Mockingbird

The impending singularity for interactivity is going to be brought on by successively more powerful platforms for rapidly prototyping and designing games. You've heard of the big ones, there's MetaPlace from Raph Koster's company, and in its own way, Storytron from the Crawdaddy himself. Mockingbird is a game-making platform oriented toward casual, spatial gameplay. It has limitations, but it also has tremendous potential for social commentary. (Ed's Note: Also consider Gamestar Mechanic.)

The game pictured is The Last Super Delegate. I made it in an hour or two, it was my first game; now that I know the interface I could make something similar in twenty minutes. Before I started I got lit, figuratively speaking, and dove into the gestalt of hacking the Democratic primary process with distorted found-art and pure cynicism. I started with the background, finding via Google Images a great pic of a brochure for the Pennsylvania Turnpike (this was back when that state's primary was ramping up). The tag-line struck me as perfect for my theme, which I slowly fleshed out as I introduced objects. I decided to go for vertical gameplay, since you don't see that so much. My protagonist was Barack Obama and Raziel, with the power to throw Hillary Clinton at automobilies scrolling up the screen, and then taking the jewels as campaign contributions. I didn't realize it until after I chose the items, but I had a red jewel and a blue jewel, pretty cleanly implying a conservative and liberal voter. I added some planes and jets scrolling horizontally and added a bounce function to them, I also put some cop cars next to the civ cars, made them invincible, and gave them a ricochet effect. The titular Superdelegate was originally going to be Charlie Manson, but I decided to make it David Rockefeller, for reasons that should be obvious to students of deep power. As I playtested and tuned it out, I realized that the process of metaphorically campaigning led there to be no civilian cars left on the road; things effectively become a police state. Mission accomplished.

The next game I started has the working title of Riccitiellovania: Rondo of Cash. I wanted to make a Metroidvania game where you play the current EA CEO, exploring the mysterious HQ and consolidating the shit out of everything you can for mad profit. I was going to lampoon the schiessty-ness of him merging two studios, then buying them after moving back to EA, or the likely arbitrage move on Take Two's stock when he tried to buy them. Once the Stop ability is optimized we'll be able to design these sprawling Metroidvania games, and I'll finish that game.

The latest title I did is called Arbitrage, which was inspired by my researching the word after Micheal Patcher mentioned it in relation to the Take Two cluster-fuck. It's a great word, beautiful and wholly evil, understanding it will help you understand a lot of how power and economy works. So I started playing with this idea, figured I'd do something along the lines of La La Land 2. I started playing around and researching images, and things took off. I ended up doing something about food commodity traders, where you have to "short" the poor people and bounce the food back to the rich fat kids. As soon as a feature gets added, I'll do it.

(Ed's Note: Actually, arbitrage is an important part of any diverse market, and helps to ensure the efficient spread of price signals.)

But these are just my pretentious expressions, you might want to make a game about how your wife gets on your case, or how much airline food sucks. Whatever. The beauty of it is, it's casual, it's like having a one-night-stand and making a baby right after you finish, but then being able to edit the baby in real-time, without any bioethics concerns. As the features get more numerous and robust, I think it's going to get really interesting. Sure, you've got PopFly and Game Brix and whatnot, but these don't let you design and play in real-time. Once sound uploading becomes supported, you can hear a song you like, have it inspire a dynamic in your mind, upload a clip and then go at it. I recommend being lit; lit with inspiration.