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Sexismus in Videospielen – auf Zehenspitzen durch das Minenfeld

Micha, 24. Juni 2012

“Die Frauen haben nicht Unrecht, wenn sie sich den Vorschriften nicht fügen wollen, welche in der Welt eingeführt sind: weil die Männer sie verfaßt haben, ohne die Frauen zu fragen.”
Michel de Montaigne, (1533 - 1592), eigentlich Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, französischer Philosoph und Essayist
Quelle : Essais: 3,5, »Sur des Vers de Virgile«

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Lange Zeit habe ich mich aus der Sexismus- und Gewaltdebatte der letzten Wochen herausgehalten. Das hatte verschiedene Gründe und einer von ihnen ist relativ profan: Für mich persönlich fühlt sie sich wie die vielleicht hundertste an. Seit über 20 Jahren spiele ich nun und an die Debatten, die ich damals als Kind oder Jugendlicher nicht wirklich begriffen habe, kann ich mich heute noch erinnern. Die Aufreger fingen mit dem Cover von California Games an, gingen über erotische Puzzlespiele auf dem Amiga weiter und mündeten vorläufig bei dem ersten Mortal Kombat. Irgendwo dazwischen gab es immer wieder neue Gründe für Diskussionen; die Suche nach Aufreger-Inseln führt sich bis heute fort. Die letzte große Debatte, gerade in Bezug auf Sexismus, wurde zu Metroid Other M geführt, da Samus mit großen Brüsten und einem Vaterkomplex ausgestattet, als auch einer militärischen Befehlskette unterworfen wurde. Das war mir persönlich ziemlich egal. Vor dem Erscheinen des Spiels hatte ich ein paar Metroid-Spiele nachgeholt und bis dato nicht einmal eine Ahnung, dass überhaupt eine Frau die Hauptperson ist. Für viele Videospieler war es allerdings nicht nur ein Vergehen an einem Nintendo-Klassiker, sondern auch eine Frechheit an der Darstellung einer Frau in einem Videospiel. Dass das Entwicklerteam ausgerechnet Team Ninja war, die sich in entsprechenden Kreisen schon mit den Dead or Alive-Mädchen keine Freunde gemacht haben, dürfte das Feuer sicher zusätzlich geschürt haben.

Jubelschreie bei Kopfschüssen

Dass die Gewaltdebatte sich derzeit mit der Sexismusdebatte vermengt, ist sowohl in Sachen Timing, als auch in ihrer daraus resultierenden gegenseitigen Anstachelung eine unglückliche Angelegenheit. Zum Thema Gewalt in Videospielen, und ich betone: nur zum Thema Gewalt, ist meine Einstellung wenig aufgeregt, da ich diesbezüglich seit einigen Jahren relativ entspannt bin. Ja, auch ich fand die jubelnden Reaktionen in der Pressekonferenz von Sony zu “The Last of Us” äußerst befremdlich, da Naughty Dog – gemessen an den bisherigen Eindrücken und Informationen – Gewalt als etwas Schlimmes mit Konsequenzen darstellen wollte. Ich für meinen Teil war sprachlos, weil der Tod von Gegnern vergleichsweise realistisch wirkte. Das Bedürfnis vor Belustigung in die Hände zu klatschen hatte ich nicht. Was Naughty Dog aus diesen Darstellungen macht und ob sie dem ein dramaturgisches Gewicht verleihen, steht selbstverständlich noch in den Sternen. Die Differenz zu den allseits bekannten überzeichneten Gewaltdarstellungen war jedenfalls unübersehbar.
Ich finde es schade, dass Publisher vorwiegend gewalttätige Inhalte als erwachsen darstellen, finde aber ebenso Wortmeldungen hinterfotzig, die darin den Untergang des Abendlandes propagieren und dabei eigentlich nur ihr eigenes Spiel bewerben wollen, wie es beispielsweise Warren Spector mit Epic Mickey 2 getan hat. Ja, auch Kriegsverherrlichung finde ich problematisch; vor allem, weil die Kinder vielerorts die Tode ihrer Großväter nachspielen. Das sind Probleme, über die man sprechen sollte, um das unbestreitbare, aber auch allgemein überzogen dargestellte Ungleichgewicht zwischen gewaltfreien und gewalthaltigen Spielen auszugleichen. Aber das war es auch schon. In gewisser Weise vertrete ich eine ähnliche Einstellung wie Iwinski von CD-Projekt, der Gewalt in Spielen angebracht findet, wenn sie zur Welt passt. Damit wäre das zumindest für mich im Rahmen einer ganz persönlichen Stellungnahme innerhalb dieses Artikels vom Tisch.

Der eigene Sichtwinkel

Kommen wir zum Sexismus. Ein anderer Grund für meine bisherige Enthaltung ist viel wichtiger: Es scheint völlig unmöglich zu sein über das Thema zu sprechen, ohne dabei jemanden zu verletzen. Es ist schwer distanziert und sachlich darüber zu debattieren, weil es ganz bestimmt auf einer gewissen Ebene auch ein sehr persönliches und emotionales Thema ist. Der gute Manu sagte einmal in einem Gespräch, dass diese ganze Diskussion ein Minenfeld sei. Diese Bezeichnung trifft es auf den Punkt: Ein Minenfeld aus eigenen Erfahrungen, individuellen Wahrnehmungen, ja, sogar Vorlieben, Geschmäckern, sowie Gewohnheiten und nicht zuletzt: gesellschaftlichen und religiösen Einflüssen. Jeder Mensch hat seine eigene Perspektive und bringt durch das Thema bedingt auch viel seiner eigenen Identität mit in den Disput hinein. Eine unglückliche Formulierung, und du hast dir vielleicht neue Feinde gemacht. Eine grundlegende Einstellung zu Sexismus wird gleichzeitig als grundlegende Einstellung zu deinen Mitmenschen interpretiert.

Allein schon der Wortbegriff des Sexismus’ kann da Hürden bergen. Selbstverständlich ist die Bedeutung klar definiert, aber ab welchem Grad es für einen persönlich sexistisch wird, ist schwieriger einzugrenzen. Manche empfinden bereits jegliche Aufopferungsgabe eines Mannes, die eher romantische Beweggründe hat, als hochgradig sexistisch, während für andere Personen dieser Begriff vor allem bei der körperlichen Darstellung eines weiblichen Charakters greift. Für mich persönlich beginnt Sexismus dort, wo einem Menschen ein Recht aufgrund seines Geschlechts abgesprochen wird. Konkrete Beispiele für diese Definition in Mainstream-Spielen wollen mir partout “nur” eine Handvoll einfallen, wogegen es Personen gibt, die vermutlich durch die aktuelle Übersensibilisierung für das Thema quasi überall Beispiele dafür sehen. Spiele mit heiklen Darstellungen, wie beispielsweise das tumbe Duke Nukem Forever, ein paar Dating-Sims oder die sprichwörtlich auf den Sex Sells-Slogan konzentrierte Wirtschaftssimulation Hot Dogs Hot Girls bedürfen auch aus meiner Sicht einer differenzierten Auseinandersetzung. Bei diesen drei Beispielen, und es wird auch ein paar weitere geben, findet eine sexuelle Objektifizierung statt. Aber ein ganz globales, massiv überkochendes Sexismus-Problem, welches im Begriff ist die Spielkultur aus dem Innersten zu zerfressen, sehe ich hingegen nicht.

Dabei kann ich mich in vielen genannten Kritikpunkten selbst wieder finden. Meiner Meinung nach könnte es auch mehr ernstzunehmende weibliche Protagonisten in Spielen geben; solche die deutlich mehr Handlungsspielraum als der sexy Sidekick oder die zu rettende Frau in Not haben. Auch die Anfeindungen gegenüber Anita Sarkeesian und Aisha Tyler bestürzen mich. Bei letzterer bin ich eher irritiert, weil mir die Moderatorin auf der E3 Pressekonferenz unglaublich sympathisch war und auf mich von Grund auf ehrlich wirkte, während ich im Falle von der Feministin Anita regelrecht erschrocken über die gigantische Ansammlung von Hass bin, die ihr entgegen geworfen wird. Ein Teil dieser Triaden wird sicherlich durch die Anonymität des Internets gefördert, dessen Effekte außerhalb der Sexismus-Debatte Phil Fish auf seiner Webseite und im März diesen Jahres auch Bioware durch das Mass Effect-Ende erfahren haben. Die Reaktionen auf die beiden Damen Aisha und Anita sind jedenfalls völlig inakzeptabel und weisen ernstzunehmende Probleme bei der Sichtweise junger männlicher Jugendlicher, Kinder oder sogar Erwachsener auf Frauen im Allgemeinen auf. Sehr viel mehr glaube ich sogar, dass es Reaktionen aus Angst sind. Angst, dass vor allem die gebildete Anita den Hatern geistig einige Spuren voraus ist. Angst, dass man ihre Argumente nicht einfach von der Hand weisen kann. Es sind viele Trotzreaktionen, geboren aus Dummheit, genährt durch Minderwertigkeitsgefühle, hervorgerufen durch Bedrängnis, die eigentlich keine ist. Die bisherigen Videos habe ich jedenfalls nicht als Angriff empfunden und ich bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass viele Vandalisten sich nicht einmal auch nur einen Teil davon angesehen haben.

Die Kirche im Dorf lassen

Allerdings ist es nicht so trivial diese Frauenfeindlichkeit zu begründen, als manch ein Blogger es gerne darstellen würde. Ein weiterer, wichtiger Grund meiner bisherigen Enthaltung ist: Ich bin kein Experte. Ich habe den Themenkomplex weder wissenschaftlich studiert, noch habe ich die intellektuellen Voraussetzungen dafür, mich fachgerecht damit auseinandersetzen zu können. Hauptbetreiber der Debatte der letzten Wochen sind allerdings hauptsächlich Personen, die sich ebenso wie ich in einer ähnlichen Position befinden. In mangelndem Bewusstsein über die eigene Wut wird die Kirche dabei manchmal aus dem Dorf getragen. Selbst Personen, die ich sehr gerne lese und die teils auch stärker in der Spieleproduktion drin stecken, wie beispielsweise Anjin Anhut, scheinen sich daran die Finger zu verbrennen. In einem sichtbar in Rage verfassten Blogeintrag gibt der Art Director und Game Designer einige Beispiele an, die stellenweise wie aus der Luft gegriffen zu sein scheinen. Ein Konzeptbild aus dem aktuellem Mortal Kombat von einem weiblichen Charakter einzubetten und auf die Wunden und die abblätternde Kleidung hinzuweisen, erscheint gerade in einem Prügelspiel ungeschickt, wo sich doch alle Beteiligten – ob Mann oder Frau – ordentlich aufs Maul geben und jeder prinzipiell den gleichen Ausmaß an sichtbarem Schaden nehmen kann. Schlecht recherchiert ist vor allem das Beispiel aus “Shadows of the Damned“, wo ein Screenshot von der Figur Paula gezeigt wird, die mit gebrochenem Genick von der Decke hängt. Als seelenlose Raumdekoration bezeichnet Anjin sie und lässt völlig außer Acht, dass in dem Spiel der erste Teil von Aligiehri´s Göttlicher Komödie anzitiert wird und Paula stellvertretend für die geheimnisvolle Beatrice steht. Die Hauptfigur Garcia geht für sie in die Hölle und erzählt seinem Begleiter Johnson auf seiner Reise, warum er die Frau so sehr liebt. Als er erfährt, dass Paula ursprünglich die Gespielin des Dämonen Fleming war, der sie gefangen hält, ist er sogar umso überzeugter um ihre Freiheit zu kämpfen, weil er “immer noch Liebe in ihren Augen sieht”. Es ist leicht Shadows of the Damned Sexismus zu unterstellen, da es voller sexueller Untertöne steckt, aber sie stehen nicht in dem plumpen Kontext wie etwa bei Duke Nukem Forever, welches zu Recht für einen Teil der Restbeispiele herangezogen wird.

Meiner Meinung im ausufernden Maß vergriffen hat sich Brendan Keogh in seiner wutschnaubenden Reaktion auf den Grindhouse-Hitman-Trailer, in dem er die Verbindung zu Rape Culture herstellt. Über den Trailer kann man selbstredend geteilter Meinung sein, vor allem da er ganz offensichtlich auf seine polarisierende Wirkung hin konzipiert wurde. Die Assoziation aber mit einem Begriff herzustellen, der die schockierende Situation in einigen Schwellen- und Kriesenländern und so gut wie jedem Krieg zumindest laut Theorie auf unterschwellige Weise in die westliche Medienlandschaft integriert, ist nicht etwa gefährlich, weil sie bei genauerer Untersuchung per se nicht existiert, sondern weil sie gerade Außenstehenden Zündstoff bietet, die mit dem Material nicht wirklich vertraut sind. Spiele kommen nicht nur ausschließlich über gewaltverherrlichende Inhalte zum schlechten Ruf, sondern auch durch unüberlegte Äußerungen. Vor einigen Jahren hat so ein Fall sogar den Release des Survival Horror-Spiels “Rule of Rose” verhindert, als Franco Frattini, europäischer Kommissar für Justiz, Freiheit und Sicherheit, öffentlich das angebliche primäre Spielziel, vorwiegend an schwachen Kindern grösste Gewalt auszuüben, beklagte. Dies löste in Europa und auch teilweise in den USA eine Welle der Empörung aus, die von weitestgehend ahnungslosen Publikationen weitergetragen wurde, welche mangels Release nicht einmal im Besitz des Spiels waren. Dass kinder-, jugend- und sozialpsychologische Hintergründe bei vorpubertierenden Mädchen mit den zentralen Themen “Vertrauen und Treue” im düster-märchenhaften Gewand behandelt werden, schien niemanden zu interessieren[1]. Die ausufernde Gewalt suchten Spielekritiker später jedenfalls vergeblich. Aufgrund der Kontroverse wurde das Spiel neben vielen europäischen Ländern auch in Australien und Neuseeland nicht veröffentlicht.

Obwohl Hitman: Absolution den Spieler in die Rolle eines Autragskillers steckt, wird das Spiel ironischerweise diese Veröffentlichungshürden aufgrund eines finanzstarken Publishers sehr wahrscheinlich nicht haben. Probleme mit dem Begriff hat allerdings auch Michael Thomsen, der sich in seinem Artikel leider stellenweise schlecht ausgedrückt hat. In Kombination mit einer abweichenden Meinung ist die Empörung übergekocht. So sehr, dass Kill Screen sich öffentlich entschuldigen musste, um die Besucher wieder zu beruhigen. Man warf ihm vor, er hätte die Unfassbarkeit einer Vergewaltigung untergraben und verharmlost. In meiner Verwandtschaft, sowie im engen Bekanntenkreis kenne ich leider Opfer von Missbrauch und bin bei dem Thema sehr sensibel; habe sogar viel Angst um meine Liebsten. Beim Betrachten des Trailers kamen mir aber keinerlei Assoziationen zu Vergewaltigungen, gar einer Botschaft zur Unterdrückung von Frauen auf. Bei Artikeln wie denen von Keogh werde ich das Gefühl nicht los, dass in den Autoren ein Zwang herrscht sich um jeden Preis möglichst akademisch wirkend äußern zu müssen. Ich weise damit auf die bereits erwähnte Problematik hin, die mich lange davon abgehalten hat mich zur Debatte zu äußern. Dank Google und Wikipedia sind Begriffe schnell gefunden, mit etwas Interpretationsspielraum und einer progressiven Interpretationskette lassen sich Zusammenhänge zumindest in der ersten Impression einleuchtend “beweisen”. Fundiert sind diese Ausführungen aber ebenso wenig wie meine – was freilich niemanden daran hindert die Argumente aufzugreifen und in verschönernden Variationen zu verbreiten. In den genannten Beispielen wie Rule of Rose und Shadows of the Damned geschieht dies zudem ohne den jeweiligen Zusammenhang; reduziert auf einige Eindrücke, die mehr oder weniger unabsichtlich zum Äquivalent für eine tendenziell eher mannigfaltige, ganze Spielkultur erhoben wird.

Eine breitere Palette

Bei all dieser Aufregung ändert sich mein Wunsch für die Zukunft nur wenig: Ich möchte ebenso, dass Stereotypen in Spielen reduziert werden, damit dieser Begriff prinzipiell überflüssig wird. Und das ganz allgemein auf alle Geschlechter bezogen, ohne dass ich aber auf die Nathan Drakes, Lara Crofts, Bayonettas oder Marcus Phoenix´ verzichten möchte. Ich möchte diese Figuren, die körperlich übermäßig attraktiv gestaltet sind – AUCH haben, neben vielen verschiedenen Charakteren mit mannigfaltigen Stärken und Schwächen, die mal mehr, mal weniger aus dem Leben gegriffen sind. Ich möchte, dass es neben reinen Fantasiefiguren auch gleichwertig viele Menschen wie Du und ich gibt. Dieser Variantenreichtum existiert in anderen Medien und um diesen zu erreichen müssten Spiele ihre große Stärke Fantasiewelten darzustellen AUCH in authentische Geschichten und Szenarien leiten. Schön also, dass Anita ihre Kickstarter-Kampagne mit großem Überschuss finanzieren konnte. Selbst wenn ich bei der kommenden Videoreihe möglicherweise nicht bei allen Aspekten mit ihr einer Meinung sein würde: Dass sie die Aufmerksamkeit auf diese Themen lenkt, kann meinem Wunsch nur ein Stück greifbarer machen.

1. [1] Ein Filmpendant wäre beispielsweise “Pan´s Labyrinth”. ↩

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Fast, Cheap, And Out Of Control - Dossier

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Dossier

Fast, Cheap, And Out Of Control

Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström is a master of the transgressive quickie.

By Gus Mastrapa

Dossier is a survey of one game maker’s creative output—an attempt to tease out the themes that emerge over the course of a video game career.

Video games are usually the product of dozens, if not hundreds, of people. Because of this, games are often reduced to an expression of the same platitudes: Evil is bad, loyalty is good. On a smaller scale, however, game makers find new opportunities. Cactus, a prolific independent game designer from Gothenburg, Sweden, understands that when you put on the hat of the auteur and set out to make a small game, this still-young, relatively unmined medium can be used as a means of self-expression as well as exploration, finding avenues to make intellectual or emotional connections with players.

Cactus is the nom de game of Jonatan Söderström, a practitioner of rapid prototyping—an approach to game design that focuses on speed and execution. Where some ambitious indies spend years mired in one project, designers like Söderström build games over the course of weekend. This kind of output can feel slight compared to fully fleshed-out projects like Fez and Super Meat Boy, but it also prevents ideas from languishing on the back burner, favoring energetic concepts with poignant, flawed beauty over those that must prove themselves over the course of a years-long development process.

Söderström readily admits that many of his ideas can’t prop up a 20-hour game. They’re fleeting notions, like video game mayflies. He dallies with arcade-style shooters, warped adventure games, and art experiments that are impossible to classify—Cactus has no apparent loyalty to any one genre—but he isn’t just barfing out half-baked concepts. Each of his games puts stakes down in new territory. He uses his work to screw with perception and with expectations, making a case for games with the creator’s fingerprints smudged all over the glass. He’s saying something about the world in which he lives and the games that he plays while retreating from it.

Norrland

Take Norrland. The experimental art game from 2010 is a nasty critique of the Swedish outdoorsman—a brute that bears no small similarity to his American counterpart. On a lonely weekend in the woods, players trudge through mosquito-infested forests, shooting at wildlife. This retro take on Big Buck Hunter is made more intriguing by mini-games that interrupt your stroll through nature. Some are base observations on the man in the wild—you chug a beer, swat a mosquito, take a dump, and jerk off to a porn mag—but the more interesting intrusions happen when the hunter goes to sleep. He dreams of being a bird that burns to a cinder when it flies too close to the sun. In these moments, Cactus is wrestling with people he doesn’t understand, trying to get a handle on what makes them do the things they do. Norrland is clearly an attack—an artsy salvo in the class war—but it also feels like an ambivalent act of empathy.

Norrland is a hybrid of several genres. At times, Cactus constructs his games like a collagist, tearing bits from old Atari games and shoot-em-ups, then cobbling them into some kind of obtuse art piece. Norrland is an adventure game melded with a collection of WarioWare-style mini-games. It purposefully disarms you as an adventure game would, throwing you into scenarios where you have no clue what to do or how to react. The mini-games, for example, ambush you with no instructions. Suddenly, you’re in a close-up of your arm with a mosquito buzzing. You flail on the keyboard to figure out which button is the one that swats the bugger. Unless you’re lucky or quick, the mosquito jams its proboscis into your flesh and feeds. Where many games aim to empower the player to overcome challenges, Norrland is like many of Cactus’ games in that it sets the player up to fail.

It’s not often that a game sets out to make you feel bad. Each little failure or moment of confusion makes the player feel that much more alienated by Norrland’s animalistic hunter. Every time the hunter misses a shot or fails to net a fish, you might feel about this chap the way that Cactus feels about him—befuddled and more than a little annoyed.

Stallions In America

It would be easy to suppose that Cactus is some kind of digital prankster. The Atari-flavored shooter Stallions In America comes off as a one-note goof on our penchant for unload first and never ask questions. Each of the game’s fifty levels (one for each state) is a unrelenting shooting gallery that sees the ripped hero spraying lead everywhere. Explosions bloom and shrapnel spreads everywhere. Finish the game, and you’ve shot the entire U.S.A. to hell. More than a few of Cactus’ efforts trade in “illogical” puzzles. The only way to bridge a gaping chasm in his puzzler Psychosomnium is to give up and go back the way you came. Rather than return to the previous screen, you appear on the opposite side of the impossible expanse, sidestepping the obstacle by looping from stage left to stage right. In the wrong hands, such a willingness to play fast and loose with the rules of the game could seem like a breach of trust between game maker and player. But Cactus’s playfulness is often countered by gravity. A good portion of the designer’s work is dedicated to grappling with the nuts and bolts of play.

Clean Asia!

Of particular interest to Söderström is one of the most elemental components of the video game—the projectile. It has been a long time since Galaga and Space Invaders, when players maneuvered at the bottom of the screen and fired bullets, one tedious shot at a time, up toward their enemies. Cactus’ game Clean Asia! riffs on some of the more imaginative modern evolutions of Japanese “bullet hell” shooters. It’s quite a bit to wrap your head around. Players choose from two ships: one that charges headlong into enemies, damaging them by collision, and another that can absorb the debris left behind by enemies and fire it back at them. Clean Asia! is a work of fan fiction—like Cactus, after spending hours awash in the sensory overload of Japanese arcade cabinets, felt he had a new voice to offer to the cacophony.

Minubeat

Another shooter, Minubeat, forces players to think and play rhythmically. Every time the player fires on beat, they’re rewarded with a lock-on that will take out its target at the end of a series of notes. The influence of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s trippy rail shooter Rez is clear, but Cactus is a much harsher taskmaster. Where Rez was forgiving and somewhat mellow, Minubeat is demanding and difficult. Since Cactus isn’t wordy when he’s communicating a gameplay idea, there’s no break-in period. He throws the player right into the shit and expects them to work out a way to survive. This, of course, is a function of working in the short form. Cactus doesn’t have the time, resources or (presumably) the patience to dole out softball tutorial lessons. He cuts straight to the moment where his concept congeals into a fully formed challenge, in medias res.

Hot Throttle

Cactus’ visual style ricochets between primitive (he favors the chunky, barely expressive pixels of the Atari 2600) and gratuitously stylized. Hot Throttle, a racing game, showcases the designer’s signature style—a thin, deliberate cartoon linework that looks like it was rendered in MS Paint. The game centers on a Fight Club for people who think they’re cars. They race through the streets naked on all fours, making “vroom vroom” sounds with their mouths as they zoom around a trashy city. There’s a whiff of punk dystopia here—the same kind that wafts off the comics of Kaz and Gary Panter. Both ’80s cartoonists imagined filthy worlds where man was demeaned by his own urges, but it was clear that they also enjoyed wallowing in the imagined squalor. Cactus may have never read Jimbo or RAW, but he’s tapped into that same subterranean art punk mainline.

Published by Adult Swim Games, Hot Throttle’s rough nihilism fits in nicely with the anti-humanity of Adult Swim shows like Superjail and Metalocalypse. Similarly, Cactus takes his own cultural potshots. The confused car men in Hot Throttle are drawn with rigid grids of teeth, shocked round eyes, and grotesque sweat bumps on their heads—they’re amped, mainlining a delusional frenzy. But where Norrland is an arms-length attempt at empathy, Hot Throttle is a little more vicious. These weirdos want to be cars, and Cactus doesn’t mind using his art to help dehumanize them. It is clear that Cactus isn’t celebrating the trans-humanistic urge to pierce, paint, and embellish our flesh. When the game’s hero uses his tournament winnings to buy the surgical procedure that will fully transition him from man to automobile, the surgeon admits that the procedure is morally questionable. He’ll take the sucker’s money regardless. If Cactus channels the sensibilities of punk cartoonists, he’s also transmitting an opposing kind of conservatism. People who try to be what they’re not are kind of weird, he says.

The benefit of being a serial experimenter is that nothing is sacred—even your methodology. In 2010, Cactus’ abstract puzzle game Tuning won the Independent Games Festival’s Nuovo Award for experimental gameplay. The psychedelic game sees players trying to move an orb across a shifting, pulsating landscape of cubic platforms. It is a game about perception and feedback. Whereas most game makers work hard to assure that their camera doesn’t get in the player’s way, Tuning’s camera pulls away, casting perspective as yet another obstacle. On paper, the point of the game is to move your orb from start to finish, but the world twists, contorts, and warps as you make the trek; the camera swirls, and the world fades in and out of view. It all distracts from the simple tasks of jumping and rolling. At times the course is duplicated in a confusing kaleidoscope, giving the player control of multiple orbs, all on their own, nearly identical quests. To conquer each level is to come to understand what you’re seeing and why you’re seeing it—or at least to weather Cactus’ visual obfuscation.

Two years ago, the game felt complete enough to win honors. Cactus, in his terse manner, got his point across. But rather than move on to the next idea, he has spent the last couple of years designing new levels—actually fleshing out Tuning beyond his typical bite-sized proof of concept. In film, this would be the equivalent of Takashi Miike suddenly adopting Terrence Malick’s work ethic. After years of working fast and on the cheap, Cactus is buckling down to elaborate on an idea rather than moving on to the next one.

If Cactus were to die tomorrow, he’d be remembered as an iconoclastic young game designer who showed great potential. But that assessment is unfair. Söderström has already done a great service. His development as an artist has been highly public, and he has shared his creations generously, asking little in return. Of the dozens of games Söderström has produced, he has charged money for very few; most are made available for free download as soon as they’re completed. He sold just a handful of physical copies of Norrland on eBay—enough to buy some beer and tickets for a summer music festival.

But the idealism of the young artist can be as much of a trap as a gig in the Electronic Arts salt mines. The current pause in output and the focus on Tuning signals a potential transition. That’s not to say that Cactus is poised to “sell out,” level up, or tone down his approach. It’s just hard to imagine that someone whose games are so concerned with agitation would settle into any routine without a fight.

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SimCity Social is an insult to its namesake

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It might look like SimCity, but it plays more like a Zynga game than most SimCity fans will be comfortable with.

When I heard that EA was promoting its new SimCity Social spin-off with the tagline “More City, less Ville,” I hoped against hope that the game might actually break the deeply entrenched, deeply annoying social gaming mold set by Zynga’s ultra-popular, ultra-simple Facebook games like FarmVille. It’s hard to think of an established, well-respected gaming franchise with more potential to bring a bit of deep simulation, complex strategy, and gameplay variety to the world of popular Facebook games.

After playing around with the SimCity Social beta for a few days now, though, I’m a little gobsmacked by how much that potential has been wasted. Given how satisfied the game is to ape the conventions set by Zynga’s CityVille without adding any significant gameplay elements from its namesake, the tagline “More City, less Sim” would probably be more accurate for SimCity Social.

Like other SimCity games, Social gives players a relatively free hand to contract their cities with their own preferred mix of housing, businesses, and industry. Here, though, the decisions end up being more cosmetic than really meaningful to the city’s operation. In any other SimCity game, each decision would be laden with consequences and tradeoffs that ripple down through a series of interrelated systems: More industrial zoning might mean more jobs and taxes, but also more pollution and crime; a fire station might help protect the citizens, but also place a drain on a limited budget.

But there are no real negative consequences to any of your decisions in Social. Sure, some decisions end up being better than others—one business might produce more money than another in the same amount of time, for instance—but even the most inefficient business will turn you into a millionaire with enough patience. The only real strategy to speak of is an incredibly basic min-maxing, to find the mix of buildings and decorations that will provide the most money and goods within the limited constraints of space and time. Past that, playing the game is really about mindlessly clicking on your buildings when they’re ready to be “harvested” for money and goods, building more when you have the resources, and watching your numbers go up and up and up.

The lack of any potential for failure in SimCity Social sucks all the satisfaction out of carefully building a city. This seems to be an inherent limitation in a large number of social games. I suppose that’s because imposing negative consequences would necessarily lead to the risk of catastrophic failure, which might cause players to stop playing. And if someone isn’t playing SimCity Social, it means they aren’t a potential customer for Diamonds, the in-game uber-currency that can turn your real money into anything from building permits to time-saving “accelerations” to the “Simoleans” needed to build most everything in the city. That’s right, if you want more money in SimCity Social, you don’t have to worry about calibrating your tax rate or even waiting for your existing buildings to produce more. You just have to spend real money to make fake money.

These kind of “friend or foe” decisions are what pass for multiplayer interaction in SimCity Social.

Outside of that, you’re basically just rearranging your city like a glorified doll house, making it as aesthetically pleasing as possible for when your neighbors visit. This is the most “social” part of SimCity Social. To the game’s credit, it does its best to make the interactions feel a little more meaningful through a goofy friend or foe system. When you click on your neighbor’s apartment building, for instance, you can choose to grease their doorstep and earn some ire, or invite them to a sleepover and earn some friendliness. The resulting resources you get for each action are the same, but leaning heavily on the negative side earns you the ability to leave your friends prank gifts like pooping birds (which is as close as this game comes to fun).

For the most part, though, friends in SimCity Social are less people to play with and more ciphers to use as virtual chattel for your goals. One of the early “events” in the game, for instance, sees a UFO crashing non-threateningly in the remote outskirts of town. To remove it, you need to invite friends to staff science team positions like ET Linguist and Physicist. Not sure who to invite? Don’t worry, the game will happily suggest 50 Facebook friends to pester, many of whom probably aren’t even playing the game and will no doubt resent your wall spam.

Such staffing doesn’t require any real sacrifice on your friends’ part— when they start up the game, they, like you, will likely be bombarded with dozens of random requests for help or virtual goods. They’ll mindlessly click through without thinking and without having to spend any of their in-game resources.

The sheer simplicity of this social transaction means there’s no real connection created by helping a friend. It just becomes another chore, a business relationship where a few clicks and a minimum of attention is all that’s being asked of either party. Of course, if you don’t want to pester your friends (or don’t have any), you can skip the whole thing by spending your real money on Diamonds, letting determined players pay to “solo” through some of the tougher goals.

When SimCity Social does make efforts towards true simulation, the results are almost laughable. Citizens will occasionally express anger or happiness over some incidental bit of city construction, for instance, but either way the comments can be dismissed simply by sending a virtual gift to the player represented by the citizen avatar. Fires will occasionally break out among your citizens’ homes, but luckily they won’t start until you’ve built your first fire house, and even then there’s no real risk that your single fire engine won’t be able to cover the entire town for a good long while. There are some businesses that can spew pollution into town as well, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out any concrete effects from all that smog.

When judged by the relatively low standards of CityVille clones, SimCity Social actually isn’t a half-bad example of the form. There are plenty of building types to rearrange, brightly colored shiny things to click on, and entertaining sound effects to listen to. But the SimCity name writes a check that this game simply can’t cash.

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Saturday Soapbox: The Majesty of Menus • Opinions • Eurogamer.net

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Let’s be honest. Nothing beats spotting a kickass title screen in the wild.

March 21st, 2003. Metroid Prime. Pop the disc from the case. Secure it in the GameCube’s open mouth.

Let’s go.

Sat in the domestic darkness of my living room, I hear an abrasive, bacterial scratching sound. Then an ominious melody, but still nothing on the TV. It’s teasing me.

And then it’s not. I see footage of some alien matter under an electron microscope. It’s all blood red and future orange. Then, finally, the logo. METROIDⓇ PRIME. Followed by a theremin trill, and a kettledrum like an irregular heartbeat.

“[Press Start],” it offers. The square brackets offering a subtext of: “[Whenever you’re ready.]”

It’s such a beautiful screen that when you do press start, it feels impatient, somehow. The game punishes for this. It whips the camera backwards, curving it down and around through a jungle of foreign matter, the theremin’s melody descending with you. By the time you arrive at the game select screen, you’re out of breath. You’re spent. You’ve got your money’s worth and should probably go to bed.

Menus! They’re like excited websites.

Which is no use to Metroid Prime! It can’t have you lolling around here, in the limbo between anticipation and adventure. So, with the grace of a knife being slipped between your ribs, the game emits an electric cough, prompting a doomsday baritone choir.

To say Metroid Prime has a fantastic menu is missing the point. Metroid Prime had a menu that didn’t just respect the Metroid name - Metroid Prime’s menu was Metroid.

I was 18 years old when Metroid Prime came out, meaning I’d been eight for Super Metroid. Retro Studios had to appease the nostalgic memories of people like me, a feat comparable to trying to feed a ghost.

But in constructing this witheringly expensive, overblown main menu, they did just that. Retro Studios tapped into the alien, lonely, bracing emotions that defined Super Metroid not just as a piece of design but as an experience. They suckered you into this world again. And they did it in seconds. With a menu. And in getting you on their side this early, they also made you open-minded to the experimental design of Metroid Prime proper.

Let’s get this straight. Main menus have a role besides their functionality. They’re the first thing you see in a game, and not only can they set the tone for everything that’s to come, they actually have to. Think how vapid an experience it’d be to get a game in the post, the box a totem of years of anticipation, and when you put the disc in you just start… playing. World 1-1. Create your character. “Welcome to the tutorial! Pick up the gun.”

No, a menu is needed. The game has to be as excited as you are, even if it’s just for a moment. The menu is a runway that guides you into the game’s world, sometimes smoothly, sometimes awkwardly, but always with fascinating speed. Pay attention, and you’ll never learn more about a developer and their game in less time.

Resident Evil 4’s a fun one. A gorgeous logo, some artwork, all of it uniquely static. No movement at all. Then you actually start a game and the menu all but belches “RESIDENT! EVIL! FOUR!” in a voice that no human has ever used before or since. It’s a laughable flip-flopping between minimalist and maximalist, but then you actually play the game and find it’s more comfortable with both absurdist action and sequences of utter tranquillity than many games are with either.

Fonts and logos? Sorted. Now can we sort out the rest of games writing?

There are a thousand of these. Far Cry 2’s main menu was a mercenary’s tattered notebook, broadcasting the developers’ desire to bring something, anything, everything, to the FPS genre. And if you think that’s nonsense, try and think of an FPS that doesn’t have an utterly straightforward menu. Except for Black Ops! Which just reeks of Treyarch trying to prove itself.

More recently, Dragon’s Dogma encouraged us to share in its glittering naivety with a menu that showed a dragon in various action poses, accompanied by a rock’n’roll theme song that is never heard again. It’s almost as excited with itself as cult brawler Bujingai on the PS2, which first had you run through a tiny level, cutting up robots with your technicolour sword, before you’d seen either a menu or a tutorial.

Unbeknownst to you it would actually record this effort, and only once you were done did it take you to the main menu. A menu with you, fighting, as the background! You, set to J-rock and coupled with cinematic camera angles that made you look amazing, even through you were, inevitably, shite. And you never got the chance to replay this. Every time you turned Bujingai on you’d hear that squealing guitar solo as you saw yourself soaring into walls and swinging your sword psychotically at nothing at all.

More elegantly, you know Kid Icarus on the 3DS is going to be a good time because within its playpen of a menu, selecting the difficulty is more fun than playing most other games.

I love this stuff. And if you do pore over it like some bizarrely specialised future archaeologist, it loves you back. The range and depth of talent packed into Arkham City’s menu, where characters are caught mid-fight, in the rain, as the camera pans past them, got me more excited than anything in the game’s marketing. There was no risk of disappointment anymore. The game would be a tour de force from start to finish.

Elsewhere, we’re through the looking glass. Games with serious multiplayer communities have started to build menus that are defined by what they don’t do.

Narrowingly missing the cut for this article was MGS4’s insane channel-hopping, and Katamari Damacy’s insane insanity.

The original Halo’s menu is built around the IP’s portentous sci-fi. You look at that menu, you feel like you’re on a horse. You get the series’ most famous piece of music, set to the Halo logo, the Halo itself spinning grandly behind it, all your options done up in the officious garb of block capitals.

And after 35 seconds, the chorus is unexpectedly replaced by those drums that kickstart your heart, those stirring strings (the same song later plays on the beach landing of The Silent Cartographer level). It’s almost, almost as if the game is teaching you to wait, in preparation for the thoughtful pace of its combat.

Halo 2’s more cocksure. You get the same layout, but the background image is monochrome, almost hidden. The Halo logo’s the only thing that matters, and the choral music doesn’t go anywhere. You’re not being wooed anymore - you’re paying your respects to the brand. It’s like being in a church.

By Halo 3, we get this new breed of menus where your options are on the left, parallel to the logo, instead of underneath it. The menu is just a Spartan springboard, in both senses, because some extraordinarily wealthy Microsoft employee who probably wears sneakers to work decided that at this point, it’d be better for the Halo brand if it didn’t try to sell itself. You turn on Halo 3, you can just start playing. Halo 3 is acting, not unreasonably, as if it’s as indispensable as the TV itself.

In downloadable titles, everything I hate about Fez is encapsulated in the fact that you’re forced through its lovely yet sluggish main menu twice. Then there’s Dota 2, which I’m playing now because I wanted to know if it was as hardcore as everyone said. The answer is that the Dota 2 beta doesn’t have a title screen, at present. It drops you into a literal menu of menus.

But there’s one thing I can’t figure out.

Coming soon to EG’s Saturday Soapbox: I write about resolution dropdown boxes.

Braid. When Jonathon Blow was making it, he got into a fight with Microsoft about the menu. Specifically, he didn’t want one. He wanted you to load the game on the dashboard, and be given control of Tim straight away.

Microsoft said no, on company policy. Every game needed a menu. In time, Blow compromised, and Braid got the minimalist “Press Start” that it has today.

What I don’t get is what that says about Braid. I do have a suspicion, though. Braid is, by videogame standards, ferociously autobiographical. In Indie Game: The Movie, Blow talks of the importance of art having a vulnerability. More pertinently, in this profile in The Atlantic, journalist Taylor Clark tells Blow (after spending weeks with him) that he thinks Braid’s ultimate message is that the pursuit of knowledge brings alienation. Blow’s response?

“Well, I would say that I would not be frustrated at all with that interpretation.”

I think Blow didn’t want Braid to have a menu because that would have been a characteristically bold first step towards expressing that alienation. It would have left the player unsure of themselves in the game’s world, as well as having the implication then whenever the game is turned off, Tim just stands there. Alone.

Just a theory.

There are just too many main menus of note, but I say: let’s have a shot at cataloguing them anyway. Name the menus that stick in your mind like hot fudge. Let’s show those developers that we were paying attention.

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The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

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Self-portrait by Tarn Adams, left, using characters from his game. Right, Zach Adams.

Tarn Adams was in the carpeted spare bedroom that serves as his work space, trying to avert an apocalyptic outbreak of vampire dwarves. “If they just run wild biting people, half the dwarves in the colony will be infected in no time,” he said, shaking his head. “That would be no fun.” He was silent for a moment. “Maybe they have to bite you three times before you’re infected?”

Seated nearby was Tarn’s older brother, Zach, squinting thoughtfully and jotting ideas into a notepad. It was a chilly afternoon in Silverdale, Wash., a town about 20 miles west of Seattle, and Tarn was wearing one of his favorite sweatshirts, a beige hoodie decorated with rows of strutting cats. The brothers — both heavyset, with close-cropped brown hair and sweetly sheepish demeanors — were conversing, as they do every day, about Dwarf Fortress, the computer game they began devising in 2002.

Dwarf Fortress is barely a blip on the mainstream radar, but it’s an object of intense cult adoration. Its various versions have been downloaded in the neighborhood of a million times, although the number of players who have persisted past an initial attempt is doubtless much smaller. As with popular simulation games like the Sims series, in which players control households, or the Facebook fad FarmVille, where they tend crops, players in Dwarf Fortress are responsible for the cultivation and management of a virtual ecosystem — in this case, a colony of dwarves trying to build a thriving fortress in a randomly generated world. Unlike those games, though, Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin. The goal, in the game’s main mode, is to build as much and as imaginatively as possible before some calamity — stampeding elephants, famine, vampire dwarves — wipes you out for good.

Though its medieval milieu of besieged castles and mutant enemies may be familiar, Dwarf Fortress appeals mainly to a substratum of hard-core gamers. The game’s unofficial slogan, recited on message boards, is “Losing is fun!” Dwarf Fortress’s unique difficulty begins with its most striking feature: The way it looks. In an industry obsessed with pushing the frontiers of visual awe, Dwarf Fortress is a defiant throwback, its interface a dense tapestry of letters, numbers and crude glyphs you might have seen in a computer game around 1980. A normal person looks at ♠§dg  and sees gibberish, but the Dwarf Fortress initiate sees a tense tableau: a dog leashed to a tree, about to be mauled by a goblin.

This bare-bones aesthetic allows Tarn to focus resources not on graphics but on mechanics, which he values much more. Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as Dwarf Fortress. Beneath the game’s rudimentary facade is a dizzying array of moving parts, algorithms that model everything from dwarves’ personalities (some are depressive; many appreciate art) to the climate and economic patterns of the simulated world. The story of a fortress’s rise and fall isn’t scripted beforehand — in most games narratives progress along an essentially set path — but, rather, generated on the fly by a multitude of variables. The brothers themselves are often startled by what their game spits out. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat dwarves,” Zach says. “But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”

Dwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.

“Playing Dwarf Fortress is like taking the controls of a plane right as it’s taking off,” says Chris Dahlen, editor in chief of the gaming magazine Kill Screen. And, he added, “flying a jet is a lot more interesting than just riding in a jet.”

Dwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. “I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,” Garfield recalled. He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but “that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.”

After nine years of development, Dwarf Fortress is, from the perspective of game play, perhaps the most complex video game ever made. And yet it is still only in “alpha” — the most recent release is version 0.31. By version 1.0, Tarn says, the game will include military campaigns and magic, along with scores of other additions. He showed me a four-inch stack of index cards, color-coded and arranged into umbrella categories, to keep track of his goals. “I like being able to hold the game in my hands,” he says.

I asked Tarn when he thought he and Zach would reach version 1.0. “Twenty years from now,” he replied. “That’s the number we talk about.” He chuckled at the prospect, adding that even when that milestone arrived, Dwarf Fortress would keep growing. “This is going to be my life’s work.”

Tarn, 33, lives in an apartment complex abutting one of the many shopping plazas that make up Silverdale, a town he calls “a strip mall.” His place has two bedrooms, the larger of which he uses for programming and which is nearly empty except for his computer desk, a framed picture of his part Manx, part Maine Coon cat, Scamps, and a fuzzy cat tree. In the living room are two gray folding tables for playing board games like Arkham Horror and Descent, and a box of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games. Tarn said he seldom touches these because “most of them suck.” The only furniture in the small dining room is Scamps’s litter box.

If much of Tarn’s apartment suggests a tenant who never fully moved in, his bedroom suggests a tenant who never sets a sock outdoors. When I peeked inside, rumpled underwear, discarded boxes and books lay scattered across the carpet. A sheet of plywood, edged with black foam rubber, was wedged into the window frame and affixed there by metal clamps. Tarn wakes up around 3 p.m. every day, codes through the night and goes to bed around 6 a.m. The plywood keeps slumber-disturbing daylight out of the room, making it a chamber fit for a vampire dwarf — or at least for a computer programmer.

Tarn and Zach’s parents live on several wooded acres in nearby Bremerton, and Zach, who is 35 and between jobs, has lived with them since 2002. Zach brought over a drinking glass from the house in case I got thirsty, because Tarn owns only a couple of dishes. In the fridge were three sodas and a jug of water and nothing else. Tarn said I was welcome to anything, although the jug technically belonged to Scamps — the tap water has something in it that makes the cat refuse to drink it. Tarn consumed “maybe one glass” of water in the last three months, hydrating with soft drinks instead. “Water’s not doing it for me these days,” he said. “I know it’s bad, but the sugar goes right into programming the game. If I don’t drink soda now, I get a headache and can’t do any work.”

Near midnight one evening, after a chat with Zach about incorporating sewers into the game, Tarn settled into his coding routine, opening his C++ software and firing up a Pandora playlist of upbeat soul. (Zach, less adept at programming, contributes to the game by brainstorming ideas.) Tarn surveyed the code, arrayed before him in tiny type, and began rocking in his swivel chair so vigorously that its joints squawked. The rocking had nothing to do with the music. “It’s a tic,” he explained later. “Sometimes I don’t even notice I’m doing it. During tests at college, people would yell at me to knock it off.”

As Tarn got into the zone, his muttered profanities and grumbles about “x distances” took on a mantralike quality. Conjuring sewers, he would type out lines of code, let the software effect his changes, frown at the results, then tweak. Initially, the sewers appeared as an illogical tangle of blue gashes, but line by line, Tarn worked them into coherence.

At about 1:30 a.m., a family of hippos, represented by light gray H’s, swam into the tunnels from a nearby river. Their arrival was an unintended development born entirely of the game’s internal logic. Tarn was pleased. “The hippos like the sewers!” he said. He took a celebratory swig of Dr. Pepper and rocked back and forth.

Despite the modesty of Tarn’s setup, he has a lot riding on Dwarf Fortress. For much of his adult life, he was headed in a very different direction. He’d enrolled at the University of Washington, where he became a star math student. He wasn’t much interested in the social atmosphere of dorms and spent his freshman year splitting a Seattle apartment with Zach, who was a senior majoring in ancient history at the university. When Zach graduated, Tarn moved into a string of “dingy one-bedrooms” with “bad moisture problems” — in one, he discovered a shelf fungus growing behind his couch. Tarn didn’t take notes in class, such was his facility with the material, and he still “4.0’d almost everything.” In his final year, the faculty named him best math major.

Tarn applied to 17 Ph.D. programs, got into 15 and, wavering briefly between M.I.T. and Stanford, chose the latter. He earned his doctorate in 2005 with a dissertation called “Flat Chains in Banach Spaces,” a rumination on concepts in advanced geometry that he describes as “not that interesting to that many people, but a nice little paper.” He published a version of it in The Journal of Geometric Analysis and, landing a postdoc at Texas A&M, seemed destined for the academic career he envisioned since his undergraduate days.

But Tarn wasn’t entirely happy. He’d had doubts about pursuing a career in math since the “pressure cooker” of his first year at Stanford, when he failed his qualifying exams (students get two chances; he passed the second time). Faced with the school’s highly competitive and professionalized environment, he came to regard himself as a “second-rate mathematician.” The issue wasn’t aptitude so much as passion. He wanted to do math but also to make video games, a juggling act he managed as an undergraduate. This had become impossible. “They wanted 60 hours a week from you, giving you problems that would take 20 hours to solve,” he said. He grew depressed and, in his only encounter with drugs, snorted meth.

For Tarn, making games “scratches all the same itches” as math: “At the end of a math problem, you have a paper and maybe you publish it, and the paper can be a building block for the edifice of mathematics, but to me that’s not so important. But working on a problem and having a game when you’re done? That’s pretty damn cool.”

In the summer of 2006, after a year at Texas A&M, Tarn went to his department head and, breaking into tears, quit. “It wasn’t easy,” Tarn recalls. “Being a mathematician was part of what I’d been doing for years. But it was easy in another sense, because I was so sick of it.” His plan, if it counts as one, was to move home and devote himself fully to Dwarf Fortress, which he’d been developing as a hobby. He figured he’d burn through his $15,000 savings and sort things out from there. To Tarn’s relief, Texas A&M offered to keep him on another year, paying him a $50,000 salary. “I woke up the morning after I gave notice, like, I can actually make this work.”

Tarn has been programming computers for as long as he can remember. “My earliest real memory is when my dad taught me how to use a ‘FOR loop’ in BASIC when I was 6, to make something go across the screen,” he says. His father, Dan, worked in wastewater treatment, writing software to crunch data and run sewage plants, and he furnished the house with the latest computers. Tarn coded little animations and, in fifth grade, wrote his first fantasy game with Zach.

Tarn’s grandmother, Elinor Ringland, who lives a short drive from Silverdale, says he was a restlessly curious child. “I remember Tarn taking my hair dryer and burning a hole into a chair cushion,” she told me. “It wasn’t mischievous; he was just inquisitive. We had to make sure he wouldn’t go into the medicine cabinet and start mixing potions.” (The brothers’ parents declined to be interviewed; “Calling them private is an understatement,” Zach explained.)

Despite Tarn’s adventurousness at home, he was withdrawn at school. “Occasionally I’d have a friend, and we’d talk or joke around or whatever, but I didn’t play sports or talk to people or have that experience,” he says. “I was a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid.” In high school he made one close friend, Alan Ames, who still corresponds sporadically with Tarn. “We’d spend weekends making video games, or these silly ‘Star Trek’ parodies with his dad’s video camera,” Ames, who is now an aerospace engineer, recalled. “He never cared about socializing.” He had to be pushed to join the math club.

Growing up, Tarn was enamored of Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien, but he has never been a lockstep member of the geek culture so much as a wanderer on the fringes. He didn’t read superhero comics as a kid, and later, he never became obsessed with the “Game of Thrones” books, say, or with “Lost.” He graduated from D&D to the more obscure pen-and-paper game Cyberpunk 2020, and he and Zach would download indie computer games from early bulletin boards. They adored 1985’s Hack 1.0.3, which, with its randomly generated levels, elaborate mechanics and primitive graphics, helped to popularize a microgenre of fantasy games known as roguelikes, which in turn influenced Dwarf Fortress. “We liked that you could choke to death on your food or fall down a stairway and fall on something poisonous you were carrying and poison yourself,” Tarn said.

Tarn calls Zach his best friend. The brothers’ closeness is largely a function of frequent moves the family made for Dan Adams’s work: by the time Tarn was 18, the family had been uprooted from Washington to California to New Hampshire and back to Washington. The brothers were the only constants in each other’s lives besides their parents. “There’s been a couple times when I’ve gone off and done my own thing,” Zach says, “but I always come back to Tarn.”

In 2007, when Tarn left Texas and moved back to Washington, he lived at home before moving to Silverdale. “I wanted to be close to Zach,” he says, to collaborate more easily on the game and because Zach, who worked after graduation in an Amazon.com warehouse and as a stevedore, was “going through some stuff.” Zach, who alluded to past problems with alcohol (he no longer drinks), told me his marriage of two years had collapsed; neither brother wished to comment further. Zach’s background in ancient history often helps in devising the imagery that gives Dwarf Fortress its atmosphere. For example, goblins hang the skin of conquered foes from towers, a gnarly detail the brothers got from a book on the Assyrians that Zach recommended.

When the weather permits, the brothers take walks along a trail that wends over marshland past plastic picnic tables near State Route 3. They watch crime procedurals at their parents’ house and follow a one-meal-a-day rule (most local restaurants are open for just a few hours after Tarn wakes up), which can mean Quiznos, a turkey sandwich from the supermarket or root-beer popsicles and handfuls of dry Crispix (Tarn is lactose intolerant).

Tarn has been single since graduate school, when he dated a Cisco systems administrator for a short time. I asked him whether he wanted children. “I don’t mind the idea of never having kids,” he said. “I want to stay focused on the game, and if I had kids, I’d wind up paying attention to them instead.”

He expressed similar ambivalence about finding a romantic partner. “If I were in the supermarket one day and someone came on really strong and it was a mutual thing, I’d probably get pushed along, but it’s not something I’m anticipating,” he said. His interest has dwindled. “It’s easier not to care about that stuff when you’re in your 30s.”

Dwarf Fortress began life as “a simple mining game, like Dig Dug,” Tarn says. The brothers worked for about four years on an adventure title, rendered in 3-D graphics, called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. Between battles, “you could zoom in on your character, and it’d tell you how curly his leg hairs were, and the melting and flash points of various materials,” Tarn said. “It was insane.”

The brothers started a company called Bay 12, nicknaming themselves Toady One (Tarn) and ThreeToe (Zach), posting games that could be downloaded free and building a fan base of about 300 people. Tarn found 3-D graphics agonizingly time-consuming to program, and Dwarf Fortress was conceived as an undemanding side project: its full title is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. Soon enough, Armok was scrapped and Dwarf Fortress took over, inheriting its predecessor’s fetish for complexity but none of its looks. It’s like a jalopy with a V-12 under the hood. “The processing power that Dwarf Fortress uses is on the same scale as modern engineering software for designing aerospace hardware,” says Ames, the engineer. “You have more complicated simulations in Dwarf Fortress than when you model the aerodynamics of a wing.”

Though it may seem ungainly at first, the game’s interface — rendered in what are known as extended ASCII characters — has a sparse elegance. As seasons change, trees, represented by various symbols, shift from green to yellow. Goblins’ eyes appear as red quotation marks; if you shoot out an eye with an arrow, the symbol becomes an apostrophe. On a message board, one fan likened the ASCII experience in Dwarf Fortress to the immersive pleasures of reading a book: “You can let your imagination fill in the gaps.”

The community that has arisen around Dwarf Fortress is remarkable. Fans maintain an extensive wiki, which remains the game’s best (and, effectively, only) instruction manual, and which even Tarn and Zach admit to consulting. There are fan-organized podcasts, and meet-ups where players converge on bars in homemade Dwarf Fortress shirts. On the Bay 12 forums, fans make suggestions for the game, and Tarn has implemented some of these. Last spring, a player calling himself Jong89 logged on with brain-bending news. Using “672 pumps, 2,000 logs, 8,500 mechanisms and thousands of other assorted bits and knobs like doors and rock blocks,” he’d built a crude but functioning computer within Dwarf Fortress.

Perhaps most fascinating are the stories that fans share online, recounting their dwarven travails in detailed and sometimes illustrated narratives. In a 2006 saga, called Boatmurdered, fans passed around a single fortress — one player would save a game, send the file to another player and so on, relay-race style — while documenting its colorful descent into oblivion. (After a vicious elephant attack: “A single untrained marksdwarf stands ready to defend the crossing, but I doubt he’ll be enough.”) Boatmurdered spread across gaming sites and made the front page of MetaFilter, a popular blog. “That did a lot to make people aware we existed,” Tarn says.

Shared projects like Boatmurdered mark the extent to which Tarn accommodates multiplayer participation. Massive multiplayer online games have been a lucrative industry trend for years, but Tarn disdains M.M.O.’s. To him, they replace the deep pleasures of imaginative game design with the novelty of community and are invariably oriented toward mass, lowest-common-denominator appeal. “Half the people I met were 12-year-olds yelling homophobic slurs,” he says.

At bottom, Dwarf Fortress mounts an argument about play. Many video games mimic the look and structure of films: there’s a story line, more or less fixed, that progresses only when you complete required tasks. This can make for gripping fun, but also the constrictive sense that you are a mouse in a tricked-out maze, chasing chunks of cheese. Tarn envisions Dwarf Fortress, by contrast, as an open-ended “story generator.” He and Zach grew up playing computer games with notebooks in hand, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered and logging their journeys in detail. Dwarf Fortress, which never unfolds the same way twice, takes that spirit of supple, fully engaged play to the extreme.

Tarn sees his work in stridently ethical terms. He calls games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled, which ensnare players in addictive loops of frustration and gratification under the pretense that skill is required to win, “abusive” — a common diagnosis among those who get hooked on the games, but a surprising one from a game designer, ostensibly charged with doing the hooking. “Many popular games tap into something in a person that is compulsive, like hoarding,” he said, “the need to make progress with points or collect things. You sit there saying yeah-yeah-yeah and then you wake up and say, What the hell was I doing? You can call that kind of game fun, but only if you call compulsive gambling fun.” He added: “I used to value the ability to turn the user into your slave. I don’t anymore.”

Tarn’s scruples have certainly cost him fans, but he says he’s doing fine. He has no plans to charge for the game; he subsists entirely on PayPal donations from players. “I like that it’s free, and if you care about it, you pay,” he says. In 2010, he earned $50,000. (He calls that year, in which he released a major update after a long delay, anomalous, and expects to make $30,000 in 2011.) His expenses are low — $860 a month in rent, $750 a month to Zach for his help and a few hundred dollars for utilities and food — and as long as Dwarf Fortress is self-sustaining, he’s happy. He has refused a programming job at a major developer (he asked that I keep its name off the record) and turned down a $300,000 offer from another company to license the Dwarf Fortress name, fearing that the proposed sum wouldn’t sufficiently offset the long-term donations drop that would likely result.

But the game’s profile is slowly growing on Tarn’s own terms. This week, the Museum of Modern Art will include Dwarf Fortress in a major design exhibition called “Talk to Me,” which Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, describes as being about the “communication between people and objects.” Antonelli selected several simulation games for display in the show but was struck by the combination of “beautiful aesthetics” and “mind-boggling” complexity in Dwarf Fortress. “When you are playing Dwarf Fortress, you are God, and the world is talking back to you,” Antonelli said. Then she added, with a laugh, “And you are a very anal god.”

Meanwhile, the smash success of the world-building game Minecraft, which is in many ways a more user-friendly version of Dwarf Fortress (and which has earned its Dwarf Fortress-loving creator millions of dollars), has only been good for Tarn, driving curious new players his way. Still, in the only moment I heard him speak with anything like bitterness, Tarn called Minecraft a “depressing distillation of our own stuff.” He paused, adding more magnanimously that the game “has its own things going for it.” The problem, he concluded, “isn’t with Minecraft so much as it’s with society.”

On a bright spring day in Silverdale, Tarn and Zach spread heavy-stock paper across Tarn’s living-room tables and opened a box of crayons. When players donate to Dwarf Fortress, they’re offered a story written by Zach or a piece of crayon art drawn by Zach and colored by Tarn. These gifts contribute to an appealing sense of the game as handcrafted and personal. The brothers usually make the drawings at their grandmother’s house, a monthly ritual in which she plays appraiser, deciding what a $5 donor will get and what a $100 donor will get.

They had 14 pending crayon requests, which ranged from carte blanche to comically precise. “One guy wants a picture of seven dwarves being chased by four zombie badger boars,” Tarn said, grinning. Hunched over the table with his tongue out, Zach would make a pencil outline, then Tarn would add color. “Is this the goblin’s shears or his armor?” Tarn asked at one point.

Tarn and Zach reached the last drawing: two dwarves standing beside a massive tower under a starry sky. The scene had been rendered and colored, and all that was left to do was for Tarn to write a caption, conceived by the donor, along the bottom. “Time for my chicken-scratch,” Tarn said. Using a black Uni-Ball, he carefully lettered the caption, which read, “We shall build a tower so tall, we can mine the very stars themselves!”

Tarn offered the pen to Zach. “Do you want to sign it?”

Jonah Weiner is the pop critic at Slate and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His last article for the magazine was about the artist Brock Enright and his Videogames Adventure Services.

Editor: Sheila Glaser (s.glaser-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

A version of this article appeared in print on July 24, 2011, on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From?.

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The Family That Built A Video Game Together

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Mark Serrels Kotaku AU June 28, 2012 1:00 PM

Set adrift like a modern day Swiss Family Robinson, Jason and Nicole Stark left the Australian games industry on mission together. They took their four children, they packed their bags and set sail to Noosa, Queensland. They gave themselves one single year to create a successful iOS game. This is their story: the story of a family and the video game they built together.

Sunlight filters through the window, but the classroom is grey. A girl dangles her legs idly beneath the desk. She doodles on her jotter; she dreams of black and white photographs. She waits for class to begin.

In the corner of her eye she sees a boy; a stride tempered with gawky teenage apprehension. Soon he’s standing by her desk. What does he want, this strange boy? Why does he look so sheepish? Why is he taking so long to speak?

Finally a sentence.

“Do you like fried bananas?” he asks.

Sorry. What?

“Do you like fried bananas?” he repeats.

And that was the very first time Nicole met her future husband, Jason. In high school. Minutes before Physics. Being asked if she liked fried bananas. Which she doesn’t.

“I’d actually made a bet with another girl I knew that this pick-up line wouldn’t work,” remembers Jason.

“But I lost the bet, because the line worked with a vengeance!”

One marriage, four children and over 20 years later, Nicole and Jason Stark are still together — and in love — but now they find themselves in a strange room, in a new town, having both left their jobs in the Australian Games Industry, moving their entire family to Noosa. They’ve given themselves one single year to make a successful iOS game.

Together, in this pokey room, in a little rental buried in the Brisbane wilderness, all Jason and Nicole Stark have is their video game. And each other.

Getting The Hell Out Of Dodge

“It hasn’t been easy,” says Nicole.

Jason and Nicole’s story began one year ago under familiar circumstances: redundancy and the collapse of the Australian Games Industry.

“It sounds very brave and noble to say we left the Australian Games Industry,” says Jason. “But really the Australian Games Industry left us.

“It left a lot of people.”

The year is 2010. Krome is in the midst of a high-profile closure; Jason Stark works there as an art director. He is one of the ‘lucky ones’ — among the numbers recruited by KMM to help make Happy Feet 2, a video game based on the movie being rushed to completion by frantic hands at Dr D Studios in Sydney. It was a Band-Aid fix for a long-term problem, and Jason knew it.

“About 18 months ago, it all started going bad,” he says. “Krome closed, but my team survived for a little bit longer — we were bought by Kennedy Miller Mitchell. We survived for a while and finished Happy Feet 2, but then we were shut down.”

For Jason, it was hardly unexpected.

“The details of that final day, well, it would have been great if there was some cinematic moment, but it was really a succession of events,” remembers Jason. “KMM shutting us down gradually became more and more likely. The final announcement was really anti-climatic. At that stage most of us already had plans.”

Jason’s plan involved dragging his wife and four children the hell outta dodge.

Children And Bears

“At that point,” says Jason, “it was either pack our bags for Canada or go it alone. But the idea of our children growing up with Canadian accents? Well, that was enough to make the decision for us.”

“I’m pretty sure a bear would have eaten one of them,” adds Nicole.

“Yeah,” continues Jason, “our children are very scared of bears.”

The Stark family decided to go it alone. They had a game idea. They wanted to create a family studio in order to build that game.

Avoiding bears and reducing costs were the top priorities and the reasons behind Jason and Nicole deciding to move themselves away from the development hub of Brisbane to the remote town of Noosa.

“The first decision was to find a really cheap place to live,” says Jason. “The choice was either live in a terrible, terrible suburb of Brisbane, or move to Noosa, which is, coincidentally, a really nice place to live. So we packed our bags and moved here.

“The kids love it here, because they can live next to the beach. That was part of the rationale. We wanted a place where we could entertain our children for free!”

The children. The Stark children are an important part of this story. Jason and Nicole have four in total — all girls. Alia is 19, Raven 15, Yukari is six, and Violet is the youngest at three. The kids are part of the reason why Nicole left Krome Studios five years before Jason did — Jason was made redundant, but Nicole left her animation job of her own volition, on her own terms. Baby terms.

“She got tired of making games,” claims Jason, “so she decided to make people instead.”

But pretty soon the people Nicole and Jason made wanted to help mum and dad make video games.

“The game we are currently making was not our idea!” laments Jason. “It was all Alia.

“Our original idea was a very gamey game. It was an RPG, with sci-fi and film noir elements. Whenever I told my family or friends about it their eyes would glaze over. They’d nod.

“Then my daughter — who is lovely, but also evil — she’s doing Psychology and she came home with this awesome little plan. She said, ‘this is how the government should fix the obesity crisis. They should let evolution do the work and just unleash tigers on the streets’.

“I told my brother in law about it. He laughed and said, ‘I’d play that video game.’”

So it was settled. The family Stark’s first game would be an iOS game about tigers eating fat people. That game would be called Run Fatty Run.

The House Of Stark

“It took us three weeks to set everything up,” claims Nicole.

“Yeah,” repeats Jason. “Three weeks.”

Three weeks to find an apartment. Three weeks to uproot possessions, furniture and six different lives from Brisbane to Noosa.

“We had chronic vertigo for the first three months,” says Jason. “We just couldn’t believe it. We couldn’t believe that our situation had changed so quickly.”

Until this point, Run Fatty Run was just been a hobby project for Jason and Nicole, something to tinker with in the few spare moments parents with four children can grab. Now, for the first time ever, their pet project was a full-time job.

“It was definitely an adjustment,” laughs Nicole.

“We haven’t been more than a foot away from each other for pretty much the last six months.”

Every morning Nicole wakes up, takes three-year-old Yukari to school and Violet to Kindy, before heading back home, where she and Jason sit back to back for a full working day and beyond, working on Run Fatty Run.

“We set up our day-to-day life exactly as if we had a job,” says Jason. “We set the kids off to school and then we sit down at our desks very, very close to each other! I can’t actually stretch back without clocking Nicole on the head!”

And, of course, they bicker. Like an old married couple.

“The biggest argument? There’s been so many,” says Nicole.

“She keeps asking me redo things,” laughs Jason. “Nothing’s ever good enough!”

“You just see each other a lot more,” adds Nicole.

“You see each other a lot more and you have to be firm and honest,” continues Jason. “You can’t tip toe around each other’s efforts. If something’s not working you have to treat each other like an employee. You have to tell each other when stuff sucks!”

“And that always goes down well,” laughs Nicole.

The biggest problem, particularly for Jason, is separating work life from home life; understandable considering how intertwined the two have become.

“Actually that’s the hardest thing,” admits Jason. “The computers are just there. I was driving you crazy, wasn’t I?”

“You have to make time in your life for not talking about work,” says Nicole, finally.

She Didn’t Do Anything!

Yukari is six years old. Her wavy auburn hair dangles over the iPad. She brushes it from her face and plays intently. She begins to shout. She’s spotted a few problems and she wants her daddy to fix them.

“Yukari, just today — she wasn’t intending to playtest the game, I didn’t tell her to at least — but she sat down and played through the entire game, oscillating between laughing wildly and screaming at me to make it easier,” says Jason.

“And yeah, she found some usability issues. And then she was really excited because she insisted on being in the credits.”

It’s par for the course in the Stark household, a household where building video games is a family project.

“Raven in particular is really interested in it,” says Nicole proudly.

“Yeah,” confirms Jason. “That’s definitely that’s what she wants to do.”

Raven is 15 years old. She wants to become a video game artist.

“Raven’s done a lot of the artwork for the game’s cutscenes,” says Jason. She’s doing really well. It’s not surprising that she’s going to be an artist.”

Even three-year-old Violet will be in the game’s credits, alongside her older sister. Much to the dismay of Yukari.

“I suggested to Yukari that Violet, our youngest should be in the credits under special thanks,” says Jason, smiling. “Yukari just said, ‘Why? She didn’t do anything!’”

Swiss Family Stark

The Starks are something of a modern Swiss Family Robinson, cast ashore in Noosa, building video games instead of tree houses, hunting for bugs instead of foraging for food. Everything they do, they do together.

“If you can do anything as a family, I think that’s awesome,” says Jason. “If you can build houses as a family or operate a shop as a family, that’s great. I grew up in a large family myself, and they bought a lot of food businesses. It’s always been typical of the whole family to pitch in and help out. Your family was like that too, Nicole, wasn’t it?”

“I actually swore that my family wouldn’t be like that!” laughs Nicole. “Because my parents owned a furniture shop and as kids we always had to help out and stuff.”

“We just picked a really cool thing to do,” says Jason. “And then forced the kids to help us!”

Sans any certification issues from Apple, Run Fatty Run will be released on the iTunes App Store next week. A video game conceived by a daughter, designed by a husband and wife, featuring art from a high school student, play-tested by a six-year-old.

Jason’s expectations are modest.

“I’d like to earn a lot of money,” says Jason. “If we’re talking pie-in-the-sky dreams, I’d like to mirror the success of Ski Safari, and I’d like to use that money to build a little studio — so we can get out of our house, into an office, start a little team and help rebuild the local games industry.”

“But you know, we’ll be happy if we just have enough to make another game,” says Nicole. “Enough money to avoid getting a real job.”

“We just need to make enough money so we can afford the divorce!”

Run Fatty Run will be out for iOS later next week. You can find out more information about the game here.

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The Case for Video Games as Music

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By Kirk Hamilton Jun 21, 2012 9:00 PM

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If you’re a regular Kotaku Melodic reader, you’re no stranger to the idea that despite many developers’ cinematic aspirations, video games have more in common with music than they do with film.

It’s an idea that I’ve been pushing at Kotaku for a while now, starting with my first article as a Kotaku columnist last year: “The rhythm of play,” the musical quality of even the most basic video games. Video games practically are music. It feels even truer now than it did then.

I’ve been happy to see more and more writers and critics talking not just about video game music, but about video games as music. And I’ve been just as happy to see an increasing number of game developers thinking along the same lines, creating games that don’t just have good music; they are good music.

In the forward to The Sound Issue of Kill Screen magazine, then-Editor-in-Chief Chris Dahlen eloquently states the case for games as music:

All apologies to those who think videogames have grown more and more like the movies, but no matter how cinematic they become, the form with which they have the most in common is music. Both forms marry performance and production, gut and theory, and repetition and spontaneity. Neither one is complete until the work gets a player, and a classic will endure a million renditions, as the performers move from practice, to mastery, to reinvention. Music, like games, is also one of the most soul-cleansing, body-rocking, and mind-blowing creations of man. Life without either is unthinkable.

“Most importantly, in practice, both music and games are played- and can be played in very similar ways.”

Man, I couldn’t have put it better myself. (And I’ve tried!) The whole magazine issue is a fantastic collection of writing about games and music, and I swear I’m not just saying that because I wrote an article for it. If you’re into this stuff at all, I recommend ordering a copy.

Over at his blog “Wombflash Forest,” composer David Kanaga has written a lengthy, fascinating post about finding the spiritual meaning in both games and music. Kanaga is a thoughtful musician and is also something of a philosopher—he’s responsible for the soundtrack to the overstimulation freakout PS3 game Dyad as well as the music for the supremely cool, chilled-out Proteus.

Kanaga’s essay covers a vast amount of territory; it’s well worth a read, though for this article I’ll focus on his second section discussing the relationship between music and games.

The relationship between music and videogames is not a rhetorical one, it’s not just an analogy— the language describing it may be, but the various identities are a fact. Structurally, there’s little the two forms don’t have in common. This has design implications— rhythmically, formally, texturally, etc. Most importantly, in practice, both music and games are played— and can be played in very similar ways.

Musical instruments are games, as are compositions. They are possibility spaces with boundaries implicitly or explicitly inviting certain types of play.

Videogames are not competitions by necessity, they are play-spaces. Play is the subject and the source of meaning. How do we play? The kinds of meanings that exist in music are the same kinds of meanings that exist, fundamentally, (but lying latent), in games— they don’t point at anything but the experience itself, at the materials and interrelationships that form the binding structures of that process.

Well said. The relationship between games and music isn’t just a metaphorical one. Games are music, they have a real musical aspect to them. Leaving harmony aside, even the simplest games have a rhythm, as I outlined last year, and rhythm is a vital, often-misunderstood element of every video game. To quote myself (sorry):

When I close my eyes and think back to my favorite games of the past few years, I remember the way they feel: the heavy-metal crunch of God of War II, the gliding flow of Flower; the irrepressible bounce of New Super Mario Bros. DS and the impeccably timed slip and slide of Super Meat Boy. Each of those games had its own unique rhythm, an irresistible tempo that hooked me and kept me coming back.

And where those games succeeded, many others fail—hot messes like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and 2008’s Alone in the Dark felt like playing a drum solo with a handful of wet napkins. Rhythm isn’t something that can easily be put into words, but it is often the thing that makes a good game truly wonderful—and a mediocre game unplayable.

Rhythm felt like a good starting place, but the comparison goes beyond rhythm. Harmony, or more simply “notes”, also have a place in the games-as-music conversation. I got a kick out of Julian Benson’s recent article at Rock, Paper Shotgun in which he “transcribes” Jon Blow’s intricate time-bending platformer Braid.

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At first blush, the article looks similar to the kinds of cool musical analyses that Dan Bruno sometimes does on his blog Cruise Elroy. But keep reading, and you’ll see that Benson is actually transcribing the game like it’s music, drawing on the work of minimalist composer Steve Reich to put Braid’s shifting, backtracking flow into context, building a modified type of music notation in order to express the events on the screen.

He then pushes beyond Braid to other platformers, wondering if we could form a universal form of music-notation… for all games. (Granted, this seems like a stretch, but hey, it’s fun.) Benson describes speed runners—players who blast through levels in the most efficient way possible—as concert pianists, describing how notation would allow them to maximize their performances:

Notation gives speed runners two things: an ability to view an entire level with all its interlocking movements and a language with which they can share their routes. Much like a conductor is able to lay out an entire concert score, with all its different parts, and comprehend the whole, a speed runner can see a completely transcribed level, the movement of all its parts. With that information they can see and devise a route through all the obstacles, all on paper: they can show it to people, other speed runners: it can be consumed faster than video, it can be tweaked an altered by the speed runner community.

This all starts to dig a little bit too deep for me (and that’s saying something!) but who cares? The important thing is that no matter how hard Benson pushes it, the “analogy” holds up. In fact, as Kanaga says, it’s not an analogy at all—Benson is literally talking about a game while also talking about music. For all intents and purposes, they’re the same thing.

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Want more? YOU DO? Okay, let’s keep going. Breaking games down along musical lines makes it much easier to look at them critically. I had been weary of the “Gameplay vs. Story” debate for a long while, until I had this epiphany: gameplay and story are exactly like music and lyrics.

Music is the foundation of any composition, just like “gameplay” is the foundation of any game. And there will always be games without stories just like there will always be music without lyrics. Lyrics, on their own, aren’t music—they’re just poetry. Story, on its own, isn’t a game—it’s just a novel, or a screenplay. But when you combine them, amazing things can happen—a piece of music becomes a song.

Of course, music has a significant head start over video games in terms of artistic evolution. But because of that, music can also give us a sense of some of the ways that video games might grow and mature. Back to Dahlen’s Kill Screen forward:

If you’re a fan of both [video games and music], you may sense a certain sibling rivalry. Music is the older, hormonal one that breaks in through the window after a party; videogames are still sitting on the couch in their underoos. One form is new, while the other was embraced by all of our ancestors when they had to get down. Videogames give us fun, revelation, and satisfaction; music is rebellious, joyous, and sad, and it’s sexy, often very sexy, something that games have yet to learn to be.

As we’re seeing lately, games are spending more and more time up off the couch, wearing real pants, out and about. More games going off to parties, meeting new people, maybe talking to their friends about joining a battle of the bands. (Have we pushed the personification thing far enough here? Heh.)

But enough of this criticism junk! Let’s talk about the games themselves. Specifically, the “New Music Games” that I’ve written about before. This year has seen so many games that deliberately use musical sensibilities and concepts to explore new territory. Beat Sneak Bandit was a rhythm game with a unique puzzle-bent - much like the upcoming Orgarhythm, which takes the same concept and merges it with real-time strategy. The enjoyably strange Theatrhythm looks to merge Final Fantasy’s now-famous music into a fighting game (??) while Dyad, as I mentioned, merges music, visuals and momentum into an unforgettable psychedelic experience. Pippin Barr’s hilarious and surprisingly affecting “Epic Sax Guy” game was a remarkable simulation of musical rehearsal and performance while at the same time acting as a humorous exploration of a weird musical meme.

The in-development FRACT aims to put players inside of a giant synthesizer, and Sound Shapes is easily one of the most interesting-looking upcoming music games of the year simply for how it merges musicality with level design. (It helps that the contributing musicians are all fabulous.)

Harmonix, past purveyors of Rock Band’s brand of guitar-controller music simulation, have begun to branch out by reaching back. Their superfun Dance Central games are still more or less what people think of when they think of “Music Games,” (not that this is a bad thing) but Rock Band Blitz looks to return to the studio’s Audiosurf roots, making each instrument in a band available to a single game controller.

Jon Blow’s upcoming The Witness looks so thoroughly, methodically designed that it feels like an exercise in symphonic game design. ThatGameCompany’s triumphant Journey is an undeniably musical experience, peerlessly melding soaring gameplay highs with composer Austin Wintory’s astonishing musical score.

It feels as though we’re just getting started. As more game designers cotton to the innate musical qualities of games, we’ll start seeing more games that explicitly tie the rhythm of play with actual music, and merge the ebb and flow of musical composition with the push and pull of game design.

In other words: It’s a good time to be into music and video games. Let’s rock.

(Braid image via Rock, Paper Shotgun)

Contact Kirk Hamilton:

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