Month: April 2012

Pajama Jam #3 from har0ld on Vimeo.

FEZ is out. I followed everything since the day they won the IGF in 2008 which feels like three decades ago.

The game is out and there are bugs. 5 years, one programmer and pretty nasty bugs -corrupted saved data, reboot and stuff-. I’m at the same time amazed that that kind of bug is making it to a finished and approved product on a console (MS, what the hell?) and at the same time, Renaud Bedard did a fantastic job at coding everything, even a complex audio system (we really need a real MIDI engine instead of reinventing the wheel each time). Chapeau bas.

It’s funny because Polytron/FEZ make me “love them and hate them” at the same time. Love the indie, hate the 360 (I hope nobody ever releases a small game as a console exclusive, ever. Oh shit, Sound Shapes). Love Phil’s open mouth, hate his open mouth. Love the colorful artistic direction, hate 8bits, old school platforms.

Like Jesper Juul says, “Fez is surely supposed to be interestingly old-school & challenging, but I think this type of puzzle worked much better when you were 12 and only had a single game – and you were playing it with your friends on long afternoons.”

Then this article (or this one) seems to nail what a lot of players find as a negative with FEZ: meh platforms and mind-fucking puzzles so hard that people wonder what’s the point.

FEZ was like the next Braid, the next “indie sensation”. Five years later, it seems like it’s not. It’s OK, making games is hard but I feel that winning the 2012 IGF Grand Prize, shouldn’t really had happened. Antichamber or Botanicula seem so fresh compared to FEZ, I don’t get why they didn’t win, they could have used some PR. I know Polytron is friend with IGF judges and game journalists and they all have parties together and stuff so when I hear that really, it doesn’t change anything with judging games I can’t help but think are you fucking serious?

And then it hits me: we are an incestuous micro scene focused a little too much on the past, our achievements and our limitless nostalgia.

Anyway, if you have a kid and live where rainy days are the default, FEZ might keep you warm. And busy.

Jon Blow interview, widely shared all across the internet. Once again feeling so close to his vision and processes, I would have probably done what he did after Braid except buying an electric car: I would have made me a prefab green house instead. But, same idea.

What the article and comments highlight one more time is the complete lack of understanding of how games are made and what is important when building them. The Witness’ dev blog doesn’t spend a lot of time on the story but quite a lot describing the world editor, cube map filtering techniques, puzzle count and architecture. Full-on game design.

I think people freak out on him talking about the juvenile, silly and intellectually lazy state of the game culture because the hardcore market is shrinking pretty fast and that makes a lot of people cranky. Less and less people are enjoying the juvenile and silly on consoles. So many mobile games are silly and juvenile but people play a few minutes here and there, it’s less embarrassing. I much prefer when people say “yes, it’s juvenile so what” than people feeling offended by this statement, kind of in denial.

Today’s game culture is silly but it doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun with it, nobody said that. I bought Just Cause 2 and I’d like to get Saint Row the Third because I know I’ll have a good time but that doesn’t mean that I have to love it to death. I still haven’t play these games and don’t feel like I failed at life not playing them either. Chill.

I didn’t like everything in Braid, haven’t finished it but I liked a lot of stuff. Brilliant stuff. Synapse-creating stuff.

I don’t get that part of the game culture where you have to vouch for everything or otherwise you are pointed out as a complete pretentious douchebag. If you like and search for different games, trying to expand this game culture, you are a complete pretentious douchebag too.

If it doesn’t show how juvenile we are, I don’t know what does.

And everybody writing about games for a living, fucking please: stop focusing on story in games. Just stop. That’s not what it’s about.

Dys4iaWare

I thought Dys4ia was great. I have to my surprise been thinking about it days and weeks after playing it.

I’m with Danc and Raph Koster on thinking about games in terms of systems, mechanics, feedback and loops more than anything else. The fact that I started to prototype, design and code my game mechanics makes it even more clearer to me that it’s all about that.

But the story-based Dys4ia touched me because of its original story, a story that I rarely encountered before –except by reading the fantastic story of Lynn Conway or Rebecca Heineman’s– it gave me something new to understand. The everyday struggle, the mindset behind humans complexity.

Anna’s game worked for me, pushed the message in a better way than reading would have.

My point is if you want to do a story-based game, it needs to be different if you want a game to work around something as static as narrative. Because really, narrative is not a game mechanic (I’m totally going to make this t-shirt).

Dys4ia is so personal. We need real things to come through our games, too. We have a pretty high level of polish today (thanks to better and better tools) but people don’t throw themselves in, they don’t try to express anything, they call their game “Pew Pew You’re Dead” or “Robots and Bologna”. We shouldn’t just play around nostalgia with a twist in 2012 because hey, “they’re just games”. They are more than that and it’s a 35 year old culture now.

So in this sense RPS is right to ask game developers to create something more.

There are mangas about wine (I mean, “The sale of fine wines in South Korea has increased significantly as a result of the popularity of the comic”) there are shows on TV about stuffing animals, dancing moms and thank god we have Octodad and some weird truck simulations but we are so bland compared to other mediums. Big lack of flavors and diversity. The other day I watched the 4D whale Futurama episode, it was brilliant. Just in one episode you had enough material, themes, funny shit to create multiple games on.

To me it’s not just about games being immature by really trying hard to be movies, it’s that even the immature part is not great or inspired.

So as Daniel explains it much better than I do:

Games are a thing onto themselves. They are human processes. They are loops. They illuminate complexity through hands-on mastery. They author artificial systems to generate culture. They can (and will!) advance forward to encompass a vast breadth of human interactions with the world.

We def should aim for that but those concepts are hard to grasp. Systems are annoying to most people, systems are the opposite of what a writer likes. Talking and writing about systems will never interest the public, it sadly, barely interests game developers. They’re busy with shaders :p

On the other hand, if you go the “narrative” way for your game, please reach for something wicked, interesting, personal, poignant and stop spreading generic fiction stories (I seriously can’t stand anymore any story about gods and mysterious civilizations and what not). We have enough of them.