The limits of a conceptual VR student game; and what would a "better" game about 9/11 look like?

The internet has been abuzz about "8:46", "a narrative driven experience designed for virtual reality, which makes you embody an office worker in the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 events."

The game itself suffers from a lot of problems. If I were to ignore the politics, there's plenty of production values to critique -- the characters have blobby sculpts, inconsistent lighting, and stilted voice acting -- the particles are really really awkward -- and the one thing I like is the floorplan, especially the cramped corner office you begin in, which feels like a pretty authentic detail of old NYC office buildings.

But who are we kidding, this game is totally a political work, and it is much more generous to the developers to interpret it that way. Most people are just going to talk about this game instead of actually playing it, which is OK, and that's what compels me to write about it: I think this is a very flawed conceptual work, and I want to talk about why that is.

(1) TECHNOLOGY. Using virtual reality was not a good idea for this project, especially in this early generation of VR where it is mostly positioned as a nascent platform and consumer market that desperately needs to prove itself. Anything using VR in these early years is, inherently, saying, "look at me, I'm using VR!"

That's an OK thing to say, but it centers the technology instead of what you're saying with the technology, which is probably not what you want to do for a 9/11 game that's supposedly about respect for the dead rather than how this cool new peripheral? To be clear, I think you could make a game that powerfully critiques Western attitudes toward the dead and who is allowed to talk about the dead; I don't think this is that game.

Attend the 2015 Queerness And Games Conference at UC Berkeley, October 17-18

QGCon 2015 at UC Berkeley has just put up their list of speakers and sessions. If you'll be around the Bay Area that weekend (in about a month!) then I highly recommend attending, it's a compelling mix of game developers and academic theorists, and there's no other games conference quite like it. Here's some interesting-sounding sessions:

• “Soft-Skinned, Hard-Coded: Straight/White/Washing in Video Games”
• “Witches and Wardrobes: Femme Play in Games and the Development of Be Witching”
• “Games of Death: Playing Bruce Lee”
• “Sex Appeal, Shirtless Men, and Social Justice: Diversity in Desire and Fanservice in Games”
• “Queer Avatar Construction Leads to Homonormative Play”
• “Affection Games in a World That Needs Them”
• “Masculinity in Late Final Fantasy”
• “Infinite Play in Games of Love, Sex and Romance”
• “Degamification”
• “Writing and Selling Queer Bots: Sext Adventure Design Post Mortem”
• (... and so many more!)

Registration is free and open to the public, and they also accept donations in the form of "sponsor tickets" -- please support the communities and institutions you want to see in games!

Game Development Studies reading list, Fall 2015

In the vein of "Platform Studies" or "Code Studies", we might consider a "Game Development Studies" ("Console Studies?") -- a field of research investigating the technical and material aspects of video games, from early prototypes to production code to distribution. How have various processes of game development changed over time? How does that influence what games are, or how they are perceived?

Here are six books that, I think, do much of that work:

Queerness and Games Conference 2015, call for proposals, due by July 1

The good folks at QGCon at UC Berkeley need YOUR session proposals for their third year running. I participated in the first year it ran, 2013, and I enjoyed the mix of scholarly rigor and casual atmosphere, there a pleasant mix of academics and not-academics that's very refreshing.

You can be a super academic-y academic and present a paper, or you can talk about a game you made, or discuss a specific games community you're part of, or even relate your personal experience with games and/or run a workshop. They're pretty accommodating and welcoming and supportive, even if you've never given a talk before. It's also pretty unique, there's really no other conference on the circuit that even tries to approach these topics.

I highly recommend submitting a proposal by July 1st, especially if you live around the Bay Area or along the west coast, it's just a short trip over.

Here's an excerpt of the call:

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...

Teaching game development... in public!

I remember one time in design school when a guest critic called out my classmate's project, a website to facilitate bartering. The critic balked at the idea of imposing specific procedures on how people should conduct a trade, and he talked about how the parents of Park Slope, Brooklyn shift several million tons of used toys using a very active Yahoo Groups (the class gasped in horror)... sometimes all a user wants is a message board.

So I'm one of those \Blackboard / "enterprise-class courseware learning platform" skeptics. If you've had the good fortune of never having to use one, they look like the image above, usually some really bloated outdated web portal thing with 50 different "learning modules" that 90% of university classes never use unless they're forced by the department.

As an instructor, I don't want to "setup an assignment" by digging through three different layers of menu screens! Sometimes all a user wants is a message board.

This semester, I'm running my game development courses on GitHub, Steam Community, and Tumblr. All three provide some semblance of message board functionality, so they're all suitable for teaching. Here's how I'm doing it:

"Quality product": on Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi

Much like Anna Anthropy's study of ZZT, Darius Kazemi's study of Jagged Alliance 2 for Boss Fight Books is a quick read but feels very comprehensive, analyzing the game in a holistic interdisciplinary cross-section across history, anthropology, politics, and computer science.

Unlike Anna, Darius adopts a much more academic tone, and rarely inserts himself into his own narrative. And while the result is a convincing, well-written, and well-researched book, it ends up falling prey to certain weaknesses that were irrelevant to Anna's book... which fascinates me, because I want to write my own book on Half-Life 1 that somehow blends both of their sensibilities.

QGCon 2014, October 25-26 in Berkeley, California

Hey, the excellent Queerness and Games Conference ("QGCon") is running again this year, and you should go! I had a pretty good time in 2013, where I presented "Queering Game Development," a critical code study of "FeministWhore" and the politics of code (I'm still working on the final essay / paper, oops) -- and I probably would've gone this year if I weren't consciously trying to lay low and try to finish stuff instead of jetting-off to conferences all the time...

... But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go! If you are going to be in the Bay Area on October 25 and/or 26, you should definitely check out QGCon at UC Berkeley. There's a bunch of really great speakers this year. So sign-up, it's free to attend! Have enough fun for the both of us.

Course catalog at Radiator University, Fall 2014

If I had a university, these are some of the courses I'd run:

PE822 -- CS:GO SPORTIFICATION INTENSIVE (2 units, Detroit campus)
In 1999, Counter-Strike changed the face of multiplayer shooters -- sci-fi gothic fantasy died and "realistic" squad maneuvers became the dominant discourse. The series then languished until 2012, when Counter-Strike: Global Offensive triggered a renaissance in player and level design theory. In this studio intensive course, we will critique this development history and "sportification" of the series while iterating on small levels designed for public and competitive play. (PREREQUISITES: Sculpture I, War Crimes seminar, Basketball II or higher.)

KL72 -- MAKER MAKER (3 units)
Tools like FPS Creator or RPGMaker bring new blood into development communities while manifesting structural critiques of game genres. If something is difficult to do in RPGMaker, can it be said that RPGs should generally not implement that feature? How do the workflows and "grains" of our tools affect our abilities to make things? This course argues that making a new generation of "maker" tools, grounded firmly in new genres, is imperative for articulating a new praxis of game development. (PREREQUISITES: at least 1 linguistic determinism seminar.)

R20A -- COLLAB WORKSHOP, "PERVASIVE ARGS" (2 units, Montana campus)
The "magic circle" refers to the idea that many games clearly demarcate the boundaries between players and those not playing -- e.g. you must be playing a game in order to score a goal, otherwise you're just some person kicking a ball on a grass field. Taking cues from David Fincher's thriller "The Game" (1997), we will act as "puppetmasters" to construct elaborate "alternate reality games" that surround / swallow our players' lives, blurring the line between playing and living. (PREREQUISITES: Metalworking II, Improv Studio 201, and/or equivalent professional experience)

E100 -- ENGLISH 1
Writing expository, analytical, and argumentative essays; developing critical reading and research skills. Review of sentence structure and grammar.

"Game Educators Rant" at GDC 2014

At this year's GDC in San Francisco, I'm going to be delivering a rant as part of the "Game Educators Rant" session.

I'm still working out the script and details, but it's generally going to expand on what I've said before -- that game development has a sociopolitical dimension, and developers should actively recognize it and work in this dimension.

It should be an interesting session overall, considering that my esteemed colleague Sarah Schoemann will be delivering a rant opposite mine, arguing against the essentialism of learning code and technical development. Bring it on!

"Well-Made: Back to Black Mesa" @ PRACTICE 2013

Very special thanks for Frank Lantz for inviting me to speak, and to Charles Pratt / Kevin Cancienne for counsel and emotional support, and Brendan Keogh / Dan Golding for convincing me that people even want to hear about stuff like this. Many of the ideas in this presentation will be expanded upon for the book I'm doing with Press Select.

First I want to set the record straight: I love Half-Life, but that doesn't mean it's immune to criticism. It is flawed in many ways. (Hard mode is too hard. The game is too long. On a Rail induces hemorrhaging. etc.)

I also think games mean things so far as you can argue for certain interpretations -- and I think Half-Life's popular legacy does not endure much scrutiny. Specifically, Half-Life's narrative is not subtle nor sophisticated nor conceptually innovative: from what we know about its development history and acknowledged inspirations, it is designed to be a schlocky silly action B-movie about a sci-fi disaster conspiracy, and I argue that reading is more convincing than thinking it's "the Myst of video games" or something.

That does not mean a schlocky game is bad; schlocky games are often fantastic. What I'm arguing, instead, is that many players prefer the weaker reading of Half-Life because they are seduced by the promise of technology without actually understanding what the technology is doing. Half-Life is magical and interesting and subtle, but not in the way that gamer culture mythologizes it. (At the same time, let's still be critical of what Half-Life does, and the values it represents to both players and developers.)

Queering Game Development, slides

Hey. QGCon just ended and it was a blast. I'll post more thoughts later.

For now, here are the slides from my talk, "Queering Game Development", which I think was fairly well-received? Some of the slides may not seem very clear / might need some unpacking; I'll post a more comprehensive essay adaptation of the talk later too, or maybe make a video? (EDIT: recording of talk on the archived stream starts at around 2:37:00)

"Developing a Half-Life Mod: Science and Industry" at NYU Game Center, Oct 23

"Indie-game developers, Kevin Cancienne and Peter Ginsberg, will talk about their experiences developing Science and Industry, a Half-Life mod. Hear about the design process of this humorous and innovative team-based multiplayer game and the community that helped bring it together. Robert Yang, first-person shooter scholar and developer, will be leading a question and answer session after the lecture."
2 Metrotech Center, 8th Floor Lecture Hall
Wednesday October 23, 7pm
RSVP for the event; free and open to public.

Two talk descriptions at QGCon and Practice

Sorry that this blog's been suffering a bit as of late. I've been busy.

My teaching load is ramping up (which is good, having more day job is nice) and I've been devoting most of my free time toward working on games, transcribing Level With Me vol. 2 at Rock Paper Shotgun, and writing / researching for two talks I'm delivering -- one at QGCon, and the other at Practice.

Here are the two blurbs:

"Queering Game Development" @ QGCon, Oct 27 in Berkeley, California
Queer and feminist critiques of games often rely on high level conceptual approaches to games -- that is, analyzing games as cultural products or media objects. The hegemony's response is to go technical and go low-level, to argue that their game engine could not support playable women characters, or to argue production schedules allowed no time to support queer content, etc. Ignoring temporarily how those are bullsh*t reasons, what if we chased them into the matrix? Perhaps we could disclose the politics inherent in game engine architectures, rendering APIs, and technical know-how. If we learn about (and *practice*) actual game development, then we can articulate alternative accounts of game development at a low level, and achieve more comprehensive critiques of games.

"Well-Made: Back to Black Mesa" @ Practice, November 17 in New York City
The modern AAA single player first person shooter consists mainly of two things: shooting faces in implausibly realistic levels with a pistol, machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, or rocket launcher -- and obeying NPCs when they trap you inside a room so they can emit voice-over lines at you. Half-Life's legacy in the latter is well-mythologized in history, but what if we re-visit Half-Life as a masterpiece of technical design, enemy encounters, AI scripting, weapons tuning, and architecture? Spoiler: we'll find out it's a pretty well-crafted game.

(I imagine the "Well-Made" as a counterpart to the "Well-Played" or something.)

On "How to Destroy Everything"

"How to Destroy Everything" is a fairly comprehensive argument for destroying everything.

That if games are art, or if games are culture, or if games are communities -- then we must recognize how art fractures, how culture is in tension with itself, and how communities constantly collapse and re-form into new ones. "Destroying everything" is about celebrating change and diversity and resilience, with the confidence that together we have the power to make something better in the future.

One of the more common instances of bullshit gamer presser-preview snake-oil-speak, alongside "day 1 purchase" and "immersive" and "cinematic," invokes the idea of "our young evolving medium." Whose medium is it? Why, it is We, the Gamers' Medium!!!! But does this Dorito-flavored ruin of Ozymandias -- does this "gamers" even realize what it whispers to itself, about evolving mediums?

At the core of evolution is sex, sex, and sex. Vulnerability! Energy! Trust! Passion! Grunting, feeling, throbbing, moaning... yes... yes... YESSSSSSSS!

I'm pretty sure the "Ludic Century" is already over.

What should you learn in Games 101?

I'm teaching an undergraduate "Games 101" class at Parsons this Fall semester, and putting together the syllabus has been... not easy.

It's supposed to introduce students to a body of game history / game theory, while also letting them dip their toes into non-digital and digital game design. This is like 4 different classes being merged into one, so it's going to be hard to cover all the bases while accommodating everyone's varying experience and fluency in game design.

Many of the students will already be familiar with video games and board games -- but just as many will be taking this class because their advisor said it was good for learning interaction design, or maybe they wanted what sounds like an easy elective -- or maybe they played Temple Run once (a month ago) and they haven't touched any video games since then, but they sure like playing beer pong and basketball and tag, and those are games, right? (In some respects, the "gamers" might have the most to learn.)

Some pillars of my approach to Games 101:

Radiatorpalooza 2013: "Technical criticism"

The Fall games conference season is in the works. (Get excited.) Here's my current schedule, subject to change...

September 14th: No Show Conference (Boston, MA)
October 3rd: Indiecade West (Los Angeles, CA)
October 26th: QGCon (Berkeley, CA)

In my talks at No Show and QGCon, I'll be talking about game levels and approaches to close-reading them, emphasizing their technical construction as a locus of analysis. The talks will be slightly less political than last year, focusing more on what I think good "meat and potatoes" / "basic analysis" might look like -- criticism that considers games as not just play systems and media objects, but also as technical artifacts engineered within certain constraints. (Of course, code is political too, but... baby steps.)

Uncharted looks and plays the way it does partly because of how its 3D engine works (texture memory constraints for consoles, deferred + forward renderer, no level of detail system), how Naughty Dog organizes its artists (does one artist "own" a level? outsourcing procedures?), and how level designers work (mostly in Maya, no in-house editor?) Yes, it also exists within AAA shooter culture and cribs freely from Indiana Jones pulp adventures, but all video games are also digital artifacts that run on some sort of code. How do technical contexts shape aesthetic contexts, and vice versa? Answering that question is traditionally called "game development," but I think effective game criticism can do much of the same work.

You do not have to be a programmer to understand (on a basic conceptual level) what a game engine is doing and how that has changed over the years.

Post-partum: teaching Unity.

Here's a bit of reflection on my first semester teaching Unity at an art and design school, mixed undergrad / grad level. They're in the form of rough guidelines that I'm giving myself for next semester:

» Don't assume mastery of coding fundamentals. Some students will be able to formulate and solve abstract problems with little help, while other students will need to be taught the difference in syntax between variables and functions, repeatedly. Course prerequisites, even if enforced by your school's registar (at Parsons, they usually aren't), are no guarantee of mastery. In my class, I put a code comprehension section on the midterm exam, only to realize that some students didn't understand nested for() loops, which implies they don't fully grasp how unnested for() loops work either; but it was the midterm, and it was already too late. Some students didn't know how to use AND or OR, and some didn't understand scoping. I should've caught these problems earlier instead of unintentionally punishing them for it.
Recommendation: On the first or second week, conduct a diagnostic quiz that asks code comprehension questions, and assess which students need which kinds of help.

» Cover vector math, every day. Do light drilling. Even students with significant code experience may have trouble conceptualizing how vectors work together / what vector operations do, especially in 3D. I don't think I'd necessarily impose grade school drilling, like worksheets with 50 problems and 1 minute to solve all of them, but a few minutes or short drill, every day or week will help a lot.
Recommendation: At the start and end of each class, do some vector math problems together as a class. Practice thinking about vectors in multiple modes: visually as spatial coordinates, abstractly as sets of numbers, and procedurally as variables in code.

» Teach Maya and Unity, side by side, in parallel. I front-loaded the syllabus with Unity stuff, and only started Maya in the second half of the course. I think this was a mistake because we ended up having a 2 week break where students did very little code and focused on Maya, and it seemed to be like we were moving "backwards." I should've paced the class better to prevent this dead time.
Recommendation: When teaching the basics of 3D transformations in Unity, also teach the basics of 3D transformations in Maya, and emphasize the many similarities in interface and project organization: scene hierarchies, hotkeys, lights, materials handling, etc.

» Don't teach coroutines. I tried to teach this early in the course, and it ended up confusing a lot of people. Personally, I use coroutines constantly because I find them really useful for timing things... but maybe I shouldn't have projected my own practices on them.
Recommendation: Teach the use of timer variables and bookkeeping variables / using Time.time instead. It is worse practice sometimes, but it is a more immediately intuitive way of timing things, and reinforces fundamentals of controlling logic flow.

» End with procedural mesh generation / mutation? I really want this to be an "a-ha" moment of the course -- when students realize that everything is just a different way of storing data, and artists are just people who can figure out how to get the data looking and performing the way they want. Considering the emphasis on 3D, I think this is a much more coherent endpoint than my previous emphasis on AI and behavior.
Recommendation: If students have been working in Maya for a while and they understand for() loops, they might be ready to iterate through arrays of mesh data. Maybe look at implementing some Perlin noise or a simple sculpting tool.

This summer, I'm going to try to put these ideas into practice when teaching 6 week Unity intensives at NYU Game Center. Feel free to check-up on us on the class GitHubs (session 1) / (session 2).

On focalization, and against convenient understandings of immersion / flow.

This post is significantly changed from a talk I gave at Different Games. It was prompted by Jon Stokes approaching me and helpfully telling me that my talk made no sense, so hopefully this post will be more clear. SPOILER WARNING: I spoil Brendon Chung's excellent Thirty Flights of Loving.

As a self-proclaimed developer of "personal games", one thing that puzzles me about these games and empathy is that no one really knows how emotional transfer between players and games works -- like, what's really happening when you control a character in a game? Do you sympathize directly with the narrative situation, or are you role-playing, or do you think more in strategic terms, or what's going on? These words -- flow, immersion, empathy, role-playing -- how much do they really explain or predict how we, as humans, experience video games?

There's very little actual research on this because, I think, the game industry isn't interested in funding it and finding out. About the only researcher I've heard of is Jonas Linderoth and he argues for severe skepticism, or that games don't actually teach you anything outside of games -- and that isn't something the game industry would want people to hear.

"Different Games" at NYU-Poly, April 26-27 2013.

This weekend I'm giving a talk called "First Personal" at the "Different Games" conference, this Friday and Saturday at NYU-Poly in Brooklyn. I'm going to talk about first person games and why I think they're really well-suited for making personal games. I'll also be showing the newest iteration of CondomCorps in the arcade they've setup.

The conference is free to attend, so if you're in the area you should come hang out for at least a little while.