some friends and i went to the new museum in chinatown friday night to see a panel discussion on the subject of “indie games,” which is an unfortunately vague topic, though one that contains a lot of interesting topics. the panelists were costik (greg costikyan), messhof (mark essen), and passage (jason rohrer).
the topic of discussion shifted a lot, given the nebulous framing of the panel and the tenuous connections between the panelists. costik, who i truly love to listen to talk about games, attempted to provide some background by naming a few games he admired (hey, paul, he mentioned immortal defense) and listing some motivations for people to become involved with independent game development. i appreciated this; this is a diverse body of people doing all kinds of different work, and to attempt to homogenize it would be foolish.
this was one of the topics at hand, in fact: is “indie game development” actually a useful term, when it describes so many different people with different processes and different agendas? the moderator noted that messhof and passage avoided the term “indie” in describing themselves. (i feel like the term is a bit snobbish and exclusive, which is one of my frustrations with the mainstream.) other interesting subjects: industry game design teams are big because they need to fill these $50 boxes with forty hours of content, and that as digital distribution makes the short form game more common this path will become a dead-end. messhof raised the idea of a “new arcade” – that a game could be experienced in a dedicated space, a social space, similiar to the way art is experienced in a gallery or film in a theater. (i’ve written about one of messhof’s studio shows before, which i think was a success.)
passage, who didn’t let me down – he was exactly as boring as i’d expected – kept steering the discussion back to roger ebert and the discussion of whether games “can be” art. jason rohrer clearly feels as though games need to be somehow legitimized by an outside force – that we need to prove to roger ebert that games are capable of being classified as art. i think this question is a problematic one, in that it presupposes that existing games have no value as what they are. i also found it problematic that jason harped on games mimicking film*, yet was willing to let a film critic dictate the legitimacy of games. costik thankfully called ebert an idiot and said that sid meier’s civilization has affected his life more than casa blanca has, which earned him a round of applause. can we collectively stop talking about jason rohrer already? how have we allowed this man to become the overnight star he is?
* i in fact agree that storytelling in games should be done through rules and the interactions that emerge from those rules, rather than through tropes borrowed from film (the cutscene) and the novel (the text dump). riding the train down to canal street, in fact, i had this idea: to present a text adventure rendition of a public domain novel that is actually, in play, the entirety of the text of that novel, presented as one long, unbroken text dump. the punchline being that a text adventure whose story occurs entirely in pages of prose is just a novel, and a graphical game whose story occurs entirely in cutscenes is just a movie – probably a sub-par one.
messhof had trouble talking about his work, a trend i’ve of late been noticing in game designers, particularly when i talked to jesse venrbux last month. they’re not used to discussing their work in a critical space – because few such places exist for videogames – and the vocabulary doesn’t exist yet to describe design decisions that are, for them, largely intuitive. i think that as we carve out a critical space for games, one that is autonomous from film, this will become less of an issue. i can only see galleries organizing panels of designers to speak as a step in the right direction. there should be more of these. hey, new museum, if you’re reading, i’m available to speak – contact me!
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Are you saying you don’t enjoy Rohrer’s games and ideas? Strange – I’ve become a proponent for games as art largely because of him. Passage and Gravitation are amazing.
passage is neat for what it is – an attempt to lend the videogame death the emotional weight that we associate with the reality of death in our lives – but his more recent work has left me unimpressed with his abilities as a designer, and i find his ideas pretty tiresome. i agree that designers are underusing the medium, but his motivations stem from a quest for cultural validation that i think is ultimately damaging to games – why do we need film critics to tell us that our work has value?
What I like about Rohrer’s games is his use of very conventional gameplay elements – music, art, controls, objectives – as agents of expression. Perhaps there are other games that do this, but I have never played them. (Except some recent ones like “I Wish I Were the Moon”.)
Furthermore, Rohrer never abandons gameplay to promote the “art”, unlike, say, Rod Humble. I found myself playing Passage and Gravitation for the sheer pleasure of playing – the emotional response and reflection felt like a byproduct, as it does, for instance, in cinema.
I agree with your thoughts on cultural validation, though.
jason rohrer came down against shadow of the colossus after only playing a couple hours.
“http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2008/07/small_words_and_short_sentence.html”
his reason basically boils down to “I feel like [Ueda] didn’t really do it on purpose.” did he even play Ico? i mean, i just don’t understand where he is coming from. so, Rohrer is an auteur and Ueda isn’t. right. it seems he is foremost after self validation.
on a different note, i know that any attempt to breach the topic during discussion classes at “art school” and bring up interactive art was met with blank stares. i mean there really is plenty of touchstones artistically, smithson’s spiral jetty, yoko ono’s ‘painting to hammer a nail in’ come to mind, but not electronically as there hasn’t been enough of a history. hell a really good curator is no different from a dungeon master. unfortunately ‘interactive’ seems to bottom out at ‘performance’ or videos of a performance where the art had once been interacted with. i just wish these two facets could somehow see they are extensions of one another, but i am not sure that is possible without dialogue.
film discussion is a dead end.
the theatre at the art institute of chicago is named after ebert so he has this sense that his foot is in the door there.
Just because someone has strange opinions doesn’t mean his work has no merit!
Personally, I feel that game designers don’t talk about their work because they’re afraid other designers will copy them. But I’ve always wanted to make a forum that was more for game designers than for fans. Some day I’ll even have an dea of how to do it.
i knew people would come in here and suck that guys dick
god
FANBOYS
also im sticking to my guns that lonesome game designers are just shy and not used to talking to people, and how that oppressed personality leads to really amazing ideas in games
kind of like how japants has really censored sexuality, so everyone is a crazy pervert and they come up with things like kago shintaro’s comics and those pornos with the dead animals
like if it doesnt come out one hole it’ll come out the other?
oh i dont fucking know
when i said lonesome i meant those people who make games all by themselves (you, venbrux, cactus, messhof, etc)
speaking of cactus and messhof and how they make games all by themselves, messhof demonstrated TERROR BIKES, the game they’re working on together. at the moment it’s apparently designed to loop forever, like cowboyana, and it’s flashy and unnerving and beautiful.
jason rohrer’s criticism of shadow of the colossus, i gleaned from the panel, is that all of the most emotionally affecting scenes are ones in which the player’s control has been taken away. (i actually think the most emotionally powerful scenes of the game are ones in which the player has limited control, but those are near the end of the game and it’s understandable if jason hasn’t seen them.)
i assume he means the deaths of the colossi; i think those stand as a counterpoint to your struggle to kill them, though: it’s the contrast between your long struggle to climb and kill these creatures and the short moment of helplessness as you watch them die that creates the game’s emotional impact, i think.
it’s also an interesting statement because the moment of greatest emotional impact in passage is the moment your control of the game is taken away from you. his repetitive arguments lend to my suspicions that for all his emphasis on the importance of rules, jason rohrer lacks a crucial understanding of player psychology.
I can’t believe someone said they enjoy the actual playing of Passage and the emotional/intellectual stuff is secondary to that. Passage is a maze game. A pretty poorly done maze game, at that. Aside from its ties to death, it’s tedious.
Daphny: was that really necessary? Just because I enjoy someone’s games doesn’t mean I “suck [his] dick”.
Cossix: judging from the near-unanimous reaction to Passage, most people would disagree with you. I’d hardly call it “tedious”.
As for enjoying playing Passage, it’s not the maze gameplay that attracts me. The goal of the game isn’t to find treasure; it’s to get to the next “stage” and to figure out any additional gameplay elements along the way.
Also, I never said the emotional/intellectual stuff was secondary. It’s a byproduct of the gameplay mechanics, in that you’re not really focused on deciphering the metaphors while playing the game. Understanding comes naturally, at least for me.
Y’know, I’ve half-considered making a game which consists entirely of one 45-minute cutscene. A sprite game engine cutscene, with text boxes and 16-by-16 sprites moving around a grid. Ramming into each other to ‘attack’. Bowing their tiny heads to convey sadness. Just all that for 45 minutes.
It’d probably need one heck of a plot, though.
I really enjoyed this article.
I enjoyed Passage when it first came out, but I certainly don’t agree that he put gameplay first, because the gameplay IS tedious and boring. His other games have just been boring gameplay wise, and the themes explored haven’t been interesting either.
He really seems to be a one hit wonder. And after seeing what he has to say, it seems his hit was more of an accident than deliberate.
Sure it’s boring, if you just think of it as a “maze game”. The real joy, at least for me, comes from understanding the rules and mechanics (i.e., going to the right leads to new places, going down leads to a boring maze with treasure, etc.). In this sense, I suppose it’s more of a game-like machine than a game (and thus has little replay value), but it affects me emotionally more than pretty much anything else I’ve played. Same with Gravitation, which I liked as much as Passage. The “game” is figuring out the rules and the consequences of your actions.
Also, since you’re posting here, I assume you like Calamity Annie. What makes it less boring to you than Passage? After all, its gameplay is much, much simpler.
Calamity Annie is based on skill and reactions and high scores! That’s like comparing a cloud to a screwdriver.
Poor Rohrer
I didn’t think Passage is much cop either, so you know, so I don’t think it was as unanimously well-recieved as some people are saying.
Man, that guy has the worst opinion on Shadow. I hold that up as one of the few real examples of a game where the emotional content comes from you, the player, and what you can do in the space you’re afforded. You’re being ‘led’ through a ’scene’ as Dess would probably say. That game is so clever.
“Skill and reactions and high scores”? In one dimension? That’s probably the thing I find LEAST fun in games, even though I enjoy Calamity Annie. Points are a silly, abstract objective that leave you with nothing once you finish the game.
As for Passage, I checked out a few threads on some popular sites a little while ago, and even though there were some people who didn’t “see the point”, most everyone else was talking about how it affected them emotionally. Pretty unanimous.
I think you’re expecting something different from your games than me – which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not an expectation shared by everyone.
i think this is why he wants videogames to be validated by movie critics, because wants to make movies instead of videogames
its pretty obvious when everything involving the player is mediocre at best, but ohhhh the cutscenes are so touching and emotional oh dear its like WATCHING A REALLY GOOD MOVIE
hes working with the wrong medium
archagon, though i agree that passage has value as a game, i’d advise against pulling the “unanimous” card in an argument. first, because if you’re having an argument with someone your opinion clearly isn’t unanimous. second, because even if it was, it wouldn’t mean that opinion is correct. popular things are not above criticism.
I’m certainly not trying to use “unanimous” as a valid argument for Passage, so sorry if it sounded that way. I was just really surprised by the strong anti-Rohrer sentiment around here, given how much praise his games have gotten.
So what do you guys think of games like The Marriage and I Wish I Were the Moon?
I enjoyed The Marriage a lot because I thought it did interesting things relating a system of rules to an intensely personal experience in a way that had never been done before.
I Wish I Were The Moon is pretty and a kind of interesting way to tell a story, but ultimately in the package that it is fails to deliver anything incredibly interesting. Storyteller is a step in the right direction, but I think the developer needs more time to really flesh out the idea.
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[...] Anthropy, who I’ve been referencing far too much lately, posted about a discussion she attended on indie games. She mentions her irritation at Jason Rohrer, the artsy developer of [...]
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