‘Blog’
You Are GO!: We Were WENT
Thursday, July 7th, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, Simon, Ivan and I went to Berlin for You Are GO!, Berlin’s amazing pervasive games festival. This is our writeup of what happened – and, due warning, it’s pretty long. There were an awful lot of games, you see…
Simon’s report:
Pieces of Berlin
Arriving after a slightly calamitous and stressful journey from London – it’s a long story – I went in search of a relaxing game that would let me take in some of the city. Pieces of Berlin by Erik Burke and Lynn Maharas is just such a game. Using beautifully crafted acetates containing fragments of photographed sites in the city, with the remainder rendered in line drawing, the game exploits Berlin’s stunning plethora of graffiti and street art. Essentially it’s a treasure hunt where you find a location matching a particular acetate and line up the image with the real graffiti to reveal a missing symbol that leads you to the next location. My teammate Dan and I raced against three other teams for a prize of chocolate. In practice the pace was quite sedate, we never broke a sweat and quite happily rolled into the finish line twenty minutes ahead of the others. Victory, a nice stroll and free chocolate: what more could I want?
Tiny Urban Game
Well, the next day I awoke with an urge for some serious strategic play and Invisible Playground’s Tiny Urban Game was there to oblige. Inspired by the legendary Big Urban Game , T.U.G. has a simultaneously witty, mind crunching, ‘curses why didn’t I think of that!,’ type mechanic which cleverly uses the timings of the pedestrian crossings on a single intersection. Four teams battle it out to keep control point of scoring territories marked in chalk on the pavement, via the placing of a limited amount small coloured markers within them. The catch is that only one team can occupy one section of pavement at any one time and of course you can only cross the road on a green man. My team suffered at the hands of a dastardly strategy from the green team who used timings of the crossings to control two pavements and block us into a lower scoring one.
Pingus
Now it was time for my offering, Pingus. Having been played at several Sandpits and also IgFest, this is a well seasoned game, but Berlin’s unpredictable weather provided a new twist. In the game, two teams take it in turns to be environmentalists who try to save a breed of suicidal penguins, i.e. the other team, who stubbornly walk forward no matter what obstacles lay ahead. Normally Penguins die by colliding with lamp posts, trees etc. but as the heavens opened I was forced to introduce a new rule whereby Penguins also died if they got wet leading to a satisfactory spectacle of environmentalists scuttling around with numerous umbrellas.
Asteroids
The finale of the festival was Asteroids, a collaboration between the Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra and hosts Invisible Playground. I didn’t get to play this game as it was full up but it was just as entertaining to watch. The orchestra really was an orchestra, with twenty or so musicians comprising rhythm section, horns, strings, and even a harp. They played a bizarre mixture of 1950’s big band, sci-fi-esque references and avant-garde improvisation all seamlessly packaged in original arrangements. After about ten minutes or so of playing the orchestra settled into a spooky loop of music and the game began. This consisted of a number of players roaming around with speakers each of which had a section of the orchestra’s music quietly playing. Many other players had to find matching speakers for which they would get points. After a certain period of time the band would pipe up again for another interlude before the next round of play. This was a highly successful fusion between music performance and game ending the festival on a high note (pardon the appalling pun).
Ivan’s report:
Bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived I stumbled through Berlin on a damp Saturday afternoon searching for You Are GO! As two men ran past, holding cardboard structures, shouting something in German about a bomb getting wet – I knew I was close…
Hounded
Although this was an international festival, spanning several continents, the first game I played that evening had a distinctly English feel. Bristol based SlingShot (of igfest fame) put on a foxhunting, tweed-wearing, trail-sniffing extravaganza entitled Hounded. As a fox I had to traipse the streets of Berlin with my team (skulk?) of five other foxes, sniffing pre laid out scent boards (small square foam bards smelling of bubblegum, wood smoke and fish amongst other things) – at the end of each trail was a word that we texted in to gain points. Easy enough, right? Well, in theory yes, but add the danger of dogs chasing you (they had real German shepherds) and it all changes. Once caught (losing your tail will cost you 10 points) you yourself would become a hound and have to catch other foxes (gaining a princely sum of 5 points per tail caught). OutFoxed, our witty-ish team name, were great trail-sniffers, and although we avoided capture until 10 minutes before the game finished we didn’t do too well over all. It appeared that other foxes who were more cunning in their plans, which included early self-sacrifice in order to catch other foxes… This was a brilliant game that tugged on our basic survival instincts, kicking off my festival experience with theatricality, heart-pounding moments and cardboard foxtails.
Shadowplay
A relaxed evening of food, drinks and international merriment was enhanced by a number of drop-in and play games that were taking place in and around the bar. The largest of these was delivered by the aptly named Gigantic Mechanic with Shadowplay, which was projected onto a huge outdoor screen for all to see. Standing in front of the projector the players cast shadows onto the screen, attempting to cover flying green spots for a few seconds until they grew and burst – the more spots you burst at the same time, the higher your points – but watch out for those pesky blue spots which if burst will cost you one of your three lives. There was lots of tactical shadow construction including the use of coats, skirts and umbrellas to aid the process. Not only was it addictive to play, but also to watch, sat in the bar on the other side of the screen.
Feromon
Before we took to the streets with Stag Hunt, I had just enough time to become a food-carrying ant in Feromon by Viktor Bedő. In a small leafy forest, a mere two-minute walk from the You Are GO! base, a group of us was split into two ant colonies, and on the sound of clacking wood were told to set off in search for food. It was a lovely, gentle game which saw everyone moving from tree to tree each time the wooden blocks were struck (attempting to avoid the other colony’s warrior ants that would paralyse you for three turns). Upon finding food you had to mark your journey back to the base with a trail of chalk powder on the floor, which created some beautiful patterns.
Holly’s report:
Gentrification: the Game
The first game I was involved in, on the Friday night, was Atmosphere Industries’ Gentrification: the Game. I didn’t play – instead I was a judge, taking the part of the local art critic and assessing the chalk drawings and neighbourhood spirit of different teams. (See the picture above for my best art-critic stance.)
I knew quite a lot about this game – it had run at the 2010 Hide&Seek Weekender, in fact – but I’d never actually seen it played before. Four teams (two of “locals”, two of “developers”) set about improving or protecting their neighbourhood, claiming properties, hosting parades, creating street art and scrawling massive chalk circles across the footpaths. It was great to see it in action, but the thing that fascinated me most wasn’t the gameplay: it was the explanation, the bit before everyone set off.
Gentrification is a pretty complicated game, by street-game standards! There’s a lot of rules to grasp, and strategies to discern from the way those rules interconnect. And players of street games can be extremely, even notoriously, short of attention: you can count of them to listen for a couple of minutes, sure, but after that, who knows? The explanation for Gentrification ran closer to ten minutes, and that’s not counting the extra elements that were introduced after the first round – but the game worked brilliantly, maybe because (again, really unusually for a pervasive game) it was long, close to two hours. By the end the players were strategising and plotting and asking if they could play for even longer. It’s made me think about games outside the half-hour or hour-long time-slot that the form encourages, and asking people for an extra investment of attention in return for a type of play that they couldn’t have without it.
Crossboccia
Crossboccia is a charming play-anywhere version of boules/boccia/petonque, with gorgeously-patterned beanbag balls that go thwonk when you throw them. The idea of a ball game that you play while wandering around the city isn’t new – there are any number of golf-in-the-streets variants, the lovely Bocce Drift, and so on. But this is the first one I’m aware of that’s not just a game, but also a product. You can buy Crossboccia sets, and they feel like the sort of thing you’d pick up in a Toys R Us, or even a Waterstones game section. It’s fascinating to see a pervasive game that feels so mainstream, and although I don’t think Crossboccia has the level of ubiquity its design hints at yet, it makes it clear that it’s possible.
Hold the Line
Cross the Line was another of Invisible Playground’s games. Players scuttle between trees, trying to pick up the sound of codewords transmitted by radio from each one, all the while dodging an enormous spotlight that was moving regularly around the playing space. If the light hits you, you’re out. If you collect all six codewords and get back to safety, you’ve won.
It’s delightful for a lot of reasons, and great to see a real-world implementation of the “avoid a regular patrol / danger zone / etc” mechanic that’s so common in video games. (Invisible Playground have investigated the same area in their game from a couple of years ago, F Be I, See I A). But mostly it’s great because it involved a thonking enormous spotlight, whooshing around a park in the dark, right next to a still-open slightly-drunken art exhibition, at midnight. Berlin is, it turns out, wonderful.
Johann Sebastian Joust
The Copenhagen Game Collective’s Johann Sebastian Joust is almost impossibly good and straightforward and beguiling. Six players, each with a Move controller glowing a gentle pastel, try to keep their controllers steady and slow-moving, while trying to nudge other players’ controllers – or the players themselves. When a controller moves too fast, it flickers red, and the player holding it is out. Last player left is the winner.
It takes two or three minutes to play, and the rules are so, so easy to grasp – watch a game or two and that’s enough. Players drop out and just hand their controller on to someone else, who plays a few games and hands it on – there’s a constant organic flow, and the designers never have to tell anyone the rules, because they’re communicated so neatly just by watching and by players inducting the player who’s replacing them.
Mehringplatz Tron is a gorgeous game, that fits so beautifully into the Mehringplatz (pictured above – the place where it ran) that it’s almost frustrating: I’ll never get to play it anywhere else.
Two teams don headphones; one team’s glow with red LEDs, the other with green. Players distribute themselves around the wide circle of the Mehringplatz, and then walk: anticlockwise for red, clockwise for green. If you meet a player of the opposite colour, you bounce off each other and change direction – unless one of you steps aside, in which case the stepper-aside has to wait until a gong sounds on their headphones before they walk on. The aim is just to get around the circle – and to be on the team that gets the most people around before the game ends.
The most interesting things about this are, for me:
- How it relies entirely on the asynchronicity of the mp3 players – if they were in time, it wouldn’t work, because everyone’s gong noises would come simultaneously;
- How the fact that it’s dark and everyone’s glowing and you’re listening to music acts to make people feel far less self-conscious – at least half the players would, after stepping aside, dance on the spot while waiting for the gong to sound;
- How such a tiny, tiny choice – should I step aside or not? – built up into a whole game, with shifting dynamics and hope and strategising and frustration and triumph.
Of all the games I played, it’s the one that’s made me think the most about what sort of pervasive games I want to design next; the enormous, almost bewildering simplicity of it, and the complexity that arose, is fascinating.
The One and Cowgirl Cowhunt
These two games both came from Catherine Herdlick and Gabe Smedresman, and though they were very different in terms of story and mechanics – in The One, you’re a warrior trying to destroy and control alternate versions of yourself from different universes; in Cowgirl Cowhunt, you’re a cow trying to find grass to eat – there were a few really interesting threads that ran through both of them:
- They both had simple lovely costumes for different roles that communicated important information about how players should behave – for example as a cow in Cowgirl Cowhunt, I had a cow mask that restricted my vision, and earplugs that muffled the world. The mask wasn’t just to let other people know I was playing, and what I was doing; it directly affected my experience of the game.
- They both had rulesets that fit onto teeny-tiny A6 pieces of paper – one-sided, as well; German on one side and English on the other
- Both of them had different roles for different players – and each type of player only knew as much as they needed to. As a cow, I didn’t really know what the cowgirls or rustlers were about, and I didn’t need to. As the surviving me from my set of universes, I didn’t know what the mes I’d conquered were tasked with, and again, I didn’t need to.
The seamless fitting-together of different roles into games that were fun and easy-to-grasp for everyone was pretty amazing.
Stag Hunt
And finally, almost at the end of the festival, we ran a version of the good old Soho Stag Hunt, the pervasive game I helped design back in the Earlye Dayes of 2007. This time we added an evil stag, as pioneered by Tim Sweetser and Obscure Games Pittsburgh. It was lovely as always to see people running around waving balloons and chasing after smartly-dressed stags, but I won’t go into details – all I really wanted was an excuse to post the picture above of Simon and Ivan as the good and bad stags, respectively.
(All pictures from Invisible Playground.)
GDOET: Buttons Redux
Thursday, June 30th, 2011
My latest column is up over at Kill Screen. It’s a follow-up to the first column, and concludes my look at buttons.
This time, we’re looking at the buttons of dedicated controllers – from rhythm-action games and beat-em-ups, to the way they’ve influenced the hardware of modern DJs.
What’s perhaps most important, then, is the lessons that the brief experience of a plastic electric guitar teaches: the way gamers become educated to the expectations and demands of interfaces. Even if players, ultimately, happily return to their DualShocks, they return with a much deeper, more tactile understanding of the relationship between player and button.
You can read “Buttons Redux” over at Kill Screen.
Photograph by benjibuls
Being There, Playing There
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
We’re very pleased to announce we’ve signed up an exceptional academic advisor for an R&D project we’re putting together. Andy Clark, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the cutting edge of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. His work explains the roles our bodies, the tools and structures we build, and the environments we live and play in, have in ‘mental’ processes we usually think of as taking place entirely inside the head.
In our brave new world of whole-body game controllers, pervasive technology, cheap robots and games everywhere, Andy’s thinking, and the brand of brain and mind sciences he explains, is becoming more and more relevant to understanding ourselves and our daily lives. His books, from Being There: Putting Brain, Body And World Together Again (MIT Press, 1997) to Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford University Press, 2008), are essential reading and have been a great inspiration for us here at Hide&Seek.
Our R&D project with Andy is currently under wraps while we’re talking to some commercial partners. Suffice to say we’re exceedingly excited about it and sometime soon we’ll be getting you involved.
Find out more about Andy’s academic work.
What We’re Playing: May 2011
Thursday, June 9th, 2011
It’s June, which means it’s time for another round-up of what everybody in the studio’s been in the past month. Which is May, and this has slipped a bit. And so:
Alex:
I’ve been playing Speedball II on my iPhone [App Store link], and golf with my Dad. Both were massive exercises in nostalgia – both games I played a lot as a teenager – and both seriously competitive…
Speedball II is a nice conversion but feels like a disappointment – although I’ve only played the single player mode so far and all my memories of it are from the 2-player mode. The design and the layout don’t quite work – you don’t get quite enough warning before you get tackled and it’s strange and interesting that you can purchase game currency by making an in-app payment: very logical in terms of the business model for apps but I took strongly against it – I think because it offended my teenage Amiga-owning self somehow.
As for golf, well: it’s a game that gets a terrifically bad press but it’s just a fantastic game. The feedback system is baked into the level design in a very beautiful way. Plus, you get to go outside and walk around, but you can be quite unfit or quite young, or quite old. I’ve been playing it with my Dad my whole life – and the game’s structure is sufficiently well worked out that we’ve been enjoying genuinely competitive games with one another that whole time (the old swine managed to pull back a 2-hole deficit to square the match on the last). There is a huge amount in golf that’s very important to me as a game designer.
Sophie:
I’m lucky enough to have a tiny commute – four stops on the tube – so the genre I play most is ‘puzzle games you can play for five minutes that make you forget you are being elbowed in the face’. Spirits fulfils those criteria perfectly.
The graphics and gameplay are sweet and dreamy – like an out-take from Princess Mononoke – and the pace is gentle. You usher restless forest spirits to their final resting place, transforming some into leaf ladders or tunnel borers to save the rest, and creating breezes to lift little ghosts upwards through arrangements of tangled roots. It’s just challenging enough to keep you playing, and is a lovely place to spend some time away from the Central Line.
Chris:
It was raining last Sunday, so I dug out the SNES and started playing F-Zero again. Hugely nostalgic (Death Wind II, anybody?), and still really playable. The circuit design and the way the vehicles corner is everything. What could be more satisfying than dipping off the power, leaning into a corner with a shoulder button, just clipping the apex (getting nicely electrocuted in the process), and then powering quickly back up to the full speed of 478 KPH?
It’s got an interesting scoring system. You compete in series of five grands prix, but no points are awarded; the objective is merely to complete each race in the top three. Fail to finish in the top three and you lose a life, lose all your lives and you have to start all over again from the first race. This can give odd/annoying results. You can come 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 4th and lose, but come 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd and win. It feels as though the scoring’s based on a platformer, in that it’s not how well you play, it’s just about limping to the finish. Still, it does mean you can’t win without being at least reasonably consistent, even on the more difficult tracks.
I can’t work out which is more lurid: the all-fluorescent colour scheme or the soundtrack – but either are sufficient to make my wife leave the room.
The best bit of the whole experience was connecting the RF cable to the TV via the RF switcher. Yeah, that’s right: I don’t have to unplug the SNES when I want to watch a VHS, I’ve got a switch.
Holly:
I went down to Herne Bay last weekend, and was amazed by the Telly-Go-Round. It’s a… well, it’s not totally clear what it is. It’s a thing, a big oblong thing, and it sits by the end of the pier. You put in a coin – any coin – to make a roulette-style wheel spins around; then a little ball bounces around the wheel, and settles eventually on the name of a character from children’s television. There’s a quick flare of music, and a part of the contraption rotates to reveal, briefly, a dancing model of that character.
It’s entirely bemusing, and obviously entirely luck-based, but it’s
also really great, because:
- It doesn’t care what type of coin you put in – a pound, a penny, an Australian five cent piece, it all works. So people (especially children) who want to try over and over again can give it twenty goes for 20p if they’re so minded. (Plus the money goes to charity, so you can fool yourself that you’re being benevolent).
- If you time your coins right – and I didn’t realise this until I saw a small practiced girl playing – then you can keep more than one character dancing at a time, and get eight or ten of the windows open.
- There’s a JACKPOT on the wheel – and if you get the jackpot, every single character turns around and dances, music plays, a tiny model merry-go-round spins on top, and a train crammed with more characters drives out from the back. The jackpot delights and rewards everyone around, not just the player who put in the coin – but that player still gets to feel a bit special and responsible for the triumph.
Andrew:
Robokill, as the name suggests, is a game about a robot that kills other robots with an ever growing array of weaponry. The player takes a birds eye view of the game space, moves from room-to-room and is met with a new challenge (which always involves things to shoot) in each room. The challenges include different types of robots, mines, boxes and the risk of falling of the edge to your doom.
The game rewards players for killing things by giving them currency which can be spent in the shop on guns, rocket launchers, shields and more guns. The increasing level of difficulty from room-to-room kept me hooked for a while, and I became a cropper a few times by falling of the edge in one of the rooms. I also like the fact that you can choose your route through the rooms on each level, rather than it being dictated to you.
The controls take 4 or 5 plays to get really used to, and there is the occasional frustration that comes from blocking your view of the game that is inherent with touch screen game controls on such a small screen (would like to try the game on the iPad). However, once you do get comfortable, they are responsive and you can get much satisfaction blasting the advancing enemy into Robodust.
The other massive frustration is that I am stuck. I have cleared 24 rooms in Level 4, and need a key to progress. But I can’t find the damn key… anywhere. I have been back through each room twice, which is incredibly dull because now there is nothing to shoot, and there is definitely no key. A brief sortie on Google has revealed that another player has encountered a similar problem. The feedback seems to suggest that this is either just a bug, and if you re-start the level it will correct itself, or that it is a little test planted by the developers (keys can be used to open doors and treasure chests and perhaps the developers have put in less keys on the level than the total of chests and doors combined) and if you have used your keys too early you will need to re-start the level.
Either way, I can’t be arsed.
Tom:
The first or second proper computer game I remember having – as opposed to lots of shareware odds and ends – was Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia. It turns out to have been both a formative experience and constant companion in my gaming life ever since. And it’s a big reason I’m fond of running-and-jumping games.
As running-and-jumping games go, Outland [XBLA/PSN download] is cracking. The running and jumping mechanics alone are really good: just weighty enough, really physical, satisfying to hit a flow state in. They’re coupled to a lovely, expansive, explore-em-up, similar to Shadow Complex, Symphony of the Night, Super Metroid, and that whole church of games (which I adore). The artwork’s cracking, too, mainly created from silhouette with hints of colour – predominantly blue, red, gold, and green – leaking through. It’s very beautiful.
On top of the Metroidvania trappings, it then adds a massive helping of danmaku influence: glorious, hellish, beautiful bullet patterns, and a colour-swapping mechanic lifted almost directly from Ikaruga – only this time, not only does your colour affect your ability to damage enemies and resist bullets… it also affects the platforms you can use and parts of the environment you can interact with.
And so you dart from platform to platform, toggling colour in air as you leap from red surface to blue, fighting off enemies, and hammering the colour-swap button as you splash through fountains of red and blue bullets. It’s incredibly satisfying when all the systems are firing at once – which usually comes in the boss fights, which combine platforming, combat, and bullet-hell in tightly confined spaces.
Physicsy, bullety, running and jumping: it’s a perfectly videogamey videogame.
Two Upcoming Sandpits!
Monday, June 6th, 2011
It’s been a while since the last Sandpit, our irregular playing and playtesting event for trying out new game ideas. But we’ve now got not one but two Sandpits just around the corner – and this time they might, for the first time ever, even involve some actual sand, because they’re both themed around the sea.
The first will be on the afternoon of Sunday 17 July, at the National Maritime Museum, with games inspired by voyages and the sea; and the second in Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Centre, on Thursday 4 August, as part of a collection of seaside-themed Festival of Britain celebrations. Both events will be free.
If you’ve ever thought you might want to try your hand at running a game at a Sandpit, now’s the time to get in touch. Email holly@hideandseek.net for a copy of the call for game ideas, and to get more detail about how it all works. And if you’d rather just play, stay tuned for more details about the games, coming up over the next few weeks!
Picture by 55thstreet
Hinterland Scratch at BAC
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
Following on from our collaboration on last year’s London Poetry Game, we’re joining forces with Ross Sutherland on a new poetry / game hybrid. Close followers of last year’s project will be pleased to note that we’re bringing even more poetry and even more game. Hinterland is about the space that appears when we speak languages that aren’t our mother tongue. And maybe also a bit about how rubbish so many of us tend to be at speaking languages other than English.
The full shebang is going to debut at this year’s Forest Fringe in Edinburgh, and in preparation for that BAC have generously offered us a week’s residency to try some things out. So, two things to look out for! We’ll be posting up some poetic games for you all to play that week, and at BAC on Friday 17th at 8.30pm there will be an informal sharing of the work we’ve done so far, with an emphasis on the word ‘informal’.
More info and pay-what-you-can tickets available here.
Green Lantern Fans help out in Astrophysics research
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
As part of our work on the Green Lantern campaign, we’ve created studytheskies.com. It’s the fruit of a partnership with Warner Bros. and Oxford University to bring hardcore astrophysics and superhero movie fans together.
The Zooniverse is a set of citizen science projects which lets internet users analyse photographic data generated by some of the world’s largest telescopes. The telescopes have generated hundreds of thousands of images – far more than any team of researchers could hope to check. Users log in and use a simple set of tools to spot important features: the shape of galaxies, or the location of craters on the moon. The aggregate data from the massed ranks of internet amateur astronomers is then passed back to research teams for analysis.
The Milky Way Project one of the Zooniverse’s latest ventures. In it, users analyse photographs from the Spitzer Space Telescope, maintained by Nasa, orbiting the earth. The particular feature people are looking for in these is photographs are ‘bubbles’ produced by the formation of stars. They manifest in the photographs as green rings. Yes, that’s GREEN RINGS. Which, as you’re all Green Lantern experts by now, you’ll know ties in perfectly with the backstory of the movie.
So, fans who have been following the intriguing narrative being played out at NewtonAstronomers.com have gained access to the telescope and have already classified thousands of images using a customised interface, earning rewards from characters from the world of the movie. And fans who aren’t taking part in that strand of activity can access a simpler version at studytheskies.com.
We’re delighted that Warner Bros have been so supportive of this element of the campaign – it feels great to be helping scientists in their work.
Programming Games
Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
In a meeting last week, I wrote CARNAGE HEART in giant letters in my notebook. I forget why – but it’s how I ended up thinking about “games about programming”, in its loosest possible sense.
Do you remember Carnage Heart?
I don’t blame you if you don’t. From the outside, it looks like Another Japanese Mecha Game. In fact, Artdink’s 1995 title was one of the most marvellously strange strategy games of the nineties. In it, you command armies of mechs – “Overkill Engines” – on the moons of Jupiter.
Except you don’t take direct control of them. Instead, as well as the usual mech-construction and resource management… you have to program them. You’re responsible for both hardware and software. Once you’ve programmed them, they enter battle, and you have to watch as your crudely constructed AI walks in circles and jumps every time it gets hit by a missile.
Of course, this is a game, not work, so it’s not like you program them in a language that requires typing. Oh no; Carnage Heart uses a system of “chips” to create a spatial programming language.
Like that. It’s a grid, that executes from the top-left until a signal leaves the board; usually, signals follow a green arrow, until they meet the conditions of a chip, at which point they fork and follow a red arrow. The spatial constraint means that subroutines become areas on the board, re-used again and again as code “flows” back into them. The twenty-four minute video tutorial that came with the game is still available to watch online. (And, if you want to play it, it’s surprisingly easy to track down – whilst the PS2 and PSP sequels only came out in Japan, the original came out in both Europe and North America, and can easily be found on eBay).
Anyhow. When I thought about that, I thought about the long chain of games that are really about programming, and it felt like a list worth collecting.
The obvious precursor to Carnage Heart starts with RobotWar family of games: games about programming virtual robots to fight in real programming languages. Although RobotWars used a dedicated language for it, it quickly evolved into CRobots (based around the C language) and onwards into projects like RoboCode. All are built around the same principle: a “robot” is a single file that uses a stripped-down instruction-set enabling it to move, shoot, and scan its radar. All robots are “built” equally; their only differentiator is the AI you program for them. And then: you load up the arena with all manner of .c files, and watch them fight.
It teaches some tough lessons about AI programming – after all, if your “clever” code is being beaten by a robot that does nothing more than walk forward, shoot, and turn 90º if it doesn’t hit anything… surely you’d be better writing something simpler?
The *Robots genre even moved – a little – into the mainstream with titles like Maxis’ RoboSport, which was more GUI-driven and much more user friendly, but the same basic game.
Enough fighting robots. There are now two directions we can go: more geeky, and more mainstream.
So, the former first: a few more games for programmers. A much more abstract – and, in some ways, interesting – game for programmers is Corewar. Here, you’re not programming virtual robots; you’re just writing a program that executes within a very simple virtual machine. The catch is: another player’s program is executing at the same time. You win by removing every trace of their program from the virtual machine’s memory. So you’re not using guns or bombs: you’re using code itself, storing itself in memory, shifting itself around, overwriting adjacent addresses to try to locate and flush out the program. There’s a visceral thrill watching the visualisation, knowing that you’re genuinely eradicating the opponent from memory, slowly stopping it working. There’s a mass of documentation and strategy about the game, and – if this sounds interesting – it’s all worth a squint.
There are more social games about programming, too: Code Golf, for instance, in which programmers “compete” – or challenge one another – to solve problems using as few characters as possible. Enter clever algorithmic tricks, masses of obfuscation, complete illegibility, and deep knowledge of strange character-saving hacks within your language of choice. This reaches its zenith in competitions like the International Obfuscated C Challenge, in which, over the years, programmers have competed to write C programs that are as unreadable, stylistically unpleasant, hacky and witty as possible (whilst still executing entirely correctly). And hence: maze games whose source code is a maze. It’s an acquired form of wit, for sure, but still a kind of social competition.
That may not be your kettle of fish. But you can find elements of programming-like games in very mainstream titles:
Final Fantasy XII introduced a system of “Gambits” which allowed players to program companions AI behaviour. It took some of the slog out of combat, instead allowing players to ensure that allies would behave sensibly with no attention. Levelling up allows characters to have more gambits running at once – helping their automation.
The gambit system takes the form of simple statements made of a condition paired with an a action; “if health is below 50%” “cast heal“. Frustratingly, each condition and action must be purchased individually (although you quickly discover they cost next-to-nothing to buy). And yet this one change it makes combat less of a discrete activity to be engaged in, and more a system to be prepared for: you counter it by simply having sensible routines stored up. And that couples neatly with the game’s shift towards combat being something that occurs within the same environment as exploration: you counter the idea of combat occurring anywhere by making sure the player always has an automated response available.
And, of course, that’s something ripped straight from the interface of MMOs like World of Warcraft – namely, macros. Somewhere between customising the interface from a menu, and writing a plugin in Lua, lie macros: sequences of in-game commands that can be bound to a key. They’re useful for automating dull sequences that you discover to be effective – for instance, for Hunters, the sequence of different “shots” that need to be tossed out in order to maximise damage and recovery. Why click on five things in sequence when you could just bind a macro to one button that performs the correct action each time it’s clicked? They also serve useful social purposes – attaching conversation to actions to keep your raid group co-ordinated. And so, like so many office workers discovering the depths of Excel, WoW players running up against the limits of their own dexterity dive into macros, and take another step closer to being programmers.
SpaceChem is only loosely about chemistry, but it’s very definitely about programming. In constructing machines to bond atoms into molecules, and synthesises molecules into larger molecules, it pushes you through several levels of understanding that are familiar to a new programmer. First, understanding how to phrase intent in a limited instruction set. And then: slowly scaling up your ambitions, from single routines to interconnected ones; understanding loops and iteration, and how to induce asymmetry into routines; forcing you to find your own names for certain constructions, which become vocabularies of patterns that you can use again and again. As you play it, the unintuitive becomes second nature, and you learn to think within the system.
Totally a programming game.
Space Alert is a co-operative, real-time strategy boardgame. It’s a bit like the combat sequences in a Star Trek episode. An audio CD plays for ten minutes, listing threats coming into the ship, letting players know when communications are down (and they cannot speak); meanwhile, players arrange cards on tracks that represent the actions they will take in the future. The game lasts for ten minutes, real time – and then at the end, the players resolve their actions to see what actually happened. And of course, everything goes spectacularly wrong. (There’s a nice explanation of the game – with play examples – by Quintin Smith, here).
Instruction sets that get resolved later: this is a programming game, where the players are programmers at first, and then take the role of the compiler in the resolution phase, turnings their lists of actions into a series of events. And, of course, there’s the threat of race conditions: one player’s actions resolving too soon (or too late, if they tripped in the dark), causing the whole course of events to turn to disaster. It’s a planning game, and one about co-ordinating multiple series of events – which feels like certain kinds of programming to me.
And, of course, there are also programming toys: who can forget the Big Trak, which despite its limited instruction set and lack of sensor input introduced the joy of repetitive typing on tiny keypads to thousands of children.
These kind of games and toys do not appeal to all; I genuinely believe that it comes down to how your brain is wired. Some players love tangling their heads around problems like these, building systems to take other systems apart; some don’t know (yet) that they will. Some will never got one with them. And that’s OK: this type of thinking is hard, and strange; it is genuinely unnatural.
Still: there’s no better medium than a systemic one for making games about systems. As such, worth collecting some of them in one place, I felt.
Books on the Hide&Seek Shelves: The Art of Eating
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
(This post is part of an occasional series about books on the Hide&Seek bookshelves and why we have them.)
The Art of Eating is a collection of food writing by MFK Fisher. It’s really lovely – Fisher was one of the twentieth century’s best food writers, and The Art of Eating is a great collection. It has recipes, and essays, and advice, and history, and little snippets of stories, and then some more recipes, everything from rationing-era tomato-soup cake to hare pate.
It’s on the shelves because… well, here are some of the things that you need to do when you write up the rules for a game:
- Make sure the rules work for you
- Write them up so that other people can understand it, and play it
- Test to be sure that they can understand what you mean
- Test to be sure that when they do understand what you mean, and follow instructions, the game works for them
Coincidentally, here are some of the things that you need to do when you’re writing up a recipe:
- Make sure the recipe works for you
- Write it up so that other people can understand it, and make it
- Test to be sure that they understand what you mean
- Test to be sure that when they do understand what you mean, and follow instructions, the recipe works for them
I had a (haphazard, largely-neglected) food blog for a while, and the “write up a ruleset” process for a game feels so much like the “write up a recipe” process used to – but it’s easier with recipes, because there’s a massive set of conventions about how to do it, and a history of hundreds of years leading to a standard structure that’s easily decoded.
A recipe typically tries to give its readers:
- An idea of what the food will be like when it’s finished
- An ingredients list (though not, interestingly, an equipment list, unless there’s something unusual – there’s a standard set of kitchen goods that readers are assumed to have)
- Details of what you need to do to make it
- How long it takes
- Information about how many people it serves and, sometimes, what you might like to combine with it
We all know what a recipe tends to look like, nowadays, and thinking about what you need to tell people before they make some food is really handy when you’re thinking about what you need to tell people before they run a game. It’s interesting too because you can follow the evolution of recipes over time really clearly. If you look back at the Forme of Cury, the first English cookbook, you get recipes like this:
“Take Caboches and quarter hem and seeth hem in gode broth with Oynouns y mynced and the whyte of Lekes y slyt and corue smale [2] and do þer to safroun an salt and force it with powdour douce”.
Even translated, it’s not something you’d find in a cookbook today:
“Take cabbages and quarter them and cook them in a bit of nice broth, with some minced onions and some of the whites of leeks cut up small. Add some saffron, salt and other spices.”
Or there’s this:
Take Colyandre [2], Caraway smale grounden, Powdour of Peper and garlec ygrounde in rede wyne, medle alle þise [3] togyder and salt it, take loynes of Pork rawe and fle of the skyn, and pryk it wel with a knyf and lay it in the sawse, roost þerof what þou wilt, & kepe þat þat fallith þerfro in the rosting and seeþ it in a possynet with faire broth, & serue it forth witþ þe roost anoon
Or to put it another way:
Take coriander, finely-ground caraway, pepper, and some garlic that’s been ground into red wine. Mix it up together and salt it, then take some pork loins and remove the skin. Prick the skin with a knife and lay it in the sauce, roast it with whatever you like, and keep whatever seeps out during the roasting and put it in a posset with some nice broth. Serve it with the roast straight away.
1747, and Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery is broadly similar:
To boil pigeons
BOIL them by themselves, for fifteen minutes, then boil a handsome square of bacon and lay in the middle; stew some spinach to lay round, and lay the pigeons on the spinach. Garnish your dish with parsley laid in a plate before the fire to crisp. Or you may lay one pigeon in the middle, and the rest round, and the spinach between each pigeaon, and a slice of bacon on each pigeon. Garnish with slices of bacon and melted butter in a cup.
This is easy enough to follow for a simple, pigeon-boiling recipe, but the longer recipes – half a page or more of close-set type – begin to get harder and harder to follow: there’s no ingredients list, no idea of how long it might take, just this list of things to do, not even listed in the order you need to do them.
It’s when you get to the nineteenth century, and books like Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, that recipes begin to look more like what we’re used to now:
INGREDIENTS.— To every pint of new milk allow 2 dessertspoonfuls of brandy, 1 dessertspoonful of sugar, and 1–1/2 dessertspoonful of prepared rennet; thick cream, pounded cinnamon, or grated nutmeg.
Mode .— Make the milk blood-warm; put it into a deep dish with the brandy, sugar, and rennet; stir it altogether, and cover it over until it is set. Then spread some thick or clotted cream over the top, grate some nutmeg, and strew some sugar over, and the dish will be ready to serve.
Time .— About 2 hours to set the milk. Seasonable at any time.
And that’s pretty much recipes as we know them. Not quite – the ingredients are often still given as proportions rather than absolute numbers, and formatted as a paragraph rather than a list; the informal “list your ingredients in order of use” rule isn’t yet established. But it looks like a recipe. A twenty-first century cook can follow a Beaton recipe without grumbling.
Structures for game rulesets are much less clearly defined, but they do follow a similar trajectory, growing more specific and itemised – this, from Philip Sydney, in the late sixteenth century…
Then couples three be straight allotted there,
They of both ends, the middle two, do fly;
The two that in mid-place Hell called were
Must strive, with waiting foot and watching eye,
To catch of them, and them to hell to bear,
That they, as well as they, may hell supply;
Like some that seek to salve their blotted name
Will others blot, till all do taste of shame.
…through to the careful, clear rules in the recent flurry of parlour game books like Josie Curran’s Organised Fun.
So that’s part one of the reason for having Fisher around: food writing and game writing have some useful parallels, at least to people who are really keen on (a) food and (b) games. But why Fisher specifically?
Well. Back in food writing, and parallel with the development of recipe conventions, books began to come out from people like Brillat-Savarin, whose his Physiology of Taste is a gorgeous discursive rambling book full of everything its writer thought about food (it turns out that this is quite a lot – see for example Are Truffles Indigestibles?). There are game books that are a bit like this, too: Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design and Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design are broad and occasionally gently tangential, and bring in lots of different stuff that Schell and Koster think about games. There’s a strong sense of personality, there are miniature essays, there are tiny anecdotes.
So there are analogues in game writing to a lot of food writing: to straightforward recipe books, to more abstracted or sociological thinking. But there’s not, as far as I’m aware, a real analogue to MFK Fisher.
Fisher uses recipes to illustrate her essays, and essays to link her recipes. She has chapters titled “The Social Status of a Vegetable” and “How To Make a Pigeon Cry” and “Love and Death among the Molluscs”. And although she’s unusually good, within food writing she’s not unusual in her mode of communication, her mix of essay-advice-history-autobiography-recipe; it’s one of the standards of food-writing now, turning up everywhere from little-read food blogs to massively-selling books like Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat.
It’s a mode I really like, and I haven’t yet found it in games writing (with the exception of books that chronicle playground games) – so instead there’s Fisher on the shelves, filling the conceptual gap between The Penguin Book of Word Games and Man, Play and Games - just, you know, without actually being about games at all.
Pictures by PetersPic924 and The Purple Foodie.
Margaret in the Observer
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
There are two things of note here. One is that Margaret recently took part in a discussion about the psychology of games. You can read the result in last Sunday’s Observer, or online:
Central to it all is a simple theory – that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer – through systems and puzzles.
The second thing of note – and if you’ve looked at the picture above, you may already have started to deduce this – is that Margaret was photographed for the piece; and that in order to show just how much fun games could be, the photographer encouraged her to wear every single brightly-coloured object in the Hide&Seek store cupboard. Experienced Sandpit players may recognise the feather-dusters and bucket from Scoop!, plus the ribbons and silver gloves from Visible Cities; nobody’s quite sure where the half-deflated football (just out of shot) came from.
The moral of this story is: always keep everything, because you never know when a photographer from a national newspaper will coax you into draping it over yourself and/or brandishing it triumphantly.
(The moral of the article is rather different, and you’ll have to read it to find out.)
Picture by Michael Dales.
Hide&Seek, Artists in Residence, Southbank Centre
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
We’re delighted and honoured to announce that we’ve been invited to become Artists in Residence at the Southbank Centre. Since 2008, we’ve produced a number of Sandpits and Weekenders at the SBC; throughout that time, it’s always been a pleasure to work with the team there, and to make games for this unique space.
If you’re a studio making social games and playful experiences, with a stated interest in running, sneaking, gathering, noise-making (and the list goes on) – then there may not be a better place in the whole world to work than the 27 acres of the Southbank Centre’s site. There are staircases, hidden gardens, great public squares, bounded by the cinematic backdrop of the Thames and London beyond it. Playing there, over the last few years, we’ve come to know this place in a particular way – through a set of breathless moments, a set of mental snapshots, moments in the great story we tell about the games that we play.
And now, we’re taking those experiences into a new kind of conversation. We’ve been asked to understand the way the organisation works in greater depth, and to contribute ideas and imaginings to future festivals and projects. We’re at the very, very beginning of that journey, and it’s much too early to know what will result, but my hope is that it will represent the very best of what Hide&Seek is capable of producing as a studio,that it will closely involve the makers and players of the Sandpit community, and provide many more opportunities for magical play to happen in the heart of London.
Picture by digitaldust.
The Game Design of Everyday Things
Friday, May 13th, 2011
I’m writing a new regular column for the Kill Screen website.
It’s called The Game Design of Everyday Things, and is about the ways that the ways we interact with objects, spaces, and activities in the everyday world can inform the way we design games.
Which is, you know, a big topic, but one that pretty much encompasses lots of my interests and work to date: games, interaction design, urban spaces, the everyday. I’m looking forward to what’s going to be coming next over the coming weeks and months.
I’ve started by looking at that fundamental of electronic games: buttons.
Every morning, I push the STOP button on the handrail of a number 63 bus. It tells the driver I want to get off at the next stop.
I’m very fond of the button. It immediately radiates robustness: chunky yellow plastic on the red handrail. The command, STOP, is written in white capitals on red. There’s a depression to place my thumb into, with the raised pips of a Braille letter “S” to emphasize its intent for the partially sighted. When pushed, the button gives a quarter-inch of travel before stopping, with no trace of springiness; a dull mechanical ting rings out, and the driver pulls over at the next stop.
It’s immediately clear what to do with this button, and what the outcome of pushing it will be. It makes its usage and intent obvious.
This is a good button.
You can read “Buttons” over at Kill Screen.
Spin Your Partner and Taunt! at Igfest
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
We’ve mentioned Igfest before – Bristol’s festival of street games; it’s now just around the corner, on the 28th and 29th of May, and the schedule of games is looking amazing.
We’ll be there with two games: a quick run of Taunt!, which you might remember from last year’s Weekender: a game of shouting, etymology, insults, teamwork and more shouting and insults; and Spin Your Partner, a brand new… something-or-other… that’s part game, part dance, in the style of an old-fashioned ceilidh.
There’s also Igfest’s own amazing chase game 2.8 Hours Later, plus games from SF0, Come Out and Play, and more – if you can make it, you should definitely come and play!
Picture by jonesor under a CC license
Games IN SPACE
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
It’s time to play… in SPACE. Hide&Seek’s latest project can be found at the blog of the Newton Astronomers blog, a bunch of amateurs with a little 8″ reflector telescope who have been picking up something strange in the sky. It’s just possible that they could use your help:
I’m posting this here on our website (which is still embarrassing by the way Ben), just to stake our claim on a genuine discovery. Otherwise it’ll be the supernovas all over again, and someone who has an in with the establishment will take all the credit for our discovery.
Alternatively, if you’re in the mood for something more heroic, you could head over to the Green Lantern Boot Camp and play a game that will help catapult you into the realms of the superheroic! Train your will and your courage! And your sword! And your lightning bolt! And also your angry swan and eventually your giant squid!
There have been some brilliant ads for the game on the back of comics and science fiction magazines, and the story’s progressing apace, so do have a look!
Open data and fake science
Thursday, May 5th, 2011
It’s not all been Royal Wedding picnics and bank holiday fun and games for Margaret. Last week she wrote about SpaceChem in the latest of her “Five Minutes Of…” series for Gamasutra and just yesterday she added to Culture Hack Scotland‘s growing number of videos grappling data & technology questions (see the whole set here).
#chs11 minivideo – Margaret Robertson from Hide & Seek from festivalslab on Vimeo.
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