"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.

"Let's Play" at the Nightingale Cinema, April 25 2013 in Chicago.

Jake Elliott and co. are running a "Let's Play" themed event at 8:00 PM on Thursday at Chicago's "beloved microcinema", the Nightingale. What is the LP and what's interesting about the form? What's the difference between LP and machinima, and what happens when that line blurs? (Extra credit: play the Stephen Lavelle classic Rara Racer for further commentary of the LP genre.)

Daphny and Liz Ryerson (and me!), among other artists, have made new original videos just for the show. I think some are even doing live Let's Plays as performance (!!!) Personally, I had never recorded an LP before and it felt really weird to me... are the results compelling at all? Find out in Chicago, tomorrow! Full description and info pasted after the jump:

Urban scenes

Wrapping up work on CondomCorps this week.

The color palette is heavily inspired by the "Benten" levels of Jet Set Radio, as those levels always felt the most "urban" to me. But if we're talking about urbanness, then "what is a city without its people?" The pedestrians on the sidewalks are particles, but obviously particles -- so I think they're actually less conspicuous than, say, the animated runner sprites in Mass Effect 3 skyboxes. To me, that's what most video games get wrong about cities: they are utterly crowded things.

And if anyone asks: yes, New York City has 2 Chrysler buildings...

Dreamlab: VR research at Parsons.

Next year, me and Kyle are starting a (very small) virtual reality ("VR") research lab at Parsons. We've set our initial long-term research initiative as some sort of "virtual sculpting studio" -- so maybe one day you'll put on your Oculus Rift and power gloves, sculpt some virtual clay, and then send the model to a 3D printer? Wouldn't that be cool? We have lots of other ideas too, but those will require a lot more money / space / time, so this is us, thinking "small."

If you think it sounds awesome, please "like us" (ugh) on this weird startup grant social media platform thing so some giant well-funded entity can give us money. Or, if you happen to be a corporate or nonprofit entity that has money you'd like to part with, please get in touch.

The full proposal text is here:

We envision virtual reality as a “place” that allows us to do useful work and experience unique phenomena. Much like going to a woodshop to work wood, or a kitchen to work food, we imagine dedicated VR spaces for people to work and play with data in intuitive ways. How can we use the unique affordances of virtual realities to visualize, embody, and interface with virtual data most effectively?

A letter to a letter

Dear Raph Koster's Letter to Leigh,

You were right when you said that the authors of "personal games" would probably take you the wrong way... It's hard not to. It's impossible to divorce the politics from the forms of these games, which, yes, makes them difficult to critique as formal designed objects without appearing to attack their politics.

These authors argue that "apolitical formalism" is inherently political, that the worst politics pretends it's not politics. Porpentine tweeted that she prefers "blatant bullshit over honeyed poison." (Uh, she was talking about you, by the way!)

I'm sure you'll understand these authors' reluctance to trust this kind of criticism after the past decade of sustained critical attack on such games and their contexts -- perhaps these "crimes" weren't always inflicted by you or whatever, but it's certainly a trigger when you begin your letter with wondering, "what is a game?" My brain shifts into red alert. That line of inquiry has been a long favored tool of well-intentioned oppression, because these arguments often masquerade as thoughtful discourse but function as a weapon of de-legitimization, that argue these personal games can't really fit a formal definition of game. The emotional leap is that these people can't really fit a formal definition of people. Adding, "it's okay if it's not a game" comes off as sounding like, "it's okay if you're not a person," which doesn't really help you seem apolitical.

Again, you're aware of this. You are a very carefully written letter.

The joys of sub-projecting in Unity

Let's say you have a personal Unity framework full of useful models, prefabs, shaders, scripts, etc. that you'd like to use across several projects. How do you best deploy that framework?

If you use version control, then maybe in each Unity project folder you'd also have a special folder hooked up to an SVN or a Git submodule. (Though I find Git submodules to be scary and unwieldy and more trouble than they're worth.) If you don't use version control, maybe you'll keep a separate Unity project just for your framework and from that you'll export a new Unity package every now and then, then separately import and update the Unity packages across your different projects as needed.

There's a third way that I'm trying, inspired slightly by how the Source Engine's filesystem works: basically, you keep all your projects *inside* a main Unity project, so they exist more as "mods" or "sub-projects", and they interface with each other as well as a main framework folder that has core prefabs and scripts.

Post-partum: #lostlevels 2013

As 1/4 of the organizing force behind Lost Levels (the other 3/4 being: Harry Lee, Fernando Ramallo, and Ian Snyder), I'd like to talk briefly about it.

It went really well. Like really really well, much weller than I ever thought it could've went. At least 150-200 people showed up, and we had about 50-70 speakers in the end. Thanks everyone.

I'm sure all attendees and speakers have different takeaways from Lost Levels: on the power of organization, the ultimate uselessness of Powerpoint, why GDC must be destroyed, why GDC must exist, etc. At the very least, I'd like to think we succeeded, to some degree, to break down a sense of "exclusiveness" and unreachability among all game developers and players.

As a former modder, I occupy a strange space in the game developer ecosystem: my background is in AAA tools and techniques, but my politics and interests will often clash with AAA politics and interests. I can't identify completely with the more militant indies nor more militant AAAs. However, I do think militancy has a crucial purpose, and that purpose is to move the middle to a better place, and right now I think that place is toward those who have the gall to align themselves with the forces of human empathy.

Now, all throughout Lost Levels, I felt very conscious of this appearance that we're "against" GDC. Again, we are not against GDC; rather, we are against a pervasive system and mindset that prevents GDC from changing for the better. A giant corporate conference structure has strengths, but it also has very real gaping flaws -- its expense forms a prohibitive cost barrier that fundamentally limits the diversity of voices who supposedly represent all game developers, which enforces a monoculture of ideas and works. Monocultures kill games.

My main takeaway from Lost Levels: we all possess some degree of power. We must simply exercise it collectively, decisively, and tenderly.

Thanks for participating and see you next year!

(As a reminder: I am only 1 of 4 Lost Levels organizers and my opinions do not necessarily represent the rest of the organizers' opinions; it's okay if you disagree with me, you will still always be welcome at all Lost Levels existing and imaginary, whether I'm helping to organize it or not.)

"You sleep rather soundly for a murderer": on murder systems and destabilizing virtual societies.

In many video games, you must kill stuff all the time, and quite frequently. Killing becomes the environment. It is so pervasive that killing becomes the context for something else -- clicking on a soldier's face rapidly enough to demonstrate mouse dexterity, or chaining together different button presses to make combos, or optimizing your stats to make a big number even bigger, or carefully managing various bars before they deplete. The killing is rarely about the killing. (Which makes you wonder why we need to wrap it in the narrative of killing.)

During an Elder Scrolls game, you will likely kill thousands of things. However, all of those killings are sanctioned by the NPCs in the game: you are killing monsters outside of cities and villages. Their deaths don't matter -- more will respawn to take their place, or maybe the game will delete them to free-up memory when you wander away far enough. They exist only to be killed. They are domesticated and farmed.

The Dark Brotherhood questlines in Elder Scrolls games, then, are one of the few instances in games that really focus on killing as killing. Specifically, it frames murder as a deeply anti-societal, anti-social, transgressive act, and explores the philosophy required to justify it. At it's best, it's also deeply systemic.