I like using Formspring. Every once in a while I’ll get an interesting question about video games and how I feel about them, which is incredibly gratifying/ego-stroking.

Sometimes I bluff, but sometimes it turns into this “thought experiment” prompt and I end up stream-of-consciousnessing some overwrought missive (look out! It’s how I actually write everything, ugh).

And very rarely am I so pleased with my Formspring answer, I might repost it here. (And then again, once in a great, great while I get a vaguely lewd question, but this happens not so often as you might think, which is nice.)

This afternoon, as I was hurriedly typing something about Adam Levine’s new record label, I received this question:

So we’ve established games are art. Are sports games (something like Madden ‘07 to pick a random one) art?

What a great question! It’s exactly the type of thing I plan to cop out on answering, too, because who can answer a thing like that? So I defy you to call my bluff. Below, the full text of my Formspring response:

Well, don’t pick a random one at all! Pick a specific one!

OK: Take ‘Sin City.’ I read the comic, didn’t like it. Thought it was very pretty; hated it. Right? So I already knew, going into the movie theater, that I wasn’t going to enjoy the movie in that regard, because I already don’t enjoy Frank Miller. (I’m not the hugest fan of the way Robert Rodriguez treats women in his movies, anyway.) Outcome: I enjoyed ‘Sin City’ HUGELY. After, I kept trying to understand why. And I realized the movie absolutely elevates “facsimile” to art.

A number of years ago a friend of mine was working on his Masters thesis in “themed environments”—I think his research is still ongoing, actually, even though he has his degree—and we talked a lot about simulacra, artifice, how the Tiki Room at Disney is like a video game, real surreal stuff. When he wasn’t working on his Masters, though, this cinephile liked to collect or make reproduction-quality movie props. Once I saw them I was totally obsessed with them, the same way I am obsessed with action figures and scale miniatures. You absolutely could not have convinced him these handmade movie props weren’t objets d’art, and as such I was not allowed to handle them.

You might think of any sports game as an attempt at a “scale miniature”—this genre is classed as a type of “simulation,” after all—and so a very good sports game might impress the same way a working model train, with all the bells and the smoke and the tooting, and then the little trees and motorized signs, might be riveting.

But that’s only facsimile, isn’t it. What does it take to elevate “facsimile” to “art”?

The last sports game I played with any real depth was probably ‘NBA Jam’ on SNES*, so I’m pretty far out of my element. But a lot of that game’s enjoyment comes from, it isn’t really a simulation at all, is it? I mean, it appropriates the functional design vocabulary of a “sports game,” but it hardly aspires to any sort of “realism.”

What about ‘Hot Shots Golf’? I’ve always called it a “Sunday game” because it is lazy and fun and nothing like a real PGA Tour. Then again, I’m not sure it constitutes “art,” but you know, at least it’s something different.

Similarly, while I like racing games, I do much better with games that delve into the fantastical—something like ‘Burnout,’ maybe something with a lot of blood and guts—than I do with, say, a NASCAR sim. These “fantastical” games willfully fudge the real-world physics of driving (which isn’t to say I haven’t managed to learn to execute a “drift” in my own car, because depending on the highway, I can, and good god I am probably going to kill myself sometime), but they do this while appropriating real-world architecture, like buildings and lights and sounds, all to ground the game in an accessible vocabulary. (Then you have F-Zero and wipEout which, ah, don’t. They don’t do this at all.)

So I don’t play enough “hard” simulation to readily assess whether a “scale miniature” can be the same thing as “art,” because I can’t (and why would I want to?). I CAN say that I recently watched ‘Moneyball’ and began to wonder whether games already apply the same kind of math to sports games. Wow!

But—and this is working from my experience as a person who avoids sports and “sports games” at any cost—I think you can add new, unlikely dynamics unto a “sports game” that really fundamentally change the experience from “artifice” and “simulacrum” into this new thing. Is the new thing “art”? Well, now we’d have to talk again about what art “is” and what art “does,” and no, thanks.

None of these ideas are very inventive, no, but that’s because you can apply them to all sorts of media and environments.

*this is a lie; I actually play a lot of soccer sims; for illustrative purposes, I lied.

P.S. After I tweeted about this, writer Nick LaLone recommended that I follow along on his Madden 2012 odyssey. With zeal, Mr. LaLone!

I interviewed game developer Jake Elliott in time for last year’s Indie Games Festival, but I never posted it anywhere. I knew the interview was too, too long for publication, okay, but it was just so great, I didn’t want to let any of it go. (I interviewed Jake over Skype during the big Chicago blizzard.)

Now, there is a far more readable version of this interview at Unwinnable.com; in the meantime I got special permission to post the less-edited version right here.

Jake’s latest work, The Penguin’s Dilemma, will be a playable installation at Super Button Mashers, a gallery exhibit opening February 11 at Chicago’s OhNo!DOOM. Don’t miss it! I’m serious!

Jenn: Let’s see. Uh, so. I should have reread my notes before this.

Jake: Oh, that’s cool. I don’t have any notes to work from.

Ha! That’s awesome. Also I am really bad at interviewing. I’m okay at having a conversation, though?

Well, okay! That’s fine!

So you’re actually nominated in [last] year’s IGF Nuovo category for A House in California. And this is an adventure game with really simple images, and simple, kind of graphical parser commands?

Yeah.

And I played Hummingbird Mind yesterday, and in comparison it seems like that game is simpler to play? Because it’s maybe all [conversation] trees? But visually it’s actually more complicated?

Yeah. It’s, like, photos….

Yeah, it’s photos, right. Exactly. So I guess I was curious about the aesthetic decision you made with House in California.

I mean, mostly it was a strategy about what I thought might be—like, I don’t really have much skill in rendering graphics and drawing, or anything like that, so it all kind of started as a strategy about how I could do everything in a game, for myself, without borrowing graphics from other people. In something like Hummingbird Mind, they’re all Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr that I did some processing on.

Oh! I didn’t realize that. I actually—
Yeah, I don’t call it out anywhere, but I mean, I credit the people in the—

No, I thought maybe you actually, um, had just, like, wandered around your apartment or neighborhood…

Right. I wanted to do something like that, but then I didn’t, and I just stole most of them. Or borrowed them, or whatever. Used them. [laughs]

I made my best childhood friend play—I didn’t make her play it—but my best childhood friend played A House in California. And halfway through, I asked her to stop playing it? So that we could go do something else?

[chuckles] That’s cool.

No, but she wouldn’t! And she played it to its end. It isn’t a long game, but she played it to its end. And she does not play games. So it seemed like it was this really good crash course—for her—in adventure game logic.

That’s great.

And I know that it was also part of the—was that kind of the—I mean, is that on purpose? [laughs] Like I know that it was part of the Learn to Play exhibit in, was it Cupertino?

I mean, I wasn’t thinking of it as a tutorial—yeah, it’s funny, the name of that thing, and I never really understood exactly why they called the exhibit that, or what the title meant, exactly, but—

Well, I can tell you why! Because I watched my friend play your game, and it was like, oh, this is really perfect, as an exhibit. And it’s the kind of thing that maybe other people would hover around, going, “Go! Do that! Click on the cloud!”

I guess I can…. It does resonate for me, the idea of it being a tutorial or someone’s first encounter with that genre. It was real important to me that you couldn’t make any mistakes in that game. So every action you do has a response. Like, some text hidden behind it?

I enjoyed that, actually! I think I got through the game … not missing anything.

Oh, wow.

Which is maybe the completist, or completionist, in me.

[laughs] Yeah, that’s a lot of text. I’m glad, though, because I wrote all that text, it took me a really long time. So it’s nice to know somebody read it all.

And my best friend did, too! Simply, you know, to see what would happen.

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s great, because also, the main kind of criticism that I heard from people that I showed it to, or people who wrote about it online, was that is has that kind of—what they would always talk about as this “adventure game logic,” or something where you’re trying to guess what the designer might be thinking, and [the logic] doesn’t really follow players.

And I thought about that, very early on when I was making the game, that this might be something that would happen, with these very weird [parser] verbs and these weird sentences that I wanted to have as part of the game. So I wanted there to be kind of like an advent calendar discovery thing, where there’s something underneath everything you flip over. So that it felt more you’re discovering what the words are, rather than discovering the logic.

I actually take a lot of issue with that criticism! I almost personally feel defensive, because the thing I really enjoyed in watching my friend play was, she did know what to do next in any given moment. And for her it was just, how to accomplish it? And so it was like she was learning this dream-logic language. And she knew that she needed to do something to get off this one screen, for instance. And so she automatically puts it together: Oh, why don’t I just look at the sky. And I asked her, while she was playing, How did you know to do that? And she said, I don’t know.

[laughing] Yeah, it, right, subconscious. Intuitive, some kind of…? [chuckles]

Right, exactly! But it is very much about trying to understand the dream-logic that the game’s author is directing you toward. And I wanted to talk to her about that, but our conversation was really clipped. Because we didn’t know how to talk about that.

Oh, yeah, right. Because she’s not a gamer.

She’s not a gamer! Well, and it’s not something I’ve ever asked, you know, someone who’s fresh to gaming about. How do you know? I don’t know. So there is something really interesting about the player’s decision-making, I guess.

And it’s kind of a weird case, this one too, because it doesn’t hold your hand, necessarily, there’s no instructions, really. But then, also, there’s not like a whole lot of freedom, exactly, and you can’t move through the game in a different pattern than the one I’ve built. You can play around in each space, but you can’t—there’s not a whole lot of agency, as far as progress through the game, so it’s kind of in a weird spot that’s not quite Farmville, and not quite Grand Theft Auto, you know? [laughs]

Related posts:

1. Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!ARCADE

My friend Nick Disabato recently founded a quarterly print publication called Distance, which pledges to underscore “longform essays about design and technology.” It launches next month.

Nick himself is something of a comparative media Renaissance guy, and on the whole I trust his judgment. Last week he recommended I skim an excerpt from one of the magazine’s first essays. The piece was written by somebody named Benjamin Jackson. Nick suggested I might find Ben’s work “interesting.”

Um, yes. Yes, I found it interesting. Why, a week and a half earlier I had hemorrhaged something passingly similar to Ben’s excerpt, albeit nothing so cohesive.

You owe it to yourself to read Ben’s essay, too, because it connects seemingly disparate ideas about patternicity, carrot-dangling, “gambling,” and the ethics of the con:

It was later revealed that the machine, more commonly known as the Mechanical Turk, was an elaborately constructed ruse, where a highly-skilled human chess player of extremely small stature was hidden in the cabinet. Openings on the sides revealed gears, levers and machinery designed to misdirect the viewer into thinking that the Baron had devised some mechanical means of intelligently responding to a player’s moves.

The Mechanical Turk is an early example of unethical game design. Later examples include three-card monte, in which a spectator is shown a card, is asked to follow it with their eyes, and is then misled into following the wrong card. Many casino games are unethical: for example, slot machines usually randomize their payouts to ensure that players keep coming back, even when they’re clearly losing money. But unethical traits can appear in any game, no matter how subtle, and a recent crop of games shows a fuzzier moral ground.

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns: common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin take advantage of deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards in much the same way as the slot machines described above. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools5. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

What, with all these concurrent ideas about “scams,” is Ben readying to describe to us?

ZYNGA. He is about to discuss ZYNGA.

A longer excerpt appeared this afternoon at The Atlantic. Now you can really see how cohesive Ben’s piece is. It is all about the maturation of the con, how Zynga lands us, hook, line, and sinker.

Here is an especially magnetic aside about “what” makes a “game” “good,” and why we might choose to invest in any game the way we do (it strongly borrows from the sociological idea of “cost,” wherein every human relationship is a type of transaction):

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt’s creator, discussed the notion of “time until death.” All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can’t spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game’s cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.

Really exciting stuff; I can’t wait to see what the entire essay contains.

You can help Nick Disabato kickstart Distance over here.

This Christmas I told my mother about Mohan Srivastava, some dude I first started thinking about ten-and-a-half months ago. Back then I’d written some diary thingie about “cheating,” “stealing,” and “cons.” The February 2011 issue of Wired was about all those things, too—the magazine had included an article about Mohan Srivastava—and reading the magazine was the first time I ever thought more carefully about “game-breaking” and morality. (Belated edit: I just remembered how much I like this book also.)

Over the holidays, my mother and I were watching an episode of The Mentalist together, which I like to watch with my mother sometimes because, even though it is a terrible television show, I like the idea of the main character being a mentalist and skeptic. A mentalist understands all these little rules about people (like how to perform a “cold reading”), and the hero of the TV show uses these talents for good.

This particular episode was about a town where all its residents are obsessed with finding veins of gold. The fictional people in this fictional town are all looking for gold but they are sidelining their lives to pursue it: going broke, wasting money on mining gear, alienating family, pinning every hope to finding those riches. (The episode is also about scams and cons, so I was really enjoying it, even though it was just as mediocre of every other episode of The Mentalist.)

“This really happens!” I said to my mother during a commercial. “People really waste their lives trying like this! On a pipe dream. It’s all just gambling,” I concluded. I was thoughtful.

“Haven’t I told you about Mohan Srivastava?” I asked my mother then. “The geological statistician?”

Srivastava is a type of statistician who consults the evidence, runs the variables through a complicated algorithm the rest of us will never understand, and thereby deduces the location of gold veins. So it turns out that locating a vein of gold is already a “solved game,” just like chess but more intricate.

This isn’t why Srivastava is famous; there are other geological statisticians who can also do what he does. Instead, Srivastava is famous because he realized “solving” the lottery isn’t so unlike “solving” the location of little streaks of gold in rock, and so Srivastava used the same rules and algorithms he already used for his job until, finally, he could no longer “lose” the lottery.

“Isn’t that unbelievable?” I asked my mother. “People will gamble their entire lives away on these little chances but it isn’t even real gambling, because nothing is really random. Or if it is gambling, it’s shooting your arrow blindly, over and over, hoping that you will land in one of these fated spots. And so you’re only gambling on yourself, not really on the location of this gold.” This is also many video games, right? There is a fated, narrative end, but you play on anyway.

The commercial break had ended, and now the eponymous Mentalist had determined the location of the gold by tricking someone else into going to the secret mine ahead of him (our hero, pretending to be a sort of psychic earlier, had really only followed the bad guy there).

Then I asked my mom if she remembered Roger Craig, Jeopardy! champ. She did! She loves him. I asked her if she knew how he had become unbeatable. She didn’t.

So here is the story: Roger Craig created a piece of software to help him study for the quiz show. First he created a huge database of Jeopardy! questions. Then he “categorized” all the questions, probably by hand. But it would be impossible for any one human being to study every category of Jeopardy! question, so Craig assigned values to these categories. Because it’s like, certain categories—like “World History,” say—are going to come up more often than “Ballet” or “John Waters Movies,” obviously. What’s more, correct answers for “World History” will tend to hold a lot more cash value than other answers might. So Craig knew which categories to study harder for. He was essentially looking for veins of gold.

Craig used his makeshift software to quiz himself, and these quizzes also helped him determine that he is just naturally lousy at answering certain categories’ questions.

Therefore, Craig discovered an algorithm: If 1) Craig’s odds of getting an answer correct are low and 2) the category isn’t very worthwhile anyway, then 3) Craig actually knows which categories to tackle and which to leave alone. This was especially handy while he was actually playing the game: Roger Craig would look at the category, consider its worth, weigh its worth against the odds of his knowing the answer and, using a type of math, decide whether or not to go all-in.

In-game, Craig visibly pauses to calculate his odds of a win. “I’ll bet it all,” he finally says, and his victory is almost too incredible to watch:

I tried hard to explain all this to my mother. Then I asked her whether or not she thought this was “fair” play.

“Of course it’s fair,” she told me.

“I think I agree,” I said slowly—my mother and I both love Jeopardy!—“and I think he earned his win. But some people might not feel that way. He figured out how to beat people who maybe know a lot more about stuff but take the wrong chances. In a way, he won against people he shouldn’t have.”

We both were quiet for a long time.

“Um,” I said, breaking the spell. “So it really is the same as with the geological statistician, because his only real ‘crime,’ if there were a crime, is learning these secret rules of the game, these rules that nobody else understands, so that he never has to take a gamble. See?”

“No,” my mom said.

“That guy could play the lottery and win every time,” I continued, “and so is it fair that other people ever had to play against him.”

“I don’t know,” my mom said.

“What I am saying is, we socially dictate such a fine line between ‘knowing the real rules’ and ‘cheating,’” I mused.

Now I told my mother about pick-up artists and ‘The Game.’ I told her about how we naturally do not trust pick-up artists because that is a sleazy trade.

“Why is that?” I wondered aloud (now I was revisiting a thought I’d first had out loud with a friend on October 30 of last year). “Sure it’s wrong to treat women like gold dust, but a lot of The Game is studying basic tenets of human psychology that maybe other people haven’t bothered with. There are all these little rules most people don’t understand. Is it actually wrong to use those rules, when a person is only really trying to understand how other people work, better than most people do?”

We both were quiet again. Maybe my mother was asleep.

“So we act like it is not moral or ethical to figure out those rules, because we treat it like an unfair advantage,” I told nobody. Now I was thoughtful again.

Hmm. Sometimes, if things start to seem ‘unfair,’ we legislate. We get really legalistic about this type of thing.

Martha Stewart was subject to this. One time she was given a hot stock tip—we might call it a “new game rule,” if we are feeling generous—and now that she possessed this new information, she had to decide whether to play by the rule or ignore it, as if she never had been told how the stock game works. She chose to play by that rule, rather than taking risks, and she ended up in jail for awhile. We call what Martha Stewart did “insider trading.” We don’t like “insider information,” because that means someone gets to play by a ruleset the rest of us cannot access. When anything seems ‘unfair,’ even fleetingly, we collectively feel so victimized.

Or maybe someone is in a casino, gambling. If he is a pretty good poker player, he will know how to watch and play. If his opponent plays a Queen (or whatever), our card shark might realize the hand he was cultivating is finished, and so he folds and still escapes with some of his money. That type of thing is OK.

But what if the same card shark is also really good at counting cards! What if he has developed a machine’s computational agility at knowing where every card is in the deck? Knowing how to do this is difficult but not miraculous, but it is most certainly a type of cheating, and a card shark on a winning streak might might eventually be asked to leave the table, or maybe the entire casino.

A great card shark really impresses us, though, doesn’t he? His knack for counting cards is a real talent, a type of high scam. Sometimes we tip our hat to mentalists and “hustlers,” don’t we, because they can be really creative and talented even as they are defrauding people, and if we are not the person being defrauded, we are so impressed.

“But maybe if we feel like we are the person who is losing something to somebody else,” I continued aloud to my mother, “we decide things are unfair.”

“Hmmmmmm,” my mother said, not thoughtfully but sleepily.

“Anyway,” I said to her, “the whole thing makes me so sad!”

“Why?” my mother asked me, sounding more awake.

“Um,” I said. “We feel like the right thing to do is to not know the secret rules. We feel a lot more sympathy and respect for those hardworking dreamers who keep shooting and shooting those arrows into empty spaces.” Ugh, the losers.

“And,” I said. “And.

“And those things everyone is looking for, they aren’t up to chance at all! They aren’t! They’re, uh, they aren’t chaotic, they’re part of math and a harmonious universe, and they’re, um,” I said.

“It’s like predestination,” my mother the Catholic said.

“Well, yeah! Well, determinism,” I said.

“Which is sad,” she said.

“And scary! And sad,” I agreed. “How terrifying, that you can try and try your whole life, and there is free will, but the ‘free will’ is you, you, never hitting on the ‘right’ thing, this thing that is—”

“Fated,” my mother suggested.

“Yes!” I said.

And here is where this particular blog gets weird.

I sat there, reeling at the idea that your ‘fortune’ is this ancient thing that predates you, and your only hope—if this is the sort of thing you long for, for any type of life success—is to somehow arbitrarily strike on it, or maybe to not-randomly strike on it, if you are some kind of cheater. That idea radically changes everything, doesn’t it? Every philosophy.

Now I wondered aloud, to my poor mother, at what the location of gold veins—just, the literal location of gold veins!—meant for me, for narrativity and storytelling, for game-making and game-playing, for my own sense of religion and life philosophy, and she and I both got worried.

Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything? But I was raised Southern Baptist, where we are taught that there is one final truth, and unless we breathlessly drive toward that final truth, toward that singular golden vein, we are going in the wrong direction. But! there is another part of (most denominations of, excluding Calvinist) Christianity, too, and that is, we all have free will. The concept of free will is tantamount to the type of idea of moral “salvation” I grew up with. It goes: maybe if we stop gambling and choose this one thing, that choice is all the more important because we chose freely. Otherwise, what is the point?

Or maybe that is not true, either. I’m not sure. Everything is in flux, so I am thinking out loud.

I know, I mentioned Calvinism. I know that determinism, predeterminism, and predestination are commonly-confused terms with nuanced differences. I struggle, too, to not conflate them. But I have written lengthily—even here! Right here on this blog!—about my longstanding fear of determinism, which I only hope isn’t a thing.

Because if I were to become convinced the game of life is “solvable,” whether with or without algorithms, I very constantly wonder whether I would be able to also live ethically. Can I? Can we? Can we really live ethically while believing in golden veins? Many philosophers say no. I’m not sure.

So I said all this to my own mother, and she and I were both worried for me.

ETA: John Peter Grant expands on these ideas, connects them more tangibly to games, and—oh, just read this.

From a longwinded, boring diary entry wherein I transcribe notes on a panel/Q&A/lecture with comix author Chris Ware, dated May 9, 2010:

That is because comics use space instead of time (McCloud, Understanding Comics).

Also, speaking of space-as-time, as the eye travels from (in our English-speaking world) left to right, the eye’s spatial movement conveys the illusion of the passage of time. And after all, the passage of time itself is illusory. So what happens on the left side of a panel happens before what happens on the right side of the same panel, and the eye arrives at each spot and puts them into that spatial/time order, into sequence. Or! If a panel makes your eye jump left and right and left and right, as with speech bubbles in a dialogue, you interpret it as a fast exchange, bullets shot back and forth in almost a single moment. And! A long panel is a long moment, or maybe a long sequence of moments, and a huge panel with not too much inside of it is a perfect and lingering, cinematic Tarkovsky moment which, you know, is the exact opposite of montage. So I want them to all talk about that.

During the Q&A session, and I do not know this yet, they’ll get to it.

[…]

Here come questions about scripting a story in advance. Do you? Do you script your stories? Ray [Ray Pride, the panel’s moderator] wants to know.

This question made me think about college and about Professor Gary Saul Morson’s excellent textbook, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, which is important for you to read if you have any interest at all in not-linear, unscripted literature, and also especially Slavic literature, which is Professor Morson’s mode. That book is about time, chance, and narrative possibilities (McCloud’s Understanding Comics is about space, chance, and narrative possibilities, so there is your connective tissue).

[…]

Morson’s book is also pretty great if you like the idea that morality is grounded in all things being changeable. What I mean is, a lot of Doomsday Christians, right, excuse themselves from accountability because they believe we are driving toward a predetermined ending anyway. Eschatology allows for incredible human unkindness: if all that matters is the Next Life, what shit ought we give about one another in this life? And so we are preoccupied with saving one another’s souls when maybe instead we ought to pay more thought to how we are planning to feed, clothe, and shelter one another, etc etc. So if you believe in determinism, and I try so hard not to, how can you believe in living ethically also?

Anyway, “narrative freedom” is an important point to stress, because how can a story, told in seeming sequence, be full of narrative possibility, if it is true that the story is also barreling toward a predetermined end? How can that be so? Morson’s book is about that, about how the two can impossibly happen at the same time, and so is McCloud’s.

And actually, I have always dreamed of Chris Ware talking about this, because in his stories’ architectures maybe you are not always sure of which direction your eye ought to travel (or, and so, in which direction “time” and sequence ought to be moving), or in which order you ought to read, but his storytelling itself is good enough (and seemingly pre-plotted enough!) that the story works in all radiating directions, and so, in navigating the seemingly sequential narrative, you are free to wander and choose.

Here I have written in parentheses, “video games too,” and I don’t remember why.

But maybe this is an OK thought because, say, the Astro Boy game for GBA is about hopping around through “time.”

Like, OK, in any 2D platformer, time is plotted as “stages” (or “levels” or “boards”), and these are basically panels that usher you through the “timeline” of a game. And that’s interesting because if you are “stuck” on a level and can’t pass it, you’re basically locked in this stagnant moment in time and story. So Astro Boy is a pretty normal 2D platformer, and you play through levels like normal, as in any game. But when you are made to play through the narrative again, or maybe not directly play through, but “revisit” the stages, I guess—and this is happening in the game because, as Astro Boy, you have to make something right in another place and time, looking for the spots where a time-traveling villain has changed the narrative timeline to suit his own nefarious ends—you play the levels out-of-original-and-established-sequence and not-linearly, and there are all these clever little narrative changes happening in the levels as you are revisiting them.

Or, OK, I like Braid, and while I’ve long since lost my notes on Braid, that game is about time being represented spatially—like, in some stages moving left-to-right makes time move forward, and in kind, moving right-to-left makes time go backward—and you play through the levels asequentially, or you can revisit narrative sections on a whim, and so on. And that game is all about stopping time and reversing it so that you can rectify your mistakes: you have second, third, fifth, millionth chances to make things right again, not only as a gamer who made a concrete misstep, but also as a human who is incapable of loving people the way they wish you would love them. I think that’s what the story is about, anyway. Maybe it isn’t.

Or, maybe—I’m not sure why I wrote “video games too” in parentheses, remember—maybe I’m not thinking about different ways to afford a gamer his own narrative freedoms at all. Maybe I am wondering instead about what would happen if a game were not too, too well scripted before its developer actually began working on it. That could be why I prefer smaller, low-budge games to big-budge AAA games, which are terribly scripted and, also, terribly scripted.

On scripting, Ware—who pre-plots sort of, kind of, but not especially so—sez: “Scripting seems to make both the reading and the drawing of the work ‘drearily boring’”

I like that idea, too, because it’s easy to forget that, as a writer and illustrator, the not-knowing, the wide open possibility, is preferable to the mundanity of always-knowing, or always driving ahead according to preset goals.

In Loop Raccord, the player is tasked with finding just the right spot in an animated gif, splicing it there, and then reversing the footage so that it creates an infinite loop.

In any given stage, videos are arranged in a grid, 12 at a time, everything moving and bobbing and jumping all at once. Its no-frills presentation is jarringly ugly. It’s a YTMND migraine. It isn’t even fun. And I couldn’t stop playing it. Oh, my god, I came back to it again and again.

And I was horrified, too, because I knew that clearing all these stages was pointless: the game was developed according to the Experimental Gameplay Project’s Neverending theme. Loop Raccord’s visual cacophony is endless. I knew I was headed nowhere! And yet I was completely arrested.

What should video games do? Often we—I am lumping myself in with critics and reviewers, but game-makers say this, too—tell designers to ‘engage the player,’ without considering what we’re really saying. What does that even mean, to ‘engage’ someone?

I can engage anyone in conversation, and just because he politely engages with me doesn’t mean that he wants to, or that he’s having fun, or that he isn’t trying to get away from me. When game critics tell game-makers “you need to engage the player,” what they really mean is, “You need to make your player invest in your game.”

Developers, you need to dangle any kind of carrot. I need to see my goals, always in view, just out of my grasp. That’s what a game should do to me.

Nicolai Troshinsky has done exactly this. Here I am, grudgingly playing some interactive thing about film-splicing, which is probably the least of my interests. And I start pausing between takes to examine all the other screaming rectangles on my grid: one down, two down, four down, stage clear. I start looking forward to other squares on the grid.

I recognize a clip. “I can’t wait to make Santa Claus from Miracle on 34th Street look stupid,” I think to myself. Or I recognize an animated square I’ve already looped: “That one will be easy,” I remind myself optimistically. I start planning out my goals, even though I know the game is endless and so, in that superficial way, fruitless.

But I am also talking aloud to no one a lot. And grunting, and whooping, depending on my successes and failures. I am remembering Metagames and Containers and thinking about the game, with all its small goals and accomplishments, that I have been making for myself.

Loop Raccord is zenlike and meticulous, but it’s also kind of stressful. And it’s hilarious! I can’t believe how funny the game is! But what is it? Is it supposed to be an installation? I can picture it projected onto a wall, a large crowd of people passing a wireless controller among its players.

I am only a little bit ashamed of what I wrote directly to Loop Raccord’s developer:

I thought a lot about your game in the grocery store parking lot yesterday. I struggled to understand how a game that is endless, with no save states, with no real forward or backward direction, no permanent success or failure, can feel so satisfying.

And then, belatedly, I understood the ‘endless loop’ joke more concretely, realizing that, in playing, I am a looped film clip too. I’m jogging forward and backward, finishing a screen and starting over, and ultimately, I’m fixed in space and time, too, just like the subjects in the film clips.

Loop Raccord taught me, in a very short space, that I can feel fulfilled without need of a fixed destination.

• Plural Games – Loop Raccord

Related posts:

1. Playing through the 2011 IGF Nuovo final-list: A House in California
2. IGF 2010: “Tuning” trailer
3. Why aren’t you playing Multiwinia?

Oh, sure, A House in California, recently named a nominee for the IGF’s coveted Nuovo Award, is all stark white flixels against a black backdrop, in the style of some early 1980s graphic adventure game. It is point-and-click interactive fiction, terribly sparse, with all possible parser commands weighting the bottom of the screen.

But the commands are strange—“Remember”? “Forget”? “Befriend”?—and sometimes, depending on what I accomplish in the game, the commands change. That is disturbing. But also, inexplicably satisfying, to see that I am somehow changing things with my actions?

I now totally get why House in California was included in this year’s Learn to Play gallery exhibit: the game uses a lot of “dream logic” and “guess-what-the-designer-wants-you-to-do,” and as you explore and progress, you find yourself making real sense of the game’s mediations. Like other good games that toy with their chosen genres, this game demands that the player learn its secret language.

In Part 1, Lois moves from place to place by “remembering” on certain objects: this segues play into a kind of flashback board, another place-and-time where Lois can remember how to do something in-game by recounting the circumstance in which she first learned to do it. To recall back to the game’s main action, Lois must “forget” what she’s thinking about. This turns game movement into a kind of procedural that mimics the way we ourselves think and do, and recollection’s role in thinking and doing. I am fighting to say something really intelligent and incisive, now, but maybe only a description of the game’s action is interesting enough.

In Part 2, Beulah, a writer (and a singer, and a cook), gets from place to place by writing or maybe reading about things—something about revisiting memory and making a different kind of thing out of it. You can see how this game ought to interest other game-makers.

In Part 3, playing as Connie, I broke and consulted a walkthrough because it was difficult to make any sense of all the butterflies. Maybe I could have figured out that watching things on the television—instead of remembering, see—would help me learn to do new things in Connie’s real world. But I was too used to playing the memory levels, and the introduction of the play mechanic’s newer idea, about learning passively through meditation and simulation, was utterly lost on me until later. Finally, in Part 4, you take all the pieces you’ve been tutored through—everything about learning and playing and reading—and the game gradually inverts and empties itself.

I’ve been complaining for a little while about certain independent games assigning ponderous values to mundane in-game actions, using hopping-over-a-curb as synecdoche for having-your-heart-broken and all that. I’ve also become annoyed with the use of 8- and 16-bit graphics to manufacture a sense of nostalgia. Maybe, in a way, A House in California is doing both, and then again it’s doing neither, or whatever it is doing, anyway, it does authentically.

The game feels fiercely autobiographical, too, but it doesn’t read, necessarily, as somebody else’s experience: playing the game made me ache with recognition.

My grandparents had a house in California—when I was a kid, I called it “The Big House”—and the backyard had a hill and a big stump with moss, and you could hear wind-chiming wafting from a great distance. My grandfather eventually moved away; he built a miniature version of the Big House on a patch of land in Kent, Washington, where we lived for a few years. I think a lot about someday having billions of dollars, knocking on my grandfather’s door, and asking the house’s occupants to please move out.

Or there was the one-storey house we had somewhere I think in Seattle, with these big fruit trees in the yard and all kinds of blossoms, maybe peaches or nectarines, squishing underfoot. Or there was me in my childhood bedroom in Texas, sitting at the computer click-click-clicking, and my adopto-mom standing in the doorway, pointing and hissing “I am so sorry we ever bought that thing.”

I was replaying Braid yesterday (thanks, Humble Bundle) and thinking about how hard it must be to write a nice art game. Text must be legible and so it must be used scrupulously or else completely fill the screen. And I wondered at how harsh the written parts of Braid really seem, all these prolix passages with actual, physical wayposts serving as textual wayposts. It doesn’t quite work.

Maybe Braid’s rhythm is all wrong, in spots. Ian Bogost, quoted capaciously in Stephen Totilo’s What If A Video Game Was Poetry, speculates that limited meter is what matters, not only in the writing itself, but in a game’s “constrained technical architecture, the way you program it, even the form of the assembly code on the screen—these long thin codes of data.”

Again, I worry that if I say too much else on the subject, I’ll ruin it. Probably that’s what Professor Bogost means by “meter,” in the end.

• dai5ychain – A House in California

Related posts:

1. Playing through the 2011 IGF Nuovo final-list: Loop Raccord
2. IGF 2010: “Tuning” trailer
3. Why aren’t you playing Multiwinia?

(I have a weakness for Russian villains.)

• Daily What – Late Links of the Day

Related posts:

1. Video Game Feminist of the Decade: or, when “You” is a girl

Then Mr. Nelson emailed me about his “odd art games,” many of which you can play right in your web browser by visiting Arctic Acre. (In his email, he also suggested that I visit Jason Nelson’s School of Games. You should probably go watch his video lecture series, too, because it is hilarious. There are currently 16 episodes, each only seconds long.)

Maybe ‘odd’ is almost the wrong word for his games: they’re straightforward 2D platformers, with moving and jumping and spatial circumnavigation and an end destination in sight, so that the way to play is immediately discernible even to your mom. But as you run-and-collect, the screens become cluttered with prose noise, taking on the likeness and verve of treated text. Everything feels very inaccessible and obfuscated despite the mechanics’ simplicity.

I got a little bit nervous when I googled Mr. Nelson and discovered he is a “lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital writing, and creative practice at Griffith University,” which itself is located in another country etc. (Everything I know about both digital writing and other countries, amounting to peanuts, I learned from 253.) And I am not a lecturer. Also, you probably already know more about Nelson’s games than I do. So I was pretty nervous about approaching his work at all.

Anyway, a bit about each: I started with the first one (?), called game, game, game and again game, or: belief systems are small clumsy rolling-type creatures. As I played, I typed into my note-taking software, “I am a spider or hairball or some kind of space-time tumbleweed,” and so when I went back to the first screen and noted its title I was relieved.

And as game, game, game’s story comes to the surface, sometimes the new scribbles onscreen will obscure (or totally change) your intended pathway to the end goal, and you are forced to reconsider and regroup. Just as in the game of life! And in some stages, choosing one avenue subsequently walls off another. Very philosophical and nice, OK.

Next I tried i made this. you play this. we are enemies, which I appreciated right off the bat because I am usually wondering as I am playing a game why the game designer hates me so much when we haven’t even met. I did enjoy the exhilarating physicality of hopping around Metafilter and Fark, but also I liked that the things to run-and-collect were hyperlinks and search terms. That is how we read! That is how we search the web! As in the first game, this one had a lot of portals in it, zapping your little rolling ball from location to location. The portals don’t actually make the games nonlinear, but that’s fine.

Evidence of Everything Exploding is the third game Jason Nelson links to at Arctic Acre, I think, and since I am predisposed toward a certain liturgical orderliness, I went to that one next. From the start this one is a lot more polished than Nelson’s other games, but it shares the same scrappiness that makes them credible. It is also more challenging and more playable, and so it is more fun.

It’s similar in makeup to the other two, except you swim around the mazes of text instead of hopping from platform to platform. And you blow stuff up! That’s cool. I’m pretty easy to please, though, because this is a game for people who play games and like the secret language of games. Of Mr. Nelson’s games, EoEE is definitely my favorite.

In each of these works, maybe the author is satirizing video games’ cutscene “reward system” when he includes his hair-tearingly meaningless videos. You don’t have to watch them, and I am pretty sure he is making fun of you for watching them, but I watched them.

Alarmingly These Are Not Lovesick Zombies woke up my family because I was playing it pretty late at night. It is bombastic and action-packed. I liked it least, in fact, even though I liked the branching “play as living or undead” option best in terms of mechanical ingenuity. Still, a playthrough is well worth Nelson’s “hidden secrets of the video game industry” game design whiteboard series, which appear during level intermissions.

But all of Jason Nelson’s maybe improvised? whiteboard demonstrations, which I entirely watched, are collected at Jason Nelson’s School of Games. Again, check those out. Seriously.

Some of Jason’s older work is available at Secret Technology dot com, below.

• Secret Technology – Jason Nelson digital art and poetry

Related posts:

1. Playing through the 2011 IGF Nuovo final-list: A House in California
2. Learn to Play’s digital and analog game art
3. Digital Download Korner: 10 games for your MacBook

Like its predecessor, DX is a Pac-Man style maze gobbler with a shifting layout and a strict time limit, forcing you to go for the highest possible score before time runs out. DX adds in a “ghost train,” wherein sleeping ghosts around the maze wake up and begin chasing Pac-Man. Provided you don’t get yourself trapped—think Snake—you can use the train to rack up huge scores, grabbing a power pellet and chowing down on dozens of ghosts in one fell swoop.

I’d had a nagging feeling that this reminded me of another game, but I couldn’t pinpoint what. It wasn’t until my riveting game of Centipede at Ann Arbor’s Pinball Pete’s that my memory jogged: DX smacks of the Magnavox Odyssey² game, K.C.’s Krazy Chase! That game was a curious mash-up of Centipede and Pac-Man, deliberately designed to prevent a lawsuit from Atari—a fate that had befallen the game’s antecedent, K.C. Munchkin.

K.C. Munchkin, released in 1981, was a huge hit for the Odyssey², at least for its brief availability on the market. Beating the 2600’s notorious Pac-Man port to home consoles by nearly a year, Phillips, the parent company of Magnavox, found themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit by Atari, who argued that the maze game was too similar to their own, and that Atari had the sole rights to Pac-Man on home computer. To be sure, K.C. Munchkin had its differences—multiple mazes, a level editor long before editors were common (it used the Odyssey²’s attached keyboard), and dots that roamed the maze itself—but ultimately it was a game in which an impish munching character wandered a maze, eating dots and avoiding monsters. As if driving the point home, with a wink and a nudge, that K.C. really was Pac-Man in disguise, the game even had power pellets that would allow the player to hunt the three monsters for a limited amount of time. Of course Atari won the suit, and K.C. Munchkin was pulled from shelves. Still, the game’s success had blown the door wide open for a sequel.

K.C.’s Krazy Chase once again featured the multiple mazes and level editor of the first game, but the gameplay went in a decidedly different direction, pun intended, from that of most maze games. Doing away with dots and power pellets entirely, the only things in the maze besides K.C. himself are two “Drats” (the resident monsters), randomly growing trees, and the Dratapillar. It is this Dratapillar that play fixes itself on, for that monster is both the primary antagonist and the focus of scoring.

While K.C. can eat trees, they are each worth a single measly point. Clearing the level instead requires you to attack the beast itself, but because the Dratapillar’s head will kill you, you must go after its body. There are a few ways to fell the Dratapillar. You can nibble away at it from the rear for 3 points apiece, which is safe, albeit slow, and still a bit dangerous as the Drats can trap you. Alternatively—and this is what reminded me of the ghost trains—you can go for the jugular, so to speak, and attack the segments closer to the Dratapillar’s head. This requires you to intercept it as it crosses an intersection, and you have to be wary of it turning to come after you. The trees come in handy here: the Dratapillar is also chomping away on them, and it will slow down to enjoy its meal.

Once a segment farther up the Dratapillar is eaten, the remaining segments will stay in place to be eaten by K.C. or, in a brazen and rare videogame display of autosarcophagy, the Dratapillar could well swing around and devour its own body. Eating a Dratapillar segment will also turn the Drats white, empowering K.C. to stun them momentarily for a cool 10 points. Eating the entire Dratapillar body will award 20 points, and this resets the level at a faster speed.

The game, then, becomes an exercise in strategy based on the maze, speed, and placement of all the objects. Eating one segment of the Dratapillar and then hunting nearby Drats can build up your score, but you’ll lose position on the Dratapillar itself, and may get killed when K.C. ceases to be powered up. Focus on level-clearing nets a large amount of points, but the speedier game will make it harder to control and maneuver effectively with regard to K.C.’s foes. While many maze games require knowledge of where the pursuing enemies are at any given time, almost none other makes the enemies’ position the entire focus of the game.

While the design is fresh, it is the fun visual effects that give K.C.’s Krazy Chase so much personality. Our title hero’s mischievous face rolls around the maze grinning, winking when a stage is cleared; when K.C. is killed, he smiles sadly and waves goodbye with his antennae before receding forever into the gaming void. The Dratapillar itself leers maniacally right up until the level is cleared—then, just a disembodied head, he wears a pained frown. The other Drats, when stunned, spin in a wild circle.

The game is also compatible with the Odyssey²’s Voice: Addon module, a voice synthesis accessory that serves as a pass-thru for the console and games. Though some games use this more effectively—such as the Odyssey² port of the arcade game Turtles, which uses it as a second sound channel to hum the background music—K.C.’s Krazy Chase sees K.C. offering words of encouragement, crazed laughter, and an “Oh, no!” of disappointment when he inevitably dies. Like many Odyssey² games, you get a whopping one life to work with before the game resets, so a certain degree of finesse is needed to last any length of time. I looked around on YouTube to try and link a video showcasing the Voice functionality, and this video by user “Croooow111” is all I’ve come up with:

Perhaps even now the Odyssey² doesn’t elicit the respect of its more popular rival consoles, like the 2600 or Intellivision, but its developers had a knack for making games that retained the feel of popular arcade games, with still enough twists to make them wholly unique. While overshadowed by home ports and exclusives of better known games such as Atari’s Pac-Man, Colecovision’s Ladybug, or Intellivision’s Lock n’ Chase, K.C.’s Krazy Chase was a notable system seller in its own right. And because it is such an innovative bent on the maze-gobbler model, 30 years later, K.C.’s Krazy Chase yet feels new and immediate.

Further reading:

• Phosphor Dot Fossils – K.C.’s Krazy Chase
• Odyssey 2 Homepage – K.C.’s Krazy Chase review
• Halcyon Days – Interview with Ed Averett

Related posts:

1. Christian Bale’s Pac-Man cereal ad
2. Fear and Shadows: a Mountain King retrospective
3. I Love the 80s: Michael Ian Black is REALLY into Ms. Pac-Man

Reality—real life—the newspapers and the newsmagazines and what goes on across the street—these are the materials of great art, but not art itself, though I am conscious of the semantic difficulties inherent in the word “art.” Let us say that “art” points to a cultural, and not an aesthetic, phenomenon: that a wilted spider put inside a picture frame somehow, magically, becomes a work of “art,” but that the same spider, untouched, unnoticed, is still a work of “nature” and will win no prizes. This is a definition of art that greatly angers traditionalists, but it pleases me because it suggests how Gestalt-like and shapeless life really is and how necessary we writers (and scientists, and map-makers, and historians) are to make it sane.

Related posts:

1. Quotables
2. Quotables
3. Quotables

Games can be a kind of philosophy, a kind of homebrew neuroscience, a martial art in which you get to eat pretzels and drink beer, a spiritual discipline made out of math, a way of thinking about thinking, a way of becoming more consciously aware of our thoughts and beliefs and decisions and learning about complex and counterintuitive truths about ourselves and the universe. So as we reinvent gaming as the dominant art form of the 21st century, I just want to remember that games can do that.

Related posts:

1. Quotables (on game-making and art, sort of)
2. Quotables
3. Quotables

I Love Bees is an ARG, or alternate reality game. What that means specifically is hard to quantify, but ARGs tend to share a few common characteristics. They are played in real time over a finite length of time; they involve group efforts in puzzle-solving, either online or in the real world; their stories are told in rather unconventional ways, ranging from clothing lines to trading cards to false newspapers to in-game websites in games over the years. As for I Love Bees, the main action of the game occurred at the website of the same name.

The story played out in two different ways. One half took place in the present, on the website itself. Initially starting out as a pretty basic-looking site about beekeeping and homemade honey production, the site was first mentioned in the theatrical trailer for Halo 2. Within a couple weeks of going up in the summer of 2004, the site went mad. Garbled code, random snippets of story, and corrupted files permeated the page, along with a countdown. Theories abounded as to what the countdown pointed to, with a prevailing idea being that it would be a Halo 2 demo. Once the day had passed however, it became clear that wasn’t the case. What was apparent was that a number of beings now inhabited the website. There was Melissa, also known as “The Op,” a hard-nosed, slightly mad woman seeking out her “crew.” There was the Sleeping Princess (or the Rogue Process, according to Melissa), an ephemeral being who hid out from Melissa in the site’s 404 page and spoke in storybook language. Rounding out the characters were the SPDR and Pious Flea, a repair program and quasi-friend to the Sleeping Princess, respectively.

Every Tuesday and Friday the site would see updates. The Sleeping Princess would put up puzzles to be solved on Fridays, but Tuesdays took on a different sort of challenge. Early on, a series of numbers started appearing on the site. Players determined that these were GPS coordinates and times, and that after checking the locations out, there were payphones in these spots. If everything went well, when that time rolled around, the phone would ring, and Melissa, improvised by actress Kristen Rutherford, would answer. She would ask questions of her “crew,” asking them to sing songs, take pictures, and in the case of a few, get their cell phone numbers so she could call them at home. If they succeeded in passing her tests, they would hear a snippet of an audio drama, and if enough people succeeded, the clips would be unlocked on the website. From there the clips were arranged into chronological order, and another story would start to take shape.

This audio drama portion is probably the part more people are familiar with, since unlike the rest of the game, a person could simply go back, listen to it, and enjoy a high quality story. The creators of the game, 4orty2wo Entertainment, were able to assemble an excellent and rather well-known cast of voice actors, including the aforementioned Rutherford, Kari Wahlgren, and Yuri Lowenthal. Taking place in 2552, this portion primarily follows five different people—Jersey, Jan, Kamal, Rani, and Col. Herzog—and a former military AI, Durga, as they each deal with the Covenant War and a strange cover-up of a Naval spy ship, the Apocalypso, being blown apart in Earth space. These are essentially ordinary people, though each with specific skillsets and attributes, and they’re just living their lives as best they can as the world falls apart around them. I’ve heard some compare them to the crew of Firefly, and I think it’s a very apt comparison, simply in how they all interact with their peers and, eventually, with each other.

Everyone, even Melissa, felt like real people. And the players kept the Puppetmasters on their toes. At one point, Melissa was hunting the Sleeping Princess, and asked her crew about her whereabouts. The PMs didn’t think anyone would turn in such a nice character, and were quite surprised when the player “Weephun” told The Op on the phone that hey, the Princess is hiding out on the 404 page, go get her. One scrambled rewrite later, a story arc where the Princess escaped the Op was put together. Weephun, in the meantime, was ostracized in the game community, because players literally felt like he had betrayed a close friend of theirs.

Even after the story ended, the players stayed together. Some ended up buying the Xbox and Halo 2 to play with other Beekeepers, which went on to form two different clans: The Beekeepers and Evade Evade Evade (a common phrase of the Flea). And in May of 2005, players from across the US and Canada came together in Chicago for the Hivemeet, a gathering where everyone could reminisce and hang out. 4orty2wo even put out a DVD of all the audio drama parts, plus photos people had sent the Op, and gave players their blessing to make copies. I, personally, made a number of good friends across the country through this game, and always enjoy getting together with them at conventions or just online.

Even the actors, who have gone on to other things, have kept in touch with their Beekeepers to varying extents. When Bungie staffers said that the ILB story was non-canonical, the voracious fanbase complained until finally, in 2006, they did an about face and embraced the story and the mythology. The game even went on to win a GDC award for innovation, as well as a Webby.

Early in the game, Jersey told Durga, “For a quality experience, the girl has to be real.”

The new crew made this game more real—and the characters, more alive—than anyone could have expected.

Now, with the continued assistance of the University of Potsdam Press, DIGAREC has collected, edited, and published the sum total of the May 2008 conference. The result: a finished book, Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, with keynotes and lectures divided and edited into chapters.

Essays include “The Concept of War in the World of Warcraft,” “The Space-Image: Interactivity and Spatiality of Computer Games,” “The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games: Freedom and Discipline in America’s Army,” and “Différance at Play: Unfolding Identities Through Difference in Videogame Play.”

Incredibly, DIGAREC opted to publish the book as a free, downloadable PDF—but make no mistake, this is a proper book (with an ISBN and endpages and everything!), suitable for your Kindle or e-reader. It’s a pretty hefty tome. Oh, and yes—it’s all in English. (My German isn’t that good.)

• Universitätsbibliothek Potsdam – Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games (via)

In a sense these games, as well as a few other examples, owe a great deal to arguably the first major game, Spacewar. Spacewar was initially released in 1962 by a group of computer hackers at MIT who, upon getting access to the university’s fancy new PDP-1 computer, proceeded to pool their efforts and write one awesome head-to-head game. The premise is simple enough—each player controls a ship and tries to blow up the other guy while utilizing a limited supply of fuel and ammunition.

What makes the game interesting is the role of gravity. The ships are circling a star, and crashing into it will destroy you. The star’s gravity will pull you in or fling you out, depending on how well you can utilize it. Though you do have direct control over your ship, your thruster isn’t good for much more than maneuvering. Firing the rocket long enough to actually move independently of the star will drain your fuel in about 28 seconds. The winner is the person who can keep gravity from becoming an enemy.

The game creators—Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, Pete Samson, and others—also went and made the game code open source. Tweaks went into the game as time went on: the programmers added an actual, real starfield; a hyperspace feature was added that would allow your ship to make an emergency jump to a random location, but not always safely; options to make the star invisible or nonexistent were also added. The game ended up pushing the PDP-1 computer so far that DEC, the manufacturer of the machine, ended up including the game with every PDP built as a test of the system. As a result the game spread across the country to every major university, inspiring a generation of programmers.

In fact, the earliest arcade machines were generally variations on Spacewar. Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck put together Galaxy Game, an arcade cabinet essentially running a PDP inside it, and set it up at Stanford University in 1971. Only months later, Nolan Bushnell and Atari released their first arcade machine, Computer Space, also inspired by Spacewar: though there wasn’t a star to contend with, and as such no gravity, you still had to handle your own momentum to fight UFOs that weren’t bound by Newtonian phsyics.

Suspiciously similar: Space Wars resembles Spacewar not just in name alone.

Cinematronics’ 1977 arcade game, Space Wars, on the other hand, was practically a straight port of the computer version, albeit with stronger thrusters and weaker gravity, and it featured a control panel with a bevy of game options. And ports of that version made their way to the Atari 2600 and Vectrex consoles. There’s also a number of computer versions that have been made over the years, though usually based off of the arcade port.

Spacewar also strongly influenced Star Control’s combat, and it could be argued that the game set the stage for every competitive game since. More recently, Microsoft has included a version of the game with its XNA development program (and why isn’t that up on Live? I’d pay money for an online version of Spacewar!).

Despite its age, Spacewar has a depth to its gameplay that makes it timeless, even now. A few years ago my friends and I would play a java-emulated version of the game nearly every time we got together. Spacewar is a real testament to the idea that no matter how old the game, no matter how poor its graphics and sound may be, a good game is ageless.

• OverSigma – Spacewar! Original 1962 code on PDP-1 emulator

Related posts:

1. Hello, Homebrew: Thrust
2. Starflight and the open-ended RPG

Nonprofit organization Games for Change (G4C) is continuing its march to save the world through gaming. Aided by some vicarious funding from the AMD Foundation, G4C today launched a new toolkit designed as a crash course to help non-profit organizations learn how to create “social issue digital games.”

The Games for Change Toolkit is primarily a Flash-based presentation containing video, reference material, and links to demonstration games that cover various aspects of game design, from the initial concept to production and distribution. While an actual SDK may not be involved, the toolkit introduces nonprofit organizations to both the broad potential and finer details of bringing an issue-conscious game into reality.

According to Chartier, the design primer’s video resources are culled from footage from the 2008 symposium “Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop on Making Social Issue Games,” here reorganized into a logical hierarchy for the G4C site.

I guess I thought the G4C Toolkit would be kind of a bore*, but I ended up hunting around the flash site for a long time: this kind of game design philosophy absolutely overlaps with the broader genre of edutainment. One of the best moments, I think, is during Karen Sideman’s presentation, when—paraphrasing James Paul Gee—she asserts that games don’t necessarily ‘make’ learning fun. In fact, it’s just the opposite: games are fun because we are learning.

*More social issues games ought to be as addictive as PETA’s Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals.

• Games for Change – G4C Toolkit (via)

Starflight is a now-obscure EA game that originally saw release on Microsoft’s old DOS platform, before being ported to the Genesis and a slew of other computers systems, where you essentially traveled through the galaxy, exploring planets, meeting aliens, and either talking with them and getting information or blasting each other to bits. Part of the appeal of the game is simply how fleshed out the world is; each of the alien races have histories together, and each will tell you slightly different stories about one other and themselves. Some will come after you for having a particular species of crew member on your vessel, while others will just try to blow you away immediately.

There is a story, and a fascinating one, but you aren’t presented with it through a series of events like most RPGs. All you get off the bat is that an ancient colony ship was found on your planet, Arth, which is populated by members of several sentient species. The ship has been reverse engineered, your vessel has been constructed, and you’re to go out and explore. That said, there is an objective here, but everything is revealed organically. Offhanded remarks by aliens, ancient ruins found through the galaxy, and the periodic bulletin from the Interstel Corporation drive the story more than anything. It’s this style that may be the game’s greatest strength, and is sadly something few games have followed up with since. But by the time you’ve pieced everything together—which probably will require a notepad—you’ll know what happened to put your people on Arth in the first place, the fate of the mysterious Ancient alien race, and how everything is really just a matter of perspective. The game makes you think in a way good sci-fi can.

The sequel, Starflight 2, was only released on DOS platforms; much more recently, a fan driven effort has been underway to produce a new game, The Lost Colony:

At the very least, the original Starflight 2 continued with the tongue-in-cheek humor of the first game, which included a series of bulletins back and forth between a loan shark and its client, a race speaking entirely in binary code, and—in the computer versions—an appearance by Star Trek’s Enterprise itself. The game bears many similarities to Star Control 2, released in the mid-90s. Perhaps the similarities to Mass Effect, too, were intentional, as Jason Attard of Bioware said that he had put a lot of time into both Starflights and Star Control 2.

But perhaps in the oddest twist of fate, Mass Effect is now owned by EA. If that means the return of the Elowan, Mechan 9, or Veloxi in a new game, sign me up!

• Starflight: The Lost Colony

• Mass Effect Community – Is Mass Effect the unofficial sequel to Starflight?

Related posts:

1. RIZ-ZOAWD, the Oz RPG, is a pastel wonderland
2. Replay: ‘Scapeghost’ (1989)

Seeing in the Abstract

Let’s talk cartooning.

In his wonderful work of literary and visual criticism, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains (emphases his):

...I’m going to examine cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification.

When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.

How do cartooning, caricature, and avatars relate to videogames in a broader sense? The key, I think, is iconography. Take a look at Character Design for Mobile Devices, wherein realistic character design and artistry are pared down to their simplest and most fundamental pixels.

“How did you feel,” 1UP editor James Mielke asked Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, “about seeing your elaborate illustrations transformed into such tiny sprites?”

Amano replied with an elegant description that could be applied to any type of icon. ”...Back then, ...my art couldn’t just go into the game without major adjustments,” he explained. “So I looked at the sprites as just a symbol of my art. Here’s an example: when you say ‘Mount Fuji’ and you make a motion like this”—here, Amano makes a peak sign with his fingers—“everybody knows what Mount Fuji looks like, so they get the mental image in their head. So I was in charge of making the master art piece that people would keep in their mind, and people would remember this art because of these symbols in the game.”

Avatars as Cartoons

I’m not sure where this Flash avatar software came from, but I remember it being pretty popular a few years ago. In spite of its consistent inability to produce a reliably accurate face, I like it. It is unequivocally cartoony.

Since the choices for eyes, hairstyles, and mouths are deliberately limited by the software itself, I felt like it was necessary to select the second-ugliest chin possible. Does that make any sense? What I mean is, I feel like the software forced my hand in choosing a horrific, truly gnarly chin, but the avatar itself is all the better for it.

In the aforementioned Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud conveys himself as a simple cartoon dude wearing eyeglasses. “We don’t just observe the cartoon,” he writes, “we become it!” In the next frame of his comic, he draws himself unabashedly photorealistically. “Would you have listened to me,” his hyper-real avatar wonders, “if I looked like this?”

The moment is startling. But in the very next frame, he concludes—drawn again as his former, cartoonish self, with a speech bubble blooming above his head—“I doubt it! You would have been far too aware of the messenger to fully receive the message!”

McCloud’s point is significant: a meaningful avatar is one that is instantly relatable, if only because its identity is willfully indistinct.

Facing Your Manga

Because my MySpace user photo made use of ‘MySpace angles,’ it was almost less disingenuous to switch to a Face Your Manga avatar (at the time, it was all the rage on Twitter and Flickr). An ex-boyfriend witnessed the MySpace Avatar Switch and felt compelled to message me. “Your manga avatar,” he wrote, “is absolutely creepy.”

Dave, I absolutely agree. The manga software creator allows just enough variability for me to find my almost-actual facial features and hilariously uninspiring hair-do. But—and this is a big but—the creator does not allow so much variability that I will be permitted to choose another feature out of vanity. This seems important.

Instead, I will choose beady brown eyes, framed by eyeglasses and wickedly arched brows. I will choose plain hair, a smallish mouth with zero upper lip, a beaky nose, and a face shape allowing for just as much chin as possible. Ultimately, the outcome is as cartoonish as could possibly make me recognizable, without being so cartoonish that my avatar becomes gruesome.

AbiStudio Portrait Maker

I’m sorry. There is absolutely nothing I can say about the AbiStudio Portrait Illustration Maker (AKA “the one from Livejournal”). This could be a picture of anybody.

Anyway, I’ve only edited this paragraph in because I wanted everyone to see the crow shitting in a straight line.

The Simpsons, or, WTF?

Here is my Simpsons character.

Not too great, huh?

How am I supposed to superimpose my identity onto a standard Simpsons avatar? How should I depict my own ‘character’ on top of a Simpsons character?

Generally, and especially in this case, the shortest shortcut to my visual identity is hair. After all, the facial features will be Simpson-ized, so I have to rely on hair for my avatar’s identity.

No real offense intended, but it might be different for a man. His visual identity might be able to trade on sideburns, facial scruff, a mustache. He might give his Simpson avatar short hair, long hair, a curling ‘fro.

But this is the nearest I could find to my own hair, past or present, and the outcome is, for want of a better word, shrugging. By choosing the hairstyle nearest to my Self’s real-life hair, I have created an avatar identity that is distinctively faraway from my Self. It is distinctly indistinct.

Sure, using the Simpsons avatar as evidence of anything is unfair. The goal is to look, not like myself, after all, but like a Simpson. My pale flesh-colored skin is reinvented as pale yellow. I wear cartoon glasses, and I have a stylized overbite. Yet the implied humor of ‘Simpsonizing’ yourself using the flash avatar creator is, indeed, to create a vain ‘celebrity’ version of the Self as it would appear in a Simpsons episode. But especially for a woman, this motive seems unavailable. Why is that?

I Hair, Therefore I Am

In a recent blog entry (well, it was recent—editor), writer and indie game designer Auntie Pixelante explores the importance of Hair on female avatars.

Specifically, her blog looks at the changes in the hairstyles of Princess Toadstool and Princess Peach. Are they different people only because they have different hair colors? When clothing is stripped away—and indeed, in the case of fan-made pornography, Pixelante remarks, it is literally stripped away—hair color is the only discernible identity marker for Mario’s leading lady.

(Quick aside. Three seconds of research yielded the following: Princess Toadstool and Princess Peach are, in fact, the same person. -editor)

In her final paragraph, Miss Pixelante discusses iconography in a broader sense. She writes,

There was a time—those of us who are growing up with videogames as a given may not realize this—when the minute details of the appearance and identity of the characters who inhabit our videogames were not etched out and trademarked, and each of us had room to fill in the ambiguities between a character’s pixels. This is why I think projects like ‘i am 8-bit’ are so important: they reassert that each of us as players own an image of our favorite game’s characters that may be different than their author’s, because Nintendo doesn’t own our experiences. This is part of the reason why the cast of the ‘8-bit era’ resonates so much with us: because we define them, much more so than the talking, hyper-detailed characters of so many contemporary games.

I do not mean to miscommunicate her intent by publishing just this paragraph, but it is this paragraph that coincides most with Scott McCloud’s writings on cartooning and caricature. With a cartoon, and especially an 8-bit one, we are able to superimpose our own intent onto the blank slate character we are shown.

On the subject of hair, and for Auntie Pixelante’s aforementioned blog post, I remarked:

There was an online game-project, three or four years ago, that was all about word association. You were shown an image, or photograph, or graphic, and you needed to type the words that came to mind. Your goal was to type the same words you thought everyone else had assigned to each image.

Of course, the project was not a game at all—the idea was to get real humans to tag photos and make them human-searchable rather than robo-searchable. Here’s what they found out instead: any time somebody saw a photograph of a woman—any woman!—they would type “hair.” It is, especially for a man, the most salient thing about a woman’s appearance. It immediately and conveniently simplifies her visual identity down into an icon.

More broadly, though, I think we do the same with race, eyeglasses, wheelchairs, braces. I am not sure what this means.

I know for sure that Miss Pixelante is onto something. Otherwise my avatars would not rely on out-of-date hair for their identities.

Edit, five months later: over here.

Will it never end? Is there no respite? The disjointed ruminations will, we hope, come to a close in Avatars, part III of III.

Related posts:

1. Avatars, part I of III: Caricature
2. Identity in Second Life: part one
3. Video Game Feminist of the Decade: or, when “You” is a girl

During the NXE beta, someone sent a message to my Xbox. I didn’t recognize the handle, but he apparently knew me. “Your avatar looks so much like you!” he wrote. I frowned. “I hate my avatar,” I wrote back curtly. Then I clarified: “The hair is all wrong.”

He wrote back, confessing he hated his own NXE avatar. You know, the hair.

Later, at a Thanksgiving dinner among friends, I complimented someone on his NXE avatar. “I liked mine,” he agreed. “But yours was incredible.”

Was it? I wondered aloud. “I haven’t worn my hair that way in a year,” I reminded him. He seemed really startled, slowly realizing that I was right. I do not have short, shaggy hair. Not anymore.

The art of avatar creation is, at times, the same as the art of caricature. It could be said, too, that caricature is the equivalent and perfect polar opposite of vanity, that willful misrepresentation of yourself as someone more attractive than you really are (see also: Myspace angles). Caricature is here defined as not only an exaggeration, but as a “grotesque imitation or misrepresentation.” And because caricature is a deliberate misrepresentation, in a perfect parallel with the art of vanity, it willfully contradicts reality. Your identity on the Internet, as in the workplace and in virtual worlds, is probably a work of willful caricature.

This is a little bit uncomfortable for me, but for the purposes of objectivity, here is a neutral photograph of my face today, straight-on and with very little makeup. I’m giving you a little Mona Lisa smile, too, since emotiveness would necessitate constriction of my facial muscles: this is to say, smiling broadly would actually change the shape of my face.

So here is my fat, unapologetic face. I know this is uncomfortable, but examine it.

I have suspiciously beady eyes. They are framed with glasses (an accessory since third grade) and a full eyebrow, with a sharply defined arch, that sits hereditarily low on the browbone (I call that “80s brow,” and I was mocked incessantly for them in daycare). I have an arguably smallish mouth with a much fuller lower lip. I hate my nose. It is small, with a peculiarly broad bridge, so that it forms a perfect triangle—like what a scarecrow or a Tarutaru might wear on its face. In profile, my nose also has a Roman bridge, so that it becomes almost beaklike despite its flatness. My facial features are all pushed toward the center of my face, so that I have a fivehead—which I attempted, in childhood, to conceal with bangs—and a generous chin, whose size was only pointed out to me during my freshman year of college. I have a squared-off jaw: that, a friend pointed out to me in junior high. In this photo, you cannot see that my two front teeth are at least twice the size of my other teeth. That’s right—I have bunny teeth. Braces in junior high were meant to correct my overbite, albeit with dubious results.

Here is something that might eventually become important: In high school drama competitions, the judges used to write in the margins of their critique ballots, “long hair glasses.” It was shorthand so that they could better remember me minutes later when they would score all the teenaged competitors against one another. In response, I cut my hair short, “so they can see my face better,” I explained to my weeping mother. Genuinely, though, I had my hair shorn so my appearance could become distinctive. I wore my hair short for ten years. Now it is long again: laziness. Recently, I gave myself bangs. Whoops.

If vanity is only superficial insecurity, it follows that my intimate knowledge of my own face is culled from ungentle remarks from childhood friends. I defy you to know your own face so well without having first been a nerd.

Xbox 360: NXE avatar

Here is my NXE avatar. After a truly weak attempt at giving myself long hair, I elected to use a caricature version of my hair from, say, a year in the past. I have already misrepresented myself.

But game avatars trade on our sense of vanity to compensate for the innate grotesqueness of caricature: this avatar is, in fact, only one slider-notch shy of the fattest an Xbox caricature can become. Incredible.

Except for the deliberate discrepancy in hairstyle, which does feel disingenuous, I am pretty much reconciled with this avatar. After all, NXE let me create a character with beady eyes, glasses (my most salient characteristic!), a squared jaw, a beaklike schnozz, and dark, arched eyebrows. There was even a preset, thin-lipped mouth with bunny teeth, so I totally lucked out there.

But on the whole, I’m not sure this avatar is a success. If every hairstyle, or every notch on the slider, feels like a lie, I will never be completely comfortable in my decision to represent myself this way.

Nintendo Wii: Mii avatar

This is my original Mii (and, uh, sorry about my CRT’s moiré effect). It’s hard for me to discuss it in a perfectly objective way because, in 2006, that hair was so totally accurate. This Mii is essentially a comfortable old shoe.

The Mii creator omits necks, so for a semi- neckless wonder like me, my Mii is fine, but for you with swanlike necks, the Mii will never capture your body’s distinctive sort of grace.

The Nintendo Wii’s avatar creator is unique to most avatar creation software in that it allows you to ‘place’ the facial features. Given this, I have moved my nose to the center of my face, and for proportion, I moved the eyes as close to the nose as I could without making them weirdly convergent. The chinniness doesn’t quite overstep into Evil Dead territory. All in all, this is a pretty good caricature, I think.

But I don’t mean ‘caricature’ in its truest sense, because my facial features have been pleasantly transformed into something more endearing and kawaii. Since the Wii’s avatar creation tool goes well beyond any mere Potato-head software, it has more potential for caricature, but in a way that also seems to account for—ah!—human vanity.

With this point made, I will let you in on another little secret: My sliders are set toward what is very nearly the shortest and stumpiest a Mii avatar can be. But I tweaked and pinched at those sliders for a very long time. Because of that seemingly more refined control of height and girth, this avatar feels, to me, more sincere. Like less of a lie.

And therein lies the fib! For Mii avatars can convey utter slimness, but they are incapable of conveying fatness. The Mii character itself aesthetically stresses that by which we define ourselves—the human face—and deemphasizes the body. So the face can be caricatured, but the body cannot. And where vanity is involved, we want the distortion of true caricature to be tempered by a more encouraging conceit. The Mii avatar, it would seem, accomplishes both.

90s avatars

Here is my Shadow of Yserbius avatar from ImagiNation (or, as it was known in its earliest days, The Sierra Network). Because Shadow of Yserbius is an MMORPG from 1992, its character creation software is very limited. So if you don’t use a fantastical character default, you might as well go for broke, right? I did.

Scott Sharkey loves this avatar so much, he created a City of Heroes avatar based on her. (Incidentally, other playable avatars of Sharkey’s include Inside-Out Girl. Yikes.)

I include this avatar simply because its facelessness, its distinct lack of character, is kind of what does it for me. Its lack of identity makes it something of a counterargument to “caricature” and “vanity” both—it is a grotesque misrepresentation of nothing at all, but in the absolute extreme.

Next to a an actual INN avatar (here’s mine!), the Shadow of Yserbius avatar is comparatively distinctive, though. It makes my online character into a memorable icon, and isn’t that what avatars are really supposed to do? In contrast, my pigtailed pixel-portrait conveys little about me—except, I suppose, my apparent inability to feel. In short, the faceless avatar is inexplicably able to convey what the other cannot: any personality whatsoever.

And that’s fine. But I want my avatar to do more than just ‘have personality’ and ‘not wear a shirt.’ I need an avatar that is both recognizable and relatable, creating a virtual someone with whom other citizens or players will want to engage. I want to carefully simplify my own visage into a stark, memorable icon.

Tomorrow Next month, we’ll look at avatar creation through the lens of cartooning in Avatars, part II of III.

Related posts:

1. Avatars, part II of III: Cartooning (or, the Importance of Hair)
2. Identity in Second Life: part one
3. “1000 Avatars,” an installation in Second Life

My Second Life avatar is sitting in my stead, attending the fourth-ever Living Game Worlds symposium, streaming live from Georgia Tech. And right now, Raph Koster is speaking. The symposium focuses on the interplay between, and I quote, “multiplayer games and virtual worlds.”

You too can attend Living Game Worlds via Second Life (fitting!), if only you click here. Of course, if you wouldn’t be caught dead in Second Life, you may also participate by opening the live streaming video in one window and keeping IRC open in the other.

I think I want to talk more about this soon, but right now I’m really just enjoying it.

edit: It’s over! Until tomorrow.

What’s really neat is, the IRC channel and the theater in Second Life are ‘bridged,’ so that everything the kids say in IRC pop into Second Life, and at the same time, Second Life users appear as users in the chat room. Neato.

Related posts:

1. Identity in Second Life: part one
2. “1000 Avatars,” an installation in Second Life