Yugen and Games

"As the taillights of that last ride grow small and wink out, the horizon gathers itself to your singular perspective. There is no grandeur to bait expectation, no promise to invite distraction, only the quiet of ditch and litter and grass and self; without preconceptions you begin to see your place in a different way, from the ground up. You warm to how consummate this place is in its becoming: the perfect pattern of stones along the shoulder; the fast food wrappers, their logos clinging just so to the sage; there at long rest in the shadows, that old trilobite of the highway, the fallen muffler. And so you become consummate yourself; instead of a face lost in an embarrassed crowd, you become unique and necessary to that moment, your perspective creating, for better or worse, this one place in the world. It is a time to whistle."

That was a quote by John Landretti, from his essay "On Waste Lonely Places" in the book The Future of Nature. I had written it down by hand in my notebook close to a year ago; looking back through my notes of the past year in reflection, I found it again and decided to share it.

It reminded me of this blog post, which I had just come across earlier this week. The author describes playing the small art game The Graveyard, then the bigger and decidedly-non-art game GTA IV, and how both of these games created in him an experience he called yugen, "the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered."

Playing it, I found an odd thing. I found my head starting to clear. It wasn’t so much that I was sensing the emptiness around me - rather I was the emptiness. My thoughts were coming and going on their own - frothing up then melting away again - and slowly the oceans of my mind began to fall calm.

There was nothing mystical or arcane about it, merely an experience of being right here, right now. It was very ordinary.

To me it sounds like the experience of meditation, or at least the kind of meditation that I am familiar with.

And it sounds like a fruitful area of experience for notgames to explore, since this is something you are left with when you strip the "game" from "games", letting only the interaction and immersion remain.

The feeling of yugen hovers in the background of many games - filling me with the desire to explore those green hills behind Super Mario World’s flat levels, say - but it usually only breaks through fully when the mechanics of narrative and threat have been removed. My mind can’t empty in Another World - despite the barren, evocative landscapes - because it is so focused on avoiding death and finding a way home. It is when the designers take a step back from filling our time with obstacles and rewards, and allow us just to experience the realms they have created, that the subtler emotions like yugen are given room to manifest.

Still, I think there is something missing, something that we will have to identify before we can really make compelling yugen-ish experiences that are not games. When you strip the distracting goals and challenges from conventional games, what you get is rarely worth writing blog posts about. If nothing else, such "gamification" is good at getting people to care about what goes on in a virtual world, and the other ways of creating engagement and involvement with a story and characters common in movies and books and such tend to be more difficult in interactive media. But I think we just don't know enough.

I suspect that there are ways to direct this experience more subtly, still from a game designer's perspective, but not so heavy-handed with goals or points or typical game-y things. More toward Knytt, perhaps, but further. Much further.

I don't know. I guess I'll just have to try it sometime.

Happy New Year.

"Offering your attention to a waste place is like finding a book in a library, a book nobody reads. Or perhaps a book harboring a single due date, one purple smudge thirty years old. And there it is in your hand by the effortless design of coincidence. You look over its pages and before is effort and presence; whether the contents have appeal is another matter, but the book does exist and is open before you, full of its telling. And so it is with these shelves and sheaves of world that daily surround us: every rock, blade, and bottle, every leaf, an invitation to an understanding."

- John Landretti, "On Waste Lonely Places", The Future of Nature

Why Avatar Is Important

I wrote this back in January, and somehow never got around to posting it until now. Well, here it is. Better late than never, right?

There was this other movie that everyone seems to be talking about. I saw that one, in IMAX 3D. I shamelessly add it to my list of favorite movies, along with The Matrix and Lilo & Stitch and other such gems of cinema. I may be excessively indie when it comes to games, but no one can accuse me of being a film snob.

Whatever people are saying about it, what I appreciated in that movie was that it clearly showed what people left behind when they took up agriculture and industrialization and the trend toward global corporate hegemony - I said "hegemony" haha! - that is, the fun. Not moral superiority, not environmental friendliness, not utopian peace and happiness, but a life that, despite the dangers, the high mortality rate, the lack of iPhones or toilet paper or whatever else you want to measure, a life that is richly fulfilling, challenging, rewarding, interesting, in a way that the human mind and body craves and thrives on - in a word, fun.

This pressure gradient between the two societies, the fun and the unfun, is what drove the progression of this story. And this movie drove this difference home in the way no other medium could - except for games, of course - and for that reason, it is important. That's it.

And lots of people feel it. They feel this gradient pushing them away from their own lives and into the imaginary fun of the movie, which is no place to be if you are in fact a real person. But this fun place is real, it's just out of sight, in the past, or in those pockets of the world where the fun has yet to be sucked out and converted into GDP.

But no one's talking about it like that, because the usual sides to pick, the usual ways to debate these kinds of things are so readily available. Yes, kind of sad. But it gives me hope. If you show people what they're missing, they will feel it, and they will desperately seek it out, even if they believe it to be imaginary.

So, hope for the world. I must remember my mission. This is why I chose games. Light the fire, make the spark. Don't crack the whip. Whips don't work very well on rockets anyway.

How Artists Want to Make Games

On the notgames forum, Michaël Samyn posted this thread:

Programming in code is counter-productive for people with art-sided brains. The solution to this problem exists: graphical programming. But the people who need to implement this solution happen to be its worst enemies. Because to engineers, code-based programming beats everything.

Until somebody somewhere starts believing artists when they say they want to program in a visual language, or starts realizing that giving access to artists is the best way for a creative technology to continue evolving, I find myself settling with inferior designs. Because I cannot express myself adequately in code, I need to change my ideas, I need to talk about simpler things in a simple way.

It's like someone is forcing me to write poetry in French. French is a great language. And people who are familiar with it can write beautiful poetry. But I speak Dutch. My Dutch poems are subtle and sublime. In French, however, all I can write are nursery rhymes.

So I've been thinking about this a lot over the last several days. Actually I've been obsessively thinking about it non-stop and reading everything I can on related topics online.

I tend to do that for a different thing every week. This week, it's been this.

So there are a few pieces I've been focusing on, that seem most crucial to the success of a programming or game development tool for artists. There are probably others, but I thought I'd share what I've been thinking about so far.

One is readability through R-mode perception.

First of all, a disclaimer: When I say "R-mode" versus "L-mode", as in "Right brain" or "Relational" or "Rtistic" versus "Left brain" or "Logical" or "Linear", I don't mean to suggest that the brain is really divided into strict differences between its physical right and left halves. That is an outdated belief. But I find the terminology to be a useful shorthand.

Thinking on Michael's comments about visual flowcharts being easier for him to read than linguistic code, and looking back on my own experience, I think there really is something significant about how the code is presented and perceived, even when the underlying logic is the same.

When I am reading code (or a book!) I am usually using what I call "L-mode" perception - going through in a linear, linguistic way, and building up my mental model one step, one line of code at a time, following the logic that is expressed symbolically, in sequences like that.

However, sometimes my mind is in an "R-mode" of all-at-once, spatial perception like you'd use for looking at a painting or trying to find a certain LEGO piece in a big box of pieces. When I am in that state of mind, and I look at code (or to a lesser extent, written language) I see all the words at once and perceive the spatial relationships between them, and the underlying logic of the code is utterly incomprehensible to me. Obviously not the "right" way to read code.

But maybe it could be.

Ha, that would be a good tagline. "The right way to code." :P

The thing about R-mode perception is that it's a lot easier to be creative when you're in it. The other thing about R-mode perception is that artists are usually a lot more skilled at functioning in R-mode than they are in L-mode.

Therefore, if you had a tool that let you do programming while in R-mode rather than L-mode, it might be slightly easier to do creative things with it. At the least, there would be less inefficiency caused by switching between R-mode and L-mode whenever you think about what you want to change and then have to dive into the code to actually change it.

However, this may not even be possible.

All the visual programming editors I've seen, all the examples that have been posted here, require an uncomfortable mix of L-mode and R-mode perception in order to use. What I tend to see is a bunch of visually identical boxes connected by lines, and differentiated by text.

What you see in R-mode is the set of relationships between the boxes. But you can't tell what each of the boxes does. To do that, you must read the text and think symbolically, in L-mode. Really, very little information is conveyed through spatial relationships, through R-mode. Most of it is still sequential and symbolic.

For that reason, I find that pure written code, all L-mode, is much easier for me to deal with, since I don't need to switch around multiple times a second just to figure out what everything means. However, I suspect that there may be a way to create a pure R-mode method of programming too. But I'm not confident that it's actually possible. Just intrigued enough to try.

There are some programmers who hate the idea of visual programming, and say that it's a waste of time to use spatial relationships to convey the meaning of code. If you are one of those people and you use syntax coloring or indentation, you are a hypocrite.

So there's one aspect. Make sure your tool is R-mode accessible, if you want artists to be able to use it.

The second thing is building with functional pieces in real (or almost real) time.

Artists tend to appreciate tools where "what you see is what you get" - you're manipulating the end result, so you can immediately see the results of your actions. The process becomes more like sculpting.

Programmers tend to discount such tools as nice but unnecessary. They are used to typing in code for an hour, hitting a button, and waiting a minute for everything to compile and show up on the screen.

These are two fundamentally different mindsets, as different as a slideshow and an animation.

When you operate in the slow, "slideshow" approach, development and creativity tends to happen in an architected, "top-down" way. You have a plan, which is in your head, and then you put in a bunch of time and hard work to mold reality into the shape of that plan.

There is a fundamental shift that occurs as you decrease the time between action and result. It's as real as the shift that occurs when you hit 24 frames per second - from slideshow to animation. To your brain, it's alive, it's moving.

When you operate in the immediate, "animation" way, development tends to operate in a more exploratory, "bottom-up" process. You don't have to have an entire plan in your head. You see the results of your actions immediately, and if they are surprising or unexpected, you can adjust your plan. You can try random things and follow them if they prove to be interesting.

In the area of game design, innovation is much more likely to come out of an exploratory process than an architected one. As Jonathan Blow said earlier. It's hard to do things that haven't been done before if you have to plan it all out in your head first.

So we want a tool that allows us to sculpt the end result, with immediate feedback.

Part of this is that everything you can make should work. It may not work in the way you desire or expect, but it should still do something.

If you are painting with pixels in an art program, no matter how you put those pixels down on the screen, it will always be a functional, viewable image. It might not be pretty, but you can still see it. You are never going to run into a error message that says, "Invalid pixels at position 55, 46. Image cannot be displayed."

But if you are writing the code for a program, this sort of thing happens all the time. Most of the things you can type won't work at all. They won't turn into a program, even a broken one. There are right ways to write code, and wrong ways to write it.

I would say that this also makes a big difference. Perhaps the biggest difference is that writing code has a much higher barrier to entry, more learning how to do things at all before you can start learning how to do them well. But it also makes experimentation so much more difficult. You can't throw a bunch of random stuff together just to see what happens. Because what happens is nothing. It just won't do anything at all.

So if you can build only with pieces that work, and immediately see what changes, this would make truly artistic interactive art much easier to create.

The last thing is expressing general logic through specific examples.

This is probably the most impossible and most revolutionary but least important of the three. If you just had a tool that you'd use in R-mode, that let you shape the end results with immediate feedback, that could be awesome, and probably enough to make a huge difference.

But at the same time I am intrigued by this further vision I have of providing specific examples, which the system will extrapolate to create possible general rules for creating those examples, which you will then provide feedback on and refine in order to guide the system's hypotheses toward the end you have in mind.

Because I don't see how to actually avoid symbols when describing logic, or how to directly manipulate end results in a general way. Because games are systems, and the end results happen when you take the rules that you have set up and run them through their paces.

So maybe this is the only way to achieve those first two goals in their entirety.

What am I talking about?

You know how you draw diagrams and mockups for different things that happen in different situations in a game? Like this. It's a pretty common way to organize your thoughts when you're designing. The thing about those is they're all organized around specific examples, not general rules. So you might draw a diagram with a guy hitting a wall, showing how he bounces off or breaks through it or whatever. It's not completely specific, as you might have an abstract line standing in for any kind of wall, and a stick figure representing any kind of guy, but at the same time it's very concrete. And you can add general connotations by writing in little notes, to explain the rules behind the example more clearly.

The reason that we don't just stop there is that our game development tools require everything to be spelled out exactly - they cannot extrapolate from these examples, because there is so much ambiguity. It could mean this or it could mean that.

However, we run into a similar problem when trying to communicate our ideas to other people who are helping us make them into a reality. Especially if we are designers and we are telling programmers what to do. How do we solve this problem with other people?

Part of this is by clarifying with more examples when an area is unclear. Kind of starting at the highest level and breaking it down into more specific situations when necessary. Another part is through conversation, asking "It sounds like you're describing this... Is that right?" and responding "Yes, exactly!" or "No, I was thinking something more like this..."

Both of these could be accomplished with a special computer program instead of a human programmer. Maybe not as well, especially in terms of accuracy of translation, but in some ways better - particularly, in the time between your description of a design and seeing something on the screen. And this increase in speed could make up for the lack of accuracy, since you can adjust and correct much more quickly. And as a result, make use of exploratory design instead of architecture.

Break dynamics down into stories instead of rules. A playthrough of the entire game could be an example story, and you could create example stories of successively smaller and smaller pieces of the game until you have specified it completely. Or completely enough.

The tool generates possible rules that could create the situations you specify, and presents several for you to try out. Most likely none of them work the way you want. Pick the one that's closest, and let it generate more possibilities based on that. It's an evolutionary search. Like Biomorphs.

And stories don't always have to be specific stories about specific instances. They can be more or less abstract and universal. Like Raven, with a capital "R", who is both the character Raven and all ravens and all tricksters at once. Or the princess in the tower, or the wise old man, or the dragon in the cave. Or the stick figure on the crosswalk sign who represents all pedestrians who could ever walk this way. There is a continuum between the specific and the symbol.

I am particularly inspired by the concept of the Dreamtime. The translation of this name is misleading, as it does not refer to a time in history. It is like a parallel slice of the world running alongside and underneath the specific, physical world, where the gods and heroes walk, creating and personifying the dynamics and processes that underlie everything we see in reality.

I want a tool where I can not only shape the world as a level designer, but also shift into the Dreamtime and shape the dynamics of that world as concretely I would shape the placement of coins and mushrooms.

When this happens, we will get our interactive art.

Walk or Die and other games that are notgames

I don't spend a lot of time playing games these days. Portal sits in my computer, unfinished. A borrowed copy of Psychonauts lies unopened by a dusty PS2. I have accumulated a list of more than a hundred web games yet to try, and I haven't even checked the Jay is Games archives in several months.

So, it may come as a surprise to you that today, in a bout of either procrastination or perhaps a newly strengthened determination to make a dent in my overwhelming backlog of unplayed games, I have, in fact, gone ahead and played a handful of games. Well, technically speaking, notgames.

Not sure if I've mentioned notgames yet on my blog. Officially, they do not exist. There are no notgames, nor is there a "notgames" movement. But there is a forum. :p And a blog.

One is called Hummingbird Mind. I found it very immersive, despite - or because of? - being mostly text. Immersive like a novel. Or like I Fell in Love with the Majesty of Colors, maybe.

Perhaps it helped that I found myself in a similar mental state to the protagonist. If only I could allow myself to take a nap as I did in that game. Or notgame?

Another is Looming. Same guy who made The Majesty of Colors. The black and white pixel art brought me back to my Mac SE and calculator days. I'd like to make a game in such a style sometime.

It's a good example of distributed or embedded narrative. In fact, that's all it is, really. You are an archaeologist. Piece together clues about the past in a ruined world. Like Where We Remain. I'd like to do something similar for my own game Flydrill, eventually.

And then there is Freedom Bridge, whose author even refers to it as a notgame. Not quite Passage, but I found it very effective, particularly considering how absolutely minimal it is. I do wonder whether making the graphics more detailed would improve or detract from the experience. I'm not sure, but I'd be curious to find out. I'll be thinking about what inspiration I might take from this.

And lastly, Walk or Die, by the same author. It was this notgame, perhaps the least impressive of the four, that inspired me to write this blog post and overcome many months of non-blogging inertia in doing so.

...or die

By the way, once you try these games, you should head over to the Game Trekking website for the chance to support the author of Freedom Bridge and Walk or Die in making more experimental notgames as he travels across Asia. Less than three weeks to go if we want to get this off the ground. I've pledged one hundred dollars.

Anyway.

Here's why I wanted to write this blog post in the first place. After playing Walk or Die, I wrote this post on the notgames forum, which I am now reposting here, on my blog:

Finally got around to playing your notgames. ;)

I played it for at least ten minutes, while walking on my treadmill. :) I liked it quite a bit.

Actually, I really like it. I stimulated my creativity almost like a real walk would... though it helped that my real legs were moving at the same time. :D

I really like the day/night transition. I've been wanting to make a game with a five-minute day with the changing light and sounds and creatures - I've even commissioned a song for it, with morning, day, evening, and night, and I love the song but I haven't made the game for it yet. :p

One suggestion to try which might go against what you were originally exploring is requiring a steady relaxing pattern to be maintained at about the pace of an average slow walk, rather than holding the space bar.

I was thinking the same thing! Press to step, control speed, and all that. Maybe even more interesting terrain to walk on, as opposed to a completely flat surface. And I could see that being interesting, focusing on the feeling of accidentally stumbling and the fear of death.

And also I wanted to see more elaboration on the "death" part of the experience, because you can still observe, and maybe see the one spot grow and change over time though you are not going anywhere, you are transforming.

"Oh, this looks like a nice place to die. I will stop here." I thought.

And maybe combined with something like We the Giants, leaving traces for other people, seeing other people's traces. Reminds me of an idea I had about a game where you walk along a pebble beach, and you can arrange pebbles and driftwood in configurations that other people can see, or you could entropy-ishly knock over a tower someone made. And close to the waves, structures are knocked over and smoothed over naturally by the water and wind, while further, toward the cliffs, footprints and structures last longer.

Not sure how that would apply here, exactly, but it's got me thinking... :)

This is like the notgame equivalent of the game Linear RPG! :D

Now I really want to take this concept and have brontosaurus make some really nice pixel art for it! And nice sounds... No music, just high quality environmental recordings.

Procedural. I've been reading about how Left 4 Dead's AI Director works (fascinating stuff!) and I wonder now about applying it to other ends. Specifically, instead of measuring "emotional intensity" and modulating stress levels, how about modulating "boredom" or "joy" or "confusion" or "interest"? The system is really not that complex. I'm reading about it because I'm trying to do something similar for my game Flydrill.

I've wanted to make a game that feels like walking in a forest. So far The Path is the closest thing I've found. And now this.

Mind if I elaborate on this concept with a real (not)game? :)

Hum. By the way, I finished two new narrated video tutorials for my origami zergling and hydralisk. They are slow, and for the first time people are actually getting all the way through to the end! I'll post about them soon...

Art Museum Notes

The following is a fairly faithful transcription of the notes I made in my sketchbook at three art exhibits, several years ago. I hope you find them as interesting as I did.

The links were added after the fact, of course.

An-My Lê: Small Wars


(rehearsal)

these military tents, vehicles, etc.
just staked out in a featureless desert

• really gives a feeling of makeshift,
  arbitrary imposed structure
  
  • culture, human actions and thoughts
  
  
• would be a good setting for a game
  
  • reminds me of IvoryDrive's Black

one of those soldiers there lying in the shade of the camouflage
reminds me of my dad when he was younger

setting up facades, models, in the desert
for simulated training environments

• physical, not digital
  
  • in the desert

The camouflage really does make them blend in.
It would be hard to see while driving through
the desert, eyes getting bored, skipping over things

• hiding in the gaps of attention

(reenactment)

I like those bamboo and forest photos

Snipers - a lot of pictures of those
It's an interestingly different role
and way of approaching gun combat

• hidden, but not really that much
  
  • gaps of attention?
  • desert vs. jungle

the Distant Flare photo is interesting


Kim Jones: A Retrospective


books and covers - paths, portals, symbols in the mind

• living, organic, growing, moving book covers?
  how does that change things?
  
  
  • showing an instance of dynamics of the system
    that is described within

playing wargames on maps - Tufte
"work on it, get tired of it, work on it more"

• long-term devotion to a creative construction,
  a miniature garden - viki
  
  
  • similar to Civ2 micromanagement and slow pace
    keeping higher levels of organization in mind,
    but individually controlling the smallest parts
    

I like those weird stick/clutter/adhesive costumes

• good for ragdoll?
• MMO customization?
  
  • Katamari

"indeterminate form" "biomorphic forms" "hybrid creatures"

• one must map out Jones' particular symbolic language,
  his "personal idiom of figures, animals, and forms"
  to understand possible or intended meanings
  
  
  • connection to "homeless, camouflaged soldiers, peasants,
    or any number of mystic figures found in religions worldwide"
    
    
  • Raven?
    

Installation art is a good source for miniature garden,
anthropomorphic, symbolically rich, minimal constructions

stick interweavings similar to jungle/forest

• Bug aesthetic

war games become abstract, mathematical structures
when you zoom out, like cellular automata

particle trails connecting the elements of this installation,
depicting dynamics of their relationships,
and also in their individual operation

• Dust in The Amber Spyglass

putting books, meaning-rich pictures
into crevices and hidden surfaces
in ordinary physical objects and landscapes

• the objects without secret books all point to the special one
  somehow, in their arrangement or orientation
  

Having to lie down, or crouch, or whatever
to engage with whatever material is hidden there,
can bring or force a particular physical context to the situation,
which is usually seen as uncontrollable
in the design of digital content


Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art


Gutters - in comics, in books - rooms in architecture

Books used to have a lot more different forms, before perhaps
economic processes pushed it to a local maximum?

• When a new medium is invented, many forms emerge,
  each as guesses of what might work
  
  
• scroll (continuous) - no gutters?
• pleated (accordion) - gutters partly there
• pages (normal book) - gutters permanent between pages

Ink can make letters visible, or cover them up and distort them

distortion of discrete signals vs. continuous?

• what happens when the interpreting rules, the context, changes?

What feelings are contained in the flow
and halting and reversing of line in written characters?

• alternative to interpreting visually, it's kinesthetic.

Sketch books are another sort of book

Paper cutting (like with an X-acto blade)
could be a way to do Northwest Coast art

using the stacked pages of books as a blank substrate
on which the results of a process could be recorded

• like burning patterns

letting ink build up beyond its use within the context of books,
and let it take on a life of its own

• like the magic books in Discworld

putting the reading of an image in an explicitly sequential form
by putting parts of it on each page

Where does ink get its power?
Partly in the materials and processes used to manufacture it.

• similarly with paper

"encyclopedic"

Different languages, different writing systems,
different cultural approaches to books, text

Silk worms, living letters

The book, "transmits knowledge but does not
guarantee its authenticity."

• what would a book be like that does
  guarantee its authenticity?

Tools, instruments, for writing and printing

• specialness, valuableness, preciousness of objects
• containing stories within? worlds? hints of them?
  

a chunk of stone forming interesting spaces and patterns,
held by a stand

• stands, frames = important

Early Chinese characters were very rounded, lacking tension.
The modern characters are angular and hold much more discretely
understandable tension and flow, like traditional formline art

Sleeping books

• as architectural ruins
• active cultural objects, carriers of social messages,
  eventually become dead relics
• "vulnerability of memory and history"

How would this look anthropomorphized,
like in Discworld's Unseen University library?

What does it describe?

• pathways in the universal possibility space,
  ant trails formed but fading away

Several Intriguing Ideas

More ideas? Yes, indeed! I'd like to share with you several intriguing gems I've recently unearthed from my idea notebook:

2009/07/12
A game about guerrilla gardening, where you collect seeds and construct seed bombs. You would go on bombing runs where you try to turn vacant lots into gardens or break open pavement by putting certain kinds of seeds in the cracks. Like a collectible card game, it would support a variety of play styles that would appeal to different kinds of people. But instead of collecting cards, you collect different types of seeds, and instead of building decks, you strategically construct seed balls, and instead of dueling, you go out and try to plant your 'bombs' without getting caught. The concept also makes use of a slowly evolving world that changes as the plants grow, much like a turn-based strategy game such as Civilization. I think it could really fun.

2009/07/02
Try making a physics-based strategy game that derives its gameplay and complexity from the basic physical rules rather than a complicated set of components and interactions. The purpose of this approach would be to make the game intuitive enough to pick up and play without a tutorial, which is very difficult for the typical RTS.

2009/05/26
A game to help you notice the weather and how it changes. In this game the weather would have a big impact on the gameplay. Your character could be warmed up by the sun, or rained on, or snowed on. There would be a sort of 2D map of clouds blown around by the wind, so if you look up into the sky and see which way the wind is blowing, you can predict what sort of weather will be coming your way.

2009/05/17
An art tool where you manipulate shapes or direct streams of particles, but instead of choosing options and colors with a toolbar, there are 'seeds' that appear. You can either ignore these seeds or cultivate them and use them as new colors or shapes in your drawing. There would be a sort of genetic algorithm at work, where new seeds would appear based on existing elements on the screen, while neglected seeds fade away. The idea is kind of similar to the way that new goo balls are actually crawling around on the structure itself in World of Goo, not in a menu.

Like the sound of these? Let me know what you think! :)

I especially like the first one, about guerrilla gardening, and I'll probably try to make it into a real game some day. Let me know if you want to help.

A Few More Interesting Ideas

Did you like the ideas from last time? Here are a few more ideas from my idea notebook:

2009/06/19
A game where you are a janitor at a big, explorable place with interesting characters. Cleaning would be made into a fun, satisfying activity, so you go around doing your job and end up seeing a lot of different places and characters. As you explore, you encounter all these different stories that you can observe or ignore or interact with, that arise from the characters you encounter and the larger situation itself. Like in Spirited Away. Or a place like Hogwarts, or the hospital in Scrubs, even. I'd really like play a game like that.

2009/06/14
Web startups seem to be obsessed with metrics and analytics to direct their efforts. It's a lot like the feedback in games telling you what works and what doesn't. Why not make a Web 2.0 startup game based around developing a business around these metrics? Usually in a game the feedback tells you one specific thing, or leads you to some specific understanding, but what if instead each new game had different feedback rules, like a random map? Then you're not simply learning one particular model through the feedback, you're learning a general strategy for how to use metrics and listen and adapt to feedback.

2009/05/09
A game about eating your cake and having it too, where you must eat cake to survive, but your social status is based on how much cake you have accumulated. Then there could be a special powerup that lets you eat cake while having it too, for a limited amount of time.

2009/03/16
A game or environment sketch where some people are walking by, on a street perhaps or in a variety of environments. But you can only see them from the knees down, only the lower legs and feet. The challenge is to make the walkers as expressive as possible within this limited representation. One effective way to differentiate between characters could be size, like a parent and child. More interesting could be using differences in dress or gait to distinguish between the characters.

2009/03/07
A game where all each person is rendered as a single sketchy line, redrawn each frame or so to show the gesture and pose of the person without necessarily showing what they look like. The line would be more or less straight, not looping around, and usually tracing a path from the head to one toe.

Just a few random ideas. :p

What do you think? Let me know if you want to try making or collaborating on one of these ideas. I'd like to hear from you. :)

Death, Patronage, Mythic Games

I just played through Today I Die and Don't Look Back, two art games, short and sweet. Like Passage. Worth playing.

Today I Die, aside from its artistic merit, represents the start of an experiment in a new monetization model for art games, beyond advertising or microtransactions. That is, patronage, or enhanced donations. Further discussion here.

Don't Look Back is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in interactive form. There are no words, other than in the title and instructions. To my mind, it really demonstrates the similarities between myth and games. I think there is a lot to explore here.

Fourfold Formline Folly

Again, I offer no apologies for the title of this blog post.

I've just posted four drawings to my deviantART gallery, my four best pieces from a class I took about a year ago, taught by artist Marvin Oliver. No, I didn't get his autograph, but I should have. :p

They are done in the formline style, developed by many native groups along the Northwest Coast of North America, such as the Tlingit and the Haida. A formline is a line that changes in width whenever it changes direction, and when you put a bunch of formlines together in certain ways, you get art that looks kind of like this:

Leaping Velociraptor, a naturalistic design. The silhouette more or less matches that of the actual animal. Not traditional at all, perhaps to the point of being offensive to some.

Baby Turtle, a configurative design. The silhouette is recognizable as that of the animal, but the parts are distorted stylistically. Fairly traditional.

Future of Frog, an expansive design. The parts of the animal are distorted to fill a geometric shape, but remain recognizable. Inspired by the current amphibian extinction crisis.

Salmon Box, a distributed design. The parts of the animal are rearranged to fill a geometric shape, ignoring anatomical relationships. This is a common approach in traditional art.

If you like this artwork, and you want to learn more about the cultural context in which the style was developed, please see the excellent book A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst. I guarantee that it will get you excited about Haida culture and myth, especially if you're into games or art. Be sure to check out the review I wrote for it if you need further convincing! ;)

Google Is the Future of Games

It seems to me that the future of game development, in terms of minimizing the barrier to entry so anyone can easily make a game, would look a lot more like Google than like Photoshop. And it wouldn't look at all like Visual Studio. ;)

I can imagine a knowledge network of algorithms and components and behaviors, built up by people searching a space, as in Electric Sheep, and then organized and filtered by people participating in some kind of social network metagame.

If I am putting together an environment sketch and I'm looking for some procedural water ripples for a fountain, I'd be able to search for these procedural components as easily as I would for a web page. I'd be able to navigate through the space of algorithms at a finer level, too, like Biomorphs, to tweak an existing component without ever touching any code. And if I wanted to, I could modify the code directly.

Whatever social rewards I'd gather through my creation would automatically trickle down to those who created the components I used to make it. In this way, there would be an ecosystem of people creating, evolving, filtering, and combining this procedural material from which games are made and recycled back into.

I'm not saying it will happen, but something like that will have to happen before creating games becomes a mainstream activity. It's a tough problem, but I'd love to see it solved. How do you turn software engineering into an art form?

*image from one of my favorite flash animations, Pencilmation*

Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 4

This post is a celebration of exciting game ideas. Are you feeling excited yet? :D

I've recently revisited the Three Hundred Mechanics project, which is one guy's attempt to document a new, original game design every day for three hundred days. Apparently he's given up on the "every day" part, but among the hundred or so concepts that have been posted so far are quite a few that I really like.

For example...

• Massive Boardgame
• Tiny World Cities
• Stacked Fortress
• The Long Rewind
• Banner Serial
• Escalation
  
• Communist Zombie MUD
• Tiny Crawl World
• Pellet Quest
• Neg-Space Wars
  

And many more...

Just pick one at random and take a look! I find them quite clever, often intriguing, and always delightful to imagine. And as an added bonus, the pixel art that accompanies these descriptions provides another nice treat for the imagination. :)

Speaking of pixel art, here's a guy who takes pixel-y classic games and creates awesome painted character and concept art in the delicious flavor of the originals. Not only that, but he also writes up detailed design documents for his reimagined classics. I don't know if these designs are meant to ever be made into real games, but I hope they are - I'd love to play them!

That picture at the top of this post? That's Bomber Queen.

And be sure to check out Viper Girl as well - the art for that one is really inspiring. I'm amazed that no existing games make use of that chunky, solid-color painting style. It just looks so good!

"I like the simple flat colors of the NES version. With such a limited palette, you almost have to go for a simple light-shadow solution. As hardware evolved and artists got more colors, many fell into the trap of doing gradiation and texture just because they could. It's an easy trap to fall into for a painter as well."

Now, if you thought that was cool, here's something that may be even cooler. Take a look through these continuity guides by art director Bill Perkins. While there's a lot of nice concept art on that site, the first dozen slides are what you really need to see.
Start here.

These images are the continuity guides for a game called Gon, which as far as I can tell never made it out into the real world, sadly. Continuity guides are kind of a step up from concept art. Not experiments in how the game might look, instead they describe how to create art that fits the feel of the game. In this case, that involves an intriguing blend of African art, fractals, plant life, and messing with pictorial space.

Did you know that African art is fractal? I didn't. But apparently a lot of it is, and that's awesome. And what's even more awesome is seeing how these various examples of African art have been drawn upon to deliver a unique and compelling depiction of the savanna. I don't know about you, but I'm inspired. Click.

Oh yes, and before I forget, Mr. Shen wins the internet!
He wins it. Wins. It.

my mind.
blown.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Review of A Story as Sharp as a Knife

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the one artform with the most relevance to games is myth. Here is a review of the book that lead me to that conclusion.

A Story as Sharp as a Knife:
The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
by Robert Bringhurst

This book is about myth, and how to understand this ancient art form in a time when we are so far from the sort of social context in which myth was the primary way of making sense of the world.

What do you think of when you hear the word "myth"?

Perhaps the most frequent way the word is used in our modern, literate society is to refer to a story that is false, an explanation that is incorrect. This is not the sort of myth to which Bringhurst has devoted over four hundred pages. Another place we might encounter the word is in museum exhibits or books about ancient history, where we read "myths" as the rather fanciful religious stories of those cultures yet to be blessed with a scientific understanding of the world. This sense of the word is somewhat closer to what Bringhurst is concerned with. But there is an important difference.

Myth is a performance art. It is oral poetry, storytelling. When we open a book and read "the creation myth of the ancient Egyptians" what we find is a fossilized skeleton that reveals no trace of its original vitality. As Bringhurst convincingly shows, the art and value of a myth is in its individual, idiosyncratic telling. If we read a summary of a myth and assume that that's all there is to it, we are no better off than someone who tries to understand a masterpiece of jazz improvisation by looking at the song's chord changes. In the case of myth, the story isn't enough - you need a transcription of the artist's actual words, just as you'd need a transcription of the actual notes that were played in a jazz solo. Better yet, listen to a live performance.

As you might expect, however, live performances of mythic storytelling are hard to come by nowadays. We are lucky to find even a faithful transcription of such a telling, as it is a rare anthropologist who has understood the importance of taking precise dictation rather than recording only a summary. One notable exception was the linguist John Swanton, who in 1900 went to live with the Haida people off the northwest coast of Canada and transcribed thousands of lines of oral poetry. Then in the late 20th century, Robert Bringhurst managed to come across Swanton's work.

Bringhurst's background is in poetry, not anthropology. As a result, he has been able to see in these old transcriptions a quality that most others have failed to appreciate. And with his book, A Story as Sharp as a Knife, he provides a means for others to begin to understand what is so great about these classical Haida myths and about all myth in general.

The book's subtitle is The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, and in it you will find a tour of that world, organized around a selection of about a dozen myths. It's a tour that you may repeat many times, or just skip around to the parts that interest you. The book doesn't set out to prove one particular point, and there is no explicit introduction or concluding chapter to summarize the book for you - the prologue gets you started on a journey, but it doesn't provide a map of what you'll encounter.

Each myth featured in the book serves as the reference material for an investigation into a different aspect of mythtelling. In each section, Bringhurst provides some historical and cultural background, followed by the translated myth transcription itself and an analysis, highlighting certain passages and occasionally bringing in outside connections such as Renaissance painting to compare or contrast with Haida mythtelling traditions. The main chapters of the book are supplemented by an extensive collection of notes, as well as several appendices on language and translation concerns.

Of course, there are plenty of things that the book doesn't do. It doesn't give you a large number of myths, just enough to give you a feel for them. Neither does Bringhurst go into much detail about Haida culture or mythology beyond what is required to understand the particular stories he presents. And while obviously a great deal of research went into writing this book, everything in it is either historical fact or the author's personal interpretation; it is not what you might call a "scientific" book. Not that that's necessarily a weakness, but it would be nice to have further verification of his views through another source or the support of a fleshed-out theoretical framework. What you can expect is to gradually gain a unique appreciation for myth through the experience of reading the book.

Though it is difficult to reduce Bringhurst's investigation into a single question or argument, there are several identifiable threads connecting the many observations and explanations distributed throughout. Some of these are simply context, the stories of villages and mythtellers and anthropologists, together covering the who, where, and when of the subject. The others could be thought of as supporting the main theoretical concern of this book, the what, how, and why of mythology.

One of these threads, answering the question of what is the nature of myth, explains that myths are living things, perpetuated through human minds because they are deeply meaningful. Together, many myths form an ecology, a living mythology, in symbiosis with a human society. This mythological system exists to make sense of the structure and dynamics of the world, how the world works and how it is organized. While it is still alive, every mythology is an ecosystem that continually evolves as individual mythtellers reinterpret the stories in terms of their own understanding of the world. As Bringhurst writes, "A genuine mythology is a systematically elaborated, extended, interconnected and adaptable set of myths. It is a kind of science in narrative form."

Another thread, which deals with how people convey meaning through myth, emphasizes the importance of individual tellings, that the way myths convey an understanding of the world depends on the details of a particular artistic performance. Myths make use of archetypes, themes, plots, and patterns, but these are building blocks - they are not the essential message. What matters is how these elements are connected and arranged to create new meaning: "A story is, in fact, a sentence: a big sentence saying, or revealing, many things that a full list of its components cannot say." When myths are reduced to summaries and stereotypes, as has sadly been the case in a vast majority of anthropological work on the subject, "we lose all the learning and insight, perception and wisdom, that the myth has been used to convey."

The other thread, of why myth takes the form it does, contrasts myth - oral narrative poetry - with other art forms such as verse poetry or prose. Bringhurst makes the point that myth can only thrive as myth in an oral society, one without writing. Verse poetry may also exist in oral societies, but only in those that make their living through agriculture rather than hunting. "Humans, as a rule, do not begin to farm their language until they have begun to till the earth and to manipulate the growth of plants and animals." The argument there is that the structure of mythic poetry has a spatial quality reflecting the irregular order of the forest rather than the uniform repetition of the cultivated field reflected in verse poetry. Myth can be very musical in its own way, but as a music of thoughts and images rather than sounds.

That last thread helps explain why historically so many anthropologists have misplaced the significance of the myths they encountered. As members of an industrial, literate society, they were ill-equipped to understand story in the same way as their hunter-gatherer subjects. Words simply do not have the same role or meaning in oral societies as they do in literate ones. According to Bringhurst, "In a self-sustaining oral culture, faith, hope, and even charity are invested very differently than in cultures that are learning or have learned the use of writing. A shift from oral to written culture affects the functioning of memory, the understanding of truth, and the place of voice and language in the working of the world. It affects not just the meaning of words but the meaning of language itself. It affects the meaning of meaning."

If only those anthropologists could have read A Story as Sharp as a Knife before they went forth to capture the traditions of those people who had yet to be enveloped into industrial global culture! Time warps aside, those of us in the 21st century now have an excellent opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the mythic mindset through Bringhurst's book. When you first start reading the actual myths, you will likely feel somewhat out of place, getting used to the translations, the unfamiliar storytelling style, and the initial strangeness of the stories themselves for those unaccustomed to Haida mythology and culture. But as you become more familiar with the style and learn how to appreciate the myths through Bringhurst's insightful analysis, they become quite enjoyable in their own right.

The book is not dense, but it is long and there is plenty of material to chew through. There's such a variety of ideas to absorb that you'll likely want to spread out your reading of it, enough to appropriately digest each topic. It is a thoughtful book that paces out its most fascinating bursts of insight such that the interested reader will remain eager all the way through its four hundred pages of discussion. And by the end of it you'll have developed a new appreciation for myth and oral storytelling, and perhaps even an interest in discovering more about this often neglected subject.

In other words, read it! :D

Myth in Games

You want to see how games can transmit values? How games can deliver subtexts? How games can be art?

Then read the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. If that doesn't help, read Ishmael. Then think about the game Spore, by Will Wright.

If that still doesn't get you anywhere, then read the book A Story as Sharp as a Knife, by Robert Bringhurst. And maybe read this article first, to get you thinking in the right way.


All that I will say here, now, is that the one art form with the most relevance to games, that will provide the most guidance in shaping the future of games, is myth.

That's right. And the reason it has been so overlooked, so far, is that myth can only exist in its genuine form in an oral society. The society from which I am writing to you, and from which you are reading this, is a literate society. Literate societies have no way to understand myth, or to make use of it. We can only hope that a digital society will allow us to reconnect with that mode of thinking, through games.

Environment Sketch 01 - Spring Rain

As you may have noticed, last week I added a new category of links on the right side of the page: Environment Sketches. What could those be, I wonder?

Considering that "Environment Sketch" is a term I made up, I should probably explain. An Environment Sketch is neither an animation nor a game, but something in between. It is a scene that you observe. It's like a window into a world.

The idea is to take some piece of my environment that I appreciate, and put it out for other people to notice and appreciate. But it's not simply a photograph - the idea is to capture the mood and feel of a place as it moves through time, not doing anything, just being.

So with that in mind, I present to you my first Environment Sketch!

Spring Rain

Spring Rain is my first Environment Sketch, a simple but evocative depiction of a scene or place.

This is not a graphic sketch but a procedural one, a viewpoint generated by code that describes how the scene is to be constructed and how it evolves over time.

Spring Rain is a tribute to plants and rain. Please enjoy.

It's all procedurally generated - different every time - and running a real-time physics simulation. The background is created from blurred particle trails, the plants are assemblages of particles connected by springs, arranged with some amount of randomness, and the background sounds are mixed randomly.

Spring Rain was made in Flash, so I actually ended up reusing a lot of the code from my earlier ragdoll games! :) I think Flash is the perfect medium for these Environment Sketches, because it is so easy to combine hand-drawn art with code-generated graphics, not to mention the huge audience that already exists for Flash content. With any luck, the Environment Sketch will someday become recognized as a legitimate genre alongside Animations and Games. I'll do my best to help it along. :)

I've had many sources of inspiration in defining the Environment Sketch concept and in making Spring Rain. Most significant was simply my appreciation of the world around me, finding beauty in bits of my surroundings which I felt compelled to share with the rest of the world. But there were also some Flash pieces I found across the web that have helped to point me in the direction of these procedural sketches as a way to share that appreciation.

The first one I found was perhaps Ferry Halim's Raindrops. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one out there who loves rain. :D But the biggest influence on me I think has been the Flash developer and artist IvoryDrive. The first time I mentioned my intention to make these procedural sketches in a comment on his excellent interactive piece City. His thought it was a great idea, and guess what - he also really liked Spring Rain! Wow! So I'm very grateful for IvoryDrive's encouragement. :) He's got a lot of other work you should check out too, including his latest, 5 Differences, which is basically a game wrapped around a bunch of little Environment Sketches.

Another nice example of what I would consider an Environment Sketch is this real-time Hogwarts scene. While it looks to me like almost all the graphics in that piece are made by hand rather than generated procedurally, I think the intention behind it is similar enough to qualify as an Environment Sketch. It depicts a place as it exists through time, and while it contains many hand-drawn and animated graphics, they are only used to reinforce a momentary feel rather than to push a story along.

One place that Environment Sketches might find a home is in website design. How about giving your site a more natural sense of place by putting in a virtual window into a dynamic scene? One person on the Fisix Engine forums had the same idea and I've given him permission to add Spring Rain to his site. Looks nice, don't you think? :)

If any of you out there are thinking of making something like these Environment Sketches, or think they might be cool to use on your site, let me know! It'd be great to hear from you. :)

Say Hi to my Haida Hydralisk

I offer no apologies for the title of this blog post.

Anyway, I've been learning to draw in the traditional Pacific Northwest Coast style. I've sketched art from museums and books, read Bill Holm's
Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form, and now I've finished my first piece in that style:

Haida-lisk Incubation

This is a picture of a Hydralisk, from the game StarCraft. It is depicted in a traditional Northwest Coast Native American style, closely approximating the formal Northern style of groups such as the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Hydralisk is curled up inside an egg, waiting to hatch.

Thus, Haida-lisk Incubation.

I painted it in Photoshop, which, as it turns out, was a very poor tool for the job. This art style is extremely unforgiving of sloppiness - not good when all you have is a tiny tablet and a whole lot of pixels to push around. In the future I'll be using a vector-based program like Flash for my Northwest Coast art.

So look at it, save it, print it, show it to your friends, whatever.

I'm quite happy with it. In my opinion it's the first decent Northwest Coast design I've made, and I liked it enough to print it out and frame it on my wall! :D

Hope you like it too. ;)

Yes, it's a hydralisk from StarCraft, just like my origami hydralisk. Actually, I had originally planned to make a larger picture where the hydralisk is transforming into a lurker as it bursts out of its egg. I'd still like to do that - I can just use this basic design and add a big scary lurker to it. No promises though. :)

I've recently found an artist on deviantART, tarkheki, who does some really nice Northwest Coast art, including a couple rendition of characters from Pokemon in addition to more traditional subjects. I guess I'm not the first to draw a game character in this style then. :p

Art and Engineering

Some thoughts - something of a rant, but interesting:

Engineering is built around figuring out how to do things, around solving problems. It's about making progress by discovering as many wrong solutions as you need before you find the right way. You try something, and then you find out if it works. It may take minutes or hours or days or weeks to see the results, or even seconds, but that delay is what separates engineering from art.

In art, you experiment and discover not to find one solution, not to document your mistakes, but to build your own internal, intuitive knowledge, to become fluent in the space of a system. Then you have the potential to create. It's about bridging the gap between intention - directed from within the self, not by a person or institution - and manifestation. The painter studies and practices and learns the characteristics of paints and brushes and surfaces, not in order to compile a manual or to solve a problem, but so that when he wants to paint something, he'll be able to paint it.

It's the difference between a slide show and an animation. It allows for that spark to appear between the frames. Once you are there, once you are fluent and exploring a space, with all the technicalities subsumed by your mind so you are free to create rather than to simply solve, then you are in the realm of design and artistic expression.

Oh, and if Daniel Pink is right, then engineering is also what may become automated or outsourced. I'm sticking with art. :p

Why Hasn't Anyone Thought of This Yet?

Okay, this needs to happen: A marionette fighting game for the Nintendo Wii. The PS3 could work too, with its motion-sensing controller.

Admit it, this is a brilliantly obvious idea. Haven't you ever picked up a Wii Remote and wished there was a frightening, battle-ready puppet suspended beneath it? No? Well, neither have I, probably because I don't have a Wii, but still, I'm sure you can see the connection.

This idea arose as a possible solution to the problem of physics-based avatar control. In most games, you move around a character, like Mario, for example, who is represented by an animated image moving around on the screen. But there are some games where instead, your character is made up of many physically simulated parts. You then have a direct control over the movement of these parts, whether you are individually controlling each joint or moving a ragdoll's head around with the arrow keys. This freedom allows players to develop their own playing style within the physics of the game world, but also tends to result in games that are very difficult to learn.

As Matthew Wegner of Fun-Motion said in his review of Toribash,
"Other games have attempted to implement full body, physics-based control mechanisms. The problem lies in the complication of movement. As a designer, you either need to simplify the control mechanism, automate some aspect of the process, or rely on convoluted controls. It’s a very hard problem to solve for a real-time game."

That's the problem. If you want a game that lets players do realistic, physics-based kung fu, well those players are going to have to be real kung fu masters. Either that or you're going to have to take some control away from them or simplify the game until it isn't really like kung fu. The ability to distill a complex activity into something controlled by a few buttons, while still retaining that interesting complexity, is central to the art of designing physics games.

So anyway, how about taking a ragdoll and rather than strapping a jetpack to its head (basically what Ragdoll Masters does), try attaching virtual strings to its arms and legs? I originally envisioned this as a way to combine individual control of limbs with an analog input device like the mouse. But it would work even better with a 3D motion-sensing controller like that of the Wii.

Puppetry also provides a wealth of inspiration for the visual style of a game. Tons of different cultures around the world each have their own puppet traditions from which one can steal ideas. And they all look really freaky. It's quite relevant to games because puppetry is basically the oldest form of virtual reality. Puppets are not just pictures, they are virtual actors, not made for their own sake but as part of a larger production intended to convey a story, to create the illusion of an imagined world (yes, that did need to be italicized). As a result, they offer a long history of approaches to representing people and things within restrictive technical limitations. Puppets are not "photo-realistic" and neither are games. It might do us games people some good to take a look at how stylization has been done in the past. I think puppets make a better example than animation in this respect.

And yeah, that's my idea. I'm sorry for the lack of activity on my blog. There is much to write about, and little time or motivation with which to do it. Not that I'm just too lazy, necessarily, but when I get a great idea of what to write, I usually don't have the time, and once I do get the time, I'm just not feeling it anymore. But occasionally those two occurrences coincide, like now. Though this has taken way longer than I expected. Oh well. Thanks for reading. :)

Seeing Art as Games

For the first time in my life, I find myself acutely aware of the changing seasons. Having grown accustomed to the moods and aesthetic of winter, I was quite surprised to see green buds appearing around me. Now it seems that everywhere I look there are cherry blossoms blooming! And since I take much of my own mood and inspiration from my surroundings, this matters.

This enhanced artistic awareness in general is all thanks to deviantART, where I've been spending a lot of time building up my art appreciation skills over the last few months.

However, I notice that when looking at any new type of art, my first reaction is to think of it in terms of a game. Oh, that would be an interesting art style for a game. That looks like an interesting environment to explore in a game. That character would be an interesting one to encounter in a game.

Kinda pathetic, ain't it? Well, I know that the artists are able to see their art in a richer way than that. So I thought it would be a good idea for me to take some art classes in order to learn how to see the art the way the artists see it, and not just as a bunch of messy paint. Because I'm sure there is something there - tons of people consider their art worthwhile and fulfilling, even if it is not understandable to the average person.

Once I can see this art as the artists see it, maybe then I can turn this around and see new possibilities for games inspired by this new way of seeing - beyond the spatial and symbolic systems of existing games to explore other aspects of human experience.

On an unrelated note, I hear that Gish 2 is under development! Woohoo! I am tingling with anticipation and also making funny noises. Mmm... Gish 2. :D

Metastability

I just posted a new deviantID for my deviantART profile. It has a pretty interesting story behind it, so you might want to check it out. Here's the description:

I just looked it up, and "metastability" is an actual word. So I'm using it. :) According to Wikipedia, it is "the ability of a non-equilibrium state to persist for some period of time." Wow, that's perfect for this picture! You'll see why later.

See, this is a picture I took of this tower of rocks I built by a river bed. I made it to draw attention to the cool sculpted rock that serves as the base. That's one rock, smoothed and shaped by the river. So people would see the tower, and think "hey, that's a cool rock there."

The nifty thing about the tower is that for every rock I placed, I attempted to enhance the stability of the tower, instead of making it more tippy. So each rock has its own unique shape and balance, and there's kind of one spot where if you press down on it, it locks into place as the force gets distributed down. It's a lot like Aikido. So I tried to build the tower up so that each rock's weight pushes down on just the right spot on the one below, so it becomes more stable. If you press on the top rock the tower just settles into place better. Of course that big base rock helped a lot, since it acted kind of as an anchor for the other rocks to lean against. The rocks above were not so stable, of course. But the idea is still there.

So that's where the "stability" part comes in.

Then I thought it would make a good portrait or ID, since yes, that's my shadow there, and it's all kind of self-referential and "meta" and all that. I mean, I never really see myself except from the inside, so why should you? Here you see me by my influence, by my little piece of order on the entropy of the stream bed, and by my shadow. You can tell a lot about my personality from this situation.

And this really is a metastable situation, this tower. The equilibrium state would be for all the rocks to be in an even layer on the ground. It's the state of greater entropy. But the way I've set this up, the system will not just fall into that state right away. To move any one rock would take more energy, because you would be moving it up and off its center. But once you knock it over, that gravitational potential energy, that tension is reduced, and the system is in equilibrium. Metastability.

Deep, huh? :p