Curious Games: “Best Practice”

curious games, indie, Process Writing, research

This week, the Curious Games Lab gang talked about heuristics and best practice, and how they’ve evolved from efficiency models in the workspace. Here’s an article that takes a tour of these heuristics and recommendations and analyzes some games in terms of them:

Sweetser, P., Johnson, D., Wyeth, P. and Ozdowska, A. (2012) “GameFlow heuristics for designing and evaluating real-time strategy games”. In Proceedings of The 8th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Playing the System (IE ‘12). ACM, New York, NY, USA.

Sweetser et al. provide a set of guidelines for making games that have already been made. While there is a great deal of sense in not totally reinventing the wheel and finding a completely different way to deal with every one of these heuristic elements, keeping each of these the same across games removes the incentive to innovate.

I think that it makes more sense to start from a game concept, mechanic, or idea that the developer finds interesting and to work from there and decide what will be best for that game than it does to start with best practices. Best practices are probably useful for conventional aspects of the game that the developer is not trying to highlight – making them the same as most other games in a genre is a good way of effacing them. So, if something is not an important aspect of the game, there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel… or is there?

We discussed the possibility of creating a series of games that basically takes these heuristics and deliberately breaks every single one of them, one by one. I think that’s the kind of exploration that makes best use of these “best practices.”

In my own attitude towards playing games, I think that I’m trained to expect the “best practice” kind of experience (to the point where, when starting Unfinished Swan and being faced with a completely blank screen with just a dot in the middle, I thought that I must need a move controller to play it, but as it turns out I could have just checked the controls to know that I could sling paint with the trigger buttons – which are, in most games that I play, not usually the primary controls, and that I didn’t even think of pressing. Since the screen was blank, I couldn’t judge my progress when moving the joysticks either, so I didn’t know what was going on.) but I don’t want to be trained to expect it (I laughed very hard about the Unfinished Swan thing). I like games that turn my expectations on their ears.

Similarly, while sometimes it’s good to give the player some sign posts, I resent the recommendations in the Sweetser article that recommend a whole lot of hand-holding and that recommend that games should be playable by people of all skill-levels. Some games should just be really hard – not everyone should be able to easily finish them. It’s the same with books, and it’s the same with nearly every other medium. Not everyone appreciates the same experience in the same way.

Games that break the rules tend to be the most memorable and replayable. Katamari Damacy in particular comes to mind: the goal is to roll up the level, and at larger scales the player can literally roll up entire islands and eventually continents. It breaks most of the recommendations for Concentration in the Sweetser article, depending on how you interpret them. Actually, all of these are largely dependent on how you define them for a specific game. Some of them even seem to contradict each other: what is stimuli that is “worth attending to?” and is that stimuli a “distraction from tasks that [players] want or need to concentrate on?”

As a game designer, I have not yet discovered exactly what kinds of games I’m making, having only made three so far (one as part of a GGJ team this year, one for Pixelles, and the one that I’m making for the Curious Games Studio), but I do recognize that what I am doing is trying to make games that I haven’t seen before.

Oh, and because I will recommend this every chance I get and have mentioned Katamari in this post, here’s an in-browser version of Katamari Damacy: http://kathack.com/
Roll up!

Curious Games: Planning Ahead

adventures in gaming, curious games, indie, Process Writing, research

medical malpractice lawyer says: “very nice post, i actually love the web site, keep on it”

Looks like I’m on to something! You keep on it too, medical malpractice lawyer!

So what I have been doing this week for the game is creating assets and continuing to think about design. So far, the very basic Stencyl file has a custom cursor, screen shake that simulates poor motor skills (but there will be much more to mess with the player’s motor skills if I have my way) and a health bar that starts at 2000/3000 PSI.
(Why 2000? Because in diving, it is recommended to reserve 1/3 of an air tank for the descent to a destination, 1/3 exploring that destination, and 1/3 for the ascent.)

Here are two of the lovely art assets that I’ve made this week: the buoyancy control hose and the console – hand-drawn in Photoshop. (I’m not yet sure if I’m going to have the console have static dials, animated dials, or just numbers).

These are modeled after my own BCD, which the player will be wearing.

I have this desire to make most of the effects in the game randomized or happen at more or less random intervals… I’m sure that this is relatively simple, but I have to look up how to do it in Stencyl. That can make simple tasks seem daunting — kind of like Nitrogen Narcosis! — so I tend to plan things out in detail when I could probably just start implementing features and see what sticks.

Here’s my game plan (or really, a list of tasks that I need to accomplish and features that I want to include):

– because people with nitrogen narcosis have problems multi-tasking/tend to focus very narrowly on one task, I want a fish to swim by sometimes and for the camera/player’s view to follow/pan on the fish. I want the player to have to find their way back to the game board.

– because of that same narrow focus, I want the buoyancy of the player to occasionally cause the player to start to sink down past the game board, and for them to have to adjust the buoyancy to regain the board (and if they over-inflate, they may end up shooting to the surface — I don’t THINK this is too ambitious).

– because nitrogen narcosis can come with feelings of euphoria or fear: I want to adjust the brightness of the game in tune to either a very happy soundtrack or a very unhappy soundtrack. Preferably either can happen at random from a baseline. I may also include some bizarre actors like dancing fish or divers, or decorative decals.

– I want to blur the edges of the screen somehow (the camera shake effect does somewhat do this at higher intensities) to mimic tunnel vision (another symptom).

– I want to find other ways to mess with the player’s motor control — since I think it will be point and click, maybe I can find a way to at random reverse the mouse tracking (I know there’s a way to do this on consoles with the joysticks…I’m hoping there’s a way to do this in stencyl).

– Continuing with motor control, I was thinking that the placement of the pieces on the board should have to be quite specific – that the collision area of the piece should be quite small relative to the entire size of the piece, making it harder to place each piece.

– Because poor judgment (and, at much deeper depths, hallucination) is one of the major symptoms of nitrogen narcosis, I want to perhaps screw with the player’s perception by making the game board appear different than from how it actually is, or maybe make some game board pieces that can’t be dragged, or that can only be dragged so far.

– Because people experiencing nitrogen narcosis can experience slow thoughts: I want to find a way to slow down the player, perhaps by slowing down the controls or the speed at which a game piece can be moved. I don’t know if this is possible with stencyl. Maybe I can do this by creating a mechanic where the player clicks a piece then clicks the place on the board, and the piece travels at a predetermined speed towards the board. I could set the speed of individual pieces to different values, thus making some relatively easy to place, and some more difficult.

– I want to implement a 3-minute time limit on the game in which the player has to win a certain amount of tic-tac-toe games. How many will probably be determined by a lot of playtesting…

– I also want to have there be the chance that the player experiences some of the other minor annoyances of diving, such as a foggy mask or a free-flow (basically when the regulator gets stuck open and starts to spill out precious air — this is usually quickly fixable). I’m not sure if these will make it into the final game but as soon as I figure out randomization, they’d be easy to implement.

– Obviously, I have to program tic-tac-toe. Pippin has told me that he will help me with this. I was thinking that it might be interesting to have the program have some of the same handicaps as the player as a rational for the program making mistakes in the placement of their pieces.

Where I foresee some challenges is in randomizing these behaviours. I know that I can make the camera track a specific actor (the fish) through an environment. (I don’t know exactly how to allow the character to move the camera back.) I know how to make music play at specific times. I also know how to set collision areas and the movement speeds of actors. Largely, learning how to randomize the behaviour and learning to do it within appropriate parameters so that things aren’t totally at random, seems to be my biggest challenge. There are plenty of Stencyl tutorials about this, though. (Although learning to program Tic-Tac-Toe will be another kettle of fish.) I also foresee that I might have some difficulties with making the character navigate the level with the mouse, but I’m already thinking of ways around it.

I’ll keep you posted, Internet!

Curious Games: Tools and Neutrality

adventures in gaming, curious games, Process Writing, research

This past Wednesday during the Curious Games Studio class, we talked about the neutrality (or rather lack thereof) of software and other tools that most people use on a daily basis. Most tools are designed with the expectation that they will be used to create some fairly specific output with some fairly specific methods. The example that we discussed in the most depth is PowerPoint, which encourages an element of performance to the presentation of information and gives users all the tools to create punchy, attractive slides that privilege design over content. Here’s Edward Tufte on PowerPoint – and of course we can do this kind of analysis for nearly any kind of software.

When asked about the software and other tools that I myself use on a daily basis for content creation and how it affects my process, I immediately thought about a relative newcomer in my array: the cellphone, and, more specifically, the Apple iPhone 4S. Having only gotten a cellphone what is now almost six months ago, I can directly trace what impact it has had on my work and on my life more generally.

Now, before December 2012, I had never owned a cellphone and barely had any contact with them – if I had to borrow a phone, it was limited to a few minutes to place an urgent call and that was about it. The iPhone 4S is my first cellphone ever, and it was fairly easy to get enamoured with. It’s also easy to trace how it’s affected my practice and my day to day interactions with people. I decided to get a cellphone because I was home a lot less, I was about to begin a job working with video games, I was under the impression that a lot of indie games are released on iOS (which is the case but most are now pretty quickly ported to Android, so the joke’s on me – but honestly having gone from no cellphone to a 4S, a lot of what my cellphone does still feels incredibly sophisticated to me) and that having a smart phone would be great for live-tweeting journalism.

It used to be that I would fill up the small notebook that I carry in my bag with me about once every three months, taking down appointments, phone numbers, ideas, for writing down what my friends and I wanted to order out, that sort of thing. I also had larger notebooks for taking notes in class and for writing out those ideas in their larger forms. (Oh, incidentally, in January 2013 I acquired my first ever laptop, meaning that in two months I jumped forward about a technological decade.) Now, I’ve had my present notebook since December and there’s barely anything filled in. I’ve begun to take notes on my phone and laptop.

It also used to be that I would spend any traveling time reading books, but now I’m more likely to fiddle with a game or check in on work that needs doing. I used to read about a book or two a week just on transit. Now I’m still stuck on Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood.

My iPhone also dictates, in some ways, what tools I will use on it – certain apps are free for Android but cost money on the iPhone, and vice versa, and since I’m a student, I don’t usually want to pay more than a dollar for an app that I may or may not end up using/liking/needing, etc. – and even then, the apps that I usually don’t mind paying for are things like critically-acclaimed indie games or…well, yeah, mainly those.

Having any cellphone at all has also changed the way that I communicate: it used to be that people could either call me at home and either reach me or leave a message or they could email me. I really liked the fact that if I was out and about, I was incommunicado, untethered and unlikely to be disturbed. Now, I can get called by work while I’m out at social events and of course I get way more text messages than phone calls.

In terms of productivity, my having a cellphone makes other people’s jobs easier – they can contact me when they need something and I can act right away, and they can contact me in real-time to see how the job is going. In terms of my personal productivity, what a terrible thing having a cellphone is! I’m not terrible about the whole obsessively checking my phone thing yet, but I have definitely played ‘Hanafuda’ more than I have read in the last six months, and I think that I can no longer really call Hanafuda “research.” I also waste time that should be spent writing checking things on social media and such, which was less the case when I was limited to my desktop.

On the other hand, and this is a bit of a sidebar, having a laptop has increased the speed at which and the number of places where I can write and accomplish other work. It permitted me to attend a conference the other weekend without any fear of missing important information and updates on my projects, and I am able to write much more quickly than with my pen and notebook since I type much faster than I handwrite.

So, in sum: having a cellphone has changed the way that I communicate and the kind of cellphone that I have has determined what products I use. It has made me more accessible to other people but has made my productivity decrease by quite a lot (I’m currently fighting to push the balance back in the other direction by simply taking the time to think about ideas while traveling instead of playing iPhone games). I do use it for work, having played games that I wanted to research on it, recently recorded an interview with Lynn Hughes and Bart Simon, live-tweeted talks and events, and done some writing/note-taking on it, but the ratio of work to time-wasting that I do with my cellphone is absolutely shameful. On the other hand, going mobile in other ways has had its advantages. I guess that as long as I can work on limiting my time-wasting activities, I’ll survive this personal technological revolution.

TOMORROW THE WORLD: Interviewing Lynn Hughes and Bart Simon About Critical Hit

indie, Process Writing, research

This summer, TAG is hosting a game collaboratory called Critical Hit for games for social change. The program will run ten weeks and applications are open until the 29th of April. With that in mind, I spoke to Lynn Hughes, the TAG Centre’s Associate Director, and Bart Simon, the TAG Centre’s Director, about the genesis of the collaboratory and their hopes for the project. To know more about them and what they do at TAG, you can visit our people page.

JRM: When you started TAG, what was your vision for the centre? What kinds of work with games did you hope to foster, and what do you envision for TAG and its projects in the future?

LH: One of the main things was to do something with other departments and involve groups and individuals from outside of the university. We wanted to have a bigger bundle, a bigger mess.

BS: The fundamental idea of the centre was to break the deadlock of disciplinary divides. The research centre model is the best structure we have for thinking of doing that in a way that doesn’t overly burden individual faculty members. Once individual faculties members are actually able to come together and spend time together, we can make it easier for students to do so as well. That’s the real goal: not to change our lives, so much as to the conditions for graduate students and eventually undergraduate students. The idea is to create a structure which enables this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration. With respect to game design, this should have an impact on the kinds of games people think of making and on the kind of games that they actually make.

LH: The idea is not supposed to be that Bart and/or I conceive of a research idea and then a bunch of other people execute it. The idea is that projects are supposed to bubble up from wherever they bubble up from and we see if there’s a way that we can bring people together and facilitate them or support them. It’s supposed to be a lever for other things, not just for us.

BS: Literally, a kind of social-cultural material condition of possibility, right? Until we get a structure where it’s possible for students to breathe long enough that they can imagine doing something else, it’ll never happen. The idea is to make a space where people start to realize that their own education can be something other than what they expected it to be.

LH: In my case, one of the other motivations is to move out of the art sphere and into the games sphere – or more precisely to interbreed the two. That was what this was starting out – more recently, it’s been about trying to promote a view of games that is much broader than the view that you get in the media. It’s also much broader than the view that you get from some people making games. For me, TAG contains a very broad spectrum of stuff, it includes all kinds of things, some of them near art and some of them all the way on the other end of the spectrum.

BS: One of our goals is to think about games in the broader liberal arts sense rather than in the vocational game making sense. Do games have a place in the conception of what the traditional liberal arts mission of the university might be? We’re trying to reimagine what the role of liberal arts is. Rather than making new workers for this industry that may or may not survive, we have a much broader conception of what games can be.

JRM: Montreal is a fairly important city in game development today and fosters a vibrant indie developer culture. How do you think TAG benefits from the community in the city and how do you think the community benefits from TAG?

LH: At this point, we’re getting really well-connected. If you look at something like Mount Royal Games Society, two of the leader-founders are connected to Concordia.

JRM: Saleem Dabbous and Stephen Ascher.

LH: I’ve also known Nick Rudzicz for a long time, but Saleem and Stephen are specifically Concordia connections. In terms of TAG, you can see that there’s a lot of back-and-forth. Bart and I are currently trying to organize something in London and we hope to involve the Mount Royal Games Society (http://mrgs.ca/). Or, there’s the IGDA and someone like Jason Della Rocca who was the IGDA director for many years and who is now doing Execution Labs. There’s a very collegial connection – there’s a regular flow of emails and late dinners, talking and exchanging.

BS: Montreal’s game developing community is a bit different than others in part because it’s super-dense. There’s a very large number of media arts-trained people in the development community rather than pure engineering or pure computer science. When Lynn and I started, there was a natural audience, a natural community that extended beyond the University. We used to go to the Montreal Games Summit when it first started up – our students were there, participating in everything that was going on. We used to sit in cafés chatting with everyone about games. Early on, we had projects where industry designers would informally or more formally make use of students. The networks were starting to develop.

One of the crucial things is to have a platform that allows us the time to do that – a platform that says it’s good to go over to Ubisoft, it’s good to go to EA, MRGS meetings, IGDA meetings. The community is very rich: students should go, faculty should go. Out of those connections, which are informal and casual, come real collaborations, and that’s one of the only ways that they come. We’ve been lucky because of where we are in that sense. Montreal doesn’t have the vibrant indie community that other cities have but there is a density that has allowed it to continue developing. We see part of TAG’s role as participating in the building of that vibrancy, given the background of the changes in the industry.

LH: Speaking of the relation between media arts and games here, it’s been unusual. I don’t think that you’ll find that in Toronto or Vancouver the way that it is here. Concordia is a part of that, but it seems to be generally the case in Montreal. If you want to look at TAG’s relationship to that, something like FRACT would be a good example. The FRACT team came here for our first incubator and ended up completely redesigning FRACT using MAX/MSP, which is a media arts approach to doing sound – it’s not at all a games’ approach. They did that with the help of a Concordia student. That’s special to here.

I’d also like to talk about our relationship to Dawson. If we’re talking about Critical Hit, that’s an important relationship that developed somewhat naturally because Dawson is just down the road and because they’re doing similar things to us. Sean Bell from Dawson came and found us and we’ve formed a great relationship that’s very important to the Critical Hit project.

JRM: Critical Hit is described on its website as a “A Montreal-based summer program to catalyse the development of experimental games motivated by contemporary social, cultural and political concerns.” How do you feel about the way that games are currently being mobilized as vehicles for social change?

LH: That covers a broad spectrum! I wouldn’t pretend know what the whole spectrum looks like. There’s a caricature of it that I have in my head – that there’s a superficiality or that the games aren’t very good. I think that’s probably a simplification. I’m looking forward to spending the summer discovering the better games that are trying to mobilize social change. I do have a broader definition of what can be included in that category – not because I have a broader definition of social change although I may have that, but because I have a broader definition of what can be considered a game! I’m looking forward to taking a look out there some more and seeing what I find.

BS: It’s important to note that we don’t necessarily purely subscribe to the definition of serious versus unserious games or games for change versus games that are not for change. Our description of what we’re looking for is trying to get at – I believe – a kind of a level of designer intention that says ‘we believe that in contemporary culture games communicate things about the world and that you can have an idea about what you want to say about the world and do that with a game.’

I’m less concerned about what it says than that the designer would like to say something and has a conception of who they would like to say it to and what they’d like that person to hear. Part and parcel of that is that it isn’t acceptable from the point of view of Critical Hit to have a designer come and say that ‘what I would like to communicate is the need to make more money. I want to make a game that I simply know will make money’ or simply to come up with a game that’s about saying ‘I have a better shooter.’ What we’re asking is for a level of designer intentionality that I wouldn’t say is missing from the games industry but that needs development. It’s there, and people are crying out to be able to make games that communicate something about the world that they’re a part of. What we’re trying to do is open up the space without getting trapped in the definition of what counts as a good game to make.

LH: The way I would put that is to say that we want games that are thinking about games and thinking about the world. A lot of the time, there’s games thinking about games. That’s a good thing but we’d like them to be thinking about the world at the same time. And the question is, what does that mean? Because we want them to be thinking about the world in a way that’s interesting where the game is also interesting. We’d like to be surprised. Whether that will happen right away, I don’t know. Maybe this will happen over the course of the next three years. The first year is going to involve this kind of discussion. Hopefully by the second year but definitely by the third year, people should see the collaboratory as a place where they can bring unusual games or games that might not be accepted anywhere else.

BS: Medium specificity also matters. It’s not like somebody can say ‘I have an idea for a film but there’s no incubator for films so I’ll just try out my idea for Critical Hit.’ That’s not gonna work either. There’s got to be some discussion of why the medium of the game is important. We’re looking for an understanding of what games are, in terms of their mechanics and their futurity – why it matters as a game and not as a novel or a poem or a film or any other medium of cultural production.

JRM: The teams who make it into the Critical Hit collaboratory get to keep all their intellectual property and are actually encouraged to try out more experimental angles that won’t necessarily lead to commercial success. Many incubators do have the goal of commercial success in mind. How do you expect this will change the output of the incubator?

LH: It’ll be better? I don’t know – I don’t know if I think about it that way. I think that we should be looking for releasing new kinds of games. The criteria shouldn’t be whether or not they’ll be commercial successes. Maybe some of them will be commercial successes. I think that it would be ridiculous to be against commercial success.
That’s not the idea – the idea is that that’s not what we’re going to talk about. What we will be talking about is whether or not it’s a good game – and that can help with commercial success. The idea is that it should be an interesting good game.

BS: I’m not convinced that we would entertain any proposal for a game that has no intention of being played. If there’s an intention for it to be played, I think that it’s obvious to begin thinking about commercialization, or at least distribution. We’ve been pretty clear that you don’t have to plan to make a game for iOS and go through the Apple store, although you certainly can. You could instead shoot for a festival venue or something along those lines – both are equally legitimate to us. I think that the notion that one should design with players and distribution in mind is crucial. What commercial incubators are struggling with, is that failure is crucial to innovation. But if you have a business model incubator, your window for failure is much narrower than I would argue ours is. We’re not going to live or die on the basis of the success of the games in our incubator.

What we’re going to encourage is experimentation, innovation, failure – in a productive way, and therefore hopefully affect the broader landscape. It’s not just about us, but about how the games that we’re making in our incubator can actually impact the larger community. How can the games that are made and the process by which we make them in our space influence how people make games in the industry, or in other incubators, or at jams? This tiny little three-year experiment is to see whether our context – a non-commercial context for game incubation – makes sense and to join a larger conversation about game-making.

LH: This is also partly about how universities can work with an industry or the larger community – about what the relationship is between inside the university and outside of the university. The idea in the university is “excellence!” How does excellence translate into commercial success? I think that it should. It’s just that the emphasis here is on taking risks, on innovation, on excellence in a broad, non-stuffy way of thinking about it, and what happens after that.

BS: At the same time, we’re going to encourage excellence, say, through failure or experimentation. But we’re not encouraging flakiness. The idea is not to come in and slack off because the pressure of commercial success is off and you’re not hungry for dollars to survive. We think we can give people the experience of what it’s actually like to make a game under serious conditions while at the same time protecting them from the survival worries that plague commercial incubators.

LH: We’re planning on doing more than one public presentation at the end – that in itself is a deadline. A serious deadline: you have to get up there and make a fool of yourself or show what you’ve done.

JRM: Ideally, at that point, you’re proud of what you’ve done because you’ve been taking the work seriously.

LH: Yes, so that you’re not ashamed to get up there and say what you’ve done.

JRM: What kinds of games are you hoping to see come out of the Collaboratory?

LH: I’m hoping that I’ll see something I didn’t expect! Something exciting, something new.

BS: I’m hoping that we’ll see something different, that we wouldn’t have anticipated we’d see. I’m also hoping we see something ambitious. I’d like to see teams that aren’t interesting in settling, even if that means going beyond the scope of our ten-week project. I’m also interested in seeing what the process itself brings to the team. It would be pretty sad if a team came in with a plan, executed the plan and it was exactly what they planned on doing from the beginning. That wouldn’t say much about the productive space that we’re trying to create.

JRM: It also doesn’t fit how any project ever actually ends up working.

BS & LH: Yes!

LH: If that’s the case, there’s something wrong.

BS: What we need to think about in order to keep this project going is how our process influences exactly those changes that takes place. The outcomes are games, yes, but they’re also processes, and how to understand the process is equally important to us.

JRM: Has TAG been involved in other incubator-style projects? What kind of work came out of them?

LH: Two years ago, we did the first Montreal Games Incubator and we had four projects. One of them was FRACT. We had one large team that came mostly from Dawson, one from Champlain College, one team of independent professionals and one one-person team. The games were all quite different. The whole experience was really a success. The larger team especially told us that they got a lot out of the mentorship.

BS: Our first pilot was just to see if we could run an incubator. We asked people who already had a project and let them make their games.

LH: We had a call just like this one, and about ten teams submitted, out of which we chose four teams.

BS: “CUBE” was the Champlain College iOS 3D puzzle game. “Commander” was from a UdeM one-person team who was looking to improve an already-released game. The big team from Dawson made “Damnatus” which was an online multiplayer tower defense game… we knew that it would have to be cut down. It was a good process to see how the team pared down the project with the help of the mentors and the other teams. “FRACT” came in already having won the student competition at IGF.

Richard Flanegan, the lead designer, already had a good idea of what he wanted to do, and came into the incubator and completely changed his mind because of experiences he had at the incubator. That was a really strange proof-positive that we had something interesting on our hands. We thought that FRACT would be the one game that came out of the ten-week incubator looking ready to go, but it turned out to be the one that got redesigned from scratch, but also as a result is the most robust of the projects. If our incubator space allows for that robustness to develop, then the results should be promising.

LH: We also had a nice presentation night for the games where each team came up and gave a short presentation about their game, after which we had a big party with demos up. Lots of people came and it went very well. We were pleased, especially for something that we just leapt into and crossed our fingers, because we wanted to see what would happen.

BS: Since then, we’ve also done the Global Game Jam two years running and a lot of TAG people got involved with the Pixelles incubator. We’ve been very closely watching Jason Della Rocca’s XL and we were involved in early conversations about what it would look like. We’ve been focusing on game incubation activities since the pilot.

JRM: Is there anything else that you’d like to say about the incubator or the projects going on at TAG?

BS: It’s important for me to understand the Critical Hit project as part of a larger ecosystem. While one of the motivations for Critical Hit is a kind of conversion of space and resources in the summer time – students are off and doing their thing – how can we keep the game developing going 24/7? At the same time, it’s not like we just cycle in and cycle out when the students return. We’re developing relationships and hope to foster collaborations during the rest of the year between students, indie developers, other universities, mainstream industry people and community arts people. The longterm hope is that we’re seeding a major Montreal establishment. In the next five years, we hope to have a vibrant hub – publicly supported and funded – for people to get together and make games. Less than a business incubator and more than a game jam – that’s how I’ve come to think about it.

LH: In terms of community ties, we’re especially happy to be fostering Angelique Mannella and the Decode Global team. Decode Global is an independent not-for-profit company and they’re winning all sorts of awards for their new game, Get Water! We lent them space and have been supporting them, nurturing a relationship with with the outside world under our roof. Also, since Angelique is now going to be managing Critical Hit, we hope that there will be an interesting synergy there. We want to blur the boundaries – or make them permeable – between what’s inside the university and what’s outside.

—

My Take on Gaming Beyond Screens

indie, playthroughs, Process Writing, research, talks

So, I didn’t take place in the two-day workshop before the Gaming Beyond Screens symposium and arcade, but I was privileged to hear four great gamemakers talk about motion gaming and then had the chance to play their games. Here are some thoughts.

(If you missed the Symposium, there is a video here – if you missed the arcade, I can’t think of any other time that these four games will be presented together in the near future – sorry! Lucky for you, I took pictures, and there’s also this great video of some of the gameplay, but as we’ll see, it’s the opinion of at least one motion game creator that you can’t judge a motion game by watching somebody else play it.)

SYMPOSIUM

Jim Toepel

First up was Jim Toepel, one of the lead developers of Dance Central 3, and also actually an ex-rocket scientist. I thought that was pretty cool. Jim’s talk focused primarily on the actual development of motion gaming: common pitfalls, misconceptions, what makes a motion game fun, and quite a few tips on how to develop one that won’t drive the creators crazy while they do it.

Jim emphasized the challenges that motion gaming controls present, because the kind of input that players are, well, putting in, is much more complex than it ever has been before. While many people complain about the input devices themselves, the truth is that the range of movement and possibility attached to a human body is about a thousand times more complicated than pressing buttons with your fingers and thumbs. This problem is compounded when we consider that, while mostly you can expect everyone to be able to press those buttons with their hands, there are a lot of different levels of ability just when it comes to moving our bodies.

Jim’s point about the difference between playing a motion game for yourself and watching someone else play was also extremely well-taken. It is almost literally the difference between being out on the field yourself in a team sport versus sitting the bench and watching other people play. We enjoy movement – and we also enjoy learning. Those are two things that motion gaming combines very well – learning how to play is part of the pleasure of motion gaming – and of course there’s no such thing as motion gaming without movement.

The other points that I took away from Jim Toepel’s talk were about avatars and voice commands. Not to be oversimplistic, but avatars can make people uncomfortable as there’s a kind of uncanny valley feeling to watching an avatar move with you on-screen. Also, Jim says that people who play motion games like the idea of being themselves, so avatars may not be working to a game’s advantage – there’s the risk of alienating your players. And lastly, on voice commands: the Dance Central team found out fairly quickly that if they told people what to do via voice commands, they were a lot more likely to correct the aspects of their play that the voice commands told them to correct. And so, Boomie the anthropomorphic boombox was born, voice-acted by an in-house artist from Harmonix.

Kaho Abe

Next up was Kaho Abe, creator of Hit Me (amongst a slew of other amazing games including Ninja Shadow Warrior, where you get to hide behind things and your score is posted to a tumblr, and one called Mary Mack 5000 where you get to play patty-cake games to rock versions of the songs that go along with them). Kaho’s topic was Costumes as Game Controllers.

To start off, Kaho discussed how she built Hit Me out of hacked doorbells and cameras, and her interest in face-to-face games such as Hit Me.

Kaho talked about where her inspiration for her games comes from, especially for her upcoming game about lightning bugs. There’s a Japanese children song about lightning bugs that was the genesis for the initial idea. She talked about the gesture of handholding that persists throughout a game like ICO, an art installation about becoming a bird, cosplay/LARP, and also about shows like Kamen Rider, where putting on a costume, coupled with acrobatic feats, signals transformation. Kaho discussed how when people put on costumes, they become powerful – as in the case of Wonder Woman or Iron Man.

She also discussed her prototyping process for the glove from her upcoming game. She showed off the prototype at different stages – and it was really, really neat-looking. Kaho also talked about her interest in cooperative gameplay between people wearing different costume parts. The example that she gave was one player wearing a backpack that acted as a powersource, and the other player carrying a gun that is powered by that backpack. The players would have to collaborate to be able to shoot.

Doug Wilson

Doug Wilson of Die Gute Fabrik and one of the creators of J. S. Joust. Doug talked a lot about folk games, the playground, and subversion of the intended use of games technology. In an auspicious start, Doug talked to us about Dark Room Sex Game, which was a game that he and a team created for a game jam a few years ago. He told us that one of the greatest successes of the game was the awkwardness that it created without the release of catharsis. Dark Room Sex Game is a game that has basically no graphics – and Doug says that that helped increase the awkwardness. Since there was no cheesy animation to laugh at, catharsis was blocked by the fact that the action of the game took place within the mind’s eye, making it all the more effective.

One of the highlights of Doug’s talk was when he discussed new folk games that are coming out of Denmark, such as “Sneaky Lance” – a game where two blindfolded players move in super-slow motion until one of them is able to whack the other with a wooden spoon. You can bet that I’m going to give that one a try.

On the subject of subversion, Doug talked about the rhetoric of progress: how technology (such as motion gaming technology) is often marketed as making things (especially games) ever-better. Doug seems to think that technology is maybe taking itself a little too seriously. He prefers to think of motion gaming as slapstick comedy. The thought is appreciated – it’s true that motion gaming can put us in awkward positions, and that’s part of the fun.

For Doug, part of the fun of creating games is subverting technologies and their intended use. For example, in his game, B.U.T.T.O.N, he has turned a non-motion gaming Xbox controller into a motion gaming controller just by telling people to leave the controller and walk around doing what the game tells them to – eventually, they are all called back to the controller and the first person to press their button wins the game. Naturally, this creates a mad dash to the controller where people might bodily throw each other around or get into a fight in their attempts to reach their button. Lately, he’s been working on a trampoline game – which he says is cheating at game design because trampolines are already so much fun on their own.

Bart Simon

Bart Simon is one of the developpers of Propinquity and of course the current director of TAG, as well as an associate professor at Concordia. Bart’s talk was about his impulses as a game creator concerning the kinds of games that he would like to create, and how he thinks about motion gaming in particular.

Bart began his presentation with this quote from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which is, by and large, one of my favourite plays, and also a really excellent tea from DavidsTea):

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

By framing his talk with this image of “the bodying forth” of imagination, Bart reminded us of the visceral qualities that motion gameplay, in his opinion, could possibly have. For Bart, this “bodying forth” makes imagination seem like something that the body does as a kind of reaction or mechanism. The kinds of games, then, that Bart would like to produce, are those that would allow players to appropriate the game as a bodying forth of imagination.

Bart, like Jim Toepel, is interested in the learning curve behind motion gaming. Rather than the expert motions of someone like John Cleese performing a silly walk for a Monty Python Sketch, Bart is interested in the joyful motions of say, teenagers mimicking John Cleese doing a silly walk. Bart thinks that the second movements are much more fun, and much more interesting. Case in point: the Star Wars Kid, and the playground antics of basically every child who has ever seen a playground (or a Star Wars movie) and wanted to pretend to be a Jedi. It all comes back to the fun of joy in the accidental, and pushing the limits of our coordination and our daring.

I am really, really sad to have missed getting a shot of Bart playing with the retractable lightsaber that he brought along for the occasion.

THE ARCADE

Talking about these games is not the same as playing them, so I don’t know how much I can say that’ll be all that interesting to anyone who wasn’t at the arcade. I brought along my tallest friend (6’5″) to play Hit Me with, and he basically proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Hit Me is the tallest player’s game. I also finally got to try Propinquity, which I have been wanting to do since I heard that it existed, and I really wish that I could own my own copy of the game. I had so much fun – and I would love to develop some alternate play conditions – or really just get the chance to play around with it again. Dance Central was excellent – it was a lot of fun to play as part of a crowd instead of just with a crowd watching. The same is true of Joust – I didn’t get to stay until the Joust-in-the-Dark part of the arcade, but I had a blast in the round that I did play.

In case you missed it, here’s a link to a video of the arcade. If you’re curious about the kind of live-tweeting that I did for the event, you can visit @jekagames.

Without further ado, here’s the gallery of pictures that I took during the arcade.

Impressions: Global Game Jam 2013

adventures in gaming, Process Writing, research

Thursday afternoon, the day before the start of Global Game Jam 2013, I didn’t own a laptop and had no way of participating in the event. By Thursday evening, I’d acquired a decent mac book pro at a very decent price, and still wasn’t planning on making anything for the jam. What I thought would happen was that I would spend the weekend asking other people what they were making and taking photos and maybe working on my Pixelles homework. Well, as it turned out, I did all three of those things, but I also ended up joining a team and participating in my first game jam.

After participating in a brainstorm session, I ended up in a team of five that had never worked together before. Mathieu Montreuil handled programming in Unity. Charlotte Fisher made textures and did 3D modeling. Sahar Homami, also a 3D modeler, made our main character. Carolyn Jong (yes, that Carolyn Jong!) made 3D models, textures and did sound design. As for me, Charlotte and Carolyn were kind enough to teach me the basics of making textures and I made the floor and wall textures, as well as doing a bit of self-taught sound design myself and creating the game page. There are a lot of free, strange noises out there.

We all worked together on problems of concept and story, and I think that overall we made a very good team! It came down to the wire though, and we had a small problem with our ending when the first judge played through.

The game? Legacy. You can read all about it on the Global Game Jam page that we made for it! (And even play it!)

The atmosphere at the Game Jam was a blast to work in. People were supportive, kind, and above all, fun-loving! For someone who went in there not expecting to make anything myself, I really got caught up in the experience. Here‘s a list of all the games that were uploaded from Concordia. One team, Will Robinson and Jason Begy, actually made a board game called “The Body Politic” – a bit harder to upload, but you can still read about it on their page and I think that the resources for making your own copy are also there.

Like I said before, I did end up doing some of that journalistic stuff like tweeting, taking photos, and asking people questions about their experience. You can view the tweets on my twitter account. As for the photos, well, here they are!

Mathieu Montreuil, our programmer, showing off our game to a judge.

John’s game is being judged!

Site organizer and judge stand-in Jonathan Lessard plays a game.

Players testing G-g-g-ghost!

Still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after 40-some hours!

My game jam team! My station is the empty one!

Will Robinson and Jason Begy with their game, The Body Politic.

The game pieces from The Body Politic.

Arcade Royale is a fun way to test your game jam game!

A brainstorming session from the beginning of the event.

Taking Another Look At ‘The Victorianator’

indie, playthroughs, Process Writing, research

victorianator

In 2011, the Ludic Voice Team, headed by Jason Camlot, created a game with the goal of exploring gesture and Victorian elocution practices. Articles in Wired and the Globe and Mail couldn’t quite agree on what the app made players sound like, but it was somewhere between actually Victorian, Steampunk and Ian McKellen.

Maybe I don’t have a voice that lends itself well to being Ian McKellen, but my experience was fairly different from any of these. My favourite description is from the New Yorker, which calls the game “a cross between a poetry reading and Wii Sports.”

In my experience, all of my original recordings, in monotone, make me sound dead (tired), and the more I gesticulated with my iPhone, the more digitized I sounded. This is something that Jason Camlot addresses in his article for the Victorian Poetry Network:

“None of the synthetic effects that are triggered by gesture to ‘Victorianate’ the players voice are very Victorian in quality. For example, we were aiming for a Tremor akin to that of Victorian actor Lewis Waller reciting Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. But what we ended up with is something closer to Peter Frampton’s talkbox guitar solo in ‘Do You Feel Like We Do’.”

Actually, I was reminded of Neil Young’s ‘Transformer Man.’ But clearly this is something of which Camlot and presumably the Ludic Voice team are aware.

Since Jason Camlot’s article already contains a sophisticated exploration of the process behind the creation of the Victorianator, and the historiographical implications of its steampunk aesthetic and the fact that it is a game one plays on that symbol of modern innovation and decadence (I kid), the iPhone, I will try to limit myself to a player’s perspective. Rather than discussing the concepts behind the game design choices, I think it is valuable to examine the game in terms of what is visible to the player.

Depending on one’s perspective, access to the story tied into The Victorianator comes with different implications. Are we “unlocking” the story of Silas, or are “progressing” his story? The rhetoric matters because it changes the way that we think of the player’s agency and the gameplay as a whole. If we are only unlocking Silas’ story, then the story is a reward that is given for good performance. If we are responsible for the progression of Silas’ story and responsible for his fate, we have a direct impact on his rise or fall in Victorian society based on how good we are at one: reading in monotone and two: correctly modulating that monotone according to a set of predetermined rules. The problem then, is that the expectations of the game are not entirely made clear. I feel bad for Silas if truly he is relying on my performance to help him through Victorian society.

I had hoped for a little more unity in terms of the rationalization for the combination of different game aspects. Not knowing where to situate Silas’ diary (as a reward or as something that I can impact), I don’t really have clear knowledge about what my motivation, as a Victorian poetry reader, is. The name of the game implies that this is just a matter of transformation, or that the only motivation that one needs to play a game called The Victorianator is because one can be Victorianated, which is cool. Similarly, who is the helpful tutorial robot, and is he a stand-in in other ways for the player? That would be interesting, since the result sounds so mechanized. Here’s a thought: what if The Victorianator’s reality is one in which robots were trying to figure out Victorian poetry and elocution in some distant future where humans no longer exist?

Camlot suggests that The Victorianator shares some similarities with and draws inspiration from games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band. This is problematic in The Victorianator. The signposts of success in these other games are clear: if you are playing well, your guitar doesn’t make unpleasant noises that signal false notes, your score increases, and the song that you are playing sounds like other versions of that song with which one can compare them. In The Victorianator, I don’t know what a good performance sounds like, and even if I am performing well, I don’t sound Victorian and I don’t even necessarily sound particularly pleasant to listen to. I guess what the game lacks is some kind of signpost like a points system, since there are no master recordings that are accessible as self-checks while one is playing. The meter on the screen is small, and unfortunately difficult to look at during the recording process (if I got distracted, I had trouble continuing to read through the poem) and nearly impossible to look at while one gesticulates wildly with one’s phone.

I guess the fact that most people don’t like to listen to themselves on a recording might have something to do with my lack of enjoyment of the gameplay, since I have to both record myself and then perform gestures while listening to myself. Does anyone remember that “speech jamming gun” that plays back your own words to you?

I realize that for a game like The Victorianator, the conceptualization and the process is, in many ways, more important than the end result. The challenges that the team set up for itself are impressive, and on most counts they have achieved wonderful results. The art design of the game is lovely and charming. The writing is excellent – Silas’ diary, especially where it digresses into discussions of mustache styles, is entertaining, and often touching. I enjoyed the interface and the use of motion is innovative and well-designed, especially for an iPhone game. I like the project, and despite the criticisms that I’ve pointed out above, genuinely enjoyed playing it. Also, if anyone ever makes a similar game with the reading of Middle English texts, I will playtest it for free and be your best friend.

In case you missed the links further up, you can read articles about The Victorianator on the Wired.Com, New Yorker, Globe and Mail and Victorian Poetry Network websites. The Victorianator is available for free on iTunes.

Pixelles Pre-Week 1

adventures in gaming, pixelles, Process Writing, research

So, since the Pixelles Incubator is about to start, I thought I’d gather some resources before getting started. I’ve downloaded the free versions of Stencyl, GameMaker: Studio and Unity. I don’t know what I’ll actually end up using, or if the three are compatible in any way. I’m also armed with a decent background in writing, art (sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, mixed media, graphic design), and a stubborn desire to make something playable.

We’ll have to see how it goes with balancing the rest of my workload.

Henry Jenkins At Concordia

Process Writing, research, talks

Last night, Concordia welcomed media studies researcher and author Henry Jenkins to a room that was soon filled to capacity. In his opening remarks, Charles Acland (of the Screen Culture Research Group) listed some of Henry Jenkins’ (impressive) accomplishments, finishing off by reminding the crowd that Jenkins was, first and foremost, “a writer, looking to expand the vocabulary we use to describe media.”

Indeed, much of the introduction to Mr. Jenkins’ new book, Spreadable Media, is concerned with vocabulary, and these concerns were also addressed at his talk yesterday, as well as at the more intimate discussion period that he hosted today. Jenkins emphasizes that the vocabulary that we start with necessarily frames further discourse, and often determines not only how we talk about certain subjects, but even how we implement policy and make other important decisions.

A favourite example both in the talks and in the introduction is the concept of something “going viral” and the problem with the vocabulary of infection and inoculation, especially as it regards personal agency. A virus, Jenkins argues, is something that is beyond our control, whereas this is not the case with media. While it may be beyond the control of the original creator, it is the individual decision to share or not share that determines how far something like a video or an article will spread. Jenkins’ answer to this problem of a language of infection is the term Spreadable Media, which he coined while giving another talk a few years ago.

“If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead,” said Jenkins. “I thought that was kind of catchy.”

Over the next hour and during the question period, Jenkins dealt primarily with questions of spreadability on the internet and the public’s ability to shape media. Participatory culture, which is one way of describing this phenomena, is what happens as the public gains more and more access to the means of production, enabled by tools that may not always be used in the ways that they were originally intended. As Jenkins was quick to point out, “YouTube functions in participatory culture but isn’t itself a participatory culture” and the same is true of other platforms. The Occupy Movement, for example, could use YouTube to political effect, but that doesn’t mean YouTube is in the business of promoting democracy.

Given the nature of the internet, the topics of the talk were equally broad-reaching, from the Occupy Movement to Invisible Children and Kony 2012, to Mitt Romney’s Binders Full of Women, to the Harry Potter Alliance, to education and media literacy. Another quality of Jenkins’ seems to be a good deal of optimism about the future of bottom-up spreadability and what enough people getting together on the internet and offline have the power to do. About the Harry Potter Alliance, for example: Henry Jenkins’ predicts that we will be hearing more soon about Warner Bros. and the chocolate that they use for Harry Potter products, which the HPA claims is not fair-trade.

During the question period, Jenkins addressed a variety of topics, including:

Whether fans in the Harry Potter Alliance are being manipulated by “big name fan” Andrew Slack, or if he is a genuine Harry Potter fan. (The answer, by the way, is that Henry Jenkins is reasonably sure that Andrew Slack is a sincere fan).

Whether participatory culture dumbs down issues. (We tend to dig deeper about the things that we care about, but really it’s a matter of opening up discussion and raising awareness.)

How Piracy can create value for the original product (as in the case of fansubbed anime, which some might say paved the way for the Western anime market).

How games can be mobilized for social change. (Jenkins thinks that games absolutely can be tools for social change, but is wary of gamification – assigning points’ scales in order to alter people’s thinking.)

This morning, a smaller group of people who had been given the opportunity to read the introduction to Spreadable Media gathered to discuss it at the Loyola Campus. Jenkins welcomed questions and potential criticisms for about an hour and a half. Since Jenkins demonstrates such a concern about language and vocabulary, it was unsurprising to see his readers take up those concerns. Jenkins was asked about the cultural economy of neologisms and whether there is a danger of neologisms simply becoming a way of branding ideas. Jenkins admitted that the term transmedia had taken off this way, and that many places now offer job positions with “transmedia” in the title, but with a lack of clarity about what the term originally meant. When asked about his apparent avoidance of the term “ideology” in a discussion that seemed to call for it, Jenkins said that one of the goals of Spreadable Media was to reach beyond an academic audience and open up a dialogue with industries. This may account for the overall positive outlook of the book as well. He didn’t want the word ideology to “be a buzzkill.”

Amongst other topics, Jenkins discussed the potential future of print as a medium. He pointed out that the time between writing a book and having it published can be quite long: “print’s sluggishness is enormously frustrating” because certain references that were current at the time have already become obsolete, “but there’s an advantage there to the permanence of print.” Print also makes, he admitted, for slow conversation between academics. His previous book, Convergence Culture, was written in 2004 and published in 2006. There are responses to that book coming out now which were probably written in 2008 or 2009, which he may be able to respond to by 2015. However, he expects that copies of his books will be kicking around university libraries long after the associated articles have disappeared from the internet. Another problem with the digital is that it can be edited. People tend to remove things that make them look bad, as in the case brought up by TAG’s own Kalervo Sinervo about an old flame war between Penny Arcade creators and Scott McLeod.

There is a collection of free articles about spreadable media originally commissioned for the book which are now available on Henry Jenkins’ blog.

JEKA GAMES

MAKING STUFF & WRITING ABOUT IT.

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