Creation Year: April

After the busy-ness of March, April was a welcome respite and a chance to start working again.  I chose to start a fairly ambitious project...

One of the main ideas of Creation Year was benchmarking.  I had to create things and show them off to people so I could have an idea of how good I was at those things.  With my application to UCSC denied, it became especially important to get my work out there.  I decided to make a goal of showing off a game project or four in an art gallery.


Given that most of Grand Rapids is not terribly aware of the art game scene, I thought a simple premise would be best.  Something that everyone understood on a fairly fundamental level so that they can easily "get" how a game could express that idea.  I figured the seasons would be a good place to start.

Beyond just picking a subject, though, how would I make that happen?  For some time, I've been interested in Perlenspiel, a simple, abstract, web-based game engine.  Created by Prof. Brian Moriarty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, it's an engine that not only suggests abstraction, but demands it.  It forces both the designer and the player to think more about the systems of interaction than on art or world building or storytelling.  Its high degree of abstraction would, hopefully, help my players "get" the idea of Seasons even better.  Hopefully.

So April began with Spring.  As the trees were blooming outside, I sought to create a simple, game-like interactive toy that expressed the new life, unpredictability, and simple joy of that season.  I finished it just a few days into May.

Currently, the demo of Spring is available here, soon to be hosted on a new website designed by Jared Ransom.

Wither.

I recently played a short game called Wither.  It’s yet another art game that I’ll insist is so profound and yet people will just stare at me as I try to explain it.

Spoilers be below.

As near as I can tell, Wither places you in the shoes of a survivor of a car crash.  You may or may not have been the responsible party.  Either way, your brother (or other loved one) is dead and you promised to bring him twelve flowers.  The game then allows you to explore a small town, accomplishing small deeds in exchange for flowers to bring to his grave. 

I need to play through it again to chew through it again, but one thought really stuck out to me as I played: I was really sad.  Again I see the uniqueness of playable media.  I really lived in the death of my character’s brother.  Not in a creepy way or a way that assumes more emotional investment than a 20 minute game requires, but for that full 20 minutes, I was thinking about death.  Every action that I took reminded me of death.  Every flower was another promise that I had fulfilled.  Every character I talked to was someone else who could help assuage my survivor’s-guilt-ridden conscience. 

Had this been a short film, I would definitely have been affected, but there is a greater degree of separation between me and the characters.  At any given moment, I can choose to disengage my emotions and stop feeling what’s going on in the story.  Not so in Wither.  In order to progress, I necessarily must continue toward the goal of the game.  A goal which, might I remind you, was really, really sad.  Even if I wanted to disengage, every little interaction forced my emotional involvement in some small way. 

Anyway, it was a cool experience.  Yet another example of how games can be used to make us think differently.

Gamers as Artists.

Read this.  Right now:

http://kotaku.com/5857873/games-are-art-only-when-youre-playing-them

A couple of brief observations tonight:

1. A quote from the article: "...is a symphony meant to be played or listened to?"  
2. I notice that the author of this article seems to be a believer.  Well, he's working on a Masters in Systematic Theology, so that's something.  This is one of the more original posts I've seen on Kotaku in a while and a believer wrote it.
3. His last thought is wondering how gamers would respond to a call to artistry.  How can gamers be artists?  And guess what?  All the comments have nothing to do with the article.  They're all about trolling.  That's telling.

 As you play games, how can you consider yourself a co-creator in the art of the game?  Does it require research?  Playing along with the story instead of seeking to break the game and stretch the rules (a la last night's post)?  What do you think?

Juxtaposition.

Yet another video and a response...



My work is pretty awesome.  For those who don't know, I run all the technology at the media department at Cornerstone University.  (We have a Vimeo account.  You should check it out.)  Lately, my boss has been incredibly gracious in allowing me some student workers that can help me a few afternoons a week.  That has left me with time enough to a) take care of longer term needs and issues, and b) start learning and doing new things.  So, in addition to some dinking around with Adobe After Effects, I've been trying to brainstorm some short film ideas.

I'm not much a a short writer.  Most of the ideas that I get excited about are absurdly large journey stories.  My poor players in my Dungeons and Dragons campaign have hiked around most of the continent just to satisfy my lust for hugely epic narratives.  So, to get myself in the mood for writing shorts, I've been watching quite a few short films.  On the clock, no less. 

16: Moments is one of the films I checked out today.  I loved it.  I thought it was incredibly unique.  There are no words at all, yet it is packed with simple meaning.  I have heard that the power of filmmaking comes only from the juxtaposition of images and the audience's interpretation of those images.  16: Moments is this idea boiled down to its simplicity.

Now, its meaning and power do not simply come from the images.  The soundtrack does a heck of a lot to enhance the theme of everyday life and beauty.  But most of the heavy lifting is done by the editing and beautiful cinematography.

Ultimately, I think that this short is about the beautiful moments that make up our lives.  The fluidity of motion between most of the shots helps the viewer to thematically connect the two shots into similar ideas.  (Side note: isn't it amazing that the human brain can, in hundredths of a second, determine complex and abstract relationships between two moving pictures?)

Take, for example, the segment from about 1:14 to 1:39.  It's a brief story of life.  From the first shot of the fisherman casting his line to the shot of the footprint disappearing in the sand, every shot is a reference, in some way, to a life story.  Some of the shots only make sense looking backward, but it still makes sense.  The fisherman casting his line (looking for the girl).  Two teenagers kissing in the hallway (young, innocent love).  A bird chirping in spring (the season of love).  Unwrapping a condom (a little more mature love...).  A drill going into a two by four (...).  A couple holding hands as they step down stairs (maybe even a little more mature?).  Baby pressing footprints.  Baby walking.  A gravedigger at his work.  Finally, footsteps in the sand (recalling this poem, perhaps).  In 25 seconds, we're given a look at a life.  All through the juxtaposition of simple clips and the natural, cultural connotations that we have inside us.

One of the other things I love about this video is that it is beautiful without caving to the DSLR "look" that is so, incredibly pervasive in short film these days.  Yes, bokeh is beautiful.  Yes, I love high contrast images and tight depth of field.  But 16: Moments manages to be beautiful even though some of the shots look like they were shot with a news camera.  Almost everything in frame is in focus.  It looks like it may have been shot at 30fps instead of 24fps (like film).  It flies in face of what is popular right now while retaining a cinematic beauty that continued to compel me to watch.

I continue to be fascinated by short films like this.  Though I'll never be able to write one, they still inspire me with concepts, ideas, and themes that I want to draw on in my future writing.

What stuck out to you as you watched?


(Huge shout out to http://www.filmgen.com/.  I've been trawling their archives for good short films yesterday and today.)

Reading Between the Lines.

(This turned out to be quite a bit longer than I originally thought it would be. And it's mildly self-indulgent. I do apologize. But I wanted to still post it just in case there are other world-builder types like me trying to figure their lives out...)

I just read a lovely article thanks to a friend and several things came crashing together in my brain. Said article was called "How to Steal Like an Artist" and, essentially, was a giant, "Here's some stuff I've learned about creating art."

It's no big secret that I have, at times, fancied myself an artist, so it was good to read an article that spoke directly to that part of my identity that has not been getting fed like it should have been.

His last point, however, stuck with me.

10. Creativity is subtraction.

It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is.

In this age of information overload and abundance, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out...

It's something I've heard, for sure. That creativity is choosing what to not show or tell as much as it is choosing what to show or tell. But, all of a

sudden, a bunch of things started mashing together in my brain.

I've recently become slightly obsessed with Echo Bazaar. For those of you who are unfamiliar (which, I'm sure, is most of you), it is an online game that uses the intervalled actions of social games and mixes it with cleverly written narrative set in Fallen London. Here is the text from the About page:

1889.

Three decades ago, London was stolen by bats. Dragged deep into the earth by the Echo Bazaar. The sun is gone. All

we have is the gas-light of Mr Fires.

But Londoners can get used to anything. And it's quiet down here with the devils and the darkness and the mushroom wine. Peaceful.

But then YOU arrived.

Welcome. Delicious

friend.

You learn almost nothing from that block of text. That doesn't tell you that the game is based around 40 actions a day that regenerate at one a minute. It doesn't tell you that new narrative threads are opened up by how it tracks various stats. And it certainly doesn't tell you anything about the world. At least, not on the surface.

You see, the brilliance of Echo Bazaar is that it tells you nothing. It treats you like a citizen of Fallen London and expects you to keep up. Stolen b

y bats? Literally? No. It couldn't be. Or could it? And what exactly do you mean by "delicious friend" and why do I imagine the eyes of the speaker looking sort of hungry?

I have been absolutely driven to play this game. I want to solve every little mystery. I take little cues from seeming insignificant details. What was just said about Mr Wines? And I wonder if that's related to the Fourth City in some way... And if that's the case, then the Starveling Cat must be...!

The restraint that the designers and writers showcase is exactly the thing that allows me to string together these mysteries and have fun. They know who the Masters are. They know where each of the Bazaar's former cities are. They knew that Hell is, in fact, connected to Fallen London far before I ever figured out that it wasn't just a metaphor.

There is, to me, something primordially attractive to this model of storytelling. As I think about it, this is the model most of my favorite properties have used.

As a child, I was obsessed with Zelda games. Like, seriously. I wrote fan fiction and everything. Back in the late 90s as Ocarina of Time was getting ready to come out, I remember Miyamoto (the series' creator) stating that it would be, chronologically, the first in the series.

"WHAT???" said little Kemp (and about half the game wo

rld with him). "They're not just a bunch of games with similar gameplay, titles, and themes? They have a metanarrative??" And so we went to work.

Analyzing each of the games, trying to figure out what the correct order was using evidence from inside the games themselves. When Miyamoto came back a year later and, in an interview, gave his "official timeline," most of the Zelda fansites I frequented had already disproved it months before. He was wrong about his own games! Is that even possible? Did it even matter? And why the heck did I care?

The genius in the Zelda games is in the story that isn't told. I was (and still am, honestly) attracted to the series precisely because there was all t

his depth to it that was unexplored. I could put the pieces together myself. And I did. A lot.

I read this article by Leigh Alexander a few days ago and she says it this way:

When games were more abstract-simple designs and massive worlds with yawning gaps in between each fragile plot point-they engaged us more, because they became worlds we could own. When all of the work of creation is done for us, when every element of lore is written in, when every object in the game world is explicable and available for interaction, there's nothing for our hearts and minds to do except ride along. And that's beautiful and well, but it's just not very engaging.

She goes on to say:

But if a game wants me to care-if it wants to grab my heart in its fist the way I used to feel-it needs to engage my imagination. Present the skeletal threads of a backstory without feeling the need to fill it all in, to connect all the dots for me; give me characters I'll only get to really know in my wildest dreams. Give me a world that's richly realized, but don't feel responsible for making it all interactive.

I have never been able to put the pieces together quite like that. Why is it that, despite my love for world-building and environmental storytelling, I've never been able to get into Fallout 3? Maybe because of these reasons. There's just too much detail. Too much to play with. Not enough just to accept.

It's like the difference between Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series. Tolkien wrote volumes of history and an entire language to support his world. Lewis just wrote what was and left it at that. And I've always been more attracted to Lew

is' world than Tolkien's...

When it really came home for me was how I connected it to my own creative process. Since I was small, I've been trying to build worlds. Back in high school, I worked on ideas that provoked me to make up languages, societies, religions, magic systems... Anything to help justify and give meaning and rules to a world - a place for real cha

racters to exist.

It's the exact same thing I used to do with Zelda. You see, in my head, there are these almost self-existent ideas. If you write or create anything, you know what I'm talking about. Half the time, my job is simply to find those and record them accurately. But the challenge and the fun comes from connecting those. From taking those points that feel like they've already been authored and figuring out how they go together.

On my wall right above me right now is a long string of post-it notes.

Each of those is a little story beat for a thing I've been working on for a long time. See the blank spots? That's the challenge. The actual notes are story nodes that, in my mind, are as true as the tsunami in Japan or the 2008 election. What I find joy in is completing the story. Finding or creating the ties. Explaining the characters' choices after the fact.

The question is... is that something that I should be doing for a career? I love constructing these elaborate worlds and mythologies and metanarratives. But, when it comes down to it, I just don't like those games that much. The games and stories that truly draw me in are the stories where those things just aren't explained. They're there, surely, but they are never explained clearly.

Any good fantasy/sci-fi property has a series bible - that document that spells out all the secrets and shows the creators how the characters are in their internal selves. But you know what? The audience never gets to see that. I can't think of a single world bible that has made it out into the public. And that's okay. It shows itself by natural character interactions and subtextual dialog.

But still. Who hires people just to flesh out backstory and build worlds? And does it matter that I probably won't like the games that I make nearly as much as the games like Zelda or Echo Bazaar? (You know, the ones that really engage my imagination...) Will I be okay making games that don't engage me as much just because the process of making them engages me? Or should I learn how better to craft the games that I enjoy the most?

I dunno. Things to think about.

Discovery.

I started writing this in my journal, but I thought "hey, why not share it?" So I am.

This weekend was Thanksgiving. On the drive to Ann Arbor, I pushed my mind to consider Dust to Dust, a story I've been working on for some time. I made discoveries.

There are many similarities between making stuff up for stories and discovering things. Both result in being able to push the story forward Both result in new characters, events, and locations. Both feel good to do for the writer.

But discovery is completely different. It truly feels like the idea exists somewhere out there, floating in space, and all I am doing is plumbing its depths, trying to find more of what exists.

The birth of a story I came to call Legion was like this. I was sitting in 11th grade Humanities class, bored out of my skull and writing, and all of a sudden, there's this guy named Travis. And he's in a battle. And he's sort of killed, but winds up in this glowy whiteness with a sword on a pedestal in the middle. He acknowledges the place and says, "I guess this is the Atrium."

I remember being confused. I, as the writer, had no idea what my character was talking about. I asked all my friends that day, in dumbfoundedness, "What's the Atrium? Why is it capitalized? Why is there a sword there?" None of them could answer me...

Every time I added to that story, it felt that way. I was merely an observer chronicling events that were - somehow - happening.

(Speaking of, did you ever have the idea that all imagined things actually do exist? That the imaginer merely has some kind of psychic tether to some alternate timeline/universe/plane? I did...)

But then I had to finish the story.

All of a sudden, all of these individual scenes had to be tied together. All of the strange dream sequences that involved a small theophany had to be put into the sense of the story. Enemies that were mere shadows needed motivation. And there had to be an ending.

I felt so uncomfortable forcing that story to a conclusion. It lacked all of the reality that the rest of it held in my mind. I tied scenes together that, intuitively, I knew did not belong together. I jumped to thematic conclusions that source material received with coldness.

Since turning that project in, I have not even looked at the final product. It felt dirty, polluted. Like I had sewn together a Frankenstein's monster. There was no way to pull out the good pieces from the bad without ruining them.

But this weekend was different. As I explored a character, I found myself exploring a place. And with that place came events. Backstory. Presuppositions that I knew were there all along were explained simply and elegantly. It was... amazing.

No.

Perhaps divine. It is easy to see why, for so long, the creative spark was regarded as some kind of god.

Perhaps these moments are gifts that God gives to us creatives. We spend so much mental energy trying to tell meaningful stories, but so often, we grasp at straws trying to make sense of a world whose purpose has been so veiled. But God, in his grace, awakens that intuitive grasp that we have of the hidden structures of reality and we truly discover something that has never existed.

Executive Series Luncheon.

I was asked to give a three minute speech at an event we have at Cornerstone called the Executive Series Luncheon. They invite a bunch of local business owners to CU to have lunch and hear another executive speak on some topic or another. This time, they wanted to hear a student's voice as well. They were pretty strict on the three minute thing, though, so I had to write it out. Here's what I wrote/spoke (Sorry the formatting is a little funny...):

It’s a privilege to be representing the students of Cornerstone University and welcome you to our campus. I was asked to share some thoughts, but I only have 3 minutes, so it’ll just have to be one: sort of an intersection between the tools Cornerstone has given me and what God has been working in me lately. I hope it will be encouraging to you.

To be honest, I feel slightly out of place here. I am not a business man, but a story teller. My hope is to one day become a writer for video games. Just this past week, I was in San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference. Over 17,000 members of the video game community gathered to sharpen each other and improve our industry.

One of the topics that comes up over and over again at these conferences is the question, “Can video games be art?” Often, this comes to a false dichotomy between designers – the people that make the systems – and writers.

Designers want a completely open space for players to explore. They take pride in giving players ultimate choice.

Writers want to craft a perfectly structured story for players to experience. They want every interaction, every choice to perfectly fall in line with their beautiful thematic argument.

You can imagine, then, that there is some conflict in this process.

As a hopeful writer, I have naturally fallen on the side of structure. I have often compared game design to being god – not in a sacrilegious way, of course. We create this world, populate it with characters, and design a perfect way for them to go through it (the story).

Designers, kind of like the serpent, want to give the players ultimate choice. To let the players do what they want.

Do what they want? You mean allow them to rebel against my beautifully sculpted creation and my design for what they should do?

Yes.

Sounds familiar, right? I viewed the task of the writer to be similar to the task of our God: to slowly and gently lead player from their meaningless, headstrong ways back into the story I had designed for them.

One of the writers at one of the sessions humbled me, though: It isn’t about me.

It isn’t about the designers. It isn’t about the animators or the writers or the programmers. It is about the player. Video games are about giving the player a great experience, not about the messages that a writer or a designer is trying to propagate.

When we have artistic disputes, the only question we should be asking is “Which choice would make a better player experience? Which choice would serve the player best?” It cannot be a matter of what I want or what is easiest for the programmers. Ego cannot factor into our design decisions at all. Only the other. Nothing but serving the player.

And isn’t this what Jesus asks of us? To love our neighbor as ourselves. To serve each other.

I was ashamed. I went to the gardens above the conference center and journaled for 15 minutes. How dare I, as a Christian, compare my role in the creative process to God! And here was this writer – who was not a Christian – reminding me that my job is to serve. Even at the expense of my agenda.

I think businesses that are a little less artistic in nature get service more than any artist ever will. No matter what your job is in the company, ultimately the company exists to serve someone. The ego of an artist – with our themes, characters, and messages – falls before the customer. “The customer is always right.”

As I continue to reshape my theology of writing, if you will, I wanted to encourage all of you to continue loving people more than your agenda. May you always remember that your jobs are not about the messages that you send or the profit you earn. Your job is to love and to serve. I pray that you continue to serve Jesus in every interaction with client and customer, that you would always think first of the other.

With that, join me in welcoming Mr. Bob Israels.

The Jetsons and Post-modernism.

My biggest concern about American life as we know it is not gay marriage, the economy, our dependence on foreign oil, or the apathy that has spread across our political institutions.

It's our imagination.

Look at the products our imagination has produced in the past 20 years, especially with regards to our future. There's Blade Runner, the father of modern cyberpunk (and hardly a happy look into what will be...), the Mad Max movies, Terminator, Children of Men, Babylon A.D... The list could go on.

What about our video games? Video games have thrived on sci-fi and fantasy tropes. Post-apocalypse is what we do. From Fallout to the Metal Gear Solid series, video games hardly have a positive vision of the future. It almost seems as though humanity knows and/or fears that we are nearing the end, that we're not going to make it without some serious cataclysm.

What happened to the Jetsons, cheesy as they were? Or Star Trek? These shows captured our imaginations and showed us that the future, despite what the present seemed to indicate, will be bright.

Which brings me to my fear: if we cannot even imagine a solution to the multitude of problems our generation faces, how will we overcome them? Without even an unrealistic solution, how can we begin to work towards anything?

In part, I think the problem lies with post-modernism. (No, I am not a post-modernism hater. Actually, I am sort of post-modern to post-modernity.) Post-modernism has (justifiably) rejected the hope that modernism had in the progress of man. But at what cost? When will we allow ourselves to have hope in anything again?

This thought has become somewhat of a conviction. I've mostly stopped working on one of my favorite story ideas because it is more post-apocalyptic than I'd like it to be. I believe it is the task of the storytellers and artists to craft a more positive vision of the future, giving us, if nothing else, the hope that we can go on.