Level With Me, a post-mortem / some unnecessary notes / dear players, it's no longer okay to not know how video games work.

To be clear, I think all readings of "Level With Me" are valid, even the ones that say it's pretentious (though I think it's a remarkably contentless thing to say about experimental work) and it's indulgent (which is like berating a biography for focusing on an individual). But at least it implies a player's willingness to read the levels, even if they don't like what they read -- assuming they even played it.

Game design relies on a theory of mind for players. By that measure, many mainstream commercial games think players are utter simpletons and strive to explain every single thing -- Arkham City will have the Penguin frequently tell you how upset he is and how many enemies are left in the room; tool-tips will remind you that, yes, that glowing electric plate is electrified -- if you prefer your games to talk down to you, to patronize you, then I'm sorry you're going to be disappointed with this mod.

I was shocked, then, by the most common line of criticism I saw: a refusal to read, an insistence that a level without a puzzle-y Portal puzzle is a bad level. It's like the rhetorical equivalent of donkeyspace. I literally can't go through the mental gymnastics required to conclude that challenge is the only interesting thing about first person single player games. Comments like that make me miss all the people who said it was pretentious; I want a higher level of criticism.

Then I watched a "Let's Play" of Level With Me, even the grueling hour or two where he's stuck at the end of chapter one -- and at the end of the whole playlist, he says he doesn't think he "got it" and wants an explanation. Well, whatever you took from it is what it meant. You don't need me to tell you what it means. (This, perhaps, is what the anti-intellectual "pretension police / gestapo" understand better than anyone else.)

Nonetheless, given his struggle and triumph, I'll honor his request. If you can't bother playing the mod, check out his Let's Play Level With Me playlist on YouTube. Now, here's an explanation of my intent and one possible reading of the mod. There are MASSIVE SPOILERS. You were warned:

Tales from Zobeide

The biggest bottleneck for city generation right now is time; it takes 80 seconds for 2800 buildings. I guess I can just delay the player and make them watch a lot of loading screens? I'm also hoping a "complete" city will have at least 4000, which will probably be about 1.5 million polys -- but they're among the cheapest type of polygon to render, so it'll hopefully be okay. Draw calls seem under control too; I'm merging entire city blocks as combined meshes. (And I'm testing on an integrated card, so it should be fine.)

Postcard from Antiquity

Currently finishing up a geocentric space RTS, another collab with Eddie Cameron, for the Super Friendship Club "Universe" pageant. (Newer interface demo is playable here.) Come make games with us!

Postcard from Yorda

Started working on an Ico-ish game on a whim, now I have a half-finished monster -- all because I have to prove to Unity's Flash export that I'm not going to let it beat me with it's half-implemented functions and dozens upon dozens of undocumented bugs.

Right now I'm just improvising a giant castle thing, and then I'm going to sprinkle some gameplay in there or something -- I've left some empty spaces for puzzles, whatever those will be. Try out the v0.3 prototype here, which'll probably be the last public prototype since so much of this one is about novelty:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19887116/yorda/03/yorda3.html

(click to walk, double-click to run, or just sit back and let the pathfinding work its magic)

Postcard from Zobeide

Zobeide is going to be a hypertext FPS about the danger of desire. I have a decent interface with Twine working, but the seamless level-sharing has been kind of a technical roadblock, with the Playtomic API randomly deciding to fail sometimes. Now I'm thinking I need to have a generic backup city to load in case it can't reach the servers. Next, I need to model some more buildings and think a bit more about the interaction / aesthetic.

About "Territory"

Territory will be up in about a month or two -- it's an upcoming project that will pair critical essays about video games with short browser games that make arguments.

Part of it stems from my longstanding distaste of games criticism / writing that doesn't readily offer a translation from theory into practice, an opinion that probably isn't popular with most writers (the idea that criticism must be "useful" otherwise it's just whining) so I won't dwell on it.

Perhaps the hypothesis here is that words alone aren't the best way to discuss games. Discussing games is maybe a job best left for games: instead of writing 750 or so words on a game, a reviewer should make a short game about the game. Readers' comments would take the form of mods and new levels, mutations of existing rulesets and graphics to make a new point. (Eventually, some enterprising online pharmacy will code a spambot that will make spam levels and spam games.)

But for that glorious future to happen, I guess we need to think more about how we "read" games. As game designers, we're always deeply concerned with how players behave and think. Territory might help with that.

Truly, some pieces of games writing really shine with an additional layer of interactivity, although there's probably a tendency among those who call themselves gamers to disregard these interactions as "gimmicks," as if every digital interaction must require repetition, time, and mastery. Without those elements, these aren't games...

... Because games have mechanics! "Games aren't X!" But every time you say that, it doubles as an open invitation to the entire world to make a game that is exactly X. Maybe even 2X.

(A related tangent: these days, toddlers learn how to swipe, pinch, and click, before they ever learn how to spell or type words. What do we make of that?)

Anyway. If Territory is successful, I'll open it up to wider participation and start playing matchmaker for games writers / game developers. For now, I've talked to a few people and I'm planning on making small games based on their essays. It's a test run. We'll see how it goes. If it ends up failing, well, let this post be a testament to my completely benevolent and well-meaning intentions.

Level With Me, a Portal 2 mod

STARING EYES! It's unofficially Radiator vol. 3, and the only mod I'll have put out in the last two years. Watch this space as release is pretty imminent, and thanks for reading. We'll see if people hate it or love it.

EDIT: It's out now. Try it out. A typical run-through for me is about 30 minutes long, so that means it'll take the average Portal 2 player about 1-2 hours. If you get stuck on the first chapter, then just skip to the second, it's really not a big deal.

Radiator Blog: Two Year Anniversary

Yes, that's right, from all one of us here at Radiator Blog -- happy anniversary, we're two years old now. In keeping with last year's tradition, here's a "best of" compilation from December 2010 - November 2011 and a bit of commentary with the benefit of hindsight. These were generally the articles that got a high volume of page views / attention from Sunday Papers or Critical Distance or whoever, though I also included some ignored ones because I still think they're decent reads. At any rate, thanks for reading.

GAMES I MADE

• CondomCorps. The prototype is pretty unplayable, but I still want to re-visit the idea of peeping into hotel windows to make sure gay orgies take-off without a hitch. The best part was reading a game studies undergraduate's blog post about it, arguing it was unethical to weaponize sex education like this or something.
• Polonius. An FPS with multiple characters, where you have to eavesdrop on a couple's conversation as they walk around a crowded plaza. I liked the mechanics here and want to come back to this, it just needed some tutorial levels and some more massaging. Based on the film, The Conversation. (collab w/ @eddiecameron)
• FuhFuhFire. Rescue people from a burning building -- or maybe not. I feel like the mechanics here were pretty sound, I just need to redo the level design here and make it prettier.
• Apollo 2. I made a very short FPS in zero hours. I'm pretty satisfied with what it is.
• Super Cult Tycoon 2. Guide your very own cult from a van and a barn to a sprawling complex with Kool-Aid factories and counterfeit wallet exports. Got a ton of coverage on Kotaku, PC Gamer and Indiegames.com. (collab w/ @eddiecameron)

GAMES AND CULTURE

• "On the first person military manshooter and the shape of modern warfare" argues that games like Call of Duty are unethical NOT because someone's going to go on a shooting spree, but because they're making us think war is something you can win.
• First Person Films comes from watching Enter the Void and thinking the first 15 minutes were more interesting than everything else.
• Me, and I think a lot of other people, were disappointed a little with Portal 2 because it was pretty much just a faster horse. A fantastic horse, of course, but still just a horse.
• People are freaking out about Portal 2 level editors being used in schools. Hopefully they won't copy the mistakes of Logic Quest 3D, an obscure edutainment FPS with a built-in level editor -- that is, a warning from 15 years ago.

FORMALIST DESIGN THEORY

• Part 4 of the "Dark Past" series on immersive sims ended with an attempt at reviving Randy Smith's "valence theory" (my word for it) as used in Thief games.
• I apply Chris Crawford's concept of "process intensity" to procedural narrative. The post doesn't really have a point in the end, but it's nice to try to sort out what's happening in the field today, even if we're going to end up failing.
• Here's Dan Pinchbeck's PhD dissertation, summarized in a blog post. The idea to take away is "ludodiegesis," which basically argues that the world tells a story. I like it because it's a very neat shift away from the crassness of "environmental storytelling" and ties back into film studies.
• My close-reading of Mass Effect 1's Noveria demonstrates how I go about analyzing level design. Don't say bullshit like "the blue barrels and leading lines guide the player's eye, blah blah blah" -- that's not how players play games. We need to look at how environments afford gameplay, and then see how we can co-opt those same affordances for a narrative effect.
• Love letter to a bridge is in the same vein. In de_aztec, visuals and mechanics combine into something that's just a really elegant piece of design.

GAMES AND ART

• "It belongs in a museum" argues that games don't belong in museums. Prompted, in part, by Pippin Barr's excellent game, The Artist is Present.
• Butte, Montana. 1973 is a board game about open-pit mining disasters -- and in the end, you'll create your own chemical spill that's problematic to clean-up. I think board games are ripe for a revolution in materials and narrative; let's fight the cold proceduralism of German board games with all our strength.

COMMUNITY

• Welcome to the Indie FPS is a round-up of 5 people doing cool fun things with first person shooters; I argue they all take their cues from Myst instead of Doom. The most haunting thing is the eerily prescient NYT review of Myst that I unearthed during my brief bit of research.
• There used to be a Valve-sponsored modding community called the VERC Collective that had peer-reviewed articles about design theory / coding stuff. It was really cool. I wish there were researchers archiving the rise and fall of these internet communities -- you can literally trace lineages of game developers and creators from these places. These were our think-tanks.
• In April 2011, I declared the Death of the Mod. We used to think total conversions were the "epitome" of craftsmanship, a "world wonder" of the modding community. Now that notion is more or less dead, replaced with the idea that you're squandering your output if you're not going indie and selling your stuff in a standalone.
• A Closed World was an MIT-Gambit research project to make a game about LGBTQ issues. Me and some other self-identified LGBTQ indie game devs kind of got upset about it.