A Thing Said At #lostlevels

So earlier today outside the GDC/IGF in San Francisco, an awesome and amazing thing happened called Lost Levels. It was an free unconference for anyone to attend, talk or do something at. It sounded amazing and I was stuck in London doing admin/being in the pub. So even though I couldn’t be there, I gave someone else some words of mine to say at Lost Levels.

These are the early thoughts of an idea that has been playing around in my head for a few months that I really needed a reason to get them paper for. They are rough sketches and any thoughts on them would be much appreciated. Enjoy!

The Huge Unknowable Mess In Your Head

Hello Lost Levels, I’m either at work or on a bus in London right now, I might even be asleep so here are some words about some things read out by Jon who is saying this right now. Lovely day for this isn’t it? This is a slippery beast of an idea I’ve only just started wrestling with so please forgive the roughness.

Firstly I want to talk about a musician and writer. He’s called Adam Gnade and he writes songs/books/novellas/zines/poems about his life, his farm, his friends and their lives. These are the stories of their hopes, fears, failures, successes, stories about driving across the dark night to see each other, about strangers in bars and about everything in their day to day existences. All these stories are told across all the different forms that he chooses. It’s a dizzying, bewildering array of stories, fragments, moments of all these people’s lives. The thing that is really fucking beautiful about his work is that no matter how much you read, listen and explore the world he offers up you never see it all. You’ll never understand it all because you aren’t living those lives, just as he doesn’t understand all he writes about himself or those he knows. Just as those in his stories don’t understand the whole picture of the lives they are leading. It’s a grand unfinishable project.

This is that dark unknowable mass in your head. It’s a story. It might be the story of you and your friends, it might be a story about a made up person. All I know is this story is most likely bigger than 1 project. Most stories are. Some are tiny fragments but they are from something bigger. All my stories are about running away.

We still mostly make games as a single entity. Finish it and move on. If it does well or we enjoyed making it, we make a sequel. It might become a franchise or god forbid an IP. But mostly these games, even when connected, are separate. They are trapped in a void, trapped in the structures we always use. Those 3 acts and character arcs and peril/resolution. Once one ends the next begins.

I want to see a series of ‘experiences’ that slip between the cracks. That move between poems, games, music, zines, novels, short stories, performance, theatre & film. Stories that span all these and that we can never fully grasp. I want to see a life mapped out in as many forms as it takes. I would love to see a game that is just an afternoon in the grand scheme of it’s creators vision. That is just a few fleeting moments that are chokingly beautiful that slot into a structure that can only be seen from space. An afternoon from a life, a whole life you can explore.

Performance makers Forced Entertainment say their work is created by an ongoing process of answering questions. When they finish one performance project they look at what questions are left unanswered with that work and they use these as the basis for the next thing they create. Through this they have created 25 years of work that slips between form, stories and time. There is a line between these works but it’s blurred, difficult to find and if you found it, chances are you that you’d be more confused than you started. The works exist as spate entities but they are interlinked in ways that franchises and the traditional sequel format can’t understand.

Some games feels close to this at the moment, games like ICO/Shadow Of The Colossus. Games that are connected, share themes and moods. Games that are entwined together. Games that even after playing you aren’t quite sure of the cross overs between them . The earlier works by Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture feel like they fit as well. The ending of Flower, Sun & Rain that suddenly loops it back into the world of The Silver Case and the two come smashing together like when a character from Gnade’s short novel The Darkness To The West turns up in a song he wrote 3 years earlier or when you find out an old love is having a baby with your best friend from school. Beautiful unexpected moments that can only arise from a new way of looking, structuring and understanding stories. That moves beyond easily resolved plots and neat structures. Resolutions are nice but they are almost non-existent in the real world and if we want our games and the stories they tell to truly reflect us then we need a new way of shaping/smashing/viewing the mirror.

Videogames/Museums

So MoMA has gone shopping for videogames and they bought 14 of ‘em. It’s an good list with some great games on it like flOw, Passage, Katamari Damacy and Myst. I’m worried though; worried about their ability to present the games in such a way that will show why they are such great examples of the videogame realm. Now I’ve never been to MoMA, never even been to New York for that matter but I’ve seen videogames in museum spaces before and they didn’t work at all. In fact if anything these previous exhibitions reinforced the idea that games are a thing for children to play with while parents go off to look at proper art like paintings. Things to ignore, pass by and forget. That games don’t have anything to say beyond the joy of play (just to say that play is a wonderful thing though and we should never underestimate the value of play).

About 2 years ago I saw an exhibition called ‘2player: Computers. Games. Art’ at the New Walk Museum in Leicester. This exhibition featured the work of Mark Essen, Paolo Pedercini, Jason Rohrer, Pixeljam and Erik Svedäng. All of whom are makers of some of the most ‘artistic’ games around, both visually and thematically, and the exhibition featured some of their best known work like Perdicini’s Every Day The Same Dream, Essen’s Flywrench or Rohrer’s Inside A Star Filled Sky as well as lesser known works. There were some bizarre choices of games though like the painfully dense shooter Transcend by Jason Rohrer instead of his masterful storytelling game Sleep Is Death or that most famous arthouse game Passage. As well, they were nearly all 1 player games apart from Essen’s Jetpack Basketball and perhaps a few others. The space these games were shown in was a cramped, dimly lit area off to the side of a large gallery space which housed around 10 – 15 computers each showing a different game. On the wall as you entered there was 5 A5 sized plaques explaining the exhibition and why videogames might matter as an art form. That was the only context provided for these games, 5 A5 plaques. An entire medium summed up in 5 plaques and then thrown open to the visitors. In the space beyond these plaques, there were computers but no ushers, attendants or anyone to explain what these games were, how to play them, why they might matter and why they should be enjoyed.

It was just an empty room full of computers and screens. A few of the computers in the space were broken and not running any games or, due to a lack of attendants looking after the space, people had quit the games and were playing on MS Paint. Because of this lack of context, people to talk to and working equipment the space was mostly inhabited by children playing the games for a few minutes and moving on. Kids which had been dumped in the space along with lines from their parent’s like ‘Look Jimmy, there’s some games for you to play’. A child left with Every Day The Same Dream. I’m not saying a child can’t enjoy Every Day The Same Dream but is this what we want for one of the most interesting games created in the past few years. Next to that computer was one running Inside A Dead Skyscraper, a videogame music video created by the musician Jesse Stiles and Paolo Pedercini. A game about flying, history and the events of 9/11. I watched as a child played this game, freely flying around enjoying the feeling of flying and exploring as their mother stared off disinterested by what her child was playing. Looking straight past the quite intense message this game was presenting because this was a videogame, a thing for children to play with nothing to say and this was reinforced by the space presented to her. A room of computers devoid of context or people who might care about how to allow people to interact in a meaningful way with these games that deal with clearly adult themes like terrorism or sucicide. A room like this gives nothing but games on their lonesome which of course is read, by many people, as a space for children to play in while parents enjoy the real museum.

Now the MoMA almost certainly gets a different audience to the New Walk Museum but the same mistakes can almost certainly be made by them. It is not enough to put a load of games on PCs in a room and except people to connect to them. Not all games work in the same way and whilst a game like Canabalt can almost certainly be played and enjoyed in a quick blast in a public space; games like EVE Online or Dwarf Fortress takes weeks or months to peel back their layers and explore. Some games work as public shows and others work as private introspection. I wouldn’t want to explore Passage or Myst in a public space full of other games and noise. Games exhibitions need a huge range of spaces to show the work in as some games, like those by Tale Of Tales for example, need a certain space, mindset and context to enjoy and this is hard to achieve in a public gallery full of games like Katamari Damacy or vib-ribbon. As well the differing spaces needed for each game, the contexts of creation, play and the rest of the gaming medium is key to understanding a game’s place in our culture and in videogames culture. Without this context a game by Jason Rohrer, Anna Anthropy, Cactus, Suda51, Die Gute Fabrik, Jonas Kyratzes, Fumito Ueda, Pippin Barr or any of the other amazing and creative designers out there is just lost in itself, you wouldn’t show a work by Jackson Pollock and not discuss the world in which that piece was created so why does this happen with videogames. A space to show games needs to be responsive and caring to the games it shows, a gallery space should be a dialogue between the work and the space, it’s not just a case of putting things in a white box and expecting people to care. Hopefully these MoMA exhibitions will take the time and care needed to show these games off to their fullest but I worry and I will continue to worry because I’ve seen games exhibitions take some of the most beautiful, joyous, creative, fun, breathtaking, heartbreaking and life affirming games we as a medium have and drop them, break them and try to piece them back together again. A game in a white room doesn’t become art because it’s in a white room. It becomes art when we play it.

No one left to punch, no steps left to take

When I was about 11 I punched my brother’s friend because he pulled out the memory card while I saving my game on Final Fantasy 8 and corrupted all my data. I punched him because he had stolen 35 hours of my life from me. He had made all those hours worthless and I wanted revenge so I punched him. That was 12 years ago and I just started a new game.

Today a chance mistake when transferring my data between old and new laptops stole another save from me. This time it wasn’t an epic battle between nations that was lost. It wasn’t a gunfight in a run down marketplace and neither was it a coming of age tale cut short. It was a stroll that was stolen, a long walk down a long corridor taken a few steps at a time. A glance at some flowers and a pool of water surrounded by the silent beauty of floating creatures were stolen and destroyed.

The game was Vesper.5 and there was no-one to punch for this.

This was my own fault. The days I lost are mine to carry.

This time though, there wasn’t any anger. I don’t revenge and I don’t want to replay what I have lost. The power in Vesper.5 is in the gaps between your actions. It is a game where you take a step and wait for the next day before you may move again. Every day has a purpose, a reason for existence and a reason to load the game up but between those steps are the gaps where the game really breathes. Those moments before a step or after a step when you take stock of your actions and begin to wait and think about the steps and choices you have taken. This is a game of patience, a game of waiting and game of thinking before each and every action. I didn’t think when I transferred my files and so I made the greatest misstep of all. A mistake that will take weeks or months to correct but I don’t want to walk those steps again. I don’t want to try and recapture my walk. My journey has come to an end because I chose my path and now I must carry on that long walk.

My Vesper.5 game will forever be waiting at the start of the journey and maybe one day I will start again but for now I grieve for the journey that could’ve been and I will wait and take stock. This is a wound that will take more than a day to heal.

Still Half Finished.

This is just a quick post to say, this website is still half finished and full of blank pages which hopefully should be filled by the end of this weekend. It’s on the to do list so it better get done or no weekend fun for me, bad times. So yeah, sorry if a page you want to look at has no info on it. Give it a few days and it should be all up.

In other less website based news I’m performing Several Amazing Things About Tetris (1984) again after vowing never to perform it again after the 7 hour performance marathon at Game City 6. But anyway, I’m performing it at Bit Of Alright, an awesome games conference coming up at the start of Feb in London. Check it out at http://bit-of-alright.com/, should be an awesome day full of awesome speakers and me talking about Tetris again.

An Oasis Residency in Nottingham

Eh up y’all,

Hope you like my temp website, should hopefully have a better one soon but until then, we can all just enjoy this one.

Big news  at the moment is that I’m doing a residency at the super awesome Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, in conjunction with Hatch, who are just as awesome. Anyway the residency is for the development of the next few parts of An Oasis in 5 parts. Throughout the week, I’ll be working on and showing bits of parts 2-4.

During the week, you’ll be able to come in the Broadway Cinema and try out Part 2 and Part 3. Part 2 is a 20 minute audio piece which will be set up somewhere in the Broadway Cinema, and Part 3 will be 10 to 15 minute prototype of the full game set up in the Broadway cafe. Both will be free to try out during the week.

Finally on the Friday night, the 16th, I’ll be presenting a work in progress version of Part 4, a performance made for cinema spaces. This will be in a double bill with a performance of Like You Were Before with the supremely amazing Debbie Pearson. Tickets for that can be brought here: http://www.broadway.org.uk/events/film_media_arts_double_bill_deborah_pearson_and_pat_ashe

Come and check out any of the parts if you are in Nottingham during next week, would be awesome to see y’all there.