Documentation October
- realitypsi
- Jun 14, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 15, 2020
Documentation October I
13.10.2019 iArts Graduation Project | Clara Seifert
Inspiration
I went to gamescom back in August. My godmother had lent me her old Nikes which completely fell apart within the first two hours of being on the fair. My socks were my armour that day, when walking around the halls for hours, and on the way to the train to the hostel once it was over.
I came home with a bunch of stickers, flyers, a notepad full of unintelligible scribbles, and a lot of bright new input as well as love for this creative community. There were some great talks, for example with a very iArts-y dude displaying hand painted pixel art. He had a very interesting approach to values in games, and decided to create representations of the seven deadly sins using popular retro game icons. (You can check him out at pixelethics.com).
Also, I bought a beautiful and inspiring book from another artist I met there, and a gamescom-T-shirt with my *gamertag* printed on the back. Guess it’s official now. Here are some bad pictures of really cool art by Christian Klement.
In two weeks, the Essen game fair will take place. While the gamescom (almost) exclusively presents digital games, the SPIEL focuses more on analogue games - such as board, card and role-playing games - and toys. The next documentation paper will contain a fair report and hopefully also links to and pictures of new contacts and their work.
Theoretical Background
Currently, I am reading this hugely helpful book:
Its way of using lenses to view a game through really vibes with me - you know I like exploring different metaphorical perspectives on things.
Below you’ll find some interesting quotes on the alternate realities we build when playing games and how the experiences gained within those realities can relate to our more traditionally ‘real’ world.
When it comes to defining games as such and analyzing their characteristic aspects, there is a lot to be found here. The author also talks a bit about Game Design as an Art in and of itself, which is a valuable perspective to consider in my own research.
“Johan Huizinga called (the boundary at the edge of the game) ‘the magic circle’, and it does indeed have a kind of magical feeling to it. When we are mentally ‘in the game’, we have very different thoughts, feelings, and values than when we are ‘out of the game’. How can games, which are nothing more than sets of rules, have this magical effect on us? To understand, we have to look to the human mind.”
(...)
“It is almost as if our minds are equipped to set up an internal, minimized, simplified version of reality that only includes the necessary interrelationships needed to solve the problem.”
(...)
“Now we see the magic circle for what it really is: our internal problem-solving system.This does not make it any less magical. Somehow, our minds have the ability to create miniature realities based on the real world. These microrealities have so effectively distilled the essential elements of reality for a particular problem that manipulations of this internal world, and conclusions drawn from it, are valid and meaningful in the real world. We have little idea of how this really works - but it does work very, very well.”
A Game A Week A Month A Year
The challenge: Rapid Prototyping brought to the next level
Turns out, a week is basically nothing.
Good that I’ve tried it, and probably even better that I wasn’t too proud to overthrow the idea again. (Or perhaps I was simply much too proud to present the rather pathetic speed-games done within a week. Either way, I will definitely keep this concept in mind and use it again, once I have practiced the basic skills a little more, so coming up with an idea and translating it into action immediately doesn’t take up as much time as it does now.)
By the way, how do you like the idea of connecting my game experiments, via story or sets of players or otherwise? Probably just another of those things that sound cool in my head but just make the project needlessly complicated to construct.
Well, Harlowe there!
My current practice of both designing a game (narrative and visuals/output) and programming it at the same time has helped me maintain a better balance when working creatively. It’s not nearly as draining as conceptualizing all day long, and has made me far more productive.
In this experiment, I let the player make choices within a story. Is it still art? Potentially. Is is a game? Probably. The level of interactivity is pretty low, however, and most of the joy players might experience (if any) will be induced by finding out what the story brings. In this one, I am clearly the creator, effectively giving the audience only the illusion of a choice; that is, the choice of how to proceed through the story, not much more interactive than allowing someone to choose the reading order in a collection of (relating) short stories.
To tell you just a little bit about the story in this one:
There are two players, one of them plays Gabriel*, the other plays God*. Taking turns, they try to each reach their respective goals: Gabriel to reach his workplace unharmed, and God to kill him first. On this mission, they have different tools and abilities to use to their (accidental dis)advantage.
*All names are made-up or used fictitiously. Any semblance to real people or deities, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Game Nights
To playtest my little games, I will have to organize game nights with different potential target groups. To make it less like a petri dish situation and more of an actually fun evening (to simulate a life-sized group of people voluntarily playing), I will combine the test rounds with something I’ve been planning to do for ages: Inventory of my game shelf.
That means that I can observe the behaviour of the players under more realistic conditions, calibrate their preferences, and establish a player profile. To achieve this efficiently, I will try to provide a wide variety of games on every event: ranging from my most complicated sci-fi strategy night-filler to the old wooden memory my little sister got on her fourth birthday.
Also, of course, it is just more fun to play “proper” games as well.
To create a bit of an incentive, the winners of each evening will get a prize, paid from the fee they had to pitch in at the beginning. This pot will contain favours the pitching player now owes the winner (because money is lame).
For now, this is just a bit of a teaser (since there is nothing even ready for the Alpha yet), but in the coming papers, this section will be filled with information I collected during the test events, from both observation and feedback rounds.
An Excerpt of my Writing
To give a bit of insight into the more abstract treatise my philosophical contemplations yielded last year, I will include a bit of text from that time in every documentation paper. It might not always be quite as directly related to the current shape of my project as the other segments, but as it was part of the development process, I think it is still wise to keep a mental eye on it.
Game as a medium between our reality and a fictitious one
We already know what the word means; it is a transmitter of some form of information. Now think of a medium in the most esoteric sense: a literal middleman between the creator and the recipient of the information.
Lost in transmission, mutated through translation to and from the language of the medium, information gets transformed and sometimes even newly emerges: with every added dimension, another layer of content, a new form of presenting what is known also creates room for accidental details and sometimes forces the “creator” to display unheardof information.
This grey area of self-created content, shaped by the medium itself, is of special interest to me as a creator of creativity.
Building or composing a system that will perpetually generate new information and therefore be independent from its primal originator would mean successfully achieving the stage of universally fertile art.
What I’ve been playing
Here I tell you about what games I’ve been playing just for fun, and what I can learn from their mechanics and design.
Nymphiad
A cute little digital game by the one-person developer Muzt Die Studios. You should know that I am somewhat addicted to indie pixel-art games - in the next editions you will definitely see more of my favourite titles mentioned.
This one is special, because it is a very basic puzzle platformer, with some cool mechanics and quaint animations. It is available as a free download on the dev’s website, and this dude is already inspiring simply because he makes games on his own just for fun, and publishes them accordingly. I love how he takes a simple concept, adds his own personal twist to it, and goes through with the idea all the way. It makes me feel like I could achieve stuff like this as well, maybe even on the side whilst officially doing something else (or probably especially so).
In this game, you play a little fairy that is trying to make its way through a labyrinth with a few simple compounds with basic functions. Like a good joke, it is entirely self-explanatory, which is something I love. Just by combination of the elements the puzzles actually do get quite hard later on, and the player has to get creative himself in trying out different - at least in my case sometimes rather far-fetched - ways of solving the problem at hand. Unless, of course, he hasn’t even identified it yet.
Considering it seems to be humbly sold as ‘just something I made someday’ (it was designed and developed for the Pixel Day 2019 classic games contest), I find the scope of the game impressive. And for such a ‘cheap’ game, it is surprisingly fun to play, even stretched out across a longer time period: the puzzles, catchy music and adorable pixelated details just make you keep coming back.
Play the game online here.
Kööstee
This is an old game manufactured in the region (the name roughly translated to “little wooden box” - if you look at the picture below, you’ll know why).
The goal is to get rid of all of your little wooden sticks first. You roll a die taking turns; if you roll a three, for example, you can put one of your sticks in the hole accordingly, unless there is one in that hole already, then you have to take it out. The hole in the middle (representing the number six) leads to the inside of the box. You can roll the dice as often as you want, until you have to pull your first stick.
It is incredibly simple, and in the end there are only two really valid strategies: play it safe or take some risks. That leaves just enough risk-taking (eliminating chance as the only power controlling who wins and loses) to make the game not feel extremely stupid and repetitive, and for you to feel like you might actually deserve to be winning.
That’s the tiny mechanism making this game interesting: Having this one very low-stakes choice, that feels like it is really important, simply by being the only one offered in the game. Other than that, we only really enjoy the banter (Only hole number four is still empty? Ha! You’re pretty much bound to lose! … *the other one rolls a four* You have got to be kidding me. But what is that I see? A six?), and stacking the little wooden sticks in neat little piles.
The main reason I mention it here is because my Mom and I play it sometimes, and somehow, I win literally every single time. And it is not even a close call either. At this point, we are probably just playing to see if chance is even still an option for us to consider, or if we should just accept that the Kööstee-gods are smiling upon me.
I recommend this because it is simple and effective, and because of the local tradition and the feel of nostalgia that’s attached to it for me and anyone from around here that plays it.
Some illustrating images
^A screenshot of a paper Isabel sent us, which I feel personally attacked by
^A pic of me enthusiastically reading “The Art of Game Design” (yes, I read in this precise position)
My health
+ I’ve certainly been sleeping enough lately
+ I’m back to working out every day, I’m even doing cardio fairly consistently, even though it is literally freezing outside (proof: my muddy shoes from running in the snowy forest)
+ I’m actually talking to people, how’s that sound
+ I eat semi-healthily (if you don’t count Wednesday, I swear I don’t normally have pizza thrice a day)
- my sleep schedule is still kind of fucked up, if anything I might be getting way too much sleep (think ten to twelve hours a day - and I haven’t even talked about the nights yet! hehe)
- I drink ungodly amounts of alcohol.
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