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Weckt meinen Entdeckergeist!
pixelpunsch.de

The Possibilities of an Island
haywiremag.com

News - Why Candy Box became more social than 'social games'
gamasutra.com

...........//: an in-depth response to darius kazemi's "fuck videogames"
ellaguro.blogspot.de

auntie pixelante › how to make games about being a dominatrix
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The PA Report - How a clever player with a “useless” item almost took down EVE Online’s entire economy
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IndieGames.com - The Weblog Indie development in the 1990s: The Game-Maker story
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Simon Flesser, co-creator of Year Walk - Interview
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Weckt meinen Entdeckergeist!

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Ich kann es heute nicht mehr hundertprozentig nachvollziehen, glaube aber, dass der erste Teil von Super Mario Bros. das erste Videospiel war, das ich je zu Gesicht bekommen habe. Voller Enthusiasmus starrte ich auf die Glotze und als ich endlich auch mal spielen durfte, merkte ich, dass ich vor allem von der Neugier getrieben war, was sich wohl im nächsten Bildschirm, Level oder Abschnitt befinden würde. Dabei geht es bei Super Mario bekanntlich eher um Geschicklichkeit. Dennoch hatte das Spiel meinen Entdeckergeist geweckt. Ich will wissen, wie das funktioniert hat.

So naiv ich seinerzeit gewesen sein mag, nahm ich doch an, dass Super Mario Bros. nicht aus dem Supercomputer-Zufallsgenerator, sondern von einem Menschen stammte, der sich etwas dabei gedacht hatte. Mich faszinierte ja schon die Tatsache, dass sich in den meisten Fragezeichenblöcken einfach Münzen befanden, in einigen anderen dann aber doch Pilze oder sogar Feuerblumen. Mit dieser Sensation konfrontierte mich das Spiel bereits in Level 1-1! Was mochte da noch auf mich zukommen, was hatte sich dieser irre Japaner noch für mich ausgedacht? Als die Jahre ins Land zogen und ich selbst begonnen hatte zu spielen, wurde mir immer mehr klar, dass ich bei Super Mario Bros. noch gar nichts gesehen hatte. In anderen Spielen konnte ich mich schließlich viel freier bewegen, sogar an Stellen zurückgehen, die ich schon besucht hatte. Oder nach oben und unten gehen, nicht nur nach links oder rechts. Mein Wille zur Erkundung digitaler Welten begann, neue Ansprüche zu stellen.

Realität = Dreck hinter Mülltonnen

Bezüglich der Erforschungs- und Entdeckungsmechanismen in Videospielen gab und gibt es ein bestimmtes Phänomen: Wer als Videospieler einem Nicht-Videospieler von seiner Begeisterung dafür erzählt, stößt auf teilweise schockiertes Unverständnis. Schließlich könnte der Stubenhocker mit dem Gamepad ja auch einfach mal rausgehen und kucken, was sich eigentlich hinter den Mülltonnen im Hinterhof befindet – da hat er ja auch noch nie nachgesehen. Die Krux ist, dass der Videospieler schlau genug ist, zu wissen, dass dort nichts auf ihn wartet. Nur Dreck. Schließlich hat der Hausmeister die Mülltonnen dort abgestellt. Würden sie von einem Spieleentwickler stammen, könnte ich mit an Sicherheit grenzender Wahrscheinlichkeit davon ausgehen, dass sich dahinter ein wertvolles Item, zumindest aber ein sammelbares Objekt befindet. Das ist Teil des Geheimnisses: Wenn virtuelle Welten gut sind, gibt es darin viel für mich zu entdecken – im Idealfall sind das Dinge, die ich wieder zu irgendetwas anderem verwenden kann. Aber hier, im Hinterhof oder zwei Straßen weiter, was soll da schon sein? Noch ein Wohnblock vielleicht.

Große Welt = Nutzlose Welt

So einfach ist es natürlich nicht. Nicht jedes Spiel, das bewusst auf den Entdeckergeist des Spielers setzt, versteckt wirklich hinter jeder Ecke einen Schatz. Die Welt von Skyrim ist ziemlich groß und noch dazu unglaublich dicht, überall sind Hütten, Höhlen, Viecher, irgendwelche Leute, mit denen der Spielercharakter reden kann oder zumindest ein paar verlassene Behälter mit irgendwas drin. Dummerweise ist dieses Irgendwas in den meisten Fällen ziemlich wertlos. Wer in Skyrim wirklich Wertvolles sein Eigen nennen will, sollte am besten selbst Hand anlegen, sich etwas schmieden oder verzaubern. Dennoch wandern tausende von Spielern täglich durch Skyrim ohne wirklich einen bestimmten Auftrag zu verfolgen. Sie drehen jeden Stein um und werfen einen Blick hinter jeden Baum. Dabei verrät ihnen eigentlich sogar das Internet, wo es die wertvollsten Items gibt.

Angebot = Nachfrage

Zum Teil beneide ich Spieler, die für Welten wie Skyrim noch diese Form von Faszination aufbringen können. Natürlich habe auch ich nicht einfach nur die Hauptquest durchgespielt, bin mal abseits der Wege durch die Wildnis gestapft und habe mir angesehen, was die Entwickler für mich zusammengebastelt haben. Vom Umdrehen jeder doofen Muschel in den Flussbetten Himmelsrands war ich dennoch weit entfernt. (Da kann ich mir dann auch einfach besagten Wohnblock ankucken.) Wohin ist seit Super Mario Bros. eigentlich mein Entdeckergeist flöten gegangen? Manchmal glaube ich, dass der Umfang von Spielen langsam aber sicher einfach an seine natürlichen Grenzen stößt. Irgendwann werden Welten so groß, dass Entwickler zwangsläufig nicht mehr überall etwas wirklich Wertvolles verstecken können, weil das Wertvolle dadurch wieder wertlos würde. Erschwerend hinzu kommt gerade in Rollenspielen, dass ich das, was ich einmal gefunden habe meistens für immer behalten kann und nicht Gefahr laufe, es in irgendwelchen gefährlichen Situationen wieder zu verlieren. Selbst wenn mich ein Spiel im Laufe der Geschichte meiner kompletten Ausrüstung beraubt, hält es für mich meistens wenig später einen Auftrag bereit, der mich alles wieder zurückgewinnen lässt.

Osterei = Explorationsfreude

Wahrscheinlich haben mich faszinierend große Welten wie die der Elder-Scrolls-Reihe dazu erzogen, an Spiele unerfüllbare Erwartungen zu stellen. Spielwelten sollen groß sein, dicht bevölkert, voller nützlicher Items, glaubwürdig und in einer Lebenszeit am besten gar nicht ganz erforschbar. Ich will eine Ostereiersuche mit tausenden von Ostereiern, wobei ich mich über jedes so sehr freuen will wie über das erste und von denen auch bitte jedes sehr gut versteckt sein soll. Das geht nicht. Interessanterweise konnten meinen alten Entdeckergeist aber zuletzt gerade jene Spiele wieder wecken, die es eigentlich gar nicht darauf angelegt haben – Bioshock Infinite, Dead Space 3 und Dishonored. Diese Titel geben mir meinen Weg eigentlich relativ klar vor, erlauben es mir aber hie und da vom Weg abzuweichen und zu überprüfen, was sich in irgendeinem Seitengang befindet. Das Spiel füllt mich nicht randvoll ab mit Content, den ich dann gar nicht mehr gebrauchen kann, es gibt mir stattdessen in einem eigentlich relativ statischen Spielablauf ab und an die Chance, mich selbst besser auszurüsten als jemand, der einfach nur durchrennt.

Virtualität = Raketenwerfer hinter Mülltonnen

Ich vermute, dass es dieser Eindruck ist, das mir heute bei vielen Spielen fehlt: Die subtil gefühlte Überlegeheit gegenüber dem potenziellen Durchrenner. Der würde vielleicht am nächsten Endboss scheitern, ich jedoch nicht, denn ich habe hinter den Mülltonnen im Hinterhof einen Haufen Munition und einen Raketenwerfer gefunden. Wir leben nicht mehr im Super-Mario-Bros.-Zeitalter. Was ihren Umfang angeht, stoßen Spiele nur noch wirklich selten an ihre technischen Grenzen. Das ist die Stunde der Spieldesigner. Sie können mir jetzt eine Welt bauen, die zwar groß, aber nicht unübersichtlich ist. Eine, in der ich immer relativ genau weiß, wo es lang geht, in der ich mich aber trotzdem freue, wenn ich am Wegesrand etwas finde, das ein Anderer vielleicht übersehen hätte. Bitte mehr von sowas. Und bitte trotzdem mehr Ostereier in Skyrim.

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The Possibilities of an Island

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Johannes Köller has gone missing in Proteus.

I am such a fool.

It’s relaxing, they said. It’s refreshing, they said. It’s a walk in the park, they said. And I just had to take their word for it. Why? Why did I have to listen? Look at me! I haven’t slept in days, I haven’t eaten in days, I haven’t even touched another game in days. All because of their meditative little nature simulation: Everywhere I look, I see only its vibrant colors and adorable critters, taunting me with that sublime arrangement I have yet to find within the constraints of its cruel, random nature.

Did you know some people don’t even consider Proteus a game? I can only assume they are joking: This is by far the most challenging, painful, torturous game I have ever played. In their satirical articles, these comedians pretend to mock the game for lacking objectives and meaningful interaction. It’s quite an elaborate ruse. Of course Proteus has an objective: aesthetic pleasure. What objective could possibly be more noble than pursuing beauty, and what interaction more meaningful than to gaze at it, absorb it, let it speak to you?

Only, do you know how hard it is to find beauty in this world? Oh, not at first. It’s all very beautiful at first, the little animals, the trees, the clouds, the colors. But by being wholly picturesque, Proteus spoils you. Soon islands that are merely pretty will no longer do and you go looking for one that is not just beautiful, but breathtaking. The one island with just the right combination of colors and sounds, the ideal arrangement of trees, clouds and animals dotted over impeccable topology. You start searching for the image your mind created as you read that sentence: the one, perfect island.

I’m starting to think it doesn’t exist. It must, somewhere within the myriad of potential landmasses hidden in Proteus’ procedural algorithms, but what are the odds of finding it, really? Not that it matters. So long as it’s out there, or might be out there, I cannot rest and I cannot accept substitute pleasures. This one? Too flat. This one? Too rugged. This one? Too symmetrical.

None of them ever live up to the lofty standard I have set and I have long since stopped spending more time on any one of them than is absolutely necessary to grade its looks. That’s all the time I can afford these subpar artworks if I mean to continue this quest for perfection. Maybe this is why Minecraft gives you tools? I used to think that it was simply a way to keep players busy, to play to their narcissism and possibly their obsessive compulsions by allowing them to colonize and structure the space surrounding them. Maybe it’s a necessary coping mechanism though, a way of dealing with the endlessly disappointing possibilities of this Impressionist generator. Unable to improve the game’s creations, you can only stare at their flaws, shudder and recoil. Without the means to craft perfection, all you can do is chase that elusive dream.

Perhaps Minecraft is entirely the wrong comparison. This is no innocent little sandbox full of diversions and distractions. It’s a frustrating meditation on inadequacy and ugliness that gives you a deceptively simple goal, but not the means to achieve it. It’s Slender, only with roles reversed so you are endlessly chasing instead of fleeing. It’s visual horror, aesthetic splatter, art gore, and it has trapped my anhedonic mind in an endless loop of terror.

Well, not entirely. Sometimes, sometimes I find a spot that’s just close enough to the picture in my head to stop my shaking and frantic breathing for a while. I’d sit down and, just for a minute or two, wonder if maybe this is good enough. If maybe this will do, even though that slope is not quite right, the trees are too far off and there are no critters to be found. Those wonderful clouds are drifting away and the sun is going down, but I could go find this island’s magical circle of time travel and see if the vista works better in a different season.

Or I could stop. If I accept that the not-quite-perfect will do, there’s all manner of flawed beauty in my life already. Novels, films and games are just piling up. I got articles to edit, conversations to lead and actual, real walks in parks to take. Fresh air to breathe. I could spend an afternoon just lying in the sun and not worry about anything. Let perfection find me instead.

Or I could try again. Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe this time it’ll be right.

- Johannes Köller

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News - Why Candy Box became more social than 'social games'

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May 7, 2013   |   By Leigh Alexander
13 comments
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Over the last week, the Twitter feeds of game creators and fans alike began to fill with a peculiar wave of notices about candy. Things like: “I’ve maxed out at 100 lollipops a second,” and “I’ve now thrown 1000 candies on the ground, why am I throwing candies on the ground,” and people answering frog riddles and upgrading their swords into better swords. It looked a lot like a Facebook game.
Except Aniwey’s Candy Box, the source of the craze, isn’t a Facebook game, or even a “social game,” per se. It’s a tiny, free, ASCII stat-based grind played in a browser tab, and for a hot second there, it was all the rage.

This in spite of the fact that it has the same kind of “empty” grind mechanics players have derided in social games for years now: Your resource counts increase simply with time spent, which means scores of people bragging about how they left the game open all weekend at the office in eagerness to return to a candy bounty.

When you spend resources on an upgrade, you have to wait to interact with the upgrade system again. You can undertake a quest, but need to wait about two minutes until you can do another. There’s even a dual currency system (though no real money is ever involved).

It’s a spreadsheet, really, a numerical climb, and yet it spread virally entirely on the volition of participants, the same kinds of players who would have opposed forced notifications and newsfeed spam as a “game mechanic.” People loved the shared experience of participating in Candy Box, and since the game’s surprisingly full of mysteries and secrets with little direction or feedback, that social component became actually-essential to progress for many.

The success of Candy Box is fascinating on several levels, the main one being that it proves that it isn’t actually the hooky, skinner box-ish grind of Facebook games nor their rampant virality that is inherently offensive to gamers, but probably the platform and the presentation instead. And the purveyors, maybe — Candy Box began burning up fan attention right after Zynga reported continued declines in its Facebook game business.

Chatter about Candy Box died down almost as quickly as it sprung up — the main game is relatively short all-told, and players can (and did) devour it in a few days of all-consuming obsession. But the little game that could is sure to be memorable, and leave lessons in its wake. Here are the things that worked best:

Sense of discovery.
Candy Box opens with an incredibly minimal interface: The ‘Candy Merchant,’ actually an ASCII graphic of the “fourth Doctor,” is on the screen. He is obsessed with candy and wants to trade you lollipops. The player’s candy count begins ticking up slowly.
At first, you have two purposeless choices: Eat the candy you’re accumulating with every second you look at the screen, or throw it on the ground. The average person could look at this screen, see nothing of import, move along.

But Candy Box is built on continually surprising players by rewarding patience and curiosity. After a few minutes of throwing candy or interacting with the merchant, more things appear: A farm where you can plant the lollipops you’ve bought, with the promise they’ll produce more lollipops. More items appear in the Candy Merchant’s menu, including a sword. And then you earn buttons to view your inventory and to undertake a quest, and then you’re off.

Even that simple “world” opens up further from there: Completing quest areas rewards you with maps that take you to intriguing helpers that will bestow upgrades, like a riddle-slinging frog or a lollipop-crazed sorceress. Every additional discovery adds meaningful variation. And then the game gets meaningfully hard, redoubling the player’s investment in the grind. It always feels like there’s something new and whimsical around the corner.

Traditional “social gaming” experience.
The game gives the player very little direction or feedback, aside from an FAQ provided to answer very common sticking points. It’s so minimalistic that it recalls a beloved earlier age of games, when all of them were opaque and mysterious, and the only real way to progress was to share playground lore.
In the early stages of Candy Box, it seems impossible that there should be a dragon somewhere in the game, but while you’re still counting candies and fighting tree trunks for practice, seeing on Twitter that people are planting trees and using acid rain spells against a castle beast sounds like a myth you’re determined to see for yourself.

As childhood gamers, everyone always had that friend with the false boast about what happens later in a game you yourself can’t conquer. Or you learned about secrets and easter eggs through rumor and conversation, things you never thought to try for yourself.

Candy Box is loaded with easter eggs — it might never occur to you to click on the Candy Merchant himself until he reacts, but there’s a small reward to be found by pestering his hat or his beloved lollipop accessory, and you wouldn’t know that unless the rumor had spread from someone who’d figured it out. Gamers often fondly miss the days when gossip and lore were the only real direction through a forbidding, mysterious interface, but Candy Box brings that back.

Total accessibility.
Candy Box is incredibly low-stress, requiring only an open browser tab. You can save your game just via a bookmark button. You’re racking up resources just by leaving it open while you work or read or compose emails at your computer.
Since the game allows you to make investments to speed up your resource production, only a few clicks can make just the act of leaving the game on increasingly-gratifying. Actual gameplay, like questing, making purchases or preparing potions and spells in your cauldron (a relatively-later gift) takes only a couple minutes at a time, and then you basically have to leave it alone again.

Social games have depended on these kind of time mechanics to craft experiences intended to be pleasant background noise. But while most designers and critics found Facebook city-builders to become demanding, addictive nuisances constantly intruding, less than an hour with Candy Box illuminates the appeal of having a low-friction game as a kind of daily companion, one tab over from your work, rewarding you quietly in the background.

Candy Box never makes a demand on your time — no alerts, no notifications, not even a humble pop-up asking players to share the game with friends, even though its opacity makes it a game most successful and meaningful when shared as part of a community experience and discussion.

It seems like if you don’t force players to engage others, and don’t try to moderate their use of time, a game can be viral and time-dependent on a purely voluntary basis. That’s a powerful thing.

Charming minimalism.
No doubt Candy Box’s ambiguous author, charming old-school ASCII art and use of only one window helped earn player loyalty and imagination. Imagine the same exact game with brightly-colored, cartoonish customizable characters, illustrated words and animations. Even the addition of sound effects would have impacted the experience negatively.
Its visual innovation is to be reserved yet creative within constraint, and through that choice it never gives the impression it’s going to overwhelm or burden either players’ attention or their device performance. Half the fun of playing Candy Box is discovering what its mysterious creator will invent next with such simple visual resources. The most lightweight, handmade look and feel possible seems to benefit games that aim to provide simple but deep distractions.

Brevity.
The Candy Box craze is already ebbing, having hit peak fervor after only a few days. That’s because it’s easy to feel “done” — the main game only takes a couple days of sustained attention to complete, and while there is an intimidating end game, only the most obsessive players seem to persist with it, since there is a sense of actual accomplishment and fulfillment to be found after a reasonable degree of investment.
The game doesn’t seem motivated by the desire to keep people staring at it for as long as possible, and feels comfortable with creating a meaningful arc within a relatively-simple system. That may fly in the face of the conventional need to keep players doing something for as long as possible, but that Candy Box doesn’t overstay its welcome or become a genuinely-unfriendly time suck is part of why there’s so much goodwill still hanging in the air toward it even after the fervor dies down.

What about monetization?
“Aniwey,” the game’s creator, could certainly parlay that good will into other projects, now. The creator says there’s already a sequel underway, but a good hunch suggests that in the event they decided to solicit donations of some kind as a show of support or to enable more single-tab ASCII adventures, satisfied players would respond. I definitely feel like my time with Candy Box was worth a few dollars; if thousands of others felt the same, the creator could be on their way to launching a formal community.
It’s often the games that seem either disinterested in or oblivious to “best practices” of traditional design, particularly in the systematized and alienating social arena, that become accidental overnight hits. In Candy Box we now have an important lesson — people don’t necessarily hate grinding. Or social play. Or timed engagement, or even games that are basically spreadsheets skinned with a graphical interface. They just hate nearly everything the social games business has tried to feed them so far. Looks like something a little bit sweet can go a long way.

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...........//: an in-depth response to darius kazemi's "fuck videogames"

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‘s recent piece “” talks about how videogames are not necessarily a medium suited for expressing all the sorts of things we’d like to use them for. Ian Bogost summarizes the aim of this piece in : an issue that i see underlying the whole piece that is never really expressed explicitly - it’s the case with many “gamers” and techies in general that so many who have constructed their lives and identities through videogames often have a hard time accepting that there are other valid means of expressing or legitimizing their own emotions outside of technology. the world of technology is, after all, what they know. they want to make personal videogames because they understand how videogames work (having played them a lot) and that they can express deep emotions through play, but they don’t have the kind corresponding experience with other forms of art to understand how those work. this lack of understanding combined with videogames’ newness means they get raised to the top of the pantheon as the all-encompassing, clearly superior, art-form-to-end-all-art-forms. and that defines conversations among people passionate about games more than anything else - a spirit of “we can do anything with games”. one that can take on a socially progressive angle, but is often . but let’s talk about points 2 & 3 of Bogost’s summary in more detail. here’s a direct quote from Kazemi’s piece: i love . it has plenty of issues, but it is a very accessible tool that has allowed many to make games who would otherwise not have the patience or understanding for it. this is a good thing. i have mostly avoided doing my own Twine games, though, because if i usually feel like if i want to write something personal, i’d rather just do it here on my blog - instead of presenting players with some vaguely game-like, and ultimately not very meaningful set of choices. plenty Twine games don’t do this - but it’s always a danger of making games in that (or any other) format. , and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of artistic responsibility as the creator. using a Twine game as a way to write about your own personal experiences doesn’t absolve you of artistic responsibility, either. a game, like any piece of art, is a subjective window to reality - not reality itself. presentation is always the key, and it always defines how others will interpret and respond to your experience. a lot of people also make Twine games as a social activity, and to have their experiences accepted and legitimized by others. and that’s alright, but i find it highly peculiar that it seems to be treated as a somehow more momentous or more deep medium to express one’s own emotions. we are a culture that defines itself through words. the “important works of art” we’re exposed to in school are novels, and maybe poetry. we inherently value words as way more deeper and insightful signifiers of meaning than images or sounds. anything that doesn’t fit into that way of thinking is either treated with suspicion, or seen as vague, or strange, or manipulative, or incomprehensible, or frivolous. and i think this is a toxic idea. it is very easy to wrap oneself up in a cloud of words, or to build a tower out of them, convinced their ultimate rightness and trueness. . Twine games - and “personal” games in general, of course, can be a great avenue for fostering empathy, and letting us explore aspects of ourselves and others we couldn’t otherwise. but they’re only one avenue. i worry that we tend to have trouble understanding how to make choices unless they are presented in a game-like manner. so we’re using these games as a way to better understand ourselves and others through a way that we can connect with. and that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. but games are often not the best mirrors, either - particularly when creators aren’t very thoughtful about the choices they provide their players. it’s easy to misrepresent personal experiences in all kinds of awkward and manipulative ways and undermine your ultimate goals. i have to admit - “personal” games have been a real thorn in my side. i did the music for , a game i love by a game designer (and human being) i love that has done many wonderful things for many people. but i don’t know if critics would’ve understood at all what the game was communicating if the text wasn’t there to tell them exactly what each little minigame was about. and maybe that’s underestimating their intelligence, but i haven’t given much reason to suspect that most critics have any ability or desire to comprehend subtlety in the thing they’re experiencing either. i am extremely skeptical that making an on-the-surface “personal” game is an inherently more valid or emotionally honest way to express oneself. i have seen too many times where clueless critics only construct meaning of works of artists as either a form of political protest or some kind of evocation of personal demons. these are the two pre-baked avenues allowed artists in a society that doesn’t really understand or value artistic expression very highly. in an effort to expand the expressive and empathetic range of the medium i feel like we’ve made a mistake in what we’ve chosen to highlight the most. to put it another way: . i’m starting to feel like i won’t be taken seriously unless i make a game that is viewed as “serious” or as “personal”. i am starting to feel like unless i say my game is “about rape” or “about transphobia” or “about misogyny” (three things i know a lot about) and clearly articulate why this is the case, that i won’t be taken seriously. i must be trying to achieve some kind of articulable political goal, and/or the things featured in the game must be “my” experiences. otherwise, i’m just making another stupid cartoony videogame. let’s not beat around the bush: . yes, i said it. those who have the most access have the time and money get to control the distribution and the conversation for everyone else. they also get to run the events and choose what gets talked about at those events. we may try to do all we can to fight against this and subvert it, but they’re still controlling the outlets for discussion in the end. major events happen in places like the SF bay area, or NYC, or LA, etc etc - these are where the real connections are made and relationships are built. . people trust people they know. i know this because i’ve experienced it firsthand. . and i’m privileged for that. the more i’ve gone to events and met new people, the more i’ve begun to realize that . and i find that incredibly disturbing. why? because it means once you start to greatly prioritize their needs above the needs of people you don’t know, you stop becoming critical of yourself and the people around you. and this leads to cliques and increasingly greater and greater conflicts of interest. one high-profile example that most people know about: Brandon Boyer, chairman of the IGF is friends with Phil Fish, whose game Fez won the overall award in the IGF in 2012, despite having already won an award back in 2008. and yes, i have interacted with Brandon a bit and have seen that he is a swell guy in many ways who cares about a lot of important stuff. and Brandon is no means the only person in this position. i’ve seen many journalists become close friends with their subjects. but with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility. being a nice person doesn’t mean that he has the ability to take on his friends to do what is needed in that situation. because he hasn’t shown that he does. and yes, i understand that artists tend to connect with like-minded artists. the internet assists greatly in bringing us all together. and the world around “indie” games and thereabouts is a small one as it is. i know that it’s inevitable that many of us will make friends with each other. but i don’t think it’s a desirable situation for everyone to be friends with everyone else. why? because i don’t think there are any adequate incentives for people to be critical of their own friends. i certainly don’t need to be friends with everyone. i already feel like i’m stretching myself thin a lot of the time, and i constantly worry about hurting other people’s feelings with my opinions. the bay area is a wonderful place in many ways, but i don’t think everyone should move here either. i know this is very possible, or at the very least, is desperately needed. a vaster breadth of culture would certainly help save us from the increasingly narrow western frontier of highlighting expressive innovations in games built around new mechanics and novel subjects. we’re not really respecting these games, as it is. they’re ultimately treated as objects for us to feel better about ourselves as self-respecting educated white people who like videogames. they’re monuments to a medium we still think of as ultimately stupid and immature.

the worst part is that we secretly don’t even like them that much anyway. we say we love  but we don’t actually want to play it. it’s just there to make us feel good. we’d much rather sink our teeth into some .

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auntie pixelante › how to make games about being a dominatrix

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so i was invited to speak at the first-ever different games conference in brooklyn, april 26th and 27th (at the “nyu-poly” campus, WHICH FELT ODDLY APPROPRIATE). let me tell you, first of all, some cool things they did. shortly before the conference i emailed them, concerned about their security policy which required folks to wear badges carrying the names on their government id cards (for a lot of trans people, not the names they go by). probably nyu campus policy. they immediately responded by negotiating with security to have their own printed badges, bearing the conference attendee’s chosen name, count as security passes. also, they converted two bathrooms into gender-neutral bathrooms. see: it’s not hard to make your conference more welcoming to trans people.

the other thing that i really liked about the conference was its use of the word “difference” as a really inclusive, intersectional term, encompassing race, gender, ability, queerness. it made me think about the language i use, how i frame my own work. what also made me think: i realized during different games that no one’s really talking about class and how it affects people’s access to game development tools, and what tools. (fer example: lots of underprivileged queer folks use twine because it’s free and because they never had the opportunity to go to tech school and learn to code.) different games is an academic conference, mostly attended by academics – it’s not really surprising that the class conversation doesn’t come up there, or at similar conferences.

what did i actually say at different games? i was on a panel with robert yang, mattie brice and haitham ennasr, some of my favorite geniuses. we each gave a short talk and then we took questions. my talk was called “how to make games about being a dominatrix.” instead of slides, i had my slut illustrate my talk live using transparencies and an overhead projector. i didn’t let her look at my speech ahead of time. people seemed to like it, though the projector burnt out close to the end. you can watch all four talks and the panel here – that’s another cool thing about different games, they recorded all the talks and put them online for free. anyway, have a transcript of my talk:

as people who spend a lot of time making and discussing games, we talk a lot about the rules of games – we develop a mechanical understanding of them. and rightly so, because we create play by designing rules. tetris’ whole trajectory comes from the rule that only complete lines are eliminated from the screen – mistakes and imperfections remain, making it harder to create complete lines.

the ways that the rules of tetris interact to create a meaningfully stressful experience are fascinating and beautiful, as true an expression of art as anything you’d find hanging in a gallery.

but as a queer game designer i find that most of my work isn’t motivated strictly by a pure abstract desire to play with the form. most of the time, my games are motivated by imperatives to represent aspects of my identity, or to provide criticism, or to interrogate politics.

so i’m going to talk about context: the ways in which we frame our rules and communicate them to the player.

here is the first thing to know about context:

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

in 2009 i made a game called MIGHTY JILL OFF. the protagonist of mighty jill off is submissive in a latex suit who jumps really high, and has to jump all the way up a tall tower in order to prove herself to her queen, the recipient of her devotion and lust.

if you’ve played mighty jill off, and if you’ve also played a nintendo game called MIGHTY BOMB JACK, you may have observed that they play exactly the same. the bomb jack games are about outmaneuvering enemies using elaborate in-air acrobatics. jack can stop jumping on a dime, giving him perfect control of the height of his jump. he can hover in mid-air, giving him greater horizontal mobility during a jump. the player can hold UP or DOWN when initiating a jump, controlling the parabola of his jump.

i was really fascinated by these games for a while. when i made mighty jill off, i stole the entire vocabulary of rules for in-air motion from bomb jack. the mid-air break, the hovering – i didn’t keep the holding up and down because it didn’t seem necessary.

so we have two games whose most important rules – the rules from which the play comes – are identical. do we have two identical games?

we don’t. mighty jill off is about the relationship between a submissive masochist and her domme. what i’m talking about, though, isn’t a superficial reskinning: mighty jill off is informed by my person experience, it’s based on my relationship with my collared submissive.

that experience provides a context for the play: the difficulty of a game like that, the trust the player puts in the designer to adequately prepare her for any given challenge, the need to push her limits without breaking them, the player’s desire to prove herself to the game by meeting the game’s expectations for her – these things resonate with my own experience as a domme and a top.

mighty jill off is a game that communicates ideas that mighty bomb jack does not. it does contain a set of rules which interact with one another in ways that are interesting and meaningful to the player, but it frames those rules and their interactions in a way that relates (and encourages the player to relate) to my personal experience.

that’s important in the face of the games culture that brought us bioshock infinite. bioshock is a game that forces you to watch images of racialized violence – there’s a part where you watch a man of color pecked to death by crows, begging for his life. and then a minute later you gain a power-up that lets you have crows peck people to death.

bioshock infinite is an EMPATHY-CHALLENGED game. the culture of videogames is an EMPATHY-CHALLENGED culture. videogames needs stories of racism from people who experience it, not bioshock infinite.

context is everything. in 2011 i made a game called TRANSGRESSION that is essentially a “find the hidden object” game. but what you’re trying to find is a woman who has a penis at michigan womyn’s music festival. this game would be trivial without the context. (and let me add as a disclaimer that i really like where’s waldo books.) but the entire purpose of TRANSGRESSION is to illustrate the absurdity of michfest’s “womyn-born womyn” policy by reducing it to as simple and transparent a system as possible.

do you see what i’m saying? context is a tool we can use for visibility, representation, empathy and satire. as marginalized people, the contexts of our lives are political.

as creators and critics, we have every right to investigate and to play with the friction of rules bouncing off each other, to explore in the abstract the dynamics and systems that the interaction of those rules creates. but as people whose social existence is driven by dynamics and whose lives involve struggle with systems of oppression that are invisible to the privileged, we have a unique opportunity to give our dynamics and systems contexts that are informed by our lived experiences.

in march i made a game called TRIAD. it’s a puzzle game about sliding weird-shaped tiles around to try and fit them in a limited space. but the space is a bed, and the weird-shaped tiles are three people who are trying to sleep together successfully. this is one of the fundamental problems i’ve encountered as someone who is poly – someone who has multiple partners.

the sliding tile puzzle is an old game, but it’s the context, again, that creates a meaning for players that doesn’t exist in games with similar puzzles. i’m not saying that i don’t believe in games as places for abstract mechanical exploration. i just can’t afford it.

to refuse to take a political stance is itself a political stance – it’s to stand with the status quo. and the status quo of videogames is alienating, is racist, is misogynist, promotes rape culture. it is important to me that my games exist in visible opposition to that. and a conversation about games, a criticism of games that is purely mechanical, that erases context, erases my identity.

as a trans woman, i exist in a society that is continuously trying to erase my identity. context, in my games, is the voice through which i speak my name.

context is everything.

(photo via charismaphone.)

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The PA Report - How a clever player with a “useless” item almost took down EVE Online’s entire economy

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CCP

How a clever player with a “useless” item almost took down EVE Online’s entire economy

EVE Online is a game famous for its devious players attempting to either fight for power or to destabilize the game in some way. I spoke with the then-EVE Online executive producer John Lander at Fanfest in Iceland last week, and I asked about the player behavior that most surprised or delighted him.

This is why it’s so easy to love CCP: Lander went on to describe an exploit that could have sunk the entire game’s economy, and he did so with a big smile on his face.

What happened

“We did Inferno in the middle of last year, and we made some big changes to faction warfare,” Lander began. EVE Online is constantly being updated with new content and game play, and these updates are all given names. You can read more about Inferno on the official page.

“You would get rewarded for killing, or blowing up, opposing militia ships,” Lander continued. “We worked out this interesting algorithm where, depending on how expensive the ship was, you would get these loyalty points, and you could cash in loyalty points for special items.”

So it made sense to go after expensive ships, earn loyalty points, and then trade those in for better items. Suddenly there was a good incentive to take down powerful ships, or at least ships that were carrying expensive items.

One player went to work on gaming the system.

“One of our players found an item on the market that cost 1 ISK [ISK is one of EVE Online’s virtual currencies], nobody used it, and he basically bought all of them, tons and tons of them,” Lander explained.

“He put them back on the market for a hundred ISK, or more, and then one on the market for a billion ISK. He then buys the item for a billion ISK. He’s now moved the average price of that item from one to around half a billion,” he continued. “That is now the average price of that item on the market. He then puts that completely worthless item on a ship, and gets his friend to blow him up.”

The ship contained that “useless” item, but the game thought it was worth half a billion ISK. “You get loads of loyalty points, and you cash those in for something good. He completely manipulated the market, and it started having this massive effect on our economy,” Lander said.

No one knew what was going on, but the market was obviously being manipulated in some way. They put their full-time economists on the job to try to figure out what the hell was going on. “So we’ve now had to go and fix that. Our players are devious, and they will find ways to mess with our systems, and we’ll often have no idea,” Lander said. They finally had to close the loophole, much to the dismay of the characters who were quickly getting rich by blowing up ships with nearly worthless items.

But the question remains: When do you step in and fix an issue, and when do you leave it alone? EVE Online is notorious for scams, long cons, and other social engineering that is allowed in-game.

“It’s a fuzzy line, and we have to be very, very careful,” Lander admitted. “This had the potential to fundamentally destabilize the game, and that’s bad for all the players. Because it was very obviously something wrong, whilst we didn’t take any action against the players who were doing it, we did fix the problem.”

This was an edge case: The players were being very clever, but it put the entire game at risk. “We said well done, you made a lot of money off this, but you’re done, we’re fixing this thing,” Lander told the Report.

It’s worth noting that nothing happened to those players, and they were allowed to keep the fortunes they had amassed while the exploit worked. “Oh, absolutely,” Lander said, laughing. “Good for them! Clever guys.”

Update: While CCP told me the players involved were allowed to keep the money, this devblog indicates otherwise.

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IndieGames.com - The Weblog Indie development in the 1990s: The Game-Maker story

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Podcast

IndieGames Podcast #26: E3 2012

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About The IGF

IndieGames.com is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference. The company (producer of the Game Developers Conference series, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

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Indie development in the 1990s: The Game-Maker story

May 8, 2013 2:37 PM | Staff

[Written by EJR Tairne]

Fifteen years before indie games gained traction, the buzzword for amateur game design, and PC games in general, was Shareware.

In the early ‘90s, PCs were the realm of the tinkerer and the white-collar professional. Thanks to the crash of ’84, they were also the only major outlet for North American game design. The problem was, PCs were built for business rather than leisure. After a decade of hacking and add-ons, the hardware reached a level where a bedroom programmer could attempt the fast-paced action of arcade and console games. Add in a growing network of dial-up boards, and you have distribution. Creativity exploded, giving rise to games like Commander Keen, Jill of the Jungle, and Doom.

In the mid-‘90s, the Internet hit the mainstream. All of those bulletin boards dried up, as did their ratio-based uploading, so there was no distribution. At the same time, 3D cards began to hit. File sizes went up, coding got more complicated, and development got more expensive. As PCs became a household appliance, competition for the glitziest showpiece went bananas. For about a decade, the bedroom developers all but vanished.

Then in the mid-2000s, thanks to the growth of social networking and the advance of boxed game design kits like Mark Overmars’ Game Maker, a new generation of bedroom developers appeared, to fill in the creative void that some felt in the mainstream industry. In early 2013, the indie scene is again one of the most vibrant regions of the development community.

That gap need not have occurred. In 1991 a company called Recreational Software Designs released its own game creation system for DOS. RSD’s Game-Maker supported VGA graphics, four-way scrolling, Sound Blaster music and effects, full-screen animations, large maps, and fully animated characters and monsters. Its editing tools were powerful and intuitive, allowing quick turnaround of sprites and background tiles, and easy assembly into full games.

Game-Maker had its glitches and its limitations, but a skilled designer could put out games comparable with the high-profile shareware of the time. Some games, such as Jeremy LaMar’s Blinky series, became cult hits. Other users, like Liight programmer Roland Ludlam and Bionic Commando associate producer James W. Morris, found their careers in game design. Still others, such as Seiklus author cly5m, graduated to become superstars of the modern indie scene.

Unfortunately RSD ceased development just before the Web became established, and right on the verge of a radical reinvention of the software. RSD never built an online presence, and aside from a few scattered users Game-Maker failed to make much of an impression on the Web – leaving a void, eventually for Mark Overmars to fill.

We caught up with lead programmer G. Andrew Stone to talk about Game-Maker and the place that it holds in indie game history.

It’s good to reestablish contact! So what sort of resources do you still have around from the RSD era?

I’ve got it all, I’d say.  A three-inch stack of letters.  Source code, media, you name it!

I was thinking about the attitude in your magazine ads, and how strongly they focused on loading up and tweaking others’ work. They almost suggest more of a creative collective than discrete authorship. It’s an interesting attitude.

Well at home we would show, suggest, and work on each other’s games quite a bit.  I mean for example there are techniques to make something look good in a 20x20 block.  For example, grass.  Is it one flat green color?  I remember showing my mom how to speckle other colors around to make grass look like grass instead of a boring flat green field.  It actually made the process more fun and the games a lot better.  And of course, we realized that it would be pretty hard for a ten to twelve-year-old to do it all himself so there were practical considerations.

And growing up we were always doing projects together.  Not just software or programming, everything.  Totally random stuff!

I like this whole collaborative arrangement. I can envision sort of Game-Maker clubs springing up to meet on weekends, where everyone pitches ideas and shares insights – I guess not all that different from the demoscene, over in Europe.

Yes, I’ll betcha that Game-Maker was used by lots of groups of friends; but of course, of all of those only a few manage to learn to work together to the point where they can come up with something!

I think that it was shared around a lot.  I’m guessing that the sort of person who would buy Game-Maker is more likely to have the ability to pirate it then the average game consumer.

In fact in ‘94 I was hanging out on a C programming IRC room and someone offered me a hacked copy – totally unsolicited.  He had no idea I wrote it.  I never really minded at the time; however in retrospect I’m realizing that if some of those people actually bought it then, the financial situation might have ended up slightly differently (as we were right on the edge of making money), which would have totally changed my personal history.

So how did this whole Game-Maker project get started?

I had done quite a bit of programming which I am going to skip – for example I wrote my school’s entire scheduling and grade storage system, a countries-of-the-world quiz game (in Eighth grade, I think before Carmen existed), and a vector-style graphics editor to enter maps for the previous – and start here:

In about tenth grade I got quite excited in front of the school computer, so a friend came over and asked, “What?” I said something like, “Do you see that little red dot on the upper left corner of the screen?  I put that there!!”  He was unimpressed.  So I said,  “But you don’t understand, I’m putting that dot there absolutely as fast as it is possible to do so!!”  I was using optimized direct write Assembly language (REP STOSB), and so one dot was actually an important edge case whereas a whole line was easy.  As I’m sure you know he still looked at me like I was nuts.  And he said, “So what?”

Additionally, my brother and I were fascinated with maze calculation algorithms, coming from playing NetHack – we could imagine how to do the entire game; it’s just a big database and logic engine, except for the maze calculation – and were having a bit of competition making them.  I think my dad even joined in with one or two cave-like algorithms.   My brother “won” with a 3D representation that he literally disappeared for about 72 hours in my dad’s office to complete.  it was freaking amazing since there was no 3D games at that time.  In fact he did not use 3D vector math to calculate it, but sort of a complex logic engine that followed probable line of sight.

But if I could not one-up that I could certainly expand in a different direction in playability.  And you couldn’t bring a game into the school computer science room, but what if I wrote it?  Then we would have a good excuse for playing it.  So that dot became a maze solving game.  This game was inspired by the Piers Anthony Proton/Phaze series.  Players start at opposite ends of the maze and try to make it to each other’s starting point.

Graphically it was 320x200 8-bit (like Game-Maker).  It split the screen in half, putting two players’ top-down views of the maze side-by-side on the screen.  In fact, although Game-Maker was one player at a time, I had always been more fascinated with what we now call P2P games.  I think this stems from one night when I was literally up all night playing an RPC, and suddenly at about 4am I had this really weird sensation where I just completely divorced myself from the game’s surface interface and suddenly felt every key I typed was just meaninglessly changing bits and bytes deep in the computer. And so I felt, what was the point?  If I want those bits to be a different configuration, why not just go in there and change them directly?

Anyway, one player typed madly on ASDWX, the other on JKLIM,  to control a character through a much bigger block based maze with a view of about a 5x5 squares of almost Game-Maker sized blocks.  In the Proton/Phaze books the floor lights up after you go through, which is sort of a great leveler because if you go the wrong way at first, your opponent could follow your tracks down the wrong path.  Whereas if he makes it straight through to your path, as soon as you find his path it’s a straight shot for you to his end.  Clever, I thought!

But I had a little quirk, which is that I put the maze in a natural setting with rock walls and grass.  Every time someone trod over the grass, it would droop and get a little more brown until after about ten times there was a clearly defined brown path (that’s why I knew how to draw good grass!).  At first I knew this and no-one else did, so I’d win all the races, but I kept dropping hints and later people noticed and it got really fun!

To make all these subtle grass changes, I needed a block editor.  So, BLOCEDIT was born.

And I remember having a conversation with my parents, something along the lines of “You know, I could add this and that alongside BLOCEDIT, and you’d be able to make your own games without programming… maybe no summer job this year?”

I suppose it’s becoming clear where the name “Recreational Software Designs” comes from. Did the company exist before Game-Maker?

We incorporated for Game-Maker. I came up with the name.  Just made it up.

So you’ve built up a set of tools, and you’ve got this concept for marketing them. How did you go about financing the project, producing the inventory, and promoting everything?

Enter my father; I was the titular CEO, but really I was flat out coding like a maniac.  He did 90% of the day-to-day business stuff and kept the books.  And it was his money, so really whoever holds the purse strings is really the CEO. He trusted me totally – I could write checks and all (in fact, as CEO I had the final signature) but you know, I never did that for anything expensive (without discussion) because I guess that’s just the way I am.

But I did help out on stuff like images for the box, user manual (after all I was the only one who really knew how it worked), and so forth.  Also, I was sixteen to twenty.  I mean, it’s hard to be taken seriously at that age when trying to book advertising and so forth.

How many ads did you print? I was wondering what sort of spread you had, and for how long.

There were three ads, all done at the same time by the same guy to save money. There was a 1/3 page which I’m sure I have at least one copy of, as it is in a frame hanging over my desk.  But I think I can find a better copy in a magazine or the laminated original.  And I seem to remember a black-and-white 1/4 to 1/6 page with almost the content in the black-and-white box in the full page.

Do you remember which outlets? The ones I saw were in VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. I’ve also heard of ads in various PC magazines.

I’d say six or so gaming magazines for at least six months in each (at a time).  But multiple iterations for the most successful ones (you saved money if you bought multiples).  In retrospect, we should have tried some DIY magazines… but remember a lot of people back then did not even own a computer.

We also had a booth in the CES maybe in ‘94 in Chicago.  That was a pretty awesome experience!  I think we still use our sign as a Ping-Pong ball stop…

What sort of response did you get at the CES? How large was your booth?

We had a free-standing “sub-booth” inside a larger person’s space (sub-letting space is very typical).  I forget who did the subletting, probably one of our magazine contacts, but I remember that there was a flight simulator and joystick maker there as well.

I take it that direct orders formed the bulk of your business?

Yes. Direct through KD software in the US, indirect in UK and Korea.  For indirect orders, the markup is prohibitive unless you are selling thousands of units through each distributor.

I wasn’t aware of the Korean version. Do you recall what it was called, or who distributed it?

Well, I mean the name is in Korean probably.  The whole thing was translated.  They had this awesome method where they would literally go into the .EXE and hack the strings into Korean.  I didn’t have to do anything.  You may find a lot there; we got some royalties from them and our feeling (and unfortunately you know the stereotype actually still persists today, but I work closely with a major Korean TEM today and nothing could be farther from the truth) was that since there basically were no copyrights there so if we were getting anything at all Game-Maker was probably selling 10x as much.

So you sold the game directly and ran a BBS. Both of those were outsourced, to KD Software and GameLynk respectively. How did you work out those arrangements? KD Software was local, right?

Yes, Sheldon [from KD Software] was about an hour away.  Not sure how we hooked up with him.  My father made the initial contact.  As far as I remember, Mark [from GameLynk] was one of the first people to contact us with a professional-looking game, and in his letter he sort of said “Check out this game, and check out my BBS.” After that, my father’s negotiating skills made it inevitable.

In retrospect, I should have either hosted it myself or had a friend host (I had a few with BBSes).  That way I could have been involved in the community.  I did a lot of BBSing at that time, and in fact wrote a quick “never-ending-story” application for a BBS, but the standard in-house rule was local numbers only.

I probably could have called Mark’s BBS more often but as you might have noticed, I was generally so flat-out busy coding features that I did not even consider asking for long distance “permission” to that one BBS!

How did you settle on the price point (about US$89)? I notice that the software got cheaper over the years.

Oh, we priced it above most video games because it was not a game that you play then throw away, but not significantly higher because we needed to hit a price range. We reduced the price as the commercial video games got better and better (and 3D).

You mention that Ollie was into 3D coding. I remember that late in Game-Maker’s life your brother was excited about a 3D add-on. Did that plan ever go anywhere?

Nope!  But yes, remember everyone was wowed by Wolfenstein and later Doom.  Platformers were dead, and would remain so for ten years. The question on every buyer’s lips was, “Does it do 3D?”

One thing to remember was that over just those few short years the capability of the hardware dramatically improved, both in RAM and in speed.  Solid 3D was not feasible when Game-Maker first came out, but completely workable later (remember Wolfenstein did not have solid floors or ceilings; Doom did, so things really were moving quickly).

I mean, there was tremendous pressure for more and more features.  Due to the possibility that a professional firm might pick it up and you’d actually make some real money, because every kid has their favorite game with certain features that they want to copy, and because every game has that “special” custom 5%.

As you noticed I didn’t talk directly to my users that much… not only was I quite busy, but also too many conversations just devolved into a laundry list of all the features it would be great to have.  And you know fifteen-year-olds are not that subtle — quite a few were not nice about it just very demanding.  You know, they get the key dev for Game-Maker on the phone and they are both scared and desperate to communicate their needs…

But at this point I’ve learned in my life that for every product (yes especially Apple’s) you can point to another product and say that one does X and yours does not!  Or does Y better!  But somehow those other products don’t do it all better, or yours would not be around…but when I was nineteen it was pretty depressing to hear all of GM’s shortcomings from its users.

Which leads to another question. I know that the last official release was 3.0, but did you make any further progress with the code? What features, if any, were you thinking of changing or implementing?

Yes there is a “Game-Maker Pro” sitting on my drive.  I forget what is in it now, but honestly I know I did not get far with it.

Tons of great stuff was planned.  For example, many [users] mention the song format issue.  Yes, that was an eleventh hour addition because it was easy to add.  The plan was to create a song format with an editor like the Integrator where each node was a repeating clip and the lines indicated transitions that could be hooked to game events.  This idea sort of deconstructs the linear format of a song, allowing endless variations, and meant that the single song could (for example) seamlessly switch to become more “creepy” or something when your character’s health was low.

There was a tension between making the engine more sophisticated and catering to the twelve to sixteen-year-old current market.  Hence the name, “Pro”.  We had also been contacted by some (small) game dev houses who would say something like, “This and that are cool, but you have to fix X, Y, Z before we can really use it.” That was driving more sophisticated ideas. I think one house may have used it for quick prototyping.

So GM Pro, in some fantasy land, may have been sold to kids with game license restrictions and real dev houses for a lot more without them. I think that that time period was sort of the end of the DIY gamers for awhile – everyone was enamored of 3D games and other complex gaming, which seemed quite out of reach (aka boring) to DIYers, due to lack of standardized libraries.  For example, Game-Maker itself had to individually program a dozen or more sound and graphics cards.  There were no standard drivers back then, so we had to basically write our own drivers for everything!  That was quite a boring chore, after the first couple.

But I was growing more sophisticated as a coder (the Integrator, with its “graph” diagram, was the last tool written) so that graph was where it was all going.  In music, as I previously discussed, and in character and monster animation.

With respect to characters  and monsters, Prince of Persia really opened my eyes as to what smoothness of animation should be possible.  So I set myself to figuring out how it could be done.

My idea was that the edges of the graph would be animations.  So if you are in a particular “node”, only some animations are available.  If the user hits the “up” key (vector direction 0,-10, let’s say), the system would look at each possible animation and pick the one that gets closest to 0,-10). Or, you could assign a particular key (“J”) to a particular edge (to jump for example).

Monsters are exactly the same as characters, but no keys assignable.  The system knows that the monster wants to move to position (X, Y), so would pick the animation that gets closest, and maybe “cheat” a pixel or two, or stop the animation early (abortable flag), to hit it exactly.

What sort of song format are you talking about? Was this a tracker format, with embedded sound samples?

Yes, with respect to format I probably would have let you stitch together .MOD clips (since I had the format document).  Supporting the Sound Blaster music format was a last minute thing; it was clear that the music editor would not be ready and we had this free code supplied by Creative – so we used it!  My brother did that work, and he is entirely responsible for the monster editor.  I did the rest.

Oh. So you had been working on the sound editor for quite a while, then?

No, I got waylaid by video driver and XFERPLAY [game engine] problems.  The music was going to be completely dropped, but then my brother pulled this free code up and made it work!

That explains the odd formats it supported. Aside from the Sound Blaster code, you say that your brother Ollie coded Monster Maker. How deeply was he involved with Game-Maker? Did he design any games?

Those contributions are what I remember; we only pulled him in for a summer or two…

So, just trying to digest what you’re saying. You’re saying that for GM Pro, you were working on a new character tool and a new monster tool, that were based on the same node-and-path format as Integrator. And that for any given animation state, you could set a tree of potential transitions into other animation states. Is that right?

Yes, except for the “working” part — I don’t remember well, but I doubt you’d find much in there except for extremely rough skeleton code.  I’m more saying that this was the top of the wish list.

So both direct activation of an animation by button press and also desired geometry.  So the up button could be assigned to merely change the desired character’s position to a few pixels upwards.  And the system might automatically translate this to climbing up a ladder, jumping, or doing a ledge pull-up (if you were hanging from a ledge – not sure if you ever played the original Prince of Persia, but you could hang from a ledge – it was an “extreme running” game before extreme running/parkour was invented).

So what got in the way? I know you were heading off to college. I think your dad said you were looking into ATM coding.

ATM as in Asynchronous Transfer Mode – it’s a telecom protocol that carries both voice and data traffic.

Had you already been doing data transfer coding at that time?

Nope! I went in there cold.  That was supposedly a high performance embedded job, but believe me I have never had to do as highly performance sensitive code as I did with Game-Maker.  I mean, I was chasing the electron beam down the screen changing the pixels just behind it to provide zero-flicker animation.

What part of Game-Maker would you say was the hardest to realize, either technically or conceptually?

The XFERPLAY [game] engine.  First off, it really was pushing the limits of available RAM at the time.  Within XFERPLAY, [the hardest to realize was] the character monster interaction (especially solid monsters used as platforms), and the fast moving character’s interaction with solid walls.  The character used to get “stuck” in the walls.  I finally just limited the top speed, an unfortunate compromise that I later noticed all other platformers doing.  But man it was pretty fun to have the Nebula [character] drop like a rock!

Also the “replay” was tricky, because I would remember what keys the user typed and play them back,  but the granularity (based on the system clock) was a little slow – which meant that the replayed keys might come in at slightly different times, which every once in a while would cause the replay to miss a jump (or something) that was successful in the real play.  I eventually hit upon the idea that even though the key was pressed at a particular moment, I should not actually “accept” it until a very well-defined moment within the run loop of the program, so the replay could accept it at that exact same moment.  This is actually a pretty fundamental software practice, crossing multiple disciplines.

Finally, the four-way scrolling.  That was really pushing the limits of the hardware.  Basically, the hardware was too primitive at the time to support buffered pages.  A lot of games would put a lot of junk (status graphics, etc.) around the edges to significantly limit what really needed to be redrawn.  I did not want to do that (ultimately a mistake because users thought that all that junk looked more professional – after all it looked more like professionally released games – even though it was a lot simpler), so I literally moved the video card’s start address in RAM around, leaving the background for the most part untouched.  This was tricky because the actual video memory was 65536 bytes (after which it would wrap back around to 0 on most, but not all, cards) but the screen showed 64000 bytes.  Also, each card handled wrapping (or not) differently, using their own special-purpose registers, including one which would simply freeze until the power was reset.

So this turned into a real slog, and is the source of the monster/character flickering issues.

But the technology was moving so fast that by the time version 3.0 came out, full-screen double-buffered redraws were possible at a reasonable (but still slower) frame rate, so I finally did throw in a double-buffered implementation (to reduce the number of product returns).  And as time went on, that implementation ended up being what everyone used.

So you’re saying the collision issues were a factor of available RAM, and that’s partially a result of your decision to write to the full screen during four-way scrolling?

No, collision and scrolling were two separate issues.  And the full-screen four-way scrolling issue was not  the available RAM; it was that the CPU did not have enough speed to copy the entire screen contents every frame.  Well, okay. Extra RAM on the video card could be used to solve this issue also…

Would a DOS extender, like DOS4GW, have helped things?

Yes, absolutely.

Why were you so intent on drawing to the full screen? A matter of principle?

I suppose.  I just felt that the full screen greatly increased the game quality. I guess I just hated staring at the action through a fifteen-inch monitor already when playing video games.  I mean, try it in real life.  Get a big piece of cardboard, cut a fifteen-inch square in it, and then walk around your house with it held at arm’s length for a day.  In fact, I have always been right on the bleeding edge of multi-monitor tech.

I’ll also tell you why I chose not to continue with it after college, as that question seems to be a big theme in some of your questions.

Yes, that is one of the big questions. How did the situation wind down, and why?

I guess there were multiple competing forces that simultaneously acted to encourage my decision.

First of all, Windows 95 was extremely successful.  So all DOS based tools were clearly dead and so the Game-Maker tools would need a complete GUI rewrite.  However, simultaneously early Windows 95 had horrible graphics performance.  The “DirectX” stuff was not out yet… so its not like the OS was providing a high-performance graphics framework all ready to go.  There would still be a bunch of ripping and hacking and tricking out the OS — nasty coding.

Secondly, the 3D game Doom came out in 1993 (but took time to gain steam) and so platform-type games basically died out starting in 1995 for over a decade.  Everybody wanted Game-Maker to make Doom.  Doom was a technology tour-de-force; really well-optimized code, etc.  I mean in 1995 a Doom quality engine would have been worth a fortune to professional game development houses — so while the end user wanted 3D (and so would not purchase a platformer game maker) they were not going to get it.  And of course adding 3D to Game-Maker would require adding a whole suite of tools.

Third, I think the DIYers were trending away from the PC, and we felt that because fewer adults used Game-Maker as time went on.  The PC was transitioning from a hacker platform to an appliance.  When I started college in ‘91 I was almost the only person in my dorm with a computer, by ‘95 it was practically required for incoming freshmen.  I think if you could find the data, you’d also see the the average number of developers building a commercial game increased dramatically during this time.  So in 1991 you could look at a game and say “I could do that”.  But by 1995 there was no way.

Finally, the telecom boom was on & I had an offer with a salary (that recognized my Game-Maker experience) from a startup in that field.  And you know, telecom pays the biggest salaries, game development (at least back then) paid the lowest.  This was important as since I was just leaving college I did not want to lean on my parents anymore.  And Game-Maker did not make much money; a couple thousand bucks.  But as everyone does when you have a company, we threw all reasonable expenses into RSD.  You know, computers we would probably have bought anyway (and back then a computer was — I’m guessing here — about $8,000 in today’s dollars; it was $4,000 back then).  So with all that stuff, Game-Maker did not make much money; a couple thousand bucks I think.

Of course, I did not recognize that the advent of the web would allow me to have essentially free advertising and encourage far-flung communities.  If I had realized that the entire ad budget could be cut out, it would have made probably a salary’s worth of difference in our bottom line.

So ignoring the pending Internet explosion, to continue with Game-Maker would have required some massive changes.

Absolutely.  Even with the internet explosion massive changes were required.  But at least with the internet community we could have saved a huge amount of advertising dollars.

And the work had to be done without using the toolkits (like DirectX) that we knew were being created.  So all the work that was done would sort of end up being transitional; thrown away when the toolkits finally matured.  Basically the OS itself was in transition so it would have been like building a house on unstable ground.

It sounds like Game-Maker had already changed a lot. It started as a specific top-down maze game, and then you tweaked it to allow adventure platformers, like your game Nebula.

In fact, making something like Metroid was sort of the bar I set myself for version 1.0.  Which is why I added the secret passage features, and gravity, early on.

In retrospect the Metroid influence is pretty clear, actually, but Nebula takes on very much its own identity.

Yes I’ve never been interested in making direct copies, and really can’t understand all the copying that goes on by people on the web.  I mean isn’t the point to do something new, if you wanted to copy it why not just use the original?

How much did you find yourself adapting the tools for other genres? Did any other specific games influence the direction you took?

NetHack has been a constant influence, but not a particular influence for Game-Maker, in the sense that Game-Maker and NetHack-like had not converged.  But I think you can see that GM could form the basis for a good graphical NetHack (which I think has always been a bit of a “holy grail” in the OSS gaming community). Of course you’d have to add a module with RPG elements; inventory system, object database, etc.  But these are added modules, not rewrites of the existing Game-Maker.

So you’d like to open up the boundaries a bit? Game-Maker has some of that, but it’s more geared toward games like Zelda. By contrast, NetHack almost feels like chaos theory in action.

Yes, a good game lets the player himself be (or at least feel) creative!  That is what fundamentally bugs me about many games.  The fact that there was only one possible solution, where IRL there are many.  Don’t have a key for the goddamn door?  Chop it down with an ax!  Burn it!  Remove the hinges.  Forget about it and do something else!  This is where NetHack remains an amazing game.  But actually under the covers it is not so impressive.  Its just a gigantic list of “if” statements – the authors spent hours thinking of everything, instead of devising independent systems that could interact in ways not anticipated by the designers.

I’ve seen users bend Game-Maker in all kinds of strange shapes that weren’t mentioned on the box. It always surprises me how flexible the software is, considering its simplicity.

Yes I think the mark of a well designed piece of software is that the interacting features create emergent behavior (additional features) that were not anticipated by the writer of the software.  I think that lot of modern programs deliberately try to avoid this because it means that the user goes down untested paths.  But if the features are developed well, they will work.

You refer to an added RPG module. Did you ever have plans for, say, various genre-friendly add-ons or expansions? A scrolling shooter module? One for brawlers?

Absolutely that was the plan, and the Integrator can connect them all up.  First on the list would be a scene-by-scene module – that is, King’s Quest style where all the action sits on one screen and made of an image, not blocks. Just like for the blocks the user would designate solid areas, gravity areas, etc.,  but in this case it would be done by drawing lines and filled polygons of effect.  And an in-game action could overlay a new “effect” map onto the scene (to open doors, activate a trap door, etc.).

Next was the same thing, but a long, thin image for vertical or horizontal scrolling shooters (or fight-type game — Galaga or Double Dragon),  and additional “monster” stuff, to help them appear at the correct time, etc.  But Double Dragon-style fighting AI would essentially always be out of GM’s reach, as that would require custom coding.

I was going to make a menu maker where you could apply full-screen animations triggered on keystrokes to traverse the same kind of Integrator graph.  To replace the front “Play game” menu, and for all kinds of other in-game choices, like Myst and Dragon’s Lair. Also, storefronts where you spend stuff to buy power ups, inventory screens, all that kind of stuff. And to lay the groundwork for strategy games.  Like the “Risk” style (Civilization for example), where you spend half your time optimizing your cities by picking stuff from menus.

One thing that we did discover with Game-Maker is that it was quite good at implementing 99% of platformer games, but it’s often that missing 1% that really makes the game good.  I mean, that 1% of custom programming is often a pivotal plot point.  For example, a bomb defusing game needs a countdown timer.  A platformer needs special “boss” characters.  So we were envisioning in GM Pro to let people write add-on game-specific sections.  Nothing was actually done, but you know its actually really easy to do; I was already dynamically loading custom software depending on what video card was detected.  So all I had to do was provide a “hook” in my code that would essentially NOT do the default behavior and instead call a custom “monster” (or whatever) plug-in.

So this did not raise the bar on the minimum sophistication of our customer, but it certainly massively raised the bar on the maximum sophistication… which is exactly what GM Pro was all about.

That sounds perfect. I’m surprised things were on the verge of becoming so flexible. How far along did these plans come?

Not far, conceptual mostly.  I am mostly talking about work that I would have done after college if we had chosen to continue Game-Maker.

When you say that users could write their own custom plugins, do you mean coding them from scratch? Or did you have a sort of internal scripting in mind? Or some other scheme?

Written in C, using all the Game-Maker libraries.  For example, you would not have to physically animate your monster motion, just call a function to tell use where you wanted it to go.  Today I would use a scripting language like Python but back then there was just not enough CPU or memory.

Was this in response to the requests you heard from professional firms?

Both professional requests and for that last 5% of game customization.  Look, its the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.  “Stop whining that the feature doesn’t exist and learn enough programming to make it yourself!”

Have you thought about what to do with the source code? Do you have any plans to add to it or port it to other platforms? Otherwise, have you considered releasing the code?

Yeah, you know I should have OSSed a long time ago as I am a proponent of open source.  At first there was the possibility that I might jump back into it.  And later the fear that whatever startup company I worked for at the time would try to claim it.  But upon mature reflection I think that is impossible.

And you know, with some interest I may also jump in again!  Certainly I have lots of ideas some of which still have not been implemented AFAIK.

It is fascinating to me that after delving for 15 years into 3D twitch games (never my favorite) the culture has circled back around to casual gaming and ironically simultaneously suffered a dramatic decrease in computing hardware (on the mobile platforms), actually possibly making Game-Maker relevant again with very few changes.

I realize what a broad question this is, but what of lasting significance do you feel you learned from the whole Game-Maker experience — the coding, the planning, the business?

First of all, it gave me a great skill, speed, and correctness at software development that has been extremely valuable through the years.  I can’t emphasize the last, correctness, enough.  When I joined a company, I got a project to do.  After some time, that project was done and I went on to other stuff.  Rinse and repeat.  Sure there were some bugs, but I fixed them and kept moving to new projects.  I did not fear the empty page, or the huge project.  Simultaneously I noticed other people still working on their original project, essentially “stuck” there.  They drowned in their own bugs… and I’m sure it reflected in their review, salary etc.

Game-Maker got me a job in a startup in ‘95 when all other grads had to take jobs in big companies.  And certainly I can’t complain about working for startups during the telecom boom!  Companies that I have worked for (and these were all less than 50 people) have been acquired for a cumulative amount totaling approximately a half billion dollars.

On the other hand, this skill made me quite frustrated in college; I had to listen to the criticism of grad students and even professors who literally had less actual coding experience than I did (but for the professors of course that was never their thing anyway; they were computer science researchers not coders).  Since I was frustrated, I hopped into the industry thinking that it would be pretty easy to get a few years experience and then do my own startup, etc.  But in fact that is not so; venture capitalists are actually extremely conservative and certainly can’t look at someone and determine their coding skill or quality of idea (in fact your billion dollar idea just seems strange and foreign to a VC). So in retrospect (and this would be my advice to any young hot-shit coder graduating out there now), I probably should have entered a Ph.D. program and then gotten the backing of a professor to do a startup.  It makes a good combination of energy and respectability that VC’s would really like.

With respect to the planning and the business side, all I can do is give an example.  A few years ago I decided to learn hardware engineering, for the fun of it.  I stumbled on the Arduino platform (an open source microcontroller) and now I have a “hobby” business that sells LED driver circuit boards.  I’ve sold 100+ boards to people all over the world.  Most people who learn the Arduino build up a breadboard, move a few motors, and stop once they get something basically working.  I think my Game-Maker experience allowed me (and made me want) to take that next step.
[EJR Tairne wrote this post originally on sister site Gamasutra’s community blogs]

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Simon Flesser, co-creator of Year Walk - Interview

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Interview

Simon Flesser, co-creator of Year Walk

Meet the developer who made ghost horses and supernatural dolls seem all too real.

By John Teti • May 7, 2013

A dead-eyed horse, wearing a suit, standing in an ice-cold stream. It’s not the image we’re accustomed to seeing in a Simogo game. The Swedish studio—co-founded by Simon Flesser in 2010 (he’s on the right in the photo above, with his creative partner Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck)—was better known in the past for whimsical works like Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit. But Flesser and his collaborators raised their art to a new prominence recently with Year Walk, a gloomy puzzle game for the iPhone and iPad that’s set in the woods of Sweden and is based partly on Scandinavian folklore. You play a man named Daniel who sets out on a sort of vision quest to glimpse his future. Along the way, you encounter strange beings from the netherworld like the aforementioned Brook Horse and a ghostly seductress known as the Huldra.

Year Walk is striking and moving on its own, but Simogo also produced a free companion app that purports to explain the folklore roots of the game. Players who dig into this supposed add-on will find that it dramatically deepens the experience, to the point that Year Walk isn’t truly complete without it. Flesser spoke to The Gameological Society about his ambition to make a game with a more prominent “serious side,” his commitment to minimalism, and the fun of blurring the line between reality and myth.

(Flesser and I spoke freely about the details of the game, so while I don’t think this interview will ruin Year Walk for anyone who hasn’t played it yet, it should be noted that major revelations are discussed. If you want to play first and you possess an iThing, you can buy Year Walk on iTunes. It’s cheap and it’s good, but your call. Also, because of repeated difficulties with our transatlantic audio connection, most of this interview was conducted over Skype text chat—from the third question on.)

The Gameological Society: I think Year Walk is generally seen as a departure from Simogo’s earlier, cheerier work. Where can we see the seeds of Year Walk in your earlier games like Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit?

Flesser: Bumpy Road definitely had a more serious side if you played through it and collected every piece of the little story. And certainly games that we worked on before [founding Simogo], like ilomilo, had a serious side. Both of these games talked about life, love, and death in a pretty serious way, but I would say not a very apparent way. So I think Year Walk might have been an ambition to talk about those ideas.

Gameological: Is that the genesis of the game? You were looking for more serious subject matter?

You can’t describe good art in one sentence.

Flesser: It’s actually based on a short movie script that never came to life as a movie. Gordon and I had been talking—I would say since Bumpy Road—about doing something more horror-like. Serious or dark.

Gameological: A movie script is such a rigid structure. How did you develop a game from that?

Flesser: We basically rewrote everything about it, with the main concepts left as they were—the start and the ending. But most of it is actually new for the game. That was really different for us, to work with something that had a start and an end and this is just the path. The way that we work is usually more like improvising the game as we go along, so that was definitely a challenge.

Gameological: I saw you in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference. You had a demo booth there for the Independent Games Festival. We both remarked that Year Walk is a pretty tough game to demo. Did it make you nervous to make a game that you can’t really pitch to players in 15 seconds?

Flesser: There definitely were concerns about the financial viability of it. I think that a “pitch” is such a bullshit idea to start with. You can’t describe good art in one sentence, I would say.

Gameological: The game doesn’t help players along very much. There are no tutorials or menus.

Flesser: That was a very concious decision, and some of the first things we said were, “No menus, no text, no fluff.” In the end, we had to add some dialogue for Stina, as we needed the players to have some sort of connection to her. But for hints and that kind of thing, we were 100-percent set on not doing anything of that. And because of it, we see from time to time that some people are a bit nervous [about whether] the game is actually saving progress, since we are basically telling the players nothing about it.

Gameological: I wonder if this is something we’ll see more in games. Like last year, Journey had minimal menus, too. Maybe it’s a trend—to makes games that are less decorated.

Flesser: Maybe? For us it felt very appropriate this time. I guess in certain types of games, it makes more sense than in others. We wanted to give Year Walk this air of…I don’t know, a silent movie, a piece of art in motion? And menus and all that jazz would have ruined that feeling.

Gameological: It does have these distinctive moments of motion. The Huldra is this swooping, ghostly figure. And The Brook Horse emerges from the water with a lot of drama. Did it take a lot of experimentation to get those motions just right?

Flesser: It certainly was tough to get it too feel serious and not like a South Park episode. I had imagined the animation to be a lot like stop-motion all around, but for some characters, it ended up feeling a bit comedic. But the Brook Horse is one of the characters that retained the 12-frames-per-second look, like stop-motion. It just suits his character.

Gameological: There’s a watery feel to his motion. You can sense him just lightly bobbing in the stream.

Flesser: He’s an odd character. I sense the most connection to him of the characters, I guess it’s because he’s the most human of the bunch. Yet he’s very mysterious.

Gameological: And he looks you directly in the eye and holds your gaze. The other characters are mysterious in different ways—they’re not engaging you as directly.

Flesser: He has this air of having one foot in the human world and the netherworld, whereas the other creatures are very much more based in the netherworld.

Gameological: I enjoyed the sensation of decoding the symbols of a lost civilization. I have to imagine that a lot of that comes about because the game is based in Swedish folklore. What kind of research did you do?

Flesser: Hm…I know Jonas [Tarestad], who wrote the story that it’s based on, and the companion things, is pretty well-versed [in folklore]. But a lot of the “research” comes for free with our cultural heritage.

Gameological: Year Walk overall has one foot in truth and one in myth. I’m still not entirely sure which portions of the companion app are factual.

Flesser: It’s all part of creating and presenting a world in which the player coexists. Breaking down the walls between the storyteller and listener, if you will. Without the companion app, it would’ve been a good little story, but with the companion app, it’s a narrative that takes place in the same space as the player.

Gameological: Suddenly, it’s not this story that you hold at arm’s length. It enters our world.

Flesser: Exactly! So while it’s not breaking down the wall in that sense that the player is involved in the outcome of the story, it’s a narrative twist that is only made possible by the fact that Year Walk is a game.

Gameological: Is that why it’s important that the companion app is a separate app? It wouldn’t be as convincing if it were contained in the same program as the game itself?

Flesser: That’s the biggest reason; it’s just an exciting element. In a way, it’s almost role-playing. You are playing the role of a researcher or a detective going through these files and connecting the pieces. Other reasons are that we wanted to keep the game really clean, and also it’s a good presentation for people who might be curious about the universe. So in a way, it’s also a demo, but not a demo at all!

I think that giving the player a role in the game itself is a super-underused opportunity in games. It’s certainly something that we are keen to explore more. Like, when you are going through the notes of Almsten—you are the detective John Teti making research, right? Not that we tell you that you are, but there’s this sensation that you are doing this for real. You are playing the game in the real world, if that makes sense.

Gameological: Was the Almsten story part of the original concept?

Flesser: That definitely evolved. When we started, we had none of the meta/present-day elements, and the original script is just Daniel’s story. So that came about later.

Gameological: What is the most frightening moment in the game for you?

Flesser: Actually, it’s not a very scary game to me at all! But I think the vision after touching the runestone is a bit unsettling.

Gameological: I was unsettled when I saw the photo of the puzzle box in the companion app. This object had vexed me so much while I was playing the game. And now I saw a photograph of the actual object. I felt like Year Walk was entering my world. The boundaries got blurred.

Flesser: Good! I actually have the box here next to me.

Gameological: Ha! You’re teasing and enticing the player with the box, aren’t you? You put it right at the beginning of the quest, but we can’t open it. It always feels like unfinished business.

Flesser: Actually, we placed it there at the start with two purposes. One was to have players feel constantly stuck, haha. Or, actually, it’s the same reason: to make them feel frustrated and stuck constantly, so their mind would always be on the box. So they know the box is important.

Gameological: I would always go back and try the box again.

Flesser: Exactly! “Okay, THIS symbol must be related to the box.” Happy to hear it. We accomplished what we wanted.

Gameological: The Myst games, Myst and Riven at least, take a similar approach. There’s always something prominent at the beginning of the game that refuses to yield its secrets.

Flesser: I think it’s conceptually pretty interesting that the game can be completed in under a minute if you had all the info to start with. We don’t require a playthrough to open it. So it was also a bit of trolling from our side to destroy the experience for people watching walkthroughs (maybe). Actually, have you played Dream Machine? Anders Gustaffson, who made that, is a friend of ours. He lives here in Malmö. He constantly changes the solutions to make walkthroughs obsolete. So fun.

Gameological: At the Myst postmortem at GDC, Robyn Miller said that he thinks Myst could have been made without any puzzles, which was startling to me. How important do you think the puzzles are to Year Walk? Could it be just a pure exploration game?

Flesser: It could. That’s how we had envisioned it, actually. But then I think we were just too tempted to give this a very cryptic flavor, and I think puzzles were a way to achieve that. It creates some friction that I think is important. I am not saying every game should have friction, but for us it felt important that there was something trying to keep you away, yet at the same time reel you in—testing your might.

Gameological: The game is very cryptic—each puzzle seems to have just enough detail for the player to figure it out. How do you strike that balance? There’s playtesting, but at a certain point you just have to have faith that smart players will “get it,” right?

Flesser: Puzzles are, of course, a very subjective thing, so it’s more or less impossible to strike a balance. Actually we do not do a lot of playtesting. [We playtest] among our friends and such, but not anything major. Certainly not to get opinions—more to watch and see if interactions make sense, that kind of thing.

Gameological: I wish more developers would take that approach. I think over-testing often leads to generic games, filled with prompts and hand-holding to make sure everybody is along for the ride.

Flesser: That’s a tough balance to strike, though. Everyone says they do not want tutorials, yet most of the support mail we get are actually people that don’t know how to progress, even early on, before meeting Stina. So it’s hard, because a lot of people simply do not have the patience to try themselves, in the Twitter age.

Gameological: When that email started coming in, did you think you’d made a mistake? I think I would panic a bit.

Flesser: Not really. I am a pretty neurotic person, but when it comes those kinds of creative decisions, we are very confident.

Gameological: Some of the most striking moments come from an intense use of touch—holding ghostly infants on the screen with your fingertip, twisting a doll’s head. How important is touch to the game?

Flesser: If we were to make the game for a controller or mouse or keyboard, we would remake a lot of the puzzles. So, important, I guess!

Gameological: Did you consider other platforms?

Flesser: Not really! I think it’s interesting in that way. A lot of people say, “No other games exists like this on iOS!” but I would argue there’s no game on console quite like it. We’ve been asked a lot about making a PC version, but that would take a lot of remaking—not only the touch puzzles, but we would have to consider a way to translate the companion into a context that makes sense on a computer. And for that amount of work it’s basically making a full new game. [Making a new game instead] would probably be more exciting for everyone, including ourselves. For example: What would the companion app be on a PC? A site? A 1990s CD-ROM application? The narrative involving the companion makes much more sense on a smartphone, so it’s a tough one to “translate.”

Gameological: Did you grow up with stories like the folklore in the game?

Flesser: Yeah. I guess every kid grows up with myths to some extent. The Huldra and the human form of the brook horse “Näcken”—which literally translates to “The Nude,” I think—are definitely things that most kids are aware of when they grow up. At least, I think so. Maybe it’s iPads and Vuitton bags nowadays.

Gameological: These folk characters are like seeds that are planted when we’re kids, and they take on new meaning as adults. That’s the feeling I get from Year Walk, too. It plants seeds that take on new meaning both as you play and after you play. Is your understanding of the game still evolving?

Flesser: I think so, yes. We have a pretty clear idea of what the story is, but we are still thinking about new interpretations all the time. We’re often very surprised by the interpretations [from players]. For us, it’s pretty clear. As clear as time paradoxes and the supernatural can be.

Gameological: What are some of the surprising interpretations you’ve heard?

Everyone says they do not want tutorials, but…

Flesser: I think a common one is that Almsten and Daniel are the same person. One interpretation I can think of that is pretty interesting is that the game is based on the notes of [a real-life] Almsten.

Gameological: That thought occurred to me at one point as I was reading through the notes. Because it felt so real.

Flesser: [When development began,] the companion bits were going to have a bit more of a ghost story to them, and it was a lot more complex and had a lot of elements to it. But we distilled it down to a “do not fuck with the rules of the universe because it will not end well” kind of thing.

Gameological: One last question on perhaps my favorite detail. The first sound you hear once the game begins is your foot crunching in the snow.

Flesser: Ha, a lot of people like the snow crunch, that’s for sure!

Gameological: It’s great. The sound design remains minimal throughout. Why be so reserved with the audio?

Flesser: It’s just the rationale that’s behind all of the game. Everything is very subtle, slow, suggesting things rather than telling you them. So we wanted the sound to have that too.

Gameological: You had someone from outside Simogo handle the music, right?

Flesser: Yes, Daniel Olsén! That we worked with before, during our time at Southend. I made the rest of the sounds, though, including some jingles here and there based on Daniel’s music. Fun note: at the start of the project Daniel asked “Does he have to be named Daniel? It’s creeping me out a bit.”

Gameological: Ha, but you kept the name anyway. Is there a meaning to it?

Flesser: I think Jonas just wanted a very “blank” name. In the original script, he’s much more of a character. In the game, he’s more of a blank sheet of paper, so that there’s no disconnect between the player and him.

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