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!

How to Choose a Tool

When choosing a tool, the two most important things you could base your decision on are how a tool fits your goals and how a tool fits what kind of designer you are.  The whole point of using a tool is that it lets you accomplish your goals with the least amount of effort.  And how successful you will be using that tool will be (at least partly) based on what kind of designer you are.  Your end goal is to become intimate enough with your tool that it becomes an extension of your mind, just like an art tool such as a pencil becomes an extension of your mind.  In that way, you’ll be able to be expressive with your work.

Here’s an example:  those familiar with indie games will have heard of Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström, one of the most prolific indie game developers.  He is prolific partly because he uses Game Maker, which allows for rapid 2d game development.  He has committed to using this tool and has become an expert at it.  Furthermore, the tool’s strengths match up with the games he likes to make.  I thought the story ended there.

Cactus Motivational Poster, concept by Petri Purho (kloonigames.com)

However, after talking with him at the 2008 GDC, I also learned that he gets bored with ideas fairly quickly and has a hard time finishing longer projects (don’t we all!).  So he decided to accept this aspect of his character and continue to get better and better at making smaller games quickly, before he gets tired of them.  He has learned about himself and used that knowledge to set realistic goals, and then found tools that work well for who he is and stuck with them.  The end result is that he’s one of the heroes of indie games.

Based on my experience, I could recommend four tools that would be good solutions depending on the goals you’d have as a designer:  Game Maker, Processing, Flash, and Unity.

Why Use Game Maker?

If you haven’t finished and released any games, your goal is just to finish some 2d games, and you don’t mind or even prefer using a Windows tool, then I think Game Maker is one of the best tools you can use.  Game Maker uses drag-and-drop functionality to make developing pretty easy.  It lets you manage your content pipeline and provides support for loading animations.  You can use simple scripts based on a custom scripting language to control the logic of the game.  It even comes with built-in scripts that provide common solutions for games.

YoYo Games provides a ton of resources, tutorials, and even competitions on their website.  The Game Maker community is quite large, active, and supportive.  Many of the resources are for beginners, but you can find a good deal of more advanced tutorials and support if you look below the surface.  Game Maker’s ease of use can make it seem like you can’t do much with it at first.  However, you shouldn’t be fooled; you can do tons of amazing things with the tool, as Cactus and so many other developers have proven.  A quick look at the YoYo Games website shows a 3d GTA clone, a Mario Kart 64 clone, and 2d games of almost every type.  It even supports multiplayer games.

I use a Mac, so I haven’t been able to spend much time with Game Maker, but once the Mac version gets to a more finished state, I’ll probably be taking a look at it again.  I consider it a “get things done” sort of tool, which would make it perfect for prototypes or experiments I want to make.

Why Use Processing?

Processing is a development environment that is specifically designed to help designers and creative types learn programming and interactive technology.  The environment was developed by people at MIT who were focusing on teaching visual thinkers programming and interactive concepts.  If your number one goal is programming education, or you’re interested in creating interactive experiments using a variety of media and inputs, like generative visuals based on sound input or applications using Wii remote input, then Processing would be a great choice.

Another interesting result is that you can share your Processing programs directly on the web since it outputs Java applets.  But unlike Flash, there’s no real industry surrounding Processing, which is why it’s best to use it for educational or freeware purposes.  I’ve used Processing for educational purposes and to make an animation for my church.  For that project, I modified a particle system developed by Robert Hodgin and set it up to create particles dynamically based on a song my friend Paul Gratton composed.

Why Use Flash?

Flash’s greatest strengths as a tool for game development are its content pipeline, its ability to use animated clips very easily, and its install base as a web platform.  You’ll have to do your own programming with ActionScript in order to create anything more than a simple button-based game, but there are a lot of resources out there that can teach you how to program with ActionScript.  That makes it a great platform to learn on.  You can find contract work using Flash, and there’s also the Flash game sponsorship space if you’re interested in making a living creating games that fit the sponsorship model.  An important detail to keep in mind is that it’s not hardware-accelerated, so you’re limited to a certain level of game complexity.

If you’re familiar with Game Maker but interested in Flash development, keep in mind that every hour you’re spending learning ActionScript is an hour that could be spent working on a game with Game Maker.  That makes sense as long as your goals for creating Flash games are more important than your goals for creating Game Maker games.

Up to this point, the Intuition collective has used Flash for everything.  It was a great choice for us since we had a team that wanted to create games quickly, we had experienced programmers who could quickly program things in ActionScript, and we saw opportunities that could allow us to get paid for doing it so that we could develop full-time.  However, as Greg pointed out in his post about why Flash sucks, many people expect a certain type of game with Flash, and if you’re interested in making games different from that, it’s worth considering a different tool.  Some of the games we want to make will still fit that expectation, but for those that don’t, we’ll be using a different tool – most likely Unity.  I have begun using it myself recently.

Why Use Unity?

The fastest way I can think to describe Unity is that it’s like a larger-scale, 3d-focused version of Game Maker, but with a more polished interface and wider support for platforms.  Unity is a full 3d game development environment – a fully-featured engine with a built-in editor.  Like Game Maker and Flash, it has a library for asset management and even allows you to edit files outside the tool and come back to see them updated immediately.  It lacks Flash’s animation system that supports game development so well, but instead it adds great 3d scene management tools.  However, members of the Unity community have created tools to load SWFs inside Unity, allowing you to utilize the strengths of both.  Also like Game Maker, it includes a set of built-in scripts that let you quickly implement common input/control systems.

One of it’s greatest strengths as a development tool is it’s ability to play your game in the editor and modify parameters during play to test the game.  Based on my level design experience working on Darkest of Days, I know that this feature can speed up development exponentially.

Unity is best for 3d games, and that plus all of its features make it a little more complicated than Flash.  It’s not limited to 3d, so with a little extra work you can make 2d games with it just fine.  In fact, many popular iPhone games made with Unity are 2d.  Unity supports JavaScript and C# for scripting, so it’s similar to Game Maker or Flash in the sense that you’ll have to script the logic for most games.  However, unlike Flash, since it’s a proper game engine, you don’t have to do as much programming to get an actual game running.    Thanks to the built-in scripts, I’d say the level of programming knowledge required to make a simple game is somewhere between Game Maker and Flash.  One last big plus:  the Unity Web Player is hardware-accelerated, well-optimized for performance, and supports a large number of video cards.

The thing that excites me most about Unity is using it as a release platform.  As of right now, you can publish a Unity game as a web-based game for OS X and Windows (obviously it doesn’t have the install base of Flash, though), or as a downloadable for OS X and Windows.  With an additional license and tweaks to the Unity game and content, you could publish to the iPhone.  With an additional license, tweaks to the game and content, a Nintendo developer license, and a dev kit, you could publish to the Wii.  Some time in the future, you’ll be able to publish to the Xbox 360, too (this was paused a while back to finish up support for the Wii and add support for the iPhone).

The Ultimate Goal

My tool of choice is changing from Flash to Unity, but only because I have specific goals for my games that match Unity’s strengths, and I’ve tried Unity and feel it fits the type of designer I am.  In the end, I hope to be comfortable enough with Unity that development becomes expressive.  To me, that’s the ultimate goal of any tool – to be able to “sketch” an idea quickly, and then iterate on it until completion.  The tool you choose should be able to do the same if you stick with it.