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Today was the most fascinating and inspirational day yet! Unfortunaltely, I don’t have the time or the energy right now to cover everything I’d like. Instead, I’ll give you some bare-bones notes on what happened now, then come back and fill them in later.
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So here I am in San Francisco again, getting ready for the first day of the 26th annual Game Developer’s Conference. Registration isn’t cheap, and neither were the plane tickets and hotel reservations. I don’t actually work for a game company, and the number of games I’ve made can be counted on a single finger. So why am I here?
The GDC represents all that I love and hate about the current state of video game design. It’s big, it’s loud, it’s crass, it’s commercial. It’s juvenile and gaudy and shallow. But there are moments of real beauty here, too: talks that inspire and uplift, people looking for a deeper meaning, developers striving to make games into something more than merely a form of entertainment. That’s why I’m here; to be reminded of the fact that there are other people in the world just as passionate about games as I am, and just as determined to see them become something greater than they are now. To make new friends, find new ideas, and become inspired to create something new and radical and marvelous. If you like, you can come along with me on my search for secrets, here in the heart of the video game industry. Let’s go exploring!
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Independent games hold a very dear place in my heart. I love games, and the quirkier and more experimental they are, the better. Large corporations can’t make quirky, experimental games very easily because of the risk that experimentation entails—with some of the larger blockbuster games requiring teams of hundreds of people and budgets of tens of millions of dollars, it’s no wonder that big publishers tend to stick to established franchises and proven formulas. If left unchecked, this can lead to stagnation and decay, and the industry suffers as a result. This is where the independent developers come in. Since independent developers aren’t tied to big publishers, they have more freedom to make riskier games on smaller budgets.
IndieCade is a festival celebrating independent games and the people who make them, held every year in downtown Culver City, Los Angeles. It’s been called “the Sundance of video games,” and in addition to having many independent games set up for attendees to play, there are talks, panels, activities, and “big games” that attendees can participate in. This year, I went to see the sights and try to meet new people and find new inspirations, and that’s exactly what happened.
The most interesting new game I played at the festival was a bit unusual; it’s called Johann Sebastian Joust, and it’s a game played with up to six motion-sensing controllers (PS3 Move, specifically) and no graphics. Each player activates their controller (which lights up in a different color to quickly indicate which player is which) and faces each other as music begins to play in slow motion. If you move your controller too quickly, it will vibrate and flash red, indicating that you’re out of the game; the objective is to be the last player with an active controller. At random intervals the music will speed up, indicating that you can move a bit faster without losing, but you have to be careful to listen for when the music slows down again or you’ll be out of the game! The genius of this game is that, although it encourages very physical play with people trying to move their opponents’ controllers, the need to keep your own controller from moving too quickly keeps the game from getting out of control. The fact that people have to move in slow motion really does make it feel like jousting or fencing; it’s surprisingly elegant.
There were plenty of interesting graphics-based games too, of course. One of my favorites was Fez, a Metroid-style platforming/exploration game where the 2-dimensional protagonist gains the ability to rotate his flat world into the third dimension. Each level has four sides, and each side plays like a traditional Mario-style 2D platformer, but at any time you can rotate the world to show another side. It’s very clever, and the art style and music are gorgeous. Another game I liked, along similar lines, was a simple title called The Depths to Which I Sink. Played in full 3-D, it’s a game about depth perception where you control a simple bouncing dot in a three-dimensional box. Windows, hoops, and obstacles float through the box, and your objective is to fall/rise through the hoops and break the windows while avoiding the obstacles. It’s a lot of fun and surprisingly engaging. The Depths to Which I Sink was so popular, in fact, that it garnered enough of the attendee’s votes to win the Audience Choice award. Another game that intrigued me was a game for the iPad, which had come out a few months ago. It’s improbably named “Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP” and is an eccentric point-and-click adventure that consists almost entirely of exploring an expansive, lovingly detailed 2D world of beautiful pixels, humorous characters, and incredible music. It’s almost more of a meditative experience than a game, and I was sorry I was only able to play it for a few minutes. Other favorites included Antichamber, a philosophical first-person puzzle game involving the navigation of very strange, often non-Euclidean spaces, and At a Distance, a similarly mind-bending two-player cooperative game where the biggest hurdle to completion is figuring out the rules! There were a lot of other games there that seemed interesting, but I didn’t get a chance to play all of them—there was everything from a cooperative platformer where the two players have to invent their own gestural language (called Way, this game won the Developer’s Choice award), to a puzzle-platformer game where players manipulate gravity and navigate Escher-like “impossible” environments (the name of this one was The Bridge), to a magnetic “kiss controller” where couples actually use their tongues to control the game! Good stuff.
In addition to the games on display, there were also some interesting panels and sessions. I got to participate in one called “iron game designer”, in which three teams were chosen from the audience and had to come up with a game that they could play and test out then and there. Each game had to be based on a theme that the audience chose (the Amish), and had to incorporate a “secret ingredient” (which turned out to be bananas). Later on in the day, there was a talk I’m still recovering from by Adam Saltsman, maker of the Flash game development kit Flixel. He talked about such high-level philosophical concepts as death, infinity, and the true nature of the sublime, all in front of a 60-minute animation of a spaceship launch. The day after that, Phil Fish (the developer of Fez) gave an even more experimental “talk” in which he did not say a single word. Instead, he showed a slide show, accompanied by music, that began with the text “a thousand pictures are worth a million words.” Then he proceeded to click though, yes, one thousand collected images in time with the music. The presentation lasted ten minutes and could probably have been made into a bestselling music video.
The conference wrapped up with a party (and, of course, a game), followed by the presentation of the Audience Choice and Developer’s Choice awards. I had a lot of fun and am definitely looking forward to going back next year—who knows, maybe I’ll have a game on display myself!
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Open your favorite music program right now, play some music, and turn on the visualizer. Look at it for a minute or two. Put it in the background while you read the rest of this essay.
Back yet? Good. Now, what you’ve been looking at is art. I don’t mean to say that it’s Art with a capital “A”, or even good but “low” art–that’s not what I want to talk about here. All I mean to say is that you’re looking at some form of creative expression, as distinct from the music you’re listening to as a film is from its soundtrack. If we agree that fractal art is a legitimate form of creative expression, it’s hard to say your visualizer isn’t. But…what kind of medium is it?
It’s a moving image, so it’s certainly nothing like prose or painting, and it doesn’t seem to be film, because you never see the same thing twice, and what you see is dependent on the music. It’s tempting to call it a game, but I think this is a mistake. It’s not like any game we’ve seen before: it has no objectives or goals, no notion of progress or completion, and very little interactivity. In fact, the little we can do to interact with it–change the music–results in the least interesting behavior. It looks much better if we just let the music play. The program is interacting with the music, not the player–you don’t “play” this game at all, you only watch it! It doesn’t even seem to have any rules except in a very abstract sense. You could, I suppose, argue that it still counts as a game, that the music is the “player” and the lines of code that govern the program’s behavior are the “rules”. But doesn’t that seem like cheating a little? If the categorization were that simple, we would still be calling films “photoplays”. Why don’t we? Because calling them photoplays is a disservice to the unique strengths and weaknesses of the medium. Can you imagine what film would be like if we still thought of them as “plays, only on a screen”? The film industry would be a joke! A film that was shot on location instead of on a set would be considered “experimental”, and “avant-garde” would be a film where the camera moves from place to place instead of remaining static. No one would have even thought to actually cut and edit the film! The same is happening now with video games: because we call them something they’re not, because we still think of them as “games, only on a computer”, we limit what they are capable of.
Look back at your visualizer. What you’re looking at is not a game: it is something new entirely. The fact is, games are not new. Games have been around longer than movies, longer than books, longer than writing. Kittens play games; they are probably older than language itself. Games are not new. Computers are. Computers have given birth to a medium of expression so new, so bizarre, so unexpected, that so far we can only identify it by what it is not. The video game industry–even those on the very edge of the avant-garde–still hold to the assumption that games are made to be played. But programs don’t have to be played. They don’t have to be interacted with. They don’t have to be “fun”. Like the best true art, they can be beautiful for their own sake.
I don’t mean to say that we should stop making games. Computers are a wonderful tool, and–like in many other media–they have allowed us to do things with the medium that weren’t possible before. I don’t even mean to say that games can’t be art, in the highest sense of the word–Brenda Brathwaite’s Train, a game made without a single silicon chip or digital display, is as unquestionably a work of Art as any painting or song I have ever experienced. What I am saying is that by fixating on games, we are ignoring the potential of this new, unnamed medium. What’s worse, by confusing this new medium with the medium of games, we’re putting severe limits on what we can do with it. Film gave us a new kind of stage play, it is true–any play, after all, can be easily translated into a film. Similarly, any game can be translated into a video game. But in both cases, the true potential of the medium lies in the things it can do differently than that which came before. Games can be wonderful–and like plays, they have strengths that their successor lacks–but these new programs, these “notgames“, have the potential be so much more.
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Professor Brian Moriarty‘s talk was not, he explained, an apology in the sense of an expression of regret, but rather in the sense of a defense. Many months ago, film critic and author Roger Ebert sparked a firestorm of controversy when he commented in a blog post that he was not, and would never be, interested in playing video games. The debate reached its peak when, in a follow-up post, Ebert (rather rashly) claimed that “video games can never be art”. Needless to say, many in the gaming community were incensed at this claim. Ebert’s comment produced such an explosion of criticism, in fact, that he ultimately retracted his position and said he wished he’d never brought it up. Though he still says he will never play a video game himself, he no longer maintains that they can never be art.
So what’s to defend? Moriarty’s defense is not of this retracted claim, but of one made in support of it: the fact that no one has been able to cite a single game “worthy of comparison” to the great works of composers, filmmakers, novelists, and painters. And it’s true–I’ve played and loved games most of my life, and even I have trouble thinking of such a game. Why is this? Why have games failed to produce what Moriarty refers to as “sublime art”? There are several reasons, he thinks, but there is one excuse we cannot use, and that is the excuse that games are a new art form. Games, in fact, have been around for millennia; they are almost certainly older than all other art forms, and quite probably older than language itself–even rats play games. Computers are new; games are very, very old. What’s more, the idea of great art is actually relatively recent–art used to be considered on purely practical terms. Now that the concept has become part of our culture, however, we need to distinguish it somehow from so-called “low” art. Moriarty uses the term “kitsch” to describe this kind of art. What distinguishes kitsch, he says, is that it is unambiguous, conventional, and never challenging. With kitsch, you are never in any doubt as to what you’re supposed to feel. Kitsch is all surface, “pop” art. Unfortunately, he argues, kitsch is so pervasive in our culture that an enormous number of people never experience any other kind! Why is this? Simply put, it’s because “entertainment”, and games in particular, are an industry. Industries are profit-driven and hence risk-averse. Kitsch, for these companies, is a risk reduction strategy. Kitsch, unlike sublime art, is durable–blockbuster films like Avatar won’t suffer if the dialogue is awkward in a scene or two, but painstaking attention to detail is crucial for sublime art. Even independent game developers, who unlike public companies are not legally obligated to make a profit, are ultimately subject to the same commercial pressures. They have slightly more room for innovation and experimentation, but in the end, if no one buys their games they will go out of business and have to do something else. Hence, most games tend to be shallow and escapist. “True art”, Moriarty points out, “is not an escape from life, it’s a way to deal with life as it is”.
All that said, is there reason to think that games might someday become an art form? Moriarty isn’t so sure. As a Romantic, he cites Schopenhauer’s art theory and contrasts it with games. Schopenhauer claimed that misery, pain and struggle are born from the “will to live” that drives all living things, and that the only way to escape this misery is by subverting the will through the contemplation of sublime art. Games, however, are about choices, and choice is a fundamental expression of will–how can will be used to transcend will? Art, Moriarty says, has no goal, no purpose, no winning condition. Games, in his opinion, are anathema to sublime art, which he elegantly describes as “the still evocation of the inexpressible”.
What do I think of all this? On the whole, I agree with Moriarty; I think he makes excellent points. However, I think it is a mistake to assume that games must fundamentally be about an exercise of will on the part of the player. Many of the best, most expressive games actually put severe and deliberate restrictions on the player’s choices: games like Silent Hill 2 and Shadow of the Colossus move us because we feel complicit, not because we feel powerful or free. Moreover, games do not necessarily need to have a goal, a purpose, or a winning condition. It is possible, I think, to create games that are beautiful strictly for their own sake. Industry, of course, is always a difficult barrier to overcome–and as Moriarty points out, even those who set out to make art games entirely in disregard of industry run the risk of making “arty” games instead, which are simply traditional games disguised with quirky graphics and pretentious narratives. However, I think the bigger issue is one he didn’t address at all–the fact that we are still unsure what games really are.
Summary:
If I had to sum up the most important takeaway from this entire conference in one sentence, it would be this: what are video games? Nearly every speaker I heard that addressed the topic of artistic expression in games touched on this point, directly or indirectly, at some point during their talk. Not only is it an open question, most developers don’t even seem to be aware that there’s a problem–Frank Lantz, in his talk on day three, was the only developer I saw speak who addressed the question directly, and he only touched on it. Does a game need goals? Competition? Rules? Interaction? All of the above? None of the above? This confusion makes trying to be expressive in games very difficult, because you have no pre-established conventions upon which you can rely; you have no idea what works or why, so you basically have to shoot in the dark and hope you hit something. The issue is further confused by the fact that video games may not necessarily be games–for instance, traditional games are abstract, defined by their rules alone, whereas video games are aesthetically rich, and their rules tend to be implicit. As far as I’m concerned, the question of what games are is the most important in the field. If we can answer that question, then the question of how to use games as a tool for creative expression will be almost easy.
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There were a couple of really exceptional talks today; a perfect end to an amazing week. Here’s a brief overview of the sessions I attended:
The Story of Cave Story
Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya, the one-man team behind the retro cult hit Cave Story, is really adorable in person. In his talk he presented a retrospective of the process of creating Cave Story, and his philosophy of design. It all seemed very interesting. Unfortunately, Pixel doesn’t speak English, and I somehow missed the fact that there were handheld translators available, so I had to sit through the entire lecture listening to it in Japanese. My Japanese is just good enough that I could sometimes tell when he was talking about one of the items on his slides (which were in English). Oops.
The Game Design Challenge: Bigger Than Jesus
The Game Design Challenge is an annual competition between a few leading designers in the industry; this year’s combatants were returning champion Jenova Chen, industry legend John Romero, and independent upstart Jason Rohrer. This year’s design challenge was to design a game that was in some way also a religion, or a religion that was in some way also a game. Jason, the first contestant, presented a really interesting idea called “Chain World.” Chain World is a Minecraft mod; there is only one copy of Chain World on Earth. The rules are basic Minecraft, with a couple of additions. The first additional rule is that you can only play once–if you die even once while playing, that’s it, you’re done for life. The second rule is that the game ends when you die–for this reason, suicide is allowed if you decide to finish playing at a certain point. Third, signs with text on them are not allowed, nor are you allowed to talk with others about what you’ve done. Finally, once you have played Chain World, you must pass it on to someone else who wants to play it. In this game, Jason was trying to communicate the sacred feeling of being a small, anonymous part of a long chain of history. He related a story to the audience of his first (and only) playthrough of the game with his daughter; the two of them were both excited, hoping to build many things that later players would be able to come across and explore. However, early on he encountered an unexpected dangerous situation (in accordance with the no-discussion rule, he didn’t say what) and was killed. It was, he said, the most poignant death he has ever experienced. His daughter burst into tears, and was so frustrated that she wanted to smash the flash drive containing the game. After his talk, Jason gave the flash drive to a member of the audience, so that they could be the second person to play it. Next was John Romero, who engaged the audience in a Twitter game. The first twelve people to follow the messiah (@messiah6502, the son of @god6502) became his apostles. Each apostle was then given a stack of sticky notes and encouraged to try to convert members of the audience by giving them the notes; they had only two minutes in which to do this. Once the two minutes were up, converts were asked to look at their notes to see if they had stars (representing miracles) on them. The apostle who had given out the most miracles was the winner. Last came Jenova Chen, who outlined his proposal for making TED into a game/idea-propagating religion. Essentially, this meant redesigning the TED website so that popular ideas (that is, ideas that have influenced the most people) are easily visible and more heavily promoted, so that speakers have their own pages and can list other speakers who have influenced them, and adding feedback loops so that the more influential your ideas are, the easier it becomes to spread them. At the end of the session, by audience vote, Jason Rohrer won a decisive victory.
An Apology for Roger Ebert
Professor Brian Moriarty (yes, his name really is “professor Moriarty”) gave what was probably my favorite talk of the entire week. I liked it so much, in fact, that I’m not going to talk about it here, as I’m too tired and it would take too long to give it the treatment it deserves. Instead, I will write my summary and reactions tomorrow and post them separately.
Classic Game Postmortem: Raid on Bungeling Bay
Will Wright is one of the most famous and influential designers in the game industry today. His contributions to the game development community include such landmark titles as Spore, The Sims, and Sim City. To date, The Sims is the best-selling computer game franchise of all time. Raid on Bungeling Bay, released in 1984, was one of the first games that Wright created, and the editor for the game went on to evolve into the original Sim City. The structure of the presentation was a fairly typical coverage of the game’s genesis, design, and production, though presented with Wright’s particularly clear and humorous style. There was an interlude in the middle of the talk, where he spent some time talking about the Soviet space program, which was a bit of a non sequitur although plenty interesting. Not a whole lot to say here; look up RoBB if you care to know more about it. One thing did interest me about his talk, however, and that was when he mentioned that one of his goals in making the game was to create a (relatively) large, “clocklike” toy world for the player to explore. That was something that really appealed to him in earlier games, he said, and he wanted to expand that idea and make a game “with a world big enough to get lost in”. This comment, though only mentioned in passing, really resonated with me because my favorite moments in games tend to involve that sense of place, of being lost in a self-contained world. During Q&A I asked him if he had ever thought of making a game that consisted solely of a world to explore–no objectives, score, or rules–and he replied that there are some games that already do this to a large degree. Myst, for instance, has puzzles and a plot, but it is not exaggeration to say that they exist almost as an excuse to give the player this world to explore. Some of the other games made by the Miller brothers go even further in this direction–one of Wright’s favorite moments in gaming, he said, was in just such a game, where he was standing outside at night, listening to the chirping of crickets. I wonder why we don’t see more of these kinds of experiences in games, given the profound impact they can have on a player.
General Impressions:
Overall, an outstanding end to a spectacular week. I’ve heard a lot of talks by some brilliant people and they’ve given me a lot to think about. Tomorrow I’ll finish off the week with a description of professor Moriarty’s talk and a summary of all I’ve learned so far.
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In Search of Secrets 