Friday, December 21, 2018

Radiator Blog: Ninth (9th) Anniversary Roundup


Wow, it's been nine years. I didn't write as much as last year, partly because I took on so many small projects and did so much traveling this year. (There was one month where I was basically in a different country every week!) But overall I think this blogging pace has been sustainable, and for the future I'm going to aim for this kind of rhythm of posting: roughly once a week.

In the tradition of past anniversaries, I use this annual post to try to collect and curate all the blogging I did over the past year, and maybe even do a little bit of reflecting.

First: as usual, I cover some individual games...
  • NSFware is one of the best sex games I've played, and I think my favorite thing about it is that it's so much about timing and feel -- yet it was made in Adventure Game Studio, an engine not known for its timing and feel (to be charitable). The process of rotoscoping from PornHub videos also lends it an uncanny quality, despite the abstract neon color palette. Basically a masterpiece.
  • The Forgotten City was a popular Skyrim mod that felt very "dense" to me, with lots of possible options and connections between its various NPCs and quests. Like other "dense quests" in Bethesda-style open world RPGs, it also doubles as a commentary on the game systems and simulation, exposing assumptions and limitations and engaging with that friction.
  • Subnautica brilliantly solves 3D 6DOF open world design in a novel way. Most open world games are about traveling laterally to the edges, but here Unknown Worlds provides a fresher approach to progression with its focus on (literal) depth to the bottom of the ocean. It's especially ambitious to do this in a first person format, a genre where players rarely look up or down.
  • Fortune 499 is a innovative deckbuilding puzzle RPG with a fresh story that meaningfully engages with the accounting inherent in CCG-style mechanics. It also has some very compelling encounter design, resulting in an RPG with no grind and no "filler puzzles." It's a huge shame that more people didn't play this game, it basically does what everyone claims to want, and it's smart about it too.
  • Un Pueblo De Nada is a short game mirroring an experimental short film within the Kentucky Route Zero universe. There's an attention to detail and craft here that is basically unmatched anywhere else in games; I've also become so paranoid that I think this game has secret messages intended just for me, hidden deep inside it??? Anyway GOTY 2018

I also did more level design projects this year...

Thursday, December 13, 2018

"Unforeseen Consequences: A Half-Life Documentary" by Danny O'Dwyer


A month ago I got to be one of the many people interviewed for Unforeseen Consequences, A Half-Life Documentary by Danny O'Dwyer (NoClip). Here are some notes, thoughts, and reactions:

I think me, Laura Michet, and the Project Borealis folks, are all there to present some continuity and young(er) blood to the story, versus the middle-aged white guys who dominate the first hour.

But it's also a very telling way to present Half-Life's legacy: the game is 20 years old, which is like a million video game years. At NYU Game Center, the vast majority of our incoming game design students have never played Half-Life because it is older than them, it is a quaint curiosity that we force them to play. It's video game broccoli.

I was fascinated by the segment where Randy Pitchford (co-founder and CEO of Gearbox Software) talks about their company's history with Valve. They basically rescued Gearbox with a speedy deal to make Half-Life Opposing Force -- but according to Pitchford, Valve was also a difficult collaborator, providing very little input on Opposing Force and sabotaging the mediocre Counter-Strike: Condition Zero by demanding an ill-advised scripted single player campaign. It's roughly in-line with the company culture that most Steam indies know: they're eager to setup a deal, but rarely remember to follow-up or maintain communication.

I was most struck by how the various AAA dudes recall witnessing Half-Life: huddled around a coworker's computer, deeply anxious about how their own product would technologically stack-up. Half-Life is defined partly by its world and narrative approach, but also by the smart ways it leveraged targeted uses of game technology. Half-Life 1 was an early pioneer in skeletal animation and AI systems; Half-Life 2 popularized physics-based gameplay and detailed facial animation; neither engine was "top of the line", but cleverly hyped and promoted the tech advances they had. In contrast, Source 2 has basically zero hype at this point, and even diehard Valve fanboy modders Project Borealis decided to use Unreal Engine 4 instead of holding out for a new engine. The game industry has fundamentally changed since 1998 or 2004.

The documentary concludes with one big argument: Half-Life 3 probably isn't coming for a variety of reasons, and we need to find comfort elsewhere. There's a lot of rumors of a Half-Life VR project, but would a story-driven single player FPS still be relevant in an age of multiplayer open-world third person games? Could any possible Half-Life 3 feel like a proper Half-Life 3?

Or instead we could look to the countless modders and designers who still fondly remember it and interpret it in the Epistle 3 jam organized by Laura Michet, or feel its deep influence on perfectly competent games like Respawn's Titanfall 2 or Campo Santo / Valve's upcoming In The Valley Of Gods.

That's ultimately the argument I made when O'Dwyer interviewed me: if you actually love the Half-Life series, you should value the time you had together, but ultimately you have to let it go. Such is life...

Monday, December 10, 2018

The end of Tumblr (and Cobra Club?)


(UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 21, 2018: the game server has been patched to post to a Twitter account instead of a Tumblr. Feel free to follow @CobraClubPics for all your fake player-generated dick pic needs.)

If you haven't heard the news, Tumblr plans to ban all adult content on their platform starting on December 17th. As many point out, this will have disproportionally adverse effects on marginalized people, especially trans and queer creators, who have relied on Tumblr to build and maintain communities to explore their sexuality and identity. Now it's not really a surprise that this is all happening, but it's certainly cruel and harmful to the communities that can't easily pick up and move elsewhere.

I have some strange skin in this situation: my dick pic photo studio game Cobra Club involves a networked component that links with Tumblr. This had resulted in amassing what is technically the biggest gay porn blog across all of Tumblr, with over 100,000 user-generated CG dick pics uploaded from the game. (The nearest competing gay porn blog I could find had only 30,000 posts.)

However, this whole ordeal has made me much more reluctant to build any social network integrations into my games for the foreseeable future. What's the point, if these platforms are just going to devour everything in a few years?

I now see this is a difficult technical problem with making art on the internet: our current internet is heavily privatized and incorporated, and so to comment on the internet, we have to invoke these other platforms and brands in order to say anything at all -- and as many libertarian web programmers will love to remind you, these private platforms can do whatever they want without any accountability or compassion to anyone. Building art with their APIs is like building a house on quicksand.

Back in 2015, I had chosen Tumblr because it seemed like it was queer-positive and sex-positive, with a large enough infrastructure and community. But then in early 2018, Tumblr instituted a mandatory "safe mode" block on all adult content blogs, which basically broke my game already. And yes, Tumblr does have very real problems with abusive porn bots and revenge porn, but it seems they've given up on actually targeting these problems, and instead they've decided to raze their user base instead. So much for tech solutionism's bid to save the world, huh?

As for what will happen to Cobra Club, I'm evaluating whether I should try to patch the game to integrate with another social network, to preserve the game's functionality and meaning. Some have suggested that I hook it into Twitter, but honestly, how much longer do you think Twitter will tolerate adult content and queer community?

(To continue mourning what once was, check out Lydia Morrish's "How Tumblr became a sanctuary for outsiders"... I also spoke to Vice, twice.)

Monday, November 26, 2018

Notes on "Sparkling Dialogue", a great narrative design / game writing talk by Jon Ingold at AdventureX 2018


My colleague Clara Fernandez-Vara pointed me towards this great game writing talk by Jon Ingold this year at AdventureX, an excellent narrative design conference in London. Unfortunately the Twitch video of the talk is hard to follow and the YouTube version of this talk is still forthcoming, so I thought I'd summarize the talk here because I found it very useful. As of December 1st, the YouTube version is now online!

(NOTE: This post isn't a transcript of Ingold's talk. It's a summary with my interpretations, and I might be wrong or misunderstanding.)

Ingold begins with something that should be obvious and uncontroversial to everyone: generally, most video game dialogue is poorly written. This isn't to say video games are bad, or that they we shouldn't try to do any dialogue at all. There are also many reasons why game writers are forced to write poorly, whether it's because of lack of resources, or last minute changes in the design, or other production constraints, etc.

The point is not to blame writers. The point is to highlight a problem in the craft and to define a better ideal. So, how can we write more competent game dialogue that is slightly less embarrassing?

To demonstrate the problem of typical video game writing, Ingold shows us this conversation from the first hour of Assassins Creed Odyssey in the starting mission "So It Begins":

Monday, November 19, 2018

Rinse and Repeat HD remastered, and three years of reflections and thwarted plans



I've just uploaded an updated version of Rinse and Repeat: it is now known as Rinse and Repeat HD, which is basically the same version currently playable at the Victoria and Albert's Videogames exhibition.*

In addition to fancier graphics, I've also: added gamepad / rumble support, re-programmed the entire scheduling algorithm to be more stable, and tweaked much of the balance and feel.

If you're not familiar with the game, you should probably read my artist statement "Rinse and Repeat as cup runneth over" so that you know how the game works.

The rest of this post will assume you mostly know what it's about already!...

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

The medium is not the magazine; the medium is not the criticism



This post is about how we talk about video games, but it takes me a little while to get there...

This year, I was interviewed for two artsy print magazines: PIN-UP is "the only biannual magazine for architectural entertainment", while Phile is an "international journal of desire and curiosity" with lots of fingers in the art world.

Both writers Drew Zeiba ("INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT YANG, DESIGNER OF 3D FANTASY SEX SPACES") and Zach Kotzer ("ON GAY SEX AND GAMING") did lovely jobs with presenting my work to a non-gamer audience. And both publications kindly mailed me a print copy, and as I flipped through their glossy layouts and playfully experimental type treatments, I was shocked by how I'm such a fucking nerd and how these people are so much cooler than me.

When I'm flipping through PIN-UP #24, I'm mentioned in the same pages as Amanda Levete or Frida Escobedo, real architects making real art with their real professions and real expertise. In fact just a few months ago I was visiting London for the V&A Videogames opening, and I walked through Levete's V&A addition as well as Escobedo's 2018 Serpentine Pavilion. As their art and stature literally enveloped me, I had to wonder, why did I deserve to be featured alongside these much more important people?

Or in Phile #3, directly after my interview, there's an interview with Peaches (Peaches!!!) and she is just so much more amazing and brilliant than me, and it's absurd that my segment is right before her segment, or that a reader might accidentally reflexively compare the two of us together while flipping the page. Not to mention all the other pages in this issue, detailing this whole complex community of writers and artists working with sexuality and eroticism, where I'm not just some sort of weird curiosity -- in fact I'm probably the most boring artist in the entire issue.

Anyway this isn't about me airing-out my impostor syndrome or whatever.

On the contrary, I definitely fit OK into these discourses. In PIN-UP #24, Arakawa and Gins talk about "eternal gradients" and constant reassembling, which makes me think of constantly remastering and re-releasing my own games. Or in Phile #3, I learned how my problems with Twitch's hypocritical morality policing mirror Peaches' problems with YouTube's morality police, and I also feel a lot of parallels between my treatment of tile in 3D showers and featured artist Prem Sahib's sculpture of gay bathhouses.

Instead, what I'm emphasizing here is how these critical publications readily dissolve the barriers between mediums while maintaining high production values and curating a unique identity. And then these non-game publications still end-up performing game criticism anyway!

Sunday, November 4, 2018

The first person shooter is a dad in mid-life crisis

OK I know Heavy Rain isn't an FPS but I like this screenshot so I don't care
Every semester for our introductory Games 101 historical survey class, a different NYU Game Center faculty member presents a survey of a game genre. Matt Parker lectures on sports, Clara Fernandez-Vara talks about adventure games, Mitu Khandaker talks about simulations, and so on.

My personal lecture happens to be on the first person shooter (FPS) genre. In my lecture, I trace five main currents through the FPS genre:

Friday, October 26, 2018

Level With Me, Thief 1 complete!

This week I finished streaming through all 15 official missions of Thief 1 (Gold edition) as part of my "Level With Me" project, where I play through games and talk about the level design and environment art in them. In my runs, I usually try to imagine how a first-time player approaches the level, while occasionally demonstrating more "advanced" tactics --and then frequently messing up and alerting a dozen guards.

You can catch the whole Thief 1 playlist archive on YouTube, but here's some commentary and design themes that kept coming up:

Friday, October 19, 2018

7DFPS x PROCJAM, 20-28 October 2018 (make a first person game in 7 days) + (make a proc gen thing in 7 days)


For the first time since 2014, the #7dfps challenge is starting tomorrow. If you're not familiar, it's a week-long jam to make a first person game that tries to do something new.

Past alumni of 7DFPS include high-concept gun games like the original Superhot prototype as well as Receiver, but of course you don't have to do any shooting or violence for your first person game. Make a first person whatever-you-want.

If you need help getting started with making a first person game, even if you've never made an FPS or even a video game before, then here's a great free step-by-step tutorial with video examples on KO-OP Mode's "Make Weird Stuff in Unity" workshop page.

For a bit of historical perspective on this, also check out the 7DFPS video keynote from 2012, where a baby-faced JW and other game industry folks beg you to do something new with the first person format:



This year, 7DFPS also falls on the same week as PROCJAM, a community jam to make something that makes something (procedural generation)... they have their own list of talks, tutorials, and resources to help you make a proc gen thing.


Maybe this is a good time to make that procedurally generated first person game you've been dreaming about it? It seems the gods will it so.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Level Design Workshop at GDC 2019: submissions due November 2

GDC season is coming up soon. If you have any interest in level design and you have something to say about it, then please submit a proposal to the Level Design Workshop mini-track at GDC 2019.

Although it is supervised by AAA developers with a level design background, like Clint Hocking or Joel Burgess or Lisa Brown, you don't have to be a AAA developer -- hell, they even let me give a couple talks in past years, and I'm just some kind of vaguely-leftist pseudo-academic weirdo? Again: indie, modder, altgames, etc. folks of all backgrounds are all welcome and encouraged to submit, as long as there's some relevance to environmental world design for any game genre. I don't look at the submissions, but I know the committee truly does want to highlight any new voices and new approaches to level design.

(Also: this is a really great alternate way to attend GDC without going through the main submission process. The applicant pool here is smaller, the mentoring process is more cozy, and we often do some kind of group level design dinner that week.)

Submit a proposal within the next two weeks, by November 2nd. Good luck!

Full blurb is below:

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Kick the cover box

A soldier hiding behind a gray box in a futuristic lab, from Deus Ex Human Revolution (2011)
The room pictured above from Deus Ex: Human Revolution is, I argue, bad level design.

The playable area consists of an open flat floor with lab counters, yet all the counters are the same height (they have to be, so the player can recognize them as "those boxes I can hide behind") and each box offers basically the same affordance to the player. (Hide behind it! Look over it! Shoot the NPC that's programmed to pop his head out every 7 seconds!)

Any given object becomes bad design when it is numerous, redundant, and lacks context to the rest of the game. If you automatically repeat any type of shape throughout your game world, as a catch-all solution to fill a space, then that object is basically functioning like the dreaded video game crate. Whether it's a pallet of barrels, or a stack of bricks, or a concrete road barrier, it all boils down to a "cover box"...

Level designers often place these objects in the same faux-haphazard way, like tasteful glossy interior design magazines forgotten on a coffee table. But they're mostly responding to the game design they've been given, especially in a AAA system where combat systems feel like immutable facts. Water is wet, crunch must happen, and shooters need cover boxes. It's going to happen, live with it.

So whose fault is it, really? Well, I blame Steven Spielberg.

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Queer Futures in Game Feel


This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Queerness and Games Conference 2018.

Game feel is most known through indie game developer Steve Swink, who wrote an influential article and a book about it. While I like Swink's book and methodology, I also think it limits itself to a very narrow subset of games and feels -- focusing heavily on platformer action games, but never really thinking about the game feel of strategy games, interactive fiction, or dating simulators, etc. There's a lot of pages on the input curve in Super Mario Bros, or the camera feel in Gears of War, or the animation in Symphony of the Night, but it omits something like The Graveyard or World of Warcraft. Do those games not have game feel?

Claiming these other genres and games under the banner of game feel might've weakened Swink's argument for closely coupled cybernetic loops and virtuosic traversal across game worlds back in 2008. But now ten years later, I think the time is right to expand game feel's concerns.

Monday, September 24, 2018

Post-partum: "Ruck Me", a gay Aussie football TV game about men marking men

How the installation looked from the street; temporary transformation of Bar SK into a sports bar.
Ruck Me was a game installation commissioned for Bar SK as part of the Artworld Videogames event series, in conjunction with the MEL x NYC festival in 2018. It debuted on August 9th and ran until August 15th. For a variety of reasons, it will never be made available for download, and it will probably never be exhibited outside of Bar SK in Melbourne, Australia.

... so if you missed your chance, then, um, too bad.

This post focuses on the game's design and public reception / reaction, and it basically spoils the game. For more information on the game's themes and influences, see my earlier post "Ruck Me and its inspirations." You can also read this CNET write-up by AFL super fan Jackson Ryan for someone else's take on that night.

The Ruck Me installation consists of two parts: (1) an interactive video-based Aussie rules football league (AFL) TV simulation made by me, (2) controlled via a custom-made vinyl blow-up sex doll controller constructed by Bar SK co-proprietor Louis Roots.

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Fall 2018, teaching game development memo

Sorry I haven't posted lately, we've been pretty busy here at NYU Game Center with the start of the new semester. We're also currently in the middle of some curriculum renovation for our game design programs.

First, we're increasingly adopting JetBrains Rider as our code editor IDE of choice. It is free for students, common in commercial studios, and it's supposedly even used by the Unity CTO himself. While I find Rider to be somewhat annoying in its code style suggestions, its Unity-specific benefits seem to justify it as a teaching tool. We're also teaching source control with Rider's built-in Git support, instead of using a dedicated tool like SourceTree or GitKraken. (If this semester is a disaster though, I might go crawling back to VS Code and GitKraken.)

Second, we're starting to teach new game genres beyond mainstays like platformers. For instance, our MFA studio class now begins with a Fungus-powered visual novel project instead of a traditional platformer. This is partly a reflection of where contemporary game culture is at, where visual novels are perhaps more popular and relevant than platformers today -- but also a visual novel framing helps students focus on different development skills, like narrative design and pacing.

Third, we're gradually moving towards more of a "core studio" design school model, where every 3rd year student will be required to take core studio classes about making self-directed projects. Previously, undergraduate students would optionally enroll in these project studios, but we found that many of these students would opt out in favor of other electives -- and then they would feel unprepared to take on their capstone project in their 4th year. The goal is to normalize "bigger projects" for them. It's also a good opportunity for them to bond with the rest of the students in their class year.

As for my personal teaching load, I'm looking to debut a new class next semester about Let's Plays / game streaming culture. Game streamers are some of the most popular and visible figures in game culture, or even the larger internet as a whole, but I find that most of game academia doesn't really engage with it. It's partly a generation gap thing, where lots of middle-aged and elder millennial faculty (like me) didn't grow up with streaming and still view it as somewhat of an aberration / stain on discourse. However, there's no question that no one reads game critic blogs anymore (RIP, Radiator Blog!) and YouTube and Twitch are driving the big cultural conversations today.

As a discipline that seeks to engage with public game culture, we have an obligation to figure out how to analyze and teach this subject! So far, I'm still figuring out my course design, but I know I want to challenge students to become live game streamers themselves as part of their final project. I'll also be leaning heavily on T. L. Taylor's imminent book "Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming" for most of the readings. Maybe next year I'll be able to report back on how the course goes.

Monday, September 10, 2018

"Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt" @ Victoria and Albert Museum


I got to attend the private premiere of the new "Videogames" exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The show features a special HD remastered version of my game Rinse and Repeat, configured to run once per hour instead of once a day. At about halfway through, I'm also in a video panel of talking heads, giving a pithy quote on video game violence. Oh, and Nina Freeman and I interviewed each other for the exhibition book. I also spoke to several British newspapers for the exhibition, like The Guardian and The I.

In the past, most mega-museums have gone with nostalgic industry-approved perspectives (The Smithsonian) or they curated games as part of a generalized technology exhibition, and in doing so, barely say anything about games (Museum of Modern Art, New York). The V&A, in contrast, is the first huge museum to balance an industry production perspective with a specific political and cultural approach. The curators Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing rejected the boring historical survey methods of other museums (fuck off, Spacewar and Pac-Man) and even their commercial AAA choices feel slightly eclectic and unusual.

It is, by far, the best major museum exhibition on games that I've ever seen, and every other huge cultural institution in the world should be taking notes.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Darner's Digest, vol. 2: Why I made two new Yarn tools


Darner's Digest is a series of occasional posts about the game dialogue system Yarn.

Last time, I talked about some Yarn community news. As I've written before, I've become a sort of community booster for Yarn and Yarn Spinner because I want to see it become a standard in game narrative design -- I think it occupies a nice middle-ground between frameworks that try to do everything for you vs. coding a system yourself.

This time, I'm making the Yarn news myself. I've released two free open source Yarn / Unity tools for people to use, and I reckon they're darn good:
  • Merino, a Yarn script plugin for the Unity Editor, with built-in syntax highlighting and playtest preview. With Merino you can easily test the flow of your interactive stories without leaving the textbox or the Unity Editor.
  • Ropework, a Yarn-powered visual novel template for Unity. With Ropework you can control scene changes, sprite rendering, and sound playback, all from Yarn scripts -- and you can basically make a visual novel without writing C# code.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

No Quarter 2018 @ DUMBO Loft in Brooklyn, NY on November 30, 2018

We've just announced No Quarter 2018, a games exhibition staged by me and the team at NYU Game Center, with a big fun one-night premiere exhibition for the games at DUMBO Loft in Brooklyn, NY on November 30th (Friday, the week after Thanksgiving). The loft is a big warm space next to the Manhattan Bridge plaza; we ran No Quarter 2015 there and I loved it, so I'm jazzed to return to it for my fourth and final year in my term as curator.

This year, we're commissioning new work from: Meg Jayanth, Ethan Redd, Brianna Lei, and Ivan Safrin. All these folks have proven themselves as experienced artists and designers, and we're excited to fund a platform for more of their work.

Here's a short little curator's note I wrote for this year:
The 9th No Quarter Exhibition marks the end of my four year term as curator. During my tenure, I wanted to explore what “public games” means — games designed to be played and witnessed in the public sphere. But with the rise of game streaming and let’s plays in game culture, perhaps any game can be made into a public game. Maybe “public” is more like a verb.

So this year I’m prompting the artists with something more specific: to make a “mural game.” Murals are traditionally large format paintings, painted by more than one person, aspiring to represent collective ideas and values — and I think the mural is an excellent tool for thinking about how to “public” a game.


For more info about No Quarter check out our event website, including artist bios for this year as well as info / archives on past years. RSVPs will open a few weeks before the event, probably in late October. Until then, you're encouraged to subscribe to the weekly NYU Game Center newsletter so you get first dibs.

Hopefully see you all there! (PS: hotels and airfare in NYC are a bit cheaper around that time of year too, just sayin'...)

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Grinding as repetition as savefiles as insistence


In "Portraits and Repetition", Gertrude Stein argues that repetition is better understood as "insistence":
"... there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis." (PDF)
This rings true to me for basically any activity. Woodworking, cooking, dancing, guitar-playing, painting, writing, welding, negotiating, swimming, typing -- everything requires practice, and in practicing, we insist on the continued value of that activity each time. We can never repeat any performance or action exactly, by virtue of memory and time. Each repetition always means something slightly different, and changes the meaning of all the repetitions before it.

Game design theory formalizes this repetition as a "core gameplay loop" or "mechanic" or whatever, but let's keep following Stein's insistence on insistence for a minute:

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Radiator Australian Tour 2018

As I've mentioned before, I'm going to be visiting (Melbourne) Australia in a few days as part of the Artworld Videogames event series. Here's are the finalized dates in my event schedule, hope to see some folks for at least some of them:
  • "Ruck Me" installation premiere. Thursday, August 9 - Wednesday, August 15, 6:00 PM @ Bar SK (free)
    August 9 is the opening night party for my commissioned gay Aussie rules sports game installation "Ruck Me", and also maybe probably the one single opportunity in history to ever play or witness it??? also featuring various other sexy games by NYC-area designers throughout the weekend!... I might hangout on other nights too, but I'll definitely be there on Thursday
  • Democratic Lighting Workshop. Monday, August 13, 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM @ RMIT City Campus, Building 80, Room 002 (free)
    a talk about level design and lighting design, followed by a "democratic" workshop that focuses on audience participation, in which we all light a game world together... the goal here is to demystify lighting and 3D world design, and maybe even have a little bit of fun
  • Masterclass: Sexuality, technology, and video games. Wednesday, August 15, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM @ Australian Center for the Moving Image ($40 AUD / $28 AUD concession)
    long format introduction to sex and eroticism in games, current state of the art, research directions, and obstacles / institutional barriers, with some ideas and guidelines for "how to design a sex game"
I hear that Melbourne's been really cold and rainy lately. Can't wait!!

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

My gay Australian football game "Ruck Me" and its inspirations


I'll be premiering a new game "Ruck Me" on Thursday, August 9th at 6 PM at Bar SK. As per usual, I'll eventually publish a more thorough artist statement that spoils the game's systems and imagery, but for now I'd like to talk about its general themes and inspirations.

Ruck Me is a game installation specially made for Bar SK in Melbourne, Australia for the Artworld Videogames event series. Because it's designed specially for this installation, Ruck Me will never be made available for download (because it simply wouldn't work without the right setup)... so if you want to play it then I guess you better go visit Bar SK!

For this commission, I wanted to do something site-specific that accounts for the local Smith Street / Collingwood neighborhood around Bar SK, while also stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something new.

To that end, I've made a homoerotic Aussie rules football league (AFL) game which makes heavy use of video footage starring the local Collingwood club, to be played using a custom-made blow-up doll alt-controller by Louis Roots (designer and Bar SK proprietor).

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Darner's Digest, vol. 1


Darner's Digest is a series of occasional posts about the game dialogue system Yarn.

As I've written before, there are a variety of different narrative system plugins to use with Unity. Fungus is a full visual scripting solution ideal for beginners, Ink is great for text heavy games with huge word counts (like 80 Days), and Yarn / Yarn Spinner is a lightweight extensible Twine-like dialogue system for games about occasionally talking to characters (like Night In The Woods).

I don't know what's going on in the Fungus community, and I loosely follow Ink -- they are running an upcoming Ink Jam to encourage new users, and the maintainer Inkle Studios is doing exciting dynamic narrative research in Inkle with their upcoming game Heaven's Vault.

However, I can definitely speak to more detail about what's happening with Yarn these days though, so here's my attempt to recap:

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Tips for working with VideoPlayer and VideoClips in Unity


Traditionally, game developers use Unity for real-time 2D and 3D games and shun any use of pre-rendered video, partly out of design dogma but also because the MovieTexture system was a nightmare. However, the recently overhauled VideoPlayer functionality means that *video* games are now much more doable. You can now feasibly make that Her Story clone you always dreamed of!

I'm currently making a video game that makes heavy use of video, chopped into many different video clips. It's been fun trying to figure out how to build basic video functionality like playlists and clean transitions between clips, except in Unity.

The thing they don't tell you about re-inventing wheels is that it's fun and exciting to re-invent the wheel, and it gives much more appreciation for the craft that goes into wheels. It was fun to think about how a live telecast cues up video footage on multiple monitors, and how a real-world broadcast works, and I learned a lot about why they do it like that.

Let's talk video in Unity.

Friday, June 29, 2018

The Forgotten City (Skyrim mod) as dense quest


This post kind of spoils (but not really) some of the Skyrim quest mod The Forgotten City.

Bethesda open world RPG games have developed certain quest tropes. One trope is the conflicting stories quests like Two Sides of the Coin (Oblivion), In My Time of Need (Skyrim), and A Business Proposition (Elder Scrolls Online) which present two NPCs with conflicting stories and no real way to discern who is right, so you just have to pick a side and hope you feel good about it. Naturally, this provokes heated debates among fans, such as this epic two year 500+ post multi-thread argument about which NPC was ultimately truthful in Skyrim.

I heard about the popular Skyrim mod The Forgotten City after their E3 2018 retail remake announcement. After playing it, I think The Forgotten City exists within a different open world quest tradition of complex "dense quests" with many characters and possibilities in a small space. It reminds me a bit of Whodunit (Oblivion), Tenpenny Towers (Fallout 3), Beyond the Beef (Fallout New Vegas), and Diamond City Blues (Fallout 4)... the retail version of Skyrim conspicuously doesn't have any comparable dense quest, so The Forgotten City sort of fills this gap.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

The DreamboxXx Bundle


Me and my collaborators on The DreamboxXx project (the commission for my recent game Dream Hard) have launched a queer arcade bundle. In the tradition of past social justice oriented game bundles like Devs With Ferguson, the proceeds from this bundle will benefit local queer / trans / pro-immigrant nonprofits.

It's a limited-time offer, running from June 24 - July 24, and it consists of 8 games for $8, a 69% discount off the $26.23 retail value. (Nice!!) Here's the blurb / more info:
Most of these games are for two players, all can be played on the keyboard, and the majority are cooperative. Most of these games are also experimental, and don't really fit the standard idea of a traditional arcade game. These games include:
  • queer sex party simulator about lovingly eating cuties before the last train
  • stark auto-biographical explorations of social anxiety
  • a day at the beach, because you deserve it
  • an abstract notebook about migration and queerness
  • retro 3D brawler about fighting fascists, in glorious Playstation-era graphics
  • gay space RPG about fucking friendly aliens
  • a competitive arena game about gay orbs... I mean, it's orbtown, enough said
  • cooperative strategy game where you literally create a safe space large enough to rescue the entire planet
Most importantly, all these games were made by LGBTQ people to support their community! Proceeds from this bundle will go toward local social justice non-profits of each artist's choice, such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (local legal-aid organization serving low-income people of color who are trans, intersex, or nonbinary) and Make The Road New York (local grassroots organization dedicated to immigrant rights and working class communities)
We hope you consider donating toward these worthy causes, and thanks for everyone's support!

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Dream Hard as queer brawler defense



This post spoils the gameplay and ending of my game Dream Hard.

In collaboration with local arcade collective Death by Audio Arcade, me and several other gay / queer artists made games for a Brooklyn queer arts space called The Dreamhouse. My contribution was a retro low polygon 3D brawler called Dream Hard. If you ever find yourself around the Bushwick or Ridgewood neighborhoods in New York City, you can play this (and many other queer games) on The DreamboxXx cabinet at The Dreamhouse.

While making this game, I was interested in what it means to appropriate a game genre with queer intent, and I wanted to figure out why the brawler genre would be a good fit for this kind of aesthetic. Some of my early prototyping and design direction is already covered in an earlier post. I wanted something that recognizably belonged to the arcade era, while staying fairly simple and accessible to a general audience.

Much of my personal memory of arcades focuses on big licensed beat 'em up games like the X-Men brawler cabinet or The Simpsons arcade tie-in. I also liked playing old 16-bit console games like Golden Axe II or Streets of Rage 2 on the Sega Genesis, but neither of those franchises exists today. Other than a few notable indie releases, the classic brawler game is mostly dead. I wanted to channel my nostalgia for these games toward The Dreamhouse.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

PRACTICE 2018, June 21-23 in New York City


Hey all, just a quick reminder about PRACTICE 2018, a yearly eclectic game design conference put on by my employers and colleagues at NYU Game Center. It's happening very soon, during this coming weekend in New York City, June 21-23.

I go to stuff like GDC all the time, and I'm often frustrated by huge industry events' limitations -- they're huge crowded anonymous affairs that must cater to an entire field and assume a wide general audience, or they focus too narrowly on a technical detail without reflecting on deeper implications. At this point, GDC probably can't change itself very much, but what if there were a bunch of different events that could do what GDC can't?

So I think this is one way of making the game design conference we'd like to see in the world. The PRACTICE speaker lineup is tightly curated, seeking a variety of deep case studies as well as deep primers outside the niche world of video game design. Generally, there's usually at least one tabletop game design speaker and one sports design speaker, and this variety helps a lot. In the past, there's been professional poker players, race car data scientists, breakdancers, rock climbers, all going into the actual problems and examples they work with -- as well as AAA game designers talking about combat systems and indie developers talking about game feel. There are zero 101-level intro talks here.

Basically, this is a conference for working game designers who already kinda follow what's going on, but appreciate deep critical takes on what's happening. Unlike a lot of these types of events, the post-talk Q&A actually has some good audience questions and isn't terrible! It's also great if you want a more laidback environment where you can chat with everyone, instead of running to the next party and apologizing to the folks you missed.

If you live in the New York City area, I hope to see you there -- and if you live outside NYC, maybe you should look at some last minute airfare deals... and the city is especially lovely this time of year too, you know...


Thursday, June 7, 2018

Why I'm not super excited about Valve's new Steam policy

In case you haven't heard: Valve recently announced it won't attempt to moderate the content on Steam anymore except when legally required to, or when it's "obvious trolling", whatever that is.

On the face of it, this is supposedly a net-win for queer people and marginalized creators. Supposedly I'll be able to publish as much dick as I want! But after many years of dealing with platforms, and their intentionally vague policies and selective enforcement, I've grown extremely wary of these many public statements that promise to do better, and then never do. Even if this new policy is for real, I can easily imagine a future where Valve suddenly changes its mind to disallow my games -- I'm used to being treated as a "controversial" edge case in games, and all these companies have successfully trained me not to trust them or take their word for it.

There's a lot to unpack in Valve's post, and you can read a lot of different editorials all around the internet for the full scope of those ideas. Personally I'm not interested in regulating "spam games" or "asset flips", and my analysis will focus more on my experience and attitude in using Steam as a developer.

I think one big problem with "Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store" is that it doesn't recognize how some developers are more On The Steam Store than others.

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Remastering Rinse and Repeat

Rinse and Repeat remastered, for Radiator 3 (2018)
Rinse and Repeat (2015)
I'm nearing the end of the remaster process for my shower game Rinse and Repeat, as part of a future re-release planned for late 2018. As I've said before: if you have the time and energy, I highly recommend remastering your games -- you get to revisit all the compromises and sacrifices you inflicted on yourself, and now you're not desperate to get the game out the door -- you can finally do things calmly and properly.

The time difference helps you see the project with new eyes. In my case, it's been about two and a half years since the original Rinse and Repeat release in October 2015. Game engine technology has changed, my skills and tastes have changed, and it's surprisingly therapeutic to revisit my past decisions. Like, why did I give everything a weird green tinge? I don't remember. Maybe I had good reasons that I've now forgotten.

Here's some of the specific changes I made to the shower scene, and some of my reasoning:

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

On the indie story RPG's use of "encounter-space" and Fortune-499


This post spoils some gameplay systems / moments in Fortune-499 and its general themes, but none of the specific plot events.

I just finished playing Fortune-499, a short stylish story RPG replete with millennial career angst and light deckbuilding. It does what other strong indie story RPGs like Undertale do: it actually questions the logic of its battle and progression systems, exploring its own design space for narrative effect.

Few video games ever do this. Acclaimed AAA RPGs like Final Fantasy 12 ask you to fight many monsters and level-up via "license boards" or whatever, but rarely explore what those metaphors mean / interrogate the logic of these metaphors within the game world.

So if a game is about programming your party members with "gambits" as a metaphor for command and decision-making, then isn't it weird that you have to buy gambits at shops? Does that mean poor people in this fantasy world literally have less sophisticated reasoning and mental capacity because they can't afford better gambits? Or if a character has low self-esteem, shouldn't that affect their license board / upgrade tree, which is a metaphor for self-improvement and growing-up -- or vice versa, if there's a story beat where they renew their commitment and self-confidence, shouldn't they get a million experience points to emphasize their growth? (This isn't over-thinking it, this is just a demand for designers to follow through on their metaphors.)

Of course Final Fantasy 12 isn't alone on this, and AAA games don't usually care about this dissonance / disconnect, while most gamers probably don't even notice it anymore. However, I think Fortune-499 is one of those rare exquisite indie story RPGs that really does care enough to ask questions about its own game systems.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Games as Research symposium, after-action report


A month ago I attended a one-day Games As Research symposium, hosted by TAG at Concordia University and organized by Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr. If you want my rawest thoughts, here's my live tweet thread from that day.

I learned a lot about design history and current methodologies for studying how a game is made. Here's some of the common topics and threads that we kept coming back to, and a brief summary of each presentation:

Friday, May 18, 2018

So you want to try playing Thief 1


I've been streaming some Thief 1 for the past month, which has gotten some people interested in trying the game for themselves. You definitely should, especially if you like eclectic first person games, immersive sims, open world games, or walking simulators... it's almost 20 years old, yet it still feels really different and fresh and distinct from anything today.

That said, it can be a bit tricky to play for modern tastes, so here's a bit of advice for getting into Thief:

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Radiator does Australia, Summer 2018 tour (but, like, Winter in Australia though?): Artworld Videogames, August 9-29


People of Australia! Now hear this!

The kind generous people at Bar SK and the notorious Doug Wilson of RMIT Games, in partnership with National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and Australian Center for the Moving Image (ACMI), and in conjunction with MEL&NYC Festival (phew, this is a lot of organizations) are running an "Art/world Video_Games" month and bringing three New York City area game designers to Melbourne, Australia this August.

Those people are me, Nicole He, and Zach Gage.

I'll be flying to Melbourne first, with a kick-off exhibition at Bar SK, later followed by a tag-team master class with Nicole He at ACMI. After that, I fly back to NYC and hand over all ceremonial duties to Nicole and Zach, who I'm sure will have further events / appearances planned. For more info and updates on the full Art_world Video-Games schedule, check out the main event page.

While in Melbourne, I'll probably try to hold some kind of open office hours in the afternoon (especially if it's raining) where anyone can talk to me about whatever (... well, within reason...) and I will graciously allow folks to buy me beers (... within reason).

See everyone in August.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

new interview: Tone Control with Steve Gaynor, Episode 26


At GDC 2018, me and Steve Gaynor sat in an empty rehearsal room and nerded out about level design and stuff for nearly two hours. Not only that, but it was also recorded for his developer-focused podcast "Tone Control"?! Make sure you also check out the rest of the Tone Control episodes too, like my colleague Bennett Foddy feebly attempting to defend cricket to a US audience.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Dreamhouse process diary and prototyping notes + a better retro 3D low precision vertex shader


In collaboration with local NYC-area arcade collective Death by Audio Arcade, me and several other gay / queer artists are making small games for an event at a Brooklyn queer arts space called Dreamhouse / (formerly known as The Spectrum). My contribution is shaping up to be a retro low polygon 3D brawler called "Dream Hard."

If you want to play it, you'll have to visit The Dreamhouse, which will house the only public display of the game in the world (for the time being), starting in late May 2018.

I don't have much time to work on this, so grounding the concept firmly within a clear retro arcade genre helps me work quickly with less realistic visuals and simplified character art, while also engaging deeply with the arcade tradition of game design. Specifically I'm riffing off one of my favorite genres, beat 'em up games like Die Hard Arcade, X-Men Arcade, Simpsons Arcade, or the iconic Street of Rage series, which all offer breezy brawling with strange setpieces and colorful sets.

Here's some prototype GIFs and notes from my development process...

Friday, May 4, 2018

What is the game university for?

I did not go to game design school -- not that I had a choice, since only a handful of game design programs existed when I attended college. Like many in the industry, I'm "self-taught" -- which is to say, I relied on informal learning from a network of creative communities and random online tutorials. Today, I teach in one of the better-rated and better-funded game design programs in the world. With my self-taught background, I'm often suspicious of the idea of formal technical education. So here's my experience with teaching game development for the past 5-6 years:

There's often very loud implications from students, parents, and industry developers that we, as universities, are never doing enough to prepare students for the "real world". This criticism exists alongside the skyrocketing cost of US higher education, the ivory tower elitism of academia, and a societal shift toward privileging "practical" "hard" skills like science and engineering, instead of "useless" "soft" skills like literature or ethics. This anxiety is understandable, but it also plays into a very politically conservative vision of universities: that we exist only to train a productive and compliant workforce.

Danette Beatty recently tweeted something that seems very reasonable and actionable, and her thoughtful thread started a long important conversation on generalism vs specialization and how we ought to teach game development... but a lot of people don't read beyond the first tweet in a Twitter thread so I'd like to get into why "set your students up with the skills to actually get jobs that are in demand in the industry" has been complicated for me as a game dev teacher.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

A MAZE 2018 after-action report


This year I attended A MAZE 2018 in Berlin. It's still probably one of the best video game events in the world; it happens in one of the coolest places in one of the coolest cities around. In the day, you basically hangout in a beer garden and drink some surprisingly affordable beer. At night, hordes of punky post-apocalyptic Berliner teenagers hangout and dance. This unique audience and format makes it all feel pretty special, and I think this year's award show host Tim Rogers put it best: usually people at games events are frantically planning where they're going afterwards, but at A MAZE, the after-party is the festival itself, and many people often linger into the wee early hours of the morning in true Berlin fashion.

There's also a strong participatory focus at A MAZE. Each night, there was an open booth for anyone to plug into and DJ, and "open screens" for anyone to exhibit their projects. There were also stand-up comedy routines, hypertalks, and a "devolution" show featuring various old builds of Superhot to understand its 3-4 year dev cycle. In that spirit of experimentation, I ran a "democratic lighting workshop" where I solicited lighting suggestions from the audience, and then attempted to realize their designs in a Unity scene. We laughed and we learned!!!

But wait, that's not all...

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Advice for making a game design / game dev portfolio


After advising several game dev students on their portfolio websites, I realized I was basically giving the same advice and pointing out the same kinds of issues, and maybe I should write about it. So here's some thoughts for students making a portfolio:

First, figure out your audience. Who is your portfolio primarily for? If you want to get a AAA game job, you should try to tailor it to the norms of that industry -- if it's for some sort of school admissions application, then think about what an admissions committee would want to see. A small indie studio will want to see that you're versatile and that you won't need much supervision to solve problems. Each situation will have different expectations for a portfolio.

A portfolio is more curated than a personal site. A personal site can be whatever you want, and represent all your diverse interests and complex personality. In contrast, someone hiring for a programmer job doesn't care whether you play guitar or whether you draw sometimes, and anyway, they have 50 more applicants to look at! Your still life paintings are important to your identity, but probably irrelevant to a gameplay programming position, so you might want to consider keeping your portfolio separate from your personal website.

Next, here's some more specific advice:

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

On "Marathon" as an almighty whoosh



This post spoils my game Marathon.

Marathon is a 0-99 hour game about the athletic endurance required to masturbate for very long durations. I only spent about 6 hours making the game at this year's Nordic Game Jam, but I do intend to revisit this prototype and update it later. (Coming in Q4 2018: Marathon HD?)

The game is a pretty simple one-button timing game: you have to hold down [SPACE] on your keyboard to arouse yourself, but you must avoid arousing yourself for too long or else you might prematurely climax; similarly, if you avoid holding [SPACE] for too long, then you will fall flaccid and you won't be able to get it up again. I wanted to keep the mechanic simple because I didn't want to focus particularly on strategy or skill. Instead, I wanted to test endurance, and how long a player would be able to keep edging themselves without getting sloppy and/or bored.

The game concept is heavily inspired by merritt k's article "The Man Trying to Break the World Record for the Longest Time Spent Masturbating", an interview with a man named Drake Hardy who is competing for the world record in time spent masturbating:

Monday, April 9, 2018

"Sex and Drugs and Video Games" at Nordic Game Jam 2018 - Friday, April 13th at 4:45pm


This weekend I'll be in Copenhagen to speak during the opening program of the 2018 Nordic Game Jam on Friday, April 13th. The talk is called "Sex and Drugs and Video Games"... it's intended mostly as an introduction / primer for thinking about sex games and intimacy in play, since most of the audience will be younger people or newer devs who might not be so familiar with this particular diversity of indie games.

Here's the blurb:
There are already many video games about simulating popular real-life activities such as jumping and killing, but what if there were video games about things that people never do, like sex and drugs? In this talk, we will explore this fascinating frontier of game design and learn about this rich history and community. Because maybe sex is a real-life activity too?
If you'll be at the jam, feel free to say hello. I'll probably jam a bit on Friday night and Saturday, but unfortunately I can't stay long and I have to fly back to New York on Sunday. See you around maybe!

Sunday, April 8, 2018

American Choppers debate the arches in a sewer level from Half-Life 2

This happened last night. I'm so so sorry.

I don't have the time to actually fit this into the American Choppers meme template... but at any rate, I'm clearly Paul Sr., because I'm clearly right and I also deserve the last word!

Full tweet thread embed (what Twitter calls a "moment") is below:

Thursday, April 5, 2018

A call for video game neorealism

Bicycle Thieves (1948)
This is adapted from a spur-of-the-moment Lost Levels 2018 talk.

In video games, we understand realism as meaning photorealism: a hyper-real commercial aesthetic that's cynically detached from politics, emotion, and reality. Photorealism is also about escalating the video game value system, where high production AAA games are generally seen as more "immersive" and well-crafted than something that's less photorealistic. These are supposedly the videogamiest video games.

But outside of video game aesthetics, realism means much more. There's a centuries old tradition of literary realism, that sought to plunge the reader in the banal moments of everyday life. Social realism was a movement to paint more of the poor and working class, while socialist realism was a state-sponsored hyper-heroic style about personifying socialist thought. And today, we arguably live in an era of capitalist realism, where art and culture cannot imagine a world outside of capitalism. Reality is not a fixed thing -- there is not one realism, but many realisms, and each realism has a different type of commitment to reality.

So to imagine a world outside of photorealism, I'd like to build-off of another historical moment in realism -- and that is (Italian) neorealism in film.

Friday, March 30, 2018

GDC 2018: How To Light A Level, slides and transcript


This post is aimed at beginner / intermediate designers. It's a summary of the talk I gave at the GDC 2018 Level Design Workshop with David Shaver (Naughty Dog) for the "Invisible Intuition" double-feature session.

David's slides on blockmesh / layout are here (PDF) with case studies from The Last of Us / Uncharted. You can also get my full slide deck PDF here, and my speaker notes PDF here... but I don't know when GDC will upload the talk to YouTube, sorry.


A very brief and simple history of light starts with the sun. Then let's not forget about fire, controlled burning in gas lamps, incandescent light bulbs with a filament... and these days, there’s a stronger focus on more energy-efficient fluorescent lights, and LED lighting is also becoming more common.

It’s tempting to think of this as a story about technology and progress and older light sources becoming obsolete... but the light bulb did not make the sun obsolete, and the LED does not make fire obsolete! We still use fire as a light source all the time -- in our birthday candles, in our campfires, in our romantic candle-lit dinners -- in fact, I hate those little fake flickering LED candles, because a real flame has a unique quality to it, you know?

Fire hasn’t disappeared from the world, but rather our culture around fire has changed. That is, fire used to be a common and practical tasklight in Shakespeare's time, but now it feels more like special decoration for a special occasion. As a designer, you need to sensitize yourself to how light feels and conveys these ideas, because this is how you communicate those moods to the player.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Interview with merritt k for MEL Magazine

merritt k kindly interviewed me for MEL Magazine, a publication which covers culture "from a male point of view" but also seems to employ a fair amount of not-men? Anyway, the discussion mostly focused on video game culture and masculinity. I argue that video game masculinity missed a few developmental steps, and I'm dutifully trying to plug that hole with my work. Here's an excerpt of my tirade:
[...] I bring it up because I think the game industry’s anti-sex stance means we never figured out the equivalent of teenage sex comedy games — so game masculinity jumped from a love of cruel mindless violence to a stilted masculinity about being a Cool Dad who raises their daughter to be a Cool Girl, which is totally unearned, right? Video games cannot continue to repress this whole “sexual anxiety” part of masculinity and growing up. Fuck that shit! You don’t get to reconcile with feminism until you actually put the work in.
Feel free to read the rest of the interview, I'm told I say some good words in it. Thanks to merritt for the thoughtful questioning.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Dispatches from GDC 2018

In keeping with a tradition I've done for GDC 2012 and GDC 2015, I like to try to condense general moods and topics at GDC. What happened there?...

Post-indiepocalyptic. In past years, I've remarked on the tension between AAA developers vs commercial indie devs vs non-commercial "artists" -- that tension isn't gone, but it's certainly not as big of an issue anymore. Everything everywhere is kind of terrible for everyone. So many people are making so little money that it's hard to distinguish their precarity from another precarity. Besides, a massive political shift is now underway in the form of...

Unionization. I was one of maybe 150 people who attended the unionization roundtable session. My live tweet thread is here if you want my version of what happened. Throughout GDC I heard so many stories that made me realize working conditions are worse than I imagined, and there's a shocking sense of resignation when I spoke to one AAA dev who predicted they were going to burnout with their next 100 hour workweek / 6 month crunch, like it was just this inevitable natural disaster that was definitely going to happen... As someone who trains students in game development, I guess I'm extremely concerned about throwing my students into this giant machine that will mercilessly devour them! (For what it's worth, the IGDA moderator Jen MacLean seems to have walked-back some of her anti-worker positions as a result of the roundtable.)

Generations. I don't know how a lot of other "established" indies feel, but this year when I went to a party or looked out into a crowd, I didn't recognize as many faces as I thought I would. Maybe this is just what happens in every industry, as more people burnout or find something better or in some cases even die. I spent a good amount of my GDC trying to meet new people, and that was utterly exhausting, but I'm still glad I made the effort, because this year felt...

Gayer? I met so many queer and trans people at GDC this year. And one night when I asked someone whether they were going to "the gay party", they asked me to clarify my question: "which gay party?" (!)... As always, I'm reluctant to praise diversity efforts because that implies diversity has been achieved and no more work is needed, but I did feel like there were generally more LGBTQ people everywhere at GDC, or at least more than before, and it was kind of nice.

Overall. Everyone was tired, but there was a sense that maybe it was worth staying.

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Tips for talking to Robert Yang at GDC


Everyone's doing a bunch of GDC advice for first-time GDC attendees on Twitter, so I thought I'd chime in with a few tips of my own. Here's a helpful tutorial for how to have a successful social interaction with me, assuming you'd ever want to:
  1. Do you see me? I look like this. Or try to sneak a peek at the name on the badge. It should say "Robert Yang" on it.
  2. Are you sure that person isn't Brendon Chung? Brendon looks more like this; we're about the same height, but he's a bit more handsome and has a deep voice, and I have larger lips and generally sound louder and shriller.
  3. If we met at some past event or party one time, and I don't regularly interact with you in-person or on Twitter, then there's a good chance I won't remember you or your name. (I'm sorry in advance.) If you want to remind me that I should've remembered your name, you can briefly mention something like "we met at GDC last year" -- but don't mention a specific number of months, days, or hours, because then it'll seem like you've been pedantically tracking our non-relationship.
  4. (For advanced users only:) I don't respond well to praise or compliments, unless you deliver the compliment in a tone that borders on sarcastic / flippant while still remaining essentially earnest. Your goal is to perform a chipper yet world-weary knowingness.
  5. If we're talking but you don't want to talk to me anymore, then just say something like "well it was nice talking to you" and walk away. If we're in a group or cluster of people, then just let the conversation naturally die down, and then turn to someone else and subtly emote that you're not paying attention to me anymore.
  6. Whatever you do, don't tell me that you read this guide.
If you're looking for a more genuinely useful primer for going to GDC, see "GDC Advice for young first-time attendees, 2017 edition"