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The Very Last of Us

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The Last of Us ist toll. Und zugleich ist es eine Enttäuschung. Denn so atmosphärisch, cinematisch und mitreißend es auch ist: Es verkörpert keine mögliche Zukunft des Spielens, sondern eine Vergangenheit, die sich schon genauso lange festkrallt wie die laufende Konsolengeneration.

Allein darin hat es Gemeinsamkeiten mit einem anderen großen Titel des Jahres, deshalb erinnern wir uns kurz an Infinite und seine Rezeption zurück. (By the way: Dass uns das alles jetzt schon wieder vorkommt, als wäre es vor hundert Jahren passiert, ist eigentlich der erschütternde Beweis dafür, dass die Branche, der Diskurs und auch die Spieler in einem kurzlebigen, nervösen Zwang zum Dauerkonsum samt Wegwerfmentalität feststecken. Aber das ist eine andere Baustelle.)

Erinnern wir uns also an Infinite: Nach Jahren von Preview-Hype und großem Marketinggetrommel erscheint Ken Levines Wolkenschloss-Shooter zum Klang hymnischer Reviews. Alle, wirklich alle großen und namhaften Games-Seiten und -Magazine feiern das Spiel als grandiosen, großen Wurf. Doch dann passiert etwas Bemerkenswertes: Es vergehen eine, zwei Wochen - und des Kaisers neue Kleider werden ausgelacht. Unmittelbar nach dem Abflauen der ersten Begeisterung folgt schwerwiegende und durchaus reflektierte Kritik.

Plötzlich fällt auf: Gameplay und Story vertragen sich nicht. Die Gewalt ist Selbstzweck und unreflektiert. Rassismus, Geschichte und religiöser Fanatismus sind nur aufgeklebte Tapeten, mehr noch: Bioshock Infinite schrammt selbst am Rassismus entlang. Joe hat in seinem Artikel die Hauptpunkte der Kritik am wenige Wochen zuvor noch überall einhellig gefeierten Infinite zusammengefasst. 

Wieso wird der Disconnect zwischen Gameplay, Story und Atmosphäre im ersten Überschwang einfach hingenommen?

Da drängen sich doch mehrere Fragen auf: Welchen Sinn hat ein Day-0-Testjournalismus, wenn er die nachfolgende berechtigte Kritik nicht selbst zu äußern imstande ist? Warum dürfen sich auch oder ausgerechnet Hochglanzprodukte derartig offensichtliche Schwächen leisten - ich spreche hier zB von Infinites offenkundig problematischer Gewaltfixierung - und diese wird zum Launch nirgends thematisiert? Wie kann es sein, dass der Disconnect zwischen Gameplay, Story und Atmosphäre im ersten Überschwang von der gesamten Presse achselzuckend hingenommen wird?

Ein Blick auf Metacritic zeigt bezeichnenderweise, dass die Kritiken, die um den Tag der Veröffentlichung erschienen sind, fast ausschließlich Lobeshymnen sind, während etwa Game Critics fast zwei Wochen nach Launch erschienene Review im Unterschied zu den Vorkritikern durchaus nüchtern urteilt: 

Fuzzy-headed narrative and thematically irrelevant auxiliary mechanics make Infinite feel sloppy even when it’s working. Combat increases in frequency and decreases in impact after the Hall of Heroes, so for most of its length the game sinks towards a deflated ending rather than rising towards a climax. However, that slow descent starts from a great height, so there is still much to value in Infinite even as it drowns in its own shortcomings.

Die möglichen Antworten auf die oben gestellten Fragen berühren einige zentrale Punkte in Bezug auf die Spiele selbst, aber auch das Verhältnis der Kritik und der Konsumenten zu ihrem Medium und zu ihrer Industrie. Die sich aufdrängenden Antworten mag man sich selbst überlegen - von Doritogate bis zur verzweifelten Jagd nach Aktualität und Clicks reicht die Palette der legitimen Antworten, und auch die schon ermüdende ewige Suche nach dem “Citizen Kane of Gaming” hat etwas damit zu tun.

Interessanter als die sich - eben - aufdrängenden Antworten auf diese Fragen scheint mir die Voraussage zu sein, dass sich für Last of Us Ähnliches ankündigt - und das nicht zu Unrecht. Es gibt eindeutige Parallelen. Auch Last of Us wurde nach aufwendigem Preview-Zirkus und PR-Bombardement hymnisch besprochen. Die Begeisterung über Naughty Dogs neue Franchise und die Hochglanzqualitäten der Twilight Years der auslaufenden Konsolengeneration schlägt sich in begeisterten Reviews nieder.

Bei so viel Begeisterung kommt die Kritik schon mal zu kurz. Denn bei aller Freude, und bei aller Anerkennung, dass The Last of Us wirklich außerordentlich gut gelungen ist: Es liegt durchaus auch einiges im Argen. Das betrifft vor allem die weit aufklaffende Lücke zwischen grandios atmosphärischem  Setting und Gameplay, aber - wie in letzter Zeit bei allen AAA-Titeln zu bemerken - das problematische Verhältnis zur Gewalt.

Das Gameplay kann mit der Fantasie und Faszination des Settings nicht mithalten.

Denn kaum ein Wort wird in den jubelnden Kritiken zur selbstverständlich aus Uncharted übernommenen und inzwischen schon gar arg langweilig gewordenen Covershooter-Mechanik geäußert, die uns - schon wieder - dutzendfach gegen Männer mit Knarren anballern lässt. Auch die Puzzle-Elemente, die zum Großteil darin bestehen, Leitern und Planken herumzuschleppen, können kaum als inspiriert angesehen werden. Die Schleichpassagen sind spannend, werden durch den Lauschmodus aber eigentlich höchst unatmosphärisch zu fast mechanisch ablaufenden Pflichtübungen. Kurz: Wie in Infinite dient eine perfekt und beeindruckend realisierte Umgebung letztlich als Schauplatz für hundertfach abgelutschtes Gameplay, das, sagen wir es offen, mit der Fantasie und Faszination des Settings nicht mithalten kann.

Stillschweigend wird auch hingenommen und unhinterfragt akzeptiert, dass es mit der Wahl des postapokalyptischen Settings eben absichtlich und selbstverständlich besonders “hart” zugehen muss - wie schon in Tomb Raider werden auch in Last of Us ein Mangel an Humor und Leichenberge mit “erwachsenem” Anspruch gleichgesetzt. (Eine Szene, die sich mir besonders negativ eingeprägt hat, soll bereits zu Beginn die “Härte” unterstreichen: Wie Tess den gefangengenommenen und wehrlosen Robert achtlos per Kopfschuss exekutiert, ist nicht durch Setting oder Story-Entwicklung zu rechtfertigen, sondern schlicht gratuitous violence.) 

Was tun wir als Spieler in den beeindruckend überwucherten Ruinen der Zivilisation, im Luftschloss über den Wolken? Womit verbringen wir die zehn, zwölf Stunden Spielzeit? Wir killen us so durch, hanteln uns in spielerisch soliden, aber letztlich uninspirierten Gameplay-Episoden von Storyhappen zu Storyhappen weiter, schleppen in unsinnigen Puzzle-Einsprengseln Leitern durch die Gegend und drücken in QTEs wie Laboräffchen auf die aufpoppenden Knöpfchen. Bezeichnenderweise werden denn auch von einigen Kritikern die “ruhigen” Momente von Last of Us als die große Stärke des Spiels erkannt - jene Momente, in denen das Gameplay der Atmosphäre nicht im Weg steht. Denn zugegeben, die Atmosphäre ist beeindruckend. Auch die NPCs, hier Elizabeth, da Ellie, sind beeindruckende Schauspieler, die linear und nicht beeinflussbar ablaufende Story ist spannend, klar, aber: Ist das jetzt wirklich der Gipfelpunkt eines interaktiven Mediums, das irgendwie dem Erwartungsdruck standhalten muss, das wichtigste des 21. Jahrhunderts zu werden?

Ist das wirklich der Gipfelpunkt eines interaktiven Mediums, das das wichtigste des 21. Jahrhunderts werden soll?

Das führt zu einer anders gearteten Frage: Ist es ungerecht, von den mit Millionenbudgets auf Hochglanz polierten Titeln MEHR zu erwarten als “nur” Hochglanzunterhaltung? Mit anderen Worten: Erwarten wir ungerechterweise zu viel von unserem Medium?

Ich glaube nicht. Vielleicht aber suchen wir in ungeduldigem Optimismus an der falschen Stelle. Es ist vielleicht gerade der Fluch jener Hochglanztitel, sich im Spagat zwischen PR-Hype und Hochglanzanspruch aufzureiben und den medial geschürten Erwartungsdruck nur oberflächlich befriedigen zu können. Ganz sicher sind AAA-Vehikel der grundfalsche Ort, um  nach Fortschritt, Großtaten oder Visionen im Medium zu suchen; wie riesige, schwerfällige Kolosse wuchten sie sich mit dem Ballast aller Multimillionen-Dollar-Unternehmen dahin.

Die spannenden Spiele, die Vorhut, die Späher ins Spielen der Zukunft sind klein, flink und ambitioniert. Kein SimCity kann so aberwitzig komplex werden wie ein Dwarf Fortress; kein Call of Duty darf so hintergründig sein wie The Stanley Parable; kein 60-Dollar-Hochglanztitel darf sich die puren Freuden des Masochismus so offen auf die Fahnen schreiben wie Teleglitch, Super Meat Boy oder IWBTG. (Außer Dark Souls. Aber das ist ohnedies ein Ausnahmetitel, der Last of Us und Infinite turmhoch überragt.)  

Hochglanzmonolithen wie Last of Us versuchen sich stets an einer möglichst perfekten Konsolidierung des bereits Bekannten, Vertrauten. So gesehen müssen sie eher rückwärtsgerichtet sein, was sie in vielen Fällen beeindruckend, aber dadurch auch wieder enttäuschend macht.

Kurz: Es ist wichtig, dass neben der Anerkennung - ja, Infinite und Last of Us sind große Kaliber, wichtige Titel im Medium, beeindruckende Spiele - auch immer wieder unsere Unzufriedenheit zu Wort kommt. Denn irgendwie wissen wir: Das geht noch besser. 

Verfasst von Rainer Sigl am 21. Juni 2013 - 10:15

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E3 2013: is the games industry making real progress? - Line Segments

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18 6 / 2013

E3 2013: is the games industry making real progress?

I put the diversity question to Mark Rubin, producer of the largest of all video game blockbusters, Call of Duty. “I would love more diversity,” he said. “You know, I saw this stat somewhere that showed that while Call of Duty is the biggest video game franchise, the others are Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed. So I think there is diversity there. I’m actually excited about the next gen consoles because I think industry-wide it will help small, indie-ish developers who couldn’t develop well on Xbox and PS3 to do more.”

This quote

It’s so amazing

Nine points on this stunning piece of found art follow

1.
Mark Rubin believes that Call of Duty is the biggest videogame franchise. I imagine there does exist a string of modifiers and caveats that can make this world true for him. Let’s say, console sales, from this console generation, U.S. sales only, no digital sales, not linked to a hardware bundle, not… not made by Nintendo. Something like that.

2.
Some set of people in Mark Rubin’s sphere of economic influence are doing a lot of work to convince the media covering E3, and the public at large, that this string of modifiers is a perfectly natural way to define Actual Videogames. The way he airily talks about stats he saw somewhere suggests that Mark Rubin is among the most successful targets of this campaign. 

3.
This string of modifiers defines a very narrow audience with very specific tastes. For Mark Rubin, the cost of living in a magical world where he is King of Videogames is that it is solely populated by these guys. In a way, this is tragic?

4. 
Mark Rubin thinks “diversity” means “games that aren’t Call of Duty”

5.
Mark Rubin thinks “diversity” means “games that aren’t Call of Duty, but you still run around a realistic 3D environment killing guys. But like, you run around in different patterns.” Since his world is so tiny, this perhaps shouldn’t be surprising.

6.
Even outside of the tiny world, it can be easy to make arguments that WELL those three games really do represent a range of play styles because etc. etc. But you look at the three franchises that have the most credible claim of being the biggest in the real world - Mario, Pokemon, and The Sims - and Rubinworld’s range of play looks much less impressive. Your skills in The Sims do not transfer to Super Mario. All three of the top franchises have different visual styles, different mechanics, and different themes. And none of those themes is “killing guys is a drag, but also the only thing I can do.” 

7.
(That this is now the dominant theme of manshoots is a good sign that their golden days are numbered.)

8.
Rubinworld is an incredibly fragile construct. Mark Rubin has only made the biggest game in the world as long as there are very few people in that world. Even a small number of new arrivals could tip the balance enough that - saints preserve us! - Wii Sports is more popular than what the tiny giants of E3 have created.

9.
If the broader public stops believing that videogames are solely the domain of young male nerdbros who only like running around and shooting things, they will also stop believing that these companies are as successful as they say they are. There are real economic reasons for this community to put up the barriers it does.

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A Rundown of What’s Going on with Penny Arcade Now

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It hasn’t been that long since the last time Penny Arcade did something that cast the company in a negative light, but here we are again with another fiasco that’s been making its way around Twitter today.  I thought it would be helpful to do a quick rundown of the events from today to make everyone aware of the situation and help answer some questions about why you might want to rethink supporting Penny Arcade, PAX, or anything affiliated with that organization.

It all started today when this panel was posted from PAX Australia, titled “Why So Serious? Has the Industry Forgotten That Games Are Supposed to Be Fun?”.  The original screencap of the description is below.

“Why does the game industry garner such scrutiny from outside sources and within?  Every point aberration gets called into question, reviewers are constantly criticised and developers and publishers professionally and personally attacked.  Any titillation gets called out as sexist or misogynistic and involve any antagonist race other than Anglo-Saxons and you’re a racist.

It’s gone too far and when will it all end?  How can we get off the soapbox and work together to bring a new constructive age into fruition?”

There is so much wrong with this panel description that I don’t even know where to begin. The idea that games as a medium are exempt from criticism because they’re “supposed to be fun” is ridiculous and immature.  This complete and utter display of privilege and a total dismissal of the concerns by women and people of color is awful, but then conflating ‘a new constructive age’ with a time where we disregard the concerns of marginalized gamers is flat out embarassing.  Naturally, the internet responded.  As a result, the description was altered and the line about sexism and misogyny was removed.

“Does the games industry garner too much scrutiny from outside sources and within?  With review score aberrations often called into question, writers are constantly criticised and developers and publishers professionally and personally attacked.  Has it all gone too far?  Can we just get along and we work together to bring a new constructive gaming age into fruition?”

This still-blatant disregard for the fact that criticism is an important part of moving media (TV, books, movies, prose, song) forward shows that this was clearly edited for the purpose of calming down the masses.  Naturally, when people complain to him, Gabe (aka Mike Krahulik) says that “we don’t make the panels, they are submitted by the community.”

As someone who has submitted panels and talks to other conferences in the past, I am keenly aware that these submissions are reviewed, edited, and approved by the conference staff.  They are not just blindly posting up any submission that is entered.  This is a cop-out response in which Krahulik is pawning off responsibility to the “community” (which he is supposed to be leading).

But it gets worse.  Cue the transphobic tweets.

After complaining a bit about how he’s receiving death threats and not wanting to antagonize people on Twitter, he posted up what was intended be a ‘resolution’ to the problem, by ‘proving’ that he’s capable of learning and that even his ‘trans friends’ are able to have civil conversations with him.  Unfortunately, it’s proving to be offering way more harm than good.

To be honest with you I had no idea that you were not born a girl until just a couple months ago. When we met and hung out I always just thought you were a woman. Knowing your situation changed nothing about how I would treat you. I am happy to treat someone however they want to be treated. Wanna be a guy or a girl or a fox or whatever and I will be happy to treat you that way.

But I think that is very different from the physical reality of your human body.

I think you’re awesome and super talented. I have no idea what your body parts are and I don’t want to know. I will treat you as a woman if that’s how you present yourself to me.

I hate the idea that because I think boys and girls have different parts I am “transphobic” that pisses me off it makes me angry and so I lash out.

While it’s wonderful that he will treat someone as the gender they wish to be treated, perhaps it would be nice for Krahulik to actually view them as that gender and not worry about what sort of genitalia they have.  His constant reiteration of the fact that he feels all women have vaginas, and his disrespectful comparison of gender identity being the same as asking people to call him Batman is at complete odds with the sort of ‘compassion’ he is trying to show his ‘friend’ Sophie in her email.    You don’t get to say that you don’t care about genitals and you don’t want to know about people’s body parts, but then use the presence or lack of genitalia to define what someone’s gender is and make sweeping statements about the qualifications that have to be satisfied before you’ll think someone is a woman.

It reads as if he posted this response as a way of showing the world that a trans woman doesn’t view him as transphobic, so therefore he isn’t.  Poor Krahaulik, being picked on by those humorless feminists again.  I bet he has a lot of ‘black friends’ too.  Anyone want to play bingo?

I will edit this as it continues to play out.  I’m sure we’re nowhere near finished, unless Krahulik has decided to keep his mouth shut before getting into any further trouble.

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Gunpoint Recoups Development Costs In 64 Seconds - The Gunpoint Blog

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 GUNPOINT

Gunpoint is a stealth puzzle game that lets you rewire its levels to trick people. This video will explain it.

Release Date

Finally goddamn out!

Platform

Windows only for now, hopefully Mac and Linux later.

Bug?

Report it!

Blog

Trailers

Screenshots

Video Blogs

Team

Design/Code/Words

Tom Francis

Character/Level Art

John Roberts

Background Art

Fabian van Dommelen

Mission Music

Ryan Ike

Title Music

John Robert Matz

Menu Music

Francisco Cerda

Theme

By Tom Francis. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.

Scheme

No! Don’t tell them my scheme!

Get Updates

There’s now a mailing list for people who’d like to be told when it’s out, and what we do in future. Join it why not!

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Also Twitter

I tweet news, shots of things I’m working on, and despair at the complexity of coding.

Sounds OK

Yes, You Can Monetise Videos You Make Of This Game

Here’s the formal permission bit.

IGF Finalist: Excellence In Design

Press

A framework for a puzzler that rewards cleverness and convoluted sadism in equal measure. JC Denton would be proud.

Eurogamer

Even in its incomplete, early state, it is enormously entertaining.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The core gameplay mechanics shine.

BoingBoing

Probably the most exciting piece of game design in a long, long time.

Blogossus

Gunpoint Recoups Development Costs In 64 Seconds

I just finished Gunpoint’s third patch yesterday, and a lot of what I need to do next requires someone to help with Game Maker Studio / Mac / Linux porting (more on that at the end). So perhaps I can finally take a minute to tell you how it all went?

About 1 minute and 4 seconds after Gunpoint became available for pre-order on the evening of Monday the 27th of May, it had recouped its development costs. This was not entirely surprising, since the only direct development cost was buying Game Maker 8 for $30 three years ago.

Edit: I should have mentioned that I call that the only direct development cost because I was still working my day job. There were some less direct costs too – if you factor all those in, it took a few hours.

The surprising bit happened next.

That’s pre-order week, when the free demo was out but the game was not. This was beyond all my estimates – we were on course to sell enough for me to become a developer before it was even out! But would launch see a surge like those first two days of pre-orders? How fast would it slope off after that? Would we even-

Jesus Christ.

So, I quit my job.

In fact, I think I have quit jobs, as a concept. I started Gunpoint as an audition piece to get myself a position at a developer, but designing it has been so creatively satisfying that I no longer want one, and so commercially successful that I’ll never need one.

I haven’t been retweeting praise or flaunting any actual sales figures, but if it’s not going to sound too horribly braggy, I’ll share the one part of Gunpoint’s success that you might actually care about:

I can now make games full-time for the foreseeable future

More amazingly, I can do it with total creative freedom. There’s really no pressure for my next thing to make a particular amount of money, so I can do whatever I think will be most exciting.

It also means I can afford to keep being nice. I didn’t let anyone pay for Gunpoint until I was ready to put a free demo out, so everyone would have a way to make sure it ran OK on their system and that they liked it before giving me any money.

I was informed by lots of people with industry experience that this is commercial idiocy: you want to hold it back so that excited fans buy without trying, then you can release the demo later to tempt those who weren’t convinced. And with some (not all), you get weird responses if you bring up non-money factors in a business conversation.

“You’ll lose sales this way!”
“From people who don’t really like it? I think I want to lose those sales.”
“No, you don’t understand. You’ll have less sales.“

I’m sure they’re right, and as a noob I appreciate the advice. In fact I got so much skepticism that I started to think the lost sales might actually be the difference between being able to become a developer or not. But even if that had been the case, I wasn’t going to quit my job for a career in tricking people into giving me money and regretting it.

I have no idea if and how much the pre-release demo hurt Gunpoint’s sales, but it doesn’t matter now – that’s how I want to treat people, and the amazing support for Gunpoint means I can afford to.

So, my deep, deep thanks to everyone who bought it. In return, as well as continuing to develop Gunpoint, I will make new things for you!

Which brings us to this:

I’m looking for someone to port Gunpoint to Game Maker Studio on Windows, Mac and Linux

One talented fella is already interested, but he has a lot on his plate, so I’m wondering if there’s someone similarly clever out there who’s available, and also what kind of payment they would feel is fair. What I need is:

A Steam Workshop plugin for Game Maker 8: if possible, I’d like to get Steam Workshop support in before we convert to Studio, in case that takes a long time. I realise we’ll need a new plugin for Game Maker Studio then.

To convert Gunpoint to Game Maker Studio: I tried this myself when Studio was in beta – a few deprecated functions have to be replaced, quite a few scripts are called with the wrong number of arguments in places, and then it still didn’t work so I decided to get on with the game and find someone competent to do this later. Obviously you might have to delve into my awful code a bit – I’d be on hand to talk you through anything particularly incomprehensible.

To get the GM: Studio version of Gunpoint working on OSX: it probably makes sense to release the Studio version for Windows first, maybe with a beta, and make sure that works before converting to Mac.

To get the GM: Studio version of Gunpoint working on Linux.

To handle tech support for all three versions: this means responding to e-mails, reading and replying on the Steam forum, and patching where possible.

So I’m looking for:

Someone with experience with Game Maker Studio, ideally including converting GM8 stuff to it.

Someone who’s released a thing on Windows, Mac and Linux. Doesn’t matter if it’s free or commercial.

Someone whose Windows, Mac and Linux thing has a support forum or something where I can see what sort of issues people are having, and how they’re being dealt with. Some kind of patch history would be good to see too.

So it’s a bunch of work, then a lesser amount of work on an ongoing basis. But as the graphs above should suggest, I can pay.

If you have the skills and you’re up for it, e-mail this address, link me to what you’ve done, and let me know what you think would be appropriate payment.

Maybe it should be a lump sum for the initial work, then regular pay or a revenue share for the ongoing support, for the period you’re providing it. Open to other ideas though.

If I can find someone good to handle this, it’ll free me up to work on the remaining things I want to add to Gunpoint, and then start working on a new game as well. Lord knows I have plans.

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"Don't quit your day job" - A letter to the hobbyist on the ledge.

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Alec Holowka tweeted something that rings pretty true when it comes to Going Indie.

I feel like a lot of people are considering going Indie and I’m not sure they really see how much work it is.

— Infinite Ammo (@infinite_ammo) June 17, 2013

And I replied:

@infinite_ammo a big one is “i’m making games in my off hours, whoa! imagine if i had the whole time!” and then, that’s not really true.

— Greg Wohlwend (@aeiowu) June 17, 2013

For a lot of game developers it’s the dream. Going indie means you probably have a cache of cash. Maybe 6 months worth or more if you’re lucky. Now it’s time to take the leap, put in your two weeks and buckle down.

It’s not a bad idea. I’ve been doing this full time for 6 years or so. I wouldn’t trade it for anything and I regularly encourage people to Just Do Things. I also identify on a deeper level with Full Time Indies but it’s not because we’re necessarily having more fun than everyone else making games. Actually, it’s the opposite.

We band together because we’re often weary. We trade stories of pain and sacrifice and it’s not honorable or anything, this is just Video Games after all, but we have an understanding on this side of the hedge. On the other side that stuff sounds sexy, like a rite of passage. “I could be Indie Game: The Movie!” You could and that’s awesome. But also, that’s a movie. A movie can’t really get at the dejected-forehead-on-desk-praying-it’ll-be-over-soon feeling that lies within. Depression that won’t let you fix anything in your life other than your game. An immortal solitude that’s safe yet destructive. The constant worry that the game isn’t fun enough. It’s not ready to show yet. You’ll convince yourself that what you’re doing is all for the good of the game. It’s all necessary. These chest pains that won’t let you sleep will someday be worth it. It’s not good enough (even though it’s great). It’s really good (even though it’s shit). ‘Which is which?”

There’s a reason that the most celebrated talks every year at the Independent Games Summit are also the most personal tales of failure and strife. Most recently, Matt Gilgenbach’s talk on Retro/Grade, Tommy and Alec’s talk about their struggles as early developers a couple years ago and many other glimpses into the emotional reality of making video games independently. It’s something many of us have to deal with in many different ways, and likely you will too.

Or maybe not. Maybe you’ll manage it. You’ll exercise regularly. You’ll keep to a schedule. See friends. Won’t lose sight of your hobbies, your friends, your relationships, or your sex life. Get heavily involved with the community. Show your game and get critical feedback. Allow yourself to not only work. It’s definitely possible. I know more than a few indies who seem to do this very well. But when you’re starting out and you now have 2 months in the bank and you can’t even see the end of your game, what do you do?

The thing with having a “Day Job” is that it auto-regulates your life. Maybe you work at a coffee shop, the apple store or a snooze-fest software company. For those 40+ hours a week you probably get some decent social interaction in. It’s not perfectly peachy or anything, but it’s not you alone in your bedroom. Scrap that though. You don’t need that. You wake up and just get to work, you’re cooking on 12-14 hour days and it’s great, but after 7 days you’re not sure if the idea is any good anymore. The exhaustion is setting in and you’re not as excited to get up in the morning and work on your game.

That day job you had meant more to your life than a steady paycheck and a barrier to Getting Your Game Done. It was a way for your brain to cook up ideas. To relax. Chances are it wasn’t the most challenging thing for you to spend 8 hours a day on, and so: you dreamt. You fantasized about all the things you’d pour into your game as soon as you got home. It was nearly a guarantee that you were super pumped to work on your game whenever the chance presented itself.

Also! You didn’t have to worry about reality quite as much. Sure you want the game to do well but if it tanks or never gets done then at least you don’t have to find another job, go on unemployment or get evicted.

Your job was a benevolent enemy. A sparring partner that focused you intensely for a few hours every weeknight. When that’s gone, what will drive you?

I know this is really preachy. Going Indie is amazing. I want way more of us to do so. But it’s a serious life decision and not always the best way to make more games. If it’s working for you now, and you just don’t see a way to finish your project without going full time, maybe your project is too big. If you are about to go indie, have 6 months of runway and don’t think you’ll be able to finish your game in 6 months while still working your day job, then I’d say to wait until you can. Then consider quitting.

It might even be HARDER to finish after you quit your job. Changing up your life that dramatically might stymie your motivation within mere weeks and you’re left paralyzed. Work might be an unseen support system for you. It’s easy to overlook the value of your coworkers when you are truly passionate about making something. As an indie, you’ll have none. Maybe one.

This is likely your first game, and if it’s The One, that could be a problem too. Putting too much stock in your first game is often a bad idea. It only compounds the amount of pressure in an already highly pressurized situation. There are myriad of lessons waiting for anyone who ships a video game, free and especially commercial. Some of those are impossible to learn unless you’re full time, but the healthy majority are learnable by taking it gradually.

I could write another thousand words on why you should just jump already. That you won’t know yourself until you just do it. But that’s for those afraid of heights. You’re a jumper.

If you’re excited to work on your game when you get home, you love it and love working on it, why get married?

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Me, On The Screen: Race in Animal Crossing: New Leaf

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Things I’ve Written Recently

I’m sitting on my bed for the third day in a row. I’m waiting for 5PM to hit so that I can finally close my 3DS. I’ve been ‘tanning’ my avatar in the …

text:Jun 18, 2013 3:15 am

State of Decay: Filling in the Gaps

Also washed up High School Running Back now in the zombie apocalypse is pretty great. — Austin Walker (@austin_walker) June 6, 2013 —- Frank Johnson …

text:Jun 8, 2013 6:22 am

This Is Not An Agent: Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth Problem

The final entry in a series on Bioshock Infinite. Here are parts one and two. Spoilers follow. Analysis, for me, often brings with it the impulse to reduce. …

text:Apr 11, 2013 2:56 am

I Can See My House From Here: Bioshock Infinite, Nostalgia, and The Uncanny

In my first post on Bioshock Infinite, I argued that developer Irrational Games built a game aware of—and reliant on—the ‘theme park’ restrictions of linear …

text:Apr 9, 2013 5:34 am

On and Off the Rails: The Problem of Player Agency in Post-Bioshock Games

Part One in a series on Bioshock Infinite. Below, I think through how Infinite approaches questions about player agency. There are no plot spoilers to …

text:Apr 4, 2013 2:44 am

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Me, On The Screen: Race in Animal Crossing: New Leaf

I’m sitting on my bed for the third day in a row.

I’m waiting for 5PM to hit so that I can finally close my 3DS. I’ve been ‘tanning’ my avatar in the latest entry of Nintendo’s long running Animal Crossing series, New Leaf. I put ‘tanning’ in scare quotes because the method doesn’t match my intention. Yes, I’m doing the the thing the game calls tanning, but my objective isn’t just darkening my avatar’s skin tone, it’s being able to see in the screen what I see in the mirror.

Why avatar and not character? Because the hallmark of Animal Crossing is expressivity. You play a recent immigrant to a small town, and over the course of many short play sessions you carve out a place for yourself. You go fishing, catch bugs, and harvest fruit to raise the funds to pay off your home loan, and then do it all over again to pay for expansions and for new floors. You go shopping for new furniture and clothing from a rotating stock of available options. Want to look like a sea captain? Grab that ridiculous but charming beard and design yourself a sharp looking pea coat. Want to turn that new add-on into an ad hoc trophy room? Get some shelves and tables, and put those trophies out. You’ve earned it. You get to decide the direction of the little community you live in too: Plop down (and finance) new bridges; Put into place ordinances that require residents to take better care of the plants in town. Animal Crossing is a game you push and pull and stretch and step on until you like what you see, and then you do that some more because aesthetic contentment is a moving target, and AC is all about letting you hit that target again and again.

Well, almost. Because no matter how much direct control I have over my house, my wardrobe, or the town I lives in, I don’t ever get to specifically pick one very important thing: my skin color.

Technically, you don’t customize your character at all before the game properly starts. You’re asked a few innocuous questions in the opening moments of the game, and based on how you answer, you get an arbitrarily assigned avatar. I got a doofy dude with what looked like an off-brand Fantastic Four t-shirt. I’ve seen people on forums defend the absence of a skin selection option by referencing this opening. They argued that the game would be less charming if it had a checklist-style character creator. It almost goes without saying: this is an argument that comes from a privileged position. It’s easy to make charm your primary concern when discomfort and exclusion aren’t ever possibilities. 

Still, I’m okay with having some degree of vagueness here. It works. As above, AC is about making small, discrete choices over the course of weeks and months that slowly brings your vision into being. I don’t mind the t-shirt: I know that I can buy something cooler as soon as it’s in stock (and if it isn’t, I can always design something on my own.) I don’t mind the hairstyle: I know it won’t be for at least a week or two, but eventually a hairdresser will move to town and I’ll be able to get a new ‘do. When I’m sick of these choices I can change them again. That’s where the joy in AC comes from for me: bringing the avatar and the world into line with my whims. And it does it so damned well, except for this one thing.

It is 1992.

I am 7 years old and standing in Tilt, the local mall arcade. I flip from character to character on the Street Fighter II: Champion Edition screen. Who do I pick? Maybe Ryu? Karate and headbands care cool. Maybe Blanka? Monsters and electricity, right? Woah, definitely not Balrog. He looks, well… He looks dumb. That’s what dumb people look like. He looks like the bad guy. And he is, he’s one of the bad guys. He’s not even the cool bad guy. He doesn’t get a cape, or a catchphrase, or a mask. I don’t know the word brute yet. I don’t know that he’s a crude parody of Mike Tyson, I just see a resemblance. I don’t know know why, I just know that I do not want to associate myself with the only African-American in this game.

There are other characters of color, of course. Sagat seems okay, I guess… Dhalsim can spit hot fire, so, okay maybe. Chun-Li maybe… sure she was a girl, but she was fast. And back then, and for years after, I wanted to play as everything I wasn’t. I wanted to be thin, quick, attractive. That word called a great variety of images into my head, but they were rarely (if ever) black men. Especially when we understand ‘attractive’ to incorporate more than physical attributes.

So I tried to find affinity in other places. That same year, the X-Men cartoon started airing on Fox, and I’d pretend I was Cyclops because, like me, he had to wear glasses all the time. I got good grades, so I’d choose Donatello on the TMNT machine—he was the smart one. But I never saw myself in any of the few black characters that were available. I chose to run with Vincent or Cid in my third party slot in Final Fantasy VII, never with Barrett—another brute, another parody. Other people saw me as black, but I knew that I was mixed, and I might have clung to that. That’s how I rationalized that I get to play as the white hero instead of the black sidekick. That’s how these things work.

I hover over Balrog for a second, one more time. I like Mike Tyson, but I hear he’s a criminal. That meant a lot. I was a good kid.

I like Randall Cunningham, the quick-scrambling, play-making quarterback for the Eagles. No, I love him. My dad makes sure I get his autograph once, outside of an open practice in Westchester, PA. On the way home I hear from him about how “black quarterbacks” are a fairly new thing. That for years, white coaches and sports writers thought that blacks were too dumb to play QB—that they were good running backs, good wide receivers, great linebackers, but they just didn’t think quickly enough to be leaders. Even Randall… he says, trailing a bit, knowing the stats, knowing that he makes mistakes, that he throws interceptions. I wonder now if there was ever a point in my father’s life that he wondered, like me then, if what those people said about us might be true.

Back at the cabinet. Back in Tilt. I pick Guile, of course. Straight blonde hair, blue eyes, american F-16s and combat fatigues. And I’m a Guile player for years.

It’s this past Thursday.

I’m at a friend’s house, looking at what might become a spare room in the next month or two. Back in my current apartment, my 3DS sits open on the makeshift end table next to my bed. I forget to turn the volume off when I leave, so when I come home, I can hear the ‘exotic’ island tune chirping out of the tiny speakers. I frantically check to see if Argyle—my twee-as-fuck avatar—has gotten any color yet. It’s been five hours, and nothing. See, it’s not that I have no control over my character’s skin color. Based on past games in the series, I knew that I could tan. Just head to the tropical island that opens up a few days into play and hang out in the sun. Just five hours and you’ll hit the darkest shade. At least, that’s how it used to work. Now, nothing.

I’m upset. I’d already been frustrated, but now I’m really upset. If I could go to the island, tan to the level I wanted, and go on about my business for the rest of the game, I wouldn’t be writing this. I’d still be upset that skin color wasn’t a customization option in the game, but the practical effect on my play would’ve been so minimal that it wouldn’t have simmered for so long, it wouldn’t have made me feel so disconnected from the me on the screen.

Because the me up here wants to go do other things: he wants to head back to the mainland, shake some trees, talk to the other villagers in town, write some letters, redecorate the house, maybe check out a few of the museum exhibits that I’ve donated to. I can’t do any of that. I adore how a friend of mine has carefully displayed custom ground tile patterns around her village in order to build walkways and boardwalks and plazas, and even though I know it would take a lot of work, I’d love to do something just like that. But I’m stuck on the island hoping for a tan.

I don’t even know what is preventing it from happening. After the first day without results I decide I should remove my avatar’s glasses, my hat, my shoes and socks. I wonder if fishing could somehow interfere with the tanning process. What if my inventory is open? Or if I’m designing a new pattern? Does the tan happen live, as I play? Or do I have to wait a day to see the result? It’s all unclear. Not only is this a time sink that keeps me on the island, it’s opaque too.

Like I said before, I don’t mind having to work at getting the things I want in this game: that’s the whole point of playing. But this isn’t work. Those other goals require skill or planning—oftentimes both. They result in discrete rewards: selling the bugs you collected for cash you can put towards new clothes; turning in the giant carp you caught at the very last second to net you first place in the fishing tournament (and a sweet trophy). They’re aspirational: a second floor to your house; a community campsite that will attract a new range of characters through your town; a new wing on the museum, maybe even one you can curate yourself. Those things are interactive. This is, well, this is me out at lunch while my 3DS sits and waits. This is patiently waiting for 5 PM when (supposedly) the tanning process ends for the day, and I can get back to work. Get back to play.

That’s the crux of it. If ‘tanning’ is a thing you want to do actively, it means stopping ‘normal’ play. There’s only so much you can do on the island. You have a limited access to storage, so you can only save up so many fish and bugs. There’s a character who will buy things from you on the island, but she only offers you 5% of what you can get on the mainland. (I’ll leave someone else to spend a few thousand words on cutting into that.) You can’t even choose to save your game from the island.

In short, the island is ludically segregated from the rest of the game. On one hand, that makes it different, it makes it special. Trips to and from the island come with a sea shanty sung by an offensive-but-maybe-in-a-charming-way sea captain. You can play mini-games with your friends there. It’s a great place to visit, but…

For years I played as white characters.

They were inevitably the ones I wanted to be like. Still, there were moments when I’d get to step into someone’s shoes I felt comfortable in. GTA: San Andreas’  Carl Johnson is problematic in his own right, but when I read people on Gamefaqs complaining that Rockstar had “gone ghetto,” I bristled. For the first time ever, I took pride at seeing someone like me in a starring role of a game. He was only like me in this one way, but it was the one way that had never been represented, so it mattered that much more. It got tricky when games started to let me customize my characters. I made huge stables of wrestlers in Fire Pro Wrestling G, and yeah, some of them were black, so I didn’t even notice that I never actually played as anyone but the quick, non-black luchadores. I never even noticed that the black characters I’d made were all from the Balrog or Barrett school. Bruisers. Tough guys. Brutes.

I remember my Knights of the Old Republic character so well: he was the asian guy with reddish hair, a smug look on his face, just asking to fall to the dark side. But something in me was upset that he got paler when he went evil. I wanted him to remain a man of color, even if it wasn’t my color. Years later, I split the difference and made my two main characters on the MMO The Old Republic green skinned, alien brothers with Greek features and strange tattoos.

In sports games I made myself. No. I made Randall Cunningham, again, but with my name, and with less interceptions. The game knew Austin Walker was black and was a quarterback, but it didn’t know he was a “black quarterback.” It would never run those smarmy editorials, carefully phrasing my trade in such a way as to signal to the “right” readers that I should leave because of how my race affected my performance.

The first time I ever played in a long term D&D campaign I made a half-elf—bi-racial, like me. I’m putting this out there because it’s hilarious and says basically everything you need to know about 18 year old Austin Walker: his name was Xanatos Woodshymn, he was a bard who was raised by orcs and who saw himself as the ‘by any means necessary’ advocate for the kobolds who were being used as slave labor in the nearby mines. He was the reincarnation of the Elven god Corellon—it was one of those D&D games—and at the final moment of the first “season” of our campaign, he sided with the orcs, resurrecting their ancient ‘evil’ god and becoming public enemy number one for all of elf-kind. It was a weird year. I had dreadlocks.

I had dreadlocks because I’d spent years trying to work out a hairstyle. In high school, I wanted hair like all my white friends. In the end, I chose simply not to have the same hairstyles all my black friends. In the process tried a number of regrettable hair styles, many of which—like the dreads—stuck around for way too long.

By the time Mass Effect came out, I’d cut off the dreads. I was sitting with my roommates and making my character, and there was an unspoken pressure there. For weeks, I’d planned to remake my space-asshole Asian character from KoTOR. But what would my roommates say if I did that instead of making someone who looked like me? Would they be surprised? Concerned? Suddenly, for the first time ever, I felt a responsibility to really be me, on the screen. I remembered early interviews with Casey Hudson, how he described Shepard’s indistinct, multi-ethnic background. He was already halfway there, I thought. Let’s just give him a less chiseled chin, tight, curly hair, my lips, my nose. I made Austin Shepard. Since then, I’ve never made an “Austin” again. Since then, I never had to. But all of my characters have had something of me in them.

My 3DS is in my bag, at my feet.

The volume is down this time, but I keep peeking to make sure that Animal Crossing: New Leaf is still running, that my battery hasn’t run out—I can’t save here on the island, remember. Plus, every half hour or so I pick up the system and flick through a few menus, coming to rest on a new one. I’m terrified of screen burn-in. I’ve read that it’s rare on the 3DS, but I have a history with electronics breakings in remarkable and unlikely ways. Still, it’s worth the risk.

Soon—if the past games are to be any indication, it’ll be in mid July—I’ll be able to tan on the mainland too. That is only a relative improvement though. I’ll still have to be careful about becoming too tan—I’m not a “level six” tan, after all. This will never be stable: it is an ongoing, careful project, and it’s one with questionable implications.

One is the way in which your desired skin color affects the degree to which you have to monitor your avatar’s time in the summer sun. Because New Leaf’s tanning doesn’t seem to happen in real time, and because it seems to take days instead of hours now, trying to get a particular mid-level skin tone is more precarious than maintaining a pale complexion. Not only is the outcome hard to predict, but someone who wants the default skin to stay only has to bring a parasol around with them in the summer sun. They literally have access to tools and methods I don’t. It is very hard not to just write “DO YOU GET IT?” over and over again. I don’t have a tanning booth, or tanning lotion. I certainly don’t have a way to lock in my current tan level.

The other implication is that it might be the case that tanning is a disincentive to overplaying. I hadn’t realized it until my friend with the cobblestone roads pointed it out. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’ve kept your game running for five straight hours for some odd reason. You might notice that your town’s other villagers will greet you with an admonishment. You look tired they say, you should take a rest. You should stop playing. There is a strange, formal parallel between this directive and tanning. Both come only after hours of uninterrupted play. The same activity results in both outcomes. Coupled with the fact that players are outfitted with ways to prevent, but not cause tanning, it’s hard not to draw some connections.

My argument isn’t that Nintendo has gone out of its way to be racist, it’s that the question of race seems to have never been brought up to begin with, and that has its own problems. Privilege works by naturalizing one position, or one set or style of positions. It isn’t as simple as valuing that position over others: even that would acknowledge a field of differences. To work in a system of privilege is to start all projects from a set of premises that are believed to be inviolable. You don’t get more pale, in New Leaf, you only get darker. The natural position is whiteness—or, at least, one without melanin like mine.

I’m sitting at Starbucks. I’m writing this from an armchair I’ve sat in before, hundreds of times. Once, as I did so, two older women, white, glared up at me from across the communal table when I started to read, and relocated across the room. They shot me dirty looks for hours.

Games rarely got race right, but sometimes they’d cede control to me, and let me figure out what I thought “right” meant. I craved those experiences, and I still do. Not all of my characters are black, or men, or straight like me. I get to craft something along with the game, something that ‘fits.’ That can be an awkward experience: fiddling with skin color sliders, augmenting breast size, giving a character a deeper or higher voice. Figuring out what ‘fits’ for the character I have in mind feels somehow almost fascist. There is something actually sadistic in all authorship, after all.

But there are moments when I want to see more of myself on the screen. Times like this. I rarely use terms like ‘privilege’ in my writing, whether here or academically. It isn’t my field. Or, I guess, part of the way this particular power relation is structured, it is my field even if I didn’t want it to be.

I remember that I’ve been called nigger more times in the last two years of walking this small stretch of Canadian road than I did in 25 years of living on US soil. Someone threw an egg at me once.

I haven’t felt like sharing many of my New Leaf screenshots. Sometimes, something is too clever not to share, but I position my character so that he’s obscured. On seeing the head-on shot of Argyle wearing my cobblestone road friend’s absurd t-shirt design (above), another friend said “That’s my mental picture of Austin almost exactly.” He meant that in the nicest way possible, but it stung. I knew part of why it was only ”almost” exactly.

A girl I dated here suggested that my skin tone prevented me from getting important vitamin D from the sunlight. Vitamin D, she said, necessary to make deep, interpersonal relationships. I see some irony now, desperate that my little avatar soak in as much sun as possible I want to be on this screen. I want to be black on this screen.

Across from me—and I can hardly believe this is happening right now—a group of twenty something student teachers are whispering about how black students don’t understand apostrophes or commas. I hear the phrase “drug issues” and “them” a few times in a row.

But still. My 3DS is in my bag, open, my avatar staring back up at me in the island sun. I wanted to end this piece by saying that I’d closed it. I haven’t. The sun is still out on the island. I can’t be sure tanning actually stops at 5, so I wait. I’m hoping he’ll look more like me, soon.

Edit: So, a couple of people have brought up the “Mii Mask,” an object that eventually becomes available after a few weeks of play. The Mii Mask is worn over your avatar’s head, and may (or may not, it’s unclear) match your arm and leg skin tone to the mask’s. Some people have been saying that this is a solution, but I think it doubles down on the problem in the worst way. Here’s why.

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Crossing a Line: Gender Identity in Animal... - Nintendo 3DS, DS, Wii U, and PS Vita News, Media, Comics, & Retro Junk

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Crossing a Line: Gender Identity in Animal Crossing

[Writer and game creator Anna Anthropy (Dys4ia) examines how Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the series’ most queer/transgender-friendly game yet, but also explains why she’s weary to applaud Nintendo for this seemingly progressive stance. Image above is via Derek Rose.]

animal crossing has always been ripe for queering. i founded my last animal crossing town — in city folk for the wii — with my partner and our mutual then-girlfriend (my partner took great satisfaction in demolishing her house after we broke up). there’s really no getting around the fact that animal crossing is a very capital-affirming, binary-enforcing game by a publisher that recently edited gay marriage out of one of its games.

player characters in city folk are born with gendered clothing attached to their bodies: BOYS get t-shirts and pants, GIRLS get dresses with poofy sleeves. the same piece of clothing magically transforms according to the body it comes into contact with: a flowery dress will become a flowery t-shirt, worn over shorts, the second a “boy” tries to put it on.

player characters are also born white: there are over fifty kinds of animals represented in the game, but all humans are pale and pink. for animal crossing, enforced whiteness is nintendo’s path of least resistance to the question of player race. you do get a choice of gender, but it’s between two identity-erasing extremes: do you want to wear a dress for the rest of your life, or never?

there are a lot of compromises for queer players. i remember playing a woman character in my family’s animal crossing game long before i ever came out as trans, because the thought of a world with no options to externalize my femininity was too crushingly familiar.

i remember my partner and i racing to collect all the girls’ hairstyles in city folk: we’d heard that once you’ve gotten all of the hairstyles of your chosen gender, the game allowed you to choose from the hairstyles of the other gender. i’ve spent a long time exploring possibilities for femme expression and externalized queerness in the game. i became a punk, a femmebot, a barbarian queen, a girl scout. i created identities for myself that the game didn’t account for.

now new leaf is out for the 3ds. in this new animal crossing, shirts and dresses aren’t part of your body, you can change them. a “girl” character can wear pants or shorts, or dresses and skirts. a “boy” character can wear dresses, skirts, long socks, or a t-shirt and pants. a character’s body no longer dictates what clothes the player is allowed to put on them. it reminds me of saints row 2, the game whose character creation i think gets gender best: it doesn’t remove gender signifiers, but allows the player to mix and match diferent gender signifiers however she wants to. that’s closer to the ways we externalize our identities.

it’s easy to see the design of the new animal crossing as an endorsement of queerness, of transness and gender play. but it’s important to realize that animal crossing is the product of a corporation — and one that’s under no obligation to care about us. as long as we’re playing animal crossing, we can’t change or contradict the rules nintendo has decreed. no matter how many bells you pay to tom nook and his nephews, you’ll never be allowed to choose your character’s race. our identities are glitches in nintendo’s system. will nintendo “fix” the “bug” that allows boys to wear dresses?

queerness is all about context, and that’s what we do control: not what the game allows us to do, but the meaning that we give it. to animal crossing, one shirt is the same as any other, just another bitmap, but it’s intensely powerful for me as a kinky queermo to be able to put a leather jacket on my avatar. as a fat trans woman who has a hard time finding feminine clothes that fit, the ability to design my own clothes for my digital body is super meaningful. but that meaning comes from me, not from nintendo. we’d do well to remember that.

TO FOLLOW THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF MY PARTNER AND I IN ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW LEAF, FOLLOW THE HASHTAG #NEWQUEEF ON TWITTER.

by eric caoili, co-editor

Source twitter.com

1 week ago

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Playing Outside – The New Inquiry

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Playing Outside

By Leigh Alexander

The Honeymoon Killers, 1969

If video games want cultural legitimacy, designers will have to concede it’s not all about fun

Video games are bone-weary with growing pains, though the signs are that the medium has arrived: The multibillion-dollar game industry draws curious investors and heavy-hitters. Franchises like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft have become cultural institutions and tradeable names, and on the back of their success the CEO of leading game publisher Activision received an 800 percent pay raise, to nearly $65 million, last year.

Interactive entertainment hasn’t just been succeeding financially; it has begun attracting a new cultural legitimacy as well. The soundtrack to Journey, one of 2012’s most celebrated games, got a Grammy nomination, and the game itself crushed the annual awards cycle, an impressive feat for an indie game based on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and the sentimental concept of unvoiced collaboration with strangers. Just last week, the TriBeCa film festival hosted a panel on Beyond: Two Souls, a game heavy with the vaunted promise of mature storytelling — and featuring the voice and facial-mapped performance of actress Ellen Page.

This essay appears in TNI Vol. 17: Games. Subscribe for $2 and get it today. These are the kind of radar blips that attract attention from the “proper” art and technology world, those who might have previously consigned gaming to the realm of the incomprehensible plaything, mere power fantasy for males of a certain age. Gamification is mostly marketing-friendly snake oil as far as to anyone who actually makes real games is concerned, but the idea that game-design concepts can impact and influence productivity and social change has turned a lot of heads.

There’s a growing vibe in the games industry that while the wider world still might not “get” video games, they might be willing to entertain a re-evalulation of their prejudices. This is, after all, the era of the smartphone, and games are the most popular category on the App Store, eclipsing even books.

The growing outsider interest in the medium is partially a result of patient insistence on visibility by charismatic innovators like Will Wright (of Sims fame) and game critics and journalists, and partially the result of games industry’s dogged pursuit of legitimacy.

Outcasts and weirdos in the late 1970s and early 1980s founded what would become gaming culture. Rogue programmers and witty, countercultural Steve Jobs types built awkward, secretive text adventures and later led the early rush to colonize the Internet with ways for people to role-play and explore fantasy realms together. The modern games industry we see today — the one made to answer for mass shootings and to serve in-jokes to Family Guy and South Park — emerged more slowly, the result of a certain lack of self-esteem that maybe isn’t surprising for a medium born of nerds.

The industry of the 1990s viewed itself as an earnest second cousin to film and generally consented to help hardware makers mobilize their young male audience with promises of immersive interactivity and “in your face” special effects. Since Doom and Counter-Strike began colonizing student computer labs all across the nation, the muscle-bound first-person shooter has been the dominant paradigm, though far from the sole one.

Japanese role-playing games, comedy-sketch adventure stories, and sprawling, stat-heavy fantasy campaigns became safe zones for the uncool. You could be a social outcast or a geek, but as long as your parents could afford a PC or a Nintendo 64, you could have access to a world where every variable, every event could be controlled, where every conflict had a predictable win condition, if only you were skillful enough.

The downside of developing a lexicon that only you and your friends value and understand is that it’s by definition inscrutable to everyone else. Advertisements for hyper-realistic war landscapes and parades of unrealistic, objectified female bodies intimidate or alienate most people. And all gamers have some story of the time they tried to show a nongamer friend some rich, transporting universe with which they’d fallen in love, and despite bravely hefting a controller — these days they include twin sticks, a directional pad, four buttons and four rear triggers — the friend struggled to make the character stop walking determinedly into a wall.

But passionate game fans are willfully blind to the communication gap between the games industry and everyone else. “Are games art?” is a question raised so often in social media-enabled gaming fandom that it’s almost a joke. When the late, great film critic Roger Ebert declared years ago that video games “can never be art,” he must have had no idea of the nerd war he was about to launch. He eventually recanted that position in 2010 — not because some revolutionary work of interactive entertainment had changed his mind, one imagines, but because he’d simply become exhausted by Internet trolls and declared a truce.

Gamers are a force to be reckoned with online, uniting with absurd fervor to defend their medium. They see the mainstream world’s dubiousness about the value of their safe space as further rejection, more teasing from the jocks. They’re so attached to those old high school dynamics that they have a hard time seeing that interactive entertainment finally has the attention of digital artists and experience designers, and a real shot at broader recognition.

Sexism is such a hot topic in the games industry these days because new voices are virtually banging down the industry’s doors to be recognized, included, and heard. The geek treehouse is terrified at the idea of change. The obsessively earnest Internet comments and tweets about how games absolutely are an expressive art form that deserves as much respect as anything else are paired with claims about how feminism and “censorship” are going to ruin everything for them, naturally.

In most ways, gaming culture is much like any other insular, ideologically-driven group faced with the fact their little world needs to start meaning more things to more people. One finds the same political problems among passionate leftists — white men who feel especially sorry for themselves in ways that countermand their expressed desire for respect and change.

But these attitudes may no longer be financially viable. The main arm of the commercial games space — colloquially called triple A because of its $100 million budgets, hundreds-strong studio teams, and obsession with the ideal of visceral realism — is contracting despite the increases in executive pay. A significant portion of gaming’s founding fan base has quietly turned into grown-ups and parents, more hesitant than they might have once been to put war simulations and high-resolution breast physics in front of their colleagues and kids. As game play shifts to more participatory online multiplayer, muddling in the trenches with a lot of slur-slinging, phobic Internet trolls is an ever-less attractive proposition.

With decreasing time budgets, shorter — and less expensive — art-house games and smartphone-market “distractionware” become a more appealing proposition. Much of gaming’s historical audience would rather integrate gaming into their adult lives than cling to a militantly geeky platform.

But the game industry, laboring under a dated marketing vision that still dreams of the 17-to-25 year old gadget geek with the endless wallet, hasn’t grown up at the same rate. Risk-taking and creative innovation are receding amid a destructive feedback loop in which appealing to a niche audience becomes ever more critical the more that audience’s contribution to the bottom line shrinks. As a result, the games currently lining store shelves are increasingly impossible to distinguish from one another. Game companies bet on becoming the single most attractive player in the same homogenous field rather than branching out to create something new  and risking expensive failure.

***

When games writer Jason Schreier recently wrote a Kotaku post expressing annoyance and fatigue with yet another set of unrealistic anime breasts in fantasy-action game Dragon’s Crown, he drew a wave of ire — and even a homophobic gibe from the game’s Japanese artist. Shouldn’t an artist be allowed to express himself, myopic fans demanded to know in regards to a top-heavy cartoon sorceress. And aren’t games just for fun, anyway?

The idea that at the end of the day, games are obligated to serve the purpose of “fun” above all others has been the main wrench in the works of the gaming industry’s machinations for legitimacy. Why should games be mature, cope with social issues, reflect society, or demonstrate the genuine artistic vision of a grown-up creator? At the end of the day, they’re just for fun, say gamers when they’ve run out of defenses against the mainstream industry’s embarrassing, stagnant homogeneity.

Alarmingly, professional game creators often contribute to that echo chamber too. Traditional game production is a ruthless wringer of a career, demanding 80-hour weeks and making widows of wives (creators are still predominantly male). A developer who’s led a product that’s managed to achieve commercial success is virtually canonized for his sacrifice. Veteran game developers are masters of creating “fun”, and understandably lead the charge against the idea that games can or should be anything else. But if genuine legitimacy for games lies in the idea that they can be creative expression, tools of global communication and teaching — that’s the evolutionary purpose of play, after all — fun decreases in relevance. Culture-changing entertainment is rarely described as “fun.”

Games’ 21st century culture war could have been consigned to end in attrition: The form became an economic heavy-hitter, colonized every modern technology platform, spawned a fervent and accessible independent games scene that’s as relevant to the medium as festival flicks are to cinema. But when all the opportunities were finally at hand, the industry’s slavish commitment to economics, best practices, and the grail of “fun” kept wider legitimacy at arm’s length.

That future doesn’t need to repeat itself. A tiny but reverberating kernel of gamemakers, tired of waiting to be embraced by veteran developers busy planning how to make an even more realistic assault weapon, have embraced new technology that allows them to create independently.

Development tools used to form a significant barrier to entry. To make a game once involved a highly specialized skill set, access to programming or digital art and design education, and high-end technology for both practice and creation. But game tools have been quietly skewing closer to Web development tools, becoming easier to use. Tools with pricey licenses are getting dislodged by tools with lower barriers to entry, like Unity, GameMaker, RPGMaker, the visual novel generator Ren’Py, and a flexible, free interactive text tool called Twine.

This mass democracy of tools has meant that women, genderqueers, minorities, outsider artists, and a broad, brand-new wave of individual creators who haven’t necessarily grown up on the insular vocabulary of “video gaming” have been drawn to experimenting with games, digital play, and interactive entertainment. The popular wisdom in game design has long been to lavish players with the idea that they are the ultimate storytellers and that the job of the game designer is simply to provide a framework for the players to create their own experiences. That approach is not inherently invalid, but it just feels huge that after decades of rationalizing and defending nerd fantasies as high art, personal expression and authorship now have the opportunity to at last become a major trend in games for the first time.

One nominee in the Excellence in Narrative category of the 2013 Independent Games Festival (the industry’s Sundance, in a sense) was Dys4ia, a game by Oakland-based designer and author Anna Anthropy, about the intimate struggle she endured undergoing hormone therapy for gender transition. Anthropy has long been one of indie games’ most beloved and contentious Angry Young Women, developing indie games that deal with themes of identity, kink, relationships, and personal storytelling. Her manifesto, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, urged aspiring artists of all kinds to get their hands on the broadening menu of accessible game-creation tools and be heard in interactive entertainment.

Dys4ia didn’t win at the IGF, which traditionally celebrates young white guys experimenting with the language of design through well-liked but increasingly familiar twee, retro aesthetics. (Disclosure: the festival is run by the same organization that owns one of my longtime employers, industry news and features site Gamasutra.) But this year the festival’s grand prize winner was another harbinger of a new, deeper way of viewing what game experiences can mean. Richard Hofmeier, another independent game designer, made Cart Life, a grueling simulation of the daily life of someone relying on a sidewalk cart’s income to survive. Its bleak grayscale art and the ruthlesness of even its smallest rituals, like showering, buying food, and remembering to pick your child up from school, represented a shift in the “life sim” genre, highlighting the humble heroism in simply facing the world every day without privilege rather than the power fantasies with which games are usually associated.This essay appears in TNI Vol. 17: Games. Subscribe for $2 and get it today. 

Hofmeier took a further step once he received the award: He turned over his booth on the well-trafficked show pavilion to his friend, critic, writer, and text-game creator Porpentine so she could showcase her game Howling Dogs, a fascinating, brilliant text experience in confinement, depression and escapism.

Since then, the individual games movement has exploded, attracting curious creators and new experimenters in droves. It’s also attracted its share of detractors, veteran game designers who look at the narrative-driven personal-storytelling games as “cool, but ‘not games.’ ” They may see a betrayal of their sanctified best practices of systems design, player agency, and reaction driven by conditions. Their resistance has begun to seem as political as it is professional, a desire to close a door to underrepresented voices just as they’ve begun to step through it.

It’s within this growing personal games movement that we can see the genuine potential of games as art and communication. The geek community has been validated for long enough by economic growth and a product industry that panders to them even at their own expense. Let them have that niche if they’re so desperate to choke it into irrelevance.

Cart Life, Howling Dogs, Dys4ia, and their contemporaries are touching and occasionally brutal, antithetical to games’ holy doctrine of fun. But they are important. The high-end triple-A gaming business will hopefully start to learn from the brave experiments of indie artists with everything to say and nothing to lose, folding some of the movement’s most resonant lessons into its experience design. That’s the road to a healthy culture and a genuinely mature, artistically legitimate games industry. But for now, individual outsider games are gently bringing game creation back to its spiritual origin — this time, in ways that could include everyone.

That nongaming friend who views even the most innovative among console games as a foreign language can pick up Dys4ia, Howling Dogs, or any of its contemporaries and understand its purpose, receive its intended message, be touched by empathy. Changed — maybe enlightened about a lived experience that isn’t necessarily their own. They won’t just be walking into walls.

Please fill in all fields

Previously by
Leigh Alexander

Playing Outside

June 17, 2013

Designed by Imp Kerr Built by Krate

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In defense of shooting people in the face

killscreendaily.com

Jun 18 2013 WITH A BANG By Jamin Warren

In defense of shooting people in the face

A meditation on E3.

It’s 9 a.m. and I’m standing in line. The last time I saw so many people snaked around the block, I was a teenager waiting for Avail tickets. Now that I live in New York, my abhorrence of lines has heightened to a profound degree. This doesn’t stem from an undergirding sense of cool (I mean, I ruminate on videogames all day), but more from a mantra one develops to stay sane after years of living in the city: There’s nothing good enough to wait in line for.

And yet, here I am on South Figueroa with hundreds, thousands of others, waiting outside for Microsoft to open the doors to USC’s Galen Center. I will be ushered inside, assigned a seat so small that it cramps my legs ten minutes into the presentation of the Xbox One, and spend the remainder of the press conference by the concession booth, watching characters unknown and unremembered as they are slaughtered one-by-one. They will have their throats gouged, faces indented, and screams ignored as one Microsoft executive after another will announce the new slate of Xbox One games. Welcome to E3.

This is my sixth Electronic Entertainment Expo and each year, somehow to my surprise, is roughly the same. It is an event of unparalleled noise and confusion. Imagine a casino with gas-powered slots running on full-tilt for three days. Then there’s the neon—oh, the neon!—of the brightest hue, polluting every untainted corridor. When philosopher Theodor Adorno lamented neon’s “false luminosity,” he was clearly envisioning Xbox greens and PlayStation blues.

The psychic toll is incalculable.

And while EA decided not to arm their massive booth with a thundering subwoofer to show off Battlefield 4 as in years past, their press conference did feature the lovable FIFA-fan Drake and a very amiable Dana White, president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, who said he wanted to gamers to know what it’s like “to get punched in the face.” (I took notes.) The psychic toll is incalculable.

Naturally, the common refrain from E3-hardened critics and commentators after the event each year is complete and utter exhaustion and despair. “E3 killed my desire to play games,” one critic wrote of last year’s affair. This physical discomfort and mental weight takes on a metaphorical significance as well. Games continue to be mired in the power fantasies of yesteryear, fail to showcase their diversity as a medium, refuse to, frankly, “grow up.”  And in years past, this would have been my complaint too, while I washed my hands of the whole mess and jetted back the East Coast with my tail between my legs.

But something different happened this year. Yes, my senses were overloaded, as to be expected, but I finally understood. Let me explain.

There is a tendency among older game critics to expect “more” from games. The prevailing argument goes something like this. There are too many games about shooting people in the face. “The industry” should stop making games about shooting people in the face. Games need less weapons and more characters, experiences, and perspectives. I am a proponent of this school. In fact, I started Kill Screen precisely to advocate such positions.

“None of you want any of us to have a good time just ‘cause you never did.”

But.

I also remember what it was like to be a 14-year-old freshman at an all-boys high school. We had a T1 internet connection. We also had Quake. And so each afternoon, while Dr. Schmiedekamp holed himself away to do whatever a high school teacher of computer science does at 3 p.m., we alit the hellish wasteland of unknown namesake, bunny-hopping and strafe-jumping to our hearts’ content.  It was that Quake-infested part of my calcified marrow that stirred quietly, and then loudly, as I walked the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center. If I was that gangly first-year, I would have loved E3.

Clearly and happily, I am not a teenager anymore. But those who’ve been playing games for two decades or more must acknowledge that with age comes to the tendency to dismiss our raucous past as adolescent indiscretions. When a teenage girl at a Rolling Stones chastises the suspended adolescent/ad exec Don Draper on Mad Men, “None of you want any of us to have a good time just ‘cause you never did,” Don responds with the uncharacteristic voice of an adult: “We’re worried about you.” Fans of the show will note that Don’s parental word showed the one thing Don tries so desperately avoid: age. And so it goes that we deem the Roman bloodlust of Ryse as something to grow out of, rather than a reminder of the anarchic roar of youth.

And yes, E3 boasts an air of desperate intensity, of Gil the Salesman pleading for a lick of the shiny, brass ring. This is a commercial event after all, but, again, that blare and snarl of the convention floor is a consequence of teenagedom. Jennifer Senior’s excellent New York feature on why we never leave the “sentient madness” of teens explains why via radical changes in our brain chemistry:

The prefrontal cortex has not yet finished developing in adolescents. It’s still adding myelin, the fatty white substance that speeds up and improves neural connections, and until those connections are consolidated—which most researchers now believe is sometime in our mid-twenties—the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain (known collectively as the limbic system) have a more significant influence. This explains why adolescents are such notoriously poor models of self-regulation, and why they’re so much more dramatic—“more Kirk than Spock,” in the words of B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

That time period is remembered with such mania, because we were literally crazy. Teens are becoming their selves for the first time. We felt everything more.

Of course, Senior goes on to document how dangerous those impulses can be and how teenagers live in a constant state of fear. Moreover, Senior’s worry, echoed by researchers, is that failure to learn how to cope may carry consequences for later life. It could be easily argued that this explains the state of big-budget games with disturbing clarity—that clinging to each Call of Duty only suspends our collective maturation as game players.

But perhaps something different is at work. Games are entering their first, true generational cycle and while the endless march of space marines and ax-wielding mages could be considered a sign of metastasized orthodoxy on a billion dollar scale, a more charitable reading is thus: that segment of games will never grow. And that’s ok.

“That” segment of games will never grow. And that’s ok.

It’s ok because we were all teens once. That is the moment in life when we are the least powerful. We possess the intellect to understand the structure of the world but none of the power to actually change it. We are frustrated, febrile, and paralyzed. And many, like me, turn to games as the one place where we could feel whole, where we could escape.

The apostle Paul, no stranger to first-person shooters, quipped: “When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Such is the way of games of course. As we age, we yearn for depth and meaning. I saw those on display in forthcoming titles like the melancholic Rain and the delirious Hohokum. Yet the makers of those titles were surely weaned on the same violent forebearers as those making modern shooters and it is exactly those experiences, holed away playing DOOM and Counter-Strike until reticules were retinally burned as after-images, that fuel their creativity now…if only in reactive form.

But that games are expressing themselves in new and profound ways is not an argument that less “cultured” spheres of gamedom should be severed. Contextualized, of course, but not abandoned. It wasn’t so long ago that the whole of games, good and bad, labored under the same global misapprehension. E3 may not always be the best foot forward, but it’s one whose necessity I am finally willing to accept.

Or at least wait in line for.

Microsoft booth photo via Caleb Sconosciuto. AMD Eyefinity booth photo via AMD Global. Counter-Strike photo via Silicon Gulf.

Jamin Warren founded videogame arts and culture company Kill Screen. Formerly a culture reporter for the Wall Street Journal, he’s been an advocate for game culture and serves as an advisor to MoMA’s department of Architecture and Design. Jamin also hosts the Kill Screen show for the Creators Project, a collaboration between Intel and Vice.

killscreendaily.com

How Games Are Made: Defense Grid 2

polygon.com

By Russ Pitts @russpitts
on June 20, 2013 at 12:00p

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Part one of an exclusive year-long report behind the scenes of creating a modern video game.

Hanging on the wall is a television screen. It is massive. In your home, this screen would be luxurious; ludicrous, even. Here it is merely functional.

The television is connected to a computer; on the screen, a complicated spreadsheet outlining every facet of the creation of a video game, step by excruciating step. The game does not yet exist. It is being built at this very moment. It’s little more than a few lines of code. Some art. A wealth of documents.

And this spreadsheet.

In another year (give or take) the game will be complete. You’ll be able to download it on your PC, your Mac or maybe your mobile devices. You might enjoy it — the people making it certainly hope that you do — but if you saw it in the state in which it currently exists, you wouldn’t even know what it was.

Month by month, milestone by milestone, that bit of code, those pieces of art and design will multiply and coalesce. Slowly, following the steps outlined on the spreadsheet on the massive screen on the conference room wall, the pieces of a video game will be assembled. And at any point some little thing may go slightly wrong, derailing the entire thing.

This is game development.

I’m sitting at the end of a long conference table witnessing a planning meeting for Hidden Path’s upcoming tower defense game Defense Grid 2. Halfway down the table sits Dacey Willoughby, the project’s associate producer. She carries herself like a nurse: kind, but tough. Empathetic, but determined. She’s done this before, this game-making thing.

Willoughby worked at Warner Bros. (on Lord of the Rings: War in the North) and other places. She owned a business with her husband (a smoothie shop — it didn’t work out). She worked at Hidden Path once before, but quit (to run the smoothie shop). Now she’s part of one of the most experienced small development teams in the industry, working to corral the disparate pieces of Hidden Path’s next game into some semblance of order.

Right now the conference room is Willoughby’s workstation. She’s setting milestones: scheduled deadlines the team must hit or risk losing money. Technically, these milestones have already been set, but Willoughby is adding detail; describing, in writing, exactly which parts of the game will be finished and on what dates and by whom.

Over the next 12 or so months, the team members behind DG2 will hit or miss these marks. Willoughby hopes they hit more than they miss, and she has some reason to be hopeful there. The team at Hidden Path is composed mostly of veterans. In the game industry as a whole, the average “time in” for game developers is approximately five years. At Hidden Path, it’s 12.

This veteran crew is now making the official sequel to its first (and only) original title (as well as a couple of other games that team members can’t talk about yet). But the process of game development is complex. Things go wrong. Creativity, always hard to bottle, reacts poorly to pressure. People fail.

This is game development.

Polygon has been promised exclusive access to the Defense Grid 2 development team over the next year: its meetings, its milestones, its design documents. Everything. We will bear witness firsthand to how a video game gets made, from the ground up. Everything will be on record and reported.

Hidden Path has, in short, given Polygon total access to the development of Defense Grid 2, and we will get to follow along as it struggles to make the game that could make or break the independent studio.

Our reports will be published in installments between now and whenever the game launches (projected: 2014).

This is part one.

A tough week

A tough week

I’m sitting in a restaurant with the co-founders of Hidden Path. It’s a little awkward. They’re not used to press or visitors. And they’re smart. Scary smart. The kind of smart where you understand all of the words they are speaking, but none of what they are saying makes any sense.

The kind of smart where, when tasked with making idle chitchat with a stranger over lunch, no one knows where to start.

Mike Austin jumps on the grenade, kicking things off by talking about wind and how it can knock over buildings, a phenomenon known as mechanical resonance. I’ve heard of this, but their discussion goes into atmospheres of intellect too thin for my wings to carry me. I can simply nod and smile and hope, at some point, I’ll be able to interject and not sound like a moron.

Austin is the youngest among Hidden Path’s founders by about 10 years, but he’s had roughly the same number of years in the industry. He just graduated from school early.

Right now Austin is heading up development on a game that’s not Defense Grid 2 and noodling with technology unrelated to any game in his spare time. One of his recent pet projects involved writing an algorithm that could recognize musical frequencies. Turns out it was harder than he expected — and for the same reason that wind can topple buildings.

As Austin made progress on his algorithm he discovered that low notes are harder to identify than high notes, and when he researched the problem he learned that it’s a common one. Low notes essentially borrow each others’ frequencies, overlapping and cascading. Which is why, if you have a building built to be susceptible to a low resonant frequency, it will topple easier than if it wasn’t, because any one of several frequencies could trigger a collapse.

Mike Austin jumps on the grenade, kicking things off by talking about wind and how it can knock over buildings, a phenomenon known as mechanical resonance.

This revelation (expanded upon in great detail) marvels the assembled brains at the table, and the conversation then turns to a proposed NASA project someone heard about involving jet engines placed at the corners of buildings, to “steer” them from collapsing in high wind. And then we’re back to music, talking about how graphing musical chords on paper produces visually appealing graphs for chords that also sound pleasant, and visually unappealing graphs for chords that don’t sound as nice. And then we’re on to piano tuning, and how tuners don’t really understand any of that; they just measure the vibrations of the strings.

Then the food comes.

In the span of 15 minutes we’ve gone from staring awkwardly at our water glasses to full-on nerdery over seemingly mundane yet stunningly complicated mysteries of the universe. That’s the kind of smart these guys are.

**

Hidden Path was founded in 2006, after the founders had “a tough week” at their old job. The job? They were the masters of the Xbox.

Austin, Mark Terrano, Jeff Pobst and recently departed Dave McCoy all worked together at Microsoft as part of the Xbox team’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG). Sort of a game development “A-Team,” ATG would travel the world, meeting with third-party game developers, helping them design the best games they could for the original Xbox console. Solving problems.

Imagine the people who design games as experts in computer programming and mathematical computations. Now imagine the people those people call when they can’t figure out how to make something work.

Need a higher frame rate? Call ATG. Can’t get your game to work with Xbox Live? ATG. Want to squeeze more pixels out of that console’s Nvidia graphics chip? ATG. They were the guys who essentially served at the pleasure of the game developers, doing whatever needed doing, with a smile, and expecting nothing in return. All with the blessing of Microsoft.

Then things changed.

Depending on who you ask, it was either politics or money or both, but at a certain point the mandate for ATG took a left turn and the members of ATG cashed in their time off and called it a day.

“We left in February of 2006,” Austin says. “We were working out of my living room, because I had space. I made breakfast every morning in my kitchen.”

“We were launching the 360 and [Pobst] said, ‘Did you ever want to go back into games? What would you make?’” That’s Mark Terrano speaking. He’s the design director at Hidden Path. Also, he developed the classic strategy game Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings. “I told him and he said, ‘My God, we gotta go do that.’

“So we both said, ‘OK, if we were gonna pick anybody we could work with in the whole industry, who would we pick?’ That’s how we started, with a list.”

Then: Hidden Path.

The ATG boys looped in veteran money man James Garbarini after the fact, because none of them wanted to do that job. Garbarini was the CFO for FASA, creator of the MechWarrior universe, and ran part of that company for a time, after most of its assets were sold to Microsoft. When Hidden Path called, he was contemplating leaving the game industry entirely to teach middle school.

“The appeal was that there was not any single person who would be solely responsible or solely in charge,” says Garbarini. “That and the experience and the intelligence these folks had who were going to be participants. They were extraordinary.”

CEO Pobst explains the name:

“With the launch of the 360 and the launch of [Xbox Live], I would go out and visit a bunch of studios,” he says, speaking of his time as the group lead for ATG. “We saw a tremendous number of studios. The things we saw were: one, no studio made games the same way as another. It doesn’t happen. Two, we saw a lot of genre studios, or technology studios, or art studios who then kind of did OK on the other stuff.

Need a higher frame rate? Call ATG. Can’t get your game to work with Xbox Live? ATG. Want to squeeze more pixels out of that console’s Nvidia graphics chip? ATG.

“We felt like the most important thing for a game was fun. We didn’t see many design-based studios that could do multiple genres, that could work and be successful in multiple ways.

“You needed technical expertise and you needed art. You needed all of that to do it. You couldn’t just focus in one area.

“We saw a lot of developers that we felt really just focused on one area. And so we thought, ‘What if we built a studio that really was about how you get to fun?’ And so that was the conversation. Hidden Path was the way you get to fun.”

For the first few years, the industry was kind to Hidden Path. The founders’ tight relationships at Microsoft helped them land key deals and greased the wheels for the release of Hidden Path’s first original game, the science fiction tower defense game Defense Grid: The Awakening, in 2008.

Then the world economy collapsed, and a year or so later, the industry that everyone believed was recession-proof revealed itself to be anything but.

By 2008, Hidden Path was working on games with each of the three major console makers: Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Then, one by one, those game deals collapsed. Hidden Path was left with nothing. Then: layoffs, scrambling and a lucky last-minute save in the form of investment from overseas and a request from Valve to begin working on several projects, one of which would become Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Then the world economy collapsed, and a year or so later, the industry that everyone believed was recession-proof revealed itself to be anything but.

It is now 2013. Hidden Path, the company forged from the ashes of Xbox’s A-Team, has reinvented itself as a high-caliber indie, with the experience (and then some) of a major triple-A studio. If it were a car, it’d be a Tesla with a rocket engine.

“It’s still hard for me to think of it as being a real company now, because it’s more like we hired people to help us do our stuff,” says Austin. “Then at some point we started doing real things and suddenly we’d been around for seven years, which is still crazy.”

This seventh year could be the start of Hidden Path’s rise to greatness. After seven years of ups and downs (a lot of downs), the company is now working on multiple titles again, but this time around the future looks considerably brighter.

In the summer of 2012, Hidden Path Kickstarted a long-overdue expansion to the original Defense Grid. The hope was that the campaign would raise enough money to fund a full sequel. It did not. So Pobst sent out a Hail Mary and the man who caught it was none other than the notorious angel investor Steven Dengler.

Says Pobst: “I wrote [Dengler] a letter and I said, ‘Hey. There aren’t many people who are willing to invest in games. It looks like this is something you’re doing. We’ve got a good team here. We’re making, I think, a good product. Is this something you would be interested in?’

“He wrote me back within a few hours and he said, ‘Look, I get about 200 of these a week. I ignore most of them, except the games that I know. I’m one of your backers. I like your game. Let’s talk.’”

By the end of 2012 Dengler had been to Hidden Path, seen what it could do and was sold. Pobst crafted a business plan, Dengler invested the cash and Defense Grid 2 … is still not yet a game. But it will be. Soon. (They hope.)

Even though Hidden Path has made plenty of games before, no one knows how this one is going to turn out in the end. This is game development, and it’s a long, long road.

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Waiting is hard

Waiting is hard

The road starts with John Daud.

Daud is the lead designer of DG2. He’ll be largely responsible for how much better or worse the game is compared to its predecessor. What he wants to be doing more than anything right now is digging in to the level design tools and making playable sections of the game he can try out and use to test his theories.

What he’s doing instead is writing. Lots and lots of writing.

Daud is writing design documents, mainly, but also emails, scripts, reports. He’s writing so much it’s starting to make his wife nervous. But he’s writing because he’s nervous and, for the moment, there’s nothing else for him to do.

What he’s doing instead is writing. Lots and lots of writing.

The level design tool Daud will use later in the year is mostly not yet built, and what is built is broken; building roads causes it to crash. Just a few hours after I left the studio one Monday, Daud experienced one such crash and flew into a fit of rage, yelling and throwing small objects at his computer screen. When I arrived the next day, the other members of his team were still laughing about it.

Daud wasn’t laughing.

Now he’s sitting with me in a room Hidden Path uses for telephone meetings, wearing a Seattle Seahawks hoodie (un-ironically, he assures me). Daud is addicted to sports, and football is his favorite. He enjoys watching football because it requires a level of physical prowess he will never possess, and that entertains him. But, more than that, he enjoys studying how it works.

NFL football is, at its core, a game. And the various rule changes that hard-core fans bitch and moan about, season after season, reveal a dynamic between the game and its audience that is extraordinarily similar to the dynamics of long-running multiplayer video games.

“And it’s a real-life problem,” says Daud. “You know why they’re doing it — the safety stuff. It’s not just to be benevolent. It’s self-preservation. Lawsuits, and keeping your players alive. I get it. It’s just … ” He makes a pained, groaning noise. It’s similar to the noise he makes when he talks about how much game development still needs to happen before he can really get his hands dirty designing DG2.

“It’s not just to be benevolent. It’s self-preservation. Lawsuits, and keeping your players alive. I get it. It’s just … “

Daud has been with Hidden Path since 2007. Before that, he was an artist at an outfit called 5000ft, where he worked on, among other things, some of the “many” sequels in the Army Men franchise. His team at 5000ft was underfunded and understaffed, forcing Daud to learn to do a lot, quickly. Up to and including assuming the role of level designer, which, for an artist, is highly unusual.

“All the artists were doing level design,” Daud says. “I think we each got an equal portion of the level design stuff. Which meant basic scripting and laying the levels out and then playtest. Lots of playtest.”

For another Army Men sequel, the license holders wanted to “make the Army Men real.”

“They wanted them to be more human and they wanted [players] to be able to … customize the characters. … That direction changed after a while. I think they realized, ‘Wait a minute. This is plastic men. We can’t make them real.’

“So that changed.”

Time and again, Daud got drafted into design duties because of his ability to write and communicate. Which led to more writing and communicating. Which, eventually — after “the unfortunate Daredevil game,” a Disney Princess game, a poker game and the Aqua Teen Hunger Force game — led him to Hidden Path.

Six years later, he’s leading the charge on what Hidden Path hopes will be its most successful original game to date. Although, as of this writing, “leading the charge” means writing. Refining his ideas in design documents and then breaking those ideas into discrete tasks — in writing — for the rest of the team to begin working on.

“I pride myself on the [design] documents, even knowing that they’re going to evolve,” he tells me. “They always evolve. At some point during this process, I will just consider those documents the starting point. I’ll update them as we go along, probably for the next few months, but then it’s like, ‘OK, we’ll do this by email or me shouting across the room or putting it on the whiteboard.’

“At some point it switches over from becoming a design spec to a historical documentation of what the design is. That seems to be the natural flow of design.”

I’ve seen the design documents. To say they are “comprehensive” would be an understatement. Whereas some video game design documents read like bullet-pointed wish lists, or half-baked theories cribbed from cocktail napkins, Daud’s DG2 design docs read like a review of a game that already exists, and is playable.

For Defense Grid 2, Hidden Path will [utilize] a more advanced internal technology platform developed in-house over the last two years. … This [Hidden Worlds] engine is based upon the original Defense Grid work and now incorporates deferred rendering, a procedural terrain engine. It runs on the PC at a higher performance on the same minimum requirements as the original Defense Grid.

This new tech base includes visual features such as ambient occlusion, hemispherical lighting, supports an almost infinite number of lights in the scene with deferred lighting … allows for more striking and exotic locations as we take the player to new planets. …

A new story with multiple characters will be the glue connecting the game levels as the player progresses through the game. … There will be improvement in alien animation vocabulary as well as methods of alien death and destruction. While no actual physics will be used, visual reactions to the world will appear to take place by the aliens through a limited set of animations.

This is taken from the 2,000-word main design document, one of more than 12 documents that Daud has written outlining every aspect of the game’s design, from story to monetization. It is an exhaustive treatise not just on the design of DG2, but on the current state of the game industry itself and how DG2 will fit within it.

Something only a person with a great deal of experience — and a great deal of time — could have created.

“The ideas have just been coming up for years,” Daud tells me. “Either by Michael [Austin] and Jeff [Pobst] and Mark [Terrano]. … Because [Defense Grid has] just sort of been there on the back burner for years, there have been a lot of ideas and a lot of documents. There are a bunch of pitch documents.

“Basically [my part] was taking all that stuff and making sense of it.”

Speaking to Daud, he gives the impression of a race car spinning its wheels, waiting for the green light. Defense Grid 2 is all but designed in his head, and he’s ready to start tinkering with his theories and tweaking them. Seeing how the new towers (not yet built) will work with the new aliens (still being conceptualized). Adding in multiplayer (which he admits is a radically new concept for Defense Grid) and tweaking the UI (user interface — which he admits was not great in the first game).

Daud talks about these things as if he is already working on them, which, in his head, he probably is, and has been since around the middle of 2012. But in reality these things are weeks away from him being able to touch.

In the meantime — in addition to writing — Daud is trying to spend as much time as he can with his family. When the game development gets into full swing for him, his time may be short. Although at Hidden Path, the team very rarely uses the word “crunch” and not because they’re hiding from it; it’s because they don’t do it. And that’s part of why the studio is able to attract such a talented team in the shadow of their much more heavily funded colleagues in the Seattle area.

“Those are my levels. The buck stopped here. And so … Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“That’s one of the reasons we’re here,” Daud says.

Daud tells the story of how his second child was born almost immediately after Defense Grid: Containment, the Defense Grid expansion Kickstarted as part of the same campaign that launched DG2, shipped. Luckily, Daud’s bosses knew his wife was expecting and designed their schedule assuming he’d be gone towards the end, but childbirth is like game development in that anything can happen. If the baby had come early, it would have been a tense moment.

“That would have put it into perspective, I think,” Daud says. “Those are my levels. The buck stopped here. And so … Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know what would have happened.”

But he’s convinced it would never have come to someone asking him to miss the birth of his child. Not at Hidden Path.

“I don’t think they would ever require us to do that,” he says. “That would kill me. I can’t even imagine that.

“I’ve missed weddings and funerals [at other studios]. I’d like to think that … It may not have saved the game, but it probably saved my career, I think. If that’s any consolation. That’s usually how I think about it, but it still grates on me. I know a lot of people probably feel the same way. But birth? Oh. No. I think I’d have to draw the line. That’s not cool.” He laughs. “That is not cool.”

War machines

War machines

Dacey Willoughby is sitting in the Hidden Path conference room, typing and mousing and staring at the massive screen on the wall. Sitting beside her is DG2’s lead artist, Lex Story. They’re haggling over an animator.

“The biggest thing is, they want a sample mid-game level,” says Willoughby. By “they,” she means the game’s investor, Dengler. “We’re going to need to have a level.”

Story: “The level will comprise of … ? Towers that animate, correct?”

Willoughby: “Yes. They’re going to put the alien stuff here, in sprint seven, at the end of next month. I think it would make sense to just do as many mobs as we can.” (Mobs means “mobiles,” which is video game speak for things that move. Enemies. In this case, aliens.)

Story: “If they’re not animating? Where’s my animator?”

Willoughby: “I need to talk to Jeff [Pobst] about the animator.”

Story: “That would be Ron, correct?”

Willoughby: “I think after we have this plan and I present it to him and say we need an animator, they might be able to switch his project. At least for a little bit. I don’t know if you think this is enough time to get all of the mobs done. … It’s three weeks.”

Story: “All of the mobs done? Where did you get that number?”

He’s starting to get antsy. Willoughby takes a mental step back. She’s watching Story carefully, waiting to see if he’s going to flip out, or if he’s slowly coming to the same realization she’s already reached — that there’s a lot to do and not quite enough time.

Willoughby: “What do you mean?”

Story: “That’s like May. That’s three weeks.”

Willoughby: “Yeah, exactly. Is that too little time?”

Story: “Yeah!”

And so it goes. For nearly 20 minutes, Willoughby and Story hammer out exactly what pieces of art will be required to create a level for Dengler, and exactly how Story and his small team will be able to make that art in the time they have.

It’s clear from the volume in the room that Story hates meetings. He likes working, he tells me later, and meetings don’t feel like working. Especially when they come in the middle of the day, or without warning. They break his flow, and it takes him a long time to get the gears moving again. Willoughby knows this. She prepped him in advance, telling him this morning that he had a meeting this afternoon.

“She’s awesome for the job she does,” Story says later. “Because a producer is somebody, when you see them and they’re walking down the hallway and they greet you, you say, ‘Oh, shit, did I fuck up something?’ or ‘Shit, is something due?’ That’s the kind of producer I want. She provides all of that. She’s like, ‘Look, I’m gonna make you very responsible for the crap you said you were gonna do.’”

Story has been through all of this before. His resume reads like a history of notable games: BattleTech 4.0. Return to Zork. MechWarrior 2, 3 and 4. MechCommander. Crimson Skies. Supreme Commander. Space Siege. Then, at Hidden Path: Defense Grid, Left 4 Dead 2 and Counter-Strike: GO. DG2, in other words, is not his first rodeo.

“I was one of the only guys who said, ‘I want to go into games and show them 3D. Everybody was like … ‘There’s no such thing.’”

Nor is game development his first career. Story came to the industry by way of an aborted career in the culinary arts. Prior to that, he was in the U.S. Marine Corps.

It was his military experience that defined him. Sitting anxiously across from me in a small meeting room, elbows on the table, camouflage ball cap perched on his head, knee bouncing, sandaled feet poised to propel him (if need be) bodily out of the chair, he unwinds a tale of someone with an almost Forrest Gump-like tendency to appear in some of the most transformative events since the 1980s, in and out of the game industry. Starting with the civil war in El Salvador.

“It was a sketchy, stupid part of the whole … I mean, my commander in chief was ‘Ronnie Raygun,’” Story says, as if this explains everything. And in a way, it probably does.

Story’s unit was involved in a conflict most Americans don’t even think about and that the U.S. Congress refused to acknowledge at the time. It was tasked with recovering weapons sold to Central American warlords by the U.S. government. By “Ronnie Raygun.” “We were basically making deals with bad people because they were our bad people. It was very … ambiguous.”

Story was what’s called an “NBC” instructor, standing for Nuclear Biological Chemical. Basically the worst possible stuff to have thrown at you in war, and he was responsible for training fellow Marines how to survive it. After a series of “full engagements,” he began to wonder: If he died in El Salvador, would anyone ever know why?

Soon after, he left the Corps, but was recalled for the first Gulf War — back when everyone assumed Saddam would gas attack invading U.S. forces, forcing Marines like Story to run around in 120 degree heat wearing rubber suits and suffocating protective gear.

“We’re brutally honest. We don’t put numbers out there because that’s what we think the publisher wants to hear.”

“We had to deal with a lot of … but anyways,” he says. The conversation trails off. Story’s leg bounces. There’s more to this part of his life, but he’s not interested in sharing it. Or maybe he’s not allowed.

On to the next chapter.

After leaving the Marine Corps, Story studied chemical engineering, got bored, went to art school, applied for an internship at PBS and ended up working as a post-production computer graphics animator for the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. He also helped with the famous Civil War miniseries by Ken Burns. The one with voice actors reading soldiers’ letters over images of old photographs and wood carvings. The documentary that, in short, changed the way documentaries are made.

The more Story dug in to creating computer graphics for television shows, the more convinced he became that he could make 3D graphics for video games.

“I was one of the only guys who said, ‘I want to go into games and show them 3D,’” Story says. “Everybody was like … ‘There’s no such thing.’” Story decided to prove them wrong.

After leaving McNeil-Lehrer, he cut his game development teeth working at Location Based Entertainment, then FASA, the MechWarrior creator that was eventually sold to Microsoft and which formed the core of Microsoft Game Studios during the early days of the original Xbox. Then (after a brief detour to go to culinary school) he went to Chris Taylor’s Gas Powered Games, where he helped with Supreme Commander and other titles. When his longtime friend Dave McCoy called up (they worked together at PBS and again at FASA) and said he was co-founding Hidden Path, Story didn’t hesitate. He knew there was an opportunity to do things the “right” way, and not necessarily the cheap way or the popular way.

“We’re brutally honest,” Story says. “We don’t put numbers out there because that’s what we think the publisher wants to hear. We put those numbers out there because we know what we’re capable of. We ‘fess up to it. We’re like, ‘Hey, look, it’s gonna take this much time. It might cost you a little more, but at least you’re going to get exactly what you wanted in the time that we know we can deliver it in.’

“I would work at Activision and it wasn’t always ‘[hire] the best person.’ It was ‘[hire] the cheapest person.’ ‘Really? You brought this guy in because you saved a nickel? That nickel in the end is going to cost you more and more down the road.’”

The DG2 team. Back row (from left to right): Charlie Ngo, Mark Shoemaker, Tyler La Belle, Peter Freese, Scott Bodenbender, Mark Forrer, John Daud, Mark Heinen, Jeff Pobst Jon Lee. Front row (L-R): Michael Austin, James Osborne, Matt Johnson, Dacey Willoughby, Mark Terrano, Lex Story (partially hidden).

Back in the meeting room with Willoughby, Story is concerned about what exactly each milestone requirement entails. Citing a bullet point that reads “core housing,” he growls that that doesn’t even need to be on the schedule. It’s a simple piece of geometry, he says. And besides, someone is already working on it. Willoughby wants to be specific. She believes that other members of the team understand what a core housing is, and that they need one. She wants it on the schedule so people know when it’s coming, whether it’s simple or not.

The mood is tense, but focused. Willoughby takes it all in stride.

“I think that the production role here is about … kind of catering to what the partners are looking for, information-wise, and [then] catering to the team,” she tells me after the meeting. “Different team members look for information in different ways. Like, engineers usually just like lists of things, whereas other people like to look at spreadsheets with colorful information on them. Tailoring to everybody’s needs.”

In the conference room, Story pushes back: Levels are not made in pieces, in advance. He doesn’t know what a level will look like until he starts working on it, then adding things. For Defense Grid, he didn’t know a level would need alien tentacles until he looked at it and decided that it was missing something … like alien tentacles. So putting “alien tentacles” on the schedule would have been impossible. Which is, he says, what Willoughby is asking him to do now.

Willoughby relents, agreeing to change the wording, but the bullet point remains on the schedule. Story agrees to hit the mark.

“With our schedule and the way this game has come together for its development, we don’t know, really, how long it’s going to take,” he tells me after the meeting, in the small room, leg still bouncing. “We know it’s going to be a shitload of stuff, but we don’t know how long it’s going to take.

“Until I actually make it, I’m really just blowing smoke up your ass, because I don’t know. Just give me a chance to do it, one piece, and then come back and ask me how long it’s going to take.”

For Story, the goal with DG2 is to make the game feel like a comprehensive experience, like the action is really happening, or could really happen. He complains about the original Defense Grid’s gun towers looking like “towers with guns on them.” For DG2 he wants them to be war machines.

“Being shot at changes a lot.”

“They’re not these decorative pieces and then you happen to have a nasty bit on the beautiful tower,” he says. “It’s not that. When you deploy this thing … shit’s breaking loose. You’re like, ‘Oh, fuck, we haven’t turned that thing on in thousands of years and now we’re turning it on?’ That’s the feeling I want.

“The first game, it was very … everything was a relic. It was this old weapon system that was reactivated. In this one … no, these people forgot. They’re very happy. They live in this beautiful place. They all sit around and watch the sunset every day. They don’t worry about horrible things like traffic. Then all of a sudden their whole world is disrupted because this alien force is coming to attack them. It’s turning the world upside down. It’s turning the world ugly. So we have to employ these things that … the general populace doesn’t even know they exist. It’s a completely different feeling.”

It’s a feeling that Story, having been that thing no one knew existed, understands perfectly well.

“Being shot at changes a lot,” he tells me. “How you look at what normal life is or what you can cope with. … Games are emotional for me. They should be. When you look at them casually as, ‘Oh, yeah, I just wiped out a couple hundred thousand people,’ it dehumanizes you a bit.

“It’s still entertainment, but there are certain things that are told in stories … like when you read Homer, The Iliad. You’re like, ‘Uh, that’s not a casual thing.’ It’s not as beautiful as Brad Pitt running up and down the beach in his sandals. It’s pretty fuckin’ horrible. I’m trying to get there. I’m trying to be a good storyteller, and aren’t all game developers trying to be good storytellers?”

Critical section

Critical section

It’s the beginning of the day, on a Monday. A few hours before Willoughby and Story will haggle over architecture in front of the giant television screen in the Hidden Path conference room. I’m sitting in a chair stolen from beside Willoughby’s desk in the bullpen area where the DG2 team works.

The room is a mishmash of odd desks and random chairs. You get the sense the furniture has been accrued over time, or based on a person’s individual preference. It’s dark in here, but not dreary. Japanese screens wall off certain desks from certain others. Bookshelves form walls. Lamps shed a little light — but not too much. This is a place where people work, but there is energy and life. It’s “lived-in.”

“Things can go bad” is programmer speak for “disaster.”

Around me, in their own chairs, the members of the DG2 team are arrayed in a circle. They’re running through a scrum meeting.

Willoughby starts: “Today we’re going to meet and go over the plan for this coming milestone that we’re starting. Then we’ll talk to everybody and see if everybody agrees and we’ll know what people want to do. Then Lex and I are going to meet and go over the articles, so we can nail down some more specific tasks for you guys.”

Going clockwise around the room, members of the DG2 team chime in to state what they are working on, what their goals are for the week and what they expect to, or would like to, be working on next. This is how the project stays on track. When so much of each person’s work involves sitting alone, working at a computer, it’s easy for each to burrow so deep into their own rabbit hole that they could derail another person’s part of the project. Or miss the mark for not knowing what the mark actually was.

“Once you get them all talking in front of each other, then they discover things that they would not have otherwise known,” Willoughby tells me later. “Or something that they assumed that they knew is actually not 100 percent what they thought they knew. It’s revealing, even though they don’t think it will be.”

After Willoughby kicks it off, the meeting turns to Story, who briefly updates the team on the art he’s working on with his team. Then the meeting turns to Matt Johnson, also known as “Twig.” He’s the lead programmer and right now the production of the entire game is resting on his shoulders. He’s working on the level editor that Lead Designer John Daud needs to be finished so that he can start building levels. Johnson, as of this moment, is the linchpin.

“John’s having issues with the editor,” Johnson says. “I want to spend some time making sure it’s better for him.”

“Is that the flashing thing still?” asks Story, referring to an earlier bug.

Johnson: “It’s a new thing. And I want to fix our road-generation stuff. It’s causing crashes.”

He’s the lead programmer and right now the production of the entire game is resting on his shoulders.

Johnson describes the problem to me later. It’s something to do with “threaded processing,” “race conditions” and “critical sections.” I’m following, but just barely.

“Two things running concurrently, both trying to fiddle with the same part in memory,” Johnson explains. “One is using it and the other one changes it out from underneath the thing that’s using it, and it’s no longer getting what it expects. Things can go bad.”

“Things can go bad” is programmer speak for “disaster.”

Here’s how I understand it: Let’s say you’re using the game’s level editor to draw a road. You start drawing a road, putting a start point in one spot and an end point in another, and the program dutifully draws your roads. Then, for some reason, it stops. The program crashes.

This, in general terms, is what’s called a bug. Something in the program code causes the program to stop working. Part of Johnson’s job is finding those bugs and eliminating them. That’s what he’s working on now.

The particular bug involving roads has to do with two separate program “threads,” basically operations that are running simultaneously. One of the threads is what’s called the “main game loop,” which keeps track of all of the objects in the game, what they are doing and what they should look like. The other thread is the rendering thread, which creates the graphics. What’s happening is the two threads are trying to use the same section of code at the same time, which they’re not supposed to do. One is supposed to be able to lock down the section of code it wants to use, creating a “critical section,” and the other is supposed to wait for the first to finish. But that’s not happening.

For some reason the main game loop isn’t giving up its critical sections. It’s like a traffic signal that’s always green on one street, and always red on the other. Eventually cars will pile up on the red light and something will break. The rendering loop, unable to do its job, is piled up at the red light. Which is causing the program to crash. A bug.

Johnson’s been working on the problem for about a day. He’s not concerned about fixing it (to him it’s just code) but he’s not sure exactly what the problem is yet, and he can’t move on to anything else until he figures it out.

This is game development.

“You write some stuff and then it starts behaving … not like you expected it to,” Johnson says, summing up the complexities of code creation in typically terse and entirely factually correct programmer language.

Johnson is called “The Keeper of Defense Grid” by other members of the team. He’s the only employee at Hidden Path who’s worked on every iteration of the game, focusing on little else but Defense Grid for the seven or eight years it’s been in existence. Updates, expansions, ports. Then Containment, the Kickstarted DLC, and now DG2.

Before becoming The Keeper of Defense Grid, Johnson worked at Microsoft, on Office. Specifically on what’s called the “UEX,” or user interface team. That was much different from working on games. On a program like Office, there may be hundreds of programmers, but each works on a specific section of the program and all of the decisions are made from above. With games, particularly at Hidden Path, someone like Johnson has the freedom to take ownership of a project and make decisions. To be creative.

“The coolest part, in my opinion, is just figuring out how all the pieces fit together.”

Like most programmers, Johnson got a computer when he was young. He taught himself to code and made a text adventure game at around age eight. As he grew older, he’d spend time in arcades, falling in love with the classic cabinet games of the ’80s: Galaga, Dig Dug, Pac-Man. He always knew he’d be a programmer when he grew up. He participated in a special program for computer sciences at his Minnesota high school. He got his first programming job while he was still in high school. Getting into games, though — that was a bonus.

“The coolest part, in my opinion, is just figuring out how all the pieces fit together,” he says. “I like thinking about … ‘We need to create a system to do X.’ OK. What does that system look like? How does that interface with all of the other stuff in the game? I like that part of thinking about how something works and designing it in your head. Just the code architecture. Writing it down or thinking about it and then going ahead and implementing it.

“When you’re done, you have this little thing, and it’s like, ‘Hey, look, I created this! It’s cool! It works!’ I don’t know if everybody sees it that way, but I see coding as kind of a creative outlet, like an artist paints a picture. They have something they can show off to people. Creating software feels the same way to me. You have this little bit of something that you came up with and created. It just works.”

Back in the scrum, Willoughby wraps up the meeting and asks if anyone has anything impeding their individual progress. Anything “blocking” them.

“I’m blocking,” says Johnson.

Willoughby turns serious.

“Who are you blocking?” she asks.

“No, I’m building blocks,” he says, deadpan.

There is laughter. This is a common joke. The meeting breaks and everyone returns to their desks to plug away at making a game that will (maybe) come to life in about a year.

This is game development.

Editing: Matt Leone, Charlie Hall Design / Layout: Warren Schultheis, Matthew Sullivan
Illustrations: Warren Schultheis
Photograph: Hidden Path Entertainment

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The Simulation Dream

gamasutra.com

This article is a written version of a talk I delivered at Ottawa International Game Conference on June 1 2013.

I recently published a game design book called Designing Games. If you’re interested in learning design analysis and day-to-day process skills, check it out at Amazon or O’Reilly.

There’s an old dream in game design. It drives the design of games like SimCity, Dwarf Fortress, Tropico, The Sims, and Prison Architect. I like to call it the Simulation Dream.

In 1996, Starr Long, the associate producer of Ultima Online, talked about the game before release:

“Nearly everything in the world, from grass to goblins, has a purpose, and not just as cannon fodder either. The ‘virtual ecology’ affects nearly every aspect of the game world, from the very small to the very large. If the rabbit population suddenly drops (because some gung-ho adventurer was trying out his new mace) then wolves may have to find different food sources (e.g., deer). When the deer population drops as a result, the local dragon, unable to find the food he’s accustomed to, may head into a local village and attack. Since all of this happens automatically, it generates numerous adventure possibilities.”

That’s the Simulation Dream – the idea of making a complex simulation of a story world, which creates fascinating emergent stories as powerful as those you might write yourself. The idea bursts with potential. And it appears everywhere. Early in the development of BioShock, that game had an ecology too. There were three parts to it. Splicers would hunt Gatherers, who were in turn guarded by Protectors. The player was supposed to interact with and manipulate this ecology to survive.

But these dreams shattered. After its release, Richard Garriott said of Ultima Online:

“We thought it was fantastic. We’d spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it. But what happened was all the players went in and just killed everything; so fast that the game couldn’t spawn them fast enough to make the simulation even begin. And so, this thing that we’d spent all this time on, literally no-one ever noticed – ever – and we eventually just ripped it out of the game.”

The same happened on BioShock. While BioShock retained some valuable vestiges of its simulation-heavy beginnings, the game as released was really a heavily-scripted authored story. There was no systemic ecology at all. It worked fantastically as a game – but it wasn’t a deep simulation.

The problem is that simulations with a lot of moving parts quickly become complex in the intimidating academic sense. There are so many pieces interacting that the game can easily become too much to understand, predict, or play with. All the interesting stuff in the game ends up lost in the silicon, inaccessible to the human players’ understanding.

And that’s really the key – making complex simulated events accessible to human understanding. Which brings us to a nerdy idea I like to call the Player Model Principle.

The Player Model Principle

The Player Model Principle is this:

The whole value of a game is in the mental model of itself it projects into the player’s mind.

We make a simulation in computer code. That is a computer model of some situation – a dwarven fortress, a prison, and so on. But that is not the only model of that situation designers need to worry about. There is another model of that fortress or prison - the mental model in the player’s mind, which the player constructs while playing the game. Designers create the Game Model out of computer code, while the player creates their own Player Model by observing, experimenting, and inferring during the play.

In play, the Game Model is irrelevant. Players can’t perceive it directly. They can only perceive the Player Model in their minds. That’s where the stories are told. That’s where dilemmas are resolved. So the Game Model we create is just a pathway through which we create the Player Model in the player’s mind. 

The Player Model Principle indicates a source of risk. Namely, anything in the Game Model that doesn’t copy into the Player Model is worthless. That’s what happened with the ecologies in Ultima Online and BioShock. They didn’t enter the Player Model and so degraded into noise. This is a fairly obvious risk and is common in game design – all designers have seen players not understand a piece of their game.

But the Player Model Principle also implies an amazing opportunity. What if we could put something in the Player Model without implementing it in the Game Model? What if we could make the player perceive some event or relationship or meaning that wasn’t even there?

The advantages are obvious. We wouldn’t have to build it or test it. And it wouldn’t add any complexity burden to the game. While this sounds exotic, it actually happens all the time. It’s called apophenia.

Apophenia is seeing meaningful patterns in random or meaningless data. For example, look at this wall socket. What do you see? A face! And not just a face. But a face with a confused, perhaps pained expression. Why do you see that? There is no such personality here. But we perceive it all the same. It’s how we’re wired as human beings.

That ability to perceive personality and intent is a deep-seated human ability. It happens below conscious awareness, the same way you can look at a room and understand it as a 3D space without thinking about it. The only knowledge of the room you have is a 2D projection of it on your retinas. But some silent processor in your brain generates the perception of a 3D environment. In the same way, we effortlessly perceive minds and intentions. It’s why ancient peoples perceived spirits in rocks, water, sun and moon.

Apophenia is powerful and varied. Consider these Michotte demonstrations, named after the researcher who explored them in the mid-20th century.

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Discourse/Narrative/michotte-demo.swf

Michotte did many variations on these demonstrations. It’s amazing how much people see that isn’t there. We perceive human-like relationships between the balls, with concepts of dominance, gender, and intent. Some of the explanations are astoundingly complex. For example, “The little ball is trying to play with the big ball, but the big ball doesn’t want to play so he chases the little ball away. But the little ball is stubborn and keeps bothering the big ball. Finally, the big ball gets mad and leaves.” None of those feelings existed, except in the Player Model.

This apophenia – this perception of personality and intent where there is none – is the key to making a simulation game work. We can’t simulate the emotional core of a good story on silicon. Computers just aren’t good at handling generalized intelligence, intent, and feeling. But we don’t have to simulate those things. We only need to show the simulation equivalent of moving balls and let the player layer in their own emotional perceptions.

In this way, the simulation is a co-author of stories with the player. The simulation does the logistics and generates some random outcomes, while the player adds the meaning and pathos.

Apophneia example in The Sims 3

Here’s a story someone created with The Sims 3. He created a Sim version of himself and his roommate. Soon, a cute redhead enters their lives. And the redhead goes straight for the roommate, leaving the protagonist frustrated, angry, jealous, and alone.

But none of those emotions are in the game. The Sims 3 has a very simple computer model of social interactions which does not really depict deep human emotions like jealousy and anger. We perceive these things through apophenia – the same way we perceive a small ball fleeing from a large one.

Now the player takes control of the story. He hatches an evil plan involving a cheap stove, poor cooking skills (which cause fires), and wooden chairs.

And the plan works.

This story was co-authored between the player and the game. The game simulated some simple event (attraction between redhead and roommate), and the player ascribed meaning to it (jealousy and frustration) the same way he might have for the Michotte balls, even though that emotion was not actually in the simulatiion. The next part of the story was cued by him when he orchestrated the murder. The game simulated the logistics of firey deaths, but the sense of sorrow and revenge was, again, ascribed completely by the player. Most of this story is apophenia – present of the Player Model, absent from the Game Model.

Creating apophenia

It’s hard to see obvious ways to make players imbue meaning into a game that the game doesn’t actually have. But survey the products that do it well and you see patterns.

Borrow archetypes from real life and fiction

Use the archetypical jealousy plot, the evil stepmother, the good king, the classical hero. This saves exposition since the player already knows the stock character or situation you’re hinting at. This makes it easy for players to fill in absent details.

Allow players to project themselves into the game.

When a virtual character has your name pasted on, it is easy to imbue that character with motivations that are relevant to you. The same goes when the player projects in their friends, house, and so on, into the game. The Sims gains massively from this.

Create uncertain situations with human-relevant values in the balance

This is storytelling 101, but it bears mentioning. The simulation has to create situations that are worthy of being called stories. That means something important has to be in the balance, and the outcome has to be uncertain. Human values must be at stake.

Human values are things like life/death, alone/together, wealth/poverty. The game should revolve around things that affect these human-relevant values, and not descend into a dry simulation of traffic networks or production lines. Such simulations may be intellectually interesting, but will not generate effective stories because they are emotionally hollow.

Express or imply simple, pure, primal emotions

Annoyance is less interesting than fury because of the difference in intensity. Melancholic existential hipster sadness is less accessible than grief over a dead child because that grief is simpler, more relatable, and more primal. If the game has no opportunities for characters to feel such emotions, it is unlikely to generate good apophenic stories. Stories are built from primal feelings, so the subject matter of the simulation must create situations where characters would feel primal emotions.

Drowning in Complexity

So we’ve covered the benefits of apophenia. But we still haven’t solved the problem that killed the ecologies in Ultima Online and BioShock. How do we handle complexity? For apophenia to work, players have to see and understand interesting things happening. And this can easily prevented if they’re drowning in complexity.

Think of a simple system, like orbiting planets. For the most part, each planet only has a relationship with the sun around which it orbits

If you want to tell a story about each planet, it’s easy. You just look at its one relationship and talk about that. So the Earth orbited… and it orbited… and it orbited. The problem is that while this story is easy to see and easy to tell (satisfying the Player Model Principle), it is also quite dull. We need more interactions, more variation, more unpredictability. We need more complexity.

Now imagine we’ve made a simulation of a village. Each of the hundred villagers has a relationship with each of the others – father, friend, enemy, lover, or acquaintance. Each can work at the fishing pond, the market, the field, the mill. Each can satisfy their own needs at the tavern, in bed sleeping, at the outhouse. The water can flood the field. The outhouse can spill into the market and contaminate it, causing sickness, overloading the hospital, making the doctor work too hard, leading to divorce. It sounds like the Simulation Dream. But there’s another problem now. The connections multiply until the whole system appears as a gigantic hairball of complexity.

Such a system could support some very interesting stories. I just told you one of them. The catch is that it will constantly break the Player Model Principle. With so many relationships, it becomes very hard for players to understand cause and effect in the system, so those stories end up buried and unobserved.

What we want to do is create systems that are smaller and simpler than these giant hairballs, yet have more interesting, comprehensible interactions than simple systems like orbiting planets. What we really want is not a system that is complex, but a system that is story-rich. Story-richness is a term I invented for this article, and a concept that I keep in mind while doing simulation design. It has a simple nerdy mathematical definition.

Story-Richness: The percentage of interactions in a game that are interesting to the player.

Consider every interaction in the game – every crop harvested, every path walked, every work spoken by a character. Of all the interactions happening in the game, what percent are part of an emotionally meaningful story? In a successful game, this percentage is high. Much of what you observe will be part of a story. In a poor game, it is quite low.

Interestingly, real life and most fictional worlds are not story-rich! Most days for most people on Earth or in Middle Earth are quite mundane. It’s only very rarely that someone has to drop the Ring into Mount Doom. Follow a random hobbit in Hobbiton, and you’ll be bored soon. It reminds me of an old war simulation MMO, where players sometimes had to drive a truck for hours just to reach the front line. Yes, we know war is 99% boredom interspersed with moments of terror, but a game about it should not be.

This means that a simulation game can’t be a faithful simulation of its subject matter! It has to be a narratively condensed, intensified version of that village, fortress, or prison. And it has to seem true to the source material without being true to that source material. The Simulation Dream just got harder.

Creating Story-Richness

Like apophneia, the sources of story-richness are difficult to see. But there are some patterns. The basic principle is to avoid uninteresting events and create more interesting ones.

Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate

This is a complex piece of advice that I’ll try to unpack by example.

Imagine we’re making a simulation game and trying to decide how to model food in that game. How many classes of food do we put in? We have lots of options

All of them! Cheese, venison, beef, chicken, broccoli, barley, corn, beer, water, juice, and so on. Hundreds of options, each acting slightly differently.

Categories by type: Meat, vegetables, liquid.

Categories by quality: High-quality, medium-quality, low-quality.

One: Food is food.

Zero: Food is not modelled and nobody eats.

Which do you choose?

Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate.

The above sentence is fairly dense, so I’ll try to unpack it.

Consider the kinds of stories you want to generate in your game. To what degree are they about food? If you’re making a simulation of a New World colony in 1550, food will be important because starvation is a key driver of many stories in such a setting. The threat of hunger is, one way or another, part of most of the stories in such a setting. So you’d probably want a pretty nuanced food model. In such a game, the difference between seal blubber and vegetables could be important, because a diet of only seal blubber leads to scurvy during the winter, which leads to death. Human values are at stake!

However, if your game is a prison sim, you could make a strong case for not simulating food, or for simulating it in the simplest possible way. Because prison stories are not typically about food. Watch Oz or The Shawshank Redemption and few of the plotlines revolve around who is eating tasty bacon and who is eating cheap rice. A complex food simulation in such a game is likely to just add a lot of systems and noise that don’t contribute anything to the stories players care about. This complexity would be better added to the systems for gang membership, shiv combat, or friendship.

In general, lean on the simple side. You don’t have to simulate that much. The game is a co-author, not an author. It just need to hint at what is going on - the player’s apophenia will fill in details.

Use hair complexity for cheap fictional flavor

Hair complexity is my term for pieces of the simulation that don’t affect anything outside themselves.

I call it hair complexity because it sticks off the main ball of relationships without feeding back into it, like the hair on your head. Such hair complexity can be ignored by players who don’t wish to deal with it, while more interested or skilled players can pay attention and get its full flavor. It’s like the flavortext in a card game.

Examples: 

In Dwarf Fortress, each dwarf has an appearance. These appearances do nothing, but help players form mental images.

In Prison Architect, prisoners have criminal histories. They do nothing (so far), but they add flavour if you want to watch a certain prisoner.

In The Sims, sims have conversation topics represented by images in speech bubbles. For the most part, these topics don’t matter. They could talk about sailing or sports; it makes no difference. What matters is that they are talking and their relationship score is improving. But players can, if they wish, watch the stream of images and imaging a thread of conversation leading from money to cars to a mutual friend.

It was mentioned to me at a conference that hair simulations (e.g. Tomb Raider) are, ironically, hair complexity, since they don’t affect anything else in the game. Har har.

Hair complexity is cheaper to design. And since it doesn’t feed back into the larger game system, it doesn’t add complexity – just a bit of interface burden.

Eclipse Colony design case study: Crop Growth

Let’s put this into practice and look at a small example of a simple system design problem from my game Eclipse Colony. I faced this problem in early May 2013. Get ready for design nerdiness – we’re about to do some heavy analysis on what seems like a simple problem.

Task: Currently, plants just grow on a timer and can be harvested when the timer expires. But it’s odd that plants yield the same regardless of whether they’re exposed to vacuum or not. I’d also like some notion of farmers tending plants to help them grow and yield more. Fix these issues.

In this situation I wrote several candidate designs to choose between before I decided on a path. Here they were:

Option 0 – Skip it

Do nothing. Let plants grow the same on the same timer anywhere.

Analysis: Option 0 should always be there. There are always a lot of things we could work on in a simulation game. We could make a better friendship system. We could add animals or new weapons or wild plants. We could improve world generation. We could differentiate cultures, make a religious belief system, or add more nuances to the combat model. You have to be sure that what you’re doing is actually somewhere near the top of that gigantic priority list, because it’s easy to get tunnel vision. In this case, I decided that crop growth was worth working on because starvation is a big part of life in this fictional space colony. Furthermore, the missing behaviors had been bothering me in a direct and present way during playtests. It was a problem crying for a solution.

Option 1 - The yield variable

Each plant has a variable called yield.

When the plant is harvested, the amount of food that appears is based on yield.

Each time a farmer tends the plant, yield increases. Once tended, plants can’t be tended again until a certain time has passed.

Damage to the plants reduces yield.

Being left in vacuum reduces yield.

Analysis: I liked this system at first because it seems to reflect the fiction well. But there’s a big caveat: a new variable (yield) is undesirable complexity. Also, how will yield work for wild, unfarmed plants in the future? Will they even have it? How does it interact with more normal damage from fire or explosions? Do plants also have a health variable? The added complexity and edge case ambiguities made this seem a poorer choice.

Option 2 - Use the growth timer

Remember that plants already have a timer that counts down until they’re finished growing.

Each tending operation speeds the plants towards finishing growth.

Damage to the plants reverses their growth.

Being left in vacuum reduces plant growth.

Analysis: The simplicity of this is good because it doesn’t require any new variables. But this doesn’t capture reality – real plants don’t just grow slower when deprived of care or when damaged. They grow poor harvests, but they still flower around the same time. This system could lead to absurd situation like crops being slightly damaged repeatedly and just never becoming harvestable. Or plants being very well-cared for and being harvestable on a weird accelerated schedule.

Option 3 – Re-use the health variable

Plants have the standardized health variable.

Final harvest output is proportional to the plants’ health.

Plant health steadily decreases at all times (due to insects etc.)

Plants are damaged by vacuum and normal damage sources like fire.

Tending plants is essentially repairing their health.

Analysis: There are no new variables or interfaces, which is good. It captures the essence of the idea well enough. It even expresses the rotting of grown plants, since they lose health over time after they finish growing. This seems like the minimal representation that captures the subject matter and supports the stories I want the game to co-author with the player.

I ultimately decided to re-use the health variable. But even this could still change as the game gets tested more.

The Simulation Dream Reborn

It seems like maybe we killed the Simulation Dream. You can’t just simulate a super-complex world because players won’t understand it. And even if you did, it would be boring, because even Middle Earth isn’t very story rich.

But the Simulation Dream lives on. We just know we have to approach it very carefully. We can’t blindly simulate everything, because most things are boring and people can’t understand over-complex systems anyway. We have to carefully craft a condensed system of simple, understandable hints that cue players’ apophenia to do the heavy lifting of ascribing emotion and meaning. We have to make sure that system projects well into the Player Model. And we have to make sure that much of what happens in it concerns powerful, primal human emotions, not logistical details.

But if we do all that, I think the Simulation Dream is still in our reach.

Follow me at @TynanSylvester. My website is tynansylvester.com.

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