New Website for Meaningful Gameplay, First Game Jam
I just launched a new website dedicated to creating meaningful gameplay: www.meaningfulgameplay.com. Other developers in the community seem to be interested in the idea, so I figured it deserved it’s own site. The goal is to create a resource for other game designers by developing prototypes that explore this topic and then analyze them and share that analysis.
The first post is to promote the first game jam for it. I mentioned the idea with my other Iowa Game-Dev Friendship buddies and people seemed pretty open to the idea. So our next game jam, scheduled for August 12-14, will be dedicated to meaningful gameplay. It will be held at BitMethod in Des Moines, Iowa, USA, and online at the Meaningful Gameplay website. Will Canada has a post about the game jam on his site, too.
At the end of the jam, we’ll be submitting our prototypes and analyses to the website to begin creating a resource for the benefit of the game development community.
A Meaningful Gameplay Game Jam
In the last post I was wondering where the sense of urgency was for creating meaningful games. It even sparked some interesting discussion on whether or not one should reduce the solution to a formula. I don’t think we’re in a race, but I think there seems to be a disconnect between the number of people willing to play/calling for games that are more deeply meaningful and the number of people doing something about it.
A Definition
Several developers have asked “What does a meaningful game even mean?” This is a very fair question. Here is my own attempt at a definition of “meaningful game.”
Meaningful game: a game that has significance or provides purpose for how one lives life.
Games that are meaningful try to reach outside of themselves. They are about more then their own consumption. Maybe they give players deeper empathy, or sympathy, or comfort, or inspire an action outside of the game world. They are meant to transform, even if it’s just a little bit. A game that’s “only fun” might be nostalgic by referring to past 8-bit games, while a “meaningful game” might be nostalgic by referring to a child-parent relationship.
Earlier I linked to a video of Brandon Boyer’s GDC talk. He mentions the 3 artists he keeps praising whenever he meets people. His reason for continuing to share them was because their art was meaningful to him in this same way. Their art affected how he lived.
There are some games out there that create this effect…as a secondary, often temporary point that serves some other goal. But very few games are completely dedicated to this, and there are even fewer resources for how to make more games like that.
The Problem
So why the disconnect? Part of the reason is that when a designer sits down to try to create meaningful gameplay, it’s simply hard to know where to begin. It’s easier to start designing a competitive fighting game dedicated to gaining coordination skills, or an RPG dedicated to managing stats well or character development in an armor-building or combative sense.
But what about a fighting game that explores the philosophy of fighting? What about an RPG dedicated to character development in an emotional or psychological sense? Let’s get real here. Do we even know it’s possible to dedicate a sizable game to something like that?
There just isn’t that much out there to build on, even for smaller games.
A Possible Solution
Therefore, we need some baby steps. We should hold game jams fully dedicated to meaningful gameplay. It’s a chance for designers to help each other learn how to make more meaningful game experiences and to explore the potential for games to affect peoples’ lives.
What happens at a meaningful gameplay game jam? We each explore a game mechanic or other non-mechanic game element using prototyping tools. That means the intention is not to create an entire game, but to explore an element of a game from multiple perspectives. The challenge is for a developer to pick a mechanic or element that would result in meaningful gameplay and (1) develop several prototypes of it in the first 36-40 hours or so. The last 8-12 hours would be dedicated to (2) writing a critical analysis of the resulting prototypes in a text document and then having a (3) show & tell to share the prototypes and analysis. Then the analysis and feedback would be (4) posted on a website dedicated to meaningful gameplay to share with the game development community. That way we are providing resources for making all these meaningful games that everyone was asking for at this year’s GDC!
An Example Result
When I explain the idea to people, I keep going back to Jordan Magnuson’s Loneliness as a perfect example of this. If loneliness as a mechanic was explored at a meaningful gameplay game jam, you’d have 4 or 5 different versions of where he put his “message” or different versions of how the boxes moved around, followed by an analysis of how he thought the concept was communicated in each version.
Then later, as a developer who wanted to create a game that explored the concept of loneliness, you could go to the website, play through the prototypes, read the analysis of what the developer thought, and then start prototyping your own, maybe completely different, take on loneliness. The resources help you keep in mind something that did or did not work, or otherwise they just give you food for thought.
The collection of prototypes and analyses acts as a scientific journal of sorts for game design that other designers can then use. So you’d have something that’s not only useful for the creators, but also something useful for the game development community at large. That’s a good thing because you will then rely on that community in the future to help you improve.
A more informal version of this is already happening at sites like Experimental Gameplay Project. It’s just that there’s usually less analysis since developers are rushing to finish a game for a competition.
But What About Art?
Some developers have suggested that this sounds like meaningful experience is being reduced to something easily quantifiable, like a mathematical formula. I am very grateful to see this, because as a person who enjoys good debate, I would probably be presenting the other side as well. But that is not my intention.
It would be hard to disagree that there are (at least) two sides to the process of making games: the artistic side and the design side. This is a problem with the design side of games, not the artistic side. I think great progress can be made in game design through more experimentation, critical analysis, and building off of each others’ discoveries, as evidenced by science as a whole for the last 1000 years or so.
When it comes to the artistic side of games, Keita Takahashi seems to have it right when he says that progress can made in games through game developers living a rich and varied life and taking in inspiration from many things outside of the field of games. So let’s assume that a game developer who wants to create meaningful games will fulfill artistic needs in a more personal way, or at least in a way that’s less relevant to a quantifiable design process. Most of us have the life experience needed to at least take games a step deeper, either through trying to communicate our own experience or through creating a “space for searching.”
In the end, this is meant to improve the craftsmanship of design and its process. Its the ability to take what needs to be communicated by the artist and successfully express it through the medium of games, or the ability to build the space for searching. That ability is something we’ll need in order to create more meaningful games, and this kind of game jam could help develop it.
Special thanks to Jerry Shkavritko for suggesting I take the meaningful gameplay analysis idea and match it with a game jam!
Where is Our Sense of Urgency for Creating Meaningful Games?
I just returned from a wonderful experience at the Christian Game Developer’s Conference. The trip ended up being pretty last-minute, as we found out we had an opportunity to VJ with Weiv for the band BarlowGirl (more on how that went later).
The Success?? of Christian?? Games
My favorite talk of the conference was the last one, a roundtable discussion that led with a question about the perceived lack of success of Christian games compared to other media. I just came across a post by John Hanan about it, which inspired this post.
To me, the panelists’ answers mostly avoided the issue by trying to challenge the question – you see this a lot in politics – with rebuttals like “What does success really mean?” and “What does a Christian game really mean?”
LAME. At that point, my passions started to stir (and they are still stirred as you can tell by my last post!). To me, exploring definitions is much less important at this point, if you look at the progress made – or lack thereof – in game design that is deeply meaningful at all, let alone that is Christian specifically.
We Need More Shotguns
Now, do I believe we’re in a golden age of videogames? Of course! But that doesn’t mean we’ve made a lot of progress in making them meaningful. The exciting part is that we’re shotgunning new game ideas due mostly to the Internet, and in part to more-open-than-console mobile platforms. But I want to make something clear: we need a hell of a lot more shotguns.
And so, just like I asked at the end of that panel, I ask it here. And just like I prefaced this question at the end of that panel, I preface it here:
Trip Hawkins’ “Dark Age of Videogames” is a LIE
Through a hashtag typo by Nicole Lazzaro on twitter, I was made aware of the GamesBeat conference happening today and a story about Trip Hawkins speaking on the state of the videogames industry. As a game developer who’s actually somewhat aware of what’s happening in the games industry, reading through the article naturally resulted in outrage:
Software licensing has hurt innovation in the video game industry — with social game maker Zynga being the exception to that rule — thanks to large game companies like Nintendo, said Electronic Arts founder and social gaming company Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins.
Zynga. Zynga?! You gotta be kidding me. They don’t make games, they buy game companies. Zynga is a company that consumes instead of creates. To use a food analogy, Zynga is a glutton, not a chef. The ridiculousness continues:
I think we actually had our golden age when game development was using floppy disks and it was an open free platform when we could all make games like we wanted to make
That’s a bunch of crap. That golden age has re-emerged in the last couple years and is happening TODAY. It’s called indie games. Anyone, at any point, can make the game she wants to make. And she actually does in the indie games community. That’s basically the whole ethos behind indie games.
Where has Trip Hawkins been? Is he really that oblivious? Of course he isn’t. It’s strategically disadvantageous to mention the beauty, the diversity, the life of the indie games community. It’ll threaten his sales.
So don’t listen to guys like this. Videogames are alive and well. 
The very identity of videogames is constantly expanding and morphing. We are in a golden age. Enjoy the sunlight!
NOTE: Trip has generously taken time out of the conference to defend himself below, please see the comments.
Heart containers for Japan by Ted Martens
The Master Sword from Ted Martens on Vimeo.
Friend and ally Ted Martens has released a screensaver app entitled Heart containers for Japan. 100% of the proceeds are going to relief to help those affected by the earthquake and now continued radiation.
The atmosphere is great and it is both charming and soothing. Awesome work Ted.
I’ve been reading a really amazing book about social justice and it has convicted me and made me realize how apathetic I tend to be to those in need. Not in the emotional sense, but in the actually doing something about it sense. This is a great example of someone using their unique gifts to benefit others. I am proud to call him my friend (and best man).
Less Stuff, More Meaning
This is another one of those posts that’s been sitting on my hard drive. Pity I didn’t have the motivation to release this with the other indie game-length posts, even though it’s half finished. In this case, I wrote it almost 2 years ago. I actually still agree with it, although it makes me laugh how academic and logical I am with my argument. Maybe others will find it interesting, and since I will likely not finish the second half any time soon, I’m sharing it now…
Oprah’s Game Design Wisdom
A while back, Oprah had a show about simplicity. I don’t really watch Oprah, but as I came home to grab some food, I walked in at just the right time to clearly hear her closing remarks, which included something along the lines of “the goal for this year is less stuff, and more meaning.”
Oprah isn’t explicitly providing that as a Christian message, but having a simple and efficient life just makes sense given my experience in life so far and more importantly, it’s a biblical principle that’s mentioned in several different places. It struck me, and naturally, my next thought was “How can this be applied to videogames?” What first struck me was how similar that statement was to how Rules of Play defines good game design. But I realized that she started with “less stuff,” and the more I thought about it, the more important the concept of “less stuff” became.
Effective Game Design is Meaningful
Rules of Play states “the goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play.” This assumes several things. Design is intentional (has a goal) and design can be measured in terms of success (how well it achieved the goal). Agreed. After that is that game design creates play – as in what you do with a game is play it. Lastly, it assumes meaning can also be measured in terms of success, with more meaning being more successful. Agreed, although meaning is difficult to measure.
So if a person is describing the value of a game, the person who says “this game has better design” would really be saying “this game creates more meaningful play to me.” That makes sense, so it seems like a sound definition. However, when you consider the concept of efficiency, there are cases where the definition creates problems.
Here’s an example. There’s a game that gives you a certain amount of meaning – let’s call that amount m – in 3 hours of play. There’s another game that gives you m meaning in 5 hours of play. Which game is better? According to Rules of Play, neither is better. Both create meaningful play, since the definition never addresses time.
Effective Game Design is Meaningful and Efficient
If time spent on this earth wasn’t limited, then that would be ok. But time spent here is limited, so a person can only play so many games. Therefore, if a person plays a game with the same amount of meaning but in a shorter time, the person can play another game in the time that was saved. That leads to more meaning experienced over a game player’s lifetime, which, according to the assumptions, is better than less meaning. I think this makes sense, since players already do this by seeking out and playing the games that are most meaningful to them.
If all this is true, then successful game design is the creation of meaningful play in the shortest experience. And consequently, the success of a game design is measured by an average representing the amount of meaningful play per a length of experience.
Implications of Game Design Efficiency
The addition of the concept of time to the definition of effective game design, and its subsequent affect on valuing a game, has wide-ranging implications, and also describes several game-playing behaviors.
…
Aaannnnd that’s all the further I got, sorry for the cliffhanger. 
The Importance of Game Engine Authorship, Part 2
In Part 1 I said I would talk about our game Undefined Behavior more specifically. Maybe that wording was a little too liberal. By the end of the game jam, we didn’t really have a game per se. With that said, what we did end up with had a distinct feel to it.
The game was supposed to be a sort of first-person puzzle game where you’re a programmer in a highly augmented reality world who accidentally introduced a viral bug which starts to glitch that world more and more. You have to explore the environment and using your “debugging tools” to study specific glitches and figure out what’s wrong. Over time you realize what the symptoms are, which leads to an “ah-ha” moment where you realize what you did followed by a climax last-minute bug fixing. I’d love to come back to the idea at some point, especially since we didn’t get very far with the glitches. Evan did have an idea to use the raw memory data from the program itself to glitch things out, which I thought was great.
As I mentioned earlier, Plaidgadget is a 2D vector-based engine. Despite that, we decided we were going to try out a pseudo-3D, old school FPS style like Doom or Wolfenstein. He was able to take his figure animation system to load in an object drawn from multiple angles, so we could have the object rotate as you walked around it, along with an edit mode for placing objects in a level. For the 3D look, he places figures on the screen and scales them manually, which in some ways is more interesting to me than a fully 3D space.
2D vs. 3D
Quick side note: I’m not sure what it is about polygonal 3D (although I certainly have theories!), but many times polygonal 3D graphics just doesn’t seem to have as much character as 2D graphics (it appears I’m not alone in my opinion). An irritation has been rattling around inside my head for the last couple years…concept art looks better than the final end product of a videogame. Concept art is usually just so much more inspiring and full of wonder, and that bothers me. One of my goals in life is to be successful enough that I can lead a “videogame art direction think tank” that has the sole job of learning how to translate the awesomeness of concept art into videogames. I already have a big long list of things for this hypothetical team to do. Maybe someday…
Pushing Against Self-Imposed Boundaries
So anyway, I think a big part of the distinct feel we had comes from trying to hack pseudo-3D into a 2D engine. Despite the fact that I’ve read about this before, actually doing it made me realize first-hand that you can come up with some interesting things when you intentionally give yourself stricter boundaries and then push against them. By taking Plaidgadget, an engine intentionally limited in scope, and trying to see what creative things we can do within those limitations, we ended up with something interesting.
It was a rewarding enough experience that I’ll be thinking about how I can do it again in the future.
The Importance of Game Engine Authorship, Part 1
Our local game developer club, Iowa Game-Dev Friendship, held what I think was our 8th game jam in Ames this weekend. As expected, it was an awesome time. This time my team had a big setback, and because of it I came to a profound realization about game engine authorship and its importance for a meaningful creative experience. Developers and designers talk about the importance of videogame authorship, but this weekend I realized in a new way how that can translate into game development tools as well.
Background
Before I explain in more detail, you should know I’m increasingly becoming a “get things done” kind of guy, which is manifested by my avid support of the Unity game development tool due to its ability to get something up and running quickly. Naturally I want to use it for every game jam, and this one was no different.
While brainstorming ideas over pizza, my friend Evan Balster of Plaid Notion (Infinite Blank, Sense of Wonder Night finalist and Kickstarter fundee) and I came up with an interesting game idea based on a mutual affection for glitch art and decided to team up for the game jam. I convinced him to use Unity, but due to some apparent bug in Windows 64 bit, it simply would not install on his machine after at least an hour of effort. In the end, we decided to use his own engine Plaidgadget, and I had to face one of my biggest game jam fears: spending the first 8+ hours setting up the dev environment. I thought we were doomed, but I guess God had other plans…
Evan as game engine
If you’ve ever met Evan, it won’t take you long to realize that he’s a character. He’s very eccentric, which would likely turn off some, but he seemed to me to have a certain innocence and lovable genuine-ness. This feeling was recently confirmed when he offered to help me in a way that only a true friend would.
It didn’t take me long to realize how much of his own character was present in Plaidgadget. If anyone could ever call a game engine “charming in its quirkiness,” I think you would say that about this.
Plaidgadget is a strictly 2D vector-based game engine – designed with a specific goal to not be a generic do-everything engine. It even has some of its own art tools, including a “figure editor” where you can draw vector shapes and even skin them to bones with simple IK. The workflow is pretty unique, designed with the help of Plaid Notion partner Beau Blyth (Action Fist, Fish Face, Uberleben) and includes a transform tool based on concentric circular areas for pivot, move, rotate/scale, and rotate. It even lets you animate with forward and backward keys and primitive previous-frame onion skinning through showing the outlines, but has no real visual interface for keyframes.
At first glance, the figure editor seems ghetto and very limited, but eventually I came to realize that those limitations really helped me to focus. It actually changed the way I thought about creating, which is what all of my favorite tools do. By using this tool, I understood more and more how providing a large number of options to perform some task can sometimes slow you down by making you value specific techniques more highly than you should, causing you to spend too much time trying to determine the best course of action. I thought it was funny how much I valued Unity’s “get things done” ability yet missed how it can also sometimes work against that by offering so many choices and by trying to do everything. I was beginning to form a dogma.
Because Evan had a vision for a specific engine that could do one thing well and really put himself (and Beau) into it, Plaidgadget is essentially following the same mentality as many indie games. As a result, it’s both interesting and inspiring to use. Here was this tool that, despite some flaws, still allowed me to focus precisely because it was limited.
Game development philosophy repentance
This realization was liberating in a sense because it freed me from a sort of judgmental mindset about game dev tools. It lifted what was becoming an evil burden off my shoulders. And by the grace of God, that led to a sort of creative breakthrough toward the end of the weekend. This freedom inspired me to design a character and animate a simple walk cycle “traditionally,” i.e. with no skeleton, in about the course of an hour. It was a pretty big accomplishment for me considering I did no planning or sketching at all beforehand and since I don’t consider myself very good at drawing. I essentially sketched a character animation the way one sketches a thumbnail, and it gave me a whole new level of confidence.
I often read about people who say “I can’t believe what I was able to accomplish,” but don’t really experience it myself very much. This was one of those experiences, and I’m not sure if it would have happened had things gone the way I wanted them to. I still love Unity, but I feel like a changed man with an appreciation for what I now consider “indie tools” that have a singular vision and try to take one interesting idea and run with it the way indie games do.
In Part 2, I talk about our game more specifically and how it was impacted by different tools.
The Importance of Game Engine Authorship, Part 2
New digs
As an Impromptu Studio member, I was invited to the new BitMethod office space once it was secured. I decided to follow along, especially since there’s some space to expand here and since the price was very reasonable. I was an Impromptu member since day one, and I’ve come to like working along side Zach and the BitMethod crew. My new address is:
God at play
418 6th Ave
Suite 1210
Des Moines, IA 50309
There’s an open house November 16th from 4pm-7pm. If you’re interested, come check it out, the space has a cool set up. Here’s the sign you see when you come in, how internet-y.
More pics; moving in, some views from the offices.
Interactive Twitter friendship visualizer
My good friend Justin Wise asked me to help him out on the visual side with his BeDeviant Social Media Summit. I figured I’d take the opportunity to create something interactive using the Weiv platform that expressed something fundamental about social media. The end result is an interactive Twitter friendship visualizer.
The concept behind it is that it watches tweets filtered by a hashtag (I set it up to watch the summit’s #BDSMS hashtag). Every new user that tweets with that hashtag pops into the scene with a physical force, and then the visualizer looks up that person’s friends list. Like most things in infographics, the end result is larger than the sum of its parts. You understand how interconnected people are in a visual way. And (nerd alert) I use a hack for real-time ambient occlusion to shade overlapping squares. B-) The camera auto-zooms on the whole group, and you can switch to view each user individually – controlled in the crowd or on the stage with a Wii Remote, if desired.
As of right now, that’s all it can do. Future features include visualizing new tweets from the same user, and maybe displaying tweets themselves (which every other tweet-stream app does). I could also somehow visualize how active or popular a twitter user is. There are a lot of opportunities to show cool things, really.
I think this is a cool application of the Weiv platform that could be used for events like Justin’s summit, a conference, a church service, or even during the lead-up for a concert. Any time when you have a hashtag and want to visualize connections in a community, and encourage people to actively promote the event through social media. In the future I dream of creating a world through this visualization and exploring it with a character. Ahh dreams…
