A few weeks ago, I sat down with a friend of mine over beer, and he told me about his experiences working in a computer store in the 1990s. Our conversation made me realize that there is a large segment of the population under the age of 25 who have never heard of a “computer store” before: a store explicitly dedicated to selling computer hardware and software. The idea of visiting a brick’n'mortar building to purchase a video game, for folks that have grown up with Steam, must be a bizarre anachronism akin to inserting a Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia CD-ROM to look up the capitol of Finland.

What was it like to browse physical shelves of new and used computer games? What happened behind the scenes, among the distributors, store managers and salespeople? How did salespeople persuade customers to buy expensive computer hardware like the Amiga 500, Tandy 1000 and IBM PS/1? In this article, my friend Ray – a father of two and a long time video game devotee – tells me about what it was like working as a hardware and software salesman during the peak of the modern computer revolution in Western Canada.

A Typical Computer Store in 1994

Although we did not know one another at the time, I often visited the store that Ray worked at in the mid-90′s. I was a teenager, and CompuCentre was the place to go to buy computer games. A wallet full of birthday cash – usually $60 or $80 – meant that I could afford one new AAA release, or two budget/bargain-bin games (usually I opted for the former). The store entrance was eerily similar to the “Software Excess” parody in Space Quest IV. I remember CompuCentre having an open floorplan: hardware kiosks and displays were scattered around the centre of the space, and the walls were lined with wire racks that showcased hundreds of software titles. Being an IBM user meant that I would not only pay no attention to the Amiga and Apple sections, but actively avoid them.

Ray: Besides a section of the store that was for all the gaming consoles, it was otherwise divided into computer sections, so you had the IBM software, the Commodore section, and even a little section for Mac.  People didn’t seem to buy computers to play games explicitly, however, the types of games available for a computer could influence someone who hadn’t decided on which computer to buy.  That’s even how I bought my own first computer.  It was an Amstrad that I bought from The Brick.  While my first experience was with a Commodore PET that used a cassette drive to save my work, it wasn’t until a few years later that I was able to buy my own.  I bought the Amstrad solely because it could play some of the games I had seen at school.  I wasn’t too interested in word processing or graphic design.

The computer buyers were generally either the creative artist who leaned towards the Amiga – the music composition software abilities were greatly sought in particular, or the at home professional who wanted a business computer.  I don’t remember anyone who thought of a computer as being so dynamic in that it could be used for work and games.

Ray:On the computer side, we primarily sold the Amiga and the IBM PS/1.  There were other models but those were the main.  Amiga was set up to be the go to machine if you had a lot of creative applications, like music composition or drawing (sort of where the Apple machines are niched now).  The PS/1′s were set up as the workhorse.  Sure it could do stuff the Amiga could, but where the Amiga was prettier (with regards to sound or colours or general creativeness), the PS/1 had the more necessary applications like Tax packages, word processing, spreadsheets…stuff like that.  It seemed that games for the computer were mostly an afterthought, or a bell and whistle that was nice, but not necessary.  At the time, the Internet mostly consisted of dialup modems, BBSes (bulletin board systems) and chat rooms.  Not near as fancy as we have today.  I remember many conversations where I tried to explain how the machines were different but both could access the same “cyberspace”.

When I was six years old, my mother worked in an Adult Education Centre – her job was to train and teach adults, usually women who had been living as house wives for most of their lives, how to re-integrate into the workforce. The Adult Education Centre was a stone’s throw from my elementary school at the time, so my sister and I would walk over there and spend the afternoon with my mom after school most days. Sure, getting to spend the afternoon with my mom and sister was always great… but the real reason I went there was my love affair with the single taciturn and sensible IBM PC XT with a monochrome monitor that sat on a table along the wall: It had a game that let me fly a plane.

In this article I explore the different qualities the word “simulation” has, and argue for a more experiential approach to flight. A note to readers: I’d love to hear about your experience with all kinds of flight simulators, because I have intentionally pared it down to just a few here.

Flight Simulation in its Infancy: MSFS 1.0

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was, to my best knowledge, my first computer gaming experience. One of the teachers – when he wasn’t busy – would sit down with us, and patiently point out the controls: left hand on F2 for power, and right hand on the numeric keypad for direction. My sister would hold down F2, and I’d feebly try to point the “plane” down the runway.

I write “plane” pejoratively. The problem with MSFS 1.0 was that the experience of flight was an afterthought – the aircraft never appears on-screen, the field and runway are low-res projections, engine sound is limited to a variable buzz from the PC speaker, and the instruments are the only real indication that something important is happening.

Inevitably, we would careen down the runway and the plane would edge upwards for a second, stall, and land back on the tarmac. Twenty frustrated minutes later, my sister and I would give up and wander over to the Xerox machine and make copies of our hands.

From a gamer’s perspective, I am being unfair: MSFS1.0 was one of the earliest flight sims, and SubLogic’s programming efforts were leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors. But, I think, when you see past the crude graphics and choppy frame rate, you see less a “game” than a spreadsheet.

So the question is: what is being simulated? Should a flight simulator try to simulate the experience of flight, or simulate the mathematics of instrumentation?

Ask anyone that’s flown in the front seats of a smaller aircraft like a Cessna 172 or Piper Cherokee: the aircraft is very responsive. A feather touch on the control column pitches down the nose a few degrees, and the tail snaps upright in a single motion… your gut climbs up into your throat, and your head swims for a brief second. The sound of the little engine thrums in the cabin, and penetrates past the David Clark headset that is vacuum-sealed around your ears. As a passenger, I can stare at the instruments and appreciate that there are a dozen things happening simultaneously, but I really don’t know (or care) what they mean. I’m focused on the feeling of flight itself.

A Step Closer: Aces of the Pacific

Fast forward about seven years. Sitting in my uncle and aunt’s office, with a much heftier and sexier machine: an AST Advantage! 386 with a 256-color VGA card. They owned Aces of the Pacific and a CH Products Flightstick Pro. Afternoons were spent gunning down Japanese Zero’s from the cabin of my P-38 Lightning.

The flight model in Aces of the Pacific is pretty responsive. As you’ll see in the video, climbing off of the runway is effortless… the engines rev up to max within a couple seconds, getting up to takeoff speed within five seconds, and once in the air the aircraft snaps left and right as if it were a dragonfly. A real P-38 flies nothing like this. But, I spent months dogfighting and bombing, running missions for both sides of the second World War just to scrape up another hour of time in the cockpit. It was fun.

But when you strip away the art, there wasn’t very much difference between Aces of the Pacific and Wing Commander II. The “simulation” of flight in these flight combat games was so heavily tuned for combat that any semblance of simulation was tossed out the window. Training my 37mm cannon on a Japanese Zero at 8,000 feet wasn’t much different than training up my Broadsword’s Mass Drivers on a Kilrathi Dralthi at Nav 1. Something was lost in the experience of flight in Aces of the Pacific, and it wasn’t until 1995 that Looking Glass Technologies finally got it right. And, to my knowledge, no flight simulator has gotten the experience of flight right since.

What it Really Feels like to Fly: Flight Unlimited

Sitting in my uncle and aunt’s office in 1995, this time with an even beefier Gateway 2000 Pentium 90 that my uncle called “The Ol’ Stove” because the processor alone could heat up a room. But that kind of horsepower was necessary, because Flight Unlimited demanded some pretty serious computing resources.

I sit down in the Pitts Special S2-B and harness up. The view out the front is limited by a handful of gauges, and the wing that tapers across the nose of my little aerobatics plane. Revving up the single engine is a pleasure in itself – it was obviously recorded from a real Pitts Special, and the engine noise changes in pitch and loudness according to its RPMs. The plane lurches forward on the runway, and as I get up to stall speed I notice it start to shimmy back and forth slightly … the wheels are grabbing at the tarmac at different rates, just as I’ve felt in a Cessna 172 as we lift off. A few feet above the runway I experience the “ground effect” – the Pitts floats as if on a cushion due to the increased lift caused by the air pressure being so high close to the tarmac. When I hit climb speed, I pull back hard on the control stick, and the Pitts climbs up into the atmosphere with a metallic groan.

I climb up to 5000 feet for a little fun: the in-game flight instructor is teaching me down to do a “spin” – a forced stall that causes a plane to pitch downward into a corkscrew path. I point the nose up at the sun, cut the engines and hit the left rudder. What happens? My Pitts Special turns to the left and begins to dive, corkscrewing around the left wing. My speed is increasing, and begins to redline the airspeed indictor. I’m “overspeeding” the airframe, and the wind rushing past the wings gives off an eery metallic whine. I don’t want to crash, so I follow the virtual flight instructor’s advice: cut the throttle, apply full rudder in the opposite direction of the spin (in my case, right rudder), and gradually pull back to zero-out my angle of attack. Unbelievably, I recover from the spin, and resume level flight like a pro. And damn, that was fun!

A few minutes later, I do the same spin maneuver and intentionally overspeed the aircraft, and as I careen towards the terrain below, I snap back on the control stick and watch as the forces applied to the fuselage and wings snap the little plane apart. They smash into the ground in a pile of parts that the FAA/NTSB crash investigations teams would have a hard time deciphering. My flight instructor wryly adds a note to the logbook: “Solo flight. Wrecked the plane. We’ll fly in your plane from now on.”

 A Pitts Special exploding in the air as the airframe collapses under extreme G-forces

The whole experience, from takeoff to aerobatic techniques to engine noise (or in the case of the engineless sailplane – the whoosh of air around the cabin), is responsive and enveloping. Anyone who has flown in a small aircraft can attest to how different Flight Unlimited is, say, compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

Computational Fluid Dynamics for Dummies

Flight Unlimited was, and is, the first and only flight simulation game to use a completely different flight physics model. An interview with Seamus Blackley (published in CGW Issue #133, August 1995 - I honestly suggest reading the entire article, it is excellent) – the programmer and designer behind the game – reveals the unique values and skills that went into developing an accurate simulation of flight:

When Blackley set out to design this flight simulation, he wanted the armchair pilot to get that “yummy, visceral, fluid feeling that you get when flying a real airplane.” To do that, Blackley and the Flight Unlimited team had to dive head-first into the Navier-Stokes equations, which, according to Blackley, are “horrible, complicated partial differential equations” that model the way a fluid behaves when it moves around a solid object.

Instead of relying upon a Newtonian system of drag coefficients and vector geometry – where an object remains in motion until it meets an equal and opposite force, or a brute-force approach that models flight on huge tables of data generated in wind turbine lab experiments - Flight Unlimited was built on a physics model derived from Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Blackley, a pilot himself and an ex-graduate student in particle physics at the time, turned to computational fluid dynamics because they could model the feeling of flight moreso than the mathematics of movement. And with computers featuring built-in floating-point processors (like the Pentium) and tons of calculation cycles available, it became possible to use CFDs for the first time in a computer game.

So how does Flight Unlimited actually work? First off, the complex sets of Navier-Stokes partial differential equations would allow the game to simulate the effects of air pressure on a fixed wing: when the air pressure above the wing is less than the air pressure below the wing, the air (a fluid) makes the wing buoyant and pushes the airplane up into the air.

That process is complicated enough, but add to it the infinitely complex changes in air pressure over the entire plane:

… the propeller creates turbulence and a torque imbalance; the air eddies and curls as it comes off the back of the wing; the air “sticks” to the surface of the airplane, causing drag; and bumps in the plane’s shape, such as the pilot’s canopy, cause turbulence in the moving air. All of this adds up to one hell of a mathematical nightmare, but all of those little blips in turbulence and pressure are calculated by the Navier-Stokes equations…

…the program must compute the air pressures over the entire surface of the airplane, and convert those pressures into a series of force distributions, which are then used to calculate where and how the plane is moving.

 An image generated by a Navier-Stokes analysis of air eddying off a wingtip.

In short, the plane flies through the air because Blackley has simulated an atmosphere in the world that applies air pressure changes to the entire aircraft, and the “control surfaces” of the plane – the rudder, the ailerons, the elevator – all create turbulence and disturbances in the atmosphere that pitch, roll, and lift the plane. A plane feels like a plane because it displaces, and is displaced by, air. As Blackley puts it, “You get everything for free once you get the air’s fluid dynamics right.”

Final Words for Developers

Make no mistake – I’m not arguing for pin-point accurate physics simulation as the key for more immersive and more enjoyable flight simulators (or any other kind of game). In fact, I’ve argued before that we probably should rely a lot less upon “realism” as a central value in most games. The point is that games like Flight Unlimited manage to deliver an enjoyable and visceral flight experience because the developers make the experience, and not the mathematics the core value of the simulator. Developers need to learn to leave the mathematical aspects of games “under the hood” and make them completely subsidiary to the player’s experience. After all, the only thing we have as players is our experience of the game.

I hesitated to write this article at all, because it deals with something very personal and difficult to write about. A few months ago I ordered a watch from David Vigil, the renowned leatherworker whose creations were featured on Kotaku twice, Game Fanatics, among other gaming news networks. A month later, after inquiring about when my gorgeous leather watch would arrive, I got a response that simply said,

I am so very sorry for the delay with everything. I’m running Vigilante Leather while David is in the hospital having emergency treatment for his stomach cancer. He was unable to resolve anything or continue to work due to his illness and was also unable to contact anyone.

David is one of the most ardent supporters of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series. He is a leatherworker and craftsman, meaning that every one of his Uncharted creations is meticulously created by hand. He isn’t in this for the money – he is in it for the love of what he does, and the joy that each of his creations brings for Uncharted fans like myself.

David needs our help. He is trying to get treatment for Stage III Stomach Cancer. I recently have had family and friends going through various forms of cancer (all in Canada, where getting cancer treatment is part of our public health care system), and the healing process is extremely taxing on everyone. So you can imagine how awful it is to have to worry about having enough money to just start getting treated.

There are 10 days left in David’s fundraising campaign to get his cancer treated. After seeing the hundreds of thousands of dollars that us gamers put into indie Kickstarter campaigns, the very least we can do is send this guy enough money so he can fucking live. I am putting my money where my mouth is, and I’m skipping my Christmas vacation this year so I can afford to send him a good hunk of cash today, along with my best wishes for his recovery.

So if you want to save someone’s life – save someone that loves games as much as you do, an artist who has devoted himself to gaming culture, and a damned friendly and caring guy – you have your chance to make a real actual difference. Donate anything you can afford, or not afford.

Can’t afford to donate? Then just spread the word by posting a link to his Save the Vigilante Indiegogo Campaign, and eventually we’ll reach enough people to make this happen. Anything helps.

Recently, Kyttaro Games ran a new indie game bundle project, this time focusing on space-themed games. Kyttaro had ran an adventure-themed bundle earlier, so I was interested in understanding the process of putting together these bundles. Indie games are notoriously different in their styles and amount of polish, so building a bundle with a theme seems like an extremely difficult prospect to me. I took this as an opportunity to ask Gnome of The Gnome’s Lair about the Deep Space Bundle.

[Chris] Can you tell me more about Kyttaro Games’ Droidscape: Basilica book? Tell us a bit about how you got involved with Kyttaro in the first place

[Chris] Space Giraffe: Many retro fans will recognize the name Jeff Minter, but it is less likely that today’s generation of gamer would. Minter is a pretty household name for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, and enjoyed some of his classic Llamasoft creations like Tempest 2000 and Attack of the Mutant Camels. How did Space Giraffe become involved with the BIAB promotion, and what did it mean for you to get his support?

 [Gnome] I was trying to think of something unique and deep space themed to get into the bundle. Something legendary perhaps and was going through tons of games and such sites as IndieDB or MobyGames when I took a break to play a remake of Tempest 2000. Space Giraffe simply seemed the obvious choice after a dozen levels, so I dropped Mr. Minter a line and he promptly agreed to having more people play Space Giraffe. It is a game he really (rightly too) loves.Also a game that has taken countless hours of my life.

As for getting the great Jeff Minter to join Bundle In A Box… well, I was elated. The man is a legend; a ridiculously talented legend and I distinctly remember doing a little dance the moment I got his email saying ‘yes’.

[Gnome] First and foremost, Rob brought DRM to an otherwise DRM-free bundle. And a stunning exclusive game, that has already been loved by Joystiq and Rock Paper Shotgun, and grabbed itself an impressive 8/10 over at its EDGE review. An honour usually reserved for the likes of such classics as VVVVVV, Mass Effect 3 and System Shock 2.

What’s more, Death Ray Manta is a brilliant arena shooter, with a silly sense of humour and some really pretty colours. Also, I do love the fact that it was created exclusively for Bundle In A Box. I had contacted Rob ages ago and he had been on it for months. Happily, the result is even better than I expected and Rob remains the kind and giving person we all know him to be.

[Chris] The Wreckless: Duct Tape Games’ The Wreckless has been around for a while, yet hasn’t received very wide attention in the indie scene aside from an RPS article. Aside from the obvious space theme, what is your favourite part of the game? How did Duct Tape Games become involved in the BIAB project?

[Chris] Dark Scavenger: Adventure-strategy games are a pretty rare breed. How did you find out about Dark Scavenger? Did you plan to have an adventure game in the bundle from the beginning, or was this a happy accident?

[Chris] Armalyte: This game has an old history, starting with Cyberdyne Systems for the C64 back in the late 80s. Considering that there were already several SHMUP-style games already in the bundle, what specifically is it about this remake that makes it a unique addition?

[Gnome] The fact that it’s a proper and properly remade Commodore 64 classic of course! Don’t think a retro remake had ever made it into a bundle before, and I do enjoy firsts. Remember that text-adventure in our first bundle?

“Lend me your wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.” – Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

When I first stepped out delicately into the dune, my foot sunk in past my ankles. This was not the hardscrabble of a wind-raked wasteland, nor the moist bleached sand of coral beaches. It was the sand that Frank Herbert imagined in Dune, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry recollected in his Wind, Sand and Stars. The kind of sand that welcomes your toes in, a finely sifted sugar.

The Elementary Particles 0f Emotion

What makes Journey stand apart from other games that have made the natural environment central to the experience (i.e. Fallout 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Mass Effect series) are the ways in which rich colours, luscious landscapes and pliable terrain serve to ground the player’s feelings. Thatgamecompany’s attention to the landscape comes as no surprise – both Flower and Cloud invite the player to delight in repainting and reshaping the earth and sky, turning a drab scene into a visual and audial bouquet. But, like Flower, not all of the environments are cheerful and bright… Journey makes room for the industrial, the cold, and the ominous. But in each landscape, whether carried into the sky by the strong and dry simooms that whoosh through the hot desert, or struggling against the bitter katabatic winds that rush down from the mountain peaks and flatten me to the ground, each kind of experience is tightly wound around a cluster of feelings. Warm, flight, playful. Cold, march, laborious. Each element, earth, sky, water, and fire, express the elementary nature of our feelings by showing how the terrestrial comforts of the sand are inexorably intertwined with the joyful airiness of the sky. We need both lightness and heaviness, and warmth and cold, to be complete human beings.

A Different Understanding of Multiplayer

But, as many have pointed out, the game offers a new kind of multi-player experience. When I explore the landscape, I inevitably run into other people. At times, Journey randomly selects one other PSN player and injects them into the same landscape as I, and we are free to explore the lands together (or not). By whittling communication down to the expressive cry – a single musical morpheme – players can ‘sing’ to one another. As I run and fly through the lands with my anonymous play partner, I cannot contain the peculiar smile that erupts on my face: we are managing to communicate with one another using the primordial languages of human and animal expression alike… singing, dancing, gesturing, and gliding like whirling dervishes. The Endless Forest is the only game that offers a comparable kind of experience.

If Journey is poetry-prose that explores the long march from childhood to death through the four elements, then Thatgamecompany has managed to dig deeper into truly human existence than any other game I can think of. Sure, Journey can be broken down into game mechanics, architecture, plot elements and characters, but ultimately the experience it offers involve primeval feelings, and those who will inexorably analyze the game will miss the point. Games like Journey beckon gamers towards a deeper appreciation for what is basic to human life; I hope invites developers and game writers to work towards understanding gaming as an inherently human experience.

Update: Jamie Love has written the article that I wish I had written about Journey in the first place, over at GameSugar. It partners well with mine, and focuses on different aspects of the game that I wish I had. Go check it out.

I’m walking down a long hallway in The Citadel, and I’m waved over by reporter Emily Wong. She wants some information on a local crime lord, and I’ve got some data on the guy that would give her a scoop. I hesitate at first, unsure of her motivations, but I eventually give in and I’m rewarded handsomely for the data. Not only does she transfer some credits my way, but I (Commander Shepherd) agree to giving her some juicy exclusive interviews. These interviews will put my name on the galactic map. Sweet.

Sadly, we face an almost identical ethical problem in the indie games industry, as I do in Mass Effect.

Diogo Ribeiro’s excellent article The “Indie” Challenge, if you have not read it already, presents an excellent overview of the challenges independent developers face when trying to get their games into players’ hands. Diogo singles out the all-too-cozy relationship between AAA developers, publishers and the writers/editors of large gaming networks, as a serious barrier for indie developers getting their games promoted. The article tugs at a lot of issues dear to us gamers and writers: the ‘us and them’ attitude that pervades ‘indie vs. mainstream’ industries, the ethics of game promotion and reviewing, and the perception of indie games as rarely something more than time wasting devices.

As an outsider to the games industry and journalism, I really appreciate Diogo’s strong insider knowledge of those domains. There is a lot of good information here for the indie seeking to get their newest creation out into the market:

Your first email to either should avoid looking like a typical press release. Don’t bother with terms like “cutting edge” – you’re supposed to be talking about games, not fax paper. Focus on the strengths of your game. If it sports a concept never seen before in videogames – a very rare thing, mind you – extol those virtues. If it uses traditional play mechanics with a novel twist, don’t be shy about making comparisons. “All the action of Gears of War with the ovine satisfaction of Sheep!”….

Obviously, this is critical for people trying to make a living out of game development, and I agree with everything he has to say here. But I see an extreme danger in this promotion-driven approach to game development. Herein lies the great danger:

Introversion is a case study for several reasons, but to me the most important one is they cared about one thing that most indie devs don’t – they gave as much emphasis on promoting themselves as they did creating their game. Why aren’t you doing the same, indies?

Is it true that indie developers should be spending as much time on promoting themselves as they did in creating their game? Of course there are obvious financial benefits to heavily promoting your indie game, but what kinds of costs come with a promotion-heavy approach?

Indie Ethics

The indie world depends very much upon the goodwill, honesty and free time of people who have very little financial benefit from reviewing or promoting your game. I have never received a penny from Rastek (Wither), Jenova Chen (Flower), Markus Persson (Minecraft), Anthony Flack (Cletus Clay), or Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey (The Endless Forest). None of these people asked me to write about their games. I chose to write about these little games (some of which became big games) because they were not promoted, because they were unknown, and because these creations impressed me completely on their own terms. When I get a request to review/promote a game, even if it is heartfelt and personal, my interest immediately sinks. People like me who write about games are not interested in being used as extensions of the advertising industry; asking me to promote your game is a very good way of alienating me from your creation. Real writers are their own source of inspiration; they don’t need your one-liner press kits.

There is another ethical consideration at play here. Diogo mentions fellow Canadian Phil Fish, whose game recently won a major award at the 2012 Independent Games Festival. Diogo writes,

Fez is an indie game that’s been in development for five years but continuous interaction with fans and trailers that highlighted the core gameplay, along with improvements to the game engine, went a long way to maintaining curiosity about Phil Fish’s game.

True. And it is also true that Fez precipitated a major ethical crisis at the GDC this year, when Phil Fish entered his game for a second time into the same competition purely out of self-interest (Note: I am not singling out Phil Fish – he seems like a decent enough guy, I’m just using this as a recent example). His appearance in Indie Game: The Movie similarly reveals the indie games’ industry’s sad history of shameless self-promotion, endless navel gazing and cult-of-the-celebritization. In The Competition: The Story Behind the IGF’s Critics Brendy Caldwell does a great job of summarizing the controversy here,

… in 2008, Fez won in the Excellence in Visual Arts category at the IGF. It certainly is a lovely looking game, I can personally testify to that. In 2012 it remains unreleased and subsequently re-enters the IGF for that year (and is eventually nominated for both the Technical Excellence award and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize).

Fez went on to win the Seamus McNally Grand Prize, worth $30,000 USD.

So what is the danger here? What’s wrong with a guy who shows off his little game?

1. The controversy helped to fuel a new ecology for what I call ‘moral entrepreneurs’… journalists, developers and nobodies who use moral crises as ways of promoting themselves (I won’t mention any names here). There was a massive backlash to Phil Fish’s promotion strategy, and instead of focusing on the issues at hand and the games we care about, moral opportunists used this crisis as a ripe opportunity to viciously personally attack Phil Fish, and in so doing draw attention to themselves.
2. I do not see the public value that is served in self-promotion. Easy-to-chew sound-bites and one-liners, hastily injected into press kits, 0nly serve to devalue gaming as a whole. When a developer encourages a game site (or magazine) to use ready-made text, this discourages independent thought. Needing to railroad a writer into a particular view of your game is, to me, evidence that your game probably sucks. Worse, videos like Anthony Carboni’s recent sycophantic interviews with indie developers do nothing to improve the perception that indie developers are in bed with the media; instead suggesting that journalists are more interested in basking in reflected glory than critical and honest evaluations of games.
3. All of the work that hard-working people like Phil Fish put into their promotion strategy is time that could have been used in making a better game. Appearing at industry events like the GDC may be a requirement for AAA publishers, but I fail to see how attending the Independent Games Festival makes your game any more playable. When I attended the IGF/GDC in 2009, there was no time for developers and players to have a meaningful conversation. When you approach an IGF booth, you wait in line for 10 minutes and play for a few minutes – then you ask a few cursory questions about the game with the developer, and make room for someone else to play. The IGF is all about promotion and is not about tuning gameplay, just the Oscars don’t help people make better films.
4. Aggressively promoting your game puts you personally into ethically dangerous waters. There is nothing worse than seeing a great game get shunned because its developer made a serious (or minor) error in judgement when dealing with the press. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard players promise that they’d never buy a game from ________________ because the developer accidentally said something morally questionable in an interview.

A Quality-Driven Approach to Promotion

Instead of thinking from a marketing perspective, I think that the marketing perspective needs to become the outcome of careful design and play-testing. Indie developers have to stop thinking with dollar signs in their eyes, stop thinking about how their game will serve to stroke their ego, and start thinking about whether their game even deserves to be promoted at all. This is an overgeneralization, but many games like Minecraft sold well because they were great games. We will still be talking about Minecraft in ten years, but we won’t be talking about games like Super Meat Boy in one year. Why? Because Minecraft was developed with the care and love that comes with slow and incremental design that emerged over years; it did not rely upon self-promotion. People love Minecraft because of the breadth and depth of its gameplay, not because of a superficial retroesque charm… such as the meaningless gameplay of Super Meat Boy.

Here are some lessons we might learn from a quality-driven approach:

1. Your game can succeed on the basis of its expressive qualities alone; let real writers do their jobs to find you.
2. Ever seen how much money it costs to attend the GDC or IGF? Aping publishers who aggressively market their games costs a lot of time and money. Perhaps that time is better spent focusing and improving on your game.
3. Develop close, honest and respectful relationships with your fellow developers and community of gamers. These are the people who will give you the shirts off their backs, and do anything to see your little creation survive in the wilderness of the industry.
4. As Ben Ruiz said at a recent GDC presentation, “quit being so fucking egocentric.” The whole notion of “independent” in indie games is a complete falsification of the truth. There is no such thing as independent game development – there is only interdependent game development. You need your fellow developers and gamers as much as they need you; the games industry is a very large ecology with many niches. Instead of playing your personal creation off over and against AAA developers, and cultivating your own ego, why not see how AAA developers and their games can help to improve your project?

Obviously, these are pretty polemic issues. I don’t mean to oversimplify the marketing difficulties that indie developers face, but I hope to at least point out that marketing and promotion bring up ethical problems that the industry has not addressed. And by ignoring these ethical issues, indie developers are only inviting the kinds of problems that AAA publishers are already faced with.

I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say about this, whether you’re an indie developer, AAA developer, gamer, journalist, or someone else.

Welcome to the new, hopefully improved, probably more interesting, definitely more frequently updated, and (maybe) more enjoyable Artful Gamer. As you can see, a lot has changed.

The Early Years

Back when I wrote my first post on March 13th, 2007, I had a very different kind of site in mind: “art games” were emerging as new and interesting approaches to video gaming, and I hoped to hitch a ride on that bandwagon. The art debate played well with a lingering malaise about the quality of video games writing in the air – the journalism of Gamepro and other massive magazines were gradually being supplanted by non-journalists and other writers (like myself) who just wanted to talk about games with a knowledgeable audience. Folks wanted to debate how and why we should talk about games as a way of life, whether games were “mere entertainment” or something deeper.

But at the time, few other blogs existed: Chris Bateman’s Only a Game was a little over a year old, Gnome’s The Gnome’s Lair and Corvus Elrod’s Man Bytes Blog were about a year old, Jason Rohrer’s Arthouse Games was a couple of months old, and Michael Abbott’s Brainy Gamer would not launch for another six months. There just weren’t very many places for mature, interesting conversation.

But despite the heated arguments that emerged from the great art debates of 2007, the storm soon lost its power. Sharing no common language for video games, most of us realized that we couldn’t just argue about what games were about, the blogging community actually had to spend some time thinking about what it meant to play games. This led to a fairly significant shift away from game-blogging as a way of letting others know what the game of the week was, towards more critical, analytical and experiential approaches to thinking about games.

The Golden Years of Game Blogging

In those years – say, from 2008-2010, the game blogging community was a hotbed of discussion: for the first time ever, you could google for “Mass effect review” and come up with thoughtful commentary and criticism on video games that wasn’t written by a major gaming magazine or online publisher. For better or for worse, game bloggers filled in the gigantic linguistic gap that was left from the disappearance of print magazines.

I took my own approach in that time: interleaving my personal experiences (past and present) with philosophy and psychology in order to expose something new about games. I hoped that, deep down, the poetic and lyrical aspects of video games resonated with some of you in the ways that they resonated with me. But that style of writing wasn’t for everyone, and more often than not my interlocutors felt that the writing was too dense, or not dense enough, too analytical, or not analytical enough. And so on.

The Quiet End

Then, in 2010, things started to slow down in the game blogging community. Fewer and fewer blogs were being posted to regularly (including this one), some disappeared completely. The great gold rush that the “Brainysphere” ushered in, was over. Some of the bloggers got jobs in the gaming industry as either developers or as journalists; others pursued their educational aspirations or careers in unrelated fields. Sure, there are more game bloggers out there than ever, but the core blogs that were powerhouses in the Golden Age of Game Blogging (2008-2010) had moved on.

The Artful Gamer, in that time, barely loped along. I was finishing writing my doctoral dissertation, teaching, and was newly married. I neglected the site, and it showed. I made a few abortive attempts at constructive conversation on Twitter, but soon realized that Twitter is not a place for conversation; it is a place for gossip and moralism.

But the demand for thoughtful and honest commentary on video games has not went away. There are more people today, reading and writing about games, than there ever have been.

Postcards from the Multiverse

So, now, five years after I wrote my first post that (as Chris Bateman would tell me years later) horribly offended the respective writers of Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Video Games, I am back on the mule. As you will see in my first new article, I have turned towards a different style of writing that – I hope – is a helluva lot more fun to read. And hopefully, it remains insightful. My first post in this new style is The Land of Tamir: The Text Parser as Play. Let me know what you think

Every week I will write a postcard back home, from whatever planet, town, village, dungeon, galaxy, fairy tale, bathroom, space ship or house I happen to be in. And I hope that you’ll write me back. 

Thanks for all of your supportive, interesting, thoughtful, and insightful replies over the years. Your commentary and responses mean the world to me.

Yours humbly,

- Chris.

Dear Mom,

Bad news. I’m writing to you from a little mansion somewhere in southern Tamir, and I’m stuck. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of this room, and I can’t get at it. I tried moving the furniture, but it won’t let me. I tried jumping for it, but my skirt isn’t really geared for jumping. I have all kinds of stuff in my inventory, and none of it works. It even took a long time to get here – seems like everything I try, the world won’t let me do it.

That reminded me of something. Remember when I was a kid, and my sister and I would goof around in King’s Quest IV? We didn’t care if the game didn’t let us do certain things – we just enjoyed screwing around with the world. We’d try to do nonsense stuff like “kick pan in his fat ass” or “punch the minstrel”. Most of the time we’d get back a generic “Can you try saying that in a different way?” or “You’ll have to take a different approach”… but sometimes something hilarious would happen. If we tried to fart on the dwarf, we’d get back “Perhaps you need to purchase a copy of ‘Leisure Suit Larry’?” (*sigh*. Yes mom, I secretly played Leisure Suit Larry with my buddies when I was 12.)

The point is that the text parser was fun partly because it was so finicky and antiquated, and partly because we were goofy kids. Nowadays, I can’t move through the world fast enough because this damned parser keeps getting in the way. Not to mention these ridiculous puzzles! Who the hell put a trapdoor in the ceiling that isn’t accessible from the floor? Why is there an Egyptian crypt in a land full of Anglo-Saxons? Why am I allowed to rob a half-dozen graves near the mansion, but I’m not allowed to steal a bowl of freakin’ soup?

Anyway, I guess I have something to learn from my twelve-year-old self: whenever I get frustrated with a place, it’s probably because I’m not really playing in it anymore.

Love,

Chris

ps: send me a grappling hook with 25ft of rope.

pps: none of the houses in Tamir seem to have toilets. Send me some TP too?

As you’ve probably noticed, things slowed down with the Artful Gamer over the last couple of years. What was I doing in that time? Well, I was working on a doctorate, among several other projects, and that was finally completed just a couple of months ago. Now I have some time to work on some real writing.

On March 13, 2012, I will be restructuring and rebuilding the Artful Gamer as a different kind of experience. Hope to see you all there.

The RPG Maker crowd is a world unto its own. I’ve steered clear of the fan projects that emerge from it over the years, because, let’s face it, the depth of gameplay and story that I need in games often isn’t there. But, based on a recommendation from the nice folks at Meridian Dance (site now defunct), I gave it a shot. Despite my own misgivings about RPG Maker games, I was delighted (and disturbed) to find a game that invoked more emotion in me than any other indie game to date.

Before you read on, head over to the Wither page and give it a go (Windows-only, Mac users will have to run Parallels/VMWare/Boot Camp). The game can be finished in 5-10 minutes. If you’re not the kind who cares about spoilers, then please, read on…

On its surface Wither won’t grab most players. It visually borrows the cabbage-green Game Boy aesthetic of the 80′s and 90′s, the sounds are lifted from other games, the gameplay isn’t much of an improvement upon Pokémon Red, there are no battles to speak of, the story is small and unambitious, and its earnest 8-bit melodies hardly stir up a sense of grandeur.

But even a few minutes of the delightfully simple yet otherworldly dialogue disturbs me from any of these criticisms. Wither’s charm comes from the tiny, almost unnoticeable details that unsettle me. When I sit down on the bed, I am prompted with YOU HAVE A NIGHTMARE. The phrase prepares me for a journey into a desolate underworld littered with the skulls and carcasses of animals, juxtaposed with beautiful flowers.The music reminds me of the kind played in funeral homes: synthesized organs echoing the somber mood that call me back to memories of a dead loved one. The grey/green-scale artwork embraces a monochromatic world, as a story about guilt and depression quickly emerges. The lighthearted Game Boy-esque experience manages a perfect disharmony with its sober tone. But all of these elements are crafted together with subtlety, and the author doesn’t beat us over the head with cheap metaphors or sentiment.

What separates Wither from games like Jason Rohrer’s Passage that try to grapple with the same kinds of human existential problems? Passage tries to mechanically represent emotion through gameplay (e.g. walking forward in time and watching one’s loved one age and die) that leaves absolutely no room for interpretation. In contrast, through strangely poetic moments like having bizarre nightmares and witnessing suicides, Wither leaves the protagonist’s psychological world open to interpretation.

If it is clear to the player that at some point the protagonist has reached the Farthest Shore (quite literally – via a boat) in search of her/his loved one, just what this means is open for debate. How should one deal with personal tragedy? Does losing someone mean losing one’s own life too? Or is there a way of coming back to the world of the living after making this crossing? The game was never intended to address (or answer) existential questions, but the fact that I can entertain these questions after playing through Rastek’s “poetic-prose” is a recognition of Wither’s minimalistic expressive power. Wither is, by design or by accident, far more artistic than any game that advertises itself as such.

Note: Melly Tan has a much more extended and articulate write-up on Wither that I could only dream of writing myself. I strongly suggest reading her article if you’ve played the game and are craving more analysis.