/'dɹɑkɪn/

this is where i think aloud

[variouspixels]

In the time it takes me to make 4 sprites, my more talented and productive 4 year old son can make 20… HOW?

[stanyek]

BYOND DEEP DIVE

or: an essay on “dead” games

I have a long history with BYOND (short for Build Your Own Net Dream, a name and acronym that betrays its age.) A really, really long history. About half of my entire life, all the way back to, from what I can remember, December of 2009.

Like the vast majority of the people using it, I downloaded the platform for Space Station 13. I remember the exact framing, too: it was Christmas Eve or Christmas and my mom pulled me away from the computer for a family photo. I was pretty excited to get back to the game, because a scientist was busy ripping the brain out of my body to put inside of a robot.

The map that happened on doesn’t exist anymore and, as far as I’m aware, there aren’t any pictures of it, so my introduction to this game exists only in my memory, dreamlike, the 32x32 sprites rendered far more impactful and lifelike thanks to a mixture of time and a kid’s imagination.

Basically, before we can get to BYOND’s insane, seemingly undocumented and mostly unloved hoard of weird, borderline not-games, we need to talk about SS13. I’ll keep it brief, since this post/article/essay/whatever isn’t about it.

To get to the point: Space Station 13 has a Wikipedia page and the engine it’s built on doesn’t, even though it’s been around since, from what I can tell, the late 90s. ‘96 if you’re counting precursors, ‘99 in its more-or-less current state. It’s been accused of looking like spyware. It isn’t, but it looks like it.

SS13 usually has about a thousand simultaneous players during peak hours. The spot for number two is contested between Eternia and Sigrogana Legends 2, both JRPG influenced roleplaying games that, honestly, occupy that weird space between a video game and a late 2000s freeform roleplaying ProBoards forum. I played Eternia in middle and high school and it’s okay if you’re into that sort of stuff. I assume the other one is fine, too.

You boot up Murder Mansion. A social sort of murder mystery game: one player’s the killer, the others aren’t. Stop him-her. It inexplicably has a single player option (complete with bots) and the soundtrack is a handful of (presumably stolen) MIDI renditions of horror movie themes.

A friend of mine on IRC hosted the game every day for about a month in, I think, summer of 2012… aside from SS13, this’ll be one of the only games showcased that I have an actual, personal connection to.

What gets me about Murder Mansion is that it’s so obviously a labor of love. Almost all indie games are. There are seven large maps and, with the player’s slow speed (there’s a run option but there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll trip or slip on something and, quite literally, die instantly) they feel a lot larger. And the maps aren’t re-skins, either, all of them have tons of unique assets, items, etc.

Dead MMOs are sad; thousands of hours of development work over what may be a decade or more, an entire community, and what amounts to someone’s vision of a living, breathing world are strangled by the invisible hand of the free market.

Dead indie games - the multiplayer type you find on BYOND - are sadder. In Murder Mansion’s case, the developer updated it consistently for ten years, from 2003 to 2013. What we’re left with is something that feels empty, but not completely lifeless. Someone loved this game! They loved it enough to update it for years and years.

Wandering around in this game is wistful.

Mitadake High is more or less the same genre of game as Murder Mansion, except it’s set in an… anime high school.

The main difference is that, from my memories of playing Mitadake High, people got super into it. It is absolutely amazing when someone is trying their best to get into the character of a blue-haired anime boy who just killed eight people and explains to you that their motivation for murdering a pile of people is that they have tuberculosis.

Probably the only BYOND game, aside from SS13, to have a TVTropes page. Which, by the way, is extremely expansive.

Games like these are fantastic: someone saw Higurashi or something and decided to make a video game out of it. The main menu music is ear-piercingly loud and ripped directly from the show. I was once murdered for knowing someone’s name because the gamemode was literally Death Note. I saw the guy who made Tails Gets Trolled on here once and played a round with him, because of course he played this game, it’s practically made for him.

Years ago, when people still played this game, I saw someone say “Oh my Kami!” as a substitute for saying “Oh my God!” multiple times in complete seriousness.

Your middle school id laid bare to up to dozens of people, all of whom are competing for the non-award of being told after the game that your character’s improvised backstory was compelling, tragic, and deep.

In Freeside, two glowing orbs appear and compel you to commit a mass shooting in an almost entirely colorless (there’s some grass) and empty city. The roads lead nowhere: to the same grey concrete walls that make up the city’s buildings, almost completely empty except for crates and guns.

This is the Platonic ideal of a shooter. Very little explanation other than, explicitly, go forth and kill. You can’t win, but there’s a score. As far as I can tell, it isn’t uploaded to a leaderboard anywhere. This more or less illustrates the crux of what a lot of BYOND games are: hyperindividual and disconnected minigames, whether it’s competing for the title of most tragic anime mass murderer amidst an honestly hostile and combative ‘community’ of roleplayers, a sperm-based maze game where you’re racing to fertilize an egg, or a mass shooting with a score that never mattered to anyone except you.

It’s beautiful: even when there are others, there’s an audience of one.

Elora brings an issue to the fore: BYOND has games that I’m almost certain only a dozen or so people close to the developer have played longer than a minute.

The presence of a chat function insinuates that there’s something already missing; I tried, in vain, to find a monster, but the game’s selection of monsters seems limited to the cast of Back to the Barnyard, wolves, and deer. The sound your character makes when you move causes my eardrums to pulsate and throb. Elora is dozens of lakes, circular mounds of black rock, tracts of grass, dirt, and fruit trees. None of the animals, even the snarling wolves, try and hurt you. Elora is a depiction of paradise. Wolves will stand side by side with cows, boars with pigs, and so on. Jannah rendered in 32x32, just like God would’ve wanted.

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking that, outside of the top three titles, two of whom are borderline identical and one of which is probably among the most resilient and  popular indie games ever made, BYOND is dead. It’s not. I’m not a mortician or an archaeologist. BYOND is very much alive: games are still being made. People still post on its antiquated forum and, more than anything else, this obscure engine for multiplayer games from the 90s is still up and running.

Certain games are dormant, sure, but they’re still full of life. Say they’re sleeping, not dead - say they’re dead and it’s for real. I already called Murder Mansion dead, probably thanks to sentimentality.

One of the most famous “dead games” isn’t even dead, for fuck’s sake.

Brief but relevant detour: when someone first posted about Worlds, a still-running 3D chatroom from the last century, on /x/ way back in 2010, 11, or 12, I can’t remember, it was marketed as a ‘dead game.’

It wasn’t: as it turned out, there was a still-active community of people playing the game. Geriatric? Sure, some of them have even passed on in the decade between then and now.

Sidenote, in case you’re the type of person to think there’s a cult in Worlds: there is no cult in Worlds, the locals are just fucking with you! Everyone used to do it. I know I did.

Still: there’s something off-putting about it all. Hundreds if not thousands of games, most of them ranging from bad to okay, all of them charming in their own way. How many hours of work, collectively, does BYOND’s catalog represent? Probably somewhere, not joking, past a million if you count SS13. Get rid of that, somewhere in the low hundred-thousands.

Most BYOND games wouldn’t be out of place on Glorious Trainwrecks - there’s an extreme earnestness behind them. Someone really wanted to make a video game, made it happen, and then moved on; orphaned games. Almost like a litter of, I don’t know, cats in a cardboard box outside of a supermarket.

According to BYOND’s hub, I am the first person to play Birdland since 2014. The menu helpfully states that the first five games are free: I have to pay for more.

As far as I know, this is the only BYOND game you have to pay for. A slow, borderline non-puzzle game with no sound aside from birds shrieking that came out in 2002. I genuinely wonder how many people bought a lifetime subscription. The link no longer works and another link, totally inert, leading nowhere, tells me that I can discuss the game on a “Birdland forum”, which no longer exists.

I am left picturing what Birdland aficionados discussed on their forum, because the game itself isn’t deep enough to answer that question.

CryptHead is less than a year old. There are four people online, just one short of the number required to start a game. I type “hello?” in chat - no response.

Hard to sum up my feelings on BYOND. If I were cynical, I’d probably use this AVGN quote: “When I was eleven years old, my whole world was video games. Just locked in my room playing Bart vs. the Space Mutants and all this crap… man, I wasted all my time on this shit. I want it back. It ruined my life.”

I’m not, though, so I’ll say this: BYOND’s the reason I started doing sprite artwork, something I really, really enjoy but haven’t been able to do lately. Something felt wrong about making art for games that I didn’t have the skillset to actually give life.

After going through the plethora of games BYOND has to offer - some good, some bad, all of them real, tangible games made by, most of the time, a single person - I can’t say I can look at it that way anymore. Sometimes, making stuff is its own reward, even if you’re the only person who’ll ever see it.

Games Shown or Mentioned

Space Station 13, Exadv1, 2003

Murder Mansion, SuperSaiyanGokuX, 2003

Mitadake High, Devourer of Souls, 2007

Freeside, Doohl, 2013

Life, Jittai, 2013

Elora, Kozuma3, 2015

Worlds Chat, Worlds Inc., 1995

Halloween: Terror, Ganing, 2009

Birdland, DDT, 2002

CryptHead, Magicbeast20, 2020

[droqen]

independent game designer. artist.

So, hey. I think this tumblr is just about retired. I’ve made a bad habit of bouncing from internet-word-zone to internet-word-zone, but I finally just hosted my own relatively simple one, disabled comments for the most part, and am hoping this one will stick 🤷‍♀️

I’m doing great & making more games than ever, though probably writing a little less than usual, because i’m so damn busy making games (yay).

You can find me on twitter, I have a patreon with associated discord if you’re into that, and of course there’s the blog listed above. There’s also a somewhat defunct mailing list - if you want on it, just message me somewhere and ask to be put on it. I’m done with forms :P

Thanks! Play my new game! Vote for it to help me Win The Game Jam!

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2020/rate/694301

[myfriendpokey]

pokey review

it’s far too early to do a year in review but the christmas decorations are already out so perhaps it is society who is to blame….. anyway, just some general updates.

Keep reading

[droqen]

i was at a sort of community garage sale on the first floor of my building recently, and as it wound down it reminded me of how i feel about the current state of indie games -- a room full of people with stuff to sell, sitting there making idle chit-chat, theoretically there to unload their theoretically desirable things on others for money.

but nobody was buying anything. it was just a bunch of people and their crap sitting in a room.

(i bought a small metal steaming basket for $1.)

[rethy]

Hey, I made this for a local comics contest.

I won, so it’s good.

[droqen]

spacious

I put a small game online just to test out the stability of my small mmo engine. Not really a game, tbh - more of a tech demo with game-like aspirations.

I forgot to credit Arachne for the sprites I used! They’re lovely tiny sprites. I don’t really know how to attribute properly, but I found them -- the “8-color roguelike assets” -- here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14166.0

Anyway. I’m going to make a very, very short blog post now.

I started with very small screens (next image is actually just a mockup), trying to get a feeling of players travelling across a large space:

The world felt too empty? Like, one room was interesting, but travelling from one to the next was too quick, easy, frictionless. Each room was the same.

I thought I’d play with larger rooms. I went as large as 25x25, but this size (15x15 with 1-tile border) stuck for practical purposes:

It was bigger, to be sure. But it still wasn’t interesting. And although I know it’s a very bare-bones prototype/tech demo/kinda thing, it's helping me a lot to step back and reconsider my original feelings-based goal (MDA’s Aesthetics, if you like) to see exactly what I was even falling short of.

It still didn’t feel like travelling across a large space, not in the way I’d envisioned. It felt like traversing a lot of small, undifferentiated rooms. In particular, I experienced the exact same loop of “randomly wandering in cardinal directions and getting a bit lost” (Definitely a Dynamic)

~

Anyway. Just making the rooms bigger was my initial attempt, and after playing around I realized it’s not the solution to this problem. Having bigger rooms may be nice for solving other problems, but I’ve still got this one:

The world is flat and boring to explore.

I’m working on it :P

[droqen]

Abstract People

For a very long time, I've had my troubles with simulated humans in videogames.

I think it must have first manifested as a distaste for stories about people, for attempts to insert human life into videogames. Signposts with human faces populated digital towns. Branching dialogue trees tried their best to fake some kind of conversation.

We, as people, share stories about other people. That's different. Videogame people have always been different.

Hearing the same story a second time doesn't make the event less real, but discovering that what you considered a person is actually a person-simulacrum is... unpleasant. jarring. eerie.

Bots & Soundboards

I've developed armour against it, over the years. Whenever I receive a call and recognize an automated voice now, I immediately recognize it as inhuman. On a day when I felt like having a bit of fun I flippantly responded, "You're a robot!" and the voice answered back in a monotonic description of how it was actually a real person at a soundboard.

I hung up immediately with a horrible, shaken feeling in my gut.

I don't talk to phone robots anymore.

Bots & Videogames

Sometimes bots pass as humans in videogames, as unrecognizable as your first recorded caller. In a game where you suppose yourself to be playing with 10-20 other people, it's a strange (and not good) feeling to realize you've just been playing with a bunch of bots. No real people. Alone.

Bots & Single Players

And yet the thought of AI has never been enough for me either. You think gluing a face onto an extremely smart computer is going to make it human?

The strange thing is, this bleeds out into even games that don't try to pass people off as people. I'll play these games where I control groups of """humans""", I'll do digital violence to """human""" enemies, but creating games myself is always a battle against abstraction.

Giving a human identity to a mess of pixels or polygons has not been something I've ever been able to bring myself to do. These things we make might be worlds, but they're not our world. Games can bridge the gap between people far away or very close, but I've never been able to -- in my own development -- get over the idea that in a single-player videogame, you have no peers.

You're alone.

People & Cities & Global Connectivity

Living downtown in a major city, I've become desensitized to the people around me. I recognize that they're people but it only comes through in a moment now and then. Strangers I walk by are reduced to a single overheard sentence.

"Really good pho is really good."

"You only YOLO once."

"Cars don't hit pretty girls."

Internet comments are throwaway interactions, strangers I pass by and forget I ever knew. Living downtown in a major city is nothing special next to living on the internet.

Is it enough to know that if I were to engage with any of these passing sentence-people, they'd have more to say than just that one sentence?

Abstract People

How can I even begin to make a game about any human interaction?

It's disingenuous.

Playing a game, failing, and starting again: that's games. That's how they work.

Saying the wrong thing to a person, failing, and starting again: that's grossly incorrect. That's not how people work.

Designing a game about fighting other people, about selling items to other people, about teaching other people, about loving other people, about meeting & knowing & losing touch with other people... It gives me a sort of weird, sick feeling to consider the scale necessary for designing a human-to-human experience like this without it actually being a human-to-human experience. (That is, without it being a multiplayer game.)

So I'm stuck between wanting to make games about human-to-human experiences, and not being able to bring myself to fake the humans necessary to do it, and recognizing that it's a lot harder to make multiplayer games with the skills I've got, and recognizing that it's a lot harder to play multiplayer games than singleplayer ones.

Cool.

One More Thing (Bonus Mini-Rant)

I think that a lot of the world is struggling to deal with the idea of how to handle millions of people all at once.

There are a lot of multiplayer games that reduce people to abstract-people easily replaceable by bots because they're easier to deal with that way.

And it's true. We are easier to deal with when we can't be meaningfully distinguished as individuals, as humans. And lots of people love these games -- think Hearthstone, where you're matched with a person who might be anywhere in the world and all you can see is their developer-vetted videogame actions, their handful of developer-vetted emotes, and their... username. I think it's a completely reasonable approach to take for large-scale multiplayer games.

Even still:

Fuck that.

[droqen]

for making pixel-clean 2d games in unity: navdi

I made a small engine so I could work with Unity my way.

I've learned a lot from my brief brush with teaching -- it's one thing to discuss game design with your peers, and another thing entirely to try and be a part of someone's game design education. In particular, I habitually encourage conversational partners to disagree with me, but that habit really falls flat in a classroom. Before I can teach, I need to believe in something.

With that in my head, I decided to build a public-facing version of that engine I'd built for myself. I didn't have the time to make a game this month so I hope this is a suitable stand-in.

You can download an extremely alpha version of navdi here - https://droqen.itch.io/navdi

I've never really shared my code or workflow for others to use before. This is new to me, and if you want to give it a try, please understand that it's still poorly documented and full of poorly thought out decisions. But I'll also try to be around to answer questions and help out and in the long run I'd like to document it better and polish up any of its rough edges.

For now, my March-long project, navdi, is complete & released, and I'm reasonably proud of it.

[droqen]

M O N E Y & P O W E R

Wow, money is pretty important.

Although I don't have any real good thoughts to share right now, I've been dealing with the Money in Games for a while, but especially recently with the Gloam Collective, but also getting paid to teach, to substitute, to hold a workshop.

If I've learned anything from a childhood and lifetime of playing videogames it's that control is easy and time is cheap. Almost every game I've played has allowed me to pass any little challenge after, at absolute most, a day's work.

Programming is almost the same: it allowed me to design systems and I basically stayed away from any grungy, complicated work. Programming single-player games can be such a clean and personal experience, and I let myself avoid dealing with messiness.

Making a game and releasing it on Steam is bizarrely effortless. I barely had to talk to anyone. I provided images and text, and the game was out there.

...

There are billions of strangers out there living their own lives (playing their own games, having learned their own strategies).

Even considering the people who live near me, there are tens of thousands within a short trip's radius. How weird is it that in cities we live and interact with so many people in such asocial ways?

I'd heard talk about tech and tech-developers as people who don't really consider other people into their designs. It's easy to develop tech and be people-blind. But it's not like this is new... the impersonalness of money paved the way. People have been disregarding the humanity of people for money a lot longer.

...

...

...

I don't know if my words on this have value or meaning. I'm a lot more comfortable talking about game design but I don't have anything to say about game design that seems worth saying right now. But... I had to make a post. Every Sunday. So here it is.

[droqen]

Player As Collaborator

I find something exhausting about the current state of game design. This video, the whole goddamn thing, is the antithesis of everything that I love, and watching it catalyzed these particular thoughts.

This will not be true for everyone, but I crave a measure of creative control and expression in my life. I don't want to be a recipient of focused gameplay experiences -- I want to be an active collaborator.

Bioshock spoilers below.

Would You Kindly (Bioshock Spoilers)

So there's this guy Atlas who tells you what to do, and Bioshock being a videogame, you do it. Roughly halfway through, he's like "Well actually I was mind-controlling you, and you had no choice but to do my bidding the entire time."

Some people loved it, others hated it. It shone a fictional light on a reliable, necessary facet of most games:

To play, you must first submit.

Submitting To The Game

Videogames in particular are predefined and often unchanging. There exist moddable games and significant modding communities, but taken at face value, videogames first define rules, and we then exist at their mercy.

I've talked about a property I call authoritativeness before, and I do see many, many games encouraging players to follow a single path -- to submit to their authority.

Hidden mechanics, subtle cues, AB Testing... everything in pursuit of the player's best experience. But to me, this brings up a question of agency.

Are Games More Interactive?

in·ter·ac·tive /ˌin(t)ərˈaktiv/ adjective (of two people or things) influencing or having an effect on each other.

There was a time when I talked a lot more about how games are 'interactive' and how that's the only thing that sets it apart from other media. There's being told a story, and then there's telling one yourself.

(There are many stories (in media - books, film, etc) which I love. I'm by no means attempting to minimize the value of such things. But this is about games and their squandered potential.)

You can play a game and change its state, but you do the same thing with a book, or a film. Turning the page is interaction. Pausing the movie is interaction.

When a tree falls in a forest, etc

The philosophical question about the tree is asking about the relevance of an event outside of its effect on human life. Sure, the tree falls, but what happens to the noise if there's nobody around to be scared by it, to tell stories about it, to be changed by it?

As a player, when I play a videogame, who cares if I change the game? In almost every case I'm changing my own save file, on my own copy of the game. So I'm only really interacting with myself.

Many games (maybe even, depending on your definition, most or all games) provide goals to achieve and the means to achieve them.

It's common for AAA games to design a 'critical path' and funnel players into it. Designing a single experience allows you to polish the shit out of it to maximize the number of people who will love it. Those who stray from the path, you put back on the path using any means at your disposal.

So if I'm only interacting with myself, and the games I'm playing have already defined what I should be doing, what am I doing, exactly?

Am I influencing or having an effect on anything, or is this a one-way street?

As a player, with whom am I hoping to interact?

Trust & Respect

So, why secretly manipulate players into playing the way you want instead of saying it outright or letting them play the way they want?

There are technical limitations to be acknowledged, of course: you can't account for every player-desire, no matter how open your world or big your budget.

But I think a lot of it comes down to treating players without trust or respect.

Trust & Respect Must Be Earned?

Okay, so, here's where the whole fucking internet comes in. It's... a lot harder to trust and respect when you're expecting a glut of asshole strangers to pour into your videogame.

Honestly: I don't know what to do about this.

It's just the way things are, but it blows that 99% of the games I play are designed for asshole strangers not deserving of trust or respect.

I want to play a game that trusts me to try and enjoy a game on its terms as well as my own, and which respects me enough not to try tricking me out of my money, time, or excitement.

Can't we be equals?

Can Players Be Collaborators?

Tabletop roleplaying games (story games?) have been selling me hard on the promise of Collaborative games.

Apocalypse World and each of Follow, Microscope, and Kingdom have produced some really fun experiences for me in which I've been capable of driving my own play. They've made me exercise skills in storytelling which I'm starting to recognize are actually getting better.

Although these games are fundamentally multiplayer, and I acknowledge that computer simulations are not yet a match for a human's creativity...

We already make games for ourselves.

It should be clear as day that many people are capable of knowing what they like and designing something to satisfy their own needs. Why do more games, especially single-player ones where there's no balance to be considered, not allow for more collaboration with the player?

Trust and respect.

If you're going to use the black magic of game design to trick your player's psyche at least do it for something new and valuable.

Post-Mortem, the end.

Cooling down after writing this ridiculous article, I'm recognizing that what I'm after might not be something that would be traditionally recognized as a 'game', but the traditional definition of 'game' is cold in the grave, so who even cares.

[droqen]

Not Dead, Just Thinking

I missed my last Sunday Blog Post, and I guess I was about to skip this one too because I was like, hell, why not? I already missed one.

But that kind of thinking is what makes me stop doing it at all.

Just here to remind myself about the nature of deadlines and my relationship to them:

If I commit to making a blog post every Sunday, however bad, I'll put in the effort to make it good, because I can't stand to put myself behind something I don't like very often.

This is my Sunday blog post. It's terrible. The next one will be good, and about something or another I've been thinking about for a long time.

Thanks for reading.

[droqen]

I dream in mechanics, but satisfaction evaded my waking designs.

On a day in the distant past, I had an idea stuck in my head; I wanted to make a game where the player had nine one-off powers bound to nine number keys. It would be a platformer, so they were likely to be JUMPING-related powers.

That was a mechanic, a rule if you like, a simple sort of game-world-fact that I thought I could build a game around.

It didn't work out. I was a bit aimless. The design despite having a focal point lacked focus. I ran into problems I couldn't solve. I could see that I would have an issue with play being too strict, too designed around fixed-solution problems. If I designed a tight puzzle, I had a strong feeling the gameplay would generally be uninteresting to me -- you'd have to solve it one particular way, unless I designed several solutions, but that would be a lot of work.

I did it anyway, and it still wasn't quite what I wanted. It wasn't a particularly rewarding design.

I didn't know why then, but I know now.

Knowing your focus, choosing your intent.

'Nine one-off powers' was not really broken or flawed in any particular way. You could certainly make a game that took this idea to its limits. You could make several. The idea was not the problem.

The problem was that I did not take a good, hard look at the focal point, this unchanging pivot in my design, to decide whether or not I cared about it enough to put it at the center. If you're solving problems, best to make sure you're trying to solve the right problems for the right reasons.

Look at everything you're fighting for, everything you're unwilling to change, and make sure it's worth it.

In the very first version of the nine-power game, I'd dreamt of the player having nine vastly different and weird abilities, and I think what I liked about this deep down was this alien creative space, a strange and varied landscape of oddities that you could combine in ways to solve problems but also satisfy a sense of systemic curiousity. What happens if I use these two things together? Can I solve this problem using this power instead of this one?

It seemed like too much work, and I wasn't sure what the nine powers should be, so I decided to design a cut-down minimal version of the game, which I still think was a totally reasonable decision. It helps to make the small game before you make the big one.

BUT, I didn't look for what my focus truly was, and I fell into the trap: I thought my focus was the mechanics, rather than the dynamics. I thought my unchanging pivot was the rules.

I thought my focus was 'nine powers', and decided that a simplified version of this game could be nine jumps of different heights. That fit what seemed to be my focus, the mechanics were lost but not butchered.

The dynamics, what I actually cared about, were lost and butchered, and the prototype I made was vaguely entertaining but strictly not good enough.

It died. (I killed it.)

Pay attention to what you want to accomplish.

Don't hold things sacred just because you think they're important. Hold them sacred when you know they are important. If you're designing things and they turn out bad, maybe it's because you were looking at the wrong compass.

For me, I know a major way I judge my own games is by what it feels like when I play them. Does it feel good, or bad? Does it fascinate me, or do I lose interest?

But I'd still design by other metrics entirely, stubbornly sticking to arbitrary principles and struggling to find the fun in them.

I'm aligned, now.

[droqen]

Sequestered Authorities

This is the third entry in a series haphazardly built on this idea of Authoritativeness in games. (It started here.)

Last week, I talked about designing for player expression. In very short, "To design a game for expressive play, reward a broad spectrum of play."

Secret Boxes

Screw Your Walking Simulators is an article from Joel Goodwin (Electron Dance) that discusses throughout the idea of a 'secret box', calling upon click-and-see games like Windosill and the GROW series.

Another way to say 'click-and-see' is 'trial-and-error'. In almost all games of this sort, there is a single way to solve each puzzle.

When I put it this way, these games are highly authoritative -- the only way to achieve victory is to perform a specific set of actions, possibly in a specific order.

But to a new player, especially one blind to the authoritative mechanics or particular unfussed about winning, the apparent authority is extremely low.

Invisible authority isn't authority.

GROW CUBE starts up with 10 buttons to click on, and each provides a reward: a pleasurable bundle of sensory feedback and increased systemic knowledge.

When you can't tell which choice is the correct one and are rewarded anyway, authority appears low regardless of how high it might mechanically be.

Starseed Pilgrim's authoritativeness / expressiveness.

My best-known game Starseed Pilgrim has fairly distinct authority (a 'winning strategy') but that starts out invisible. You don't need to know all the tricks to perform at a moderate level, and you don't need to perform at higher than a moderate level to be rewarded in the early parts of the game, and you don't know that the later parts of the game exist.

So: the authority feels low because you're rewarded for a relatively broad spectrum of action, therefore player expressiveness ('freedom' might have been a better word but it's too late now...) feels high.

Lost

I forgot where I was going with this one. That's cool. I'm used to this feeling, of not knowing where I'm going... it's been a little weird, writing the last 2 blog posts with a clear sense of purpose...

Nice, but weird.

Anyway, here we are at the end.

I've developed a new sort of axis for describing games & I'll happily use it in conversation, especially when talking about what games I like.

Here's some more Low Authority Games I really like:

Corrypt

Wilmot's Warehouse

Please make more for me.

Droqen's Everyday Disclaimer

Someone has probably described the phenomena discussed in this article already. I'm terrible at research -- forgetting the research and pretending I'm the first person to discover something is the only thing that gets me through writing articles like this. So, like, if you know about a stunningly similar theory, or this other place where they actually define the word I'm trying to define but they define it a different way and it's already "taken", absolutely feel free to tell me all about it. I'd just feel weird if I didn't publicly display some sort of self-awareness. Thanks for reading!

[droqen]

Authority & Player Expression

Last week I wrote a blog post about Authoritativeness of games as a consequence of their design.

In short, I put forward that Authoritative elements provide systemic encouragement for players to adhere to a specific pattern of behavior and as a result define what players recognize as the "correct" way to play the game.

Here's the follow-up.

What are less Authoritative games?

My loose definition of Authority (seen above and in the previous article) is based on two factors: incentive and lenience.

With High Incentive, there is a stronger reward for playing correctly and/or a stronger punishment for playing incorrectly. Consider some of the older arcade games (PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong) built on the notion of 'lives'. If you take damage, you lose one of your lives (of which you don't get very many). If you lose all your lives, the game is over and you're punished extremely heavily: You lose all progress and must start from the very beginning.

With Low Lenience, the expected pattern of action is more specific, with less margin for error. Consider getting a 'PERFECT' result in a rhythm game: these will often require a predefined input, which must be performed on a specific few frames.

They are separate axes to some degree, but if Incentive drops to zero or Lenience is at a maximum, Authority is entirely lost. This should be intuitive, but I'll explain my thinking in brief:

With Zero Incentive, there is no reward/punishment for failure. Therefore, it does not matter what the player does -- it goes equally unrewarded/unpunished.

With Maximum Lenience, the game's definition of 'success' is so broad as to include literally any action. Therefore, it does not matter what you do -- it's all equally rewarded.

So:

Less Authoritative games are those which reward you for a broader spectrum of action, and/or provide weaker reward/punishment for doing what is deemed 'correct'.

I Dream of Low Authority Games

Last week I wanted to get to this point.

This week I'm finally getting to it.

See, I've fallen in love with a great number of low-authority games, and it's taken me quite a while to put words to the feeling. I'm taxonomizing this because it's something that matters deeply to me as a player of games and it's something I'd like to be able to think more clearly about, and talk more clearly about with others.

(Dear H.M.: Sorry I don't have a comment section! Yours is really nice! I want to get one, but right now I've been tumbling for a while and change is hard -.-)

Some of the low-authority games I've fallen for over the past couple years:

Earthtongue

Uurnog Uurnlimited

Lamemage Productions' role-playing games

And the common factor between my experiences in all of these games is that as a player, I feel allowed, encouraged, emboldened to express myself.

This leads directly into the titular point:

Player Expression

Originally when thinking about the opposite of Authoritative I considered the name Expressive, to communicate this newfound understanding in my brain that player expression only occurs outside of authoritative spaces. But the words didn't line up; the game wasn't expressive, it was permissive of the player's expressiveness.

But the relationship still stands.

If the player understands that they are STRONGLY REWARDED for DOING ACTION #1, of course most players will do action #1. (High Incentive, Low Leniance at work!)

Remember that rewards are relative and several exist within a system.

If the player is EQUALLY STRONGLY REWARDED for DOING ACTION #2, the player now has a choice between two actions (#1 and #2). Although this is not a high degree of expressiveness, it is nonetheless a basically 'expressive' option provided to the player. The positive/negative feedback is equal regardless, so the player has to dig deep to find other metrics that are important to themselves (How to make hard choices, 9m32s) -- or else choose on a whim. Some people are not interested in making 'hard choices' or otherwise expressing themselves.

But I am.

I won't get really deep into what it means for a person to express themselves. I want to wrap this up. So here's my formula:

How to design games which permit player expressiveness?

High Authority = Low Expressiveness

High Incentive, Low Lenience = Low Expressiveness

The stronger the difference in reward/punishment between actions, and the fewer actions you reward for, the less expressive play will be.

∴ To design a game for expressive play, provide maximum and roughly equal rewards for a very broad spectrum of actions. Systemically indicate that a very broad spectrum of actions are 'correct', and expressiveness will naturally follow.

Next Time...

'High Incentive, High Lenience', or maybe 'Sequestered Authorities', depending on how I'm feeling by next Sunday.

Droqen's Everyday Disclaimer

Someone has probably described the phenomena discussed in this article already. I'm terrible at research -- forgetting the research and pretending I'm the first person to discover something is the only thing that gets me through writing articles like this. So, like, if you know about a stunningly similar theory, or this other place where they actually define the word I'm trying to define but they define it a different way and it's already "taken", absolutely feel free to tell me all about it. I'd just feel weird if I didn't publicly display some sort of self-awareness. Thanks for reading!

[droqen]

Authoritative Designs

I've been looking for the right word to describe a particular facet of the game-playing experience, and I think I've narrowed it down to one term that sounds & feels right on the money: Authoritative.

So, I'll start with a couple definitions of the word from the dictionary.

authoritative

(adjective)

having due authority; having the sanction or weight of authority

substantiated or supported by documentary evidence and accepted by most authorities in a field

If I describe an element of a game as 'authoritative', it is generally a tenet which should be followed, or a particular action which I am strongly encouraged to perform, as sanctioned by the only 'authority' that matters: the rules of the game.

To my mind, authoritative also evokes the author. The author defines the rules, and so if some particular dynamic is necessitated by the rules, it stands to reason that the we can say that the author is to blame.

But, that's not always true. In more complicated systems-based games (especially very popular ones), play can often evolve in a direction beyond what was intended or predicted by the author. See: the still-living meta of a nearly 20-year-old game suxh as Super Smash Bros.

I'm already making things messy, but let's just be clear that whether or not something is authoritative is sort of flexible. Things can change. This is the nature of games, and just any sort of living situation in general. In a game, the designer sets up the rules, the mechanics, intending something -- but the dynamics are often unpredictable.

Especially in complicated systems.

Following The Rules

There is a certain motivational comfort in knowing what's expected of you -- in knowing you're doing the "right" thing -- and I think this is a huge part of why heavily authoritative games are so popular. In many cases if a game is not authoritative enough, it may be decried as "not a game". It's been a while since I've heard that particular phrase, though, so maybe I rephrase and say that when a game is less authoritative than expected its players may find themselves feeling "aimless" or ask questions such as "What am I supposed to be doing???"

We can take the super-tight arcade game Super Hexagon for an example of a particularly authoritative game. There's a little wiggle room, but if you don't do what the game wants when it wants it, you will lose immediately and must try again.

Designer Knows Best

Even beyond the comfortable direction provided by an authoritative design, there are plenty of good reasons why a designer might take an authoritative approach.

If you feel like there's a particular way your game is best enjoyed and players are engaging with it the "wrong" way, you have the power to alter aspects of your game in order to channel them towards playing it the "right" way.

This sounds a little close-minded to me, though. If someone's playing your game "wrong" but having a great time, maybe it's time to redefine your understanding of the way you'd like to see the game played.

Maybe.

Unintentional Authoritativeness

I see a lot of games that might cater to a wide variety of play-styles, but in fact the rules drive play into a corner. For the most extreme example, let's go back to Smash Bros. again...

Super Smash Bros. Brawl tier list

Metaknight was so overwhelmingly powerful that high level play was dominated by a single character, in a game with thirty-eight different options to choose from. Those characters were designed to give the game variety, and to give its players expressive choices about who to play as -- but some unfortunately bad balance damaged those elements of the game by introducing some unintentional emergent authoritativeness.

Definition???

Highly Authoritative mechanics or dynamics of a game provide a systemic reward and/or punishment to a player depending on how closely they adhere to a specific pattern of behaviour. Through this, they define what is a "correct" way to play the game, or what is a "winning" strategy.

As the reward and/or punishment decrease in severity or importance, authoritativeness goes down.

As the matching pattern of behavior becomes less specific (more broad/flexible), authoritativeness goes down.

Next up

The second entry about authoritativeness: Authority & Player Expression

Droqen's Everyday Disclaimer

Someone has probably described the phenomena discussed in this article already. I'm terrible at research -- forgetting the research and pretending I'm the first person to discover something is the only thing that gets me through writing articles like this. So, like, if you know about a stunningly similar theory, or this other place where they actually define the word I'm trying to define but they define it a different way and it's already "taken", absolutely feel free to tell me all about it. I'd just feel weird if I didn't publicly display some sort of self-awareness. Thanks for reading!

[droqen]

doing something?

First sunday of this month I was like, "Quick, make a blog post RIGHT NOW and then you can start making a blog post every sunday of the year and not have missed one due to poor planning!"

So, you know, I did it, and four Sundays in I kinda want to force myself to regularly do something else. Not to say I'm doing a particularly good job of this: Every Sunday, like clockwork, I realize I've intended to write up a draft of something I thought was good & important and always just end up scratching some shit together last-minute.

Weeks are short and I have things to do.

And I guess I'm not very good at writing. I have a lot of thoughts and it's easier to talk about them than it is to choose one and program it and make a thing, but I'm not even as open about them as I used to be -- I almost started writing out an idea and I was like, this is crap! Who wants to read about this game I wanna make! It'll come out wayyy better if you just make it! Do it do it do it do it!

So, like... maybe I'll stop with the Sunday articles and try for something more ambitious instead.

I have what amounts to three jobs right now (all in games, most of them extremely part-time), I'm in the midst of making a GGJ game, and I don't want to overwork myself by adding a massive extra workload to all that.

I know I can make a game in a week and in the past I've been like WHY CAN'T I MAKE A GAME IN A WEEK ANYMORE??? and, well, it's fine that I just can't find a week solid to devote to making a game... right?

My ongoing experiences with the Gloam Collective have taught me (or I've taught myself, through these trials) what works & what doesn't w/r/t setting deadlines and not procrastinating work to the last second.

Can I make a game in a month?

On March 1, I'll release what I've done to my mailing list even if it's shit & unfinished...

And then maybe if it's good I'll let other people play it.

So, like, sign up to my mailing list at droqen.com if you want to see it regardless of its quality.

Are Sundays done?

I guess so. Maybe I'll keep it up but write shorter things. It's nice to have a regular outlet that isn't weird unthreaded middle-of-the-night twitter ramblings. 1 2 3 4

[droqen]

You’re warm.

I often find myself in analysis mode when playing or considering games, thinking myself clever enough to crack open a game or other experience and take it apart and look at all of its individual pieces. But I'm really only good with the cold part of a system: the hard results, the numbers, the yeses and nos.

On the other hand, I have a much harder time visualizing and predicting and designing for the warm part: the people playing the games. To some degree I think that's because of how much I excel at the cold part -- I try to apply the same logic to the people playing (or interacting with) it, and it just doesn't work that way.

It's not all guesswork, but it feels like it. What will someone figure out, how will they feel, coming into this system? There are too many people coming from too many different places to account for every variable the way it's possible within a closed system, within the cold, hard parts.

Immersion

To be immersed in a videogame is to be swallowed up by it so that it replaces you. It is to forget who you are, who your friends are, the world you come from.

This feels, to me, like the desire of a cold designer. If I could only excise the warm part of the game and control every variable... if the player was so immersed they became one of my variables with their every action under my purview, it could all fall within my design.

And as a player of games, I understand the desire too. Sometimes you want to lose the world you're from in favour of a better one -- the price, of course, is that the worlds we make for ourselves are sub-worlds: simpler and less crucial. The real you will always be out there.

Outside

Personally: I've found it hard to think about what I want when playing games. From my experience of seeing other people playing games, I think a lot of people do. As players of games we choose to subject ourselves to their rules and to play within them. I say this too much, but I don't know if I've ever wanted to say something negative about it before:

Videogames are different from other media in this respect.

Playing a game, you're entrusting it with control over a small and isolated portion of your life. With a book or a film or a piece of music, this is optional, and you always have perfect control yourself, as the observer, the consumer.

I've been a player of videogames for basically my entire life and I don't think twice about handing over this control. I default to trying to understand the rules so that I can best work within them. I immerse myself in the cold systems because they are absolute.

But the way videogames are has perhaps tinged my perception of all games. Even though I don't have to, I play board games the same way, following their rules to the letter and doing anything in my power to win. (The goal of a board game is to win, right?)

I've been thoughtfully and slowly loosening my grip over time, looking at the games I play and the way I play them from further away, looking at the places I play them and the people I play them with. Am I at the mercy of the games I play or are they my tools?

And if they're my tools... what am I using them for?