Thursday, March 19, 2015

Lighting theory for 3D games, part 2: a formal approach to light design, and light as depth

Here's how I generally, theoretically, approach lighting in my games and game worlds. Part 2 is about light and function, mostly for level design.

In part 1, I talked about how different light sources have different connotations to the viewer, and these meanings are culturally constructed. In New York City today, an antique Edison bulb connotes trendy bourgeois expense, but 50 years ago it might've been merely eccentric, and 150 years ago it would've been a thrilling phenomenological novelty.

But people rarely intellectualize lighting this way, in, like, your own bedroom. In your daily middle class Western life you don't usually agonize over the existential quandaries of electricity, you just flip the light switch without looking. When in familiar places, we experience light as a resource or tool and take it for granted. So much of our everyday relationship with light concerns its functionality and what it enables us to do.

Monday, March 16, 2015

#altgames is the no-fault divorce that indie games needs

I'm cautious. I've been watching #altgames from a distance. Quite a few years ago, Jim Rossignol said I was supposed to be part of an "alt mod" scene, but by then I was tapering off most of my work as a modder so I'm not sure if such a community ever really materialized anyway. I generally don't like labels with "alt" in them since the alt-ernative can be said to be anything, but I do like what TJ Thomas said at Indiecade East, and I like a lot of games that are "altgames", and I think much of my work shares whatever those altgames sensibilities are... so there's probably some kind of consensus, we just have to keep articulating it?

In my GDC 2015 diary, I confessed I felt disconnected from fellow indies who were concerned with running small businesses and contract negotiations. No one wants a civil war over what "indie" really means, or a witch hunt over who is authentically "indie" or whatever. We all have different relationships with games and that's okay as long as you're not promoting hate speech or something. At the same time, it's ridiculous to pretend that I'm not bored out of my mind during countless GDC conversation(s) lingering on advertising revenues and Indie Fund deals and sales figures, and then people get visibly annoyed with me when I don't say anything and check my phone instead. Where is the way out?

This morning, Zoe Quinn's altgames manifesto at Offworld really crystallized this for me:

#altgames can be the no-fault divorce that we need where we don't blame each other, where we even stay friends with contemporary indie games. We can still have dinner parties and share custody of the kids! However, we also have very different goals and concerns, so let's try not being married anymore, and maybe we'll all be happier for it.

FAQ:

Saturday, March 14, 2015

"Local Level Design" at Different Games 2015, April 3-4 in Brooklyn, New York

"American Corinthian" via
Paolo Pedercini
In about 3 weeks at Different Games 2015 in Brooklyn, I'll be speaking about "local level design", a practice of level design that I setup in opposition to industrial AAA level design methods and procedural level design. Local level design is level design concerned with player community, sustainability, and context; it rejects a top-down formalism that demands game levels exist as territories with strategic affordances orchestrated by an architect, and it sidesteps a technological imperative to engineer and articulate a fixed grammar that a game engine must understand. Instead, local level design is highly conceptual, to the extent that few people actually play these levels at all.

If you'll be around the New York City area in the beginning of April, come hangout at Different Games, and perhaps see me talk! Or if you can't, but still want to support the conference, then know that they do accept donations.

Details and stuff (but no schedule yet) are at their website. See you there maybe!

Monday, March 9, 2015

GDC 2015 dispatches / minutiae

Here are some thoughts I thought during GDC 2015.
  • Virtual reality: I didn't get to try Valve's fancy new thing that requires everyone to clear out a mini-holodeck in their apartment, but I was pleasantly surprised by Google Cardboard. I tried it once before, and disliked it, but I tried it again and now I think it's not bad as a VR solution. I appreciate the transparency and "honesty of materials" -- it is basically a cardboard box that holds a phone to your face, it doesn't try to pretend to be something else, while still delivering on the all-important affordance of VR headset as elaborate blindfold.
  • Phony war: The big technical news of free engine access for Unity 5, Unreal 4, and Source 2 were inflated non-announcements. They've been practically giving away Unity and Unreal for a while now; 90% of Unity feature-set is free, and Unreal only required you to subscribe for a month and then you could cancel it and keep it... and the details and workflow for Source 2 aren't public yet, other than a requirement to offer first look rights to Valve or something? So again I think there's no real story here, other than positioning these engines as the new "big three" versus Unreal, CryEngine, and idTech trinities of yore. 
  • Generations: This year, quite a few NYU students attended GDC for the first time, and I felt some modicum of responsibility. For better or worse, a lot of young people invest GDC week with a lot of emotions, and it's really important that community elders (ugh, am I one of those? let's hope not) are there to help nurture their spirits. Things like the annual Wild Rumpus party or Lost Levels or Richard Lemarchand's GDC Feet tour are about articulating and performing considerate attitudes toward games and play, to imagine this culture as something shared and owned by everyone. A lot of teaching game development is about emotional education -- to deal with people saying difficult things about your work, the ability to absorb success or absorb your disappointment and not let it crush you... so please, I beg you, think of the children!
  • Biz-culture: In contrast to what I just said in the previous bullet, I also sensed an increasingly fractured community. There's a steadily widening gulf between a games space deeply concerned with sales figures and how to negotiate with platform holders, and a games space striving to reject the existing market system and formulate alternatives. We are increasingly talking past each other, so I think a lot of "indie love" politics is about plastering over these divides and avoiding difficult arguments that we probably can't avoid forever. Films like GameLoading are about doing the work of uniting disparate artistic approaches and communities as a movement, but sometimes it smells more like a possibly empty "Radio for Change" gesture, and I wonder when the coalitions will start dissolving and we all realize we actually don't have much in common. But maybe being a family means pretending everything is going to be ok? Let's do it for the kids.

Saturday, February 28, 2015

GDC 2015 dance card

Hello. Here's some of my GDC plans. See you blog readers at some of them! Don't be afraid to say hey.
  • MONDAY: I fly-in and arrive in San Francisco.
  • TUESDAY: Level Design In a Day track. I'll be on-duty in the panel all day, then I'm presenting my talk at the very end of the track at 5 PM
  • WEDNESDAY: I'll be spending much of my time at #LostLevels, and then hanging out at the annual Wild Rumpus party. This is pretty much the only time at GDC where I dance; everywhere else, the music is undanceable or the nerds refuse to dance.
  • THURSDAY: I'll probably visit Alcatraz; there's an Ai Weiwei exhibition currently going on. I'm also looking forward to the Adventure Design minitalks later that night.
  • FRIDAY: I'll go to a talk or two maybe? Also might flee Moscone and just take a nice walk around Land's End / Sutro Baths. I guess I'll see what I feel like.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Hurt Me Plenty, patched to RC5 + now with Linux build

I've updated my spanking game Hurt Me Plenty to version RC5... by removing the Leap Motion support which seemed to be crashing for certain users. Thanks to all the people who e-mailed me to report the crash / sorry for any inconvenience.

If you want to play the game with a Leap Motion, download version RC4; if you don't have a Leap Motion or you were having problems playing before, then download version RC5.

I also updated the in-game graphics with an actual mouse graphic, so it should also be easier to play / figure out what you're supposed to do. Oh and I finally did a Linux build, it's x86 / x86_64 universal.

Game is available for "pay what you want" here: http://radiatoryang.itch.io/hurt-me-plenty

Friday, February 20, 2015

Radiator University, Fall 2015 catalog (excerpts)

CENG 395: ESCAPING A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (STUDIO INTENSIVE)
In this class, we will analyze a variety of escape narratives, from stage magicians to US slave narratives to feminist memoirs to prison break films to the modern war refugee story, to articulate a robust "aesthetic of escape." When is escape possible and honorable, and when is escape futile or cowardly? From this cultural survey, we will conceptualize and construct a real-life "escape room" puzzle installation that attempts to invoke and honor this long and complex tradition of escapism in its materials, environmental storytelling, construction process, and puzzle design. (2 credits, Sao Paulo campus.)
Prerequisites: ARCH 211 History of Prisons, CENG 200 Intro to Plumbing Electrical and HVAC.

HTECH 201: HAMLET ON THE HOLODECK
Using a combination of 3D scanning, motion capture, and virtual reality technologies, we will literally attempt to recreate a scene from Hamlet on a "holodeck." In doing so, we will also critique the rhetoric of immersion that permeates popular fantasies about virtual reality and narrative, and align it with contemporary interpretations of Hamlet. For instance, in Shakespeare's time, the ghost-revenge plot was already a well-established trope -- thus, one could argue that Hamlet is essentially a self-aware character who knows he is in a cliched video game, and wonders whether he can transcend the military-entertainment complex's demand for graphic violence. (3 credits, Spring semester only.)
Prerequisites: ENGL 314 Elizabethan Literature, HTECH 100 Intro to Holographic Interfaces, at least 1 semester in any Melee Combatives lab.

EDUC 999: STANFORD UNIVERSITY EXPERIMENT (cross-listed: PSYCH 999)
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a notorious battery of mandated sadism that masqueraded as a scientific exploration of human nature. Using similar terms, we will attempt to build and perform a model "Stanford University" within our existing university, replete with its own facilities, students, faculty, and administrators. In the best case scenario, basic legal and ethical concerns for humane treatment of human test subjects will prevent us from running the experiment at all, thus implying that Stanford University itself is an oppressive institution barely distinguishable from a supposedly artificial and isolated prison. (no-credit pass-nopass only, Fall semester only.)
Prerequisites: CENG 395 Escaping a Room of One's Own

Previous semesters are available here: Fall 2014, Spring 2013

Esteemed alumni: have you recently thought about making a large donation to Radiator University? All donations to...

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

We are drugs; speculative dev tools and psychedelic hologram futures.

This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Indiecade East 2015, where the theater was way too small for the crowd, so not many people got to see the talk... sorry / oh well. Here's basically what I said:

Our story begins on October 8th, 2014, on a very special episode of the Late Show with David Letterman. He was ending that episode with a musical guest from Japan -- a holographic vocaloid named Hatsune Miku. Pay attention to Letterman's barely-veiled incredulity as he introduces her. He can't believe the words coming out of his mouth:



But what really makes this moment is the ending, after the performance. Letterman doesn't even know what to say, and he knows he doesn't know what to say. The experience was completely overwhelming, so Letterman has to somehow pivot back to interpret it for his audience (mostly moms and dads from Milwaukee) and all he can muster is a facile comparison to "being on Willie Nelson's bus." (Willie Nelson, if you're not familiar, is a celebrity notorious for his drug use, among other things.)

The meaning is both clear and agreeable: Hatsune Miku is drugs.