For the last three years, I’ve been working on a PhD in design theory and game design, at IT University of Copenhagen’s Center For Computer Game Research. I ended up writing about some of the games I’ve been developing in my life as an indie, including Johann Sebastian Joust, B.U.T.T.O.N., and Dark Room Sex Game.

I finally finished the dissertation this year, and I’ll be giving my “defense” next week, in the form of a public lecture. My talk is going to get quite theoretical, but in case you’re into that sort of thing and will be in Copenhagen, feel free to attend. Abstract and details below!

When: May 15, 1pm
Where: IT University of Copenhagen, Auditorium 4

(More info here).

Abstract

Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation -or- How to make friends by trying to kick them!

In this dissertation I explore what it might mean to design games that aim to nurture a spirit of togetherness. My central claim is that games which are intentionally designed to be confrontational, broken, or otherwise “incomplete” can help inspire a decidedly festive, co-dependent, and performative type of play. Appropriating the political theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that her concepts of “action” and “plurality” provide useful definitions of performance and togetherness as they relate to gameplay. Drawing primarily on theories of embodied interaction, precedents from the contemporary art world, and various folk game movements, I grapple with the messy relationship between designed systems and sociocultural context. I describe how confronting this relationship head-on opens up fruitful design opportunities. Taking seriously Dave Hickey’s concept of “the pleasures of disputation,” I explore how we players and designers might transmute the acrimony of conflict into something joyful.

Research is important, that’s why we have neither spared expenses nor pain to do proper research for Mutazione on Hawai’i, even though we would rather be in cold and rainy Copenhagen right now. Here’s some footage from a walk we did yesterday on an abandoned road, the old Pali highway on Oahu.

Today we visited the Lyon Arboretum, an impressive botanical garden in Manoa Valley. I took hundreds of pictures, but here are two of my favorites, a beautiful tree and some decorative epiphytes.

Aloha from Oahu!

Nils and I are here in Hawaii on a work/vacation trip. Last week we drove around the Big Island, and this week we’re staying with my family friends in Lanikai.

The last few months have been extraordinarily busy for me. I submitted my PhD dissertation on March 1, and then the day after I left for GDC, where we had our hands quite full. So, it’s been great to finally escape to some relaxation – I really need it!

But this trip isn’t all vacation. We’ve come specifically to Hawaii to do some research for our upcoming action-adventure game, Mutazione. The game is going to be a character-driven “swamp soap opera” set in a strange tropical world. The game is originally Nils’ brainchild, and it’s very much driven by his illustrations. We just started production two months ago, so it’s still in the very early stages.

I don’t want to give away too much about the game right now, but what I will share is that Mutazione is going to centrally involve various ecosystems of tropical plant life. So for both Nils and I, it’s been hugely inspiring to hang out in a tropical environment. Here in Hawaii we’ve been spending a lot of time at botanical gardens and in the jungle. We’ve also started to read some biology textbooks on plants and mushrooms. We aren’t so interested in making some kind of biologically accurate simulation, but doing this kind of serious research does open up a lot of game design ideas, and helps Nils with his illustration work. Finding inspiration is important!

We’re also very excited that Alessandro Coronas, the sound designer behind Where is my Heart?, is working on the sound and music for Mutazione. It’s a shame he couldn’t join us here in Hawaii to soak in the jungle soundscapes, but fortunately he’s already been sending us some tasty sounds of his own. We can’t wait to share them with you all!

Stay tuned for more news. Meanwhile, enjoy this nice photo of Nils on the Saddle Road:

Nils and I are currently away on vacation, recovering after an extremely hectic week at the 2012 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. GDC week was a little too busy, but we nevertheless had a very enjoyable and productive trip!

I’ll write more about the trip soon, but for now I just wanted to share the one major piece of news:

Our game Johann Sebastian Joust won the “Innovation” award at the 2012 Game Developers Choice Awards!

We’re so honored and humbled! This award is particularly crazy because we were chosen over some AAA titles like Portal 2 and LA Noire. Wow!

It was a strong night for indie games more generally. Supergiant Games, the team behind Bastion, took home two awards, and Sword & Sworcery EP (by Capy Games and Superbrothers) won Best Handheld/Mobile Game. We’re big fans of both games, so it was an honor to be featured alongside them. I’m particularly proud that us indies are showing that we can indeed rub shoulders with the big guys!

Thanks to everyone out there for all the support! We’re still figuring out our release plans, but we hope to share Joust with you all soon. Stay tuned.

When? This Spring!

What? Our puzzle platformer game, Where is my Heart?

Where? Windows, Mac, and Linux!

Can you be more specific? Not yet, but stay tuned for more news!

And remember that the game is already out on PSN, for your PSP and PS3.

(Game journalists, drop us an email if you want to chat with us about the game at GDC next week.)

Exciting news from the factory!

We’re happy to announce that our friend Stephen Ascher has joined the Gute Fabrik team to work with us on our forthcoming action adventure “swamp opera” game, Mutazione. Stephen is going to take the role of Lead Programmer, but he’ll also be helping out on the design (on a team this small, everyone wears multiple hats).

Stephen lives in Montreal, Quebec, which means that we’re going to be working together remotely. But we hope to steal him away to Copenhagen, at least for the summer. I also secretly hope that this will give me an excuse to return to Montreal soon.

I first met Stephen this past Fall during my sabbatical in Montreal. Stephen is one of the guys who runs the Mount Royal Game Society and the annual Prince of Arcade exhibition. He and his co-organizer Nick went out of their way to welcome me to the city, and partly thanks to them I quickly got involved in the local game dev scene.

Then, in October, Stephen joined me for a field trip out to Ottawa, for one of the monthly Dirty Rectangles meetings. On the bus we got to chatting, and Stephen ended up showing me a bunch of his wacky Unity prototypes. On the ride back, we tried to jam on a small game together. We were too tired to make much progress, but from that night on I knew I wanted to work with the guy some more. And the rest is history!

Stephen will be hanging out with us at GDC next week, so if you’ve never met him before, make sure to come find us and introduce yourself!

Thanks to a recommendation from my friend Mike, I recently finished reading The Master of Go (1951) by Yasunari Kawabata, a famous Japanese author and Nobel laureate. The book, though semi-fictional (some of the names and details have been changed), follows the story of a famous game of Go from 1938, between the Go master Shusai Meijin and his younger challenger, Kitani Minoru.

I know a little bit about Go, but my grasp of the game’s subtleties is rather tenuous. Nevertheless, Kawabata’s book was still very enjoyable! A deep understanding of Go might provide some additional color to the story, but it certainly isn’t necessary. The book is primarily a character portrait, as well as a chronicle of a specific subculture and a specific time in history (keep in mind that in 1938, World War 2 was looming close on the horizon). Kawabata overarching argument seems to be that the Meijin-Minoru game marks a fundamental shift in how Go was played (at least in Japan). The end of an era, so to speak.

The book is an easy read, and I imagine that most game designers will find it rewarding. For the discerning reader, The Master of Go offers some useful lessons about game design and game culture more generally.

Typically, we tend to think about Go as the shining exemplar of “elegant” game design. It features a simple ruleset, yet also boasts mind-bogglingly complex strategic depth. There’s certainly some truth to that evaluation. But if Kawabata’s tale has anything to teach us, it’s that any competitive game – even Go – is necessarily riddled with awkward ambiguities.

The climax of story, at least as Kawabata tells it, revolves around Minoru’s (Black) controversial move #121. To understand why Black 121 was so controversial – and indeed, even reviled by some – you need to understand three things about the Meijin-Minoru game. First, the game spanned several months. Between each session, the players would break for several days. Second, each player was given a limited amount of total time (40 hours) to contemplate their moves (note that Minoru came close to using up all his time). Third and most importantly, the Meijin-Minoru game was played with a tournament rule that was relatively new at the time (as far as I understand it) – that of the “sealed play.” The sealed play requires that the final move of each session remain unannounced. Instead, it is written down and sealed inside an envelope. The idea behind the sealed play is that neither player should get the break period (several days) to contemplate their counter-move.

Black 121 was precisely such a sealed play. In fact, the move was so unexpected that the game’s announcer, upon opening the envelope, literally had trouble locating it on the chart. For those of you who actually understand Go, here’s a diagram of the infamous moment:

“2″ in the above diagram is the infamous Black 121

Instead of playing in the current battle zone in the bottom-right quadrant, Minoru (Black) used his sealed play in the upper-left quadrant. The move was such that it required Meijin (White) to respond in the same quadrant of the board, away from the main action. In essence, Minoru had taken advantage of the sealed play, giving himself several days of extra time (off the clock!) to contemplate what he would do in the region of the board that actually mattered. (Someone correct me if I botched that explanation!)

Meijin (the Master) responded quickly with White 122, without showing much emotion. But during the lunch break, Meijin expressed his true anger, revealing that he had been on the verge of forfeiting (in protest). According to Kawabata, Meijin had exclaimed: “It was like smearing ink over the picture we had painted.” Kawabata, taking Meijin’s side, recounts that he had felt “a wave of revulsion” upon realizing what Minoru had done. Like the Master, Kawabata sees the game of Go as a work of art:

“The Master had put the match together as a work of art. It was as if the work, likened to a painting, were smeared black at the moment of highest tension. That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the forms of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony as of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary. That Black 121 having been a source of wonder and surprise and doubt and suspicion for us all, its effect in cutting the flow and harmony of the game cannot be denied.”

From there, the story takes another interesting turn. Right before the lunch break, Meijin had played White 130. As it turns out, that move would prove to be the fatal mistake that would eventually lose him the game. Kawabata theorizes that the Master, in his outrage over Black 121, had lost his presence of mind, leading him to make a critical error just nine moves later. We’ll never know the truth of course, but Minoru’s trick certainly casts a certain “shadow” over the game.

Was Minoru “wrong” to play Black 121? Can we indeed call it an “ugly” move?

Perhaps Kawabata’s judgment is not so fair. Interestingly, a number of Meijin’s and Minoru’s contemporaries comment that the time was ripe for precisely such a tactical maneuver. Moreover, some have argued that the Master was notorious for similar such tricks. Arguably, Minoru had simply given Meijin a taste of his own medicine.

Videogame designer David Sirlin, in his book Playing to Win, writes against the notion of the “cheap” move. Sirlin argues that the point of competitive games is to play to win, and that any move is fair as long as it falls within the agreed-upon rules: “The game knows no rules of ‘honor’ or of ‘cheapness.’ The game only knows winning and losing.” As Sirlin sees it, good players respond not by complaining about “cheap” tactics, but by searching for a counter-strategy. He admits that in rare cases, some moves might be so powerful that they do “break the game.” But he claims that these cases are very rare, and that players should, as a rule of thumb, assume that any tactic is fair and continue playing.

Sirlin certainly makes a compelling argument. The problem, however, is that his perspective assumes that the rules are indeed agreed upon and unambiguous. In Meijin’s defense, we might point out that he was playing a different game than he had thought he was playing. Admittedly, using Sirlin’s reasoning one might counter-argue that Meijin can only blame himself for assenting to the sealed play the first place. But whether or not we should “blame” Meijin, Kawabata’s larger point still stands: “New rules bring new tactics.” In adding a new rule to make the game more “fair,” the officials had also changed the very game itself. It wasn’t the same game that Meijin had grown up playing.

The question, therefore, isn’t simply whether Black 121 was “cheap,” but also what changes we should (or shouldn’t) make to existing games. When we add new rules and regulations, how do we change the culture around that game? For Meijin and Kawabata, Go symbolized an entire way of life, both literally and figuratively. We can at least understand why they would feel sad to see that culture transform. Change can be difficult.

Moreover, both Meijin and Kawabata seem to be arguing that winning isn’t actually everything. Romantic or not, their claim seems to be that the “old” culture of Go valued the aesthetics of play, not just the result. Obviously, this argument is somewhat problematic (again, see this contemporary discussion of the controversy). But personally, I can’t help but feel a little sympathetic to that point of view.

If we believe that the beauty of play is indeed located in the back-and-forth between well-matched opponents (see Bernie DeKoven’s work on the Well-Played Game, or Dave Hickey’s famous essay on Julius Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), then it’s crucial that the games both players think they are playing actually match one another. Possibly, the Master would have insisted on different rules (for example, less total time) if he had known that Minoru would play with such tactics. Arguably, Meijin had already sealed his fate before the first move was even made.

In fact, Black 121 is not the only point of contention during the Meijin-Minoru game. Throughout the story, unexpected issues arise. For instance, when Meijin falls seriously ill, the organizers pressure Minoru into assenting to a modified play schedule. At times, Minoru feels like the Master is failing to live up to the “contract” of how the game is supposed to be played. At one point, he himself comes close to quitting (ragequitting!) altogether.

Sirlin is therefore a little too idealistic when he writes that “There’s no weaseling out of defeat by redefining what the game is.” Whether we like it or not, there is always a certain degree of gamesmanship in negotiating how, where, and when the game should be played. This applies not only to tabletop games like Go, but also to computer games. My adviser T.L. Taylor writes about how even a game like StarCraft runs up against rule ambiguities and thorny tournament disputes. As T.L. phrases it, rule negotiation is a “consistent feature” of computer gaming. Total systemization is a myth; it is impossible.

For us game designers, the takeaway lesson is this: new rules and regulations might fix some problems, but inevitably they introduce new ones too. Of course, this isn’t to say that we should necessarily shy away from altering existing games. But Kawabata’s tale does usefully remind us that even a seemingly minor alteration can change the entire culture of a game. Sometimes change is inevitable, but it’s at least worth contemplating carefully.

Here’s a postcard of us Jousting in the factory offices! That’s Nils, Ida, me, and our friend Ricky Haggett, who was nice enough to come visit us at the factory. Right, Ricky? It’s always nice to Joust to an oceanside view.

Nils just prepared that graphic for my new business card. I’m excited to share it at GDC this year!

18-player Johann Sebastian Joust! Yup, we made it happen.

Three armies of six face off in an epic battle. And there’s an additional twist – there’s one traitor lurking on each team! The traitors, though they don’t know who each other are, comprise a secret fourth team. A small rumble at the beginning of the round tells you if you are a traitor. It’s kind of like J.S. Joust meets the famous parlor game Mafia.

The suggestion to introduce backstabbing to the game came from my friend Manveer Heir. Partially inspired by some scenes from Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, I decided it would be more “epic” to have three colored armies, rather than an 18-person free-for-all. Actually, I’ve been joking about calling the installation “Johann Sebastian Bushido.”

Running a game with 18 Move controllers isn’t trivial. Not only do you have to track down that many controllers (luckily, my friends and I were able to pool together 25 of them), but you also have to overcome some Bluetooth hurdles. One computer can only connect about 7 to 9 controllers.

Fortunately, my friend Thomas Perl – the mastermind behind the PS Move API (upon which Joust is based) – was in town for this year’s Nordic Game Jam. Thomas wrote some code to network together three OSX laptops over LAN. Two client computers simply relay commands back and forth between their connected controllers and a master computer. We had actually developed this new technology for a brand new installation game that features 20+ Move controllers (I’ll write something about that game in an upcoming blog post), but we decided to first test it with Joust. Luckily, Thomas had abstracted away all the network code behind his existing API, so all I had to do was add the traitor mechanic and a few other small tweaks.

At about 4am on the Saturday night of the game jam, we rounded up a bunch of fellow jammers and gave it a whirl. Thomas’ new code was surprisingly stable, and the game itself was a blast! There was this one moment where I pushed a guy into two of his team-mates, taking out all three in one glorious triple-kill (you can see it in the video above). Ace!

In theory, given enough controllers and OSX laptops, we could scale up the number of players indefinitely. At some point, however, the game will start suffering from Bluetooth interference. But it’s not clear how many controllers it would take to reach that point. My guess is we could at least manage a 40-player game. Some day, I hope!

I may try to run the 18-player (or more?!) version at GDC this year. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with one last video – the very first game we played, actually. This round is especially exciting because it ends with my friend Rami Ismail defeating me with a shoe-throw. Well played, Rami, well-played.

Also see this lovely (OK, cheeky) play-by-play commentary by Chris Watters.

Thanks again to GameSpot for a very amusing video!