re the ones making the anti-war statements!”

No. We’re just adapting the experiences of someone who’s actually gone through it. But making it about shooters gave us, I felt, more of a real, valid platform to stand on and talk about it.

Yohalem: Right, because we did live that. That’s the thing. I grew up playing shooters and thinking about the way they make me feel. For me, the analogous experience in film would be playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Because she’s so into the system of being a star that she goes crazy. At the end, when she’s being led away, it’s like, “Oh, I’m posing for the camera.”

To me, what’s exciting about video games is, in something like Far Cry you’re living that. You’re feeling the system and going, “I love this! I love this! Give me more! Let me kill my girlfriend because I love this so much!” And then you’re Norma Desmond. I feel what’s going on inside her the way I never could have felt in that film. Because in that film you’re just watching this person and going, “Whoa. That’s not like me. She’s a maniac.” But what if you were? That kind of being able to feel those kinds of experience is so exciting.

So we can embed it in the work. There are a lot of clues. Maybe, like you’re saying, we should have leaned out, but it’s all there. Originally there was a speech at the end where Jason talked to the audience and laid it out. It basically says, “If you didn’t feel this way about the whole thing, here’s how you’re supposed to feel.” And then it’s not fair. If people feel like the game supports all these ideas that they have, then it’s like the game betraying them.

There have been a lot of articles that have found some of the hidden stuff. There’s a French text on the internet that goes through all of the higher order of meaning. And so if you look at the game and analyze it contextually, you will see all of this. It’s not fake, in the sense that this is stuff that you can read into it yourself, if you can find it. In my mind, as long as that stuff is there, then the meaning of the game is fixed. Then, if you interpret it differently, you have to support that interpretation.

RPS: That’s another thing, actually. Earlier, you said you were trying to avoid making overarching references to academic works, so as to make your meaning accessible to all. But it’s ultimately couched in references to Alice in Wonderland and Jane McGonigal and stuff like that. How is that any better?

Yohalem: Academic things to me are stuff from the 17th century or 15th century. When you go to university and you pay $150,000 to be part of this academic elite that uses a certain code of references. This happens all the time in academic literature. Every reference that I used is something that is available for free to the culture without having to have gone to university.

RPS: Certainly, but there are many that I think a lot of the culture hasn’t necessarily sought out – especially not in the way you connect them. So you’re not speaking in an academic language, but it seems like you’re speaking in your own.

Yohalem: I’m trying to create this type of game language system. I’m trying to pin it on existing structures, which is how you analyze literature. You take that and bring it down to a more accessible level. And so this is my first experiment in that. You always, always have to keep growing, or you haven’t done anything. There are tons of ways that I could build on that experiment, but I do believe it’s the right direction, because it encourages people into a way of playing with a story that I think is very fun when you get into it. What I’m saying is, I could have been more overt with the rules beforehand. That would have meant talking about it beforehand, like, “Here are the rules I’m playing with.” But otherwise, I just think that this ultimately is more exciting. It makes games more exciting.

Check back soon for the thrilling conclusion, in which we discuss Spec Ops’ poor sales, whether or not this type of in-game criticism has any sort of future, and why triple-A gaming’s lack of a people focus might be the root of many of these problems. Also BioShock, because BioShock.

__________________

« Kung-Fu Kidnapping: Age Of Wushu Now Live | Hey Now, You’re A: Wildstar Beta Begins »

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Pippin Barr's philosophy of developing 'curious' games

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Pippin Barr’s philosophy of developing ‘curious’ games

by Jessica Conditt on Apr 11th 2013 5:15PM

Pippin Barr’s doctoral thesis is titled Video Game Values: Play as Human-Computer Interaction, submitted in 2008 to the Victoria University of Wellington as the final stage of his degree, Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science. In the thesis, Barr highlights the act of playing a computer program rather than simply using one, with case studies in Civilization 3, Fable, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life 2, and The Sims 2. Schoolwork completed, Barr spends his time teaching at the University of Malta’s Institute of Digital Games, and developing small, profound games with an experimental edge. Barr’s projects are simple, thoughtful and play with the boundaries of what a “game” can be:

The Artist is Present is a game about waiting in line at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, complete with real-life museum closing times and hours of standing, doing-nothing excitement. Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment is a series of short games about Greek myths – short because they’re all unwinnable, with death as a constant outcome looming behind each stark, pixelated scene. Barr’s most recent project, the Mumble Indie Bungle, features six games based on popular indie titles as if your grandmother misheard them at the last family dinner, such as World of Glue, Carp Life and Gurney. They’re short, minimalistic and frustrating, but they’re definitely not all supposed to be “boring,” Barr tells me. “I want to make games that controvert the standard rules – I spent quite a bit of time on that in my early games – well, maybe all my games,” he says. “Games that you can’t win, games where you just have to wait for a long time, games where you win but it’s not satisfying, games where you’re not very important in the world of the game, and so forth. These games can be boring if you’re not prepared to embrace a different perspective on things – but if you are prepared to do so, I think they can be quite interesting experiences.” Surprisingly, Barr has never been called a hipster.

At least, not to his face. Even if someone were to throw that word at him, it “doesn’t seem like the end of the world,” he says. Barr calls his projects “Curious Games,” but not in the proper, Alice in Wonderland sense that they’re odd. His games prompt players, and Barr himself, to consider new angles of life, feel a fresh emotion or consider awkward subjects such as death or consciousness. This isn’t always on purpose. “I do think that many of the games I’ve worked on have kind of developed their own agenda as I’ve been making them,” Barr says. “While I usually start with what I think of as a joke – a game where you dance against Zorba, a game where you play as Epic Sax Guy – I almost always end up thinking about the games more philosophically by the end. Not always, but most often.

“Gurney, in the new collection of games, started off being just a funny way of interpreting that word, but by the time I was done with it I felt like there was something poignant about the representation of death (or the loss of consciousness) and prayer and so on – I do feel like it catches something more than just a laugh. I’ve called these kinds of games ‘Curious Games’ as a way of getting at this process. Often it feels like the games themselves are curious.”

In Gurney, players must correctly type out a series of religious phrases as they scroll across the bottom of the screen, the majority of which is filled with passing ceiling tiles, light fixtures, and the mute, harried faces of doctors peering down. The words become jumbled and illegible as the player on the gurney loses consciousness and confronts death, represented by strobing lights and loud, mashed-up sounds.

Gurney is part of the Mumble Indie Bungle, a selection of five free games and one that costs $1, at least. It’s an inverted take on the “indie bundle” fad, featuring similarly backward games: Gurney, World of Glue, Spy Parity, Proteas and 30 Flights of Loathing for free, and Carp Life for $1 or more. In 30 Flights of Loathing, for example, players climb a series of stairs by typing the words composing the steps, such as “My life is pointless” and “I am disgusting and everyone laughs behind my back.” The mechanics of Barr’s games are excessively simple, and he thinks that’s just fine. He craves the emotional and intellectual impact.

“In The Artist Is Present, all you ‘do’ is wait in a queue for hours, but I’ve had at least a few people write to me to say that that was a very meaningful and deep experience for them,” Barr says. “Likewise, in 30 Flights of Loathing, in the Mumble Indie Bungle, all you do is type letters to climb stairs, but I’ve certainly found a kind of half-poignant, half black-comedy moment in the ‘winning’ of that game.”

Download 30 Flights of Loathing for free right here to find out exactly why Barr puts “winning” in quotes.

Much like pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, Barr doesn’t make games to get rich, and in fact, charging $1 for Carp Life is a bold new move for him – until now, Barr hasn’t made any money off of these games at all.

“Fortunately I don’t really need the games to make money at the moment,” Barr says. His wife, Rilla, is an Associate Professor and successful academic, and she supports the pair as Barr contributes financially with more random university teaching gigs. “All that said, I’d really love to figure out a way for my games – and other people’s quirky, not-quite-right games – to make money,” Barr says.

Making money with indie games is tricky, especially in the mobile space, since industry standards dictate a hefty amount of game for a small price, usually just $1. Recent games such as Ridiculous Fishing challenge that price point, charging $3 for a full game, but for now it’s still a tough marketplace for experimental titles.

“I’m not sure what the way around this is,” Barr says. “My wife was joking about people forming a union, actually. One part may just be to charge more for these things and to try to have everyone think of them as different. A game I make isn’t the same sort of thing as Angry Birds, say, and that’s all right. It might even dare to cost more than Angry Birds. I don’t know, though; it’s very tricky. I’m mostly resigned to not ever making a direct ‘supporting income’ from games.”

Perhaps after his Carp Life experiment, Barr will uncover a new way of selling underground, artistic indie games to a wider audience, but until then, he’ll keep making “Curious Games.” Not because he wants to, necessarily – because he has to.

“If anything, my agenda is ‘make the games I feel must exist,” Barr says. “I felt very strongly, once I’d thought of it, that a game where you go to a museum to see a performance artwork must exist. And I felt I’d probably have to be the one to make it. It often goes that way: ‘Well, guess I’d better make this game, no one else is going to do it.’”

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Hello World « Blendo news

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April 11th, 2013
Category: development

Hello World

This week I’m fortunate enough to be featured in The Humble Weekly Sale. My email inflow has skyrocketed, and amongst them I get a fair amount of messages like this:

I’m a student in high school and I’m really interested in making games, but I have no clue where to start. I was wondering if you could offer me some insight into where to start?

Everyone’s brain is wired differently. For me, my best suggestion boils down to:

Make stuff. Then make more stuff.

If you’re not into brevity, I’ll get more specific.

The Dive

Someone smarter than me once described game development as jumping out of an airplane with nothing but a needle and a silkworm.

I don’t think it’s important to have a great idea. I don’t think it’s important to be unique or innovative. I don’t think it’s important to be bulletproof, or for that matter, good.

When the ground is rushing toward you at a million miles per hour, what’s important? You make something.

People can’t play a design document. People can’t play a grand vision. People can’t play all the cool ideas you’ve planned out down the road.

People can play the game you make.

The moment you start making objects move on your computer monitor, that’s when a flip gets switched. That’s when all your theory and ideas are forced to prove themselves, and it’s there, in that collision of code and art and sound and design, where things happen.

You start sussing out what “feels right.”

Connections start connecting.

Discoveries are unearthed.

Your skillset crystallizes.

Most importantly, your toolbox gets bigger.

Don’t get stuck focusing on making it good or clean. Focus on making a game. Get good at implementation, and the game will follow suit.

The Show

I find it impossible to objectively view my own work, so I place a lot of value in playtesting. Order pizza and present your game to your family and your friends and the friends of your friends.

By “present,” I mean you stare at the player as they play your game. They play. You watch. They’ll ask you questions, and you reply with a stare. Silently. Gravely. With your steely butternut eyes.

The thing is, the player doesn’t know what the game is supposed to be, or how it’s supposed to play like.  The verbal feedback they give sometimes matches up with the game design, but actions speak louder than words here, because actions can’t lie.

You’ll see them fidgeting with the mouse, not knowing what to do next. You’ll see them completely miss the giant glowing button in the middle of the screen. You’ll see them do everything wrong.

And so you stare, and don’t give a single lick of help as they click on every incorrect thing. You’ll have a notebook where you write down every horrible thing that happens, and this notebook becomes the new center of your galaxy.

Then you make a new build and find new friends to rest your steely butternut eyes on.

The Finish

The hardest part of making a game is the last ten percent. By now, your elegant work has matured into a tattered tower of popsicle sticks held together by wishful thinking.

But the game’s not done with you. The tower is gluttonous and hungers for more, making the tower more shaky, more warty, more farty.

And you’re going to release this warty farty thing into the wild.

More poetically, you’ll let your caged bird fly free.

More realistically, it’s going to be a bloodbath. It’ll be educational, it’ll be enlightening, you’ll emerge covered in a thick coat of goopy blood.

And you’ll restart the cycle all over again, because you know your next project is going to be ten times better, and damn that’s addictive.

Et al

I started dabbling in game development during elementary school and began earnestly putting time into it during sixth grade. This was stuff like QBasic, DEU, and Autodesk Animator.

Years later, Gravity Bone was my first game that I was satisfied with, in that its execution began to match my taste, and in how it found an audience.

That’s a span of about fifteen years between me first starting game development, to making something I liked. Fifteen years of making really awful stuff.

Actually, that last sentence is deceptive. It implies I no longer make awful stuff. Truth is, my hard drive is bursting at the seams with broken, clunky prototypes. After shipping Atom Zombie Smasher, I spent the entirety of 2011 making prototypes, all of which explosively failed:

Here’s the multiplayer space RTS:

Here’s the dungeon-master game:

Here’s the survival roguelike:

Here’s the hack n’ slash roguelike:

I fail frequently and I fail quickly. It’s a natural part of the process, and because I’m human, this parade of failure does get discouraging from time to time. Everyone has to find their motivations to push onward.

So, to wrap it up: make stuff. Then make more stuff.

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Daniel Cook - Google+ - Donating my Xbox Today I donated my Xbox 360 Elite to…

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Daniel Cook
08.04.2013 (bearbeitet)  -  Öffentlich

Donating my Xbox
Today I donated my Xbox 360 Elite to Goodwill. It represented a time in my life as a developer that I’m not overly proud about living.

I worked for a couple years designing games at Microsoft. It is honestly difficult to say the exact group I was in since the organization was hit regularly by massive reorgs and general management failure.

This was the era right before Kinect and there was yet another effort underway to broaden the audience to extend beyond the ‘big black boy box’ brand that so defined the original Xbox. Ultimately, the anemic outcome of this great leap forward was a handful of resource starved trivia games and gameshows. But the dream of bringing socially positive games to more people really appealed to me.

I was an outsider. Intentionally so. On the rare occasions I used a console, it was likely to be one built by Nintendo. Instead, my earliest influences stem from the Amiga and early PC titles, not the regurgitation of a roller coaster known as Halo. As such, my design direction tended towards non-violence and cuter, gender neutral designs. I still design original mechanics and will trade cutscenes for gameplay in a heartbeat.

The capital of the console ecosystem
In many ways, a gig at Microsoft was a career peak for many developers I worked with. Since childhood, they had played console games, worked at console companies and then finally made it to the platform mothership from which all their life’s work was originally born. The repeated mantra was “The things we do here will impact millions.” The unsaid subtext was “millions of Gamers just like us.”

It was also a cultural hub. You worked there because you were a gamer. People boasted about epic Gamer Scores and joked about staying up multiple days straight in order to beat the latest release. The men were hardcore. The management was hardcore. The women were doubly hardcore. To succeed politically in a viciously political organization, you lived the brand.

You got the sense the pre-Xbox, ‘gamers as bros’ was a smaller subculture within the nerdy, whimsical hobby of games. Over two console generations, a highly cynical marketing team spent billions with no hope of immediate payback to shift the market. In an act of brilliant jujitsu, Nintendo was slandered as a kids platform, their historical strength turned against them. Xbox put machismo, ultra-violence and chimpboys with backwards caps in the paid spotlight. Wedge, wedge, wedge. Gamers were handed a pre-packaged group identity via the propaganda machine of a mega corporation. For those raised post-Xbox, Microsoft was an unquestioned Mecca of modern gaming culture. Dude. They made Halo.

Cognitive dissonance
I’m okay with not fitting in. Over the 17 years I’ve been part of the game industry, I’ve gotten comfortable being an alien floating in a sea of Others. There weren’t a lot of computer-loving digital makers in rural Maine in the 80s. I spend most of my days dreaming of an intricate systemic future where things are better. It is a state of constantly being half a second out of phase with the rest of the world.

Still it was a challenge being in an group that knew intellectually they had to reach out to new people while at the same time knowing in their heart-of-hearts that just adding more barrels to a shotgun was the fastest path to gamer glory. Talking with others in the larger organization would yield a sympathetic look. “Someone has to deal with those non-gamers. Sorry it has to be you. Bro.”

I am not actually a bro. Don’t tell anyone.

We made adorable hand-drawn prototypes and watched them climb through the ranks only to be shot dead by Elder Management that found cuteness instinctually revolting.

Correct games
There is a form to modern console games. If you’ve played the recent Bioshock Infinite, you can see the full glory of the vision. These are great games, especially if you know and appreciate the immense skill that goes into their creation.  Each element serves a business purpose.

First there is a world rendered in lush 3D. This justifies the hardware.

Next are intermittent dollops of plot. These are voice acted because it is a quality signal. They feature intricately modeled characters on a virtual stage. This gives the arc narrative momentum and lets you know you’ve finished something meaningful.

Filling out the gaps in the 7-12 hours ride are moments of rote game play with all possible feedback knobs tuned to 11. Blood, brains, impact. Innovation is located at 11.2. This makes you feel something visceral.

Each element of this form is refined to a most perfect formula. There are crate-raised critics who make subtle distinctions between the 52 historical shades of grey. There are documents and research. If you are a creative working at or within a publisher, your higher purpose is to judge games based off their adherence to the form. The game is a product and consistency, much like that found in McDonalds fries, results in repeat purchases. As a publisher designer, you are someone with taste.

You police the act of creation. It is a job. It is a set of orders that come from above. It is your childhood dream.

Away, away
I no longer work at Microsoft. Instead, I started up the independent studio Spry Fox and spend my dreamy days making odd little games. Easily the best career choice I have ever made. My current games barely have plots. They focus on player agency and more often than not sport cute 2D graphics. Very few can be won. None come in boxes. We don’t need to spend billions, because people love playing them without the crutch of traditional marketing or press. (For those who wonder, articles like this drive almost zero traffic to our games)

As part of my personal journey, I’ve found that I’m driven by ideals that fit poorly with a highly gated console monoculture: What if games can connect people? What if they can improve the world? What if they bring happiness and joy to our lives?

Hardcore gamers, women, men, children, families, bros, feminists, and wonderful people that play no other games…they play these intimate, quirky games of ours. Yeah…if you count up the numbers, we impact tens of millions. Deep down, I’m not sure if any of them are people like me.  My job as a game designer is to make beloved games, not fit some limited corporate definition of a gamer.

So far, none of our games have been released on the Xbox. There’s so far little economic or cultural fit with the artificially propped up tribe residing in that cloistered warren.

So goodbye, big black box. I never really liked what you stood for.

take care,
Danc.

Edit 4/7/2013
Whoa…that spread further than expected.  To clarify a few minor points that keep cropping up.

- The inspiration for writing was that I was cleaning out my closet.  I thought I might put into words my reflections.  This sort of thing happens regularly with writers on a rainy Saturday.

- There are some really wonderful people that work inside Microsoft.  My personal observation is that the environment rarely lets them shine. However, I have great hope for those that escape.

- Spry Fox is doing quite well…easily the best career decision I’ve ever made.  However the point of this was not to promote a company but instead talk about a personal journey.  If you are a game developer and you take something from my mistakes, great. If not, that is okay too.

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76 Kommentare

Dan MacDonald07.04.2013
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This post made me smile. : )

Shoe Skogen07.04.2013
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Me too!

Corey Birnbaum07.04.2013
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Dang. You make it sound like crushing your Xbox would have been more appropriate, considering your feelings towards it. Anyway, excellent commentary of that culture—I feel the same.

Allen Varney07.04.2013
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More power to you. But you won’t gain respect from the Microsoft culture until you show you’re doing better financially at Spry Fox than you did on salary in Redmond.

Daniel Cook07.04.2013
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+Allen Varney I have zero need for their respect. :-)  Nor is it useful to anyone for me to reveal my finances. ;-)

Trent Sterling07.04.2013 (bearbeitet)
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Spry Fox: It is your childhood dream!
EDIT: Maybe your adult dream? Anyway, its dreamy :)

Graham Davis07.04.2013
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Great post. I felt it was an interesting way to frame the way I feel about the Xbox ecosystem too. Thanks for sharing it.

Bruno B07.04.2013
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Great post, but still I wonder, what do you think about Microsoft’s role in the development of the indie culture? In the end, it was Microsoft that launched XBLA (and its less successful sibling, XBLIG).
It was Microsoft and its money that pushed the very first indie success stories (Braid, Limbo, Super Meat Boy, Castle Crashers).

I wonder if, without Microsoft’s push, the indie games scene would be the same as it is nowadays.

Daniel Cook07.04.2013 (bearbeitet)
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+Bruno B Never mistake the poster children for the prime movers.  Yes, XBLA was one of the many platforms opening up due to the advent of digital distribution.  And they were particularly good about connecting with the existing press apparatus.  It is important that you recognize these for what they are: “Success stories”  Exactly the sort of PR tale that a new and untested platform needs in order to bring in more developers and gain network effects.  It is worth noting that now that those network effects exists, the contracts for XBLA have once again turned predatory.
Yet Flash portals, TIGsource, and eventually Mobile or Steam all spawned their own hobbyists and entrepreneurs. This is a technological and distribution sea change, not a few isolated events performed by heroic figures. The indie movement would have occurred independent of a handful of minted millionaires. Though of course, the unique flavor they add is undeniable. :-)

Bruno B07.04.2013
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Yes, of course Flash portals like Newgrounds existed long before XBLA, and the PC scene has always had tons of underground, often free, productions.
But before XBLA and its initial stream of “indie” productions, there was not an indie culture as we know it nowadays.

Nothing heroic, just a cynical market analysis on Microsoft’s part probably, yet still, it leaves me wondering if much of nowadays’ indie “culture” is actually a byproduct of Microsoft’s (and, to a lesser extent, Sony’s) marketing strategy.

If you check Japan’s indie scene, for example, it seems to me quite different from the western one, as there’s not the same separation between “indies” and “hobbysts” (http://indiegames.com/2013/03/a_history_-_and_call_-_for_ger.html) we experience here.

And why is that? Maybe because Japan (and, to a lesser extent, Europe) has been less subjected to Microsoft’s own definition of “indie”.

Mike Tucker07.04.2013
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If you look at the exclusive/2nd party IP’s this gen for Xbox
Gears of war Halo Alan Wake Kinectimals Viva pinata Fable Trials
Forza
PGR

Not very dudebro in my opinion

What we have seen is other non microsoft studios taking gears of wars dudebro style and copying it

Vincent Leon07.04.2013
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It’s not really surprising that the gaming culture at microsoft is so cynical. These guys thought they could buy their place on the game market when they tried to acquire Sega and Nintendo around 2004.

Rad Vandersax07.04.2013
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Thanks for this.  I really appreciate your comments as an outsider myself.  Do you regret your time at MS?
You are quite skillful with your use of vocab, very entertaining btw.

Victor Strobe07.04.2013
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I’d say Bruno B has a point. Reducing XBLA to a string of isolated “Success stories” comes off as very cynial. It was a platform they pushed very hard at the beginning of the generation, integral to their reimagining of the Live service. It provided a first proper console outlet for types of games that were being marginalized on those machines for years (not on PC, obviously), and the roots of that problem lie in the generation prior to the one in which Microsoft entered the business.
Of course, it eventually mutated into something that’s not as inviting anymore, and it was somewhat of an opportunistic move in the first place - just as their push for Kinect after Wii’s success was, and just as their presumably more social-oriented future strategy will be - but it did serve as a spark that brought us quite a few good things in the long run.

By the way, I’m not deluding myself into thinking that Sony or Nintendo are any less opportunistic. Wii U itself was a very cynical attempt to cash in on the tablet craze (and 3DS is not very far either), and a misguided move which was rather obviously going to produce a tepidly received product.

Bruno B07.04.2013
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+Victor Strobe thank you. :) I think it’s true that Microsoft (and Sony) have helped the indies in gaining momentum and popularity, as cynical and interested their actions may have been.
What I’m also trying to say, is that Microsoft (and Sony) also “shaped” what an indie should be, by pushing titles such as Braid, Limbo, Flower, Journey, and so on.

Nowadays you can develop, let’s say, a perfectly nice and enjoyable sidescrolling beat’em up in your basement, using only ur grandma’s money, but unless you make it quirky, or artsy, or in any case openly “against” the mainstream, it won’t be accepted so easily as an “indie” title.

Because “indie” has become synonimous with small, quirky, artsy, meaningful, and so on, and IMHO Microsoft (and Sony) plaid a big role in this.

Antonio Rodriguez07.04.2013
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Well said!  BTW, uh…which Goodwill?

Jason VandenBerghe07.04.2013
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Hmm. Well, I pretty strongly disagree. Crediting Microsoft (or Sony) with any part of the success of today’s indie scene seems to me like a fairly astonishing revision of history. It simply didn’t go down that way.
It’s true that the ‘popular success stories’ were picked (sort of) by the publishers, but that was as much something they stumbled into as it was a strategy. They improvised well, but that’s hardly enough to credit them with ‘shaping’ the scene (unless you mean, ‘in the mind of the more mainstream consumer’, in which case, sure).

From what I saw at the time, it was companies like Unity and Kongregate that were shepherding the initial scene, and they did it by getting the community involved. What I saw was that, in the end, the indie scene was built by the indies, not by a corporation. I think they deserve the credit for what they have accomplished (good and bad).

(for the record, I’m a corporate guy. ;)

——-

Dan, honestly, I think this is one of the finest posts you’ve ever written. Utterly inspiring. Thanks for sharing.

Harest Ation07.04.2013
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Like i said on /r/games, I like how i feel the same thing, especially in this sentence : “It is a state of constantly being half a second out of phase with the rest of the world.”
Keep it up!

Nicholas Ng-A-Fook07.04.2013
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Well said! Makes me feel even better knowing that you’re behind Spry Fox, cause of the quality of games that you put out.

Robert Ozimek07.04.2013
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While i feel sorry that you did not get to make the games you wanted you are so dismissive of the people that play those games that you come off as pretentious.
If you want like cute nintendo style games with innovative mechanics and very light story elements good for you. doesnt make you any better than the bro gamer who plays every COD and only COD or the hardcore RPG enthusiast who couldnt give a shit about the iterative mechanics as long as the story is good.
basically good luck at your new job but get off your high horse. being in the minority doesn’t make you artiscaly superior and being in the majority doesn’t make me a “bro gamer”.

Calvin Walzel07.04.2013
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I really appreciate your oppinion stated. I also do own a Xbox 360 but I rarely use it anymore. I really hope indie games and small games in general will lead back to the “true nature of gaming”.
P.S.: Spry Fox looks great. I’ll keep an eye on it!

Abe Burnett07.04.2013
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The first console I bought (from any brand) was the XBox 360. And I bought three of them: I sold the first to buy a Playstation 3 (because my best friend had a Playstation and I wanted to play Modern Warfare with him), sold the Playstation 3 because I hated how they designed it (friendship not-withstanding), bought another Xbox which had the power cube go out, and finally decided to just buy a new one instead of go through the rigmarole of getting the power cube repaired/replaced. In short: I went from a non-gamer to a Xbox FANATIC. I played a lot of the Halo and the Modern Warfare and the Black Ops. And then…I got tired of it all. I started to feel a deep seated urge to play a game which didn’t just reward reflexes and low ping above all else—a game which would incorporate the use of my brain. And I was suddenly blown away by how clearly the Xbox focuses on action and FPS. There were only a handful of Strategy titles available—many of them overly simplistic and “old” (as in 2009-ish). I played—and enjoyed—Civilization: Revolution but soon found the lack of options for diversifying the multiplayer tiring. After getting to the point where I beat the AI every game in Civilization, I stopped using my Xbox for gaming. It became merely an overpriced Roku box used for streaming Netflix. Then when my wife and I started watching all of the content we were interested in on my laptop (1080p, 15.6”), the Xbox and the attached 42” TV were never used again. After months of just sitting there, I sold them both. I suspect that I am not atypical and that at some point everyone will get tired of the focus on action and violence and shooting games. I just want more from my gaming—and when the studios focus on producing multi-billion dollar blockbuster games, it rapidly results in Halo 8, Modern Warfare 12, Black Ops 7…and a whole bunch of derivative shooters and action games. If you like one of those games, you’ll likely like the others, but should you ever tire of the genre (like me) then all the sudden you’re not interested in anything the Xbox has to offer.
I’ll keep my eye on the Xbox 720 (or whatever it’ll be called) and see if things change there—but as of now I don’t anticipate they will, and thus I probably will not be buying into the next round of consoles.

I’ve discovered that there are a lot more titles that I’m interested in on the PC: Civilization 5, Anno 1404, Anno 2070, etc… games which look pretty, exercise my brain, and don’t rely on my reflexes or ping.

Look out Microsoft (and Sony): gamers are getting tired of the same ole’ thing and I think there will be a tipping point. When it arrives, mark my words, analysts will be scratching their heads: “why aren’t people buying Modern Warfare 13?! They bought every other version of it in droves. We made billions and billions and now…costs are up, profits are down. What do gamers of today want?” Something different. Variety. We want a diverse array of games so that we can tailor our gaming to our mood or our evolving preferences. When you put all your eggs in one basket—as Microsoft and Sony especially are doing—you’re bound to lose them all at once.

Ricardo Bánffy07.04.2013
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I too believe something is lost when art is exhaustively processed, optimized, distilled into its most perfectly saleable dollops that appeal to the most basic instincts of the reptile-with-a-credit-card built deep inside our brains by faceless teams who think the final goal of everything is to make a sale.
Good luck!

Chris Traweek07.04.2013
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The tone of this article strikes me as strange because most of the xbox gamers I know are women.
I’m glad you’ve found a happier place to produce your art!

Garth Arendse07.04.2013 (bearbeitet)
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My Xbox 360 (number 4 due RROD) and AAA game collection recently went to a teenage son of friends since my daughters were never keen on it ,  they seem to prefer playing those cute plot-less games (see Team Lava).
It started with playing Call Of Duty : Black Ops 2 and realizing how crap it was and how my entire gaming for the last few years has been playing the latest action shooter from Bungie, Epic, Take 2 or Activision.

Recently played TellTale Games The Walking Dead game due to them winning Game Of The Year at Spike  and it was a for more enjoyable and memorable experience.

Also the recent blowup over the requirement for an always on Internet connection for the Xbox 720 also makes me feel better exploring other ways of playing games.

Fyzard Brown07.04.2013
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+Vincent Leon
You do know that Sega approached Microsoft to make the original XBOX compatible with the DreamCast.

Siddharth Kulkarni07.04.2013
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Yikes, I didn’t get the gist of it.  A tl;dr will help.

Nelson Minar07.04.2013
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I guess this means Triple Town isn’t coming to XBLA? Too bad, it’d go nicely next to Fez, Braid, and Lumines.

Josh Rehman07.04.2013
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Hi Dan. Your section on ‘correct games’ struck a nerve. The part that I don’t think you emphasize enough is that this correctness does actually resonate with a large population. It is a collaboration of sorts between MS and the gaming population, a kind of feedback loop that gamers enter into with MS, and it expresses legitimate utility on the part of the gamers.
The reason I say this is because I love Counter-Strike, but I also think World of Goo is a world-class game, and spend a lot of time on Kongregate, playing astonishing, amazing little works of art. E.g. I liked Chronicles of Riddick but I also love Charlie Kaufman movies. It’s possible to enjoy both Halo and Braid.

The world is not divided into such neat categories. Like dark matter, alternative cultures exist, mostly silent, because they don’t have PR firms broadcasting their existence. :)

David G07.04.2013
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+Allen Varney Sometimes it is better to do what you love for less, than do what you hate for more.

Nicole Cooksey07.04.2013
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I finally bought an Xbox 360 back in November. I had several roommates over the years who had PS3s and 360s, but I only had my SNES, Nintendo 64, GBA, and PC. I refrained from choosing among the three main consoles, just playing them when I had the opportunity.
I’m ready for something new that isn’t a hardware feature of a platform I may or may not own. Tablets, smart phones, motion control, voice control, etc… That doesn’t change a game from being a button-masher.

I really enjoy Bioware games and I’m playing through Dragon Age II for the first time. But the level of mashing the A button can’t be ignored. The level of difficulty is increased by the number of enemies rather than challenging the player with dynamic enemies. Even the ghosts in Pac-Man are programmed with a different strategy…

Brian Shearon07.04.2013
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You claim to have never liked what they stood for, but had no problem taking their money and a job with them. You also say that when you played a console, you would have played a Nintendo one. Why not take a job with Nintendo, then?

Marko Mac07.04.2013 (bearbeitet)
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Just wanted to say that I completely agree with your opinion. I had grand hopes when Microsoft purchase Rare. Viva Pinata is still one of my favorite games on the 360.
Also, now that I have a place where my voice might be heard… do you have any intentions to bring SteamBirds to Wii U eShop? I’ve heard good things about how Nintendo handles indie devs and you can get in touch via eshop [at] noa.nintendo.com

Nintendo has more info about putting your games on the Wii U on their GDC page: https://gdc2013.nintendo.com/

As a Wii U owner, I can say that your games would definitely have a home on the eShop.

EDIT: And I wasn’t only referring to SteamBirds, I meant any/all of the games developed by you and others would be appreciated by a majority of Wii U owners, look at Toki Tori 2 as a recent example.

Ozan Tunca07.04.2013
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I don’t think we need only one type of games whether if it’s violence games or more intelligence requiring games. Personally I like playing war games as well as games with less action and more plot. I also play browser-based strategy games which has jpegs as graphics and requires diplomacy skills with real people. I think what world needs is diversity. There are no right games people should be playing. We should play everything to get every kind of skill and joy from them.

Pete Blois07.04.2013
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I thought you said you’d let me borrow that Xbox to finally try out Kinect some day! I feel so deprived now.

Stilgar Naib07.04.2013
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Perfect. I was worried that Xbox would become hipster, low-power, low-quality console (like Nintendo) and drop the core experience. However your post means that they care about hardcore gamers like me and I can buy Durango without worries.

Curtis Isabell07.04.2013
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it’s weird because the ps3 doesn’t seem to have these issues. little big planet, journey, flower and many other games seem to be the kind of games you would be interested in developing, maybe sign on with sony.

Matt Kil07.04.2013
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Well played Sir.  All the best to you in your future endeavours.

Jason VandenBerghe07.04.2013
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Wow. Touched a nerve, it seems. ;)

David Martin07.04.2013
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+Robert Ozimek Someone is defensive.

Waldo Verdejo07.04.2013
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Bravo. I raise my glass to you good sir. Kudos to you for going after what you truly believe and share it with passion, being able to explain it inside out. Might a big giant like M. miss you. Keep up the good work.

Rob Zimmerman07.04.2013
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I miss those resource starved games. Fun while they lasted and I wish more like them would emerge.

Andre La Velle07.04.2013
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Perhaps this post is just a marketing scheme ;)  As an ex-EA developer, I can truly understand about getting away from the giants and doing your own thing.  On the other hand, I believe that the technology should be used for something else than just games.  Interactive technology is a powerful tool that we have yet to use to its fullest potential.

Bram Stolk07.04.2013
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You selling it means that the next young mind can be poisoned with Gears of War crap. Fix your karma by buying one laptop per child or something.

Tobias Cohen08.04.2013
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Sure, the masculine-dominated world of blockbuster video games is sadly limited. I’m not sure that today’s “casual games” made by companies like Spry Fox of the slot-machine-inspired wait-or-pay genre are any better. Aggressive competition has more going for it than compulsive self-destructive behaviour.

Zachary Schulte08.04.2013
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Did you have anything to do with Bunni Bunni? Some night in my research in “how to be a mobile game marketer” (I’m still looking for some guidance, holler at me, wise ones) I found and played this sweet flash game (or well-built prototype? I’m unsure…)
It was a magical few hours and even if Sly Fox only published it, this millennial who grew up on PF Magic and Maxis has high hopes for more ethereal-yet-cute games in the market. Thank you.

Brian Carpenter08.04.2013
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Goodwill? Seriously? Why not donate it to a Children’s Hospital instead? Or sell it on eBay and donate 100% of the proceeds to Child’s Play?

Phil Erskine08.04.2013
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TL;DR Likes new Bioshock, doesn’t like Halo.

Russell Carroll08.04.2013
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Keep dreaming Daniel! The world needs more dreamers. :)

Sean Paradiso08.04.2013
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+Phil Erskine
I’m not sure you read that correctly..

mirjam eladhari08.04.2013
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Dan, just a short note to say I really enjoyed reading this post!

Lily L08.04.2013
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Hey +Daniel Cook, just wanted to say I’m the kind of person you’re probably developing for. I saw this post, and although I don’t  agree with everything you said (I like violence AND cutesy things), I’ve now spent the entire day playing Triple Town and Highgrounds (so cute and addicting!). Good on you for leaving XBOX, but don’t belittle the hard work the teams in big name companies are putting into their games just because the head honchos decide they want to keep regurgitating the same things over and over again. There is passion at every level, from the big guys to the little guys, and that’s what should unite us gamers. :)

Nathaniel Hourt08.04.2013
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+Daniel Cook So you’re not planning to target Xbox, but do you think Spry Fox games might ever show up on Ouya?

Colin Northway08.04.2013
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Wow, that was amazing Dan!

Mr Slippery08.04.2013
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Really introspective Dan. I’m glad you found a place in the gaming ecosystem, a unique niche that is fulfilling.

Colin Northway08.04.2013
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+Abe Burnett People aren’t going to suddenly all get sick of FPSs, they will continue to be very profitable for the same reason that summer blockbusters continue to be profitable: the never ending parade of 14 year olds. Somehow the world just never runs out.

Daniel Cook08.04.2013
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+Zachary Schulte Yep, +Andre Spierings and I made Bunni. Glad you enjoyed it. :-)

Lucky Red08.04.2013
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This isn’t the first time I have seen some ex-Microsoft employ mention the constant management re-organizations within a team or section; after reading about how Microsoft heavily puts a lot of focus on middle management I am not impressed that this does come with a lot of problems from the developer’s perspective.
That said, I think the problem mostly lies to specific parts of the management and the line between the developer and the rest of the organizational structure and the people who have such responsibilities.

At the end of the day, Microsoft’s a big company and things went the way they went. I wish you good luck with your indie career, Daniel.

Zachary Schulte08.04.2013
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+Daniel Cook ( ^ω^ ) How does it end? I was so close to solving the ‘dance’ riddle near the end and ‘finishing’ the narrative but lost my connection and I could never seem to log back in to the save game. Also, talk about a spookycute hook in the beginning with the ghost bunni!

Louis Fontaine08.04.2013
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Really liked reading this. This line is a gem: “adding more barrels to a shotgun was the fastest path to gamer glory”. :)
(I wonder if Microsoft is working on a game where the primary goal is adding barrels to your shotgun…)

Lucas González08.04.2013
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+Daniel Cook Thanks for sharing these thoughts with us. For me, it’s really reassuring to read this as, somehow, you are wording some of my own thoughts. I think your “rant” can be easily extended to most of the main big publisher/studios of console games. And at the end of the day, to any other mass media…

mathew murphy08.04.2013
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Well, you convinced me to download Triple Town.

Jeremie Loveskorea08.04.2013
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Hello, I love Triple Town but also Halo and Bioshock. By the way, Halo was developed by Bungie, a not so big studio at the time, and it fueled the development of e-sport on console (featured at the WCG and MLG). My first LAN party was not with PCs (didn’t have the cash for a competitive rig at the time) but with Xboxes on Halo (at the time when we couldn’t play on Xbox Live yet). Basically I met or reunited with some of my still closest friend through playing Halo at a somewhat competitive level (co-organized a French Halo tournament too, gathering players from all corners of the country). So now you can spit on Halo and the “Bro” culture around it and other console FPS (let me call it simply friendship or community) but just because you don’t like it shouldn’t make it bad. It’s quite an achievement to bring so many people together.  Few indie games ever did that. As I said, I like Triple Town a lot, spent several hours on it, but why the hate for the achievement of bringing quality FPS gaming to consoles? At the time of Halo in 2003, I was totally blown away because it was so new on console. Now the market is flooded by FPS games but no need to blame Halo or Microsoft as the root cause of all evil.
Microsoft didn’t kill Nintendo, for all I know.
What Microsoft represents might be different from what you aspire to, and you obviously made a great decision in starting Spry Fox, but as other have said, no need to be so dismissive of the “Bro gamers”, since many of them could also be playing your games.

Samwise Bateman08.04.2013
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“chimpboys with backwards caps”

Dave Spedzia08.04.2013
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If you want exposure I suggest being part of the Humble Bundle for Android. I myself have bought many bundles, I love indie game devs, and love even more supporting them.

Bruce Smith08.04.2013
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Thank you for your article.  I would like to agree and disagree with you if that’s okay.  I understand corporate culture and what it means being in one and also from the outside.  Like any culture, including indie, it has its advantages and drawbacks.  There is no denying that.

The only thing that bothered me was us versus them tone of the article.   It has been interesting to read your views on their culture and how it stifled you and now you’re working outside it and thriving.  I would have loved to see you take it one step further and talk about how you’re trying to bring both the big plot driven games with the fun and not so plot driven games sides together.  To me it looks like you’re doing the same thing you accuse Microsoft of doing.  Maybe it’s a tone that I’m just reading into it based on personal experiences.  I did really enjoy your view and take on things and I’m 100% sure it happens across all platforms and publishers out there.  I understand it was a personal thing for you so there’s no need to stress it too much.  Like I said I may be putting my own past experiences and reading into it too much.  Thanks again!

Ian Slutz08.04.2013
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+Daniel Cook the thing that astounds me more than anything else in this write up is the nakedness. As a long time game developer I fear the Code of Science so much I feel uncomfortable even commenting on something like this out here in public. Yet I am glad you have said it and given people something more to think about.

George Ioakeimidis09.04.2013
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I am with you man, this is why i hate microsoft and sony for what they did in the 90s and 00s with the playstation 1, 2 and xbox. They turned gaming into popcorn.

Rahul Choudhury09.04.2013
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Ha, so you wrote that! Why am I not surprised :-)

Jason Catudal09.04.2013
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Profound. You are like a philosopher of gaming. Best sentence I’ve read in a long time: “There are crate-raised critics who make subtle distinctions between the 52 historical shades of grey.”

John Smith10.04.2013
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I couldn’t get over the whining over failing. If you make something worth selling, it will sell. Otherwise not a very good post with few hopeful moment that I would realize value in reading it.
The entire capitalist system has been the same since the flood waters subsided and bullies bonked people on the head to steal their ish. I am sorry that you believed you were special. That pill is hard to swallow.

Charles Goran10.04.2013
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Dan,
I just tracked down your used XBOX and I’m having a blast! I was still on an old Vectrex system…

I wish there were more first person shooters though :-(

nick gulajec11.04.2013
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Thanks.
The Brainy Gamer podcast did a 4 episode stint recently, revolving around this subject.

Nicholas Boterf11.04.2013
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Great insights into the development process. One concern though is that this post divides games into the console / computer, simple / complex, corporate / authentic dichotomies that simply does not quite stand as an overall generalization. To take one example from your post, Bioshock Infinite is available on both consoles and PCs, so it is hard to call it just a console title. The difference seems you seem to be pointing to is between every rough-edge smoothed AAA titles and more jagged indie titles, rather than console vs. computer. While I have no doubt that your experience is representative of the culture within Microsoft at the time, I don’t think it quite applies to all console games or gamers.
But again, thanks for the post. Fascinating read, and very helpful.

Ian Slutz11.04.2013
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+Nicholas Boterf it may be presumptuous of me to speak for +Daniel Cook or Irrational, but impling AAA titles are console centric is not that inaccurate. Tools like Unreal make multi-platform development much more seamless and teams try to be balanced in their approach, but games of that scale are often developed in a console first manner. If the team does a good job this can be hard to see, or sometimes the internal cultures means it isn’t true. But if you look closely you can see how certain features (UI is often a good example) lean toward the console side.

Andrew MorrisGestern um 10:29
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I’ve worked in several IT companies that have grown to become publicly traded companies and changed their culture beyond all recognition in the process. Sadly always for the worse, which is why I keep moving on. For some reason management ceome increasingly distant from the environment and treat employees like numbers and customers like dupes. I wish I understood why that was, or could change it.

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Writing About Games And The Struggle To Be Better

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Making a living by producing content on the internet takes a lot of hard work. Scams and marketing exploitations aside, we’re still trying to work out a way of doing it, and the question of whether it will be possible in the future is a constant worry. The way it’s going, only a lucky few will be able to do so.

The problem? The internet allows for anyone to produce content and upload it for an audience to engage with at zero cost. That’s a great thing for many reasons. Not so good for those who work for publications creating content that help pay their bills. Despite pushing for better quality content, it’s often not enough to fight against the behemoth of content creators that exist on the internet.

I bring this up because earlier this week, UBM Tech announced that they were closing down Game Developer Magazine after 19 years, and “evolving” the content on the rest of their publications. Another print publication dead, and its digital counterpart, surprisingly, being lobbed off at the head as well. But that’s been happening for years now due to the rise of the internet. What has been worrying me is the grander tactic that UBM are adapting in order to survive, as it sees a huge company like them laying off games journalists and those who otherwise write about games for a living, in favor of reaching out to “community contributors” to supply them with free content.

“…it’s a devaluation of our work – a shift away from seeking quality content – and that affects everyone who writes about games and hopes to or expects to get paid for it in cash.”

Naturally, I’m very concerned about this move as they have the power to pull it off, and in doing so, they devalue the work of games journalists. Why should they pay us if they can get free content from a community of game developers and gaming enthusiasts? That’s business thinking. The plan is to drive all of their gaming-related content forward onto Gamasutra, where they have a few select journalists who have survived the cull, and the rest supplied by community blogs, which are written for free, and the best ones get featured on their front page. As said, it’s a very nifty tactic if you are able to do that, and they probably are able to given the popularity of their sites and the community blogging that goes on there already. Don’t think me ignorant either – I know that there are a number of websites that are run in similar ways to this. The concern is that this becomes more widespread and becomes “the norm,” and those who want to write about games can only do so as a hobby.
My greater concern (given that I write about indie games) is how this has significantly shifted how another of their websites is handled now, too. Since the beginning of 2008, Indie Games – the Weblog has been a part of UBM (CMP Game Group back then). Before that the website and its authors ran a well-known and respected indie games blog over at indygamer.blogspot.co.uk. I’m not sure if the writers at Indie Games were paid the moment that transferral took place, but I do know that they handled the costs of running that website for Tim W at the new domain, at least. It was therefore a website under their ownership, and they had an indie games-focused editorial with a loyal following to produce content for them and, ultimately, bring them ad revenue.

Now, I do know that by the time Mike Rose arrived on Indie Games in 2009, they were paying their writers for their work, as he writes about on his blog. And it’s been that way for a number of years now (I know that because I was offered a paid position on the site last year). Until April 2013 hit, that was. At the beginning of this month, the new tactic has been to deliberately not pay anyone who writes for the website, except – I presume – for the Editor-in-Chief, whose role it is now to find willing contributors to submit content without the promise of money at the end of it. These “community contributors” are not paid in cash as the journalists were, yet they are more than happy to produce content for them, and in return they may receive a GDC Vault subscription or a tiny bit of exposure for themselves, their game (if a developer) or their work, I’ve since found out. The last paid writers they had on Indie Games were Cassandra Khaw, Gnome, who still blogs on there a little, but does so for free, rather than being paid for it like he was previously, and Danny Cowan, who has seemingly stopped writing about games altogether for now.

These are people I know, people I’ve looked up to and discussed indie games with. They’ve given me advice on how to get paid for my writing so that I can do it more often. And now they’ve lost a source of income because UBM want to cut as many of their costs as possible. And worst of all, there are contributors willing to post on the site at no cost; they’re working for free. From one perspective, it’s great because the community gains a louder voice as it can speak through a popular website and reach its big audience. But for writers who make it their mission to help out the community by finding unknown games and writing about them, talking to developers so they can tell their story and give their opinions on various topics, it causes the value of their work to get ever closer to zero.

This hurts. A lot.

After years of striving to write about indie games full-time, which requires being paid for my work, after bettering myself by talking with the community as much as possible and admitting mistakes when required, after sacrificing parts of my own life due to the overwhelming desire to get into the position I am now closer to – after all of that, the work I, my friends and colleagues, and many others, do is being rejected in favor of finding those who will post for free, as if they were being done a favor. And sure, in a way, that is how it looks to them, and I can’t really blame them for taking an opportunity like that.

“…we believe in their hard work, because we want those incredible stories and because we believe that there is a serious lack of decent writing, particularly within our niche.”

Unfortunately, it’s a devaluation of our work – a shift away from seeking quality content – and that affects everyone who writes about games and hopes to, or expects to, get paid for it in cash. Of course, this is part of a larger problem with the entire industry, as we’re hearing more stories on a near daily basis about development teams who are hired to create a game, and then, before it’s even been released, the entire team is laid off. Journalists who do their job properly, who go out of the way to find the truth in stories and get that vital extra piece of information, to then have their efforts trashed by other journalists, who steal the story and don’t even bother sourcing it out of courtesy because they’re worried about something as petty as giving another website extra page views. In-fighting between people desperate to keep hold of their jobs, who sadly don’t seem to exercise the rules they bark at others to apply when they’re not sourced – ironically devaluing the kind of work they’re trying to uphold in order to keep their job. A slew of writers looking to get that all important scoop so that their website attracts all of the eyes that day. So-called journalists reporting on fake stories made up by people just to see how dumb and gullible they really are. We’re an embarrassment to ourselves, to our profession.
Perhaps we don’t deserve to get paid.

But that would be denying the amount of quality writing in the field that there is. And it is there, it’s just that you have to dig through layers of asinine Top 10 lists and barely informative previews to find it. There are publications that I know through first-hand experience who refuse to not pay a writer for an article if they’re willing to publish it, because they want you to care about your work and be encouraged to produce quality content for them. We’ve got to move on, and the positive that comes out of this move by UBM is that it forces the rest of us to strive to be better. We’ve got to work harder and produce even higher quality content if we want to earn money for it. And this is where I have to work out how Indie Statik slots in.

Josh and I started talking about putting an Indie Statik website together back in July 2012. It was not long after I had left The Indie Game Magazine, where I was being paid to write on a daily basis. I left because I was not happy at all with the management there. I also wasn’t happy with the kinds of articles I was being encouraged to push out. So Josh and I decided to take matters into our own hands and create a website that would focus on quality writing about indie games, and we said from the very start that we would go to the efforts to find a brilliant team to deliver the content we wanted to publish, and we would pay them for it to show that we valued their hard work. And we’ve been doing that for a number of months now.

I’m not saying that Indie Statik is the best place on the internet. I’m British; I’m far too modest for that. But what I am saying is that we are a small team of writers who are interested in putting the extra effort in to find those weird games, to write about those issues that other websites won’t bother to or may not understand, who can connect with the indie games community and act to serve them. We will continue paying our writers because we believe in their hard work, because we want those incredible stories and because we believe that there is a serious lack of decent writing, particularly within our niche. Part of our plan is to also allow for a space where the community can voice themselves too, if they wish. But we won’t be relying on this as a sole source of content. And those who do become prominent voices may be offered a paid position to write more regularly on the website. Is that backwards – outdated – foolish? I don’t think so. I think that’s taking pride in our work and striving to do it properly.

I don’t mean any harm by this article, but I felt it was necessary to voice my feelings on these topics, merely because I had been left completely demoralized by what I had found out. I know so many people who deserve to be in better positions, who should be paid to produce their content because it’s important and should be encouraged. Is nothing that we do valued at all? It’s not that I don’t think people who want to write about games as a hobby shouldn’t. That would be saying the same of hobbyist game developers who I love so much. Neither is it asking for a club of elites who are allowed to write about games, and no-one else. It’s an interest in aiming for more, a belief that there’s room for quality games journalism and that it should be paid for in order to encourage it. We pay for quality content because we believe in it. We see it as important, and we want to encourage more of it.

It’s the same with the games we cover. We like the weird, quirky and interesting, and so that’s what we write about. We won’t cover cheap cash-ins or awful copycats that exist due to the efforts of others. We don’t want that. So here’s an interesting question: are we expecting everything of a relative quality to be paid for by the player? Not necessarily, because there are a lot of great free games out there, and it’s true that, sometimes, we even write about what could be perceived to be bad games. It’s the equivalent of me, or someone else from the site, going off to create their own blog to write about games instead, as a hobby, which is fine.

We’re talking about a company that’s going out of its way to not only fire journalists to cut costs, but replace them with content produced by others for free. Keeping with our analogy, that would be like Activision, for example, firing developers and getting in those who would create games for them for free, and then charging the normal price for the game, no matter the quality (though their games often aren’t great anyway), and keeping all of the profit for themselves.

I’m not saying Indie Statik is there yet, but we’re trying our hardest to set out what we aimed to do, and that’s write about those small games that deserve the attention they’re not getting, and write about them well.
Now it’s time to completely contradict myself, as I reveal that we do actually have someone who contributes to Indie Statik for free – Richard Glenn. We’ve tried to force money into Rich’s hands many times, but as he reveals below, there are reasons for his refusal of it. He voluntarily edits a lot of our articles for us, and occasionally writes opinion pieces too, which we’re happy to publish.
Rich is a fantastic writer, and he enjoys the act enough to write when he feels like it, and not when he’s obliged to by monetary payments. He wanted to weigh in on why it is that he refuses payment for his writing, as he has a number of messages and some stories that are very relevant to writing about games and the “being paid for it” discussion too. It’s interesting to hear what he has to say, for both his difference in opinions to mine, as well as all the similarities.

Take it away, Rich!

I hope you’ll all forgive the pretentiousness, but I feel as though I ought to begin with some form of prefacing disclaimer. My reasons for wading into this debate have nothing to do with an attempt to curry favour from the community, nor are they meant to be suggestive of a drive to carve out a “White Knight” identity in the face of a decadent industry. This isn’t supposed to be a matter of smugness; it’s a matter of openness.

I’ve been writing about indie games on a sporadic basis for just over eighteen months now, yet I’ve never received a penny. There was a time, not so long ago, during which I’d routinely churn out four or five news stories a day for an internet-based publication that prioritised the satisfaction of news quotas above virtually anything else, profits notwithstanding. And I did it all for free.

Now, having joined Indie Statik upon its expansion from cult YouTube channel to fully-fledged web editorial, my articles have assumed a much more infrequent ilk, with sporadic opinion pieces and very occasional news stories being shoved out whenever I can muster the mental energy or, more importantly, whenever my schedule allows it. I still do it for free.

Corruption? Not quite. It’s all done willingly.

So, basically, I don’t take payments for my dubiously labelled “services,” but I have my reasons, and I’d like to share them, even if only for peace of mind. I don’t expect everyone to empathise with my stance, and I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree with it, but I feel compelled to lay all the cards on the table and explain why writing for free can, in some circumstances, be an acceptable practice.

From the very first day I joined Indie Statik (and, for those unaware, that was during the tentative planning stages, long before a single word was written), I was told that I’d be entitled to regular compensation once the site began to even threaten to establish itself as a sustainable financial entity. To say the least, that was flattering. My potential contributions were being valued by two men for whom I had the utmost respect, and with whom I looked forward to co-operating as the months drew closer to the site’s launch. It was a gesture that I wholeheartedly appreciated.

“I couldn’t take the money. I just couldn’t.”

But I couldn’t go along with it. I was coming up to the crunch period of my university degree, the point at which a prolonged lapse in concentration could have had a considerable impact on my studies and, indeed, my future career prospects. In short, I was in no position to commit to a “journalistic” undertaking, and I use that term with both a pinch of salt and a hefty bout of retching, that would likely necessitate the devotion of several hours’ worth of in-depth research and intimate familiarisation with the site’s source material per week. That just didn’t seem possible.
Josh and Chris were duly magnanimous enough to permit me to take on a bit-part role with the site, giving me both the flexibility to swoop in whenever my schedule allowed it and the editorial freedom to speak my mind on whatever issues I saw fit. That’s a good deal, and one that very few online editorials would afford a largely unproven member of staff. I’d also be allowed to take on a role predominantly entrenched in the background, with the powers that be giving me permission to correct the minor grammatical inconsistencies, punctuation errors and general misnomers that so irked my irrational psyche.

And they offered to pay me too. Now, I won’t lie here, and I certainly won’t attempt to paint myself as the selfless pariah of the written medium. I was tempted to take them up on their offer. Why wouldn’t I be? I could quite easily knock together a chunk of prose that nobody would ever want to read, send Josh an invoice and ride into the sunset. Perhaps paying the bills would be easier too.

But it wasn’t to be, and I have no regrets. For me, I was being given the chance to indulge in a hobby that neither interfered with my personal life nor compromised my academic endeavours, and I saw that as an enviable position to be in. I was having fun, and fun was something of great value at a time when deadlines loomed closer, family members fell ill and stress levels grew more potent. I couldn’t take the money. I just couldn’t. I’d been handed a source of respite on the proverbial silver platter, and to demand payment on top of it would have seemed like a prime example of having my cake and eating it too, for lack of a less self-contradictory idiom.

Fast-forward a few months and my degree has been successfully completed, but my personal circumstances remain similar. I’m working two part-time jobs, and writing time is harder to come by than ever before. There’s really no chance that I’ll be able to play a game through to completion for review at any point in the foreseeable future, and I really can’t see myself being able to conduct research on a game, interview its developers and put together a piece of thorough analysis for the community, or at least not one that did justice to the standards of quality that both my peers and the site’s readership hold in such high regard. All I can offer is the ad-hoc assistance to which I have become accustomed since the site’s debut, and that’s unlikely to change.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m eyeing up a potential career, and it isn’t based in the field of video games. I’m not going to reveal my professional plans here, but games journalism isn’t a career that I’ve ever had an interest in pursuing, and certainly not one that I ever want to be reliant upon as my only form of monetary support. It’s a time-consuming, often thankless avenue to go down, and recent turns of events, such as the aforementioned UBM shake-up and last year’s “Doritos and Dew” scandal, have done little to sway me in the other direction. As much respect as I have for the honest, ethically-driven individuals in this industry, it just isn’t for me. I make no apologies for that.

But for the sake of balance, I’d like to clarify that I in no way condone the practice of a profitable site or publication short-changing its staff, and that brings me onto something I experienced during my first nine months as a writer. For those nine months, I was never offered a shred of compensation for my efforts, and in my own inexperience and naïveté, I considered that to be a standard form of conduct. I’ve never applied for a writing position, and I’d been asked to contribute to another independent gaming website after one of the suit-and-ties had found one of my reader reviews over on Eurogamer. After those nine months had passed, however, an e-mail came through. They were going to pay me.

I didn’t know what to think. I’d been happily going about my business without even the slightest thought that small-fry writers could get paid, and, truth be told, I was a little perturbed. I’m a firm believer in a meritocracy, and I couldn’t begin to fathom the possibility that my words could be worth anything to anybody. In effect, I’d been indoctrinated.

Let me be a little more specific. Upon joining the site, one of the first things I, and the other new recruits, was told was that I was there to generate money for the management team. That was it. There was never a passing mention of personal treasure to be yielded, and we were told that having our opinions and names put down in writing was reward enough for our efforts. In my juvenile gullibility, I thought nothing of it.

Yet here was a site that offered a premium subscription service, under which readers were asked to fork out a regular fee to access what the bigwigs designated as the “best” content the site had to offer. Not only that, but a bi-monthly publication was also thrust obnoxiously in the faces of anyone who deigned to access the site’s homepage, a fairly meagre montage of words and pictures that apparently merited additional customer expense. My contributions to that particular piece of media weren’t compensated either.

Any form of payment was reserved only for those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction, and that often meant those willing to give up the hours of their time every day required to knock out several articles in quick succession. There was, and, to the best of my knowledge, still is, a subsection whose writers didn’t get paid at all. And yet it all made sense to me, somehow.

“I’m happy to have been exempt from the inner-working of such shoddy practices.”

At least it did until new recruits would show up and immediately demand compensation for their reviews, features and news posts. How ungrateful they seemed! The sheer audacity it took for someone to rise steadfastly and ask their superiors for physical gain seemed wholly absurd, and yet here these people were, too big for their boots and certainly not on the guest list for my next toga party.
Oh, hindsight. Where were you then?

Day by day, the layers were peeled away, revealing the sordid interior of an organisation I once respected. I watched as wide-eyed recruit after wide-eyed recruit, many of whom were teenagers, came and went, each one departing on a sullen, anticlimactic note as their aspirations of prosperity within the industry they loved were callously worn away by the draconian business practices and covetous executives. Our editor-in-chief departed in a manner as abrupt as it was demoralising, his once-revered reputation dragged into the mud and soiled by the embittered string-pullers who owed their very success to his dedication and endeavour. The idea of charging developers for news stories and reviews was discussed on several occasions as a means of keeping the coffers quenched, if only to further pad out the wallets of the perpetrators of the site’s ongoing demise. I’d had enough, and out I went.

Knowing what I know now, do I regret not taking the money? No. On the contrary, I’m glad – relieved, even – that I remained stubborn, because I’m happy to have been exempt from the inner-working of such shoddy practices. But I now consider myself to be more alert, more militant, towards the concept of a site manager refusing to even entertain the thought of compensating those who brought him or her to the dance. Live and learn, I guess.

Thankfully, Indie Statik hasn’t been the cause of any such headaches, and, as long as the same people remain in charge, I don’t expect it to. I still won’t take payments for my articles, but it’s no longer because I’ve been hoodwinked into disagreeing with the practice itself. The difference now is that I have the power to make a choice I’m comfortable with, and that is perhaps the biggest difference in the world.

Do I want everyone to abandon their own principles and join me in the voluntary corner? Absolutely not. I’ve never met any of my Indie Statik brethren in person, and there’s a strong probability that I never will, but the majority of them are people who I consider to be friends. I want them to be happy, and if that happiness manifests itself through the compensated pursuit of a career in this industry, I’m all for it. If that’s what motivates them to produce the best content they can muster, thumbs up, say I. But would I encourage anyone who, like me, is having doubts about their career prospects or their discomfort with the idea of taking money over the internet? Yes, sir.

So, if you’re tentatively exploring the possibility of games writing as a career, stay in school. Make sure you keep your options open. Don’t be afraid to keep it to one side as a spare-time venture, and don’t beat yourself up if you don’t end up having second thoughts. The last thing you want is to have to venture out into the conventional world of work with a blank CV and a dearth of potential referees. If nothing else, remember that though writing may seem like a dream career, it’s not the only career out there.

And for those who do want to be paid? Don’t see yourselves as mercenarial cavaliers, but, at the same time, remember not to compromise your sense of honor and respect. If you’re writing for a previously accepted sum of money, don’t hold up your site or publication for more. Yes, I’ve seen that too. Fight for what you believe in, but never, ever stop questioning whether what you’re fighting for is true and ethical.

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Opinion: We have an empathy problem

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By Adam Saltsman on Apr 12, 2013 at 12:00p

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A kind of debate-rant-fueled movement among game makers and critics has unfolded over the last few weeks, and will continue to do so, hopefully for the foreseeable future. At the heart of this movement, as far as I can tell, is a passion for video games. It is about a powerful need to make games that are more inclusive. This means not only making games that are about more than just swords and guns, mitigating the overwhelming male gaze and exploring the form and content, but also getting people who wouldn’t normally express themselves through games to do just that. What better place to get new experiences than from new people? This discussion has been inspiring, enlightening and frustrating in equal measures.

I’ve spent the last couple years dealing with some big life changes, and trying to figure out how making video games squares with my new life. Being on the sidelines of a movement that is all about inclusivity in games, finding new audiences and new experiences, this is all enormously reassuring for me. When someone I’ve never met writes, “This is the first video game I’ve played and enjoyed since Tetris,” about a game I helped make, I get pretty emotional.

At the heart of this movement, as far as I can tell, is a passion for video games

The last few years, and especially the last few months, have brought with them an endless string of eye-opening and awareness-raising incidents, some happy, some sad, that are helping me improve my understanding of my life and the lives of the people around me. We are, and I mean this in the best way, growing up a bit. We have a lot of growing up to do still, too, but when I look back on ideas and attitudes that went unquestioned just a couple of years ago, I can see concrete progress.

But I feel frustrated, too. I’ve felt frustrated for weeks, actually, and I’ve been struggling to figure out how to explain what I’m feeling. My frustration, as far as I am capable of understanding it, stems from the role of dismissal in this ongoing conversation about the future of games. I see a lot of dismissal happening on both “sides” of this conversation, some of it implicit, some of it explicit, and all of it harmful.

The last few years have been eye-opening

Robert Yang wrote yesterday that when we’re talking about the games from this new movement, games like Cart Life, Howling Dogs or Depression Quest, or even Train and Proteus, bringing up the question of “but are these games?” is actually a form of dismissal. It is a harmful categorization that tries, whether we like it or not, to create a separate set of standards by which to judge these games. It’s a way of stopping a conversation before it has even started, and that is the last thing we need.

The other extreme, though, is the idea that any attempt to categorize or understand games from this movement is a political action against not just the games but the games’ creators. That is, if you were to examine the structure of these games, not just the narrative presented by the game, that could be construed as an act of oppression against the artist. This is maybe a more explicit form of dismissal, but otherwise functionally the same.

In a way, this act of dismissal could be construed as furthering the conversation, for how many questions it raises: Is it more harmful to analyze a work than it is to dismiss its critics? Is creating a public work an act of submission to critical analysis? When we make things, do they transfer out of our ownership? Where do we draw the line between creator and creation? We can (and will, I hope) pursue these threads, but at the root of all this is an attempt to cut off a branch of discussion.

When we make things, do they transfer out of our ownership?

We are in the midst of the most important and influential movement in video games in a decade, if not ever — a movement that is vital to the ongoing cultural relevancy and maturation of our medium — and almost everyone involved in the conversation is, intentionally or otherwise, looking for ways to ignore everyone else. We can do better than this, and we have to, in order to make progress.

This is our real empathy problem in video games. Instead of figuring out some reason why this person we disagree with shouldn’t even be at the table, we should be trying to figure out why they so badly want to be part of this discussion. We will always, always, always learn more from people with whom we disagree than from our own personal echo chamber, as safe and comfortable as that place may be.

We have a real empathy problem

This is all easier said than done, of course. In practical terms, this might mean worrying less about how to define a game, or whether games are art, or what indie means. It might mean being receptive to analysis of personal works made public, even (especially?) if we disagree with them. It means striving for this kind of perfect zen balance of deep, passionate belief in your own ideas, while cultivating a very real respect for people who don’t share those beliefs. It means growing up a little bit.

To be perfectly clear, I don’t want to see consensus building, prescriptive diatribes or agreement on The Right Way Forward, whatever that is. I want to see 500 (or 50,000) game makers, all with different ideas about how to make something interesting and new for a new audience, arguing about how to make great art, with vigor and passion, and complete respect for everyone’s right to be part of that discussion. I want to see the great works they make to back up their rhetoric. Because the thing we have in common, this need to make more games better for everyone, binds us together with far greater force than the things that we think divide us.

Adam Saltsman is an indie game developer in Austin, Texas. His previous games include Canabalt, Capsule and Hundreds. For more information on his work, visit his website.

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Where Are Gaming's Role Models?

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By Warren Spector

Thu 04 Apr 2013 2:17pm GMT / 10:17am EDT / 7:17am PDT
Development

In his first exclusive column for GamesIndustry, Warren Spector ponders why game designers aren’t making games of real significance

The following is an introduction and the first in a series of exclusive monthly columns from renowned video game designer Warren Spector. As the long-time games veteran phrased it, his regular column will be about “taking games seriously or big questions I can’t answer,” and each month Spector will aim to pose critical questions about the industry. We hope you find them interesting and encourage you to join the conversation in our comments section.

I’ve read lots of columnists - heck, I’ve written a couple of regular columns over the years - and most of them, probably including my own, are simply opportunities for pundits to pontificate on subjects in which they are considered “experts.” I expect there’ll be a fair amount of that in this column over time. But I’m going to try (really try…) to take a different approach.

Instead of offering readers answers to questions I’ve already thought through, discussing my answers to gaming’s vexing questions, I’d like to offer up the questions I can’t answer. And trust me when I say there are enough of those to keep a monthly column going for decades!

Why is that?

Well, first of all, we’re an incredibly young medium, as I’ve been saying for the better part of three decades. We should have lots of unanswered questions to ponder and debate.

“Can you imagine a game about a guy on a spiritual quest in a boat with a tiger? … The breadth of content game developers are allowed to explore is stultifyingly narrow”

Second, in 30 years of making games I’ve never been anything less than awestruck at the intelligence of the people playing and making what often seem like mindless entertainments. That’s always seemed an odd contradiction, and I’m hopeful (and pretty certain) that engaging gamers and developers is the best way to get answers to questions I can’t answer myself!

Maybe, just maybe, asking these questions might encourage someone to change the way they think about games or make a kind of game they wouldn’t otherwise have made. That’s the goal, anyway.

In future columns I’ll talk about the seriousness of mainstream games… the role of games in public discourse… what we can, can’t and shouldn’t learn from other media… The oldest form of storytelling and how it informs the newest… And other stuff that happens to come to mind and confuse me. I don’t think there’ll be any shortage of material, but if you have specific questions you’d like see addressed, let me know and I’ll flail around a bit before giving up and throwing the question back to the crowd here!

—

In the March 17, 2013 issue of the New York Times film critic Brooks Barnes wrote a column, “Hollywood’s New Role Model (Beard Optional).” In that column, he talked about movie stars as role models - but role models of a very specific sort.

There is now a class of celebrity whose lives and (occasionally) work break out of the pure entertainment mode to deal with matters of serious significance to the world.

So, for example, a Ben Affleck can go from “Gigli” to “Argo” in the course of his career - and others of his generation can make similar transitions (witness Sean Penn, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Leonardo De Caprio and, precursor of them all, George Clooney).

Clearly, some movie people are bringing a social conscience and a seriousness of intent to at least some of their work. Being unable to divine what’s happening in the soul of another, each of us must decide whether this reflects a cynical approach to career development or a sincere desire to express in their work what they find important in their lives. I, perhaps naively, choose to believe the former. However, whichever way you look at it, these celebrities are offering audiences greater variety of content and a level of seriousness that benefits their medium, even at the expense of their own and their studios’ bottom line.

So here’s my question: Is there any analogue to all of this in games?

I look around and, outside of a very few indie games and, of course, the self-styled and largely unheralded “serious games” movement, I don’t see any mainstream developers or publishers offering this kind of serious fare. Ever. As a medium we remain mired in action and genre conventions. Even what passes for seriousness in mainstream gaming seems to require zombies, serial killers, aliens or demons to attract an audience.

If I were to say I wanted to make a game about rescuing hostages in Iran - without guns! - assuming I could figure out how to make such a game, I’d get laughed out of the pitch meeting.

“Even what passes for seriousness in mainstream gaming seems to require zombies, serial killers, aliens or demons to attract an audience”

Similarly, there’s no way any publisher is going to fund development of a game about Abraham Lincoln that doesn’t involve actually fighting alongside the Union army, leading it to victory. The behind the scenes machinations would take a backseat to an elevator pitch along the lines of “You are honest Abe! Once you used your axe to split rails. Now you must use it to split heads!” or, if you’re a gamer of more serious intent, perhaps “Do YOU have the military expertise to Defy History and lead the rebel troops to a victory the real world denied them?!”

Can you imagine a game about a guy on a spiritual quest in a boat with a tiger? How about two old people struggling with the pain of love and aging? Or the story behind a raid to kill the world’s most notorious terrorist? Okay, we could probably do an okay job of that last one, though probably not the events leading up to it - do you water board that guy or not? Seriously? But you get my point.

The breadth of content game developers are allowed to explore is stultifyingly narrow. In mulling this over I can come up with only five possible explanations, none of which feel right or satisfying:

- One, I’m just missing something and serious, real-world concerns are being expressed in mainstream games and/or by mainstream game developers. (I hope this is true.)

- Two, games are incapable of expressing ideas that lack a strong action component. (I hope and believe this is not true.)

- Three, we’re still such a young medium that we haven’t figured out how to move much, if at all, beyond spectacle. (I hope this is true but it’s not a very good excuse!)

- Four, gamers and game developers are arrested adolescents with no interests outside the childish worlds of Alien Invasion, Zombies, the Mysteries of Ancient Magicks or the Activities of Criminal Masterminds and Lowlifes. (I categorically reject this, though I’m sure many will feel it to be true.)

- Five, the monied interests that support, and therefore direct, the work of game developers have no interest in a different kind of fare. Or, related to that possibility, no developers have yet achieved a level of clout that would allow them to buck the system. (These points are almost certainly true and likely to remain so until and unless new business and financing models allow us to broaden our perspective.)

So which is it? Or, as is usually the case when I think I’ve begun to understand something, are there other possible explanations I haven’t considered?

Brooks Barnes ends his piece by trying to put a label on this new breed of movie star: The PAC Pack, The Give Back Pack, The Strat Pack. But he proposes the most exciting and hopeful label of all - this new generation of socially conscious stars are, simply, Grown-Ups.

Where, I wonder, are gaming’s grown-ups?

Warren Spector left academia in 1983 and has been making games, as well as lecturing and writing about them, ever since. You can follow him on Twitter under the user name @Warren_Spector.

About the author

Warren Spector
Warren Spector is a veteran game designer best known for his work on System Shock and Deus Ex.

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They Made a Game That Understands Me

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- Worth Reading 04/05/2013

- Another Stab in the Dark With Mark of the Ninja: Special Edition

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Giant Bomb News

by Patrick Klepek on April 10, 2013

Depression Quest isn’t about winning. It’s about helping you and me understand a disorder. Jennifer actually lives with depression, and until Depression Quest, she hadn’t found a game that spoke to her.

If there was a single trend during the Game Developers Conference this year, it was empathy.

Cart Life tries to convey the daily life of a struggling, working class cart owner (spoiler: it’s not fun). Depression Quest wants (hopes?) to help the player understand what it’s like to live with the crippling disorder of depression. Most cannot know what those experiences entail. These games bridge the gap.
In Depression Quest, the main character binges on streaming video to fill the void of time, not actually taking anything in.
There is no way to “win” playing Depression Quest. There are endings, the story comes to a conclusion, but at no point will you, the player, be granted the satisfaction of a happy resolution. That’s not what Depression Quest is about. It’s not what you’re left with when the story is over.

“There was a moment where I just lost it and broke down crying.”

That’s Jennifer. Earlier this year, Jennifer found a game that finally spoke to her.

Jennifer is not her real name, but she is an active member of the Giant Bomb community, and for understandable reasons, wanted to remain anonymous while talking to me about her experience with Depression Quest.

Like many people, she lives with depression every day. She has for a long time. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said one in 10 adults in the United States reported signs of depression.

“Like a handful of my family members, I have a lifelong history of it,” she said.

Depression is specifically defined by the CDC as follows:

“Depression is a mental illness that can be costly and debilitating to sufferers. Depression can adversely affect the course and outcome of common chronic conditions, such as arthritis, asthma, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Depression also can result in increased work absenteeism, short-term disability, and decreased productivity.”

Depression Quest is a “game” from designer, writer, artist, and coder Zoe Quinn, writer and editor Patrick Lindsey, and musician Isaac Schankler. The quotations around game are there only to remind you what to expect, as Depression Quest isn’t about empowering the player. It’s a text adventure (which is more commonly referred to these days as interactive fiction) that addresses a very serious subject matter that is often dark, unsettling, and confusing. I consider Depression Quest a game, but I have loose definitions. In any case, it doesn’t matter. It’s semantics, and it doesn’t remove the power of Depression Quest.

“Games are in a unique position to elicit empathy from players, since when you’re playing a game you kind of take on a different role for a little while.”
—Depression Quest designer, coder, writer, and artist Zoe Quinn

“We hadn’t seen depression represented much in any medium, much less games,” said Quinn. “Considering that in our research we found that more people would rather tell an employer that they’d committed a misdemeanor and served jail time over telling them that they’ve received psychiatric care, we thought we could make something to push back against the stigma. Games are in a unique position to elicit empathy from players, since when you’re playing a game you kind of take on a different role for a little while. A lot of the experience is autobiographical. The situations may be slightly different but the little things and the thought processes and the emotions, those are very much autobiographical.”

The game opens by explaining why it exists, partially because the experience could possibly trigger episodes with anyone already living with depression. It’s a serious warning. There’s much more to the opening, though. It’s honest. How many other games lay themselves bare before they’ve begun?

“Our hope is that in presenting as real a simulation of depression as possible, other sufferers will come to know that they aren’t alone, and hopefully derive some measure of comfort from that.”

The playing part is deceptively simple. You read blocks of text, and some bits are highlighted. Those sections contain information about the main character, but you aren’t beholden to these backstory details. Then, at the bottom of each page are some options. Click one, go forward. If you want to take the character in a direction than their past history suggests, it’s an option. Each time, the first choice, a seemingly obvious one, one a person might rationalize in their head, is presented but scrawled out.

Jennifer discovered Depression Quest through humor-centric website Cracked.com, of all places. She actually hangs out on the forums a fair bit, which she described as a “safe place” to be open and honest.

Dealing with depression is not new to Jennifer. It’s a struggle that’s been with her for decades.

“I distinctly remember situations in elementary school,” she said, “where I would be surrounded by friends who were laughing about horses and tamagotchis and Rose Art, and I would have moments where I would get pried out of my body. I went through the motions of smiling and talking but I didn’t feel like I was actually there. Like I was lost somewhere in the wrong place, although where the ‘right place’ was supposed to be was unclear. It was strange and confusing. I assumed it was normal and never told anyone.”

As she approached puberty, a ruthless and complicated emotional period even without depression being in the mix, the situation became worse. Now, she was having suicidal fantasies and fighting bulimia.
Cart Life, like Depression Quest, isn’t about “winning.”
“I was bullied relentlessly because I was pale and skinny and weird,” she said. “I excused myself to the bathroom once per class every day so I could lock myself in a stall to cry so hard I couldn’t breathe and then go back and smile and pretend it never happened. One day as I was walking along the tile floor of my home while my parents were running errands, I was just so tired of everything that my legs gave out mid-step and I didn’t see any reason to get up for hours afterward.”

Jennifer, now in college, has sought help in various forms, but still struggles with the term “depressed.” It has a stigma. Depression Quest was like looking into a slightly foggy mirror—familiar but different.

Though Depression Quest is about a person, the story is written vaguely enough to avoid trapping the player into specifics. This person is suffering from depression. This person has a boy/girlfriend trying to understand. This person may as well have been Jennifer.

“As a college-aged straight lady with a long-term boyfriend,” she said, “I can relate to the main character’s struggle to such a degree that playing the game made me feel sick to my stomach. It was as if I were looking in a mirror under harsh fluorescent lighting—I could see everything. The little secrets, the ugly truths, the things I tried to deny to convince myself I was okay. And while I still hesitate to look back on the experience of playing because it was so unpleasant, it led me to the first step of saying, ‘Hey dummy, this is not normal behavior. You have a problem.’

One of the most repeated scenarios in Depression Quest is struggling to explain the character’s conflicted feelings to another person, whether a boyfriend, mother, brother, or friend. These moments are infuriating, as I struggled to understand why a person would bury their feelings, forcing themselves into awkward situations. The reasons they do this, though, are the point. It’s why Depression Quest gives us access to the moments before and after, listening to the character reflect on their own action and inaction.

I’d heard about Depression Quest, but like so many games, the link sat somewhere ignored. When Jennifer sent me a message, writing hundreds of completely unsolicited words about the impression Depression Quest had left on her, I wanted to know more. Something so simple managed such an impact.

“I want to push the boundaries of what people expect from games, and welcome people who might not understand that there’s more going on in games than FPSes,” said Quinn.

“It has helped me. If it can do the same for someone else, I think it’s fair to say that it’s a game worth supporting.”
—Jennifer

Depression Quest hinges on its deeply personal writing style. It feels as though you’re reading someone’s unfiltered mental diary. Depression Quest is uncomfortable in that it feels voyeuristic, but the cramped proximity is how you develop a relationship with the character. It’s why, by the end, I was able to say I understood depression a bit better. It’s a window.

In some ways, the choices in each scenario provides some agency to the player, but that’s mostly uprooted by the end. The game provides no real closure. The character is still depressed, and depending on your ending, it actually feels like they’ve regressed and you’ve failed them. No matter what you do, no matter how much you push the character to change themselves for the better, you can’t win. It hurts.

“It was really important that the endings reflect that depression is something you live with and manage, it’s not like you magically are cured someday,” said Quinn. “We wanted there to be some hope for players who were able to reach out to others and seek help, because we didn’t want to portray depression as a death sentence or essentially emotional snuff, but we didn’t want it to be suddenly cured either. That doesn’t reflect our experiences or those of who we’ve talked to while making the game.”

Playing Depression Quest isn’t “fun,” like watching Schindler’s List isn’t “enjoyable.” They’re important for different reasons, and it’s okay if they exist for the small audiences who will appreciate them as they are.

“It has helped me,” said Jennifer. “If it can do the same for someone else, I think it’s fair to say that it’s a game worth supporting.”

(Depression Quest is free on browsers, but you can donate. A portion of the proceeds go to iFred, which supports depression research and education. It’s also trying to get approved on Steam Greenlight.)
Patrick Klepek on Google+

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Edited by armyofmeat - April 10, 2013 at 8:56 AM

Thanks for a great article, Patrick. I played this a few weeks back and was blown away by it. I have a lot of loved ones who suffer from depression, and it helped me understand their struggles a lot more deeply, and let me adjust my own behavior to better support them.

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Posted by WalrusWalrus - April 10, 2013 at 8:58 AM

Love these indie games exploring unknown territory.

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Posted by perilator666 - April 10, 2013 at 8:58 AM

great writeup. im gonna play this.

now im just waiting for schizotypal quest to help me.

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Edited by vucub88 - April 10, 2013 at 8:59 AM

Amazing article, Patrick. Thanks for not shying away from a difficult subject.

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Posted by mrfluke - April 10, 2013 at 9:02 AM

glad that the game is helping Jennifer with her depression issues.

@patrickklepek i know your checking comments right now,

mind taking a look at this thread

curious to know what you make of this

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Edited by Coafi - April 10, 2013 at 9:05 AM

@patrickklepek You should check out The Cat Lady, if you haven’t already. It deals with similar themes, with great writing and a very distinct art style.

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Edited by MEATBALL - April 10, 2013 at 9:07 AM

<p>&lt;p&gt;Playing this game with depression extra sucked, to be honest, left me with the impression that even if I do opt to do things constructive that I might often avoid life will fucking suck anyway.</p><p>Obviously I wasn’t expecting a happy “You’re cured!” Moment or anything, I’ve been in therapy and dealing with this long enough to know it’s not that simple, but I really just felt the game left me feeling worse more than anything.

It definitely captured the affliction well, but personally I think it’s a game more useful in offering those without depression some unique perspective.

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Posted by Weatherking - April 10, 2013 at 9:15 AM

This game was part of the reason I finally came out to my folks that I probably needed psychiatric help. I haven’t had a meeting with a therapist yet, but I hope I’ll be able to figure things out and not stop myself from pursuing how I want to live my life in the future.

Speaking of which Depression Quest also was one of the major inspirations for a game I’m making for school about Social Anxiety Disorder, which I pitched today and was in to much of a nervous daze to remember how it went, freakiest part is that the only thing I remember is hearing my voice like it was traveling through a wall. It’ll probably work out alright…

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Posted by Winternet - April 10, 2013 at 9:19 AM

Yes, let’s put a quote from a man who committed suicide. That will cheer everyone up :)

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Edited by Envisioned - April 10, 2013 at 9:21 AM

Echoing others, but thanks for this article @patrickklepek. The game is indeed an immense help for not only those with depression, but those struggling to understand just how difficult it can make everyday tasks.

This is tremendous exposure, and I’m really grateful to you for taking the time to write the article and for Jennifer for sharing her story. I know how difficult that can be, and it’s awesome to see her express her thoughts like this. Yaaaaay gaming!

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Posted by rebgav - April 10, 2013 at 9:21 AM

The ‘game’ seems well-meaning and all but the writing has a one-note amateurish feel and the music is quite overbearing. It reminded me primarily of “A Closed World,” which I guess is probably not a compliment.

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Posted by Sor_Eddie - April 10, 2013 at 9:24 AM

Good article and I’m glad that people are going to be more aware of this game, but there IS something of a good “winning” ending, Patrick. If you follow a good mindset path, go to the doctor and stay regular with your therapy and medication, etc you end up with a pretty positive ending where your character reflects on how far he’s come and even though he’ll always have his bad days and still have to live with depression, his life is doing better and better each day, and he’s got people who love and support him. It’s a realistic “good” outcome, and I’m glad it’s there, because misrepresenting depression as “it always ends tragically” is just as inaccurate as a super happy Hollywood ending would be.

I’m also not really sure why you kept referring to your character’s boyfriend, since he’s a straight guy and Alex is a girl.

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Posted by Sweep - April 10, 2013 at 9:25 AM

Just played through Depression Quest and was actually kinda startled by how much of it I could relate to. I don’t feel depressed, though? Am I depressed?! I don’t think I am. I feel great! Right? Yeah! ….yeah.

I don’t know what’s real any more!

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Edited by patrickklepek - April 10, 2013 at 9:34 AM

@sor_eddie said:

Good article and I’m glad that people are going to be more aware of this game, but there IS something of a good “winning” ending, Patrick. If you follow a good mindset path, go to the doctor and stay regular with your therapy and medication, etc you end up with a pretty positive ending where your character reflects on how far he’s come and even though he’ll always have his bad days and still have to live with depression, his life is doing better and better each day, and he’s got people who love and support him. It’s a realistic “good” outcome, and I’m glad it’s there, because misrepresenting depression as “it always ends tragically” is just as inaccurate as a super happy Hollywood ending would be.

I’m also not really sure why you kept referring to your character’s boyfriend, since he’s a straight guy and Alex is a girl.

You’re right about that. The game intentionally allows you to project. I’ve tweaked the language to reflect that.

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Posted by Little_Socrates - April 10, 2013 at 9:39 AM

@sor_eddie said:

I’m also not really sure why you kept referring to your character’s boyfriend, since he’s a straight guy and Alex is a girl.

Yeah, I was able to play the game where Alex was a woman and I was a man. I think the writing is vague and the questions can probably be answered in a way that changes the gender of Alex (a gender-neutral name, and my name, which was weird.) Think of the moment in Kentucky Route Zero where you either name your dog Blue (a girl) or Homer (a boy).

I played Depression Quest sometime last week when I found Zoe Quinn on twitter. Rather than summarize my thoughts too succinctly, I’d rather do a write-up.

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Posted by rjayb89 - April 10, 2013 at 9:40 AM

Would have been more depressing had you titled this article “The Game That Made Me Feel Again.”

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Posted by RecSpec - April 10, 2013 at 9:46 AM

Depression Quest was a pretty good experience. I played through it a while ago and I’m glad that I did, thanks for the article.

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Posted by Jayzilla - April 10, 2013 at 9:50 AM

Thanks for this Patrick. As someone who is bipolar and suffers from depression, it’s nice to see coverage of this title! I am an avid gamer and sometimes the only way for me to cope with my disorders is with writing, gaming, or a book. Sometimes all I can do is lay in bed. I will totally play this. Thanks again man!

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Posted by BasketSnake - April 10, 2013 at 9:51 AM

I’m getting depressed just thinking about playing a text-game.

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Edited by Fobwashed - April 10, 2013 at 9:57 AM

Played through it choosing the options I felt I would take for myself and it ended on what seems like a good note. The interesting thing about this game is that while the choices were obvious ones for me, it didn’t cause the other choices to become obviously wrong. I also felt a bit like I was playing the game as someone giving advice to myself on what I should do as opposed to what I might do if I were in the mental state the character was in. All in all, this game is very well put together and I feel like I’ve experienced the state of depression better in half an hour than in all the other depictions of it I’ve seen before combined. Excellent work. And thanks Patrick for pointing this out.

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Edited by SleepyDoughnut - April 10, 2013 at 9:59 AM

@meatball said:

<p>&lt;p&gt;Playing this game with depression extra sucked, to be honest, left me with the impression that even if I do opt to do things constructive that I might often avoid life will fucking suck anyway.</p><p>Obviously I wasn’t expecting a happy “You’re cured!” Moment or anything, I’ve been in therapy and dealing with this long enough to know it’s not that simple, but I really just felt the game left me feeling worse more than anything.

It definitely captured the affliction well, but personally I think it’s a game more useful in offering those without depression some unique perspective.

I’m better now, but I was depressed all of last year and didn’t realize it for a long time. I agree, playing this game sucks if you empathize. Playing this game I said aloud multiple times “fuck you and your accuracy!” It was fun to laugh at how accurate it was, but after a while it’s like I get it, depression was and is a bitch.

This part,

“Lately you’ve developed a nasty habit of waking up 10 - 20 minutes before your alarm rings, and unfortunately today is no exception. You lay in bed, each minute ticking closer and closer to “wake up time” and passing on a swelling wave of ever-encroaching dread. Sooner than you would like, your alarm blares with caustic inevitability. You frantically pound the snooze button and then retreat under your blankets, as if the warmth of your comforter can shield you from the passage of time.”

was shockingly accurate to my life. I’m so thankful that the study abroad trip I’m currently on has changed my thinking and my worldview. For everyone who suffers from a troubled mind, know that change is always possible.

“A great Tibetan teacher of mind training once remarked that one of the mind’s most marvelous qualities is that it can be transformed.” - The Dalai Lama

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Posted by Trejik - April 10, 2013 at 10:02 AM

Playing this game has helped me understand a friend of mine better. He’s struggled with depression his whole life and clearly demonstrates the symptoms, but hsa never admitted it, even if he did see a therapist for a short time. I identified myself with the mother in the game, to such a degree it almost made me cry. I’m the type of person that always pushes for more, and fights for more, and I want my closest friends to be the same. I have my own problems because of this, and occasionally feel down and understand this particular friend better after those bouts of “depression”, but never had I really opened my eyes to the fact that maybe, my most recent attitude towards his problems have hurt him more than they’ve helped, much like the mother in the game, and even though he knows I love him and would do most anything for him, this attitude doesn’t help him progress, and contrasting that with my previous attitude towards his problems I can see I haven’t been a good friend because I didn’t fully understand that maybe he needed something different from me.
tl;dr: What I’m trying to say, is that after playing this game, I read up on depression, and have realized some mistakes I’ve recently made with a close friend. This game has impaced my life, made me feel terrible for things I’ve done, and has made me want to be better, in this case, for the well-being of my friend. I happily donated, and everyone should play this game.
Thank your for the article Patrick. Excellent work.

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Posted by joetom - April 10, 2013 at 10:14 AM

I might have to check this out. While I’ve never suffered from it myself, I’ve known far too many people who have depression, including a family member who committed suicide a few months ago. I don’t expect this game to cause any huge societal change, but if it can help just a few people really understand what depression is, it seems like it’d be worth it. Our societal view on depression and mental illness sucks and needs to change.

Thanks for the article, this is one of many reasons why Giant Bomb is my favourite website.

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Posted by NME - April 10, 2013 at 10:14 AM

Depression Quest was not at all what I was expecting. I guess I’m glad I played it before reading this, because I probably would have written it off entirely had I known it was, and I’m boiling it down, a choose your own adventure story.

As empathy-inducing games go, I felt ambivalent about Depression Quest. Parts of it hit very close to home, while others felt like a charicature of a depressed person. I suppose that makes sense from both a story telling perspective and a design constraint, but it took me out of the experience a bit.

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Edited by Vorpal - April 10, 2013 at 10:24 AM

Great article, Patrick. I saw this on Greenlight and I’ve seen it mentioned on Twitter but it’s nice to get some context for the game. I’ll definitely be checking it out.

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Edited by dvorak - April 10, 2013 at 10:29 AM

I find this game and amateur articles like this about depression and mental illness to be extremely irresponsible for a huge number of reasons.

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Posted by Branthog - April 10, 2013 at 10:30 AM

I haven’t played this yet (and I’ve never watched Schinder’s or Reqium for a Deam, either), but found the part about “trigger” to be really damn weird. Is it a warning, because there is something about rape in the game, or because a game named “depression” that is about depression might trigger reliving of depression for a depressed person going through depression, while playing the game…?

Also, the point about employers is totally accurate. There was a time when I very briefly considered a therapist, but despite having very awesome health insurance, I did not want anything like that on my record. I didn’t even accept the risk of calling the insurer to find out how to arrange an appointment or find someone. It must be difficult for someone with a persistent problem and the same sort of concern. Even 22 years ago, as a little kid in an abusive situation being sent to a therapist, I was aware enoug of the stigma that I refused to ever talk, until the therapist (after about two months and a dozen hours of staring at each other) gave up. :D

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Edited by BBAlpert - April 10, 2013 at 10:31 AM

I may give this a try, but I’m willing to bet it’ll hit closer to home than I’d like. But if it is helping get the message of what depression really is (or can be, at least), then I’m all for it. From the description, it sort of brings to mind a little PSA thing about obsessive compulsive disorder I saw online a while back.

The video was basically just a message like “This is a simulation of what every day is like for individuals with certain forms of obsessive compulsive disorders,” but the video was only about 3 seconds long, with the text only on screen for about 2 or 3 frames (maybe a tenth of a second). The effect was that the first time you watch the video, you only see it long enough to recognize it as text, but not read it. So you rewatch the video to read the message, but you only have enough time to get in the first few words. So you watch it a third time, and get a few more words. By the time you’ve read the whole message, you’ve probably watched the same video clip 5 or 6 times in a row. Maybe this is just because I’m someone that suffers from that kind of OCD to some extent, but I think it really nails the feeling of “wait, did I lock my car? I think I did, but I’m not sure. I know I just checked twice, but maybe I should check one more time…”

*edit: Here’s the video. I was a little off about the “tenth of a second” part, but it’s still very quick*

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Posted by mbr2 - April 10, 2013 at 10:32 AM

@dvorak said:

I find this game and amateur articles like this about depression and mental illness to be extremely irresponsible for a huge number of reasons.

…and those are?

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Edited by Asmo917 - April 10, 2013 at 10:33 AM

I’ve dealt with depression for around 5 years, and probably exhibited symptoms of it for close to 10. For me, seeing the “optimum” answer to a prompt, seeing it’s not available, and then seeing the available options were the things I had done in the past was powerful. It was upsetting, and it brought 5+ years worth of regret and second-guessing rushing over me.

I’m still really glad I played it.

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Posted by cabrit_sans_cor - April 10, 2013 at 10:36 AM

I tried to play it. I had to stop. It was hitting so close to home for me that it was incredibly uncomfortable.

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Edited by Lyfeforce - April 10, 2013 at 10:36 AM

Good article about an interesting game. One that hits me way too close to home to not have an emotional reaction while playing. Thanks, Scoops.

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Edited by FinalDasa - April 10, 2013 at 10:38 AM

I’m glad this is getting a prominent spotlight and I hope Jennifer from the article knows she isn’t alone. It’s very difficult to explain depression when so many people who haven’t suffered from it simply think you can cheer up from it. Good to see something attempting to remove the stigma from mental illness.

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Posted by BeachThunder - April 10, 2013 at 10:40 AM

@patrickklepek have you checked out Actual Sunlight? It’s another game with a similar theme.

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Posted by crusader8463 - April 10, 2013 at 10:46 AM

Got the 647-723-5274 number from the friend. Googled it to check and sure enough it’s a number for a real depression helpline. Nice touch. And it’s Canadian too.

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Edited by Phatmac - April 10, 2013 at 10:46 AM

Thanks for the article Patrick. I wish Jennifer well wishes with her depression. I’ll be sure to play this soon.

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Posted by neoepoch - April 10, 2013 at 10:48 AM

Thank you.

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Posted by roguehallow - April 10, 2013 at 10:51 AM

Thanks for another great article Patrick.

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Posted by MariachiMacabre - April 10, 2013 at 10:51 AM

@mbr2 said:

@dvorak said:

I find this game and amateur articles like this about depression and mental illness to be extremely irresponsible for a huge number of reasons.

…and those are?

He’s a troll. That’s all the reason he needs.

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Edited by fox01313 - April 10, 2013 at 10:55 AM

Still not finding this much as a game I’d be wanting to play (as RPGs work good for right now) but having dealt with depression after company layoff & spending the next year trying to find just about anything in the corporate creative jobs, I can at least fully relate to what others have gone through with it. Just sucks all the motivation out of you, gives you insane amounts of stress & psychologically drains you; with something like what I went through, very hard to get out of for very long but games are a great way of just a mental escape & break from the stress, great article Patrick.

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Posted by TJUK - April 10, 2013 at 10:56 AM

OK that’s it, I have to say it:

Fuck this kind namby-pamby indie game.

I’m sick of all the games in recent years that want to make me “feel” something. Just shut up. I’m 33 years old, I’ve been been playing video games my whole life and am certainly a million miles from being a “bro gamer”. I’m looking for interesting game mechanics as much as the next gamer.

I swear it’s crap like this that makes people crave a game that just gives them a gun and something to shoot at.

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Posted by Y2Ken - April 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM

Thanks for writing this Patrick, and thanks to the person who contacted him for getting in touch and speaking their mind on the suspect. It was a really interesting read.

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Edited by Psychohead - April 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM

@branthog said:

I haven’t played this yet (and I’ve never watched Schinder’s or Reqium for a Deam, either), but found the part about “trigger” to be really damn weird. Is it a warning, because there is something about rape in the game, or because a game named “depression” that is about depression might trigger reliving of depression for a depressed person going through depression, while playing the game…?

The warning at the front of the game is for people currently dealing with depression. Basically says “if you have depression, this may set you off.” It’s a good warning, and one I really wish I’d heeded. The content cut a little too close to the bone for me, and I spent the next few hours curled up on the bed just feeling shitty. I mean, it’s always nice to see that other people understand what you’re going through. At the same time, having it all laid out in black and white like that just god damn wrecked me.

It’s a heck of a game, but if you’re someone who is already predisposed to this stuff, I strongly recommend you steel yourself before going in.

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Edited by Oni - April 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM

Awesome to see this being talked about, I played it and saw so much of myself in it. I related a scary amount. I think I’ve suffered from some of the symptoms for years, though never quite as strongly as depicted in DQ, but the first few months of this year were awful for me. I’d always feel guilty for even thinking I might be depressed in some way though, like I was looking for an excuse for being so unmotivated in life. idk, it’s confusing. I feel better now, which makes me think I probably wasn’t really depressed - that’s not something that comes and goes, right? I mean I can’t even begin to honestly compare myself to Jennifer.

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Posted by rebgav - April 10, 2013 at 11:02 AM

@tjuk: What on Earth are you talking about? It’s an IF about depression, how could its existence possibly offend you?

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Edited by Ben_H - April 10, 2013 at 11:05 AM

Holy crap did that game hit close to home. It basically described me circa a year and a half ago after my mom got sick. I shut down, avoided people like the plague, never wanted to do anything, had no motivation, etc. etc.. I’ve had symptoms on and off for probably a good 5 years now.

Somehow I have managed to turn it around without help. I still have bad days like once a week but other than that things seem a bit better. I still get far too anxious about things I shouldn’t though.

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Posted by Branthog - April 10, 2013 at 11:08 AM

I can understand being put off by games like this or the discussions surrounding them, but even then, they still deserve credit for trying something different. I hate rhythm games, but that doesn’t disqualify them from anything but my own gaming shelf.

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Posted by Milkman - April 10, 2013 at 11:08 AM

@tjuk said:

OK that’s it, I have to say it:

Fuck this kind namby-pamby indie game.

I’m sick of all the games in recent years that want to make me “feel” something. Just shut up. I’m 33 years old, I’ve been been playing video games my whole life and am certainly a million miles from being a “bro gamer”. I’m looking for interesting game mechanics as much as the next gamer.

I swear it’s crap like this that makes people crave a game that just gives them a gun and something to shoot at.

FUCK FEELINGS LET’S SHOOT SOME SHIT WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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Posted by TJUK - April 10, 2013 at 11:10 AM

@rebgav: The game doesn’t offend me, I don’t need to play it if I don’t want to. No video game offends me regardless of it’s content (well, a game where the aim was to kill my children would offend me, so scratch that).

I mean games like this just aren’t what I’m looking for. I see more and more stuff like this these days and it just turns me off.

We don’t have to agree on this, I’m just giving my opinion. Most of the comments so far on this article have been very positive. I don’t think it hurts the discussion for someone to give an alternative view.

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Depression Quest

Depression Quest is an interactive fiction choose-your-own-adventure style game dealing with depression in a realistic way.

US Release Date: February 14, 2013

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Conspicuous Consumption

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04/10/2013

On growing up wanting.

Lana Polansky

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I used to love going to the grocery store with my mom. It was a bonding experience, an excursion, an opportunity to compel her to buy me unhealthy snacks. But mainly, I went for the game demos set up on the latest, hottest consoles smack at the store’s entrance. I knew (because I had asked, more than once), that I’d never get my hands on this tech, but at least I could distract myself with the first level of Crash Bandicoot for PSX. My mom could dump me there while she went about her business with the milk and cereal and eggs, and she knew I’d be in front of the cutting-edge CRT television of the era, nearly catatonic, as soon as she had paid her bill.

We weren’t particularly affluent. Growing up, my mother supported the three of us on her nurse’s salary and my father—and I say this with as little hostility or self-pity as possible—was not one to contribute or participate in the act of healthy parenting. That’s about as diplomatically as I can phrase it. So, my access to games didn’t match my level of interest, and I took whatever I could get.

The retail store demos, my brother’s elderly NES, the N64 my aunt bought me for my birthday one year, the Gameboy Color my grandparents were generous enough to buy me for another birthday.

The N64 for which I had the Pokemon Stadium cartridge that came with it. The very battle-beaten copy of Mario Kart 64 that my mom begrudgingly bought for me from the sport and game memorabilia store up the street. She reminded me, whenever I protested for more games, that even buying used wasn’t cheap. I did not yet understand the fiscal constraints of lower-middle-class family budgeting. To be fair, I still don’t.

The NES for which we had Al Unser Jr’s Turbo Racer and a single cartridge containing both Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt.

Pokemon Blue, Pokemon Gold, a used copy of Kirby’s Dreamland with the awkward New Game Plus code.

Sonic on the Genesis at a friend’s house, where I had to beg for half an hour to get him to hand me the controller for 30 seconds.

Playing on my cousin’s consoles in my grandmother’s basement because there’s only so much you can do on your family vacation to Winnipeg, Manitoba.

These were my luxuries. They were, I see in hindsight, indulgences I wanted in large part because wealthier kids in my neighbourhood were guaranteed to get them and flaunt them. These were also, I recognize, things I felt legitimized me because they were boy’s things, and being coded as a “girl” repulsed me for everything it represented. I know this last fact worried my mother to no end.

I won’t pretend as if I haven’t always simply liked games; I’m not so sullen and joyless. I’ve always wanted to play them and think about them, to some extent or another. But I took what I could get resentfully. The desire to own devices had little to do with the pleasure of actually playing the games. It had to do with material possession, and for feeling for a long time that ease of access to gaming eluded me and was a thing I could only hope for or aspire to if only I was one of the boys in my classes with the rich PTA parents. I probably wrote this down in a diary somewhere.

I know that gender must have had something to do with it, because I played Doom on our piece-of-crap home computer that ran Window 3.11 and that I prized, even when my peers were running Windows 95 with dial-up Internet. I played Doom because my brother played Doom. I liked Doom, and I still do, an awful lot. But at four, it scared the living shit out of me—and without the masochistic thrill that I would acquire later like a new appetite. I failed at progressing often because it frightened me, and it frightened me even more because I kept failing at it.

I played it because it was cool and edgy and hardcore and even my very young self had begun to place cultural currency in these values, coveted all the more because of how distant they seemed to me.

Kate Cox, too, grew up without much financial access to the popular games of the day. Describing how the PC opened up a gateway to inexpensive gaming for her, Cox writes,

“I reached adulthood with no fond childhood memories of any Zelda or Final Fantasy game, and the time I spent navigating Sonic around in circles was all at the neighbors’ house down the street in one summer. But the computer that was my tool for writing term papers in college also brought me Heroes of Might and Magic III, Diablo II, Worms Armageddon, and even a painful number of hours of Snood. In grad school, between arduous chapters of my terrible thesis I could nip into EverQuest II or Sid Meier’s Pirates!”

Like Cox, I didn’t actually grow up with Zelda or Final Fantasy (or Goldeneye or Starfox or, or, or…). Many of these games I wouldn’t actually play until my early adulthood, and many I still haven’t played. Because of this, I often feel as though a certain pedigree and cultural cache is missing for me. I don’t necessarily get all the referential nerd humour, and though I am now practised with controllers and keyboards and mice, I don’t necessarily have knowledge of all gaming conventions imprinted in me like a second nature.

This is part of why I don’t like playing games with strangers, or out in public. These blind spots water the seeds of doubt that my credibility as a critic is hampered by my being a woman or by my missing certain formative skills. Mattie Brice has written about these cultural obstacles to accessibility in gaming—a kind of literacy that “gamers” have and “non-gamers” often don’t, which is often used by said gamers to tightly control who gets to participate in the culture. This extends across and often intersects physical ability, gender, age, race, sexuality and class.

I know that relative lack of access, because of my gender and because of my class, made it difficult for me to inherit the culture that I now actively participate in. I know that many of the people who did inherit this culture early were given access often because they belonged to a more dominant gender or class, among other things. And I know that this lack of cultural inheritance can and often is used against people as proof of inferiority or lack of merit. And yet the seeds are sown, watered, ingrown.

Cox was able to find her outlet through that obstacle in the PC. Maddy Myers, by contrast, recently took the elitism of hardcore PC gamers to task, asking on Twitter, “Are PC gamers richer, in general, than console gamers? Serious question. Is that war secretly a class war?”

“There are barriers to entry for PC gaming: building your own computer, knowing enough about computers to upkeep it, having $ to buy it…”

Bringing the forum-speckling, meme-generating phrase “PC master race” down a few notches, Myers questioned the insistence of this community that gaming consoles like the Wii, or things like aim-assist in console versions of FPSs, are somehow naturally inferior. “…Affordability and accessibility makes the Wii less ‘cool’/‘hardcore’ etc which is not only gendered but classist,” Myers tweeted, touching on the comorbid biases implicit in this common sentiment. Even Cox observed that generally, there has been an inversion in the status symbolism of consoles versus the PC, tweeting that “10-15 years ago…many houses had a computer, but consoles were $$$ toys.”

I probably relate more to Cox’s original article in terms of having found access to games in the digital distribution networks of the Internet (including user-generated content sites like Newgrounds, whose amateur games and videos filled my adolescent hours.) But Myers’s tweets raise a valuable dialogue about the link between material possession and the creation of status symbols in nerd culture, and, ultimately, how that relationship reflects much larger systems of inequality and the prejudices they tend to encourage.

It echoes, once more, that nerd culture is by no means extricable from these systems and in fact often embodies them. It echoes into a cavernous feeling of isolation in which I still struggle with my anxieties of not being adequately “gamer” enough. It tells me, instead, not to sweat it so much. There are so many people working on this access thing, on blurring the lines between who is a creator and who isn’t; on who is a real gamer; on what a game even is; on shifting the values of mastery, achievement and control to something a little more cooperative, a little less capitalistic.

It’s probably quite fitting, then, that so many of my gaming memories involve going to supermarkets or department stores of some description. I barely even remember the games. I mostly just remember wanting them.

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Lana Polansky is a game critic and writer peddling her wares at Kill Screen, Gameranx, Medium Difficulty and here at Bit Creature. Also, a ludonarrative disco-dancer.

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Bioshock Infinite – Infinite Privilege

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EDIT: A commenter pointed me to the fact that I use the term “reverse racism” wrong. I’m not a native speaker so, I used the term to describe someone being racist back against someone they feel is racist against them… racism in return, I guess. I apologize for any confusion.

Okay, so this article is tough.

Usually when I criticise games over social issues, it’s more that I think whoever was responsible kinda lacked a certain perspective or self-reflection to understand what their messages are implying. You know, I don’t need to call someone a sexist for example to point to sexism in what he does.

With Bioshock Infinite I don’t know what to do. What Irrational Games did there is so blunt, I really have trouble separating the message from the messenger.

I really have trouble seeing how everyone involved completely missed out on the fact that they produced a play about white guilt and reverse racism with a white entitled protagonists who gets to be the shining hero and the true victim.

Okay okay, let’s back up for a second, let’s go through this step by step.

So this contains spoilers, obviously. You still should read on. This stuff needs to be worked through before you buy that game. I was glad to have the narrative spoilt for me before I subsidized this game with my money. But hey, spoiler warning, bla, bla. And maybe trigger warning? I don’t know.

Ripples

Through human history, there are a lot of occurrences of white folks benefitting from oppressing non-white folks, pretending that their whiteness entitles them to enslave, exploit, deport, scapegoat, impose ideology or simply kill non-white folks.

And much of that mass violence and oppressive mindset still has negative repercussions today, for people who were born after it happened. Many scars have not yet healed, much damage is not undone and many feelings and concepts from those eras are still prevalent.

The negative repercussions for white people all revolve around white guilt. The feeling to be held responsible for the actions of previous generations of white people basically and whatever unfairness and emotional hardship that entails.

The repercussion for people of color are much more substancial, tangible and are continuing to cause much more damage. There is no equivalency here.

I’m not starting a politics discussion here about “who suffers more from racism”, but I’m going to base my complaints about Bioshock Infinite on the premise, THAT IT’S NOT THE WHITE GUYS!

The True Victim

Irrational Games decided to use the still very much relevant history of white oppression of black people in America as a backdrop for their latest epic. I don’t even have to point to analogies, like I had in my Gears of War 3 genocide article,… it’s explicit here. It’s unambiguous, that we are meant to understand that the racial conflict in the game is referencing the early 20th century America.

It’s a piece of history that still ripples as racial conflicts today. It’s not healed or resolved yet. It’s sensitive matter. And Irrational Games’ contribution to this ongoing conflict and process of resolving things? To make white people feel better about that white guilt stuff by creating a caricature of racism, putting black people in the reverse-racism penalty box and making the white player a tragic hero of a conflict that originated in a past life.

Bioshock Infinite presents an unequivocal image of who the “true” victim of racism is and offers an interactive tale to fight your way out of that victimhood, while venting your anger in luscious violent gun rage.

White Guilt Absolution

Let’s decent into madness:

1. white protagonist

Well this in and out of itself is in my view nothing to object to, if it weren’t for the lack of protagonists of color in other publications. There are great stories, inspiring stories, to tell about racism with a white character at the center. But considering how often that is done and how few movies, comics and games acknowledge who’s empowerment story the civil rights thing actually is, it feels like a missed opportunity – maybe again driven by the desire to please the hetero white male demographic.

One still has to keep in mind, that Bioshock Infinite now is the story arc of a white protagonist, while black americans only provide fodder for that arc and are completely interchangeable. You could have told the same story with the 3rd Reich, Apartheid, Manifest Destiny (oh yeah, that’s actually in there), colonialization, …heck, even animal abuse.

If you exclude a person of color from the roster of protagonists, you make their story an asset, something secondary.

2. sins of the past

This is where the white guilt gets established as the issue for the player to solve. The sins of the past are explicitly an instance of white oppression, as the protagonist participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

But through exposition, carefully placed bits in the campaign and the ending, it is made clear, that it is a sin of a past life, something be absolved from but still haunting the protagonist and the driving force behind his quest. You know, crimes of a past life as in crimes of past generations.

Bioshock infinite does not tell a story about fighting racism, it’s a story about a white man struggling to deal with his guilt. Okay, so far so good. Sad set of priorities, but typical Hollywood treatment of racial conflict in american history.

3. exaggerated racism

A thing that many movies do, most comics and Bioshock Infinite, is depict the faction in the story representing racism as unequivocally evil. Cartoonishly evil actually. This pretends like racism is some sort of thing mentally deranged people do, something sociopaths and psychopaths are drawn to or something you become when you are indoctrinated into some sort of cult.

While this of course serves to condemn racism as a concept, it mainly serves as a way out of dealing with your own internalized racism and serves as a way to absolve yourself by comparison. It also serves – and that is actually the truly ugly effect of that treatment – to push what we are allowed to label as racism into an extremist corner and it sabotages any healthy debate about racism in our society.

These straw men racist are nothing but a shield to keep you from dealing with whatever racism you might have in you. You compare yourself to those obviously screwed up people and go like: I’m normal, I’m better than that, they are racists and I can see that clearly and condemn it and therefore I’m not racist. Of course I’m against racism, I would never do something like this, I mean look at those inhumane monsters, glad that racism is over in America.”

Oh and when someone dares to call you out for doing something racist, you can be all offended and be like: Are you crazy, you compare me to those monsters? I know racism when I see and that wasn’t it, also I don’t hate black people, so I’m not a racist. You are blowing things out of proportions, brother!”

In fact this exaggerated racism – found in Avatar for example, or District 9 – is blowing things out of proportion. It’s trying to make racism and issue of being wrong in the head, while completely ignoring that it actually is an issue of various degrees of that kind of tribalism, xenophobia, prejudice and self-rationalization we all have in us.

4. white savior

We are still in typical Hollywood glorification territory and twisted perspective here.

This is the biggest thing that pissed me of in Avatar, where the white hero is basically wearing the equivalent of blackface while leading the savages to victory against the cartoonishly evil white men.

The white savior against white oppressors is an inherently flawed element in any story that even attempts to be critical of racism. Every pretense of actually being critical of racism falls apart when you give us a scenario in which white people oppress non-white people because they feel superior to them and then give us a white person who needs to take on the job of beating the oppressors because somehow all non-white people are not as able or capable to do that.

Seriously.

5. false equivalency

So far it was just common, though unfortunate story tropes. Now it gets really icky.

Around the middle of the game the methods of the resistance in Bioshock get more and more nasty and soon the both white protagonists (I just count Elizabeth as a protagonist as well, though she isn’t playable) find themselves – explicitly! – equating the racist faction and the resistance with each. Saying the leaders of both factions – Zachary Hale Comstock leading the racists and Daisy Fitzroy leading the resistance – are a match for each other.

So violent oppression and violent resistance against violent oppression is the same? I would even go as far as to say, that is debatable. But when you map this equivalency to the actual racial conflict it Infinite is referencing – and you need to do that because that conflict is still relevant – it is super disgusting.

The civil rights movement was in no way whatsoever violent compared to the beating, shooting, dog attacks, tear gas and angry mobs, black people and their supporters had to endure.

Why would you write a story in which you have fictional factions – one representing racism and the other one representing the fight against racism – and then go ahead and make them equally bad?

6. reverse racism

And this is where I have to get my bucket, since I already feel it boiling in my stomach when thinking about this. Daisy Fitzroy – the black woman leader of the resistance, the personification of the fight against the white oppressors, the character that serves as the voice for the reasons behind the resistance – needs to die when she almost murders a child because it is white.

Her fight is not driven by a desire for equality or a desire to defend against oppression – that may have been why it has started – but now it’s nothing more than reverse racism.

White Empowerment Fantasy

I don’t know what to say. Bioshock Infinite tells a story of an america where white racists clash with black racists and a white guy gets caught in the middle because of something racist, that was done in a past life. Wait, Irrational Games tells that story 2K games tells that story and Ken Levine tells that story.

It’s an empowerment fantasy and cathartic slaughterfest for those poor poor white people who think they moved past racism and who feel unfairly burdened for the racism in past generations, thanks to white extremists and those accusatory black people who in the end probably are just reverse-racists anyway.

It pretends that the fight against white racism is as much driven by racism as the white racism itself, that they are equivalent, metaphorically calling for both to be shot down equally.

No, Irrational! No 2k! No, Ken Levine! We are not at the point where the fight against racism is already over, you don’t get to delegitimize that very alive and necessarily fight as an attack of reverse-racist black people on white people. How dare you?

And even if your white guilt absolving moral play is just meant to be a piece of fiction and the american racism is just a stylish backdrop. Even if Bioshock Infinite is not commentary, not analog to what you think is going down today or has been going down in the past… …how dare you abuse that still relevant conflict, that pain and sacrifice of people still living and still suffering from it… and turn into some sort of joke, like nazi zombies or something?

Too soon? Yes, too soon. I complained about a lot of things in AAA gaming but this takes the cake, this is just wrong, shame-on-you-wrong. Is this also something you were forced to do because of focus tests in frat houses?

ANd what gets me even more riled up is that unabashed praise Bioshock Infinite gets, for the world and story and how that’s art and such… instead that people join me at the bucket. What the actual fuck?

Unfortunately Bioshock Infinite has no multiplayer so it could provide a safe space for those white kids who get unfairly vilified for going like “Boom, headshot, N*gger!”, but as we all know don’t mean it that way. Screw this.

Recommended additional reading: http://designislaw.tumblr.com/post/47313514087/bioshock-infinite-and-the-terrible-case-for-banning-all
Thanks to @clichegames for suggesting the title.

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Only one of Infinite Endings » Ludonarratology

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Apr 082013

One of the problems with stories that use the concept of multiple universes is that the word “multiple” doesn’t even begin to describe the scale of existence. Consider, for instance, the universes in which I just reached through the internet and handed you a cookie (hope you like pistachio sandies!). Now, in the context of known physical laws, this is an extremely unlikely event, so much so that if you were to try to write out the probability by putting down a 1 and writing zeroes in front of it, you could go the whole lifetime of our universe without ever reaching the decimal point. The portion of the possibility space occupied by this event is infinitesimally small. Nonetheless, the number of universes in which I very recently reached through the internet and handed you a pistachio sandy is infinite. The multiverse is an infinity of infinities, which would imply that there are an infinite number of universes where the ending of BioShock Infinite made sense to me. This, alas, is not one of them.

In a comparatively large number of universes I am bothered by simple continuity. The Booker DeWitt that Elizabeth brings to the site of the baptism comes there from 1912 and has already lived through the event. Killing him, while probably cathartic for everyone involved, wouldn’t erase 23 years of misdeeds committed by the possible DeWitts (ranging from mostly drenched to completely drenched) that walk away from the river. This can only be accomplished by drowning the 1890 version of DeWitt, who is curiously absent during the scene. Killing Booker at the end of his adventures wouldn’t seem to do anything to the Booker that exists at the beginning of them.

Of course, the whole ending sequence takes a rather strange view of who Booker is, being as much a (modified) tour of his memories as an exploration of multiple universes. However, the game very clearly establishes that simply entering a new universe does not fuse the different versions of its individuals together. Otherwise, Robert Lutece’s entry into Rosalind’s universe would be even more distressing, to say nothing of Booker’s entry into Comstock’s. Indeed, if existing in the same possibility space caused some kind of fusion the lighthouse tour immediately preceding would have played out very differently. So, in order to work, the ending must discard not only the rules that informed the entire preceding game, but also the ones that governed scenes shown just moments before.

In a rather smaller, but still infinite, number of universes, I am more irritated by the asymmetry between problem and solution. Say the Elizabeths drown 1912 Booker and somehow that does cause 1890 Booker to die. Well, rather, it causes an 1890 Booker to die. Just a few minutes before Elizabeth guides Booker back to the stream, she explains that the multiverse has millions upon millions of Comstocks, and it’s clear from the land of lighthouses that there are many versions of 1912 Booker running around. Why, in light of these ideas, would we subscribe to the belief that the possibility space of 1890 Booker is singular? Rather, there are millions upon millions of 1890 Bookers, and drowning just one of them should not trouble the infinite number of Bookers and Comstocks descended from a man who visited a river in an uncountable number of alternative universes.

Granted, Elizabeth does discuss “constants and variables”, but as the Lutece’s coin-flip tally shows, the constants are not singularities of events, but rather multiple appearances of a similar event in similar contexts. Elizabeth implies that the BioShock games are two instances of the same event in vastly different contexts, and perhaps this linkage explains why so much of Rapture found its way into Columbia.

A diagram in the game implies that the multiple universes of BioShock Infinite form by branching, rather than existing timelessly in parallel. This suggests a solution – go back far enough, and you could find a branch point that safely and completely eliminates Booker DeWitt. But how far back would one go? If an infinite number of Booker DeWitts reached the stream, then a slightly smaller but still infinite number of Booker DeWitts were born. You could smother a baby a minute for 50 years and still not eliminate all the Bookers from universes where the 11th day of the week is named Bunzday (after Dan Bunz, whose heroic goal-line stand saved the earth in the Transtime Football Wars).

What if we eliminate Booker’s mother? There’s an infinite number of her, too. The problem is not really reduced by climbing back up the family tree, because the numbers involved are so large. The collateral damage, however, for trying to address matters by offing Booker’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother is likely to be enormous. You’re not just taking out Booker DeWitt, you’re eliminating hundreds or more people (per universe) who are barely related to him. The number of possibilities only gets manageable in the few instants immediately following the Big Bang, but lopping off branches of the causal tree here involves mass murder on a scale that makes Comstock’s ambitions look trivial.

In an even smaller, but still infinite, number of universes it bothers me that BioShock Infinite doesn’t pay attention to its own ideas about Booker and Comstock, or the multiverse in general. The multiverse is not the land of “or”, it’s the land of “and”. In a single universe, either Booker walks away from the stream as himself or gets dunked and becomes Comstock. In the multiverse, Booker walks away and he gets dunked; these possibilities merely occur in different branches. If Booker gets in the water and drowns, therefore, this does not eliminate any branches, because the very nature of the multiverse denies the possibility of exclusivity. Drowning Booker merely generates a new branch of reality alongside the other two. The infinity of Comstocks are still visionary genocidal maniacs, and the infinity of Bookers are still drunken, dissipated jerks.

This isn’t to say that Elizabeth’s action is pointless; it generates a new set of universes which are likely better off for having no version of Booker DeWitt within them. Of course, these may be the universes that instead contain Andrew Ryan.

The ending of Infinite still works, on an emotional level. Although the studious player will find plenty of hints on a second playthrough, Ken Levine makes the wise choice to hold off the game’s big twist until its final seconds, where it lands with maximum impact and minimum time for processing. By the time the player has gotten over the shock of the moment, the last piano note plays and the game cuts to black. The realization that BioShock Infinite ignores its own timeline, its own descriptions of the multiverse, and the very logic that underpins the entire story to make that ending work doesn’t hit until some time later, if at all. So, in some small but infinite number of universes, I’m not bothered by the ending at all, and this post is a discussion of things I could have found wrong with it. For the people living in those universes: I hope you liked that pistachio sandy.

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Posted by Sparky at 19:43

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Reality is Chosen   Nobody at the tower

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