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Das sinnlose Kondom des Cheaters

agatagoralczyk.de

“Was für ein elender Mist!” motz ich in den Monitor. Meine Hand verkrampft sich um die Maus herum. Am liebsten würd ich das Teil an die Wand donnern.
Ich bin frustriert. Ich komme nicht voran. Das Spiel stinkt mir sowieso schon länger. Ich will aber den Rest der Geschichte sehen. Will sehen, wie das Ganze ausgeht. Vielleicht gibt es ja doch noch ne Rettung für meinen Abend.
Mein Freund Google spuckt unter “deus ex invisible war godmode” die Lösung aus: Ich werde unverwundbar.
Ich cheate. Und anschließend ist es wie immer: Das völlige Elend. Zum Frust, kommt noch mehr Frust, kommt die Langeweile. Ich spule das Spiel irgendwie nur noch mechanisch ab. Reine Pflichterfüllung. Angeödet renne ich durch die Gegenerscharen. Dem Abspann entgegen.

Cheaterfrust

Es ist ja nicht das erste Mal. Wenn ich ehrlich bin, passiert das jedes Mal, wenn ich cheate. Egal ob Komplettlösung, Trainer oder GodMode. Jedes Mal bin ich nicht nur vor sondern auch nach dem Cheaten frustriert.
Irgendwas stimmt da doch nicht. Ich hole mir den Cheat, um den Frust los zu werden, nicht, um mich neu anzufrusten.
Warum kommt statt der versprochenen und erhofften (Er-)Lösung noch mehr Elend über meinen Abend?

Anna und die Regeln

Kürzlich habe ich Anna Anthropys wundervolles Zauberbuch (1) gelesen. Sie schreibt dort, ein Spiel sei eine von Regeln geschaffene Erfahrung.

A game is an experience created by rules. (2)

Ein Spiel sei dazu gut, Dynamiken, Beziehungen und Systeme zu erforschen.

And that’s what games are good at: exploring dynamics, relationships, and systems. (3)

Regeln, die Erfahrungen schaffen. Das klingt, als könnte es mich weiter bringen. Vielleicht finde ich hier die Erklärung, warum der GodMode so ein Rohrkripierer ist. Schließlich benutze ich den GodMode, um Regeln zu umgehen.
Wie war das nochmal ganz konkret mit Alex D., den Regeln und dem GodMode?

Alex D. in Kairo

Ich verschaffe mir Zutritt in ein abgesperrtes Gebäude. Hier gibt es mehrere über Treppen zu erreichende Etagen mit verschieden Räumen. Zudem gibt es immer wieder Ventilationsschächte, durch die ich mich kriechend fortbewegen kann.
Der Aufbau der Umgebung setzt klare Grenzen und regelt, wohin ich mich überhaupt bewegen und wie ich von einem Ort zum anderen gelangen kann. Die Spielphysik definiert, wo Durchgänge und wo unüberwindliche Hindernisse sind. Wohin kann ich gehen, kriechen oder klettern. Auf was kann ich springen.
Der GodMode tastet diese Regeln nicht an. Ich bräuchte schon einen Cheat, der mich durch Wände, Möbel, etc. gehen lässt.
Die Erfahrung des Spiels, eine festgelegte und beschränkte Topografie zu erforschen, mich auf eine bestimmte Art fortzubewegen und Zugänge zu suchen, bleibt also erhalten.
Ich erlebe mit Alex D., wie es ist, Treppen herauf zu laufen, durch Lüftungsschächte zu kriechen und durch Räume zu gehen. Ich erkunde meine Umwelt, suche nach Wegen zu bestimmten Bereichen und freue mich über geheime Pfade. Auch präge ich mir die Verteilung und Anordnung der Räume ein, um mich zurecht zu finden.
Alex D. ist verortet. Mein Erlebnishorizont wird phänomenologisch erweitert.
Diese Erfahrungen der Räumlichkeit sind mir nur durch die vorhandenen Regeln der Spielphysik möglich. Mein Cheat hebelt diese Erfahrung nicht aus. Ich erlebe im Spiel tatsächlich etwas, was außerhalb des Spiels und seiner Regeln nicht möglich wäre.

Sehen, hören, schießen

Ein weiteres Element im Gebäude sind immer wieder fest installierte Sicherheitskameras und automatische Geschütze zur Überwachung der Räume. Beide haben einen bestimmten „Sichtradius“. Tauche ich in diesem auf, wird ein Alarm ausgelöst, bzw. ich werde beschossen. Dies kann ich durch Ducken, Bewegung im toten Winkel, das Abpassen der Kamerabewegung und andere Ausweichmanöver verhindern. Zudem habe ich eine Biomodifikation eingebaut, die mir eine „Unsichtbarkeit“ gegenüber dieser Technik ermöglicht. Mit einem weiteren Biomod kann ich Kameras und Geschütze kontrollieren. Schließlich gibt es noch bestimmte Waffen, die diese Elektronik außer Gefecht setzen.
Natürlich halten sich in den Räumen auch Personen auf. Zudem dürfen in einer futuristischen Welt Wach- und Kampfroboter nicht fehlen. Sie stehen an einer festen Stelle oder bewegen sich über einen festgelegten Pfad. Ähnlich wie die Kameras haben sie einen Wahrnehmungsradius: sie können mich sehen oder hören. Wenn dies passiert, greifen sie mich an, wenn sie mir feindlich gesinnt sind.
Auch hier habe ich verschiedene Möglichkeiten, die Situation zu beeinflussen. Durch Tarnung und leise Fortbewegung, durch Ausschalten der Personen oder Bots mit verschiedenen Waffen, durch Ablenkung.
Die von der oben beschriebenen Topografie beschränkten Bewegungsmöglichkeiten werden durch die “Wachelemente” noch weiter eingeengt. So kann ich mein Ziel nicht auf allen Wegen erreichen. Sicherheitsanlagen und Feinde als Designelement regeln, auf welchen Pfaden, bzw. zu welchem Zeitpunkt ich mich fortbewegen kann.

Selbstwirksamkeit

Gleichzeitig erlaubt es mir mein Handwerkszeug (Waffen, Biomods) den von den Designer festgelegten Ablauf punktuell zu stören oder zu verändern. Mit Kreativität und Ausprobieren kann ich diese fest verdrahtete Welt verändern. Kann meinen eigenen Weg finden. Kann meine eigene Erfahrung schaffen. Ich kann mich selbst als kompetent erleben und Erfolgserlebnisse sammeln.
In der Psychologie spricht man von Selbstwirksamkeit. Je öfter ich mich als erfolgreich erlebe, desto höher ist meine Selbstiwirksamkeitserwartung: mein Glaube an die eigenen Kompetenzen.
Das ist ein verdammt wichtiger Aspekt des interaktiven Mediums Videospiel. Erfolge sammeln, mich als selbstwirksam, als kompetent zu erleben. Das steigert nicht nur mein Kompetenzerleben und damit die Frustrationstoleranz im Videospiel. Wie alle Erfolgserlebnisse kann auch dieses auf andere Lebensbereiche übertragen werden.

Schwitzen, bangen, rennen

Der GodMode ändert nichts daran, ob ich von den Kameras oder Feinden wahrgenommen werde. Ich muss aber die Konsequenzen einer Unachtsamkeit nicht tragen. Die Reaktionen des Systems machen Alex D. nichts aus – sie ist unverwundbar.
De facto also heble ich das Regelsystem der Bewegungspfade aus.
Damit geht mir die damit verbundene Erfahrung flöten. Ungeduldig in einem Lüftungsschacht zu kauern und um die Ecke zu schielen, um den Raum nach Kameras und Patrouillen abzusuchen. Deren Bewegungsmuster zu verfolgen und minutiös einen Weg an ihnen vorbei zu planen. Einen perfekten Ort auszuspähen, um von dort die Feinde einen nach dem anderen aufs Korn zu nehmen und auszuschalten, bevor sie mir gefährlich werden. Nervös den idealen Zeitpunkt und Weg zum Loslaufen zu antizipieren. Sich endlich zum Loslaufen zu entscheiden, in der Hoffnung, heile anzukommen. Mit einer hit-and-run-Taktik durchzurasen, um hinter der nächsten Ecke getarnt in einem Versteck zu verschwinden. Mit Schweiß an den Händen in Sicherheit anzukommen, oder von den Geschützen zerfetzt zu werden.

Präservativ

Der kleine Akt, einen Cheat zu benutzen, unterbindet eine ganze Palette emotionaler Erlebnisse und gelebter Erfahrungen. Mit GodMode muss ich weder ausprobieren noch kreativ werden. Ich nehme mir selber die Möglichkeit, etwas zu verändern, eine Erfahrung zu schaffen, mich als selbstwirksam zu erleben. Ich betrüge mich selber um den im Videospiel gesuchten Effekt: Die Interaktivität, aus der – im Gegensatz zu anderen Medien – ein Kompetenzerleben erwachsen kann. Der Cheat wird zum Verhütungsmittel des Erfolgs.
Es ist völlig paradox. Eigentlich habe ich den Cheat benutzt, weil ich im Spiel erlebte, keine (oder zumindest nicht genug) Macht zu haben. Ich wollte mehr Macht, mehr Erfolge, weniger Frust.
Statt dessen kastriere ich mich mit dem Cheat selber. Ich kann gar nicht erst in eine Situation kommen, in der ich mich kompetent und erfolgreich fühle. Wie denn auch? Wo keine Erfahrung, da auch keine Kompetenz.
Das von den Entwicklern festgelegte, dem Spiel inhärente Regelsystem wird vom GodMode ausgehebelt. Spiele ich das Spiel mit GodMode, kann ich die Dynamiken des Spiels nicht erleben. Die Erfahrung, die durch die Regeln geschaffen wird, kann ich nicht (mehr) machen. Ich habe ja die Regeln gezielt ausgeschaltet.
Wenn aber diese von Regeln geschaffene Erfahrung das Sinn des Spiels für den Rezipienten (also mich als Spielerin) ist, dann schaffe ich mit der Abschaffung der Regeln auch denn Sinn des Spiels ab.
Der Cheat macht das Spiel sinnlos und das Spielen zur sinnentleerten Handlung.
Das saß.

Aktuell hänge ich wieder einmal in einem Spiel fest. Ich hatte schon überlegt, ob es dafür einen Cheat gibt. Statt dessen überlege ich lieber, was ich mit dem Frust sonst machen kann.

1. Anthropy, Anna: Rise of the Videogame Zinesters – How freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, dropouts, queers, housewives, and people like you are taking back an art form. New York : Seven Stories Press
2. ebd. S. 43
3. ebd. S. 46

agatagoralczyk.de

\\...........//: The Talk of Magicians

ellaguro.blogspot.com

today marks the 5th anniversary of the first release of Braid. i was going to write a eulogy of sorts, but it came at a bad time and i decided that Braid has already been picked apart so endlessly that i didn't feel a particular desire to contribute any more to it. then it occurred to me i already had an unpublished but article from early March of this year with some added edits i made today that delved into some of the issues i was planning on bringing up in the Braid post in a strange, roundabout way. it seemed oddly apt, and i don't quite know why this article never made it online anyway. so... without further ado, here you go:

(be warned, there are some spoilers for Corrypt!)

=====================================================

The Talk Of Magicians

"If Corrypt had more-polished graphics and sound, and were a bit longer, 100X-1000X as many people would play it...and it would make a good living for the developer" Braid developer Jon Blow tweeted. Other commercially-successful game devs followed suit: Hundreds developer Greg Wohlwend said in the same twitter conversation that he and Spelltower developer Zach Gage "agree(d) with jon" and that if Corrypt dev Michael Brough “worked on the visuals, the game would then be more accessible to outsiders". Blow, Wohlwend, and Gage then laid out advice for Brough on how to sell his game. Brough had for some reason set the original price on the app store at 1.00, which he changed to 2 dollars shortly after. "Part of it is building a name for yourself. these designs are good enough that you could build a base of people who would pay $10/$20 for whatever you do..." Blow said. Wohlwend agreed, and emphasized that by setting the price higher he'll "grow a following that will pay for (his) quality game design."

A few weeks prior, New Zealand-born, UK-based game developer Michael Brough posted on his blog re: his future prospects of full-time game development: "I expect to keep going for another year or two and then have to give up and get a real job". Indeed - according to his post, the only thing that brought Brough much money in 2012 was his game Vertex Despenser, which was a part of an Indie Royale Bundle that just happened to contain a pack of several titles from the commercially successful Serious Sam franchise in it. Still, 2012 was a productive year for Brough: he had four of his games in the app store: O, Glitch Tank, Zaga 33, and Corrypt. Shortly after making this post, his game Vesper.5 was nominated for a Nuovo award at this year's IGF. Brough's recent shout-outs for Corrypt from more high profile game devs like Blow, Canabalt creator Adam Atomic, and NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz (in an app store review) have also no doubt helped him get some more exposure since then. He even has been profiled recently in an issue of Wired.

But the value of this kind of social currency is becoming increasingly vague and hard to parse. A month after Brough's post, UK game developer Sophie Houlden, in a post reviewing her past few years as a full-time indie, wrote "I have enough money left to eat for a month, maybe two". Her situation is not particularly unique among indies. Brough's lack of app store success shows how difficult it can be to make any degree of living off selling one's games on distribution services. And Steam Greenlight, a supposed help for users to vote for lesser-known developers to get sold on the popular digital distribution service Steam, is not exactly what one might call a friendly venue for slightly offbeat developers like Brough or Houlden either. Putting aside the controversy surrounding the 100 dollar entry fee, one look at the list of Greenlit games and you'll see a very conservative cross-section of the "indie" community. Many even appear to be unfinished (On Greenlight, Houlden tweeted: "Greenlight is great, how else would unfinished games get a steam deal instead of hundreds of finished games!"). If it's much of a surprise to anyone that these are the games the Steam community would choose to put on the distribution service, they haven't been paying very much attention. But it does certainly dispel the oft-repeated cliche that the best or most interesting ideas eventually rise to the top.

==========================================

Walking into the world of a Michael Brough game feels like stepping inside of a machine that has existed for a very long time before you ever entered into it. His obsession with hyper-intricate backgrounds with interlocking networks of symbols, like these circuit board-style designs for his game Helix feel like occupying the nervous system of a living being - which makes no concessions to you, nor does it make any effort to translate its logic into human language. There's a constant tension between this alienness and your in-game character, of just being in the environment and then having to manipulate it to serve your own ends and progress in the game.

Brough's games are also particularly notable in the way they have no seeming desire to make concessions to players while still being somewhat approachable and "game-like" in terms of mechanics. He does all the visuals and sound in his games - and largely because of this consistency, across genres and styles they all feel like self-contained worlds. These worlds can be cryptic and unfriendly, often hostile to many players. The Wired article (somewhat bafflingly) describes them in its title as "ugly".

This "ugliness" is actually a highly-refined, organic style of Brough's that somehow manages to feel both coarse and delicate. Brough has been using this style across a majority of his games, but Corrypt addresses the possible intent behind the aesthetics by encoding strong environmental overtones into it. In Corrypt, your character awkwardly shuffles through and pushes a series of boxes and manipulates the environment to complete side quests and collect mushrooms and gems and keys. After your character pushes enough boxes to collect enough items, he has the power to spend them as currency to buy magic from a magician (which other NPCs in the game warn him to stay away from). Buying magic allows the player to completely alter the fabric of the environment, permanently destroying and warping it in all kinds of maddeningly unpredictable ways, in order to gain every last gem. This process enacts a lot of fear and anxiety in the player, especially as he or she moves further along, from seeing what her or his actions have wrought.
It's hard not to see the magic in the game as some sort of allegory on human beings' never-ending thirst for more resources, and the irreparable damage it enacts on the environment. It suggests, especially taken with his other works like Vesper.5, that environments are delicate spaces that need to be accepted on their own terms in order to really be understood at a deeper level.

These greater themes seem to be absent in the little critical writing that does exist about his games - they're not mentioned anywhere in the Wired article, nor in this detailed critical reading, which focuses solely on the mechanical aspects of his games. The strangeness and beauty of the environments become a marginalized backdrop to a game seen as only remarkable from a design perspective - something the game even seems to mock with its flat looking aesthetics and its big, square block pushing and its few mock-JRPG miniquests in the beginning.

Not only have Blow and other well-known devs failed to understand that these subtle aesthetic choices are actually an integral part of the experience of playing Corrypt - they've actually completely missed what the game is trying to communicate in the first place. The more I think about it, the more the gap in perspective and intentions between designers of "polished games" like Blow and more self-expressive, experimental types Brough seems to widen. Maybe this also explains Brough's seeming indifference about how he priced Corrypt in the app store.

Many commercially-focused indie devs might like to say that they intend to use their games to create a deep, thoughtful space through the design. But it's hard to skirt the reality that those devs are often just aiming to create smaller-scale, slightly off-beat versions of already commercially successful formulas. And when they aren't, the focus on polish and polish and on this somewhat impossible goal of reaching a mass audience - in a way that becomes oddly prescriptive and cynical and self-limiting about content, and erasing of the circumstances of those like Brough who maybe don't have the time or money or interest to endlessly "polish" one game. Like Blow et al aren't aware that making something which might not be accessible, or at least their conception of accessible, to a large audience could be anything but a lazy and self-defeating artistic choice in the end. Like they're almost offended that Brough refuses being their protege or following the same career path as them. The message to Brough in Blow's and others' tweets seems clear: either play by the rules or don't expect to make any sort of living off what you're doing.

====================================

Still, Brough is lucky. His struggles reaching a wider audience were just recently profiled in more detail in the previously mentioned Wired article. It remains to be seen whether this exposure will let him keep making games full-time - but in private conversation, he told me "I want to be clear... I don't want to be using the image of poverty to get attention" and that him and his wife are comfortable for now. He also acknowledges his privilege in a recent blog post: "If I'm any good at what I'm doing now, it's only through having had the chance to devote an incredible amount of time to it. I'm fortunate. Being able to put years of unpaid full-time work into something before seeing anything back from it is an incredible privilege."

If we know anything about games, we know that the people who make and sell games will need to find ways to make their games resonate with larger audiences outside of "gamers"  if they want a higher degree of cultural penetration. What this might mean, though, no one can really say. Successful indies are, after all, a privileged minority. I strongly suspect that a small percentage of games in the App Store (things like Spelltower, Hundreds, or Canabalt by previously-mentioned devs) make a vast majority of the money, but without anything concrete to prove it, it's still not a particularly rewarding path for most developers to take (to put it lightly). "Indie games" as we know them are barely now five years old, but the idea of a freak, Canabalt-type success now seems all but impossible now, let alone a Minecraft-level one. But the narrative that gets endlessly picked apart and reiterated and grossly fetishized by the press and by vulture-like indie devs is the one of the commercial success stories like Minecraft or Braid or Super Meat Boy - even though Sophie Houlden's (or thousands of less well-known developers') experiences are much more typical.

To Blow or Wohlwend, a talented designer accepting that his or her artistic choices aren't going to make she or he a lot of money might sound like bad a move. But then, the idea that any self-identifying artist finds this to be a not sane or valid perspective to have about his or her art just shows how insane and money-fueled the current climate of videogames, indie or not, is.

It shouldn't be so revolutionary to suggest that the world of a Michael Brough game might be giving players something meaningful - not just mechanically, but aesthetically, that commercially-focused devs like Blow or Wohlwend's games are not. In a world where a majority of indie games aren't known at all outside a relatively small group of insiders, his search for depth, both mechanical and aesthetic, certainly shows a much greater respect towards the works of very un-techie factions of the visual art and music world than his aesthetic's detractors' do.

The excitement that veils something much more sinister - the odd obsession with an unobtainable systemic perfection, often fueled by unrelated emotional pain or longing fostered by society - the thirst for money masked in frenzied experiments to remodel human behavior - an utter cluelessness and indifference to different modes of values or anything and anyone not in the room. This is the language of tech culture of the early 21st century, and the language implicitly embraced by Braid (even if it tries and fails to be critical of this from within). It's a language that just serves as another sad mirror, another small subset of what we are enacting on the earth and all the pain it causes - social, spiritual, environmental. It's a language that Corrypt, in all its seemingly insubstantial, clunky, box-pushing glory, is acutely aware of. It's a language that Corrypt is very critical of in both its aesthetics and design, in a way that Braid misses the boat on.

Conventional wisdom says that in the current market for indie/mobile/social games, players will eventually reach a point when they become so turned off by the absolute oversaturation of  disposable mass-market dross flooding distribution services. Talk is cheap, and talk, in the end, usually fails to account for people's changing needs and values. Then, we can hope, they'll start to actively seek out things which are more mechanically and aesthetically rich. But this could also be false optimism. Maybe the culture of games is so deeply channeled towards the most surface, dumbed-down communication in that the only hope for the future is the freaks coming in from the outside and trying create an entirely new model. Thankfully, Michael Brough is happy to oblige.

Whatever happens, let's pray to God the shovelware market suffocates itself sooner than later - because right now, Brough's games are some the few that offer any sort of real, untainted route out of the unending waves of shallow, manipulative entertainment. Maybe we'll even reach a point in the future where all the highly calculated programmers and businessmen with seemingly unending confidence and resources who make games - or, as Corrypt would call them: magicians, come face to face with a reality they can't undo anymore.

ellaguro.blogspot.com

Gamasutra: Adam Saltsman's Blog - Making Art for a Living

gamasutra.com

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.  

What follows is partially a response to Elizabeth Ryerson’s interesting post about art and commerce from earlier today, but is also just me getting around to posting something I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

Also, keep in mind as always, that what follows is written from a place of remarkable privilege. I’m a white, college-educated cis-male who grew up in a stable, tech-friendly, middle-class household in the midwest US. On top of that, a lucky early project of mine (Canabalt) received an overwhelming amount of attention. I keep these things in mind and on my radar, obviously, but I have no doubt that they still have some influence on the way I perceive the world around me…

BIG LIFE EVENTS

We had our first child when I was in my late 20s, about 18 months after releasing Canabalt. Throughout those 18 months, I… didn’t do much. I’ve thought a lot about why, and I can appreciate now that those 18 months, while they produced little of lasting value, still had a somewhat formative effect on me. But mostly I was sitting on ass and not taking shit very seriously for a long time.

I think a lot of people can look back and find an event in their life that acted as a kind of catalyst for a degree of either motivation or self-examination that was previously unknown to them. Often these events take the form of a personal tragedy, a family member lost, a divorce. I got lucky again; for me it was the birth of a crazy, crazy boy named Kingsley. After becoming a father I became very preoccupied with a kind of existential question about making games.

I’d already decided that that making games was a worthwhile way to spend my life. It can be easy (and even beneficial sometimes) to convince yourself that you’re just building trivialities and time-wasters, but even those things can have astonishing value to people. Play is so fundamental to our existence as animals, I see a lot of worth and even nobility in devoting yourself to making playful things, regardless of their intellectual aspirations (though those are great too).

(A quick aside - I will be sometimes using the word mainstream in this essay, and by mainstream I do not mean Call of Duty. I mean actually mainstream, as in mainstream humanity, not mainstream gamers.)

And so the question I was struggling with, following the arrival of our son, was not “why games?” but “which games?”

A PHILOSOPHY OF ART AND CRAFT

I spent a lot of time in 2011, more than I intended, traveling to games-related thingies, meeting new friends, hearing good lectures, and making time to catch up with old friends. Late at night I would put the question to trusted creators: how do you decide what to work on? Is it all about maximizing your impact? Is it about money? Self-expression?

Eventually I’d cobbled together my own Frankenstein’s monster of a belief system, which I still ostentatiously refer to as my Philosophy of Art and Craft. Be warned! The way I am using “art” and “craft” (much less “philosophy”) here is specific and bespoke; they were just the best words I could find at the time for this purpose. Anyways, my philosophy goes something like this:

Everything I make can be placed along this spectrum, with Craft all the way on the left, and Art all the way on the right. As I said before, my use of these terms is somewhat non-traditional; for me, these terms are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. For example, some things I’ve worked on (Canabalt, Hundreds) share the following properties:

accessible or obvious interface

subject material with relatively wide appeal

medium to long total play time (replay or content)

weirdness and challenge often hidden or optional

small impact on a wide audience

Games with these properties would be firmly slotted over near Craft, on the left-hand side. Other games I’ve worked on like Capsule or Fathom seem to share other properties:

idiosyncratic

specific, personal, small

built around a single idea

no effort to communicate in a mainstream way

big impact on a small audience

For me, it’s useful to place games with these qualities way on the right-hand side of the spectrum, over near the Art label. Remember, these labels do not have any intrinsic value, they are just boxes that are useful to me (as you’ll see later, I hope). Anyways, these games and designs are all very important to me personally. They are all expressions of my values and interests, and are representative of me trying to make the most interesting thing I can at that time. Some of these games express Craft traits, and others express these Art traits instead. It’s kind of up to the games.

Capsule, for example, would be ruined if I tried to force it into the Craft box. Too much of what I view as its inherent value depends on the traits I have labeled Art. But games like Canabalt and Hundreds required little in the way of compromise to fit snugly inside the Craft box. Canabalt was a straight fluke that way, but on Hundreds we put a lot of effort into making sure that the design was able to intrinsically communicate with normal people, but also be systemically deep enough to engage more serious players too. Hundreds’ creative integrity was actually strengthened by this process, even though the same approach would destroy Capsule.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MAKING A LIVING

Kind of everything, it turns out. As I said earlier, I’d already decided that making games was a worthy venture for me. I didn’t need a so-called philosophy of art and craft to figure that out. What this philosophy does help me with is figuring out, on a purely practical level, if a project has a reasonable expectation of connecting with a mainstream audience. The reason this matters is that connecting with a mainstream audience is a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for commercial success, which makes a useful metric from the specific perspective of making games for a living.

A quick example: if I’m looking at a prototype that has a lot of Art traits, that usually drastically lowers my economic expectations for that project, because it is less likely, by my own definition, to connect with a mainstream audience. I usually estimate an Art-oriented project will make $5000 or less if I even try to sell the thing in the first place. What this means on a practical level is that project could only sustain a month or two of development without outside funding (i.e. dipping into our savings). For some games this is totally fine - Capsule only took a month or so to assemble - but for other Art games that might not be enough time, which can be useful knowledge.

Likewise, generally speaking, if the design shares more traits with the Craft end of the spectrum, I might upgrade the idea to some kind of imaginary “commercially feasible” rank, since it is more likely to connect with mainstream players. Commercially feasible can mean a lot of things, but generally to me it means this game could, if all the planets aligned etc, reach a large enough audience to bring in at least maybe low six figures. In my book, that is a “hit” game. But while Craft games seem way better suited to being hits than Art games, at least for me, Craft game ideas that I’m genuinely interested in working on are more and more rare, since they tend to be less exploratory and strange by their very nature, and require a lot more sheer effort to produce. Thankfully there are a few that still hold my interest.

Let me emphasize too that this does not mean making a value judgment about one game idea or another, or even actually making one game and not the other. I derive an enormous amount of satisfaction from both types of games, for which I suppose I should consider myself lucky. So long as I can afford to, I will usually make both: build a Craft game, then build an Art game with the leftover money. Then a Craft game, then maybe another Art game or two, and so on. For me, this approach provides a creative and financial balance to my work that improves my ability to make things no matter where they fall on the spectrum. It also pays the bills (and, occasionally, then some).

Grave, for what it’s worth, is a Craft game. My other ongoing project, codenamed “Parlay”, is way more on the Art side. My hope is that Grave will help me be able to pay the bills while I further explore Parlay in the future. If it doesn’t work, oh well! I’ll probably work on Parlay a bit more, but then I’ll have to put together another Craft game.

Much worse things could happen.

THIS PART IS LABELED “THE CONCLUSION”

I realize, of course, that at best, what I’m talking about here is an unreliable and unproven heuristic based purely on imagination and wishful thinking. A lot of the time I feel like a kid who has been playing Street Fighter II at home alone and thinks he’s really good, but has never even been to an arcade. Maybe my tried-and-true strats just can’t cut it in the long term; I just don’t know yet.

I absolutely think it is possible for Art games to become mainstream hits, and of course it’s extremely easy for Craft games to become huge flops… and yet, I still recognize these basic patterns. This tendency for games of otherwise equal depth and merit to sometimes strike a large target with ease, and sometimes a small target with ferocity. And I recognize this pattern for games of the former variety, games that strike wide, to have a better chance at commercial success, just by sheer probability if nothing else, but also for a tendency to better resemble things people already buy.

Does recognizing that basic relationship irrevocably mutate you into a crass capitalist machine hell-bent on soul-eroding bland rehashes? Maybe. I hope not. Maybe by measuring it we change it, or maybe by knowing our enemy we can better protect ourselves from its influence. Maybe we have to choose between having some heuristics and having a day job, neither of which is ideal, and both of which have a lot to offer. I’m not sure.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should all make what you want, for who you want, whenever you want, for whatever reason makes your heart beat and your mind ache and your palms sweat. If you want to get paid to do that, then I think the approach outlined above is one possibility for framing the way you think about the part of your creative life where a bank account is involved.

I hope this was interesting to read and I am curious what you think; I’m on twitter too much as it is, so let me know! Thanks.

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The Making Of: Thomas Was Alone | Features | Edge Online

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The Making Of: Thomas Was Alone

Edge Staff at 11:45am August 14 2013

Mike Bithell was alone. It was the ninth weekend in a row he’d spent at his computer coding his new game. Or was it the tenth weekend? It didn’t really matter, because each week had become the same. “I was working in London with a 40-minute commute,” he remembers. “I’d get home about 7:30 each night, do two hours’ work on the game, then go to bed. At weekends, my girlfriend would make up a lot of excuses about why I couldn’t come out to the pub.”

Ironically, the game he was coding is all about friendship. Its titular hero is a lonely red rectangle who teams up with a bunch of other brightly coloured quadrilaterals to escape from levels full of water, traps and spikes. It’s a charming 2D platform-puzzler designed around cooperation, self-discovery and love.

Thomas Was Alone started life in 2010 as a Flash game. While working as a designer at Blitz Games, Bithell saw the explosion that was happening in the indie scene and was inspired. “I’d been in the game industry for about three years. I was a guy making stuff in a big team, and that story of one or two people making something on their own was very attractive.”

He started brainstorming ideas. Watching the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? sparked an idea for a platformer about two characters chained together like escaped convicts. There was another idea about a big hole that you had to stack characters to get out of. And then there was his love of Bauhaus, mid-century modernism and minimalism. It all coalesced when he sat down one weekend for a personal 24-hour game jam.

Uploaded to gaming portal Kongregate, Thomas Was Alone quickly racked up 100,000 plays. “A switch flipped for me,” says Bithell. “Even though I was working in the industry, I saw games as a closed shop. I thought you couldn’t get people to play your game if you didn’t have a massive marketing team or lots of money.” In a sudden epiphany, he realised that was wrong: “It was a fantastic mix of optimism and stupidity.”

Design documents show each characters’ traits – Sam was cut “for being crap,” says Bithell.

Thomas Was Alone was born in Flash, but it came of age in Unity. Bithell began work on the bigger, better version of his prototype in early 2011. He’d changed jobs, moving down to London to work as a design lead at Bossa Studios. His new employer had given the 27-year-old the unusual freedom to work on Thomas Was Alone in his own time without demanding to take ownership of it, as many other studios would.

His bosses knew he was making a game, but Bithell saw it as a process of learning more than one of development. “I’d never coded a full game before. The original Thomas Was Alone prototype was the most complex thing I’d ever built, and that was really simple. So I had to teach myself coding. Ironically, the development folder for Thomas Was Alone on my computer is called Teaching Myself Unity. For posterity, that’s what it will always be called.”

Unity represented a huge jump from Flash. By chance, though, the inaugural meeting of the London Unity User Group was held three weeks after Bithell started working at Bossa Studios. Its first talk focused on how to make a 2D game in Unity. And so Bithell found himself alone, coding in evenings and weekends.

Facing up to the constraints of his coding know-how, Bithell decided to make a virtue out of his limitations. He used the middleware component iTween for the game’s animations, but realised he had to keep his characters simple.

“I knew I couldn’t do character art in terms of motion-captured characters jumping around. I knew, from both a technical point of view and a game design point of view, that the game falls down if they’re not rectangular. Literally, characters wouldn’t be able to stack properly.”

Bithell’s notes on how the plot should unfold.

So he set out to make the best quadrilaterals he could. Quickly, his research brought him into contact with the work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose ‘neo-plasticism’ canvases obsessively meditated on primary-coloured rectangles and squares embedded in grid-like compositions. They were the perfect visual reference for Thomas Was Alone’s characters.

Armed with a colour palette by his friend Daz Watford, Bithell found the game evolving in unexpected ways as he paid more attention to the ratio of composition, colour, shape and scale. “The original prototype was a game about squares,” he explains. “The final game is a game about characters who happen to be square.”

There aren’t many games that can make you care about a bunch of geometric shapes; they don’t have eyes, or faces, or expressions. And yet in Thomas Was Alone, they have personalities. Take Thomas, the hero, an observational little chap who’s inquisitive about the world. Or Claire, the blue square who’s convinced she’s a superhero because she can swim.

Bithell is certain that his game design isn’t what secured Thomas Was Alone’s success. “I don’t think it is the strength of the game, which is a shame, because that’s the main bit I did. I think it’s competent. Competent in the actual sense, not the derogatory sense. It’s a good game made much better by the storytelling and everything that plugs into that storytelling.”

Just as Bastion is given an extra dimension by its narration, Thomas Was Alone is transformed by Bithell’s script. Tonally, his inspiration was the conversational style of British comedian Danny Wallace, and he spent a Christmas locked away in a room with Wallace’s audio books. “For me, he’s the great pub storyteller,” says Bithell. “He just pulls you along on a story.”

Danny Wallace: “My job was to try to make you care about these blocks as if they were real people.”

Finding the right voice actor to breathe life into the lines proved impossible, though. The story – about artificial intelligences unleashed inside a computer mainframe due to a programming glitch – needed warmth to work. Despairing, Bithell approached the comedian directly. After all, if you’re looking for a Danny Wallace type, there’s one person who’s best placed to nail that.

“Well, I’d definitely put myself in the top three,” laughs the comedian. A former game journalist and occasional voice performer in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Wallace remembers being instantly taken with Bithell’s opening email. “He’d had a couple of drinks, I think. I’d had a couple of drinks and he sent me this really well-written email. Immediately I felt like he was talking to me, and there was some warmth to the way he was writing.”

Intrigued, Wallace fired up the accompanying build of the game and was charmed by the colourful blocks. “It was magical and unusual,” he remembers. “When you first see a screenshot of it, you can forgive doubters online for going, ‘What the Hell is that? It’s just a block jumping over a thing!’ But when you see it move and you feel the world, the game feels much more fully formed than just a simple screenshot might imply. My job was to try to make you care about these blocks as if they were real people. But they already felt like they were real to me, really, just in terms of that world that Mike created so brilliantly.”

From Bithell’s perspective, Wallace’s involvement was just another piece of remarkable good fortune. The comedian, who’d go on to win a BAFTA for his performance as the game’s narrator, joined the ranks of people who’d gone out of their way to help the one-man outfit.

“A big part of making Thomas Was Alone has been the kindness of strangers,” Bithell says. “Things like [game designer] Eric Chahi talking about Thomas Was Alone in interviews just because he liked it and wanted to help out. Side, who did the voiceover recording, helping me out and making sure I could get into the studio at a reasonable price. These are the guys who do Assassin’s Creed. They didn’t have to do that, but they did. [And] the guys at Audiomotion, who did this awesome April Fools’ Day trailer for the game. So many people have helped out – my previous employers, who let me develop a multiplatform game in my spare time. Not many studios would have been cool with that.”

Suddenly, Bithell wasn’t alone any more. Like Thomas, he had built a team of friends around him. “I put out a friend request and the Internet answered,” he jokes. When Thomas Was Alone became available for download via a standalone website in late June 2012, and on Steam in November, it quickly found an audience. But there was one more friend left to emerge from the wings: Sony’s PlayStation division.

Shahid Ahmad loves games. He especially loves indie games. He’s a senior business development manager for Sony UK, and has been responsible for signing everything from Hotline Miami to Luftrausers to the company’s platforms. His team of consultants spend “their entire working life – as well as, it seems, their waking and sleeping lives – playing and analysing games”.

Back in 2012, his group was looking for content that would suit PlayStation Vita. When Ahmad saw the April Fools’ Day video for Thomas Was Alone, which jokily pretended that the blocks were motion captured, he was “absolutely bewitched”. Impressed to find a solo developer using non-traditional marketing techniques, he reached out to Bithell on Twitter. “At first, he must have thought I was a stalker,” says Ahmad with a laugh, “because I didn’t tell him I was from PlayStation. He thought I was just a fan.” They exchanged a few messages.

When Thomas Was Alone came out, the game charmed Ahmad all over again. “I thought it was inspired. I thought it was taking independent games in a new direction. I loved the use of narrative and that it was totally, unapologetically about squares, although that wasn’t the point of the game,” he explains. “I thought all of these unusual messages very much suited PlayStation and one of the directions in which we were taking Vita.” A deal was hatched. With the help of Bossa and Curve Studios, Thomas Was Alone was ported across to PS3 and Sony’s handheld.

The current narrative of the next-gen console war is that Sony is positioning itself as the go-to place for indies. Is that true? “This is happening,” says Bithell. “I come from a console background. I’ve developed games for consoles. Obviously, I was in junior positions in those conversations, but you could tell the kinds of relationships that took place between console developers and publishers. Sony are trying to tear down every limitation. They’re making a smart call. It’s that old war analogy: every army learns to fight the last war just in time for the next one. That’s what’s happening with console generations.”

For Bithell, Thomas Was Alone arrived on the PlayStation platform in the midst of “a period of transition, I think, from the old-school way of working with developers to something new”. He’s convinced the new Sony is a more open place. One look at the Twitter feeds of Bithell and Ahmad suggests things really are different than they were a few years ago. Ahmad isn’t just a suit. He’s accessible, interested – the human face of a monolithic corporation, much like his colleague Shuhei Yoshida, president of Worldwide Studios.

It’s a view echoed by Bithell himself. “Shahid is my man,” he says warmly. “Sony are moving with the way things are now.” He mentions a meeting he’s having with the company about his next project. “I have no compunction telling you that [meeting is happening] because [Ahmad and I] had a chat on Twitter about it. That’s a big shift. It changes a lot. It’s a different way of doing business. It suggests Sony is becoming a very different company. Maybe they have learned that focus is a good thing for them. It’s something they maybe didn’t get right in the last generation – they may have spread themselves too thin and not had quite the focus they should have had. I think they’ve learned a lot. The fact that I’m happy telling you that opinion and am happy for that opinion to show up in this article kind of demonstrates how they’ve made me feel. There’s no way you’re going to hear anyone talking about Microsoft in that way, at least not publicly. There’s a very different relationship forming.”

Bithell says he has enough capital to work on his own games for three to four years. “In indie terms, that’s kind of the only important thing,” he suggests. It’s clear that his world has changed. Mike Bithell was alone, but he isn’t any more.

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The Making Of: Final Fantasy VI | Features | Edge Online

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The Making Of: Final Fantasy VI

Edge Staff at 02:45pm August 5 2013

Even back in 1994, the Final Fantasy series was settling into the sort of routine for which it later became well known – and was often scorned for. While each of the five formative games was set in an unfamiliar universe, with an unfamiliar clutch of characters to serve and know, recurring rhythms and themes had already been established that seemed fundamental to its identity.

Crystals and oversized chickens, knights and castles, a mystical power threatening the world and an unexpected orphan hero: all echoes of Tolkien bottled, infused with Japanese aromas, and then blasted out in bombastic, near-annual game releases. The details changed with each game, but the tone – not to mention the systemic DNA – remained a constant. Lose these anchors and you’d risk losing the Final Fantasy spirit, the only thing yoking one game to the next.

The sixth game, however, interrupted that rhythm in many unexpected ways. Drawing back the curtain on a steampunk world quite unlike any seen in Final Fantasy before, it opened not with the burning of a village or a vainglorious battle between buff-armoured knights, but with a squadron of weary robots trudging mournfully through the snow. It’s here, in the remote town of Narshe (population 2,100), that we first meet the ensemble cast, a rogue’s gallery of eccentrics pulled from the extremities of society – the high royal and penniless pauper – whose stories soon intertwine in delightful, unexpected ways.

“We began work on Final Fantasy VI with the idea that every character is the protagonist of the story,” says Yoshinori Kitase, the game’s director. “Everyone on the team contributed ideas for characters into a melting pot. We were very keen to design a game featuring individual episodes for each character. In fact, Final Fantasy VI’s influence may have been responsible for the greater emphasis on character creation in subsequent titles in the series.”

Final Fantasy VI director Yoshinori Kitase.

For Kitase – who today keeps a steady hand on the Final Fantasy tiller following the departure of series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi from Square Enix – this was his first directorial job. It was a significant promotion for the young designer, who had worked in a range of disciplines across Square’s 8- and 16bit titles. Prior to Final Fantasy VI, he had penned the story for Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy (originating key plot points and turning them into scripted events in the game), been field map designer for Romancing SaGa (shaping the game world’s landscape) and, most recently, event planner for Final Fantasy V.

“When it came time to begin work on Final Fantasy VI, Sakaguchi divided responsibilities between us,” says Kitase. “He placed me in charge of event production, carefully assessing those parts I directed. I was essentially given the task of unifying all the scenarios and dramatic sections in the game into a coherent narrative.”

Final Fantasy VI contains the largest cast of playable actors of any game in the series, with 14 permanent playable characters, and a further clutch of key performers who are either momentarily placed within the player’s control, or are crucial to the plot’s development. With so many discrete elements, ensuring coherency and intelligibility for the player was inevitably Kitase’s most demanding challenge. “If we consider that Final Fantasy games are divided into two core elements: battles and drama,” says Kitase, “then I oversaw design of the latter while Hiroyuki Ito supervised the battle aspects. It was then up to Sakaguchi to bring the project together as a whole, intelligible piece.”

Work began on the game almost immediately after the international release of Final Fantasy V in 1992, and the entire production lasted just one year. Even though lines of responsibility were carefully drawn – necessarily so, for such an ambitious game with such a challenging development schedule – in reality the creative journey proved loose and collaborative.

“It was a hybrid process,” explains Kitase. “Sakaguchi came up with the story premise, based on a conflict with imperial forces. As the game’s framework was designed to provide leading roles to all the characters in the game, everyone on the team came up with ideas for character episodes.”

Kitase’s role was to piece these disparate vignettes together like a puzzle. “I can’t say that I conceived the complete story,” he recalls. “Locke and Terra, for example, are greatly coloured by Sakaguchi’s influence. Meanwhile, the background and in-game episodes for Shadow and Setzer were mainly devised by Tetsuya Nomura [character designer for the Final Fantasy series from the seventh game onwards], while Kaori Tanaka [AKA Soraya Saga, illustrator and co-creator of Xenogears] provided suggestions for Edgar and Sabin, among others. I devoted my time and effort to creating Celes and Gau.”

While Square’s other in-house teams played with the idea of multiple protagonists in an RPG via another contemporaneous game, Live A Live, Final Fantasy VI was the first high-profile game to make the perspective-shifting storyline work with such flair and vigour. “Looking at videogame design and development up to that point,” says Kitase, “I supposed that action games, for example, relied on sense and instinct while RPGs appealed more to reason and logic. What made the Final Fantasy series so innovative was the emotion realised from drama within the game in addition to those other elements. I believe this innovation was more apparent than ever before in the sixth game. This game really brought that creative goal into full bloom.”

The Japanese RPG had always wrapped around the spine of story, but for Kitase and his team Final Fantasy VI offered a chance to increase the creative emphasis on narrative and character exposition. “The idea was to transform the Final Fantasy characters of the time from mere ciphers for fighting into true characters with substance and backstories who could evoke more interesting or complex feelings in the player,” he says. “Since the scale of each character’s individual story was expanding, I began linking this to the concept of different dramas developing, according to the player’s choice of character in the game.”

Final Fantasy VI’s technique for investing players more fully into the narrative and inter-character relationships was to switch control of characters or groups of characters over the course of the storyline. This enabled players to function as both spectator and active participant in the business of drawing the various narrative threads together, as if taking part in an extended play.

Much of Final Fantasy VI’s plot revolves around Terra Branford.

Each of the controllable personalities encountered has a completely distinct – and unique – way of behaving in battle, not to mention their own fully fleshed out backstory to uncover. The battle system, while more orthodox than the game’s story, is also wonderfully inventive, and the fact that each character in the game has their own clutch of moves and approaches – echoing their personalities – helps emphasise the character development. Gau, for example, is a feral child found wandering the desert, who can be tempted into the party with a slab of dried meat and has the capacity to learn new attacks from the animals and monsters that the party encounters. This marriage of backstory with active application in the game world fostered a clarity and precision rarely seen in releases of the time.

But balancing a game with multiple personalities in the lead role was not without its challenges. “Maintaining a careful equilibrium between all the characters was probably the greatest challenge I faced,” says Kitase. “However, I ended up so involved with each personality while scripting the scenarios that there were points where, looking back at the game today, it’s clear that I somewhat lost this balance. For example, as the scenes featuring Celes and Kefka progress, these characters (while not directly playable in the game) became far greater and more influential than originally intended when development began.”

Released toward the end of the life of the SNES (AKA Super Famicom), the game brought with it a number of technical difficulties as the team attempted to draw ever-more impressive spectacle from the hardware. “From a technical point of view, I’d say our greatest challenge was the 3D rail scene,” says Kitase. “We used the Super Famicom screen support mode known as Mode 7 and painstakingly illustrated the graphics one dot at a time to create a mock 3D effect. Although producing these graphics was a huge undertaking, the results we finally achieved were unfortunately far rougher on the eye than we had originally hoped. So, in the end, this section didn’t leave anything like the lasting impression we intended for them.”

Final Fantasy VI launched on schedule and within budget; but not without the strain of a significant crunch towards the end of production, which was necessary to iron out remaining issues in the code. “A huge challenge as production continued was managing memory, which, at the time, couldn’t be entrusted to computers and had to be done manually,” explains Kitase, “This meant human errors were much more prevalent than, say, when making games today.”

Moreover, at the time that Final Fantasy VI was being developed, Square had no tools or software to aid programmers in detecting those errors. “I distinctly remember the process taking a long time,” Kitase says. “In some ways, there’s very little difference with debugging a game today when it comes to technical problems: we’re still tormented by bugs! And goodness, the final debug phase of Final Fantasy VI was an exhausting affair. In fact, I missed out on the early reception to the game, as I took a month or so of holidays after production was concluded just to rest and recuperate.”

More Final Fantasy VI character art.

Final Fantasy VI’s story is atypical, both in terms of the series and the genre into which it somewhat awkwardly fits. The game suffers none of the bloated excesses and philosophising associated with Japanese RPGs of the time, each character presenting believable motivations, flaws and quirks with an authenticity that enriches the narrative. The plot keeps fantasy metaphysics to a minimum, instead focusing on more grounded topics of politics and empire-building – a decision that helped to endear and connect the game with western audiences, which found the storyline more immediately accessible and welcoming to their sensibility.

“In those days we didn’t have the Internet and, as a more junior staff member, I wasn’t given the opportunity to venture overseas – so I wasn’t really aware of the reception the game received outside of Japan,” says Kitase. “However, in more recent years, I’ve regularly tagged along on PR tours to Europe and America – and I have had a lot more opportunity to talk with foreign media and fans. I must say, whenever I go on these tours I’m taken aback by the number of westerners who ask me to sign their Final Fantasy VI cases. In Japan that would apply more to the subsequent game, Final Fantasy VII, but I get the impression there’s a large number of players in the West who prefer the earlier game.”

Launched in America with the title Final Fantasy III (the true second, third and fifth games in the series had been overlooked for translation), the game’s English translator, Ted Woolsey, was granted just 30 days to complete his work. This gruelling deadline was compounded by Nintendo of America’s strict guidelines on the use of language in games for its system. In an interview at the time Woolsey explained that “there’s a certain level of playfulness and… sexuality in Japanese games that just doesn’t exist here [in the USA], basically because of the rules and guidelines”. The censorship extended to graphical assets, with nudity being covered and even some signs in being changed from ‘Bar’ to ‘Café’.

Perhaps inevitably for a series that had established clear themes and ideas in the previous titles, the abandonment of certain of the Final Fantasy touchstones of the past was disorientating to some Japanese players upon release in 1994. “The absence of crystals – a symbolic item, which ran through previous FF titles – in this game, and the realisation of a fully technological civilisation and so on seemed to bewilder some of the more serious fans of the series,” says Kitase. “That said, the impact of the opening scene, with Magitek Armors traversing through snowy fields, was well regarded; and fans were willing to accept the challenging culture of the game, so it was mostly well received at the time.”

Final Fantasy VI’s popularity has continued to grow as the series has gained wider recognition in subsequent years, with new fans tracking back to the earlier titles to explore its beginnings. It’s also worth noting that this was the final 2D Final Fantasy game before the series switched from Nintendo hardware to Sony’s PlayStation, and as such the game represents a development team in full control and mastery of the hardware.

“It’s maybe strange to say [this], but I miss the limitations of making games in those days,” Kitase acknowledges. “The cartridge capacity was so much smaller, of course, and therefore the challenges were that much greater. But nowadays you can do almost anything in a game. It’s a paradox, but this can be more creatively limiting than having hard technical limitations to work within. There is a certain freedom to be found in working within strict boundaries, one clearly evident in Final Fantasy VI.”

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Teaching Stanley

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Erik Fredner

Harvard Englisher. Videogames, lit, film. Scrubber of toilets; ukulele-devotee; sometime-DJ; part-time rower; occasional juggler.

Published

August 9, 2013

I tell my class, “We’re going to play a videogame today.” Cheers, uproar, what you’d expect to hear from students thinking about platforming instead of reading. “And we’re going to beat it six times in six different ways before the end of class.” A palpable calm. Looks like we’re not playing Super Mario.

I have thirteen aspiring fiction writers in the room (fourteen, counting me), and we’re talking about the relationships between the author and the reader, and between the narrator and his/her/its characters. What are the responsibilities the author has to a reader and how do they go about fulfilling them? The classic road in to this discussion with teenagers would be reading The Turn of the Screw, talking about unreliable narration and the fear through uncertainty James creates. It’s short, it’s approachable, it’s canonical, it’s high school. It’s also a bit stale. The slightly more progressive approach to that class would be to ask whether a book written in the late nineteenth century by a white man also fails in other respects to establish and hold the author-reader relationship with a twenty-first century audience. But this class isn’t happening in a school with state-defined or -curated reading lists and standardized tests. This is summer camp. Creative writing summer camp. We can teach just about anything. But I want to argue here that using videogames—and especially Stanley—ought to be fair game, so to speak, for regular school, too.

Writing about The Stanley Parable feels almost like a required extension of the game itself. It’s the last level, so to speak, the decompression exercise. And because the game inevitably leaves one with more questions than answers (but also asks so many probing questions about the narrative possibilities of the game form), it seemed like a memorable jumping-off point for the class and a good use of our hour-and-a-half that morning.

What The Stanley Parable is really about doesn’t become completely clear until the first cutscene ends and you’re presented with your first choice (other than starting the game, of course, but I’m getting ahead of myself here). The cutscene tells us that Stanley, employee number 427, works in a place where he pushes buttons all day, a place that seems to echo that children’s song about a poor, servile button-masher named Joe:

“Hi. My name is Joe. I got a wife and three kids and I work in a button factory. One day, my boss came to me and said, ‘Joe, are you busy?’ I said, “No.” ‘Push that button with your right hand.’”

And the verses repeat with the boss asking him to push buttons with his left hand, right foot, left foot, and so on until The Evil Industrialist has Joe using every (decent) body part to press as many buttons as possible, contorting his body to do a job better suited to a machine, while poor Joe feigns happiness and job satisfaction in a cold factory. Stanley is another Joe. And, while you’re playing, Stanley is also you. Which, by extension, means that you too work in a button pushing factory, so long as you consent to working there. I think you see where this is going.

Thing is, The Stanley Parable is as heavy-handed a metaphor about videogames as that little ditty about Joe is about the industrial revolution. Where factory workers submitted (and submit) themselves to egregiously long hours spent doing tasks as mechanical and menial as pushing buttons for pay, videogame players often do work as disempowering and pedantic as pushing buttons that appear on a screen under the guise of fun. When we play games, we’re showing the side of ourselves that’s most similar to Joe, the side that likes being told that we’re doing the right thing at the right time, the side that likes micro-rewards, pleasant sounds, blissful productivity. This familiar, gamey plucking of the reward center is The Stanley Parable‘s in-road and also its trapdoor. But, of course, if you want to play this game, you have to allow the floor to be dropped out from under you, which my students happily did.

The classroom was set up with a hot seat in the middle, mouse and keyboard, facing a projection of the game up front. Other students who weren’t playing were scattered throughout the room, staring intently at the screen as the person playing for that round made their choices, moved through the company’s bleak and unpeopled hallways. From a pedagogical standpoint, one of the great things about The Stanley Parable is the fact that the player is never in danger. Or, to be truthful, the player is never in danger from which they could protect themselves by playing better. You can take as much time as you like in making a decision, but once you make it, there’s no turning back. This was great because it’s a low-stakes proposition, especially for people who are uncomfortable with or have never played games before. Stanley is immediately accessible, unlike a lot of other great chin-stroking games in recent memory. For example, I would love to lead a group play session of Spec Ops: The Line, but the problem with that is that it wouldn’t be accessible to anyone in the classroom except those who already have skills in first- and third-person shooters, the very group which that game takes as its subject to interrogate and criticize. Thanks to Stanley’s mechanical simplicity, it was great to see students who admitted to never having played games before jumping up to take the hot seat after seeing others play, knowing that they risked little and had a lot to gain in learning the ways of WASD.

Once the scene was set and the students had started playing, a seasoned gamer took the helm. After the introductory cinematic, the game introduces its foundational binary—obedience versus free will—by presenting its first choice: a fork in the road, two open doors. The friendly-sounding British narrator, cued by the player’s moving into the room with the fork, says, “Stanley walked through the door on the left.” In a deft bit of voice acting, the word “left” is said with just enough force to imply that the player really ought to go to the left, that it’s a foregone conclusion, a verbal waypoint, what you’re supposed to do. To echo a line the narrator says in one of the possible endings, it becomes clear at this moment that “This is a videogame.” We expect to go where we are guided; we expect to be guided to where we ought to go. All the signs are here: the narrative artifice, the keyboard and mouse, the screen. You’re being guided around by a disembodied, unexplained, yet highly knowledgable voice that seems to know both where you are, should be going, what you are thinking, what you know. A writer, in other words, of your character. But the use of the past-tense in the narrator’s speech as well as the overt symbolism of that first choice—to obey, left, or disobey, right—gives the player the opportunity to re-write the story, so to speak. And this is where Stanley gets interesting.

The first player, fluent as he was in the language of videogames and understanding the basic conceit of (dis)obedience, immediately disobeyed, going for the door on the right. Everyone laughed. That was his personality, a script-flipper, owning the trait quite literally in this case. After you pass the fork, the narrator gives you one polite chance to correct your mistake, throwing wide a door in the hallway that would lead you back on the correct path, politely assuming that you simply mixed up your right and left at that last choice. Our intrepid hero—the player—barreled on past that door, into the elevator. This is where the narrator starts to get disappointed, where it starts to get personal because you are messing up his story. “Oh, Stanley,” he laments, his clear disappointment almost a reward in itself for the disobedience. The level goes on like this, and, without dropping too many spoilers, let’s say that there was a lot of screaming at this particular ending.

Lights up in the classroom, and I did a quick survey to see how people were feeling. Without my saying a word, the first player had jumped out of the hot seat and traded places with the next Stanley. And so the story pressed on, with each successive Stanley trying to correct the mistakes of their past incarnation. The whole session had aGroundhog Day feel to it.

As I mentioned earlier, Stanley has six possible endings, each representing an extremity of obedience or disobedience and varying shades of each. Only one of those endings is followed by the words “The End” (and Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For A Film”). I’ve seen playthroughs of Stanley where “The End” comes first and it doesn’t carry any of the emotional oomph it’s owed; those words are merely an absence in the next five endings. Luckily, our session that day ended with “The End,” and the students really felt like they’d won something because of it. They’d earned their freedom from the oppression of Stanley’s narrator, made choices independent of the narrative needs of the story, read between the lines and found hidden doors, escape routes from seemingly fixed choices. And it was kinda fun.

But then we had to address the purpose of our play, to decompress. We journaled generally about the experience for a few minutes (remember, writing is the last level), recording impressions and thoughts, and then came back to a group discussion about the relationship between Stanley and his rather forceful narrator. Each of the fiction writers pitched an explanation of their relationship, motivating Stanley’s silence, and what psychological traumas might have affected each to find satisfaction in pushing buttons and forcing characters to do things they shouldn’t want to do, respectively. But the question we always came back to was this: Why would an author craft his or her story with the appearance of choice but the absence of agency? Or, on the other side of the coin, why do we pretend that there is free will in an authored work? It was a jumping-off point for a few heated arguments about free will and fate, their role in fiction, and an author’s responsibility to let their characters be themselves, to the greatest extent possible. We talked about irrational choices we’d seen characters make in books, movies, and TV; about the anger we’d felt when one of those characters or one from our own lives seemed to contradict themselves or compromise one of their values simply to push the story along, so to speak.Stanley offers a great in-road to Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths and, I think, provoked some thinking about what an author owes his or her characters.

Recently, I caught up with a few of them about what they remembered of the lesson. Here’s what they had to say

First Stanley: Well, I’ve never trusted authoritative voices from the sky telling me what to do, so as to my thoughts to the game, it was mostly, disobey as much as possible. But, in more detail, I liked the binary story telling. That the story hinged on you choosing a or b, and the endings where you didn’t die revolved around either completely following the voice or completely ignoring the narrator.

Second Stanley: What I remember about the relationship between Stanley and the narrator:The fact that the narrator had a personality made the game, for me anyway, much more human and therefore engaging. It also made it much more terrifying as we realized that the “narrator” was going to use any means necessary to get Stanley to go where he was told.I also liked that there really were no ways to win, at least if you were new to the game, which I was. No matter what choice you made, you were going to lose, and it was actually stressful to the player as the lights went red and your character was seconds from dying; you yourself actually got scared.

Third Stanley: That was my favorite lesson because it was very VERY scary! I remember when we got to the last “option” of the game and it was dark and you didn’t really know where you were and then you would just hear the narrator, in this knowing smug voice say “Stanley…”, but it was like he was talking to you. So creepy! I wrote a short response after that class that explained how the Stanley Parable pretty much told us we had no free will under societies watchful eye.

Fourth Stanley: It’s certainly not like most games. If it could be compared to anything in terms of game play the closest I can think of is slender man. After watching the situations I remember feeling guilt as an author for killing of characters. At the same time it made me aware of social conceptions such as “bad things happen to you if you don’t become extreme”, which is to say that in life you can get my reasonable unscathed if you follow all orders given to you without question or once you’ve freed yourself from they hierarchical system. That creates a whole branch of other questions about free will and how best to not only live with it, but also portray it in our characters as they interact with their society.

Fifth Stanley: It was simultaneously chilling and delightful to have a narrator who didn’t want the best for us, but instead a rigid system of conformity and ignorance. His goal was to keep us in the dark about keeping us in the dark. And when his attempts to do so failed and the class realized his true motives, it was as isolating as it was entertaining. Navigating a dystopia together, in my mind, unified the class in one understanding: that to be without authority or control of our surroundings leaves us incapable of living, and without character. I didn’t feel like Stanley because I knew that he had never experienced freedom; we controlled him, and in a way, he was under our jurisdiction as much as he was under the narrator’s. Stanley wasn’t a person; he was a concept, an empty shell, and to both control him and inhibit his body only made me feel more powerless; there was no clear division between puppet and puppeteer anymore. So the voice of the narrator guided us as we attempted to both understand our limits and make impossible choices, and we hung on for dear life. And it became clearer that there was no clear answer to any of our questions about who was really in charge.

This post originally appeared on www.8bitscholar.com

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I <3 Video Games

This Happened to Me

Erik Fredner

Harvard Englisher. Videogames, lit, film. Scrubber of toilets; ukulele-devotee; sometime-DJ; part-time rower; occasional juggler.

Published

August 9, 2013

medium.com

Storyteller: Games with a Message

storyteller-game.com

Last week I was invited to talk at a conference where a few speakers had 30 minutes to present their work. I just played Storyteller the whole time, showing a few cool things that I hoped would communicate what the game is about.
But then I was surprised to see some of the other speakers concerned by Storyteller's inclusion of suicide, murder and infidelity. Someone stated that every videogame has a meta-message and suggested my inclusion of these concepts was thoughtless.
It is not surprising then when legislation to ban games happen, if even creators and academics themselves don't think deeply about how their games actually mean.

The format of the conference didn't allow me to reply on the spot, so I will do it here, especially because this superficial analysis of games is pervasive even in game developers. I am also going to ignore that the expression "meta-message" suggests there's a main message to being with and that's already problematic, but that is covered in Conflicts in Game Design.

The Meta-Message

I totally agree every game has a meta-message that is "read" by players: Games automatically communicate what the creator thinks of his players.

This message is conveyed through what the game asks players to do with their time. If a game maker assumes his players are incompetent, unable to draw conclusions or a cash cow, players will get this kind of messages:

Your time is worthless: Games that force you to perform repetitive mindless tasks for arbitrary reasons. ie: Most MMOs.

You can't stand challenge: Games that are too easy for fear of scaring impatient people. ie: Lots of Angry Birds wannabes on iTunes.

Pay Up or waste time: These games put a (low) price on your time, stealthily try to get you to commit and then ask for a ransom. Usually games with the "Free to Play" model.

Do as I say because because I know better: Edutainment that presents solutions instead of exploring the problems, like telling players to save water ,usually with text or videos, instead of letting them figure out why it matters. Educational games are often the worst culprits, as most adopted the dictatorial attitude of schools [1].

When games are designed like this, players will feel mistreated, even if they can't put their finger on where the mistreatment is coming from. Even if the game is fun. And there's no way to disguise, coat or counter it; the game will ooze its creator's opinion of his players anyway.

This invisible message will be part of how she believes the world sees her as a person. She might accept the mistreatment as natural; after all, school and most jobs frequently hammer these demeaning definitions of ourselves in our heads.

So what would be a game with a positive, reinforcing meta-message? Meaning and messages are a complicated thing, but I believe it's enough to stubbornly assume my future players are smart, can draw conclusions, choose if they are interested in playing or not and whose time and attention is valuable. Always. Regardless of what I know of who will end up playing the game.

My Policy for Storyteller

This is how I see my players: smiling as they try clever ways to outsmart the goal of each level, concocting twisted plots and sometimes surprised and delighted by the possibilities the game offers, and then be on their way with a trace of a new storytelling technique in their heads. Some people won't be into the game, and some will think about it for a long time. I wish to provide good value for the former until they decide to move on, and interesting concepts to think about to the latter.

Storyteller will only include levels that I am convinced are the best, no filler. I am willing to end up with a 2 hour game if need be [2].

I will also assume that whoever plays the game is able to form their own ideas on sordid concepts like suicide, murder and infidelity and how they fit in fiction, like they would if they read Romeo and Juliet or watched a teenage soap opera.

[1] besides, making a truly good educational game is harder than making just a good game, which is extremely hard on its own, thus my default skepticism.
[2] Last playtest took 5 hours from start to finish... so I don't think I will end up with a 2 hour game, even if I cut out a massive chunk of what is implemented now.

storyteller-game.com

Radiator Blog: Ludonarrative dissonance doesn't exist because it isn't dissonant and no one cares anyway.

blog.radiator.debacle.us

"I'm a living breathing person... but I'm just going to stand frozen in this spot forever. Also, I'm a tortoise."

I complained about Bioshock Infinite before. Here, I complain some more, because I really can't get over how bad this game is. Hopefully this'll be the last complaint post. I'm sorry.

Clint Hocking famously coined "ludonarrative dissonance" to describe moments when what's happening in a single player action game doesn't fit with what the game is telling you is happening -- maybe it's just plain wrong, maybe the tone doesn't match, or maybe the game thinks this thing is more interesting than it is -- either way, it doesn't quite work.

It's when you realize your sympathetic handsome male player character is a sociopathic mass murderer, or maybe when a character in an RPG "dies" despite having already died and revived dozens of times before, or maybe the brief instance when an elite soldier NPC glitches in the middle of a doorway despite all the boring game lore dumped on you. Sometimes it's intrinsic to making a game about killing people, sometimes you hope fridge logic kicks in, and sometimes it's a technical quirk you forgive.

But I feel like that theory doesn't explain what actually happens out in the field: if Bioshock Infinite was forged entirely, purposefully, from solid ingots of 100% pure ludonarrative dissonance, why didn't this annoy the shit out of everyone? Isn't ludonarrative dissonance supposed to be jarring and horrible? Why was the unusually unified critical response to Binfinite something like, "wow this game is colossally stupid," but the mainstream response was, "this is amazing"?

So I have a new theory -- most players do not find dissonance to be dissonant, and therefore ludonarrative dissonance doesn't really exist.

An important part of being good at games means looking past dissonance to value the "game underneath."

In

his Last of Us review

, Tom Bissell calls it something else -- a "gameism" -- and he argues that learning to internalize gameisms quickly, or even nostalgizing their absence, is

a fundamental step to taking on a gamer identity and truly understanding these games

. These are design decisions we've quickly learned to take for granted, to ignore their blatant implausibility and incoherence.

All human senses must adapt to pain.

Becoming an "experienced gamer" means learning to readily resolve a game's dissonance and ignore it as a gameism, an intrinsic byproduct that We Just Have to Learn To Accept To Enjoy Man Shoot.

Some academics might call this a "lusory attitude" or make references to a semi-porous "magic circle." Or maybe it's a suspension of disbelief, or maybe you're in a flow state and you're not in a mental place to criticize. Whatever you call it, a lot of players seem pretty good at ignoring stuff that gets in the way of playing video games.

Bissell implies that gameisms are supposedly just these fringe cases that'll get ironed out by the Grand March of Game Innovation, temporary band-aids to patch the cracks between systems before Our Dear Young Medium Grows Up and surpasses Hollywood as an influential culture industry.

... I disagree that they're fringe cases. As frequent game players, we've just numbed ourselves to the more primal gameisms that form the fundamental core of AAA single player action games; the most basic assumptions and reasoning we make about player progression... they all involve heavy doses of gameisms. The contrivance is EVERYWHERE with everything we do.

Like, let's imagine you're playing a typical first person game, and there's a locked door: what do you do now?

Do you remember seeing a door like this in Fallout 3? Probably not, because noticing the incoherence here does not help you level-up your character. You were probably looking for rocket launcher ammo.

Faced with a locked door, which arbitrary leap of logic are you supposed to make? Maybe encountering a locked door means you need to find a key to open it -- unless it's a post Half-Life 1 game and there's a nearby hallway or crevice to go around it -- or unless it's a fake un-unlockable locked door intended as set-dressing -- or maybe a scripted event / monster closet that broke? -- and you can tell it's a fake door because there's no 3D doorknob model there? -- but wait the door just turned red, that means we need to sprint into it to knock it down! -- oh but that door has a gold padlock on it, made of unbreakable metal? -- but since it doesn't require any lockpicks to pick it, we know it's probably a critical-path door, since the game would never put me into an unwinnable situation that required lockpicks without any to be found -- oh wait there's a crumbling wall, I can probably just stab these bricks with my knife to knock it down -- and hey, the apples in that nearby tree resemble the positions of the bricks, I have to stab the bricks in that specific order...

Game logic is frequently illogical. When is that okay and not okay? When should we do better?

I'd reckon that AAA designers, either wisely or obliviously, rarely have these existential crises. It's not just the players, but also the developers, who have to train themselves to ignore the gameisms inherent in their games.

I can imagine an early design meeting where they were brainstorming different pants powers for Bioshock Infinite's scrapped multiplayer mode, balanced on an XP curve progression with custom loadouts. Then they realized they had to cut multiplayer to meet 2K's release deadlines. But what about all these different hats / shirts / pants powers they've spent months designing and tuning?

Well, let's just cram this inane magical clothes system into the single player game! That fits really well, because the player character probably wears clothes, right? And we need to give the player more choices and trade-offs, because that creates deep combat, right?

Hopefully it didn't happen like that. But what other kind of groupthink could produce thinking like this:

How about a pair of pants that lets your magical flaming crow-gun-hand haunt an enemy's gun to shoot by itself? Yes, but then should we tweak the haunt duration from 5 seconds to 7.5 seconds? 40% probability or 45%?

At any point in these design meetings, did anyone wonder whether bird-igniting pants-ghosts were even relevant, at all, in a game supposedly about fatherhood / redemption?

Or it's also a game about poverty too, with money routinely found in trash cans... and it's about the systemic complexity of racism, and you can solve racism in Act II by pressing Q... and let's throw some quantum science-magic in there too... also,

the player should press F everywhere

...

The result is a moist pile of theme-creep, a game that isn't about anything except how it isn't about anything. All attempts to read Bioshock Infinite, in any consistent way, end with, "because video games." Where some games might worry a lot about the coherence of an NPC invincible in combat, suddenly dying in a scripted event -- or maybe why a family would lock so many interior doors in their own house, and then leave town -- this game said, "Fuck it."

I suspend my disbelief for games all the time. But here, I couldn't. The most charitable thing I can say is that it put a great deal of hard work into being lazy.

... And no one notices and no one cares. The falling tree never made a sound. Clearly I don't play enough first person shooters to appreciate the tradition! Forgive me, Bissell.

Here, Gamespot puts me in my place: "[Binfinite] depicts uncomfortable, relevant themes in an effective way [...] Upgrades make you feel increasingly powerful. [...] Some annoying texture pop-in and screen tearing are the culprits mostly likely to disturb the captivation. [...] 9/10."

(I'm glad they finally made a video game where upgrades make the player more powerful. Very relevant. Very captivating.)

See? No dissonance. No confusion. It's totally straightforward.

Except for a little bit of screen tearing (-1 pt!), Bioshock Infinite is truly the Citizen Kane of video games. It is decided.

No dissonance.

blog.radiator.debacle.us

Why I Like Papers, Please | HAWP

heyash.com

You know when you play a first-person shooter that claims to be about “how far you’re willing to go to protect the ones you love,” or “the true cost of a life,” or “moral ambiguity,” but the gameplay actually consists of shooting hundreds of dudes in the face? And you know how in the back of your mind, you wonder, “I wonder what it’d be like if a game actually designed its gameplay around those concepts rather than just duct-taping them on through noninteractive story?”

Papers, Please is that game. It manages to ask (and importantly, not answer) questions of duty, safety, privacy, family, self-interest, and morality through an incredibly simple, focused set of mechanics based around checking transit papers and stamping passports.

And it’s spectacular.

The basic, moment-to-moment gameplay is one of those things that, if you try to explain it to a friend or someone who isn’t interested in games, will make you sound like a doofus.

“So, a person gives you their travel papers,” you say. “And then you have to check all the information to make sure it’s not contradictory or forged.”

“Ah,” the other person says as they begin to look around the room for someone less bizarrely enthused about passports to talk with, “so you just, like, click the information and the game says if it’s correct or not?”

“NO,” you say, spittle flying from your mouth in excitement. “NO. Sometimes you just check for obvious discrepancies, like when someone looks female but their passport says male, and you question them on it. But sometimes, you have to check things in your virtual journal that has a bunch of information in it. So if someone says they’re from Antegria but their passport says it was issued in Haihan, you can check your journal and go, ‘a-HA! Haihan’s in Impor, not Antegria’ and where are you going please come back”

So, yes. It sounds boring. In actuality, though, the act of checking passports is incredibly satisfying thanks in part to the great audiovisual feedback (the ka-chunk of stamping “denied” on a passport never stops being tactile and weirdly satisfying), and the fact that successfully finding discrepancies actually makes you feel like a goddamn genius. For another way to look at it: imagine the good parts of Phoenix Wright (finding and pointing out inconsistencies in the courtroom) with none of the shitty parts (the crime scene investigation). That’s kind of what the passport review gameplay is like.

If that’s all there was to Papers, Please — if the entire game consisted of checking increasingly complex transit papers and nothing else — it would still be worth your time. But it’s the way that developer Lucas Pope combines this gameplay with some intelligent narrative and moral mechanics that makes Papers, Please an absolute must-buy.

Everytime you correctly review a passport, you get some money. At the end of the day, you can spend that money on food and heat for your offscreen family. At a certain point, the transit papers will get so complex that you will, inevitably, start making a lot of mistakes. This can become a serious problem as every incorrectly reviewed passport will deduct more and more cash from your pay at the end of the day. With your family’s lives on the line and the job getting tougher and tougher, the game asks you — like actually asks you, through gameplay — what are you willing to do to get the money you need? Will you take a bribe from a shady character? Will you start throwing more people in jail so you can get a cut of the prison guard’s bonus? Will you do knowingly dishonest or immoral things just so you can get that extra ten bucks that might allow your family to eat tonight? There are no right or wrong answers. The game comes with twenty different endings, so you never really get the sense that the game is judging you — there are simply a bunch of different ways to complete your 31 days of service, no “right” or “wrong” ones. For a game purely about stamping one of two answers on little pieces of paper, you’re actually given a spectacular amount of freedom in how you choose to express yourself. Are you a patriot at all costs, slavishly devoted to the system that got you this job? Or do you prioritize your family’s safety over all elsef?

And I haven’t even mentioned how disturbing, yet even-handed the actual act of processing a human being feels. Looking over someone’s transit papers, you get a glimpse into their life as filtered by whichever government stooge filled their forms out for them (probably another tired nobody trying to make ends meet, just like you). You look at the “physical description” form for a sad-looking woman. It has only one word: “overweight.” On the one hand, Jesus — you had one word to describe this woman with, and that’s the one you chose? That’s awful. But on the other hand…it’s not inaccurate. She is a little chubby, and if it had said “skinny,” I would have had to confront her about that inconsistency, and she would have had to take a fingerprint test, which would have taken up more of my very short day, which means I don’t get to process as many people, which means my family might fucking die.

There’s a ruthless efficiency to the things you do in Papers, Please, but it never feels morally simplistic — this isn’t 1984. The first time you put someone through a physical search (by way of an X-ray camera that shows you their entire naked body), you feel disgusting. Surely, you think, this is a statement on how post-9/11 American paranoia has exchanged personal freedom for the illusion of safety. So a few minutes later, when a woman comes up to you with a slight discrepancy in her papers — they say she weighs 88 kilos, but the scale in front of your booth says she weighs 91 — you let it pass, either out of negligence or personal philosophy. You stamp her passport “approved,” and she gratefully walks past the checkpoint to the soldiers waiting behind you.

That’s when she detonates the hidden explosives strapped to her chest, killing the soldiers.

You would have found the explosives, if you’d just x-ray searched her. But you didn’t. And because of one mistake, three people are dead, your day ended earlier than it should have, and you now have to choose between letting your family go hungry or cold tonight.

Not to mention that despite your lack of verbs and the fact that the entire game takes place in pretty much the same exact screen, Papers, Please is spectacularly immersive. Not just in terms of the graphics and music (though those are very good), but in that all of the game’s “story” elements are conveyed purely through the process of playing it. There are no cut scenes where you meet an Important Character who tells you an Important Thing. There is only your booth, and the people who approach it. You’ll see some characters over and over, like Jorji, the ever-optimistic old man who just can’t seem to get his papers together. Or the frightened prostitute who begs you – begs you – not to approve the man behind her (even though he’s cleared to enter) because she is certain he will sell her into slavery. Depending on how you treat these people, the story and your resources change. Your narrative and gameplay choices are the same choices – not like in, say, BioShock, where you have The Gameplay (shooting things, collecting resources) and The Moral Choices (the little sisters). The simple act of stamping passports, denied/approved, functions as both.

There’s a brilliant irony to Papers, Please. The act of checking passports is simple. This sheet of paper says you’re from Enkyo, this one says you’re from Vedor. Therefore, you are lying. The process is objective, mathematical, efficient. But knowing when to breach someone’s privacy to protect others? Knowing when it’s okay to take a bribe if it would secure the safety of your loved ones? Knowing who the good guys really are, and how far you’re willing to go to help them? These questions are difficult, subjective, unanswerable. That Papers, Please asks you to deal with both is nothing short of spectacular.

Papers, Please comes out on August 8th for PC. You can get it directly from the creator, or from Steam or GoG or whateverthehell.

heyash.com

IndieGames.com - The Weblog Why I Get This Call Every Day isn't on Steam Greenlight anymore

indiegames.com

[by David Gallant]

On December 28th, 2012, I ponied up $100 to Valve and added I Get This Call Every Day to Greenlight. It was a bit of a lark; I knew the game had limited appeal thanks to its terrible visuals and deliberate focus on mundaneity. 

I started keeping a journal of my experiences. Greenlight was a bit different back then, without any relelvant stats for developers. Gamespot let me publish the journal as an editorial of sorts. 

On January 29th, 2013, I was fired from my day job because of the game. Many "Let's Play" videos of the game hit YouTube, some by incredibly popular webcasters (the Yogscast has well over 5 million subscribers, and their playthrough video of the game has been viewed over 1.8 million times). Thus came a fair spike in votes and ranking, reaching as high as 90% of the way to the top 100.

On May 31st, I removed I Get This Call Every Day from Greenlight. If you're curious about its final standing, check here.

At the time, I was pretty pissed at what happened to Paranautical Activity. However, it wasn't a single incident that informed my decision. I was already pretty sour on Greenlight as a system, starting from the realization "everything was made up and the votes don't matter." Even now, games are Greenlit at Valve's discretion alone, with vote rankings but one factor used to make their decision. That's a reality I accepted when I paid for the service, but others certainly have not: I've seen my fair share of complaints when games high in the ranking get "overlooked" when new games are added.

Greenlight was also a great source of negativity. I didn't have things as bad as, say, Depression Quest, but there were still a fair number of hurtful comments. Here are some gems:

It is absolutely appalling that a 'game' like this even makes it into Steam Greenlight. What kind of person actually votes for this?
- [ò_ó] Sheepocalypse 'i'm a game developer' you could have at least tried to make it polished, this is just pathetic.
- DeityPoorly made flash game with bioware like decision making game that nobody wants to buy. Don't crap up steam with with this shit.
- FEEDel CastroUngrateful employee. Will not support ANYONE with this individual's nonexistent work ethic.
- anthonypants 

Before removing the game from Greenlight, I copied the entirety of the page's comment section and dumped it into a spreadsheet. Then I rated each comment by the emotional reaction it inspired: Positive, Negative, Ambivalent, or Confused. Here are the rather surprising results:

Emotional Reaction to Greenlight Comments
Over half the comments were positive, and yet I still had the impression that the majority of them were negative. Hell, I even tweeted them out under the hashtag #greenlightcomments as a coping mechanism. Even though less than a fifth of all comments were negative, they were powerful enough to overwrite the supportive ones, a lot of the time.

Now, here's the biggest thing. I believe in communities of mutual support. The successful help the less successful, and they help right on back, or pay it forward, and hopefully everyone becomes more successful in the process. When it comes to making games, we aren't really competing with each other. Greenlight is not a mutually-supportive community; it is a competition, where one game's success directly and negatively impacts every other less successful game on the service.

Every upvote received by I Get This Call Every Day knocked other games back in the rankings. Every game that surpassed I Get This Call Every Day in the rankings knocked it back further as well. Near the end, I could watch the ranking drop daily. Some days I could get a few hundred votes and not make a dent; in fact, the biggest jumps would come when other games left Greenlight (either by being removed, or by being greenlit).

It's not a community; it is a mountain for everyone to scramble up on the backs of everyone else.

That's not for me, sorry.

I'd like to apologize for all 14,181 people who said "Yes, I would buy I Get This Call Every Day if it were on Steam". I'm sorry to have disappointed you. Will I ever use Greenlight again? Maybe. The fee's paid, after all, and Valve is still making changes to the service.

There you have it (I'm bad at endings). 

[David Gallant wrote this post using sister site Gamasutra's free blogs]

indiegames.com

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