The Art Of Play

Earlier this week I went up to Pittsburg to get ridiculously wasted over lite beer and 'urp with a host of esteemed collegues - you know, discourse. It was called The Art Of Play, and it was so money, yet so free. Held at CMU, the symposium was a meeting between game designers trying to push the medium to it's artistic maturity, with an emphasis on how, instead of boring, bullshit questions like "can they be?" or "why?" This, ladies and gentlemen, was the straight-talk express.

The speaker presentations were good, and perspectives ranged from the academic to the industry/academic, to the industry, to a dude who lives in a cabin. Actually, for the record, Jason Roher lives in a house y'all, not a cabin.

After the lectures we got mad Thai food. I sat next to Paolo (spelling? help me out dude) who is a project manager at Microsoft. Across from us was a student who was interested in project management styles, and in serious game development. You can imagine the dialectic: this motherfucker right here has lead small projects with the laize' faire macro-management style of the Dude going bowling (Dude, mark it zero!); while my counter-part had experience managing large teams with task-queue optimizational rigor for a major (and EEEEEvil, if I may add) corporation. The food was excellent, and the pinot too.

WARNING: Watch for dropping names, helmet advised.

Then, me, Phil Fish (Fez, various Kokoromi titles), Mark Johns (Shit Game, Space Barnacle, Owl Country), Randy Smith (EA, unannounced Spielberg collaboration), Heather Kelley (Lapis, various Kokorimi titles), a student named Greg (Dreamscape) and last but not least, Cindy! - yeah, we all went out and got fucking wasted.

We talked about smart stuff.

I ordered a pitcher.

Then, by sheer chance, while discussing the application of text versus context, or something, I happened upon the aforementioned 'urp, I split the cost 7/13 with Phil.

Dude, so ripped.

And what great discourse.

I really hope I'm not undermining the integrity of the symposium, it was a lot of smart people saying a lot of smart things, and I remember quite a few of them, but for me, that's not the best part. The best part is the energy that was there, implying to me that a) indies live like rock stars, give or take the cash flow and b) there will be indie game groupies in the near future, maybe.

I slept in my car, in the parking garage, having to rig up a sleeping bag tent, rung through the clothes hang, but that only modestly blocked out the incessant light. Best of all, I didn't have to pay for parking when I left at 5:55. I went to the park and watched the sun rise.

The arcade was a great set-up. Jaron Lanier, pioneer of augmented interactive spaces, which he coined by the term "Virtual Reality", made a C64 game in the 80s, and it was on display briefly, before going blue screen. Braid was nice, reckon I'll buy that one. Facade and Passage were there, and people who are non-traditional players came in and played them. I was saying how I loved seeing people's faces when the wife died in Passage (spoilerz!) or something clever happens in Facade, but the thing we then realized is that people playing in public, in a gallery situation, don't tend to have the same level of intimacy with these moments. Mark testified, when he played Passage at Gamma 256, he wasn't moved, only in a private setting with a different setting pace was he able to really appreciate it.

Okay, smart stuff; a bit of lexical confusion about whether games have to have goals, i.e. if Tale of Tale's stuff are games. I say, it's all games, there are different kinds of goals, explicit, implicit, and aesthetic, which neatly correspond to MDA, in that order. Let's move on.

General agreement that Doom 3 was an abortion, and symbolic of everything wrong with the industry. Let's make games about meaningful dynamics of the human spirit!

It's hard to make an art game with more than a few people, so the consensus goes. I think a team making something really amazing should be like a coven of Mages, from Mage.

Some interesting talk about business models on the bus ride to and from the ETC, where people pay mad money to get put on projects with other people. Passage was a profitable game if you billed each of the ~50 hours Jason spent on it at $20/hr, and measured revenue in donation uptake. The idea of charging people entry to a gallery, or even better, a short-form themed contest like Gamma, was suggested. I said it depends on the design, Loot, which is a game I designed which might see the light of day if Ari hustles, is an art game about greed which uses the skill-game business model to satisfy its creator's greed. Too vague? Later, talking with Mark about it, he said he's trying to license the IP for his upcoming, unannounced title to publishers for as many platforms as possible, to get up-front cash so he can afford to keep making new games. I think that's a smarter strategy than getting slogged down in the development of one game as a franchise, hoping to not get screwed out of royalties. Bottom line: it depends, there is no silver bullet. Apply the same creativity to business models as you do to game designs, preferably at the same time so there is no noticable difference.

While eating a cheesesteak with delicious hot sauce, an escaped mental patient sat down next to me, called me a "nigga", and told Mark he was "pretty cool for a white boy" after he gave the guy a cigarette. He told me he was bi-polar and schitzo, because I asked, and I inquired as to what schitzophrenia was like. He said "one second," turned around and shouted at nobody "hey, shut the hell up!"

Randy Smith DJ'ed at the bar across the street. We danced like transmodern, infomorphic wave-forms, and said our goodbyes.