Quotes of Eastern Wisdom

Doesn't that sound corny? Eastern wisdom? Almost as bad as saying Wisdom of the East. Horrible.

Anyway, last year I had one of those calendars where you get a quote every day, and it was called Wisdom of the East. Surprisingly enough, there were a few good quotes in there - which I saved so I could read them again every so often. I thought I'd share them with you here.

Who knows if you'll get anything out of them, but they are actually meaningful to me. Here we go!

"Praying is not about asking; it's about
listening... It is just opening your eyes to
see what was there all along."

- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche


"If your desires do not accord with
your spirit, sacrifice them, and you will
come to the end of your journey."

- Attar


"Do not dwell in the past.
Do not dream of the future.
Concentrate the mind on the
present moment."

- Buddha


"Pleasure is a freedom song,
But it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires,
But it is not their fruit."

- Kahlil Gibran


"To get rid of your passions is not
nirvana - to look upon them as
no matter of yours, that is nirvana."

- Zen saying


"Whatever you want to be, start to
develop that pattern now. You can instill
any trend in your consciousness right
now, provided you inject a strong
thought in your mind; then your actions
and whole being will obey that thought."

- Paramahansa Yogananda


"You are unique as you are here and now.
You are never the same.
You will never be the same again.
You have never before been what
you are now. You will never be it again."

- Swami Prajnanpad


"The resistance to the unpleasant
situation is the root of suffering."

- Ram Dass


"...don't make any conjectures on good
and evil! Don't try to stop your thoughts
from coming. Ask yourself only this
question: 'Which is my own spirit?'"

- Bassui


"Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of
plain living and high thinking the moment
he wants to multiply his daily wants.
Man's happiness really lies in contentment."

- Mahatma Gandhi

One at a time.

The Story of the Mountain Climber

Over the past few weeks, I've realized that I enjoy working in the domain that I have become fluent in, but find it frustrating to untangle a new, unfamiliar system while simultaneously trying to build something with it. I like exploring permutations and connections, rather than untangling difficult puzzles. And I am able to focus much better and use my time more productively when I am doing something I like.

And all of this has helped me realize that I don't want to be a game programmer. I want to be a game designer.

I like to explain this in terms of the Explorer and the Achiever player type. I am an Explorer (or Seeker). Programming, or engineering in general, tends to be most rewarding for Achievers, not Explorers. Achievers feel a rush of pleasure and energy when they finally solve a difficult challenge. I, on the other hand, tend to feel relief rather than excitement. What I like is the part that comes afterward.

Here's a little story to help visualize the situation.

Imagine climbing a mountain. I'm part of a team of engineers, laboriously lugging a heavy load of code up the mountainside. It's hard going, and we have to keep our heads down, focus on keeping a solid footing, freeing our load from snags, climbing over or around the boulders in our way. All the while, we have to stay coordinated and make sure the whole team is making steady progress up the mountain. Our determination and caffeinated beverages keep us going.

But I tire of this more quickly than my companions, and often turn to look out, away from the rocks and mud and out to the valley below. Something about this valley excites me, in a way the challenges of the mountain never could. But I turn back, grudgingly, to my teammates who still depend on me to carry my share of the load.

Eventually, finally, we reach the summit. Cries of triumph can be heard from all around, and a jubilant energy fills the air. I, too, am excited - now, with all that hard work and preparation out of the way we can finally begin! I look out across the magnificent vista spreading before my eyes and the terrain comes alive with plans and possibilities. I see empires rise and fall, resources flow and networks grow.

Then, I turn back to see my fellow engineers putting the last load of code into place, heaped atop the mountain, waiting for the designers who will be arriving tomorrow morning. Time to head back down! We'd better be on our way if we want to reach the next mountain in time!

Wait a minute - we're leaving already? The fun part was just about to start. No - but the others have already started down the mountain, caffeinated beverages in hand. Can't wait to conquer the next challenge. I turn to follow, reluctantly, with one last wistful glance over the vista that had so captivated me earlier.

Just another day in the life of an engineer.

Achievers get a big rush of pleasure upon reaching the top of a mountain. The bigger and more difficult the mountain, the bigger the rush. Explorers, like myself, enjoy looking out from the top of a mountain onto the world below. Just drink it in. Getting to the top isn't pleasurable in itself, it just means that the fun can finally begin.

The more patterns, the more connections, the more fun. That's what being an Explorer is all about.

I guess that should give me an edge in the next Casual Gameplay Design Competition. The theme is EXPLORE! ;)

Yet More Intriguing Ideas

These will probably be the last new ideas I post for a while. Hope you enjoy them:

2009/07/14
A game where all magic is created by playing music. You have a flute that creates different magical effects depending on what note is playing as a drone in the background. Flutes in different keys would interact differently with the same drone. You can supply your own drone, but more powerful would be to use a drone that is already sounding in the background, like the electric hum of a generator, or the rushing sound of a waterfall. In a mechanical or steampunk world, droning sounds would be easy to find.

2009/03/30
A game about visual hierarchy, where you can create, modify, and arrange graphic elements in order to achieve certain goals about the way a viewer would look at the composition. Different elements might draw attention more strongly, or hold attention longer, or direct the flow of attention in different ways. It could make a good puzzle game. People could play it to learn graphic design.

2009/03/07
A game about software development, but abstracted, so you are building a system of interacting parts to accomplish some goal. You may add pieces to it, and you may factor out identical or similar components. These pieces would most likely be physical shapes that link together rather than actual code. You may also reorganize or refactor the system to make it possible to factor out more pieces. There is a tension between adding more, for short-term benefit, and refactoring, which is better in the long run.

2009/03/03
A game where you can snake around as if controlling one end of Noby Noby Boy. But you also want to come back to your center, your foundation, so that you can move your center instead of just getting caught up in your head and hands. There is a tension there between continuing to snake around and collect stuff and deal with stuff, and taking the time to come back to your center and move from there, to reset.

2009/03/01
A game where you are a small aquatic creature dwelling near the surface of a small pond, perhaps an artificial pond or pool in a garden.You spend your time close to the edges of the pond, as the open water in the center is more dangerous to you. The water is dark, but full not empty, and its depths are warm and reassuring. Sometimes it rains, rippling the surface and bringing colder water to the pond. It is always overcast. The surface colors are black and shiny gray, turning to orange and brown below and at the edges, the color of the soil and water. On land are the muted grays, browns, and greens of winter plants and stone.

Yay. Let me know if you have any thoughts to share about these ideas. :)

A Handful of Interesting Ideas

I keep an idea notebook, which I make sure to write in every day. Sometimes I come up with some interesting ideas for games. Here are a few I thought I'd share:

2009/07/03
A story or game about someone who is used to living lightly and is very self-sufficient, who finds a child or animal and chooses to care for it. That could result in some interesting tensions, where one's way of living has been optimized for solitary life, and then must suddenly change to accommodate another. It could be interesting as a minimal game like Passage or Gravitation. Another interesting twist could occur when for some reason it is time to give up the child, and discover what it's like to go back to solitude, or create a new lifestyle.

2009/06/29
A game about freedom and proactivity and breaking out of the control of the game itself, based on the idea that you should "vote with your money." It could be a shooter where you can buy upgrades and such, but the money you spend goes to whatever faction that is selling the item. Different factions control and deploy enemy ships, and the more money they have, the more powerful they are and the more the other factions seek to imitate them. It could be a genetic algorithm influenced by your spending choices. When you first start the game, it seems that you have no choices, where one wrong move means instant death. But you can slowly expand your circle of influence by spending your money wisely.

2009/06/26
An iPhone game to promote basic visual awareness, where you choose a color for the day, and try to notice all occurrences of that color as you go about your activities. When you see the color, you show it to the iPhone's camera to have it counted toward your score. The more the better. Difficulty could be varied by changing the threshold for detecting equivalent colors. The more precise you have to be, the harder it is.

2009/06/22
An audio-only game where there are objects positioned along a horizontal line, whose positions can be determined by the stereo sounds they make. You could move a turret left and right and shoot, like Space Invaders. Your turret and all projectiles would make sounds also, so you can track where they are and get a feel for how the sound and input map to the virtual space. Distance could be represented by volume. Maybe even pitch and texture and other things could play a role, in the background. It could be a full shooter in sound, without graphics. Maybe it could be made musical, to be like music with meaning. And when you upgrade your weapons or your turret, they would sound cooler than before!

Any thoughts? I particularly like the "vote with your money" game and the audio-only shooter. Maybe I'll have a chance to make them sometime. Let me know if you want to use the ideas yourself - maybe we can collaborate!

More cool ideas on the way! :)

What I'm Excited About...

This is an attempt to articulate the basic motivation behind my passion for games, the drive underlying all my explanations of Why I Care About Games. What is it that excites me, at this very basic level?

In the abstract, the things that get me excited are figuring out how to expand the limits of what people think is possible, and helping other people appreciate the things that I find interesting or beautiful. As an example of the former, a big part of the appeal of calculator game programming for me was being able to do things that people would have never thought possible with the horribly inefficient language TI-BASIC, like make a rudimentary raycasting engine for a simple FPS, or an action game with actual pixel art graphics. It was really fun to explore the possibility space of the platform, researching the most obscure functions to see if they could somehow be put to use in making games just that much faster, or establishing a standard set of ugly but beautiful shortcuts and optimizations just to shave off a few bytes or milliseconds. And of course to share and show off these tricks with other calculator programmers online.

Now I direct this creative energy toward exploring new forms for Games (with a capital G) as a whole, expanding on what people think of and what they think is possible with something that is a "game". Not an easy task. The thing that excites me the most, and what I consider to be my life's work, is to help the medium of Games grow into its own as a powerful vehicle for understanding, expressing, and sharing views of the world and dreams for the future. I believe that Games have the potential to be as significant a new medium as the printed word ever was, perhaps more, and as powerful a force for change, hopefully beneficial. I will do what I can to make sure it happens, and happens in the best way possible.

One way I think this will happen, and where I am most interested at the moment, is through transforming education. I am very passionate about improving the quality of education in terms of its effectiveness and potential to benefit all life and living, particularly by using games to teach - teaching through games. As a student, I have experienced, and continue to experience, my fair share of less-than-optimal education. I'm convinced that such instances could have resulted in much more effective and enjoyable learning if only they had been conceived and structured as games. Computer and video games have much to offer to education, not only in game design theory but directly, using actual game software to enhance traditional schooling. It is an area to which I've directed a significant portion of my game design energy.

And as I mentioned earlier, what motivates me from project to project is in connecting those fields that I find interesting and sharing my appreciation with others, whether that is in Persian classical music, the martial art and philosophy Aikido, the beauty of plants, or Northwest Coast native art, among many others. Games simply happen to be the default mode of expression I turn to when imagining how to accomplish this.

A Blessing for the New Year

Happy New Year! :D One of my New Year's resolutions is to update my blog once a week rather than once a month. I thought I'd start off 2009 with this, originally posted on the MochiAds community forums.

Now 'prayer' and 'soul' are not words that I have ever had much occasion to use. But I think I'm starting to understand what might be meant by someone who uses the word 'prayer', or 'blessing', and where those concepts would fit into a worldview or practice. You see, words are magic. They can be quite powerful in shaping one's expectations, one's mindset, one's perceptual field. And I'm glad to use whatever tool I can get my hands on, if it helps me bring my life more in line with my goals and values.

So, given that, here's a nice bunch of words I've come across recently that felt particularly relevant to me, and how I'd like to be, and now I'd like to offer them to you all, my fellow game developers. :)

A Blessing

May the light of your soul guide you.

May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the
secret love and warmth of your heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and
renewal to those who work with you and to those who
see and receive your work.

May your work never weary you.

May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment,
inspiration, and excitement.

May you be present in what you do.

May you never become lost in the bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your
new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected.

May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

~ taken from page 160 of Anam Cara by John O'Donohue

All that stuff is much easier said than done! I guess that's why we keep saying it - to remind ourselves of what we're aiming for. ;)

Here's one thing I've been trying to put into practice - my own words this time:

Don't get overwhelmed or anxious about possibilities or lost opportunities - just make a choice.

As Eskil Steenberg wrote, "In every situation you find yourself, there are limitations, disregarding how much power you accumulate. So being creative is really about finding the possibilities of what you have rather then the limitations of what you don't."

Just do the best you can, right now! You're here, now - make the best of it. :)

Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 5

Here's a new game for you to try out: Storyteller. This clever little experiment allows you to manipulate three characters to influence the outcome of the story they live in. And what's interesting is that people seem to like it! I couldn't find any negative comments about it at all.

This one example may be simple, but it hints at the awesomeness that could be had with more sophisticated interactions and a more immersive presentation.

As I mentioned in a comment on Kongregate:
If people can enjoy a story space consisting of permutations on pairings between three simple characters, imagine what greatness could arise from a more complex and nuanced story.

There was also an interesting discussion of the game on GameSetWatch, focusing on the unusual way it deals with story structure.

"Storyteller works through and because of its clichés. Does it have anything to tell us about interactive storytelling?

If so, what it has to say is probably this:

Explicit structure matters.

Storyteller allows us to change almost everything about the outcome of its storyworld, but it constrains us to three episodes: set-up, crisis, outcome."

More recently, another experimental, pixelated game has been taking the world's Flash portals by storm. This is the delightfully be-tentacled
I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors. It has been popular enough to be the subject of a card challenge on Kongregate and has been featured on the front page of Newgrounds for over a week now. This is quite surprising for a game that has no goal other than to explore all possible branches of the story. And I'm not complaining.

The Majesty of Colors has been described as a vignette game. I'd also describe it as a sort of Environment Sketch, with less on the procedural content and more of a focus on character and story instead of natural beauty. It is also very much a roleplaying game, in the sense that the gameplay consists of playing a role, of acting, and deciding what kind of character you are by the actions that you take. Of course, it is almost minimally simple, like Storyteller, but it hints at the exciting possibilities to be found along this path.

The game also relies heavily on text, as does the earlier experimental hit You Have to Burn the Rope, which I find intriguing. This text is like a sketched placeholder for something that would, in an ordinary game, be conveyed through interactivity. Which is not to say that the writing feels rough - in The Majesty of Colors, this text is very poetic and establishes mood and expectations superbly.

I wonder about the minimalism of these games. Are they that way simply because they are quick experiments, the first of their kind? Could the concepts support a more complex, involved implementation? Is this perhaps an example of intentionally limiting resources to spur creativity? I don't know. I guess I'll just have to try, and see how it turns out.

And now for something completely different.

Or perhaps not so different. This post has been all about the triumph and promise of exploratory, freeform gameplay over the rigidly goal-oriented kind. Now here's an article arguing that play, contrary to popular belief, is not a waste of time: No more game shame. Its premise is actually quite far-reaching:

"We've been steadily increasing our productivity for decades. We work and work and work; when we finally give ourselves permission to play, we party and binge-drink ourselves into oblivion (or sleep in restorative seclusion), maximizing the efficiency of even our recreation. Then we crash and recover just in time to report back to work. Somewhere on a hill Sisyphus is smirking.

We need more creative energy, imaginative thinking, and an infusion of earnest, unselfconscious, child-like faith in impossible dreams. We need more playful fun - not simply downtime or vacation time - that engages our minds and spirits in joyful re-creation. In other words, we could stand to bring back a few lessons from the world we enter when we play with toys."

One reader goes even further in this comment:

"If primitive peoples could get by on four hours a day spent on securing their survival, why, with all of our modern technological advances, do I need to spend twice as long doing the same thing? I perceive WORK to be the waste of time. The eight or so hours a day I spend at work is time I pissed away doing nothing pertinent to what I value or my goals for myself, the world, or my environment."

An interesting perspective on work. And primitive peoples. It brings to mind this delightfully inflammatory article, about the work of Food Not Bombs: or, Free Bread and Soup is a National Threat. As its author says, "The realization that I lived in a culture that locked up it’s food in order to force us to work was a brutal shock." Yes. Interesting.

Why do we work? For money, of course. I came across another article recently. It happened to be curiously relevant to this particular line of thought. I had never really thought about money before, or the dynamics of the system it supports. But now I can see something rather sinister about the whole deal, and where it ends up...

"Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?"

Right? Maybe not. Read on:

"Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation -- and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money."

That doesn't sound too good to me. The guy who wrote Ishmael has this to say about the difference between traditional economies and those of us civilized people:

"In [tribal] societies, people look after each other for much the same reasons that people in [hierarchical] societies take jobs and have careers. In [tribal] societies, people look after one another not because they're saintly but because looking after one another assures that they themselves will be looked after. If they don't look after one another, then the community disappears -- and no one is looked after.

...

It's an economy. An economy based on support instead of products."

Can we do better?

Well, to bring this back to the world of games, how about I link you to a game development diary detailing the day-by-day progress of a simple Flash game? You like that idea? I wish more people would publish that sort of thing. Maybe I should do one. Hmmm... :)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

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.

Why I Care About Games

This is something of a continuation of my earlier post Why Games? I wrote this only to focus my own thoughts, and not so much to produce something intelligible to others, but I think it turned out quite nicely. See for yourself. :)

(...or skip to the good part!)

Do I love games? Really?

Do I right now? ...not especially.

Why did I say that I love games? Was it a simplification? It must be true, right, or else I wouldn't be focusing my entire life around working on games...

Writing this is hard. I am reluctant to do it. Remember I said that I want to just make stuff, not write or talk or argue about it. Once I make it, arguing will be silly - Are games art? Not right now they aren't, but I have faith that someday they will be, and there's no use arguing about it. Just wait and see. It will happen. Critique about something already made is okay. It's useful. But arguing back and forth, over and over, round and round about what the future might or should hold - it's useless. It's a waste of my time and effort.

What don't I like? There's a lot. I don't like reading magazines like EGM - the tiringly hardcore, guns'n'explosions, sarcastic, overwhelmingly male face of the traditional game industry today. It's useful to keep up with what games are out, what's popular, what's considered good, but it's tiring. It's obnoxious. It's not my kind of culture. It drains my energy.

I also read Game Developer - a magazine for creators, not players. It's better, but still, more of the same. Not so garish, more technical, intellectual, but still - standard industry. People all thinking the same way about games, following the trends, not making them - glimpses of popular visions of the future, nothing great, nothing outside the boundaries.

I got tired of reading amateur game design forums years ago. The same hypothetical questions, over and over, nothing amazing. The common denominator is too low to sustain any really serious inquiry into innovation.

There are some books I've been quite impressed with - Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost, Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons by Chaim Gingold. They're fun to read, often eye-opening - I'm glad to have read them. But still, too much reading, and pretty soon another year has gone by without anything to show for it. You have to make something, or else it's just talk. There's so little out there, so little really good stuff, that it will get noticed. It will, if you make it. If you make it, they will come. And they'll spend way too much time talking about it. But that's how it is.

There's one blog and forum I do like, of the two-person development team Tale of Tales, with their Realtime Art Manifesto, and blog posts condemning the latest industry hits. I think they have the right idea, more so than most. And they're actually making stuff, according to their vision. But hanging around on their blog all the time isn't going to help me or them. If I can actually make something that embodies what I believe games should be, or at least points the way, that would help.

One thing I've heard a lot in game development is that you have to have an actual working game to show people, even if it's just an ugly prototype. If you want to get a job in games, you have to show something you've made. If you're already working in games and you want to convince people to work on your game idea, you have to show them. Game ideas are practically worthless on paper - they have to be made in order to judge their worth. And I think that's true for talking about games in general as well. You have to make them, and judge them by how the public receives them.

So, what do I want to make? What do I think is so good?

Well, explaining my various beliefs and thoughts and visions would be difficult, because as I've just mentioned, you can't really understand a game design just by reading about it. But it might be worth establishing. Or maybe not. I'm not trying to put forth my vision here, I'm just trying to explain the situation, why I have to do what I have to do, why I should just make things, why I have to gain prestige in the conventional system before what I make, or want to make, will be taken seriously.

But maybe I can try to explain a little - why do I care about this potential that I see in games?

First of all, games are what I'm good at, what I like making. If I am to express myself artistically, I'd like to do it through games. I like most every sort of art, but game development is extremely interdisciplinary, integrating visual art, music, sound design, spatial architecture, social architecture, education, programming, storytelling - probably more than that, even. Since I like pretty much all of those things, games are great because they let me think about all of them, instead of restricting myself to one. And as opposed to more or less linear storytelling through writing or film, games are more about creating spaces from which stories can emerge, and I've always been much better about thinking in terms of spaces and worlds than in stories. Creating an expression of a single viewpoint in time and space has never been natural for me, so I'll do what I do best - design entire systems, worlds, games.

Secondly, games are a young medium. More specifically, computer and video games are young, with only a few decades of history behind them. Most everyone would agree that games have yet to produce any artistic masterpieces which will be revered through the ages. Some people don't believe they ever will, though I am confident that it will happen. Since games are so young, their future is still very indeterminate. The current decade and the decade ahead will be pivotal in shaping the direction of all games to come, as it gathers momentum to become truly a mass phenomenon. I like having the power to shape the future. I'm at the right time to do it with games, and quite possibly the right place too. With luck I will be able to insert myself right at this pivot point, to nudge the future of an entire medium along a course that I consider healthy, one quite different from the decadent stagnation of its current state.

Third, there are some specific causes that I'd like to promote, certain things that I'd like to express, that I believe lend themselves particularly well to the medium of games. One thing I've been acutely and personally interested in changing, improving, since my first experience with a truly bad teacher in eighth grade is... the education system. Our education system. Pain and suffering, at least since the start of middle school, and onward. Yes, I know quite well that life is all about pain and suffering. It's an initiation. Should education teach anything different than reality?

I think that education can help change that reality for the better. This education system, throughout its various forms, has been my world for basically my entire conscious life. Most all the pain and suffering I know is within the context of this system. Not all of it, of course, but most. What this system teaches, both explicitly in its curriculum and implicitly in its structure, feeds right into the receiving system of adult work, profit, consumption, and all that good stuff - reality. Right. Part of reality. Part of one reality, maybe. But change the education system, and the system of adult life must respond with some change of its own. Maybe then you can change reality by changing the education system. At the least this contradiction will require some reevaluation and responding change, and I don't think it will be a change as simple as reverting education back to its previous state.

What do games have to do with education? Heh. I'm glad you asked. Games are education. Education is games. Play is learning. Learning is play. Many video game theorists, including Raph Koster of the book A Theory of Fun, and Daniel Cook of the blog Lost Garden, have argued that the fun of games is fundamentally about the brain's addiction to solving patterns. People like figuring things out, and when these challenges are paced in flowing progression of difficulty, densely layered, people will eat them up for hours. Like Pac-Man, eating up dots. Games are about managing, structuring challenge and reward. Some of these challenges are more reflexive, appealing to early instincts, some are more cerebral - from aiming, timing, matching to complex resource management and strategy. But there are patterns everywhere in life. Any of them can be made into games. The problem with current games is that they deal with such a limited subset of patterns, skills valued by protohuman hunter-gatherers perhaps but few if any that deal with the skills of living in an immensely complex human-built world, as well as an even more complex natural world becoming increasingly a subject to human influence. Games must expand to encompass these complexities, and in fact games among all other media are uniquely suited to accomplish this task. What else could convey an intuitive and embodied grasp of the systems that make up and sustain humanity but a dynamic, miniature world specially designed for human comprehension, miniature lives carefully structured to aid the bridging of connections within and across chosen domains? Games? The word is a silly one, I know, but it's what we've got. Games.

I've skipped right past education, haven't I. Well here's the obvious punchline: design education around games. Education as it is done now is more or less a bunch of poorly designed games. So design them better. Make it compelling for anyone to pick up inorganic chemistry, or proof by induction, or European history. It must be compelling for someone, some scientist, some professor, so use games to structure the experience of others so they too can experience that joy. Or at least have some chance of it. Maybe then people will be able to focus their attention to the content and purpose of the education system in general. Does the content matter, the curriculum? Should it matter? Why are we teaching what we are teaching, or what we say we are teaching? Why is this system structured the way that it is? Maybe then these questions will get some attention. And maybe games will have some solutions then, as well.

So that's three. Those are three reasons I care about games, and what they might become. There's more, but that's basically what it boils down to. I like games, games are young, games will save us. Salvation through games. Something like that. That's why I do what I do.

Reaction to The Present Confusion

I'd like to comment on a recent post on one of the blogs I watch. I will do it here since the author has disallowed comments on that post. Here is my comment:

:)

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.

Why Games?

A week or so ago, someone asked me why I am so devoted to working in game development, to the exclusion of other types of jobs. At the time I couldn't really think of a reason beyond that I can't imagine not being constantly obsessed with game design. But I think the question deserves a more thorough explanation.

One reason is that I like to make things. Making things is what I do. At some level, pretty much everything I enjoy involves making things. I also like learning new skills, understanding new ideas. Games, or rather computers, are kind of the ultimate medium for making things. I can create my own miniature universe, limited only by my own skill and understanding. Well, obviously in reality it is a little more complicated than that, but compared to anything else out there, making computer games is the easiest way to realize such a vision.

Another reason is that I have many different interests, and game development is one of the few areas that appreciates and incorporates all of them. Art, music, programming, complex systems, cognition and understanding humanity and life, all can be part of games. It's hard to make time for everything, but focusing on games encourages me to consider them every so often, in a way that say, database programming, doesn't. I doubt that database programmers spend a lot of time thinking about the artistic or societal impact of their work.

Also, I'm not content to simply learn the established conventions of an existing industry and spend my life sustaining tradition. I want to shape the future in some significant way. Games (or interactive virtual spaces in general) are just emerging as a medium. What you see right now in terms of games and computers is just a hint of what is possible. I am confident that games will be extremely significant in the evolution of our society away from industrialism. Using games for education is just part of that. And I think I'm in the perfect position to be part of all this change, through games.

Iaido and Tea

I just heard a great quote from one of my Aikido teachers; I hope he doesn't mind if I reproduce it here. He said that "Iaido is the tea ceremony for boys." Funny, because it's true. But let me explain.

Iaido is a Japanese martial art where you draw your sword, slice up your imaginary opponent, shake the blood off and then sheathe the sword again in one fluid motion. Well, maybe several fluid motions. But fluidly, either way. The name "iaido" literally breaks down into 'i' - being, 'ai' - harmony, and of course 'do' - way. Kind of like "the way of harmonious awareness" or something like that. It's a good name.

Anyway, so similarly to the tea ceremony, it's all about everything being precise and in its place. I just realized that the reason you train, or at least work up to training with, a live blade is that it really makes you extremely aware of how exactly you're moving with the sword! Otherwise you're just waving a stick around. But if you are holding an extremely sharp piece of metal, you have to be precise, unless you are tired of having fingers that are still attached to your body. It's a tangible mental change.

The tea ceremony basically does the same thing, but let's face it: tea is girly. What kind of boy would want to spend his time perfecting his tea-serving abilities? Swords are obviously much cooler. Thus, "Iaido is the tea ceremony for boys."

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

Flow

I'm reading a book called Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is kind of required reading for game designers. It's about the experience of being perfectly immersed in an activity, where your abilities are just enough to match the challenges coming at you - not too easy or too hard. This is one of those books that every page or so I just want to jump around with excitement because it's so good. True Names was another one of those. So was Emotional Design, which I plan to write about here eventually.



The most interesting part about the book I think is the connection to society. From page 76:
"In fact, flow and religion have been intimately connected from earliest times. Many of the optimal experiences of mankind have taken place in the context of religious rituals. Not only art but drama, music, and dance had their origins in what we now would call 'religious' settings; that is, activities aimed at connecting people with supernatural powers and entities. The same is true of games. One of the earliest ball games, a form of basketball played by the Maya, was part of their religious celebrations, and so were the original Olympic games. This connection is not surprising, because what we call religion is actually the oldest and most ambitious attempt to create order in consciousness. It therefore makes sense that religious rituals would be a profound source of enjoyment."

It continues on the next page:
"In modern times art, play, and life in general have lost their supernatural moorings. The cosmic order that in the past helped interpret and give meaning to human history has broken down into disconnected fragments."

After describing a few ideologies, such as sociobiology, it goes on:
"These are some of the modern 'religions' rooted in the social sciences. None of them - with the partial exception of historical materialism, itself a dwindling creed - commands great popular support, and none has inspired the aesthetic visions or enjoyable rituals that previous models of cosmic order had spawned."

Modern 'religions' just aren't as fun as they used to be! How about that?

Game Collaboration Criteria

If you answer yes to a lot of these questions, that means I'd probably enjoy making a game with you! Or at least you might have some chance of understanding my ideas...

• Do you find inspiration and ideas in almost everything?
• Do you maintain a child-like sense of wonder at the world?
• Do you like to appreciate the beauty of nature?
• Are you interested in artificial life and intelligence?
• Do you practice a martial art or other movement art like dance?
• Do you like stick animations or another minimalist art form?
• Have you created any kind of art by your own initiative?
  
• Have you made any games?
  
• Have you been touched emotionally by a game?
• Do you like to read books and articles about game development?
• Do you keep up with the state of independent game development?

And if you're wondering, all these questions are true for me.

Wittgenstein and Language

Commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
First off, I find Wittgenstein's use of multiple voices easy to read because I myself use multiple voices all the time when I am thinking. I may think a thought, then respond to it from another perspective. It is like hearing two people talk, except you identify as both of them at the same time. And that is what passes for my stream of consciousness. Actually, I do have voices that I consider to be myself, and those which I consider to be my impressions of other people. And of course not all my thought is verbal!

Wittgenstein seemed to be saying that language (and by extension, logic and thought) are all very relative. The meaning of language depends on the context. There always must be a context. For example, wondering what the parts are of some object only makes sense if you have some context within which to ask the question. The fundamental parts of, say, a tree, are different depending on what kind of answer you want. You might say that the basic parts are the branches, or maybe the cells, or the atoms that constitute the tree. Another situation where meaning depends on context is in the case of metaphors and words with multiple meanings. You can only know what the word refers to from the context. There is not a special essence for each word to refer to. So there is no perfectly exact language which is free from the necessity of an arbitrary environment to give it meaning.

The implication of this is that language is not so special as is commonly believed. Language can not be understood as a perfectly exact mathematical manipulation of symbols. Instead it is rather chaotically interpreted based on preconceptions and context, obeying no particular law. In this way it is similar to the other activities of the brain - chaotic and messy, but also creative. Another interesting point is that the brain can learn a language without having any prior understanding of it. What Wittgenstein tries to show in the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations is that it is not possible to explain in a purely algorithmic way how language is learned. Discussing language requires understanding of self-organizing and evolving systems, and not of sequential, logical systems. So then language becomes not the vehicle for an ultimate truth, or something with which to distinguish between rational and irrational beings, but just another technique of evolutionary systems. Language has a role to play, but it does not live separately from a natural understanding of the world.

Reaction to Zen TV article

Zen TV Experiment
I've taken the advice of the article and tried observing my own computer use. I notice the sounds of people around me and my spatial position in the room, as well as the sensations of my body. It is difficult to maintain this state of awareness, though, like trying to stay conscious while falling asleep. In other words, I can't do it. Yet.

The part about relaxation and renewal resonated with my experience. I find that being in front of a computer jams my ability to think. I come up with ideas whenever I'm free to be by myself, whether I'm walking around or just getting a snack. Well, maybe writing on the computer is different, but the kind of web browsing that is similar to TV creates a mental state that inhibits my creativity and understanding. It's like the computer presses down and holds my mind, and once I escape to the outside I can see myself and think again. Even observing myself use the Internet gives only a limited context. I know that once I get up and go outside my mind will be much more free.

I have thought about this before. I remember noticing how draining an electronic screen can be. I contrasted this with sound, which is all around and more relaxing for me. My idea was to make a game of only sound, which would incorporate the sounds occurring naturally in the player's environment, and to increase the player's appreciation for the sound that always surrounds us. Here's how I described it in my journal on 2005/01/03:

A game or experience that widens perception rather than focusing on a small screen. Sound is a good example of expanding perception. Focusing is tiring, gives headache, etc., expanding is relaxing.

Sound is all around you and inside you. (You can focus your perceptions on particular sounds though.) Sight is restricted to your field of vision in front, and is often focused - on a page, or a screen. It is also more difficult to produce expanded sight perceptions (VR helmet) than sound (headphones). So sound is a better medium.

It should make people want to find new sounds and take the game to different places to explore new worlds (Pokemon effect). Then they would think differently about sound and all places they go, because they have that extra layer of meaning or pattern recognition attached to different soundscapes (one of the learning principles).

Also, see this essay for elaboration on that last point.

"We no longer do, we watch, and reality is someone else's creation."
I have also noticed a feeling that I am not in control of my own actions, that I am watching my senses, my feelings and thoughts. Especially my voice is something which can seem foreign to me at times. For me, writing is a much more faithful transcription of my thoughts. So you're getting the real deal here! This is a common idea for me, playing with the idea of free will and personality. I don't think this was due to TV or the Internet, as I rarely watch TV, and I never really used the Internet much then.

Kevin Kelly Quote on Exploration and Exploitation

Cooperation without friendship or foresight
"Every complex adaptive organization faces a fundamental tradeoff. A creature must balance perfecting a skill or trait (building up legs to run faster) against experimenting with new traits (wings). It can never do all things at once. This daily dilemma is labeled the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Axelrod makes an analogy with a hospital: "On average you can expect a new medical drug to have a lower payoff than exploiting an established medication to its limits. But if you gave every patient the current best drug, you'd never get proven new drugs. From an individual's point of view you should never do the exploration. But from the society of individuals' point of view, you ought to try some experiments." How much to explore (gain for the future) versus how much to exploit (sure bet now) is the game a hospital has to play. Living organisms have a similar tradeoff in deciding how much mutation and innovation is needed to keep up with a changing environment. When they play the tradeoff against a sea of other creatures making similar tradeoffs, it becomes a coevolutionary game."

This is the tension between diversity and conformity. Also, exploration and exploitation are the two key words I came up with for adventure and strategy games.

Kevin Kelly Quote on Body and Mind

No intelligence without bodies
"For better or worse, in reality we are not centered in our head. We are not centered in our mind. Even if we were, our mind has no center, no "I." Our bodies have no centrality either. Bodies and minds blur across each others' supposed boundaries. Bodies and minds are not that different from one another. They are both composed of swarms of sublevel things.

We know that eyes are more brain than camera. An eyeball has as much processing power as a supercomputer. Much of our visual perception happens in the thin retina where light first strikes us, long before the central brain gets to consider the scene. Our spinal cord is not merely a trunk line transmitting phone calls from the brain. It too thinks. We are a lot closer to the truth when we point to our heart and not our head as the center of behaviors. Our emotions swim in a soup of hormones and peptides that percolate through our whole body. Oxytocin discharges thoughts of love (and perhaps lovely thoughts) from our glands. These hormones too process information. Our immune system, by science's new reckoning, is an amazing parallel, decentralized perception machine, able to recognize and remember millions of different molecules."