Creation Year: June

Despite a family vacation in the middle of the month, I've been able to get quite a lot accomplished.  A welcome respite from the last few months of spinning my wheels.

Spring is complete.  Summer is complete.  That just leaves two more micro-games and Seasons will be done(ish).  To be honest, I'm already reconsidering Summer and Fall.  But I knew that if I spent all summer thinking about the design, it would never get done.  Better something less awesome, but ready for ArtPrize than something well designed but completely theoretical.

The other day, I had a frustrating experience.  I finished Summer on Wednesday, but then realized I hated it.  The more I consider this piece, the more I am impressed by the following realities:

1. Seasons will be installed in a loud bar with plenty of other distractions. 
2. I am requiring something more from my audience than just to look, shrug, and move on to the next thing.
3. Players will not have time to spend more than a few minutes at my piece.

These realities are affecting my design more and more.  Because of them, it means that the player doesn't have time to be confused.  Goals must be clear and feedback immediate.  If I were to make some sort of meta-game that spans all four seasons, the rules would have to be explained ahead of time, but (1) and (3) limit the potential of them reading and understanding them. 

Most art games (that I love, at least) require a few play-throughs to really understand well.  I think of the many students I've watched play Passage  for the first time only to keep walking straight across the screen without exploring the maze beneath.  And that was in class!  My players won't have half that focus, probably.

So I went back and tweaked Summer, changing some rules and adding a few.  Thankfully, it was easy enough.  After playing Spring and Summer with some real-life (instead of testing) numbers, it's playing much better.


Very soon, I'll have a new website to launch.  You'll be able to play the demos there.

Creation Year: May

Continuing my attempt at logging my attempt at Creation Year...  May and June have been a little hectic.  Again, unfortunately, no fully completed projects, but lots of good momentum.

The biggest decision I've made the last few months has been that I would not only attempt to put my Seasons project into an art gallery, but to tackle ArtPrize.

For those of you who won't click on that link, ArtPrize is a massive art competition located in Grand Rapids, Michigan.   There are rounds of audience voting and a jury prize.  Overall, somewhere around $800,000 is given away in prize money.  While I don't expect to get any of that prize cash, ArtPrize is a massive community event.  Last year, I think we had something like an extra 500,000 people in the city or something.  Go big or go home, right?

Artists partner with local businesses that host their work.  Much of the city is turned into an art gallery, from bars and restaurants to real estate offices, museums, and churches.    So I set about trying to convince people to take a risk on an uncompleted project in a relatively little understood medium by an unproven artist.  I was beyond excited when the B.O.B., a local venue with multiple restaurants, nightclubs, and bars inside, accepted me as one of their artists this year.

The B.O.B.

This is pretty exciting news and let me tell you why: the B.O.B. has the highest foot traffic of pretty much any venue in the city.  People are there almost all day every day, both for ArtPrize events or just to enjoy the venue itself.  So my little arcade machine with my artsy little game will be playable by thousands of people over the span of three weeks.  Agh!

So May was spent setting up ArtPrize connections and continuing to plug away at Seasons.  Spring is completed (or, at least, ready to be put on the shelf until the rest are done).  Summer is underway.  And I have two and a half months to pull off.

Deep breaths.

The letter of the law.

Jesus once accused a group of 1st century Jewish religious leaders of obeying the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law.  According to their own law, they were fairly sinless.  They took special care not to walk over an 1/8th of a mile on the Sabbath, they cleaned out their house of yeast before Passover, they gave a tenth of their income to the temple. 

But Jesus absolutely blasts them on one point: according to their law, it was permissible for them to find a loophole in the system whereby they could avoid their filial responsibilities to take care of their parents.  Sure, it was legal.  But it completely denied the elderly of financial support.  And there was no social security to fall back on.  So, though they were righteous according to the letter of the law, they were guilty of violating the spirit in which it was written.

I was thinking about this concept as it relates to games the other day. 

When we play games, we essentially enter into a behavioral contract.  We agree that we will limit our behavior to a certain accepted norm.  By doing so, we hope to win the game (thereby achieving other goals – having fun, proving we’re better, alleviating boredom, etc…).  The whole process should be relatively simple, right?  Observe a group of children playing at recess and it’s incredibly apparent that it’s not.

I think the concept of “letter of the law” and “spirit of the law” has a place in a game environment and players’ behavior tends to fall toward one or the other. 

One group of players believes that the rules give us the bounds of acceptable game behavior.  They spell out for us, in Mafia/Werewolf/Witch Hunt, for example, that, when the narrator tells the townspeople to go to sleep, everyone closes their eyes.  In freeze tag, if we’re tagged, we stay still.  But these players believe that the rules only spell out the explicitly acceptable (or unacceptable) game behavior.  Anything else, as long as it is not outlawed by a particular rule, is fair game.  So, in Mafia, even though your eyes are closed, there’s nothing in the rules that says anything about moving around.  Or talking.  Or giving back rubs to other players in the middle of the night cycle.  In poker, if another player is being sloppy and somehow reveals their hand, they’ll do their best to leverage that information.  None of these actions is explicitly forbidden according to the game rules, so they are absolutely acceptable in-game actions.

The other group of players believes that rules are there to give them a starting point to extrapolate proper in-game behavior.  When they played freeze tag, they would scream for help.  Surely, the point of freezing was to remove them as an active helper of the team, right?  Moving their mouth doesn’t do anything to unfreeze anyone else, so it seems like appropriate behavior.  In Mafia, during the night cycle, these players actually close their eyes and sit still.  In poker, they purposely don’t look at other peoples’ hands, believing that most of the fun of the game comes from the speculation, playing of odds, and understanding bets and bluffing, not from taking advantage of another players’ stupidity.

Each of these, taken to their extremes, can ruin the fun of a game.  Spirit of the law gamers essentially end up adding tons of extra rules.  They might try to enforce the laws of physics into a D&D game, for example.  Letter of the law gamers tend towards exploiting a system.  I think the true extreme of this type is online griefers.  Repeatedly crouching over a corpse is not outlawed by the rules of Halo.  Neither are ten minute long, four letter word filled diatribes against teammates.  But both of these clearly violate the social rules of the game and the spirit of the law of multiplayer gaming. 

So what do you think?  Do gamers fall into these categories at all?  What are the circumstances under which you might be more of a letter gamer or spirit gamer?  Which is the more acceptable behavior? 

Simulated Effort.

I drank waay too much caffeine last night.  I ended up in bed around 1:00am, but unable to sleep until probably 2:30.  During that time, I teetered on the edge of sleep, leading to some interesting thoughts that, I’m sure, will be shared on here in the coming days.

One of the things that struck me (for whatever reason) is simulated effort as portrayed in platformer games.  By simulated effort, I mean the simple idea that the longer you hold the jump button, the higher your character jumps.  It was a simple choice in the early Mario games, I’m sure, but as I thought about it, it was quite significant.

This might seem obvious to most of the world, but that kind of means that the harder I work, the harder Mario works.  And none of us, especially in the early days, merely pushed down the button and leisurely held it longer.  No, we mashed that thing into the controller.  On several occasions, I’m pretty sure I had to unstick the B button out from underneath my Super Nintendo controller.  As I reflect, though, my increased effort was met with what seemed to be a commensurate amount of effort from my little avatar, Mario. 

This really increases the identification I have with my character, too.  We really are on the same team, both trying hard to save the princess. 

I mean, think about it.  How much more sense did Mario make in Super Mario World than Donkey Kong?  In Donkey Kong (correct me if I’m wrong), your jumps barely clear the barrels.  Every time.  Mario’s effort was the same when you accidentally hit jump as when you, in a last minute realization, jammed it with all of your might.  But in Super Mario World, Mario can hop.  And when you want and need him to, he jumps with all his might.  How right did that feel the first time someone experienced that? 

Obviously, this idea has evolved over time.  My favorite instance of simulated effort was in the cult classic, Shadow of the Colossus.  I have never been more stressed in a video game than when I realized that, by holding a button and watching a bar disappear, I was making this poor kid hold on for his life.  As that circle of effort shrank to nothing, I pressed harder, hoping that, against all logic, it might help my hero.  He seemed to renew his effort, but his exhausted animation matched the dwindling “effort bar” until he fell back to the ground.

What brilliant innovations for their time, these simulations of effort!  Now, in our era of motion gaming, we have new opportunities of increasing the bond between player and character.  And yet, in the motion games I’ve played, this has woefully not been the case.  Is this because of lack of engaging games (most motion games are sports sims, so far, it seems)?  Or is there an “uncanny valley” when it comes to motion control without force feedback?  What are your thoughts?