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“Es ist auch ok, nicht immer perfekt zu sein!” – Lea Schönfelder über ihr neues Videospiel “Perfect Woman” und das Spielemachen

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“Es ist auch ok, nicht immer perfekt zu sein!” – Lea Schönfelder über ihr neues Videospiel “Perfect Woman” und das Spielemachen

Von Lucie am 3. Mai 2013 

©, by Lea Schönfelder

Kleinerdrei war auf der A Maze – Indie Connect, dem 2. Internationalen Indie Game Festival, das vom 24.-26.04. in Berlin stattfand. Ein Spiel hat dort besonders unsere Aufmerksamkeit erregt – denn in “Perfect Woman”, einem Spiel für Xbox Kinect, geht es um die verschiedenen Rollen, die eine Frau im Laufe ihres Lebens ausfüllen kann, um dabei – vermeintlich? – möglichst perfekt zu sein. Und das geht eben nicht ohne ziemliche Verrenkungen, im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes…

Hinter “Perfect Woman” steckt Lea Schönfelder, die an der Kunsthochschule Kassel Visuelle Kommunikation studiert hat und Spiele macht. Abseits vom Mainstream großer Publisher machen ihre Werke nachdenklich, wagen Irritation genauso wie schwarzen Humor. Mal macht sie das Leben und den Tod eines Straßenjungen in Sankt Petersburg in “Ulitsa Dimitrova” zum Thema, mal mischt sie in “Ute” Elemente aus Pacman und Leisure Suit Larry.

Lucie und map haben Lea Schönfelder am Rande des Festivals getroffen und über ihre Spiele und die Gedanken dahinter ausgefragt.

kleinerdrei: Du hast an einer Kunsthochschule studiert. Wie bist du zu Spielen als Medium gekommen? Würdest du dich als Videospielerin bezeichnen? Was reizt dich an Video- und Computerspielen als Medium bzw. Kunstform?

Lea Schönfelder:Während meiner Jugend und Kindheit war ich nie eine große Computerspielerin. Ich hatte zwar schon Erfahrungen damit und auch hin und wieder gespielt – Roller Coaster Tycoon z.B. und Tomb Raider – weit entfernt aber davon, eine richtige Gamerin zu sein. Lustiger Weise habe ich aber schon als Kind selbst Spiele erfunden. Ich kann mich erinnern, Jump `n Runs aus Papier gebastelt zu haben. Heute spiele ich natürlich schon, ich habe Spiele und Ansätze gefunden, die mich wirklich interessieren. Hauptsächlich interessieren mich Spiele nicht wegen einer süchtig machenden Mechanik, sondern wenn sie Themen und Fragen verhandeln, die für mich relevant sind. Also beispielsweise politische Spiele oder solche, die eine persönliche Handschrift tragen, Autorenspiele, wie ich sie nenne.

An der Kunsthochschule Kassel hatte ich mich zunächst für das Fach Illustration eingeschrieben. Schnell bin ich dann ich die Trickfilmklasse gewechselt. Während eines Seminars mit der Klasse der Neuen Medien hatte ich meine erste Erfahrung mit Interaktivität. Dort traf ich Gerard Delmas, mit dem ich unsere ersten beiden Spiele “Huong Jiao Ping” und “Ulitsa Dimitrova” realisierte. Meiner Meinung nach muss man offen für eine Vielzahl an Medien sein, ob Buch, Comic, Film oder Game, im Mittelpunkt sollte nie das Medium stehen sondern das, was ich als Künstler ausdrücken möchte. Aber jede Form der Kommunikation hat natürlich ihre charakteristischen Vorteile.

Am Spiel schätze ich sehr die Möglichkeit, dass die Spielerin, dadurch dass sie selbst aktiv ist, sich in einem sehr hohen Maße verantwortlich fühlen kann. Außerdem bieten Spiele eine neue, nicht lineare Form der Geschichtenerzählung. Ideen können in Form von Systemen ausgedrückt werden, was mir sehr liegt.

kleinerdrei: Perfect Woman spielt ja auch mit der Idee, dass Frauen in Rollen passen sollen, und sich verrenken und verbiegen müssen, wenn sie immer die gesellschaftliche Erwartungshaltung erfüllen wollen. Was waren deine Gedanken dahinter? Was war der Ausgangspunkt für “Perfect Woman”?

Lea Schönfelder: Die Idee hinter Perfect Woman ist, Menschen Mut zu machen, nicht immer perfekt sein zu wollen. Wir werden in der Schule benotet, haben Karriereambitionen, wollen uns selbst verwirklichen, aber gleichzeitig im Privatleben nicht zurückstecken. Hier gilt: Möglichst eine glückliche Beziehung, glückliche, erfolgreiche Kinder und bitte viel erleben, sodass wir im Alter weise und erfahren sind. So zumindest sieht ein “perfektes Leben” in unserem westlichen Kulturkreis für eine moderne Frau aus. Das kommt schon ziemlich nah an eine Zerreißprobe, dargestellt durch die entsprechenden Posen, die man in Perfect Woman einnehmen muss, heran, oder?

Wir wollen natürlich niemandem sagen, dass sie nicht versuchen soll, alles zu haben, wenn sie es möchte. Aber gewisse Schwierigkeiten werden da schon hin und wieder auftauchen. Und wir meinen eben: Hey, es ist auch ok, nicht immer perfekt zu sein! Du musst nicht Karriere machen und die perfekte Mutter sein, zum Beispiel. Oder anders herum. Im Spiel Perfect Woman wird der Spielerin vorgegeben, was die perfekte Wahl ist. So ist es mit 34 “perfekt”, eine erfolgreiche Professorin zu sein. Die anderen Möglichkeiten, z.B. Dein Leben am Strand zu verbringen, haben aber auch ihren Reiz. Im Spiel kann man ausprobieren, wie schön es sein kann, manchmal perfekt zu sein, manchmal aber auch nicht.

kleinerdrei: Mit “Ute” und “Perfect Woman” greifst du Probleme aus Sicht einer Frau auf. Wie begegnet dir die Videospiel(er)welt bei dieser für sie zum grossen Teil eher ungewohnten Perspektive?

Lea Schönfelder: Mal die negative Seite zuerst: Bei Spielen wie Ute bekomme ich Feedback wie: Das ist doch kein richtiges Spiel. Das Game Design lässt zu wünschen übrig, etc. Das stimmt zu Teilen! Denn wie schon oben erwähnt, geht es mir in erster Linie darum, eine künstlerische Position auszudrücken und weniger, eine ausgeklügelte Mechanik zu entwickeln, die die Spieler in einen Highscore-Rausch versetzt. Allerdings sehe ich mich trotzdem bestätigt, denn auch Ute wird von vielen Spielerinnen und auch immer wieder gespielt. Das liegt zu großen Teilen am Humor des Themas und der Animation.

Auf der anderen Seite sehe ich einen großen Hunger nach Spielen, die eine gesellschaftliche Position vertreten. Man schaue nur auf den diesjährigen mehrfachen Preisträger beim Independent Games Festival: Richard Hofmeier mit “Cart Life”. Auch ich fühle mich von der (Indie-)Szene sehr offen aufgenommen. Ich schiebe das auf das Verlangen nach drei wichtigen “Inhaltsstoffen” meiner Spiele: Erstens, nach Spielen, die sich mit Fragen des echten Lebens beschäftigen, zweitens nach mehr Diversität im Look und drittens nach mehr Diversität bei den Spielemachern, also unter anderem mehr weibliche Spielemacherinnen.

Immer wieder werde ich nach feministischen Positionen in meinen Spielen gefragt und natürlich bin ich auch stolz darauf, eine Feministin zu sein. Andererseits muss ich schon manchmal schmunzeln, wenn allein das erzählen aus Sicht einer Frau ausreicht, als feministische Spielemacherin gesehen zu werden. Das heißt dann wirklich: Es gibt noch viel zu tun!

kleinerdrei: Viele deiner Spiele scheinen sich auch um “Agency” zu drehen, also auch um das Gefühl, eine Wahl zu haben. Anders als die meisten anderen Spiele gaukelst du da aber nicht grenzenlose Freiheit vor und zeigst dem Spieler, dass seine Wahlmöglichkeiten begrenzt sind, oder sich beeinflussen. Was sind deine Beweggründe hier zu experimentieren?

Lea Schönfelder: Es stimmt ja nie, dass man in einem Computerspiel völlige Freiheit hat. Das Spiel wurde schließlich von jemandem aus einem bestimmten Grund designt. Selbst in Spielen wie Sim City, die einem wirklich viel Freiraum zu lassen scheinen, ist man ganz klar limitiert. Du baust eine Stadt, das wars! Und das muss auch so sein, denn ein Spiel wird ja erst durch Rahmenbedingungen, d.h. Begrenzungen, spielbar. Innerhalb eines Regelsatzes gibt es bestimmte Wahlmöglichkeiten.

Diese Wahlmöglichkeiten können auch eine Aussage übermitteln wie in meinen Spielen: Pjotr, das Kettenrauchende Kind stirbt auf jeden Fall am Ende. Die scheinbare Wahl, die der Spieler hat, besteht nur darin, aufzuhören zu Spielen, oder nicht (was ja auf Dauer unrealistisch ist). Das führt zu der Aussage: Es gibt keinen Ausweg, Pjotr stirbt immer. Spiele sind also höchst manipulativ! Es mag viele verschiedene Möglichkeiten für die Spielerin geben, doch jede einzelne ist von der Game Designerin zuvor bedacht worden und sie legt auch fest wozu jede Entscheidung führt. In diesem Sinne ist ein Computerspiel ein Medium wie Sprache oder Bild: Der Hersteller versucht, seine Position deutlich zu machen und vertritt dabei immer eine Meinung.

kleinerdrei: In Ulitsa Dimitrova konfrontierst du die Spielenden mit einem sehr deprimierenden Spiel, das man nicht gewinnen kann. Hast du dazu Feedback bekommen, wie das aufgenommen wurde?

Lea Schönfelder: Zunächst mal natürlich wird Ulitsa Dimitrova nicht als klassisches Spiel gesehen. Der Reiz an dem Spiel ist, das zugrunde liegende System zu verstehen, auch Pjotrs Straße und sein Leben kennen zu lernen, aber es endet immer schlimm. Über Ulitsa Dimitrova wurde viel geschrieben und wir konnten es auf vielen Festivals zeigen. Das heißt, es hat die Leute beschäftigt. Ulitsa Dimitrova liegt eine Haltung zugrunde, ein Aufmerksam machen auf ein ernstes Thema.

Wir haben jedoch versucht, auf die große Moralkeule zu verzichten und selbst Pjor in seinem Straßenleben hat durchaus glückliche Momente. Umso trauriger natürlich dass Pjotr erfriert, sobald der Spieler es aufgibt mit ihm zu spielen. Neben einigen Preisen, die das Spiel gewinnen konnte, sind wir sehr stolz auf einen Artikel in der britischen Zeitung “The Independent”, in der es heißt, dass im russischen Parlament, der Duma, darüber debattiert wurde, “russenfeindliche” Spiele, wie Modern Warfare 2 und Ulitsa Dimitrova zu zensieren. Das zeigt schon, wie viel Durchschlagkraft selbst ein gewaltloses Spiel haben kann.

kleinerdrei: Viele deiner Spiele lassen sich ja durchaus sozialkritisch interpretieren. Ist dir das wichtig, Spielende auch auf der Ebene zu irritieren und zum nachdenken zu bringen?

Lea Schönfelder: Ja, das ist das wichtigste bei meinen Spielen. Ich habe ja schon ausgeführt, dass genau das meine Priorität ist. Ich kann aber auch sagen, dass ich die klassischen Spaß-Spiele keineswegs verachte: Es muss alles geben! Ein kleines Ziel für meine Zukunft ist auch, die zwei Positionen ein bisschen mehr miteinander zu vereinen als ich es bisher getan habe. Das heißt im Idealfall, ein Spiel zu machen, das gleichzeitig eine gesellschaftliche Relevanz hat – damit meine ich nicht, dass es belehren muss, aber es sollte schon einer Frage nachgehen, die über den bloßen Zeitvertreib hinaus geht. Und aber die Regeln eines guten Game Designs nicht verachtet, also darauf abzielt, den Spielerinnen länger und wiederkehrend Spaß zu bereiten. Auch was Kommunikation angeht, können wir Indies meines Erachtens nach eine Menge von der Industrie lernen.

kleinerdrei: Hast du schon neue Game-Projekte in Planung?

Lea Schönfelder: Perfect Woman ist das aktuelle Projekt an dem Peter Lu und ich seit meiner Residency am UCLA Game Lab arbeiten. Es versucht genau das zu machen, worüber wir eben sprachen: Wir haben einen gesellschaftsrelevanten Ansatz, sehen aber auch in unseren Playtests, dass es einfach Spaß macht, vor der Kinect herumzutanzen und in die verschiedensten Rollen zu schlüpfen. Perfect Woman soll bis Oktober fertig gestellt werden.

Nebenbei arbeite ich immer mal wieder an kleineren Projekten, wie zuletzt an “Dwayne York – Stagediver”, ein kleines Spiel, das zusammen mit dem tollen Team von Major Bueno im Rahmen ihres one-game-a-month Game Jam entstanden ist. Dort war ich hauptsächlich für den Look verantwortlich. Ich bin eigentlich immer offen und freue mich, in verschiedenen Teams mit zu arbeiten.

kleinerdrei: Wir sind auf jeden Fall gespannt, was es noch von Dir zu sehen geben wird. Vielen Dank für das Gespräch!

The Perfect Woman (WIP) from UCLA Game Lab on Vimeo.

Von Lucie am 3. Mai 2013 

kleinerdrei.org

It's Time To Unlearn The System

indiestatik.com

Game developers everywhere are so quick to declare their creation dead by detailing the journey of its coming to be and having the audacity to label that a “post-mortem.” What? You’re saying that all of the work on the game then suddenly ceases because you’ve shifted the decimals around and plonked a “1.0″ on the end of your game’s title? You know damn well that’s not the case; in fact, I’ve been told by a number of developers that the majority of the work on their games starts after they’ve released the game for public consumption.

And what’s this we’re introducing now? “Consumption?” Thousands of hungry players gobbling up your apparently decaying game?

Do they play it or consume it? Make a choice.

Of course, siding with the latter would imply aligning those who you’ve worked to serve with your creation with a pack of vultures. Carnivorous birds pecking at the dead fleshy code that you’ve sweated over. I prefer the comparison to maggots, actually, thousands of them writhing away and breaking down the individual fibres. Games, then, are publicly acknowledged monsters of the Dr. Frankenstein artistry – detached limbs and torn brows, shackled spines and ripped torsos clamored together and a big roll of duct tape used to contain their loosely strewn form. It’s a bundle of cadavers, ripe for the picking. And we gobble them up.

Consider this a pratty exaggeration of established and accepted labels we use when discussing games. A farty etymology that extends the truth in the words and language surrounding games culture. “It’s backwards” is the message. As the famous doctor screamed, “IT’S ALIIIIIVE!” Games are alive. Developers bring the various parts – graphics, sounds, code, text – to life. Well, the good ones do.

Structures and systems, people. It’s all about that. Games are made out of systemic stitching, and the adherence of the creator to apply this craft to realize their intention is how we discuss them. With a zap of magic, it’s possible that you’ll be willingly fooled into extracting an experience from engaging with this system or systems. It could be one that deliberately lets its bones poke out through the papery skin, or it may be one that’s so drenched in congruity that you’re lured into breaking the walls of its fiction down and stepping inside it to take in a breath of its dead air. I’ll stop with the whole “dead” metaphor now.

But I do want to linger on the role of death in games. Well, I’ll get to that in a bit. Instead, allow me to introduce a highly important word that will lead to that discussion: truth.

Teaching Truths

Already I’ve pronounced ideas in these paragraphs that I consider to be truths. Through my interaction with the world and its denizens, I’ve formulated an understanding of topics and terms, and from that emerges a truth. Now, importantly, these truths are based entirely on how my nerves have relayed information to my brain, and from there, I have churned it all around in my skull. If a new piece of information is introduced, then I simply add that to the pot, and it could be that ingredient produces a different end result – a different truth.

This process is exactly how games work; they teach us truths, and we then understand them and apply them to the game in order to progress. Let me reiterate that point. Games consist of systems. These systems consist of truths, and players are taught these and apply them in varying ways to progress. Anything can be a truth. And we’re completely free to accept the truths that suit us, though we’re usually happy to acknowledge other truths that exist for other people. From here we can look at the entirety of our existence and the many different truths that exist within it. A most obvious one is the clash that exists between those who believe in God – a specific god – and those who don’t. Religions are systems that teach that God exists, and just like the application of science as evidence for non-believers, they’ll find evidence to prove this. It might just be the words of the Bible, but it could easily be an interpretation of just about anything, so long as it is fed into the pool of proof that god exists. In theological debates, what is understood to be truths by the people under a certain religious identity is what the arguments are over, and they’ll nitpick at the evidence each side brings to present their truth in an attempt to debunk their opposition.

A more approachable though more convoluted truth is gender. Most cultures will teach certain specifications for gender identity, such as a girl having long hair. The truth that is commonly understood is this: a person who has long hair must be a girl. As you know, that’s not always the truth. Here’s another one: a man must love a woman. Again, based on what we know, that’s not always true. Or I should hope that you know that’s not always true, because one of the truths I’ve come to believe after accruing first-hand experience is that those who think a man must always love a woman are generally ignorant people that I find it very hard to get on with.

Let’s apply this thinking to games. Remember, anything can be a truth, and what often makes a game interesting in its early stages is how it presents this truth to the player so that they may learn and understand it. One of my favorite breakdowns of how a game presents its “rules” (which play into its truths) is Anna Anthropy’s analysis of the very beginning of Super Mario.

“let’s take the very first screen: the left half of the image, just Mario under an open sky, a flat landscape beneath his feet. This is the first thing a player sees on starting the game. So what does it teach her? The first and highest concept in the game: that Mario’s goal is to the right!”

What Anna refers to as a “goal” is also a truth. The player is taught through its systems that progression lies to the right. It’s a very basic, and very easy to understand, truth. The game holds steadfast in its verisimilitude from this beginning, and by that I mean that once it teaches you these truths, it only adds to them and never breaks them. Traditionally, breaking the conventions of an established rule is considered bad game design, mainly because the player’s relationship to the game then becomes one of deception, and not just truths. However, if it is the developer’s intention to mess with the player and suddenly alter the rules, which might also affect the truths, then the game design could just be interesting, if jarring, and not necessarily “bad.”

There are other ways that verisimilitude can be broken, and to good effect too. Now that games and genres of games have commonly held rules across them, and en masse, it is quite possible for a developer to create a game that is incongruous when held up against other games. For instance, we know that when playing a first-person shooter, pressing forward will move the character in the direction we’re facing. But the truth in our incongruous game could be that pushing forward could move them backwards, through a deliberate lie told to the player. That might confuse the player, and many of them would probably not continue playing it because the truth they’ve come to understand has been broken. This is why when I played Angel of Darkness, which is part of the Tomb Raider series, I stopped playing immediately upon discovering that the Square button no longer made Lara Croft jump, but instead made her roll across the ground. The truth that had been embedded in me for so long was broken, and I couldn’t bring myself to play the game due to that tiny detail. I should add that when I went to jump and she rolled, I fell off a very high balcony and died within ten seconds of starting the game up.

Of note was how volatile my reaction to this alteration was. How dare they swap the buttons around? How dare they?

This reaction is something we see on a daily basis, especially on the internet. Those who write about games, so-called game bloggers and journalists (another debate is held around applying these labels), present truths to their readers. Like I am right now. I am telling you that all of the ideas I’ve presented are true. When a reviewer tells you their opinion of a game, they are also giving you a truth. In such a case, it is up to the reader or viewer to discern how much truth is present, and this is quite often based on how much they trust the reviewer, and how their interests and values align. If they don’t, then the reader may pipe up and deny the so-called truths on offer in the comments section or another public forum. This is why re-reviews have become more commonplance too – the game has been updated by the developers based on feedback post-release, so in order to better present the truth, the game has to be reviewed once again by the publication if they are to be considered as heralds of truth. And they want that because that brings back readers, and with that comes money through ad revenue or other monetary deals that pay the writers so they can keep doing their jobs and cover their living costs.

When a game developer is interviewed, they are presenting truths. When you jump on a platform in a game and it crumbles away, you learn a truth. Everything can be interpreted as a truth, but these are completely subjective and open to being tampered with. It’s the developer’s job to ensure that they aren’t. It’s also the role of a journalist to be somewhat of a truth seeker. They dig further into stories and approach evidence without prejudice in order to find the absolute truth so that others may then better understand this.

Gaming The System

There are a number of recent games that are of high interest in this talk of gaining truths through systems. But before we touch on them lightly, I’d like to once again point out that everything is, and can be, broken down and understood as a system. The problem is that games are often made up of very complex systems, and so there are others who seek to create and play games that do without these and deal with simpler ones. A truth for these people is that a systemic approach to design and analysis is ugly, and not that engaging. Indeed, I’m not particularly fond of breaking down a game into its mechanical systems myself all the time, and certain games offer themselves to such a treatment more readily than others. Instead, we may prefer to look at a narrative system and how that is constructed to present its truths. For some, that’s more accessible and easier to discuss.

Take Dear Esther for a prominent example. This is a game. And like all other games (and everything else), it is made up of rules and systems and truths. But discussing them is pretty boring. For instance, take that it drives you down a certain path and indicates progression by inserting poetic voice clips that standby on cue. If you turn around and go back along old ground, then you won’t hear any more of these inserts, and so progression is discovered upon happening across the path of breadcrumbs that these construct. In all honesty, the system isn’t all that subtle, what with the many invisible walls and all, and due to this, Dear Esther actually comes across as quite “gamey.”

Consider this: would so many people accuse Dear Esther of not being a game if the voice clips were realized as a path of glowing orbs that you collected?

That is a more recognizable game convention, and one that players have come to understand. And that’s really the problem here. Players didn’t take the time to understand Dear Esther before they thrusted forth their volatile reactions. It was a first-person game, and forgive the trope, but perhaps it was that this viewpoint was seen without a gun poking out from the corner, a rarity in games, that caused the reaction. The long established truth imbued in players of games using the first-person perspective had been broken by Dear Esther, and the players didn’t like this new truth.

“What would normally be classed as a fail state in both of these games is used as another tool to teach the player by making them rethink their actions or change their approach to the problem.”

Antichamber is another game that toyed with player expectation, but further than that, it also toys with the idea of teaching rules to the player to establish a set of truths. In other words, it practises unconventional game design. Antichamber’s ‘tutorial’ (you could argue the whole first playthrough is a tutorial) instructed the player to attempt to jump across a large gap with the word “JUMP!!” hovering just above it. Players who have ever played a platformer before wouldn’t need instruction, most likely, considering that the common rule is that you jump across gaps, and if you fall down them, then you die. We can cross-refer this to our mention of Super Mario earlier, a game that was fundamental in the common understanding of these rules in the platformer genre. Antichamber immediately breaks both of these truths. If you fall down the hole, then you don’t die, and you shouldn’t jump across this gap to traverse it, but walk across it. The game not only breaks these conventions, but throughout this beginning stage especially, it gives the player rules, and then subverts them immediately. So ‘on the edge’ the player becomes with regards to what the game is teaching them that when they are told to not look down by some text upon a ceiling, they are left in a predicament as they try to read the developer’s intention with this instruction. Which action should they take to find the desired outcome?

Another game that can be said to be similar in design to Antichamber for a number of reasons is Starseed Pilgrim. While not as playful and deceptive as Antichamber, Starseed Pilgrim doesn’t present the player with many truths at all, and in fact, it relies on the player to discover them by themselves. This leads to the initial play in Starseed Pilgrim to being one of trial and error, of asking questions and experimenting to find the answer (the truth).

I find that the most basic comparison that can be made between Antichamber and Starseed Pilgrim is how they both treat death. More pointedly, how death doesn’t exist. Death in a game is a fail state, a set of parameters that completely reset progression or otherwise punish the player. What would normally be classed as a fail state in both of these games is used as another tool to teach the player by making them rethink their actions or change their approach to the problem. Ultimately, you cannot fail in these games. This is contrary to how we experience life. As you should know, we treat death as a finality. In our game (of life), death completely halts progression. That is the truth we’ve all come to understand.

This truth about death is always counteracted in games. While punishment may come along, we can always learn as players and can re-enter the game to do better next time with our experience and better knowledge. In this way, games are always about winning. Death or failure is often inevitable when playing a game; it’s how we learn what not to do. Arcade games are especially generous in dishing this out, mostly because it would then seem fair that the player would then have to insert another coin to keep playing or try again. There’s also a more modern reapproximation of arcade game sensibilities as the harsh punishment and strict, but fair rules of such games lead to a need for mastery and utmost skill, a quality that some players seek to be taught and challenged by. This is why a lot of these games that are aligned with this approach to game design look quite similar. It’s so the players can recognize the games and what the play will offer them; it’s the truth they’ve come to accept and seek out.

Systemic Death

By no means do games have to be about reaching a goal or winning, as we’ve seen with a number of games that usually get categorized as an “art game.” So distant is this truth from the common understanding of what a game is and should be that a new label has to be created, and one that associates its design with pretentiousness. It’s a deliberately distancing application of semiotics. It could be that these “art games” don’t have an end goal at all, and the only way to stop playing them is to manually back out from play, rather than being automatically brought out of it when losing all of your lives or completing the game entirely. Perhaps these games are closer to how our own lives play out. Do we ever have an end goal that we can reach and then be brought out of reality? No. But we can exit at any point, but should we do so, we would not be allowed to return. Games as immortals.

There’s a game that plays out exactly as life does, though. One Chance acknowledges the finality of death. You attempt to find a cure to save humanity across seven days, and when the time is up, you’re given the ending you’ve managed to reach. And that is the ending you’ll keep. If you try to replay the game, you simply have the image of the ending you reached before. That’s it. The truth of this game is one that reflects the truths we’ve come to understand of our lives in our mortal realm, the one that we would consider outside of gaming practices. But when you think about it, if everything is a system, then life can be analyzed and reviewed, just as a game can. It might seem ridiculous and disrespectful to do so, but the capability of such a procession is there.

GlitchHiker is a another game that inverts the role of death in its systems. The game is now dead; however, there is a way to play it if you download it from the website. Initially, it was designed for the Global Game Jam 2011, and those who played it and failed to succeed would cause the game to delete part of its code. Things started off just fine, with the player able to play GlitchHiker with no interruptions, but with more failures came more glitches and bugs, which made it harder to play and easier to fail. So with enough bad players, the game would kill itself by becoming unplayable. Once it was dead, that was it. It was dead.

As such, GlitchHiker is the only game that can have a proper postmortem.

Games are systems that inform truths, no matter how nuanced, subtle or obtrusive they may be. I want you to leave this article with a truth. It has been my intention as the curator of this text to present to you through evidence and opinions, which are the systems I have guided you through, to come to a conclusive truth. Or have I? But if that is my intention, what could that truth be? Is there just one?

Perhaps it is that games can be designed in any way they choose, should it match the intention of the creator. Maybe it’s that everything we learn and live by is up for debate. Is it that the question of what games can be is debated only between those who fail to see beyond the narrow truths that best suit them?

Maybe I was trying to imply that the work of game writers (bloggers and journalists) is to present truths from what they find, but ultimately, the only aspect of their work that can be improved is how they present these truths and how they’ve come to understand them. Another of my intended truths could have been to show how the culture surrounding games is one that is futilely based on truths that are constantly being hampered and shown to be narrower than initially perceived as they are challenged by other truths with stronger evidence. Maybe the truth, or as I understand it, the many truths out there don’t even matter.

Perhaps there are no truths at all. Yeah, I like that.

indiestatik.com

The quest for Shadow of the Colossus' last big secret • Articles • PlayStation 2 • Eurogamer.net

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Eight years after its release, there remains a group of secret seekers looking to unearth Team Ico’s final mystery.

By Craig Owens Published Thursday, 2 May 2013

There’s a rocky outcropping right at the edge of the world.

It’s not hard to find, though you must trot through caves and gallop across a desolate grass plain to reach it. The real question is why would you want to? There’s no colossi to be found perched on this craggy jut at the southernmost tip of Shadow of the Colossus’ Forbidden Lands. There’s just a stunning ocean view, a thin grassy strip to walk upon, and a flock of seagulls quietly wheeling their way through the air below. It’s peaceful, certainly, but so are dozens of other beautiful, tucked away corners of Team Ico’s evocative landscape.

Yet Michael - better known by his username Ozzymandias - was stood here all the same, and he was doing something rather strange. He was studying the seagulls. Time and time again he’d load the game, steer Agro towards this postcard-perfect view, and then dismount from the steed. While Agro trotted away quietly Ozzy would carefully walk up to one of the many rocks overhanging the edge of the bluff. And he’d wait, watching the birds fly by.

And then Ozzymandias would jump into the sky.

Ozzymandias’s journey to that cliff-face had started three years before, when Shadow Of The Colossus emerged.

“I’m pretty sure I just sat down and played the entire thing through front to back”, explains Ozzy, who’d fallen in love with Ico and had patiently awaited the team’s next game. “By the end, I was picking my jaw off the floor thinking they’d done it again, but it was mixed with this really intense sadness that after all this waiting and anticipation it was over.”

Ozzymandias is just one of the secret seekers, a group dedicated to unearthing Shadow of the Colussus’ big secrets.

So Ozzy turned to forums filled with likeminded, passionate devotees. At first he was looking for canny ways to defeat colossi faster, but he soon discovered something far more mesmerising. The hidden garden at the top of the Shrine of Worship, glimpsed during Shadow of the Colossus’ final cutscene, was accessible in-game. This is Shadow Of The Colossus’ biggest Easter Egg, teased by the mossy growths, handholds and ledges that weave around the exterior of the structure, but not actually reachable until you’ve completed the game multiple times. The Secret Garden, as it became known, is a final reward for the most dedicated of colossi-hunters: one last challenge and a glimpse of verdant green beauty in a starkly austere land. But it wasn’t enough for Ozzymandias and his fellow fans.

“Are there other places you can get to?” Ozzymandias wanted to know. “What else is there?” he asked. “What else can you do?”

Even now, it’s easy to understand why Shadow Of The Colossus kept so many people so enthralled. Playing through the game again, I’m startled by the sense of history that suffuses Team Ico’s landscape. Crumbling ruins lead into bleak ash plains, empty cities and stunning, temple-ringed lakes. Everything feels like a secret in the Forbidden Lands, because the game utterly sells the idea that yours are the first human eyes to cast upon it for thousands of years. On my way to visit Ozzymandias’ skydiving spot I get lost, and end up stumbling upon a sparkling grotto sealed off by the mountains surrounding it. It feels like a discovery, not least because Shadow Of The Colossus is coolly indifferent as to whether you find this stuff at all.

We’re used to playing through spaces with purpose. Skyrim offers a landscape as large as SOTC’s, as well as a wintry beauty of its own, but the homeland of the Nords is utterly crammed with function and padded with lore. Every cave has a quest attached, every NPC a task. There are no secrets in Skyrim, just one epic to-do list.

But in Shadow Of The Colossus all you can do is stare at a ruined shrine in the middle of a desert, and wonder what it’s for.

Ozzymandias and the other secret-seekers had found a home on Sony’s official forums, where they congregated in order to figure out where Shadow Of The Colossus’s remaining secrets and Easter Eggs might be. Early speculation fixated on the idea that there was way to climb beyond the top of the secret garden, to the roof of the temple beyond. More ambitious secret-seekers hoped that, were the right requirements fulfilled, players could somehow unlock a secret ending to the game. And the most fanciful theory of all was that there was a hidden 17th colossus, somewhere in the Forbidden Lands.

Along the way secret-seekers unearthed tricks that aided their exploration of the game, many of which involved some clever exploitation of Shadow Of The Colossus’s physics. Agro-launching is a crucial skill for any would-be secret-seeker to learn. Jump off Agro at precisely the right moment as the horse clambers up an incline and Wander will be hurled into the sky and, maybe, into hidden corners of the map. Other, more daredevil secret-seekers started launching off the colossi themselves, using the creature’s attacks and animations in order to fling themselves to otherwise inaccessible part of the beast’s lairs, or to simply defeat the monsters in record time.

Still, there was a scrappy, disorganised air to the early years of the secret hunt: “Someone had a theory, they would start a thread, nobody would be able to take it anywhere and it would sort of fade,” Ozzymandias recalls. And then that changed.

Secret-seeker Ascadia-PSU had a theory that shifted focus away from the central shrine and towards another ruin to the north. But much more importantly, the man had a sales pitch.

Ascadia’s thread explains his Theory of Intersecting Points in such comprehensive detail that it’s hard not to be caught up in his enthusiasm upon the first read. Drawing from exposition at the start of the game, studious analysis of maps of the Forbidden Lands and some creative interpretation of arcane symbols dotted about the game, Ascadia concluded that Team Ico was pointing players towards the lair of the 11th colossus, Celosia, and a mysterious, bricked up the door. Behind this door was where the The Last Big Secret (as he coined it) would be found. The problem facing the secret-seekers was this: how to open it?

Many theories were tried. Celosia was the only colossus fought with an extra tool - a flaming torch. Flaming torches were used in Ico as puzzle-solving devices. This was a clue, surely? But no - no matter where players Agro-launched themselves to there was no hidden brazier to set light to, or lever to find. In time, the Theory of Intersecting Points fell by the wayside. But the thread survived.

At five hundred and fifty-nine pages that thread is an enduring tribute to the dedication and passion of the secret seekers. Started two years after the release of the game it still receives occasional updates today - because even after the Intersecting Points idea was abandoned Ascadia’s detailed analysis and persuasive arguments turned his thread into the focus point for all subsequent secret-seeking. At peak, barely a page goes by without the discovery of a new glitch or a beautiful geographical find. And barely a dozen pages can pass without a new theory being mooted, eagerly seized upon and then left behind.

Inevitably, some theories were more desperate than others. “One thing that I thought would be key” recalls Ozzymandias, with an ever-so-slightly embarrassed tone “was the catacombs en route to the 16th [and final] colossus. Most of us recall the first big gaming Easter Egg as the one in Adventure where you find the dot in the catacombs and it opens a door for you”, he continues. “So, yeah, I had a harebrained theory that I could run around in these catacombs pressing Wander against the walls and eventually I would find the dot, so to speak.”

“I never found the dot,” admits Ozzy. “There was no dot. So yeah, that didn’t work. But everybody’s ideas were going to these kind of places, because the lowest hanging fruit had already been eliminated.” Other dead-ends included a mysterious, walkable piece of water on the south-eastern fringes of the map. Sadly, what at first seemed like an invisible bridge to parts unknown was soon dismissed as wayward collision detection.

Still, the secret-seekers did make some discoveries. Not the Last Big Secret, perhaps, but these quirky hidden features of the game are a reflection of their dedication. Someone found a beach eerily reminiscent of a similar piece of shoreline seen in Ico’s closing scenes. Another player found two ponds with actual, animated fish hidden in the world. But my favourite find is the Lokis. There are birds flying all over the Forbidden Lands, and it didn’t take long for players to realise that Wander could leap and grab them. But the secret-seekers found three special birds, unlike any others in the game. These giant hawks weren’t tugged down by Wander’s weight when players grabbed them - meaning they’d take players off on a flying, sightseeing tour of the surrounding landscape. But not, sadly, into a hidden colossus’ lair.

“They were probably four or five times the size of other birds in the game,” Ozzy recalls. “Their flightpath never changed, but it was exciting, and there was no doubt it was intentional. They must have been meant to be there.”

Ueda originally intended there to be 48 Colossi - the number was cut drastically come the final product.

It was a different set of birds that brought Ozzymandias to his clifftop, however. While other players were Agro-jumping into unintended corners of the map, many with half-finished textures and unreliable collision planes, Ozzy was convinced that, if there was a Last Big Secret to be found, then it would be uncovered by more legitimate means. What’s more, he’d found a promising lead. Down at the southernmost part of the Forbidden Lands were a flock of seagulls whose flightpath, just like that of the Lokis, brought them for a tantalising moment within range of Wander’s grasp. There just one problem: the player had to jump off the cliff first.

“I remember seeing them and watching them for like five minutes,” Ozzy recalls, “before they’d make that split-second pass. I was watching them for an excruciatingly long time. But I knew the jump was possible. I don’t know how many times I died trying to do it.”

And then it happened: Ozzymanias jumped from the clifftop and grabbed a fistful of seagull on his way down. “I thought for sure it was going to take me to secret cave within which I’d find a 17th colossus that nobody had seen before,” Ozzy recalls, laughing.

The bird carried Ozzy around for a short while, before his weight dragged them both to the ocean where they drowned.

By now, however, the quest for the Last Big Secret had entered a new phase. And the moment of transition can be marked precisely. Midway through 2008 a new user joined the Official PlayStation forums, and started posting strange clips containing impossible to replicate bugs - such as land-bound colossi flying through the air.

“Try figuring out how I do these things,” he cryptically teased.

He was cheating. It turns out that an emulated version of Shadow of the Colossus runs askew, throwing up strange, sometimes useful glitches like sped up animations that could be used to access previously unreachable parts of the game. Pikol’s work pretty much obliterated any remaining hope in long-nurtured theories. There was nothing behind the door in the 11th colossus’ temple. There was nothing but glitchy, half-finished architecture above the Secret Garden, towards the top of the shrine. But by so thoroughly cleaning out the old ideas Pikol allowed a new kind of secret-seeking to start - more concerned with peering into every forgotten corner of the game than uncovering some transformative mystery at its heart. Pikol’s biggest discovery was an entirely finished, textured dam - cut off from the rest of the map and seemingly cut from the game.

Nomad, whose blog showcases his masterful Shadow of the Colossus-hacking abilities and theorising, and whose images accompany this article, was one of the latter generation of secret-seekers: “[Pikol] showed what was possible via hacking - he could go anywhere he liked and it made me want to try,” he recalls. Nomad was already an accomplished Agro-launcher - “I got up behind the towers in the Autumn Forest and could run around up there, people couldn’t believe this had been missed all these years” - but his real passion was using hacks to explore the closed-off mountainous regions at the edge of The Forbidden Lands.

Ueda’s landscapes are infused with an enigma - and it’s one that may never be fully unlocked.

“Pikol and the others would never have done this,” Nomad recalls. “It just didn’t interest them, but to me it was the most exciting - there was never anything up there, just barren landscapes with trees and bushes, but they were vast and solid - Wander could walk there - which is really strange as in most games those kind of areas have no collision detection, but here they did.”

Eventually, the hackers managed to track down official preview code for the game, and started hacking away at it to find secrets that had been cut from the retail game. At this point, the notion of a legitimate secret that players were ‘meant’ to find had been entirely abandoned. “I wanted to explore what was different [in the beta version]” hacker WWWArea explains, “and to find more lost beta stuff”. He did - WWArea’s finds include discarded beta items such as the Eye Of The Colossus, which, when used, would have allowed you to battle colossi with a camera angle fixed to their point of view.

I’m not sure there’s anything left to find in Shadow of the Colossus. Eight years plus countless forum threads, blog posts and Youtube videos mean the secret-seekers have picked the game clean. These days, Nomad’s more interested in finding out what’s been cut from the game than secreted away inside it. His speculations on the nature of eight discarded colossi - what they looked like, how they might have behaved, and where players might have fought them - make for fascinating reading.

But does it bother the secret-seekers that they never found what they were looking for? Nomad is philosophical about the quest he was once a part of.

“It was the search that was the thing,” he tells me. “I like to say it’s like a Rorschach test, people imprint whatever hopes and beliefs they have onto the vast empty landscapes and see secrets that aren’t there - they just hope they are.”

Ozzymandias, meanwhile, looks back fondly on his cliff-jumping days, and admits that he always knew a big find was unlikely. Though, then again, this is the note we end on:

“You know what’s going to happen when you publish this, Craig?” he tells me. “It’s going to inspire people to search, and one of those people is going to find the Last Big Secret of Shadow Of The Colossus.”

Good luck.

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The art of noise: Inside Memory of a Broken Dimension • Articles • PC • Eurogamer.net

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Ezra Hanson-White discusses the archaeology of the future.

By Christian Donlan Published Monday, 29 April 2013

A good game draws you through the screen.

You know this feeling: your surroundings bleed away, peripheral noises grow quiet, and you’re suddenly inside the machine, keyboards or controllers long forgotten, pushing into the ether as you head from one decision to the next.

Ezra Hanson-White’s new game takes this sort of thing fairly literally. You load it up and you’re confronted with a black background and shimmering grey text. A command line awaits. What do you type?

Well, what did you used to type? Hack your way around the system for a few minutes and exciting things start to happen: strange files are downloaded, and you’re invited to explore them. So far you’re still outside the screen, peering in. You’re role-playing yourself, in essence - a lone figure tapping away at an odd interface, trying to make sense of it all, trying to progress. Then you hit the jackpot. Everything starts to scroll, figures and symbols rushing past. It’s a sudden eruption of data. The soundtrack, formerly shifting tones and chattering bursts of static, begins to build to a jet-engine crescendo, the occasional glitches that have rattled across the text increase in frequency. The code becomes a syringe pushing you forwards, the light starts to fragment and then - black out. You’re somewhere else.

You’re inside.

As with games like Space Giraffe, the imagery can be almost overwhelming. And, as with Space Giraffe, it’s worth sticking with it anyway.

Even in its current demo build, Memory of a Broken Dimension is a stark and wonderful thing - sprawling, fidgety, often frightening. It’s also strangely coherent: a computer game about computers themselves, the message turned inwards to comment, however obliquely, on the medium. Its opening sequence may not be particularly friendly to new players, but it will strike a note with anyone who remembers the early days of home PCs - the days before the interface cleaned everything up and made everything accessible. If the game is a mystery, it’s because it’s channeling the inherent mysteries of the machines it runs on: we made them, but they do not feel like they are of us. What are they exactly, then?

Hanson-White has been working around computers - and working in games - for about a decade. After stints at both Gearbox and Monolith, he’s now in Seattle with Camouflaj. By day, he’s helping to build Republique, Ryan Payton’s cinematic stealther blessed with a name that, for some reason, makes it sound like a fancy brand of ladies trousers. By night, though? I like to think he’s piecing Memory of a Broken Dimension together at night. It feels like a game made after dark, anyway, emerging naturally from the ghostly glow of the monitor.

“I can’t remember the first video game I played, but I can remember the early days of using computers,” Hanson-White tells me over the static and buzz of a Skype call. “You’re using DOS, you’d have boot disks that you’d have to make to get certain games to run because there wasn’t enough memory. It was just this huge ordeal just to get a game to run. This game that you’re really excited to play. You’d have to explore, then it wouldn’t work, and there would be bugs and you’d have to do things with your computer to get it to work as it should. That’s definitely influencing some of the mysteries of the project.

The architecture seems menacing and ancient.

“Today everything is just so much more accessible,” he sighs wistfully. “People have common languages for explaining things. It’s a little less mysterious now. It’s probably the same with the internet. Especially when I was younger. It just seemed a little bit impossible: these computers are connected to all these other computers. You get that exploration feeling: where did it come from, what’s inside of it, who made that? I’d like to capture some of that. With Memory, my approach has been that it would be amazing if I could send people the game anonymously on some weird looking USB drive - no documentation or anything. Even without that happening, I’m sticking with this idea that it’s a computer emulator that’s become a weird legend on the internet. People are sending it to each other but nobody knows where it came from.”

This ‘legend’ aspect might explain why Memory’s so fascinating, why it’s been pinging around the Eurogamer office for the last few weeks captivating everyone who sees it. The game Hanson-White’s building doesn’t really feel like a game: possessed with a distinct Demoscene vibe, it’s more of a cool, confusing, somehow ancient thing that you found. A virtual sculpture. A program that can take you to weird places.

But the weird places themselves - the worlds shifting and rattling behind that command line - are influenced by things that lay outside of early computing experiences. “There have been lots of different elements that have affected the idea and have contributed to how it’s grown in my head,” admits Hanson-White. “There’s always been a lot of influence from space exploration stuff with the rovers they sent to Mars. To me, it ties into the idea that you’re using the internet and you’re watching a streaming video in the late ’90s. You’re getting lag and the connection drops and then suddenly you’re seeing all these compression artefacts and the image is stretching. It’s unintended, but it’s still interesting-looking. I just wanted to play around with the idea of doing something that has really distorted visuals and could be related to ideas from space exploration or archaeology: you’re exploring a space that you’re unfamiliar with and you’re not really sure where it is.

“That ties into a lot of influences from pop culture cyberpunk stuff. I really like Neuromancer. Then there’s an artist, Tsutomu Nihei, and most of his work is these really huge, gigantic structures. It’s never explained who built these structures - they’re just there for the characters to explore and see what’s in them. Even related to that there’s the Pyramids in Egypt, old megalithic structures like Stonehenge. They’ve all got the same kind of wonder behind them and I want to capture that with the game.”

Inevitably, then, Memory is a game rooted in exploration. Once you break through the barrier of the command line, you look up to find yourself in three-dimensional space - a distorted, artefact-riddled stormworld where the ground is latticed with grid lines and the sky is torn and ragged with static.

There’s a surprisingly intuitive platformer at the heart of the experience - not bad for a first-person game.

It’s a rather scary monochrome vision of cyberspace, a decayed and lo-fidelity alternative to the sleek edges of Tron. As you move around inside it you may initially find yourself wondering how much you can take. Every few steps - if steps are even the right concept as you ghost over the shifting ground, leaving a bright white line of data behind you - the landscape buzzes, the screen threatens to collapse in on itself, and you can almost feel the sensation of an electric shock every now and then. It’s thrilling to be here, but it’s also exhausting: it’s like rattling about inside a migraine.

This is a digital world, though, and the rules that control it turn out to be reassuringly straightforward. All around you are shattered spars of geometry, flashing and flickering in suspension. If you find the right spot where your perspective brings them all together as a single object, you can click the mouse to lock them in place - to synchronise them in Hanson-White’s words - and transform them into a physical object.

Architecture! Satisfying aural feedback guides you through learning the simple rules at play, and within a few moments, you’re navigating the world one discrete chamber at a time, syncing handy pieces of the environment together and then using them to explore.

“The real root of the actual game mechanics was that I was just messing with visual effects a long time ago, and I saw this perspective trick,” recalls Hanson-White. “It’s been used in paintings. The artist will draw in an object, and you won’t be able to see it if you’re looking at the painting straight on. Then, if you’re looking at a specific angle, though, you’ll see there’s like a skull or something hidden in the painting. I found that interesting, and I guess in some ways it’s similar to the visual tricks someone like Escher might use. I wanted to see if there’s a way I could do that with 3D geometry. I wasn’t really sure if it would work at all. It’s just always been a thought in the back of my mind.”

While it makes for a bracingly simple blend of puzzling and platforming - if you’re really stuck, you can even track down spindly little nodes on the map that give you a brisk audio cue when you’re in the right position to sync something - it also ties into one of the game’s most fascinating preoccupations, the relationship between virtual data and physical objects.

One of Hanson-White’s greatest design challenges lays with finding a balance between atmosphere and readability of the landscape.

It’s a relationship that Hanson-White finds tricky to explore in words alone. “I think this kind of gets at the idea that, say, scientists are looking at information from the Curiosity rover on Mars,” he begins tentatively. “What if they had to work through these weird glitches to the data that happen during the transitions? Maybe they understand why it’s happening, but there’s this process to eliminate the glitches before they can actually see or use the data. That’s what I find interesting about it.

“I guess in general when you’re doing research, you’re capturing data and analysing it,” he continues. “There’s often clean-up involved: getting rid of noise and boosting signal quality. Having the geometry being fragmented and then allowing you to synchronize it together and make it physical, it’s my take on all of that.”

From this conceit - capture chunks of the landscape and then use them to strike out into the unknown - Hanson-White’s hoping to build a relatively traditional structure as the player learns new skills for manipulating data, thus opening up additional parts of the environment. He’s also hoping that as the audience begins to tune in to geometry in need of synchronisation, they’ll also be picking up traces of a narrative that will bring the whole thing together.

“What I’ve been trying to do is get everything planned out for when I’m ready to go full-speed on the project with full-time work,” he explains when I ask how far the game has moved beyond the current playable demo. “I’d say there is a story at work, and the interesting thing is that it’s all based around the player themselves. You’re not playing as a character from the first-person view, you’re just you using the computer. There will be programs and tools that will be presented to you, and it’s up to you to piece things together and figure out what their uses are.

The glitches have an almost haptic quality - Hanson-White’s working to make them more reactive, too, based on player location and the speed of their movement. They feel like a form of guidance.

“Overall, without being too spoilery, the intended narrative is that this computer system has a purpose. It’s unknown to the player when they start interacting with it, but then, over the course of the game they discover tools that weren’t available to them, they piece things together, start to see the bigger picture, and they start to form an opinion of what the computer system is used for. I’m not sure the game will ever outright explain what’s going on, but I’d like to drop enough fictional hints in to help the player paint a picture of what this is. The player has to be imaginative.”

The fact that such a disorientating space does encourage you to be imaginative is just one achievement amongst many, I’d argue. I’ve been playing Hanson-White’s prototype build for a week or two, and I’m still surprised to discover that, each time I turn it off, I emerge back in the real world blinking and rather muddled. It’s like pulling your head out of a washing machine drum after poking around inside for a stray sock, or stepping from a plane following a lengthy flight. Everyday life suddenly feels bright and vast and open: the physical environment seems to have changed a little.

Memory of a Broken Dimension has still got a long way to go, in other words - but it should definitely be a journey worth taking. And that’s regardless of where it deposits you once it’s all over.

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Interview - The Catamites

gamejolt.com

Posted On 5/1/2013 By indiegamehunt

The amazing and stupendous…

thecatamites

The Catamites is a guy who makes freeware games. If you’ve played at least one of his games, chances are you were inspired to seek out more, or maybe to create your own. The games of The Catamites are funny, surreal, boundary-pushing, and full of wonder over the possibilities of videogames and the worlds they can create. They often feature quirky dialogue, strange characters, handcrafted art (pen and paper, clay, dioramas, Legos), and a tendency to toy with game tropes and genre conventions. The Catamites is building one of the most exciting and original bodies of work in gaming.

The Catamites burst onto the scene in 2009 with the Lego-based adventure game Biggles on Mars, and has gone on to craft such instant indie classics as Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog, Space Funeral, Drill Killer, and Pleasuredromes Of Kubla Khan. His most recent game is the amazing Goblet Grotto, made in collaboration with J. Chastain.

Like a game design ninja, The Catamites emerges from the mists periodically to deliver a new game and send shockwaves through the community. There is little to no hype about his games before they are released, and he has seldom shared any insight into his development process. This is an author who is truly making games to please himself. But each release is a revelation and a new demonstration of what can be achieved with videogames that can’t be replicated in any other medium.

Almost all of The Catamites’ games are available to download on Game Jolt.

The Catamites has rarely been interviewed, so I was ecstatic when he agreed to answer some questions for me.

Hello, and thank you so much for this opportunity! It’s really an honor. First off, can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up? Were videogames a part of your childhood? What gaming experiences had the most impact on you?

I was first exposed to the x-toxin - which you call “videogames”- when an uncle gave me his old Gameboy with some games for it, I think Tetris and Super Mario Land. The latter definitely had an impact as I remember being pretty bewildered by it. You’d jump up and hit some block and a little blob thing would come flying out and play a sound and leave a little incomprehensible message which I thought said LUP. It was all very self-assured which convinced me that it knew what it was doing and there must be some context I was just missing.

I grew up in Inchicore which is a suburb of Dublin in Ireland, a nice place though quiet, but remember having the sensation pretty quickly that everything in the world happened in America (equivalently, JP) and that the only things that made it to these shores were like the 8th-generation bootleg derivative leavings of real culture and had been poorly replicated too many times to be anything but vague outlines. The blocky abstract little Gameboy sprites were my friend. I have lots of old memories but they’re all pretty tedious.

I only realised it recently but a lot of the videogames I played were actually other people’s, like friends, relatives, someone’s absent older brother, a cousin who had to sit exams and had his SNES games passed out to younger relations, rental copies, this possibly also contributed to feeling of something being lost.

Why do you think you started making games? Is there a developer who has particularly inspired you?

When I was very young I drew a lot of comics with a friend which were all basically an attempt to replicate videogame experiences, lots of blocky little guys moving sideways across flat plains and shooting rayguns at each other. I’m still not sure why these ideas appealed to me.

I downloaded RPG Maker in secondary school for reasons I don’t remember and kind of instinctively fell into making very generic things. There’s some kind of thrill to making your own little guys in charas-project.net and having them walk around a little place, it’s like there’s just enough rudimentary rules (WALK, TALK, BATTLE) to be able to extrapolate a little world and fill in the gaps yourself.

My younger brother also used RPG Maker and I remember he got really into constructing secret rooms for a castle he’d made. If you clicked on a certain chair you’d be teleported to a little dungeon filled with angry skeletons moving randomly around and if they touched you you got teleported to the skeleton dimension and could talk to them and buy special skeleton weapons. The perfect videogame!!

I remember being inspired to try and make my own GFX and make stranger games by playing Wilfred The Hero by Brandonabley and Psychosomnium by Cactus, but I didn’t play that many other games. I hung around on the one RPG Maker forum all the time and only knew about the stuff posted on that forum which limited access and also honestly preferred daydreaming about my own stuff to playing other people’s. I’m shit!

What games do you like to play these days? What are your all-time favorites?

I don’t play that many anymore, I work in an office all day looking at a screen and then come home and there’s gamemaking and emails and things, which are also on a screen, so the prospect of spending more time looking at a screen makes it hard to get into the right mindset for playing a videogame. Sometimes I play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or Dragon Quest which are both kind of brutal RPG things about being chased and killed in horrible labyrinths by monsters. I’m really bad at them so there’s basically no time investment, it’s just seeing what interesting stuff you can find before being murdered.

That sounds like a really good description of Goblet Grotto, actually. Goblet Grotto seems to mash up everything that was ever great about classic RPGs— the sense of wonder and discovery, the danger, the arcane lore found in the manuals that you had to actually use. Is it your tribute to the classics? Is it your roguelike?

The weird thing is I never played any old WRPGs, Stone Soup and Nethack are my only experiences, but it was definitely inspired by those. I started working on it for the Super Friendship Forum “Mysticism” pageant and the idea was to play on stuff like the [P]ray button in Stone Soup. When you kill something in that game you have the option to either eat it or sacrifice it to an evil god, and since food is easy to come by on the upper levels and goes bad quickly I kind of absentmindedly got into the habit of ritual devil worship despite not really knowing what it was meant to accomplish. “If doing something makes a number go up and nothing immediately horrible is happening then it was a good decision” - the cardinal law of videogames. The original joke of Goblet Grotto was encouraging people to engage in this kind of banally awful ritualistic behavior for vague reasons as they explore a brutal hole, which is maybe kind of trite but whatever. It expanded horribly from there.

How is it you came to collaborate with J. Chastain and what was that process like?

Chastain sent me an e-mail after Space Funeral came out, which thrilled me as I love her comics. We talked a good bit about VIDEOGAMES and it was a big impact on me & got me interested in the more “gamey” stuff - strangeness arising from shifts of representation, convoluted GUIs, real-world things abstracted into grotesquerie, this is why things like Murder Dog IV and Crime Zone and Drill Killer were playing more with structure than what I was doing before. Eventually I showed her the Goblet Grotto prototype and she offered to collab on it. It was a cool process but a strange one as I don’t think either of us are naturally collaborative people, so we’d kind of work on our own things and put them all together at the end, I think this is one of the reasons that game is so bizarrely structured, it also became almost a running thing to see how far we could keep up this decadent work method. So it gradually turned from a joke about this super-specific dopey RPG thing into this general dumping ground for ideas about malevolent game spaces. I enjoyed the process a lot tho and it got me working harder. SUPER EAGLE was based on a comic she was doing that was briefly an RPG Maker game, based on either Where Eagles Dare or possibly The Guns Of Navarone (I think these are the same film??). I love the art for both of those games and feel sorry that it was buried in things that are mostly unplayable.

Can you tell me about the runes in Goblet Grotto (they remind me a bit of the alien “language” in the old game Captain Blood)?

They were definitely based on Captain Blood and Chastain’s explication of same at mu-foundation.blogspot.com, but another big influence was Famicon’s “MyZaza” video, which had this awful, squat, gibbering little cartoon person being ordered around by voice prompts and haltingly responding. I liked the idea of this kind of ambiguous relationship with the player character, where it’s at once this kind of neuter probe you use to explore the universe and also has this affective dimension that kind of grinds against that: like Pac-Man Adventure 2 where you have to continually shoot the main character with pellets to make him, weeping, crawl through the horrible bio-industrial command zone. This weird coercive dimension that highlights the hostility of the gameworld, where the probe person dissolves like a tooth in a glass of cola, as well as the odd ways you both control and identify with the little man onscreen. The frantic output of ambiguous, semi-comprehended sigils was very funny to me also and I liked the idea of having to gauge important game states (starving, crippling depression, etc) in this distressing and unusable way.

I understand that a lot of people playing the game are hearing loud and continuous honking sounds from their toad. This is an error and can be fixed by restarting your computer. If problem persists please return toad to source factory.

You tend to work with handmade visuals. Whether Legos, paper cutouts, clay figures, drawings scanned in from a piece of paper, or even your digital art, the visual components of your games always feel handcrafted. Do you make things in any other mediums besides games? What other artistic mediums interest you and inspire you?

I don’t make anything else, I kind of just like the juxtaposition aspect of videogames. Even in normal ones there’s this emphasis on building a image of what’s going on - in terms of game states, narrative, locations, etc - by comparing different discrete objects, like the difference between the “GUI” and the “little guy moving around” areas of the screen, maps, [SHOP] screens, text, external info, all kind of playing off each other. Self-contained little tiles repeated or broken up to denote different types of terrain. Old ASCII games with messages and dialogue that’s also just concretely embodied in the level environment, etc. Doing anything directly with drawings or words or cardboard stuff makes me feel weird and cramped because there’s a feeling you have to focus on the minutiae of each thing rather than just using the weird systemising aspects of videogames to give coherence to whatever garbage you throw in. Write HORSE on a piece of paper that has some four way walk system and it’s a horse, write CORPSE FACTORY on a different piece and have your horse disappear when bumping into it and there’s a little environment already. I do like music and books but I’m kind of overawed by them whereas with videogames who cares, make a horse simulator.

I feel like we are kind of at the start of a new renaissance of sorts in independent games. Are there any young developers doing work today that is inspiring for you?

I don’t really play much so I’m just kind of abstractly amazed by most of the new games coming out on freeindiegam.es, etc. I like the general impression of games made by people who are indifferent or hostile to canon history of vidcon medium to this point, like most of the Twine things which are about things that aren’t other videogames, an important leap. I still just listen to music and hoard scrap fragments for when I make things.

Kind of a biased aside but I feel excited about stuff like Quimdung as well, idea that all the big console companies hopping the “indie” “crowd sourcing”” train will lead to resurgence of all this strange scrappy shareware made by weirdos, drip tar and piss all over pristinely minimalist iconsoles.

Just following up on the new developer thing — it’s not that I’m resistant to influence or feel sniffy about videogames (or at least exciting free ones), it’s more that I don’t actually like playing videogames at all. My favourite ones are where you have to kinda build up and refresh your image of this startling little self-contained world from a handful of mystery scraps, but that’s also why I like “shitty” or “blank” vidcons with minimal affect. Good ones unsettle me for some reason to do with levels of private emotional intensity being channeled thru these strange interaction structures, feeling yourself change as you engage with opaque structures. “When you gaze into the void..” - DarkNietzche87 but there’s something in the way you engage with these things that gives me the willies and I guess it’s why I always think of videogames as having this vague malevolent quality. Trying to understand the little world and being taken apart yrself in the process, it’s not that I have any moralistic objections to this as it could be the most interesting thing about videogames, but I’m not equal to these bold new experiences.

Space Funeral is pretty much an indie classic at this point. Why do you think this is the most widely played of your games?

I believe the freeware videogame scene was hungry to embrace the “moe” aesthetic in all forms and guises and this videogame came out at the exact right time to capitalise on this. Leg Horse was a HIT. I attribute all my terrific success to the essential purity of my soul.

Timing and the purity of your soul aside, do you think there was a sense of familiarity people felt about the traditional JRPG trappings, and the MSPaint art, so they were more comfortable embracing Space Funeral than with your previous games?

I think it’s like how Final Fantasy VII is the most popular of the series, the stock JRPG template is a magic box that lends an illusion of coherence to whatever stupid shit you happen to throw at it, the more arbitrary the better. Mark E Smith’s description of repetitive music with really weird vocals sitting on top applies directly here. Like this really banal accumulation thing that can support any kind of content / can do anything in music as long as it has a 4/4 beat and you’ll still be viable support act for the Ramones.

I think it’s popular because it kind of simulates what I remember about playing JRPGs without most of the horrible tedious shit that forms the actual experience of playing those games. There’s the bare bones of a plot and little cartoon guys moving around and scraps of dialog that don’t really mean anything but it all seems reasonably assured of itself and there’s that accumulation system under it so you can just kind of drift through in a fugue and look at things and read jokes. I also stole several excellent songs for the soundtrack.

I think some of what people love about your games is the effortlessness—apparent or actual—with which you create them. Veggie Tales 3D may be the epitome of this. Do you prefer making a game quickly or spending more time developing it? Is the decrease in the frequency of your output of late because you are spending more time with your games, or is it just due to other circumstances?

I got a job, so it’s tougher to go on a tear and make quick things. Also, it takes longer to make things in Unity, I’m still not used to the scripting. But I’ve always kind of played with long, impossible projects in the background and then given up and puked out something quick to relieve myself! The quickest one was Twenties Flappers Vs The Mummy btw and Veggie Tales 3D was modeled on that working method, a single piece of paper used for all the GFX and everything thrown out as quickly as possible. It was supposed to inaugurate a whole bunch of quickly shot out papergames with minimal thought involved but I got sick of it halfway through.

I generally end up feeling embarrassed about short things that I just build to amuse myself but it’s like building things from paper and paint, the scrappiness of it all forms a corrective to my natural pedantry, and I enjoy the first feelings of throwing ideas around.

You’ve been working in Unity recently. What do you like about it? You going to stick with it for a while?

I like making 3D things but I dunno why, it’s probably hurtful to the imagination or something, like how all the different ways of communicating info through videogames suddenly devolved into a choice between the stock 3RDPERSON / 1STPERSON camera and movement decisions on the consoles, with all the different types of content mediated through those. But I’m still kind of attracted to that idea and to sensations of moving little guys through 3D space.

I believe Jungle Max was your first game in Unity, but it was Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan where you really mastered using it to create an explorable space, which I think is what Unity does best. Was Pleasuredromes developed quickly? What inspired you to make it?

It was done for a 7 day contest on saltw.net, along with the vgood Twine game Weird Tape In The Mail, although in my defence I only really had time to work on two of those days. I think it was based on a joke in the book “Against The Day” where one of the characters gets work performing in a whiteslavery street theatre routine put on in the Chinatown district, where prurient rich white people get to watch in titillated horror as women pretend to be dragged screaming into the sewers by Yellow Peril types, my god, those perverse orientals, who can fathom their depraved minds, koff, koff, hem. I liked the idea of this ludicrous theme-park performance acting as horrible mirror image of ideology and desire, like those Disney animatronic things with the kids of all nations. It later morphed into this other thing.

The stuff about Joe Walmart was based on an old Ken Levine interview at the time of the original Bioshock about how videogame players wouldn’t want to experience such a rich and meaningful story if you weren’t able to kill mutants,  as well as some video I saw once about “how to be a game designer”” which advised the viewer- with the world-weary cynicism of one who has truly ‘seen it all’! - that people in Walmart don’t care about art or themes. I was delighted by the idea of all these gentle, sensitive corporate vidcon designers trying to make Important Art but being held back from their task by howling prole morlocks. Let my people go.

Pleasuredromes is a fine example of your persistent interest in edutainment. It would have been a perfect fit on the Games 4 Schools website! Where does this interest stem from?

I like the ambiguity of function of that stuff… With regular videogames most of the focus is still on “having fun” and so a lot of effort is put into making you like and engage with what’s happening, through presentation and “flow” and careful dripfeeding of rewards and prizes, so they have this kind of needy, cringing, servile aspect that can feel very revolting and suffocating. Edutainment titles are like those overly-detailed German truck simulators, or the stock software that comes with your computer, things that kind of blur the line between videogames and neutral application programs with some other specialised function. For example many videogames have a linear nature that relies on concentrated and consistent effort while the edugames I have played were mainly bundles of unrelated minigames spread laterally around, demonstrating a laudable indifference to concepts of progress or accomplishment. The relentlessly artificial interests that they need to assume on the part of the player (“>Tell me more about these colourful mosaics”) also aids in the impression of highly specialised objects sitting slightly apart from human life and regarding it with wary indifference, like cows.

There are probably a lot of reasons to be wary of the kinda Reithian values embedded in this stuff but even then I find it more liberating than more pure entertainment, which demands that you not only do what it tells you but that you LIKE it at the same time. The Games4Schools website is officially no longer canon as I forgot the password some time ago.

After Games4Schools came the mysteryzone website on geocities (which seemed like a perfect fit for The Catamites), and now your games’ current home on the web is harmonyzone.org, is that correct? By the way, I love the NES worldmaps page on mysteryzone and still look at it every once in awhile.

I enjoy the geocities ethos of innumerable disorganised web 1.0 experience units but wanted to be able to upload my videogames there as well and had been reading something C Bren wrote about sites (http://seminal.us/tips.html) that would be at least slightly more autonomous than the free stock ones. Harmony Zone is my canon web fortress at the moment.

I noticed that you added Twine to the Resources page on harmonyzone. I’d love to see a Twine game from you. Your writing is so unique and dialogue is such a big part of many of your games. Have you made anything with Twine?

I’m uncomfortable with the directness of text and prefer to communicate everything via funny cartoon animals. It’s like the juxtaposition thing again of directly represented text vs text as component in some looser structure that gives me more wriggle room for getting things across, like having a little plastic shipwreck for your octopus to live in to mitigate the fear of being spied on by predators. I’m the octopus in this metaphor.

I want to mention A1 Reviews. I followed it for a while before I was made aware that it was your work, and you take no credit for it on the blog. I have to say, it is just amazing. Sometimes it is a satire on game reviews, but other times it is sincere look at work you admire. It often feels like a dip into your stream-of-consciousness. Why don’t you explicitly associate it with The Catamites? What is the purpose of this blog for you?

I wanted the site to be an autonomous IP to up the market resale value. It was purchased by prominent videogame developer in February for use in a viral multimedia campaign. I won’t say who bought it but his name rhymes with “fon blow”.

The central purpose of the site was making jokes and whiling away the time. The game review format was stolen from my friend Rusalka-Mask / cicadamarionette.com since it seemed like a funny, elastic structure to dump all these scraps of thought into.

Those games by Magical Zoo look awesome and one can really see the influence on your work. Have you ever had a chance to actually play Golden Grave or any of their other games?

I never even tried, emulating Japanese adventure games from the 80’s seems like a task in itself aside from the problems in playing them when I don’t actually know any Japanese  It’s nice to see these cool little rabbitholes while acknowledging that you’ll never have the time to explore them properly, like William Blake’s prophetic works or knowing astronomy or playing Dwarf Fortress. They’re still out there.

I admire Dwarf Fortress as well, though I can’t play it. Speaking of which, about these long, impossible projects you’ve worked on in the background… can you tell me about one?

I’d rather not, they’re all the kinds of things you look back on and feel gross about. Imagined projects draw on your own mental image at the time of who you are and what’s worth doing and so they have a very low shelflife, it’s like the famous cliche about seeing pictures of your old haircuts. Whereas things you’ve made have to incorporate some bit of reality just because you can’t be too precious if you want to finish something so you have to disengage superego a bit.

For a long time I’ve wanted to ask you: Was there a Murder Dog 1-3? I once saw a screenshot that looked suspiciously like an earlier adventure of our favorite canine supervillain.

Murder Dog 1 was a collab with Tales Of Games that was a side-scrolling murder-em-up, like the NES Robocop games. Murder Dog 2 was a vague dreamy story I was playing around with after the first one collapsed that had to do with navigating the dog through a sort of maze of perception and memory after an anti-MD cabal mount a psychogeographic assault on our hero. Murder Dog IV was made for a SuperFriendshipClub forum pageant about “justice” since I still had the character lying around and was lazy, it was supposed to be based on Bertolt Brecht’s “Trial Of Lucullus” but got progressively dopier as I worked on it and the murdering parts came to the foreground. My favourite part of franchise trivia is the title screen one of the ToG’s guys did for the first one which suggested the existence of multiple identical Murder Dogs, just like the Battletoads.

Are there other unfinished (or finished but unreleased) Catamites games sitting on a hard drive somewhere?

Classified… Illegal information…

Your most recent releases were a pair of small games for Quimdung’s free GameDog project for mobile phones. Girl Cube and Magic Wand both seem to tease and toy with the player. And I think they both comment on inevitability and predictability in videogames. What was the inspiration for these?

Just the idea of malevolent shovelware being produced for this unsettling console I thought was funny. Magic Wand is kind of an arcade thing based on grinding slowly around checkerboard rooms filled with bombs and monsters. Girl Cube is a dating sim based on pictures I saw of the Girlfriend Construction Kit for DOS. GameDog is A+ console software which has been heavily championed by Shigeru Miyamoto and John Romero along with many other famous, popular people. You are missing out on the “new zeitgeist” if you don’t play and talk about it all the while and will certainly die alone when it becomes world’s only topic of conversation.

Do you currently have any games in development or is there anything on the horizon?

No.

The Catamites has achieved something of a legendary status among indie gamers and game developers. I’ve spoken with a number of developers who cite you as a direct inspiration for them to make games. You know how there are authors that are referred to as “writer’s writers”? I think you may be an indie developer’s developer. So, how do you feel about being an inspiration to a bunch of people?

[silence, vague hissing and crackling from other end of phone etc]

Hm, there seem to have been some technical difficulties there.  Ok, I have one more question for you. As someone who’s made a lot of games, what advice do you have for any budding indie developers out there?

YOU MUST CREATE A VIDEOGAME OR BE ENSLAVED BY ANOTHER MAN’S.

About the author: Paul Hack (Phack) writes for Game Jolt, independentgaming.net, and indiegames.com. He has a blog at indiegamehunt.tumblr.com and his twitter handle is @indiegamehunt

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Paul Hack

Paul Hack (Phack) writes for Game Jolt, independentgaming.net, and indiegames.com. He has a blog at indiegamehunt.tumblr.com and his twitter handle is @indiegamehunt

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penueclocki: so basically it becomes a one step program

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This is the general chat. Be nice to it. Dont spam. Be considerate. If you want to find people to play with you, go to the Multiplayer room. If you want to talk about development, go to the Developer Chat.

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02:31 penueclocki: dry out the blood and liquid first

02:26 penueclocki: if you want a fps

02:26 penueclocki: just buy cod

02:26 penueclocki: thats the game most people prefer to play anyways

02:26 Regret: Well, there is Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, that is 20$ though but I loved it when I was younger.

02:27 penueclocki: thats a pretty old game

02:27 penueclocki: no offense to the lego fans

02:27 Key_Board_Basher_13: oh okay, no, he doesnt like games like that, he likes more the pixelated animated adventure games, no blood or dead bodies, he gets freaked out by that

02:27 penueclocki: if you want to actually play a good rpg game

02:27 penueclocki: go play buy a legit game

02:27 penueclocki: like WoW

02:28 Regret: penueclocki, ensure you read everything previously. He wants a game 10$ or under that is E, E10+ or T. I don’t think he wants a rated M game. Does age matter on how good a game is to you? The Legend of Zelda is old but most still love it.

02:28 Key_Board_Basher_13: no M games hes only 15

02:28 penueclocki: YEUSSSSS

02:28 penueclocki: legend of zelda was classic

02:29 penueclocki: imo

02:29 penueclocki: twilight princess was the best one

02:29 penueclocki: ideally for wii

02:29 Regret: Your son is 15 and is scared of blood…

02:29 Regret: and FAKE dead bodies?

02:29 Key_Board_Basher_13: he really wants a steam game, he doesnt use his DS or XBox or ps3 etc just PC Gaming

02:29 Regret: But likes pixelated games…

02:30 Key_Board_Basher_13: yea like FEZ for example, mondern but 8-bit

02:30 penueclocki: oh

02:30 penueclocki: i thought you weer prefering to legit fps

02:31 Key_Board_Basher_13: he has a learning disablility, blood and dead bodies make him freak out

02:31 penueclocki: 8bit games are COSMOS away from fps

02:31 penueclocki: give him a basket fill with human body parts

02:31 Regret: I am sorry, I am having trouble believing you right now. I am 15 years old myself but play rated M games. It is truly sad if he is scared of FAKE (dead) bodies laying on the ground and blood. You have truly kept him away from the true beauty of gaming in the modern day.

02:31 penueclocki: however

02:31 penueclocki: dry out the blood and liquid first

02:31 penueclocki: so basically it becomes a one step program

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Jason Rohrer hid a board game in the Nevada desert. So we went looking for it.

killscreendaily.com

May 1 2013 gold rush By Jason Johnson

Jason Rohrer hid a board game in the Nevada desert. So we went looking for it.

There’s only one copy of A Game for Someone. And it’s buried somewhere in the Nevada badland. 

About a month ago, on a foggy, rainy, windy day somewhere in the Nevada desert, Jason Rohrer, the bohemian game designer best-known for Passage, was hiking through sagebrush. “It’s a lot harder to hike in Nevada than it sounds,” he tells me, “especially when you’re carrying a thirty pound board game on your back along with a pick and a shovel.”

Rohrer had spent the previous two months designing and fabricating his now lost game, teaching an A.I. to play it, and sealing it’s components in airtight glass. Forged of practically indestructible titanium, A Game for Someone is buried a couple of feet under prairie dirt, begging to be unearthed. This is all part of the perverse scavenger hunt Rohrer dreamt up. All we know is that the game is located a few miles from the road on public land in Nevada, at one of literally a million GPS coordinate points.

Rohrer, who claims that he himself isn’t even sure of the game’s exact whereabouts, believes it probably won’t turn up. “It’s so much work to go find this thing,” he says. “People aren’t going to do it. It requires a plane ticket, a rental car, buying a metal detector, a GPS. It’s an expedition!”

So, we called him on it.

Like any good scavenger hunt, we need the proper tools. And also, plenty of spare cash. A ticket to Vegas would cost me about $700, and a hotel room in a small town such as Mesquite (population 15,400) or Fernley (19,300) would run around $60 a night. As Rohrer said, I’d need a rental car to get around. The cheapest, a Kia Rio, is $22 a day. We’re talking a pricy $1,300 for the week. But realistically this could take months, even years. I’d do better budget-wise stocking up on pork and beans at Costco and driving across the country myself.

But clearly, I can’t do this alone, so I called in some experts. I rang a Nevada-based metal detecting club, to see if it was even remotely possible to find this thing. The guy who answered wasn’t in the mood to talk, but gave me the number of his treasure-hunting buddy, a sympathetic prospector from neighboring Arizona. He advised me to pack plenty of water, food rations, and camping gear, and highly recommended securing a four-wheel drive pickup, so that I could sleep in the truck bed. When he asked my battle plan, I told him that I knew it was buried somewhere on public land.

“Eighty percent of Nevada is public land. Mmmhmm. It’s possible, but highly unlikely,” he said.

So who has the most public land? The state and federal government, of course. I decided to phone a deputy ranger at Valley of Fire, an inhospitable stretch of dry craggy badland with jagged red sandstone formations jutting up. It’s one of Nevada’s oldest state parks. He told me not to uproot any natural resources and to watch out for bears and dangerous plant life. “People fall into cactuses sometime. And there’s datura, which is poisonous, if you ingest it,” he said. Ok, don’t eat random plants. Check.

I called up a bounty hunter.

Also, it turns out it’s impermissible to use a metal detector in a state park in Nevada without the written consent of a park ranger, according to his secretary Elise. I’ll have to update my stationary.

Things weren’t looking too good, but, undeterred, I called up a bounty hunter named Brian, who was referred to me by a bail bondsman in Reno, to see if he could help out. Admittedly, I was a little apprehensive about talking with a burly dude who specializes in wrangling in wanted men, and felt relieved when a tickled woman picked up.

–Hello.

–Yeah, I was wondering if you guys could help me track down a board game that’s buried in the desert?

–Uh, a what?

–This guy has buried something in the desert in Nevada and I was wondering if you guys could go look for it for me.

–No sir, we won’t do that… laughing.

–So tracking personal objects isn’t a thing you do?

–We don’t do anything like that… laughing.

Well, so much for that.

I get the feeling Rohrer is secretly hoping A Game for Someone remains undetected for a very long time. “If this is going to be found at all, it will be found in two months. If not, it will only be found by, like, aliens in a way-distant future,” he laughs. It’s still missing in action, and it looks like he will get his wish.

But Rohrer’s a realist if anything and admits there are a few other possibilities besides an alien discovery. “Someone could stumble upon it through erosion or rainstorms in twenty years, when a rancher will be chasing after a cow and step on it,” he says.

“There’s also the idea that ubiquitous aerial drones are coming, and someone will easily be able to program one to visit a million coordinates. But I actually don’t believe that. It’s just hype, like flying cars.” Also, dolphins. “It becomes a different game,” he says, “for somebody who can potentially see through titanium.”

“It will only be found by aliens”

Luckily, the instructions are written in abstract diagrams, so they can hopefully be understood by someone or something besides us. But it’s not perfect. “Some of these things I had to punt on,” Rohrer says. “How can I explain what a game is diagrammatically? How can I explain why two players would want to sit down across from each other with this piece of metal between them to determine a winner? How do you convey that you want to be the winner? Do you draw a star?”

There’s one other question he forgot to ask. Is the game actually any good? Rohrer is quick to admit that he isn’t sure. “You know, I’ve never played it!”

killscreendaily.com

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