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 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!

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:

I do not want any cop-out answers. I want real examples. How do we, as game designers, actually design a meaningful game? FOR REAL. Like actually design one that is actually meaningful. I am looking for resources to do this, and I have found very few. It seems to me like we should be holding 10 game jams per year trying to figure this out.

Unintentionally, I asked it rather accusingly, so what followed ended up being mildly embarassing. But I probably would have exploded had I not asked this, so it was a fair trade.

A Sense of Urgency

The answers? It seems that no one really knows at this point. And that should be a Really Big Deal™ for all game developers interested in designing games that are intended to deliver a meaningful experience. It should be our #1 priority to figure this out. We should all be running to our laptops and feverishly creating experiences that attempt to explore this issue, and then sharing the results.

And yet… I can only find a handful of other designers with a sense of urgency about this, and most of those few are not sharing results in a way that progresses game design. Including me! Shame on me. I don’t know, maybe a sense of urgency is the wrong thing to look for, but I guess that’s what tends to inspire and motivate me. I keep remembering a conversation I had with Greg Wohlwend where we likened a sense of urgency in creating something to being chased by a lion. I think it is a beautiful picture.

It scares me that I, as a wannabe videogame designer of meaningful experiences, am starved for resources on how to actually do this. The important thing is that if that’s the case for me, then it is most likely the case for many others.

My Solution: A Meaningful Gameplay Game Jam

I love game jams. At this point, I’ve been involved with roughly 9 or 10 of them since 2007, most of which I helped organize. I think they are a savior of sorts for videogames as a medium. And so naturally I turn to the game jam to solve this problem. I’m probably biased, heh.

I have a vision for a game jam dedicated to exploring meaningful gameplay. I think it can be structured in a way to help solve this problem. And I think it deserves its own post, so I’ll save that for next. Sit tight.

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.

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

What is Weiv?

Weiv is an interactive media platform for enhancing live performances. It allows a group of people to act as a “visual band” that can play to live music. With Weiv, people move Wii Remotes to the beat of the music, creating animations or exploring a virtual scene on a projection screen.  As I’ve mentioned before, this allows people to express themselves visually the same way they do musically when singing.

Here are a few of the features:

Engage through live interactivity

Because people are involved in creating the visuals live, the entire audience is engaged. The performers create, while the rest of the audience experiences the same benefit of live visuals as they do for live music.

Group interaction

Use up to 7 Wii Remotes to allow an entire group of people to collaborate, just like a visual band.

Videogame technology & media

Weiv uses technology found in modern videogames to support advanced graphics and interaction. This medium especially connects with youth because videogames are their heart language.

More info

Looking for more information or still confused?  Head over to the Weiv pre-order page to get an idea of what the platform consists of, read about more features, and of course pre-order if you’re interested in speaking the heart language of a new generation, and/or if you’re interested in supporting independent videogame development.  I’m applying for a grant through the Iowa Department of Economic Development, and the biggest chance at getting the grant would be to get pre-orders.  Help me make this dream a reality!

I found this comment to be particularly poignant:

For a society that seems to love tolerance, we sure seem to hate Christians a lot.

The Left Behind games obviously aren’t helping things.  I’ve never played one, but based on my research, they seem to be poorly crafted and a little mixed-up theologically.  This, of course, is based on the theology of the Left Behind books themselves, the first of which is dissected in incredible – though often over-the-top – detail at the Slacktivist blog.

If I were to unfairly distill Fred Clark’s analyses of the books down to a statement, it would be that the Left Behind series represents an anti-Anti-Christ perspective of the world which is not always pro-Christ.

I was having a recent conversation at my bible study lately involving the fire-and-brimstone preaching that you would hear on the street corner (or at the Des Moines Farmer’s Market).  To be clear, we didn’t agree with that behavior and concluded that neither would Deitrick Bonhoeffer, author of Life Together, which we’re currently studying.  I often wonder if this is what the Jewish authorities of Jesus’s day were like.  You know, the ones he had the most trouble with.  The ones that conspired to have him executed.  Not that what’s being preached on the corner is never true.  I think it can be, but so can swinging at a stranger’s head with a baseball bat in order to smash a fly that had landed there be technically “true.”

Nevertheless, I’m encouraged to see Walmart’s willingness to be open to more Christian games.

I still long for the day when I can play a game that is actually meaningful and says something about my faith.  Something real that actually represents the message of Jesus; “the last will be first,” “whatever you do to the least of these,” “love you neighbor as yourself,” and so on.  I guess that makes me just another game developer that is trying to make the kind of games I want to play.

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.

As you can see, it’s quite tempting as a designer to add complexity to the image above.  And yet, this must be the first game.  But I’ve decided most of the games will have more than just this, which will make them “mostly meaningless” I guess.  On top of all this, they should be positive.  I haven’t come up with too many ideas on how to do that yet, so I’m hoping that something will just come to me in the middle of development, hehe.

One of the things I realized I could learn from this whole experiment is how to intensify and purify meaning by separating elements of the game through elimination.  If I define what isn’t in the gameplay, maybe that will help me realize what is.  A nice side effect is a possible better skill in improving the non-game-specific elements of a game.  Let me illustrate:

This first illustration would represent elements of a game and potential meanings the player could get from the game.  If you remove some elements and reevaluate the game, you would notice certain meanings that are missing.  Then you can group those elements and meanings together, which would result in a better definition of what game element creates what meaning.

If I continue this process scientifically, I could get a pretty defined set of elements and their corresponding meanings.  The opposite would also be true:  if I only started with one element – say a title – that could lead to a specific corresponding meaning.  Then I could add elements little by little, evaluating the new meaning created.  By keeping the elements few, I can focus on creating specific meaning using the least elements possible.  This would result in an efficient game design, which I hope to talk about in a later post.

Will it work?  It seems to be going all right so far.  I’m working on a game with a few more elements, and I’ve already thought of an interesting by-product.  Removing some elements can have a meaning in and of itself, and I hope to explore that with this game about rewards.