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 That is an outdated belief.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.

Active Sketch 03 - Words

Update:
Reviewed by Gregory Weir, the author of Silent Conversation! :D

A new prototype.

It's an attempt to turn a text into an interesting environment for a game, along the lines of some of my earlier thoughts. I was never really satisfied by Silent Conversation's take on the whole "text as environment" thing, and I've been trying to extract some meaningful gameplay out of the words themselves.

So this is where I'm at so far.

Active Sketch 03 - Words

The goal is to match similar words. Use the arrow keys to move around. You can pick up a word by pressing x or c.

On the right is your score, and on the left is your score multiplier and the current word you are holding. If you match two words exactly, your multiplier goes up. If you pick up two words that have no letters in common, your multiplier is halved. Otherwise, you get points for each letter the two words have in common, multiplied by your score multiplier. I stole the multiplier system from Music Catch.

There is no time limit, and words reappear after they go off the screen, so you can get as many points as you have patience for. It's not a game. It's just a test.

The story is something I wrote over a year ago, a retelling of Where the Wild Things Are with the themes of Ishmael, in the style of a Haida myth. It still has a sappy Western ending, though.

The lines that end in "they say" are the canonical elements of the story - actually two stories, Where the Wild Things Are, and Genesis. That's based on a Haida mythtelling convention, more or less. The symbolism and structural harmony and such is woefully inadequate compared to the stories of the master mythtellers, but hey, it's my first try.

Anyway, the story doesn't matter. It's just filler text to test out the matching mechanics. :p

Try it out and let me know what you think.

they will eat you up...

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.

Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 1

First things first: Braid

This is very encouraging news. Braid is an independent game that has met with very big success. It was developed by a handful of people led by designer Jonathan Blow, and not only is it selling well, it has been getting unanimously positive reviews by both players and critics.

Like Portal, another very popular and well-received game, Braid is an innovative puzzle game built on top of a more familiar action game setting. I wonder if there is something about puzzle games that makes them easier to perfect and polish into a cohesive, finely crafted experience like Braid and Portal.

Braid's author, Jonathan Blow, is a sometimes controversial figure whose writing and talks I have been following for a while. Though I don't necessarily agree with everything he says (or what anyone else says, really) it's always fun and interesting to listen. And the success of his first big project, Braid, shows that he knows what he's doing, and that it's possible to make it big as an indie developer. I find that very encouraging.

At the end of one talk he gave earlier this year called Games Need You, about "how our games are inherently conflicted", Blow read a quote describing how games convey meaning:

"...meaning which is less specific, less concrete and deliberate, harder to define, harder to pin down, a meaning that transcends the author-reader conduit model of 'message' style meaning, a meaning that absorbs intention but is not bound by it, a meaning that can't be reduced to a claim about the world, but is no less about the world because of it."

It struck me that this describes not only how games might convey meaning, but could just as well be a description of mythtelling through oral narrative poetry, as described in the book A Story as Sharp as a Knife. If you want to understand the meaning of games, you would do well to read that book.

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.

Motivation and Structure

I don't know about you, but I often have difficulty getting motivated to work on school assignments. Even moment-to-moment, I just don't have any clear idea of what I should be doing, of what exactly is the best action to take. The only place where it really flows is while playing a good game, or surfing forums on the web (or of course working on a project, which is not so much of an option during the school year). I suspect that this is true for many people, particularly the typical Flash games audience.

As I mentioned in a recent post, most Flash games are all about the reward structures, the path you take through the game, rather than the play itself. These games very overtly lead the player along with carefully (or not so carefully) spaced goals and rewards that create a continual sense of accomplishment and purpose.

This is just my speculation, but maybe for the general audience of Flash, these games are one of the few places they consistently get that feeling. They may be aimless in school and in trying to deal with the increasing responsibilities of adulthood. :p

In other words, in many aspects of real life the goals are just not clear, and the feedback is delayed or inadequate. This means flow is harder to achieve, and learning is more difficult. Obviously with much of life, this is appropriate, as it's not simple or easy to learn how to live life, but many of the subjects taught in schools could be effectively encapsulated in this way.

If you're trying to impart a body of knowledge, like inorganic chemistry for example, it would be possible to set up a learning experience that leads the player along with ample goals, feedback and rewards in order to create flow. I think most students would agree with me that most chemistry textbooks are insufficient in this respect. Instead, an electronic game would be better suited for this role.

But once you get to the real interesting stuff, where science takes place through pushing the rules, interaction with other players, and so forth, creating the smooth ride of a well-oiled game is not completely possible. However, there do exist games and communities around such boundary-pushing activities as well. Look at the communities that have built up around hacking or modding games, or even the many people exploring the Line Rider universe.

Here we are getting into motivation beyond the goals encapsulated inside a little game. Whether you are looking for social recognition or mastering the system or something else, the feedback, the reward structure, is less immediate and you must supply your own motivation to bridge that gap.

Scientific interest, and perhaps more significantly in the past, religion, has often supplied people with an overarching context to structure their motivations. I was just talking to a guy about this a few weeks ago and he noted that, contrary to popular belief, there are in fact interesting things to do outside. With the right mindset, you can apparently have a lot of fun observing patterns in nature and trying to explain why things are they way you see them: why these kinds of trees grow over here, while these grow over there; why the shoreline is shaped the way it is; stuff like that. Obviously, there is hardly any feedback to test your suppositions against, short of going through a lot of expense doing scientifically controlled experiments, but the right kind of mindset can bridge this shortcoming and find enjoyment.

More specifically, a scientist might enjoy trying to interpret natural phenomena in this sort of freeform way, because of the context for looking at life that science provides. On the other hand, I might like to imagine how one might navigate these trees and the shoreline in a game environment, because of my game-obsessed view of the world. And then the many other mythologies and religious interpretations lend their own unique ways of seeing things, of decision-making, motivations. Seeing a raven and understanding it not just as bird but also in the context of its role as Raven the trickster. Or seeing it in terms of its role in coastal forest ecosystems, whatever that is.

So, what I'm trying to do here with this post is to illustrate the significance of motivation and structure throughout all of life, and perhaps a dangerous lack of this kind of flow in modern culture. You wonder why kids play these stupid games so much? Yeah, most of these games are pretty stupid. But that's one of the few places they can get this experience. People aren't learning how to experience flow, how to bridge the gap with their own motivation.

Games, science, and religion. They are much more closely related than you might think, and will probably become more intertwined in the future. And that's a good thing.