Claire Hosking

Grad Architect, illustrator & hobby game maker.

[clairehosking]

Reading Notes

Ian Bogost wrote a piece in the atlantic, here are some of the notes I took on my second reading, as in-line replies.

A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. It would be like living in a novel, where the player’s actions would have as much of an influence on the story as they might in the real world.

Okay straight off the bat that seems a pretty specific definition of story, which requires:

complex characters

Player Influencing plot

“Living in a novel” (which I’ll take for meaning complex simulated environments)

It’s an almost impossible bar to reach, for cultural reasons as much as technical ones. One shortcut is an approach called environmental storytelling. Environmental stories invite players to discover and reconstruct a fixed story from the environment itself. Think of it as the novel wresting the real-time, first-person, 3-D graphics engine from the hands of the shooter game. In Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight, for example, dioramas summarize the plot and setting of the film. In the 2007 game BioShock, recorded messages in an elaborate, Art Deco environment provide context for a story of a utopia’s fall. And in What Remains of Edith Finch, a new game about a girl piecing together a family curse, narration is accomplished through artifacts discovered in an old house.

Okay so environmental storytelling is seen as an attempt at holodecking b/c it allows for rich environments, while artifacts imply or relate the life histories of complex characters, and player has influence in the sense that they move the plot along.

The approach raises many questions. Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts?

I think you doing the assembly rather than having someone assemble something for you is still a meaningful difference.

Are they really stories, when they are really environments?

I think I can only answer this when I understand what your definition of story is.

And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?

On this measure, alas, the best interactive stories are still worse than even middling books and films.

I’m a little confused by this standard. In terms of storytelling, are games falling short of the holodeck, or falling short of books and movies? b/c they seem like different questions to me. The holodeck question is about whether games meet the specific criteria to become the dreamed-of interactive movie. If the question is whether they measure to books/films, it’s more about whether games have equivalent ways to express characters and events but not necessarily whether it matches up to a linear, player-involved, immersive environment standard.

In retrospect, it’s easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are harder to create than it seems, especially on the relatively low-powered computers that first ran games like Doom in the early 1990s. It helped to empty them out as much as possible, with surfaces detailed by simple textures and objects kept to a minimum. In other words, the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run.

An empty space is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. Add a few monsters that a powerful player-dude can vanquish, and the first-person shooter is born. The lone, soldier-hero against the Nazis, or the hell spawn, or the aliens.

Those early assumptions vanished quickly into infrastructure, forgotten. As 3-D first-person games evolved, along with the engines that run them, visual verisimilitude improved more than other features. Entire hardware industries developed around the specialized co-processors used to render 3-D scenes.

Ok so games are kinda doing the complex simulated environments part?

Left less explored were the other aspects of realistic, physical environments. The inner thoughts and outward behavior of simulated people, for example, beyond the fact of their collision with other objects. The problem becomes increasingly intractable over time. Incremental improvements in visual fidelity make 3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.

But failing at the complex interactive characters part. True. (Some interesting experiments by SpiritAI and the game Event[0] however.)

Worse yet, the very concept of a Holodeck-aspirational interactive story implies that the player should be able to exert agency upon the dramatic arc of the plot. The one serious effort to do this was an ambitious 2005 interactive drama called Façade, a one-act play with roughly the plot of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It worked remarkably well—for a video game. But it was still easily undermined. One player, for example, pretended to be a zombie, saying nothing but “brains” until the game’s simulated couple threw him out.

Also failing at the plot-influencing part and emergent events part (but some interesting experiments -- blood and laurels, for instance).

Environmental storytelling offers a solution to this conundrum. Instead of trying to resolve the matter of simulated character and plot, the genre gives up on both, embracing scripted action instead.

In between bouts of combat in BioShock, for instance, the recordings  players discover have no influence on the action of the game, except to color the interpretation of that action. The payoff, if that’s the right word for it, is a tepid reprimand against blind compliance, the very conceit the BioShock player would have to embrace to play the game in the first place.

True, this is what 3D games do. But I’d argue that other games give up on the fully simulated environment in order to resolve simulated characters and/or simulated plots. All three of these things are happening they’re just not happening in the same games.

In 2013, three developers who had worked on the BioShock series borrowed the environmental-storytelling technique and threw away both the shooting and the sci-fi fantasy. The result was Gone Home, a story game about a college-aged woman who returns home to a mysterious, empty mansion near Portland, Oregon. By reassembling the fragments found in this mansion, the player reconstructs the story of the main character’s sister and her journey to discover her sexual identity. The game was widely praised for breaking the mold of the first-person experience while also importing issues in identity politics into a medium known for its unwavering masculinity.

Feats, but relative ones. Writing about Gone Home upon its release, I called it the video-game equivalent of young-adult fiction. Hardly anything to be ashamed of, but maybe much nothing to praise, either. If the ultimate bar for meaning in games is set at teen fare, then perhaps they will remain stuck in a perpetual adolescence even if they escape the stereotypical dude-bro’s basement. Other paths are possible, and perhaps the most promising ones will bypass rather than resolve games’ youthful indiscretions.

I love Gone Home but I certainly don’t think it shows the limits of what can be achieved at all, even within this palette of techniques. So far it feels like this article is trying to point out the weaknesses of games trying to holodeck, but Gone Home never felt like an attempt to. It felt like it was trying to glean which storytelling techniques come naturally to games and explore them.

* * *

What Remains of Edith Finch both adopts and improves upon the model set by Gone Home. It, too, is about a young woman who returns home to a mysterious, abandoned house in the Pacific Northwest, where she discovers unexpected and dark secrets.

The titular Edith Finch is the youngest surviving member of the Finch family, Nordic immigrants who came to the Seattle area in the late 19th century. It is a family of legendary, cursed doom, an affliction that motivated emigration. But once they arrived on Orcas Island, fate treated the Finches no less severely—all its lineage has been doomed to die, and often in tragically unremarkable ways. Edith has just inherited the old family house from her mother, the latest victim of the curse.

As in Doom and BioShock and almost every other first-person game ever made, the emptiness of the environment becomes essential to its operation. 3-D games are settings as much as experiences—perhaps even more so. And the Finch estate is a remarkable setting, imagined and executed in intricate detail. This is a weird family, and the house has been stocked with  handmade gewgaws and renovated improbably, coiling Dr. Seuss-like into the air. The game is cleverly structured as a series of a dozen or so narrative vignettes, in which Edith accesses prohibited parts of the unusual house, finally learning the individual fates of her forebears by means of the fragments they left behind—diaries, letters, recordings, and other mementos.

The result is aesthetically coherent, fusing the artistic sensibilities of Edward Gory, Isabel Allende, and Wes Anderson. The writing is good, an uncommon accomplishment in a video game. On the whole, there is nothing to fault in What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a lovely little title with ambitions scaled to match their execution. Few will leave it unsatisfied.

And yet, the game is pregnant with an unanswered question: Why does this story need to be told as a video game?

(This sort of conjures up the idea that game designers sit down with a linear plot and attempt to holodeck it, which I feel is less and less of a thing)

The whole way through, I found myself wondering why I couldn’t experience Edith Finch as a traditional time-based narrative. Real-time rendering tools are as good as pre-rendered computer graphics these days, and little would have been compromised visually had the game been an animated film. Or even a live-action film. After all, most films are shot with green screens, the details added in postproduction. The story is entirely linear, and interacting with the environment only gets in the way, such as when a particularly dark hallway makes it unclear that the next scene is right around the corner.

One answer could be cinema envy. The game industry has long dreamed of overtaking Hollywood to become the “medium of the 21st century,” a concept now so retrograde that it could only satisfy an occupant of the 20th. But a more compelling answer is that something would be lost in flattening What Remains of Edith Finch into a linear experience.

Yep, I would agree with that.

The character vignettes take different forms, each keyed to a clever interpretation of the very idea of real-time 3-D modeling and interaction. In one case, the player takes on the role of different animals, recasting a familiar space in a new way. In another, the player moves a character through the Finch house, but inside a comic book, where it is rendered with cell-shading instead of conventional, simulated lighting. In yet another, the player encounters a character’s fantasy as a navigable space that must be managed alongside that of the humdrum workplace in which that fantasy took place.

Something would be lost in flattening most “walking sims” and narrative investigation games and that’s the experience of space itself, perhaps the most prized thing holodecking adds to stories (after all, if you want to participate in an ever evolving, player influenced story, you could do d&d instead).

These are remarkable accomplishments. But they are not feats of storytelling, at all. Rather, they are novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine.

I disagree. “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” are the “telling” part of storytelling.

The ability to render light and shadow, to model structure and turn it into obstacle, to trick the eye into believing a flat surface is a bookshelf or a cavern, and to allow the player to maneuver a camera through that environment, pretending that it its a character. Edith Finch is a story about a family, sure, but first it’s a device made of the conventions of 3-D gaming, one as weird and improvised as the Finch house in which the action takes place.

Such repurposing was already present in earlier environmental story-games, including Gone Home and Dear Esther, another important entry in the genre that prides itself on rejecting the “traditional mechanics” of first-person experience. For these games, the glory of refusing the player agency was part of the goal. So much so that their creators even embraced the derogatory name “walking simulator,” a sneer invented for them by their supposedly shooter-loving critics.

But walking simulators were always doomed to be a transitional form. The gag of a game with no gameplay might seem political at first, but it quickly devolves into conceptualism. What Remains of Edith Finch picks up the baton and designs a different race for it. At stake is not whether a game can tell a good story or even a better story than books or films or television. Rather, what it looks like when a game uses the materials of games to make those materials visible, operable, and beautiful.

Right, so it rejects holodecking and tries to convey character, plot and space according to its own language. This feels like saying games are bad at holodecking, not necessarily bad at stories.

* * *

Think of a a medium as the aesthetic form of common materials. Poetry aestheticizes language. Painting aestheticizes flatness and pigment. Photography does so for time. Film, for time and space. Architecture, for mass and void. Television, for economic leisure and domestic habit. Sure, yes, those media can and do tell stories. But the stories come later, built atop the medium’s foundations.

What are games good for, then? Players and creators have been mistaken in merely hoping that they might someday share the stage with books, films, and television, let alone to unseat them. To use games to tell stories is a fine goal, I suppose, but it’s also an unambitious one.

lol

Games are not a new, interactive medium for stories. Instead, games are the aesthetic form of everyday objects. Of ordinary life. Take a ball and a field: you get soccer. Take property-based wealth and the Depression: you get Monopoly. Take patterns of four contiguous squares and gravity: you get Tetris. Take ray tracing and reverse it to track projectiles: you get Doom. Games show players the unseen uses of ordinary materials.

And if I take a story, shake it up and scatted it all over an environment? Is that the aesthetic form of storytelling?

As the only mass medium that arose after postmodernism, it’s no surprise that those materials so often would be the stuff of games themselves. More often than not, games are about the conventions of games and the materials of games—at least in part. Texas Hold ’em is a game made out of Poker. Candy Crush is a game made out of Bejeweled. Gone Home is a game made out of BioShock.

The true accomplishment of What Remains of Edith Finch is that it invites players to abandon the dream of interactive storytelling at last.

This doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve made a good case that games can convey character and plot well through “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine”, and you’ve made a case that environmental storytelling doesn’t achieve holodecking, but I’m not going to rule out that other techniques might.

Yes, sure, you can tell a story in a game. But what a lot of work that is, when it’s so much easier to watch television, or to read.

A greater ambition, which the game accomplishes more effectively anyway: to show the delightful curiosity that can be made when stories, games, comics, game engines, virtual environments—and anything else, for that matter—can be taken apart and put back together again unexpectedly.

To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel. If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.

But this sort of gets why games have stories at all, which is that they are necessities to explain and contextualise the weird things game engines produce. I’d argue that regardless of whether you feel game stories are as good as books, some  “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” need narrative context to be understood and enjoyed by players. Rapture is less rapturous without its story. 

[clairehosking]

Hey y’all, I wrote this piece on Polygon about violence in immersive sims and what morality systems say about the player’s relationship to the world!

“In some games, narrative must perform a tricky balancing act: make it OK to kill, but not too OK. In older games, like the classic Thief or Hitman series, this is achieved by characterizing the player as a rogue-at-the-edge-of-society: mercy towards optionally-killable characters is encouraged by the game’s difficulty settings or metrics, but it’s presented as a sign of cool professionalism, not responsibility or humanity. Not killing people in Hitman, ironically enough, is just another sign you’re a very good killer.”

 http://www.polygon.com/2017/1/18/14296782/dishonored-2-chaos-differences

[clairehosking]

Cibele

Spoilers.

I just finished up Nina Freeman’s Cibele and it was really really really good. There’s been a rise in autobiographical games recently, particularly small indie experimental ones. Many feel written more for the creator than the audience, which is fair enough. But what I like about Cibele is it feels more deliberate and curated in its storytelling, cutting through to exactly what you’re curious about, saying a lot with tiny snippets, letting you collage the different pieces together.

Some of the writing captures to the patter of im conversations or teen blog posts better than others, and there’s a small unevenness to the effectiveness of everything presented. and I’ll admit, I can barely read my own poetry from that age, let alone someone else’s. But other things are deadly accurate, like the portrayal of that exact secret, tender, sweet, teasing convo that lulls you into wanting to confess love. The tentative circling of liking, negotiation, nearness. The way it can be easier to talk online sometimes.

Some ways this feels so similar -- playing the game and managing ims perfectly evokes the mid-late 2000s experience of getting home, finding something to do on the comp and chatting to half a dozen people online. I turned 13 at the end of 2000, so this is the teenhood/uni life I experienced and the role the internet played, and to some extent, since I live in Australia very very far away from some of my favourite people, the role it still does. Anyway, I’m 29 and I’m still avoiding selfies and not believing my guy friends when they say I’m looking good etc. “I wish I was skinnier” “no way you’ll lose your boobs” I have memories of having this exactly conversation at that age. Does everyone? Good to know someone does.

Freeman presents these people as they are or were, without exaggerating them into tropes. Blake/Ichi seems slightly creepy but it’s more in the delivery of what he’s saying (you’re so hot etc) than the words. His “I don’t want a relationship” spiel is painfully, authentically 19. He isn’t the deliberate user or predator; just callously inconsiderate. Backing out at the end feels true to character, and I suspect is. Her own character, pushing past obvious warning signs, flaking on friends to spend more time in the intimate one-on-one convos with blake/ichi, seem honest. Neither glamourised nor harshly portrayed. The relationship is allowed to occupy a liminal space, not easily boxed into particular mistakes or wrong-doing, just something that rolled out the way it did. It’s easy to sense Nina’s heartbreak at the end, without any swelling strings or tear-jerking bittersweetness.

This is intimate but I don’t think it’s presented as voyuerism. These aren’t other people’s things or thoughts or audiologs, they’re yours, Nina/Cibele. It’s more first-person than the storytelling in most first-person games. Maybe I feel that because I lived a lot of this -- I don’t need an amnesia excuse to wipe clean a slate -- the game quickly paints a rough enough backstory to me to extrapolate on. It was actually a little bit surreal b/c my middle name is Cybele & it feels weird having characters call you your own name?

It took me the first act to figure out exactly how to juggle all the incoming info and play the game, and I’ll admit Cybele’s pathfinding made it a little difficult to team kill enough enemies to keep the plot rolling, but I got the hang of it by act 2. I found myself wavering a little between tedium and flow, but overall I really liked the play/juggle messages/listen to conversation combo. The art is beautiful, I’m so happy to see something that evokes the dreamscapes I wanted for video games as a kid, after living in this gritty, gritty age. Those poor adorable octopi! If I had a main criticism, it’s that the onscreen characters don’t express much about the personalities of their players, instead just cycling through their attacks. It’s a tiny game, and I know animation is very resource intensive, fair enough. Maybe the kind of layer you’d add with a bigger budget.

I also liked Freeman’s games How Do You Do It and Freshman Year; I’m so happy to see the emergence of devs making smaller games as part of a body of work rather than 4-7 year masterpieces. I really appreciate that her work focuses on developing sexuality, from prepubscent awareness to teen relationships and boundaries. I don’t think games pay nearly enough attention to women’s agency and perspective yet, especially sexual agency.

What I learnt about Cibele in high school was all of the following (borrowed summary from wikipedia):

One upon a time Hippomenes fell in love with Atalanta, the virgin huntress who strongly disliked the idea of getting married. Disturbed by men admiring her beauty being creeps as she ran through the forest, she declared that whoever wanted to marry her had to beat her in a footrace or lose and be put to death.

Atalanta raced her suitors and outran all. When it came to Hippomenes, he prayed to Aphrodite for help. Aphrodite gave him three golden apples and told him to drop them one at a time to distract Atalanta. After each of the first two apples, Atalanta was able to recover the lead, but when she stopped for the third, Hippomenes won the race. Atalanta married Hippomenes and they set off for Hippomenes’ home. But Hippomenes forgot to pay the tribute to Aphrodite he had promised for helping him, so she caused them to have sex in Cybele’s Temple, which offended Cybele. Cybele turned them into lions to draw her Chariot.

Love doesn’t always turn out how you want, does it?

[clairehosking]

The Beginner’s Guide

SPOILERS!

The beginner’s guide starts out feeling like it’s about games criticism: Here are ideas with handy examples to illustrate each point. Yes, I agree with what it has to say about games -- for some creators, they’re not about the player, they’re just about making a thing that you want to exist, or about formal experimentation etc. But I just like the Beginner’s Guide as a story about an author who tried to connect with someone, misunderstood them, pushed their own feelings onto them, alienated that person, gets rejected, and eventually felt sorry that that particular connection was beyond their abilities because they didn’t know what it would be like to approach games in a very different way.

It touches on fears of mine, like the fear that I’m weirding out my dev friends by being too excited about their games, that I’m putting my expectations on them. Navigating fandom & friendship is trickier now I regularly meet writers and devs I admire. Even just recently I was worried about a friend who released a particularly nihilistic game. (tho I run in art game circles so that isn’t so uncommon). Some friends I just feel like I’m walking on eggshells trying to find the ways we connect. I wonder “Am I doing this right?” all the time.

Davey the character can see that his friend is incredibly happy, yet assumes depression & withdrawal on the basis of the games. Could I be that wrong? The possibility of not only being incompetent at people, but so incompetent I can’t even tell how I’m messing up is kinda terrifying, really. The Beginner’s Guide reminds me of The Sense of an Ending or My Brilliant Friend, other stories about people finding another human perplexing.

The game is a kinda confession, justification and apology. I have a lot of sympathy for Davey the character’s intentions in trying to help their friend -- I would probably try to help too. I was worried about Coda the character. Confession: It’s true I worried a little about the Davey the person & William Pugh the person when I played The Stanley Parable back in 2013, that they were suffering some kind of total disillusionment with games (they wouldn’t have been the first). Sorry!

On the flip side, I’ve also been through the frustration of having someone misread you, or assume things about you without actually asking how I’m thinking or feeling. It can feel a tiny bit stressful when somebody really really likes a thing you did and you might subconciously not wanna disappoint your new fan. Reminds me of Regurgitator’s song “I like your old stuff better than your new stuff” where the lyrics sound like a demanding, whiny letter from a fan who’s probably gotten too attached to their own idea of the band.

It’s not necessary for me to know if Davey the person has been through this firsthand or whether they’re just very good at imagining what it’s like. I just appreciate Davey the person showing Davey the character going through these feelings.

Here are some posts I really liked about this game:

Cara Ellison, particularly towards the end where she talks about how the atmosphere of the game shapes the experience:

http://arecklessdisregard.tumblr.com/post/130312145314/the-beginners-guide

Laura Hudson, picking apart the fan/creator relationship:

https://boingboing.net/2015/10/02/the-beginners-guide-is-a-gam.html

[clairehosking]

Boutique Indie

There’s a bit of worry that new steamspy figures spell the end of this wave of indie, or at least solo, development. The theory seems to go that as first wave indies raise production values to increase chances of capturing a non-growing audience in a highly competitive environment, they make it impossible for small devs to compete.

I’m not convinced. For one, first wave indies were going up against *AAA*. They were already fighting the highest production values out there. I’m not totally convinced that competing with mid-range production values is more threatening than high ones (though I could be swayed). I suspect the threat is more the number of good games out there, not the level of polish.

What I suspect will happen is something more like what happens in architecture: People go to university or trade school, cut their teeth in large commercial studios, branch out to start solo practices or small studios, those studios either fail (the designers then return to working for large studios for a while, or move laterally into something related to their skills) or they succeed, at which point the studios start growing and possibly merge with other similarly sized studios, and either find a happy medium size or become the large, industrial-production-line commercial studios that exploit train junior designers. All three co-exist, address different needs and moods, and constantly swap participants back and forth.

(There’s also a strain of people who go straight from university into acclaimed boutique practices, and people who join firms and grow with them and never leave, and all sorts of other situations etc)

A few things would have to adapt for this situation to become possible. The games industry would need to get its working conditions to a state where they’re only as bad as architecture. It would also need to come to value the knowledge and experience of older devs, though since longer console/engine cycles are making long-term knowledge more valuable, this could be on the way.

So, I don’t know. This is just my first thoughts when I see this topic swirl around a bit.

[clairehosking]

Her Story Story

Hey y'all, I loved Her Story but I wrote about what I hate about it for Unwinnable Weekly, so go get that good thing: http://bit.ly/1puY3GY

[clairehosking]

Thoughts re: Frank Lantz’ “Against Design”

I feel really weird writing this because I have so much respect for Frank Lantz and I get that his piece is almost more about describing a sense of something, it’s impressionistic, not laying out a literal argument. That said, here I’m going to treat it as a literal argument so I can unpick that, and so I can articulate some thoughts I have about the value of design.

I’m a game designer. And I teach game design. So I have a lot invested in the idea that game design is a discipline, maybe a young discipline, one that is still defining itself, but nonetheless a legitimate, professional design discipline with established principles and techniques and hard-won knowledge to be cherished and preserved. And I believe that idea. I do believe game design is something you can study and learn and work to master.

Cool. I come from the much older and more established design discipline of architecture, so maybe my perspective will make a good compare & contrast.

But lately I find myself questioning design as a way of understanding where games come from and what makes them work. There are so many great games in the world that don’t reflect good design principles, or that don’t seem designed at all.

Umm it’s weird to conflate the whole of “design” with your own specific design principles. If the game was designed, and turned out good, doesn’t that mean it had good design principles by definition? If you’re trying to teach design, shouldn’t you update your principles? If you wanna talk about the way very specific rules of thumb are cherished by the community by all means do that, but don’t conflate that with “design”. Also I dunno what games that don’t seem designed has to do with this - either the game was designed or wasn’t, whether it seems to be is irrelevant.

Look at Shadow of the Colossus for example. What do we, as game designers, know about videogames? Well, we know a few things, we know boss battles suck. We know jumping puzzles suck. We know you get great games by focusing on meaningful interaction and you don’t get great games from aping cinema and focusing on graphics.

We do?

So, how about a videogame that is nothing but boss battles, and each boss battle is a jumping puzzle, and the whole thing is set in a giant empty world with nothing to interact with, and a lot of the main motivation of the game was an attempt to achieve some film-inspired visual effects? Does that sound like a good recipe for creating one of the greatest videogames of all time?

Isn’t that what design is tho, unlocking those things and shaping them into the thing that you want? Shadow of the Colossus, to me, seems like an example of how elements that don’t work designed in one way work beautifully if designed a different way. It may not seem designed, but from what I understand, it was actually very carefully designed.

Is the fact some design principles are complex with a lot of caveats and exceptions really an argument against having design principles? Or does it just suggest that the task is very very complex and requires similarly complex understanding?

Or take League of Legends. This game breaks so many rules of “good design”. It is a clone. It is over-complicated to the point of utter indecipherability. It is fussy, baroque, full of arbitrary, non-intuitive details (Last hitting? Inhibitors??). It makes no attempt to teach the player or draw them into its labyrinthian systems. If you didn’t grow up playing it you might as well not bother trying to learn. And it’s the most popular videogame in the world, and maybe the most important and the most beautiful. Look at the AWP, the signature 1-hit-kill weapon in Counter-Strike. It’s completely unbalanced. Any sensible game designer would have rejected it. Luckily for us, Counter-Strike wasn’t made by sensible designers, it was made by unreasonable people who kept this unbalanced ingredient and evolved the rest of the game around it.

Keeping an unbalanced ingredient and evolving the rest around it is design tho.

Lantz’ piece desperately frustrates me because, in my 10 years as a designer of art, graphic design and architecture (and a little bit of homebaked game design), I know that breaking well-established design rules of thumb often (but not always) requires more design, not less. It requires more experimentation, decision making, more intent, to move away from well-tested principles than it does to stay with them. It asks more of your design brain. I would almost say the thing Lantz is against here, let’s call it “blindly following received wisdom about good design principles”, is the opposite of design, not its embodiment. I would say Lantz’ piece is against having design principles, perhaps, but not against following design process.

Or look at Counter-Strike surfing, one of the weirdest, most beautiful and interesting game genres of the past 10 years, which was created by players and map-makers without the help of any official game designers at all, thank you very much.

In architecture, where legally registering as an architect is quite restrictive. But how do you become an official game designer? You design a game. There’s no difference between that and these players & map-makers. It’s weird to assume players & map-makers weren’t designing. Were they using the editor with their eyes closed?

I admire good design. I respect good design. But I have to admit that many of the games I have truly loved do not seem to be the result of good design, they seem like beautiful accidents, hot messes, mistakes that worked, acts of God, or lucky, miraculous mutations.

I dunno. Did you research whether they actually were hot messes tho? It takes an amazing designer to design something so well that it seems effortless.

But then, and I’m just gonna quote what I said on twitter, I do agree there's a fallacy in assuming good games are just the product of intelligent design decisions rather than that & time, place, and all the decisions people make without realising. That said, I don't like valourising intuition as an artistic virtue because if you don't mediate what comes out of your brain, ie design it, often it's the same old crap that went in. Tropes etc.

And there's issues with the idea that artistic intuition is more authentic than conciously designing work, which leads to dumb ideas like the idea that if you change your mind due to outside input you're "self censoring" your work.

I feel like you have a responsibility to at least try to design your work. At a minimum, you have to be careful that the thing you make doesn’t harm people. For me, that means fire exits, for you, probably carefully designing any kind of representation etc.

Design implies a kind of rationality, an ability to identify clearly-defined problems and apply known techniques to solve them. But I think we overestimate the utility of our definitions and the power of our techniques. Like economists who overestimate the predictive power of their mathematical models we are overconfident about our ability to predict and explain the qualities that make great games.

I don’t think you have to be able to articulate your choices when you make a design choice. Maybe I draw a much less strong line between concious design deciscion and intuitive design one. I’ve run into this same attitude in architecture - that just because we can’t fully capture the nuance of say, 50 years experience in the discipline and the way that informs someone’s intuition and condense that into easily explicable princples that it means principles are pointless. But I just don’t see the difference. Make a choice because you run it through your spread sheet or your flow chart or your if clauses or, in architecture’s case, your procedural design algorithms.

Oh, I just realised. Game designers do this thing Lantz is against all the time. We call it procedural design. It’s the process of quantifying our design decisions to allow them to be replicated and produce new games. The utility of our definitions and the power of our techniques and our mathematical models and algorithms really are able to say something about what makes a good game.

Take, for instance, Spelunky. Spelunky codifies the idea that certain patterns and mechanics and density of enemies and many many other design principles are capable of producing a good game. It then allows the algorithm to produce a new game each run. True, it’s quite strictly limited in the games it produces. But in theory, you could keep complexifying the rules that govern Spelunky indefinitely, creating an algorithm that could produce a wide variety of moods and game types etc. Maybe it would only combine certain elements together, and you’d never get certain combos. Okay. It probably wouldn’t describe all the possible “good” games out there. but it’s still, y’know, possible. It’s possible to articulate enough good design principles in code that they can consistently produce a new fun game. Having design principles you use to produce individual games is just going through this process manually.

You could argue that often the variables we pick and balancing them well is a happy accident, and that’s true in some cases. We might not have been able to predict the qualities that made a good game, but here, in the algorithm, they are enumerated.

Even if we can’t describe and encode the nuances of game design to the point of building a totalising procedural game design machine,

I have even grown skeptical of the iconic image of the designer – smart, confident, sophisticated, stylish, informed. This image has come to represent a romantic illusion about the scope of our ability to define and solve problems.

I dunno. There are good designers who produce consistently good games. They just tend to be the designers who produce many little games, constantly building on their principles, rather than few huge ones. Unfortunately this is very different from producing financially successful games.

But songs are not designed, paintings are not designed, poems are not designed.

um, This is just wrong. If songs weren’t designed Max Martin would be out of a job. What about Tin pan alley and Hans Zimmer?  I’m not a fan of U2 but I have respect for The Edge’s design process as documented in It Might Get Loud. There’s a long history of design in paintings, even if you just look at the golden mean and principles of composition and the development of perspective. I’ve studied poetic composition in two languages, and yeah whoa the idea poems aren’t designed is really weird. I’ve written about why code can be poetry before, and it pretty much boils down to making decisions with a particular design intent within a established syntax (even if that’s established by you).

The alternative is terrifying. That we don’t know, that we will never know, that the problems we are trying to solve are not only unsolvable but undefinable, inexpressible, beyond comprehension. That we are negotiating with trees and shouting at volcanoes. But I have come to believe that this alternative is the truth. Or, more precisely, that the truth resides somewhere in between – close enough to seduce us with faint glimpses of its profile, far enough to forever elude the grasp of our design patterns, our textbooks, our lesson plans and our clever blog posts.

I guess I agree with this? That design plays a role but isn’t the whole explanation for how games turn out seems true. Publishers, fans, studio culture, timing, the limitations and abilities of engines, the list goes on.

I recognize the value of building an established discipline, and of crafting a shared set of principles that define game design as a profession. But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.

Architecture doesn’t really have any principles that are widely accepted except the “Design according to the particular problem, don’t blindly ape old or fashionable styles” that constitutes “modernism”. Doesn’t really stop us defining the profession. Also, a lack of codified design principles hasn’t ever really stopped us being gatekeepers, for better or worse.

I see your point tho - the rarification/valourisation/worship of high design, especially in tech communities, undervalues so many other design practices, especially in low arts & crafts (ie feminine or blue collar practices).

I don’t really draw much of a line between art and design, btw. They’re the same process for me. Roughly, Art is about expressing myself to other people and design is when I am trying to serve others’ needs or some external condition but there’s so so so much overlap.

And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve.

I’m very down with this - being really specific and articulate about your process rather than generalist is good.

At the NYU Game Center we struggle with this issue daily. Our approach is to define game design broadly, as the act of making games in a way that is driven by vision, in pursuit of a creative goal, mindful of how what you make will intersect with the people who play it, of how it will intersect with the world. We teach critical literacy and the fundamental principles of solid design, but within a context that leaves space for the unknown. Game design, from this perspective, is not so much the application of rules and guidelines as it is an unruly collision of divine inspiration, hard work, and good taste.

I dunno where you got this idea that “design” is the application of received wisdom. It’s certainly not the definition I’ve encountered in any other discipline I’ve worked in.

One of the things that really, really annoyed me about architecture school was everyone was so afraid of the idea “there is true good design” that they never taught us anything. Lecturers shyed away from articulating design principles, even the ones they themselves worked by, for fear of cramping students’ style and their own discovery. I think though, it left us with no starting point to build on or rebel against. It also makes for a very boring architecture criticism scene, presently. Believe me, games have much more interesting conversations, part of that is a fearlessness from people articulating what they think makes a good game good.

Am I disillusioned with the way received wisdom seems to influence development and publisher decisions? Sure. Do I think we put far too much faith in individual people’s abilities to control the outcomes of their games (and lives), and fail to account for unintentional or external factors or limits beyond their control? Definitely. But not to the point where I write off the importance of trying, as a designer, to understand and address the problem I’m trying to solve. I was talking about this with Alexander Bruce recently, who very much believes in the power of thorough consideration and thorough design to increase your chances of achieving what it is you set out to do. I would agree, though we probably disagree about the amount it changes your chances.

And for my part I will continue to design games, because that’s all I know how to do. But I will attempt to do so with a renewed sense of humility before the inexplicable greatness of games that have managed to spin the silver thread of love from the wool of the world in ways that I cannot hope to understand. Clutching my rulers and my pencils to my chest, in the night, in the middle of the storm, begging for lightning.

That sounds nice. I certainly don’t wanna tell you how to make your games. And yeah, I don’t think it’s easy to abstract the complexities of design process and intuition and heuristics into easily articulated design principles. That doesn’t mean I think the latter isn’t valuable.

I think the main flaw of this piece is it doesn’t really differentiate between what Lantz is actually objecting to - overly simplfied design-by-numbers/inherited wisdom/design grammers/pattern languages/procedural design - from what “design” usually refers to: the design process, or, as JP (@vectorpoem) pointed out “If there's a def of good design I can get behind, it's the ability to reconfigure assumptions to meet subjective goals.”

[clairehosking]

A Fistful of Dollars thoughts

I got knocked-out by a cold today so I stayed in bed and watched A Fistful of Dollars for the first time.

Okay this movie is weird. I don’t have any context for it at all. I think I watched Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in high school but it was lost on me and I’ve never seen Yojimbo.

It’s a really beautiful movie. I thought I would find it campy and over-the-top because I’ve mostly seen parodies of westerns, but even though it wasn't naturalistic I found it elegant. It’s very staged but graceful. Same with the music.

I liked how it kinda didn't have an overall purpose, like I don't think he rode into town originally thinking "I'm just going to murder everyone in this town" (later) "oh, now I've murderer everyone. goal achieved". I like how it’s about evolving with whatever happens. Reading about Yojimbo this seems to be one of the biggest differences - the lead in Yojimbo actively decides he’s going to save the town from the rival sides by killing them, but in FoD he doesn’t seem to have an overarching motive. Well, besides the dollars.

I think that’s a really interesting choice and I’d really like this movie to be about how the “might makes right” attitude causes all this misery and waste and how this kind of world where the situation is always changed forces a kind of extreme, moment-to-moment pragmatism over a higher morality.  But it seems just way too into “Look how cool Clint Eastwood is. He’s just a badass. Don’t you wish you were this badass?” to do that. “Just make sure you have the most might and you’ll be a merciful, just king”. Just do what you want. Save the beautiful woman for an arbitrary reason. If you never have an overarching moral code, you’ll never have to deal with your desires conflicting with your own morals. It weirdly almost seems like they think "being so detached you just go where the money is" is superior to being bogged down by a desire to make life better for people.

I think I would have told the same story, because it is a great story even if it’s about horrible people, but I would have framed it differently. Mad Men does a really good job of this, actually. Don Draper is also a broody, super capable dude who rules the roost (and also, would probably be pretty boring in conversation about anything except work). But Mad Men manages to make it really clear why that’s seductive, and forgives you for finding it seductive, but also exposes why it’s ultimately horrible.

but seriously imagine trying to have a conversation with the man with no name. Like, he has all these adventures but he’d clearly make a terrible storyteller. You just stand around looking really defiant at each other.

[clairehosking]

Playing and Reading and Making and Writing

Feels weird to say anything about video game journalisms atm considering I’m neither a journalist nor a video game, but here goes:

If your opinions are mainly about people in games, I’m just not that interested. I don’t design or play people.

But if you’re someone who wants to participate in games culture, who wants to talk games and write about games and make games in addition to playing games, I hope the past few weeks haven’t discouraged you too much. I really want you around.

I’ve dabbled in everything from games to programming to robots to architecture. I love games and game design, they fascinate me. I’m always keen to meet designers and critics, to talk games and see what interesting ideas crop up. Some of these friendships have been enduring and inspiring. I love going to igda meetings, I loved being at uni with student designers, I love going to student showcases, and jam showcases, and games picnics and parties, I love going to PAX. Then I like to go away and write my thoughts out, informed by seeing first-hand what’s happening in games at the moment. You can too! If you have interesting thoughts on character design or narrative or how gameplay is used to do x or y and how that’s new and fresh I cannot encourage you enough to write about it or meet other writers or critics or game designers or whoever and talk talk talk. It’s the best. As someone who likes to make little games too it’s always really inspiring to read or watch videos with interesting insights about games. Don’t worry if your writing or videos or streams or comics or podcasts are bad or not how you imagined them in your head. Everything takes time to get good at. Just try to do a little every time you have thoughts about games and you’ll get better.

  So yeah! Please keep doing that.

[clairehosking]

City Beautiful

There’s a pervasive idea that procedural storytelling and arts are somehow less “authored” than linear narrative, which is bullshit. I love Transistor because it skewers this idea mechanically and thematically, and while many games ask us to question what we consume (a la Spec Ops: The Line), Transistor asks us to question what we make.

Transistor imagines a city where push-button-make-reality is possible. This is a game about a city where citizens create “functions” (a script written to do or create a particular thing, for instance, create a bridge or a new pizza topping), then people vote for which functions they want, then the winning designs are put into practice by the algorithm/robot force that automatically creates the city around them.

Are these generated/programmed works worth the same, artistically, as “hand-crafted” ones? Transistor says yes, erasing old “digital art vs real art” dichotomies in meaningful ways. Most effectively, the combat system merges both intuitive combat -- the real-time, expressive responses to enemies -- with a more ritual, turn-based system that allows you to “program” your character to carry out future attacks. This spotlights the continuity between what we think of as “authored” vs “procedural” design. 

Then the story carries these themes of continuity between “authored” and “programmed” expression forward. Despite “art” being almost entirely procedural here, some Artists are still considered virtuosos. Transistor even frames this in a traditional romantic way: In Cloudbank, it seems possible to program things by transforming aspects of yourself or your expression directly into functions, much like the stereotype of ‘Artist as fountain of creativity’. (How & why this works is left unexplained, but technology, self and personality seem a bit magical here; this world has softer lines between reality and simulation, and might even be made out of uploaded consciousnesses, as Rowan Kaiser has suggested.)

Transistor treats them so normally; Why shouldn’t it? All artists practice according to their own rules, years of experimentation teaching “Do x if you want y” or “Don’t do b or a will happen”: There’s not that much difference between whether you intuitively calculate the outcome of those rules in your head to decide where to put the paintbrush down, or program them into a brush-wielding computer. I can paint a picture of a sky, or I can program a shader that creates beautiful skyscapes, in both cases I’m still an artist executing my vision with my chosen tools.

The game itself is the perfect example: The beautiful environments are a combo of hand painted and sculpted assets along with programmed elements like procedural patterns & shapes and shaders. Both sculpt the world to the makers’ artistic intentions.

But Transistor goes further, and asks - How do we treat systems with many authors, are they just as art? If our art is influenced or aided or constrained by the tools, algorithms and systems that other authors create, is it still our own vision?

Cloudbank, with its beaux arts styling, reminds me of the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s which encouraged citizens to see cities as collective works expressing common values. This city is beautiful, cool, exciting, intriguing, beguiling. By glamourising this democratic city, Transistor (intentionally or not) implies that a collaborative, collective art process enriches cities.

Which, as someone who studied urban design, I tend to believe this to be true. While some architects have been able to impose their individual visions directly on cities -- Haussman’s renovation of Paris, or slum “improvements” like Pruitt-Igoe -- most cities seem cohesive because of external pressures: laws & regulations, the local properties of brick-making-clay, the harshness of the sun, social beliefs about what houses should look like, builders’ expertise and technology, the will of the people. Architects aren’t fully autonomous but design within these limitations. It’s clear from history that the question isn’t whether social & circumstantial influences can co-exist with powerful works (they definitely can), but whether those influences are good or bad. Influence itself isn’t inherently bad.

But a nefarious cabal of super-rich self-appointed, uh, urban designers, don’t like how emergent this kind of democracy can be. To the Camerata, a city continuously subject to “popular whim” (to quote Todd Harper’s excellent piece on queerness in recent games) changing but possibly changing back, expresses no lasting values at all, no history or evolution or vision. To them, this influence is inherently bad, because it constrains their desires for their own art. Selfishly, they decide their own vision and desires for the city take precedence over anyone else’s, our character included.

However, The Camerata are glamourised too - tragic loves, dramatic deaths, sharp sartorial style - making it difficult to see whether Transistor believes that collective greatness trumps individual greatness or vice versa.

I know Greg Kasavin has written on his blog he prefers stories that explore all aspects of an issue than stories trying to push a perspective, but as an outsider, this “even-handedness” feels uneven.

The Camerata’s goal of artistic freedom only comes at the expense of everyone else’s any-kind-of-freedom. Is being portrayed as the villains enough? After all, they’re stylin’, highly intelligent, aspirational villains. Are they like Don Draper, a character designed to show how horrible ideas often come wrapped in an appealing shell?

It’s interesting. The Camerata’s very attempt to escape the influence of these overarching systems - or least control them themselves - ends up totally destroying any freedom they had. So you could say it ends up pointing to an interesting idea - there really isn’t any art that can exist outside these kinds of forces, some “one true art” that proceeds entirely from an author’s vision unshaped by their circumstances. The best we can do is create systems where the way we influence other artists is as productive as possible.

It also points to how the threat isn’t that the masses will take control of art, diluting its power, but that a handful of the powerful will, corrupting its purpose. (Art, after all, exists to explore our common humanity.)

Corrupt planning forces don’t arrive with robot armies but can do terrible damage to the people who inhabit cities. Poor regulation, or no regulation, can allow injustice & exploitation to run wild, as it did in the 19th century. So can the algorithms that shape ours, if we don’t take time to understand who chooses the variables and why. As we start to use programming more and more to determine those codes and limits - through ordinary stuff like traffic modelling, height modelling etc - we have to start viewing these techniques as something consciously authored, where those rules and limits are selected by someone, based on someone’s assumptions about how societies do and should work.

The rich and the big really do have more power to shape these underlying rules and decide who gets to design within them: Councils, Adobe, Caterpillar and Unreal are as much responsible for the shape of our cities, art, buildings and games as individual architects, artists, engineers and devs. (This was a problem for pen & paper too - the Sydney Opera House design changed because we lacked the abililty to calculate it).

That’s a bizarre thing about some video game fans to me now - people who are deeply concerned that ordinary individual critics might influence art just by popularising arguments and persuading artists to make different choices, but don’t seem worried about the ways that actual money and power can put hard limits what it’s possible for an artist to do (nefariously or not).

It’s not inherently bad that there are influences, since there’s no way to escape some degree of influence, and we’ve shown that systems themselves can produce art that’s as worthy as hand-crafted things - it’s just important that those influences are democratic, constructive and positive.

Cities are a collective artwork we make, so is the video game scene as a whole. Things like underlying structure, regulations and social convention aren’t just there to hinder or advance your art. Sometimes they exist to ensure your total autonomy doesn’t result in everyone else getting lasered by robots.

[clairehosking]

Threshold

Back in 2012 a friend asked on twitter “Do you think Dear Esther is a game? Why/why not?”. I thought about it and how I make digital worlds for architecture, and wondered what was the difference between those and games. I felt that, amongst the many digital arts, games have challenges, that’s what differentiates them from other virtual worlds.

So I felt a little uneasy when I saw people so insistent that their work was games. I didn’t consider making walk-through digital architecture a demotion. Coming from both an architecture and procedural arts background, seemed odd to see people shrink from the idea that maybe their digital art falls into some non-game category.

I got talking about this to Bennett Foddy (@bfod) and Ed Key (@edclef) on twitter so I put my argument to them: kicking stuff out of the games category isn’t really kicking it out of the medium, because games aren’t the medium, just part of it. It’s weird to call games “a medium”, because they’re not like other media. Films are made on film, Dance is made of dances, Paintings of paint, Murals are on walls (from muralis, which means wall). The name of the medium is what it’s made of or on, not what the works are like or about. But “game”, on the other hand, seems to strongly imply what the content is. Games are made of code*, but unfortunately they aren’t called “codings”, and it’s a pity we don’t have a good word to describe all the expressive things made of code. (Programs is perhaps closest, but it sounds so serious. I like “app” but it’s so strongly associated with one brand.)

And as much as we say, well, it doesn’t have to be prescriptive, “Game” can be the term all expressive things made with code, it still leaves me without specific terms to differentiate mechanics-based digital arts from other digital arts. Maybe that’s not a big problem for you. But I'd like a nice word to fill that role.

*(Not that a dev needs to to code any more than a painter needs to make paint. You can dab code together with a brush (eg Unity). But that’s what they’re made of, ultimately)

But Bennett and Ed clued me to an interesting idea, though I’m not sure it has exactly the same implications for me as it does for them: Whatever key criteria we pick, whatever we decide the core qualities that games have, we’re bound to see them in things that aren’t games too. And vice-versa. That’s an interesting idea, I thought, that works are rarely purely one thing, games borrow from other media and other media borrow from games. Any work of expression might be 20% game, 10% painting, 70% book (or 10% context narrative, 90% tonally unrelated “gameplay”; or 85% fountain, 15% puzzle). A portrait with both painting and drawing elements won the Archibald portrait painting prize just a couple of years ago, it’s still called a painting.

I think to Bennett and Ed, this meant ‘anything can be a game’, thus the question is moot**. To me, rather than going from two categories to one, I went from seeing two categories to millions. If game isn’t an either/or question, then something can be kinda game, or partially a game and partially something else, very game, mostly game, barely a game etc etc etc. All games, yes, but a way of thinking that reflected how much they felt like games to me. Further, things, like people, may possess many qualities, but which qualities we perceive most strongly depends a lot on what we’re seeking from them. So even though I still feel like mechanics make something feel the most like a game to me (though that's changing) and not like something else, here was a vocabulary that let me understand and talk about the idea of game differently, more inclusively.

**(Edit: Ed clarified after this post went up that he doesn't think "anything can be a game" but "it feels like a useful mode of thinking" )

I can see it in other things now too: architecture has long been moving away from a dichotomy of inside/outside, and it’s only broadened the vocabulary of space and made for better buildings, buildings that take advantage of the landscape as much as shelter from it. Without giving up on having colloquially understood definitions of inside & outside, we’ve embraced spaces that are various amounts of both, or neither. (I was pretty stoked to see this very idea appear in a recent indie game, Kentucky Route Zero, while I was writing this post. Cardboard Computer do some fantastic work!)

  Shearer's Quarters, Bruny Island, by John Wardle Architects

  Serpentine Pavilion, Frank Gehry

Can you be outside and still inside architecture?

It’s not like “games” is a spaceship, and things left outside are in deadly airless infinite nothingness. It’s not:

But more like:

Something is definitely there, but it has no exact edge, yet some works seem be more part of the something than others. Formalists emphasise perceiving the cluster, outsider gamemakers emphasise the lack of edge.

There are quantum particles all around us and in some places they are so dense we can’t get past them. Those are walls, but really, walls and space aren’t mutually exclusive because there is still space between particles in a wall. At the same time, I know exactly what “wall” means when I walk into one. A fence is a wall to me, but not to a mouse: Everybody knows what feels like a game to them, it depends on who they are. People decide for themselves where exactly those dots become part of the games cluster, exactly where the boundary is from the centre. Mechanics might be key to games - but how many does it take to make a game? What percentage of game time has to be taken up by mechanics-based bits? How much story telling can I get away with per puzzle? How many cutscenes per hour of platforming, or grinding, or shooting, before I don’t get to call it a game anymore? What if there’s only one mechanic? What if there’s many but they’re all so simple that there’s no challenge to the game at all? If Halo is 10% cut scenes is it less of a game than chess? What about games that are 50% cutscenes? 

And if games are defined by mechanics, how come games that are purely mechanics are called “casual”, while the majority of hardcore/canon/”true gamer”/cultural touchstone/AAA are the ones with large “non-game” elements and sections?

(All of these things are games, though some place using mechanics to express their theme at a higher priority than other concerns, and those are ‘more game’ to me. It’s not about how many mechanics or how complex they are - Donkey Kong is simpler than journey in its mechanics, somehow Journey’s the one that fields the accusation of not being game enough - but how well considered they are for the experience.)

________________________________________________________

At the same time, I wonder, what’s so wrong with not being a game?

There’s a fantastic continuum of software arts out there, like robot art and architectural parametric modelling and procedural arts (stuff like complexification.net), and trying to snap everything that’s mixed gamic and other elements into the game label leaves all those other things further away. The genres become more isolated, more like singular dots. The bigger the gulf gets, the more critical it is to be on the right side. I want to see a smoother gradient between different genres, and part of that is loosening up and finding other words to call trends in software arts.

But then, there’s audiences and money for games that there isn’t for ‘interactive art’ or ‘expressive programming’, and it seems like attempts to deny that what outsiders make is “games” is trying to deny them that recognition for their work.

I think if you want to even pretend that insisting your mechanics-based definition of game is an objective one and your intentions are innocent, it’s your responsibility to raise up those other arts first. You can’t be all “Oops, sorry I ardently kicked you into obscurity, I guess that’s your problem now.”. If you really think that there’s no shame in calling something interactive art, where’s your championing of interactive art?

In architecture, the change in mindset from “inside is architecture, outside is elsewhere” to “a continuum of space” engendered a responsibility to foster the outside and the liminal spaces too, ideas that saw the barren victorian suburbs of Sydney planted with trees and street furniture and paved. You can’t just pretend calling certain games “interactive experiences” is equally respectful when you show no embodied respect: Links, reviews, hype, fanart, hours played.

I still want a wider vocab. Visual art has a long history of taking exclusionary criticism and repurposing it as a banner to march under. A critic trying to gatekeep said “Just cubes!” and thus named cubism, another “Mere impressions” and impressionism got its catchy monkier. I think we could do the same.

So yeah, I’m trying to find a def that feels intuitively right and isn’t exclusionary - a spectrum of game-like-ness is kinda working for me. Not feeling that everyone has to have the same def, only that we shouldn’t force our definitions on devs.

__________________________________

P.S. It’s also possible to look at my whole dilemma as “Architecture clients are inadvertently commissioning games of their future buildings” which is hilarious.

P.P.S. The ancient Romans used the same word for ‘game’ as for ‘school’, which seemed totally contradictory to me from my culture. Whatever they considered the core similarity, I’m glad we’re not held to the same mental categories forever. When I was translating, the question is never “what does this word mean?”, as though that’s some kind of fixed thing in all contexts, but “what did this person mean by this word?”

_______________________________________

I don’t think anyone has to be interested in game definitions, mechanics, and inclusivity, but I am, mostly because new players/makers should hash out what games mean to them and what their yardsticks to measure games will be. I see debate over the extent of “games” as a sign that most people feel like they own some of games culture, they belong to it and it to them.

Openly believing-in-one’s-own-definition isn’t the case in all artforms. Visual arts suffer from the conception that “art” is hard to understand, hard to define, and hard to judge. It hurts the medium: It puts off students who aren’t sure if their work is “art”; it puts off fans by making it hard to walk into an exhibition and say ‘I think this is shallow. I think this is bad art.’ because they don’t have their own def of what art is. Acting like art is indefinable is widely used to shut down outsiders’ attempts to ‘get it’. (eg those asinine wags who’ll dead-end any attempt at reflection with ‘Ah, but what is art?’?). This uncertainty lets racists and sexists shield their racist and sexist work by claiming “It’s art” (ie indefinable, unquantifiable, and therefore unjudgable), as if that should stop us from critiquing, rather than invite critique. Maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on personal experience, but once someone clued me to a good working definition of art, my ability to appreciate, criticise, engage with and make art grew fast. YMMV.

On the other hand, conversations about music flourish at all levels and most people feel confident to say what they think and feel about it, in part because music is seen as intuitive to understand, intuitive to define, and intuitive to judge. (YMMV)

I think I’d prefer games to fall into more of the music situation of ‘you decide what you feel a game is, follow your star, let others follow theirs’, than the more visual art type attitude of ‘game can be anything, don’t even try defining it’

That’s why it’s important to me to feel like I’ve arrived at a position on how I define game, and I hope you arrive at one too, even if we don’t pick the same one.

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[clairehosking]

Monument Valley: Follies

Spoilers

Folly, noun 1. A mistake

2. A costly ornamental building with no practical purpose

Really liked Monument Valley, very clever little puzzles almost like clockworks or Burr puzzles. (It also reminds me of Naya’s Quest, which is a totally underhyped game.)  Intimidatingly gorgeous art style, someday I hope I’ll make real buildings that captivating. 

At first I enjoyed the mysterious story, the light overlay of context for each Monument, but towards the end I felt like it was overly aloof; like, if you’re going to set up this intrigue, you have to have to give answers eventually for it to be satisfying, otherwise it looks like you just scattered elements together without actually writing a story.  

(But then, on the other hand, should the story make more sense than the geometry?)

But I feel like the ending was just enough to feel confident the storytellers knew what story they’re telling. I’m guessing - a bird princess sent her subjects to steal the artifacts of an ancient culture for her, they became trapped, the artifacts caused her to forget her ego, now she regrets and decides to return them, not quite knowing why. I like its inversion of video game and adventure story tropes - an anti-Indiana Jones, a little girl who returned stolen artifacts to their culture. I like that a lot. Much as a I love the British Museum and archeology and history, I hope as a culture we’ve moved on from just saying “finders keepers” about the cool stuff ancient cultures made. It’s quietly anti-colonial, in a “hey, Queen Victoria, not cool gal, not cool” kinda way.

Being sorry for what you did is one thing, but actually repairing the damage you’ve caused takes work, and I like that this game focuses on a character doing that work, not just “coming to a realisation”.

[clairehosking]

The Sense of An Ending / Idle Book Club

So many spoilers. 

I'm glad there's an Idle Book Club episode for this book, since I was really hesitant to form a view after reading The Sense of an Ending, because I sort of thought: “Tony resonates with me, but Tony is bad at forming correct opinions, so I don’t really trust that I’ve formed the correct opinion of this book.” I tended to agree with Tony about Veronica more towards the end than I had in the middle even though I knew that’s not how you’re supposed to feel after you find out more about her. I tried to imagine what other people might have thought of it and found that pretty difficult, like on the podcast Sean mentions he doesn't know how Julian Barnes feels about Tony. Julian Barnes plays Veronica to the readers, totally unwilling to guide us to the correct conclusion.

I’d just read The Shining Girls, Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies in a row, so I wasn’t very keen to dive into a self-pitying story about boomer boys in private schools. Chris talked on the podcast about the joy of the prose, but I didn’t get that initially, the reflective talk felt like very obvious observations. Then I got up to Adrian and that sucked me in. That was the whole book to me: disliking everything while feeling compelled to keep reading by the tantalising withheld information.

I was pretty harsh on Veronica. In flashback, it’s possible to believe that Tony really just missed something obvious, since Veronica seems to want to be understood. But later the story wants us to believe that Veronica is dropping clear hints when she’s actually doing obtuse and difficult to parse things, like sending photocopies of single pages and sitting in cars looking at people. It just seems like she was never someone who learnt how to communicate properly. I got angry at her too b/c, okay, mess Tony around if you want but jesus stop fucking me around I’m just the reader I never sent you a goddamn letter why did you have to burn that diary I really wanted to know Adrian’s secrets.

So I felt bad that I was also tantalised by the idea of reading Adrian’s diary and finding out why he really killed himself, then finding out that’s actually pretty selfish. And I felt a bit angry at the book, like it’s a cheap gimmick, a post-bioshock ending for a book. But then on the podcast Chris gave an interpretation of Veronica’s point of view where she’s just being hounded by this entitled douchebag, and I thought maybe The Sense of an Ending isn’t “Spec Ops: The Book”, where I’ve been enjoying a standard plot device and now the creator is going to shame me for it, because the moral isn’t “Don’t read voyeuristic fiction”, it’s “don’t be Caleb Hannan”. Don’t harass secretive women because you feel your curiosity burning, just learn to accept it without acting on it. I like an artwork with a moral that isn’t “Don’t consume this artwork”

(but I’ve always loved this drawing by my mum’s friend that’s been in my house my whole life)

Chris then wonders if we fall for condemning Tony like Tony condemns others? I don’t think I did when I first finished the book. He does stuff that’s only evil if he’d had more information that he has, and how can you blame him for not having it and simultaneously blame him for seeking it? Tony’s blinded by who he is, it’s hard to tell if it would have been possible for him to choose to be a better person. Sometimes relationships are toxic even if the people in them aren’t.

I’ve been reading An Instance of the Fingerpost which I hoped would be a good follow up since it’s also about unreliable narration, but instead it’s very obvious what the character’s blindspots are. That’s in part because historical fiction likes being able to say “Look at this person’s historical flaws (sexism, racism etc) and look how blind they make them!” and also because the writing is clumsy. I think Sense of an Ending is cleverer: Tony doesn’t have flaws that make him blind, blindness is the flaw. That and the insecurity that stops him from venturing his interior. Tony has many relevant thoughts, speculates in the right direction a lot, and expresses them to the reader, which makes it easy to miss how he’s not confirming his hypotheses at all. He constantly opts out of seeking actual information if it would require him to put forward his own theories first. (Like sending his condolences to Veronica). Tony keeps missing his cues to engage in particular kinds of discussions or to express himself, from the teacher’s questions (where he parrots witticisms) to Veronica’s remark about how periods exist to let you know you’re not pregnant (I would have thought Veronica’s remark about periods hints that fear of pregnancy was the main reason for her chastity, whether she knows that conciously or not. Instead of addressing/comforting that, he shames her for being frigid.). It makes more sense if you think of Veronica’s behaviour not as Tony does, as clues to be deciphered for an explanation, but as tests of whether he can engage with the world in a particular way.

Sarah Argodale (I think?) put forward an explanation on the Idle Forums that Veronica’s “confusing” behaviour is the result of being pulled between not wanting to reward Tony with an explanation but also wanting to punish him by letting him know what he catalysed. I think that’s pretty insightful and plausible, but I was also thinking that maybe V, unlike Tony, doesn’t want to tell stories that makes her into the central character. Veronica feels shame explaining a story that makes her the protagonist, since she wasn’t the one who ended up dead. Maybe she is ashamed of feeling any self-pity for being affected by the fallout of something worse that happened to someone else. Yet I can understand her hoping that someone sympathetic would stumble on the truth themselves, understand how much she’s been through, especially how horrible her mother was to her. Tony’s the only person who also hates her family.

The thing I found hardest to fit into V’s character was leaving Tony with her mother. After her mum deliberately disparages Veronica, I imagined her as something like Megan Draper’s mother in Mad Men, just kinda selfish and heartless, but thinking she’s being cruel-to-be-kind. If she does what the book suggests she does - deliberately made passes at her daughter’s bfs, doesn’t follow the Campsite Rules about dating much younger people (Nothing serious, no emotional or physical harm, leave people the shape than you found them, no pregnancies), was unremorseful about Adrian’s death, named her child inescapably Adrian, sought to divulge the secret to a near-stranger when her daughter might finally be free of her, was possibly grateful to Tony for his role and unable to see how the diary would probably cause him guilt for catalysing his friend’s death - it seems fair to assume she’s been a damaging factor in Veronica’s life well before Tony’s visit. So why does V leave him there? 

So I didn’t like the book to begin with, but once I knew the ending, rereading it was amazing. Gah the subtle foreshadowing is insanely well worked into the logic of the preceding story - Sarah Ford sliding an unrequested and unwanted extra egg onto Tony’s plate. I got how beautifully put together it was, the ideas resonated properly. I didn’t reread the second half.

________________________________________________________

Anyway, that’s all the thinking I’ve done since reading the book and listening to the podcast. Do you wanna see the dumb notes I wrote during the book when it seemed illegible to me? Here you go:

  Beginning - Can’t stand the writing/tone/mood

Middle - Veronica may have unrevealed logic or maybe she is just forgivably irrational. I think I confused a boy or two doing things without explaining them when I was 22.

End - huh, that’s definitely a possibility I considered, minus the child. Other main guess: Adrian was gay. Rejected it: too centred around Tony.

This story makes more sense coming from an author of many books, it’s not the kind of novel you write as your first and possibly only work, but as part of collection of character studies, where you’ve already written characters closer to your actual point of view and feel like you can branch out.

Veronica seems less likable that she stayed so unable to express herself her whole life. I know that she probably feels she met a jerk who expected sex, dumped her because she expected insight/interiority, used her for sex, got resentful, tried and succeeded to ruin her future happiness.

I think I’ve written nastier letters.

I can’t parse what he was meant to realise about their relationship.

Don’t like not knowing. I know that’s childish, but I spend my daily zen on calmly accepting my spelunky deaths. I don’t like being dragged through with a tease.

I felt more like Veronica when the book was less on her side. I don’t like Tchaikovsky and I only own things I’ve read/played.

The neatness of how everything is explicitly foreshadowed bugs me, like it’s deliberately heavy-handed like an architectural detail - make flaws into features - but not sure it succeeds.

I wonder when Adrian’s suicide happens during the pregnancy exactly.

Sarah is the biblical character who is particularly alluring (At least two kings wanted her for a wife) and has a child despite thinking she’s too old and barren. She also laughs a lot. She’s one of the few biblical characters that gets away with openly doubting God, though I could be wrong about that. I guess if I’d been thinking more I could have picked up on her laughing at the frying pan as a clue. This kinda stuff is just annoying to me. I love Dickens’ onomatapoeic names but I hate cheap biblical allusions.

  As a name, “Veronica” gets wrongly associated with Vera Ikon (True Image), but I’m guessing it’s actually more a reference to the Elvis Costello song about memory loss. Veronica’s other name, Mary, might be a reference to an old vaudeville song:

He used to come and court his little Mary-Anne

I used to think that he was my young man

But mother caught his eye

and they got married on the sly

Now I have to call him Father

[clairehosking]

Broken Age thoughts

*spoilers, you should probably play Broken Age first. You really should, it’s good.*

I started with Shay’s story, which was solid. Shay is expressive, dissatisfied in a relatable way (tho probably my favourite character is the teleporter).  The Wolf is shady enough to seem excitingly dangerous, the programmable loom delightful, and the whole story & locations form a neat interconnected arc of exploring Shay’s home/life and moving the plot forward. Puzzles are simple but they work hard to tell you about the world. Double Fine somehow made Shay’s fake adventures feel hollow and his real adventures feel exciting even though they’re both fake constructions to the player. There wasn’t a huge amount of difference in them mechanically, but it beautifully outlined a point about how children’s dreams (and games) aren’t just desires for heroism & power but also meaning, which I think gets missed a lot. While Shay’s story doesn’t have the immediate energy of other Double Fine games, it’s gentler and more exploratory.

On the other hand, Vella’s story seems to start with a clumsy exposition dump that made me cringe a lot. A lot. At first, the writing seems about half as good compared to Shay’s. The characters are thinly constructed (though Vella improves a lot after she gets to the birdworld) and the story arc is loose.

The first Maidensfeast scene was pretty bad. I get it - this society expects women to compete to be the most acceptable. Sounds familiar. It’s true, there are Heathers/Mean Girls out there. But why are there only two types of girl here: Vella, and airheads? (I’m particularly disappointed because Grim Fandango wasn’t even trying to directly address sexism in the same way but at least it had a lot of variation among its female characters.) Why is getting eaten portrayed as a kind of “Veruca Salt” scenario, where ridiculous vapids get their just desserts? This parable ends up conflating “desire to be attractive” with wishing doom on oneself. This scene was just a big WTF moment in an otherwise thoughtful game.

Am I misreading this? Am I getting confused between a not-great portrayal of girls with a deliberate portrayal of not-great girls? It’s not like there are no other girls - there’s Vella’s sister, there’s M’ggie, there’s the two Blind God temple guards. I like that Double Fine was willing to put an unsettlling edge on both Vella & Shay’s stories, in order to explore themes like social pressures on girls and femininity, the need in children for meaning & trust and the morality of heroics. Those are good reasons. Vella’s scenario is similar to Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, I think games should be willing to touch on similar themes.

So don’t get me wrong - I really want this scene in the game, I just want the characters of the girls to be differently set up - maybe a more varied set of girls or to make a point about how women are taught to compete with each other when working together could liberate us all (there’s hints this theme could come up in act 2 though - Vella does keep asking people to help her, and the eaten girls are apparently on the ship Vella’s now trapped in). But at the time I was playing it read more like “Sluts get comeuppance, good girl is saved”, which is same old, same old. (Also are we supposed to laugh at the fat girl for finding herself attractive?)

I’m sad this ends up taking up three paragraphs of what I have to say about the game because it’s a beautiful and worthy game.

After that, I liked the rest of the game more. I loved whenever Vella interjects dialogue you haven’t picked for her, filling out her personality (Jerk bird!). It’s her own opinions too, not just emphatic “woo!”s or whatever. The other Maidens after the first scene seem more human. Jack Black as the guru Harm’ny is a highlight, as are the goofy birds that dot the backgrounds. I loved how it’s a game that wants you to linger and study your surroundings, gives you something beautiful and often animated to study.

I love Tim Schafer’s work in general to the point of continuing to play Stacking despite it giving me the worst motion sickness I’ve ever had from any game. There’s no Double Fine game I love that doesn’t have a clumsiness about it that you forgive out of the sheer charm & cleverness.  In writing actually lively, interesting characters rather than empty shells for the player to inhabit, Broken Age gives itself a good reason to explore themes more about individuals than post-bioshock game with nothing to explore but the game itself, but it also risks more incongruity. I’m hoping Maidensfeast was just an opening hurdle, that as the writers get more comfortable with the character and the world they’re writing, things seem to flow more naturally.

[clairehosking]

Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Spoilers.

People get hung-up about what makes an experience significant, like if they watch something it’s only worthy if it’s life-changing, or if you make some art it should start revolution or at least a riot a la The Rite of Spring’s opening night. “Life makeover” movies like Stranger Than Fiction tend to reinforce that, like “Here’s a character living a worthless grey life and now Ta-da! they’ve made it epically meaningful”. But what I liked about The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was it took pains to show how the day-to-day is valuable. It emphasised a well-roundedness: Dignity from the mundane and glory from the adventurous, each playing into the other. Walter doesn’t become a new person, he just incorporates another side and reassesses.

It was a kinda softness that carried through the mood and particularly the lighting & textural qualities of the different environments. The Time Life Building has a shininess, the play of light with the revolving doors that gives it a sense of optimism, it’s not the bleak office cliche. The landscapes aren’t sudden burst of sunshine but have a softer quality, more respite than metamorphosis. They’re contrasted as different kinds of experiences, rather than one being nothing and the other being “real experience”. Maybe just because I struggled with suspension of disbelief that he could climb a mountain on his own, those parts of the movie still felt tongue-in-cheek, not what the film wanted to anoint “real”. (Less slo-mo soccer thanks)

I’m not surprised that in a movie made a few years into a recession, people look more fondly at the importance of day-to-day jobs and day-to-day people. That said, his life is disrupted by poverty as a teen and then by technological change. Silicone Valley got rich but inadvertently caused print’s demise so they have to sell the piano. I think he could afford to get a little more angry at a system that asked him to sacrifice the possibility of adventure & then his livelihood because of accidents of fate.  

The movie teaches Walter to value his life & work but doesn’t really ask the viewer to care that people who had 20 years experience in telling stories are being scattered to the winds. Is it enough that it wants the viewer to empathise with one person? If the movie asks you to value even the stuff that doesn’t start riots, is it true to itself if it doesn’t either? Maybe it’s okay if it’s just a comfort film for people “disrupted”.  

It’s true, I’m bored with saving the world and cheap tricks to up the stakes, I like that this took a very small thing and made it very valuable to me. It barbs the gimmicky “no cover” cover, and I think, happily undermines its own reveal to make it softer. Lots of clues as to what the cover is going to be, and no “clever” switcharoo, just something that make polite sense to the story. So yeah, I liked it and I feel like it met my criteria for good art: Not riots, but anything that’s embiggening to our sense of humanity.

[clairehosking]

Gravity

I really liked Gravity, I liked it for being an intelligent popular film. I loved the fragility that’s everywhere in this film. Everything’s made of flaky pastry.

I loved seeing a woman dealing with her own dilemma, looking from her eyes. Even if she has assistance, it’s not a movie from the perspective of men-dealing-with-her-problems-for-her (ie she’s not a damsel). She still has agency over her fate, even if she’s not the only factor.

It’s a delicate construction, a movie about how we often have less control than we think but also portraying a woman as capable of self-determination. It gets past the man-effective-woman-futile cliche without going straight to everyone-effective-all-the-time. Here actions are unpredictably useful, so I like how that fits with my feeling it’s worth it to always be trying, but one can never be blamed or credited solely for how things turn out, good or bad.

Religion in movies is a tricky thing to portray (everything in movies is tricky to portray. making good art is hard), but I liked the references to deities here. Praying as reconciliation with being just one force amongst many greater ones, rather than an attempt to bargain with/ control the universe. I liked the overt visual metaphors (mothership as womb) in a way I don’t usually except in comics.

It’s a good movie to see the weekend before you come into work and find out you’re redundant, in a job you kinda took and a city you kinda moved to to get away from everything. This is why women need stories about them. Not that my life is nearly as tragic, but imagining the situation as flaky pastry space junk is comforting somehow, both as “well, at least I’m not that screwed” & “imagining self as central characters in an epic” kinda ways. Also in a “Well maybe I should go to China?” kinda way.

It’s a video-gamey movie in the way it keeps moving everywhere. Apollo 13 is like, sit tight and work your way through the many options available to you and hopefully pick the right one in time to not die. Jason Di Rosso called it a fantasy of powerlessness, maybe. In the sense that it’s a fantasy of trading uncertainty for being forced into knowing exactly what you have to do next, I guess. Upping the contrast.

Gravity doesn't seem deliberately meaningful - it doesn’t have the irony, the overt questioning, of high science fiction - but I like that here. You walk away with a sense, rather than a message.

I remember a few years ago feeling like my life was falling apart, reading Rem Koolhaas talking about something architecture and painting a picture of the world as loose floating cultural debris on which to surf, that was comforting at the time.

[clairehosking]

Complexity and Contradiction In Games

In Architecture there’s this idea that if you are trying to make a building feel light then you should make the joints light (eg, bound timber joints, lightly webbed trusses), or if you want it to feel solid then the materials and joints should be solid too (concrete, solid beams). Nevermind that you can paint fiberboard to look like concrete, creating a heavy-feeling but actually flimsy space, or that the re-invention of concrete allowed us to create buildings with a greater sense of light and air.

The experience and the method of construction should exemplify the same idea. Kinda like the idea in games that mechanics should be thematically appropriate for the story.

Nevermind that humans really like ironies, non-sequiturs & paradoxes*. To vastly oversimplify: In the 60s architect Robert Venturi wrote “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” a book that celebrated the richness of “the difficult whole”. He felt the diagrammatic mid-century architecture was obsessed with harmonising effect with means to the point of producing one-liners. He, with Denise Scott Brown, later wrote about the different between “ducks” (buildings that symbolised their contents, roles or idea, like a Duck shop shaped like a duck), and “decorated sheds” (buildings that exemplified their content, roles or ideas, like a bank decorated very richly on a pedestal of firm stone. This building is actually prosperous in decoration and secure in materials, it doesn’t just symbolise prosperity and security through, say, statues of the Goddesses Prosperity and Security).

If these two points seem contradictory, I’m sure Scott Brown and Venturi would be pleased. They argue both for buildings that exemplify their themes, and for buildings that do not merely exemplify their themes or edit out richness in the name of purity.

I think that’s the best lesson - yes, avoid ludo-narrative dissonance in your games if you can, but also know it’s not always bad, it’s a tool you can use to bring a sense of irony or sublime, paradox or sublte unease, and many other things. Maybe don’t sacrifice these things in the name of avoiding ludo-narrative dissonance if they bring richness to your game.

*I have a personal theory that the bible is attractive because of its internal contradictions, not despite them. They play upon the mind like the unresolved drama of a pop song; supposedly they’re resolved in some other dimension, inviting us to consider the sublime. It’s the way it feels beyond our comprehension to fully resolve its contradictions that makes it feel ‘Holy’.