Curious Games: Novel Design Ideas

adventures in gaming, curious games, Process Writing

Think of an object that you’ve been using more or less your entire life. It’s better if it’s an object that uses electricity/has some complexity, but any object will do. Now, in two minutes or less, develop a new use for that object.

This is an exercise that we completed in class this week, first with a keyboard as our object, then with a trackpad and mouse. One of the ideas that my group came up with for the keyboard was the most interesting to me. It involved swiping the keys on the keyboard from one end to the other in order to accomplish something on-screen – perhaps something like shooting in a first person shooter, where the rate at which the player swipes affects the rate of fire, the charge of the weapon, etc.

I have a picture in my head of this actually being for some kind of magical ability – maybe like shooting a fireball or some other kind of magic missile. I think that there is a “sweet spot” rate of swiping, probably the longer that you press, the more charged that the projectile is (meaning that it does more damage), but the faster that you press, the farther the projectile goes (meaning that it goes less far if you take the time to charge it). It would have to be a chain of key presses and releases that sets off some kind of timer that sees how long it is between when a key is pressed and when it’s released, and what the time is between the first and last keys being pressed.

I think that it would be neat if the keyboard were a separate PC keyboard rather than one integrated into a laptop, that the player held at a right angle to themselves and strummed like a harp or something. Maybe a wireless keyboard, so that the player isn’t tied to the desktop.

Although it sounds like a tedious thing to debug, even I can see the glimmer of how to make something like that work on a limited scale in Stencyl, which has “button down” and “button released” behaviour.

Curious Games: Musical Adventures

adventures in gaming, curious games, indie, Process Writing

After finding out about Wolfram Tones, I was adamant that I wanted to use it to make music for the game – specifically, during the “euphoria” and “fear” parts of the game, I wanted to have appropriate music. Well, it turns out that Mac no longer supports the QuickTime plugin in-browser. Wolfram uses QuickTime, so I couldn’t play anything on my Mac as I composed it. That made using Tones pretty much impossible, so I went over to my desktop, made some awesome music, then sent the midis to my email and tried to open them on my Mac. On to the next adventure: the midis can’t be played in Audacity, which is the audio editing software that I’m using. So, at first I tried to find a midi to mp3 converter, but couldn’t find a free one and am too cheap to pay 30+ dollars for something that I likely won’t get much use out of. Instead, I updated QuickTime to QuickTime 7, opened the midis there, and recorded them with the computer’s microphone directly into Audacity. Since I don’t have a recording studio, I had to restart several times as my fiance chatted to me, not realizing what I was up to, as people passed by our open window, and as my future in-laws moved about their house. But, at last, victory is mine!

I now have “Happy Music” and “Sad Music”! I’ll try to eventually get them up here for you to listen to. Meanwhile: Wolfram Tones is awesome, but much easier to use on a PC. Give it a shot!

Thinking about how to implement some of the randomness: I’m thinking that the easiest thing might be to set timers and have the scene change for some of the more complicated of my “special effects” – like the euphoria/fear effects. It would also fix my fish problem (that the character needs to be created in the scene to be able to follow a character in the scene). I’d just have to find a way to keep the score for the tic-tac-toe games consistent across the scenes. That’s probably more trouble than it’s worth, but this is not actually a game about playing tic-tac-toe (did anyone think it was? okay, maybe it is). If I can keep the game board and score consistent across the scenes, then this is the perfect solution (if a bit complex. I’ll of course be looking into other solutions).

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.

Curious Games: Brainstorming

adventures in gaming, curious games, indie, Process Writing

So I’ve decided to make a game about performing a simple task under unusual conditions. The task will be to play Tic-Tac-Toe 130 feet underwater while at least slightly under the influence of nitrogen narcosis, which is basically like being drunk underwater. This usually becomes at least slightly noticeable when divers go below 100 feet and the symptoms disappear when the divers ascend.

Here’s a link to my “Your World of Text” World (be careful: if you edit anything, it’ll be saved) where I’ve been working on a brainstorm that kind of shows my process a little bit. I’m starting to think about mechanics that should be simple enough to code but that will transmit the experience effectively. Ideally, I’d like to switch up some of the mechanics while the player is in the process of playing. I’m not sure if I want to have the controls be based on keyboard or on mouse. There are advantages to both: I can make the keyboard controls be flipped and might be able to actually make the controls switch mid-game.

One thing that I’ve definitely decided is that I like games like B.U.T.T.O.N that make the players enforce rules that can’t be enforced by code/programming/the game system itself. To that end, players of my game will have to wear some scuba diving equipment: a mask, a snorkel, a BCD (Buoyancy Control Device – a vest-looking thing), a regulator and octopus, and either a weight-belt or integrated weights.

Some goals this week: to create some prototypes of the “symptom” program effects and the timer and air limitations.

Curious Games – I wish I were the Moon

adventures in gaming, curious games, playthroughs, Process Writing

[A brief sidebar: I’m taking part in the Curious Games Studio/class with TAG/DCART’s Visiting Game Designer, Pippin Barr. Over the next two months, I’ll be writing about the experience, about my own design ideas, and about playthroughs/explorations of what might be called “Curious Games.” And I’ll be making my own curious game! Here goes.]

I wish I were the Moon by danielben

When asked to identify a Curious Game, I wish I were the Moon came pretty much immediately to mind because I had played it pretty recently back in January for the Pixelles Incubator. It’s a curious game for a couple of reasons. It has a small scale (it’s just this one level and one small frame) and unusual properties, like a curio (a small object – usually an art object or artefact prized for its unusual properties and its ability, through its general weirdness or beauty or something, to inspire thought or discussion or just a moment of pause – that people kept and still do keep in curio cabinets). It also has an interesting gameplay mechanic – the player moves objects in the environment around by taking pictures which can then be deposited in other places in the environment. It also doesn’t have any instructions except the unexplained frame of the box that is the player’s only visible tool (not that it takes any time to figure out how to use that tool).

This is a game with eight endings – as soon as the player finds one ending, the game teasingly (teasing rather than pleasing being another element of a curious game) tells the player the name of that ending and that there are 7 Missing Endings. It also reveals the second game tool: Pressing R to Rewind.

Finding the endings has a puzzle element to it – it’s not immediately obvious what manipulations will lead where and part of the puzzle lies in thinking up new things to do. Killing the characters in the game in a variety of ways leads to valid if not “happy” endings, inasmuch as the game seems to be asking the player to find all eight endings (most are fairly tragic). I refuse to look at a walkthrough and I still can’t find the last ending. The game is just too charming and I keep trying different combinations. (UPDATE: I’ve found at least 9 endings now.)

The fact that there is no “right” ending is reinforced by the emoting of the characters on the screen – when the human pair are together on the boat and the Moon is high in the sky, one character looks sad and the other looks worried. Actually, that ending is called “Lost Love” – and of course I can’t ignore that the game’s title is I wish I were the Moon. Who then, is the I?

NOTE: Please play the game before reading further on – there’s potential spoilers just in the names of the endings.

Replaying the game reveals a great depth of narrative – the names of the endings and the simply but clearly illustrated emotions of the characters seems to reveal a story of unrequited love: a woman, in love with the man on the moon – a man who is in love with the moon. If the man sends her away on an (albatross? that’d be symbolic bird), he is telling her to be free, but she cries into the ocean forever. If she tries to join him on the moon, it’s disastrous – she doesn’t belong there and they all sink into the sea. If either of them dies, it’s a tragedy. If they go down together, the woman is selfishly saying that if she can’t have the man, then nobody can. If the man comes down to live with her, the moon will return to its place in the sky, but he will always regret it, and the woman cannot comfort him. If she takes his place on the moon and lets him be free, she loses her reason to live. If she switches places with him, then the moon stays close, the man gazes up lovingly at the moon, and the woman can imagine that he is also gazing at her. So, then, for me, the I was definitely this woman, suffering through an unrequited love that she nevertheless cannot imagine losing.

(I also found an ending just titled “Sunk Boat Secret Ending” but it doesn’t really fit into my story.)

UPDATE 1: I discovered another ending where you can give the far-distant moon to the man to hold — but that doesn’t help our woman with her unrequited love much either.

UPDATE 2: There are actually at least 9 endings.

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.

—

Pippin Barr’s Mumble Indie Bungle

playthroughs, Process Writing

As you all probably know by now, TAG and the Department of Design and Computational Arts at Concordia will have the pleasure of receiving indie game designer Pippin Barr this summer. He’s our inaugural Visiting Game Designer and he’ll be here from May 1st to June 28th.

Barr just released a set of games as the ‘Mumble Indie Bungle’ and you can download them for play here:

At the bottom of the page, you can also download a pay-what-you-want game that won the IFG Grand Prize this year, Carp Life.

Here are just a few quick impressions of my two favourites in the bundle: typing games ’30 Flights of Loathing’ and ‘Gurney.’ (Probably you should play the games before you read this if you’re worried about spoilers, although I sincerely believe that even knowing everything about these games doesn’t compare to the experience of playing them and that spoilers won’t much matter in this case).

30 Flights of Loathing is a game where the player makes an eight-bit character ascend flights of stairs by typing self-loathing statements. When the player makes a mistake, the character falls past however many flights of stairs they’ve managed to ascend all the way to the bottom. Every time the player makes a mistake and has to start over, the statements on the stairs change. They’re statements about loneliness, insecurity, feelings of inadequacy and overall just statements that altogether were very relatable to me as a player. I’m not a flawless typist but I’d guess that I have to correct a typo maybe every 100 words – but the effect of the texts in 30 Flights had me wanting to go faster, perform better. Being a slow typist means having to spend more time reading the flights of stairs and also reinforces that, as a slow typist, I, as a player, am perhaps not as good as a faster typist, which relates back to the things that I’m reading/typing…However, going slow in this game is the smart thing to do (wins the race and all that) because the slower that I went, the less typos I made, which meant that I was better at playing the game.

Gurney is a game that made me feel the most emotional distress that I have ever felt playing a typing game. As the title suggests, there’s a hospital gurney involved in the game even though the player never sees it. One of the interesting things about this game is the perspective – the player is staring up from a hospital gurney, and what the player types is a prayer…a prayer that seems to be going through a consciousness that is (slowly at first) shutting down. I won’t say much more about this one, but it was definitely my favourite.

Pippin, looking forward to having you at TAG!

Get Water! launches tomorrow!

indie, playthroughs, Process Writing

You might remember that, a couple of weeks ago, TAG playtested Decode Global‘s Get Water! at one our our 5a7s. TAG and Hexagram have had the pleasure of hosting Decode Global at Concordia for some time now, and we’re very happy to see how well Get Water! is doing. The project, for example, won the Create UNAOC Award for 2012. Tomorrow, on World Water Day, Get Water! is slated for launch and here’s a little bit about what to expect. I also recommend watching the trailer.

The heroine of Get Water! is Maya, a little girl from India who is pulled out of school to fetch water after the pump breaks in her neighbourhood. As I mentioned during my writeup for the playtest: A few of the dangers that she has to avoid: peacocks, who will scare her into dropping the water, turtles that she might trip over, errant footballs that might knock over her jug, and of course, the very real threat of contaminated water. She is armed with boomerangs and other unlockables that will send her enemies running or improve her ability to get water.

So, when I last played Get Water!, it was on an iPad. I played the current build on my little old iPhone, and I have to say that that switch made a pretty big difference for me. Playing on the iPhone was, for me, a lot more difficult because my drawings had to be much more precise – I found that I was doing the same kind of drawing that I did on the iPad, but not getting the same results (probably because the displacement of a few millimetres matters a lot more on the smaller interface). I also found drawing Maya’s trajectory a lot easier on the iPad because I could draw shorter parts of her path and wait to see what was coming (a technique that didn’t really work on the iPhone’s smaller screen). So, if you have the choice, I’d really recommend getting it for the iPad. Otherwise, I got used to playing on the iPhone after a while.

One of the highlights of the game is that it’s a story-driven endless runner, which is not something that I’ve seen too often. During the playtest, not all of the cut scenes when the player unlocks parts of Maya’s story were implemented yet, so it was with great pleasure that I watched the new cut scenes, which allow the player to get to know Maya and her environment and see how the consumable items in the game were actually born of Maya’s innovative thinking about the world that she lives in – such as finding a new way to get around the turtles after watching her friend cross the water on some rocks, or using the rubber from balloons to block up the holes in her water jug. The scarcity of water has forced Maya out of school, and the game makes it clear that she is an obviously intelligent young woman who deserves an education.

I still love the idea that it is the cumulative effect of the player’s efforts that leads to rewards and changes in the game – an idea that is reinforced by the way that levelling up works in the game by adding up the percentage of progress from each individual run. Everything is just a drop in the bucket, but those drops in the bucket add up! So, as a message for social change, that kind of thinking is definitely appreciated. If we took the same approach to social change that we do to crowdfunding and kickstarting, we’d start to see some definite results come out of those drops in the bucket.

What I enjoyed in this final version was that the player gets to hear Maya’s voice – it’s a small change, but I felt a lot more connected to her because of it. (I’m not completely sure if this was in the play test version or not, just because the room was full of people and the sound may have been turned down – but even if it’s not new, it’s new to me!)

Overall, this is a game with a great message and a fun interface that has, to date, kept me busy for about four hours. Water is a universal need, which makes Get Water! a very relatable game that’s also just a lot of fun to play.

You can visit Decode Global’s website or follow them on Twitter (@decodeglobal). Get Water! launches tomorrow for iOS.

JEKA GAMES

MAKING STUFF & WRITING ABOUT IT.

Process Writing