A few months ago, I wrote about how I think VR "empathy machines" are basically just a form of appropriation, where VR brands associate themselves with vaguely progressive political causes in a bid to make VR seem more relevant.

Maybe a lot of people still aren't really sure what "cultural appropriation" means? It's also a bit more of a US-thing, because of how race in the US works, so if you don't live in the US then you might not be as familiar with it.

If you're in a hurry, Amandla Stenberg made a popular 5 minute video in 2015 called "Don't Cash Crop On My Cornrows". Back in 2015, white performers like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus were incorporating black music, black hair, and black memes into their acts, but it seemed like that care suddenly evaporated when black people got killed by police. Are white people actually the anti-racist allies they thought they were? If this is "cultural exchange", then black people were getting a pretty bad deal -- in return, they weren't even getting their own lives!

However, the conversation on cultural appropriation has shifted since 2015. So as a sort of public service, I'd like to highlight some more recent writing on cultural appropriation, all published within the last month or so, to give a small sense of what some people are saying right now.




If you want a really bad, really misleading understanding of cultural appropriation, then read this terrible garbage NYT June 2017 op-ed "In Defense of Cultural Appropriation" by Kenan Malik. Malik basically argues that artists shouldn't have to ask anyone for permission to make art, and fear of cultural appropriation forces artists to ask communities for permission, thus ruining art forever... as if art hasn't already been ruined countless times already, as if artists are always right, as if art is immune from racism, as if Elvis wasn't wrong, as if artists don't make bad art all the time, as if the sovereignty of an individual artist is more important than the collective pain of a community... etc.

But what really annoys me most about this guy, and people who make similar arguments, is that they always say stuff like "culture is complicated" as well as "but cultural appropriation isn't real and never happens." It's ridiculous to say culture is complicated, and then turn around and flatten culture like that!

I include Malik's article here to show how these appropriation-deniers keep dragging the conversation backwards, disingenuously asking the same basic fucking questions, to try to make us all justify ourselves over and over again. It's a strategy designed to make us feel tired, to make us feel like this isn't worth thinking about.

But don't fall for it. We can do this.

Yes, different cultures should certainly share and exchange ideas... and appropriation helps us consider when that exchange is fair. A few weeks ago, Dakota Kim made a similar point with cultural appropriation in terms of food, and recently Soleil Ho wrote a helpful follow-up with lots of examples. It's not about banning white people from eating certain kinds of foods! Instead, at its best, it helps enrich our understanding of food, and helps us appreciate culture even more.



Decades ago in the art world, "appropriation" was more of a fun edgy thing where underdog artists would appropriate copyrighted commercial imagery without corporate permission, and make it into their own. In her amazing way-before-its-time proto-meme 1979 video art montage Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, artist Dara Birnbaum appropriated footage from the Wonder Woman TV show without the TV company's permission, and the resulting twirling and explosions was a great piece of video art that predates even today's amazing shitposts. How do we separate this "awesome appropriation" from "gross appropriation" that exploits marginalized people, and/or who gets to make that call?

That's famous author Zadie Smith's question in her Harper's July 2017 article "Getting In and Getting Out": who owns black pain? She talks about the horror film Get Out (and heavily spoils it, by the way) and its anxiety about white affection toward black bodies, and how white "appreciation" can end up feeling much scarier and more racist than outright hatred. As if literally owning black people wasn't bad enough, now they feel the need to own the pain as well. In this sense, you can think of cultural appropriation as yet another modern extension of slavery.

But when Smith saw Dana Schutz's controversial painting "Open Casket", she says she felt disappointed rather than angry. She argues that the painting should not be destroyed, that this is not the hill to die on, because it's just one painting in a long history of violence against black people. (Smith also writes about biracial pain and "quadroons", and so some writers accuse her of intellectualizing black pain in a way that neglects African-American experience (Smith is black and British) but I don't think I'm equipped to unpack that claim, so I'll leave that to someone else.)


Lastly, let's consider this artist roundtable from fancy art magazine Artforum, where 7 different artists, writers, and activists, talk about what cultural appropriation might mean today, and in the future. If you want all the detail and nuance in their own voices, I highly recommend reading the original discussion, but personally here's what I got out of it:

First, they agree that "cultural appropriation", as a useful term, is on its last legs. Joan Kee notes that appropriation means treating culture like property, which fails to describe how culture works on the internet, where everyone reformats / reposts / remixes constantly. However, the panelists can't agree on what term can replace "appropriation." Homi Bhabha suggests "translation", since we don't expect translations to exactly replicate the original, and it helps us focus on the quality of a good or bad translation. But translation doesn't really force you to think about power, which is maybe why Salome Asega proposes "scamming". Scamming brings the focus back to who benefits from what. Did Harlem benefit from the Harlem Shake, or did YouTube culture scam Harlem?

Jacolby Satterwhite argues this is a popularity contest; white rapper Iggy Azalea started underground with a diverse audience, but once she made it big and had too much power, she was judged guilty of appropriation. Yet Satterwhite also thinks none of this will matter; today we have to invent imperfect unwieldy words to talk about this, but in 10 years, young people will feel this in their bones and navigate politics much more fluidly. Kee is skeptical -- her teenage students today are reluctant to debate art controversies because they think it's a fake "dialogue" for the sake of dialogue. If the issue is whether black people are offended by Dana Schutz's painting, wouldn't a dialogue serve only to question their pain? You can't talk past the pain.

So instead, maybe we should debate the causes of that pain, and how images move around on the internet and in society. Ajay Kurian suggests "migration" as a metaphor for culture because there are many types of migrants: nomads, barbarians, vagabonds, refugees, etc. which forces a focus on political identities. Gregg Bordowitz cautions that those labels invoke surveillance, which often leads to in-fighting among activists. "When the enemy is not in the room, we practice on each other." Bhabha thinks it's more complicated than that, because when the enemy is so complex, you don't even know when the enemy is in the room or not.

The whole panel is disturbed by the viciousness encouraged by social media. Facebook and Twitter encourage hot takes and "throwing up in your brain" instead of accountability, convergence, process, and trust. Bordowitz suggests that trust and solidarity come from new shared identities, like "people living with AIDs" unites many different people. Bhabha cautions that new identities must avoid sectarian essentialism, and he quotes James Baldwin: “You cannot resolve the problem of African Americans without white Americans. You cannot resolve that issue, and you cannot displace it onto some Pan-Africanism either.”

...

Hmm. So, uh, it seems like nothing really got resolved... but, you know. Culture is complicated.

If I had to sum up all this conversation, I'd say it feels like talking about cultural appropriation is ultimately a bit of a trap, but at the same time, it is necessary for us to fall into it.

The alternative is to fall into a much worse trap, full of unchallenged racism and ignored pain and hot molten lava. Compared to that trap, this one isn't so bad, right? And then when we eventually figure out how to crawl out of this, we'll be better for it.

Honestly, it was pretty exhausting for me to try to read and unpack everything here. However, I think it is definitely worth the effort to try to understand it and figure it out, and I hope you agree.

Some recent posts on indie dev failure have been going around lately -- Introversion Software talks about how their experimental exploration game "bombed in a big way", and also Cliff Harris argues "Your Indie Game Will Flop And You Will Lose Money", while Greg Wohlwend writes in his Tumbleseed postmortem about how they will likely never recoup their development costs, and each collaborator earned maybe $10 / hour. You can also connect these threads back to Hugh Monahan's Full Indie 2016 talk "What Scuttled Brigador's Launch", as well as Daniel Cook's theory of "minimum sustainable success" right around when the Indiepocalypse talk was in full gear. I think it's fair to say that the general mood in commercial indie game dev land has been kind of dark for the past few years, and it's getting darker.

I've written in the past about how I don't expect to make a living off of my games. I give away my gay sex games for free because (a) they're short-form games in a market that demands "replay value" even though people don't even touch most of their Steam libraries, (b) I don't want to invest all my time and hope into commercializing it, just to earn like $5k a year if I'm lucky, which does not go far in NYC, (c) when an indie game has poor sales, then that often becomes the game's entire legacy forever. I don't want the conversation around my games to orbit around the awkward pity of my SteamSpy numbers! To me, there's a certain peace of mind in not trying to make the next gay sex minecraft blockbuster happen.

And yes this is totally a weird defense mechanism on my part. I understand that everyone has a different living situation, and I'm not holding myself up as a role-model to emulate. We all have different ways of working in games, but personally I feel like I can't access the same tools or methods as successful commercial devs, so why should I bother trying? If Cliff Harris and Greg Wohlwend can barely make it work, what chance do I have?... I want you to understand why I ask this question:

Why is it so important for us to make our living from selling our games? Why can't we make our living from doing something else?

I mean, yes having money lets us pay rent and eat food which is great -- I'm talking about this more from an emotional or psychological angle. Game dev culture has a specific idea of success that involves astronomical blockbuster commercial success, and most of us will always fall way short of it, in ways that often feel out of our control. Why maintain such impossible expectations and beat ourselves up for it?

We love comparing video games to other media and creative disciplines, so here it goes: across music, film-making, painting, sculpture, theater, dance, book-writing, poetry, fashion, sports, etc. the vast majority of practitioners and artists make very little money from their passions, and often take up other jobs or gigs or client work to pay the rent. I'm sure we can all agree this situation sucks, and society should support arts better, and value creative work more, etc. but it's the painful reality that countless artists have faced for thousands of years. (Again, I really wish it were different!)

Other fields have since adapted to these bad odds, where "success" isn't always becoming a big movie star or famous author, but rather, success might mean acting in a beloved cult classic film or writing for a small passionate community -- or maybe success involves producing a cool local theater production, or getting a compliment from another writer you admire. Success for most athletes looks like winning your school tournament or local intramural match. And guess what, these things are still worthwhile, and you are still good and talented and human, even if you're not a superstar or even a professional. You get your moment of recognition or "15 minutes of fame" and then move on.

If indie game dev makes sense to you as a small business, and you're able to survive off of it, that's great, keep doing your thing. But for many of us, I think we need alternate models of success / satisfaction that don't involve investing years into a long-shot hope of selling a million (or even 20,000 now?) copies of our games. In the past, I've written about some game manifestos that attempt to imagine these alternate value systems, or less commercially-oriented design practices like "local level design" and "local game cultures". These smaller-scale success stories rarely get valorized, or even told. Ultimately, game dev culture may have to make these shifts similar to other arts, and migrate its normative sense of artistic value and satisfaction toward a more personal dimension of self-expression. It'd be great if someone pays you for your voice, but it's also "normal" to make almost no money from it, even if you are good at it. Then maybe Valve will stop saying Steam is a meritocracy, and maybe gamers will stop playing armchair developer in your comments. (But I doubt it.)

I think it's healthy how these devs are talking about the very small odds of sustainable indie game dev, but now what?

Again, I'm not saying, "no one should pay artists" nor "we should all race to the bottom" nor "we should all give up on our dreams" nor "everyone should release their games for free" nor "not everyone should be allowed to make games." I'm not saying any of that!

What I'm saying is: we should try to feel less shitty / embarrassed / ashamed about making no money from our personal projects -- and for our own health, some of us may need to start seeking fulfillment (and maybe rent money) in other ways. Working for someone else, instead of yourself, should be totally OK and understandable, not "giving up." Being a hobbyist should not be a dirty undesirable thing.

Perhaps this is sad and depressing to some people, but isn't this also kinda what we wanted? Games are art, not because of Roger Ebert's reluctant approval, but because there are so many of us and we are all stressed-out and poor, and the world oppressively devalues our labor, just like all the other artists in other fields. Welcome to the club! It kind of sucks!

WARNING: This post spoils what happens in The Tearoom. If you care about that, you should probably play the game before reading any further.

The Tearoom is a historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and sucking off other dudes' guns. In it, you basically cruise other willing strangers for sex, and try to have some fun without getting caught by undercover police. It's heavily inspired by Laud Humphreys' epic Tearoom Trade (1970), a meticulous 180 page sociological study of men who have quick anonymous sex with men in public bathrooms ("tearooms" in US, "cottages" in UK), along with interviews, diagrams, and derived "rules" for participating in the tearoom trade.

My game is set in a small roadside public bathroom in Ohio in 1962. Much of the game sequences and gameplay are based on Humphreys' notes (in his book, Humphreys even calls it a "game" himself) and the layout of the bathroom is based partly on diagrams from his observation reports. And while I wanted the game to be about gay history, I also wanted it to speak to how video games think of sex and violence.

This is also the most complicated sex game I've ever made. It took me ~8-9 months of on-and-off work to finish it, it has several different systems going on, so it's going to take a while to unpack the history and my intent. Buckle up!...


Few video games feature peeing or pooping, but still frequently feature bathrooms for the sake of completeness. To make the bathroom "useful", level designers often stash powerups or ventilation ducts or forgotten keycards in them, but those are all secondary to the bathroom's ultimate function in a video game: to signal expense and production value. In immersive sims like Deus Ex Human Revolution or Prey (2017), the player can turn on showers and flush toilets, and each fixture sports a complex effects setup with swirling particles and refracting water shaders. This "wasteful" use of draw calls and texture memory helps assure you of the game's high budget and huge production team. (For more on the expense of video game water, see Pippin Barr's water museum "v r 3".)

In The Tearoom, I replicate the logic of the pointless expensive video game bathroom. I gratuitously cover every surface with high resolution physically-based materials, apply layers of dirt and grunge decals, lightmap the room at a high luxel density, and incorporate unique period details like vintage light switches and old faucets. I also hand-modeled the Cadillac of urinals, a luxurious drop-floor "Hinsdale", scaled to the original patent drawings... I even do one better than most AAA video games, and allow the player to freely urinate as much as they like. (However, the urine does pool rather unrealistically, to exaggerate the complexity of my flushing simulation.)

Just as video game bathrooms don't serve any crucial gameplay purpose, my urination system serves no real gameplay purpose. This pointlessness evokes the logic of cruising the tearoom for sex: you aren't there to pee, but rather you're there to pretend to pee. The bathroom and the pee are a pretext to provide plausible deniability, and "immerse" tearoom players together.


In his research, Humphreys talks about "interaction membranes" -- in game design, we have a similar concept called "the magic circle". Whatever you call it, it's some sort of loose boundary between players and non-players; players are inside the circle or membrane, while non-players are outside of it. This space of consent is crucial for play. Chasing a fellow player inside a game of tag is expected, while chasing a random bystander outside on the street could be harassment.

Inside the magic membrane of the tearoom, there were big risks to propositioning the wrong guy for sex, whether he's totally unwitting or actively hostile. It was very important to figure out who thought it was just a bathroom vs. who knew it was a tearoom. To help players see each other, tearooms evolved a complex ritual / "handshake" of certain stances and eye contact and "showing hard" over time, allowing players to wordlessly "seal the contract" (sexual consent) quickly and effectively.

In my game, I mimic this same look-based ritual for the first phase of every encounter. To establish shared sexual interest, the player and NPC must repeatedly make eye contact. If the player is slow, the NPC coughs to try to get the player's attention; if the player never reciprocates the gaze, then the NPC eventually leaves. Some NPCs are totally oblivious bystanders who will leave right after they pee, while some timid NPCs scare easily from forceful eye contact.

This segment was hard to design because decades of male heterosexual hegemony have trained gamers into thinking of "looking" as a "free" action, with few consequences or results. After several mildly disastrous playtests, I noticed players still weren't understanding that looking has power to it, so in the end I had to implement some really obvious iconography and prompting. I literally had to add flashing "eye" icons everywhere to try to get the idea of "gaze" across. Some players still don't get it, but I think I want to stop short of a big flashing text bubble "LOOK AT HIS FUCKING DICK OK??"

Then finally, when shared sexual consent is established though repeated eye contact, gestures, and pregnant pauses, the NPC will walk over and the player will automatically get down on their knees to orally service the NPC.


This is the part of the game when you suck-off a gun as quickly as possible, which, um, departs a bit from Humphreys' 1970 sociological study. My design emerged from a difficult problem: how do you give first person fellatio in a game? As an experienced real-life practitioner, it is my opinion that video games can't do this justice because a blurry appendage thrusting toward you, clipping through the camera, is not erotic, and such a literal approach would've been inscrutable and disappointing. Instead, I wanted a bit more of the fantasy, to show the excitement and pleasure and why these men would seek each other out in a public bathroom.

So in this game, you service a fellow gun owner's "gun" from the side, thus maintaining a clear readable silhouette. If the gun is flaccid, you're clearly not doing enough, but if it's twitching upward then you know it likes it. The basic licking mechanic is pretty simple: you point your tongue at a randomly selected "sweet spot" on the gun, then rapidly click / wiggle your mouse to satisfy that sweet spot. You must repeat it anywhere from 6 rounds (M1879 Reichsrevolver) to 50 rounds (M249 "SAW" LMG). As you fill it with ammunition, the gun surface gradually transitions from a fleshy biomechanical "Cronenberg" texture to a "sexy" gunmetal finish. Then upon climax, the gun empties its blanks into the air, unavoidably bathing your face with milky gun oil.

"What if this gun is my penis" is a pretty obvious metaphor, but it helped me ensure a variety of shapes to orally service. You could say gun culture is somewhat body-positive -- there is relatively little size-shaming around unique pistol designs (e.g. a Mauser C96) or unique concepts (e.g. the trendy "Obrez"), a gun can be "cool" for a myriad of reasons. Take that, size queens! More importantly, guns also help me escalate my resistance against Twitch's draconian game-banning policies because guns are clearly not penises. Therefore, there is no basis for Twitch to ban my game, like it banned the rest of my games -- however, if they still ban my game, then it will be the first time in history that the game industry regulates and bans a game about guns.


As usual, I'm interested mostly in the political implications. The game industry is a huge driver of gun culture, pushing specific gun brands and gunmetal shader aesthetics. I want to compare these gun politics of visibility to bathroom politics of visibility. There is a breathtaking disconnect between advocates of "open carry", who insist they're not intimidating the public when they brandish AR-15 type rifles in playgrounds -- and their same support for anti-trans bathroom laws like HB2, which operate by a more hypothetical line of sight, where a hypothetical woman might faint from catching a brief glimpse of a penis through the slits of a bathroom stall. If only trans people could fire a hundred bullets per second with their genitals -- then maybe they could finally enjoy the same freedoms that guns do?

But what is the LGBTQ community's relationship to violence? Historically, cops have been perhaps the #1 most dangerous enemy of gay / trans / queer people for decades, and continue to target gay people today: in 2016, the Toronto Police started "Project Marie" to target gay men who cruised parks late at night; and since at least 2004 and continuing today, the NYPD have been targeting men at the Port Authority who "seem gay", spying on them through slits in bathroom stalls and charging them with "public indecency." (Isn't going to the Port Authority already punishment enough?)

However, my game specifically cites one notorious 1962 police entrapment operation in Mansfield, Ohio: in July and August of 1962, the Mansfield police installed a two-way mirror in a public men's bathroom, and did a two month stake-out to record everyone in the bathroom. At the end of the summer, they convicted 38 men on charges of sodomy with a mandatory minimum one year prison sentence. William E. Jones' haunting "found documentary"Tearoom (2007) consists of the original 1962 police surveillance footage, minimally edited, so you can see just how fucked-up these cops were: watch two scared dudes barely manage to rub themselves out -- and as the camera repeatedly pans down to their crotches, you can practically hear the cop behind the camera salivating over how he's going to ruin their lives.



If you watch Jones' film, you may notice the men are surprisingly diverse -- poor, middle-class, white, black, young, old -- but the one thing that is the same is their behavior. They are always nervously watching the door, worried that someone might see them. The instant they hear someone else outside, they must be ready to zip-up and pretend nothing was happening.

This is also why the Mansfield Police Dept's morality crusade against tearoom trade made no sense. Supposedly these "sexual deviates" were degrading the town's fine moral fiber -- but how, who, where, and when? There were no damages and the tearoom players stopped whatever they were doing if anyone walked in; children and teenagers were specifically despised and shunned as "chicken." Humphreys argued convincingly that there was also little threat to abstaining straight men here: if you don't want sex and don't reciprocate signals, then no one will bother you. So where exactly is the crime here, other than some clandestine scratch and sniff?

Is a public bathroom a 100% totally public space? If you're being honest, then no, it's not exactly like a public plaza or a sidewalk. Bathrooms also have enclosures and stalls and an expectation of privacy, they are a sort of public-private space. But what kind of public, and whose privates?

The Mansfield police had to figure out how to jail people for having "public sex" that wasn't actually in public view. If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, then can you prosecute the tree for sodomy? To make this invisible subtext visible, the Mansfield police secretly recorded the public bathroom for 2 months and basically made one of the first full-color gay porn films in history. The ending sequence of this game, triggered by either acquiring all 8 guns or getting arrested 8 times, reveals a similar cop surveillance setup with a two-way mirror.

Thankfully, no other US police department went to such creepy lengths to prosecute men for having consensual sex with men, but many departments did deploy undercover plain-clothes officers to actively solicit and entrap men. (Most famously, in the case of singer George Michael in 1998.)

Thus, each NPC in this game has a 23% chance of being an undercover cop. As in my previous game Stick Shift, I specifically used a relevant statistic from a 2015 study of anti-LGBT violence: of LGBT people who've survived abuse or violence from a stranger, police officers were 23% of the perpetrators. I like the gesture of imbuing politics within the game code itself, and I like how it plays out in the game balance: 23% chance sometimes feels a bit too frequent in the game... as it should.


When the game code spawns a cop, that guy's personality is set to 100% horniness. He will quickly enter sex with you with minimal eye contact or ritual. He wants to trap you. My hope is that some players notice that cops are always horny, and begin to grow suspicious of horny non-cops as well. Should you be worried if someone seems too friendly, too eager? Will they report you, are they a cop? This is how surveillance destroys trust between people.

Cops also have other "tells": they are never nervous and they will never look behind their backs. Also, outside the window, a shadowy cop car will slowly roll-up and watch you. If you manage to notice these cues early on, then you should probably ignore the cop until he leaves. But if you don't catch any of those tells, and obliviously complete the eye contact stage only to realize everything too late, then your only choice is to quit the game.

I'm fascinated by meta-mechanics like save scumming, a strategy where players reload their save-game if they get bad results. Get a bad dice roll? Reload the game and roll again! If it's allowed by the game, then isn't it part of the game? And if the game saves automatically, then maybe you can quit without saving by pressing Alt-F4 in time, or set your save file as read-only, and get a second chance anyway. (This is also similar to how we consume porn around parents or employers, desperately closing a browser tab to avoid detection... But don't kid yourself, your mom knows everything.)

I like the idea that quitting the game is part of the game. Instead of rage quit, maybe this is like a fear quit? I also try to encourage game-quitting by adding a literal exit door inside the game world. But after some playtests, it was clear that some (innocent, honorable) players still didn't realize they could quit the game to avoid getting caught, so in the end, I had to add a straightforward tutorial message: "if you see the cops, then leave the game."

However if you don't manage to escape in time, then you get arrested, either before or after you begin servicing the undercover cop. Upon arrest, sirens blare and a uniformed officer spawns to stand in the doorway to block any escape -- and the cops delete all your game progress. (For example, if you managed to fellate 5 of 8 possible guns, then you lose your gun collection, and have to start over from 0.)


Given the possibility of losing everything in an instant, I hope my players feel anxious about cops -- to evoke a shred of the same stakes that the real-life tearoom players lived with, and the stakes that many people still live with today. And in 2017, if you make a game with cops in it, then you probably have to address race somehow.

In the game, the random percentage chance of encountering a black man is based on 1960 US census data. According to page 1-44 of "General Demographic Trends for Metropolitan Areas, 1960-1970", Mansfield was about 5.82% black (6853 / 117761) and so, I have hardcoded that exact probability into the game. That relatively rarity means that some players may play through 5-10 encounters before meeting a black man, and when they do, I imagine white players may feel surprised -- and then maybe feel bad for feeling surprised -- and then wonder whether he's secretly a cop -- but then were there any black cops in Ohio in 1962? etc.

And if we're talking about historical bathroom politics, then we also have to acknowledge racial segregation. In Ohio and many other US states, racial segregation was still legal as late as 1959, and of course likely continued informally afterward. This history bleeds into Humphreys' 1970 study when he quotes a white police officer, who warns Humphreys (who is white) against cruising a certain bathroom because of "trouble with the [n*ggers]" there, implying there would be a heavier police presence and response at that bathroom.

Race and sexuality and bathrooms still converge today. In one case from 2007, white Republican politician Bob Allen was arrested and convicted for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in a public bathroom in a park. Allen offered to pay $20 to let him give the undercover cop a blowjob -- but in court, he claimed he did it only because he was afraid the cop (who was black) intended to rob him. In her amazing book "Not Gay - Sex Between Straight White Men" (2015), scholar Jane Ward understands Allen within a long history of straight white dudes routinely having sex with each other, and that Allen's supposed crime was not in soliciting a man for sex, but rather in soliciting a black man for sex. When Allen crossed some sort of weird imagined racial-sex line to desire a black man, it signaled that he was so deeply gay that it overwhelmed his sense of racism, breaking the ranks of "white solidarity". (Again, recall the white cop warning Humphreys to stay away from a black tearoom.)

If Allen had solicited a white guy, maybe he still could've argued he was straight, as many tearoom players did. Humphreys wrote about this surprisingly high proportion of straight men, even (controversially) following some men home from the tearoom, and interviewing them about their lives to confirm that they actually lived a "straight life". Turns out they weren't closet-case gay men in denial, they were just straight men who liked having sex with men (MSM) and tearooms were convenient for them. (Today, maybe some of these men would identify as bisexual or queer?)


In her book, Ward also wants us to consider why some straight men seem to co-opt gay sex as "experiments", "hazing rituals", "jokes", and "bromances." When the Hells Angels makeout or heterosexual soldiers anally penetrate each other for shits and giggles, they present their straightness as totally unassailable, and trivialize gay sex as non-sexual or amusingly humiliating. They argue that having sex with men is "not gay" because only straight sex is "real sex", so therefore gay sex is basically masturbation or a prank. Personally, this attitude disturbs me, because it comes off as a homophobic performance of homoeroticism, which is a tone that some asshole YouTubers regularly perform when they play and profit off my games.

And that is also why the dicks in this game can be guns: many of these men don't think tearoom sex qualifies as real sex. These penises might as well be guns for all they care, they're just appreciating each others' equipment and masculinity, and helping each other out with their "not gay" urges -- and sometimes even while hating gay people?

The imagined end point of this theory is a catastrophic gay sex apocalypse, a fateful day when straight men will have completely co-opted gay sex acts to enrich their own heteromasculinity. Meanwhile, gay men will be stuck with boring straight male stuff like government-sanctioned marriage and cargo shorts. Cargo shorts!!!

I mean, ok, honestly, I haven't met all these millions of straight men who love gay sex, and I'm trusting all these researchers' words. I think I definitely agree with Ward's larger political point -- gay sex, especially in quasi-public or semi-private places, helps reify and build gay culture. The point of the tearoom comes down to this: when and where are gay people allowed to do our gay shit?!

If the police are going to raid and shutdown all our gay bathhouses or gay bars or gay theaters, fine, then maybe gay people should just do gay shit everywhere, all the time! Because without gay places and a gay geography, there can be no gay community. So maybe one answer is to project our gayness everywhere, and remap the entire city to our needs. Why stop at just one gay bar, when the entire city could be like a gay bar? (If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend reading Samuel Delany's "Times Square Red, Times Square Blue")

The tearoom represents an exciting and radical reclamation of public space, for members of the public who usually aren't allowed any space of their own. Humphreys used the phrase "patterns of collective action" to refer to these dudes bonking each other, but to me that phrase also has a political tinge that reminds us how the tearoom is / was also a collective of white and black men, working class and middle class men, and straight and gay men... uh, bonking each other.

But if there's any simple moral to be gleaned from this game, I just hope you never look at a bathroom, or park, or office, or shopping mall, etc. the same way ever again. Above all, the tearoom is about transforming the world around you by seeing (creative, erotic) potential in every corner and crevice. Even if you're not a sex-with-men-haver, how can you remap your world to strengthen your community? All you need is some willing players.

Maybe the tearoom is just the beginning.


This post is already way too long, so I'm just going to stick some loose ends down here:

BLADDERS / URINE: because of all the different combinations and modularity (4 different NPC types, with 8 different guns, and 1 player) the urine system has a strange structure -- every urinal is in charge of peeing into itself. A urinal does not care who is telling it to pee into itself, it could be the player or an NPC, using any kind of gun. I know some of my fans will no doubt be disappointed that this isn't a piss / water sports game, but I feel like the only place I could never set such a game is precisely in a bathroom.

MUSIC: four tracks by The Lonesome Billies. In general, I had trouble finding a country band that wanted to be associated with my weird gay sex games (which felt annoying and borderline homophobic to me, but whatever) so I'm thankful that this band was OK with my use of their music. I feel that country music is pretty underrepresented in video games, and I thought they were a good fit because they evoke a sort of Merle Haggard / Johnny Cash "outlaw country" 1970s honky tonk sound that has some rural working class roots (unlike 2015-era "bro country") while also feeling a little pop and punk. I guess it gives this a vaguely "Brokeback" vibe or something.

STALLS: I originally had a mechanic where you could run into a stall and hide whenever you wanted, or dudes would walk in while you were still sitting in the stall. It generated really cool moments where you could look though the gaps in the stall partitions and see a guy walking in. Unfortunately, it confused a lot of playtesters, who either didn't understand that the stall was a sort of "trophy room" where you see your gun collection, or they expected too much and hoped the guy would come into the stall with them. Because I'm only one developer and this project was already taking way too long, I had to limit my gameplay to just fellatio in front of the urinal, but I prefer that focus and vulnerability.

ANACHRONISM: while I like stressing how historical this game is, there's also some places where I really just didn't care about historical consistency... the 2000s-era modern police car, the eclectic choice of guns (I didn't even know they made AK-12s!), the modern surveillance camera revealed at the end. If I had to discern some meaning from it, I'd say I wanted to emphasize how a lot of the forces of control and violence from 1962 are still at work, and now they're maybe even stronger in 2017.

VIRTUAL REALITY: I didn't have time to design, implement, and test VR functionality in this first release. Motion controls and the lack of camera control mean I will have to re-design many of my interfaces and gameplay cues. I definitely want to do it, but maybe I'll just have to do it later, hopefully in a Radiator 3 release at the end of this year.

Thanks for reading. Again, you can download and play the game over here. It's an Itch.io timed exclusive!

old WIP production still from an early version of The Tearoom

I want to talk a bit about the formal design constraints in my gay sex games -- I don't usually emphasize this aspect of my work because it's a very game developer-y thing to care about, but sometimes I guess a little bit of shop-talk is called for:

A lot of my games have been what I'd call short form "one room" games, where I constrain the scope of the game to one room or one small area. When I first started doing Radiator 1 ("Polaris") in 2009, that constraint emerged from my frustration with working on a large international group project like Black Mesa Source, where I wasn't sure if we were ever going to finish and release anything. I wondered, could I work alone, and quickly make a short experience in a small room?

Cut to today in 2017. I've just finished and released The Tearoom, a game that takes place in one single public bathroom. Because it was so small and controlled, I could focus on the interactions and production value very tightly, and produce something with relatively high fidelity and density even though I was working mostly alone. (But it still took me like 8-9 months of part-time work to do all that! Maybe the room should've been even smaller?)

But I also don't exist in a vacuum, cut-off from the rest of video game culture. Maybe my attitude is also a reaction against the rise / dominance / golden age of open world games and walking simulator-type hiking games today? I know other designers counter AAA hegemony in different ways, like how Firewatch adopted a non-photorealistic illustrative art style, or how The Signal From Tolva focused on a somewhat sparse rocky-chunky-sculpted look. Both games feature large open world environments that differentiate themselves with talented art direction that also helped them scope better too.

However, I'm not really a good art director, and I still feel really tied to realism for political reasons, so I guess I have to differentiate my creative strategy in a different way... I specifically set my games in small man-made domestic spaces instead of trying to build huge sweeping landscapes. And even if I did attempt to build a huge landscape, my shabby default Unity 2 tri indie grass will never be able to compare with photoreal translucent Unreal grass, or Breath of the Wild's lush Miyazaki grass, so maybe that's why I don't bother. As much as I enjoy and admire all these grass games, I recognize that it's out of my wheelhouse and capability. Instead of trying to build a giant grassy forest landscape, I can rest with a decently crafted urinal and lean on that.

It might seem like I'm boxing myself in, and maybe I am, but honestly it doesn't feel that onerous to me. Grass is nice, but perhaps there's enough people making grass games already. I'm not sure if I have anything new or interesting to say about grass or trees anyway. (But who knows? Coming in 2018: gay trees)

By constraining the physical-geographical space, I think that helps me explore a wider conceptual-cultural space. One room doesn't just mean one idea? Or if it does, then for now, I think I'd rather make 5 one room games than 1 five room game, or 0.271 forest games.

Like a lot of digital artists today, I learned Photoshop in the late 90s in order to make awesome-looking fan sites and "professional" forum signature images. One of the Photoshop tricks I learned was the "Bevel" layer style, which embosses a faked thickness and depth onto a layer, as if it's popping outward toward / inward from the viewer.

When I first learned it, I felt powerful, like I could use Photoshop to "paint in 3D" and make my Starcraft fan forum avatar look even more professional. But then I realized that the bevel had a very specific look to it, and I started seeing that look everywhere. My astounding bevels quickly lost their sheen. To this day, the conventional wisdom in 2D game art is that you should just handpaint your own bevels, and it only takes a few minutes when you get good at it anyway.

Today in 2017, the bevel has arguably taken over 3D environment art, and like all the other game art gods, it demands labor from us. But unlike 2D bevels, there's no strong consensus on what the best 3D bevel techniques are, which means we're free to experiment...

from "Technical and Visual Analysis of Overwatch" by Timothy Bermanseder

It's worth reviewing why we want to go to all this trouble: bevels, or any kind of detailed edges, are basically what make a 3D game world look expensive and high poly. Most recently, Overwatch (2016) features some beautiful bevels and corners with clever edge breakups, but this aesthetic and value system was popular way before that -- consider the towering handpainted bevels of World of Warcraft (2004) or the normal mapped bevels of Doom 3 (2004). Detailed edges connote artistry and require more human labor, which means it's more expensive and can be sold for $60. Even "low tech" 2D pixel-art game dev communities like RPGMaker dev forums adopted a "three tile rule" that prescribed breaking-up your RPGMaker map tile boundaries at least every 3 tiles. Detailed edges, in whatever sense, signify your game's attention to detail, which raises fidelity, which raises the level of professionalism and realism, etc.

image by Andy Durdin

This appeal to realism never really stands up if you just look at what we try to pass for realism. Far Cry 3 slathered itself in SSAO (glossary: "Screen Space Ambient Occlusion") in a totally unrealistic way. This absurd edge treatment demonstrates how realism is often in tension with the demands of "realistic graphics"; sharp punchy bevels and overflowing SSAO are not realistic at all. Perhaps it is "hyperrealistic", it refers to a supposedly real-world phenomenon that doesn't actually exist. Experienced industry artists create this hyperreality with high self-awareness and intent; in a talk on Uncharted 4's character art, the artists confessed that they incorporated a lot of classical sculptural forms into the characters' faces -- idealized anatomy for idealized action heroes. Video game realism is not realistic, it is hyperrealistic. Bevels, and all the other fanciful edge treatments we do in 3D video games, help us idealize a world in a hyperreal way.

Do gamers generally notice or care? I'd predict most of them readily accept non-realistic-but-realistic graphics, just like the way they look past "ludonarrative dissonance" all the time -- which, I argue, is a meaningless concept when it doesn't feel dissonant, and anyway we actually love and celebrate dissonance in games. In a similar way, bevels and SSAO may look dissonant to any trained artist, but to the average player, it looks more like $60 well spent. I can't wait for even better toilet shadows in Far Cry 6!

Ideally, our buildings look like action heroes too: crunchy, punchy, angular, defined, sharp, focused, exaggerated, accentuated. This kind of action hero architecture ornament is time-consuming, but luckily, we can partially automate some of that labor in 3D art. At GDC 2015, Insomniac Studios' Morten Olsen presented their bevel reuse workflow as used in their open world city game Sunset Overdrive. The video of"The Ultimate Trim: Texturing Techniques of Sunset Overdrive" is online (+ the slides are here), so watch that for more details, but I'll try to interpret it here:

It is argued that even the sharpest edge in real-life has a slight bevel to it -- and that faintest of bevels will catch light in a way that makes your game look more expensive. It is especially crucial today in the age of physically based shaders; if you work more angles into your surfaces, that means more fresnel. And just like everything has bevels, everything also has fresnel. But when you model a bevel into an object using polygons, you can't really change that object and you can't adjust the thickness or softness of that bevel. The 3D model basically becomes immutable.

That's where Morten Olsen introduces the idea of the "ultimate trim" texture, a standardized texture atlas layout with trims of different sizes. Now you can re-use the same exact 3D model but still swap out brick for wood for metal for concrete, and the result will generally look pretty good. Their standard layout starts with thin trims at the top, with thicker trims as you descend, with miscellaneous endpieces at the bottom. Different trim thicknesses are crucial to maintain consistent-ish texel density, and it also helps you follow the logic of your materials. A brick trim, for instance, would use different arrangements of bricks based on trim thickness. You wouldn't want arbitrarily stretched "long bricks" or "thin bricks", because a standardized brick should stay the same general size and proportion no matter what. If we extend that methodology to a whole category of problems known as "bevels", then we can treat bevels like bricks, and standardize that workflow as well.

(This is a break from game art orthodoxy, where the norm involves handpainting / handsculpting everything, and they hate my beloved Photoshop Bevel tool.)


In real-life, other industries often use bevels or bevel-like operations to soften edges for reasons of safety (sanding off sharp edges) or functionality (e.g. a miter joint in woodworking) -- but if you'll bear with me, I'd like to argue that we still essentially use video game bevels to make a game "safer" to play, in a sense.

Many video games certainly facilitate a fantasy of agency. However, given its importance, what fantasy does the bevel fulfill?

Let's consider a fantasy of perception: the ability to effortlessly read the game world, to quickly discern threats and boundaries and escape routes. Bevels (along with lighting design) help us track the contours of our game worlds, and present it as a consistent space to parse and explore. Every edge is marked-off with glowing caution stripes / craggy plaster bevels.

A fantasy of perception also assumes a deeper fantasy of consistency, a fantasy of a stable world. In so many video games, brick walls (and their bevels) survive countless bombs and blasts. Here, decay and erosion are just ornament, and they don't signal structural weakness. It reassures us of the game's materiality and endurance, that it is 100% solid video game, that it is worth $60, that it won't crumble under the weight of our play... that the game world won't suddenly end. Who can enjoy a playground in imminent collapse?

But a stable world is embarrassingly unrealistic -- imagine living today in a world that wasn't dying? -- still, I guess it's important that we try to sand-off the edges. Maybe it helps take the edge off.

the original prototype from early 2017, with a weirder style to match the artist's vibe

A few months ago, a big record label asked me if I wanted to make a short gay sex thing set to one of their artist's tracks -- for a few weeks, I thought the collaboration was going well, but then one day they just stopped answering my e-mails. Oh well, that's just how it goes sometimes...

I still kind of like the basic idea, so I'm going to replace the music and expand it to be part of the Radiator cycle. It's tentatively called "Paseo" (but the name will likely change before then) and it's about stripping, which is a popular intersection of sex and money. As a male performer, you will do strip routines and incorporate beautiful dance movements, but you also have to work the crowd and collect your tips.

current version, with 12 different strippers to choose from (ignore his eyeballs bulging out of his head...)

The history of strippers in video games is relatively short, I think: from ogling pixelated boobs in Duke Nukem 3D (1996), to a surprisingly inclusive strip club dance in Saint's Row 4 (2013). I remember playing some random strip poker flash games as a teenager, I guess? We can also consider those old video kiosks in bars where you solve tile puzzles to undress / reveal a sultry photo, as well as Stephen Lavelle's amazing Striptease, which riffs on that tradition while commenting on sexual assault and male gaze.

My game won't be as dark, but I do want to invoke some sort of seriousness, as fun and exciting as stripping can be. Stephen Soderbergh's original Magic Mike (2012) is a useful touchstone for me -- it's half shameless beefcake delivery vehicle, but also half of a working class get-rich-scheme-gone-wrong cautionary tale. It argues that sex work is work, and just like any other job, sometimes it's fun and sometimes it sucks, and that's what it means to survive as a male erotic dancer in post-recession Florida.

Hopefully out in September or October, and hopefully releasing with VR support from launch. After that, I have to do Radiator 3 -- and then after that, I'll attempt my Moby Dick, that long-delayed gay bar game. Stay tuned!

poster by Sophia Foster-Dimino

A short while ago we announced the date and lineup for No Quarter 2017: it's on November 3rd at the Starr Space Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, featuring new commissioned work by Auriea Harvey (of Tale of Tales), Droqen, Pietro Righi Riva (of Santa Ragione), and Kitty Horrorshow. We'll be flying out all four artists for the show, so if you attend, you'll be able to meet them and talk with them at the event.

For more info, check out this NYU Game Center page for the event. I'd like to copy and paste my short curator's statement here though --

For 8 years now, the No Quarter Exhibition has been paying game designers to make the games they want to make, and then throwing them a big fun party to celebrate and amplify their unique voices. We claim no ownership over the resulting work — we just want these artists to speak their mind, and so we give them space and support to do that. We think it’s a pretty great deal for them, but we also get a lot out of it: their act of creation, and our shared acts of play, help strengthen our communities.

Now, we do all this at a time when many people think we should isolate ourselves from the rest of the world — but we know that’s a very destructive attitude. It’s so destructive that, for the first time in the history of No Quarter, we are temporarily suppressing our vocal and insufferable belief in our city’s exceptionalism: this year, we are commissioning only artists based outside of New York City. We believe a wider diversity of backgrounds and identities can only enrich our understanding of art and community… oh, and it helps us make better games too.

Also happening right after No Quarter -- game convention GaymerX East in NYC runs Saturday / Sunday. Sounds like a cool fun weekend to me! Not to mention that flights and hotels are cheaper in November too, it's off-peak... just sayin'...

combined screenshots from Final Fantasy 12 (PS2, 2006) and Final Fantasy 12 HD (PS4 Pro, 2017)

You either love or you hate Final Fantasy 12, and you either love or you hate the somewhat recent trend of remastering old games to squeeze a few more drops of profit out of them.

I'm currently playing the remastered PS4 version of Final Fantasy 12 ("The Zodiac Age") and it's still the same old nonsense story about fantasy imperialists and magic crystal macguffins. One thing that surprises me, though, is how this remastered version actually looks worse -- it went from the apex of PS2-era 3D art to looking like a mediocre PS3 game running on a PS4.

When it first came out 17 years ago (!), the Playstation 2 famously had very little texture memory (4 MB!) and no texture compression (!) which meant developers had to get creative. Loyal readers of this blog know of my love of lightmap atlases and UV layouts, and so I'd like to talk about how the textures for the original Final Fantasy 12 on PS2 were utter masterpieces produced under severe constraints -- cramming so much detail into these small texture sheets, down to the pixels...

texture sheets from Final Fantasy 12 (PS2) for the Vaan and Ashe characters, enlarged 2x (256 > 512)

Look at the texture sheets above. Note how there's only ever half of a face or torso, or one leg or arm; because these body parts are basically symmetrical, the character artist just mirrored and reused the same texture for both sides. Look at all that precious PS2 texture memory they saved!

As efficient as it is, there are a few drawbacks to this technique. Symmetrical UV mirroring means you want to avoid noisy high frequency details, and make sure your textures are relatively clean or homogeneous -- it would look weird if you had symmetrical scars on your face, or symmetrical patterns of dirt on both of your arms, etc. I think this symmetry explains why the Final Fantasy 12 skin tones are so boring and flat, and why Vaan's abs looked so weird -- it has to look flat in order to look consistent.

Compare this relatively restrained style to the gratuitous phototexturing style of something like Quake 3 Arena, which technically shipped in 1999 (7 years before Final Fantasy 12) but demanded at least 8 MBs of video memory from gamer PCs. Notice how these skins push every bevel and muscle group to its breaking point:

wide collection of different Quake 3 character skins by the legendary Kenneth Scott

Of course, Quake 3 and Final Fantasy 12 share some common values. All 3D game artists value really efficient use of UV space. If you tightly pack your UV islands, then that means less wasted texture space taking up precious GPU memory. Both styles also demonstrate mindful use of texel density, where more important areas of the model (traditionally the face and torso) get more texture space than less important parts (armpits, bottom of feet).

But notice how the Quake 3 skins make less use of symmetrical mirroring. Here, the artist Kenneth Scott rarely mirrored the chest or the face, but he did mirror less noticeable areas like arms, legs, and the butt.

Look at that one solitary shiny butt cheek on the wrestler texture, with the purple pants -- look at how round that looks. Just look at that crotch bulge, look at that ass cheek! To push those highlights and bulges, you need to make a lot of assumptions about lighting and volume that Final Fantasy 12 couldn't necessarily make.

Final Fantasy 12's character textures also prioritize UV distortion and alignment more than Quake 3 -- how easy is it to paint on this texture? With more photographic / realistic art styles, you can usually care less about distortion and alignment because of all the noise and surface detail. Notice how the lines and UV boundaries in Quake 3 go all over the place, at all angles (which works for Quake 3!) but in Final Fantasy 12, every texture segment is orthographically aligned along 90 degree angles, with many thin horizontal / vertical lines. That's because they want every line to pop.

enlarged x4 section of fancy ornate garters on a character texture sheet from Final Fantasy 12 (PS2)

It takes a lot of training to make a thin pixel art "jagged" line look smooth. You have to carefully paint the lines and selectively blur the edges to look good to the viewer. Anti-aliasing pixel art without muddying your shapes is practically an art form in of itself. When you don't have a lot of texture memory, every pixel counts! The artist had to handpixel every of those loops perfectly in order to get that metal to pop like that.

In this way, the original Final Fantasy 12 represents a high-point in this era of 3D game art. This old school low-polygon low-resolution handpainting style involved a special mix of realism with pixel art sensibilities, and you don't really see this thing anymore in games.

Architecture has this idea of material honesty / "truth to materials", where you shouldn't make concrete try to look like old stone bricks, or build old castles out of steel. I think these vintage PS2-era handpixeled textures are a great example of a digital form of truth to material, an art direction borne out of specific hardware constraints, borne of the metal itself.

Now, the characters in the FF12 remaster look cohesively repainted and remastered. I have no real complaints. There, the devs "performed the honesty" well enough... but I think the rest of the game leaves a lot to be desired.

GIF comparison between original Final Fantasy 12 (PS2, 2006) and Final Fantasy 12 HD (PS4, 2017)

In the screenshot above, I'm going to focus on the wall on the left, which is in Rabanastre, a common central city area of the game that you return to frequently. It is just one example, but if you play this new PS4 version, you'll see the same generic "remaster" up-res treatment everywhere in the game world. If I had to guess, the artists probably did this: (1) scale up texture by 200%, (2) increase contrast, (3) desaturated a little for that grayish next-gen feel, (4) apply a sharpen filter, (5) overlay a noisy detail texture on top to try to make the surface look more detailed.

You can easily automate Photoshop to do this for you, in literally a minute, for entire folders of textures, and I imagine that's what the dev team did here. But this is basically the same attitude that resolution-obsessed "HD graphics" modders inflict on games too, resulting in the fussy (and creepy) art direction of stuff like FakeFactory.

The Square Enix artists probably knew what they were doing, and consciously made this choice after considering the trade-offs. They likely didn't have much time or resources, and they decided it was worth it: to perform this "gesture" of HD remastering to appease gamers and customers, without actually repainting the world at all.

too much contrast, sharpening, and overlay... a disappointing mess of a wall

It's basically amounts to a lazy Quake 3-ification of the game's art style -- which isn't bad if your game is Quake 3 or if you put more time into it -- but here in Final Fantasy 12 it feels like a more jarring betrayal than anything that happens in the game's meandering plot. It is a gratuitous waste of texture memory in a game that made texture memory reuse into an artform; it is a negation of this game's legacy.

On the PS2, the game's environment and characters looked cohesive and balanced, albeit blurry and aliased and low-res (like any other PS2 game played on a CRT television). Still, every cinematic shot was reasonably composed, and you basically knew where to look. Everything looked like it belonged together.

But here in this remaster, the entire world is practically screaming at you. "LOOK AT THE DIRT AND GRIME ON THIS WALL!!!"

And that's not a particularly honest nor interesting thing for a wall to say... it's just loud.

OVERALL SCORE: 7/10
- This PS4 remaster is OK I guess, but really, Final Fantasy 12 probably looks best on a PS2 emulator.

(Special thanks to Brendan Byrne for his rant that got me started on this line of thinking.)

I'm working on a game that uses the excellent Yarn and YarnSpinner narrative toolkit for Unity. For this project, I'm also collaborating with a narrative designer -- unfortunately, the Yarn editor doesn't actually have a play mode or a testing mode built into it -- which makes it difficult to collaborate, because the designer can't even run through the Yarn scripts without downloading the entire Unity editor and project source! What if she just wants to test a short conversation script or two?

So, I basically duct-taped the YarnSpinner example setup to this excellent UnityStandaloneFileBrowser (for native file open dialogs at runtime) to make a very small simple tool to open and run through Yarn scripts. It can display your text, parse all your variables, and render up to 4 choices.

I call this tool "Yarn Weaver". The project source files are on GitHub under MIT License, or you can download Windows and Mac OSX release builds here. I hope it's useful for people!

Here are two old level design illustrations I did for a PC Gamer feature on level design in Half-Life 1, quite a few years ago. In the overview map, I focused on the construction of the Black Mesa Inbound chapter as a whole; and in the more focused cross-section, I concentrated my analysis on a single setpiece, the "shark cage" sequence in the Apprehension chapter.

(In the PC Gamer print version, the diagrams are annotated and labelled, but the image files I submitted were blank like these. I forget which issue it appears in. If you're interested in this topic, you can watch my Practice 2013 talk on this stuff to get roughly the same material.)

Anyway, here's a bit about my process and intent with these illustrations:


I was inspired by those old but excellent DK Cross-Sections picture books illustrated by Stephen Biesty, which I loved reading when I was little. Of course, the projection / perspective is totally broken and messed up, especially on the Black Mesa Inbound overview map -- I basically just took a bunch of screenshots in Crafty with a very low field of view setting, and hoped for the best. Then I stitched it all together in Photoshop and painted over it to try to make it look more coherent. The shark cage diagram is a lot more consistent and illustrator-y, but to get that tone, I manually perspective-skewed a bunch of Half-Life 1 textures in Photoshop, which was a bit of a nightmare. Neither workflow seemed like the ideal ratio of time vs results.

Now, certain longtime readers of this blog may remember that I wanted to write a book about Half-Life 1 at one point, many years ago... And, uh, yeah, that book never really materialized. Turns out, writing a book is a really big project!

This PC Gamer article was kind of a test run for the book's general approach. In a bid to make formal level design criticism more accessible, I felt it was vital to try approaches that weren't just long essays and paragraphs of text, given that video games are such an intensely visual medium... unfortunately, this illustration process was really labor intensive for me, and I wasn't even a good illustrator anyway.

But who knows, maybe someday I'll get back around to that book... (and maybe I'd hire an illustrator too)

Here's a few recent updates in the """discourse""" within the exciting world of QUEER GAME STUDIES!!!

First, there's a new call for papers in the long-running Game Studies journal -- this time the focus is on "queerness and video games." The full CFP is here. If you're a student or academic (or anyone with a perverse tolerance for academic citation styles) then you should consider sending-in some original scholarship and/or maybe trim your thesis into a submission; full articles of 6500-8000 words are due by December 31st, 2017. Good luck!

Next, Miguel Sicart wrote a piece about "Queering the [Game] Controller." Sicart, as far as I know, doesn't identify as queer, so some may argue he thus cannot really "queer" anything -- so please allow me, a certified gay person, to try to unpack some of his ideas here:

Currently, the most visible platform promoting non-traditional video game controllers is the (popular) alt.ctrl.gdc expo at GDC. If you've ever been to that space, you wouldn't doubt the designers' enthusiasm or skill -- but what you could doubt is any kind of "alternative" political orientation. Many of the projects at alt.ctrl, even if they're very engaging experiences about hacking sewing machines or licking gamepads, often rely on well-known game design conventions about conquering territory or avoiding death. Why aren't "alternative controllers" provoking more diverse / radical approaches to game design and player relations?

Sicart poses queer theory as a tool to help re-frame this problem: if we think of "queer" in a similar sense to "alternative", then we can ask, how does alt.ctrl.gdc fall short of a hypothetical "queer.ctrl.gdc"? Currently, you could argue that alt.ctrl.gdc, despite its good intentions and beneficial net impact, ultimately functions like a safety valve, to redirect the inspiring energy of students and hackers into a giant business convention, thus reassuring a staid industry that it isn't creatively bankrupt. In contrast, a "queer.ctrl.gdc" would not be a crowd-pleasing industry-beloved thing, it would threaten fundamental assumptions about how the game industry works.

For example, Sicart wonders, what if alt.ctrl.gdc featured games that use actual vibrators as controllers? (Yeah, I know game controllers rumble and stuff, but gamepads don't look like vibrators / don't carry the cultural impact of vibrators.) Framing vibrators as a playful device could possibly prompt a fresher approach to pacing and intimacy in game design, and it would also center the pleasure of women (and some men) at an industry expo that is overwhelmingly dominated by straight men. Dildos and vibrators are also tools that make up part of a sexual experience, but often not its entirety -- what if games were something that didn't demand complete flow, immersion, or even our attention? What if games were a "sometimes food" instead of compulsion machines?

For this reason, you could argue that GDC would likely never feature an alt.ctrl project about vibrators, because it might force the industry to justify which pleasures it embraces (constant murder and extraction of resources) and which pleasures it forbids (sex, decentralization, contemporary feminism). Can anything ever truly be "indie" or "alt" from the game industry?

Sicart points to some games and designers that are already queering existing controllers -- games like Fingle, Chicanery, or Luxuria Superbia, emphasize the tension inherent in using a touch interface with partner(s)... and then when you inevitably feel aroused, that's because your body was reacting to the interactions -- not because Call of Duty insists "press F to feel" actually produces a specified feeling. (see: "Press F to Intervene": a brief history of the Use Key Genre)

If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend checking out Shake That Button, an on-going database by Pierre Corbinais of non-traditional game installations and alternative interfaces.


Now let's pair that conversation with Marcus Tran Degnan's piece "Gaming Gone Queer", a write-up for the LA Review of Books on Queer Game Studies (a book where I contributed a study of the FeministWhorePurna scandal)

The first half of the article is about easing the non-gaming LA Review of Books readership into the idea of academic study of video games, or even, a queer academic study of video games. He also summarizes some of the chapters in the book (including mine) before delivering this critique:

Though Queer Game Studies is successful in tracing the circulation of queerness and gender in the gaming world, it lacks a sustained focus on how race, ableism, and other identities that are often entangled with discussions of sexuality and gender. As a person deeply invested in thinking about how my racial identity has been formed and functions in conjunction with my queer identity, this is an especially disappointing absence. While a handful of the essays touch on these concerns, none of them really offer the sort of substantive treatment that feels necessary. This is not to suggest that the contributors disregard issues like race completely, but rather that such topics take a back seat in ways that seem to mark a separation, deliberate or otherwise, from the gender and sexual identities that are the major focus here. The collection does, however, include some solid work on transgender representation and experience in video games that broaden what can oftentimes be a more general focus on gay and lesbian issues. As the field continues to grow — this is a primer, after all — perhaps future studies will take into consideration how queerness in video games is further inflected by an even more expansive array of identities and experiences.

He's right, the book doesn't really address race or ableism or etc enough (nor does the majority of queer theory?) but I want to add a little bit of context here -- many of these chapters in this book were actually written and compiled back in 2013 at the first Queerness and Games Conference, and academic book publishing can take a surprisingly long time.

2013 was also a different time in video game discourse (I'm literally outnumbered by gamergaters haunting the comments section of that article already) when some of us were fighting just to exist in our field, and were too focused on fighting that garbage to foresee Ferguson (in 2014) or apply that urgent theory to games. In the time since then, I know I've certainly grown-up in my thinking and I'd like to think I'm better about this, and I imagine other people feel the same way too -- and if there was ever to be a second book, it would probably be much more intersectional, because hopefully we know better now!

Of course, there are still a lot of people who don't know better. For instance, Dave Chappelle is still doing transphobic jokes, and argues trans issues matter today only because white transwomen like Caitlyn Jenner are conspiring to push black people to the back of the line. While skepticism of Jenner's politics is warranted, Janet Mock and other trans people of color aren't amused by this kind of erasure of people of color from trans movements.

These flashpoints form a self-perpetuating cycle: white scholars and critics avoid analyzing intersections of race and queerness, but then (straight) people of color see that lopsided focus on only gender / sexuality, and argue that queer theory is a predominantly white space -- which convinces white people to "stay in their lane" further, etc. We must intervene and interrupt this cycle.


Naomi Clark has some good commentary on what all this means for a possible way forward: we should to try to untangle who is / isn't allowed to queer stuff, and/or build some theoretical machinery that allows for another kind of queerness.

Marcus Tran Degnan can critique a queer game studies book because he's involved in that community and presumably lives that life every day. In contrast, Miguel Sicart's social location as a not-queer-person means he can't really critique or apply it without coming-off as appropriation or whatever, so he can only cite it, which is basically what I think he does here anyway. Is it a question of separating queer theory from queer lives, or is there some way around this?

Naomi's cheeky solution is to invent a new word for all this:

I think @miguelsicart wants C) but it's tied up w/queer community history of resistance, survival, ways of seeing. So I made him a neologism pic.twitter.com/s0jijmBSNX

— Naomi Clark (@metasynthie) August 3, 2017

I doubt Naomi truly intends to make "quarsahd" happen, but the point is made: we all need to work on this language some more, somehow. As she argues in that thread, queerness should be an "inherently conflicted" concept, changing and reshaping and morphing itself into something new.

It's going to mean having some difficult and complicated conversations, and we'll have to try to be patient with each other. Let's rise to that challenge.

(PS: please don't actually make queer.ctrl.gdc into a thing though. It's a terrible idea.)

This post spoils some mechanics and game systems in Slime Rancher.

One in-game day in Slime Rancher, I found a rare "quantum slime", a creature that pooped out "quantum plorts" that I could sell for a lot of in-game money. To make a huge profit, I intended to raise a few on my ranch in captivity, and then collect their precious poop to sell in the market.

To maximize your slime poop plort yields, you're supposed to feed your slimes as often as possible. Every slime has a certain diet (vegetables, fruits, or meat) and a specific favorite item. Quantum slimes eat only fruit, but prefer a special fruit called a "phase lemon". To get phase lemons, you have to bring back a phase lemon from the wild, plant a phase lemon tree, wait for the fruit to mature, and then shoot a different fruit at it (like a cuberry, or a mint mango) to pop the phase lemon into existence. Compared to other crops, it's unusually labor intensive to cultivate and harvest phase lemons.

This is where Slime Rancher's other big system comes in, a cross-breeding mechanic that allows you to merge two slime types together. If you feed a slime with the poop from another slime, it will become a hybrid "largo" slime that inherits both types' diets and other properties, and it will poop out both types of plorts at once when it eats something. Two poops for the price of one! When you do this on purpose in Slime Rancher, you feel like a genius.




So instead of painstakingly growing phase lemons, I fed some common pink slime poop to the quantum slime. Pink slimes are the most basic type of slime; they are the only slime that eats "everything." By merging quantum slimes with pink slimes, I had bred "pink quantum largo slimes" that could eat anything -- including carrots, perhaps the easiest and most plentiful crop to grow in Slime Rancher. The slimes' preferences were irrelevant; they would eat carrots and learn to like it, and in turn, I could then collect copious amounts of quantum poop, and sell it for $125 per lump!

This is basically 50% of your time spent in Slime Rancher: instead of exploring the wilderness, you will probably stay on your ranch for several in-game days without any in-game sleep, constantly working and refining your huge factory farms and feedlots to maximize your profits. When you inevitably run out of space, you end up cramming these cute slimes into wretched conditions, 20-40 slimes to a small 5x5 meter lot -- it's easier to deal with them that way, and the game doesn't reward you for humane conditions or free-range livestock. The markets back on Earth don't care where their plorts come from!

Whoever took this screenshot fucked up; when a slime eats 2 other types of poop, it turns into a cannibalistic Tarr slime

Games like Factorio embrace the dystopian dimension of industry, but I think Slime Rancher seems to have a bit of anxiety about the inevitable march of most players' ranches. Each player-built nightmare wasteland of hyperindustrial agriculture runs counter to the authored game narrative of Slime Rancher: the menus and in-game letters suggest you are a spunky young woman taking over an abandoned ranch on an alien frontier planet, while you and your love interest of indeterminate gender pine for each other. As you explore the planet, you find messages from the previous ranch owner, who faced a similar dilemma between exploring the frontier or returning to a loved one.

Maybe about halfway through Slime Rancher, you'll earn enough money to unlock a workshop that lets you build additional structures, and even colonize the wilds outside of your ranch. The most important buildings are resource extractors, which mine additional minerals and oils every 20 minutes. Different map areas will yield different resources, so you have to spread your structures throughout the world, and find a large open area suitable for convenient industrialization. Then you can use your newly extracted resources to build more advanced gadgets like jump pads, teleporters, or even automated turrets -- which let you settle and domesticate even more of the game world, to further extract even more resources, etc. And build even more silos to hoard those quantum plorts!...


Taken all together, what is Slime Rancher about?

It is about your (romantic) relationship with a place. The dynamic skybox and cloud rendering is gorgeous; peaceful guitar strumming music evokes a gentle prairie; and every adorable slime smiles at you, even the mean ones that want to eat you. It's nice and pleasant to be here, and by the end of your 10-20 hour run, you will know every nook and cranny of the game world. It's basically like Dark Souls.

But unlike Dark Souls, which basically resents your memory and attempts to tame it, Slime Rancher quickly embraces your powers of colonialist gaze to efficiently transform the planet (and its inhabitants) into processed commodities for human use. What are the fastest routes for gathering resources, where are the most lucrative spawning areas? How should I arrange my crops and corrals and storage silos and resource extractors for the best daily routine, and efficiently sell my commodities to the markets back on Earth? These aren't particularly romantic concerns.

So maybe Slime Rancher is precisely about how we try to wrap our land grabs with romance. Sure, you have a special someone back home on Earth -- but if they really loved you, then they would understand why you need to stay here and optimize your potato planting cycles. It is a lopsided love triangle driven by gentle compulsion to work the land; we seduce this land through our memory and labor.

This intimate attachment to the land supposedly entitles you to it. The developer Monomi Park literally made this land for you to own! It is your manifest destiny. And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us!...

8.5/10

Next week on August 22nd, I'll be giving a presentation for StoryCode, a local community group focused on immersive media and storytelling technology. As one of the few game designers invited to present in their lecture series, I thought I'd try to explain how video games conceptualize narrative, interaction, and expression, to an audience that maybe doesn't play that many video games -- or at least, they don't play what we consider to be the state-of-the-art narrative games.

I'm also being required to talk about my games and present them as case studies, even though my games don't fit neatly into the "narrative game" genre. I think I'll probably just open my actual project scenes in the Unity editor and mess with my scene setup and code, which usually entertains people well-enough? It'll also be a short primer in foundational ideas like immersive fallacy / procedural rhetoric / platform studies, and the idea that production value and paratext amount to their own kind of "story."

The presentation is free and open to the public, but I believe you're encouraged to sign-up and RSVP via this Meetup page or something.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017 @ 7:00 PM
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center @ Film Society of Lincoln Center
144 West 65th Street, New York, NY (map)

As mentioned before, I'm going full-time with NYU Game Center starting this September. For this upcoming fall semester, I'm going to be teaching three classes and advising an independent study:

• Intermediate Game Development (2 sections). This is a required class for the BFA Game Design major where we focus on using Unity in a 3D context, refine C# code fluency, learn about using Maya and Substance Painter, and become less scared of using Git.
  
  This is my fourth year of teaching it. This year, I've changed the final project to focus on studying and cloning a game. In the past, the final project asked students to collaboratively formulate an original game design concept, but I noticed students would get into endless debates about the game design instead of focusing on project architecture or collaboration workflows. Since we already have dedicated game design classes that offer more support for those debates, I now feel comfortable removing some creative freedom from this class -- so we can focus more on building-up "technical freedom."
• Intro to VR. This is a new VR-focused class we're running for undergraduates and/or people who aren't so familiar with code and 3D. At Game Center we remain cautious about investing too much in something still fundamentally unproven like VR / AR, but we still want to support students who want to explore it. Unlike our graduate-level VR Studio class which assumes technical proficiency in code and Unity, this class will offer more of a scaffold into working in 3D and VR. We'll also dip our toes into talking about VR culture and critical theory as usual, but probably stop short of discussing Baudrillard and phenomenology.
• Level Design (independent study). Years ago I used to teach a modding class with a level design focus, but one day I noticed students hated using the Source Engine, and we never identified another decent engine / toolset for level design. We also needed a good base game to design more levels for, which is why we can't switch to Source Engine 2 -- DOTA2 isn't exactly relevant for learning generalized level design practices. At least half of our students also use Macbooks, which basically wither and die under Unreal 4, so that's out of our reach too.
  
  But then a few months ago, some students approached me to advise an independent study on level design. This format is more like a seminar / reading group instead of a full production-oriented studio class, and we will focus more on theory than construction. Hopefully this will work out better than the Source modding class!

So I'm working on (another) article about level design in Half-Life 2. I chose the d2_coast03 map of the Highway 17 chapter, which is the first real "coastline" road trip section of the game, and is probably the most successful. Look at how big and open it is. Would you believe this is a map in a game celebrated as a meticulous roller-coaster? In my mind, it's contemporary with a lot of vehicle-based first-person open world game design trends that started around the same time in 2004, and they even pulled it off in an engine architecture that's still kinda based on Quake 1.


Getting the level geometry into Maya proved to be a bit of a challenge. I'm using the good ol'Crafty BSP viewer from Nem's Tools. Unfortunately, Half-Life 2 BSPs don't ship with LDR lightmaps anymore -- and modern Steampipe and VPK systems break Crafty's 2010-era Steam filesystem support, so I had to use GCFScape to manually extract all the models and materials from the VPK archives before opening the levels in Crafty. (You'll also have to manually mount the folders in Crafty's file system; open the File System window, right-click on "root", and then browse to your \hl2\ folder or whatever Source game folder you're using.)

After that, it's pretty straightforward to use Crafty to export to .OBJ format with all textures and BSP + prop geometry intact (just make sure you export textures to TGA, and not JPG, because for some reason that breaks all the prop UVs during export).


There are also several other options for exporting Source Engine level geometry into the 3D tool or engine of your choice: Wall Worm is good if you use 3D Studio Max, and if you want to bring it into Unreal Engine 4 then you can also use the handy HammUEr plugin. Here's a sample screenshot of Joe Wintergreen UE4 test import, using the d2_coast01 map:


I think it points to an eternal dream among many level designers -- to have some sort of "universal" file format that all engines and editors can use. Sadly, the dream dies a bit more everyday; each year, 3D level design is becoming more specialized and more inaccessible to the average computer user. Most AAA games either develop their own proprietary file format and/or never release their tools, or their designers just do everything in Maya and attach some metadata to it later.

In 2D land, they're a bit better about this: a fair number of tile-based 2D games use engine-agnostic tools like Tiled, which can integrate with many different engines. There's an indie infrastructure built to support these kinds of games, with accepted technical solutions and implementations. Where's the general-purpose indie 3D level editor we all desperately crave? The universe cries out for a hero...

I played Paolo Pedercini's first (and maybe last?) virtual reality piece "A Short History of the Gaze" last year at Weird Reality. I think ASHOTG is good for a lot of reasons, but the foremost reason is that few people are making VR art that's critical about VR culture and its politics. The closest we get to is when we twist VR's (faltering?) utopian branding toward our own ends, whether for "empathy machines" or whether for a vision of a "gay VR". But even among artists, it's rare to see VR work that directly critiques what VR is about, in this current moment.

Like a lot of Paolo's other work, it's political and educational, trying to distill critical theory and media studies into a short accessible interactive experience. The player goes on a ~15 minute sequence of different scenes about looking at stuff -- undressing people in an elevator (male gaze), punishing prisoners in a panopticon (incarceral gaze), being trapped by advertising (capitalist gaze), etc. in various situations. I actually found the whole piece to be slightly encouraging, because it positions VR as part of a long tradition of gazes -- and it's also clearly the weakest gaze. If VR is an oppressive force, then that force is currently minuscule or even laughable compared to any other oppressive force in the world.

Which leads us into how VR is doing right now: it doesn't look good for VR.


VR is basically dying right now. PSVR sold ~1 million units in its debut, but since then sales have slowed to a trickle. Both Oculus and HTC are running big desperate price cuts on their hardware, and there's even rumors that HTC is looking to sell-off its VR business. On Steam, the biggest PC VR platform, the user stats are still holding at 0.23% of Steam users (that's 0.0023) using an HTC Vive and 0.14% with an Oculus CV1. Among many VR devs and creators, there's a consensus that VR money is basically drying up, and that there's not enough gamers buying non-shooter VR (VR games that aren't robot / zombie shooters) to make that work sustainable. To the rest of the game industry, it's been several years and VR still doesn't have its "killer app".

"This VR cycle is dead." Tech has long insisted that VR was just a stepping stone to AR, but now they're getting impatient and rushing toward AR. (If you want a great technical primer on the state of AR technologies, read this breakdown by Matt Miesnieks.) Apple is pushing ARKit and now Google is pushing ARCore, laying down the infrastructure for more AR apps. To the tech-industrial complex, VR has been such a disappointment that they'd rather push arm-fatiguing handheld AR than wait for good quality head-mounted AR, which is still very far away from happening.

(And just anecdotally, every recent networky VR conversation I've had has always inevitably turned to, "so what are your AR plans?" Call this shift a failure or a "strategic pivot", but whatever you call it, I think it's happening.)

In a talk on VR earlier this year, Paolo argues that the death of consumer VR is ultimately a good thing for weirdos and artists. Conservative gamer culture will get bored and move on, instead of harassing women and minorities out of the field. Basically, tech has built us a massive VR infrastructure, and now they're preparing to abandon it to us!

Maybe if we stay in this "trough of disillusionment", we'll be free to make VR as radically gay or as political or as weird as we want it to be.

Let's hope VR never makes it out alive. It will find new life as an undead medium. Perhaps all those VR zombie shooters are onto something!...

Infinity Mirrors by Yayoi Kusama

This post is a summary of a talk I gave at Storycode NYC on August 22nd, 2017. All the slides are available here. It is a primer for storytelling in games, intended for people who aren't gamers or game developers, but who want to get into interactive storytelling / immersive storytelling (like VR / AR / etc).

Video game design has much to offer interactive designers, even if you don't make or play any video games. When I taught at Parsons, we taught game design as part of our general design / technology curriculum, because this field has been thinking about the aesthetics of digital interaction for literally decades.

So if we want to tell a story with a video game, we should first ask, what is a video game made of? Some men have opinions on this:

Famous game designer Sid Meier has a famous quote: "a game is a series of interesting choices." When we play games, we're constantly making choices and feeding input into the game -- which way should Pac-Man go, how far should Mario jump? Some designers even treat the lack of input as an input. Inaction as an action.

My boss / NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz has a slightly less famous, but much more handsome quote: "a game is an opera made out of bridges." What he means is that a video games often try to present a sort of audio / visual "total work of art" spectacle that demands your complete attention and immersion, but to achieve that bombastic effect we also have to engineer physics simulations and future-proof code bases to work for many years. And if we're going to go with a bridge metaphor, we should also ask, what are these "bricks" and building blocks that make up video games?


Let's say you wanted to communicate the idea "it was hard to walk"... in text, you would literally write that and display it to the user... in a painting or a photo, you might depict someone on crutches who needs assistance... in film, you could even cut to reaction shots of pained faces, anguish, and actors acting for the camera.

In video games, we totally use text and image and sound too, but we also use interaction: like Bennett Foddy's free browser game QWOP is a walking simulation that uses four different buttons on your keyboard to control your various muscles and biomechanics -- it is literally difficult to try to walk, you can try and play it yourself! As you play, notice that instead of telling an idea via text, or showing an idea via image, we're doing an idea via interaction. (Academic types: obviously this is a simplified understanding of media and language because text and image are often performative.)



Because we care so much about choices and interaction and expressiveness, linear ideas of narrative and "storyline" aren't as useful to us. You might be familiar with literary ideas of Aristotelian plot arcs, three act structures, etc. but let's put aside those tools for now, and consider other ways of thinking about story, because this classical model is basically a single thin line that doesn't allow for much deviation or contingency.



Here's are some diagrams from the book Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan. In games, we don't visualize story as just one single line, but more as an interconnected structure, a network, a graph, a rhizome, or whatever you want to call it.

Each point or node in this story system might represent a character to talk to, or a plot event to happen, or a change in mood or atmosphere. As you read the story or play the game, you move from point to point in the story space. Even in a small story space, there's potentially hundreds of different routes or traversals you can take, to experience the story in a different way with different outcomes. (Note that this isn't exclusively a digital concept. Choose Your Own Adventure stories have had this basic idea for a long time, with just ink on paper.)

Personally, my favorite spatial metaphor for story is maybe the gyre, a circular spiral clashing with other whirlwinds. Imagine your story is a whirlpool -- there's still an overall trajectory, you're getting sucked down into it -- but there's also an idea of cycles and loops. That's why a lot of games might seem repetitive at first glance, but those cycles of repeated play (with levels of variation) helps build up momentum for the player's narrative and understanding. When you're designing your interactive or immersive story, try thinking in terms of gravity, velocity, and inertia.

OK, so interactive stories should be designed as systems, but what goes into that system? Here's a small sample of some different expressive design tools we use in video games:


RULES. Many games and interactive systems shape the user's experience with rules. Like in the board game Monopoly, you collect $200 for passing "Go", which encourages you to keep moving forward, even if you're losing. (Rules facilitate pacing.) But why does this rule even exist? Does it embody capitalism, rewarding bold risk-taking and perpetual growth? Or does it symbolize a rich father funding your little real estate adventures? (A rule implies a story.)

And then what if your brother argues you only get $200 if you pass Go, but not for landing on Go? He's wrong, and his quibbling characterizes him as a joyless jerk. (Rule enforcement characterizes players.) Can every rule be legislated and debated like that? Well, when we play games, we also enforce implied norms, like "don't steal from the bank." What if your narrative involved breaking, upholding, or articulating unspoken rules in your interactive experience? (That'd be cool.)

Monopoly was originally invented by Elizabeth Magie as The Landlord's Game, and it had 2 different rulesets. One was an anti-monopolist / quasi-socialist "Prosperity Game", where players distributed their gains equally, and you win when everyone wins. The other version was the evil monopolist game that we all know today, about grinding other players into poverty. Turns out, Monopoly is really terrible to play... on purpose! The whole point was to imagine alternatives to those monopolist rules.


GAME FEEL. Every game has some sort of interface, and your use of that interface tells a story in itself. A touch screen is an interface, but so is a basketball. Did you lightly tap the ball, or did you mash that button? Those are two different performances that facilitate two different experiences and moods. Clicking a mouse can be violent, intimate, joyful, or timid -- satisfying, disappointing -- sluggish, crunchy, snappy, floaty.

Think of it as a sort of dance for your hands; the way you move your hands characterizes your mood and emotional state as a player. A game feel about frequent loud actions will probably feel hectic, while a slow rhythm of quiet actions might evoke contemplation. (Game feel helps you convey more "subconscious" aspects of a story, like texture, atmosphere, and attitude. It helps set expectations for how your experience will feel.)

Usually, we design game feel for a specific keyboard / mouse / gamepad context, but there's also a growing practice of design for bespoke experimental controllers. What game feels are possible with new alternative controllers? I've seen games use flashlights, rotary telephones, switchboards, telegraphs, giant felt vaginas, bananas, bowls of custard... the possibilities are endless, and each of these interfaces facilitates different stories and experiences.


LEVEL DESIGN. We generally use the word "level" to refer to the structure of the game world. By this definition, the Monopoly board and the basketball court are all complex pieces of level design that have evolved over many decades, and these places establish boundaries to focus and funnel interaction. But maybe theme parks are the strongest example of real-world level design.

The next time you visit Disneyland, think about how there's a central "hub" (Main Street) with different "spokes" (Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland); the hub helps you think about where to go next, and where you haven't been. (Good level "flow" lets players decide how to tell the story to themselves.) This hub structure is a very common level design pattern in video games. It also tells its own story: every time you return to Main Street, you have to look at a giant statue of Walt Disney. Maybe he was important or something? In this way, architecture, sculpture, and interior design all work together to convey your character's power and status in your world -- not just about Walt Disney, but also how other people feel about him. (Use level design to wordlessly characterize your world's inhabitants.)

(Also, Walt Disney was maybe a racist / sexist / anti-semite / etc.)


Still here? OK, I want to end with a list of recommended playing. If you truly want to learn from game design to incorporate it into your own practice, then you need to play some damn games. Pac-Man is not the state of the art in narrative game design.

If you don't play games often, you may want to play these single-player games with a partner, family member, friend, or child. It's pretty fun, and gamers do this all the time: you all take turns at the controls, and the other people boss the operator around.

All of these recommended games are pretty accessible for non-gamers to pick-up and do not require any quick reflexes or competitiveness. You generally play them at your own pace. Also, none of them are about shooting people in the face. Turns out, there's a lot of great games that aren't about that stuff!


Kentucky Route Zero is like Death of a Salesman + Jorge Luis Borges + Prairie Home Companion + a dash of Flannery O'Connor, set in the dark dreamy backroads of Kentucky... and that formula only scratches at the surface of it. It is a gorgeous literary masterpiece that is also haunting and politically relevant. Amid all its poignancy, its formal complexity often gets lost -- but this is a story with hundreds of branching paths, multitudes of scene variations, hidden private moments, and even recurring characters that appear only if you play a certain way. If you like modernist American fiction / playwrighting of 1910-1970, you'll especially appreciate how this game adapts those traditions beautifully.


80 Days is an interactive adaptation of Jules Vernes' famous pulp travel novel Around The World In Eighty Days. You play as Passepartout, and you have to coordinate Phineas Fogg's route around the world while staying ahead of the time limit -- but you also have to roleplay as Passepartout. Is Passepartout timid, patient, or a pessimist? You decide, and you decide by meeting people and taking action. Do you try to rescue a captured Indian princess from a Kali cult? If so, Passepartout may become "brave" -- only for you to realize she's actually a revolutionary resisting British colonialism and she never needed any saving, and you made a racist / sexist assumption. There's 160+ cities with hundreds of these scenarios across many different cultures and identities, clocking-in at over 750,000 words. (But of course, you'll only read a fraction of that during each playthrough.)


Gone Home is about going home, only to realize your family's gone. Where did they go? You have to explore this big empty house to figure out what happened here. This game is a master-class in what we call "environmental storytelling", where you have to examine the scenery and props to understand the characters, read their diaries and letters to understand their interiority, etc. It is like a good young adult coming-of-age novella strained through a detective story mode, set in a slightly spooky house laden with symbolism in every corner. Plus, the furniture is very authentic, based on designs from a retro Sears catalog.


If you're a gamer or developer, hopefully you knew this stuff already; and if you're not, hopefully I've broadened your ideas of video games. Yes, a lot of games are about shooting zombies and killing monsters, but that's like saying 100% of all movies are comic book movies. The truth is that every medium hosts diverse creators and communities, they just don't get equal attention or access to resources. Anyway, I hope this was all helpful for you.

This post spoils some of Tacoma and Sleep No More.

Tacoma is a sensible design progression from Gone Home. How do you expand upon the audio diary design and walking mechanics? The Fullbright Company decided to pair a dynamic holographic drama with some zero gravity movement. Unfortunately, the zero-G movement ended up making environmental storytelling more difficult so they had to scale it back (no tables or chairs; no objects at rest) and I also suspect it risked alienating a fan base that cares less about gamer-y traversal puzzles. So, that leaves all the focus on the holographic drama sequences.

Many commentators describe Tacoma as a virtual adaptation of the NYC immersive theater installation "Sleep No More" because both experiences involve wandering around a large dense environment and encountering short dramatic scenes of characters performing with each other... and then the characters split-off and you have to choose who to follow and listen to.

I think this is a telling comparison, because it also suggests the ways in which Tacoma's formal narrative structure doesn't work very well, despite its compelling themes and characters.


Sleep No More, I argue, does not convey a coherent plot or storyline in any traditional sense. The characters don't really speak, so much as move and dance with the scenery. And there's a good reason why there's almost no dialogue -- once you add dialogue, movement becomes much less of a focal metaphor. And if you enter the realm of words instead of mysterious gestures, then the set design of Sleep No More can't really carry that weight either. Sure, you can try to read the readables scattered around the McKittrick Hotel's many rooms, but it's about as much of a fun narrative puzzle as deciphering shredded tax documents in a sewer. The readables in Sleep No More aren't there to be read, they are there as poetic mood-setting decoration. They are there simply to be there.

What happens when you put dialogue into Sleep No More, and even let the audience follow everyone non-linearly and understand all the events completely? You end up losing a lot of scarcity and mystery, you suddenly have to fill-in all those gaps with more concrete details and explanations. And then you have to make the mystery much more complicated to compensate.

A typical train of thought in Sleep No More is "wait is this naked guy supposed to be Macbeth? what happened in Macbeth again?... oh my god, what's he smearing all over himself? is that nutella" and you may not ever progress past that scope of questions and appreciate it fully as a sophisticated theatrical Art, and that's OK, you'll still feel like "you kinda get it."


In contrast, the mystery of Tacoma quickly balloons into "future space capitalism and AI advancement are resulting in a critical mass of automation that replaces human knowledge workers, and now even professional information-economy careers are becoming obsolete, but also AI consciousness and AI rights are important, so that's why the crew escaped!"

Again, this is interesting plotting and theming, but it's so specific and dense that I don't think it fits with the gestural storytelling form of Sleep No More. It's like expecting a poem to convey the same informational payload as a Wikipedia article, or reading a newspaper during an opera.

So I feel like those strengths of Sleep No More (character design and animation) became a huge production liability in video game form, while the weaknesses of Sleep No More (gorgeous but thin world that can't withstand detective-like study) became amplified. Tacoma tries to fix where Sleep No More ambiguously waves its hands, while not quite taking full advantage of those handwaves.


The best parts of Tacoma are the rooms where some physical incident clearly happened: a fallen shelf in a storeroom, or a broken escape pod. The hologram playback reveals the shelf fell because two women were being playfully intimate and adventurously clumsy -- and the broken escape pod stems from a disastrous malfunction that whittles the human cast down to one woman. It is a smart intersection of environmental storytelling and audio log traditions in video games, but it is also expensive to produce, requiring a lot of site-specific character animation to sell those performances.

This is also when Sleep No More excels because it is in real-life: when you enter a bar setpiece and see two bartenders jumping off walls and over tables, there is a captivating energy in their movement and you wonder whether it symbolizes a competitive masculinity, or really hot gay sex, or both. Such bodywork, especially up-close, is strong and engaging to witness. Most importantly, it is also relatively "cheap" to stage in real-life, but unfortunately it's very expensive to execute in video games.

First you have to design the level, do all the staging and blocking, and then animate the actors to those cues via motion capture (or talented hand animation). What if you have to redesign the room for some reason? You better be careful, because now if you change the room too much, you'll have to modify the animation to fit the new space. If it's a really drastic change, you might even have to start all over again! This is usually something that even giant 200-person AAA studios struggle with coordinating, so it's pretty impressive that Fullbright managed to clear some of these character animation hurdles.


As compelling as the animation can be, I feel like the lack of character art in Tacoma ultimately hinders the impact. The wireframe AR holograms make sense in the fiction etc. and theoretically it helps you focus on their movements instead of their identities, but I'm pretty sure almost every gamer understands this design decision as an attempt to scope-down the project and avoid building 6+ characters to the same high fidelity as the environment.

I rely on recognizing faces a lot in real-life, and I also rely on faces in my own games (where I gleefully "dive to the bottom of the uncanny valley") so in Tacoma I found myself constantly forgetting who was who, despite the text labels and icons on their backs. I had to force myself to memorize abstract pairs of colors and traits. "Purple lady likes guitar, wants to bone the tall hot gold man, red and orange think purple is a bossy micro-manager..." To me these were data abstractions before they were characters. In the end, I guess I'm a victim of my own era, and I require clear anthropomorphism to attribute psychological complexity to things. (Sorry.)

I think I'm not the only one who couldn't relate though. The lack of character faces also means a lack of a visual identity for Tacoma. People can relate to Gone Home's spooky mansion or retro Americana furniture as iconic culturally-grounded objects, but a faceless hologram or yet-another-glossy-space-station (as well rendered as it is) doesn't really establish the same emotional connection. To me, the goofy futuristic food packages prove to be more human than Tacoma's actual humans, which is probably a problem.


I think Fullbright realized this, and started pushing their player character Amy Ferrier more in their press materials, but in the game she is still mostly a silent invisible player protagonist. That anti-characterization device helps the twist at the end have some impact, when it turns out Amy knows something we don't, but it also alienated me from embodying and performing as Amy, because I had no idea how she felt about anything until the very end.

Now, I don't really have any quick and easy design solutions for any of this. They probably made the best decisions they could at the time. I don't think I could've done better than Fullbright did.

I hope it's possible to acknowledge and applaud their ambition and hard work (especially some of the level design, environment art, and writing) while also saying, this game's overall approach to storytelling didn't really work or resonate with me, but nonetheless we should still try to learn from it and keep experimenting.

In the end, Tacoma is pretty hopeful about the future of human ingenuity. I think I share that hope, and I look forward to Fullbright's next game.

from de_crown, by FMPONE and Volcano

While planning a level design class, I googled for a good article about blocking-out or grayboxing a 3D level design prototype. I didn't really find one that actually went into "how" you might actually go about grayboxing a level, so I guess I have to write it.

Grayboxing is a level design practice where you build a rough block-out version of your level using blocks (usually gray boxes) so that you can iterate and test the layout as soon as possible. Almost every 3D game engine has some sort of box primitive tool -- if you know how to use that, then you can graybox.

Before you graybox, you must make sure you've established a general game design direction. You should generally know how this level might fit into your game or workflow. There's no point in grayboxing if you don't even know what the player should be doing, or what this level is supposed to convey. Is the level supposed to be easy or hard? Does it focus on combat or non-combat? Should it feel scary or safe? Level design must always exist in the context of a larger game design, or else you're just wasting your time.

Then, open up your 3D game engine, and let's start laying down some boxes...

For this example, I'll be using Unity, but there's no reason you can't do a similar thing in Unreal or any other 3D toolkit. Whatever you use, try to choose an actual game engine, and not solely a 3D art tool like Maya or SketchUp, because you'll want to be able to walk around in the actual space in-game.

1. It helps to sketch something. Like, even a 1 minute scribble on a napkin will help you plan your level. You don't have to follow the plan, it's just to help your ideas flow better.
2. Add some kind of basic floor plane to your scene. In Unity, I like placing a wide but thin cube at (0, 0, 0). It helps me get started with laying down some geometry.
3. Add a scale reference. You'll want something that's roughly "humanoid sized" to help you figure out how big to make walls / how wide to make hallways / etc. Ideally, you use some sort of actual 3D character, but in Unity I often use simple capsules resting on the floor. By default, these capsules are 2 units tall and 1 unit wide.
4. Add more blocks. When you have one wall placed down, duplicate that wall object and rotate it to make another wall, very quickly. Keep cloning objects and rearranging them until you have a room. Try to stay fast and loose, and spend only a few minutes on this. Unless you're working with a BSP-based engine like a Quake or Source Engine, or with a specific modular kit like for Skyrim or Fallout 4, then don't worry too much about aligning things to a grid.
5. Test as soon as possible! Add a player controller object so you can walk around, and test as soon as you have a room ready. If you have NPCs, powerups, items, etc. then place some of those too. As you play, ask yourself whether the spaces feel "right" and whether it will support the gameplay you want. (e.g. is there enough cover for a cover shooter, is there enough strafing space for an arcade shooter?)
6. Based on the results of your playtest, keep adding to your level and iterate. Don't forget to add more humanoid scale references in your new area, and make sure you regularly fly around the 3D viewport and keep checking different angles / line of sight. Adjust and fiddle as necessary, but also don't fixate too much on one area.

Notice this isn't a full level! As soon as the level feels "substantial", I want to start testing already.

WHAT NOW?

When you feel like you've figured out a substantial part of your level (or your forehead is bleeding from all the stress) then start art passing.

Sometimes you'll want to just retexture your blocks, and add detail meshes on top -- other times, you'll want to rebuild entire sections with modular meshes while keeping the same general dimensions. Some artists even prefer to export the graybox to a file, and import that base geometry into a 3D tool like Maya or Max to remodel everything. Be careful if you do this; that means if you want to make any design changes in the future, then these changes will probably have to be done in Maya, and you will lose a lot of the benefits of using an actual in-engine level editor tool for blocking out the space.

Communication is also very important if someone else is doing the art pass. Which walls must absolutely stay the same dimensions, and which walls are more cosmetic? Is that gray block supposed to be a tree or a bush or a car or a dumpster? You have to make sure to document your intent. No one can read your mind.

A quick paint over of my own graybox. I'm not a good painter, but you get the idea!!

Paint overs help a lot here! Try taking a screenshot of your graybox, and then paint over that screenshot in Photoshop to create a mockup of how the level might look. (Or if you have no idea how to paint, then have your environment artist do it.) These visual guides often help to synchronize communication and expectations in a design team. The paintings don't have to be great or polished, they just have to work.

As you art pass and playtest and iterate more, expect your layout to change. You may have to throw away some work at some point. That's OK, that's part of the process -- but the whole point of the graybox / blockout process was to help you get something down in the game, without worrying about how it looks.

Good luck and have fun!

I've just finished playing through all of Half-Life 2 on my level design streaming show, Level With Me. Much like with my playthrough of Half-Life 1, I've played through this sequel several times already, and I thought I knew it pretty well -- but there were still sequences where I was surprised, impressed, or disappointed.

There were several main themes throughout this playthrough:

1. The current version of Half-Life 2, the only one now available on Steam, has been poorly updated and maintained. When Valve added HDR lighting to Source Engine 1, someone dutifully went through Half-Life 2 and updated all the maps -- but that process only involved recompiling the maps with HDR lighting. That broke several things: there are no LDR lightmaps (it's impossible to play Half-Life 2 without HDR now), and the unchanged settings are poorly calibrated for HDR, often being too bright / too dark / with lots of halo-y hotspots everywhere. If you want to play a better version of Half-Life 2, I recommend the Half-Life 2 Update mod, which fixes a lot of these issues.

2. Another frequent theme has been how Half-Life 2 keeps mixing itself up; one chapter is a horror survival segment, and then 2 minutes later the next chapter is a road trip driving section. This is pretty unusual in 2017, where AAA action games usually feel more consistent, systemic, and homogeneous. (Of the big franchises, maybe only Call of Duty maintains this roller coaster setpiece structure.) You could argue that Half-Life 2 sort of tries to do 10 different things, and doesn't really excel at any of them. Or on the flip-side, maybe the Valve of 2000-2004 was really impatient and bursting with ideas, and in the end, executes all of these ideas decently enough.

3. Rugs!!!

Check out the full Level With me archived playlist for Half-Life 2 on YouTube, or watch future broadcasts live on Twitch.