Games and Their Outcomes: Qualitative Analysis Coding

Process Writing, research

I’m currently upscaling my knowledge about different qualitative methods approaches, and one of the approaches that I read extensively about and have now tried out is qualitative data analysis using codes applied in a software designed for such coding (in my case, Dedoose…largely because of the free trial month).

What seemed clear just from reading about this kind of methodology, and what became clear from my analysis is that the scope of the work is potentially quite large. I could have kept coding and working with the data for weeks longer, but because the data in question was only gathered for the purpose of this exercise, I decided to make sure that I dedicated an appropriate amount of time to the work and got what I could out of the exercise in that reasonable amount of time.

A few notes about the data: I asked my Monday Night RPG group if I could record one of our playsessions, code the data, and then write a blog post about it. With their permission, I recorded a 2.5 hour session and then chose a 25 minute section for transcription. I anonymized the data by using the character names rather than the player names in the transcript.

What I learned can probably be summarized thusly (no, not actually):
1. Transcription is awful and I wish I could pay someone else to do it.
2. Coding is a rabbit-hole from which one must plan a careful return. There are so many lenses I could have held up to the data.
3. Writing memos connected to the data helps to clarify just what lens you were using – both for yourself and others.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, our Monday night roleplaying group, as it exists now, contains an equal amount of male-identified and female-identified core members (when I say core, I mean those who attend weekly), with currently no “core” non-binary members, but with occasional guests. I understand that this is fairly unusual. With that knowledge as a starting point (and unsure where else to start, or how one ought to begin coding), I started to code the speakers as male-identified or female-identified. I also coded for the topic of conversation. I did a comparative analysis across codes and excerpts to see what patterns seemed to be emerging.

The section that I chose for analysis was a problem-solving activity involving decoding a journal entry. Not accounting for the lengths of contributions, the female-identified players spoke up 185 distinct times, where as the male-identified players spoke up a total of 99 times. Overall, the group usually spoke up to think aloud through the problem together, comparing notes and helping the group through the problem. Some players may have been more silent than usual as they tried to work on the problem separately. Female players were more likely to speak up in affirmation or support of their fellow players and their achievements towards solving the problem. Male players were more likely to question where the female players were drawing their conclusions from (perhaps because they were working the problem separately and not necessarily following the conversation).

Perhaps due to the problem-solving task that was put before them, in this excerpt the players did not act clearly “in-character” at any point. The only references to the setting and characters in this transcript were jokes related to anachronisms and game rules, as well as the contents of the journal itself.

Overall, I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this technique, but, as is also evident from the literature, my skills will evolve the more that I use this technique. In terms of my own game making practice, I could see this kind of analysis potentially being useful for analyzing focus group-type and other similarly-sustained conversations about my games. I don’t think this is something that I would use on shorter questionnaires or on shorter comments about my games. It is definitely something that works well when comparing different interviews together.

I want to thank my RPG group for being such good sports and letting me record them, given that my last post was about “accidentally” doing research while running Fate Accelerated for them last week. Thanks, folk!

Speculative Play: Deep Time and the Onkalo RPG

adventures in gaming, game jams, Process Writing, research

After spending the weekend immersed in thoughts about Deep Time at the Speculative Play Deep Time jam this weekend, it turned out that my Monday night RPG/board game group didn’t have anything to play that night. During the weekend, we had watched “Into Eternity” (http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/) and thought about Onkalo (a waste-storage facility being built 4 or 5 kilometers deep in the Finnish bedrock), as well as nuclear waste more generally. Our discussions about deep time had talked about problem of designing for someone who might or might not share the same physical attributes, sensibilities, and senses. We talked about how difficult it was for the human brain to conceptualize a 100 000-year time-span, given that our own recorded history is so short and yet older events still feel so remote. We talked about intergenerational communication and responsibility, the durability of different materials and how to communicate broad strokes in imprecise mediums – perhaps things like massively-scaled stones, or “universal” symbols like thorns or other things that might represent danger to some unknown beings. We also thought about whether such warnings would only spur on treasure-seekers, who, unconvinced of the altruism of the people sending such a message (well, altruism except in the sense of assuaging our own guilt, perhaps), might think that something valuable was being hidden from them. And, given that nuclear waste materials can be reprocessed, and that a relatively small amount of their energy is used before the material is considered waste, it might be considered valuable indeed.

Given that I am moving to Alberta fairly soon and that our membership is already becoming increasingly scattered (Guelph, NYC, Regina…), the RPG group is working on strategies for being able to continue playing when we’re apart. So far, we have had mixed results with digital play, and of course it comes with a whole host of potential challenges with regards to tech, lag, internet issues, etc. Meeting for a casual board game wouldn’t further that cause at all, and I had been itching to run a game of my own for some time. I used to run a Star Wars expanded universe campaign, but it became too much for me to manage, and so I hadn’t actually “GMed” in years — there just seemed to never be enough time. Fresh off of discussions from the weekend, I decided that, given a simple enough system (Fate Accelerated, in our case), I could indeed run a one-shot campaign on-the-fly that evening.

I decided that I would give the group very little context, asking them only to give me information about who they were as a people (human, genetically-modified/differently-evolved humans, aliens). Their constraint was that they had to be of a similar size to humans (somewhere between human-sized and elephant-sized). My primary goal was to balance feasibility and fun, and so I did have to invent and alter certain details that may not be within the realm of possibility. Admittedly, although the results of this campaign were an interesting enough way into this design problem that I am now writing about it for you here, my primary motivation was running the game in a way that would be compelling for the players. Having dedicated so much thought and consideration to Deep Time and Onkalo over the weekend made them convenient subjects for exploration, and I thought that the ideas would work well in a one-shot campaign rather than something more sustained.

The players were experienced roleplayers from different backgrounds, although all were Canadians from the East Coast (Ontario and Quebec), including a biochemist, a store manager, a researcher working with Montreal’s itinerant population, and a bank worker. Although the group usually has an even gender split, the players this time were three male-identified players and one female-identified player.

Here is what they decided about themselves, their society and their context:
The game was to taking place 90 000 years in the future. The group was part of a race of genetically-modified humans that eventually evolved further to become quite sea-mammal like — specifically, they decided that they were the Otterfolken and had large lung capacity, webbed hands and feet, oily fur to protect themselves from cold in the water. They also decided that they would have bronze-age technology (and were quite insistent that this should include Archimedes’ death ray). Their characters were part of a caravan traveling across the land, seeking trade goods. One of them was the caravan chef and mixer-of-medicines, one of them was a religious elder/prophet who had visions, one was the caravan funder, a rich otterperson who was seeking adventure, and the other was a youngling who was in charge of caring for the caravan’s animals (these pack animals were known as “Finless”). Additionally, I seeded the adventure by giving them each one piece of information that none of the other players knew: the rich caravan funder knew that there were areas on this landmass that had not yet been scavenged by other caravans, the animal-tender knew that the area they were entering had very hard bedrock and was considered very stable (not prone to natural disasters, volcanoes, flooding, etc.), the caravan cook knew that food sources were getting more scarce and the land less hospitable as they ventured onwards, and the religious leader knew that there were legends/stories told in his religion about “places that you are supposed to forget, places that no one should ever go, deep places, sacred places” and that most of these were on land.

(That tiny track and even tinier truck represent the entrance to Onkalo).

Over the course of the weekend, Rilla Khaled and I explored questions around what we ended up calling “communicative geographies” — what kinds of human-made geographies could be used to primally communicate, beyond language, that Onkalo was a place to be feared. Using plasticine (reusable modeling clay), tin foil, and plastic cups, we built a structure that was designed to surround Onkalo. We were inspired by the shape of the Hoover dam — smooth, and descending at a terrifying angle — and by the idea, brought up in “Into Eternity,” that thorns were a threatening shape, one that might potentially still be understood in 100 000 years. So, Rilla and I surrounded the entrance to Onkalo with spikes on two sides and Hoover Dam-like curves of self-healing concrete (using bacteria) (knowing that such concrete is probably not infinitely self-repairing, we still decided to imagine it as such in a speculative future), all of this on a massive scale designed to inspire feelings of the sublime in the viewer.

For the RPG, I thought about Onkalo as more of a fortress – the huge thorny spikes on the outside, and smooth, Hoover-dam inspired bowl on the inside. To make it possible for the game to proceed, I decided that at some point since their creation, one small section of the spikes had fallen or been sheared off, allowing a climbable surface in one spot, should the adventurers decide to undertake such a climb.

Additionally, I surrounded Onkalo with other safe guards, attempts at communication: obelisk-like structures (some which had collapsed) with information in every known language, and a field of flowers, genetically-engineered to recoil away from other varieties to help them grow in set patterns (and also poisonous), forming the shape of a giant pictorial radiation warning as seen in the Onkalo film. However, the warning was designed to be seen from a birds-eye view, and they could not completely discern the pattern, although that they knew there was one (until, of course, they reached the top of the ominous structure, looked back and said “Oh, no!” — but their characters didn’t understand the symbols anyhow).

As the game played out, it became clear that the players, with no context, were playing out scenarios and thinking in ways that were consistent with our discussions over the weekend. When faced with a mystery, and in the context of the RPG, their solution was to go further and solve it. When presented with ominous symbols and danger, they decided that there must be something worth protecting hidden beyond — and, in the case of one character, their primary motivation was adventure-seeking, and this definitely looked like adventure.

The fact that this all took place in the context of an RPG night can’t be overlooked. This is the metagame — the tension between player knowledge (such as knowing the symbol for radioactivity) and character knowledge. The players knew, of course, that if I was leading them towards a certain place, there would be danger. This place wouldn’t just contain a pile of treasure for them to find. And although they discussed turning back many a time, they never did. The context of the game (and perhaps the lack of real-world stakes) encouraged them to move forward rather than turn back. But is the curiosity that drove the Otterfolken to Onkalo only human?

As I slowly pulled back the curtain and they discovered maps of the space within the Onkalo archives as well as more obelisks with writing and symbols, the group seemed driven by two motivations: uncover the rest of the mystery, and act according to the characters that they had set out for themselves. Afterwards, I gave them context for their adventure, telling them about “Into Eternity,” Onkalo and the weekend’s projects and adventures.

After this foray into using RPGs to explore a design problem, I’m convinced of their potential value as a design probe, especially for the Speculative Play project. Given time and space to do so, all humans are capable of speculation.

Crossposted here and here.

Games and Their Outcomes: Ethics Paperwork

Process Writing, Uncategorized

This semester, I’m doing a directed reading course called “Games and Their Outcomes” and it is largely centered around this question:
“How can we make claims about player experience?”

Or, on a more basic level, what are qualitative research techniques that can be said to be “rigorous” and allow us to back up our methods and say with some degree of confidence that we know what we know. The upshot of taking on this kind of course is that I’m upscaling my research methods (or in a lot of cases, learning that what I was already doing intuitively is a thing that qualitative researchers who want to be rigorous do).

The first assignment that I’ve completed is one that, fittingly, also comes at the beginning of many research projects: the ethics portion. I’ve completed drafts of ethics paperwork for the Speculative Play team which I’ve just joined (featuring Rilla Khaled, Pippin Barr, Christopher Moore, Brian Greenspan, Liane Decary-Chen, Agustina Isidori and, now, me!)

There isn’t too much to say about the paperwork itself (it was fairly straightforward), except that Ethics within a research framework, especially at a University, especially for the arts, is not perfectly designed to fit research-creation work. Having co-designed a game about consent, I know my way around the topic fairly well.

But proposing ethics around design and art projects where what might develop is unknown and might potentially spiral into something completely different is a particularly strange experience. In research-creation, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to do before you do it – it’s the nature of the beast. Ideally, we would like to not have to submit ethics paperwork for every tiny project that we plan to do — that would waste both our time and the Office of Research Ethics’ people’s time, too. We want a flexible framework that respects people and our ethical responsibilities that isn’t too bogged down in the bureaucracy of the thing. It turns out that, that’s complicated.

I think that what was important about this assignment was learning to complete ethics paperwork of a similar kind to what I will actually need for my research. It was…demystifying. But I also kept bumping up against the limits of my knowledge — and the limits of what I could decide on my own from common sense. But, if we wait to submit the paperwork until we know exactly what the project will be, we may end up waiting on the ethics paperwork to actually be able to do the research, which may delay the research. Definitely not an ideal solution!

At time of writing, we are waiting to talk to the OOR ethics folk over the phone to see what we can do with our application that will allow for proper ethics but also won’t require us to submit an application for every small-scale project.

Game Night

adventures in gaming, playthroughs, Process Writing

Since roughly January 2013, I’ve been playing games with a group at TAG. This once-a-week meetup eventually turned into Monday Night RPGs, where we rotate the gamemaster so that they only have to plan roughly every three weeks. Members of the group have come and gone (and will come again, darn it, for those of whom we are waiting to return from studying at NYU), but I’ve been playing games in this context for basically as long as I’ve been making video games (I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 16, or, in other words, as long as I’ve known my husband).

Recently, it was brought to my attention that I might be learning something through all of that playing! For somebody who studies and makes games, I sure do have a hard time finding time to play them (especially video games), so the fact that these consistent play sessions have been there for me for so long is kind of a miracle, an oasis.

Next Fall, Mia Consalvo will be teaching a class called Player Studies, which I think I’ll be taking. With that future class in mind, I thought it might be worth considering what I learn from playing and participating in these sessions. I’ve always believed that doing a lot of reading is one way to get better at writing, although being a voracious reader doesn’t automatically make you a good writer. In the same way, playing games hopefully makes me a better game designer.

Of course I can identify trends in playstyles and behaviour from my group — we’ve been playing together in the same context for three years (and playing together since I was 16 for some the people in this circle). For now, I don’t want to retroactively make sweeping observations about past sessions. I wasn’t thinking along these lines during those sessions, so this is something to consider for the future, when I have the opportunity or notice something of interest.

Platforms and Programming: One Month in the Life Postmortem

adventures in gaming, critical making, curious games, Process Writing

[WARNING: There are a lot of feelings in this post and there is a lot of frankness — about mental health, mostly. MUCH FRANKNESS AHEAD. If that’s not for you, you probably shouldn’t read this.]

This past semester, I learned how to learn to program (no, that’s not a mistake). With the help and guidance of Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr, I first learned Processing (Daniel Shiffman is a great programming teacher) and then after a brief evaluation of p5.js, moved on to Phaser and JavaScript.

[A note on guidance: all this learning actually happened under the guidance of a whole community of programmers both in and outside of TAG lab. When I couldn’t figure out how to space out the flower petals around my stem in a Processing exercise, the community was there to help. The other day, when it turned out that I hadn’t learned enough about object-oriented programming in JavaScript to properly manage states in phaser, the community was there to help. So, thank you, community.]

For something that I had been dreading for so long, it was revelatory to find out that I enjoy coding — like, really enjoy it! When the pressure is off and I can appreciate the puzzle of figuring out what to do, I like writing code a lot. This should come as no surprise: I love learning languages, which is why I know, in addition to English and French (the ones that I had to learn), Spanish, a bit of Italian, a bit of German, and an anime fan’s Japanese (so, also not very much).

But, the final project for this class is one of the hardest games that I have ever had to make. It was difficult for a variety of reasons. In my last post, I mentioned how Tom was getting ready to leave for RCMP training, and how I could think of little else, creatively and otherwise. That’s why I decided to make a game about the month between Tom learning of the RCMP’s decision and leaving for Depot. I wanted to take away some of the event’s power by making a game about it.

As I also mentioned in my last post, I would normally never, ever, ever consider making a game (or any kind of writing or other creative work) about something that happened in my life so close to when it happened. Normally, I’d let such an idea sit in a drawer for a few years and then give it a go. But, as I mentioned before, this was hugely preoccupying for me. After being with Tom for nearly ten years and never being apart longer than that one time last year when I went to Europe for 45 days, I knew that this was going to be a big change, and probably a very difficult one.

And it was. I just wasn’t prepared for how hard. A lot of the reasons that made it hard for me to be without him, even though he was an email or a video chat away were because of things that we would normally deal with together — but more on that later.

At first, I didn’t have much time to devote to the game: I had to finish up my semester’s course work, fulfill my TA responsibilities, get Tom ready to leave for the RCMP, and be present for a friend that was also having a hard time. I chose to prioritize my relationships with people that I cared about, and would do so again. And that’s where the time went, up until Tom left.

After Tom left, the game was my priority. I had finished my course work and everything else could be put off for a while. I went into hermit mode and started working on the game. And that’s when my 96-year-old grandfather went into the hospital.

Now, as someone who lives in a town with decent public transit, I haven’t yet acquired my license. We visit my grandfather fairly frequently, and Tom usually would rent a Communauto (car-sharing service) car and off we’d go. I was upset that my grandfather was sick and that I had to rely on there maybe being space in my relative’s cars in order to go visit him, or possibly not visit him at all (as it turns out, I now have a standing offer from a friend to drive me so long as she’s not at work). I was upset because, at 96, even small ailments can be hugely important, and these ones weren’t so small. I found myself completely unable to focus on the project. I felt like my brain was betraying me – this was when I needed to be able to focus the most, and I was getting nothing done.

So, I left the scary parts for later. When I was able to focus, I did the parts that were familiar and pleasurable to me — I wrote dialogue, I drew pictures of my cat and my apartment, and I thought about the design of the game. But, when all that work was finished, the deadline was coming and I still hadn’t programmed anything. What’s worse, I couldn’t remember any of what I had learned all semester. On top of that, feeling like I might not be able to finish the project before the deadline was stressing me out even more, increasing the pressure.

I had actually chosen a slightly early deadline for the project, thinking that I would get nothing done during IndieCade East, which was happening right after the deadline and which was where we were going to show In Tune perhaps for the last time.

So, I fought back the feeling that I was somehow disappointing the people who had been so kind as to take time out of their schedule to teach me in a directed study this semester, and I wrote asking for an extension.

The relief was palpable when the extension was granted. That, along with the fact that, at that point, my grandfather was getting better and would be released any day, helped me regain my focus (unfortunately, he’s now back in hospital). Things went slowly at first, but working diligently through IndieCade East at the NYU MAGNET, with the support of some lovely friends there, I managed to program portions of my game. And I was enjoying it. And, given that this was my first time with JavaScript and Phaser, I felt like I was doing a pretty good job. I managed it! It had seemed impossibly stressful the week before, but things fell into place.

Well, so that’s how it was to work on this game. In terms of the workflow, what I would have of course liked to do differently is give myself more time to work on the project long before the due date – that’s kind of my style. But, up until now, I have had the privilege of an excellent support system that has allowed me to focus on my work, even when other things in my life were going on, and this was my first time doing without it. I’m not sure what I could have done differently about that.

That means that it’s time to talk about the game itself and the design decisions.

What I wanted to do in the game was juxtapose some version of the conversations that Tom and I were having about his departure with our cat’s daily shenanigans. As it says in the game, cats don’t care about human drama. They don’t understand it. So, what felt very dramatic and important to me didn’t have much of an impact on our cat at all.

I like the juxtaposition. The game is pretty slow-paced, so there’s time to read the conversations and interact with the environment (at least, I think so). My worry is that there aren’t enough animations to keep the player engaged in each scene.

For this project, I had to scope very tighly given the time frame, but I was also sick of certain of the choices that I usually make while making games on a short timeline. Namely, I wanted to try a different art style. I was sick of making pixel art for these short little games. This was at odds with the fact that I didn’t have much time to work on the game. Each individual animation was taking way too long to make. So, I had to make the decision to do story-board style animations, with very few keyframes and a simple style. Overall, it’s not what I had originally envisioned but I’m happy with the result given the timeframe.

I’m not a professional animator – I just dabble. What that means is that even the storyboard-style animations took enough time that I made relatively few of them. I wish that I could have made more of them, because I wanted to them to function as a visual reward for the player. How I made up for it is made it so that when you click the cat, messages about the cat appear, and I find those fairly entertaining. But that might just be me.

Of course, the most important thing to me about this game is that I programmed it myself in Phaser/JavaScript and that it works. That’s a big milestone for me. It was also one of the main goals of this directed study, so I’m happy that I managed it. It’s an empowering feeling, even if I know that I might struggle just as much the next time that I sit down to program something. I’m okay with that — knowing that I can do it at all is huge.

[This game is available for play here.]

Platforms and Programming: Final Project Begins!

adventures in gaming, critical making, Process Writing

I’ve done it! I’ve moved from Processing to p5.js to Phaser, now. After doing the p5.js tutorials, it seemed like there were few enough differences that I ought to move on to Phaser. My pace has slowed down a bit because of other responsibilities and, well, the fact that it turns out that I was very, very spoiled by Daniel Shiffman’s Learning Processing book. Holy cats, Shiffman! Would you please teach me all future programming things forever?! The Phaser documentation, in comparison, and other library documentations are really pretty horrible. Although I’m told that, in comparison to still other libraries, the Phaser documentation is abundant and clear and wonderful. So it goes.

Naturally, the introductory tutorial for Phaser is a one-screen platformer, something I can make in five minutes in Construct 2. It was essential that I find a project that would keep me engaged and motivated to learn, something like the Earth Twin project for Processing (although Processing is pretty appealing all on its own, I needed to find a project that used its more unique affordances, and that turned out to be computer vision stuff). We came up with the idea that I could combine the Tracery library by Kate Compton with Phaser in order to make something interesting.

So. That project.

I should start by saying that if this were a short story, or any kind of writing, I wouldn’t be touching it before at least a year or two from now, at minimum. It’s possible that a lack of clarity and perspective about the event will interfere with trying to fictionalize/make art about something that’s happening to you right now… It’s raw and tender. And sure, that can make great art, and people do this about their lived (with no fixed end point) experiences all the time. But, as a general rule, I don’t. I don’t really make personal games and if I do involve my own experiences (as one must, to a degree), it’s fictionalized and years after the fact.

Tom, my husband, is leaving for RCMP Depot Training on April 17th. This is a good thing! He made his first steps towards applying something like three years ago now, and he’s finally made it in. The steps to get here were endless. He’s put in a huge amount of work. He’ll be great at being an RCMP officer and jobs with the benefits and pay and other opportunities that this offers him (us) really don’t exist anymore.

However, I have known Tom for basically a decade, and in that time, the longest that we’ve been apart is when I went to Europe last spring for 46 days. He’ll be gone for six months! And afterwards, the chances of him moving back to Montreal is almost exactly zero. I’m a first-year PhD student – I’ll be in Montreal for years yet, and even when I’m done the things that require me to be physically present in the city, the truth is that the community here is unique and supportive in ways that don’t exist in any other Canadian city. Fully 75% of the postings are in the West, with only 25% in the East, so there’s not even a particularly good chance that he’ll be close enough for me to easily visit. They are supposed to take your family situation into account – they want your posting to be mutually beneficial to you and to them, but it’s a lot of uncertainty to have thrown into our lives. The RCMP tells you not to interrupt your life plans and to go on as if you’ll never get it (and when you consider that it took him three years to get in, one definitely could finish a graduate degree in that time, if not a PhD).

The time that he has left in Montreal before leaving coincides with the end of the semester at Concordia and, as a result, all of my deadlines. So, while I would normally a) not make a game about my personal life and b) would definitely not make it while whatever is happening is still in progress, this is all that I can think about right now. It’s taking up a huge amount of my headspace and emotional energy, and many of these deadlines can’t be moved (end-of-term work, TA responsibilities, public talks, conferences, a book chapter). So, in order to deal with it, I’ve decided to make my final project for this class about it. The hope is that it’ll allow me time to think even as I do all the other things that need doing.

THE GAME:

This is a game about juxtaposition and duration. It’ll take place over the course of 30 days (roughly a month), which is the amount of time that Tom had between finding out he was accepted and going to Depot and the time that he would be starting there. The genre that I’m aiming for is characterized by an account of events determined by a period of time, exemplified by books like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In writing workshops, we often referred to it as the “a day in the life of” technique. The juxtaposition part is because this’ll be 30 days in the life of our cat, doing cat things (like playing with toys, destroying the furniture, napping), placed alongside procedurally-generated conversations (using Tracery) about topics that Tom and I (or people in similar situations to us) would have to discuss in this limited time-frame.

At first, I thought that I would have one top-down view and that would be the end of it, but then I thought about Molleindustria’s Unmanned which I think is an entry into my “day-in-the-life-of” game genre. The different scenes and perspectives in the game are really nice and very cinematic. Maybe that’s something that I can make work for me (although it will of course be more work). One thing that I like about this game is that the actions that the player has control over (with the radio, with smoking, with playing games with the main character’s child) are symptomatic/revelatory of the character’s internal life and affect the story, without allowing the player to overtly make decisions about the path of the story. The causal link between the two is vague in a satisfying way.

Rilla (Khaled) also pointed me to The Cat and the Coup yesterday, which I’ve downloaded but haven’t yet had the chance to play. I plan to play it as soon as possible.

Art-style-wise, I again do like Unmanned‘s style. I’m used to animating with PyxelEdit but I also like the sort of cut-out minimalist collage style of things like the Fiasco books. Here’s the cover of a Fiasco playset that my brother and I recently made for my friend Allison:

I might go with this kind of style, but I’ll have to figure out a different animation/spritesheet making program. Help and suggestions would definitely be appreciated. I might experiment with OpenToonz but I’m worried about the learning curve in the short amount of time that I have to make this first version of the game. Hey, there’s of course nothing stopping me from working on it after I’ve turned it in for class! I will check it out and see if it’s simple enough (apparently there are a few stability issues).

So far, I’ve got a very basic Tracery thing working in a Phaser tutorial. More as it happens!

GDC 2016: TAG visits San Francisco

critical hit, Process Writing, talks

Last week I attended my first ever Game Developer’s Conference alongside what occasionally felt like at least half of the Montreal games people I know. It is a strange and wonderful feeling to run into folks from your city in one that is completely new to you. During GDC, this seemed to happen all the time.

I went a little early and stayed a little late, so while I was in San Francisco I also got to see a sea lion giving birth, go to a mirror maze, visit the Musee Mecanique and try all of its fortune telling cabinets, and go to the lovely San Francisco botanical gardens where a squirrel climbed up my leg (given today’s weather, I’m especially missing how GREEN San Francisco was).

For most of my time in San Francisco, I stayed with veteran GDC goer Squinky (who will soon be starting their PhD at TAG — and we’re lucky to have them around the lab with us already). This was Squinky’s eighth GDC, and they were kind enough to both find me a place to stay with a friend of theirs and to help me through what would no doubt otherwise have been a completely different experience.

The talks were excellent – as Gina has already mentioned, the TAG twitter feed is full of live-tweetin’s and retweets from the panels that we attended. Some of my favourites were Renee Nejo’s talk called “Everyone’s Silent Enemy: Shame and Vulnerability” which candidly explored her experience as a First Nation’s woman who has often felt “not native enough” in the estimation of others. No summary can do this particular talk justice, so I’ll point you towards the talk information, and hopefully you’ll be able to check it out on the vault: http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/everyones-silent-enemy-shame-and-vulnerability

It was really heartening for me to be able to watch Rebecca Cohen-Palacios, Stephanie Fisher, Sagen Yee, Zoe Quinn and Gemma Thomson deliver “Ripple Effect: How Women-in-Games Initiatives Make a Difference” — the Pixelles program is the reason that I made my first solo game and how I discovered that making games of my own was a viable possibility. The program was life-changing for me! This talk explored how such programs can ripple out, starting from the Difference Engine Initiative, where many of the speakers made their first games.

@inspectorbeans @RaygunGoth @rebheartsyou pic.twitter.com/Vkynjcwaev

— IDA (@idamarietoft) March 17, 2016

Our own Ida Toft delivered what I (perhaps biasedly, as one of this summer’s co-directors) thought was an excellent talk about Critical Hit 2015 and our experiences trying to build a safer space within the program. After Ida spoke about their take on the issues that made this very challenging, Ida invited Gina and I up, and the three of us took questions for the remaining half hour. We also invited some of the Critical Hit participants from this past year who attended the talk to give us their input as well. I was reminded that Safer Space isn’t a perfect solution, but that we have to keep trying and working towards something.

Speaking of this year’s Critical Hit participants, quite a few of them made it to GDC this year. They’re sharing their work and doing well – last fall we also saw quite a few of them at IndieCade! We managed to meet up for dinner with Kailin, Amanda, Hope, Nicole and Owen. A few of them will also be at the upcoming Different Games, so if you’re headed there, you should say hi to them!

Attending my first ever Lost Levels was also an oasis in the desert — it had a very different feel than the rest of the bustling conference, and I was able to relax for the first time that afternoon since the beginning of the conference. I listened to people talk about AI, led by the amazing Kate Compton (creator of the Tracery library, which I’m about to learn), was serenaded by impromptu music, including a live Gameboy chiptunes performance, and listened to an indie rant or two. All the while, I also ran the first ever Lost Levels Nap Summit, discussing important nap-related issues — did you know, for example, that casual naps are still naps? The Mild Rumpus, a carpeted “quieter” space within GDC with bean bags, pillows, trees, and experimental indie games, wasn’t quite mild enough for such discussions, as it turns out.

Squinky’s talk on Friday, “Designing Discomfort,” was brilliant – suggesting that maybe the flow state isn’t always ideal because it limits the kinds of stories we can tell. We should break out and explore possibilities outside of it, including more mature subject matter and more kinds of stories.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, while I enjoyed many excellent talks, some of my most worthwhile interactions at GDC happened at the peripheries of the event, because of the fact that for this week, thousands of game developers are sharing the same location. It was during lunch and dinner meetups and coffee breaks, during accidental meetings in the city or in hallways. I met a lot of lovely people, many of whom were introduced to me by Squinky.

You should also check out Gina’s excellent summary of the microtalks, which I also attended and appreciated.

Platforms and Programming: Some Thoughts on Processing

Process Writing, Uncategorized

Part of the challenge of this semester-long intensive solo programming boot camp that Rilla and Pippin are so kindly leading me through is learning how to learn. I’m not just learning a programming language or two, I am learning about libraries, APIs, references, object-oriented thinking, how to structure my code, how to debug, the vocabulary I’ll need to add to my google fu repertoire…and, perhaps most importantly, I’m learning how programming languages are learned.

One of the most challenging things I’ve had to learn is something that I already knew but have to keep reminding myself of: there are probably only a few rare somebodies who store all their programming knowledge completely in their memory. It’s normal to have to google, use the references, and refer back. I felt curiously guilty about that at first, but I’m getting used to the idea now.

So! In seven weeks, I finished the twenty-three chapters of Daniel Shiffman’s Learning Processing. Here are a few observations about Processing as a tool (I was about to say language and I guess it sort of is, but it’s also basically Java with the Processing library and applet, so…):

* Processing is very good at algorithmic, procedurally generated visuals and it handles playing around with colour very well.

* Processing (while it probably has a library for this) doesn’t handle sprite sheet-based animation very well. The animation chapter section covered flipping a head back and forth when it reached the edge of a sketch and that was about it.

* Processing can do fantastic things with video very easily! Loads of fun!

* Shiffman points out that Processing is primarily geared towards visuals – and he ought to know, he’s written most of the tutorials up on the Processing.org website. Case in point: with new updates, the sound library appears to break fairly frequently , but the video library doesn’t.

* Processing can do networking, but it involves installing extra software and additional libraries. While it takes maybe three lines of code (excluding the curly brackets) to draw something in Processing, it’s something like 30 to do any networking at all. So, clearly, visuals are a priority in comparison.

* Shiffman’s Learning Processing is really excellent. I definitely recommend it for beginners – everything is explained very clearly in the early chapters.

To celebrate finishing the Learning Processing book, I made this funky little game toy thing called Earth Twin! It uses Processing’s computer vision capabilities with an Eliza chatbot library by codeanticode. It’s available to play for either PC or Mac. Let me know what you think (@jekagames). Here’s a sample transcript:

>> Hello. Greetings and salutations. As you know, I’m here as part of a Keplerian delegation to learn more about the human world. Tell me your favourite things about humans.

Hello there.

>> Greetings. Hi. Yo. Heya. I’m from an earth-twin planet called Kepler and I want to know about humans and stuff.

I want to know about humans too!

>> What would it mean to you if you got to know about humans too ? Seriously, what would that even look like?

I don’t know anything about humans.

>> Of course you don’t know anything about humans ! Isn’t that illegal ?

It is not illegal for humans to know about humans.

>> Is this some strange human custom? I’m not sure I understand.

Yes, it is.

>> You are sure. Remember: if you ever visit Kepler, certainty is a thought crime.

That is good advice.

>> Please go on. Does this have something to do with the Internet ?

Everything reaches the internet at some point.

>> On Kepler, that might be considered an untoward suggestion.

I understand, yes.

>> You say you understand ? On Kepler, you could lose an eye for that.

Kepler sounds like a harsh place.

>> The swim to understanding is filled with eddies, currents, and large predator fish. Oh – that ? Just an old Keplerian saying.

Well, there you have it.

>> We were discussing you — not me. I’m here to gather information on humans, not to allow humans to gather information about Keplerians.

Fair enough.

>> A nematode in the pod is worth twenty in the toxic ooze that covers all known surfaces, as they say.

Goodbye.

>> Goodbye. Thank you for facilitating the Keplerian invasion.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to JavaScript. That also means brushing up on my html and CSS (when I used to mess with html as a teenager, CSS was just barely getting started). Wish me luck! First up is p5.js, and we’ll be re-evaluating from there. I know we plan to do some messing around in Phaser and PICO-8, and I think we’ll also be looking at the Nature of Code.

Exciting! New world unlocked!

Two Weeks, Two Jams: Global Game Jam 2016 and Take Care Jam

critical making, game jams, Process Writing

I’ve been meaning to write for some time now about Global Game Jam 2016 and the Take Care Jam, two jams that took place one weekend after the other (which is why I guess why I haven’t managed to write about them yet, what with the jams and the work I had to catch up on afterwards). I thought that GGJ would be an exhausting all-nighter pulling event (because it usually is) and that I would then decompress at the low-key, care-focused Take Care Jam, but that turned out not to be the case.

I arrived at Global Game Jam on Friday in time to engineer our now-traditional Game Jam Blanket Fort (ever since Pixelles Montreal ran TeaCade, we are in love with comfy time-out spots at our community events – GAMERella had a pretty excellent one, TAG’s GGJ16 location had one, and so would the Take Care Jam, as it turns out). During GAMERella, my goal is to work with a new jammer and help them have a positive first jam experience. Global Game Jam is my more selfish jam – I like to work with people that I already know and trust.

So! There were plenty of people that I knew at the jam, but it seemed like many of them were about to agglomerate into one large group. At a jam, my preference is to work in a team of three or less – maximum four. I find that it’s easier to stay within a manageable scope and to quickly find mutual game making interests. So, after some quick decision-making, I ended up working with Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer for the jam.

THE GAME: “Most Sincere Greetings, Esteemed One”

[You can also read Squinky’s introductory writeup about the game here.]

We scoped with a laser-focus (see what I did there?) – having a two-person team meant choosing our priorities very carefully. Exploring the jam’s theme (“Ritual”) through some quick brainstorming maps and settled on exploring the awkwardness of greetings. We chose to use as much theatricality and physicality in the game as we could, and so we hit on a game where players would be instructed to perform different greetings with one another. We made an aluminum-foil gong as a button using a Makey-Makey and had players wear the Muse headset to help set our stage. Combined with Squinky’s JavaScript/JSON/web dev skills and the Tracery library (link) to create procedurally-generated instructions, how could we miss?

By the end of the first night (we closed up shop at around midnight, having started to jam in earnest around, let’s say…6:30PM?), we basically had a working version of our game…From there, we just kept adding, polishing and giggling to ourselves about all the excellent procedurally-generated content that we were building, and doing our best to put our best foot forward on all of the items that it was possible for us to share on our game’s global game jam page: a gameplay video, a dashing team portrait, a github repository of our code, screenshots from the game, etc.

The great thing about this jam is that I went home to sleep both nights and didn’t feel any time pressure. I really enjoyed working with Squinky – we share similar senses of humour and they are a great jam partner. They’ve also got mad skills – both for making games and cookies! Our game even won an award for our prop-use.

The Take Care Jam, hosted by the Atwater Library in the context of Shanly Dixon’s Cyberviolence Against Women research, and planned and run by Stephanie Fisher and Kara Stone, is proof (much like my experience with Squinky at GGJ) that you don’t have to do a long crunch-filled jam for people to end up with interesting prototypes and ideas by the end. The weekend was filled with food breaks, multiple yoga sessions, and people just chatting and spending time with one another. We still made great things.

My team, which consisted of Nicole Pacampara and Amanda Tom (two people I was very happy to get the chance to finally work on a project with) along with honorary teammate Squinky (who fixed everything for us at the end with their mad skills and who I have already had the pleasure of working with) worked on a project about taking care of ourselves and of other people. The basic idea is that with a password-protected google form (you can see it here but I won’t tell you the password — you can ask for it if you like though – we just didn’t want people to add mean things) that creates a google spreadsheet. Using the spreadsheet as our database, we pull a random entry and display it on the Take Care Teller, which is like a fortune teller except it gives you an encouraging message or advice.

Here’s the current prototype of the Take Care Teller, hosted on Nicole’s site.

As you may have read by now, I’m learning Processing, and the amazing thing about this jam for me was realizing the literacy that learning Processing is giving me in other coding languages, too, just because there are lots of things that carry over. So, I was able to read most of our code that weekend (although I couldn’t have written it — that’ll come later, I hope).

At the end of the jam, after presenting our work to each other, we planted seeds from the Atwater Seed library (Guybrush the cat has knocked mine over already, but I will replant once he’s gone to his forever-home with Squinky — which will be soon!).

So, more on Processing soon…I’ve learned to do weird video googly-doos and plan to finish the book in the next two weeks!

Platforms and Programming: OOPs

adventures in gaming, Process Writing

Object-oriented programming really does change a lot of things for Processing. It’s not that the concept of something that is object-oriented was hard for me to understand, but that all of a sudden, there are so many options for where to put a bit of code, and on top of that, the methods in my code need to be called somewhere, and where I call them can make them work, or not. It’s pretty different from just having “setup()” and “draw().” Going forward, on top of learning how one actually does different things with different functions and techniques, my work will be learning about where to place my code. And there’s no right or wrong way of doing that – just ways that break everything and ways that don’t.

The other interesting thing about defining classes and objects and calling methods and all that, is that the error messages in Processing are no longer as accurate as they were for the more basic stuff – Processing no longer necessarily knows where the problem is. So, when calling a new method, sometimes all of a sudden Processing says that my class/object isn’t defined.

So, essentially, when I tried to make my first “game” after redefining my cat drawing as an object (thanks to Gersande for talking some stuff through with me in regards to the constructor), everything broke! And it stayed broken until I spoke with Pippin — together, we rewrote an example program that did everything that I wanted, and then I took that and fixed my broken code.

I’m kind of in love with it. Here’s a .gif of me playing with the cat:

Before moving onto arrays and the rest of the book, I’ll be making another object-oriented interactive thing. I’m trying to stick to things that I have learned in Daniel Schiffman’s Learning Processing so far, rather than jumping ahead so that means that I only have limited resources at my disposal (why, why, why is text so far away? — I may have to break this rule). That has me thinking about what kinds of stories and mechanics I can create (within a reasonable scope) using just what I know so far. One of the things that immediately came to mind was visual metaphor and simple “procedural rhetoric” — which, in turn, reminded me of The Marriage by Rod Humble. By Humble’s own admission, it is a game that “requires explanation” and honestly, it’s a game that I just don’t like. It comes onto my radar every now and again, and the last time that I encountered it was without explanation at IndieCade East as part of the love and rejection arcade at the Museum of the Moving Image, and it reminded me of how annoyed I felt by it. I also don’t really relate to the “meaning” of the game. Which is fine – it’s a personal game.

Anyhow, because of its use of primitive objects as containers for meaning, I thought about it for this next project that I’m planning. I think I want to use bright colours and balls that are repelled away from the mouse…Or something like that. Something about shoving/jostling through a crowd, perhaps? Or about taking space and making space?

Meanwhile, our discussion (this week between Rilla and I) has shifted to game-making softwares. Our first discussion focused heavily on Twine, and we discussed what it might look like to make a platformer in Twine, and what the essential qualities of a genre are, and whether they are important. Eventually, this lead into a discussion of the relative perceived value of some of the different elements that might go into making a game. For example, on forums, people post example code for each other all the time. But then, nobody wants to take your example poem and put it in their game (probably) – but most writers might not offer either. Writing somehow feels personal while code doesn’t quite as much. And writing somehow feels like something that “everyone can do for themselves.” For audio, there’s no shortage of free soundbanks and CC0-licensed items. For art – people are willing to sell 3D models on asset stores, but it also feels personal. But people would definitely be willing to put your free art in their games. Not your poems, though…not your poems…

That’s a big abbreviation of a much-more nuanced and far-reaching discussion.

PS: Here’s a 3-year-old poem you can use for free in your game, based on how I think the animated adaptation of Swan Lake should have ended:
“The bird was sumptuous; finger-lickin’
Para chuparse los dedos
Meat sucked off bones like fingers, wings,
And what’s this but a shred of silk
Like the colour of Odette’s dress
which was the colour of her eyes
And we knew she’d been missing
for a while
but forgot until the silk was caught in our teeth
Forgot that no good deed goes
unpunished by that magician that
yes, it’s true, you banished
just about fifteen or twenty years ago.
He had a thing, didn’t he,
for swans and also wanting your kingdom
but oh, sorry, we ate it,
and it was sumptuous, and probably
maybe
Well, where would a bird pick up a scrap
of a dress except that maybe
maybe
Odette patched it up!
when she was lost (didn’t you, Odette?)
She’s a kind soul.

The swan should know.”

JEKA GAMES

MAKING STUFF & WRITING ABOUT IT.

Process Writing