Normally I avoid posting news, but I found this bit o’ information a little too tasty to keep to myself. First reported at the Dark Castle News blog, a Return to Dark Castle trailer video (Youtube version here) has been posted over at the publisher’s web site. The gameplay looks hilarious, and definitely captures the spirit of the original. I can’t wait for this classic to hit the Super Happy Fun Fun online store.

If you missed my earlier coverage of Return to Dark Castle you might want to take a peek at the article.

ChipWits was an edutainment game that was released in the early days of the Macintosh. One part puzzler and one part GUI-based programming teacher, ChipWits used an icon-driven programming language (IBOL) to command a miniature robot on rollerskates around a room. Through combinations of operators and arguments, the robot would traverse the room picking up, eating, or frying objects at your maniacal whim. I don’t doubt that games such as The Incredible Machine, and more recently Chibi-Robo, gained much of their inspiration from this classic.

Dark Castle was a mixed action/puzzler/platformer that put you in the shoes of the bumbling adventurer Duncan in his quest to defeat the Black Knight. The game featured eery waveform sound effects and wonderful character animation reminiscent of later ‘rotoscoped’ animation. (Interesting side note: Co-developer Jonathan Gay later came to pioneer the now-ubiquitous Flash animation software. The designer and illustrator Mark Pierce later became the co-founder of software giant Macromedia. Holy jebus!) Full of slapstick humor and frustrating puzzles, Dark Castle is probably one of the least known indie masterpieces of the 1980’s.

Unfortunately, neither of these games have been playable on modern systems without frustratingly clunky emulation software. That is, until now! I was very pleasantly surprised when I found out that both have been remade into modern sequels by indie developers:

Return to Dark Castle (Mac OS X only) has been in production for the better part of 7 years. Originally developed for Mac OS 9, the game engine had to be completely reprogrammed for OS X, and the art had to be redrawn for a 16-bit color depth. Since then, the game has went through years of bumpy roads; finally making it to an immanent final release through its publisher, Super Happy Fun Fun. For now, I strongly suggest downloading the latest demo beta (link courtesy of the Dark Castle forums) and playing it through. The demo is rather short, but demonstrates the potential the final release of the game will have, especially considering that the full version will include all of the levels from the original Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, the new levels for Return to Dark Castle and a level editor. The production quality is simply stunning and demonstrates the kind of polish that is possible when a game receives nearly 10 years (!) of attention. The final release of the game is definitely on my 2008 must-buy list. Now, someone just has to convince ZSculpt to port this to XBOX 360 Live Arcade…

Edit: If you want to keep up on the latest news for Return to Dark Castle, head on over to the Dark Castle Blog.

After stumbling upon Doug Sharp’s blog a few months ago on an unrelated search, I found out that a beta of ChipWits II has been released! The original programmers, Doug Sharp and Mike Johnston, re-wrote the entire game from scratch using the Adobe AIR Flash framework - meaning that it’s playable on both Windows and Mac! The sequel very much captures the enjoyment of the original, and it’s great seeing these oldschool designers back on the saddle. So head on over to the ChipWits II web site and give it a try. Even 25 years later, it’s still great edutainment software since the goals have stayed the same, so if you have kids let them take a crack at some procedural programming. The only criticism I have is that I miss the old ChipWits interface… there’s something slightly clunky about this one. Hopefully that gets resolved for the final version…

Update: The original ChipWits was remade for the Windows platform by Klaus Breuer. Klaus painstakingly reprogrammed the entire game from start to finish, and it’s available as freeware at his web site. I highly recommend playing the original, and this is the next best thing.

The first, Privateer: Ascii Sector, is an impressive ascii-based interpretation of the original. The graphics are colorful and almost completely faithful to the gameplay of the original … minus one dimension of course. While the interface shares many similarities with roguelikes, there are many interesting enhancements that give the game a completely unique style. Most of the time I was absolutely stunned that a single developer - Christian Knudsen - built the entire game - ascii art, gigantic maps, fluid and colorful animations, and in-game economy algorithms - his work is absolutely polished. The game is currently at v0.2, and Christian is hard at work at bringing v0.3 to completion. If you play the game, please send Christian some encouragement, either over at his forums or at his Great Games Experiment page - I’d love to see a final release candidate of the game get released some day. Download it here.

The second project, Privateer Gemini Gold, is a 3d platform-independent remake of the game for Windows, Linux and OS X using the Vega Strike game engine. If you’re looking for a way of playing the original Privateer with high-res 3d graphics without running Dosbox - this project is definitely the way to go. A very large team of 3d artists, programmers, designers, playtesters and audio engineers have created a truly faithful reproduction of the original game. The development team is die-hard dedicated to the project, and respond to suggestions and comments on the forums regularly. If you were a fan of the original game, you will be immediately at home with this remake - it is probably the most detailed remake of a 3d game I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t played this classic, I strongly suggest heading over to the download page and giving it a shot.

Dragon’s Lair has always drawn serious polarities from gamers - some people (like me) have fond memories of dumping $20 worth of quarters into it at the local arcade; others find the game unforgiving or simply unrewarding. According to the source of this news clip, the game has both a “classic” 1983 mode that is identical to the original game, and a new mode that makes use of the DS’s stylus and microphone.

Happy Halloween from the Artful Gamer!

This year I had the opportunity to carve some very gamesy pumpkins. Unfortunately, the trick-or-treaters we had were almost all under 6 years old, and didn’t recognize most of these games/characters (one kid recognized the pumpkin on the far right though!). We had 45 kids this year - definitely better than last year when it was 15 below celsius and snowy.

That being said - the Artful Gamer is holding a special Halloween contest. If you can guess the three games represented in my pumpkins correctly, I’ll enter you into a draw. The winner of the draw will receive one of three downloadable games from the Introversion Software online store (valued at approximately $20 USD). You can choose between Defcon, Darwinia, or Uplink. I own all three of these games in fact… and each definitely has a unique charm. Let’s continue to support indie game developers - especially the good ones!

Entries will be accepted from now until Midnight, Friday, November 2nd (GMT - 7). That gives you 2 full days to figure this out. E-mail your contest entry to: chris {@t} artfulgamer {d0t} com

The winner will be announced on Monday, November 5th. Thank you for continuing to read AG - your support and comments keep this site alive and well.

Most people who grew up playing The Oregon Trail played it because their teacher had an Apple //e hidden in the corner of their grade 4 classroom along with a host of other MECC games such as Odell Lake and Number Munchers. But the real draw was always the Oregon Trail: five kids would pile around the green-on-black Apple monitor and yell commands to the wagon driver, then anticipate who would die of cholera or dysentery first (and subsequently fight over what would appear on the tombstone). I remember someone saying that if you purchased only spare wagon wheels and no food (or bullets), you could kill your whole wagon train within a few days on the trail.

In The Thule Trail, the developers got everything right - from the dithered color graphics, to the 1-bit mono sound, simple yet clever game mechanics, and a sense of humor that does justice to road trips. The only thing I really miss is watching andy die of dysentery (peperony and chease!)

I sent an e-mail over to the folks at Periscopic asking if any of their team would have time for a quick interview - hopefully we’ll hear something back! In the mean time, I’m going to continue writing a short article on The Oregon Trail as both a great game and an educational tool.

Why don’t mainstream media outlets like Time and the NYTimes get video games? Why do they so regularly and predictably fail to get beyond the worn out Pong / Pac-Man / Mario reference points?

I think it’s because most of them rely on a 19th century model of journalism that continues to define what the news looks like today. Journalists and editors tend to use three basic criteria when determining what they will deem “newsworthy” - conflict, novelty, and prominence. J-School 101 dictates that a story about a video game is worth writing only if it meets one or more of these standards. {more here}

And not to mention prolific! Somehow he manages to pump out an article every day. His articles cover the entire gamut of video game culture - from mainstream games, to indie games, design and production, artwork, storytelling, politics, and (you’ll find) … his loathing for Halo 3 (agreed!). And mostly importantly - it’s refreshing to find an academic who actually has a history of playing video games [and still plays regularly] and is not just a ‘ludological theoretician’!

Anyhoo, I’m not trying to up-sell you here - The Brainy Gamer speaks for itself and I’m enjoying the reading so far.

As for the Artful Gamer - I apologize for the large lag between posts. I’ve been recruited to serve as the Best Man at a wedding for a friend of mine, and those duties (aside from marking 10000 midterm exams) have obliterated my opportunities to write. Coming soon is my review of Ultima VIII: Pagan, an interview with the creator of now-defunct indie MMORPG “Omega Syndrome”, and a short article on pencil’n'paper roleplaying games.

I recently came across a post over at Jeff Tunnell’s blog that reminds game designers how important it is to have many design ideas in mind, rather than just relying on a single idea. It made me think about one of the central problems in modern mainstream game development: a lack of fresh, innovative games. As I was writing this article, GameSetWatch posted footage from the Independent Games Summit of an “Innovation in Independent Games” panel consisting of Jenova Chen, Jonathan Mak, Kyle Gabler, and Jonathan Blow. After listening to the hour-long discussion, I decided to integrate many of the comments into this article, because they were inherently relevant and profound for any discussion of the creative process.

While many people assume that independent game developers, by virtue of being unconstrained by publishers, auto-magically have creative, interesting ideas. However, as I hope to demonstrate - creative innovation is far from guaranteed simply because we’re ‘indies’, and requires a certain kind of developer or team to come up with something worth playing.

First off, I want to be very upfront about the nature of this piece: If you’re an indie game developer (like myself) this article is not meant to take the wind out of your sails - it’s meant to encourage, challenge and implore you to hone your creative ideas before you start working on your next platformer, arcade shooter, or Zuma clone. Pursue a game that you’re passionate about - something that you want to play - and not something that you imagine your audience might want to play. And if you want to play Zuma meets Bubble Bobble - by all means go for it.

On any given day, you can head over to TIGSource, Indygamer or JayisGames and find a great majority of indie-made games with minimal creative insights. These are often attempts at producing something ‘innovative’ or ‘artistic’ and become formulaic: they either (a) ape pre-existing genres without any creative insight, or worse (b) try to break all design conventions just for the sake of breaking them and end up with an uninteresting mess.

Creativity and Indie Developers

So if you do want to work creatively, and produce games from ideas that you are interested in, here’s how according to some of the current indie developers (my comments are in grey):

According to Jeff Tunnell:

“You should have literally hundreds of them floating around in your head. Even better, you should have hundreds of them written in your own design portfolio or journal.”

“One idea won’t cut it. What if you can’t get other people on your team to buy into your one idea? What if the technology is not available to get your one idea done? What if you can’t find a publisher if your idea is too big to fund yourself? There are many, many reasons why you need a LOT of game ideas.” And finally, Tunnell suggests that designers must always be on the prowl for creative inspiration from other artists.

Game designers can naturally find their inspiration in other games - but Tunnell makes us think a bit broader and implicitly suggests that all forms of creative expression are valid sources of inspiration. Often, I find that this is the weakest point among many developers, a fundamental lack of creative depth caused by:

1. A lack of experience with more than a single game genre (ie. arcade shooters).
2. (More broadly): A lack of familiarity with other forms of entertainment (ie. film, music, theatre).
3. (And even more broadly): Too few personal experiences to draw upon period - what we might call a ’sheltered life’.

Turning back to Tunnell’s suggestions, where do creative ideas come from? Creativity is inspired by other creative works and creative people, and more generally from a broad array of (meaningful) personal experiences. For the moment, this may sound a bit too unspecific, so let’s move on to another developer.

Jenova Chen from the Innovation in Independent Games panel:

Jenova’s comments and presentation focus primarily upon the role of ‘feelings’ in game development. In his presentation, he turns to modern film and shows how the genres have developed into broad categories all separable by the general ‘feeling’ that they express: action, dramas, comedies, etc. He suggests that video game genres follow a different categorization system, one based in technological differences: First-Person Shooters, ‘Shmups, MMORPGs, etc. With that in mind, Jenova suggests that instead of designing for technological innovation, designers must instead “design for feeling” and “design for entertainment”. And in terms of his personal style, he prefers to design with a very broad audience in mind and not necessarily ‘art’.

If we accept the argument that video games and films are inherently different on the basis of their underlying genre metaphors (’feeling’ vs. ‘technology’), we at least can make a distinction between games that have been designed for a technological appeal (ie. BioShock) and games that were designed to capture a certain feeling (ie. X-COM: Terror from the Deep). In that way, the audience playing your game is separable into two kinds: those who are entertained by technological innovation and those who enjoy emotional expressivity. (Keep in mind that these distinctions are only conceptual, because of course all games are a mix of technology and expression - but the idea is to work with the concepts he’s presented us with)

Pictured above: Screenshot from X-COM: UFO Defense courtesy of Mobygames.

Returning to Jenova’s argument - he suggests that if we design games they must be unified or created in terms of the feelings the author her/himself feels. For instance, to capture ‘fear’ or ‘terror’ in the X-COM series, the designers/artists/musicians had to all understand the underlying feeling of the game: the aliens have attacked Earth, and their only goal is the complete annihilation of humans. In that way, the entire game is designed around fear: the music is dark and brooding, insect-like aliens sneak up on the player using the ‘fog of war’, your UFO strike team can lose morale - panic and drop their weapons, and so on. Games that were developed with a unifying feeling in mind often inspire the same feelings in the player - and in that way are successful (anyone can remember the terror of playing DOOM with a pair of headphones on in a dark room).

Is that enough, then? Are ‘creative’ games simply only mediums for the expression of a single personal feeling for the entertainment of an audience? Now, I don’t think Jenova is suggesting that only one feeling should underly a game (since he said “feelings”) - but the large majority of modern films are dominated by single feelings. I’ll come back to this in later comments, because I believe that setting Hollywood films as the gold standard for ‘feelings’ in games leads us down a garden path to emotional superficiality and didactic storytelling.

Jonathan Mak from the Innovation in Independent Games panel:

Jon, in his markedly passionate and direct Torontonian style, turns us toward the importance of “individual expression” in game development. He suggests that worrying about [technological] innovation does not matter, since the technologies that are used in games are simply tools used to further an expressive agenda. In that way, he says that if games are designed with a technology as the focus of the development, “the game won’t be about you anymore.” He then suggests that if games are a form of individual expression, you must “follow your own inspirations” and trust your own personal judgment and tastes when you design your game. What if other people don’t like your game? Fuck ‘em - “You can’t be afraid to piss people off. You have to piss someone off!” because then (he suggests) your work cannot be ignored. To thine own self be true.

Finally, in terms of practical advice - Jon simply says that you should “Go home. Don’t innovate. Play lots of games. Find the ones you like, and make a game based on that.” And as a side note, it is interesting that Everyday Shooter was developed as a blend of his interests in music and games - albums and arcade shooters.

So, what can we learn from Jon? Are games really only about “me” the designer? Should the audience be ignored? This is a rather different style than Jenova, who says that he prefers to work with an audience already in mind when he makes a game.

Pictured above: Still frame from Frank Miller’s Sin City.

According to Jon, innovation doesn’t matter. He says that indie games are about the developer themselves - and not about their potential playability by the unseen masses. Unfortunately, this is where the details become sticky, because (according to edenb in the TIGsouce article comments section), while “innovation shouldn’t be the end goal, it does help us accomplish feelings that we couldn’t otherwise portray“. After all, certain camera techniques and graphic art styles did give Sin City an overall feeling that would be unportrayable using say - a handicam and pencil crayons. However, there is a grain to truth to Jon’s challenge, because there is no such thing as anything completely ‘individual’ in the world. We all exist as persons - we all eat, sleep (well, most of us), shit, laugh and cry. By focusing on our own personal humanity, we can necessarily (and accidentally!) strike a chord with other like-minded human beings; after all, Jon is a gamer and a music lover - his tastes are inherently human tastes. What he cautions against, I think, is treating a game like a product and forgetting that the person making it is themselves a living, breathing, joyful creature with their own interests.

Returning to Jon’s final comment (Go home, play games, make a game), we can now appreciate the importance of finding creative inspiration in things we ‘like’. While I certainly agree that a game designer must have a passion for gaming, it does not seem so wise to simply play games that we ‘like’. If I were to only watch films like that ‘like’, I would be off to see the next craptacular Jerry Bruckheimer marathon on TV. This may seem like a petty semantic distinction, but my ‘likes’ are often much different from my ‘loves’ or my ‘passions’. And furthermore, doing only things that you like (aka. hedonism) is a sure way of producing shallow pieces of art, since we truly do need a broad array of experiences to draw upon in order to give our works some depth. Want my advice? Play some games that you’ll hate. Play games from genres you’d never normally touch. The ones that stick out in your memory as being meaningful in any way are the ones you should have in mind when you make games.

Jonathan Blow from the Innovation in Independent Games panel:

Jonathan starts with the idea that no “great work” was great because it was innovative - it was because of something “deep inside the work”; those who aspire for innovation often produce creations that are ‘gimmicky’ or shallow. His overall argument is that while technological innovation can become more and more refined, it does not provide us with the “depth” necessary to become “relevant to humanity”.

In terms of practical suggestions, Jonathan tells us that “good” ideas should be thrown away because it’s the “great” ideas - the ideas that we become enamored with - that should be explored and deepened. He also says that “You know you’re doing something right when you end up discarding the idea you started with, and doing something different that you got to by following that idea.”

Similar to the previous panelists, Blow tends to focus on a divide between technological innovation and depth. What he does not do, unfortunately, is tell us what he means by “depth”. The depth of feelings? Stories? Concepts? Thoughts? Ideas? People? Experiences? All of these concepts involve depth, I’d argue.

The idea of designing for “depth” is controversial. According to Lyx (in the TIGSource article comments), “You need to understand how to express this deep meaning efficiently to others. As already shown in the previous example: it is not enough it to the player on a conceptual level. It is not enough to transmit a concept - you must be able to transmit what it feels, smalls and looks like…. not just by simply drawing it on the screen, thats not what i’m talking about“, and, “unless the receiver of the message accepts the message, it wont work.” Lyx seems to suggest that meanings/feelings are first ’selected’ by the designer, identified, and then must be ‘transmitted’ to the player.

This kind of philosophy treats artistic works as an engineering problem, and puts the complete power of the work in the artist’s hands - turning the wayward designer into a god and the audience into his followers. This is, of course, non-sense. When artists beat their audiences over the head with a concept or ‘message’ they have to tell, audiences find it preachy and insulting. I often find films that engineer feelings for the audience shallow and uninsightful, something that acclaimed directors like Steven Spielberg are horrendously guilty of: treating the audiences like puppets. What does this mean for game designers? If they shoot for this level of depth, their games may have some feeling to them (ie. DOOM was scary!) but that’s all that they will ever have - they never end up penetrating much deeper into the human experience. However, if designers allow themselves to survey a broader emotional scenery, they hand over the interpretive responsibility to the audience instead of hoarding it for themselves. This is the pinnacle of creative achievement, in my opinion - because it stimulates the audience’s imagination and allows them to feel in ways that were not necessarily intended by the author. This is a truer ‘depth’. More on this topic must be said, but for now it should be enough to say that depth comes from the imagination of both the player and the designer, and not from simply from clever engineering.

My Unsolicited Thoughts on Ideas and the Imagination

Pictured above: poster for Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. Not pictured: Any indie game that I can think of with as much imaginative depth.

I often find that maintaining a creative critical-mass only can happen when I’m thinking actively about game design, and allowing my mind to freely roam. Sometimes I entertain silly ideas; ridiculous ideas; boring ideas. Other times I’m reading more serious material, and I find myself thinking about the human condition and the circumstances of our existence. Sometimes I find myself reminiscing about meaningful childhood memories, and imagine the kinds of games that I would have wanted to play as a child. But whatever the circumstances, I’ve always found myself tying my trains of thoughts back into games and how games can be experienced.

One of the problems with this kind of free-associative mode was that I used to lose track of inspired design concepts as I was working them out in my head. That’s why having a notebook or voice recorder is handy - they allow you to explore your associative thoughts on paper (or out loud), and eventually commit them as more formalized concepts. And later, those loose design concepts can then be further refined, and committed to a design document - eventually resulting in a full game design.

Some of my best ideas have come from mundane situations like washing the dishes, brushing my teeth, watching The Simpsons, listening to music, and playing retro games. Potentially any human activity can be modeled into a design concept, but the designer’s emotional sensitivities must ultimately decide if the design concept is enjoyable, meaningful, or downright fun. This is why having a broad array of experiences to draw upon is so important - because the collective fusion of all of these experiences is what goes into a game whether we realize it or not.

Finally, I cannot stress the importance of finding other like-minded folks to bounce ideas off of - this is something that wasn’t mentioned by any of the aforementioned developers. In my case, I’m lucky to have met my creative doppelganger in graduate school and we spend many hours each week discussing potential design concepts, storylines, and programming models. We free-associate together and take turns playing with our imaginations, freely trading ideas back and forth. Eventually both of us end up at a place where we say “This sounds fucking great! Let’s make this game right now!” The ideas that we both find promising or interesting are then committed to the company wiki, and later can be tweaked or rewritten. Sometimes these concepts begin to expand and aggregate with other concepts, and eventually we have a full-length design document. Other times these ideas just sit for months on the wiki, neglected or ignored. Either way - as Tunnell said - hundreds and thousands of ideas are floating in the air at any one moment. In the end, we don’t discount or disparage any single idea, because while it may seem silly or meaningless alone, it can sometimes become integrated with other ideas to become part of a larger game.

Making meaningful games is not so much about making games that we ‘like’ or we find ‘entertaining’ necessarily (since feeling angry or depressed doesn’t fit into either of those categories very well) - it’s more generally about finding meanings that accord with human experience. Engineering, tweaking, and re-design all come after we allow our imaginations to roam freely.

This of course begs the question, what does he mean by ’success’? Just as the Hollywood film industry and the North American record industry buried their heads in the sand when confronted with poor sales figures, the mainstream game industry blames production processes, business practices, and marketing techniques for mediocre sales, instead of taking a cold, hard look at the quality of the MMORPGs being released.

With that in mind, the “critique” that psychochild offers is rather illuminating: ¹

1. Your game suck? Throw money at it. You’ve got tons.

2. Don’t make a game - make intellectual property. That sells.

3. Have 20 years of back-catalogue handy to force your next turd onto the shelves.

4. “Enjoy total freedom” - have so much corporate clout that you can bully your publisher into accepting any release date.

5. “Lie with statistics” - fool your audience into buying your game, because good games don’t sell themselves.

I apologize if this comes across as being terribly cynical, but it is frustrating to watch the mainstream game industry attempt to re-invent itself using the same dead corporate ideas that got the industry into a creative slump in the first place. It is especially worrying when these ideas come from industry representatives that claim to be concerned with re-inventing the medium in closed-door invite-only conferences. Of course, the author is only the messenger here and it doesn’t make sense to point the finger at him alone, but the message we’re hearing is pretty clear: we still haven’t learned anything from WoW.

Pictured above: Big, dumb, and powerful beast. Barely visible: Creative innovation.

Nowhere have I see an analysis of World of Warcraft that questions its value in the game industry, and the creative advancement that it has brought to gamecraft as a whole. Instead, analyses of the game focus on financial success as the ultimate standard, and only demonstrate the ongoing irony of an industry that howls, “we must innovate; push the creative envelope!” while quickly balking at designs that “might not sell”.

If the industry is so concerned with making a purse of a sow’s ear, the first thing I’d like to see are experimental, dangerous, creative exercises; not evolutionary expansions of the same recycled gameplay/stories/genres that I’ve been playing since 1981.

That’s not to ignore the fact that giant, meandering, beasts of companies with hundreds of employees do have to release some sort of game with financial targets in sight, but as I’ve said before - these financial concerns can only be taken into account after creative considerations have been fully realized.

¹(Keep in mind that the point of psychochild’s article isn’t to critique creativity in World of Warcraft - but it is noticable that the only lessons he covers are financially-driven. I would be interested in reading the possible creative/revolutionary game ideas that he sees in WoW.)

If you’re not familiar with the INN, or (like myself) didn’t have the chance to sample the service during its relatively short tenure of 5 years, here’s a short history lesson. And if, like me, you thought that MMORPGs began with the advent of Ultima Online - you’re in for a big surprise.

A Bit of History

In 1991, according to Ken Williams, the INN (otherwise known as The Sierra Network in those days) was partly conceived as a medium for online multiplayer parlour games such as cribbage and blackjack (I suspect inspired by the success of Sierra’s casual game product of 1989, Hoyle’s Official Book of Games). In a recent interview, Ken Williams himself says,

… [The Sierra Network] started because I had a grandmother who was getting older, and was bored. I asked myself one day, “Is there anything I could do where she could pick up a bridge game, without leaving home? 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?” No one remembers now, but TSN’s first name was “The Constant Companion”. It was meant to be a product targeting seniors…

As you can imagine, in 1991 the notion of playing graphical multiplayer games on the Internet (keep in mind that the World Wide Web was barely in its infancy) was beyond imagination. At that time, dialing up to local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and for-pay private network services such as Prodigy and Compuserve was the rule, and connections to the Internet were often limited to those who had access through participating universities. Since Prodigy and Compuserve were more geared to the business consumer, the on-line games these services offered were rudimentary at best.

While The Sierra Network was still based on a for-pay private dial-up service much like the aforementioned companies, its target audience would come to define a completely different experience. Instead of dialing-up to read news articles and read discussion groups in a web-like interface, TSN presented the caller with an interface much like many of the Sierra games available at the time (ie. The Adventures of Willy Beamish). Instead of navigating through text menus and drop-down lists to reach a discussion board, TSN users simply clicked on “The Town Hall” or “The Arena” and were directly taken to a new area. For example, if users clicked on the Clubhouse, they would be taken to a parlour where they could chat with other users and set up a chess or card game.

Online Gaming

Above: Screenshot of the Shadows of Yserbius town interface - borrowed from Wikipedia.

Thankfully, The Sierra Network quickly progressed beyond simple parlour games. While casual games such as chess and bridge catered to a wide variety of audiences for the first couple of years TSN was on-line, more contemporary games such a multiplayer edition of Red Baron appeared. It is difficult to express how awestruck a child or adult would be - in 1993 - seeing hundreds of players flying biplanes around in a graphical dog-fight simulation simultaneously! Given that the average modem connection speed in that era was around 2400 baud, the technical feats behind the scenes of TSN must have been staggering.¹

The service also introduced a graphical MUD known as Shadows of Yserbius, reminiscent of games such as Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder. Unlike those games, however, Shadows of Yserbius offered an MMO experience supporting up to 30 (and later 60) players in each room. If you’ve played any of the nascent MMO’s such as Ultima Online or Dark Sun Online in their early days, you can appreciate how much lag and chaos 30 players create in a single room. While Neverwinter Nights (1991) is given official recognition as the world’s first graphical MMORPG, Shadows of Yserbius clearly demonstrated that complex and fun role-playing games could become the future of online gaming, a full 5 years before Ultima Online reached the mass market.

Modern Relevance

While none of these games alone might sound very impressive to the modern gamer, I needn’t remind you that all of these games were delivered through a completely graphical online portal using a modem and VGA graphics in DOS, over 15 years ago. Contemporary gaming portals such as Pogo.com are all fundamentally based on The ImagiNation Network’s visionary approach of centralizing the player’s experience through a portal catering to different genres.

Furthermore since the games were developed at Sierra, each were cleverly integrated into areas of the user interface in such a way that the INN “town” was artistically thematic. Even now, few UI designers have mastered the kind of simplicity that the INN offered children and beginner users. Even user-friendly interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii’s front-end still rely upon a degree of gaming and Internet savvyness (even if we don’t notice it these days)… the INN had no such prerequisites for budding gamers other than moving a mouse around the screen.

Other innovations such as changing the interface to fit the current season (ie. from Fall to Winter) lended the INN a kind of aesthetic realism that I’ve only seen in one other game since: Animal Crossing. While this kind of feature might seem hokey or unimportant at first, imagine the child whose primary understanding of the world is of their immediate environment: their family, their home, their town, their school, and the different activities that each season affords them. By thematizing the INN town in terms of seasonal art, Sierra managed to turn the whole (abstract) idea of 1000 users on dial-up connecting to servers and networked together, into a very real community of people all busily exploring a theme park or town.

In the same way, the INN was one of the first games to allow players to customize their avatar’s face that would appear to all other users on the system. Again, the educational/immersive value of a simple technique such as this for a child (and for adults!) is unimaginable - rather than leaving users with just an abstract and anonymous handle or alias, the INN environment gave rise to the whole idea of a human presence and human persona online. Features like this gave freer expression to those who wanted a more personal experience online, and again wouldn’t be pick up for another decade until games such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour (2005), The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and the Nintendo Wii made use of more advanced avatar generation technology.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with visionary works, financial bungling and mismanagement crippled the project, and resulted in the service being purchased by America On-Line and abruptly discontinued, and the INN became… history.²

The ImagiNation Network Revival

More than 10 years after the INN had been disconnected, some clever indie developers managed to magically reverse-engineer some of the INN Client routines and began work on a server emulator that used the original client. After reading the very simple instructions, I had a working copy of the INN client connected to their server emulator within about 15 minutes! The server seems to emulate MANY of the INN’s original services, including Shadows of Yserbius! And not only can you connect and play these games, but you can play with other folks of course. The server emulation seems to really capture the original look and feel of the INN, and I’m sure that continued development will eventually provide access to the fabled multiplayer version of  multiplayer Red Baron was recently added by the INN Revival team! An opportunity to revisit one of the most foundational online gaming services of the decade is something not to squander. And while you’re at it - toss a little feedback to the INN Revival developers - I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear some responses to their game.

If you’re having trouble getting the INN to run using the installation instructions, I highly suggest downloading the Windows INN Revival Installer which includes both a copy of the INN client and the latest DOSBox. Mac users should download a copy of DOSBox for OS X, and follow the aforementioned instructions on the INN Revival site.

During the lunch hour my friend Andrew and I walked to his house in town and cracked open the box. We marveled at the trinkets inside - including a cloth map with indecipherable runes and some inked-in numbers (obviously made by Willy or his father). Whatever this bizarre game was about, it sure seemed like the kind of thing that geeks like us would like. We managed to just get through the six-diskette (!) installer before we had to quickly pack our bags and run back to the school in time for our afternoon class.
As soon as I got home, I installed it on my then-new IBM PS/1 and spent the next 6 months of my life exploring the beautiful world of Britannia through all hours of the night. Although I had already played dozens of games on my computers before, Richard Garriott’s Ultima series quickly became a gaming obsession. In fact, one the first times I ever used the internet (which, at that time, was merely a Lynx terminal session at university my mother was attending) was to find hints for Ultima VIII: Pagan at the then-fledgling Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter which I immediately became a member of.

Above: Actual screenshot from the PSP version.

My long, disturbing, love affair with the Ultima series has continued unabated ever since, and today I was shocked to find out that Ultima VII is now fully playable on the PSP ¹. Thanks to some brutal optimization codeslinging by Phantom Fighter, Exult (the open-source Ultima VII engine emulator) has been ported to the PSP. I’ve played many, many, homebrew PSP games, and this one absolutely shines in terms of production quality. Both The Black Gate and its sequel Serpent Isle are fully playable, and the controls have been remapped to work quite well with the PSP’s rather limited inputs. This release demonstrates not only how effective independent game developers are at cooperatively producing quality software, but also that indie developers are the only source for niche gaming.

So, if you’ve got a PSP capable of playing homebrew apps (using firmware <=1.50), head on over to the Exult PSP page and give it a whirl. Of course, you’ll have to have a copy of the Ultima VII game data in order to play, but a 4-second Google search is all that you’ll need for that..

If you have a PSP but don’t know how to play homebrew games, you’ll probably need to install custom firmware on your PSP. For the whole 15 minutes it takes, I highly suggest it.

Finally, if you don’t own a PSP but you’d still like to play Ultima VII: The Black Gate, or Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, just head on over to the Exult download page and select your operating system. I’ve used Exult on Linux, Windows and OS X, and all run flawlessly. These games are among some of the grand masterpieces of the last 30 years of video games, and I highly recommend them. Perhaps some day I’ll write an article on them…

After mulling that comment over for a 1/10000th of a second, his reaction was, “Well, art doesn’t sell buddy. Good luck with that.”

On Design “Rules”

The growing temptation in the industry, both for the corporate developers and independent developers, is to publish their “rules” of game design. You are probably already familiar with statements such as:

“The single biggest barrier is pacing. That’s the biggest challenge to manage. So that suspension of disbelief that you get in a linear medium [like movies] has been very carefully crafted and managed for you.” - Neil Young [Gamasutra]

“Some of the more basic features that can help make your game �universally accessible� include closed captioning for the hearing impaired. This means be more than just dialog. It also needs to include all game cues, including gameplay hints that might be being delivered through sounds effects or even music.” - Thomas Buscaglia [Gamasutra]

“I’ll present a list of the issues I have encountered, and my suggestions for addressing them…
[Players dislike] Back story in the game manual. Let the player experience it firsthand. Delete the pages from the manual and save the printing cost.” - Jeff Noyle [Gamasutra]

Why do designers feel the necessity to confess the very secrets that make them good at their trade? I would like to offer a very simple, yet insidious, answer: $.

The Almighty Dollar

What I’m arguing here is that what motivates the “sharing” of ideas in many indie game developer blogs has no creative or innovative potential. Most “ideas” are simply tricks for profitability. Over the last couple of years, we’ve begun to see a subversion of the AAA developers through an advancement of new indie developers. And with that, came the indie rhetoric.

Many self-professed ‘indie developers’ have prided themselves upon their “revolutionary” approaches to game design that somehow free the game industry from the creative stagnation of the last 15 years. In doing so, these narcissistic activists make use of rhetorical styles that tie in nicely with the American Dream, “Self-Made Man”, and Revolutionism…

Writers like Greg Costikyan pride themselves in subverting the oppressed gaming masses, freeing them from a tyranny of iterative Madden/NHL/Tiger Woods 2002 releases, with slogans like:

“PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Retail Chains!”

Yet, what does Greg Costikyan offer as a replacement for an empty industry?

“Building a Path to Market for Independent Games”

Slogans like this appeal to all of the classic American Dream rhetoric that we can call to mind. The Revolutionary. The Self-made Man. Ghandi. Che Guevara. But what’s so unappealing about this kind of approach to game development?

Blogging for “Good” Design

The real problem, as I alluded to earlier, is that the underlying motivaton for making games hasn’t changed one damned bit. In the end, the primary starting point for most indie games is profitability. So - you might ask - who cares? Who cares if profit is the primary goal of a game developer? Man’s gotta eat! Well, the problem comes when you actually start building games. If you start with profitability as a primary goal, you get development decisions like this:

1. Players get annoyed with save points.
2. Annoyed players are not happy players.
3. Let’s let players save whenever they want to.

Now - wait a second. That makes sense. I remember being extremely pissed off in the final boss battle of Final Fantasy VII when I had to start (again!) from the Highwind after the 14th time Sephiroth wiped out my (shitty) level 45 party! Why didn’t they add a savepoint in the damned cave?

But wait …. that was sneaky. There is a problem with that kind of mentality.

Why should it matter if players become annoyed with a certain game mechanic? When I play Chess with a friend, I certainly do not find myself screaming, “Fuck! Who designed this thing? If I designed it, the Queen would be able to polymorph into a flying Pit-bull and the Rook would fire Patriot missiles from its goddamned turrets!”

We should be asking ourselves questions like - why should game designers cater to the whims of players? Are players the best informed judges to decide on the future of game design?

[While I offer these questions rhetorically, they are also important to discuss and should be answered more adequately elsewhere. I think some players are in fact qualified to comment on design, as are some art critics - but not anyone.]

The answer to both of these questions again returns to the ubiquitous $.

The classic logic is that if players become irritated with your game design, they’re going to tell others - and those other potential buyers will refuse to pay for your indie game. Google ads won’t pay the bandwidth that your 10Mb demo has been sucking up. You’ll succumb to a heart failure because you can’t afford your expensive heart medication anymore. And then your wife will lose the house, move into a homeless shelter with the kids, and your rip-off of Bejeweled will be another notch in the game industry’s bedpost.

Where’s the sense of vision in indie development?

I think the move to a more independent industry will produce some interesting changes (and it has been, but in very small ways), but I don’t believe that the “casual games” developers have added much over the years. And they’re the ones dominating the market these days, because they know how to exploit cheesy game mechanics that sell.

And on the tails of that - if the indie market is at all successful, the only people who will profit from this venture are (again) the publishers. Those in control of the means of distributing your indie game (through online portals, etc) will ultimately be the ones with the most control of the game industry. That’s why, if things don’t change soon, history will repeat itself with little learned from its corporatist past. The industry is going to look much the same in 10 years - with different people clawing their way to the top. Already we see that publishing portals make many of the decisions for indie designers - like download size, demo length, title choice, and most obviously the game genre. And designers fool themselves into thinking that these are “good design decisions” because they’ve somehow found ways of working within the limitations of their publisher.

If the indie developer movement’s attempt at freeing itself from the confines of ridiculous crunch-times, abusive management, and dessicated genres is going to have any successes things have to change.
The original vision of the indie movement was to produce innovative games that revived dying interest from ex-gamers - to produce pieces of work that violated the “rules” of finance-driven design. But I don’t see much of a difference these days. If anything, indie developers have become even more conservative in their design ideals - they are terrified of taking design risks that might detract from already miniscule sales. At least EA has the occasional lapse in judgment and releases a good game by accident, because they can afford to make a $1 million mistake.

You’re saying that games are an Art? Fucking prove it.

Sometimes art doesn’t sell; that battleworn designer from BioWare that I referred to earlier was absolutely half-right there. Every artist knows the feeling of releasing a piece of work that just doesn’t succeed - whether financially or personally. But sometimes artists manage to produce something that resonates with a small handful of people and inspires an experience that seems to go beyond the artist’s intent. Sure, it doesn’t make anyone rich - but it did do something qualitatively different: it inspired people - it opened them up to experiences that they’ve never had before. Some pieces of art are so formative that they inspire people to create works of art themselves!

Of course there are games out there that inspire us! “Bad” games! Games that pissed us off. Games that died financially. We’ve all had those experiences - games that move us to think differently, shock us with our own behaviour, games that we talk about with our friends over lunch. Many indie/hobbyist game developers can attest to their first game experiences - and how these experiences game them a passion for the medium that eventually grew into their interest in creating their own games.

When was the last time that Bejeweled inspired anyone?

Despite their good intentions, most indie developers are putting us on the same road that they claim to be uprooting in the first place - they ultimately believe that profitability, in the end, is what dictates whether a game is successful or not. This often happens through a process of identifying what gameplay universals (i.e. game design “rules”) attract the largest number of purchasers, and then spout out these universals through blogs, developer conferences, e-zines, etc.

Here’s a suggestion to those who claim that games are an art: start developing games for people and not buyers. I am not claiming that for games to become an “art” that developers necessarily must become poor, but instead that the vision that developers craft into their game must account for the richness of human experience, and not the likelihood of universal enjoyment (i.e. the demo-purchase conversion rate).

What needs to change is the motivation and not the structure of game development, because in the end the goal of any business venture is profit. Developers must become motivated to craft their art for the sake of the art, and not the sake of their pocketbooks. Start thinking about profitability after you’re satisfied with your game.

But What Other Alternatives Are There?

The response that I’d anticipate from any starving indie developer is predictable and absolutely correct: how do we focus on the creative quality of our games while still turning a profit?

Well, one way involves innovating ways of funding game development so that it is less dependent upon the financial success of the game - and much less upon publishers.

Our company’s approach was to found a separate company that ensures that we stay afloat - as many other indie developers have done. Yes, this does require that we put in ridiculous amounts of hours building web sites, combing through MySQL databases and mindlessly coding PHP scripts - but it does put food on the table. And the reward at the end of the week is spending several hours working on our game prototype, and refining ideas without worrying if the particular idea is going to sell. With any amount of luck, the web business will achieve its own financial independence, and provide enough income for us to hire two developers that can do all the dirty work for us - and leave us to work on the game full time. Creative decisions should not begin with profitability considerations.

I’m sure there are tons of other business practices available out there that ensure some amount of orthogonality between business and design, but we’re not talking about it. Instead, we’re worrying about how to make design work within the confines of business, and I think that’s a mistake. We need come up with ways of making business work within the confines of enjoyable, inspiring, creative games.