Ludogenesis

My final project for Art 175 is the prototype for my BFA Show. It is a game set in the near future, when Gamification has become a significant social phenomenon. Every institution is rushing to use games, ubiquitous technology, and behavioral science to bolster their own legitimacy and control the actions of the people. Your protagonist is a humble agent in this world who plays along with the games, meets the myriad people of the world, and climbs the social ladder.

In the version of the game I have for the final, I have three areas represented: Your house (which is quite meagerly interactive) and two cafes: Starbucks and “Mort’s”. Many of the most basic mechanics of the game are completed. The game plays essentially like a point and click adventure game, but the focus of the game is not on solving puzzles. Most of the attention of the interface is given to the game’s dialogue system, which works like a combination of dialogue systems in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Ultima IV. Like in Morrowind, characters are given a number of keywords that they can talk about, and certain responses are shared between characters based on traits about those characters, such as their location or occupation. Like Ultima IV, the player has the option to type in certain keywords, which can reveal hidden conversation arcs. The narrative explanation of this system is that your smartphone has a “Conversation Starter” app, which provides you with certain contextual topics for conversation based on your interests, location, and conversation history by mining the personal information your character has put into various social networks. I’m taking care to make this as unobtuse as possible- a common problem in games with text interpreters (like many text adventure games, or Ultima IV) is that it can be difficult for the player to figure out what words they need to type in to get a response. I have a feature in place that can highlight certain keywords when characters mention them, signifying that that is a potential topic for conversation.

Highlighted Keywords in a Conversation

Currently all the non-player characters in the game are unique, in the sense that they don’t share any dialogue options. One of the ideas I’m toying with is having procedurally generated characters mill about who make more use of the dialogue response-sharing dynamic.  The idea of abstracting large groups of people’s behavior according to mineable data is important to the practice of Gamification, but the characters themselves will be much more interesting if they are all unique.

A screenshot from inside Mort's, the non-gamified coffee shop

The player’s journey through the world is assisted by their smartphone and the virtual assistant that lives on it, Siri. The various apps on the smartphone allow the player to move to different locations (via Google Maps) and gauge their progress in the game world (via the various implementations of Gamification. Currently the only one available is “Coffee Life”, Starbucks’ loyalty game). Eventually there will be more apps for navigating the contemporary social space, such as a Facebook app for managing your relationships with the characters in the game, a Foursquare app for telling other characters where you are (or where you want them to be), and an OKCupid application whose mechanics are based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Siri telling the player about how the conversation system works

The game does not currently, and will not have a conventional, linear game structure. I would like the game to be more of a sandbox, building a narrative outwards in a way similar to Minecraft, The Sims, or Dwarf Fortress, but it might only be a game in which there are things to read and various ways to read those things.

Click here to play the game in its current form.

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This is a screenshot from the initial room of "States of Mind"

So I made this text game for my flash game development course. The assignment was to create a decision tree game, so I adapted some code I wrote for a dialog system into my new component model and turned it into a text adventure game. You play as a university student who has to go to classes while the occupy protests are going on. The protests are essentially irrelevant, though.  Mostly what you do is go onto your computer and do various things, like read the news or watch youtube videos or play video games, and by doing so you alter your state of mind, which changes how you see the world and what you can do within it.

The sole interesting thing in the game is the way it’s structured. While I was planning out the game I drew up a big flow chart with all the possible parts in the game. At first it was basically a cross shape- in the center was the computer, and branching out were the three rooms (bedroom, outside and school) of the four possible mind states (sober, angry, silly, and “bejeweled”). The only differences between the branches were the text descriptions, though. That wasn’t cool enough. I wanted to incorporate  some different ways to move between rooms in the different mind states. I was thinking about how hyperlinks work- they’re a lot like this kind of text adventure game. You click on a thing, and it leads you to another page. Different webpages have different ways of moving around them, though. I tried to make the way you move through the different mind states similar to how you move through the websites that caused your character to enter that mind state.

Youtube is a good example of this idea. When you watch a video on youtube it gives you a few recommended videos that are similar. Sometimes if you follow a thread of recommended videos you’ll end up back where you started. When I was writing the bedroom description of the silly mind state I included a few sentences wherein character was looking around at all their trinkets, reminiscing about the events that brought that trinket into their life, then having that anecdote remind them about another trinket, and so on and so forth. It seemed like a pretty interesting system, so I thought “why tell about this system when I could codify it?” That was the first interesting path I put into the game. When you look at mementos you get into a loop and can keep looking at mementos forever.

Bejeweled Blitz has a more linear structure to it. You start the game, you play it for one minute, then you start it over again (while you’re playing it, of course, there’s more breadth to it, but I didn’t model that). After your character in my game plays bejeweled and enters that particular mindset you are set onto a course that resembles Bejeweled Blitz. After you go to class and have a run-in with the professor you are transported directly back to your room, instead of having to walk back. It’s like a reset button. Get it?

The link structure of reading the news is a little harder to characterize. I figured there were essentially two ways of looking at it- either you start at a news article, which leads to more and more articles explaining related events and the history that led to those events, each of those articles spinning off into yet more articles, or you can think of the process as starting with all those myriad articles and filtering down into your understanding of the subject. Representing either of those processes in my game, however, would have taken a lot of work. Instead, I used the structure of the “angry” mind state to characterize the volatile nature of being mad at the world. When you push your way into the crowd of protesters you have the opportunity to either stop and examine your situation or take action. When you stop you lose progress, sometimes even to the point of sobering your mind state. The friend you meet and the people you can eavesdrop on in the crowd are goombas.

I don’t think this game turned out very well as a finished product. I don’t think there’s a great deal for the player to learn from it as a person, but I did learn something in the process of making it, and it gave me an opportunity to adapt that dialog system for my component model, which has already proven useful. Maybe someone will commiserate with it, or at least recognize the sway that computers have over our states of mind. It might be terribly interesting, but I think it has a least a little bit of truth and honesty in it, and those are things that this medium could use a bit more of.

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Because I am such a generous person I am going to share with you a game idea that you can take to the bank (and you don’t even have to sign an NDA!).

Goal based games rely on being able to condense the myriad variables of a situation into a single value judgement- either a single bit (losing or winning a game) or an amount of progress. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course- the actions leading up to winning a game can be judged in quality and individual wins can build up into an overarching progress mechanic. This compression can be likened to a perspective projection- many points in 3d space can be compressed into 2d space by establishing a perspective, and by establishing a criteria for “winningness” you project the variables of the game into a comprehensible space.

My idea, then, is to create a game wherein the player is presented with a relatively small number of factors, from which they can extract more information than what is presented. It would be like seeing a painting that is painted using perspective techniques- the information hitting your eyes is all 2d, from which your mind extracts a perceived 3d space.

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Screenshot from MFA Prep Course

The long anticipated web release of the “smoking coffee and drinking cigarettes” game is finally online for all to play! It was made by me and the indomitable John Bruneau!

Click here to play it!

Assorted thoughts on the game follow.

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A dog wearing sunglasses

Here are some of the cool flash projects I did in art101b:

“Portrait of a Terrible Conversation”

“Do you wnat toseeywkmr?o”

“Google Image Portrait Generator“

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The GDC went to GDC today. After the event a few of us went to hang out with the fine folks from Ludum Dare at an incredibly rad venue called Noisebridge (a hacker eden and community space), which makes me incredibly sad to live so far from San Francisco. I had a bit of deja vu when, just like last year when we met the Glorious Trainwrecks people at that diner, there wasn’t enough room for us at the big table and we were relegated to a side space.

The overabundant technology of GDC left me feeling blown out and eschatological, so I made interactive art on paper.

Apple Puzzle

Bite into the apple and spit out the pieces again and again until only the core is left.
Solve pieces.

Orange Puzzle

Peel and eat orange.
Solve rind.

Spinning

This is a searching game.
Find the spinningest object in the room.
High score board.

Critique a Toy

Find a toy and critique it. These subjects are off-limits:
-its uselessness
-its isolating nature
-its creativity stifling
-its disconnect from reality
-its gender policing
-its reinforcement of the status quo
-its class exclusivity

Think like a child and only answer the following question: Is It Fun?

Other thoughts, thanks to the wise old man who mutilated games and received computer hardware advice from his dead friends in visions and talked to me but I selfishly pretended to ignore because I wanted to make art:

-The game .exe is a self contained program that does not stretch beyond its own walls.
-Machine code is like route directions- what is the equivalent as a map? (this I tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into a game, but I have not given up)

Lessons Learned at GDC: If someone has made art that you never would have considered to make, it means they have ideas that you have never thought of, and it is your duty, as a person who values ideas, to learn them, even if at first they don’t seem worth your time.

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a cat making a funny tongue motion

I finally participated in Klik of the Month again.  Here are the fruits of my labor.

As I usually do when I don’t have any ideas coming into a game jam, I grabbed random assets from the internet (space ghetto is my go to place) and program whatever comes to mind. I suppose it’s an attempt to get some kind of equivalent to “automatic writing” for digital game creation. It’s still a very conscious and logical process (for programming it might have to be?) but the results end up seeming somewhat subconscious, even if it’s largely a hoax.

I divided my time into two, one hour for gathering non-interactive resources, and the second hour for making the interactions.

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Kelsey’s Games

It should go without saying that these games look much, much better when they’re actually in motion, and better even still when you’re playing them. They lose a lot of their charm when they’re in a static form like this. If it’s at all possible you should play them, at least the ones that look most interesting, to get a complete feel for the game (especially Kelsey’s “Other People”- it looks very unimpressive from the screenshot, but playing it is really a trip- it was one of the first games he made for the game dev club and I totally forgot about how striking it was until I played it again just now).

Also, time scale is important here. Many of these games were made in the span of 48 hours (Emagtra, Your House Is Wet), or 2-4 hours (I Love you But You Kiss Like a Girl, A Normal RPG, You Decide, Lick the Pinapple), so naturally they aren’t going to be as polished as games that have been in development for months to years.

When we focus exclusively on making novel interactions at breakneck speed, and have a bit of a framework built up to help us out, we should see some pretty startling results.

Playable Versions:

Cygnus the Cutie (flash)

Apocalypse Snow (flash)

I Love You But You Kiss Like A Girl (Game Maker- requires windows)

A Normal RPG (requires windows)

You Decide (Game Maker- requires windows)

Time Snipers (Windows)

Time Snipers (Mac (untested- I don’t own a mac, so if this doesn’t work I’m sorry :X))

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Today I presented what I have done so far in the budget crisis game.  I’ve been working on the interface, mostly, because I had a cool idea for how to manage the inventory, and that worked so well that it spun out into a philosophy for the entire user interface.   (more…)

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Very minor update today, since I spent most of my time working on homework. I used a bunch of the code from the editor to update the game itself, now it’s an actual playable kind of thing!

The source code so far (.zip)

The playable game

The game grid is on the left, the selection bar is on the right.  Hit Space to switch between the two selection modes.  When the bar says “p” you are choosing a problem to work on, when it says “i” you are choosing a shape to use as a brush. Click on the down arrow at the bottom of the selection bar to make the list appear / scroll in the list (I don’t know why it doesn’t show them automatically, this is one of those little quirks that you can get used to if you’re the only one using it, but obviously I’ll have to fix it before I send it out ) The number in the upper right is your “score” for the problem.  You get points by putting shapes inside the goal area, and you lose points by putting shapes outside the goal area.

Playing it, I was a little surprised with how plays.  I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect in regards to difficulty.  I found that a lot of the problems were way to easy, but a few of them were surprisingly hard. They’re very prone to me remembering how I made them, since they’re just a collection of stamps, but one or two I legitimately had to think about, so I think the game has some potential as an actually compelling activity.

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