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: 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.

Creation Year: March

I have not been terribly faithful about updating the blog this year so far.  However, my Creation Year experiment is, so far at least, a moderate success.  The next few posts will be exploring the projects and ideas that I've been trying to tackle in this process

March was (and always is) a horribly busy month.  Midterms are in full swing at work.  The Game Developer's Conference runs.  And, this year, I visited the University of California at Santa Cruz to follow up on my application to their MFA program.  Needless to say, not a lot of things were created.

However, my visit to the Digital Arts and New Media program at UCSC gave me something quite tangible to bring back home.  While I was there, I had the opportunity to sit in on their graduate student pod meetings.  These were bi-weekly meetings where small groups of graduate students (both PhD and MFA candidates) get together for challenge, inspiration, and accountability.  At the beginning of each meeting, each member spends no more than three minutes 1) explaining what they've accomplished since the last meeting, 2) what they plan to have accomplished by their next meeting, 3) what current obstacles their facing, and 4) any topics for discussion among the group.

I was enthralled.  The meeting I sat in on, we discussed topics as disparate as one of the students' potential job prospects post-graduation, procedurally generated facial animation and its effect on player interpretation of text, and the #1reasonwhy/#1reasontobe situation at GDC this year.  These students pushed each other on, gave each other ideas, and discussed fascinating topics within their specialties.  Very cool and very inspiring. 

So I wanted to do it here in Grand Rapids.  The last several weeks, two friends and I have been gathering for our own pod meetings.  It has been, at times, difficult to schedule with our busy lives, but it's been worth it.  Already, they've helped me (in motivation and brainstorming) in my new project for the summer and, I think it's been helpful for them, as well. 

So, though no concrete thing was developed in March, I consider pod meetings an important step in the ongoing development of Creation Year. 

Also, if you're local to Grand Rapids, MI and interested in games, story, interactivity, and media work (in general), and want to join, drop me a line @thekemp on Twitter.  Or something.

Creation Year.

Every New Year, friends and I gather at a local bar in Grand Rapids to talk about the year that was and the year that is to come.  It's become a powerful tradition in our lives, giving us an opportunity to reflect and vision cast as a community.  We each set a theme for the year, sometimes shared, sometimes not. 

2012 was the year of being invested.  Every decision I made about how to spend my time was all about that one theme.  Being invested.  Overall, I think it went well.

This year, I sat and thought quite a lot about the past few years.  Pretty much since graduating college, I've been planning on going to graduate school for games.  I've applied several times over the last couple of years to different schools around the country, but haven't made it in yet.  Currently, I have an active application at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  I don't feel especially great about my chances.

If I don't get in for fall 2013, then, clearly, the last couple years have not given me the experience I need to get in to grad school.  How, then, do I get that experience?

I present to you, Creation Year.  This year, my goal is to create something every month and present it for critique to those that know more than I do.  That way, I can both add to my portfolio and gain a better perspective for my abilities among my peers.  No more of this big fish in small pond business.

I spent January teaching MDA 480 - Video Games Theory and Criticism at Cornerstone.

February has given me this:



This is my first experiment with Source Filmmaker, Valve's cinematic creation toolset.  More thoughts to come on that business.

Feedback is welcome.  More Creation Year products to be displayed here.

Creativity.

Another short post today, since I've spent most of the day in a hospital hanging out with my sister (who is doing well, by the way). 

While she distracted or unconscious or something, I pulled out a book I haven't picked up in a while. 

Image shamelessly stolen from Amazon.  Clearly.

Yes.  That's right.  Orbiting the Giant Hairball.  Great title.  Its subtitle, "A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace," really does describe a large part of the content of the book.  It's about how to be creative in an environment that isn't always creative.  It's about not releasing yourself in wild abandon to pursue creative things outside of any system, but using the good things of those systems while transcending them.  It's a really good book.

After reading just the first two chapters, I may have to add another point to my list of ways I'm creative.  Read at least two books about creativity a year.  Maybe more.  I dunno.  We can play with the number later.

The moral of the story is that I need to be inspired.  I need to be reminded that I am, in fact, a creative person.  I need to be challenged in a more broad sense. 

Sometimes, when I get into the mundanity of creative output, I forget about the creative part.  When I write, I think about my story structure analysis.  I think about my characters and their goals.  I think about the point of the whole story and why I'm writing it in the first place.  I start relying (rightfully so) on systems and rules that have helped me make a better product in the past. 

But in all of those details, I forget what it is I'm doing.  I am creating something (hopefully) fresh and new and interesting and unlike anything the world has seen before.  I am using my brain and imagination to echo the creative God who gave me both.  It's a huge privilege and tremendously fun while carrying a gravitas that I almost never realize.

The creative act is, I think, a bigger deal than we typically make it out to be.  It is books like Orbiting the Giant Hairball that help me remember that. 


I leave you with chapter 19 of Orbiting the Giant Hairball, in its entirety: "Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license."  Go ponder that for a while.

Blogging challenge.

I've been thinking some recently.  About lots of things.  About imagination and drive.  About dreams and will.  About discipline, passion, and skills.  And writing.  I've been thinking about writing a good amount. 

This quote from Ira Glass went the rounds on Facebook recently: 

Like so many things on the internet, I've seen it before, but I'm at a place in my life where I needed to be reminded that I am, in fact, a creative.

Unfortunately, like many creatives, I am also a perfectionist.  I rarely start something unless I know it'll be just right.  I have probably three or four drafts in my Blogger queue right now that seemed like such good ideas at the time, but weren't right yet.  Who knows how many more ideas I've had but have let slip away because they weren't quite good enough.

Daggum it, though, Ira's right.  I need to do a lot of work.  If I even dream of being a new media academic someday, I need to write.  If I want to design interactive narratives, I need to write.  If I want to respect myself in a few years, I need to write. 

So starting tomorrow, I issue myself a blogging challenge.  I will write something on this blog every day for a month.  The topics may be as diverse as narrative theory, game design, theology, community, television, relationships, music, or finances.  But something will go up here every day until November 26. 

Good luck to us both.

Ways to be creative.

Like many of you, I spend a good chunk of my week on the internet. Sometime this last week, I saw this:

I thought it was rather inspiring, so I started making my own list:

It's a bit of a small picture, but that's it so far. Here it is, if you can't read it:

1. Read. (If I'm not reading, I start losing influences and new ideas.)
2. Cultivate and pay attention to passion and fun. (I'm actually sort of bad at this.)
3. Listen to music intentionally. (I get story ideas from music. I'm weird.)
4. Write 250 words a day. Anywhere. (Journal/blog/script/concept/D&D planning)
5. Be impulsive. (I tend to have a better attitude when I let myself be impulsive.)
6. Be bored. (If I keep my brain occupied, I don't entertain myself with coming up with stuff.)
7. (I plan to add more to the list.)

What's your list?

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.

Verbs.

Sometimes, I like coming up with new ways of coming up with ideas. Check it out:

Games are ultimately built on verbs, right? In shooters, you shoot. In platformers, you jump. In Braid, you turn back time. I think interesting games often have interesting verbs.

So... maybe to come up with ideas, all you need to do is combine unlikely verbs. Next time you need a game idea, come up with 50 different verbs, then start mixing and matching and see what comes out.

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.

New disciplines.

As is my custom for school breaks, I have made a small list of things I want to accomplish with my break. There are books I want to read, relationships I want to cultivate, games I want to play, etc...

This break, I have decided to write 500 words a day, 6 days a week. It can be anything: a blog post (heh heh...), a journal entry, a screenplay, a radio drama, a poem (I count poems as the full 500, though. They're hard.), etc... The point is to make a habit out of writing.

It has been about as hard as I expected. Naturally, I have only written maybe 1000 words so far. The other night, I actually let myself get by with the excuse that I didn't have anything to write, that I was dry.

That's sort of the point of a discipline, isn't it? That you do it even when you don't want to or feel like you can't?

I hope it doesn't degrade to me updating this blog over and over again in a desperate attempt to boost my word count.

Something found.

I found this in an old file on my hard drive. I wrote it July 2007 while I was sitting in my backyard bored. To contextualize it a little more, there were many strange noises coming from just on the other side of the woods in my backyard. Anyway, here it is:

Sometimes I think there’s a war going on in my backyard, just beyond the woods. I hear the rat-a-tat-tat of sub machine guns, a helicopter making a pass, and the occasional shout of orders. The thought of an insurrection war briefly passes through my mind, where thousands of normal citizens suddenly begin trying to take over places of power or just killing random citizens – kinda like Red Dawn, but from the inside.

It scares me. I consider running inside and locking myself and my sister in our basement. I want to call my parents and my other sister to make sure that they know to stay somewhere safe rather than come home to a war zone. I just about grab the remote to see if the media is on to this start up war on our home soil but another scary thought grabs me.

What if the media are in on it? What if the battles escape the news’ attention? No one would know that there are dead bodies piling up across the woods as a father desperately tries to defend his home and family from soldiers that would have them dead.

What if the cavalry didn’t know to come in? What if there was no cavalry? What if we were left to be citizen-soldiers? Could I do it? Could you?

I wonder if this is what the citizens of Iraq feel like every day. They don’t know if the rat-a-tat-tat is some kind of construction equipment or a machine gun. That big boom could be a demolition of an old house or a suicide bomber in the middle of the market. They don’t know until they run toward the sound, fearing the worst.

I stay in my backyard recliner. The noises keep going, but I don’t investigate. I don’t get up to turn on the TV, I don’t check online. I sit here, wondering if war is going on just beyond my woods and do nothing. I tell myself that it’s just an overactive imagination. Earlier, I saw a plane come out of nowhere accompanied by a strange sound and immediately thought that it must have been displaced here from the Bermuda Triangle in the 60s. Those sounds you hear are just construction. Real guns would be louder. A real battle wouldn’t take this long. If something really bad was happening, somehow, you would find out.

But the noises keep going. And I can’t think of any construction equipment that sounds like that. In the end, I’m not sure what keeps me to this chair – the tea, the laptop, the fear that my overactive imagination is right, or the fear that my overactive imagination is wrong?

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.