v21's posterous

Sometimes tutorial sections are necessary. If it's an explicitly multiplayer competitive game, then you might ultimately need or want a singleplayer section just to teach you the fucking thing before you waste your friend's time. Fighting game practice rooms. The "training" mode in Pole Riders. But if all these are are explicitly tutorials (not just mainly), then they almost certainly suck, and you should do better. For instance, Pole Riders has you vaulting double decker buses. Trials Evolution's Licence sections are hard, as well as explicitly teaching you how to perform things you're going to need to know.

Walls of text telling you what to do are probably not great design. But they can be. The joy of poring over a manual, of reading the Minecraft wiki, or hell, visual novels or a blurb telling you how to use the parser in IF, these can be good things. I hate being prescriptive. There are always exceptions. Just go look at the "Instructions" menu item in Fez to see how best to do this. (although I seem to recall that was only inserted at Microsoft's insistence. It's certainly unnecessary. But delightful and charming and effective, etc. The game pretty much explains itself - I could hand my brother the controls deep into it, tell him what the buttons did and he got it entirely.)

Organically building teaching into your game is clearly better than having a rigid tutorial section. A lot of the joy in games comes in learning and mastering systems. See James Paul Gee for reference on this. So you're teaching the whole time, but this section is the special teaching section... It's game structure basics : teach people the mechanics one by one, let them explore and then see their powers in combination with other powers (again : I hate being prescriptive, but this is a good technique that is used everywhere). A lot of games are dead once you've understood the system and the mechanics. In Portal, once you've solved the puzzles (ie worked out the implications of the portal gun in fullness) the game is over bar the robotic lady singing.

"You play a babysitter, you turn up and the baby is made of cardboard. Would you stay? I want games to start asking more ethical questions"

-- https://twitter.com/#!/petermolydeux/status/143052751784525824

This is a game me and Alan Hazelden just sketched up at Molyjam London. I was trying to bully him into making a game, and we clicked througha few at random til we came across this, which seemed so very ripe for making as a kind of theatrical piece. So we went and found some cardboard, and made the game:

(download)

Click here to download:

holding-the-baby-umeqvIEEfvyryJrapdrz.zip (2.24 MB)

-- After a certain point, the parent leaves.

-- The babysitters score is how long they continue holding the baby after this happens.

There's a lot of arguing about story in games recently. There was this, then this, and then this. Each one kicks up a bit of argument, and then later someone come back with another tack. So here's me, butting in.

So as I see it, there are two basic ways stories and games can happen together.

• Games can be used to tell stories.
• You can tell stories about games.

The two can happen at the same time, and they can be blended, so it's not always easy to tell them apart, but they're clearly not the same thing. This isn't going to be a exhaustive study of either one, because either could be a lifetimes work.

I find holding in my head that these are two separate things clears up a lot of discussions on stories in games. So often people argue against one, and for another, or use examples of one to support a claim for the necessity of the other. But they're different things!

So now let's muddy the waters, and try to find the limits of each. This is necessarily a brief overview, as each would offer many lifetimes of study.

It's easy to think of clear-cut examples of either one. The froth generated by LARPing[1], that's a story about a game, that's when meaning is imposed onto a possibly incoherent experience. If I was running a LARP, one of my big criteria for success would be whether the LARP generated stories worth telling. For a videogame perspective -- I've spent many happy hours reading stories generated by Dwarf Fortress and I've never played the game. Or epic tales from Eve of galaxy-spanning deceit and betrayal. What these obvious examples have in common is the wide degree of player agency. And the uncertain outcomes. Bow, Nigger[2] is a wonderful story told of a game -- it happened in a space with more tightly constrained agency, but the captivating part was the part that was entirely human, was the part that coincided exactly with the the player's freedom. But I don't think a open, unscripted world is necessary to produce stories -- although it does make the ones that get told more worth listening to. If people can happily recount the plot of soap operas, then a scripted game can produce stories for telling (or retelling, I guess). And similarly a game of Tetris can be told as a story, but it's gonna be a terrible story. The point of that game lies elsewhere (although I do have a theory about similarities between narrative structure and pacing -- but now is not the time). The crucial point here is it's a shit story if it's telling you stuff you could hear elsewhere, or in this case, is the same one you'd tell if you played the game too. Or is just a rubbish story.

It's also worth noticing that the story comes afterwards. That's a process that occurs when reflecting on the game, integrating your experiences into a coherent narrative. I assume this is because the human brain is really good at remembering and reasoning about stories, particularly ones about the actions of things having human-like agency. But I was a Cognitive Scientist slightly too long ago to link to anything interesting on the topic, or indeed speak with authority on it. Running with the supposition does imply that if you're wanting to make people learn something from a game, giving them a story to tell afterwards with the lesson embedded in it is probably a good way to go about it. And it's furthermore worth noting that you don't actually have to tell a story to someone else for it to be a story -- you just have to have assembled it and made sense of it. The Oppenheimer quote "the best way to learn is to teach" comes to mind, as does the way writing this post has sharpened and cleared my thoughts on this very topic.

Similarly, it's pretty well established that you can tell stories in games. You can have a single plotline one merely advances through in an unbroken line. You can have branching choices. You can have choices made earlier having subtle consequences throughout the entire game. You can do far more interesting things, in hugely emotionally affecting ways. It's a noble goal to tell a story -- as I said above, it's the basic way humans make sense of the world, so it's strong stuff. Ultimately, though, these stories don't come from the player's agency. It's something done to them, not what they do. Of course, they have to be involved, or it's not a game. But for a game creator to be telling a story, it has to be their story, or possible stories, not one that the player has created.

For example:

"At heart, pulling off a tragedy in a game is about manipulating the player into accepting a situation they don’t want while still making them feel responsible for it. This is no small feat, but it’s not impossible by any means. None of the examples I listed are really immune to the basic “reload and fix it” issue that threatens to rob game tragedy of its impact, but they all suggest methods for making that solution less desirable."

 -- Line Hollis talking about tragedies in videogame stories

Here, she's directly saying : to create a feeling of tragedy, we need to trick someone into thinking they have agency, when they don't. And the biggest problem we have is that they can always take the nuclear option and metagame their way back into having agency. And if they have agency, why would they submit to your tragedy? [3]

Sidenote: Can you tell a story that is entirely generative? Sorry, that question is nonsensical. Can a story be told that is entirely generative? I think I'm obliged by my belief in strong AI to say yes. For a story to be told somebody has to be telling it -- if that person is actually a computer, does it count as a story? Only if the computer can impute meaning to it's (sorry, their -- I think this is a criteria for personhood) words. Else it only becomes story when it reaches the players head. Am I making up this condition, that only people can tell stories? I'm aware this is a silly distinction -- but it's by reaching for the stupid scenarios that we can see the real limits of things. If you made a game that made me believe a computer was telling me a story it had invented, I would be more impressed by your accomplishment than wanting to quibble with your terms.

None of this is original thought from me, of course. Here's an excerpt from a recent Electron Dance interview with Richard Hofmeier, creator of Cart Life.

Electron Dance: "I see lots of discussions online about people who believe games should be all about rules, right, rather than narrative"

Richard Hofmeier: "It's troubling to me, right, when I was making my failed attamept at games journalism. I said, in not only the Drawf Fortress peiece, but also something I wrote about Snakes of Avalon (which is another Adventure Games Studio piece) is that the only reason to play any game is it's story. And I guess I meant that, and I still feel that way, I do. And I think it's either the deliberate intentional narrative of the developers, or, in the case of something best represented by Drawf Fortress, or Spelunkey even, something more emergent. I think that as a player, we can't engage with either system without creating a narrative for our own enjoyment of it. So we create a story from a Dwarf Fortress playthrough. And for me that's -- Tarn Adams calls them the "After Action Reports" -- but these epic tales of histories of populations and the -- it's fantastic. And they're entirely in the head of the person playing the game. And it says more about the games player than it does, I think, about how well made that game is. Maybe it's easier for me to say that after having spoken with him about it, and his kind of disinterest in posing his own visions on a player, and really it's just a tool for soliciting imaginative work from the people playing -- it's really interesting for me that he does that, but it doesn't change my mind about the only reason to play it is for the story and so whether it's game, or Cart Life, or Dwarf Fortress or Spelunkey, I think that narrative is the only game mechanic. That might not go for something like Tetris, or maybe Sim City, or something -- those toys. I tkind of deteriorates with that dynamic - it's just a semantic problem that we call them all games, when of course some are games, and some are toys, and some are more like movies. I guess in a perfect world we'd have a term for thme -- I don't want to be childish about it, but for me the semantic problem is hugely consequential, and if we had a term for -- I guess it's all interactive fiction really, and that would be one host, one hemisphere, anfd then maybe games could be more precisely used, that term. Interactive fiction is too many syllables, it's very pretentious and academic, we don't have a good word for it, like "movies" is a great word which is fun to say, and it describes a uniting characterist of a whole spectrum of propositions, and they're all united in that they're moving pictures, and games are just interactive - they're not games, they're just interactive, and that goes for board games and card games and videogames is just awful, just a really blunt instrument of language to use to describe shit that has no buisness being called a videogame, you know what I mean?"

If you want to make something good, it's better to be consistent than to be ambitious. If you can't draw, lay things out nicely and pick good colours, and you'll get away with it (if you design it well). If you can't program, limit the complexity of the interactions that can happen. If you can't write, write as little as you can.

And if you get stuck, ask for help. Specifically, you can bug me. Or, there's excellent communities - on tigsource, on Super Friendship Club, on Way of the Pixel, on IRC, on Twitter and just generally the Internet. Most people will happily help someone who wants to learn something (but not someone who wants their homework done). And, even more marvellous is meeting other game creators in person at things like London Indies. Or, indeed, at gamejams.

Right! That's your lot. Now go and make videogames! All it requires is lots of hard work!

"This is the super lazy man’s approach to design: rather than designing an intricate object, I tend to think of it in terms of marketing… the more academic way of putting it, I would say deputizing the player rather than designing for the player. So you’re deputizing the player’s to design their own gameplay, so to speak.

And obviously it’s a mix. You are designing, of course you’re designing. I think sometimes as a game designer—especially when you’re designing party games—it can be useful to think beyond this verb of design and more to: how am I going to sell the player on this attitude of approaching things?"

So I seem to have got into a situation where I have a very large number of things which need only a bit more a push to get them done. So : let's get them done!

Not now, to be clear. The next few weeks are pretty busy with doing Christmassy drinking things. But during Christmas, during the times one is traditionally supposed to spend avoiding family, I want to:

-- finish CUBES's music and vfx synching and send out test copies to people (if you want to be tested on, please let me know). No doubt something'll crop up preventing me from fully releasing it, but I want to be close come the start of January.

-- I've got a big long list of things that need to be done on Mr Bubble, and there's no pressing release time pressing. But at the very least, I should get all the adjustments for the new mechanic in, and get those animations finally plugged in.

-- I should look at getting no-one's favorite game, Assembly onto an iPad. Just for kicks, and out of curiosity. And maybe Android, too. It'd feel nice on a touch screen.

-- A side-effect of CUBES (or maybe CUBES is a side-effect of it) is a nice library of post-processing effects. And scripts to script them. It'd like to package them all up, and sell them on the Asset Store. The only competitor I can see is Aubergine, and I think there's space for another. I'd love to know how that sold! Along with this, I'd be nice to expand the range of effects - I have further ideas! In fact, let's break down and discuss what I have so far:

• Scanlines (variable size, and separation, and darkness and offset)
• Pixelation (variable size - width and height)
• Dither (variable size, dither mask, and I guess I can easily knock up a greyscale version)
• Colour separation (variable separation for R G and B in both x and y)
• Posterization (I don't really have this, but I made it a few times while making the above)

All of which work on iPad. These probably aren't enough, so I might knock up a few more - a flashback effect, and a twirly effect are quick enough to knock up - I pretty much know how to do it already. And there's a textured shadows effect I did at work way back. And I have ideas for shiny shiny extensions to what I have. But the main priority is packaging and releasing. If anyone is reading this: what needs making? What are you starving for in postpressing effects?

-- And picking up on an old abandoned thing, working out what makes my previous attempt at a Asset Store Package unworkable. It's an editor extension that lets you run methods from the Inspector, for debugging purposes. It works fine for methods without any arguments, but devolves into reflection hell when they're included. Releasing this would also be fantastic. Again: would you use this? Would you pay for this?

Which is enough to be getting on with, really.

The really good bit is that a few of these thing will potentially earn me money. Let's hope that happens!

Here are the notes from me trying to get Mr Bubble to run in full-screen mode at a native resolution, in preparation for GameCity on Friday:

native res = 1280 * 800

1024 * 768 | full screen | no scale = 14 FPS
1024 * 768 | full screen | show all = 43 FPS
1024 * 768 | full screen | exact fit = 45 FPS 

1024 * 768 | windowed | no scale = 40 FPS
1024 * 768 | windowed | show all = 40 FPS
1024 * 768 | windowed | exact fit = 41 FPS
 
1280 * 800 | full screen | no scale = 10 FPS
1280 * 800 | full screen | show all = 13 FPS
1280 * 800 | full screen | exact fit = 13 FPS
 
1280 * 800 | windowed | no scale = ?? FPS -- the FPS counter is cut off. but it feels smooth. I would assume 30 FPS
1280 * 800 | windowed | show all = 30 FPS
1280 * 800 | windowed | exact fit = 30 FPS

As you can see, it is painful and frustrating. Notable bits of extra-ordinary pain are : the only times it is fast are when it is performing scaling. Or is windowed. Even if it's smaller than the resolution, getting it to display without scaling makes it run slowly. Since the game is cleanly pixelled, scaling appears as doubled pixels. It looks rubbish, and is surely extra work for Flash to do. Surely?

After this I tried rendering at 960 * 600 and scaling up with stage.fullScreenSourceRect. It didn't help at all.

I'd download a newer Flex SDK (I'm apparently on 4.0, there's now 4.5), but I am at home, and on stolen phone Internet, so large SDKs are a bad idea. Apparently the newer one has GPU support. But it claims the newer playes have that, when embedded within webpage, if you set the wmode. Fiddling that parameter did not do a damn thing for me. I don't understand the Flash ecosystem.

My current plan is to show the game within a full-screened Chrome window, in-browser. I can get an FPS that oscillates (noticably :<) between 30 and 60 FPS there, running at native resolution. Why is that faster than without using a browser? Why does the best solution involve turning up, finding out the native resolution, and then hurriedly entering it into the 5 different places it needs to be set for it to work properly (in the source, in the FlashDevelop project settings, written to an XML file you can't seem to override, arg, in the webpage multiple times, including once, halved, as a offset to center the player properly). *sigh*

If someone knows of a better way... please let me know.

Alan Hazleden just reminded me I never wrote this up. Here are the rules for Clandestine Candy, a game I ran at Hide&Seek's Sandpit this summer (at the Royal Festival Hall!)

Clandestine Candy

(for around 15 players, in this version)

Take everyone's names, and randomly (but fairly evenly) assign them roles. They are either :

- a Sugar Addict - these desperate creatures want to get their hands on sweets, as many as they can. They start the game with a fistful of monopoly money (the same amount each time)

-a Candy Salesman - these amoral mercenary types want to get their hands on as much cash as possible. They start the game with a fistful of sweets (ideally the kind that are individually wrapped. Boiled sweets, toffees, etc). Again, about the same quantity each.

- a Dentist - these funsponges want to stop anyone from enjoying their money or their sweets. They start the game with nothing. They are allowed to confiscate any money or sweets they see out in the open.

Everyone is also told the names of a player of each of the opposing roles. (so two other players)

The players are then set free in a large gallery space, and left to introduce themselves to others, make friends, do deals, and try not to blow their role. People are encouraged to lie about anythign they wish.

At the end (after 10-15 minutes everyone seemed to have done most of the trading they can do) , everyone gathers, and the Sugar Addicts compare their hauls, the Candy Salesmen compare their wads, and the Denists compare their confiscated goods. And everyone gets some sweets if they want.

The exact number of players told about, whether there are multiple values of notes, whether people are given namebadges in advance, and the allocation of roles can be tweaked according to the circumstances. When I ran this, I didn't tell anyone how much money or sweets were assigned, leading the value of deals to be uncertain. But 5 players of each type, a single value of note, no namebadges, and two names seemed to work pretty well.

So the first day of TIGJAM, one theme was "Fight or Flight". I decided to make a game with playing cards. The game turned out okay, so here are the rules:

"Fight or Flee"

Each player takes a wodge of cards (3 or more, I guess) from the top of a shuffled deck of cards.

They both give the other player 1 or more cards. These exchanges happen simulataneously. If you want to get a good atmosphere going, try saying "Fuck you" as you give them cards.

This exchange happens three times.

At the end, you both consider your position, count yourselves in together and then either thrust your cards at your opponent, while saying "Fight", or withdraw them, saying "Flee". If:

• both of you say "Fight", then you both lay your cards down - the person with the highest cumulative score wins the game. Well done!
• both of you say "Flee", then you both lay your cards down - the person with the lowest cumulative score wins the game. Well done!
• one of you says "Flee" and the other, "Fight" - the "Fight"-er gives the "Flee"-er one or more cards, and you go back to exchanging cards.

The number cards are valued according to their number. The face cards are valued:

Jack : 20
Queen : 30
King : 40
Ace: 100
Joker : -100

Try playing it!

Thoughts on the game

The game has some nice bits to it: the symmetry between wanting to have less than or more than your opponent is nice. This game is really about discovering the value of your opponents hand - the point of the exchaning stages is to share information as much as cards. You end up pushing cards at people, trying to convince them of your weakness, trying to hold onto the edge. If the negotiations fail, then you reach stalemate - you both agree on the relative value of your cards. This is one of the biggest problems with the game - too often you end up in an unsatisfying stalemate for too long - "Yes, you have more than me. You gotta give me more if you expect me to fight you".

But you can establish a really quite close idea of the value of the cards circulating. With final scores on each side in the hundred, a couple of games ended within 10 points of each other. The long-tail of cards can add up to a surprising quantity - a half dozen 6s, 7s and 8s is a face card, though might not always be estimated as one. One important skill is accurately estimating the value of cards in your hand. 

Which is a weakness - the amount of fucking mental arithmetic you have to do. Maybe that's not a weakness, maybe that makes it a useful teaching aid. I know my Dad would always beat me at this game - he was always better at math stuff than me. He'd eat it up, actually. It's pretty amenable to card counting, in fact - knowing all the cards that have passed through your hand would give you a really clear picture of the game. 

One neat strategy in the game is to keep a high value card always in your hand - if it's not in circulation, it's effectively invisible. (Almost - it will show in your choice of whether to fight or flee). 'Course, this is a long term ploy - you have to keep it always there, even as you attempt to twist them down into fighting or fleeing as you do. And I have no idea why a Joker would ever see the light of day. Maybe the Joker mechanic is broken - we didn't play enough games to determine it. It certainly throws in a nice element of chaos, and -ah-but- into calculations.

One bit of symbolism I do like is the way it matches animals mating fights - usually the reason for the fight is to establish dominance - who is stronger. In that case, you show acceptance of your position, and no real fight happens. But when two animals are evenly matched, neither one wants to give way. The fight escalates, and they can do real damage to themselves.

Another bit of symbolism is that of gift giving as a burden. After you - no, after you, no, after you etc. Or gift economies led by bond of mutual obligation - you each try to outdo each other in giving gifts. But when the system works well, the gifts match in value - everyone keeps a mental tally of how much the other has given away. For instance, in buying rounds - everyone casually buys each other drinks, yet everyone involved ends up with a complicated account of the drinks bought and owed. (until a certain point in the evening, where it becomes a bit of a blur). It's a rare situation where you just take a bought drink as a gift, without social consequence. An aggressive move in this game is giving some high value cards on the last exchange - there's no way for them to reciprocate.

But in the mating fight situation, the happy outcome is stalemate in this game. The unhappy outcome is what leads to victory. And in the gift giving, the happy outcome - both think the other is equal - leads to a fight (a contest of wealth or poverty - it makes no difference). I guess competition is needed to make this an exciting game (if it is an exciting game, and not an drawn-out finessing of percieved worth).

One modification that was suggested, and that I liked, and that we didn't try was to do the card exchange phase rhythmically. One two three - fuck you - one two three - fuck you - one two three - fuck you - you ready? you know what way you're going? okay - one two three - FIGHT. This would speed the game up, give speed and panic to the swapping discovery phase. And you'd still get the tension before the fight-or-flee ending. Hopefully the fun added would counteract the stalemate. And the speed wouldn't crush most of the strategy, but rather help you to focus on the other player rather than the raw numbers.

From an even more analytical point of view, the relationship between card numbers, card values, the flow of cards, and whther this would bias games to be resolved as fights or flees would be fascinating. There does tend to be a bias towards fighting. 

Thinking on it now, a dominant strategy (theoretically) might well be to not show any of your cards but one. Just keep sending the same cards back. But you'd only win by chance in that case - no-one would co-operate. It'd stalemate forever. I will ponder this game-theoretically. I mean, the game is all about shared knowledge. I wonder what it'd look like if every card that'd hit the open was laid face-up. It'd be a totally different game, though obviously equivalent theoretically.

I read Emma Mulqueeny's post on the point of hackdays this morning, and have A Response:

No, it's even better than that. I've attended game jams where you have to pay to cover costs. Ones held in cafes. There's no sponsor hoping you'll look at thier APIs. Half of the developers are starving students. It's always worth going - just to get together with your peers and make things. I make games for a living, and it's never as much fun as a jam. There's often no presentation at the end, no formal series of pitches to define the teams and end results. To some degree, people just sit down and start making. And similar things hold - you need to 10 to get a buzz, and 20 to make it really good. And if we pay for pizza ourselves, or if we go out to the cafe down the road, it's still as good (though, y'know, not that I'd turn down free pizza). And there's still the rush of "gotta get this done, gotta code this bit up" and there's still the glorious praying that this bit isn't full of bugs. And sometimes you get stuck on this obvious bit, arg, why are my collisions failing! and fail to complete. It's okay, it wouldn't be as good if there was a risk of failure. Sometimes too, people get even more hardcore, and have three-hour mini-jams within the main jam, and then the rush is even better (though the games are worse). And sometimes there's no theme, or there's a choice of theme, or the themes are picked at random out of a hat of suggestions. Still, you work hard to make something good to show your friends and your peers. And sure, who you meet is good, but if I went home from a jam having made no useful contacts, I could still consider it a success. And it can be a good time to learn new tools, sure (picture someone trying a new library coincidentally sat next to the author of that library), but it's also a good time to be using tools that you know inside and out (and discovering that - hey, I really can code this stuff!). And it's good to code without time to fuck around refactoring it and tidying it, and worrying about maintainability, because it just has to last til the end of the weekend, and then done! And it's not about the game you take away, though many fine games have their roots in game jams. You make a prototype, and "hey, this gameplay is fun!", and that might keep you going on it after, or it might not. It's a gift if it happens, and if it doesn't, that's fine. (I wrote this in preference to working on a port of a game I first made at a game jam.) And I'm not a fan of prizes because who doesn't deserve one?

I guess, at the end of the day:

And it feels better when you're surrounded by other people doing the same, and out of the joy of the work. It feels good to break new ground. It feels good to create!

@v21 now this is interesting.. ready to produce some top-trump cards based off the stats?

I just read iamdanw's retrospective on his pachube internet of things hackday project, DisplayCabinet. It's a beautiful bit of work - a simple projected circle, which when an object is placed within, shows information.

But here's the biggest limitation, as I see it. You have to have a little lump of wood representing the fridge to show the information from the fridge. You have to have a little lump representating _____ to show data about --- well, not quite ______. It's not literal, despite the presence of atoms - each object represents a sphere of information. Keys, for instance, represent the entire home. But what if you want to know what state the locks are in or if the alarm is set? The 'keys' mapping means something else already. You place the Dad maquette in the circle to see his tweets - what if you want to check your @s? What shape a lump of wood to represent that? Or "the girl I met last night"'s tweets? Sure, there's no reason this one interface should show everything, but expanding it's scope is such an enormous effort, I can't help but think you wouldn't.

There's an almighty world of data out there, increasingly, thank the Berners-Lee, queryable in a sensible semantic way. I do get that the point of the excercise is to humanize this data, to work it under the skin of our lives, but it seems such a great cost to lose the power of that vast sea entirely. If I can see my power consumption graphed, maybe I'll want to explore typical power consumption graphs for people of my demographic type. Maybe I'll want to share that data with more ease than taking a photo, or recreating the data elsewhere. In the example given, the data was explored in more detail by bringing in another token - it just seems overly, inherently, bounded. Unless you have more abstract navigational tokens, but this makes the metaphors stretch yet further. I might be wrong on this point. Maybe this sea of data is exactly what we're trying to exclude. But I still think I want it, now. For one thing, I'm used to having it around, and seeping, in it's full power, into everything I interact with.[1]

Where are these lumps going to be kept? The keys live in your pocket, or on the side, sure. But the place I would imagine putting a set of figurines representing your household appliances and family members is in a thimble case next to the table. And if you're going to do that, this whole system only gains over a touchscreen the joy of moving little wooden tokens[2]. It feels cumbersome, it feels less like wallpaper.

But! The explorable status system, that doesn't demand your attention. That feels like it has legs. Technology that we can use while not thinking we're staring into a screen like we do all day at work. That's nice. A picoprojector onto wood looks a treat, but they're expensive and require carpentry. So I think a natural place for this to emerge is the ebook cover [3]. As detailed by Tom Armitage, it's happy at rest. It doesn't call for you, but fits in. Somehow it doesn't make itself known as technology until the page changes (I think that might be the magic of it, that they change between object and technology so easily). People already have them and they leave them lying about. Always on top of things, always face up. If you want to explore what they're showing, they have buttons for now. Or wait a year or two and they'll all have touchscreens.

Or - you can go further, if you hate buttons and touch screens and boring technology. You can make the ebook super location aware. Why use a fridge token, when you can just go to the fridge? It can be a magic window on the metadata behind the actual object. Walk past a thermostat, and see it's set high. Look at your ebook, and see 24 hour and 7 day temperature graphs, and that the thermostat was changed last Tuesday. You take it to the kitchen, it tells you stuff about your food, then becomes a cookbook.

Of course, this only naturally maps to exploring the metadata attached to lumps of atoms in front of you. There's still metaphor involved, inevitably. But hopefully it should emerge naturally as a result of showing you the thing you're most likely looking for, if you're standing where you are. And of course, you can't view far off objects without resorting to symbols again. But at least these symbols can be scattered, a disparate set. Place your ebook next to a photo of your Dad, you see his Twitter account. The only real gain is that you're more likely to have a photo than a maquette, and it can carry in sitting on the side where it's already sitting. And it's easier to register new links.

Huh. I guess I just got halfway to reinventing the Chumby...

[1: for this reason, it would seem totally reasonable if this just displayed information. But as soon as you can use a thing to investigate data, it seems to call out for Google. My watch doesn't want it, but my Wii does.]

[2: a cruise on boardgamegeek will reveal this isn't an unappreciated joy. But it doesn't feel like it should be enough.]

[3: or we could cover yet another surface with ads, as Amazon is exploring. They'll be there, lurking on your bedside table, fucking display ads. It'd be a shame if that's what they end up being used for, but it does show there's money that's noticed their untapped potential.]

Sent from my phone.

No.

I mean, a win conditon ends the game. You strive for it. It is imposed from without.

But it does just as well by giving us a framework in which we (I want to say inevitably) form our own win conditions. My boss spent the day constructing a temple with an entrance shaped like an enormous cock. The game didn't tell him to do that, and nothing happened once it was complete. Other than him showing me. But he had a task and he set to it, against obstacles. He died but persevered against obstacles. He learnt from the process. All that gamey stuff, that happened.

I guess if you're wedded to the idea that games do need a win condition, you could argue that Minecraft is merely a frame that gives rise to such. But that seems such a mincing theoretical cop out, when so many things construct fun in just the same way. Like Electroplankton. Can we just call these things games? They feel like games when we play them, even if they do require our engagement. We don't deny the status of play to plays with audience interaction, just because they're only finished when they're performed.

I have also argued vigorously (and while drunk) that Minecraft has an excellent story. It builds it generatively, and you help make it, but that doesn't argue against the craftmanship with which it was designed by Notch. That's a step further, though.

There's a deeper link to the self-effacing games designed by the Copenhagen crew (and written about by Doug). But I'm two pints too far to tease that out right now. And on screen keyboards suck.

Sent from my phone.

I've been trying to write here more often, because it does me good and because I enjoy arguing, but to be honest, it's hard. With the exception of the worklogs, which are written to myself, my blog posts are arguments. I try to make what they're about important, because the world has enough arguing about dickwolves[1] already. But there are two universal rules that trip me up:

- it's simpler than you think.
- it's more complex than you think.

Everything I write seems to want to become a tweet or a book.

For example - I'm considering a post about learning and games.[2] Boiled to tweet level it comes down to: "Games can be seen as primarily about acquiring mastery, aka learning", which is pretty succinct even with all the academic hedging in there. But of course, expanding on that statement and the (largely obvious) ramifications thereof could fill a book. Indeed, I'm reading a book on pretty much that right now.[3]

I guess everything can be written about in various levels of detail, and it is only my inexperience with the form that causes me to be at all surprised by this. I guess with practice, I'll be able to judge the scope and detail a post needs to be writeable, and I won't wander down so many intriguing sidestreets on my way to the fucking point. I guess that keeping on experimenting with the choices available to me, and trying to perfect my execution until I have control over the end result will be an occasionally uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding learning experience. Like ... a game? Hmm.

[1] if you don't know, you don't want to.

[2] as is Joe Bain. I may well wait til he writes one, then write a riposte.

[3] James Paul Gee's What Videogames have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy. But I'm ripping off Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses a lot here, too. [Edit: Oh Christ, and Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun]

So I have made some incremental progress, in between all the ignoring this project I've been busy with.

Where were we last? I confess I have no idea, as I am typing this offline for later pasting up. Note to self: go to the pub, alone, with a laptop and no internet connection - you'll get hella shit done.

So recently I have made a proper helmet for all my electronics junk to fit within. I spraypainted the visor black (though it's coming off worryingly easily when it gets scraped), I put headphones in the ear protectors ( although they're a little too nice for such a role, and the left is in the right, and vice versa. thus leading to this), and I put all the wiring duct taped to the top inside of the helmet. I taped the vibration motors in place, and - voila - a lack of sensation on the sides. Evidently my head is the wrong shape. After much fannying, I gave up and went home.

Many days later, I returned, and did the obvious thing - push the motors out with padding. This also helps cushion the helmet itself from the vibrations, which is a good thing. Still, you can hear more than feel the motors. I don't really have a solution, but it's a pain. Not Ideal. The helmet is also a little uncomfortable after a while, but no more so than some uncomfortable earphones. Ergonomics matters, kids! Still, it's functional, and can now be offered to people without fear and worry on their part. (It's still outlandish, don't worry - but it doesn't look like it'll electrocute you anymore.)

To make the helmet more diegetic (fuck, that Nordic Larp book is worming into my brain), I need to spreaypaint it like a knight's helmet. KNIGHTMARE, indeed (never saw that as a kid, but that's what people say to me). Silver spray should do it? 

Anyway, platform is nearing final shape, and is at least good enough to go on with. I'ma offer it out as a gaming platform for people at the jam - be nice to see if someone can think of something cool for it. Cooler, and quicker than this long-ass project. :<

Software side, software side, I made some lovely progress last night. Testing at the hackspace produced a cry of "I don't know what the fuck is happening", and while I can reliably get to the other end, I must admit to being lost, pulling on a thread doing it. Takes too much commitment to a dull bad place to get through - no reward. Too little feedback does not a joyful experience make. This could be maybe transformed with lore, and I'll make that do some heavy work, but lore is not a place I am experienced with, so I will slap on everything else I can to make this stupid concept* work. 

To that end, last night I pimped up the sound most splendidly. The issue people were having was a lack of a sense of location. Sure, there's the siren giving you one thread to follow, but that's not enough to position you, just to drag you through. So I have added a deep roar at the entrance, a hidden source of wind deeper in, and ever so many drips and echoey areas to navigate through. As well, I've been further simplifying the level down, it's harder to get lost, and there's fewer obstacles to avoid. Possibly too far, but everything is easy enough to drag around to modify if it comes to that. And "too accessible" isn't a problem I currently suffer from.

I've also just now reworked my trigger-using scripts, and they appear a little more comprehensible this time. I did just rewrite this code out of laziness and disgust at the thought of understanding the stuff I wrote before, but I think it counts as a win. The Gorgons now no longer use UnitySteer, they just naively march towards you. But that's basically all I had got them doing before, and they're a lot more comprehensible now, so again, an uneasy win. They also only start chasing you once you stumble into their trigger area. With a sufficiently light density, you shouldn't end up with too many chasing you. I'm hesitant to develop the Gorgons too much until I'm happy navigation is possible.

What next? Work on the whole "make it more comprehensible". Polish and feedback. Working out a script to play at the start, and at the end - to make the plot comprehensible. Adding footsteps - the biggest necessity for making movement comprehensible. Once you can move and feel okay, once the game is boring, then we can add some shit to shoot! And then make that shit comprehensible. After that? Die of old age, I guess.

(*what concept? just "an FPS type game you can play with your eyes shut" or with tactile/audio only feedback, I guess.)

========================

I want to make this a comprehensible game. I know a few developers (*cough* increpare) who are happy making interesting, incomprehensible pieces. That's cool, the struggle for meaning is something I get off on. And maybe there's the old effect where game makers make games too hard due to their own practice - Increpare perhaps makes the meaning too inaccessible, because he knows it. Partly, I like games that everyone can play - I don't want to appeal to a niche. And also - this is an experiemnt in one direction, and not one I am confident of. If I have to mix my medicine with sugar to make it go down, then I'll make the sugar as sweet as possible. I wish I made more things, so each could be flimsier.

Right, so at the end of the last work log, there was a list of tasks. Let's go through them, and see what I have achieved.

At some point in the week, I killed the maze I was happily getting stuck in. There's a lesson here about saving your work. But it's okay, I wasn't going to use it.

So - I have a featureless plain. You can wander with WASD and turn with the mouse (no looking up or down, I've decided). There are many cylinders, and a couple of cubes ( cylinders are better than cubes, I've decided, as the edges aren't as sharp. Sharp edges are hard to interpret.). One of the cubes plays "The Hangover Song" from Midsummer (a play with songs)*. If you have to listen to something repeatedly, it ought to be pleasurable in and of itself. You can wander this desolate videogame plain and try to find the musical cube, if you like. You can try to avoid the cylinders (though you'll eventually slide past if you walk into them long enough - another advantage). There's no failure and no success programmed in, but it's still a weird and engaging experience.

(Game idea : game set on a a featureless videogame plain. No idea what the gameplay would be. Maybe a distant, hard to spot hole to which you could plunge to your death. It's important this game has cool weapons.)

I set up the ability to pulse all the motors independently of the obstacles. This even works off an AnimationCurve so it is a sweet-fancy pulse. Next is to set the conversion between distance and intensity to use one (and - totes not an issue, but - don't repeat commands if they haven't changed). Tuning this I'm not quite sure how to do, but I'm sure hard work and guesswork will provide.

I've also made some decisions about the game. In it, you save a singing maiden, besieged by Gorgons. You can slay the Gorgons (with a bow and arrow?), they can kill you with their touch. You can hear them and sense them. You have to navigate through the maze and out again.

So : enemies, maiden, slaying and dying. And the game feeling vaugely okay.

* Gordon McIntyre, if you're reading this, triggered by an errant Google Alert, hello. You're a lovely man, and your songs often seem to express my own inner life better than I can. Anyone else - I recommend the play, Ballboy, him.

The Hangover Song by Gordon Macintyre And Lisa Bradley

(download)

Click here to download:

The Hangover Song.mp3 (4.48 MB)

Once again, a worklog from the nightbus home from the Hackspace.

Lots of progress today, far too much for the little work I put in. Reducing the timeout on the reads from 500 ms to 10 ms has made the whole thing more responsive - still takes a few seconds to start up, but it only hung once in a day of hacking. The problems I was facing controlling the analog PWM stuff was due to having the wrong software on the Arduino - stupid stuff, but thrilling to have it fall so easily today. I wrote some stupid simple wrapper stuff for the serial stuff, which now lets you merely say VibrationScript.SetVibrate( int motor, float vibration). Hook it up to turn on on when hoping click and ah! I never get bored of physical actions being performed by a computer. A click = a buzz! How delightfully arbitrary.

And now all the hard technical stuff was suddenly out the way. I quickly and painlessly (painlessly enough) added raycasts -- at this point writing I fell asleep. Since it's now a week later, I'm going to post this as is.

But basically, the interesting technical bit is done. Now I need to make the game (or rather invent the game) and tune it to feel right. Which is rather exciting.

"Why is it hard to do cool things?"

It's a good moan to have. It means you're trying, and you feel pain.

Some people told me that if it was easy, everyone would do it, and the coolness would be spread like margarine spread by a stingy person. You'd have to retreat to harder things to get a decent share. I can see the logic.

But I'm not sure that's all. When you build a computer in minecraft, that's cool, and the coolness doesn't depend on the tools. If this serial connection on the headband thing I'm working on had worked first time, the project would have been no worse. In fact, it would be better, because the damn thing still doesnt work properly. Jonty took the internet by storm with something he made, insomniac and irritated this morning. I don't see why coolness has to be zero-sum, anyway.

So all these thing have simple powerful ideas underlying them, and I guess you could argue the ideas are what count. But any idea can fuck itself up with a cackhanded implementation (and if you know a counter-example I would be overjoyed to steal it.)

So maybe you need talent. That's a large part, that and caring about what you produce. The two are very similar, really. One lets you implement well, one makes you need to.

I could come up with counterexamples to the talent and giving-a-fuck part, but I don't want to. They depress me. Anyway, you can also get lucky. Take risks, sometimes they pay off. Make the hell out of five hackdays, one or two resulting projects will be super cool. At least. Guaranteed.

But you have to really try.

Anyway, I'm not sure the premise holds, either. It's hard to do cool things? You could start tomorrow. I make many assumptions because you are in a position where you're reading this but really - you have some free time! You have a computer! You've no excuse.

Especially because - it just gets easier. Tools are better, cheaper, and better explained than before. Your supposed rivals in the make-cool-things race? They'll help you make shit just as cool as theirs, just to see what you come up with. If you want to make games? Flash is free! Unity is free! Excellent instructional material is free! The Internet us full of people who will solve your problems for you granted a modicum of respect.

This continuing feeling, that cool shit is hard? It just points out cool shit yet to be invented. Nowt's as good as pain for showing you opportunities. Previous-George, shut the hell up and work out how to make an Arduino library for Unity. It's cool, it's useful, and it's easy. Everyone else, I'm sure you have that thing that the lack of makes your cool thing hard. Make that, and don't give up in despair if it also turns out to be hard. I'm sure it's worth it.

So! Progress has been made! I didn't expect this, but here we are.

Click here to download:

firmata.cs (14 KB)

So tonight I went to London Hackspace, and as well as drinking beer and chatting, and suchlike, I worked on this headband project. You know, one of the two that I promised myself I'd finish, but the one that doesn't yet grind painfully at my soul.

The plan of attack is to get Unity talking to the Arduino board. The sensor reading isn't going to be used, so all I have to do is set some pins to output PWM (and no maxbotic setup logic to worry about!). As it happens, the bodged together protocol I wrote lets you read but not yet write. But anyway it's shonky, and standards are awesome, so lets rip it out and replace it. So now the Arduino board is running Firmata. Firmata has it's own protocol that I'm not particularly enthusiastic about writing, so I found Firmata.NET, a class for talking it in .NET.

(Although! First, I banged my head getting serproxy working. Serproxy lets you read and write TCP and have it come out through a serial port. Useful if you wanna use Flash, although a better solution is to not. Turns out the configuration file was slightly more magical than I expected, and there was no readme bundled to tell me that net_port7, for example, meant com7, not the 7th port I told it about. Also, I had to find a patched version for it to talk to com10 and above. Given on my PC anything lower than com11 is reserved... also, I had to fuck about getting telnet to work on Windows. The Windows CLI - eternally unloved. Anyway, it worked, and I was about to write some ugly Arduino code to read rotation vals when I decided to abandon all that and do it all in Unity with someone else's protocol and C code, ie Firmata.)

So I managed to get Unity to accept Firmata.NET and import (it's not import in C#, it's something else) it from an actual game object. But not open a connection to COM11. After some fiddling with opening it myself using system.io.ports.serialport, I concluded* that COM11 wasn't going to work. Reshuffle my serial ports in device manager, and hey presto! I can now reliably crash Unity!

Writing up these notes it occurs to me that window's warning that another program is bound into COM5 may be a clue. Anyway, at this point I stopped.

Next time! I guess either I fix my ports up good, or return to serproxy. I wonder if I'll ever get the GPS my laptop supposedly has working. It's just sitting there on sweet sweet COM6...

After that, I make Unity do sensible encapsulated vibratey things, hook it up to raycasters, mount them on a first person controller. And make a game/world to wander through.

*read on the internet.

Sophie Houlden felt like being controversial today, and sent some tweets, like so:

> I feel like being controversial again today; anyone who thinks selling pre-owned games shouldn't happen is a big fat poop head

> dont want people making money off something you have done (and already made money off)? then sell licences to play instead.

> making people who cant afford to pay the ridiculous cost of a new release feel bad makes you (as previously stated) a big fat poop head

I'm not entirely sure her argument, but it turns out I have Opinions, and so I thought I'd lay them out in a bit more detail.

First off : pre-owned games happen. They're a fact of life, and people buy them and don't feel guilty. And they're pretty much the only way for shops to make money selling games these days. The margins on a new console are pretty much zero, and only a little better on those shiny new games. That's why they push them. I'm not so sure they make all that much money on pre-owned games, either - turns out, selling to digital-savvy consumers from a physical location is difficult. Who would have guessed?!

But these days a lot of games get sold in ethereal and gaseous form.  Mainly by Steam. That's groovy, but it turns out when you don't have a physical artifact, your right to resell the product purchased becomes equally ethereal. This is due to the medium, pretty much - a digital copy is identical, and is also the only way of transporting the game. And games would be awfully expensive if buying one meant you could sell unlimited copies to other people. So we move to this world where you only have a license to play games, which kinda sucks, because everyone is quite used to the notion of ownership by this point. The rules are kind of instinctive, but they're made weird and twisted when all you own is a license. It offends your natural state of fair play.

So this is going to happen, and physical copies will become more tokens of appreciation, and treasured artifacts than Ways To Play Games. You buy the Nidhogg figurine, and get a free physical download. How many people buy vinyl, then listen to the music on Spotify? These artefacts are treasured, and hold their value well over long timespans. Even if they're only tangentially connected to the work itself. Is it wrong to show appreciation for music or a webcomic with a T-shirt?

Those are the two future forms of games, in my opinion - licenses and per-month payments, with everything in the cloud, and treasured mementos where the actual playable game isn't quite the point. Mass produced plastic boxes, all alike - who wants those? They're the awkward child of two divorcing parents.

Sophie also was driving at a point about comparing the medium with other mediums - some of which have lively second hand markets, and some don't, but in almost all of which things hold their value better than the traditional box of videogame.

I guess I have to take a stab at explaining why this is, and I think the most obvious point is that videogames are computer programs. Viewed as a weird, unproductive computer program, they start to look a lot more normal. How much is a second-hand copy of Quicken? (it's notable that other programs are almost always licensed, not sold - the same digital weirdness infects them) How quickly does Madden 2007 go out of date? It's no less fun, but... How soon do fashions and technology move on, and cause games to look like ancient crusty cripples, clinging on to their DOSBox life support? Sure, some games stand out as timeless, beautiful classics, but most really don't (though naturally when you think about old games, you'll think about the best - they're the ones that still endure). And even if they are still beautiful in gameplay, graphics and sound, they become increasingly less easy to play. Consoles die with age, and TV connectors get ever more complex. Pick up a book printed 90 years ago, you can read it fine - pick up a game made 9 years ago, and see how much faff it is to play. And the second-hand market begets the second hand market. Some buy games as a form of rental, counting on the trade-in value to get them their next game.

(A lot of these criticisms don't affect indies. We distribute digitally, and so have no second-hand ephemera to leave behind. And we can't afford the cutting edge of shininess, so we tarnish slower. Not that theres a market at the moment, but I like to believe there will be. Like CD-Rs sold by the Arctic Monkeys in their early days - those retain their value and then some.)

It's also - I'm probably wrong, but I could understand a tone of defensiveness about this. How come videogames aren't lasting durable art forms, like those others? Roman statuary retains beauty 2000 years on, but we can't even manage 2 months! Well - fuck that shit. Mediums are different, and they should be allowed to be. A game becomes obsolete quickly? That's because the state of the art is (hopefully) advancing rapidly. The world of games is exciting at the moment, but I hope it becomes ever more so, that what we have is but the tiniest fragment of the range of games we'll have soon enough. If the work we make now appears worn-out and worthless then, then how much better will the form be? Even for indies - try to make a 3D game with real physics and good lighting and online multiplayer in a month. Difficult but possible, yes? Now go back to 2005 and try. Technology runs on, and hopefully if we run with it, we'll cover more ground than the games of yesteryear thought possible.