Showing posts with label indiecade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indiecade. Show all posts

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Games in public; games as public exhibitions

pictured above: "Now Play This" at Somerset House, London, UK. 2016.
Sometimes people want to exhibit my gay sex games for the public. It's an understandable feeling. If it's a large funded and ticketed event, I sometimes ask for a small honorarium... and in most cases, I usually give my blessing, send over some special builds and give advice, and ask for event photos afterwards.

When I look at these photos, they usually fall into one of two categories. One category is the huge industrial game expo. Because of their large scale and scope, each indie game inevitably takes the form of a standardized booth within a huge grid of booths. At minimum, that means a laptop sitting on a forgotten table as part of a large expo -- or if you invest a lot more, maybe there's a whole booth with black cloth partitions.

While I do appreciate any resources or labor that these events provide to me, I also wonder whether we can create alternatives and different ways of presenting games in public. Why does these public games events always look the same and function in the same way?

Monday, March 28, 2016

"Let's Get Lit: How to Light Your Game Like a Strip Club" @ 6 PM, April 30 at IndieCade East 2016, New York City


I'll be speaking at IndieCade East this year about video game lighting -- but to spice it up, I'm also going to talk about hunky dudes taking their clothes off in the seminal beefcake stripper movie Magic Mike (2012). The director, Steven Soderbergh, intentionally went for naturalistic "bad lighting" reminiscent of a strip club. Look at the shot above -- most of the men are in shadow! That's actually a pretty radical aesthetic for something that's supposedly a few steps away from commercial pornography. Plus, lighting can often be a bit of a dry topic, so I felt it was important to pair it with some sweaty studs to help the medicine go down. It'll be fun for the whole family.

IndieCade East 2016 runs April 29 - May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, and thank god it's no longer in the dead of winter.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

"Pillow Talk" keynote with Naomi Clark and Nina Freeman, at Indiecade 2015, October 22-25 in Culver City, CA


Me and fellow designers Naomi Clark and Nina Freeman will be running a keynote session at Indiecade 2015 tentatively called "Pillow Talk" -- in it, we'll be discussing relationships and intimacy in games. (Press release is here.) If you'll be around, come over and say hey, even if I'll mostly be busy stuffing as many free burgers as possible into my pockets at the Sony party.

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.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Radiator, US tour Spring 2015 ("May the Reign of Terror Begin")

I'm attending two three games events this season. Hangout with me! Here's my schedule currently:
  • Indiecade East 2015, Feb 13-15 in New York City. I'm giving a talk about dominant workflow patterns in game development, and how new (and often experimental) tools can shake-up our workflow and help us re-think our processes and possibly result in new kinds of games. I intend to live-demo most of these tools. Hopefully I won't fuck it up!
  • Game Developer Conference 2015, Mar 2-6 in San Francisco. I'm giving a talk about contemporary level design in relation to modern and postmodern architecture theory. I feel like a lot of level designers know they should pay lip service to architecture but when was the last time they actually looked at a real-life building with a critical eye? How was that building made? This is a discipline that's been around since the beginning of recorded history, I think it might have a thing or two to teach us, call it a hunch.
  • Different Games 2015, Apr 3-4 in New York City. A fantastic diversity-focused games conference. I'm part of the NEA artist grant disbursed last year, so I'll be presenting on my triad of sexy gay games: Hurt Me Plenty, Cheek to Cheek, and Succulent.
I'm also waiting to hear back from a few other things. Watch this space for updates! Or don't, that's cool too! PS: have people been playing The Talos Principle lately? I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. Might write a post about it.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Indiecade East 2015, February 13-15 at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York City


Indiecade East is back for another year in beautiful snow-filled New York City, and they are looking for talk proposals from new (as well as old, I imagine) voices in the community! You have until November 10th (that's about 3 weeks) to get your submission in:
If you have something new to say about / for / from independent game making, and you can encapsulate it in a 20-minute talk, we want to hear from you! Everyone is welcome, regardless of experience, visibility, etc.

We are particularly interested in these topics:
- Diversity in Audience, Diversity in Creators: Playing and making games is not the exclusive domain of a privileged few -- games are for everyone, and anyone should be able to make them.
- Indie Games’ Second Wave: Indie games have been around long enough that there are old-timers and newcomers. Who are the new generation of creators trying to break through in a different landscape?
- The Other Indies: There are many people making interactive art not traditionally thought of as indie games, from modders to interactive fiction writers. How do they enrich the world of indie games?
- Storytelling in Indie Games: Independent games are one of the spaces where narratives experiment with new forms and topics. What exciting new work or unappreciated old work is being done in this area?

Thursday, January 9, 2014

"Black Mesa Source: Makeover Xtreme" at Indiecade East 2014

Indiecade East in New York City is happening in... about a month... and I'm giving a talk there. (A talk that I should start writing. Shit.) I should also note that the entire speaker lineup is very exciting and diverse and Indiecade is a lovely games event with a very good signal-to-noise ratio.

My talk continues the "technical politics" theme of my other talks these past few months:

"Makeovers are serious business. That's why dozens of modders volunteered to makeover Half-Life 1 (one of the most influential games ever made) in a new game engine with new graphics, architecture, animations, voice acting, choreography, sound effects, etc. So much work goes into the video games we play, but what exactly does that work involve? Get ready for excruciating detail about the blood and sweat that goes into just one room of one level of one game -- and why us modders w-w-work it for years to give it away for free. See? Makeovers are serious business."

My relationship with Black Mesa Source is strange -- I did a lot of work for them for a few years, then left because I couldn't commit time to it anymore -- so I recognize a lot of the content, but at the same time it feels somewhat alien to me because someone else finished it.

There's something interesting to dissect about the identity of work, here, especially given the intangible status of mods.

Are mods "games"? In terms of distribution / ownership / sales, no. In terms of artistry / concept / craft, yes. Is this Black Mesa Source level mine? Yes and no. When you get a makeover, are you still you, or someone else? What are the politics of makeovers? etc.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Indiecade 2013 postpartum

So Indiecade 2013 came and went. I had a pretty great time and I still think it's a pretty good games event. I also think untempered compliments are the least useful form of feedback, so here are some notes, observations, and thoughts:

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Indiecade 2013

Hey blog readers. I'll be hanging around Indiecade this year, and Nostrum will be on display at the Oculus booth there. Feel free to say hey to me. (It'll probably be awkward for everyone involved, and that's okay.)

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Nostrum and clouds.


Hey! I made "Nostrum," a short flight sim game for the Oculus Rift VR Jam thing, and I placed 2nd. I won a bunch of money and a t-shirt, so I'm pretty happy with that.

For the first week of the three week jam, I was actually prototyping a lion simulator game. Then I watched Porco Rosso and thought, "wow, that'd be a fantastic game." So I stashed away all that previous work and started something new.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

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.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Indiecade 2012, notes


Part of me thinks I shouldn't even write about Indiecade: it's something that should be jealously protected from all the evil in the world. Its "independence" doesn't refer to the substantial indie attendance; it refers to how differently it does things, standing apart from the giant game conventions I've been to:
  • It's for the public. The "village" consumes the better half of the Culver Hotel parking lot / plaza, and you have a constant stream of random people strolling in. The finalist arcade is inside a firehouse. Various panels and talks are in random auditoriums / civic institutions. This is a festival that's actually interfacing with a city and takes pride in what a city is, while other conventions are so huge they isolate themselves in compounds far from city centers.
  • Real access to people. Want to talk to Jonathan Blow? Well, he's sitting on that bench over there. All those darlings you follow on Twitter? Over there, getting a beer. Los Angeles' lack of effective public transit means that people generally stay around the festival area and it's easier to find / meet people, ironically.
  • Really good cookies. Damn, those were good cookies.
  • Real engagement. There was a talk about queer games and people asked critically interesting questions: What, structurally, is a queer game? Is identity politics a distraction from more pressing issues like the indie-industry relationship? Across the entire festival, there were very few stupid questions, very little noise about "that's not a game" or "this genre is better than that genre" -- work was approached on its own merits.
  • It's not really about business. I mean, business totally took place -- Sony is a major sponsor and is definitely the most indie-friendly publisher I've seen -- so it's there if you look for it, but otherwise you'll never drown in it, which is really nice.
If you can afford Indiecade, then go. That's all I can say.