My old band 8-4's ad for musicians

Speaking of that, I created a page for my music.  Music is really important to me.  Playing and listening.  It informs the way I think about art and is probably the medium I have spent the most time exploring.  I have made a lot of recordings in the past years and these represent a few of my favorites.  I am missing several that I would like to include, and have a couple on there that perhaps don’t belong on the list of my favorites, but as time goes on I’ll refine it (mostly for me!).  Check it out here.

Tale of Tales

Starting with The Endless Forest, Tale of Tale’s have consistently created environments that exist for the purpose of being looked at and explored.  This may not sound all that unique as most 3D games have environments that are explored, but the difference is that these games exist solely for this purpose.  To them, game environments are not containers for gameplay, but rather are the reason for gameplay.  By only affording the player navigation controls, the player’s mind is free to embark on a journey of induction and introspection.  In their own words, Fatale “offers an experimental play experience that stimulates the imagination and encourages multiple interpretations and personal associations.”

Tale of Tales are not alone in creating games for this purpose.  Games that encourage observation and consideration of their environments can be said to form an art movement that I am referring to as the observational immersionist style.

In the second and main act of Fatale, the player controls an entity that can look upon a courtyard inspired by John Wilde’s 1891 interpretation of the biblical story of Salome.  The story goes like this: a girl, Salome, falls in love with John the Baptist and he rejects her.  She then performs a dance and demands and receives his head as a reward.  The game takes place after these events.  It is night and there is a girl, Salome, devoid of any strong emotion staring out into space with the head on a plate next to her.  Around the scene are a number of objects, candles and two other unmoving characters.  The game does an amazing job of telling the story through what Jenkins calls embedded narrative.  The player then explores the world looking for lit candles and extinguishing their flame.  Mechanically, you could label the game as a mere collect-a-thon as much of the game involves scouring the world for these candles.  But the formal rule system doesn’t account for the strong sense of place created by what the player sees and hears while locating these candles.  The surreal juxtaposition of objects and characters, along with the somewhat unsettling soundscape, is the real take away from this game.

For example, at one point, the character Salome (next to the head…) is revealed to be wearing an iPod Nano and earbuds.  Without being an expert on the history and uses of the story of Salome, I cannot offer any particularly sophisticated interpretation of implications of this, but it did inspire identification with this character from another time and was definitely a reflexive moment.

Salome with an iPod?

However, this is not to say that the mechanics are of no significance and Fatale doesn’t heavily rely on its formal rule system.  Despite Tale of Tales’ consistent and explicit rejection of the notion that designers should focus on rule systems to encode personal expression (they even go so far as to claim that rules are destructive to art), in practice they seems to champion a particular set of rules – those that serve to emphasize the environment.  By providing novel and slow moving navigation controls, the player’s mind is freed up to notice the somewhat surreal and temporally inconsistent objects that fill the world of Fatale.  Also, once a candle is found, an “ideal” composition is assumed by the camera that gives a clear and aesthetically pleasing perspective on the objects surrounding the candle.  Given this perspective, the player can then extinguish the candle by holding the cursor, represented as smoke, steady over the flame.  Once extinguished, the scene becomes darker and the candle’s flame replaces the smoke and serves as a small “flashlight” to more carefully examine the scene.  Often, this transition point, where the scene gets darker and the player starts to control the flame, is used as an opportunity to highlight certain elements of the scene (e.g. the iPod).  In this way, Tale of Tales uses rules to encourage the observation and consideration of Fatale’s environments.

Judith

Tale of Tales are certainly not alone is creating games that seek to encourage the observation and reflection about their virtual worlds.  My game Reflect was created with this goal in mind, though attempted keep the player’s attention by adding mechanics about looking and navigation.  Terry Cavanagh’s game Judith, while having a more narrative focus, has gameplay that involves navigating and observing a low fidelity 3D house.  Tracy Fullerton’s The Night Journey seeks to inspire introspection through observation and exploration with a defamiliarized world and control scheme.  Char Davies’ virtual reality projects, Osmose and Ephémère, can be said to be created at least partially for this purpose as well.  As a fringe example, Bioshock is praised far more often for how it created such a strong sense of place/space than its FPS gameplay.

Osmose

The experiences these games provide are constructed through focused observation of the land and sound scapes.  Game rules, rather than being metaphorical, or simulations of real world phenomena are used to emphasize the environment.  Through means of sensory observation these games succeed in creating a strong sense of immersion and here I label them as part of an observational immersionist movement.  I’ve been noticing, designing and trying to speak with people about games like Fatale for a few years now and I’ve struggled with a label to this approach by.  Labeling movements helps for discussion and education but I by no means want to imply that these designers are collaborating or are even intentionally adhering or limited to this particular style.

The observational immersionist approach, as discussed above, seems to be important to what Tale of Tales have been trying to accomplish with their games.  I’m not certain if this phrase will resonate with anyone else, but if nothing else, coming up with it helped me describe what I loved about Fatale.  So, if you haven’t already, support these great artists and buy Fatale now!

Molleindustria

Interpreting game mechanics is a passion of mine and thus I have strong opinions about the faults and outright failure of most attempts at wrangling procedural rhetoric.  Unfortunately, Molleindustria ’s recent attempt at creating a shmup that subverts the war machine ended up with unconvincing and problematic procedural messages that almost completely rely on verbal rhetoric (i.e. skinning as usual).

In Kosmosis, the player controls the “vanguard” that is controlled with the arrow keys.  The vanguard can touch passive members of the proletariat and awaken them to follow his movements.  The group is held together by a flocking behavior where as the group grows bigger the cohesion to the vanguard’s movements weaken (thus giving incentive to not move too fast or suddenly).  Other passive entities in this universe are green diamonds which are said to represent the “reactive war machine.”  All prolets which are touched by these war machines are destroyed.  At any point, the vanguard/player can press the space bar and turn the amassed prolets and himself into a swirling yellow cyclone which can destroy the war machines.

First of all, I really want to stress how much I appreciate Molleindustria ’s repeated attempt at representing theories through abstract game mechanics (see their Free Culture Game for another example).  Also, because of the game’s highly abstract representation layer, I forgive the outright description of the game’s message and entities (much like how Rod Humble’s The Marriage is best after reading the intended meaning first).

That said, even once I assume the assigned roles and meanings of the colored shapes, the game hardly presents a hegemonic set of non-degenerated socialist values and actually has the player enact several (almost cliché) criticisms of socialism.

All space prolets are floating through space and take no action until they are touched by the vanguard.  This idleness, along with the ease to which the vanguard can awaken the prolets, gives the sense that the player is more powerful and important than the thoughtless prolets.  The prolets will stray and follow a different vanguard if the player moves too fast.  It isn’t clear to me what this symbolizes, but here are some possibilities: the prolets don’t want to be pushed around, or maybe that they are lazy and don’t want to run too fast, or perhaps this even symbolizes how human beings don’t like to know they are being influenced and require a sneaky ideologue to determine their actions (thank god that sneaky manipulator is you!).  The process of unleashing the power of the masses for an attack also promotes the same follow-the-leader message as the proletariat conversion process.  All in all, the game appears to promote the idea that man is helpless without the right leadership (which the player represents).  This comic comes to mind.

The mechanics involving the war machines lead to more confusion and unintended/unconvincing messages.  The war machines are said to be reactionary, but are actually just as immobile as the unconverted prolets.  Avoiding them is trivial.  In other words, they hardly represent a horrible insidious war machine that one would want to amass an army of brainless masses to destroy.  They are more akin to blackberry bushes in a wide open field.  Not even that; blackberry bushes grow out of control and need to be trimmed, these green diamonds just slowly float by.

The game excelled at communicating about leadership in general, but failed to actually make any worthwhile claim about the supposed dangers of capitalism, the war machine or socialism.  The last is forgiven as the game did set out to take these values for granted in an alternate reality (i.e. no worthwhile statement necessary).  But all that is known about the war machines is that you need to destroy them.  At least in America’s Army the faceless enemy is trying to kill you.

All in all, the message of Kosmosis is: use your abnormal special abilities to amass an army and destroy the enemy.  In other words, it is a lot like every other war game.  The game set out to present non-degenerated socialist values but only managed to procedurally express only the most degenerated of messages through gameplay.

Designing procedural messages is hard!  I admit that there are many other ways one could understand this game, but these (mis)interpretations were not that hard to make.  Despite my critical review, I think Molleindustria are pioneers and love how they are pushing their agenda.  I send major high fives for creating a game that even provoked discussion of this sort in the first place, but I still hang my head in sadness that there are so few example of games that effectively utilize procedural expression.

Video games have been created about political and social issues since the early days of the medium. In recent years, many developers are rapidly creating and releasing games in response to current events. These games are being referred to as newsgames. With an increasing number of people citing the internet as their primary news source, it would appear that newsgames could become an important part of how people understand current events and could rise to be an important and expressive video game genre. However, the word “newsgame” is currently only quite loosely defined, resulting in the term being applied to many forms of serious, or nonfiction games. Also, despite the quantity of games that relate to current events, very few newsgames can be said live up to the defining claims that newsgames are the video game equivalent of political cartoons – a well developed and established medium for political expression.

This paper fleshes out the political cartoon comparison in order to learn from the long history of political cartoons and give direction to the current state of fledgling and unsophisticated newsgames. It also suggests clear and flexible definitive criteria for newsgames as well as a re-declaration their expressive power.

Just a note, A Moose’s Love is probably the most obscure newsgame ever made.

Rationalization

Though, on Rock, Paper, Shotgun people did far more than just check it out. There were over 50 comments and many of these were very thoughtful interpretations of the game. It excites and surprises me that the audience of this primarily mainstream game industry focused blog would be interested in dissecting this admittedly strange “proceduralist” game.

Almost surprisingly, most interpretations were in line with what I was intending to communicate. A big inspiration for Rationalization was Rod Humble’s The Marriage. As part of my quest to harness the alleged and only slightly understood power of “Rules as Art“, Rationalization was first purely abstract (no words, instructions or key), but because of the difficulty most people have playing and interpreting The Marriage, I decided to slightly ramp up the amount of representation and give the player some context. I worry that I perhaps went too far, but I believe there is a sweet spot that someone will stumble upon soon enough.

Most criticisms fell into one of two categories. The first group challenges the notion of a game that prioritizes a message over entertainment. These came in the form of complaints about the game being boring or not accessible. I sympathize with this position, but at the end of the day, I am committed to my message even at the cost of playability. I constantly struggle with this when I design games. It’s hard to say whether it’s gamers who need to learn to have patience (as most have for mediums) or if “boring” artgames are just bad games… I tend to bank on the former.

The other group of criticisms were mostly about the content of the message itself. And this was awesome. I know the game’s message isn’t popular. There is also a lot of confusion as to what to think about “achieving Oneness”. I know how I feel about it, and there are plenty of clues in the game to point to that, but I didn’t want the game to fully dictate what to think. Let me just say that people tend to take for granted that that Oneness = enlightenment = nirvana. Rationalization only gives you “Oneness”. However, the chain of equivalencies is also not negated by the game and this was intentional and a very important part of the message.

What more could an artist ever want than to have a bunch of people interpreting the message of their work, attempting integration in their head and intelligently commenting on the results? To me, this goes to show just how awesome the “artgame” field is. Aside from the facts that interactive computational systems are an instantiation of what other art mediums have always attempted to be and that understanding rule based procedural expression requires that one adopt a healthy and productive philosophy, games have a HUGE audience (yes, I realize how ridiculous that sentence is, but it’s what I think, OK!). With other mediums there is so much competition that you have to practically beg people to look at your work. It often just boils down to luck whether or not anyone ever sees your film, novel, album, painting, etc. no matter how awesome it is. With games there is an active community of people who are hungry to look at and experience new games. What better place is there to be an artist?

I made another game to help me think through some stuff. It’s called Rationalization. Play it! I’ll post more about it later.

Play it before reading. Its short.

This is another game that began with an idea and the rules and gameworld emerged. I’m still experimenting with this design strategy as it completely underemphasizes gameplay and fun. Though, this game ended up much more entertaining and coherent than my previous Relationships game.

To sum up its creation, I wanted to create something political, my team members and I were of different political persuasions though we all agreed that we were pissed about California’s proposition 8 that recently banned gay marriage. The intention was to try and make the game actually about the broader issue of people judging and trying to control others, but there is no time in 48 hours for such things!

I’m pretty sure the metaphor we were going for stacks up in all cases. I haven’t yet heard of an exploit that communicates some possibly hilarious unintended message. This is always a risk with creating rule systems as metaphor. What I am most happy with about this is that this game presents a not particularly complicated metaphor. There is hardly anything understood about communicating with rules (just a few examples) and progress is going to come through simple, allegorical games like this.

It all started when I heard about Gamma3D - a curated art show and call for short games that use 3D glasses in some way integral to their gameplay. I had been working on and bailing out on ideas for short art games all summer and I decided to commit myself to creating a game for this (despite the fact that I missed the initial call and there was only two weeks left before they were to be submitted…). What resulted was Toward Understanding Relationships and what follows is a description of the game, the metaphors at work (visual and system) and the motivations I had for making it.

I started with a subject that I have thought a lot about for years and still don’t really have a grasp on: Communication can be hard between any two people but even harder between two people who love each other. For example, with my fiance, I will often think I hear her say something and respond to what I thought I heard. Often we will be having completely different conversations altogether without even knowing it. To make things worse, you want to do nice things for your loved ones right? Well, sometimes you don’t know what is good for them at all. You only think you know and you can only make educated guesses (based on what you think you heard!). On top of all that you have your own thoughts and needs that are competing with your loved one’s needs. With a busy schedule, you only have so much time and a wrong response can be lead to a meltdown.

This is the situation that Toward Understanding Relationships dumps the player in. Words moving on the top of the screen from left to right are your thoughts and needs and the words moving from right to left are her thoughts and needs. The words that the player can stand on are his possible responses. There are up to four messages (two sets of overlapping yellow and blue) scrolling across the top at any point and there is always a possible response for each message to stand on (up to four). You can only choose one response – unless – you disengage the ‘yellow you’ from the ‘blue you’ and control them independently. The player makes decisions about what responses to choose based on the two yellow “general well being” meters that correspond to the player and his spouse.

With 3D glasses, yellow colors are hidden by the red lens and blue colors are hidden by the blue lens. The world looks differently depending on which eye you are looking through. I soon noticed that when a set of yellow words was overlayed with a set of blue words the yellow was essentially hidden but still visible only if you looked through one eye (i.e. while looking through both lenses the darker words (blue) dominated the yellow words and while looking through the blue lens the darker words were not visible and the yellow words were clear and readable). I used this mechanic/feature of 3D glasses to represent the different messages and interpretations that run through one’s mind during converstations.

Gameplay isn’t expected to last very long without a screen that indicates some sort of fight/argument appearing that says that either the dude or girl is unhappy. I imagine this gets pretty frustrating pretty fast (not unlike a recent MFA thesis of mine…) as there doesn’t seem to be much of a clue for why these argument screens keep showing up (even if the yellow meters are full this can happen). The screens show up because you don’t know how to interact with the system yet and as indicated in the instructions, the yellow meters represent how you think each person is doing. That being said, there is a way to win this game but its not that important. The game isn’t even meant to be played for more than a few minutes and that definitely isn’t long enough to figure out how to win. The game tries to get the player to experience the time constrained, frustrating and confusing decisions that happen in even ordinary and important discussions and realize that they have a lot to learn.

There is a consistent underlying logic at work behind the scenes no matter how much it may seem otherwise. There is always a right response to choose. The hard part is keeping track of what response corresponds to what scrolling message and choosing who to respond to. Learning this underlying logic is not unlike trying to learn how your partner thinks. However, a goal is not for the player learn the logic because it is right as the specifics of it only represent what I think right now about my relationship.

As for understanding the system at work, a hint is that yellow always represents the dude’s thoughts, anxieties and projections. Always paying attention to the yellow leads to trouble. This is especially evidenced by trying to multitask and disengaging your two halves and controlling them independently. This leads to confusion and loss of control because you don’t have time to understand your responses (not to mention the often negative implications of thinking about one thing while actually doing another). This also explains how yellow messages come from the right even when the girl is off screen.

The game is admittedly cryptic. In fact, when I was done I joked (to myself…) that I had succeeded in making a game about relationships even more confusing than Rod Humble’s The Marriage. I started by saying that this game was about something I didn’t really understand and I think that is why the game is so… the way it is. How do you formally specify (program) something you are still trying to learn yourself? About something that it may not even be possible to fully understand? This is an issue that was really brought to the forefront when I designed this game. My instincts tell me that these sorts of issues can be best explored through interactive systems – but I don’t know why and it sure seems difficult.

I should clarify (or confuse the matter more…) that this game doesn’t try to ask a question about an important issue of humanity where the purpose is to have the player interrogate their reactions, thoughts and beliefs about it (like many of Jason Rohrer’s games). Instead, I created this game to express a sensation, a frustration, and an experience. Playing it may lead to questions and interrogation but the primary purpose was to express something that I feel and don’t necessarily think. I think this prioritization is what I think leads me to my arguably unplayable games but for now I am OK with that. In my life right now, I have been trying to create games like I create music. I am still figuring out what exactly that means, but I always come back to it whenever I talk about my games. I will definitely be talking about this more later…

Wii Music

Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews (4/10?) that the game/play thing/whatever is receiving I would like to publicly declare that this game provides a much more musical and expressive experience than Guitar Hero and Rock Band combined. Of course I am not trying to slam those great games, but Wii Music actually opens up the line of musical communication between musicians and non musicians. That is an innovation and accomplishment that is worthy of praise.

Nintendo does a lot of good for the world and I am glad they are making money.

Anyhow, more to come!