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.

dRive on Jay is Games

My game dRive, which I wrote about earlier, has been reviewed on Jay is Games! I'm very excited to have a review on such a popular site! :)

dRive also got fourth place in the recent contest at Jay is Games. No big prizes, but still quite good.

Play dRive.

Promoting Your Game - Lessons Learned

Update:
This article has been published on MochiLand! I'm famous now! :)

Over the past few weeks, much of my time has been spent promoting my game _dRive - sending it out to Flash game portals around the web with the hope of getting more people to play it. During that process, I made a lot of mistakes and learned some valuable lessons. I thought I'd try sharing my newly gained knowledge here. Maybe it will help you in your next game. :)

So, the following advice is intended for developers of Flash games who want as many people as possible to play their games. If you're using MochiAds to embed money-making ads in your game, or including links to promote your website, these tips should be useful to you. On the other hand, if you plan to make your money from an exclusive sponsorship or by keeping the game locked to your site and surrounded by website ads, then you may find this interesting but it probably won't be necessary.

Step 0 - Make a good game

My advice deals with what to do after you've made a cool Flash game. But marketing is a lot easier when you start with a quality product, so give yourself some time to read over the article How to make a successful Flash Game if you haven't already. Making good games is hard, and it's something you really have to learn from experience, but reading articles can give you a bit of extra guidance when you need it.

Step 1 - Playtest the game

This point may seem obvious to some people, but it's important enough that I'll say it here: You have to test your game out on other people! Watching a new player try your game is very eye-opening. Almost inevitably, there will be lots of problems that you don't notice but will end up ruining the experience for other players.

Playtesting is what turns mediocre games into awesome games. Extensive playtesting is what made the award-winning game Portal great. If you want to learn how to do it right, read Ron's Rules for Playtesting.

• I'd suggest spending at least a week to playtest and polish your game as soon as you have a working version. Get friends, neighbors, classmates, or whoever else you can find to try out your game while you watch and take notes. Ask them for their feedback, make whatever improvements you can, and then repeat the process with someone new. For the average Flash game, a week of this might be enough. But if you can do it for longer, go ahead. More complex games, especially if they involve strategy, might require several weeks of testing. As long as you can keep finding new players, the more testing the better.

Step 2 - Beta test the game online

What, more testing? Here's the first big mistake I made with _dRive - I tried to spread it to as many game sites as I could right after I finished playtesting. Don't do that.

Instead of spreading the game right away, get as much feedback as you can with a private beta test. Create a site-locked version of your game, maybe even prompting for a password at the loading screen before allowing the game to run. Put this version online where that no one will find it unless they are looking for it - ideally, on your own private web space, or a site like Flash Game License. Then go to a forum that you trust - the one on MochiAds, for example - and ask people to try your game and give you feedback about it.

Different computers, different monitors, different browsers, different players, all will contribute to new problems that you may have missed while doing live playtesting. You want to discover these while the game is still private and under your control, not after you've sent an old version to dozens of game portals.

• If you are using MochiAds, this step would be a good time to get your game approved so you can start earning money as soon as possible!

Step 3 - Test release the game on a single site

Once you feel like you've gotten enough feedback from the beta test and your game is as polished as it's going to get, you can try releasing it on an actual Flash game portal. This is your chance to test out some descriptions and preview icons for the game.

• For this first release, choose a game site that is popular enough to get you a decent amount of views and comments for your analysis, but not enough that the game gets noticed and stolen by other sites. I'd recommend either Nonoba or Kongregate. Nonoba is a newer portal and not as big as Kongregate, so you might not get as many useful comments there. But on Kongregate, there are weekly and monthly cash prizes for the games with the highest ratings, so you may prefer to wait to put your game there until you are completely ready. However, if you don't care about the prizes, Kongregate can be a fine choice for your test release.

All Flash game sites like it when you provide a good thumbnail image to represent your game in their collection. You want to make an icon that will attract people's attention and compel them to try out your game. This is an easily overlooked but very important part of game promotion. Definitely have a look at this article on Thumbnail Design for some useful tips.

Another crucial part of promotion is the description you write to explain your game to potential players. Often portals will want both a short, ten word description and a longer one of two or three sentences. Like the game icon, these descriptions must catch the attention of people browsing the portal collections and encourage them to try out the game. An effective description will also prepare the player mentally for what to expect when they play.

• Surprisingly, many developers don't bother to come up with compelling descriptions for their games. Take advantage of this opportunity to have your game stand out. Brainstorm a bunch of possible descriptions, both long and short, and then test them on people! Read them out loud to people and watch for their reaction. If they look confused, or start laughing at you, that's a sign that you need a better description. On the other hand, if they look intrigued and interested, or laugh in delight, then you're probably on the right track. It can often take days to really come up with something good though, so you might even start thinking of descriptions for your game as early as the playtesting stage.
  

Step 4 - Put the game on Newgrounds

So, your game is good, people like it, and you're confident that it's the best that it's going to be? Now is the time to put it on Newgrounds. Why? Because Newgrounds is the biggest, most popular portal that lets you instantly upload your games and track their progress on the site. Put your game there and you are basically guaranteed a few hundred views and several reviews in the first half hour after uploading. If your game gets rated highly, you are also basically guaranteed to have your game stolen by a bunch of smaller sites. After you put a game on Newgrounds, there's no going back.

Success on Newgrounds, and by extension success on the web in general, depends very heavily on that first impression. In submitting a game there, you have a very short window of opportunity to enthrall your players and establish a good rating for your game before it disappears into obscurity in the depths of the portal. This window can be as short as one or two hours. If during that time your game is judged to be excellent, awards and recognition will be bestowed upon it. Your highest aim is to have your game showcased on the front page of Newgrounds, where it will reap a bountiful number of views and be stolen by game portals far and wide across the web.

• If you are using MochiAds, be sure to disable ads for the newgrounds.com domain before you submit your game there! Newgrounders don't take too kindly to ads in their games, and you don't want to do anything that might jeopardize that first impression. If you really want to, you could enable the ads again once your game has achieved the coveted front page, but you might instead choose to think of Newgrounds as an aid to promotion rather than as a money-making opportunity in itself.

If the game doesn't do well on Newgrounds, though, there is still the chance to fix it. It won't get stolen if it has a low score. But it probably won't get chosen for the front page either, even if you manage to update the game with amazing improvements. It's just too late - no one will find it. Still, you can try creating a thread in the General forum, asking for feedback on your game. If you're lucky, you might get a hundred more views and some useful suggestions. But that's really not a good situation to find yourself in. Do whatever you can to get it right the first time.


Step 5 - Send the game to other sites

The last thing to do is to send the game out to as many portals as you can. Some sites have online submission forms where you can automatically upload your game, while others only take submissions through email. You'll be getting your game out there in whatever way you can. This process is described in detail by the excellent article Marketing Flash Games. You must read it!

• If you're using MochiAds, now is the time to enable it for distribution! Check the box in the distribution settings for the game and upload your final SWF.

You will first need to create a distribution pack for your game. This is a compressed folder containing the final SWF of your game, thumbnail images of all different sizes and file formats, and a text file containing all the information that a webmaster could possibly need while adding your game to their site. The text file I used for _dRive included the game name, file name and dimensions, author name and website, a short description, a full description, game instructions, keywords associated with the game, and my email address. You'll probably want to have at least that much info in yours.

Put this distribution pack online where it can be easily downloaded. That way when you are sending emails to dozens of portals in a row you can simply link to the distribution pack in your email rather than trying to attach a big file for each one you send. I learned that the hard way, after spending entire days just emailing portals one after another with my game. You'll also need to write up a good letter which you can copy and paste into these emails, articulately alerting each portal owner to the existence of your game and offering a link to the distribution pack.

• This letter should include an enticing description of your game, a link to where the recipient can try the game online, and most importantly, a link to the distribution pack. If there's one website where your game is rated really highly and the players just seem to love your game, link to that one in your email! Portal owners want to add games that their players will like. Show them that yours is one of those games.
  

Then you just get a list of good Flash game portals and start spreading your game. If you need some lists of portals, try this, this and this. There are more out there, too - just search around.

The End?

Well, there's not much more for me to say here. Good luck in promoting your next game, and if you find this article helpful, make a note of it on your blog or something so I can feel good about myself for writing it. :)

And if your experience contradicts what I say here, please let me know about that too! This is really my first time promoting a Flash game in a serious way, so I'm definitely still learning. But I think it's safe to say that the lessons I've distilled from this experience are some solid and widely applicable guidelines.

Thanks for reading!

The Derivation of Spring

Ah, a rainy spring day. One of the first this year.

Also, Easter.

Also, Conway's Game of Life Day! :D Today's date, 3/23, is the cellular automaton ruleset describing Conway's Game of Life. A dead cell comes alive with three neighbors, and a living cell stays alive with two or three neighbors. 23/3.

As far as I know, I'm the only one who recognizes Conway's Game of Life Day. Pi Day, 3/14, really steals the show for March. But I'm fine with that.

I've got news. You may be wondering what that picture is. It looks like a game. It is a game. It's my new game, released earlier this week on St. Patrick's Day for the fifth game design competition at Jay is Games. Yes, I actually managed to finish something in time for a contest.

_dRive

Create your own glitch music in this experimental dodging game. Collect points to upgrade your tracks and control up to three ships at once!

It's an experiment in interactive music. I've tried dynamically mixing loops before (Braids) and now this is an attempt at something different, something a little more appropriate to Flash's technical capabilities. Glitch music is a style based on glitchy sounds like that of a skipping CD or record. In _dRive, the music skips when you move your ship. Crude, but an interesting toy to play with. I hope to refine the idea for the sequel, and perhaps for later games as well.

I worked with a composer, SineRider, to come up with some specially glitch-able tracks for the game. It was really fun to collaborate with him. I'd gladly do it again.

It's also an experiment in making educational games. Surprisingly enough, the name "dRive" is a combination of the words "drive" and "derive". It's a game about derivatives. The three tracks in the game, the three ships, correspond to the physical properties of position, velocity, and acceleration. Through playing the game, you learn to control all three at once, internalizing the mathematical relationships between them.

However, the game doesn't go out of its way to explain the math behind the motion. It's much more of a game than an educational tool. But I imagine it could be used to supplement a more traditional lesson about calculus or kinematics.

I made _dRive as part of Twig Games, a company I'm trying to start with a few other people who believe in the potential of games for education and social change (see my last post). This is our first game, so it's nothing particularly awesome yet. Just wanted to get something out there. You can expect some pretty cool stuff from us in the future though - I've got some good ideas.

Well, I've learned a lot over the course of this project, both on the development side and more interestingly, perhaps, on the marketing side. It takes a lot of work to promote a Flash game, if you want to do it right. Check my blog again in a day or two, I'll be posting a writeup of the lessons I've learned. Maybe they'll help you.

If you like _dRive, please try playing and rating it on these other sites as well:

• _dRive on Newgrounds (no ads)
• _dRive on Kongregate (stats)
• _dRive on Nonoba (stats and badges!)

Update:
The full, high-quality version of the game music is now available for download! Get it here.

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.

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. :)

NEON Ramblings

No, I'm not rambling, Braids NEON is. Rambling across the web.

I was just checking my MochiBot dashboard to see how many views my Flash games have been getting lately, and I was surprised to see thirteen sites now hosting the game! But I've only submitted it to three... How did that happen?

Apparently, whenever you submit a half-decent game to Newgrounds, it immediately gets picked up (stolen) by a bunch of smaller game sites. That's not necessarily a bad thing - you just want to be prepared to take advantage of that sudden surge of attention. I have my name in the game, but not much else. Not that I'm looking for much else at this point.

I'd never even heard of any of these sites, but they've all managed to find my game.

• Andkon Arcade
• Game Fudge
• Gameshot
• Games Hero
• Games For Work
• Gamki
• Zupagames
• eGameStorm

The remaining hosts were those sites that let you get past content filters.

It's interesting to see the new descriptions and icons people have created for Braids NEON. Andkon Arcade, by far the most popular host for the game with over thirteen thousand views in four days, has come up with its own instructions, much more concise than mine:

"Click and hold the mouse to start. Then, use the mouse to smash into your opponent."

I thought it was kind of funny. Certainly it leaves out a lot of information, like the existence of keyboard controls, but it does get the point across. And I suppose that most people do end up playing it as a "smash into your opponent" sort of game anyway, though that's not how I would describe it.

Then there's another description on a few other sites:

"The game 'Braids Neon' is a stylish kind of rag doll fighting game. You can use your keyboard, your mouse or both together to let the pupas fight it out!"

I don't know what the word "pupas" means in this context. :p But I'm not complaining. Stylish is good.

The best place to play the game is still on Kongregate, probably, since it has high scores and there's the chance I could get some money if enough people play it there. And the version on deviantART is where I'm likely to experiment with new updates, in case you're interested in that.

Update:
It looks like more sites have found Braids NEON since the last time I checked. Like this one.

NEON Renovations

I've been doing a lot of work lately on my game Braids NEON. Not just changing the game itself, but submitting it to new places, making screen shots, changing icons, stuff like that. It's been several days of intensive NEON for me, but now I'm done and I can get to new games and new posts.

So, I've made the interface much more user-friendly - the mouse cursor is now visible on every screen, you can actually click on a button to go back to the game from the menu, and it detects perfectly whether the cursor is inside the game window or not. The tutorial instructions have also been updated. These are all improvements that were long overdue, really, and well, now they're here. I'd actually consider Braids NEON to be a solid game now.

Solid enough, in fact, that I decided to submit it to Newgrounds, after some consultation with my potential audience. It's there, with a solid score of 3.44 / 5.00 after almost 300 votes. Better than on Kongregate.

And the Kongregate version is now integrated with the Kongregate High Scores API, which is not only more fun, but now I can track how many registered users are playing it there. Or more likely, how few, since it's been several days since anyone has showed up with a new score. Oh well.

I've also made a bunch of screen shots of Braids NEON and put them in my deviantART scraps. Take a look, they're pretty nice. There are a few other new things in my scraps, like my first digital animation, which you might appreciate if you're into Aikido.

And I've recently ventured onto YouTube. My account should be populated with a video or two fairly soon.

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:

:)

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

Create-a-Cult

Yeah, not quite. But strange and scary and awesome enough to inspire the possibility.

What am I talking about?

You know how in my last post, I mentioned that there's a lot of people in the game industry who don't know what's going on, and a few who are looking in the right direction? Well, Dan Cook of Lost Garden is one of those few. Just read his latest article, Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment.

The basic idea it proposes is that to incite a particular emotion in someone, you provoke in them some physiological change, like an elevated heart rate, and then provide symbols and environmental cues pointing to a particular emotion as the cause of the arousal.

Does that sound weird? Don't rely on me to convince you of the validity of the approach - read the article. I don't know whether it works or not, but it sure is intriguing. Have you ever heard anything like it being talked about in game design before? I haven't. There has been plenty of discussion about emotions in games, but Dan Cook's ideas on the subject are the first I've encountered that are weird and different and simple enough to have a chance at actually working.

You may not agree with everything in the article, but I assure you, reading it is a refreshingly thought-provoking experience. This guy knows what he's talking about - he touches on so many points, gets things (certainly understands social motivations)... Well, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Not much more I can say. Check it out, it's worth your time.

Another guy who really knows what he's talking about is Ian Bogost, in his book Persuasive Games. There are always tons of discussions cycling around forums and email lists about games as art, and serious games, and games for education and all that. But then once in a while someone comes out and just says it all, whose words rise far above the tangled mass of uninspired chatter, gleaming in their purity and truth, shining... soaring...

Yeah, anyway, well Ian Bogost is one of those people, and Persuasive Games is a book that says the right things. It's not exactly a thrilling read, and it can often ramble on, but man, those ideas... If you don't want to spend your time wading through stagnant forum discussions and you want to see the future of games, look no further than Persuasive Games.

MySpace, Miis, Motivation

Just as some background so you can see why I'm talking about this, I've done a bit of work trying to teach game programming to kids - teenagers, really - and it's not easy. Thinking of how to make education more effective is a consideration that's often in the back of my mind.

I think that if you want to motivate kids to work on creating games, or anything else really, it's essential to give the project meaning by having them publish their creations where their peers can see.

Social networking sites like MySpace are very popular - you might even say a ubiquitous phenomenon in schools (just my own observation) - and help provide meaning and motivation for other activities. So if a project fulfills a role in that social context, the kids will be happy to do it. If it will make them more popular, or special, or somehow feels like an accomplishment within the metagame of a social networking site, then they'll want to do it. Otherwise, it's just work.

Reading the excellent Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons again, I realized that games like The Sims, as well as Nintendo's Mii Channel, might be compelling to non-gamers partly because they can be used to explore and make statements about social networks. Both the virtual doll house game The Sims and the feature of the Nintendo Wii that allows one to recreate people's likenesses as virtual Mii dolls are appealing to people who don't normally play video games. I would guess that these people are not playing for the same reasons that typical gamers do. Instead I imagine that for the average person, creating and playing with representations of their friends (or enemies, or celebrities, or whatever) is an activity motivated by social concerns - a subset of those activities involved with socializing, exploring where one stands in relation to other people, and making statements about how one views these relationships. The fact that these are video games is almost irrelevant

The game industry is very used to thinking about things in terms of games - game reviewers for the most part agree on what makes a good game, and they all basically think about games in the same way. But that way is not going to help them think about why people like The Sims or the Wii.

Fortunately, a few people are thinking differently, and the creators of Habbo Hotel are a good example. I'd really recommend reading this report of Sulka Haro's keynote about Habbo Hotel - I found it very interesting and inspiring. There was one quote in particular I found very interesting, about the fact that tons of the mostly-teenage players of Habbo Hotel spend their time playing make-believe, roleplaying activities and roles that the game itself doesn't support: "If you look, little kids will play for hours... but teenagers are reaching the age where that's not socially allowed anymore. We're providing an environment where that's OK."

As an example given by the article, there are people who pretend to be horses, and then other people pretend to pet them! That's crazy, I don't even know how that would work! But apparently people do it. And another thing that was mentioned was how the players are often very concerned with keeping Habbo Hotel a private place separate from their parents - it would be too embarrassing otherwise, I imagine. Again, my mind is flashing back to Miniature Gardens.

Well, I seem to have drifted far from my original topic, which was about how to motivate kids to work on projects in an educational context. But this is all good stuff, and I would have wanted to get to it in a blog post sooner or later. I don't really have any conclusions to make at this point, so consider this food for thought.

And about the one-blog-post-a-week thing, I've just been so busy with school that I can't spare the time, seriously. It has turned out to be more difficult than I expected to turn my quick notebook entries into interesting, coherent blog posts. I'll keep trying though. Thanks for reading.

A Real Blog Now?

If you've been to this blog a few times, you'll know that I rarely post anything. Every so often I add links to the side as I come across interesting blogs, but the last time I posted was, what, more than three weeks ago?

But that's really silly, since I make sure to write something in my idea notebook every day! So I've decided that at least once a week, I'll go through my past entries from my idea notebook, and write about them here. Maybe then I can link to this site without feeling ashamed. :p

Expect a new post within a couple days!

How to make an origami hydralisk

Update:
I finally created a video tutorial for my origami hydralisk! :D



Guess what? You know those old origami hydralisk instructions I released last year - the ones that no one except maybe one or two people could figure out? Well, I finally managed to finish the fancy photo instructions that my frustrated fans have been begging for! Yes! :D Time to rejoice, I expect.

It goes by the simple title of How to make an origami hydralisk. Try it! In this interactive Flash package, there are almost a hundred photos detailing each step, and each intermediate fold as well. Plus there are several photos you can look at of the finished model, and an animation using all the images, so you can see a half an hour of folding condensed into about half a minute. There's a lot of good stuff to find in there.

To quote from the about page:
I came up with this origami hydralisk model in 2003. Eventually, in the summer of 2006, I finished drawing the instructions for it. In late October, I posted them on dA, and found that sadly, no one could decipher them. Darn. It was then suggested to me, repeatedly, that I release a new version of the instructions using photos instead. I got around to doing so on July 8, 2007, ending up with over a hundred photos to process. Over the summer, I added origami symbols and put this fancy Flash thing together. Now, on September 8, 2007, I am finally through with it!

Actually, make that 2:40 am on September 9, 2007. This has been something of a late-night project for me. :p

Before I go to bed, I'd like to thank the impatient people on deviantART for their constant nagging! They gave me the motivation I needed to struggle through this epic endeavor. ;)

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

Delicious Books!

Every so often I come across a book that every few pages makes me want to jump around, sing out for joy, and hug people! I have just finished reading such a book: A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink.

But there are plenty more I've read but haven't had a chance to really review or write about. Like these ones: (most recently read first)

• A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink

• Making Comics, by Scott McCloud

• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards

• Da Vinci Decoded, by Michael Gelb

• Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

• On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins

• Emotional Design, by Donald Norman

• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud

And then of course there's all the books I've listed on the right hand side of the page.

I've started reading The Arts and the Creation of Mind, by Elliot Eisner. Hopefully that will be another joyful experience for me. :)

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

Review of We Love Katamari

It's been a while since I last posted anything substantial, so I thought I'd share a review I wrote of the PS2 game We Love Katamari. It's about a year old. And long! :p

It's been two days since I last played We Love Katamari, and I'm already experiencing withdrawal symptoms. The theme song has been playing through my head constantly, and my hands ache for the touch of a virtual katamari. In my whole life, I've probably played the game for less than three hours, but We Love Katamari has still managed to leave its blocky, rainbow-colored mark imprinted on my brain.

First off, We Love Katamari is actually the sequel to the original Katamari Damacy, with much of the same graphics and gameplay. Katamari Damacy introduced the central idea of rolling a sticky katamari around to pick up miscellaneous objects and increase in size, beginning with a ball a few centimeters across and growing until you can pick up cars and buildings. The story in that game was that the King of All Cosmos had gotten drunk and destroyed all the stars in the universe, so he sends you, his son, to collect the raw materials for new stars. In a self-referential turn, the sequel We Love Katamari has it that the game Katamari Damacy is now so popular that now you have to appease your many fans by fulfilling their unusual katamari-related requests.

As you may have guessed, We Love Katamari is a very unusual game. The original game concept is very unique, and surprisingly fun. The blocky graphics and choppy, bright animation goes in a direction opposite the current trend in video games toward increasing graphical realism. The music, or at least the theme song, is annoying at first but really sticks in your head after a while. In fact, the whole game is kind of annoying at first. The first time I played it, I was quickly ready to move onto something more traditional. But now I can't get enough! I can assure you that I'd rather be playing We Love Katamari than any other game at this moment.

Okay, so let me start to get into the actual gameplay. Katamari is a very physical game. I have never played a video game that felt more like a real physical environment than this one. In fact, playing We Love Katamari feels a lot more real to me than does driving an actual car. The analog controls and the slight vibration when you bump over some obstacle, as well as the very dense spatial layout of the game world, all work together to produce a feeling of embodiment. It is a feeling I've missed in my life as a student, using my eyes always, but never reaching out and touching my surroundings and feeling them push back. (Actually, I am lucky to be training in Aikido, which unfortunately is only a few hours per week of concentrated tactile awareness.) For me, We Love Katamari brings back some of the feeling of integration with space, of rolling over and feeling the ground, using my hands to build with blocks and bricks.

At first, the game seems to involve little strategy, but in fact it is much deeper than it appears. When your katamari is small, you are restricted in what you can roll up. Bigger objects bounce you off, slowing you down and serving as obstacles. Later on, you may have accumulated a large enough clump to come back and pick up those former obstacles. Part of the game is about knowing what kinds of objects you can safely pick up and when, and then plotting the most efficient course through the area. Often your task will involve growing as large as possible in the shortest amount of time. Of course, in order to do all that, you must be coordinated enough to stick to your intended path, something which I am still working on. As I develop more confidence in my skill with the controls, I can keep my head up and look ahead for good routes to take in the future, and maybe attempt to get an idea of the layout of the entire space. However, the pace of the game is gradual enough that most of this knowledge will come intuitively just by playing over and over again.

One of the most interesting aspects of We Love Katamari is the continually changing scale. What at first might have been an obstacle to be avoided becomes a goody to by grabbed up. A house that once was your entire world is swallowed up in a few seconds as you roll through the neighborhood. I would guess that that was part of what made the original Katamari Damacy so appealing and interesting. It is very rare to see a game that has such a gradual but radical transformation of your playing space, but Katamari Damacy is a game that tells a story of the growth from a tiny ball picking up paperclips on top of a desk to a humongous, city-destroying monster. And all that without cutscenes in between!

Now We Love Katamari is not quite so epic. Many missions have you remain smaller than a house, depending on the strange desires of your rather ungrateful fans. This sequel provides more variety and structure into your tasks, only providing you with new missions once you have completed earlier ones. However, it is still fairly open-ended as there are usually a few different missions you may choose to attempt, and much of the game is spent playing on previous stages.

There are many incentives to replay an older area. For one thing, while the space stays the same every time you play, the individual objectives are switched around. (It is kind of like Super Mario 64, where each world has a number of different tasks to complete, which then give access to new worlds.) Also, there is a constant push to exceed the requirements of the task, because your spoiled fans express thinly veiled disappointment at the unimpressive size of your katamari or speed of your performance. The only way to gain total approval is to find the perfect, most efficient route through the space. Your pleased fans will give you presents of accessories with which to customize your character's appearance. This brings up another incentive for replaying: collection. The game keeps track of every single type of object you've picked up and allows you to browse through your collection and see pictures and amusing descriptions for each one. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of objects to find. So obsessive people might find themselves spending way too much time on this game.

I will now analyze We Love Katamari using Richard Garfield's framework. The game is mainly single-player, but there is also a two-player mode where you may compete with a friend in a race to complete the given objective first. Since both players are rolling around in the same space, there is some direct conflict between you and your opponent. The objects that you pick up are objects that your opponent doesn't get to pick up. Also, you may bump into or even roll up the other player directly. There is also a mode which involves two players, but they both work together to control one katamari. It is essentially a single-player mode with team dynamics.

Luck is an important part of the game even though all the play areas are the exact same every time, simply because much of the game is played while not knowing the complete location of every object. The outcome depends on whether you went here or there, if you took a plentiful route or not, and until you spend a long time replaying the mission to find the best paths, much of your success will depend on luck. On the other hand, skill is still important. The layouts are not so restrictive as to only allow a few effective routes; they are designed to let someone with a good practical understanding of the game do well on the first few tries. It does take some practice to get to that skill level though.

Part of the appeal of We Love Katamari is that the game heuristics are so clear. It is easy to tell how well you're doing - just see how big your katamari has grown, in qualitative or quantitative terms, as the diameter of the clump is displayed in meters besides being apparent on screen. As for what to do next, well just head for the nearest small object in range. You get immediate feedback on your actions as you roll up some object and hear a satisfying bloop and feel a buzz from the controller. Also, the heuristics do deepen as you gain more experience. You may learn that keeping your momentum going is more important than grabbing something just a little too far to the side, or start constructing plans beyond randomly wandering around and looking for goodies. However, assessing the game state becomes more complicated as well, since not only the size of your katamari but your position and configuration of the space around you also must be taken into account.

The length of a mission is usually only about five or ten minutes, since there is usually some time constraint involved in the task. This makes the game good for casual play when you want a quick diversion. However, the overall lifetime of the game can be quite long, especially when you take into account the collecting aspect and the competitive play mode. Also, the short length of missions means that a significant fraction of the time is spent as downtime, reading the inane dialogue preceding a mission or afterward. In the actual play of the game, however, there is practically no downtime at all.

There are other elements in Richard Garfield's framework, but they are not particularly interesting when applied to We Love Katamari, so I won't bother mentioning them.