Level With Me, series 2

Level With Me is a whole new batch of "candid interviews with game developers about their design process" going up on Rock Paper Shotgun, one a week.

The first half of each interview focuses on their past work / approaches, and the second half is a conversation where we design part of a first person game together, based on what previous interviewees did. This way, you get a 90s net-art pioneer indirectly collaborating with a veteran AAA level designer indirectly collaborating with an indie horror game designer, as they all deal with the weight of each others' design decisions.

The goal here, as before, is to demystify game development. Games are magic, but not because they are unknowable -- they are magic because they are so hard to execute and they require so much work and blood and sweat of human wills. I believe we can talk about game development / struggle, straightforwardly, in plain words.

This is also how we design games: we ask ourselves questions, and then try to answer honestly. Different people will ask themselves different questions and give different answers.

Promise.

It's not much, but it's what I can do:

I promise not to attend PAX, ever again, in any capacity.

I promise to advise my peers and colleagues not to attend PAX, ever again, in any capacity.

I promise to help organize / build / support new institutions and communities, to try to replace PAX and counter its owners' poisonous influence on its fans.

I can't promise that my actions will matter. They probably won't matter. But that's partly the point of a promise.

Further notes on developing games for virtual reality.

I'm pretty sure no one remembers that I promised to release Radiator: Polaris at the end of August 2013 (shhh), but here's what happened -- I was asked to join the Oculus VR Jam, so instead I've spent the last 3 weeks working mainly on Nostrum, a Porco Rosso inspired arcade flight sim / narrative-y roguelike. I think I'm going to work on it for another week or so before going back to Polaris.

A lot of my interest stems from VR requiring developers to re-consider a lot of basic ways of doing things in video games.

On "Shelter" and the power of ambiguity.

WARNING: This post spoils Shelter and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

It makes sense that Thomas Grip likes Shelter -- functionally, Shelter is basically like Amnesia, except you're a badger mother in a colorfully illustrated forest instead of an amnesiac scientist in a haunted castle. Same thing.

In Shelter, there's a constant fear of starvation and eagles. The only thing you can do is keep going to forage and replenish your food. In Amnesia, you're told to keep moving and solving puzzles to replenish your sanity. So, both games rely on transforming the idea of "single player video game progression" into a symbolic struggle.

"Press Select" is officially announced / update on the Half-Life book.

So the cute-gay-dad couple that is Daniel Golding and Brendan Keogh (oh gosh this is how rumors start) have officially launched a swanky website and stuff for "Press Select," their publishing venture for long-form video game criticism. Each author will follow Keogh's example in dedicating one whole book to one game. (It's not announced or anything, but I already called shotgun on Half-Life 1.)

My peers (announced so far) in this thing are:

• Patricia Hernandez, of Kotaku and Nightmare Mode fame
• Michael Abbott, the man behind The Brainy Gamer
• Maddy Myers, freelance critic for various outlets including Paste and formerly The Boston Phoenix.
• Chris Dahlen, critic, co-founder and former editor of Kill Screen, and writer on Klei’s Mark of the Ninja.
• Tim Rogers, game critic for ActionButton.net and founder and director of Action Button Entertainment.
• Jason Killingsworth, features editor of Edge Magazine.
• Jenn Frank, game critic, formerly of EGM and 1UP, Editorial Director at Unwinnable, and voice of Super Hexagon

I'm a little intimidated because books are really long and complicated things, but I'm also excited and confident that my lovely editors will keep me on track.

Right now I'm just working on a rough outline and scribbling a bunch of notes. If you want a sneak preview of the material, you can attend one of three upcoming conferences. Each one will be pretty different and talk about different things and aspects of Half-Life 1 and other games, but they'll all be emblematic of a similar argument: that Half-Life 1's legacy of pioneering "in-game scripted narrative" has resulted in the crappiness of military FPS shooters today, and it overshadows what's actually a very finely tuned arcade-ish shooter -- and as with anything, there are politics and tensions embedded within an arcade shooter.

The conferences I'm speaking at are:

• 14-15 September: No Show Conference @ Microsoft NERD Center. Boston, MA. ($100 / scholarships available)
• 26-27 October: Queerness and Games Conference @ UC Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. (free)
• 15-17 November: Practice @ NYU Game Center. New York, NY. ($100-$350)

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:

"Gone Home" and the mansion genre.

This post does not spoil any specifics of the "plot" in Gone Home, but it might sensitize you to its delivery mechanisms and some details.

A mansion means: old, rich, and scary. The most quintessential "mansion games" that emphasize these qualities might be Maniac Mansion, Thief, and Resident Evil -- these games would not work without the mansion tropes that figure prominently in their game design. Most importantly, mansions are big.

Gone Home is very aware of its place in the mansion genre, a genre that emphasizes the primacy of inventories, objects, and possessions. Here, the lightweight puzzle gating and densely hot-spotted environments evoke adventure; the first person object handling and concrete readables evoke the immersive sim; the loneliness and the shadows evoke horror. In a sense, this is a video game that was made for gamers aware of all the genre convention going on -- in particular, one moment in the library will either make you smile or wince -- but in another sense, this is also a video game made for humans. Gone Home carefully negates or omits core "gameisms" of the very genres it comes from.

The characters in Gone Home are tolerable (or even great) because they do not hesitate in doorways and stare blankly at you. It's the same trick that Dear Esther pulled: fictional characters in games develop full-bodied, nuanced personalities precisely when they're *not* constrained by fully simulated virtual bodies present in the world. (Maybe Dear Esther is actually a mansion game?)

Ludonarrative dissonance doesn't exist because it isn't dissonant and no one cares anyway.

"I'm a living breathing person... but I'm just going to stand frozen in this spot forever. Also, I'm a tortoise."

I complained about Bioshock Infinite before. Here, I complain some more, because I really can't get over how bad this game is. Hopefully this'll be the last complaint post. I'm sorry.

Clint Hocking famously coined "ludonarrative dissonance" to describe moments when what's happening in a single player action game doesn't fit with what the game is telling you is happening -- maybe it's just plain wrong, maybe the tone doesn't match, or maybe the game thinks this thing is more interesting than it is -- either way, it doesn't quite work.

It's when you realize your sympathetic handsome male player character is a sociopathic mass murderer, or maybe when a character in an RPG "dies" despite having already died and revived dozens of times before, or maybe the brief instance when an elite soldier NPC glitches in the middle of a doorway despite all the boring game lore dumped on you. Sometimes it's intrinsic to making a game about killing people, sometimes you hope fridge logic kicks in, and sometimes it's a technical quirk you forgive.

But I feel like that theory doesn't explain what actually happens out in the field: if Bioshock Infinite was forged entirely, purposefully, from solid ingots of 100% pure ludonarrative dissonance, why didn't this annoy the shit out of everyone? Isn't ludonarrative dissonance supposed to be jarring and horrible? Why was the unusually unified critical response to Binfinite something like, "wow this game is colossally stupid," but the mainstream response was, "this is amazing"?

So I have a new theory -- most players do not find dissonance to be dissonant, and therefore ludonarrative dissonance doesn't really exist.