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Late last year, while having a very normal time in my post-viral fatigued brain, I felt the very normal urge to drop absolutely everything and make some interactive fiction about anarchist raccoons. Raccoon vs. Wetherspoons elaborated on an analogy that I’d made in my post on this blog, Why Aren’t Leftist Video Essayists on Peertube? - at some point, your use of corporate (digital) spaces means actively choosing not to support community-owned alternatives. -
Game Changers announcement
I've had the absolute pleasure of doing some research work to support Megaverse's Game Changers, a UKRI-funded two-part live-action narrative game about responding to climate catastrophe. Part one will air next week, and it's free to join. [vimeo.com/844841246...](https://vimeo.com/844841246/7a2e2bd1db) Are you ready to join the climate action collective? This August, GAME CHANGERS is giving audiences the chance to take part in a real live-action game through their screens. Through collective decision-making, you can shape the game’s outcome and help the GreenView Rising team to make history. -
Test performance of new interactive play
I'm currently working on a new piece of interactive theatre that uses the tool that Squinky built in our collaboration together a couple of years ago. There will be a test performance on 23rd March at Barnsley Civic theatre, alongside other live works covering themes such as chronic illness and dystopian science fiction - the event is going to be hybrid online and in-person, and tickets are currently available for in-person attendees. -
Pride, queer haunting, and Geralt of Rivia's itchy doublet
I've realised recently that a surprisingly large number of things are both gay and homophobic at the same time. There are things that only make sense to me in the context of queer life, but that are also compelled to disavow their participation in queerness. The result is that they feel haunted by the lives that they refuse to animate. A lot of these uncomfortable politics can be encapsulated by an item of clothing worn by Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, usually at the behest of one of his girlfriends. -
PISSF****T: about a jacket in Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium’s Harry DuBois does not know who he is. I assumed at first that his amnesia was a simple narrative conceit by developers ZA/UM, a way of making him a blank slate for the player to turn into whoever they would like to roleplay. This isn’t quite true: the protagonist is far from silent, and although the player shapes him to a significant extent, we also, through the ways we learn about his past and through the ensemble cast of voices in his head that speak on behalf of his various skills, get to know a man who has already been shaped by his circumstances, and yet has lost himself to them. -
Cis Penance first preview
I’ve put out the first little bit of work on Cis Penance, which will eventually be a massive collection of interactive portraits of trans people in the UK. I' aim to release new portraits on a regular basis for a while until the full thing is complete. The first portrait I’m sharing is of Rainbow, a non-binary person in Northern Ireland who talks about living a non-normative life with joy, creativity, and self-expression after experiencing homelessness, human trafficking, and systemic racism. -
Cis Penance work-in-progress update
A quick update on Cis Penance, my project that involves interviewing lots of trans people in the UK about our experiences of waiting… Things are coming along really nicely. Here’s a video of the work-in-progress: vimeo.com/434171489… There is also an itch.io page for it! I haven’t published anything playable on there yet, but small demos of specific conversations are coming soon. It’ll be playable in-browser for free, but if you like, you can use the “pre-order” button to donate to the project. -
Indie Games Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan is in itch.io’s Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. This is a remarkable initiative involving over 740 projects. Over $3,400 of paid works are available Pay-what-you-want with a minimum donation amount of $5. All proceeds will donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund split 50/50. They’ve already raised $380,000 at the time that I’m writing this, and the bundle includes some games that have been really important to me, such as Oxenfree, Night in the Woods, and Strawberry Cubes. -
Neo cab and the materiality of emotion
Spoilers for the ending of Neo cab start immediately! Early on in Neo Cab, the protagonist Lina is given a “Feelgrid”, a wearable device that changes colour based on her mood, as a gift from her new roommate and childhood best friend Savy. This speculative technology seems simple at first, but the more closely I looked at how emotion is represented and simulated in Neo Cab, the more deliciously ambiguous it appeared. -
Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan, release for International Transgender Day of Visibility
vimeo.com/401492347 It’s International Transgender Day of Visibility, and you’re socially isolated. I just published a game that allows you to have interactive dialogues with 12 characters, based on real interviews with transgender people in Japan. Hang out, explore, get to know some folks! Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan by Zoyander Street -
International Transgender Day of Visibility March 31st launch of Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan
(Update: launched! Check it out at zoy.itch.io/iportrait…) This Tuesday March 31st will be International Transgender Day of Visibility. I’ve been planning to launch a downloadable version of the Interactive Portraits from Japan for this year’s IDOV, and though it feels a little out of step with what’s on everybody’s minds right now, I’m still going ahead with it. vimeo.com/401492347 If you’ve played this before, either at an event or because you got access to the link where the works in progress were available to try out, then you know there’s a lot of wisdom shared by the trans people I interviewed - thoughts about how to build resilience, how to take care of your community, and how to deal with the massive scale of human suffering. -
Arts Council Project Grant for "Empty Carriage: An Interactive Self-Portrait"
[caption id=“attachment_3351” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”]Coach-built pram in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)[/caption] I’ve been awarded an Arts Council Project Grant to turn a vintage coach-built pram into a games console. I’m making a game for it that uses my interactive portraits approach to portray myself. Whereas my other interactive portraits are based on interviews, this one is based instead on a guided inquiry to see through the illusion of self. Using multiple-choice dialogue options, players will ask the mini-me a series of questions that prompt an examination of every aspect of consciousness, turning over every phenomenological stone to try and find any sign that there is really a “me”. -
Video: Curating artist-made games at SF MoMA
[vimeo 332515057] This is a short documentary that I made a while ago but never published, about a pop-up exhibition of games that showed at SF MoMA back in 2017 at the same time as GDC. Giving this video a quick editing pass today before uploading it, I was struck by how much of an impact this interview must have had on me. Two years later, I’m still chewing on the ideas brought up here. -
Video: Collecting games at UC Irvine
vimeo.com/331049055 This is a short documentary that I made a while ago but never published, about a collection of videogames that has come to be used to teach students at UC Irvine. Back in 2017, I recorded a load of footage for a series of short documentaries about people who curate and archive games. I have a page for the whole series here. Some stuff got published on sites that briefly had a budget for freelance video, but there were multiple issues that led to the series never finishing. -
What kind of a world will videogames rebuild?
Business Insider has an eye-catching take on the fire of Notre-Dame: “rebuild effort could get help from an unlikely source: a videogame” - basically, they recreated it so accurately in Assassin’s Creed that the research that went into the game could now be used in restoration efforts. So far so postmodern - simulations are informing the construction of reality, heritage is a simulacrum, history is over. The notion that the Notre-Dame spire could be rebuilt based on a level designer’s work “to make sure that each brick was as it should be” is impressive, and it’s a bit of a testament to the value of artists' painstaking attempts to document the world. -
AMAZE Berlin events, including talk with Squinky!
I’ll be in Berlin next week for some cool events connected to the Rainbow Arcade exhibition at the Schwules Museum, as part of AMAZE festival. Come along and/or let me know if you want to hang out! Rainbow Arcade meetup Monday, April 8 • 14:00 - 18:00 Not sure I can get to this with my flight, but thought I would list it here anyway as it looks nice - details are on the Games Week Berlin website. -
Hampering the search for real criticism: Personality-based content marketing
This is the fifth post in a series about why critical writing about games is hard to find - see part one here. It was inspired by an article by games producer Jessica Price, which seems on the surface to focus on a flimsy claim that there isn’t enough “real” critical writing being done - but which I think, given a more engaged editorial approach, had the potential to say something much more interesting. -
Hampering the search for real criticism: the algoritualism of Youtube culture
This is the fourth post in a series about problems facing games criticism - see part one here. It was inspired by an article by games producer Jessica Price, which appears to misguidedly imply that there is no in-depth games criticism being done. While I know for certain that a great deal of quality games criticism is being made every week - it was my job at Critical Distance to curate it for almost three years - I also think that this work is becoming harder and harder to find, unless you happen to know where to look. -
Hampering the search for real criticism: Two platform deaths
See part one of this series This is the third part in a series of articles about barriers to critical writing on games. It is partly in response to anarticle written by games producer Jessica Price. There is, I think, a historical reason why we’re still seeing articles like Price’s on a regular basis that ask “where is all the good writing on games?” Not only is critical writing hard to access, but platform changes happen so quickly that it’s hard to even keep up with the most relevant methods of finding things. -
Hampering the search for real criticism: Mainstream vs. fringe
See part one of this series This is the second part in a series of articles about why we keep getting articles asking “why is there no real critical writing on games?” - despite there being a large quantity of good critical writing produced every week, and a project dedicated to making sure it doesn’t get lost. This series is partly in response to the most recent such article, written by games producer Jessica Price - but rather than criticising the article, which is relatively insightful, my goal here is to explore the reasons why articles like this continue to be written. -
Hampering the search for real criticism: Discourse Empress of the World
Discourse Empress of the World Adapted from Carl Orff's translation of the Carmina Burana 1. Oh Discourse Oh discourse Like the moon You are changeable, ever waxing, and waning. Hateful career, first oppresses, and then soothes as fancy takes it; obscurity, and renown it melts them like ice. Blogosphere - monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, you are malevolent, well-being is in vain and always fades to nothing, shadowed and veiled you plague me too; now through the game I bring my bare back To your villainy. -
Mozilla Festival
My work is being displayed at Mozilla festival, for the Art + Data exhibition. The Art+Data experience — part of the Mozilla Artists Open Web project — engages artists, designers, technologists, and researchers in an artistic exploration of a healthy web. With an online gallery (https://foundation.mozilla.org/opportunity/artists-open-web) and an exhibition during MozFest, Art+Data will also feature artists in residencies (on site and online) and creative, interactive sessions. Thirty-six art projects will be showcased, and all (including digital and analogue processes) will focus on data knowledge and usage. -
Icon Magazine article on Videogames architecture
I wrote the cover article for this month’s issue of Icon magazine! Huge thanks to Priya Kanchandani for reaching out with this opportunity. The article is an overview of spatial narrative, with a particular focus on titles that have been included in the V&A’s big videogames exhibition, such as Journey, Kentucky Route Zero, and The Last of Us. It’s a good time for “games as architecture” readings, with Heterotopias zine having provided an attractive home for architecturally-inclined games criticism, and architects such as my friend Claris Cyarron doing good work in the field. -
Festival of the Mind
[gallery ids=“3178,3177,3176,3175,3180,3197,3198,3199,3200,3201,3202,3203” type=“rectangular” link=“file”] Last month, the first five of my interactive portraits were included in Futurecade in the Sheffield Millennium Gallery, as part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind. These are kind of like a cross between Tamagotchi and an RPG dialogue system, and they present dialogue taken verbatim from interviews I carried out with transgender people in Japan as part of the Creator Ikusei residency. I’m going to make 13 in total, six of which are supported by Arts Council funding via the Making Ways project. -
Interactive Portraits updates from February-May
www.instagram.com/p/BfXicvX… www.instagram.com/p/BfaxCSJ… www.instagram.com/p/Bg6wCw4… www.instagram.com/p/BiezI0Y… www.instagram.com/p/BikfqWj… www.instagram.com/p/BimriEf… -
Interactive Museum of Gaming and Puzzlery minidoc
www.youtube.com/watch ZAM has published the second of a series of five short documentaries I’ve been making about people who collect and curate games. This one was a joy to make, and Carol had so many fascinating things to share. Imogap has now moved to a new location, where they are continuing their work sharing the learning and bonding power of games with people who need it most. See post on ZAM. -
Skeleton in a Beret is now online!
The short documentary I wrote and presented last year is now online, after a year of screenings at various festivals! I cannot thank Eden Film Productions enough for all of their hard work on this. Making this little film with them meant a lot to me, and it’s had a huge impact on how I think about my work as a critic, journalist, and researcher. vimeo.com/190267488 Learn more about the project here. -
Sensible Object information for parents on videogames
I’ve been doing some work for Sensible Object, conducting interviews and writing up articles on gaming for kids - from design principles to parenting practices. beastsofbalance.com/seven-way… beastsofbalance.com/freeing-c… -
Dublin Fringe Queer Oasis
This week I’m presenting work at the Dublin Fringe festival as part of the Fully Automated Luxury Gender Oasis by Trans Live Art Salon. I’m giving a reading of my chapter from the Queer Game Studies book on Friday, and I’m also exhibiting my interactive fiction piece “Elixir”. I’m super excited to be involved in a project that explicitly calls for utopian queer marxist world building! Here’s a piece in the Dublin Inquirer where they talk about it -
Dublin Fringe Queer Oasis
This week I’m presenting work at the Dublin Fringe festival as part of the Fully Automated Luxury Gender Oasis by Trans Live Art Salon. I’m giving a reading of my chapter from the Queer Game Studies book on Friday, and I’m also exhibiting my interactive fiction piece “Elixir”. I’m super excited to be involved in a project that explicitly calls for utopian queer marxist world building! Here’s a piece in the Dublin Inquirer where they talk about it -
Queer Game Studies is out now!
I have a chapter on community histories in this book edited by the excellent Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw. I’m very excited to get my copies through, there are some really amazing contributors featured in the volume including Jack Halberstam, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Katherine Cross, and Robert Yang. The book mainly came out of the early Queerness and Games Conferences, which had a profound impact on the work I’m now doing in my PhD. -
Abstract Games with Raph Koster
Here’s a documentary short I made during my trip down the West Coast of North America in January-February 2017. First Person Scholar very kindly commissioned the video, in which game designer Raph Koster talks to me about the expressive qualities of abstract game systems, and why he collects old folk games. Check out the full post for more detail on Koster’s work. www.youtube.com/watch www.firstpersonscholar.com/abstract-… -
Games to actively help trans people during trans awareness week, from the Action for Trans Health Bundle
It’s trans awareness week, a time of year when trans people work extra hard for visibility, civil rights, and access to necessary medical care. Media coverage during this week risks recapitulating the same tired old stories about famous trans people, without necessarily increasing awareness of the challenges that trans people face, and without doing much to elevate the voices of trans people with intersecting oppressions. The Action for Trans Health bundle is an example of trans people and allies getting together to create art work that expresses a part of the trans experience. -
Games to help you get through all this awful shit, from the Action for Trans Health Bundle
Many people are having trouble getting to sleep at the moment, and no wonder: the world looks like a dark place right now and anxiety is understandable. There are problems in the world that self-care simply cannot even put a dent into, but in order to fight those problems we do need to find ways to heal. This feels like a strange time to promote a charity art project, but I don’t want to hold back for too long from getting the word out about the Action for Trans Health bundle. -
Now live: Action for Trans Health games bundle
The Action for Trans Health games bundle is now live, right in time for the weekend! Pay what you want for 17 items, including games from the One Day Jam and materials on activism and the NHS. Some of my favourite games from this bundle include a foreboding space where a massive countdown timer hangs in the sky, a Twine about a trans teen having his period at school, and a patience-building Pico-8 game that forces you to wait for the exact right moment to act. -
Digital Bodies: essays on materials and craft 2012-2014
I’m launching a new book today! In the essays brought together here I unpick some of the ways that materiality, skill and identity shape the labour and leisure of games. I’ve started an itch.io site to sell this and my other two books: everything is on sale for a limited time, and you can even buy all three as a discount bundle. This book is a collection of things I’ve written for various outlets over the past few years that I am very proud of, and that I think benefit from all being in one place so that they can be read side by side. -
Funded, bundled, and Silverstrung
Lots of things to announce happened in the past 24 hours. A history of mobile games is funded! A history of mobile games has hit its funding goal with time to spare! I'm absolutely over the moon. Everybody has been so generous, not just with their contributions but with their vocal support for my work. Writing about mobile games before their heyday is a strange idea -- people always want to hear about golden ages and great successes, and this certainly runs counter to that. -
A history of mobile games, 1998-2008
I’m crowdfunding a book Goal: £3,400 Can you help? Contribute now Personal devices before the app store: a decade of tiny games that followed us everywhere. What do you think of when you remember your first mobile phone? Mine was a Nokia 5110, and my most vivid memories of using it have nothing to do with making phone calls. I spent far more time playing Snake. For much of my teen life, my mind was in two places at once: part of me was stood in the rain waiting for a bus home from school, and part of me was in a confined space with a restless serpent. -
Mini-book about energy mechanics
Since late November of last year I’ve been on-and-off working on a mini book project. Yesterday I finally got it past the finish line! You can get it from rupazero.com.
Delay is about energy mechanics, a recent design conceit popular in casual and mobile games, whereby playing drains a resource that can only be refilled by not playing it for a while. I argue that they’re about impulse control, our own fear and shame when it comes to over-indulgence, and ideas about what it means to be a grown-up.
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You were made for loneliness
I made part of a game that came out this week. It's an interactive fiction piece in which you are a robot sold into domestic service. You are silenced and treated as an object, but your consciousness is alive. As you work for your mistress, you can awaken memories that complete a picture of who you are and how you relate to others. My bit is the interlude of translated Japanese poetry linked together by symbols. The text below is directly copied from the official launch announcement.
It’s the future. The remnants of humanity, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event known only as The Fall, have fled a dying homeworld to seek refuge among the colonies of the solar system.
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Projection
I made another game this week! Click here to play it. Even though the graphics are a rough and the audio is awful and the controls are annoying, I’m still really pleased with what I was able to achieve here. I like the idea of games like Ganbare Gorby where the main character ability is to bark incoherently at people, and for a long time I’ve been wanting to make games with social gaze, where you are unable to do anything beyond what the people around you expect you to be doing. I’d really like to work on this some more one day.
Unnecessary and somewhat self-involved exposition below…
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Transworld I Spy
I made a game today! Play it Read about it -
Raph Koster seems to be achieving the impossible
These are some over-excited thoughts that I’ve written on an empty stomach with very little revision or proof-reading. I’m sure I’m wrong about a lot of things, but I just wanted to put this out because OMG FEELINGS
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Call for Submissions: Asian Histories in Games
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Memory Insufficient: Women in Games History
Last month I asked for submissions for a collection of essays on women’s history in games. That collection is now ready! Check it out. I plan to make this a regular thing, at least for a little while. So to that end, do check out the call for submissions at the end of this latest issue. The next issue will be about Asian Histories in Games, and my goal is to get at least seven essays by May 15th. -
I made a post-dating sim card game!
This weekend there were two game jams running at the same time: one was a challenge to make dating sims (mostly with Twine) and one was a QUILTBAG-themed jam which I think was proposed by the MIT game lab.
I kind of had separate ideas for each theme at first, then I realised I really ought to just make one idea work for both jams. So I was going to make a twine game about fruitlessly trying to find love in a bad relationship, but then I decided I didn’t have the emotional energy to put myself through that this week.
So instead, I made a card game about couples trying to plan their futures together. I wanted to make a dating sim that wasn’t about courtship, but about what happens after you end up in a long-term relationship with someone. I’m really interested in the difficult strategy at work in negotiating your life path when it’s become clear that you are going to share that life with another person with their own goals. I got my partner to help me test the game and design cards.
It still needs iteration for balance and extra chaos, but here’s the basic structure of the game I made yesterday:
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Call for submissions on women's history in games
This year’s Women’s History Month theme is “Women inspiring innovation through imagination.” It aims to shed light on women’s contributions to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Women have often been shut out of histories of science and technology, and this carries through into the way that histories of video games are told. I’m hoping to put together a nice pdf collection of articles at the end of the month that celebrate the history of women as innovators in the video games industry. -
Shenmue: Historical accuracy as nostalgic fantasy
Featured in February’s Critical Distance Blogs of the Round Table.
This is a work-in-progress extract from my crowd-funded book Dreamcast Worlds. I’ve selected a section that explores photorealism, deliberately moving away from technologically determinist arguments about how better console technology “allows” games to become “more expressive” (yes Sony I’m glaring daggers at you after that pseudo-history you just had to shoehorn into the PS4 presentation) and instead looking at accuracy as a design question: what does it mean for a game to be like a photograph?
Accuracy
The high level of historical details in Shenmue’s recreation of 1986 Yokosuka is as much about setting an emotional tone as is it about establishing accuracy. For one thing, they are not consistently accurate. The Sega Saturn in Ryo’s home is anachronistic - set in 1986, but Saturn released in 1990s. Nevertheless, a slavish devotion to accuracy informed work on all areas of the game, possibly in spite of calls for restraint from higher-ups at Sega.
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Voting in the GDC choice awards
Last week I was absolutely over the moon to be invited to vote for the winners of the GDC choice awards. While making my votes in the different categories, I realised that a lot of the thoughts I have about games that influenced by decisions had never really been written down anywhere.
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What is a game? It depends who's playing
After observing an argument on Twitter about Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia, I wanted to put some ideas down. Some game critics and theorists, most famously Raph Koster, find that Dys4ia does not offer what they expect from a game. Their response to this is to say that it, or parts of it, are not a game.
I like Anna Anthropy's work, but I also try to be clear-eyed about the fact that a lot of Dys4ia could be built in PowerPoint and isn't a game. That's not a value judgement. My value judgement of the piece as a work of expressive art is pretty high.
Like Raph, I also really value and respect Dys4ia. I value it for the conversations it provokes, and for its landmark place in the landscape of trans-themed game development. -
Boyfriend maker, Google, and the hilarity valley of computer learning
We’re spending much more of our time living with faulty semantic feedback from digital systems. Boyfriend maker (pictured above) is lighting up my twitter feed at the moment, but the same humorous faults come up in machine translations, machine transcriptions, spam bots and creatively intentioned twitter bots. There is an entirely new kind of procedurally-generated humour, intentional or unintentional, coming out of computer systems as we spend time awkwardly fudging our way towards the far-flung dream of universal translators and artificial personalities.There’s a particular humour that comes from being so close to the future but not quite there. Everything is still wonky and not quite right.
I’m conducting interviews through Google-enabled telepresence, on the topic of one of people’s early forays into gaming telepresence, and those interviews are being recorded automatically by the very server that mediates the communication in the first place. It’s as though you met someone for coffee to interview them, and the coffee itself recorded the information you needed. Like reading tea leaves. That’s magical. But then there’s lag and watching the playback, it’s hard to figure out if I’m arrogantly talking over someone or if I’m just unaware that they are speaking because of a technical fault.
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Console wars rock paper scissors
Today’s Gamesbrief post about Nintendo reminded me of the history of the Rock-paper-scissors game mechanic in Japan.
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Why Lim is an incredible accomplishment
I played Merritt Kopas’s Lim a couple of weeks ago. I was very impressed, but thought it was too obviously brilliant to be worth writing about. But now it’s been featured on Rock, Paper Shotgun and commenters are calling it ‘pretentious’, and saying it’s a bad game, and nothing more than an art exercise, and feels like a drawn-out level of Dys4ia, so I feel I have to write something. Spoilers follow.
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How to make Monopoly not suck: stage a revolution
The next time anyone makes me play Monopoly, I'm going to make it interesting.
I hate Monopoly. I've always hated Monopoly. It takes 3-4 hours to finish a game, and the last 1-2 are simply a slow decline as the clear winner drains all the last pennies from the losing players. Yes, it was originally intended as a parody of capitalism. No, it's not real money so I shouldn't really care that I'm losing everything to some lucky git who rolled a six at the beginning and bought all the best property. That's no excuse for making me sit there slowly dying for two hours when it's 11pm and I just want to go home. It's not fun. -
Phantasy Star Online 2: a glimpse of the future through the prism of the past
[caption id=“attachment_788” align=“alignleft” width=“156”]
All I want is to change those wedge heels for some flatformers, and PSO2 gives me no opportunity to pay to do this.[/caption]Phantasy Star Online 2 is set to become the game I love to criticise. Before I launch into a tirade, I should quickly note that I actually really enjoy this game; it’s campy, it’s saccharine, it’s one of those perfect shoot-spiders-feel-awesome games and it has pretty accurately rebooted the original game with up-to-date graphical splendour.
That’s not the only thing Sega had in mind, though. PSO2 is supposed to be a heroic step towards the future of free-to-play games; artful, unobtrusive and enjoyable for all, it is a virtual world with incentivised commerce, supposedly a paragon of F2P game design that the world simply might not yet be ready for.
At the same time, Sega has announced that from now on it will focus on its four key ip, finding it not lucrative to develop new ip in the foreseeable future. Their job will be to recycle the past.
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GDC poster presentation
Some people have been asking me to upload my GDC poster for months. Sorry for the delay. Here it is! [googleapps domain=“docs” dir=“viewer” query=“url=http%3A%2F%2Fzoyastreet.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F06%2Fposter-sunday-4.pdf&embedded=true” width=“600” height=“400” /] The astounding graphic design is the hard work of my friend Laura Moat. -
Players gonna play, consumers gonna consume
In a brilliant post on developers' perceptions of free-to-play, Jesper Juul linked to a study on players' perceptions of gaming and game ownership within free-to-play games. The concluding paragraph to this paper states that:
Compared to pay-per-play session users, renters have a stronger sense of game and game community ownership, with all game aspects viewed as objects to be experienced and enjoyed. In contrast, the sense of community among free game players is weaker, since their participation is closer to that of consumers. This explains why they generally ignore complaints about game legitimacy and fairness... The idea of “take it or leave it” is gaining strength under the influences of free market logic or player-toconsumer identity transfer.
Free players are less likely to complain, and more likely to move on to some other game instead. I think that this has startling implications, and not for the reason that immediately comes to mind. -
Gaming creeps up on you
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“200”]
Hard to believe now, but during the LonelyGirl15 ARG, these eyes used to haunt me every night[/caption]Where would the games industry be today without non-gamers? Were it not for people like my Mum and my sister, who don’t consider themselves to be gamers and yet visit some mobile or online game every single day, the industry would be without an area of huge growth.
It’s easy to comment 0n the gamers who declare that they don’t play video games as this supposedly new demographic of women and the over-35s - although my Mum was playing fantasy football years and years ago, before Silicon Valley got all hot under the collar about casual gamers and online social platforms, making her unwittingly the archetypical hipster of gaming trends. But in fact, I think that unacknowledged gaming is more widespread than this much-hyped demographic. It’s not the strength of the demographic that causes tacit gaming, it’s the strength of gaming itself.
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Free-to-play games and talking backwards in French
Yesterday I kind of hyperbolically said that Jetpack Joyride was seductive, and I scolded game designers for too often failing to create free-to-play games that charm you into buying items, rather than nagging you about it.
I haven’t said much about how I think that seduction ought to happen, although I did point out that, like the history of the Indus Valley civilisation, the organisation of items sold in game should reflect the organisation of our whole collective existence - you have to offer something of value to the world before getting anything back. But that doesn’t tell us much about seduction.
Ze Frank’s recent video unwittingly taught me a lot about how this seduction can work, although the intended meaning of the video was about being less anxious.
[youtube www.youtube.com/watch
What does this video show us about how to sell items to engaged players?
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Free-to-Play games and the Epic Bath of Mohenjo Daro
I’ve had enough Twitter debates with disgruntled game designers to know that even if free-to-play is now accepted as a lucrative business model, it’s still considered to be the handmaiden of bad game design. Too many free-to-play games are about hiding content behind paywalls or nagging players for money, without offering a particularly valuable experience to players.
Does this mean that a good quality game necessarily has to charge up-front? Absolutely not.
There may be an ocean of appalling free-to-play games out there, but there are enough excellent examples to show that the business model doesn’t necessarily poison the game design.
I’ve just finished getting everything I can out of Jetpack Joyride, a game that I relished spending money on, but that my sister has never paid a penny for and she enjoyed it even more than I did. In fact, she has started playing it again, not because they developed new content or levels - considered by so many game designers to be the bread and butter of their craft - but because they added more in-game items. Even though it’s all about the stash, there is no paywall with Jetpack Joyride - you either play it for hours upon hours to get the items you want, or you buy them.
It’s really hard to make a game that good. It’s a skill I hope to learn, and personally I think the question of good f2p game design comes down to one question: why am I alive? Or at least, it comes down to John Green’s answer on why we’re alive, and how to be a good boyfriend. This video is ten minutes long, but like the rest of the Crash Course series, well worth getting a cup of tea and watching in full.
[youtube www.youtube.com/watch
Why is the Indus Valley civilisation relevant to game design?
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Mechanic and narrative
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Dealing with fuzzy concepts - CC image by Daniela Vladimirova[/caption]I’ve been provoked into further theorising. Sean Kelly gave a very thorough response in the comments to my last games and narrative post, and I want to follow up. He brought up a lot of technical challenges to a ‘clear delineation between mechanic and narrative’, proposing that there are narratives that can be expressed in some form other than the rule set, and rule sets that can be re-interpreted with different narrative effects. If I interpreted his questions correctly, at root is this problem: if mechanic is not sufficient for narrative, why should it matter? And if it is sufficient, isn’t the term ‘narrative’ being applied too broadly?
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Games, stories and narrative
Judging from Nicholas Lovell’s recent Twitter conversation about stories in games, many developers are split on whether or not games should focus on storytelling.My own feeling on this matter is that games are not always about stories, but they do all have narratives, as do all other systems and designed objects.
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Winter is coming: the dire landscape of 2011-2012
Game of Thrones is back in the US, and snow is forecast for next week in the UK, leaving a large chunk of the English speaking world immersed in a mythic, winter landscape once again.
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Console generations: it's propaganda
Any book on video games needs to have a history section at the start. Most of those potted histories will talk about console generations. It’s a useful idea, because it reflects the fact that new games consoles were usually released in waves, so that companies would limit the custom lost to gamers already committed to a near-identical competing console that had already established itself in their homes. It’s also commercial propaganda.
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Nostalgia cascade
Some of my business cards carry the title, ‘Time Lord’. While I don’t own a tardis and only possess one heart, I do travel through space and time, to help people to solve problems. Cultural problems, that they need to resolve in order to succeed in their vocation. And then they pay me, which is important when you’re not actually from Galifrey.
I’m able to be a Time Lord because I’m a historian. However, my vocation is made both more meaningful and more possible by the dramatic shift in the very fabric of cultural history over the past couple of decades. Part of this transformation in the place-time continuum is characterised by the nostalgia cascade.
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Design an engaging virtual economy
Copyblogger recently advised marketers to tell their audience’s story, taking Downton Abbey as an example of excellent narrative marketing. It uses historical references that still fascinate people today, and creates strong characters who viewers can identify with, getting people wrapped up in a historical fantasy that feels relevant and real.
In my GDC talk, I’m going to argue that game designers should do the exact same thing with virtual economies. I will show how Final Fantasy games used fictional economics to tell their players' story, and that as their players' stories changed, so did the fictional economies of Final Fantasy games.
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Game design history
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[/caption]What is game design history? What makes it different to game design criticism or video game history?
Design history vs. Art history
Design history sounds like it must be similar to art history. In many ways it is; design historians often use art historical theories. Design history has a different set of concerns to art history. Design history looks at objects not as motifs, but as material, manufactured, traded and socially active goods. It's about making, selling and buying, while art history is (arguably) about seeing. -
Games are now officially culture
This week I will be attending not one, but three lectures on video games given in an academic context. And none of them will be conducted as part of games studies programs. It’s part of a rise in the subject of ‘digital humanities’, but I think it’s happening specifically to video games because of the stellar year 2011 was for game design. 2011 proved that video games makers are conscious of the limitations and possibilities of their medium, styles and strategies have matured and are being pushed, and culturally meaningful expression can be seen all over the industry.
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Western games don't exist
West is a four-letter word
As a specialist in Japanese video games, I often hear the word 'West' being used as a contrast. However, coming from a branch of humanities that is rather awkwardly known as 'Area Studies', I have learned to hate that word. -
Fictional Economics: announcing my GDC presentation
This was originally published on Gamesbrief, where I work at editorial assistant
Fictional economics: unlocking culture to monetise a game
If you're going to make money from in-app purchases, your game has a fictional economy of some sort.Fictional economics is about how the narrative, object design and user interface of your game tells stories about economies. It can be observed in both online and offline games.
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Photographic Game Space
The critically acclaimed psychological adventure game Trauma finally came out earlier this year, as a free-to-play browser game as well as a paid app for Mac OS. This week it became one of the top ten paid apps. The game is about searching through the memories of a patient suffering from mental trauma, by piecing together places and events from a series of connected photographs. It’s a unique and rich aesthetic experience, though as a whole project it still feels unfinished. -
Gamification in history: game mechanics as social models
Being a grown-up is not fun and games. To amend this, some cheerful people from a nice part of the world, probably California, invented gamification. I’ve seen some Stanford computer science lectures on iTunesU from a few years ago that seem to express the first buds of gamifying theories. Now we are beginning to see the fruits of those theories. Apparently more and more workplaces and commercial enterprises have modified their working practices to incorporate reward badges for hitting targets, points systems, sometimes level-up mechanics to represent your productivity/consumer loyalty.
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Materiality and Procedurality
This is my position paper for a seminar in IT Copenhagen’s game studies department called ‘Against Procedurality’. It has Portal 2 spoilers in it. Also spoilers for my presentation on Tuesday :P Anyway, I don’t usually get to put things I write academically up here because they’re so long, so I thought I’d take advantage of the opportunity to post a short piece of work. Enjoy!
‘As humans we experience our world through the materiality of things. We walk on concrete, wooden or carpeted floors and drink tea from a ceramic, paper, plastic or polystyrene cup. There is a continuous, invisible exchange taking place between us, our objects and our environment.’- Karen Richmond, Thingness Symposium, Camberwell College of Arts
‘Don’t get yourself all covered in the gel. We haven’t entirely nailed down what element it is, but I’ll tell you this: it’s a lively one, and it does NOT like the human skeleton.’ - Cave Johnson, Portal 2
Materiality refers to the emotional and pragmatic significance of materials. Wood feels familiar, tactile and reassuring. Plastic feels like anything and nothing all at once - it feels more alien the more it attempts to emulate the familiar. When games involve virtual worlds, part of their procedurality is devoted to the materiality of the game-worlds. -
Surface 2
Here's another surface colour experiment on Sonic the Hedgehog. I think this one works a little better - this time I've used Sonic the Hedgehog 2, selecting only the levels with a material name in the title (playing fast and loose with definitions here by including sky...) What you lose in this attempt is the larger perspective on how colour is used to visualise the plot arc, which was an interesting feature of the last one, but what you gain is a perspective on how surface colour and virtual material are linked. -
Surface
I'm currently working on a hypothesis that an early stage in the development of virtual materiality in video games was the manipulation of surface in 1980s platformers. As an experiment, I've made color palettes from screenshots of the first six (out of seven) levels of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, to see if color choice alone is enough to guess the materials the level is supposed to appear to be made up of. -
Panoptic games
This blog post contains spoilers. Go play Portal and Metal Gear, then come back and read this.
I have some recollection of first playing the Sims, and assuming that controlling the lives of tiny little people who I created would be like playing god. But it never felt like playing god. There was no power trip, no sense of responsiblity and no guilty feeling that I had crossed a line that humanity must never cross. It’s not that I wasn’t immersed in the game or didn’t on some level believe that the Sims were real. I did play the game as though there really were tiny little people who just wanted to have their needs met and their goals fulfilled; my rational knowledge that this was all a computer-modeled simulation that could easily be hacked didn’t get in the way of my emotional response to the poverty, sickness or loneliness of my Sims. But I didn’t feel like their god.
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Agency and Intelligence in computer games
This man is stupid but free
I just wrote this in my essay for this term:Implicit in the prevalent labelling of computer games as interactive media is the idea that the players* have agency, because through their interaction they are able to influence the content of the media that they consume. However, the Final Fantasy series, in spite of its huge popularity, is often criticised for not being genuinely interactive. Final Fantasy games are usually linear in structure, with only one possible plotline, only one legitimate course of action, and often only one effective tactic in any given battle. The game will not progress without the action of the players, but the players' actions are dictated by the rules of the game - the players have no real choices to make and therefore have no real influence on the content of their gaming experience.
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