TIGJam Midwest is next weekend, June 4th-6th, 2010, at Foundry Coworking. If you’re interested, RSVP here at Eventbrite: http://tigjammidwest.eventbrite.com

Here’s the official info:

TIGJam Midwest is an indie game jam where creatives – programmers, hackers, designers, artists, or musicians – get together and make videogames in a weekend. For those who aren’t familiar with game jams, they’re similar to events like the 48 Hour Film Project or Startup Weekend. It’s called TIGJam because our group is part of the TIGSource community, which is a developer community for indie games.

Our game jams usually have a theme, and TIGJam Midwest’s theme this year is “proverbs,” proposed by Mark Doeden of 8monkey Labs.  Participants will form teams, choose a specific proverb from a culture of their choice, and develop a game based on it. There could be games based on Chinese Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Christian proverbs, or more obscure cultures or religions.

The local community is encouraged to attend the show & tell at Impromptu Studio at 3pm-8pm on Sunday, where they will experience the games and meet local game developers. These won’t be your usual space marine shooters; expect raw and barely-finished games that explore satirical, brand new, or meaningful territory.

A couple other exciting things are in the works.  Alec Holowka of Aquaria fame will be giving a keynote Friday at 7pm.  Venom is providing free energy drinks, there could be a visit from Senator Jack Hatch to express his support of creative endeavors like this, and there are rumors of drink specials next door at the Des Moines Social Club.  Finally, barring some catastrophy, there should be free catered food the whole weekend.  Expect one or two other exciting things to get finalized closer to the event.

All this free stuff is thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Technology Association of Iowa.  It’s exciting to think that these organizations are supporting a culture of game development here in Iowa!

For the past year, I’ve been working on my own interactive projects that don’t involve game mechanics, so it was very relieving to find out there are others out there wanting to do things that are like games, but not quite games. And when ToT invited developers to join them, I saw an opportunity to be part of a like-minded community.

If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

I’m not 100% convinced that videogames proper are holding back the full potential for expression, but I have the same gut feeling as Tale of Tales that in many cases they are.

I suppose this comes from evidence that some of my favorite “games” lately have been things that actually have very minimal game elements to them. It took some dissection of Small Worlds, Today I Die, The Majesty of Colors, and others on the notgames forum in order to come to an official conclusion on that. But if I follow the trend forward, it could be possible that by having no elements at all, the experience would be even more expressive as a creator and enjoyable as a player.

An even larger amount of evidence comes when I stop to consider the unique elements of art forms (or media if you prefer), and how videogames don’t really offer anything truly unique.  This point is part of a very long-winded essay I have yet to publish, but the short story is that the “games” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames, and the “video” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames.

The “video” part I’m referring to – what I like to call a virtual, fictional interactive system – is what I love most about videogames. Basically it would be fictional media that fully utilizes the computer, including its input, computation, and output. Games would be a fine addition, but from my experience playing and creating them, they often create various forms of dissonance, especially when it comes to the more artistic/story-driven ones. A game system integrated with an artistic interactive experience usually feels duct-taped on top to me.

For example, the fact that I never finished The Dig because the puzzles were hard and I got tired of them really frustrates me. The puzzles are not why I loved The Dig, although they were interesting in their own right for a little while.  To me, it begs this question: If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

Thus, my conclusion is that it’s well worth my time to answer this fundamental question of my experience with games by doing. I will create The Dig minus its puzzles, or more specific to the game I have in mind: “Myst minus the puzzles.”

EDIT: This sounds a little misleading. I sort of got “microwaved” with a vision – a specific story idea – almost a year ago at a game jam. Since then, I’ve come up with a game idea for it, and after explaining the idea to Ted Martens, he told me what I was describing was basically Myst but without the puzzles. I realized the connection to my frustrations with The Dig after the fact.

As a final note, one of my goals as a developer is to make games (and notgames) for a variety of people, including those that are intimidated by or apathetic about games. I found this information graphic to be great motivation toward my goal, pulled from the notgames manifesto:

Make love, notgames.

Greg just wrote about Why do we do what we do? and eloquently summed up the hard-to-define reason for why we at Intuition create art:

These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them.  Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me.

I really like how he put this because it can be difficult to put into words.  He makes it look easy.  The only other thing I can compare this to is something from Judeo-Christian culture – the psalm.  This compulsion is why I created MEHC.  It’s not the kind of game I like to play, but I just needed to make it somehow.

Alec Holowka was kind enough to respond to Greg’s post and suggested we check out his recent post Why Art?.  I was inspired enough by both of them that my comment to both of their posts turned into this.  Check them out if you haven’t yet.

In Response To “Why Art?”

I’m very comforted and honored to be amongst such final gentlemen who can present a rational argument.  Alec makes a good point that anger about discussing art often comes from fear or misunderstanding.  I especially like the video he posted – that says as much about his point as the words that follow it.  We’re just a part of the continuum, communicating something about humanity to each other through time.  And because we are unique, the message will be different for each person.  I like that attitude.

What I got from his argument about why games are art specifically seems to be that art gives him something about life to relate to, and because games also give him something to relate to, that makes them art.  I would go even further and say that art is created (it doesn’t just happen), communicates something human (a story/idea/emotion), and is otherwise “non-functional.”  By that, I mean that the thing in question has no function other than the act of communication itself (thus separating the word from design).  And because video games have these properties, they are art, too.

I was a little confused by the statement about art being subjective, though.  Did he mean that the experience of art is subjective?  Or the work of art itself is subjective?  There is a distinction to make here, and it partially forms the basis to my answer of “Why art?”.

I believe that art can be perceived in a subjective way.  But isn’t the work of art itself – the video game in this case – an object?  It is a collection of code and binary data running on a computer of some sort with input and output.  That makes it material, existing in reality, which is objective by definition.

Furthermore, because art “speaks to us,” that seems to make it objective, too.  Something is doing the speaking, and I think the thing that speaks doesn’t really change.  It is we who change and hear different things.

Therefore, I’d say that a more specific argument would state that the perception of art is subjective, based on each of our life experiences and unique brains, while the work itself is objective.  That can explain why we can look at a film several years later and see or learn something different.  The film itself remains unchanged, but our perception of it changes.  It communicates something about humanity in a different way than before, because we understand humanity in a different way than before.

I think this distinction is important because it suggests that a work of art is unchanging, yet communicates on a level higher than normal understanding.  The fact that we can return to an object and subjectively learn something new suggests that we can’t fully comprehend the work all at once.

To me, that gives art a magical quality (in the emotional sense).  That is one of the reasons why I think it’s important to call games art.

Saving the World

In the comments of Greg’s post, Alex and Greg were discussing saving the world with art.  The notion may seem impossible to some, but I’d argue that we are living proof that it can work.  Inspiring people through creation seems to be one of the simplest (though still very hard!) ways to change the world with art.  Saving it is just a few steps away.

By making something of incredible quality that communicates to people and inspires them in a lasting way, you can inspire them to either change or to create themselves.  And them creating will often lead to change later.  Here’s a quote from Eva Zeisel to illustrate my point:

It’s very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good.  But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I’ll tell you.  When making a pot you can’t bring any evil into the world.

Just think about the games we’ve played that have inspired us to make games ourselves.  Those games have done good things because they have inspired us to create, and those acts of creation have changed us.  Those games have changed the world.  Saving it is just a few steps away.

In gamer lingo, it’s a 3d, physics-y, psuedo-pixel-art cannon-shooting game with a strategic probability management element.  Based on tester feedback, it seems to be pretty addictive, too.  Here’s the “official” description:

As a producer for the Japanese game show Megabank Executive Humiliation Challenge (MEHC), the nation is counting on you to keep them entertained by humiliating the best of the best in Western banking executives. Balance money-making obstacles and hire better executives to make the most profit you can in one season. Don’t let your nation down!

It’s an experiment in many ways, including emotional, commercial, and production..al, but not so much in gameplay. It’s kind of weird to look back at your baby after you’ve given birth. Sometimes you didn’t see yourself making that kind of game, and I can say that about this game.  However, I’m happy with the work I’ve done.  It’s quite a fun game.  I’d also like to thank the Gratton brothers from the Napkin Sketch collective for doing the sound.

Even though I didn’t originally see myself making this kind of game, I think in some ways I needed to make it, at least to just express my frustration with my current feelings on the nation’s economy and moreso on capitalism in general. I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with it as a system lately.  And maybe I needed a break from taking game design so seriously, too.

I’m hoping to find a sponsor for it by the end of the year.  And it should end up on FGL in some form or another soon for auction.  The sponsorship space seems pretty barren when it comes to Unity games, so who knows what will happen…

Hopefully this will be a big success, since we as developers really need more Unity portals out there.  I’ve been working on a couple small Unity games myself and have been a little uncertain if I would be able to shop my games around much.

I even considered e-mailing the guys at Blurst to propose putting something on their site, but it looks like they’ve already done the work required to set something like this up.

More and more, it seems like Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink at Flashbang are becoming the father figures of the indie games scene.  The IGF, the IGS, an indie games portal… What’s next, indie games philanthropy?  An indie games school?  At any rate, I salute the fine gentlemen of Flashbang for their work at building the indie community up.  A Blurst portal is simply the next step for them.

We’ll probably be playing Pong in tennis outfits. Actually I don’t know what would be appropriate – maybe Eliss on a Tablet PC? But I have neither an iPhone nor a tablet, so how about you show up and bring something cool.

Also, if the concept on its own wasn’t enough to bring you here, FLATFORM, an awesome DJ/VJ duo will be doing an audio-visual mix-up of the films along with records of music from the various soundtracks. Even more notable is that ReadyMade magazine will be at the party documenting how awesome it is. If enough of us show up, I bet we could convince them to publish an article about how DIY hipsters should decorate their rooms with indie gaming merch from Attract Mode.

I Always Wanted To Be A Tenenbaum is October 17th at 8pm at 1705 Pleasant St, Apartments #1 & #2.  There will be rooms themed to each film, lots of quality free food, free drinks, and free prizes. Cover is $5 if you get a freaking sweet ticket (pictured above) in advance. Send an e-mail to iheartwesanderson [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be going as Bert Fischer, Max Fischer’s dad in Rushmore.

The second party is called MOVEMENT BASH, held at Impromptu Studio (300 SW 5th St) on October 22nd at 6pm. The idea behind this party is to celebrate the local entrepreneurs that are doing cool stuff in the area.  Other people from around the Midwest will be coming to Des Moines for Highlight Midwest, so this is intended as a party to get them warmed up.

I figured we should show up to let them know there are devs around making games.  Like the previous party, there will be free beverages, free food, and free entertainment.  No cover either.  My friend Matt Shwery hand-screenprinted the posters I designed for MOVEMENT BASH.  It was a fun project, and I hope to put those skills to use on some game posters in the future.  Maybe it’s just me, but I fantasize about guerilla marketing antics plastering posters and stickers of indie games all over the city.

In this video, I recorded myself playing through the interactive environment, which I created in Unity.  The interactive parts are triggering scenes, blooming flowers, changing gravity behavior of the spheres/particle systems, changing the brightness of trails, and moving the trail thingy during the chorus.  In hindsight, I think I have a ways to go in terms of adding more interactivity in this.  I suppose that’s what prototypes are for, though!  But I’m pretty happy with how it turned out in the end.

The music is Branches by Finn Miles, and this last weekend I performed the visuals using a gamepad while Paul Gratton of Finn Miles played the song live at our church.  Paul is a part of Napkin Sketch, a creative collective of which I am also a member.

I’m really looking forward to the next two weekends.  This coming weekend is TIGJam Midwest #2, which is a game jam event where those of us from Intuition, in addition to other developer friends, try to make games in a weekend.  The name comes from TIGSource, our favorite gaming community.  Rumor has it some of the other guys are interested in making something in Unity, so that got me even more excited than usual.

The weekend after that is the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project, and those of us from Napkin Sketch will be participating in it once again.  That event is where we try to make a film in 48 hours after given a genre, character, line, and prop on Friday evening.  It should be a blast once again.

It has been a big struggle trying to get an acceptable visual style going. I wanted to progress from the pretty rough interactive sermon prototype. I decided to go 2.5D, and by that I mean planes/sprites in 3D space. I’ve also been learning to write my own shaders a little, though at this point I’m mostly hacking ones I find on the Unity forums.

This screenshot was taken in the editor and shows grass dynamically moving away from a cube. It’s based on a script by metervara who kindly provided it to the Unity community. I’ve shared my version, which ports his shader to Unity 2.5 and adds the ability to grow the bending effect radius when you press a key/button. The intention is to allow the player to use that ability as one means of expression for a visual instrument.

The original context I imagined this being used in is during worship at a church. So the band would be playing musical instruments and people could play visual instruments as a complement. In fact, the first usage of this prototype will be at our church. The deadline is July 12th, which I will probably (hopefully!) make. Of course, this could be used in any live music setting, and in fact the three of us are planning to do that for a future project.

Oh! To continue the visual instrument analogy, I was thinking that the Wii remote would basically be like a tambourine in that the primary action would be percussive. This led me to think about other parallels, like a melodic device. And now I have dreams of circuit bending some sort of guitar thing to use for this idea, hopefully with the help of someone more engineering savvy. Just think how sweet it would be to have a circuit bent Guitar Hero guitar that played music and visuals!

I imagine this tool most often being used to help visualize a sermon being delivered to a church congregation. The goal of the tool would be to present an environment that someone on the media team – a “player” if you will – can interact with.  The player would interact with the environment in a way that matched up with the speaker who is delivering the message.  One example would be if that speaker was telling a story.  The player would explore the environment and trigger events to match up with the timing and emphasis of the speaker’s story.  If the speaker was emphasizing a certain part of the story, the player could trigger events to help emphasize that part.  The final result would be an expression of the story experienced simultaneously through the mediums of virtual interactive experience (of which I consider computer games to be a subset) and oral tradition.

Here’s a run-through recording of the prototype.  It’s based on a story given to me by Chris Petrick, Perry Ross, and Richard Webb at Lutheran Church of Hope, with music and sound design by Paul Gratton (one of my partners from the Napkin Sketch collective), and voice acting by Julie Bull.

Here’s a recording from the production room while I, err….performed it during the last of 4 worship services at Lutheran Churh of Hope.  It kind of shows how the whole thing would fit into a traditional Christian church service. In this case, it was between two songs and presented on the screens. I imagine a “final version” being like this, but with a speaker telling the story live up on stage and a more developed interactive environment.

Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here.  A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I.  A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out.  The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks.  So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.

This as-of-yet unnamed iPhone game is an economic strategy game where you must make the most money you can in 30 days fishing for crawfish (slang for spiny lobsters) in the Bahamas.  The game has a couple other modes, including one where you try to make $1 billion as soon as you can and a “daily game” mode where you get the same seeded random events as other players and you see how well your strategy compares with others.  In the game, you place traps in either shallow or deep water, buy more traps, move traps around, and a couple other more minor things.  It’s a pretty fun and simple game.  The part I like the best about it is that random things happen to you while you’re crawfishing, and that combined with the play-through-the-menu style of gameplay really reminds me of playing Oregon Trail.

I’ve heard that Oregon Trail is coming out for the iPhone, but after checking it out online, I was a little disappointed.  The art seems great, but the mini-games seem to take a little too much away from the original feel of Oregon Trail, which was more about using your imagination given suggestive text with simple, low-res illustrations and also about the hunting game of course.  I can’t think of any other way to say it right now other than the fact that the design seemed pure.  There was a purity to it.  The new Oregon Trail seems to have the more recent flavor of casual game-style rewards.  Another way to put that is that it has a lot of extrinsic rewards systems, and fewer intrinsic reward systems.  I might be wrong, and I’m sure the game will still be good, but it’s just plain different from what I remember about Oregon Trail.

And that’s what excites me about Neil’s game – it will focus more on the suggestive text and simple illustrations to create a world that lies within the player’s head.  I don’t know enough about psychology to know what that kind of experience that is called, but I think this game tries to achieve that.  And I’m not saying that games shouldn’t explicitly provide a rich world because it takes away from the one in the imagination, but I’m saying it’s nice to have a simple experience like the one you get from the original Oregon Trail every now and then.  And besides, it’s just plain nostalgic.

So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been creating art for it in a pixel art style.  I’ve had a little taste of making pixel art before, but this project has allowed me to get a lot more familiar with the style, and I’m having a lot of fun.  When will the game be released?  I’m not sure; I suppose part of that will depend on how soon Intuition gets approved as an iPhone developer.  Yep, this collab of God at play and Neil Roberts will likely be Intuition’s first iPhone game.  Woot!