Approaches to PLAY

I DON'T PLAY GAMES I MAKE GAMES. R. Clancy's blog about making games and not knowing anything about games. *SPOILERS. SPOILERS EVERYWHERE.*

[alpha-beta-gamer]

Sauna 2000: Autumn Night is a wonderfully weird Finnish sauna horror game where some uninvited guests crash your sauna!

Gameplay Video:

[catchymemes]

[nostrem]

Gonna get some quick menus and stuff made and then probably release this next week for download

its called Chimp Chase: NFT Theft Simulator

[freudiandip]

where can i play it and how much is it

[nostrem]

It’ll be free and you can download it as many times as you’d like. Completely fungible

[wizard0rb]

what did we do to deserve portal 2. that shit was so good and for what

[wizard0rb]

we got to have this! we got to have a valve game set in the half life universe, and its an enemies-to-lovers-to-enemies-again sci fi comedy story about a homicidal ai created to run tests forever and the test subject she catches feelings for!! how is this game real!!!

[wizard0rb]

happy birthday to the only video game ever

[dnd-homebrew5e]

Just started imagining a Necromancer using their magic to create undead for the sole purpose of creating a musical number and they need back up dancers for their song solo.

[jared-the-dm]

[thepokeduck]

[neomikey]

[silver-tongues-blog]

Ah yes, the necromancer subclass: necrodancer

[gothfoxx]

The dead are infused with insatiable grooves

[witchcatcher]

@probablybadrpgideas

Crypt of the NecroDancer on Steam

Crypt of the NecroDancer is an award winning hardcore roguelike rhythm game. Move to the music and deliver beatdowns to the beat! Groove to

[rivaloli-deactivated20210928]

“I LOVE that game!” (watched a letsplay and commentary about it)

[khaleesi]

this counts and i’ll hear nothing against it

[queerasflux]

if watching sports counts as enjoying the sport, then watching video games counts as enjoying video games.

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

Post coming in soon!

[helloyoucreatives]

New from  Gus Wood

[sprinklesfreak]

mother 3: so we have this system where you can attack in beat with the music for combos! no worries, it’s really simple and easy to understand! have fun :)

mother 3: this song is in 29/16

[xerxestexastoast]

From the Brawl BRSTMs YouTube description:

[amtrax]

*cries in musician*

[shadowysiren]

for context This, it the 71907/40120 song. 

mother 3: yeah you just gotta do combos with the rhythm its easy!

also mother 3: *whatever this is*

[davepetasprites]

[serval-chan]

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

HUMAN VACATION. WHY?

 As I’m making this game - all these references and influences are bubbling to the surface - and I wanted to share them here to give a bit of context as to what’s feeding the idea.

For me, Human Vacation Bureau is a game about death.

I don’t mean to treat this with too much levity because it is serious - but also I don’t feel like being too precious about it because it’s me - in the past - and it’s ok and I’m ok and everything is going to continue to be ok. 

When I was 16 I unsuccessfully hung myself (maybe the “unsuccessfully” is redundant but eh). In my mind, I had checked out forever - as much as I could understand that concept as a 16-year-old. The way I’ve thought about it since is that I’m in a bonus round of life - I hadn’t planned on getting this far! I guess naturally, I do think a lot about the end of life.

The way I currently imagine death is that it is like sleep - and I am very tired of being alive so that doesn’t sound too terrible! It feels a little bit nauseating to be thinking about it. I feel a sense of vertigo like the chasm of eternal death has a physical depth to it. I think there’s a Mark Twain quote along the lines of “I’ve been dead for many years before and it didn’t bother me”. The funny thing about the whole situation is that you yourself are the one person who is not going to know you are dead. I can’t remember the book I read it in - but I have a quote stuck in my mind - “the thing about dying is that you really need to know when it’s happening to you”

I remember three years ago I was watching Tv On The Radio at a music festival in Boston and they played an old song of theirs I had never heard before called “Staring At The Sun”. It was amazing to hear it live having never heard the recorded version before - and when I got home I looked it up on genius to read the lyrics.

It turns out its based on a poem by Rumi called no room for form. This idea that there is this universal essence in all of us - that this expression t of pure love is somatic is incredibly beautiful to me.

I became more comfortable with the idea that I will die after I first took LSD. It was years before I read that Rumi poem - but I felt that sense that my soul or my life was locked in this body for now - and when I die - my soul or my energy or my vibes or whathaveyou, stripped clean of consciousness, will disperse and rejoin the rest of the universe. And nothing will hurt or matter anymore. And I’ll be free.

Coda and When I was Done Dying both also tackle these themes of exploring a death state in very beautiful and visual ways. I’ve talked about Coda already here. The video for when I was done dying is fascinating - a dozen different animators take on the theme of the time between death and rebirth and the visual approaches are stunning. As mere mortals, we tend to think as whatever comes next as awesome beyond words, at the knife edge of our comprehension - and the video both explores and toys with this idea.

I remember at work we did this resilience workshop and we had to write down one thing we regretted - and we had to try and forgive ourselves for it. Some of the regrets people shared were heartbreaking. One colleague wrote that she would never have a young family and she was afraid she was running out of time. Another wrote that he was unable to save his partner from addiction.

If we were to take a look back at the pain we encountered in our lives - would we want to do it over again? Did all pain lead to joy in the end? Was some pain needless? What was the most formative suffering you endured? What did you gain from the times where you were happy and comfortable?  Is there anything you feel that is irrevocably out of reach for this lifetime? 

What is missing from your life?

What’s left to do?

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

HUMAN VACATION DEVELOPER UPDATE

So web databases are some arcane magic that is beyond my strung out little human brain. I burned a week trying to learn how to use XAMP and myphpadmin - but like a hydra - every time I learned how to do something - I had to learn how to do two more things to make that thing work. I tried gutting a google form - this would have been an option a year or two ago but they’ve rejigged their theme options and you are stuck with their bug-ugly typography! I was even prepared to take the financial hit of having to pay a MONTHLY user fee for a ready-made form - but they didn’t even offer the style of interaction I wanted.

All was dark and comfortless at Human Vacation Bureau HQ…

UNTIL - A kind soul - young Benedict with his biblical beard and Pre-Raphaelite hair - offered to help me with a workaround. Because this game doesn’t have to live online, it just has to work inside its cabinet - I can work everything inside the localhost server. Ben wrote a js script for me that will pass the users selection to the review page by checking tags and making sure the number of checked tags doesn’t go over 10. We sat together for about four hours in total between the initial working session and then a bit of subsequent debugging. After he was finished - I went through his code and wrote in annotations to explain what was happening - and Ben checked through those to make sure what I wrote actually made sense!

It was beyond kind of him to help me - god bless to the IGPED massive.

ANYWAY - Off the back of my friends throughly slating my game - I started to think about where I could start bringing in some graphic elements. I was getting a lot of calls for pixel art, and at first, I was railing hard against it because I thought that was a lazy association to make between this “game” and the art style most synonymous with games. But considering the initial reference point of old ticket kiosks and atm machines, and the texture of old test patterns and VHS clock screens - it wasn’t a million miles off.

I also thought about the notion that this is a system made for souls - not humans. When playing this experience - you are yourself, but I’m speaking to you as a soul, and not as a person. So in this fictional space, I am imagining what kind of graphic language a soul might use. It wouldn’t reference human semiotics, but like all languages - it would need conventions that make it feel like a system. I was thinking about the graphic alphabets I made for a previous project - In Other Words, and the movie Arrival, as well as Information is beautiful - and some of the generative artwork we’ve been making for creative computing with Theo.

I wrote a book for my BA graduate project called Receive Music - about the parallels between organized religion - and our relationship with music (I’m starting to realize I have a preoccupation with faith and the afterlife, that’s the weight of catholicism for you). The book used the color blue for its reverential symbolism, and I used circular motifs throughout because they are common to almost all major religions (and to music technology - it was a really nice book now that I think of it!).

Circles might be a little bit obvious - but that doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. I think they work really well for this idea that you are an infinite entity going around for another cycle. Or like a tree trunk adding another ring.

AND the handy thing is - they give me a system that will let me create assets efficiently instead of having to design and draw pictographic icons for everything. I’ve even put together a little processing sketch that bangs our random configurations of circles! Although ultimately I’m probablly going to end up doing them in photoshop because I NEED CONTROL.

As I’m putting this master list together - I’ve realized I need to be particularly careful about what kind of options I’m offering - in my packages I offer different birth circumstances - like being born into wealth or a big family. I don’t think I can offer these on the main list - because it might lead to a situation where you have two conflicting birth circumstances!

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

PLANNING & PLAYTESTING

Using what we learned about prototyping on paper first - I got a big piece of extremely luxurious Christmas wrapping paper - and started to plot out how I see the user’s journey through Human Vacation Bureau. This, in turn, gave me an idea of what kind of things I would need to start learning to make it.

In terms of the “package experience” route - this is pretty straightforward. If a user selects that they want a curated experience package - then I can direct them to a unique confirmation page for that option. It’s not the most efficient way of doing this but my only HTML experience is coding a very straightforward text and images portfolio site, so I need to keep things stupidly simple!

HOWEVER - On the “a la carte” experience page I need to figure out how to use a form - as in storing user input (the 10 life events they select from the full list) - and passing them to the confirmation page. This might sound like an unnecessary faff because I could just use a generic confirmation page for users choosing this route BUT - my ideal version of this game gives users a ticket printed with their selection. So it’s worth working out now how to do this in the hopes of being able to access these text strings.

Other cosmetic things I would like to add to this experience would be javascript animations and sound design - I feel like I should be able to find some tutorials for these out there somewhere!

On that note - it’s time to talk about playtesting. Or how the cosmetic things are proving VERY important for this game. Which I’m not surprised at all about - what’s surprising me is the strength with which people are reacting to the minimal graphics I had intended on using.

They. Do. Not. Like. It. One. Bit.

I asked 9 friends - 4 friends of mine from art college, my girlfriend, and my 4 housemates to using the analogue human vacation bureau - a paper form using all the intended features of the real experience. I showed them some of my work in progress graphics and typography. And - they hated it.I tried explaining to them that this wasn’t so much a game as a playable experience or a piece of interactive literature. But in doing so - I felt like I was trying to make excuses for the fact that they found the interaction a bit dry and tedious.

When I relayed this feedback to the class - there was a bit of a rumbling against the comments, but ultimately I think I agree with what my play testers said - this isn’t supposed to feel sterile and dreary. I want it to feel unearthly, a bit surreal and supernatural, kind of mischievous and spooky. I’d love users to walk away with a little nagging feeling of “what if this wish comes true?”.

Or at least - 

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

WEEK 10 - GAMIFICATION

I really loved this one - because I have lived the process of watching people who know nothing about games attempt to gamify some promotion or campaign for a brand with all the charm and engagement of doing your taxes. 

It was particularly pertinent due to the fact that Phoenix used Nike’s Run Club as an example of poorly considered gamification. It overlooked the intrinsic motivation that draws people to running in favour of progress tracking and achievements. This kind of gamification misses play as a focal practice, it puts skills and training over experience and playfulness. 

A game should allow fun to emerge from a system of rules - not focus on process and results. “Think about PLAY, not games” 

At the start of the semester, we read A Gameful World, and I saved some pieces from the Introduction to the gameful world (Steffen P. Walz, Sebastien Deterding) 

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

WEEK 9 - SPACES FT. FEDE!

This week we had a special guest spot from Fede on spaces and the magic circle. My understanding can be summarized in this exchange with my dear colleague Christopher Merrington:

My favourite book of all time is Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. It’s heartbreakingly sad but also so funny and sweet. In the quote below, Loreli is telling Ruprecht (both 14) not to give up hope:

“His name was Paul Eluard, and he said this thing once: There is another world, but it is in this one...It's like, you know, inside every stove there's a fire. Well, inside every grass blade there's a grass blade, that's just like burning up with being a grass blade. And inside every tree, there's a tree, and inside every person there's a person, and inside this world that seems so boring and ordinary, if you look hard enough, there's a totally magical beautiful world. And anything you would want to know, or anything you would want to happen, all the answers are right there where you are right now. In your life.”

“There is another world but it is inside this one” - I think that’s a beautiful way of phrasing what the magic circle lets us do. We can reinvent the world - or reinterpret the one around us. I’ve been playing the Shard Game ever since Fede told us about it and I have died exactly 6 times since I started. I also loved the game “Onebehindmanship” - I need to get a game going with the ATP class for next semester!

“The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.”

“…writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered…”

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Fede spoke about games as a ritual - and while say for example Goat Simulator perhaps don’t quite have a tonal fit for the concept of a ritual (but I mean actually goat possession is a pretty big satanic thing… I dunno… no one said rituals can’t be wacky I guess?) - Human Vacation Bureau is supposed to be a quiet, contemplative - and hopefully transformative experience.

The magic circle I want is just playing with that knife-edge of a little bit spooky. I grew up in Ireland where we have to this day a very present element of superstitious magic in our culture - an often cited example is the rerouting of new roads so they don’t squash a fairy fort. As a result - and even though I am a grown adult who knows I am getting eaten by microbes and worms when I die - I still… don’t mess with magic or sacred stuff. I would never play with an Ouija board. I knock on wood if someone makes an ominous sounding statement about themselves. Graveyards give me the creeps.

If I encountered Human Vacation Bureau in the wild - this would be my thought process “Oh neat you get a little ticket! *spends an inordinate amount of time looking at packages to understand what’s going on/what’s on offer* “okk none of these are quite right for me…I want to make my own” *spends another inordinate time looking at the masterlist and makes a selection* “I have a weird feeling about this…” *gets up to the last confirm page* “no…NOPE NO NO NO NO NO - LIFE SHOULD BE A MYSTERY AND I AM NOT FIT TO MAKE THIS DECISION NONO NOT TODAY sataaaaaan”

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

WEEK 8 - EMOTION IN GAME DESIGN

Ever since I started this course - I have been ranting and raving about the emotional impact games can have vs. that of other mediums in the manner of someone who has just recently noticed the sky is blue and is very excited to tell everyone about it.

In a nutshell - Games offer players the means to influence outcomes in a way that sets them apart from other media.

Have I played Journey yet?

No.

Could I speak at length about how the game is expertly designed to invest the player emotionally through character design, thoughtfully crafted feedback and signposting, the pacing of the story, the soundtrack etc?

I have and there is every chance I will in the future.

(I will play Journey I swear to god, I just had to spend every waking hour of my life on Creative Computing last semester because I can barely read and I have the numeracy of an 8 year old).

In the previous week’s lecture - Phoenix showed us the game avatar photo essay from the New York Times. You could see the different ways people used designing their avatars to create a fantasy for themselves. An avatar that looks just like you might make it easier to imagine that that’s you running around like a superhero and kicking the living daylights out of whoever you want. Or you might want an avatar that is your idealized self - or your inverted self. One of the video pieces at the V&A’s DESIGN/PLAY/DISRUPT exhibition featured a games journalist who was herself trans, explaining how online gaming can play an important role for a transperson as they are examining their identity.

I played the interactive episode of Black Mirror - Bandersnatch, over the break with my friends. It was an AMAZING experience. I found it so satisfying - probablly heavily influenced by the fact the plot line itself revolves around building a game! The tension in the room was immense as we desperately tried to find some happy ending for Stefan.

I think what made it for me was that Bandersnatch gives the viewer the agency of controlling a game’s character - but has the well realized and crafted scripting and production of a Black Mirror episode. You had all the horror and darkness of Black Mirror - but now you are implicated - and the narrative is constructed in such a way to make you behave counterintuitively. I am always so precious about my character when I play a game - but playing Bandersnatch forced me to choose horrifying options as I tried to strategize against the games warped logic.

I particularly liked this section from the reading, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design by Katherine Ibister -  “Game designers create a summer camp – like feeling for players through a combination of carefully wrought virtual worlds , game actions , and well - crafted avatars….This shared online experience does the same kind of work as summer camp , encouraging personal growth in players and deepening their connections to one another.”

The same day we played Bandersnatch - we also played The Werewolves Of Miller’s Hollow - the quick-play card RPG. My friends from Ireland aren’t very game-oriented people, I met them at the art college I went to, we all have some visual art/design practice that we keep up. But I’ve been taking this card game everywhere with me lately - it’s so much fun and it creates a powerful magic circle in a snap. Real life friendships are thrown under the bus as the players hunt out the werewolves among them. My own girlfriend scapegoated me to save herself and I am still slightly psychologically wounded!

Because none of us have been big game players previously - playing these games together is like a revelation. It’s hilarious to see the way my friends act out the roles - and we can enjoy this tense, feverish drama - without anyone actually getting hurt!

I put a lot of myself into making Human Vacation Bureau - In the process of making it I’ve asked my friends to tell me about the life events that formed who they were, I’ve had to have a hard conversation with Aida about our differing views on religion, I’ve spoken to my Dad at length about death. I’ve sifted back through the events of my life to think about what made me the way I am now.

It’s not necessarily that there is so much that I want to say with this game - it’s more that I want to give players so many questions to ask. I hope that’s the takeaway anyway.

[idontplaygamesimakegames]

WEEK 7 - EMBODIED EMOTION

We took the development process for Phoenix’s Games “Nightmare Kitty” and “Game Over” as case studies in tapping into player’s embodied emotions. Embodied Emotion = we feel emotions with our bodies - not just in our heads. Phoenix was trying to create an embodied experience of fear in Nightmare Kitty but realized that she was taking players from a position where they would feel fearful and vulnerable (crouching), to a “power pose” (jumping to their feet).

After this lecture, I had a conscious experience of this while taking part in a performance by Ellie, (and Valeria and Batool from Creative Computing). Three members of the audience were invited to stand on the points of a triangle and take part in a ritual formed around non-verbal, consensual touch.

I was already extremely nervous because I’m very shy and I turn red when I know people are looking at me. The points on the mat were demarcated by circles the size of plates. When I stepped onto my position - I was occupied with trying to keep my feet in the circle, I had to keep my feet tight together to stay in my spot - and this made me lose my balance slightly. So I was in a flustering situation - off my balance - in front of an audience. If I had been standing with my feet apart in a stable pose - I wouldn’t have been thinking about my balance and would have been better able to deal with the actual actions of the ritual. This isn’t at all a criticism of the performance - I really liked how the artists embodied this transformative space by putting me literally on the spot! It was very simple but very effective!

Starting to think about how this applies to Human Vacation Bureau - I started to wonder what sensory qualities I could employ to put users in a particular frame of mind while playing. I quite like the idea that it lures you in by looking all lurid and kitsch but then you find yourself having a quiet and reverential experience. I’m thinking about the confession boxes they have in Catholic churches - they enclose you - it gives the act of confessing more weight because you feel like you are alone with God and the priest to humble yourself. 

A great music reference I keep thinking about would be the intro to Staring At The Sun by T.V. On The Radio. It begins with a very simple vocal line that repeats with no instrumentation. I found out the singer, Tunde Adebimpe, recorded the vocals 40 times and layered them to create this effect.  It sounds extremely simple - but it feels icy cold and ethereally haunting. It’s not overtly religious - but it does evoke some flavour of a chant or a hymn.

I’m trying to find a way to bring in that moment of quietness into the game. It would be amazing if people who played this game walk away having had a little moment of personal reflection - hidden in a playful experience.

[fance-clancy]

WEEK 7 - EMBODIED EMOTION

We took the development process for Phoenix’s Games “Nightmare Kitty” and “Game Over” as case studies in tapping into player’s embodied emotions. Embodied Emotion = we feel emotions with our bodies - not just in our heads. Phoenix was trying to create an embodied experience of fear in Nightmare Kitty but realized that she was taking players from a position where they would feel fearful and vulnerable (crouching) to a “power pose” (jumping to their feet).

After this lecture, I had a conscious experience of this while taking part in a performance by Ellie, (and Valeria and Batool from Creative Computing). Three members of the audience were invited to stand on the points of a triangle and take part in a ritual formed around non-verbal, consensual touch.

I was already extremely nervous because I’m very shy and I turn red when I know people are looking at me. The points on the mat were demarcated by circles the size of plates (possibly painted around plates now that I think of it!). When I stepped onto my position - I was occupied with trying to keep my feet in the circle, I had to keep my feet tight together to stay in my spot - and this made me lose my balance slightly. So I was in a flustering situation - off my balance - in front of an audience. If I had been standing with my feet apart in a stable pose - I wouldn’t have been thinking about my balance and would have been better able to deal with the actual actions of the ritual. This isn’t at all a criticism of the performance - I really liked how the artists embodied this transformative space by putting me literally on the spot! It was very simple but very effective!

Starting to think about how this applies to Human Vacation Bureau - I started to wonder what sensory qualities I could employ to put users in a particular frame of mind while playing. I quite like the idea that it lures you in by looking all lurid and kitsch but then you find yourself having a quiet and reverential experience. I’m thinking about the confession boxes they have in Catholic churches - they enclose you - it gives the act of confessing more weight because you feel like you are alone with God and the priest to humble yourself.

 A great music reference I keep thinking about would be the intro to Staring At The Sun by T.V. On The Radio. It begins with a very simple vocal line that repeats with no instrumentation. I found out the singer, Tunde Adebimpe, recorded the vocals 40 times and layered them to create this effect.  It sounds extremely simple - but it feels icy cold and ethereally haunting. It’s not overtly religious - but it does evoke some flavour of a chant or a hymn.