Noonat’s games are crammed with ideas. Queens (a game made for the Ludum Dare game design challenge based on the theme “domestic abuse”) gives you a new character with a new name every time your avatar dies. It’s a kind of twisted incentive to be better at the game and, in an uncomfortable way, helps you understand the obsessively abusive King antagonist. And then there is the classic plumber/princess dynamic that is present just enough to make you feel nostalgic and uneasy.

Deathbeam is kind of like Pixeljam’s Dino Run. It has the same impending wall of doom gameplay (this time in the form of an alien mother ship with deeply unsettling sound) but adds beatifully minimal visual design and lightning-quick moral decisions. It’s an excersize in capturing tension in game design, and it works (painfully) well.

Noonat discusses design with a comfortably assured vision, and it comes across in his work. I’m a big fan the games he’s made so far, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

What are your influences?

I’m a huge fan of games that tell stories through gameplay, especially when they give players their own stories to tell. I try to apply that to my own ideas, but I’m never quite sure if I’ve been successful with it. I’ve seen people telling funny stories after playing Queens, so that makes me really happy.

In the mainstream market, I think Shadow of the Colossus and Left 4 Dead are two great examples of story through gameplay. I think indie games are doing it better than most. Braid and Don’t Look Back were both excellent, and Pixeljam does it wonderfully with all of their games.

There are some games that wouldn’t normally be considered in that category that are also good at it—Battlefield 2, for instance. It doesn’t really have any story to speak of, in the traditional sense, but players are overflowing with their own stories after an hour or two of playing and love telling you about them.

What do you mean by “funny stories”?

Oh, there were a few comments on posts about it that made me laugh. “Fair Queen Souplice, you may not have the fairest name in all the kingdom but you only had the strength to survive the evil king’s dungeon.”, or “Queen Wimarca, a scrappy, short-haired brunette tomboy sort of girl finally managed to escape the king’s clutches.” I found it interesting that people remember the queens by name and imagine backgrounds for them, even though they’re just a tiny collections of pixels that usually don’t live for more than 30 seconds.

Your sound design is very effective—lot’s of brutal sounds that help reinforce fear. What can you tell me about the sound process for your games?

Hah, luck of the draw? I love sound, but I know next to nothing about creating it. It’s usually the last thing I do—mostly due to the time constraints of Ludum Dare—and at that point I’m usually just hitting randomize and mutate in sfxr until I get something that sounds right.

That said, I think I have a pretty good idea of what emotion I want different parts of the game to convey, and try to find sounds that represent that. I’m curious, what sounds jumped out at you the most in the games?

In particular, I thought the looming, vibrating spaceship sound in Deathbeam was unsettling, especially in contrast to the near silence of the game. And in Queens, the sounds were crunchy—really low-bit, broken sounds that drove home the brutality of the situation.

Yeah, the mother ship sound was the one sound that was really intentional. I don’t think the beam would be nearly as overwhelming with the sound off. I kind of wanted the fourth room in Queens to be the same: just loud, and crushing, and full of noise. That room is supposed to represent the hopelessness of the situation, and the contrast once the sound stops kind of fits with the story I think.

Did you feel a lot of pressure taking on a theme like domestic abuse?

Yeah, definitely more pressure. With this one, I was only going to do it if I got an idea I thought really fit, whereas with other themes one might be more willing to half-ass it with something that doesn’t really fit. Once you get an idea I don’t think it’s any harder than other themes.

I do think games can deal with deeper issues, but I personally prefer when it’s done through allegory. I think it has a deeper impact on the player when they have to think about it for a bit. That approach can also allow the game to focus a bit more on being fun, which should really be the end goal regardless of what other themes you’re trying to convey.

The games that you mentioned previously, what is it about their storytelling that appeals to you?

I think it’s similar to a good storyteller in face-to-face conversation. Most people, when they’re telling you about something, tell their story without really involving you as the listener. “Man, you should have seen the guy that showed up at the party… he was kind of stinky.” It tells you what happened but it’s all facts, things that happened to someone else, somewhere else.

Good storytellers throw in bits that pull you into the story to see it through their eyes. “So, I’m standing there with my drink, and out of the corner of my eye I see this ratty guy walk in. At first I thought he just looked a little scruffy, but then the smell hit me—whoa! He must not have bathed for a week.” They give you just enough hints to let you feel what they want you to feel.

For games, the gameplay itself brings out the most emotion in the player, and storytelling should take advantage of that. You could tell the player a great story without it, and that would be fine, but they could have just watched a book or read a movie. People play games to be involved in the story.

I might take flak for using this example, but I think Metal Gear Solid 4 was possibly the worst example of storytelling in a game that I’ve seen. The game should have been good, but I was so detached from the story as a player that I just wanted the cinematics to be over so I could play. At one point I looked at the time and realized I had been sitting there with the controller in my hands doing nothing for half an hour. I was more emotionally invested in the story of Donkey Kong.

Anna Anthropy (also known as Auntie Pixelante) is a dyke, a domme, and a game designer. I won’t waste any time extolling the importance and the understated ballsiness of her games and ideas, but I will say that this has been one of the most enlightening interviews I have conducted so far.

Are there examples of mainstream games that effectively communicated queer themes, intentionally or unintentionally?

The videogames industry is hit-driven. Budgets have gotten so big that the only way to make a profit on a game is for it to be as widely purchased as possible, and that means it must be marketed to the widest audience possible. Queerness exists here only as a marketing tactic. Though queer characters may appear, it’s only as a novelty: these people don’t love how I love, lust how I lust, or look like the people for whom I lust and love.

What are some examples of this novelty queerness in mainstream games?

I guess the classic example is Eidos’s Fear Effect 2. The game’s two women protagonists fuck, not because they love women or have any kind of chemistry between them, but to sell the fantasy of peeping on woman-woman sex to the game’s intended [heterosexual] male audience. One of the first things the player does is watch them strip through a secret camera.

My desire to make games was partly driven by my frustration with the lack of dyke characters or dyke desire in games, but that’s also partly just a side effect. If I make a game, what else will the characters be but queer and perverts?

Do you think independent games, as an alternative to hetero-dominated mainstream games, are by virtue a queer medium?

Where queer games come from is hobbyist game developers—people outside of the industry who craft games out of the desire to make themselves heard, to contribute. I’ve used the term “videogame zinesters” before to describe these people, and there’s going to be a lot more of them. As [game development] tools like Game Maker, Construct, and Inform make it easier for people without a background in coding and computer graphics to create games—making a game becomes closer to writing a story—we’ll hear more voices, more personal stories, more queerness.

How much responsibility does the audience have for the state of video games, especially their relation to a queer audience?

The audience is becoming the author. The industry only offers queers the role of consumer, but the medium itself is calling more and more people to become creators. We’ll be playing queer games when queer people write them.

Do you think the queer community is alienated from game culture?

I think lots of people are alienated from what we call “game culture”. Publishers are only interested in marketing to that small group of people who already buy and play games. The culture that this engenders is one of exclusivity: the vocabulary and humor of game culture are self-congratulatory, existing not to foster communication but to establish who is inside and outside of the circle.

The videogame medium is being held hostage by a small group of people, or it would be if big games publishers really were the gatekeepers to the medium they want to be perceived as. The increasing accessibility of game authorship means that games are becoming culture—created and communicated in the same ways as all other culture—instead of “game culture.”

Some designers talk about the gameplay communicating the message, as opposed to contextual elements communicating the message. Can gameplay alone communicate queer ideas? If your games were stripped of their context, would they still exist as queer games?

The design of Mighty Jill Off is informed by my experience of kink. Playing a hard game is a kind of masochism and designing the game a kind of sadism. A game can be intimidating, scary, difficult, but the player takes satisfaction in performing the game’s demands, even if it takes many attempts. The player struggles but ultimately succeeds. There’s a scene early in Mighty Jill Off where the player jumps up a tall shaft, and the screen scrolls up to reveal a wall of spikes in front of her. But the height of the player’s jump brings her right up to the spikes without touching them.

Design is sadism. As a designer and as a domme, I want the person who submits to me to suffer and to struggle but ultimately to endure: I challenge her while simultaneously guiding her through that challenge. The rules of the game and the level design carry that idea. The story of a rubber-suited dyke trying to please her cruel queen just to supply a context.

So, yes, I believe a queer design sensibility exists. Or rather, queer design sensibilities exist, because an author’s design is informed by her own experience. And what is queerness other than a diversity of experiences?

Were video games linked, from the beginning, to your own sexual orientation or experiences? Did you always relate to video game design as an S&M experience?

A videogame is a space constructed out of communication, and communication is the realm in which flirtation and seduction happen, where desire and love are both expressed and explored. It’s a space for role-playing and for exploring fantasy. Of course it has an erotic nature.

And there’s the complicity of the player, that the audience is a participant in the telling of the story. When I was little—and this is an experience I share with my submissive—I would read choose-your-own-adventure books with a special interest in the “bad” endings where my character would get caught and subjected to terrible fates.

There’s something about the second person, but not just that: it’s the fact that my decisions created the encounter. So what if the decisions were contrived in such a manner as to lead me to the author’s intended outcome? The fact that it’s me, the player—or reader—who guides the narrative to its conclusion carries a great weight; it’s a kind of complicity that’s mostly unique to this medium.

I was shown a trap and I willingly sprung it. That’s informed consent. Game design is the construction of voluntary traps.

You need to play Jumpman immediately. Either a deconstruction of ancient platform tropes or a literal interpretation of Atari game worlds, designer Andrew McClure has described the idea behind Jumpman as what would happen if the camera in an Atari game was pulled back four feet. The result is a stark, grueling, and visually dazzling perversion of ancient game aesthetics. That it’s fun and impossibly clever is a nice bonus.

McClure’s game design reflects his personality: constantly inquisitive and subtly witty. He was kind enough to give me a few moments of his time and discuss inspiration, Bokosuka nightmares, and Jumpman on the iPhone.

So Jumpman is what would happen if the camera in old video games was moved back four feet. Can you expand on that?

These really old video games are really similar because they all have similar technical limitations. There are these single screens that you look at one at a time because the C64, or whatever, couldn’t scroll very well. The thought was to say, “What if we look at the world that seems to be happening? What if we’re not looking at a representation of a construction site—or whatever the manual claims we are—but what we see is really what we’re looking at?”

One way to put it is taking those games face value. So it’s not just that Jumpman is badly drawn, but he’s actually made of big orange blocks. If you think of those worlds as being a little more realistic, if you try to think about little pocket universes that actually look like what these old video games seem to, you try to think, “What are some of the things that you would see?”

Part of that was that there were these little one-screen levels floating out in space next to each other. Which, logically, they would have to be.

You have a tendency to deconstruct video games like that. You do the same thing on your blog, like analyzing the physics behind Mario Galaxy.

Video games give you a chance to create a fake little world. The thing about taking the camera back four feet—if you try to take these worlds seriously—they are all sort of ridiculous in some way or another. If you try thinking them out too much things get humorous quickly.

Alan Moore does this kind of thing in some of his books, like Watchmen. He takes his art form—comics—and takes all of the preconceptions of this art form at face value. I’m going to take all the little weird things in the premise and say, “Okay, I accept these things,” but then I’m going to say, “here’s what happens when you see these weird things happen in a real setting.”

Is Jumpman a commentary on its own medium like Watchmen?

Maybe. I don’t think I did anything even remotely that deep. Actually, when I was first starting to do Jumpman I had this idea that there would be this plot with this video game character that was sick of his video game and wanted to get out because he just kept getting killed over and over again. There was an web comic called Kid Radd that had a plot similar to that. I ultimately didn’t really have a plot in Jumpman at all. The plot is “guide Jumpman to the exit.”

I was sort of trying to do a deconstruction of Jumpman, or trying to explode the genre in that sort of way, but I’m not sure there’s a commentary there. It just plays off the stereotype of the art, or the stereotypes of how these games are constructed.

What were the games that informed you the most?

The games that are the most important to me are the games that are telling stories by letting it happen to you. Games like ICO, or Super Metroid, or the Abe’s Odyssey games.

It’s interesting that gaming can become a story telling medium unto itself. It’s possible for games to tell a story just by popping up text screens and telling you what’s happening, or showing a cut scene, but there is also this sort of interesting thing where games are able to present an experience and have that be an equivalent for a story. Lately I’ve been interested by this creative burst of little indie creative freeware games.

One thing that directly influenced Jumpman was Passage by Jason Rohrer. I played it and I was really impacted, but what I wound up doing was taking apart the game’s executable. I realized all the art and everything was just random .tga files. I realized, “Whoa, this stuff looks easier than I thought.”

I think Jason Rohrer would agree with you about those ideas, too. Are you planning another game yet?

I’m a little bit leery to talk about anything specific because if I decide not to, it would make me feel silly. While making Jumpman I did wind up with some fun ideas I want to explore. At first this Apple II aesthetic was to make developing the game easier. The defining characteristic of all those really old 1981 games was that the graphics looked like they were made in 10 minutes by the programmer, because they actually were. I’d like to explore that approach to the artwork a little bit more.

And I’m going to attempt to make a version of Jumpman for the iPhone. That’s one thing I’m hoping to get finished. I’m hoping I’ll be able to make some more games over the next year or two.

I remember reading interviews with old arcade game designers about how sitting in a dark room all day programming Missile Command would lead to vivid, apocalyptic nightmares. I thought Jumpman would be the type of game to lend itself to something like that—it’s so dark and claustrophobic.

I do have this friend named Joe [Joe Mathlete, member of Houston band The Mathletes] that recorded the song in the YouTube video that Jumpman is being promoted with. He used to have nightmares as a kid that were a lot like those old video games where you’re in these dark corridors with glowing things coming at you.

At one point I dug up this horrible old ROM called Bokosuka Wars. It’s sort of a mess and it’s mostly interesting because it’s funny to watch a game trying to convey something to you and fail utterly, and I showed him this game because I thought it was funny. He freaked out because it was the nightmare he used to have. I do think there is something distantly nightmarish about the Jumpman art style. That’s what those games were like.

And the ending is such a brilliant contrast to that, because it’s so beautiful and blue and pastoral.

It’s a game that very aggressively has no plot whatsoever. But I think it’s fun to look at what’s happening and ask “what is happening and what is the story?”. The thought of the ending is, well, Jumpman in this nightmarish series of corridors trying to get out being menaced by weird green spiky things and eventually you get out to this point and he gets out into “somewhere else”. It’s not clear where he is exactly but it seems to be something more real instead of blocky Apple II land where he was before. There are birds and the birds look like birds and not evil tape decks. There are trees and the blue sky—everything still looks blocky and ancient, but it seems less menacing.

It’s really not clear what happens at the end. Or even if anything really happens at the end, and you’re just playing a game from 1981 and the ending is: Jumpman is on a hill sitting under a tree.

For downloadable Jumpman content and ruminations on quantum physics and video games, check out McClure’s “blog”, Mechanically Separated Meat.

Matthew Wegner is the CEO of Flashbang Studios, editor of physics game site Fun-Motion.com, an IGF content director, and an avid unicyclist. Though he has carved a distinct niche in the video game world, he reminds me of Will Wright in a lot of ways. Like Wright, Wegner loves games because they are fun. Fun in the way that inventing rules, or using a chemistry set is fun. They each use the medium to explore the things that fascinate them. Even the way they discuss games is similar: casually, insightfully, and seemingly unaware of how funny they are.

I’m wondering how unicycling inspires your game designs, if at all.

I don’t think it directly influences me. The fun thing about unicycling is that when you first start, everything seems impossible. It just feels impossible to even stand on it. Then after that, if feels impossible to turn. Then after that it feels impossible to jump, or go up  a curb. It’s a fun challenge to do things that are seemingly impossible and then just keep doing them more and more.

Which is kind of how physics games work.

Oh yeah, definitely. There is a certain challenge in unicycling that I like to find in physics games. In Ski Stunt Simulator, one of my favourite games, it seems impossible to do a flip or even simple challenges, but after you play the game for hours it’s easy to do the things that once seemed so hard.

Do you enjoy traditional games as much as physics games?

I don’t play as many retail games as I used to, mostly because of time reasons—like I wouldn’t have time to play through Bioshock… though I did play through Bioshock—but the games that I play for enjoyment these days are games I can just pick up and play.

Are you what someone would call a casual gamer?

It really depends how you define “casual gamer”. A lot of the industry that focuses on casual games really focuses on the 35-year-old-housewife demographic. Or the people who want to play Bejewelled on the phone while they’re talking to their friend. I wouldn’t consider myself a casual gamer in that regard, but then there is the other side of the coin. There’s the mainstream that considers casual gamers anyone that’s not playing Halo 3 and Madden. So I’m definitely casual in that sense.

Do you find it odd that the term casual games is applied to games designed to be addictive?

Yeah, I think the term is a little silly. When you’re talking about a game like Bejewelled where people are playing five to ten minute sessions, but some people are playing hundreds of hours. People have talked about it before, that the moniker of casual games is a little bit silly because we don’t refer to casual books, or casual television, or casual movies. A game is a game.

You seem interested in the visceral fun-ness of games. Do you see games as anything more than just fun?

Some of our guys [at Flashbang Studios] are more interested in games as a means to tell a story, but I think most of us here are more interested in games as fun. Like when I was a kid, I used to just have fun by throwing a tennis ball onto the roof and watching it fall down—to me, there is fun in that, and I would enjoy making a game as simple as that in terms of goal structure.

I don’t really have a personal interest in pursuing games as a more serious way to tell a complicated story, or making people cry. I really am just interested in games, and especially the play, I guess. Like play in that sense of two kittens playing, or when you’re just a kid bouncing a ball. I think games as a medium is definitely capable of that meaningful exploration, but I just don’t have any interest doing the exploring myself.

What kind of research are you putting into Jetpack Brontosaurus? The skeleton seems incredibly accurate.

[Laughs] Yeah, actually, some of our guys are—they’re not really dinosaur aficionados to begin with, but they’re the kind of people that correct you if you speak improperly, and they have a ridiculous amount of physical knowledge. The artist that did the brontosaurus model can name any muscle in the human body without any hesitation. When he was modeling that, he actually had all these books open from the library of the actual skeleton.

And even then we had the name—the brontosaurus—the actual brontosaurus isn’t a real dinosaur, there was some mixup in the discovery. There were bones mixed together, and the guy that found it thought he found a new dinosaur called the brontosaurus. It turned out that, no, it was just an allosaurus bone mixed together. So the compromise we had over a huge discussion at lunch was that it was an apatosaurus with the christian given name of Brontosaurus, and then we keep the brand recognition of brontosaurus but we satisfy the people [who know it is an apatosaurus].

What’s with the dinosaur fixation?

We did Off-Road Velociraptor as a joke. The goal was actually to explore certain features in the engine we are using, so we were about to explore vehicle features and terrain, and we needed a game on top of that and somehow we ended up with a velociraptor in a jeep. And for the next game we had a sketch of a brontosaurus with a jet engine strapped to him, and we decided that it was funny enough to be the next game. Our next game actually isn’t a dinosaur game though. I’m actually a little worried that any dinosaur fans we have accrued will be upset about that.

Can you talk about that game at all?

It’s Minotaur China Shop. So it’s a minotaur straight from the labyrinth. He took out a small business loan and started his own china shop, and then he’s not quit equipped to run a china shop, and so it doesn’t go well. He’s prone to fall into a rage and sort of trash the place.

Right, I saw the demo video on your vimeo account. What kind of playable game will that be?

This is also partly a technology test. We developed a system for Jetpack Brontosaurus because [Brontosaurus] is essentially a ragdoll but has joint strength to enable him to match animations. So the reason the animation is really weird in the china shop video—you can see he is a physical cohesive creature—we still have to fix it so he doesn’t look so clumsy. But the actual game will be: customers walk in and say, “I want that plate over there”, or, “that piece of china in the corner”, and you have to go get it without breaking things. But as soon as you do break something, you [become enraged and] basically need to be tranquilized, so you might as well trash the place while you still have time.

So it will be kind of a mix of Diner Dash and trashing things—watching things mash around.

That’s a beautiful idea.

We’re trying to make something shorter because Jetpack took about four months, which is a little bit too long for us. But in August we are actually going to be launching our game site, because right now we have all our games under different domain names. So we are launching Blurst, which will be the single destination for all of our games. There will be a single login for achievements, leaderboards, and everything. So we are hoping to launch Blurst this month and then we are actually going to launch it with Jetpack.

You mentioned on your blog that you beat Grand Theft Auto IV recently. What did you think of the physics in it?

The Euphoria stuff is neat […] I think the car physics are remarkably well tuned. They hit the sweet spot where it feels like you’re doing things more complicated than you actually are doing […] I didn’t used to kill pedestrians in that game, and then I realized if I have to drive from point A to point B a hundred more times, I might as well drive down the sidewalk. There’s a lot more visual reward for doing that—people slamming off your trunk and your windshield. I think it’s a great example of how physics can make doing the same action again and again—like running over pedestrians—slightly different.

In the past you’ve mentioned games that could be based on quantum theory. How would you design a game based on quantum physics?

It would probably be very confusing. Actually, a PhD student was interviewing me and his thesis was—he actually thought that the cartoony physics used in video games was actually damaging people’s real-world understanding of physics. And one of his questions was, “Why isn’t there a physics game based on strong and weak gravity, and magnets, and quantum physics?”

I didn’t really have an answer for him. I think a game like that would require a lot of deep thinking, and I think a lot of developers use short cuts that don’t involve deep thinking. I think there are a few game developers—I think Jon Blow’s Braid is a great example of a game that requires a ton of deep thinking and I think he’s the type of guy that can do that kind of deep thinking really well.

Do you think games negatively affect people’s understanding of physics?

I think if anything it will help people discover more important properties, people who don’t have any interest in real physics research. I think the people on Fun-Motion, 12 to 16 is about the average age range, a lot of these people spend a ton of time with these tool kits that are not even games. Like Phun, and  OE-Cake, these are sort of physics toys and I think they help quite a bit. I don’t think it’s damaging. I think that’s sort of a weird hypothesis.

Jason Rohrer’s most recent games Passage and Gravitation are deeply personal and unabashedly autobiographical. Like Art Spiegelman or R. Crumb, Rohrer explores the theory of a new medium through truthful, moving glimpses of his own life.

You mentioned that you hadn’t played Shadow of the Colossus. Have you had a chance to yet?

I haven’t had time to play it more than a few hours, but my initial reaction, at least to the beginning, was, “Wow, that was a really long and uninteresting cut scene.”

I think part of that was like, uh, last-generation graphics are no longer interesting to watch in-and-of themselves like they were when [they were] released. It shows the guy riding a horse through some trees, past a river, some rocks, and whatever. It was not something that was impressive to me, not deep and profound like it was supposed to be. But besides that, why is it so long? Why is he riding the horse across the long bridge and not me?

From what I’ve heard about Shadow of the Colossus, people respect it as a work of art because it has this ethical dilemma of some kind. Like you’re killing these giants to bring this girl back to life. I went through one giant encounter and it was one of the most brutal things I’ve ever done in a video game—seeking it out, climbing up, climbing up, stabbing this thing in the head multiple times until if fell down. I felt strange about that, but so far I don’t see how this game puts an ethical dilemma in front of me. You either kill these things or you don’t do anything.

I think the reason people consider Shadow of the Colossus art is because, like you write about, it delivers its message through gameplay. Like you said, you feel like you’re doing something brutal when you kill the giants, unlike other games where the violence seems senseless.

Well yeah, but that’s the thing though, when you look at how the game is marketed, the box says “you get to go up against 16 huge giants,” exclamation mark! You know? the way it’s presented to you, there is nothing about it to indicate that this is even a weird thing to do to beat the game. [Fumito Ueda] as an artist, is he trying to make a statement about video game violence or is he just making a game with really cool boss battles? I feel like I’m a little bit disappointed by it and I don’t know what people are reading into it. I feel like he didn’t really do it on purpose.

Do you think games can express certain things better than other mediums?

I really do think video games are a more powerful way of communicating certain aspects of the human condition. There are parts of the human condition that involve lots of difficult decisions. In a movie or a book it would reveal something about that character because you can see the choices they made … But you walk away form the book or theatre thinking, “Wow, well what would I have done?” In video games, if you’re dealing with something that involves difficult decisions, you can hand that to the player and see what outcome those choices create. I think they are more powerful at dealing with things like that.

Are video games better at dealing with certain topics more than others? I think video games are not so good at dealing with aspects of the human condition that don’t deal with decisions. For example, making a game about the loss of a loved one. Most of the time there is no choice involved in that. Trying to make a game about that, you’re going to end up not having any interesting choice to offer to the player. We really need to learn which kinds of things we need to stay away from or what things it’s really good at.

A game that you made, like Passage, which, in a way I would say is about the death of a loved one, do you think that handles the message well?

Right, that’s why I say that. Because Passage is more than just about the death of a loved one, it’s about the passage through life and the choices you will make, and one of those choices is whether or not you will even acquire the loved on. That’s a difficult choice. How much of your life do you want to spend with a loved one, or [how much do you want to] walk alone. In a film, maybe The Notebook, you have two people that want to be together and go different paths and come back together and end up experiencing the end of life together. It presents them with the choices they made and that’s it. Then you have a film like Run Lola Run where it shows you the different choices the character can make. And still you’re very limited because you can only show so many branches before the film becomes incredibly long.

In Passage you can make those decisions. Am I going to find a loved one? Am I going to live alone? Am I going to go after these treasure chests? Will I try to see all the scenery? The death of the spouse, of course, is something that happens in that game. The experience is out of your control, but it modulates the rest of the game mechanics. If you get the spouse there is a brief penalty where you have to walk alone, slowly, until you die. I think it’s fine to have games where events occur that are out of the player’s control, but I don’t think those kinds of events should be main things.

I’m thinking back to when you mentioned Shadow of the Colossus, that’s an example where you have no control?

You mean where you’re just watching a movie?

Yeah. Do you need some of that to contextualize a game?

I would say Bioshock has none of that. It was one of the most powerful presentations for a linear story in a game I’ve ever seen. I probably played it halfway though, but it sets up the story with a plane crash, and after the plane crashed the control is in your hands. You’re swimming through wreckage, climbing up on a light house—no one is saying “Go to that lighthouse!” You look at the flaming wreckage and you know where to go. Like in Portal at the halfway point, GLaDOS is about to incinerate you. You’re about to go into this flaming pit, no on tells you what you have to do, but you look at your surroundings and see a doorway where you can shoot your portal to. I think that kind of setup in Shadow of the Colossus, even if you want to tell a linear story, its much more powerful if the setup is in the players control. Why aren’t we riding a horse or carrying a dead girl? Why aren’t we putting her on the altar? They wouldn’t even have to tell us what to do. There’s not any argument for cut scenes in video games.

I think people who are making games with long cut scenes, like Metal Gear Solid, I think they don’t really understand what they are doing, or how to make a compelling game. In Metal Gear Solid 3 there are plenty of places where the cut scene takes over, and soldiers come out, and Snake shoots them. He kicks a crate and does a back flip—isn’t that the primary game mechanic? That’s what I do in this game, I figure out how to engage in this kind of combat. And here is Snake doing cooler moves than I can do. It didn’t look cool, it looked over-done and flashy… If I wanted to watch that I’d be putting a DVD in my Playstation 2 and not a video game.

In your essay for The Escapist, “The Game Design of Art”, you say that the biggest part of the game maker’s toolbox is gameplay, and I thought that was strange. Especially when you cite a game like Rod Humble’s Marriage. It delivers a message through gameplay, but I think it’s missing some form of immersion to contextualize the meaning, or give the player a role. Only using gameplay limits the message. I think immersing the player is the other half of what a game maker should do.

Rod Humble’s game, I was thinking about that recently, it certainly doesn’t assign you a role. You’re kind of like this omniscient outsider to the marriage, you’re not really playing either spouse. Kind of a strange way to play a game about marriage because marriage is a very participatory activity. Marriage should be a two-player game, that’s the only way it truly makes sense.

Okay, so you’re saying… Pick a  game like Bioshock: it’s immersive, it feels like a real world, you see everything from a first-person perspective, it is me. What I’m saying about Bioshock is that I think even if we are going to make games within that three-dimensional framework of virtual reality, we should have things you’re doing in that space somehow connected to what the game is about. Why doesn’t [Bioshock] have you trying to build a utopian city, or keep it under control, or exploring some of those Rand-ian principals … why don’t the game mechanics involve the individual versus the rights of society, as opposed to a game where you run through dark corridors shooting everything you see?

A game like ICO, it’s about companionship and care giving. There is a white, whispy girl and you have to lead her around, so they made puzzles based on that. Even the mechanic of holding her hand really helps to resonate what the game is about. I don’t think there is anything wrong with immersion or virtual reality, I think it limits the mechanics you want to explore. A game like Pac-Man, you have the abstract view of a maze, things synchronize across the maze—you get a pill and all the ghosts turn purple. You dont think about how the ghosts know you got the pill, it doesnt matter if it goes against relativity becase it is abstract. Replace that with a three-dimensional maze, all the mechanics dont make sense. Two-dimensional games free you to create mechanics that dont have to make physical sense.

When I say “immersion”, I don’t mean just virtual reality, I mean the role that is given to the player, the art direction, the narrative. I think these things affect meaning as much as gameplay because they contextualize it. Grand Theft Auto 4 would be a very different game you were given the role of a priveleged white man instead of an immigrant.

You’re saying having more than blue and pnnk circles bouncing around on blank plane.

Do you think that’s enough to deliver a message?

That’s the thing, Rod created those parameters. It’s a test, right? Is it possible to create a game about marriage using just game mechanics? I don’t think he was saying all games should be like this.

A game like Passage, you would say, “Oh, look at Passage. The guy looks like a little guy, the spouse looks like a little woman, there is some nice scenery, there’s some moving music…”

All those things help to reinforce the meaning. I don’t think Passage would have been as good of a work had it just been two little squares moving along something. I believe in pretty bits, to use terminology from board games. I think playing chess with marble pieces on a handmade wooden board would be fundamentally different than playing with pieces of paper. I do think that stuff is important and I think it’s important to convey the meaning… but I still think it’s possible to convey a meaning without those things.

Also in your article, you say that games should be more accesible. I think the greatest works of art wouldn’t pay attention to the the audience’s cabability. Do you think video games should pander to everyone, or deliver messages to people who do undestand them?

What I was saying there was that… In all other mediums… You could say, does David Lynch care about accessibility? Do classical composers worry about, you know, who is really going to be able to sit through this peice? I say no. They are making works for any audience that is willing to experience those works.
However: reading is a pretty common skill in modern society. But video games put this enormous hurdle in front of people. It’s more than whether or not you can understand the work, it’s whteher or not you can experience the work. If you’re trying to argue for games’ legitimacy, how are we going to show games to people who don’t play games? Shadow of the Colossus is a great example of that, what it demands of you in controls, it’s challenging. This is one I wanted to show my spouse, but when I played it I was like, “Oh man. You get frustrated with this first cliff.”

I’m not saying we should pander in meaning, I’m saying there is not a reason the game should be a challange in the way it’s controlled.

Is there a time when playing complex video games will be as common as reading?

Hmm… I don’t know… I guess all I will say is that we aren’t there yet and we can’t act like we are. In reading, you either know how to read or you don’t. I guess the equivalent could be writing books that are full of long, really complicated sentences that are hard to parse. I’d say most people in the United States know how to use a computer. They are familiar with using a mouse and a keyoarrd. But the you hand them this task where they’re supposed to coordinate their two hands in this hard way to control something in this three-dimensional space. They are used to using a mouse and a keyboard, they have this kind of literacy—so you’re literate, but here is a really big word that you’ve never seen before and it’s going to confuse you more. Here is this really long, complicated sentence that you’ll never be able to get your head around.

There are people who have made great works of literature without using big words or complicated sentences. I guess I would say Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be pretty down-to-earth in those aspects, yet it’s considered one of the greatest works of literature… American literature, at least. So I don’t know… I guess, maybe because so many people don’t have video game literacy we have to learn how to speak with small words and short sentences first.