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":

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!...

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!

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:

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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'...)

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:

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!!

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).

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:

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

• Video archive of past PRACTICE talks is here.
• PRACTICE 2018 schedule is here.
• Get your 2018 tickets here before June 21st!

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.

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:

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.

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:

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: