Richard Bartle on Making Virtual Worlds

This is a 2007 talk given by Richard Bartle.

By way of listing out the technologies he needed to know, in order to co-create the first MUD in 1978, this monologue makes convincing points about the really important bits in games. After long minutes about AND gates and compilers, he says, "And I needed a bit of, like, imagination on the top, to create the actual world."

Then, "See what I want, is just to get to the point where all you need is that little bit of imagination on the top."

Video for this used to exist publicly (if you know where it's hiding - let me know!). I thought I'd lost the transcript as well, when a host went down in 2008. I was really happy to find it recently. I've met some of my best friends in MMOs, virtual worlds that may have never existed without Bartle's AND gates, OR gates and compilers. It's really neat to have this snapshot. Thanks again to Richard, for permission to repost his words, and for going to all the trouble in the first place.

Richard Bartle on Building Virtual Worlds

State of Play V: Singapore

I'm glad to see that even at this late stage in the conference there are more people in the audience than there are on the panel.

What we've heard so far, this is a panel about building virtual worlds. And you might have been expecting some kind of technical talk, and you haven't had one. Well, you're gonna get one.

And you're gonna get one as an explanation of why this kind of panel won't be around in ten, fifteen years time. See when I co-wrote the first virtual world, what did I need to know?

Right, well, what I knew to start with was that memory is made of cores. These little torus-shaped pieces of soft iron and they're hung up over this little crosswork of wires with a read wire going through it. I also knew that I could build AND gates and OR gates out of electrical circuits by combining those in a NOT gate, a bit more sophisticated. I could make flip flops. JK flip flops, SR flip flops. You could combine flip flops together to build units which would do half adders, which would do a half the arithmetic of a full adder, which was made up of a several half adders. You could shift registers from side to side. You could also build a register which told you which of the other registers you wanted to use.

And you had a program counter, because you'd have a whole load of memory, and a program counter loads from memory into your central processing unit which has an (fetch?) execute cycle. And that told you what the arithmetic and logic unit which I've just described would do. So I knew that, I also knew that in order to program this you had to type things in pretty well on switches. You had to set some switches. Press the button, switch. Press some more switches, press the button until you'd loaded the memory with just enough so that it could read from a paper tape. Then on the paper tape you put in just enough instructions that it could read from a magnetic tape.

And then from the magnetic tape it could boot an operating system, and then an operating system could then read to a hard drive and write to a hard drive.

From the hard drive it could read all the programs you were going to need, which were things like how to copy a program, a file from one place to another. How to rename, we have programs for all of these things. I also knew that if I wanted to make the program to do anything I would need to write in an assembly language. Which originally would have been written in binary, but now because people had written them in binary we had an assembly language, which was a low level language. Each instruction corresponded to one instruction in the architecture of the hardware.

But even though I could program in an assembly language, I actually wanted to program in a high level language, because it takes a lot of time to program in an assembly language, so we had a compiler. And the way to compile a work we had fifteen, no thirteen different boot steps until, from being written in assembler it could compile itself.

So we had a compiler. BCPL, Basic Computer Programming Language. My favorite language.

In BCPL, plus some assembler, I was able to write my own compiler, and my own database and my own interpreter which is kind of like an operating system for a compiled language. And I did that, and I read from my database a description of what would turn out to be a virtual world. It dropped some assembler, which would be run through an assembly language compiler to create actual executable code.

That would then be loaded into the interpreter, which I had also written. Which would read from a file a database would also hold information about all the players. And then I had a virtual world. And that's what I needed to know.

And I needed a bit of, like, imagination on the top, to create the actual world.

Now, you don't need that nowadays. Nobody goes out and writes a database. They go and buy one or get one for free, there are databases all over. Nobody today writes their own compilers. You don't have to write your own compiler, why would you? They come with lots of documentation. They've been around for years. Nobody writes their own interpreters. What today's people do is they take libraries of software that have already been written and they kind of sew them together. And then they put them as an architecture.

So what we've been hearing here is different architectures for virtual worlds. But none of the people here have gone to the extent of actually writing their own database.

But at the moment, we're only part way along. Part way along where we're going.

Because in ten years time, you won't need any of this. Maybe not ten years time. Maybe fifteen, maybe twenty. Maybe I'll be dead.

Well, I wouldn't know, would I?

See what I want, is just to get to the point where all you need is that little bit of imagination on the top.

Let's say that I want a pagoda inside of a virtual world. Ok, let's say, pagoda, it's like a white thing, it's kind of tall, it's got an odd number of floors and there's little red circles round each floor. Let's say the circles are made of tiles, and the pagoda is made out of white brick and it's got little heart-shaped windows all the way up into the bottom. It's got this nice door with the brass fittings and a little dragon embedded on it.

I want to be able to say, "That." And have a pagoda, "There." That's what I want.

I don't want to have to program all the way from prims, or anything else. I just want to say, "That's what I want, give me it. Where is it?"

We don't have that yet, at the moment we're still on the way.

We're still building, we're still bootstrapping ourselves up; in the same way that the BCPL compiler was written in BCPL. And the BCPL itself was not quite as sophisticated as the final version. And to get to that one you had to write another compiler in a smaller version of BCPL and so on. Until the very smallest version of the compiler you could write in assembler; and then it was all bootstrapped up. We're on a bootstrapping process at the moment.

Virtual worlds have got a long way to go, but we're getting there very quickly.

And in terms of building virtual worlds. The less technology that people need to know, the more people will build virtual worlds. The more people will build them, and the more virtual worlds we'll have. And the virtual worlds we have will be beyond our imaginations at the moment (Richard asides: because there are only 250 of us, or only 10 of us in the room).

But there are millions of people out there, and they've all got their own imaginations. They've got wonderful things that they want to do. All we can do at the moment is to help provide them with the means to do it.

And some people have the ability to create pictures, some of the people have the ability to models or to animate. But eventually, once something's been animated, it doesn't need to be animated more than once. Once a compiler has been written, it doesn't need to be written more than once.

You don't need to know how your internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car.

People won't need to know how these things work, they'll just be able to use their imagination. And this is where we should be, where we will be heading.

This is what you people, half, a quarter my age have to look forward to.

And that's what building virtual worlds is about.

(Paraphrasing Richard: People aren't giving technical talks here, because we've 'bootstrapped' past that point)

And eventually, the aim of virtual worlds is for us not to have a panel like this at all. We'll only be talking about the wonderful marvelous cool things you can do, and how to avoid being sued for doing it.

(Audience question: What keeps you up at night?)

Apart from songbirds, bad opera singers and fierce air conditioning (Neils says: none of which were to be underestimated at the Marina Mandarin), what keeps me awake at night is the worry that people are going to take away my toys. We've got these virtual worlds, and after 25, ehh, 30 years they're finally getting somewhere. They're getting to somewhere which is almost to where we'd want them to be. And I've got this terrible worry that someone's going to take them away.

Because, although virtual world developers are indeed the gods of their worlds, they are not actually gods in the real world. And, sadly, there are people in the real world who've got armies. And they can make you do things.

They do this through lawyers rather than actually throw the army at you. They only throw the army at you if you don't do what the lawyers tell you.

But you can be made to do things, they can switch the power off. They can take anything away.

A few bad court decisions and, ugh, what happened to my toys? You've broke them.

You may have been trying to protect some community from the awful, one-sided EULA. Which, if you then strike it out, nobody ever creates a virtual world, so you've protected the community by removing the community.

You may [become] extinct, in an attempt to protect [your virtual world]. There are many ways that people could break virtual worlds. This is why I come to the State of Play conferences, because this is where much of the thought of how virtual worlds are treated, by the real world, goes on.

On an earlier panel we had the philosophical point raised, which is that virtual worlds are part of the real world. And of course they are, the real world always wins. And of course the players know that the virtual world is part of the real world. They have to try very hard to force themselves to disbelieve that for just long enough that they get a sense of being somewhere else, so that they can treat it as a different place.

If all the sudden the real world comes in and pricks the bubble and says, "Nope, sorry, you're in the real world," they lose what gives them much of their real power.

And that's what keeps me awake. I don't want people to say, "Virtual worlds, they've bled into the real world so much that it's indistinguishable, the real is indistinguishable from the virtual."

Well at times you do actually need the virtual, and that's what worries me.

That, and that air conditioning.

Then -

while teaching those smarter than I, typing in dark corners, and playing entirely too much League of Legends - I did not update you, blog. I will not apologize!

(Spoiler-tastic) Limbo: Not Out of the Woods Yet

Finishing Limbo feels like crawling out of an abusive relationship. Not the hamster wheel grinds of Warcraft, or the rohypnol time-loss of Civilization. This was a new brand of pain.

Oh, right. Spoiler alert.

Limbo's detached aesthetic works, I think, because most people would rather not see kids decapitated by bear traps, or impaled through the neck. We don't like hearing bones crack – over and over again – as the bleak shadow of that child crumples after a fall. But that's Limbo's ordinance. If we were used to the cold, almost clinical treatment of kid killing, this would just be another puzzle game.

Compare it to NightSky (2011), which feels aesthetically too similar (same brand of ambient music, same style of puzzles) but has a glass fishing float for its main character. If that float falls off the map, who gives a damn? When Limbo's kid is cut in half by automated machineguns, is electrocuted, dismembered by a spider, drowns unceremoniously, or falls into a buzzsaw, well, it adds that certain extra something.

In Christian Nutt's interview with Director Arnt Jensen and Exec Producer Dino Patti, they remark on this mix of macabre and atmosphere in a great back-and-forth:

DP: I think it's definitely Arnt's black humor.

AJ: Yeah, but it's fun.

DP: It's definitely something about you, I think.

AJ: It gives a good tension to the player, because you know you can die in an instant. [Snaps fingers.]

DP: There's a thing about combining calmness with brutality.

Like most repetitive emotional injuries, there are reasons to come back to Limbo. There's a tangible pleasure – instantaneous, direct pleasure – to being in the world. A melancholy calm that heaps on the dissonance, with such cool and efficient death. It's not surprising to hear that planning for the game started in 2004 (not getting released till 2010). That it began as, and remained, a desire to create a holistic experience.

“I think that's one of our forces.” Said Dino, “Like we had everything integrated, the sound, the graphics, and the gameplay...having them fit together in a single piece. I think that's where we can do something bigger companies can't do, because they really have to modularize everything to have people work on it.”

Integration is impressive. I'm always especially jealous of musicians, even some painters and writers. They know enough about their medium that their art becomes a matter of getting at a guitar, a brush, or a keyboard. They just jam. That's harder to do with games. A lot of the pleasure is found during playtesting. The flamenco guitarist doesn't need to make sure a listener can use their ears, nor do painters typically test their patron's eyes. You can slip up with writing, with overly technical info, or maybe by presenting a Czech audience with Japanese kanji. In games, a lot of that language just doesn't exist yet. It's rare to find a game with the balls to just do away with the tutorial, as happens in Limbo.

Without those pieces, a player's conversation with designers can easily degenerate into caveman grunts and brandished clubs. Presuming that designer knew enough C++, C#, Unity, 3DSMax, AfterEffects, or whatever, to even make those conversations available. Limbo flew red flags on both counts.

I'd merrily sung the praises of Humble Indie Bundles for the last year, to every friend who'd listen. My musician buddy John finally gave in last month, having wanted to try Limbo for awhile. He ponied up a good bit better than the average – and clicked to start the game. Which didn't load. His Mac seemed to be too old, by an ambiguous but small margin. I offered to give him his money back, but I knew it had permanently fucked his opinion of indie games. It was also confusing, to me, given the Humble Bundle's reputation for DRM free, cross-platform goodness.

When Limbo does load, the controls don't always work as expected. Which is a real drag, with about 5 minutes invested into an intricate puzzle. What should be a simple jump, while climbing, or a simple matter of scooting to the edge of a perilous cliff, is the same unsatisfying death. For twenty minutes. At times, the controls start to feel as sadistic and unforgiving as the rest.

Even when the game works, and the controls function intuitively, weird design sometimes grinds the thing to a full stop. Twice during Limbo, puzzles had me feeling like a six-year-old separated from his mom at the grocery store. Is this just a cruel joke, Limbo? Like the old classic, “Wanna know how to keep an idiot in suspense?” Maybe there is no ending. Maybe it's a Molyneuxian social experiment, testing to see how long I kill this kid before giving up. Truly, this be Limbo.

In the screenshots pictured below, the hanging ropes are the only game object the player's interacted with, to this point. At first, none of the visible ropes work. Jumping from this roof long enough, I spied another rope. Underneath a comically oversized circular saw blade. The cheese in a masochist's rat trap. By the time I finally figured out what the devs were telling me (how to solve this) there wasn't any sense of accomplishment. I felt like the boy.

Yeah, try doing that for twenty minutes.

In other places, the conversation became utter delight. Where the system wasn't just clear, but where we could also catch fleeting glimpses of its underlying meaning. A statement that would only ever work as a game. My moment came on first seeing the sign for “HOTEL” – the ambient music bubbling up to match a deeper chill. It wasn't just monster spiders and bands of blowgun-wielding cannibals with a preference for dead kids. An entire society seemed to have lost its humanity. Here the experience appeared to say something personal and profound, but it was doing it with ambiguity.

That intellectual engagement added enormous depth.

A lot of folks got down on Limbo for being a short game. It is short. My first play-through was three, maybe four hours. Lo, having burned a straight four years on Warcraft, and sleepless 40-hour stretches on marathon games of Civilization, I'll admit to not minding a short game. Especially not compared to the recent 60-dollar EA title, Mass Effect 3. I know some folks explored it a bit more lovingly, but even with side quests, artifact finding, and dicking around on the Citadel, my play through was barely 20 hours.

Surprising noone, I agree with Jon Blow. A few months after Limbo released, he wrote, “A movie can give you a satisfying experience in 2 hours. A painting or a sculpture can give you a satisfying experience in 10 minutes. A song can give you a satisfying experience in 3 minutes...Gamers seem to praise games for being addicting, but doesn’t that feel a bit like Stockholm syndrome? If you spend 20 hours playing a game, but the good parts could have been condensed into 3, then didn’t you just waste 17 hours?”

Waste might not be the right word. Part of what's neat about a game like Civilization or Mass Effect is that transport of the senses. I'd set it apart from Warcraft's anesthetizing grinds. Designers can and do use both to create a sort of stylistic prozac, the pleasant magic we accept and expect. Limbo does the improbable by using it's handcrafted, novel, and unified aesthetic to make something we'll reject.

Watching the kid die is repellent. Which, oddly enough, makes Limbo a breath of fresh air. Bastion, released with Limbo in this last Humble Bundle, also features “a kid.” This kid also dies now and again, falling to his death, getting bludgeoned by pick-axes, incinerated by defensive turrets. I like Bastion, in more than a few ways I prefer it to Limbo, but take them together and it's a reminder death is repulsive. Should be repulsive. Especially when its kids. 

 

Sometimes, Civ's genocides are merely sound strategy, and Warcraft's war crimes are part of an essential quest chain. Limbo asks you to watch the child die. 

Emotional salience, pleasure, interpretation of a creator's ambiguity - aesthetics scholars have called these (among others) objective, cross-cultural criteria for Art. Limbo itself speaks holistically, and persuasively. Just taking screenshots to write this, I grimaced at every grisly rock-and-hard-place demise. As the creators intended.

Art or not, it should be enough to say that Limbo made games a richer place. I'm glad it was concepted, tested, and released. Also, I'm glad to be done with the fucking thing. I never, ever want to play Limbo again.

In Which I Fall in Love with Games All Over Again

Screen capture wasn't really working, so, whatever. I'm not fancy. I used a camera.

First Impressions

 It's not OK.

This was not the point in Blendo Games' Flotilla at which I fell back in love with games. Nor was it meeting Fun Factory and Chu-Chu.

Or even the Goddess Afrodita.

 

No, to tell you how this game unclogged the fatty deposits around my heart, the cholesterol slowly but surely muddying appreciation for a brave new medium, we need to go back. Back to last year's PAX 10, and Blendo's Atom Zombie Smasher.

I was among the probably two thousand people to walk up to the Blendo display, manned by the studio's single coder/interface designer/3-D artist/3-D programmer/AI programmer/dialog writer/monetization strategist/brand evangelist/blog editor/game designer: Brendon Chung. In fact, as he'd later post, the man manned the booth single-handedly, all three days of PAX.

And I thought I was tired. Parts of the show had been cool - hanging out with some cheeky, mischievous devs, seeing a lot more of old friends than any previous PAX - but the main showfloor was depressing. Frag Dolls used, functionally, as makeshift booth babes. Endless lanes of clone shooters, a Skyward Sword indistinguishable, visually, from Windwaker. Branded beanbag chairs. So I went upstairs, where they'd cordoned off the indie games.

 

Blendo's setup at PAX 10, 2011.

Undercaffinated and shambling, I almost missed Atom Zombie Smasher. Walking in from the other side of that giant 10 poster (above), it almost looked like a couple unattended laptops, ala Jon Blow showing Witness. A fit Asian guy with close-cropped hair, in a particularly nice shirt, he looked at me neutrally. I see the flatscreen now. I point at it, then at him, then shrug.

“Umm,” I say.

“Oh, yeah!” He says.

There's a bounce in his step as he comes over. Now he's pointing at the minimap screen of AZS. I kneel down, take the mouse, and hover it over level 2 and 4 zed outbreaks. He's grinning, when I look back.

“You might want to start with a 1.”

Pffaaaaahhh! Goes brain. Later, playing on my own, the rabid difficulty of early AZS would be one of the most pleasurable, compulsively repeatable failures I'd experienced in years. I still haven't beaten it on hardcore/permadeath. But I just look over at this gentleman and say, “Okay.”

I'm setting up snipers and artillery haphazardly. I ask one or two questions, but mostly am rarin' to hit the big red 'Done' button. It is, to the chagrin of my League of Legends friends, a staple playstyle. Works out in a lot of commercial games, though. They like rewarding us for lazy blundering. AZS's interface stops me before I can start, lets me know that I've not yet placed the civilian extraction helicopter. Not that any of them are making it out alive. I place it anyway, hit the red 'Done' button, and two Napoleon Dynamitesque aviators zoom in towards me with the text, “Let's Go!”

Gas mains are ruptured. Snipers lost in collapsed buildings. Over a hundred civilians dead. But I'm having fun. A shocking amount of it. All with this hovering guy, earnestly and clearly entertained by my epic chain of failures. He seems lost in concentration, logging mental notes.

I ask if the helpful attendant worked on the game at all. I mean, even with the indie games now, it's common enough that you only ever meet the PR department. And this guy was putting a solid, nerdy face on the game. He mentions something about having made it. I babble something about the genius blend of tropes and minimalist representation. More than anything, it's the difficulty that stays with me. Contrast with anything I'd played in the last four, maybe five years, the game itself didn't care whether I liked it. Didn't care what I'd tell my friends, once it'd thoroughly trounced my lazy ass. It was content to be exactly as it was. As I turn to go, this man who worked on the game (at this point I have no idea in what capacity) says,

“Oh, hey, hold on. I keep forgetting about these.”

And he hands me a small card, with a code to download a full version on Steam. For free. This is the only piece of swag from PAX 2011 I keep. So it makes sense that it would sit, at the bottom of my canvas laptop bag, for three months.

Background

Life had been sort of sucking pre-PAX 2011. Sort of sucking for years. The specifics are about as boring as the games I'd played during that time, so it was a good thing AZS had me giving a fresh look to Steam. Didn't take long for a fresh look at Steam to turn into another look at GoG. A couple indie bundles later, the brain was waking up after a good long Rip Van Winkle.

Then, for want of a more Blendo Brand difficulty and irreverence, I grabbed the Flotilla demo. It was free, as demos typically are. But this was especially good, in that Blendo's website was asking ten dollars for Flotilla. Sure, I'd shell out on Steam sales and indie bundles, but ten dollars for one game!? (Having gotten AZS literally hand-gifted to me by its creator, paying the man via his website wound up feeling wonderful)

Cracking it open, I think I got my first taste of directorial voice in games. Here was a work (yes, work) where everything aligned. The writing, the visuals, and they had this perfect juxtaposition with the space combat. Comedic or not, the whole experience had a synchronized direction, lo, it was no surprise it'd all been put together by one person. For anyone following the whole Games as Art conversation, one of Roger Ebert's major gripes with games is lack of unified voice, especially where it relates to market-centric entertainment. That commercialism, alongside the huge teams typically required, and how antithetical choice and interactivity are to a cohesive artistic message? They're a formula for mindlessness.


Not that he minds. He wrote, “I treasure escapism in the movies. I tirelessly quote Pauline Kael: The movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have no reason to go.” He's saying that the interplay scatters the ability to create a cohesive message - prohibits any fabled 'games artist' from making statements on par with Romeo and Juliet. A happy ending for Star Crossed Lovers misses the point. But with so much riding on games – $60 mil budgets and dozens of employees – commercial games usually can't help but give the audience exactly what they want.

 

The 35-year New Yorker editor William Shawn spoke to voice and markets, for journalism, calling out the atmosphere of writers only ever giving an audience what they want.

“There is a fallacy in that calculation . . . That fallacy is if you edit that way, to give back to the readers only what they think they want, you'll never give them something new they didn't know about. You stagnate. . .

We sometimes publish a piece that I'm afraid not more than one hundred readers will want. Perhaps it's too difficult, too obscure. But it's important to have. That's how people learn and grow. This other way is bad for our entire society and we're suffering from it in almost all forms of communications.

I don't know if you tried to start up a New Yorker today if you could get anybody to back you.”

Games teams being so scattered, and large games being so essentially commercial, Ebert wanted to say that the medium would never get to the point of voice. Flotilla gives a clear example of how interactive voice can work, though I won't presume that's Chung's aim. Between his games, and what he's written about his process online, he strikes me as someone who's having fun. 

On his blog, he points out Manny Farber's essay White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.

Good work usually arises where the creators seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. [...] The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is no where in evidence, so that the craftsmen can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.

Though I’m completely bastardizing the point of the essay, I love that description of nibbling forward purely for the love of nibbling. Is it a smooth ride? No. Will it function well? Probably not. Will it appeal to a mass audience? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

But it’s damn satisfying on a personal level. There’s great joy in diving headfirst toward a direction you think is interesting. That joy is reflected in your work, and players instantly recognize it.

  
Foreground

Flotilla, like AZS, is a great example of a satisfying, short game. You can get through a play in roughly 15-30 minutes, depending on the number of space battles. That's different from, say, realizing you've spent three bloodshot days binging on Civilization. Flotilla takes the very rare risk of fulfilling the player. Prior to a 20-100 hour investment of time. Or the perpetual motion, team hamster wheels in most social games.

It's 106 light years to Iloko. We've got a full tank of gas, half pack of cigarettes, 

it's the dark of space, and we're wearing sunglasses.

You start a game, usually with a selection of the white-lit, occasionally-safe planets, and red-lit planets which (so far as I've seen) always mean battle. Visiting a planet means a randomly-drawn card, which shows you a chunk of your procedurally-generated story. Think Choose Your Own Adventure. Help out Fun Factory and Chu-Chu, and you may eventually meet Little Lion.

Sometimes it's fowl space pirates.

In those cases, you go to the tactical battle screen. Here one typically moves hard-won ships like precious rooks, pawns and queens in a 3-D version of chess. Armor being weak below and behind ships, attempts to flank lead to weaving, complicated fights. You give the commands and hope that your missiles, torpedoes, and close-range beam weapons connect before theirs do.

More importantly, you give the commands and wait.

30 seconds. A lifetime in first-person shooter land. The battling flotillas take their turns simultaneous. You can zoom around the field, in all three dimensions. Look at it from the enemy's point of view, from yours, but in the end, that's the only interaction for half a minute. If you've moved in a silly way, exposing the unarmored sections of a ship, all there is to do is watch missiles glide through space. See whether they narrowly avoid your little destroyer, or send pieces of its smoldering hull toward the rest of your flotilla.

Once you've sent them on their way you must, essentially, let go.

And everything up to this point – all that procedural story, a very humble introduction to AZS and Blendo, by a harried Brendon himself, then planning the movements of my own flotilla once I'd bought the game – it was all great. It was. But it wasn't what relit my gaming torch.

Gestalt

Part of that might have been synergy. Battleships gliding through space, to Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude. The deep-running current of personal attachment one gets through interactivity. But, for me, it was the moment of surrender. I set my pieces to move. I watch. I let go. When the flagship of my flotilla explodes – let's say a battleship outfitted with Afrodita's artifact, then a piece of it takes out a ship I've had since the start – it's real. It's atrocious. It's OK.

And so antithetical to everything else in games right now. Edge called it melancholic. I'm not sure I agree with that. Brendon described it as 'sombre' and 'tragic', in the same piece.

Edge also included Chung's nod to Sam Beckett, and the chunk of his Worstward Ho that's easily and often truncated to “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.” Which feels ingrained into the directorial voice one gets in Blendo's works. The fact that neither AZS or Flotilla allow saving. That we cope with failure. Failing well is so essential to the human experience, yet so often trivial in the gaming experience.

Beckett's Worstward Ho may not end on the cheeriest of notes, but just beyond the 'fail better' part there's a neat context for games.

"Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still.

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand."

It's a game about letting go; we're all dying here. But in that, there's an absurdist beauty. There's triumph, and spectacular failure. Maybe when it all gets too grim, you self-destruct, go out in a blaze of glory. Or maybe you send your ships blasting forward, shouting with satisfied exasperation when the best of them explodes to sizzling chunks. Flotilla gave me a perspective on life that I didn't have before. An aesthetic nested in the interplay between system and experience. An aesthetic, in other words, that works best as a game.

And it moved me. That's all. 
 

Much respect, Blendo.

Cosmetic Enhancements Are Go

Really, really long time since I screwed with the blog layout. Little on the fabulous side, but that whole drab grey shit had to go. 

Also, screen caps from the weekend's adventures at the Pasco Walmart (with Sasquatch the Rock Notch as Fett). Joel, filming it, has so far only posted his video of all this via Facebook. I'm hoping it goes to youtube before long, he did an awesome job of cutting it to Fett's Vette.

Pondering the Reading List

I like books. Felt spectacular to sell one, even if it was three or four years ago. That after another couple years of sewing together the Frankenstein monster. Then it was out, ravaging the countryside, harrying the peasantry. These days, I can't stomach to look at parts of Game Addiction. My co-author's sections – child development, brain plasticity, psychological hardiness – I love those. My sections on immersion and games culture? I can but meh.

Reading Stephen King's On Writing was the turning point, though a long time in coming. All through writing Game Addiction, I never cared about nice (or even palatable) language. I cared about gaming, then occasionally riding my word processor like a bucking porcelain pony. I dreamed that finishing it – after my last wipe and flush – I'd be off writing, kick the habit. 
 
Years went by. I taught at DigiPen, a door largely opened by the book I couldn't stand. Even hammered out a novel-length derelict of fiction. The spine of King's book winked at me, once or twice. Still didn't pick it up. And then, for no discernible reason, I needed to be better. For nobody but me. King's autobiography/handbook was right there, and I slopped it up in one sitting. On Writing has been special to me, since then. I associate it with the decision to care. 
 
Outside that, I'm skeptical of books. I'm never quite sure how useful they are, for the mysterious art of putting words in order. As a mad professor, who regularly curses artistically-inclined students with reading on comics, art, design, even reading itself, I may have given this unhealthy levels of thought. Mostly because, just as often, it's action that teaches. Whether they're Artists or Musicians, Designers or Programmers, DigiPen students or Real Live Devs, there's a time to stop reading and just goddamned finish a thing. Or fail spectacularly and repeatedly until you can finish a thing. It's why the old writer's axiom has two parts: 

Read a lot. Write a lot.

Is one the more important for the procedural pudding? And if there's a place for books, movies, even games, in teaching games, then is there canon? Are some worth requiring? 
 
So, good time for partial disclosure. Here's a handful of nonfiction I really like:


Introduction to the art and science of design: Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Paraglyph, $16.15 on Amazon
Textual immersion: J.R.R. Tolkien's On Faerie Stories, Del Ray, $7.99 on Amazon
Relationship of text to image: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, William Morrow, $15.63 paperback on Amazon
User Interface: Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think , New Riders, $22 on Amazon
The brain's processing of text: Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, Viking, $11.56 paperback on Amazon
Writing (big surprise): Stephen King's On Writing, Scribner, $10.88 paperback (or 2 bucks at Goodwill, common book)
Physiology of vision, from the eye to the brain: Anne Marie Barry's Perception Theory, in Handbook of Visual Communication
Relationship between mediums: Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, $7.68 paperback on Amazon
Characterization: Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, $16.64 paperback on Amazon
Academic sweep of meaning and process: Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games , MIT Press, $17.86 on Amazon
Games culture: Jim Rossignol's This Gaming Life $19.37 paperback on Amazon

But these aren't, generally, the kinds of books the axiom refers to. I've always interpreted Read a lot. Write a lot. as more saying that if you want to write Westerns, then read Westerns. Know your genre. Crime drama? Try Garth Ennis and Elmore Leonard. Horror? Stephen King, or maybe some of Neil Gaiman's youth fiction. In cinema, George Lucas got a lot from Akira Kurosawa, and in Michael Bay we see the clear influence of full frontal lobotomy. This last GDC, we heard CliffyB cite the Legend of Zelda, and John Romero Pac-Man.

But are those the most influential? The most useful? It's a fair question, with dozens of professors and devs hawking textbooks to games colleges. Students have got every right to challenge their texts. I've got a few quippy answers ready for just such an occasion, and suspicions on Useful Knowledge, but the truth is I really don't know if these books help them to do games better. 
 
If required gaming, viewing, and reading are all on the table (along with their fiction and nonfiction variants), is it fair to ask about required living? Philip K. Dick, in his How to Build a Universe that Doesn'tFall Apart Two Days Later, made the claim that writers created rough facsimiles of a truer reality. Base your works on older works, and you're making copies of copies. The original picture degrades, until all substance is derivative. If some of our artistic doings – our writing, filming, and developing – gets based off life, is that more the ideal? 
 
Fuck if I know. But I am curious. 

Get a Horse

About a week ago Sherry Turkle's TED talk went live.


She says that we love twitter, Facebook, and sometimes even that metallic “droid” ring tone, because they deliver on 3 gratifying fantasies:

1. we can put our attention wherever we want it to be
2. we will always be heard
3. we will never have to be alone

PARO both looks and sounds like a baby harp seal.

Turkle was surprised when researchers and nursing home orderlies gushed seeing an elderly woman pour her heart out to PARO the empathy bot. She says,

“I was thinking, that robot can't empathize, it doesn't face death. It doesn't know life. And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing. I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work.”

Margaret, my grandma, passed away a couple weeks ago. Four days before that, I read a book on bonsai while she slept, helped her drink water, and helped her to the bathroom when the orderlies were 15 minutes overdue. Recovering from the hospital, a couple months ago, she'd spent a few weeks in a well-staffed assisted living place. Sitting with her, I heard at least three distinct voices shouting from down the hall. They all said the same thing, “Help me.” I never saw visitors for the two elderly women sharing Margaret's room. Spending time with the elderly is not glamorous. It is by nature wrenching, and complicated.

Sounds good.

Maybe it shouldn't be much of a surprise that at an event called the “Tacoma Noise Rodeo,” plenty of hip youngsters, and decidedly un-hip 30-year-olds, had their phones out during the music. Everyone seemed to text, at least once. And once one person saw a phone, it wouldn't be long before they took out theirs. As if they all felt compelled to say, “Look how many other things I could be doing now, how valuable I am. How much is at my disposal, how disposable you are. God I'm fucking cool.”

At that point, says Turkle, people stop being people. Recipients and respondents to electronic pawing become, “spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.” So if we want to be heard, knowing how little we actually want to listen – why not tell 64 followers on twitter, or our 356 facebook friends (at least, the 36 who haven't blocked our feeds)? No risk of intimacy, with all the fruits of friendship. Why on Earth would anyone sit down to listen to some goddamned music? Not possible. We need that escape hatch unlocked – ready at any time, for any reason.

Until we don't. Last week Chris, a classy English gentleman, was visiting Seattle. We arranged the meeting details via email, text message, and phone. Chris, who I'd met over noir movies and 24-hour McDonalds take out, in a Malaysian hostel, was traveling up the West Coast with his fiance (the engagement was very cool, very new news, which they shared in person), and a couple from California. We wandered from the Space Needle to Pike's Place, got some donuts they'd seen on a British travel show (that I, Seattle native, had not heard of), drank, drank some more, ate some Dick's at Gasworks park, saw a troll.

Yes, and they're delicious.

It's nice to think that would have happened in an age of handwritten letters.

I write a lot about this one guy Jared, a.k.a. Sasquatch the Rock Notch. Never would have met him without games, instant messenger, and an ability to build real connection through fiber optic wiring. The guy lives three, maybe four hours away, over a mountain range and through at least two distinct climate zones. I hitched a ride to the tri-cities a couple weeks ago, in order to participate in his 12-team beer pong competition (team names included: two girls, twelve cups; sparkle motion; prestige worldwide). At the party, easily 30 people cycled between a garage outfitted with pong tables and couches, a kitchen, and other parties. Phones came out, but they didn't dominate conversations. A person whipping out their phone was phasing themselves out more than anything. Technology wasn't, basically, that big a deal. Sinking ping pong balls into red plastic cups was.

Turkle mentions people texting during funerals. I can't really speak to Grandma's, since I was in the front row, but I can say that two cellphones rang at inopportune times. After the second, a third one crooned as it was preemptively shut down. One of the offending telephones was understandable – it belonged to my mom, who'd spent the last five years caring for her mom, the last three months spending every day (sometimes whole days) taking care of pills, procedures, paperwork, and the last week with details - she was, frankly, exhausted. The other two phones? I'm not so sure. But the crowd was mostly over 50, or under 15. It was probably less disrespect, and more a matter of skill with technology.

I'm torn – it's tempting to see tech fetishism as a series of simple faux paux, thoughtless little indulgences driven by novelty (“holy shit, cars are new!” vs. “heyyy, new car smell!”) – most of us, presumably, will eventually figure out how to drive. Or how to avoid the careening Ford Model Ts. But I like the note that Turkle ends things on.

Why don't you chill the fuck out?

“An ad campaign,” she says, “promises that online, and with avatars, you can, quote, finally, love your friends, love your body, love your life.” But our real lives? Our own bodies? New technologies are at their best when they empower some form of true growth. And there's a whole world out there. Riding a horse across a green, or just walking, is a fundamentally different experience than whizzing by at 70, or floating over at 10,000 feet. Technology gives us utility, but that's no warranty on happiness. It reminds me of Stephen King, saying that, “Life isn't a support system for Art. It's the other way around.”

Some of us figure that out. Rest well, Margaret Chapman (1916-2012).

Sasquatch the Rock Notch

So, basically, my once-facebook-husband Sasquatch looks eerily like MineCraft creator / Mojang founder Markus 'Notch' Persson. Except with better hats. And corrective lenses.

Picture relevant.



And that's all I've got, for now.

Social Media FTW!

Oh. Right. I have a blog, apparently.

I'm back to teaching Media Ethics at DigiPen. After four years of experimenting with some admittedly questionable methods, it's nice to finally have an idea of what that class ought to look like.

Last night, some DigiPen students and staff set up a few cameras for an after-hours Design Club. It was a lot of boisterous young nerds pointing at Mass Effect multiplayer interfaces, snickering, and then making grand, sweeping statements about the future of game design. Or, at least, the future of Mass Effect multiplayer design. Extra Credits writer James Portnow presided, and made it into a pretty enjoyable scene.

Just in case you lack incriminating photographs of yours truly, here's one that my once-Facebook-husband Jared took last year, at a WalMart in the tri-cities:



I've escaped Facebook, for the time being. Twitter is a nice semi-ironic replacement, though I'm never quite sure whether the role of ethics lecturer should be mutually exclusive to the retweeting of wang jokes.

Yesterday, my grandma celebrated her 96th. Go grandma.

...to saying, what you mean.

Thumbing through The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, I came across a list of lecture topics Frost had drawn up in 1916, and enclosed as part of a letter to Untermeyer. His price of $50 for 60 minutes translates to about $1000 in relative 2011 currency.

That was thirty years prior to those lectures unearthed at Dartmouth. In NPR's coverage they play a recording of one, where Frost says, "As near as you want to come to saying... What you mean. That's what poetry is. As near as you want to come to it." Middlebury has some that you can actually listen to, though not permanently download. The earliest of these is from 1936. Even those wander a bit.

So color me curious. Anyone else want to hear R. Frost on anything?

[Enclosed with Letter sent Mid-1916]

ANYBODY WANT TO HEAR R. FROST

ON ANYTHING?

Partial List of Subjects in Stock:

BOOTY. Derivation of the word from beauty. Two words interchangeable in age of bride-snatching. Poetry, the bride of elemental nature. Richard Le Gallienne. Kale Young Rice. Edith Thomas. Etc.

THE UNATTAINABLE. How much ought a poet get for showing (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2) in public? How much is fifty dollars? Are the English overpaid? Masefield. Yeats. Noyes. Base suggestion that poetry is as often gloating over what you have as hankering after what you haven’t. Strabismus and Idealismus.

POETRY AND SCIENCE. Is the conflict irreconcilable? How long will the war last? Poece of Itrecht and other memorable pieces. Aphasia. Pompadour. Nell Gwyn. Resolved that evolution is like walking on a rolling barrel. The walker isn’t so much interested in where the barrel is going as he is in keeping on top of it. The Labrynthodont. The Sozodont. The Cotoledon. The Dodecahedron. The Plesiosaurus. The Thesaurus (and Rhyming Dictionary). The Megatheorem. The Pterodactyl. The Spondee. And the Concordance.

THE INEVITABLE: AND HOW TO POSTPONE OR AVOID IT. How to keep from attaining what you don’t want. Query: If what Shelley meant by Prometheus wasn’t the philosophizing poet, Shelley himself? The world’s gain could he have stood fate off for one year. Two years. Five years. Ten years. Futility of speculation.

THE HARRISON LAW: Some dull opiate to the drains. Swinburne’s famous adjuration to his sister: “Swallow, my sister; oh, sister, swallow!” Picture: We were the first that ever burst; or the danger of mixing drinks. Jamaica Ginger. A plain talk to druggists. Given in England under the title: A plain talk to chymists.

MOANISM AND SWOUNDING. On larruping an emotion. Men’s tears tragic, women’s a nuisance. Heightening. In this I make it clear-by repeated assertions-that I can use any adjective that anyone else can.

NEW HAMPSHIRE GOLD. Adventure with an examining doctor for an insurance company who, after looking me over and taking samples of me, decided I was just the romantic kind he could unload a small wild farm on because it was blessed with a gold mine that had been worked to the extent of producing three wedding and engagement rings. The moral being that I am not romantic.

TRUE STORY OF MY LIFE. Stealing pigs from the stockyards in San Francisco. Learned to whistle at five. At ten abandoned senatorial ambitions in order to come to New York, but settled in New Hampshire by mistake on account of the high rents in both places. Invention of the cotton gin. Supersedes potato whisky. A bobbin boy in the mills of Lawrence. Nailing shanks. Rose Marie. La Gioconda. Astrolabe. Novum Organum. David Harum. Visit General Electric Company, Synecdoche, N.Y. Advance theory of matter (what’s the matter?) that becomes an obsession. Try to stop thinking by immersing myself in White Wyandottes. “North of Boston.” Address Poetry Society at Great Poetry Meal. Decline. Later works. Don’t seem to die. Attempt to write “Crossing the Bar.” (International copyright.) Time: three hours. Very intimate and baffling.

(NOTE): Some of these lectures are more intelligible if taken in combination with all the rest together the same afternoon or evening.

Dollar a minute or sixty minutes for fifty dollars. I have to ask a little more where I introduce my adjectives immediately after, instead of before, my nouns-as in The House Disorderly.

Lists of nouns and adjectives I am accustomed to use furnished in advance to guard against surprise.

[Robert always insisted on the difference between being a rebel and a radical. He argued that a radical was tied far more unquestionably to a program and a rigid set of principles than a reactionary, whereas a rebel was free-free to denounce any political party, propaganda, creed, or cant. As a rebel, he was willing to be the rejected and rejecting individual, isolated, speculating sorrowfully on man’s eagerness to “belong,” to trade individuality for group “togetherness” and mass conformity.

At this time his letters sounded many variations on the theme of foes and friends. I was, of course, touched by the evidences of a friendship which grew continually closer and warmer, and I was also amused by his mock fulminations against his enemies.

It was in the spirit of mockery – “I sort of fool along” – that he sent me a parody of a lecture prospectus. He had given several “talks” after his return to America – he was the most provocative and most penetrating of talkers – but, although for many years it was a way of supporting his farm and his family, lecturing was a kind of public torture. He could never get himself to prepare the customary “descriptive list” of subjects and even refused to confine himself to a set of titles. A self-adulating circular put out by the elderly poet Edwin Markham set him off – it “made me wonder if I hadn’t a series of lectures in me that I could give.”

Enclosed with the following letter was a broad burlesque of what lecture committees liked and what he could never get himself to do. The combination of plain fact and fancy fooling presents a practically unknown Frost. The reference to his “immersing” himself in White Wyandottes conceals a more or less serious grief of ungratified chicken farming.]