I asked some of my favourite people for two sentences on the future of video games. Anna drops a truth bomb, Rich Grilloti gets Gary-Busey-level zen on us, and Cactus reps for weirdness. Enjoy!

Anna Anthropy

I envision a world where we have as many hobbyist game authors as we do hobbyist writers or artists. The proliferation of tools like Game Maker, Scratch, and Construct—and the ones that will follow them—means that big industry publishers will no longer be able to act as gatekeepers to our boundless medium: I’m looking forward to a future of more diverse stories being told by more diverse authors, not just man-boy nerds making games for other man-boy nerds.

Rich Grilloti (Pixeljam)

A creative renaissance is under way and will continue to bloom in
brilliant, amazing ways. The description “video game” will lose its
meaning as the activities, experiences, and challenges inspired by games
converge and show up throughout our lives in exciting, enjoyable,
practical, and otherwise unexpected ways.

Also, quite possibly, the act of playing roles and identifying deeply
with well-created characters in believable ways will spark a
recognition of the character we’ve been playing and have been identified
with throughout our own lives. Attention will spontaneously withdraw
out of the mentally created persona to rest completely in itself,
revealing our true nature, the shared oneness of Being. What is seen
cannot be unseen, true peace is at hand.

Cactus

My biggest hope for the future of indie games (or games in general) is to see a game that personally hits all the right notes with me. There are movies, music, comics, art and books out there that I feel truly represents what I’m looking for in entertainment, but no single game. I feel this says a lot about how narrow the output of games is at the moment.

(I asked Cactus to elaborate)

Well, that’s hard to pinpoint. I think in general that games rarely take themselves seriously. I really like weird things, and whenever something’s weird in a game, it just turns whacky. I would want to play a game that feels like a different view on reality, or maybe even a completely different reality. Something alien, something that is new to me. Life is all about having cool experiences, so why would I want the same experiences over and over, even if they get bigger and better?

I do try to add this feeling in my games. Not so much that I explicitly try to keep people from being able to laugh at what’s going on in them, but rather that I try to let those who want to take them seriously be able to do so too. And I also try to never end anything with a punchline or something that explains everything to the player. A lot of times I enjoy things I don’t understand more than things that I do understand, they stay longer in my mind as I try to get a grip of what the hell they’re all about, or just because I realize that they’re completely beyond me and that sometimes makes me admire them in a way.

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.