At the GDC

I cross-posted this as my first gamasutra blog. I'm not sure how their process functions, so for now I thought I'd set it here as well. This GDC was at times intense and serendipitous: I survived a 15 hour drive on no sleep, and was invited into locked basements for traditional Chinese folk music. It was in equal parts meditative, almost boring. I walked alone through a lot of San Francisco, spent time in a couple of cathedrals, and was singled out by the one-legged maybe-a-monk.

Fun week, though. Hope you enjoy. 

“This GDC is really weird,” says Jesse.

“Why?” Asks Soraya.

“Because every year everyone seems to know what's happening. Like, maybe one year it's the PS3. Or another year it's motion controls. This GDC, nobody knows what the fuck is going on.”

Adam Sessler is chatting animatedly with a group of random developers, outside the Hotel St. Regis. He's wearing a very stylish hat. I idly wonder what he's been up to, since G4 got bought out. Another part of our group is having a very serious conversation, maybe on business development, while we wait to hit the food courts hidden under the Westfield Mall-thing. Jesse is teaching Soraya a game that he, a former Disney Imagineer, developed while he and his daughter had been waiting in long lines. I mention that their faces look a lot like people playing Johann Sebastian Joust. Jesse looks over, with a very suspect grin.

“Oh man! Have you played Wushu Turtle?”

“Err, no?” I say.

He reaches into a pocket. “Guess who has turtles?”

–

I fucking love the Indie Games Festival.

Dys4ia. Year Walk. Thrity Flights of Loving. FTL. Terry Cavanaugh. Brendon Chung. A dozen badass people I've never met, all of them just sitting around, showing off magic.

I fucking love it.

Walking away from that part of the show floor, I just randomly saw the very last game developer for which I could anticipate nerding out. Raph Koster was wearing an old, grey hoodie and dad jeans.

“Hi Raph Koster,” I say. “You are amazing.”

“Well thanks!” He says, “Who are you?”

The name on my badge has been blocked by a highlighter-colored Hello Kitty.

“Right,” I say, handing him a Hello Kitty business card. “You linked a thesis I once wrote. That was way cool.”

He's peering at the back of the business card. “Oh right. I'd have known that, if I had just been able to see your name.”

And then we proceed to talk about durians, for a moment, before we go our separate ways. I never mention that Star Wars Galaxies – a game for which Raph was the creative lead – taught me how to take chances. That it showed me, first-hand, that I could strive to do big things.

–

“Could you please lower your voices?” Croaks the hunched, white-haired lady behind us.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who hears her, but am loving this conversation about “fun” and “engagement” too much to stop either of the two tired men. James wants more than fun. He was just given a 20-year-old roleplay guidebook for holocaust internment camps. Nick wants better fun. He just came from an IGF awards ceremony that glossed over beautiful, innovative designs. Over the past ten minutes, their volume grew to block out near every other sound in the crowded Westfield food court.

“Gameplay can be boring, and still be meaningful.” Says James. “It can be hard, or tedious. Wrapping tedium in gameplay sends a message. Right?”

“No. Boring gameplay is just bad gameplay. We're past that. Other mediums know how to make tedium fun. It's why I keep coming back to Fight Club. Fifteen seconds and we know Tyler Durden's job is boring. Fifteen fucking seconds and we still give the gameplay award to Cart Life. Profound respect to that game, right. Did it deserve to win narrative? Yes. Did it have beautiful art? Yes. But gameplay? I mean--”

“EXCUSE ME... SIR.” Says the old lady, for the fifth time. “Lower your tone!”

Nick turns around, and puts a hand over his chest. “Oh my gosh, I am so, so sorry.”

James says, “We need to do this more often. I love it when we violently agree.”

“Absolutely.”

“Wow. I don't get it.” Says a younger game designer. “Why get so worked up if you both agree?”

“Because these kinds of tiny distinctions will fundamentally alter how this medium develops.”

–

“Is he good people?” Asks the Conference Associate honcho. He gives me the Buddy Christ double-thumbs-up, paired with a questioning look.

I return the pose.

He grins, “Good enough for me.”

And so I chat with a few random CAs before we move to Johann Sebastian Joust. The conference has wound down for the day, and here's a group of about 200 men and women in red shirts. A few of them pass along the Joust batons, and face off. Between the smiles and the game faces, you can tell they've each seen hundreds of game worlds. Some have even made a few. For a week, here in San Francisco, they get to be around old friends. There's a weeklong League of Legends CA tourney. There's a dragon's hoarde of board games. They're masters of Witch Hunter / Vampire Hunter / Mafia.

They are, for a week, family.

At a lunch, later in the week, I met Lincoln the CA. He could be in his late 40's, with a shaved head and a graying handlebar moustache. He lives just down the street from the Moscone Center, where he's volunteered as a CA for twelve years. It'd be thirteen, if not for a year where he was sick (though he still got out to say hi to a few people). A love of D&D brought him to his first GDC. He'd quit a bank job for a chance to work around games. He teased me for the Hello Kitty over my nametag.

“Clearly you've never been a CA.”

“Hey, you guys can scan over the top of it. You have the technology. I did move it once, though, to make that easier for a CA.”

“You could, you know, move it again.”

His wry grin is infectious. But he allowed me to simply grin back, and keep the Hello Kitty positioned just the way I liked it. I really hope I see him again next year.

–

Data doesn't lie. Especially not the data from EEDAR.

In 2012, the top 50 games in North America spent 350m in marketing, and that marketing war is expanding.

53% of gaming magazine covers are for shooters.

WoW makes 500m a year in subscriptions. WoT makes 350m a year in profit. CoD made a 1.6b.

Good games with good marketing make around seven times as much as the good games with bad marketing (emphasis on the around - I'm grossly paraphrasing a beautifully arranged dataset).

To the Moon moved a couple hundred thousand copies.

Limbo did okay. Minecraft made money. Dear Esther moved me. Botanicula made me cry. Flotilla and Star Wars Galaxies spoke to me on profound levels.

I've never played a Call of Duty game for more than a couple hours. If I've even played one; I get it confused with all the other big budget games trying desperately to look exactly like it and tackle its market share.

–

It's been a long time since the title “gamer” held any meaningful association in my mind. When the industry was small, maybe. But for years now, calling yourself a gamer has been tantamount to calling yourself a TV watcher. There are differences between Sponge Bob, Fox News, Survivor, and the surgery channel. With tens of thousands of new games coming out yearly, and 60% of the USA playing games “to pass the time,” the distinctions matter.

The people making games are still a community. I left this GDC thinking of them as an extended family.

But I still haven't figured out where I fit. Riding shotgun back to San Jose, in the dark, I'm a little disappointed by that. After all the truly strange, nearly mystical happenings, my place in the gaming cosmos hadn't revealed itself in any blinding burst of light.

So I mention that outloud.

“What is it you want?” Asks another writer. “Money? Power? I mean, be honest with yourself.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I really don't know. Somehow I thought it'd just, be clear.”

I ask the driver, who reasonably says that he doesn't really know me. But he eventually adds, “Think of your life as a wheel with nine spokes. They could be anything. Money, love, anything. But think about how big each spoke is right now, and decide where you want them to be in five years time.”

I write that down, while we try to decide whether it's the Caterpillar or the Cheshire Cat that asks Alice which direction she'll go.

The first writer says, “In five years, what sort of effect do you want to have?”

So I tell him. And it's personal. And when I'm done, I realize that I'm crying. Something I haven't really done since finishing a very neat indie game. I don't think anyone in the car notices.

Later, I go to draw out the spokes of my life, and I realize something. Maybe that the whole exercise is a paradox. Wheels need balanced spokes, if they're going to roll. There's something that I want, in five years. Something that I'd sacrifice for. But if I'm going to get there, nine other spokes need to exist. They need to be in place, but they need to be strong enough not to shred at the first rock in the road.

The games industry has a lot of component parts, each represented by people. New wheels and new spokes and new technologies will surely come. But maybe – just maybe – now's one of those times where we balance what we have. Maybe it's time to use the wheel to get somewhere.

The Comicon Buddy System

My second visit to the Emerald City Comicon was much, much better than the first. It was all about the people.

There were a few good people the first time around. I was lucky to run into an amazingly talented nerd rock singer / highschool friend. Saw a friend or two from a Tacoma comic shop. Then a couple friends with perfectly sculpted costumes. The kind of movie-set-quality Lobster Johnson and Harley Quinn that you can't buy (this year they were the Monarch/Dr. Girlfriend showing up in a bunch of the ECCC slideshows I failed to farm for filler photos).

Via Seattle Weekly's excellent ECCC 2013 slideshow

But they all had this one thing in common: they'd followed the buddy system. They'd either driven in with someone, or sometimes buddied up with fellow geeks once they'd arrived. They knew, and I really didn't. Without a buddy, I was done with the show almost right after I'd parked.

This time, Squatch was my buddy. He'd only ever been to the TriCities' RadCon, a gathering roughly 1/32nd the size. He'd read comics his whole life, and folks like Mike Mignola and Fiona Staples – both in attendance – had inspired and kindled his love of art. We almost walked right by Mike, the creator of Hellboy, before Squatch noticed the name scrawled above a middle-aged bald man. There was a modest line, so we talked while it wound down. People would drop in, and drop stacks of a few, to sometimes a few dozen, comics they'd wanted signed. Squatch had left his at home, not wanting to “be a dick.” But while we talked, people in the line sometimes nerded out. To that, Mignola had 10% apprehension and 90% delight. Others unzipped special comics holders, then deposited neat stacks in front of him. To that clinical accuracy, he responded with efficient signing. Sometimes he'd ask the gaping fans, “Where should I sign this?”

After the line petered out, Squatch walked up. He couldn't say anything. Mike looked up, now registering something like 80% exhaustion, 20% apprehension. Squatch finally pointed at Mignola's originals, held in a portfolio case not unlike the one holding Squatch's unfinished comic, back in the car. Squatch asked, “Mind if I look through these?”

Mike nodded.

Originals, mostly from Hellboy in Hell, ranged in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Mike now looked slightly engaged, as Squatch's face lit up on flipping through pages. Still, the two said nothing. Another fan nuzzled up beside us, and bluntly held something out towards Mike. He pointed, could you sign this here? Mike did so, without speaking. He held out an identical book and said, “Could you make this out to Sally and Frank?” Again, it was signed without words, and the fan vanished without any audible thanks.

Squatch was making sounds of appreciation. As he flipped through originals, I could see the same kind of rough marker work that Squatch used. Mignola's influences on my friend were obvious. Big haphazard strokes, and characters with bulk.

Squatch looked up, fairly mindblown, and flipped Mignola's book to the start. There's a solid beat as they stare at one another. Mike blinks.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Thanks,” says Mike.

“Um, thank you,” says Squatch.

There's another moment of silence, like Squatch might say more. Might talk about how influential Mignola's use of lines and color had been to a teenage Squatch. Might have let the man know that his work had a serious, sincere impact. But while that second drags on to two Mike nods, returning to an earlier tired look. I know that Squatch, who up till recently worked at Subway, had just very nearly ponied up for one of the pricier originals.

Squatch had a similar experience with Fiona Staples, the artist for Saga. Though he's got eight longboxes and a closet full of lovingly-jacketed comics, the eight issues out for Saga are among his favorites. Since he didn't bring them, out of austere avoidance of anything obnoxious, he buys one of the prints featuring Lying Cat and The Will. He finds a twenty in his wallet.

The best Saga cosplay at the Con:

Izabel the dismembered spectral babysitter 

He mumbles something about her making a cool comic.

Her handler – a haggard, ferret-faced man with greasy hair – snatches the cash.

“Thanks,” she says, looking apprehensive at the force of that transaction. But she smiles. “Do you want it personalized at all? What's your name?”

“Uh, Jared. But you don't really have to.”

“Well, here,” she says. I can make out her signature, and his name.

I don't remember any other words passing back or forth. We seem to awkwardly drift from the table.

Squatch is, for those who've never experienced the phenomenon, experiencing a full-blown Nerdgasm. We're walking out to his car, in order to safely deposit his newly signed treasure, and he barely says a word.

–

At about 6:30 or 7pm, we found a table by the Convention Center's two-story escalator, and gave politically correct, thoughtful appraisals of the show's costumes. Our gender-conscious friend Kim had even joined us, graciously overlooking the show's various wardrobe malfunctions, and lauding the imagination and drive of everyone in costume.

“Jesus Christ, look at that He-Man! That fucker is hot! If you two are allowed to talk about cottage cheese legs and cleavage, then I get to marry that man. I am going to marry the fuck out of him, and tear off that little banana hammock, and we are going to have a lot of hot little babies.”

Comics Alliance has a good photo of

the He-Man in question.

A guy in a I work at NASA shirt, who up till recently seemed ready to stab me, finally stalks off. We see a catwoman with an enormous, abnormally-pert chest.

“Not real at all,” says Kim. “At the very least a serious pushup.”

“So what?” Asks Squatch. “If it does justice to the costume, I mean --”

“So there's no way she's bought that just for the con.”

“We actually saw them earlier,” I say. “Funny story.”

“Oh!” Says Squatch. “Right!”

“So this little kid is tugging at his dad's pant leg, saying 'Daddy I really want to gooo. I'm tiiired.'”

“And he says, eyes firmly drowning in that Catwoman cleavage, 'Hold up just one second, Daddy's gotta take a couple pictures.'”

The female Tony Stark we've dubbed, “Toni Stark” comes up the escalator. Her only departure from street clothes is a bright blue light under a white camisole. Someone chimes in, “eyes off the light, Pal.”

We're all cackling, enjoying jokes at the expense of others, when the comedian Brian Posehn walks by. Lately he's been writing a run of Deadpool, one that Squatch has followed religiously.

“Brian Posehn!” I say. “Time to go.”

Squatch stays seated. So I grab him, pull him up, and Kim follows. A huge crowd piles up around the escalator going down, and we're a good ways behind the man. While we wait, I ask a lethally thin pre-teen in excessive facepaint, “Hey, what are the candy corn horns from?”

“Homestuck!” He half shrieks, looking ready either to weep, or to leap at me in uncontrolled rage. It's the most terrified I've been in months, and I'm glad when we're finally get on the escalator going down.

“Dude, I'm not going to say anything to him. I don't want to bother the guy.”

“You love his writing. You have a lot of respect for him.”

“Can't do it, dude. Not if he's as tired as us. What would I even say?”

“Just tell him what you just said. You respect his work.”

Squatch grimaces, and walks over to him while Kim and I stand aside. We both grin at each other. I tell her that the most he's said to any of his heroes here, until now. Squatch walks over to me with his phone.

“Here, just hit the picture button.”

I hit the wrong button, so he has to break from posing with Brian to fix the phone. They're both tired, and their faces momentarily show it, but Squatch hands the phone back to me. Brian, a huge guy, makes a tough pose. Squatch gives a gleeful smile. I snap a couple pictures.

–

The next day, we spend mostly lost, and wandering. The current artist for The Walking Dead is listed in one place in the ECCC program, but word of mouth puts him across the expo floor, or even at the Image Booth. It was our third time orbiting in the rough location listed on the program, but it was still good. Plenty of crap to make fun of, the occasional, lovingly made costume, or lovingly-made art. But after failing to find this one artist, again, Squatch was just wandering. Since he was shambling into a madly overpopulated part of the convention, one we'd wandered easily half a dozen times already, I diverted us down an emptier lane in Artist's Alley.

We came up next to a booth we'd visited already, for Eric Powell.

Powell's Goon is, for me personally, a profound and inspiring comic. The voice is utterly unique. One of his books in the series, Chinatown, dealt with love and loss in a language I'd needed. It was one of those books you serendipitously pick up at a time when you really need it. I'd later find out that Powell had fought to present Chinatown  in its intended format and style – and had won. It rarely happens in comics; hearing about it made me so, so happy. I'd already picked up a bookmark for The Goon, the last time we were here, but Powell hadn't been there. There was one new face sitting, sketching.

Some promotional art for Chinatown.

“Are you the guy?” Asks Squatch.

“Nope,” he said. Then grinned. “Yeah, it's me.”

“Wow, cool,” said Jared.

He was about to say more words to a favorite creator than he had all weekend.

Jared shared that he'd just been comparing Powell favorably to Rob Liefeld. That while Liefeld's art hadn't changed much, since he'd been a 16-year-old rising star in comics art (something Liefeld himself humorously admits), Powell's had evolved, matured, and then evolved again.

Powell, whose eyes were energetic and friendly, but most of all present, at first grinned.

The tattooed blonde woman sitting next to him gave a good-natured laugh, but threw in that Liefeld had always been an exceptionally nice guy.

Powell chimed in, complimented Liefeld, then started up a conversation with Squatch on making comics. I got the distinct impression that Squatch and Powell – for lack of better analogy – were both tuned to the same frequency. In one trade paperback for The Goon, Powell had outlined his progression from early days in pencils, and then pens. At the time, a few years ago, Squatch hadn't yet read The Goon. But having seen both, Powell's earlier work had reminded me a lot of what Squatch was doing. It was one of the early hooks – that I could get the same kinds of slightly strange stories I might from my friend – if only my friend could have more time away from his job as a Sandwich Artist.

While they talked about Liefeld's technique, technique in general, and The Goon, I was doing the very thing I'd mocked Squatch for all weekend. Face to face with a creator I admired, I said next to nothing. I just, you know, listened. And looked over Squatch's shoulder as he flipped through originals.

Good weekend.

Remember to use the buddy system.

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.