following the mayday protests, my friend chigbarg chegubard found this photo of an unnamed cop jumping onto a protester barricade and extracted the cop, along with the barricade. with the board beneath his feet this little trooper was obviously set to go on all sorts of surfing adventures, so i decided to give him one.
tap right to build up speed, tap left to slow down! get as much air as possible and smash all the targets!
GODDAMMIT is another porny story. it’s about restlessness and frustration and boredom and is also pretty much straight-up about my submissive slut and muse and can probably be read as a love letter to her. we are both sick with the flu right now, which is terribly unsexy and inconvenient, but definitely boring and frustrating and restless.
being a sucker for limited interactivity, i wanted to do this as one of my twine choose your own adventures. but this story is about the boredom of being tied up and left alone, which i didn’t think translated meaningfully to a choice-based text game. but i realized that it was totally well-suited to a simple, avatar-navigation deal. a game about moving a character around, but not very far, or very fast, or to any real end seemed like an appropriate metaphor.
so the story includes these interactive html5 illustrations which were made in game maker and converted by good old leon. use the arrow keys for the pictures and the mouse for the words.
centrifeud is an ipad game for two to four players. it’s like that vacuum game in warioware – each player is trying to collect the most goal tokens, which appear on the screen at random. when a player is holding her button down, her avatar moves in the direction it’s facing, bouncing off of walls and other players, and when she’s not holding her button, her avatar is rotating clockwise in place, changing its direction. a game with a single, binary button per player. the buttons are laid out in the four corners chicanery-style.
so players keep their hands in their own corners, for the most part. but every now and then the chance to handicap an opponent appears: slow down your opponent, or make her veer to the right when she moves, or turn yourself into a ghost, so you can travel right through her. you don’t collect these advantages by moving your in-game avatar onto a power-up item. the words “TOUCH YOURSELF” appear on the screen (i always like when a game is forward) and all players scramble simultaneously to physically touch their avatars. naturally, these are in much closer proximity to each other than the buttons, and a chaos of jostling hands flutters over the game as two or three or four people are suddenly brought into physical contact. and then they go back to their buttons. it’s over in a second.
if there’s anything exciting about touch screen games, it’s that we can do this now: we can control the player’s physical proximity, we can change it in the middle of a game. centrifeud uses it in brief, frantic moments. in the late, lamented pongvaders, two players cooperate, usually autonomously, to destroy alien invaders. but at the end of every stage the players have to physically work together by tilting the ithing to direct the last ball at the last enemy. imagine a game that takes place on a sinking island – as the coasts grow smaller and smaller, the players’ hands are forced to operate closer and closer to each other.
so that abstract wrestling game i started for last klik of the month and abandoned in favor of a four-player racing game with a single button? i ended up finishing it. each player (two at a time) is given a random shape as a body, which she has to get past her opponent’s random shape body by outmaneuvering her, overpowering her, or a combination of both. it’s essentially a two-player version of the first screen in dys4ia.
i started the game in game maker, but i ended up making the finished version in flash, which seemed easier – probably because i already coded a game about irregular shapes colliding with each other before. i used andi mcclure’s wonderful drum circleto create the music. thanks to gabriel duarte and ben beltran (&friends!) for testing.
play it here! or download it. i recommend using game controllers and a group of people since it’s a very fast game. i’m planning on showing it at a gallery in LA next month. more info on that lata!
discrimination pong is a two-player game about privilege and the myth that everyone is equally capable of succeeding in a capitalist society. it’s unsurprisingly an asymmetrical game: like pong, the players use rectangular “paddles” to try and return a bouncing square ball. but while the right player, who not coincidentally plays the white paddle, enjoys consistent playing conditions, the left player is subjected to a series of handicaps: slowed down, shortened, or straight-up made immaterial. at the end of the game, the left player is told to “work harder,” a message which disregards the obvious ways the odds have been rigged against that player.
while i like the idea of exploring privilege through an actual, uneven game, i think this game’s representation of privilege is shallow. the effects of privilege never ARE obvious to the oppressor: that’s why privilege is so insidious. in this game, the right player can see the left player suddenly become afflicted by a handicap that causes her paddle to jolt up and down uncontrollably. what does that tell us about discrimination, really? that it happens?
what about a game where the players started out equally capable, but this was one of those games where, between rounds, the players were able to purchase “upgrades:” the ability to go faster, to have a larger paddle, etc. what if one player started with more resources to buy those upgrades than the other? or, even better, what if one player got lots more rewards of those resources than the other? the right player gets a higher grade than the left player on the SAT because all of the questions are about football. the right player gets the job that the left player was turned down for because she doesn’t have a home.
OR here’s another idea. what if the ways in which one player was handicapped were invisible? both paddles are the same size, but one player’s paddle moves more slowly than the other’s. the right player can’t understand why the left player can’t keep up with her. the left player tries to convince the right player that the system is biased – perhaps fruitlessly. it’s hard to look down from the top of the pyramid. it would be less effective agit-prop, maybe, but i think it might be closer to how oppression is allowed to continue.
oh, and if the authors of discrimination pong happen to read this, let me give you advance warning of your pending atari lawsuit.
my game spike sisters was two-player by accident. it was designed as a game where one player has to manage two characters with different limitations (one’s short but wide and one’s tall but narrow: they squeeze through a maze of spikes). but because the two sisters are controlled simultaneously – one with the keyboard, one with the mouse – having a different human player move each of the sisters is as natural as having one player control them both. and that doesn’t mitigate the challenge of having to coordinate two different characters: coordinating two human players has its own considerable challenges.
when talking about board game, people use the word “scales” to describe how well a game handles a varying number of players. this game plays great with five players, but it also works well with seven or three: it scales well. i like when digital games scale well. a lot of games can be jury-rigged into two-player games just by having one player hold each side of the controller, but not all games are well-suited to that kind of division of labor. toru iwatani’s libble rabble works great two-player because the game involves coordinating two avatars who move independently (two characters with a line stretched between them, which they use to cordon off areas of the game screen).
the slut and i have been seeking out games to play on our ipad. hurdle hell is, like it sounds, a game about jumping hurdles, but it features two characters on two separate tracks, each of whom jumps when one two big square buttons is pressed. as a one-player game, it’s about coordinating two button-presses that are slightly out-of-phase with one another: the left hurdler’s hurdle may come sooner than the right hurdler’s, or the left hurdler may have to wait for a slow-moving fireball while the right hurdler jumps a fast-moving bonfire. the difference in timing between the two obstacles becomes greater and greater as the game escalates.
then we started playing it together, slut controlling the left hurdler and i controlling the right. and the game isn’t, i think, cheapened this way, because it becomes a slightly different kind of challenge. reacting to and timing a jump over your own obstacle, not being faked out by your opponent’s. i’ve made it as far through the game’s stages working with her as playing alone (with her watching). when most games are designed to be played by a single player or (more rarely) group of players first and have the “opposite” mode just tacked on, it’s neat to see a game that scales just as naturally to a two-player experience as a one-player experience.
a week ago i stumbled on this brilliant two-player game michael brough made for the gdc pirate kart. it’s a simple abstraction of a sports game – moving their pieces on a grid, players try to push a ball into a goal. there’s hidden complexity: pieces can push other pieces, including the opponent’s pieces, and can even push whole rows of pieces, ball included.
and the way he uses randomness or chance – such an important part of many of michael’s games – is really smart: players take turns moving their pieces, but each time a player’s turn comes around she gets a random number of moves. if you knew that your opponent was going to have the same number of moves as you next turn, the outcome of any strategy would be immediately provable and the game would turn into a much more boring numbers game. also, one of the player’s three pieces is chosen as the active piece for a round – the player can switch to a different one, but this costs one “move.” and there’s risk involved, because the piece that takes over is chosen at random.
for this klik of the month i wanted to make a really really simple abstract sports game. i started on an abstract two-player wrestling game: each player had a randomly-shaped body that acted as a barrier to the other player’s randomly-shaped body, and both were trying to outmaneuver their opponent to reach a goal area. it was similar to the first screen in dys4ia – but getting it to work in game maker was kind of an ordeal. then jim showed up.
someone asked what he’d been working on, and jim replied that the week before he’d made a four-player, single button racing game. sparky looked up from his twine game and asked, “a single button for each player?” immediately, i realized i wanted to make a four-player racing game in which all players use a single button to move their creatures. we talked out the idea. you’d have to mash the keyboard to make your creature move, meaning you could overshoot and move one of your opponents’ creatures by accident when it switched. i knew how to decide the order in which the players’ creatures moved: it would switch at random.
i gave up on the wrestling game and took two more hours to make creature racing! it’s not entirely dissimilar to chicanery, so while it uses the spacebar as the one button by default, i think it’d work better mapped to a dance pad or pop’n music controller. for a two-player variation, give each player two creatures.
as part of the tour for my beautiful book, i went to nyu’s game center to talk with frank lantz in front of an audience. frank is an old friend – we see eye to eye on a lot of things. but in many places we walk separate paths: for example, he’s a formalist and i’m a genius. i want to empower people outside of games culture to tell weird, personal stories and he works for zynga. it is this subtle antagonism that flavors frank’s and my talk, which i enjoyed a whole lot and which i’m excited to be able to share with you.
HEY. while we’re at it, let’s have a MEDIA ROUND-UP. here’s an interview in capitol that’s pretty cool albeit having some continuity errors: my slut never “laughs shyly.” here’s a feature in the verge with a lot of good pictures from my HARPY DIEM show (taken by sara bobo, who i yanked the photo of frank and myself from). and here’s a recording of my talk at dorkbot chicago that i’ve posted before. and if you wanna hear me talk dirtier, watch for my forthcoming interview with autostraddle.
THE FUTURE: i’m going to get posters for indiegogo donators sorted soon, release an updated version of DUCK DUCK POISON, announce when the next leg of my tour happens. also, i’ll be speaking at san jose state university next wednesday the 25th at 7pm! if you missed my panel at diesel books last night with sparky, alex kerfoot and mickey alexander mouse, you should come to san jose state and listen to me ramble some more!
if there’s something games understand, it’s loops. games are written in loops: the check the game state, they move a couple things, they draw the picture, then they repeat. the player completes a task, a number gets incremented, at the scene starts over with the variables adjusted. coding a game, it requires more effort to break a loop than to allow it to cycle indefinitely. the concept of an inescapable cycle isn’t just a good fit for videogames, it’s a concept they have an innate understanding of.
the digital game is also the perfect format for giving the audience false choices: for giving them the means to struggle with the system and discover for herself that the system is a trap and that the cycle is inescapable. these two games – lucas pope’s the republia times, a bread and circuses simulation, and pedro paiva’s anestesia, a parable about working-class alcoholism - represent two sides of the same curtain, both equally imprisoned there.
it sucks that the ipad, as a piece of designer technology, is so prohibitively expensive. as a big, flat touch screen, it’s perfect for all sorts of neat two-player games with weird new touch controls. i told my slut / pr executive to find me a free ipad, and she dutifully complied: a friend of ours had an extra one from work (probably it’s better not to disclose his name / company?) and it’s ours now. i immediately sought out all the ipad games i’d wanted to play but never been able to.
michael brough’s glitch tank may be my favorite game on the ipad. two players sit across from each other, pongvaders style, each trying to maneuver a little pixel tank to destroy the other player’s tank. the movement options the players use, though, are shuffled, and the four available at any given time (turn right, turn left, move forward, move back, shoot, drop a mine, etc.) may not be the ideal ones for any given situation. select one, and it’s randomly replaced. many of the attack actions also involve movement – drop a mine while moving forward – meaning that almost every action is multi-purpose, and can fit into a plan multiple ways. the game is about cobbling together the best possible strategy from the hand you’re dealt – it’s a game about planning around chance, occupying a similar space as cactus block.
while the game is clearly informed by a board game tradition – the available moves are cards, clearly, shuffled and randomly replaced on play – the game couldn’t work as a board game. though there’s an included mode where the players take turns, i think it works best when the players are moving and firing in real-time. there’s an element of exponential growth: choosing the “miniature tank” action causes the player’s tank to release a new, smaller tank that moves and fires in synchronicity with it. it also causes all miniature tanks on the screen to multiply, meaning that it’s easy to overrun the screen with lots of player-controlled characters. on a board, this would cause the pace of the game to slow down as players resolved movement for all of these pieces, but it’s the pace of the game that’s so important – the time pressure forces you to integrate less-than-ideal moves into your strategy.
it’s also a perfect touch screen game. at harpy diem last week, we ran the original, pc version of glitch tank. that game is played with the arrow keys, with each arrow key being tied to a specific slot – but not to a specific action. for example, “move right” might not be the right arrow key, but the up or down or even left. so that adds an extra layer of distance between the player and the game: first, decide which action to take; then, figure out which button to press to take it. the ipad removes this layer: just touch the action you want your tank to perform. michael told me it worked so perfectly when he put it on the pad, it was “like it was meant to be on the touchscreen all along.”
alright, game #2: fingle. in an interview with eegra a million years ago, patrick alexander mentioned a shy piano teacher who composed duets in such a way that performing them would bring his hands and those of his students – pretty young ladies – into contact. this conversation sparked the idea that would ultimately become chicanery, my own ipad game. (secret preview: i’m working on another ipad game with pongvaders creator jon beilin that will be a kind of twister game for fingers.)
fingle is descended from the same idea. each player is trying to keep their fingers on a set of buttons that may or may not be moving. invariably, following the motion of these buttons brings the players’ hands into physical contact. in a time when digital games are generally trying to isolate us and make us more asocial, here’s a game that makes people touch. and the game plays up its pornographic tone: against seventies love shack wallpaper, the players are prompted to mime blatantly sexual positions with their fingers. i’ll tell you from my own experience: this game works pretty well at bars.
the game is, unfortunately, clearly designed for people who don’t have fat fingers. while my slut and i were able to get through all of the first “package” together, i’ve had problems fitting my fingers through those of other chubby-fingered folks. thin privilege aside, a really valuable game.
