Couch Break Episode 1: Don't Make Leit of My Motifs

I made a radio show (ITS A RADIO SHOW NOT A PODCAST SHUT UP). You may download it for free on Soundcloud 

Enjoy.

Collecting Communities

Well, it seems the companies are following their preened and fatted auteurs to the great trough of Crowdfunding. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing (don't take it personally auteurs, I would hitch myself to that wagon for guaranteed food forever too), and the recent success stories certainly demonstrate the merits of such a funding source. Square, franchise breeder and recent seriously-thats-a-lot-of-money NOT maker is attempting to leverage that collection of franchise genealogy to outsource the actual game making. So. It's a Collective because COMMUNITY. And there seems to be a list of franchises people can choose from, pitch games based on it, people vote, Square nods sagely, and the team in question gets to carry their license in a great parade over to
IndieGoGo and fund the damn thing themselves because they are adults and don't need no mollycoddling.

“So children, can you tell me what this is?”

“Is it a way for game companies to both have ownership of a franchise and make money off of it and also not have to fund the games that drive it?”

“And how would we say that with a well known colloquialism?”

“Ummmmm.... Have their cake and eat it?”

“Gold Star Suzie! You get to eat lunch today.”

Two things currently absent from their website are the franchises in question and how Square would actually make money on it. I'm sure they will have a list smaller than preferred without some franchises people really want to see (I think it's pretty much just old Eidos properties), but that's life with corporations. The further line blurring between the body and personality of franchises is the interesting part of this. To me, anyway. I mean, sure, you can pitch something to the collective that ISN'T part of a franchise and just get Square's help planning the thing, but who cares about Rent-a-Management? The fact that they are allowing people to pitch from the crowd instead of just funding from it (Crowdpitching?) is indicative of the fanward motion of franchises these days.

When I say “Fanward” motion I am referring to the decision-making process becoming more and more fan centric. If the kinds of games that a franchise produces are being chosen by the fans of the franchise, then we must conclude that Square is literally attempting to bring the term Fanwankery one step closer to sickening life. However, it could be a good thing. Too many franchises go the way of the dodo from the inability to understand the appeal, or from understanding the appeal and not being able to do anything new with it. It sucks, and it's hard, and MAN fans can be a goddamn nightmare to deal with. No wonder they want to just throw the responsibility of actually making the things to some hapless goons who would cut their toes off to make their perfect (INSERT FRANCHISE) game. And to be honest, even with my reservations, it's probably a really good idea. Once they detail how they will be involved, in any case. They could just be publishers without actually risking their money, which would suck. Or not, if the removal of financial risk means that they are willing to give the creators enough slack to make the damn game interesting. Could be a lot of things. For now, we wait, hungry, hungry for the FF7/Tomb Raider game WE ALWAYS WANTED. 

IGF Impressions: Rowan Parker Interview

I must apologize for the lateness of my IGF writings. Real Life is rearing it's ugly head, and finding the time to blog is somewhat difficult of late. My sincerest apologies.
In any case, I was lucky enough on the very last day during the very last minutes of the expo floor of GDC this year to talk to Rowan Parker about a few things. We were somewhat rushed, and being my first interview of anybody ever, I was a bit flustered. Still, I am glad that I got the chance to talk and ask a few questions.
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So, 4am. Definitely less of a gamey sort of game, doesn't have a lot of the same trappings, it's much more of a creative outlet. Was that really what you wanted to do when you started making it?

RP- Yeah, there's no score, there's no points, no goal or high score, which means it's freeform music creation, so, we wanted to craft an experience which can let regular people feel what it's like to be a DJ, bottle the essence of what DJing is and then let them manipulate that soundscape with the Playstation Move, so, yeah, we were more focused on capturing the feeling or experience than making levels.

So, as far as "capturing the essence of a DJ", what does that mean to you? Is it having it all in your hands, or seeing and hearing the music.

RP- It's something much more meta than that. The DJ doesn't just DJ in a bubble, isolated, by himself. He or she is a performer, reads the room and the crowd, and needs to be playing to an audience, which is why 4am is always broadcasting live to real people on PSN so you have a real audience who are feeding back into your performance and they can make it quite awkward for you to quit because you feel like you are letting real people down. I think that's very core, very key to that DJing aspect. Of course, you have all the cool filters and sound samples and tracks and stuff at your fingertips as well but it's a social performance art as well, it's not just isolated.

With the visualizers, were there any particular notes you wanted to hit, things you wanted to have in the visualizer?

RP- All of the music is done by Baiyon, he did all of the music for Pixeljunk Eden as well. He has very minimal house, like, electrohouse style, and he had some ideas as well for what kind of visuals he would like to match his music to. He helped give us some ideas for the style, so it's all a very Baiyon-esque deal, very minimalist and chill-out, and that kind of feel.

So coming from this to Pixeljunk Inc, at least from the brief setup you have given me previously and what is on your website, is slightly more gamey by comparison but certainly not a standard product. Coming from 4am to that, what kinds of things are you trying to do with Inc.?

RP- Inc. is a game that we all wanted to play, and no-one else was making it, so we started making it. It was started at a conversation at lunchtime. We were saying, "hey, wouldn't you want to play a game like this where you were making a massive soup empire, and, like, Incredible Machine Terraria Minecraft base, and defending it, and all these things. We kept talking about this dream game where we had all these things from other places, and put them into one game, and we were kinda waiting, and no-one else was making and, and we said, "wait, hold on, we'll just make it". So one of the programmers took his Christmas Holidays off and his personal leave days and weekends and lunchtimes, and he made the first prototype of what we were all designing, and so artists started drawing art and I started coming up with more ideas and it just kind of happened naturally. That's how Pixeljunk games are usually born, and Inc. was that way.

What kind of size team are we talking about with Inc.? Is it pretty small?

RP- Pixeljunk Inc. is three people. (chuckle). We are making a ridiculously ambitious game, and with the smallest possible team. It's just me, I'm the lead designer, and we have one artist and one programmer. So its a bare bones skeleton operation.

For a bare bones skeleton operation though, especially off of this particular Indie conference and with Journey sweeping the GD Choice awards, It feels like the time to be in those sorts of projects. Are you pretty excited for the product you are hoping to put out?

RP- I wasn't really thinking about the conference. 4am got nominated for an IGF award, but while I've been here everybody has just been asking about Inc. and when's the next game coming and can we get cards. It's, we just wanna make the game that is in our heads and once that's done we are just going to go into a cave for three months and just play it, so we will disappear, which hopefully means we have the mod support by then because we wanna do, because it's on Steam we want to support Steam Workshop and provide modding support, so by the time we go into the cave everyone else will be making things for it.

This all sounds really interesting, and I don't want to take up too much more of your time, so last quick question: Which IGF game caught your eye the most? Which one-

RP- Super Hexagon, Super Hexagon, Super Hexagon.

Super Hexagon? Super Hexagon.

RP- Yep, Super Hexagon holy crap that game is awesome, yeah, just... Goddammit Super Hexagon.

Okay, actual last question. One thing I have been hearing, especially when I asked Terry Cavenagh was the idea of Player Respect, of respecting the player, and with 4am I can see some of that in just giving the player the tools and just letting them do their own thing. What does it mean to respect the player in your mind, with your design philosophy?

RP- With 4am in particular it means we are not an orthodox rhythm game. An orthodox rhythm game like Dance Dance Revolution, or Guitar Hero is a game that forces the player to march to its step. Play these beats, when I tell you, and you are a slave to the game. 4am is the complete opposite of that philosophically. 4am is a blank canvas, and the player tells the game what to do. The player has all of the power, and all of the control, which is why it's more of a digital instrument than it is like a game even. It doesn't ask anything of you it does whatever you tell it. So, yeah, with a high skill ceiling that's the most respect that I can give to a player.

Cool. Thank you very much for your time.

RP- No worries.

IGF Impressions: Space is the Place... for Panic

I was very lucky to be able to attend the GDC this year, and see the best that this industry has to offer. I must admit, however, that I was unable to explore as much as I probably should have. I was practically chained to the IGF pavilion, playing the games and talking to the creators about said games. It was great, and I will be doing my best to cover every game, or at least give them a mention, in my coming Impressions. Today, we will cover four games in one post, starting with the wildly successful FTL, and going from there into Super Space____, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and Spaceteam. Space. Spacey Space Space. Also, a great deal of CapsLock, as the other common thread for this article is SCREAMING.

rockpapershotgun.com

FTL is a game that (hopefully) needs no introduction. After a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, FTL has gone on to become a critical darling and favorite of many people. While I certainly feel that any game that has so much praised lavished on it is deserving of the most critical scrutiny, FTL really is a total package of a game. It doesn't miss any of the important beats of the intended experience, the FIRE PHOTON TORPEDOES RAISE SHIELDS FIX THAT ENGINE OH GOD THEY HAVE ION CANNONS kind of crazed frenzy. It is the most complex of the four games, though by no means the most intense. It does have the most lasting session length, with a full traversal of it's randomized star maps taking around a couple hours, give or take. Now, one common thread in all of these games is the chaotic flailing of a spaceship's crew on the verge of annihilation. Note that this does not mean violent death by laser, but also just running into large rocks, or depending on the game, some other, crazier death. However, FTL is surprisingly limited in this regard. When playing the game, the vast majority of deaths will most likely be related to ship-to-ship combat. This is not necessarily to the games detriment, as it establishes at the outset that you are on the run from a hostile military through hostile and pirate filled space; combat is inevitable, very likely, and very well fleshed mechanically.

ign.com

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is an animal of another color entirely. While FTL draws a lot from the larger scale of shows like Star Trek and Firefly, managing a crew of anywhere from one to half a dozen, LiDS is about a couple. It is a two-person cooperative game, which at this point is limited to an arcade style survival mode, though there may be more to come later. It also is very combat focused, but since you have to manually drive the ship everywhere in this one (however unrealistic that may be), planets and asteroids are much more dangerous. It is a simpler game; when I asked the creators, the mental collective of Asteroid Base, what their inspiration was for this game, they responded with a single scene from Star Wars: A New Hope. It's definitely a shorter experience at present, with an ever increasing , rather than FTL's series of rising dread as your ship slowly deteriorates, battle to battle. It makes up for this through its coop, and the furious ranting at one another that this produces. Playing with my own partner in crime, it was a harrowing experience, which can be briefly summarized as QUICK SHOOT THAT ONE I'LL DRIVE OH GOD THE SHIELDS ARE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE SHIP SHITSHIT FIRE THE BIG LASER NO THE BIG YELLOW LASER GODDAMIT WE HIT A PLANET WE NEED THEIR LOVE TO LIVE and so on. The game neatly abstracts the usual scifi technobabble into a cute, easy on the eyes visual shorthand. The shields are blue, the ships wheel (yeah, spaceship with a wheel) and engine are orange, the guns are red, and your health is hearts. You get more health by finding planets, shooting all the bad guys on them, and the remaining inhabitants give you hearts as thanks. Your spaceship runs on love, and the evil space aliens are out to explode you. It's lovably simplistic, like your favorite picture book as a kid, and can hold that same cute and simplistic dramatic tension. It makes you hate and appreciate the other player, unlike some other game.

Digipen

Super Space ____ is that game. That game that you love, it makes you happy after you are done playing it, but goddamn it makes you hate the other schmucks you are playing with. It is some far distant descendant of Asteroids, but with your engines replaced by three people with guns of their own to shoot. It is a chaotic ballet of spinning geometry, every player desperately shooting in all directions, trying to either score points or keep the construction they are tethered to from colliding with the many instant death surfaces that you are trapped with. It is nail biting just trying to not die, and when there are three other idiots all trying to do the same thing, with everything happening too fast to talk, you hate every other person you play with for actively sabotaging the whole operation, because we wouldn't have run into that wall unless you were too busy trying to up your score and I KNOW IT WAS YOU MARK YOU WERE THE BLUE GUN AND YOU HAD THE HIGH SCORE BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T THINK THE GIANT BLOCK ABOUT TO SMASH US WAS MORE IMPORTANT GRAAARGARGHAARH. This fosters and makes fun the experience of too many cooks in the kitchen, with everybody trying to do their own thing and failing because even in space we aren't completely in a vacuum.

sleepingbeastgames.com

Now, one thing that all of these games have in common is the screaming, the yelps and cries of desperation and fun. All of these games cause them, but Spaceteam makes them the central mechanic. As an Iphone/Ipad game, it is probably the most fun I have ever had with an Idevice, and certainly the most fun multiplayer game nominated for anything this year. Yeah, it really is that fun. It is fairly simple. Every level, every player gets a crazy control panel, and orders. Those orders might be for you, or for your compatriots. They have basically the same thing on their screens; crazy control panel, crazy orders. What ensues is a shouting match of frenzied, crazy orders to one another. SET THE FLUX ANNIHILATOR TO 4! ASTEROIDS, EVERYBODY SHAKE! ENGAGE THE GRAVITOFIELD! PUT THE COFFEE ON! Yeah, there are straight gag buttons and switches. It is SO MUCH FUN. I played it three times, just because. It was equally fun every time. Such cannot be said about most games.

The one common maxim about space is that it is, in fact, rather large. So it seems strange that so many of the space games, especially the four I spoke about above, share so many elements. They are all about a crew surviving, often on the skin of their teeth. But this concept has so much meat to it, and meat so wonderfully juicy to we aficionados, that each time we come back to it, we find something different to focus on. Ship survival in LiDS and FTL, the friction of friends messing up in Super Space ____ and Spaceteam, FTL and Spaceteam both running from imminent annihilation, the shooting galleries in Super Space____ and LiDS, there are just so many mechanical variables, things to include and focus on, that each game feels fresh and interesting compared to the others.

As the indie space in particular grows, we are starting to see a lot of accumulation in variations on a theme. Now, while a cynic could see this as a bad thing, as the loss of originality in the art, I think that it means really good things. These ideas are built off of the same foundation, but being so different, show the potential and diversity within the genre and the medium. There is a lot more unexplored potential here, and we are just starting to really venture artistically. Space is a very big place, and we have a lot yet left to find.

John Payne? Max McClane? OR Roleplaying Behind the Camera

Wow! It has been longer than I like since I posted last. Whatever, just moved across the country. Back to the blogging grindstone, I suppose. Oh the drudgery.

rockstargames.com/maxpayne3

I recently finished playing through Max Payne 3. It was a pretty good manshoot, with enough context to make the linear corridors and shooting of mans from being odious. It was the context, visually rich and well written overall that got me thinking about where the player fits into such a closed narrative. When I finished, I was thinking that the player's input is completely superfluous to the narrative itself, but also vitally important because otherwise it wouldn't exist. The player is just turning pages, hitting the play button on what is billed as a piece of interactive media. However, the next thing I did with my free time is what changed my viewpoint somewhat.
I watched Die Hard.

Wikimedia

Now, the parallels between Max and John McClane are pretty easy to find. Both are grizzled, quippy, and blaze through their situation with a mix of extreme competence and bad decisions. But watching Die Hard, I had a thought. When playing a game, I would almost always be thinking of the main character as me, or that they were intended to be me. There is a supposition that the controlled character in the game is the players avatar, the embodiment of our will in the game space. But in a game like Max Payne 3 the player's agency is limited by the standards of a linear shooter's level design, and the idea of him as an avatar for the player is continuously undermined by Max's constant narration. Now, I really like his narration, but it definitely made me feel distanced from Max himself. I would never speak for myself, never make a decision besides when to pull the trigger (if at all). But, I was directing him along his chosen path, and that is where I found a comfortable position to get involved.

rockstargames.com/maxpayne3

By placing yourself in the role of the cinematographer of Max Payne 3: Favela Freakout, the game becomes much more interesting. The purpose is no longer to survive the shootout of the favelas as an ex-cop from Jersey, it's to make that digital model of an ex-cop from Jersey look as badass as possible. You aren't enacting John Woo slow motion gunplay, you are John Woo. In that capacity, a certain amount of roleplay can occur, which is incredibly immersive. While it may not have been the original intent, it has certainly cast a different, very positive light on what would otherwise be a somewhat samey game.

rockstargames.com/maxpayne3

While a lot of shooters could be played with a similar mindset, I think that Max Payne 3 is particularly suited to it, with the lack of HUD, slow motion mechanic, and the dynamic camera movements and cuts when killing the last foe of a shootout. While it may be somewhat disorienting from a player perspective, not to mention pointless mechanically, as the cinematographer, it's vastly preferable to the having the camera in the exact same over the shoulder shot the entire time (that film would be incredibly boring). The fact that you can both engage your slow motion and keep firing while the target collapses really adds to the player's control of the presentation. All of these mechanics come together to create an almost curatorial position for the player, encouraging action packed, visually arresting gameplay. Sometimes it takes a step back to really get into a piece of art.