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Beyond Minecraft: Notch On Fame, Pressure, Sequels

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The Man Behind The Hat, Pt 1

By Nathan Grayson on September 14th, 2012 at 3:00 pm.

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Notch is Minecraft. Minecraft is Notch. A year ago, those statements might have been true to some extent, but not anymore. The man behind the most pervasive invention since the wheel (which he achieved by simply putting the corners back onto the wheel) hung up his pick axe late last year. That does not mean, however, that he’s escaped from the shadow of the monolith he created. Notch and his creation are still synonymous, for better or worse. And so, during PAX, I spoke with the quick-to-smile yet surprisingly introverted developer about the pressures of overnight fame, having people hang on (and quote) your every word, the current status of 0x10c, and tons more.

RPS: Minecraft has gone completely nuclear. It sort of did it overnight, though. Not overnight from the standpoint of when you started making it, but whenever people noticed it, they really noticed it. How has that been for you? To go from just making games at some company, to making games on your own, to having millions of people know your name and follow you on Twitter and quote every word that comes out of your mouth – including the ones you’re about to say?

Notch: I still haven’t gotten used to it. I’m slowly getting more used to it. It’s been weird to feel, because it’s a very surreal thing to have happen. I still feel like I’m just this programmer guy, but all of a sudden I’m involved in this big company with, like, 25 employees. To have people recognize me on the street is kind of weird, because it made me realize I’m not anonymous here anymore. But it’s fun. The fans are the reason I’m even doing this. I always try to make sure to take the time to say hi and all that. It’s kind of weird. But it’s fun.

RPS: Has it changed the way you do things at all? Because I’d imagine it’s very difficult not to be affected by that in some way or another.

Notch: Huh. I have to think about what I do in public, because people could be watching. That’s basically the only thing. It’s changed me in that now I talk to more strangers than I did before. I’m actually kind of an introvert, where I prefer to be alone, really. I feel like when I talk to people, I’m spending energy rather than getting energy. I used to not talk to many people at all. But now I’m forced to talk to fans, because people say hi to me and I can’t really be rude. I think I’m slightly better at talking to other people now. I think my self-esteem has gone up as well [laughs].

RPS: Is there a flipside to that, though? Whenever something happens in a game that you’re working on that people just don’t like, do you get a bunch of people saying, “I can’t believe you’ve done this! You’ve ruined everything”? How do you deal with that side of it?

Notch: I used to take it really hard. Because the most vocal people are the people who are disappointed. When people are content, they’re just… They just go along and don’t say much of anything, unless they’re real superfans. I’m the same, I guess. Most people are the same. I’ve never sent letters to John Carmack or something. I haven’t done that, even though I love everything he does.

When people are vocal about something they’re disappointed with, it’s easy to think, “Oh, everyone hates it.” I took it really hard. But I figured out that’s not true. If you just look at the numbers, a lot of people play it. Even if I get like 20 e-mails, that’s a very small portion. So I started getting better at understanding the reason people send that and trying to ignore the insults. I got very good at that. “Well, it’s just some guy, and he’s upset.” I got used to it. But it took about a year.

And after a point, you realize that it’s just…people on the internet. The sense of anonymity. People can be ruder than they actually are. They probably don’t mean it as harshly as they say it.

RPS: You’re still really active on Twitter and things like that, though. In this day and age, a lot of developers take a very cautious stance towards those sorts of things. They won’t reveal anything new online. They’re very careful with their words. You, though, tend to be pretty open – even though it’s come back to bite you a number of times.

Notch: Well, I’ve always been like that. I’m fairly open. I don’t really like secrets that much. I think it’s more fun to talk about stuff, and hopefully people understand that you can say something and then possibly change your mind later on. Most people do understand that.

Gamers are very good at getting excited about things when there’s not very much to be excited about. I do that. I’m excited about Half-Life 3, which is never going to be released [laughs]. But I’m still excited about it. It’s a difficult line to walk because I’m dealing with very dedicated people. I try to make sure there’s at least some significant chance that something is going to happen before I talk about it, and when I talk about it I try to phrase it as, “My intention is…” and stuff like that.

RPS: I imagine you get, like, a billion emails. Do you try to respond to every one?

Notch: Oh, I’ve given up on responding to all my e-mails. I kind of skip through them, because there’s so many, but I can’t reply. I wish I could do that. You have people like Gabe [Newell], who actually replies to random emails. Which is a pretty cool thing. But it takes up too much time. Another thing I had to do is stop going on forums. It took up all my time. I’d just be on forums all day. Now I’m actually on Reddit a bit too much, I need to scale that back. But Twitter’s fine, because you can go in and spend 20 minutes and be done with it. But forums… Reddit takes up a whole day if I do it.

RPS: A lot of the bigger companies, especially, don’t feel like there’s a human component to them. You get a lot of people who are like, “EA and Activision are evil,” and stuff like that. They’re still being run by human beings, and there are actually people there. Just, you know, lots of them. But I think it’s even possible for the people in those companies to lose sight of that. And then you’ve got Mojang, which isn’t exactly tiny anymore. But obviously, you still have a very human, underdog-ish image. Is that intentional?

Notch: Yeah, we’re not that small anymore. We try to make sure we feel like we’re small. And we definitely want to have a personal touch to it, where we talk to the fans. We try to develop games that way. We’ll talk about them and release them and try to get the fans’ feedback involved. It’s hard to use that feedback in a good way. We don’t let the crowd decide everything about the game. It’s a difficult balance. We want to be the ones designing the games. I guess that’s actually what the fans want too, the games that we’re making. It’s an interesting balance to deal with.

Sometimes the fans are right, too. Like ladders. I did not want ladders in Minecraft at all. Ladders are never fun. They’re not fun in Minecraft either. But they’re a very good utility. It’s an easy way to get straight up without having stairs going back and forth. So I added them anyway because the fans convinced me.

RPS: In a lot of ways, Minecraft also gave a face to the burgeoning smaller and independent games movement. So that’s also on your back. It’s sort of amazing to me, because you have all of these different sides. You have Minecraft, which is its own phenomenon. You have the whole independent community. And yet you still seem relatively, well, sane. Meanwhile, there are tons of other developers who nearly need straightjackets while simply keeping track of their own games.

Notch: Yeah. I made Minecraft because… Back when I was doing hobby games, we were called “garage developers.” Then it kind of made a big breakthrough again, but we were called “indie developers” that time. So I’m inspired by a bunch of other games, like Mount & Blade, Dwarf Fortress, two of those games, they’re an inspiration for why I did it. If I can inspire even more people to try and finish games and charge for them, instead of just making prototypes, that’s awesome. There’s so much room for interesting games, in addition to triple-A games. Well, there are interesting triple-A games, but usually they kind of play it safe.

RPS: Right. Is there any component, though, of being afraid of messing up on such a big stage? Doing something that makes… I don’t know, that upsets a bunch of people and tarnishes the legacy of your game, or what you’ve done so far?

Notch: I’d rather make those mistakes than censor myself. I mean, I made a bunch of mistakes. I’ll have to own up to them and move on. It sucks when you make a mistake and you have to try to fix it, but that’s life I guess.

RPS: That’s led to you being very open with your development process. Here’s a weekly build of this game, it’s an alpha, it’s going to be buggy, but everyone play it and see what you think. Now it’s becoming a norm instead of an exception. Valve, for instance, is encouraging that mentality with Steam Greenlight. Do you think that’s good for everyone, though? Or does it put some kinds of games at an immediate disadvantage?

Notch: I think it depends on what kind of game you’re making. If you’re making a story-driven game, it doesn’t make any sense, because you’re going to spoil the story immediately. I don’t think I would want to play LA Noire that way. But for more open games, I think it’s the perfect way to do it. I took the idea from roguelikes, where the first release is really early, really buggy, and then they do upgrades to it based on feedback and bug reports. Minecraft is very complex, like a roguelike is, so that’s the way that Minecraft was being made. It’s probably going to be the same way with the space game [0x1oc] as well. But if I ever do a story-driven game, I don’t think I could do it that way.

RPS: Do you think you’d ever do a story-driven game?

Notch: No, I’m not much of a storyteller unfortunately. I would want to, because there’s something very appealing about the concept of telling this epic story. But I’m not much of a writer.

RPS: What about if you could hire on a writer to help out?

Notch: Yeah, maybe. I’ve been thinking about that. I think there might be some frustrating conflicts between the game design and the story if it’s not the same person doing it. Maybe? I don’t know. I haven’t tried it.

RPS: You’ve done Minecraft, and you’ve passed the reins on that. A lot of people in your position would say, “Okay, I’m going to keep doing stuff in this vein. I’m going to do a sequel.” That’s obviously not what you’re doing. You’re moving off in a very specific direction – something a lot more niche. Obviously it’s something you want to create, but did the thought ever enter your mind, “Maybe I should do a sequel? Maybe I should keep doing this thing that people adore me for?”

Notch: That would probably be the sane choice. I’m interested in making games and exploring game design. I don’t think I’m the most edgy game designer out there. I think I can manage some of the crazy things. If I have an idea and I want to do it, I just do it. A lot of people can do that too, but… I don’t know.

The space game is a game that I’ve wanted to play because I’ve been frustrated with… A lot of games focus on the spaceship and not the person in the spaceship, which is something I’m frustrated with. I think I could change that. And I want the spaceship to be a personality, where you feel like, “This is my ship. It has these quirks and these other things about it.” That’s why I wanted it to have a programmable computer. That’s what spaceships do. They have a computer. It kind of works. Also, I really like it when games allow me to be very nerdy about a specific component of it. It’s an actual working computer. It’s very niche, but it’ll probably be fun for the people who enjoy it. I hope so [laughs].

RPS: Whenever you’re making something like that, how much do you consider the audience? Is your impetus for making things more like, “Here’s this thing that I wish would exist for everyone,” or “Here’s this thing I want to be able to play, and I also have the ability to make it, so obviously, I’m going to do it”?

Notch: It’s the latter. I would like this game to exist, and I’m making it. Usually, when I start something like that, that I want to exist, I talk about and people say, “Well, there’s this game and this game and this game.” It already exists. There are cool spaceship games out there. It has been done before. But I’m still going to try to make something with my own personal touch on it.

RPS: How is 0x10c coming along, by the way? We haven’t heard much about it in quite a while.

Notch: It’s been… I haven’t really touched it for months now. The summer has been kind of rough, privately. So I’m just trying to take it slow and deal with corporate stuff and PR stuff instead. Now things are slowing down, so after PAX I’m going to be able to get started again. Obviously, as soon as it’s fun, I’m going to release it, but we don’t know how long that’s going to take.

Check back tomorrow for part two, in which we discuss Minecraft clones, the sorts of games (or, potentially, not-games) Notch wants to design next, Steam, Linux, Windows 8, and pretty much everything else ever. Maybe even you. OK, OK, I’m lying. All we talked about was you.

__________________

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Future Talk: Notch On Steam, Windows 8, What’s Next

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The Man Behind The Hat, Pt 2

By Nathan Grayson on September 15th, 2012 at 1:00 pm.

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Yesterday, we ran the first part of my chat with Minecraft creator and needer-of-no-introductions Notch, wherein we largely talked about life after Minecraft and what he’s been up to recently. But there’s more to this world than Minecraft (at least, until we discover our entire world is actually a block-by-block Minecraft reconstruction of the real world), so today, we’re forging ahead into the future. And also the present, but the other thing sounds cooler. So read on to see Notch discuss copycatting in games, his ideas for non-games ala Proteus, a virtual reality version of Minecraft, Steam, Windows 8, and heaps more.

RPS: Obviously Minecraft is huge and has pretty much caught on everywhere, and its influence is starting to show a lot – in many cases simply as an inspiration. There are a lot of games with blocks and constructing things. But it’s also, in some places, been cloned pretty heavily, like on Xbox Live and things like that. What’s it like watching your creation be split into so many things and applied in so many different ways?

Notch: I love people cloning stuff, because that’s how we get better games. Is it really fair to say it’s a Minecraft clone, or is it more of an Infiniminer clone they’re making, because Minecraft is very similar to Infiniminer? They probably got the idea from Minecraft. They were probably thinking they cloned Minecraft. But everything everyone makes is based on something else. There’s very, very few original ideas. Almost everything is somehow derivative. You improve on stuff you’ve played before. So I’m all for clones. If people are doing direct clones only to monetize, making iOS versions of something…

RPS: Ninja Fishing…

Notch: Yeah. Not going to name any names. I don’t think it’s nice to do that. But I feel like it’s extremely important that you’re allowed to do that, because otherwise we get into this really scary territory of owning IP and stopping innovation. I’d rather just go, “Ugh, these guys are being dicks.” But they should be able to do that, rather than trying to stop people through laws and stuff. I think copyright and trademark is fine. I don’t want people deceiving customers by saying, “This is Minecraft.” But if you take that idea and make your own game, that’s fine.

RPS: On that note, right now EA is suing Zynga on the grounds that their games are too similar. So do you think that’s dangerous territory? Do you think that could lead to someone just holding dominion over and idea or something like that, and suddenly nobody can iterate on it and make new things?

Notch: Yeah, I think it’s very dangerous territory. In the case of EA and Zynga, those games are deceivingly similar. It looks like they’re trying to almost trick the customer into thinking it’s the same game. That’s when I think you should be able to stop people. I don’t want them to be able to trick people into thinking it’s the same game. If it’s the same idea, fine, but if you’re trying to move into the concept space of what Minecraft is, for example… It’s hard to express the exact difference. But trademarks fine, patents bad. That’s kind of the short summary.

RPS: You said Minecraft is similar to Infiniminer. Is that weird for you, then, that so many people associate the idea with Minecraft, even though you were directly inspired by something else?

Notch: It depends, but yeah. Infiniminer didn’t have crafting. It didn’t have the blocky characters with the armor on. It didn’t have as many settings. It depends which part people are cloning. Terraria, they say they’re inspired by Minecraft, and it’s a great game. They’re more inspired by the things I added to the genre than the actual essence of the thing that’s similar to Infiniminer.

But the Xbox Live games you mentioned, they’re more inspired by being able move boxes around. Which is more like Infiniminer. People are like, “They cloned your game!” No, they had the same idea that I also had from some other game. Partly, anyway. I get slightly too much credit. I just assembled a bunch of ideas. They’re not original in any way.

The strength of Minecraft is the way everything is tied together. I think that’s where the magic is, in how the pieces are tied together. Not necessarily what the pieces themselves are. There’s nothing revolutionary about the concept of a diamond sword. But the way it works in Minecraft is pretty entertaining.

RPS: Do you have any ideas for games that are completely out of left field, though – that nobody’s ever done before? Or rather, for something really non-traditional? Like, if someone looked at this hypothetical game, they wouldn’t be able to say, “Oh, duh, that’s an action game, that’s an RPG…”

Notch: Oh, yeah. I’m kind of getting into this idea of making electronic toys. I played Proteus, and it had a profound effect on me. The level of awe I feel, like, “Wow, this is so beautiful” – even though it’s the most simple graphics possible. The sound design is obviously brilliant. And it’s not even really a game. When I’m playing it I kind of go through all of this… What am I doing? Why is this entertaining? I try to think through it as a game designer and everything. It’s very entertaining still. That’s kind of inspired me to maybe look into doing things that aren’t necessarily “games,” and aren’t necessarily “art” either. They’re just some experience, an interactive experience. Those would be very hard to classify. There’s no real name for them yet.

RPS: If you were to do something in that space, what would it be? Proteus already has the sort of “very cool island environment” locked down.Do you have any ideas in terms of where you’d go with that type of concept? That sort of interactive space?

Notch: The things I’ve thought about are very vague ideas. Like there’s a city populated by a bunch of autonomous agents that go to work and come back and have their thing going on. And there’s no real goal to it; it’s just that’s the space, and you can play around with that. That’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. It’s hard to define exactly what it is. This simulation of a very lightweight city. I don’t know exactly what you’d do. The idea is that you’d play as a character who can go to work and come back and earn money to pay the rent, and that’s the game. The art style of the game… Remember School Days? It’s an old, old game. I was thinking of that as the art direction.

RPS: I’d love to see one of these types of “immersive experience” games with something like Oculus Rift.

Notch: Yeah. I got a demo yesterday. Holy moley, it’s good. VR has always been so bad it couldn’t catch on. This one, I feel, is just above the threshold of actually catching on. The immersion I got was superb, and I got very, very nauseous, but I tried moving my head back and forth. It doesn’t do position, it just does rotational tracking right now. So if you move your head, you kind of go up, down…

Then you feel sick. Which is a good sign. That’s not a pleasant experience, but it means it’s actually working. You’re really expecting it to move. I’ve talked to those guys, and I’m definitely going to look into having that for the space game. And I’ll try to convince the guys to do it with Minecraft.

The problem is it has to be 60 FPS, and that’s very hard to guarantee with Minecraft, because someone could make a very complex city and you can’t render that at 60 FPS. So we’ll see.

RPS: You’ve been fairly outspoken about Steam in the past – not in a bad way, but with an air of caution. Valve’s gigantic and completely ubiquitous, after all. If there’s not a Steam sale this winter, it will actually count as Gabe Newell canceling Christmas. That sort of thing. So, with Greenlight in the picture and Valve making more of a grab for small independent developers, are you worried at all about Steam’s lack of a viable competitor?

Notch: I think Steam is very ridiculously good, but it’s too big. I don’t want the PC to be a closed platform. And now we have one de facto store – which is probably not good. I’d rather have it be like the browser thing, where you can choose between Chrome or Firefox or, if you’re insane, Internet Explorer. Actually I kind of like Internet Explorer. It’s just fun to make fun of it.

RPS: I’ve been hearing that from a lot of people. That doesn’t make sense to my brain.

Notch: It’s actually not bad, it’s just fun to make fun of it. I recently switched from Firefox to Chrome, though.

RPS: You say a closed platform in relation to Valve, though, which is interesting because Windows 8 is about to launch. And… yeah. That could be trouble. Meanwhile, Valve’s trying to fight for openness on PC by embracing Linux and things like that.

Notch: Yeah. I understand why Microsoft are doing it. I just wish they didn’t do it, because it’s…yeah. It could ruin a lot of things for a lot of people.

I understand why Valve wants to do what it’s doing, too. But then they would be the de facto store again, and you’d still have the Windows 8 situation in practice anyway. Because everyone would be using Steam. Is that better than only using the Windows store? I don’t know. It’s more open, because you could use an alternative, but if nobody does… I hope that Valve chooses to work with others. Like, I wish they would have worked with Desura instead of making Greenlight.

RPS: Part of what Valve could stand to do is just bring a bigger audience to that kind of thing. Linux is a very open platform. The way that Gabe Newell puts it is that games have a way of making people try new platforms. So the stated plan, anyway, is to be a gateway drug. To draw people to Linux – onto a more open platform – and give it some more market share. Or at least, that’s my understanding, anyway.

Notch: Yeah, maybe. I think that Steam is too large, though. I think it’s going to take over. If people would install Linux just to be able to play Steam games, then we would have a Steambox, essentially. That’s all it would be used for. I think Valve has their heart in the right place. It’s just that because there’s no competition, they’re automatically going to take over. Or there is competition, but Valve is so far ahead. I think that’s what’s going to happen.

Also, Windows 7 is awesome. It’s good, it’s very open. You can do anything you want with it. Windows 8 seems like they’re moving in a more closed direction basically because Apple is doing that.

RPS: Yeah. They want to have interoperability between PC and tablet and mobile and stuff like that. Which requires a more closed platform – at least with the way they’re doing the mobile stuff.

Notch: And they want to own the store. Which makes perfect sense. But it’s bad for consumers and bad for competition.

RPS: Yeah. I’ve also heard from people trying out Windows 8, saying it’s not user-friendly or nice or good…

Notch: I haven’t tried it myself, so I don’t know about those bits. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me, because every other version of Windows has been horrible. And 7 is great.

RPS: How do you see the whole situation shaking out, though? Do you think people will just stick with Windows 7 until Microsoft realizes 8 is a terrible idea, or are you worried that we could be stuck in this for the long haul?

Notch: I think there are several threats against the PC being an open platform. I think Steam did a lot of good as far as introducing digital downloads in a very viable way. It basically killed PC retail. But I think that’s good. That way we don’t need publishers anymore. But now you kind of need a publisher anyway because you need to go on Steam. So now they’re taking the 30 percent instead of someone else. So where’s the benefit?

And then if Microsoft tries the same thing and they control their OS, that’s another threat against it. So I think both of those are dangers that we kind of have to live through. I do think there’s some demand or need for an open OS for computers, an open system for it. I don’t think Linux is it, because there are a few good distributions that actually are user-friendly, but at its core it’s made by nerds for nerds. For people who understand computers, it’s awesome, because you can control the entire computer. For corporations or families, it’s not really what they want. They just want to be able to use the computer in an easy way.

__________________

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Terry Cavanagh on making fewer, more ambitious games - Edge Magazine

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Terry Cavanagh’s probably the closest thing the indie development scene has to its own Mark Rothko. The 28-year-old designer makes brooding, claustrophobic, and rather stark games, using simple tools and limited palettes – and they all seem to hinge on a single idea. It’s a surprise, then, to learn that his favourite game of all time is Final Fantasy VII, Square’s 1997 rambling RPG. “People always seem shocked by that,” laughs Cavanagh, who was born in Ireland and now lives in Cambridge, “but Final Fantasy VII was the game that made me want to be a game designer, and I think the reason was that it introduced me to a lot of new ideas I’d never seen before.

“I’m pretty sure that it was the first RPG I’d ever played,” he continues. “My cousin had just got a PlayStation, and before that I’d only played games on the Commodore 64 and on a friend’s Sega Genesis. To encounter this whole new genre was a pretty big thing. Then to encounter such an obliquely story-driven game was also totally new for me. It’s probably seen as being quite clichéd now, but the game’s about mind control and clones and all these things I’d never really seen stories tackle. You really get the impression when you play that game that it was trying to push the boundaries. It just felt like a huge step forward, and it was a massive thing for me to see that games could be like this. It was a huge thing to see that they could have so many ambitions.”

VVVVVV

‘Ambition’ is a word that crops up quite a lot whenever Cavanagh talks about games; it’s a quality that’s clearly very important to him, even if he ultimately struggles to define exactly what he means by it. Ask him about VVVVVV – the gravity-switching platformer that stands today as his most mainstream success – and he’ll say that, while it’s the biggest game he’s ever made, it’s a shame that it isn’t really the most, well, ambitious thing in the world.

“To me now, VVVVVV is almost an indulgence,” he laughs. “It’s a game I was making because I enjoyed the process of making it so much. I got into it in a big way and I loved the process of coming up with new ideas for it, but I don’t think VVVVVV really does anything hugely new. It’s a refinement and I like to think it’s a well-designed game, but it’s not really pushing things forward very much. Ambition’s about putting part of yourself into the game, making it really personal – and that doesn’t mean it has to be some dull art game, either. I’m incredibly proud of VVVVVV, but I hope ten years from now, when I’m looking back on some of the other games I’ve made, that I’m known for more ambitious things than that.”

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I'm having trouble understanding this seeming obsession game creators have with making games on incredible timescales - 48 hours, 5 hours, 15 minutes

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Grognor

I’m having trouble understanding this seeming obsession game creators have with making games on incredible timescales - 48 hours, 5 hours, 15 minutes - !!! Polish takes time! I have some guesses as to why, but maybe you could explain, as an ‘insider’?

- webbedspace 10 Sep

There’s a correct answer to this question, and it runs roughly like this: both Ludum Dare and Klik of the Month were founded in order to venerate the act of finishing a game. At the time of their inception, the act of finishing a game was, and still is, regarded as arduous, nebulous and generally unreachable to all but the most committed and programming-skilled. A great many people in game-making communities fail to finish what they start, often due to not knowing how to finish their game, or not knowing when to finish it, and thus constantly putting it off until they’ve squandered all will to finally do it. The goals of both these jams was, and still is, to demystify the act of finishing a game, to shrink down the distant star until you can just reach out and grab it. A finished game, no matter how small in size and diminished its sparkle, is more personally important and indubitably more playable than an unfinished one. But here’s an extra answer - one that, I think, explains my personal affection for game jams. I’ve found that, out of all the games I’ve made, by far the easiest ones to create were those whose ideas appeared in my mind fully formed - games which I foresaw in their entirety. When I get those ideas, development feels like just transcribing the game in my mind to code and pixels - no long pauses mulling over design quandries, no second-guessing myself, just a line before me along which I only have to move forward. (Games which were developed like this include Wee, IBEBASQ, Trepidatious Peak, Livestock Longstack, and QWLat5UoCB.) Now, how do these fine ideas come to me? Familiarity with the ways of small games and my own game-making limitations, sure, but a big part is the context in which the game is being created. Firstly, by simply being in the mindset of a hard time limit on development, an idea that fits within that limit is encouraged to grow. It receives the greatest share of your mind’s attention, and larger, greedier ideas are discarded in its favour. And when that idea appears, there’s no time to question the initial vision, to wonder if the idea is ‘big enough’ or ‘fun enough’ to be ‘presentable’, nor time to procrastinate and delay the vision’s realisation, to let it wane in strength and clarity in your mind. You know that the idea is already sufficient, because it fits the resources available to it, it comes with no emotional baggage weighing it down, and it is what you need to finish the jam.

Creative endeavours of any sort, to me, feel like a madcap piggyback race to carry an idea from the energetic, joyous and novel moment of its inception, over a long unpaved road into reality. Every obstacle in that race, every tiny pebble, tends to chip away at either the idea itself or your strength and confidence in carrying it. How fortunate, then, to be able on occasion to run a path that is short, with an idea that is light. To be able to make these brief, meager victories over the dark god of oblivion and void, to create something which is truly, entirely, in the spirit of its inception, is what I find highly rewarding about game jams.

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Crowdfunding video games: Money to play with

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SINCE its launch three years ago, Kickstarter, a website on which people who want to make things can ask other people to pay for their projects, has offered hope to penniless musicians, artists and designers. But what the world’s modern Medicis really want to bankroll is new video games. Of the ten most-funded Kickstarter projects, five are related to video games (see chart). Three—“Double Fine Adventure”, “Wasteland 2” and “Shadowrun Returns”—are actual games. Two are bits of gamer hardware: an open-source games console called the OUYA, and a virtual-reality headset called the Oculus Rift.

One reason that games get financed is that gamers are tech-savvy. With an average age in America of 37, they also have plenty of disposable income. They expect no return on their money, save a free or cut-price copy of the game itself.

There are structural reasons within the games industry for Kickstarter’s popularity, too. As development budgets for games have risen, says Aubrey Hesselgren, a games-industry programmer, big publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision have become risk-averse. Like Hollywood studios before them, they have taken the safe option of churning out endless sequels to already-popular titles in big-selling genres, such as military-themed shooting games. That leaves a long tail of disgruntled fans who can’t find new games they enjoy. The three biggest Kickstarter games are all from underserved genres.

Meanwhile, developers are unhappy, too. Making games is a hard way to earn a living. Contracts are often short. Long hours are common. Deadlines arrive like a never-ending shower of “Tetris” blocks. Publishers keep most development studios on a tight leash; many developers feel creatively stifled. Stories of burnout and depression abound. “The games industry doesn’t retain developers very well,” notes Mr Hesselgren dryly. “But it’s pretty good at training up rebels.”

Raising money from fans offers a route to creative control and sane working conditions. “I don’t have any crazy people [from a publisher] in my office telling me what to do,” enthuses Brian Fargo, the veteran developer in charge of “Wasteland 2”.

The combination of dissatisfied fans and mutinous developers is leavened with a dose of nostalgia for the good old days. “Wasteland 2” is a sequel to a game made in 1988. “Shadowrun Returns” is a computer version of a pen-and-paper role-playing game released in 1989. “Double Fine Adventure” is an adventure game, a relaxed, cerebral genre that has been commercially dead for more than a decade.

As word spreads among fans and developers about the possibilities offered by cutting publishers out of the loop and raising money directly from fans, the number of video-game projects on Kickstarter is mushrooming. Not all are successful, and some observers worry about what might happen when a fan-funded game flops. Still, Mr Fargo hopes that Kickstarter could evolve into a fully-fledged alternative funding source. He has promised to plough 5% of the profits from “Wasteland 2” back into other Kickstarter games, and has encouraged others to do the same.

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Interview: 600k downloads but Gasketball still “feels like a dud”

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Interview: 600k downloads but Gasketball still “feels like a dud”
by Simon Parkin on Sep 13, 2012 • 1:22 pm 5 Comments

Following the success of Sopliskier, two-man indie team Mikengreg spent a year developing their follow-up: physics puzzler Gasketball. The game released a month ago to positive reviews from both critics and consumers. But the hope that offering their creation as a free download would lead to a dramatic increase in in-game sales hasn’t paid off.

“There was a lot of panic immediately after launch when we realized that we were doing pretty terrible sales numbers and it probably wasn’t going to improve without more work,” says the game’s designer, Mike Boxleiter. “We scrambled to throw in some analytics to figure out what exactly people were spending their time doing, and it was puzzling to find out people were actually playing the game an awful lot but just not buying anything.”

Mikengreg’s scramble was especially frantic as the pair’s money had almost run out and they were now sleeping on friend’s couches. Every lost sale tightened the noose on the indie dream, a particularly galling death threat considering it was a business model holding the rope rather than any creative or design shortcoming.

“We’ve had to take a lot of time to figure out why exactly the game fails to make the sale to the player, and still all we really know is how the players currently use the game,” Boxleiter says. “We don’t know for sure how their behavior might change if we release more updates. So we’re doing a lot of redesigning and a lot of arguing about what to cut, what to keep and what to add. We have a second shot at release with the iPhone version, so we want to capitalize on that as much as possible and fix some of our mistakes with the iPad launch.”

Before the iPhone launch the pair has taken some time away from the game. I catch Boxleiter on the road, in one of the rare moments he manages to find some Wi-Fi. It’s clear that the break, long-scheduled and originally intended to be a celebration of the game’s launch, has turned into something more reflective, soul-searching.

“We wanted to do a big road-trip to PAX and then New York to take a break,” he explains, “but it’s more turned into a vacation-introspection kind of spiritual journey. We know we made a fun game, but we need to figure out exactly how to move forward.”

Mikengreg is experiencing a very different situation to the weeks following the release of Solipskier, the pair’s first iOS release.

“Solipskier kind of came out of nowhere,” says Boxleither. “We didn’t have any great expectations for it and we had no idea what the iOS market could do for us. We had great success, and that allowed us to become more ambitious and we felt we could build on that success with an even bigger game. But Gasketball has succeeded well below what Solipskier did in it’s first few weeks. Even though we’ve had around 600,000 downloads it feels like a dud.”

Initially the pair believed the issue to be a lack of up-sell screens and there being too few ways for people to pay the developer on launch. But a rapid-fire update intended to fix this has shown Gasketball’s issues may be more fundamental.

“The update hasn’t dramatically increased sales. Our issues stem from a much deeper set of problems with the game. We tried to create a Draw Something or Words With Friends style game without the simplicity of purpose those games have. Many reviewers hardly mention the HORSE mode, which is far and away the best mode in the game, and I feel the difficulty of getting into HORSE is the biggest problem we face at the moment.”

You’re going to be OK, right?

“We’re not going to die, and we have plenty of friends and family helping us out, so as people we’re not in any danger of any kind. As for Mikengreg: things are a lot more uncertain. We have a lot of questions to answer: if we failed to read the market this poorly for Gasketball, how can we expect to ever succeed again? We’ve been doing a lot of second-guessing lately, and that’s a big problem as an indie. It’s difficult to be creative and bold when you’re not sure you can afford to sign a new apartment lease.”

All this talk of business models may be fundamental to the success of running a small developer, but it’s important to celebrate the great many things that Gasketball does well. I wonder what Mike is most pleased with in the game.

“Gasketball went through a hundred little moments during development which made us sit up and say: ‘Yes, that’s cool’. For us, the creative aspect of HORSE and the friendly competition that results between friends is the most engaging stuff, and it didn’t really come together until the final month of development. We have a lot of developer friends on our Testflight account, and we had been sending builds out since March, updating them with progress on the single player campaign and trying to get feedback, but for the most part there wasn’t a lot of interest or time logged in the game. For each update we would get about ten hours of play from our forty or so testers. Then in June we put together the final version of HORSE with Game Center enabled, allowing the testers to challenge each other online, and suddenly they were logging about a thousand hours per version, some of our testers were publicly trash-talking each other over Twitter, and it seemed we finally put something really engaging together. I thought the future of the game was solidified from that point.”

In fact, the single player aspect to the game became something of an afterthought for the pair, as they focused the majority of their effort on HORSE.

“Initially I just made a shot-attack style game, the player would be presented with a single level and he would have to try to sink as many baskets as he could within a time limit. We didn’t think that really sang, so we kept messing with new ideas until we decided a multiplayer HORSE game could be really interesting. We took a couple weeks in February to crunch twelve-hour days to get out a multiplayer prototype and in the middle of that we realized that our level editor was really fun to play with and had a kind of an eureka moment realizing that we could ask players to create their own HORSE shot from scratch and send it to their friends.

“After that we added the single player and one-on-one modes as an attempt to fill out the game for more than just turn-based async players.

So where is the magic on the game post launch, that kernel of wonder that makes Mikengreg proud of their baby? “I don’t know how widespread this is, but my best moments all come from watching a friend’s replay of one of my levels. It’s intensely gratifying to watch someone struggle to figure out the little puzzle that I’ve designed and it’s even better when they get it, which is kind of counter-intuitive since I should want them to fail so I can win the game. I play Gasketball much more as a friend trying to show his friends cool shots rather than as a hard-core competitor.”

There’s a sense that Mike finds it difficult to truly celebrate Gasketball when the game his future appears to be currently tied up in the game’s failings rather than its successes. I wonder what the immediate plan is.

“The first objective is to get some money coming in, either by fixing Gasketball or by making a new small game ultra-quickly. I was able to design and prototype a new puzzle game at Orca Jam just before PAX that a lot of people have already responded well to, which is really heartening. I think I’d like to focus on smaller, less risky projects for a little while, but there’s a lot that still needs to be figured out, like where I can afford to get an apartment.”

One thing is clear: Boxleiter is comfortable enough in his own skin and abilities to be able to talk openly about his failures, to take the criticism of raw numbers and turn it into lessons.

For him, this is a key piece of advice that any aspiring young game developer should take on: “Learn to take criticism and seek it out, and this goes for any creative working in any field, but too many kids who are starting out take criticism as personal insults, and this will keep them from learning from mistakes and keep them from making friends with the hundreds of experienced devs who they could meet and get help from.

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Creativity, Puzzle Games, and Brain Damage « The Psychology of Video Games

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The Psychology of Video Games

Creativity, Puzzle Games, and Brain Damage

Have you ever encountered a puzzle in a game that utterly stumped you, then wondered why it seemed so trivially easy when you stepped away and came back to it after doing something else for a while?

I have, especially on a recent playthrough of an indie puzzle game called “QUBE” (http://qube-game.com/). For those not familiar, QUBE is a first person puzzle game (kind of like Portal) where you manipulate special blocks in the environment to solve puzzles and exit testing chambers. Different colored blocks do different things, and once you enter a room where multiple blocks come into play, the puzzles can get really tricky and require some real insight to solve. For example, in one area you cause a clear globe to roll down a slope towards a purple receptacle, and when the ball passes through a blue field it turns blue. The insight needed to solve the puzzle is that you need to get the ball to roll first through a red field, then a blue field so that it turns purple (red + blue = purple) to match the purple receptacle at the bottom of the slope.

Now click this to make it go here, then AH NO NO NO! NOT THERE! Start over…

I found some of the puzzles in the final stages of QUBE devilishly difficult because they constantly required you to combine the different game mechanics in new and unprecedented ways. The solutions seemed obvious in hindsight but I simply did not see them at all prior that “ah-ha!” moment.

That’s the hallmark of a good puzzle game, but upon getting stumped in games like these, people (myself included) will often immediately head to GameFaqs or YouTube to find the solution so they can get on with things. But QUBE doesn’t even have a story or any other kind of gameplay. The sole point of the game is to solve the puzzles, so I didn’t want to cheat. Instead I was reminded that when faced with a difficult problem requiring a creative insight we are often greatly aided by stepping away and doing something relaxing for a while instead of trying to brute force things and keep staring the puzzle down until we figure it out. The insight needed for the solution then often comes to us in the midst of a hot shower, during a relaxing walk, or in the moments right before we drift off to sleep. Adopting this strategy, I stepped away when stumped and eventually finished the game.

Weeks later I was reading Jonah Lehrer’s new book Imagine: How Creativity Works and discovered that psychologists have extensively studied this phenomenon and actually honed in on the neuroscience of it a bit. Lehrer cites a study by Simone Sandkuhler and Joydeep Bhattacharya where the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain activity of subjects trying to solve riddles. They found that a reliable indicator of when someone was about to figure out a puzzle was a steady rhythm of alpha waves from parts of the brain associated with relaxation and free association, and much less activity from areas of the brain associated with attention and focussed thought. When people lacked sufficient alpha waves, they were less likely to solve the riddles, even when given overt clues.

I don’t understand. I keep doing the same thing and not getting a different result.

Lehrer argues in his book that this is an illustration of how different parts of our brain work –or don’t work– when it comes to creativity and problem solving. Creative insights come about when our minds can wander in a way that lets them to break free of assumptions and constraints to create unprecedented combinations of concepts. This results in the pattern of alpha waves cited in the above study. As such, highly focussed effort and attention are actually the bane of creative problem solving, since they activate parts of our brain like the prefrontal cortex that overemphasize what we think we know and censor possibilities simply on the grounds that they’re weird or supposedly outside the context of the problem. Too much focus can be a bad thing.

Take, for example, another study that Lehrer cites: Carlo Reverberti et al.’s 2005 examination of the problem solving prowess of patients who had damage to their prefrontal cortexes and who thus had difficulty concentrating and avoiding distraction. The researchers started by giving these subjects a relatively simple puzzle involving Roman numerals and math. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this:

Move any single line from the expression below to make it true.

IV = III + III

Many of you probably see that the answer is to simply move the “I” from the left of the “V” to the right of the “V” to make “VI = III + III” or “6 = 3 + 3.” More than 90% of the subjects got that one, similar to a group of control subjects without brain injuries.

But now consider a trickier one:

Move any single line from the expression below to make it true.

III = III + III

Chew on that one. Can you figure it out? If so, good work. Only 43% of control subjects got it right. However, 82% of those with deficient attention spans solved the riddle, seeing how you just have to rotate one of the lines from the “+” sign to make it another “=” sign so that the expression reads “III = III = III” or “3 = 3 = 3.” The subjects who had difficulty focussing their attention also had difficulty restricting their search for solutions and didn’t hold on to unstated assumptions like “you can’t screw with the operators in the equation.”

Remember how creative you had to get in Batman Arkham City’s Mr. Freeze boss fight?

And so it is with games like QUBE and games of its ilk. In one of the later levels the solution to a puzzle (spoiler alert!) where you shuffle blocks around in a glass-covered pit requires you to realize that you can manipulate the blocks in such a way that one of them gets launched up at the glass cover to shatter it and completely change the rules of that puzzle. And it’s not just puzzle games like QUBE or Portal. It could be a Zelda game where you have to figure out how to beat an end dungeon boss, an RPG where you load out different stats and abilities, a strategy game where you try different build orders, or a combat game where you try different weapons and loadouts. Relaxation and shoving your attention somewhere else are likely to help because of the different parts of the brain that they activate.

So next time you’re stuck, don’t go straight to GameFAQs. Take a walk, play with your dog, fold some laundry, or do anything else that lets you mind wander. Or I suppose you could try getting brain damage. Apparently that works, too.

Written by Jamie Madigan

September 14, 2012 at 1:53 pm

With 6 comments

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Electronic Arts - EA Blog

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Computer- und Videospiele sind in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem wesentlichen Bestandteil der Kreativindustrie geworden und gehören längst zu den modernen Leitmedien. Daneben besitzt die Industrie ein immenses wirtschaftliches Potenzial. Im vergangenen Jahr habe ich auf vielfachen Wunsch einmal aufgezeigt, wie ein Computerspiel entsteht. Oft sind es große Entwicklerteams, die das Zusammenspiel von Bild, Ton und Handlung perfektionieren und dem Spiel eine innere Logik verleihen. Eine Kreativleistung, die der großer Hollywood-Produktionen sehr nahekommt – manche würden sogar sagen, diese übertrifft. Doch wer ist eigentlich an der Produktion beteiligt, welche Berufe und Fähigkeiten sind es, die eine Spielidee in einen fertigen Titel verwandeln?

Vor diesem Hintergrund werde ich Ihnen in den kommenden Wochen und Monaten sukzessive Berufe in der Computer- und Videospielindustrie vorstellen. Ich möchte hiermit einerseits die Vielfältigkeit einer Industrie dokumentieren, der es im öffentlichen Diskurs immer noch an Wertschätzung für geleistete Arbeit mangelt, und andererseits jungen Menschen einen Einblick in mögliche Berufsfelder bieten.

Teil 1: Lokalisierung und Synchronisation

Seit den Anfängen des vertonten Films Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts existiert in Deutschland der Beruf des Synchronsprechers. Hintergrund waren die vorwiegend aus dem englischsprachigen Raum stammenden Produktionen, die auch dem heimischen Publikum präsentiert werden sollten. Fortan entwickelte sich eine immer größer werdende Industrie der Übersetzung und Synchronisation. Mittlerweile sind einige Computerspielproduktionen teurer und aufwendiger als so mancher Hollywood-Blockbuster. Und so kommt es nicht von ungefähr, dass auch die Games-Industrie im Bereich der Synchronisation aufwendiger und professioneller arbeitet als noch vor einigen Jahren.

Im Vergleich zum Film ist die Synchronisation eines Videospiels nur ein kleiner Teil der so genannten Lokalisierung, der Anpassung eines Spiels für unterschiedliche Sprach- und Kulturkreise. Denn neben dem gesprochen Wort, muss bei Computer- und Videospielen auch die Menüführung, einzelne Befehle und geschriebener Text angepasst und übersetzt werden.

Je nach Budget und Umfang der Produktion wird ein Tonstudio mit der Übersetzung sämtlicher Inhalte oder nur der Aufnahme beauftragt. So arbeitet EA beispielsweise schon seit einigen Jahren mit dem Kölner Studio Rain Publications zusammen, das bereits für Medal of Honor, Battlefield oder Mirror’s Edge tätig war. In der Regel verfügen diese Tonstudios über diverse Sprecher-Karteien, die von Kunden für spezielle Aufträge gebucht werden. Ziel ist es, den Charme des Originals möglichst zu entsprechen und dem Spieler das Gefühl zu vermitteln, es handele sich um eine deutsche Produktion. Dialoge müssen natürlich authentisch  klingen, also die Eigenheiten, Idiome und Redewendungen der Sprache wiedergeben. Dabei kann das Alter, die Tonalität, die Klangfarbe oder der Dialekt des Sprechers ausschlaggebend sein. Die Aufträge sehen dann häufig wie folgt aus:

„71.000 Wörter, 12 Haupt- und 86 Nebencharaktere, 20% LipSync, 50% HTR und der Rest ist VoiceOver. Bitte mit Transkription und Übersetzung. Voraussichtlich 9 Batches, 5 Sprachen, 1 bis 2 PU-Sessions für den DLC. Delivery date ist in 4 Wochen. Oh, noch kurz zum Spiel selbst: Es geht um Murmeln.“ (Rain Publications)

Je näher die Tonproduktion dann rückt, desto konkreter werden auch die Anforderungen. So werden zum Casting der Sprecher detaillierte „Character Bibles“ erstellt, in denen Alter, Geschlecht, Eigenschaften, Vorgeschichte etc. festgelegt sind. Nach diesen Anweisungen zusammen mit den Original-Aufnahmen aus dem englischen Spiel werden dann sorgfältig die richtigen Sprecher aus der Kartei ausgewählt und gebucht.

Meist sind diese nicht ausschließlich für Games zuständig, sondern synchronisieren Filme, TV-Werbungen oder Dokumentationen. Ein Beispiel ist Engelbert von Nordhausen, ausgebildeter Theaterschauspieler, der sowohl Bill Cosby als auch Fred Feuerstein oder Samuel L. Jackson spricht. Doch ab und zu leiht er seine Stimme auch Spielen wie Medal of Honor.

Der Aufnahmetag

Dauerte die Synchronisation eines Spielfilmes früher mehrere Wochen, so reichen heute wenige Tage. Für die eigentliche Aufnahme brauchen die Studios neben dem technischen Equipment drei Personen: einen Toningenieur, der die Synchronisation technisch aufnimmt; einen Synchronregisseur, der den Sprecher thematisch begleitet, auf Nuancen achtet und die Dramaturgie leitet; und den Sprecher selbst. Gemeinsam geht dieses Team ins Aufnahmestudio, das meist aus einem Aufnahme- und einem Sprecherbereich besteht. In der schalldichten Sprecherkabine befindet sich in der Regel ein Mikrofon sowie einen Monitor, auf dem der zu sprechende Text angezeigt wird. Zunächst wird den Sprechern der Original-Ton auf einen Kopfhörer gespielt, so dass Tonalität und Tempo der Synchronisation besser abgestimmt werden können. Eine große Aufgabe – denn häufig gibt es zum gesprochenen Wort kein Bild, was ein hohes Maß an Fantasie und Vorstellungskraft abverlangt. Sollte es einmal nicht passen, greift der Regisseur ein. Bei professionellen Sprechern passiert dies allerdings nur sehr selten. Jedoch kann es vorkommen, dass einzelne Sätze in unterschiedlichen Betonungen eingesprochen werden. Denn die Spieler von heute sind verwöhnt und merken schnell, wenn in einem Spiel immer wieder dieselben Sätze fallen. Daher wird gerade bei großen Produktionen Vielfalt gewünscht. Sind alle Texte eingesprochen und finalisiert, werden diese meist an die Studios zurückgespielt, die dann wiederum für das Mischen und die Einarbeitung ins fertige Spiel verantwortlich sind.

Neben den zahlreichen Tonstudios, die immer wieder nach neuen Talenten suchen, gibt es auch Online-Foren wie das Synchron-Forum, auf dem sich Sprecher austauschen, Jobangebote posten oder die Synchronisation von Projekten bewerten. Wer sich einmal über den Beruf informieren will, ist dort sicherlich gut aufgehoben.

Weiterführende Links:

Blog: Ein Computerspiel entsteht – Von der Idee bis zum Spielvergnügen

Web: Synchron-Forum

Web: Rain Publications

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Systems and theology in The Binding of Isaac \ Luderacy

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Systems and theology in The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is a retro-styled action game inspired by the Old Testament* story in which God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a demonstration of his faith. The game has prompted discussion about the relationship between its overt religious themes and the systems embedded in its design.

A “Holy Room” in the game’s expansion pack.

Systems-driven deism

John Teti began the conversation by arguing that Isaac‘s design is consistent with deism. Deism is an enlightenment-era theological philosophy which seeks to harmonize faith with reason. It offers the metaphor of god as absent craftsman: the Universe is a well-made watch, but it’s up to mankind to keep our own affairs in order.

Game designers will probably grasp Teti’s analogy immediately: systems-driven games are watches, and designers absent watchmakers. Teti’s plain English explanation:

Isaac, the video game, is built by a creator who doesn’t futz… Rather than sticking to a handcrafted template that plays the same every time, in Isaac, each dungeon is built on the fly, and at random.

In the sterile jargon of game design, this is called “procedural generation.” What this means is that instead of, say, hand-crafting a level, the designer will instead build some basic rules that a level should follow. For instance, they might program a rule stating that each room should be connected to other rooms, so that it’s possible to get from the beginning to the end…

If game creators are like little gods, then [game designer and artist Edmund] McMillen and Isaac programmer Florian Himsl are from the deist school. They only make the rules of their universe; the game’s program and the player do the rest. When Isaac strolls into a den of spiders and half-skulled zombies, it’s not because the creators pre-ordained that it would happen that way.

What Teti is describing here is something unique to software, as a procedural (process-based) form of representation [PDF link warning].

Tabletop games may rely on systems, but the situations encountered by players are not generally created by pre-programmed processes. Exceptions are possible, but these would be novelties or proofs of concept. Novelists, filmmakers and other artists can establish worlds with internal consistency, but the hand of the author is always present to move the narrative along. The only counterexamples I can think of rely on ambiguity, either deliberate or as a result of semiotic mediation between author and reader.

Protestantism and scripted events

Not all games are procedural in the manner of The Binding of Isaac.

As a counterpoint, Teti offers The Legend of Zelda, a classic game with visual and mechanical parallels to Isaac but a very different design philosophy. Nearly everything about Zelda is hard-coded into the game: you’ll see the same monsters in the same locations, the same items in the same dungeons, and so on. The only randomized elements are occasional games of chance, and minor items dropped by slain monsters.

In other words, the trials undergone by Zelda players are pre-ordained, and the player’s ability to overcome them relies on the quality of her efforts. Suddenly, the quasi-religious tenor of the debate over newer, supposedly easier games by Zelda developer Nintendo is cast in a new light. Is it predestination or good works which determine whether you get in to heaven beat the game?

The Binding of Isaac

The Legend of Zelda

Not all systems are created equal

In this week’s episode of the podcast Idle Thumbs, former games journalist Chris Remo identifies the main problem with Teti’s argument: It fails to consider the nature of the processes at work in procedurally-generated games, or the impact  of those processes on the player.

The things that happen in these games are random on the immediate level, but not in an absolute sense. The processes in question are carefully calibrated by the designer to determine what is possible and probable in games of this type. Remo or one of his co-hosts refer to this as the “possibility space” of such games, akin to the idea of probability space in mathematics.

Remo argues that the possibility space in Isaac is geared toward extreme outcomes, which create a subjective experience entirely consistent with the game’s theological setting:

[W]hat the game’s actually about is… an Old Testament God who is all up in your face. Who is very much arbitrarily deciding who should be bestowed with grace and who should be just completely condemned…

[T]he things that happen are so extreme that they go beyond the traditional, “here’s a system, let it just go,” and it ends up actually simulating the Job-like [situation where] “here is a God who is calling the shots in an extreme way.”*

I appreciate the simple elegance of Teti’s central analogy, but his analysis of Isaac focuses too much on the broad characteristics of the game as an object. Remo’s attention to player experience is a more sensible tack for a discussion about the game’s theological underpinnings.

*I took some “justs” and “kind ofs” out of that, just because it’s kind of easier to understand without, like, leaving them in.

Gameplay is not code

If the problem with Teti’s argument is that it doesn’t consider the nature of the processes at work, then why not look at those processes in detail, rather than heading down the path of subjective, humanities-style analysis? Thanks for asking, hypothetical reader.

Mark Sample has written about the idea of close reading code as an essential component of new media criticism. Using the example of the original SimCity, Sample writes about the purpose of close reading the code which determines procedural experiences. In this section, he’s referencing the work of an earlier theorist, Sherry Turkle:

Turkle suggests that players can, on the one hand, surrender themselves totally to the simulation, openly accepting whatever processes are modeled within. On the other hand, players can reject the simulation entirely—what Turkle calls “simulation denial.” These are stark opposites, and our reaction to simulations obviously need not be entirely one or the other.

There’s a third alternative Turkle proposes: understanding the simulation, exploring its assumptions, both procedural and cultural (Turkle 71-72).

I’d argue that the close reading of code adds a fourth possibility, a fourth response to a simulation. Instead of surrendering to it, or rejecting it, or understanding it, we can deconstruct it. Take it apart. Open up the black box. See all the pieces and how they fit together. Even tweak the code ourselves and recompile it with our own algorithms inside.

Sample’s position is compatible with Remo’s, in that he’s concerned with the contents (rather than merely the presence) of the algorithms that underly a gameplay experience. Like Teti, however, Sample’s position assumes that the game is the sole and direct arbiter of the gameplay, as experienced by the player. It isn’t. Two reasons why:

1. People perceive randomness as purposeful. We’re hard-wired to look for patterns.

2. We interpret stimuli and construct “knowledge” based on experience, but the ways that we do so are mitigated by culture, previous experiences, and existing knowledge.

Remo knows that everything happening to him in The Binding of Isaac—a great power-up, an overwhelming horde—is the result of chained logic and weighted probabilities. Yet he is able to experience these windfalls and setbacks as the work of a capricious God. Why? Again, I offer two bullet points:

- It’s despite his knowledge of what is really at work—one part of his brain is ascribing motive and agency where his conscious mind knows there is none.

- It’s because he knows those processes are behind everything—he is choosing to conflate McMillen’s design decisions (which did lead to his trials and triumphs, albeit not directly) with the in-game antagonist.

Close reading code can contribute to our understanding of gameplay as experienced by players, if we consider the relationship between code and subjective experience as dialectic, rather than causal. The close reading approach can also contribute greatly to our historical and cultural understanding of software (or new media, the term he prefers).

Isaac’s mother, watching TV.

My take on the game itself

The Binding of Isaac is not a direct adaptation of the biblical story. Where the text places Abraham’s moral crisis at the center of the tale, Isaac is the protagonist of this game and its narrative. It is a modern woman—Isaac’s mother—rather than an ancient patriarch who is ordered to kill her son. And the God in this story doesn’t relent at the last minute.

The game is pervaded by a surreal tone. The monsters who attack Isaac include flies and variously dismembered corpses. Piles of poop litter the floor, holding occasional treasures. Items which help or hinder Isaac include Internet memes, demonic pacts, pills, severed pet heads, and items of his mother’s intimate wardrobe.

This is not a literal or sequential narrative. It’s a thematic exploration of child abuse, emotional and physical. Tonally, it has more in common with Jhonen Vasquez than with Phoebe Gloeckner. This is basically a game from the point of view of Jeremy.

McMillen does seem to intend some satire—the vacant cheerfulness of the mother as the opening narration proclaims her devotion to Christian television is hard to miss—but the precise target of that satire is unclear, due to the barrage of disturbing imagery which follows. Elements of that imagery are present in previous games by creator Edmund McMillen:

- reproduction and the parts of the body involved therein— Cunt, Super Meat Boy

- bodily fluids — Spewer, Cunt, Super Meat Boy

- extreme difficulty bordering on a consciously malevolent Universe — Time Fcuk, Meat Boy

This does not mean that Isaac represents the culmination of a cathartic artistic journey. I know McMillen in exactly the way that I know Jimi Hendrix, David Lynch, or any other artist whose work seems personal and obsessive in an abstract way. I assume that the recurring motifs in McMillen’s work are there because he A) means something by it or B) can’t help himself. Perhaps that’s a leap. Still, why return to the well, otherwise? McMillen’s well is unpleasant, filled as it is with blood and excrement.

Just because. Classic JTHM, featuring the ever-traumatized Squee.

1. *The story of Abraham is in the Torah, but The Binding of Isaac explicitly references Christianity, and not Judaism. That’s why I’m using the Christian term here.

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Super creepy Pokémon hack - Nintendo DS, DSi, & 3DS News, Media, Videos, Imports, Homebrew, & Retro Junk

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Super creepy Pokémon hack

I stumbled on this unsettling story of an obscure Pokémon bootleg/art-hack that I thought might be neat to share on here. I think this originated from 4chan, so I’ve no idea if this hack actually exists. It probably doesn’t, but it’s still a great concept/tale!:

I’m what you could call a collector of bootleg Pokémon games. Pokémon Diamond & Jade, Chaos Black, etc. It’s amazing the frequency with which you can find them at pawnshops, Goodwill, flea markets, and such.

They’re generally fun; even if they are unplayable (which they often are), the mistranslations and poor quality make them unintentionally humorous.

I’ve been able to find most of the ones that I’ve played online, but there’s one that I haven’t seen any mention of. I bought it at a flea market about five years ago.

Here’s a picture of the cartridge, in case anyone recognizes it. Unfortunately, when I moved two years ago, I lost the game, so I can’t provide you with screencaps. Sorry.

The game started with the familiar Nidorino and Gengar intro of Red and Blue version. However, the “press start” screen had been altered. Red was there, but the Pokémon did not cycle through. It also said “Black Version” under the Pokémon logo.

Upon selecting “New Game”, the game started the Professor Oak speech, and it quickly became evident that the game was essentially Pokémon Red Version.

After selecting your starter, if you looked at your Pokémon, you had in addition to Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle another Pokémon — “GHOST”.

The Pokémon was level 1. It had the sprite of the Ghosts that are encountered in Lavender Tower before obtaining the Sliph Scope. It had one attack — “Curse”. I know that there is a real move named curse, but the attack did not exist in Generation 1, so it appears it was hacked in.

Defending Pokémon were unable to attack Ghost — it would only say they were too scared to move. When the move “Curse” was used in battle, the screen would cut to black. The cry of the defending Pokémon would be heard, but it was distorted, played at a much lower pitch than normal. The battle screen would then reappear, and the defending Pokémon would be gone. If used in a battle against a trainer, when the Pokéballs representing their Pokemon would appear in the corner, they would have one fewer Pokéball.

The implication was that the Pokémon died. What’s even stranger is that after defeating a trainer and seeing “Red received $200 for winning!”, the battle commands would appear again. If you selected “Run”, the battle would end as it normally does. You could also select Curse. If you did, upon returning to the overworld, the trainer’s sprite would be gone. After leaving and reentering the area, the spot [where] the trainer had been would be replaced with a tombstone like the ones at Lavender Tower.

The move “Curse” was not usable in all instances. It would fail against Ghost Pokémon. It would also fail if it was used against trainers that you would have to face again, such as your Rival or Giovanni. It was usable in your final battle against them, however.

I figured this was the gimmick of the game, allowing you to use the previously uncapturable Ghosts. And because Curse made the game so easy, I essentially used it throughout the whole adventure.

The game changed quite a bit after defeating the Elite Four. After viewing the Hall of Fame, which consisted of Ghost and a couple of very under leveled Pokémon, the screen cut to black. A box appeared with the words “Many years later…” It then cut to Lavender Tower. An old man was standing, looking at tombstones. You then realized this man was your character.

The man moved at only half of your normal walking speed. You no longer had any Pokémon with you, not even Ghost, who up to this point had been impossible to remove from your party through depositing in the PC. The overworld was entirely empty — there were no people at all. There were still the tombstones of the trainers that you used Curse on, however.

You could go pretty much anywhere in the overworld at this point, though your movement was limited by the fact that you had no Pokémon to use HMs. And regardless of where you went, the music of Lavender Town continued on an infinite loop. After wandering for a while, I found that if you go through Diglett’s Cave, one of the cuttable bushes that normally blocks the path on the other side is no longer there, allowing you to advance and return to Pallet Town.

Upon entering your house and going to the exact tile where you start the game, the screen would cut to black.

Then a sprite of a Caterpie appeared. It was the replaced by a Weedle, and then a Pidgey. I soon realized, as the Pokémon progressed from Rattata to Blastoise, that these were all of the Pokémon that I had used Curse on.

After the end of my Rival’s team, a Youngster appeared, and then a Bug Catcher. These were the trainers I had Cursed.

Throughout the sequence, the Lavender Town music was playing, but it was slowly decreasing in pitch. By the time your Rival appeared on screen, it was little more than a demonic rumble.

Another cut to black. A few moments later, the battle screen suddenly appeared — your trainer sprite was now that of an old man, the same one as the one who teaches you how to catch Pokémon in Viridian City.

Ghost appeared on the other side, along with the words “GHOST wants to fight!”.

You couldn’t use items, and you had no Pokémon. If you tried to run, you couldn’t escape. The only option was “FIGHT”.

Using fight would immediately cause you to use Struggle, which didn’t affect Ghost but did chip off a bit of your own HP. When it was Ghost’s turn to attack, it would simply say “…” Eventually, when your HP reached a critical point, Ghost would finally use Curse.

The screen cut to black a final time.

Regardless of the buttons you pressed, you were permanently stuck in this black screen. At this point, the only thing you could do was turn the Game Boy off. When you played again, “NEW GAME” was the only option — the game had erased the file.

I played through this hacked game many, many times, and every time the game ended with this sequence. Several times I didn’t use Ghost at all, though he was impossible to remove from the party. In these cases, it did not show any Pokémon or trainers and simply cut to the climactic “battle with Ghost.

I’m not sure what the motives were behind the creator of this hack. It wasn’t widely distributed, so it was presumably not for monetary gain. It was very well done for a bootleg.

It seems he was trying to convey a message; though it seems I am the sole receiver of this message. I’m not entirely sure what it was — the inevitability of death? The pointlessness of it? Perhaps he was simply trying to morbidly inject death and darkness into a children’s game. Regardless, this children’s game has made me think, and it has made me cry.

Oh man, this is even more disturbing than that hacked Pokémon ROM going around that kills you in seven days if you don’t make a copy of it and send it to your friends.

tags / pokemon / ghost / hack / bootleg / ec

by eric caoili / permalink / / 2 years ago / 1137 Comments

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