Video games as personal expression

a blog for my personal exploration of video games as an expressive medium (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-69717646-2', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview');

[poeticvideogames]

BIT.BURST postmortem: game creation as emotional relief

BIT.BURST was my entry for September 2016's One Game A Month.

If you’ve played any of my tiny #altgames, you’ll notice that BIT.BURST is notably different in its aesthetics and feel. What is interesting about this project is its origins: it was born out of frustration and anger after I had gotten some disappointing news that was a big blow for me. I felt the need to channel these resulting emotions into a game. While it looks trippy and colourful now, the initial vision was very different. I wanted to create something angry and dark, something where you could go in and get satisfaction from breaking a bunch of pixelated blocks.

The game started out in black & white, and I envisioned the visuals and sound effects to be very violent in order to encapsulate the angry feelings I was harbouring. After some time developing and getting to the point of being able to collect blocks, I sporadically decided I'd use this project to play around with Unity's image effects, the existence of which I had only just discovered. It was by fiddling around with image effects that the game got brighter and brighter, trippier and trippier, and gradually I found my negative emotions were slowly dissipating.

From that point on, I just wanted to make it colourful and trippy, but with a snappy edge to it. My new goal was to fiddle around with image effects, rather than channeling my negative emotions. This was the first time I’d deliberately turned to game creation to give my (then overwhelming) emotions an outlet. I would often turn to poetry for this, and I wanted to see if I could do this with games as well. That the game didn’t turn out as I initially envisioned (conveying my negative feelings) doesn’t bother me—as with poetry writing, sometimes a poem born from negativity turns into something positive, and that’s okay. I was okay with this game taking another route than what I had initially intended for it.

Sadly though, I wasn't able to put enough work into it to make it a complete experience. There are even still some bugs present. I do believe however that the core of the (newly) intended experience is there. With more polish it might even become quite a satisfying game. The reason it's left unfinished is because at some point during that month I felt I was approaching burn-out, so I allowed myself to take a time-out and read as much fiction as I wanted (which really helped!). By the time I was feeling better I was doing a lot of travelling, and before I knew it the month was over. So with an unfinished project at hand and no other game to qualify for #1GAM, I decided to rather upload an unfinished game than to break the chain. I saw this as an exercise in silencing the inner perfectionist—”yes this game is buggy, unfinished, and not a complete experience, but that’s okay”. It’s a prototype of a game that could be fun, if given more attention. I have plenty of ideas for it, and maybe I'll go back to it some day. My goal of experimenting with image effects a little was reached, and my negative emotions didn’t feel so overpowering anymore. So I was pretty satisfied with the result.

[poeticvideogames]

#9 Mingling of Minds

It's all about bringing creatives together--letting them interact, letting the creative juices flow.

This post is part of One Thought A Day.

[poeticvideogames]

#8 Gamedev Garden

a poem on gamedev as a hobby

See your gamedev as a garden—

a garden you tend to on a regular basis, making little prototypes, little games, tiny little playthings, or little efforts in a collaborative environment a garden that, every now and then, you’ll reap a fruit or a vegetable from in the form of exposure, or money, or awesome shared experiences or, who knows what else, really

the garden will do its thing to grow but tending it is up to you

This post is part of One Thought A Day. I skipped some days, oops (blame Screenshake.be)

[poeticvideogames]

#7 Language of Game Poems

The quality of a written poem game depends on many things: rhythm, word choice, word order, alliteration, cohesion, use of metaphor, etc... What does the quality of a game poem (like Gravitation) depend on? What even is the language of game poems?

It’s not 'word choice, word order, alliteration’, those are highly specific to text.

Maybe it could be things like ‘object choice, use of metaphor, colour palette’ on the one hand (representational), and ‘nature of actions, repetition of actions, effects of actions,...’ on the other (nature of interaction).

Needs more thought.

This post is part of One Thought A Day. The thought dates back to Fall 2016.

[poeticvideogames]

#6 Content vs Format

'Game' hints to content, not format.  'Video game' still hints to content.  Book, poem, film, short story... Hint to format. What we know as video games is only a subset of a larger medium (since it sets rules on content). What are the formats of our medium?  What is the name of our medium, beyond 'video games'?

[poeticvideogames]

#5 Human Condition as Complex Systems

thoughts while reading Manifesto: The 21st Century Will Be Defined By Games

SYSTEMS THINKING Systems thinking is ‘a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots’.

COMPLEX SYSTEMS The human condition is comprised of complex, interrelated systems:

if depression was a system, the "seeing the whole"  is understanding the process of depression--what drives it? how can it be prevented? what factors cause one to feel depressed? how can one prevent it from progressing into a debilitating disease?

if relationships were a system, the "seeing the whole" is understanding the inner workings of relationships--what makes people closer? what makes relationships turn sour? how does distance between two people affect their thinking?

if loneliness was a system, "seeing the whole" is understanding what leads one to feel lonely, how one can get out of loneliness, how one can deal with it, etc...     

Systems thinking then is the ability/capacity to understand these systems. Not everyone is aware about the exact factors that cause them to feel a certain way, or experience certain things. Perhaps showing someone your own experience of it (through a system that can be explored) could help them:

GAMES AS COMPLEX SYSTEMS Games can be very suitable for this.

Facets of the human experience (depression, selfcare, overstimulation, relationships,…) as game systems, which can be explored by the player.

This can be achieved through game mechanics that simulate human experience & mental state (systems): depression, happiness, information overload, overwhelm, mood swings, effects of exercise on mental health, love, creativity, and so on... A game (as a system) can ‘capture’ how they work and how they're influenced or controlled (from the author’s perspective), and present it to the player in an engaging way.

I guess that’s what personal games often do: the author showing how they experience a certain aspect of the human condition.

This post is part of One Thought A Day. The original thought dates back to November 2016.

[poeticvideogames]

#4 Reflections on ‘A Slow Year’

thoughts on A Slow Year by Ian Bogost

When I starting playing it, I felt so confused. "What do I do?" It took me a while to figure out what its purpose was: It's a game about observation. I realized while playing it that many of us have forgotten the joy of observing nature. I remembered sitting by the lake, drawing joy from watching the little wave ripples and the lightplay on them, the seagulls flying over the surface and the sun setting, color spilling out everywhere. Or at the small half-frozen lake in the park, where two seagulls fought over a fish the other had caught, tailing each other in their flight. Or the beautiful ducks at the small pond that eventually become very curious about me, and specifically the bread I was throwing at them.

I'd argue that many have forgotten the sheer pleasure in observation. These game poems made me reflect on that.

This post is part of One Thought A Day. The thought dates back to April 2015.

[poeticvideogames]

#3 Emotional Release Through Video Games

this thought dates back to Fall 2015

Being an avid piano and guitar player, I know how emotionally cleansing it can be to play music. There’s certain music I play when I’m having a tough time emotionally, it gives me a proper outlet. It helps me feel the emotions and channel them. This is much like simply listening to music, but more involved.

I am interested in utilizing video games to be this kind of emotional cleansing experience, and how this can be done. I want to be able to turn to games to work through sadness, loneliness, loss, to celebrate major life changes or the beauty of a relationship with someone, to reflect on what’s bothering me or on what’s making me happy, and to feel the complex emotions that accompany that. I want them to be as memorable as my favourite songs, and to which I can return to again and again to feel the emotions accompanied with it.

For that reason I see them as highly shortform games--a 50, 10 or even 2 hour game doesn’t seem too suitable for that. There’s bound to be many different emotions involved. I’d rather have something more condensed, with a clear emotional focus, like a particular music track. But in game-form.

[poeticvideogames]

#2 Not playing to be challenged

this thought dates back from April 2015

I realised today (after playing 40 minutes of Ori and the Blind Forest) why I get bored so quickly of games nowadays.... I'm not looking for challenging or skill-based gameplay. I’ve easily had 15 years of that already, and it now deters me more than it engrosses me.

The vast majority of games seem to rely on challenge to keep a game interesting for players.  But to me it often feels like filler and distraction from the essence of the game: I was really excited for Ori—it looks gorgeous, the story seemed lovely and I wanted to experience it. But then.... it turned out to be another platformer. I don’t want to spend my time finding the perfect timing to jump past scorching fireballs and whatnot, dying when I fail and having to re-try again and again. Instead, I want to experience the rich world and beautiful story. The gameplay just got in the way of that. I lost interest after barely an hour.

I challenge myself during piano or kung fu to better myself at those skills, but I don’t have any wishes to get good at particular video games. I’d rather use that time for other skills that I truly care about. Moreover, I don’t read a poem or watch a movie or read a book to be challenged. I engage with them for the joy of it, for insight, to learn about different kinds of experiences and ways of being, for intellectual stimulation, or simply to relax.

Those are the kinds of things I want to open up a game for, too.

[poeticvideogames]

#1: Game Creation Process vs Poetry Writing

Coming up with a feature-complete game before "getting your hands dirty" (so only implementing or prototyping it when it's all planned out and working well in your head), is kinda like trying to form a poem in your mind, word for word, and only writing it down when it sounds perfect. It doesn't (usually) work like that in poetry: you’re constantly writing down and erasing words to try out what sounds best, what fits and what doesn’t, how it should rhyme or flow, etc. Lots of trial and error before you figure out the exact tone and feel. Seems like a suitable approach for shortform games as well.... but it can become exhausting quickly without high-level development tools: spending twenty minutes programming a feature or effect vs. writing a few words in a poem. Still, I like jumping straight into Unity and exploring an idea hands-on. Usually it’ll take a life of its own and turn out as something quite different from what I started with. Happens a lot with my poems as well!

[poeticvideogames]

One Thought A Day

I looked at the date of my last post and was astonished—October!? It’s already February, and I haven’t really been working on writing full posts in the meantime. My thesis needed to be finished, so I’ve mostly been focused on that instead. But now that that’s out of the way ( \o/ ), there’s more breathing space to post here again. So:

I decided I’ll post one thought related to this blog’s content every day for the rest of the month.

This will most likely come from my Evernote—I jot down my thoughts very often and some of them might be inspiring for others as well. Besides that, I just want to get some content out there. It feels productive. So there you have it. One Thought A Day for the rest of February (in line with One Poem A Day which I did about a year ago).

Hope there’ll be something that inspires you!

[poeticvideogames]

Video Games and the Mechanics of Human Experience

One of the things in video games I'm super excited about right now is simulating certain aspects of the human experience through game mechanics. I'm not talking about epic, hero or fantasy stories, and not even necessarily about stories that are more relatable such as those about our daily lives and the mundane. What I’m trying to get at are highly internal experiences that we can relate to on a personal level, and that many of us are intimately familiar with. I'm deliberately not using the word story, because that sets a whole range of expectations. Here are some examples of games that are about internal human experience, and that encompass this in their game mechanics. They are all very short, ranging from five minutes to two hours.

Gravitation is a game about depression, creativity and parenting.

What Now? shows a subjective experience of sensory overload and emotional breakdown.

Passage muses on life and death, and how our life choices affect our path.

Compass is about overcoming fears and the effects this has on perception.

LIM, a game made up entirely of squares, captures strongly the experience and violence of not belonging.

Depression Simulator is an artistic walking simulator encapsulating a subjective experience of depression.

Journey, larger in scale and length (but still relatively short, at about two hours of gameplay), goes all out at presenting the journey of a lifetime from birth to death, and the magic of experiencing connection with one another.

All of these tiny (and not-so-tiny) video games simulate the mechanics of some aspect of internal human experience. They deal with complex topics of the mind, of the emotions, of the internal experience of things, and they don't necessarily tell a story, though we can build one around them if we want. Importantly, they allow the player to project themselves onto the character to great lengths—the games themselves are vehicles to an understanding of the experiences they are about. They are playgrounds where we can enter, and allow us to safely explore the experience at hand.

How does the character get depressed? What factors play into this? How does this change the behaviour and perception of the character? How does the character get out of depression? Not just depression, but things like happiness, information overload, burnout, mood swings, the joy of a cup of tea, a walk in the forest, effects of exercise on mental health and mental clarity, love, breakup, creativity, self-care, bullying, transitioning, writer's block—all of these sorts of experiences can be translated into game mechanics in such a way that the mechanics themselves simulate those experiences. These mechanics are often metaphorical in nature, with ranging levels of abstraction. If executed well, they encapsulate that meaning and they nudge the player to reflect on the topic, they offer insight, or they simply share a personal experience with the player. They can however be very subjective, personal and specific, and different players will get different levels of satisfaction out of them, since not everyone will be able to relate to the same extent.

In that sense, such games come incredibly close to music and poetry. Sometimes I like to describe them as poetic. It's this kind of content that I crave personally—content that provokes deeper thought instead of challenging my skills—and I know there are a lot of others out there who crave it too, and who are starting to look for it in video games. I've played skill / gameplay-focused games for over ten years of my life. And to be honest, I don’t get much out of them anymore. I want to be engaged in games differently now—I want games to engage me with my own internal world and with that of other people. This is what music and poetry do for me, and this is what I'd like to open up a game for as well.

Luckily, with the rise and democratization of game development tools such as Unity, Construct 2, Game Maker and Twine, and distribution platforms like itch.io and Game Jolt, the prevalence of such auteur games has been steadily rising. I believe this is one reason that this 'genre' of video games is taking solid shape, as more and more people who are looking for outlets to express themselves discover that video games are a viable, highly expressive and accessible medium to do so.

The games mentioned above are just a tiny subset of what's currently out there, and they brush only a tiny set of experiences. I'm pretty excited for what else is out there I haven't played yet, and for what games in this spirit have yet to come into existence. Just like there are many different kinds of musicians and writers (and artists across all other media, for that matter), there are many different kinds of game makers. I'm sure we'll get to see a large variety of auteur games, which I believe we're already starting to see the beginnings of right now. I envision things like personal game albums or game collections to be more common (Memoir En Code is a good example), where instead of listening to a music album or reading through poetry, one might play through a few tiny games, and be engaged in the content they like.

I've talked about portraying the mechanics of abstract, internal human experience in video games. In the wider scope of the medium, this might be considered a niche subset. It isn’t something everyone will appreciate or look for, but it's the same in other media, like literature, music, and film. Not all formats within a particular medium will be for everyone, but having the variety makes for a rich and mature medium.

Moreover, I believe that being able to communicate internal human experience with each other through video games is an incredibly powerful thing. The dimension of interactivity for such content is something we haven't seen before, something which is entirely absent, or at least, less prevalent, in other media. I'm excited for what possibilities this brings us, and in what interesting ways game makers will utilize that interactivity.

If this (and related topics) interests you and you'd love to read or hear more about it, I recommend any of the talks, podcasts and articles I've been compiling  on the Links page.

[poeticvideogames]

Ludum dare 35 Postmortem: On forcing a game into something it's not

In April I was able to participate in Ludum Dare for the second time, after making Compass in December for LD34. I'm happy that once again, I learned some valuable lessons. This time around it's less about tools, as it was with my previous LD experience (you can find my write-up about that experience here), and more about game design.

If you've read any book on game design (I recommend A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell), you'll have read in some form or another that one of the basic principles is not forcing your ideas onto the game, but letting the game speak to you about what it wants to become. In other words, if you pay close enough attention, you’ll notice what works for a particular game and what doesn't. It sounds simple enough, and having read A Book of Lenses, I thought I knew this, but still I caught myself violating this deceptively simple principle. Here's how that happened.

Brainstorming

My natural reaction when thinking what a game will be about, is what meaning I’ll give it. This usually gets quite personal, such as “overcoming fears” in Compass. For this edition's theme “Shapeshift”, which reminded me of “metamorphosis”, I again went in that direction and wanted it to be about growing and gaining experience, about becoming a “fuller”, and well-rounded person. Metamorphosis. The visuals I had in mind involved an abstract creature collecting colour in a 2D space, the creature itself becoming more colourful and beautiful, yet flawed, as it went on (I seem to have a thing for abstract representations!). So to start this, I set out to experiment with particle systems. It seemed that it would work well to achieve the visualisation I had in mind. This time around I used Unity instead of Construct 2, you can read more about that decision here.

Day 1: successful experimentation

Day 1 of the jam was great, I did a lot of experimentation and learned more about using particle systems in Unity. Even though it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind (in retrospect, it was very far from what I had in mind), I was still very happy with the day's results:

[GIF]: https://twitter.com/linsey_ray/status/721414721707094017

The movement felt incredibly smooth, the visual style and colours appealed to me. I wasn't quite sure what kind of actual gameplay to implement, other than popping the coloured bubbles I'd put into place, which in itself felt satisfying.

Initially there was only one creature, but in the evening a neat bug happened while I was fiddling around making a trail for the creature, and poof, I saw it fit to include a 2nd creature! The colours and aesthetics of the double creature setup really spoke to me, and the movement felt even more satisfying. It was then also that my tendency to have games be about something cropped up: I decided the game would now actually be about relationships; finding a partner and becoming close to them, being together, and then the inevitable part of parting ways and being alone again but still being reminded of the other.

Day 2: the mistake of enforcing meaning

Day 2 was quite a different experience. After spending a tad too much time on getting (sub-par) sound into the game, I started working on implementing the meaning part of the game. I had several visual transitions in mind that would convey the above message in a way that made sense in my head, and spent most of the day coding these transitions. 

At the end of the day, the transitions were in place. But… it felt incredibly empty. It did nothing to me, and even though I knew what was happening and why, through a friend playtesting I realized no one else would get this message unless I explained what those transitions meant and what the game was about. They were just incredibly confused, especially about why such a soothing, relaxing game suddenly turned all creepy. I realized I had made the mistake of forcing the game into something it wasn't. Looking back it’s so obvious I shouldn’t have done this, but at the time I was blindly sticking to my initial idea, which prevented me from shifting my focus to what was clearly working well.

Day 3: cutting what wasn’t working

So on the 3rd evening after spending a day at work, I decided to scrap the transitions altogether and let go of my need to enforce meaning onto the game. I decided to keep the game to what it was on the first evening: relaxing, smooth, and satisfying to play. I coded in a frenzy to have some kind of experience that still felt complete. I settled for submitting it as a 2D space in which you simply exist and move about, popping bubbles as you go. I salvaged the code I'd written for automatic sticking/releasing of the second creature by giving the player the ability to call/release a twin creature at will, and made the different appearances I'd toyed with using particle systems available by making it possible to change appearance any time. This felt like the right thing to do.

You can check out the final submission here: https://linseyray.itch.io/splash-n-shift

Lessons internalised

1) Don't push a game into a direction that doesn’t suit it; pay close attention to what works and what doesn't. I should have noticed on the first evening that the game worked best as a soothing and relaxing experience.

2) Don't try to enforce meaning onto a game at all costs. This backfired on me twice in this project. First I wanted it to be about personal growth and metamorphosis, then suddenly it was to be an abstraction of certain aspects of relationships. This all wasn’t thought out well and didn’t mesh with what I had after the first day of experimentation. I could have 1) ditched what I had and started over to still incorporate these ideas, or 2) ditched these ideas and focus on the nice and smooth game that was coming to life in front of me. Option 2 was what I went for only at the very last moment. I could have done this much sooner and delivered a nicer experience, but oh well. Next time!

[poeticvideogames]

Lowrezjam postmortem

TL;DR 1) knowing how and when to use a certain tool matters more for productivity than whether or not it’s a low or high level tool, 2) making something, however small, is infinitely more valuable & educational than making nothing at all

Familiarity with game development tools

In a previous article about my experience with Ludum Dare 34 in December, I praised the high-level game development tool Construct 2 a lot, and stated I preferred making personal games in it over Unity3D since it seemed to provide a huge speed-boost in development time and left more room for creative expression in comparison. I now understand that that belief was naive, as I forgot to take into account the familiarity one has with their tool of choice.

I started lowrezjam in Construct 2, hoping to have a similar smooth experience as when I made Compass back in December. I envisioned a pixelated fire, and was experimenting with particle systems to achieve the effect. After some trial and error and mild frustration with Construct 2, I wasn't getting the results I wanted. It had been a few months since I’d last used it, and I only ever learned the basics during LD35, so things weren't coming together as fast as I wanted them to. Especially considering this game was going to be very simple.

Since I had been getting more familiar with Unity during my thesis work, and I knew it had an extensive particle system component, I thought, let's try this in Unity. I also remembered coming across a RetroPixel plugin that adds a nice pixel filter onto your game, which simplified (and most importantly, saved time) adhering to the 64x64 rule of the jam. Immediately I loved how the game was turning out, and found I was getting things done surprisingly quickly (I say surprisingly because I had the belief Construct 2 would allow for faster development by default). It was because of my thesis work that I now felt I knew my way around the Unity enough not to be held back by it, and on top of that, I realized yet again how much I had missed programming…

This experience of shifting tools out of frustration made me re-assess my beliefs about high-level tools for game development; yes, they can save valuable time and they can give space for creative freedom and are insanely useful if you have no programming background, but it's also still a tool, and as with all tools, they function best if you know how to use them properly, and when to use them. This explained why using Unity sped up my development, even though Construct 2 was the tool that sped up my development almost half a year prior to that. My mistake was assuming I could rapidly put something together while never having learned Construct 2 properly, which caused frustration over not getting things done as fast as I wanted them to be done.

Just do it!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I really enjoyed making Bonfire, and I’m still incredibly fond of it. Even though the jam ran for two weeks, I only set out to spend a few hours on it to experiment and get something done. I was having a very busy few weeks during that time and LD34 would start the weekend after, closely followed by A Maze Berlin. I believe adopting this mindset was a hugely positive thing to do. And that’s my biggest takeway from lowrezjam: making a little something is so much more valuable than making nothing. You learn a lot from going through the entire process of game development, from the initial brainstorm to putting it up on itch.io, because even if the game is very small, every game is different and your challenges will be different each time.

Bonfire also inspired me to start One Game A Month, which is an extension of the idea that making something is better than nothing. Bonfire became my first entry to kick it off. Right now I’m on my third month, and so far I’ve been enjoying it a lot. The satisfaction of seeing something get done each month is incredibly satisfying, and I’ll continue to keep that up!

https://linseyray.itch.io/bonfire

[poeticvideogames]

Three game jams in three weeks

The past few weeks have been super crazy; apart from my part-time job and on-going master's thesis which take up the majority of my time, I've participated in three game jams and was part of A Maze 2016 Berlin... it’s been exhausting but so worth it! Had a great time at A Maze, and the game jams taught me valuable lessons. Luckily things will quieten down now, so I’ll have more energy to focus on my thesis again.

Anyway, here are the results of the game jams!

Bonfire

lowrezjam

I had so much fun making Bonfire! I’m really fond of it. Perhaps this is because I only expected myself to spend a few hours on it, even though lowrezjam was running for two weeks. I took it as a challenge in just do it, making a little something rather than nothing. In the end, I really enjoyed working with low resolution graphics and the resulting aesthetics really speak to me. I like to just mess around with the fire, looking at what unfolds, and I’m proud I made something, instead of coming up with excuses about how busy life is.

Anyway, you can play Bonfire here: https://linseyray.itch.io/bonfire

Splash 'n Shift

ludum dare 35

Splash ‘n Shift was actually a huge lesson in game design for me, I’ll be writing a postmortem about that quite soon. Long story short, I tried too hard pushing it in a direction that didn’t suit it, wasting almost a full day of coding. I enjoyed the weekend nonetheless, and I’m extremely happy with the resulting aesthetics and feel of the game. It’s so satisfying to just swim around and pop bubbles and change shapes. As a plus, I also gained more experience with particle systems in Unity, as everything you see in the game is basically a particle system! This isn’t the most performant way of doing things, but at least it got me practice!

You can play Splash ‘n Shift here: https://linseyray.itch.io/splash-n-shift

Second Bus

Berlin mini game jam

Second Bus was created during the (8-hour) Berlin mini game jam that followed the day after A Maze 2016, and it’s directly inspired by @FlorianVltmn's hypertalk where he advocated telling more mundane, positive and/or personal stories in games. Both @wobipo and I were really pumped about putting this into practice immediately, so we teamed up and made it our goal to make a game about an every day experience. After a pleasant hour of brainstorming with coffee in hand, the sun on our cheeks and plenty of notebook scribbles,

we decided to convey the experience of a person’s shitty day turning into a good day; so in essence, a shift in mood from negative to positive. This is a natural but perhaps sometimes under-appreciated process, and we wanted to put this into focus and distill it into a little game where the player visually experiences such a mood shift. We had a small prototype running in the 8-hours of the game jam, but we decided to give this project a little bit more time and love and so it’s still a work in progress. Stay tuned for more!

And this then concludes three weeks of madness.

Time to recharge...

[poeticvideogames]

Personal expression in video games: Construct 2 and my first personal game

I love to express myself through art, and for the most part I've been doing that by writing poetry and playing music. I get a great deal of emotional release from both, and find it fascinating to return to these works at a later time. Ever since I started exploring small, personal games, the itch to make some of my own has kept growing. Most of the games I've made date from a time I wasn't yet into personal games, and I'd always write them in a programming language in combination with a graphics library like SDL or SFML, or a game engine like Unity or Godot. It seemed logical that since I'm studying Computer Science, I should use game-making as an opportunity to hone my coding skills. But in my recent attempts, when I specifically wanted to focus on making a personal game, I found that I'd quite soon lose the motivation to see it through. Programming games takes a great amount of time and effort, not just to get the game actually working but also learning how to do that—the creative process soon gets lost in overcoming technical obstacles, and it can become seasy to give up on the project, especially if there are many other things in life calling for your attention.

Switching to high-level tools

Luckily, this cycle got broken for me during the last Ludum Dare (#34) in December. It's a quarterly, online-hosted game jam where anyone can participate, either individually or as a team. I'd known about it for a long time but had never participated, and thought it was finally time to take the leap. It wasn't my first game jam, but in the ones I'd participated before I was always part of a team as a programmer, and usually the tool we used was Unity. Other games I'd made on my own were mostly clones of popular classics like Pong, Tetris or Space Invaders, and they were more of an exercise in programming than a specific intent to create something personal and unique. So this time, I was creating a game on my own over the timespan of three days, in which I had total creative freedom, and with the specific intent to create something that was meaningful to me; something that previously, I might have wanted to write a poem about.

Because my previous, somewhat frustrating game-making attempts had been mostly about learning programming and new tools, I now strongly felt the need to try a rapid creation tool. I opted for Construct 2, which is a high-level visual game engine that several friends had recommended to me. It's perfect for quickly making 2D games and prototypes as it saves you a lot of time by abstracting out the technical details.

Even though I knew I wanted to make a game that was meaningful to me, I had no clue what it would be about. Once the theme was released however, “Growing” and/or “Two-button controls”, I almost instantly remembered a quote that I've been living by for most of my adolescent years:

“Fear is not your enemy. It is a compass pointing to the areas where you need to grow.”

and I knew the game was going to be about that. Fast-forward a few days, and the finished game was Compass. It's a small, atmospheric game in which I tried to embody what the above words mean to me on a personal level, and more specifically, how I've experienced the process of gradually overcoming (mostly social) fears. I could just as well have written a poem about the topic (which I have, actually), but now the result was a digital artifact the player could interact with to excavate the meaning I've given to it and the meaning they'll create from it—there are no words in the game except for the appearance of the above quote at the end.

To me, Compass feels like a poem in the form of a game (which is one reason I would label it as a 'game poem', 'poem game' or 'poetic game'), as do a great amount of other personal games I've played (Gravitation and Passage being the most notable ones). The way I expect the player to interact with Compass is how I expect someone to read one of my poems: curious about what it is that has been molded into the work at hand, which they may or may not discover and which may or may not be meaningful to them.

Room for exploration

The creation process contrasted so much with my previous game-making experiences—both in the nature of tasks, speed of progress and the overall enjoyment I got from the process. Choosing to develop in Construct 2 was the best decision I could have made, as it freed up an immense amount of time and energy that was previously spent (or wasted?) by fretting over technical details. This time could now be used for creative exploration, playtesting and polishing. It occurred to me after the jam that if I hadn't used Construct 2, I very well might have ended up with a totally different game. I'll explain this in the next paragraph.

--SPOILER ALERT-- (I kindly invite you to play Compass, it's only takes about 2 minutes!)

My starting point was the quote mentioned earlier, and the basic idea I had at first was to use a static screen with the player positioned in the middle, unable to move, and abstract “fears” popping up over the screen. One reason for this was because I wanted to keep the game as simple as possible so I would be able to finish (and polish) it in the short amount of time available. Incorporating the “two buttons theme”, the player could then turn around (like the needle of a compass) with the left/right arrow keys, and by looking at the fears, they would come closer and the player would go through the process of “facing” that fear, making it go away as it moved through the player after which the scene would grow brighter and brighter to simulate the clarity, freedom and fresh perspective one gains when not in a hold of fear.

On the second day however, I realized that keeping the player static didn't make much sense—in the majority of cases (unless forced to do something), you have to actively seek out your fears and put yourself in situations where you can undergo the experience that you're afraid of. This was when the game shifted radically; I flipped the tables around and made the fears static but the player able to move. This made more sense, as now the player was more actively involved in seeking out a fear and having to engage with it, which felt like a better reflection of reality to me. From this new perspective, the rest of the game fell into place from there, and I had a lot of opportunity to polish and tweak and explore different atmospheric changes before the final deadline (not to mention exploring Construct 2 itself, as this was the first time I'd made a game in it).

Had I been developing in low-level tools however, I might not have realized that I actually wanted the player to move until the last day, or perhaps not at all, because it would have taken me more time to get the game to a playable state where I could actually explore it and evaluate and redirect my own ideas. And even if I had, there would still have been much less time for polishing and exploring.

Creativity and personal expression in video games

The idea of constant and active exploration and re-evaluation has long since been gaining popularity in game development and software development in general—being able to rapidly prototype mechanics or other aspects of games is considered vital nowadays. This is in the same spirit as other creative processes (think painting, composing, dancing,…), and I also see it happening when I write poetry. Reading and re-reading a work-in-progress poem can be essential in order to evaluate it and have it grow into a finished poem as it gives it a chance to grow organically; to start from a vague idea or feeling or concept and work it out in detail as you go, guided by what feels right. Very rarely do I start a poem knowing exactly how I want it to be in its finished form, unless it's really short and it magically appears on the page and I'm satisfied with this initial bursts of words. Most of the time though, what the poem will become is something I need to discover myself, and this happens during the actual writing process.

What really excites me at this point is that this is now also possible with video games—it’s possible as an individual to create a game at a rapid pace without having to dig deep into technical details, which allows for more room for the creativity and exploration. This makes the threshold for creative expression in video games as a medium much lower than before, and allows for individuals to explore new and interesting ways for expression that aren't possible in other media like literature, music and film. The obstacle for me always seemed to have been “it takes so much time”, “it takes so much knowledge”, “the progress is just too slow”, but now that these statements can pretty much be thrown out of the window, there's nothing preventing me from leaping in and making personal games besides actually making the time for it every now and then, knowing I will finish something soon enough and that I won't get lost finding solutions to technical problems.

Luckily there already seems to have been an explosion of individuals with no (or little) programming knowledge making personal games in the past years, which is absolutely fantastic. Exploring what's already out there has been a gradual and slow process for me, and I try to let it happen organically. There's just too much to discover and keep up with. In any case, I'm happy to be a part of it and hope to contribute meaningfully. But above all, I look forward to discover how I can express myself in the medium of video games as I have done before with music and poetry. And that, in essence, is why I'm pulled to video games.

[poeticvideogames]

Learning about others’ experiences through video games

“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand”

– Chinese proverb

I really like this proverb and have often found it to be true in life. It's well-known within the field of learning and education, and often used to illustrate good teaching methods. What has recently occurred to me however is that it can also be applied to learning through various forms of media.

Let's say we have never had depression, and we want to know what it's like—maybe in order to understand our partner or friend who is currently dealing with it. Since depression is something that is experienced, it is very hard for someone who has never had depression to know, really know, what depression is like. Through a piece of text we may try to explain and describe what it is, how it feels, what it is like, but still, if we have never experienced depression before, we will not fully understand it—we will not know how it feels.

We may use a movie to show what depression is like, we can have stories and characters that are deeply affected by depression, and this may deepen our understanding a bit further. But in order to truly understand what it's like to have depression (or at least, how it may be experienced by a particular person, since experiences of depression may differ), we will need to experience depression for ourselves. As is hinted at in the proverb mentioned above, 'involve me and I'll understand' (an alternative translation is 'involve me, and I'll learn'), is one of the deepest forms of learning available to us.

However, putting ourselves in a situation where we actually develop depression just to have a deeper understanding of it would be highly irresponsible and ethically questionable, so this is not a course of action. Another option is to leverage videos games to give us access to the experience of depression: since video games are, in essence, about delivering a particular experience to the player (hence the term 'player experience' in Game Studies), video games can be used to help us gain a deeper understanding of what depression feels like, to a certain extent. What's more, it can done in a safe and controlled environment that can be exited at any time.

In this sense, video games provide the perfect medium to educate people about various mental health conditions. Depression Quest, for example, is a twine game that puts you in the shoes of a person suffering from depression. By the choices the game offers to you—or prevents you from choosing—you get a deeper understanding of how depression is typically experienced. Another example is Anxiety Attacks, a first-person exploration game where the player undergoes panic attacks, and also learns how to cope with them in the process. I've never had a panic attack, but since Anxiety Attacks actually includes a breathing mechanic, I genuinely felt discomfort in breathing while playing it and recognized my desire to quit—I got a glimpse of what it must be like to have a real panic attack, and it greatly increased my respect and empathy for those who have to live with anxiety disorder.

We can also broaden this perspective and see games as a medium to convey just about any kind of experience that we long to have or understand better, but may not necessarily want to go through ourselves. This has been done in video games for a long time, but often in the form of fantasy and fiction instead of directly relatable, real-life experiences. Using games to share specific, personal (and often unpleasant) experiences has been gaining momentum, but there is still a lot of ground for further exploration. Examples of topics such games have dealt with are depression (Depression Quest), anxiety (Anxiety Attacks), child abuse (Papa & Yo), the struggle of balancing parenting and career (Gravitation), online relationships (Cibele), transitioning (dys4ia), the difficulties of coming out to a non-accepting parent (Talks With My Mom), overcoming fears (Compass; my entry for LD #34), what it's like to feel excluded and bullied (Lim), losing your child to cancer (That Dragon, Cancer) and many, many more.

The significance of the existence of these games can't be overstated. As we typically do with forms of art, we seek out connection and validation. We want to know that others out there have gone through similar struggles that we are going through—it makes us feel less alone and more able to cope. We want to share our positive experiences as well and share in the joy of it. In both cases, we might look for a specific piece of music, a movie, a TV series or a poem about something we've gone through or are dealing with. This, I believe, is where games are currently headed as well—those mentioned above are just a few examples out of a growing list of personal games that deal with increasingly intimate yet universal topics. It will take time however for the stigma surrounding games—that they are merely entertainment—to make way for respect of its capacity for artistic expression.

However, just as 'playing' a driving simulator is not the same as physically driving a car on the road, so is 'playing' an anxiety or depression simulator (so to speak) not the same as having anxiety disorder or having clinical depression; we can only go so far to preserve a real-life experience within a game environment. And even though this glimpse into 'the real thing' can be highly educational, it does not mean that reading about or watching movies about the same topics is a 'lesser' way of learning about them—I believe engaging in a combination of all three would offer the most complete understanding.

So if I had to rewrite the proverb I opened with as a question for you to answer, I would write this:

Do you want to know what a certain experience is like? I can tell you (through literature), and you might form an idea of what it's like, I can show you (through film), and you'll see what it's like, or I can let you experience it safely (through games) and you may feel, to some extent, what it's like.

Which option(s) would you prefer?