Babycastles Summit: Why Make Games

Evan Narcisse (Kotaku) moderated a panel with Nate Hill (Race Warriors), Joe Ahearn (Silent Barn), Michael O'Reilly (I Wanna Be The Guy), and Zach Gage (Spelltower) about why they make games.

• Zach's game design deals a lot with randomness. Zach recently deconstructed what he's actually doing and he finds that randomness shows the beauty of the system in a way better than designed levels. "Randomness feeds into the system to speak to itself."
• Joe designed a LARP to be played in a bar setting. In the game, everyone writes down their goals and is assigned a random animal. They must hunt other animals by asking them yes or no questions, and ultimately, figure out the other players' goals. If the person being questioned refuses to answer, they are kicked out of the bar. The game was designed to get people to talk and flirt with each other, which was supported by the fact that they were getting drunk.
• Nate designed Race Warriors, a hack of Ikari Warriors. The game starts off with a survey with ten random questions such as "Do you sing in the shower?", "Would you rather be a fish or a bird?", and "Are you afraid of spiders?" After the player finishes the survey, he is assigned a race and is told to kill another race in a very derogatory manner. All the enemies in the game are turned into racist stereotypes and the player must perform genocide. The concept of the game was to be extremely racist and extremely absurd, therefore making the connection that racism is absurd. Nate chose the video game medium to drive this concept because he wanted the experience to be immersive and interactive. However, the game does ask for a heavy amount of cognitive dissonance from the player.
• Michael mashed up old-school games when he developed I Wanna Be The Guy. He did so because he wanted to learn how to make a game, so the best way for him was to experiment with several game mechanics. Old-school games, for him, are very solid because they can't hide behind spectacle, and rely completely on gameplay and interaction.
• Zach's Scoundrel is a rogue-like where poker hands are your weapons.
• Zach's Spelltower is a great metaphor for indie game development. You must manage your resources, saving them for the long run or using them for short term gains.
• Zach has recently developed a word game, a card game, and a music game. He doesn't necessarily think of genres mechanically (shooter, action, puzzle, etc.) or thematically (fantasy, scifi, military, etc.), but in terms of equipment (cards, words, etc.).
• The Silent Barn, run by Joe, is a Brooklyn-based punk house where Babycastles operates from.
• The Cory Arcangel exhibition at the Whitney Museum shows off games in the art space. But there's still a lot of work for games to be accepted in the the art culture.
• Michael's first game, I Wanna Be The Guy, uses a lot of copyrighted art from other games. His next game, however, will not be a mash-up of other games. He wanted to make something that's his. But art takes a long time to make and you should never say "that'll be easy."
• Nobody wants to make a bad game, but people often run into walls.
• Papa y Yo turns gameplay into a metaphor and turns emotional aspects into an impetus to play.
• Games are a powerful medium that is still finding its own language.
• Nate created a twitter bot called White People Smell which collects tweets and elicits opinions of what white people smell like.
• Zach's Lose-Lose is a Space Invaders-like game where each enemy killed deletes a random file from your computer and losing the game causes it to delete itself. He wanted to bring to light the uncomfortableness that many people have with computers.
• Race Warriors was not distributed well enough because it required gamers to have a NES emulator. The message wasn't well-carried either since the hardcore gamers probably already knew racism is bad. The game was built on the wrong platform with the wrong audience.
• Can a game be popular without being fun, like a Schindler's List of video games? There is Phone Story, an iOS simulation game about conflict minerals, poor work conditions, and cheap labor involved with phone manufacturing.
• "We must free games from the tyranny of fun."
• LARP has a clear distinction between what's in the game and what's outside the game. Lose-Lose, however, blurs that distinction because what's happening in the game is affecting what's outside.
• Zach has been making games since he was a child. His mother used to read a lot of Greek mythology to him and he would often build games revolving around its characters and their trials. He would design games and make all his childhood friends to play them. The teachers actually had to take the other kids away and teach them that they don't have to be "bullied' into doing something they don't want to, but the kids responded that they were actually having fun.
• "The system is more interesting than the components."
• Can conceptual art games go mainstream? Not really, but they will definitely get more popular than they are now. Most conceptual art films or conceptual music don't penetrate the masses either.
• Super Mario Bros. is actually a conceptual art game. During an interview, Shigeru Miyamoto admitted that the game was influenced by the surrealism movement.
• Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Nier, Catherine, Limbo, Spec Ops: The Line, and Heavy Rain were cited as examples of conceptual art games that were popular. Killzone 2 is surprisingly a conceptual anti-war shooter, masked in a common first-person shooter affair.
• Both Killzone 2 and Killzone 3 have really surprising anti-war stories, but there is a great lack of conversation around video game plots.
• Super Columbine Massacre is a really horrible game to play. It is not fun or pleasant, and the mechanics are not melded with the story. It is a traditional RPG where you have to level your character up before you can tackle the high school jocks, but this mechanic doesn't capture the brutality and random violence of the actual attack.
• Most of the games mention make you feel bad through narrative, but Spelltower is effective at making you feel bad through its mechanics. Playing the game gives you a lot of anxiety and managing your letters as resources is quite stressful.
• Spelltower's rush mode, which was timed, was the first mode to be developed and playtesters said it was entirely too stressful. Puzzle mode, the untimed mode, was created to be relaxing. However, as players got better and more skilled at the game, the puzzle mode turned out to be way more stressful because the player has all the time in the world to plan their moves. The rush mode turned out to be the relaxing mode because it's constantly forcing you to make a move.
• Emotions are not mutually exclusive. Players can be angry and happy at the same time.
• Games are good at creating a sin wave of frustration and catharsis. MOBAs, especially, have really low lows and really high highs, creating a compulsive emotional loop.
• Doug Wilson's games are sometimes called "broken" because rules exist outside of the game mechanics.
• Sometimes bugs are great, ridiculous, and can be turned into a feature.
• What's some advice for making your first game? Find an easy engine (Scratch, dice, Gamemaker, ZZT), start with a small scope, expect small progress, and fail often.
• Games where cheating is built-in are interesting because the systems are not static and rules can be input in like in a math function.
• Desert Bus is a game built off of negative emotions.
• There already is a Schinder's List of games -- Brenda Brathwaite's Train.

Babycastles Summit: In Conversation With Doug Wilson

Doug Wilson, of Die Gute Fabrik (The Good Factory), gave a talk about his game development philosophy in a panel moderated by Jesse Fuchs of the NYU Game Center.

Presentation

• Doug started his talk by showing a demo of Robo-CLOP, a recent game jam project. It is a mod of CLOP played with four Playstation Move controllers attached to each limb. The mod was done in Unity, reading in inputs from the Move controllers and mapping them to the keys necessary to control the horse.
• His talk was called "Games, Subversion, and Simplicity."
• He's been doing installations based around Bennett Foddy's games (QWOP, GIRP, and CLOP). Playing these games with physical controllers make it more performative and public.
• Doug's previous game, Dog the Wag, is similar to Robo-CLOP. Players tie a Move controller to their behinds as if it was a tail and shake frantically to score points. Periodically, a player's controller would glow, prompting other players to tackle him and press a button on his tail. It ended up being a pretty violent game.
• Doug finds joy in subversion. In a Playstation Move ad, Kevin Butler holds two controllers as if he's shooting an arrow and a holographic bow appears in his hands. The tagline underneath says "This changes everything." However, in actuality, the technology is limited and can only go so far. Doug likes to exploit the weaknesses of the technology in his games; in other words, turning a bug into a feature.
• These technologies are self-effacing game technology and deliberately oppositional to marketing rhetoric.
• In Dark Room Sex Game, you and a partner try to reach orgasm by swinging the Wii remotes at the right rhythm. Doug subverts the family friendly game tech into something adult and perverse. The Wii remotes, in essence, are phallic devices. He also spliced a Wii commercial with pornographic sound effects, taking his subversion outside of the game as well.
• B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Okay Now) is a very physical game where people wrestle over controllers. The game almost encourages you to "cheat" because the game itself doesn't enforce many of the rules or instructions.
• Doug embraces the DIY aspect. The XB360 controller has a giant home button in the center that brings up the dashboard and takes the players out of the game. It's often accidentally pressed due to the game's frenetic nature and there's no way to turn the feature off in software. So, in the beginning of the game, there is a page of instructions showing the player how to duct tape a bottle cap on the controller to cover up the home button.
• MegaGIRP is a mod of GIRP played with four Dance Dance Revolution pads. It turns the game, commonly known as Twister for your fingers, into actual Twister. It also makes it great for public spectacle.
• Doug has an idea for a Twitter game called the Silent Game, where players receive points for not tweeting. To prevent players from creating a bunch of dummy account, the amount of points you would get is tied to how many followers you have. He wants to subvert Twitter by using the platform against itself.
• Johann Sebastian Joust is a competitive sport that sprinkles in silliness. It was developed in parallel to Lemon Joust, both unbeknownst to each other. Lemon Joust is a non-digital games where players balance lemons on big spoons and try to knock other players' lemons off. It was a coincidence that they both settled on the word "joust" for their games.
• Doug considers Johann Sebastian Joust to be a very different game than Lemon Joust. The lights on the move controllers and the music change the experience, and the computer keeps track of the win/lose conditions for the players.
• Why does Doug use so much technology? They're expensive and there are a lot of negative political associations with them regarding conflict minerals and bad labor conditions in manufacturing plants.
• The act of complicity, and the subversion of commercial products, artistically and intellectually make these games art.
• He quotes Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity. "Complicity suggests mutual gain. This relationship is not direct or unmediated, and not obtained through a simple sellout but via a complicated set of interconnections. The "other" was never outside of culture but was an integrated component of its values, systems, and operations. This insight doesn't spoil the game. It renders explicit some of the terms on which has been operating."
• Doug received awards for innovation at GDC, but he doesn't necessarily think that Johann Sebastian Joust is that innovative. It's only considered innovative because of its subversion of the Move controllers.
• We should think of game culture as context in our game design. The cultural aspects of these technology is as important as their formal description.
• Doug recently built an installation game with Bennett Foddy called Get On Top. It is played with two giant trampolines and Move controllers.

Discussion

• "My inhibitions are the closest thing to a personality." - Jesse Fuchs
• Doug doesn't necessarily consider his games to be folk games, since they don't have years of history behind them, but he hasn't found a better word. Maybe he'll use playground games.
• He is interested in functional fluidity, finding uses for technology outside of their intended use.
• He finds indie games a little homogeneous because of bedroom coders.
• He personally calls B.U.T.T.O.N. a "broken" game because so much is left to the players.
• Games are not just systems. They are also performed and shared experiences.
• Bennett Foddy's games deliberately have crappy graphics and weird music to invite the player to join in on the silliness.
• There is a scavenger hunt game that has good luck and bad luck artifacts that the players can pick up. These doesn't affect the system at all and are purely aesthetic. But the game puts a lot of emphasis on collecting these artifacts. Doug thinks it's forward thinking to add in silly rules.
• Liar's Dice, in the U.S., is played to eliminate down to one winner who takes all the money. In Europe, it's played to isolate a loser. Winning is boring; it's more fun to make someone lose so everyone else can laugh at him. 
• Doug builds a lot of "open" games in the sense that they require a lot of players to self-police. He's inspired by Mafia and Werewolf, which have DIY game design. Every group of friends have their own house rules of how to play these games. Negotiating the game is as fun as playing it.
• At one venue, people played Johann Sebastian Joust by dangling the Move controller in front of their pelvis. It makes moving much harder and defending yourself more precious. It didn't occur to Doug to play the game this way until he saw it in action.
• He calls Neal Stephenson's Clang project "fucking ridiculous." Building a sword-fighting controller is fighting against abstraction, yet it doesn't have the real tactile feel of actual sword fighting.
• He loves abusive games like Zach Gage's Lose-Lose, Bennett Foddy's games where they all ridicule you for failing, and Kaizo Mario. He finds abusive games to be the best way for the designer to have a back-and-forth dialogue with the player. The player has to get into the mind of the designer to beat them and there are several levels of reverse psychology.
• Kaizo Mario is a mod of Super Mario World that someone actually made for his friend, who posted his playthrough online. Doug considers the Asshole Mario series to be "objectively the best videos on Youtube."
• Inuit, also known as Mouth Pull, is a 2-player game where players put their thumb into the other player's mouth and play tug of war.
• Tony Conrad, who was suppose to be in this panel but didn't show up, is a minimalist composer and a structural filmmaker. He made a film called Flicker, using really minimal media to maximum effect.
• Doug doesn't consider himself an artist; just a game designer.
• Agatha Christie would've been a great game designer. Her mystery novels are filled with red herrings, constantly challenging the reader.

Babycastles Summit: Making Things No One Asked For In the Games Industry

Joe Kowalski, of Harmonix and Double Fine, gave a presentation about taking initiative in your work and finding success.

• Joe is an UI graphic designer who started in the game industry in 2004. He draws a clear distinction between a game designer and a graphic designer. The first thinks about systems, the second thinks about visual communication.
• In the old days, arcade cabinets were very clear and all buttons were labeled. In the console era, the controllers are abstracted from the games and there are way more buttons.
• "More complicated interactions demand better instruction."
• He showed a mock example of how Super Mario Bros. would be with a first-user tutorial, complete with popups for every new action. It seemed really ridiculous compared to the simplicity of the original game. A great interface is one that is not noticed at all.
• "Your favorite things are things you take upon yourself to make."
• "It's okay to make up things as you go along."
• He first worked at Irrational Games, then moved to Harmonix. At that time, they were starting production on the first Guitar Hero. The first two buttons were deliberately green and red. It's where the primary fingers rest and those buttons double as Yes and No. All menus were vertical because you can only strum up and down.
• UI is never mentioned in game reviews.
• Joe wanted to talk about three experiences where he took initiative on tasks that nobody asked him to do and the lessons he learned from them.

1. Guitar Hero logo
• During production of Guitar Hero, he asked if anyone would make a logo. The team said that the publisher usually provides that.
• He spent a weekend and made a logo himself. He showed it to his boss whose only comment was to "add a bevel." He updated the logo with the bevel and shortly after, it became the official Guitar Hero logo.
• He took it upon himself to make the logo. He was the new guy at the office at that time and nobody would have came to him to design the front-facing image of the entire franchise.
• "If you see a problem you want to tackle, tackle it before anyone is paying attention."
• In a similar story, a designer at Microsoft named Vincent Connare saw a beta version of Microsoft Bob where the characters were using Times New Roman font in their speech bubbles. So he created a new font called Comic Sans. Be careful about taking initiative because you'll live with it the rest of your life.
• Harmonix later had to design the Rockband logo. The requirements were to make it more emblematic of rock than Guitar Hero and look different from Guitar Hero.
• The Guitar Hero logo was reworked for a mobile version of the game. The designers described the rework as "idiosyncratic with a vengeance!"
2. Rockapocalypse pitch
• "A looming problem in need of a solution is an opportunity."
• The implied narrative of Guitar Hero was flimsy. During the pre-production of Guitar Hero 3, Joe took the opportunity to design a narrative for the game by mocking up a trailer.
• In this post-apocalyptic world, rock is dead and guitars are outlawed. The people in power built a giant gun and blew up the moon. Some people in the underground hold onto their guitars, waiting for the day for a hero to rise up. A true guitar hero would wield his mighty weapon and fight for the oppressed.
• The team was really excited about the trailer, but ultimately, the Rockapocalypse story didn't happen. Months later, Joe's boss showed him a magazine with an article about Brutal Legend. He said, "This kind of reminds me of your pitch." A few weeks later, Joe went to work for Double Fine.
• Brutal Legend was steeped in heavy metal mythology. For the in-game menus, Joe designed a journal based on a notebook a roadie would carry.
• "When looking for inspiration, look at obvious things, but also the things that inspired them."
3. Brutal Legends menu
• Joe pitched a crazy idea. What if the main menu of the game was this elaborate view of an album? The idea got the greenlight from Tim Schafer. That was great! But now he had to make it...
• During development, there were many problems with the menu. Navigating was slow, you can only do one selection at a time, it was not apparent what selections there would be if there were there at all, etc.
• The team suggested a lot of solutions, for example, adding text on the side or above the album to show the selections on the other pages.
• When you work on something so closely, you start to lose perspective.
• Joe himself suggested a cheat sheet that shows up the first time you play the game, teaching you how to navigate the menu. When he showed the idea to Tim, Tim said, "Man, that's like a big apology for our awesome menu."
• Joe looked at Saul Bass for inspiration. In the early days of film, opening credits were completely throwaway and projectionists would start the film from when the credits ended. Saul, however, created interesting animations during these title sequences. This was so revolutionary at the time that his films were shipped with instructions to the projectionist to tell them to start projecting from the start. Saul saw these opening sequences as a way to create emotional resonance with the audience.
• "People get nervous when they're faced with anything other than straightforward design."
• But people will forgive shortcomings if you lead them with positive emotions.
• "It's okay to sacrifice usability for personality, especially if it's a goddamn game."
• "Design for your audience, but find areas where you can design for yourself."

• Joe is now working on his own independent game called The Third Rail. It is an iOS game about subway trains. It was an interesting challenge to design the UI for a game about complicated subway paths, but "it's okay to make thinks up as you go along."
• Brutal Legend's main menu got in about a month before the game shipped, so it didn't get user-tested as much as it should have been.
• Joe has had many things rejected or needed rework.
• Joe has gone from big studios to independent development. He can be more risky in a big project because there are more eyes looking at his work. On a small project, he has to be more careful because every little risk can have huge consequences.
• He filmed the Brutal Legend main menu with Jack Black in about 90 minutes. Some things that took about 7 minutes to film took him about 7 hours later in post-production.
• Brutal Legend's main menu worked because the core audience has already paid their money for the game and was already signed up for the experience. You have to be careful with free-to-play, casual games because players can easily drop off if they're bored in the first minute.
• Amped 3 is his favorite UI design with all its different elements (ie. paper cutouts).
• Double Fine uses ScaleForm for its UI. Harmonix had their own proprietary software.
• Joe mostly uses Photoshop and Illustrator for his work, sometimes Flash for some animation, and After Effects for animation mock-ups but not for production.

Babycastles Summit: Designing Games for Public Space

Greg Trefry, of Come Out & Play Festival, curated a panel between three public space game designers: Ramiro Corbetta of Hokra, Matthew Parker of Recurse, and J.R. Blackwell of Shelter In Place.

Ramiro Corbetta's Presentation

• Ramiro worked at Powerhead Games for 5-6 years, where he worked on many casual Nintendo DS games and Glow Artisan, which won an IGF award. He attended Babycastles and started learning programming. Then Charles Pratt approached him to make a game for the No Quarter Exhibition.
• He made Hokra, a 2v2 game played with XBox 360 controllers. It's a game that's meant for 4 people playing and 20 people watching. Charles told him to make a game that'll be entertaining for spectators, so he added motion trails and made the UI very easy to understand.
• He was looking for inspiration for a public space game and found it in soccer, which is the quintessential public space game for him (he's Brazilian).
• Abe Stein, a writer at MIT, wrote a review of Hokra. He mentions that it's the "physical and digital jostling, the shouts, jeers, grimaces, chants, cheers, roots" that make Hokra a sports game. The game is very much about the audience and the players as much as what's on the television screen.
• Ramiro also made OBMAD (Or Buy Me A Drink) along with a developer of Super Crate Box. It is a drinking game where people get a card with instructions when they buy a drink. They can give this card to anyone else, who must either do the actions instructed on the card or buy the challenger a drink. Ramiro is really interested in drinking games and is now working on a single-player drinking game.
• They key to making a public space game is to have meaningful interactions between players, make it entertaining for spectators, and make gameplay as performance.

J.R. Blackwell's Presentation

• J.R. Blackwell is the creative director at Galileo Games.
• Velociraptor! Carnivore! is a board game for 4-6 players where velociraptors steal body parts and eat prey.
• Bulldogs LARP! is LARP game taking place in futuristic space. Players fill out a Transgalaxy Employment Contract which is their character sheet for the game. This game also involves a puppet of a punk-looking bear.
• Shelter In Place is a zombie LARP for 10-24 players. A director decides how games will go. There are human players and zombie players. The game is played in three acts with zombies growing strong each subsequent act. The game is like a big game of tag where the character with the higher number value wins in an exchange.
• The human characters include a business man, construction worker, medic, architect, horror movie buff, and a child, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The child, for example, is the last human to be bitten, which is an advantage to him. However, any other character that the child gets close to gets decremental value, which is a big disadvantage for the team.
• The zombie horde all work as a team towards one goal -- eat brains.
• There can also be twist characters such as a cyborg, vampire, werewolf, time traveler, MIB agent, or a tourist. The tourist is J.R. favorite twist char because he just came into town and doesn't realize he's in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. The game is lost if he is convinced that he's in a horror situation.
• The game uses props to make it more immersive. Physical engagement is very important for public space games.
• Shelter In Place has flexible game design and is adjusted based on the space and the audience. The game is based on zombie movies from Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead, so at the start of the game, the director picks the mood of the game based on the players.

Matthew Parker's Presentation

• Matt is involved with Deepak Chopra's Leela and co-authoring Hacking the Kinect.
• He designed Hali, a hide-and-seek game played with GPS-enabled mobile devices. In this game, everyone knows where everyone is at any given time, but GPS only gives the approximation of locations. The game is intended to be play on huge parks and fields.
• Matt curated "Fuck the Screen" event at Babycastles, which showcased Doug Wilson's Johann Sebastian Joust, Kaho Abe's Hit Me, and his own Duello. Duello is a cowboy duel game where both players are armed with a gun and a cowboy hat with sensors. The game is projected on the ground for both the players and the spectators.
• Recurse was commissioned to be a lobby piece for the NYU Game Center. It's a simple Kinect game where the player waves their hands frantically at passing green spots and avoid red spots. The game was also released for the iPad.
• At Jean Claude Van Jam 2012, the game jam ended up producing a lot of physical games, which was appropriate for the huge space at Eyebeam. The winning game was Wrong Bet, based on the film Lionheart. Two fighters play a simple game of Rock-Scissor-Paper on two separate laptops, while a crowd circles around them, yelling suggestions and making bets. This game was interesting because it made spectators a very big part of the game.
• Matt also worked on Lumarca, an installation piece that projected 3D objects onto string. This was hooked up to Kinect so that the objects on the string installation were mirrors of the objects in front of the camera. He tried many ways to turn this piece into a game, but could not find anything.

Panel Discussion

• Major influences of public space games are sports and theater.
• Most games (board and digital) have big barriers of entry, but public space games aim to lower that barrier. They're meant to draw in random bystanders and get them into the game in a seamless fashion, or at least bizarrely entertain bystanders with its strange spectacle.
• Ritual is a big part of sports and performance. Ritual is something developed and shared among people.
• There is an internal vs. external performance when it comes to public space games.
• Is accessibility the enemy of depth? There can be accessible games that are also deep. Examples include Baribariball, Tennis, and Nidhogg.
• What makes a game a public space game? It's the possibility of an audience and its permeability.
• Street Fighter is a public space game. It was made for arcades which are very much public spaces.
• Duello was more fun for spectators than players. It was designed to have realistic shooting and most people are very bad at shooting accurately, so players couldn't find too much fun from the game. But spectators were entertained by the silly outfits and the performance of the duel. On the other hand, Recurse was more fun for the players than the spectators. People watching other people play the game feel really uncomfortable or awkward, but once they're in front of the game, totally get into it and start doing silly motions.

Question and Answer

• Do you look at technology first or come up with the idea first? Doug Wilson looked at technology first for Johann Sebastian Joust. He investigated accelerometers, realized that they suck, and designed a game about not moving the accelerometer. Duello was very much theme first and then finding technology to fit the concept. Hokra and Shove were both technology first. For Hokra, Ramiro was excited about finally making a game for a big television screen after working on Nintendo DS games for the last five years. For Shove, he looked at the Kinect and designed a game that the Kinect cannot do well, ie. getting close and in contact with other players in front of the camera.
• Are cosplayers game players? Cosplayers are definitely inhabiting characters, but not necessarily playing games. However, there is a lot of crossover between cosplayers and LARPers. Costumes make games and role-playing much more immersive.
• Most LARP are centered around horror because there is a lot of opportunity for conflict in the horror genre. In addition, LARP is very effective at creating true fear, so it's playing at its strengths.
• Minecraft is not an accessible game and Matt doesn't consider it a game at all. Making a game accessible and deep is the hardest thing to do.
• Does technology limit accessibility? A controller is definitely more inaccessible than a camera since there are too many buttons and it's very intimidating for someone who's never seen it before.
• Not all games need to be accessible like Chess. LARPs are very inaccessible but are very engaging.
• The best LARPs are the ones that are highly curated.
• Drinking games are big public space games. Drinking games should be studied for inspiration for public space games because they succeed in how easy it is for people to enter the game and how quickly they can get players engaged.
• Recurse was meant to draw people, who don't expect to be playing, to play the game. It uses a mirror, which innately attracts people, but also skews it in an interesting fashion, which intrigues them even more.
• Public space games differ between spaces. The experience definitely changes for Shelter In Place depending on the location. Recurse was designed specifically for an individual space (the lobby of the NYU Game Center), but got more attention when it was brought to spaces with large audiences. Hali, on the other hand, was built to be played anywhere, but didn't really work in testing. It was brought to the Come Out & Play Festival in San Francisco and the game was barely playable because the fields were too hilly and the technology couldn't keep up. Hokra can be played anywhere, though it was meant to be played in public spaces, but will probably end up being playing in the living room. OBMAD is played at bars, but the game completed broke when it was brought to an event was an open-bar.

Babycastles Summit: The Bill Murray Theory of Game Design

John Teti of Gameological Society drew interesting parallels between game design trends and classic films of Bill Murray. The two films he specifically references are Groundhog Day (1993) and Scrooged (1988).

• In both films, Bill Murray plays an asshole in the television industry who eventually becomes better due to supernatural forces that only he experiences.
• In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, is trapped reliving a single day over and over again. Through the course of the movie, he becomes relatively superhuman and gains intimate knowledge of the everyone in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The film is regarded one of the greatest comedies of all time.
• In Scrooged, Bill Murray plays Frank Cross, a cold-hearted television programming executive. Frank is visited by three ghosts who show him the error of his ways in the past, present, and future. The film is a zany, loud version of A Christmas Carol.
• Imagine Bill Murray as the player and the worlds he inhabits are the video game systems.
• In Groundhog Day, Phil replays the day over and over again until he gets better. He retains memories of past events, even though nobody else does. This is very similar to a videogame where the player can die and revive, gaining more knowledge whereas all the enemies replay their same routines.
• Phil is ultimately able to leave Groundhog Day, essentially beating the game. But it took five essential steps for him to get there.
1. Exploration and testing of the boundaries.
• After realizing that he is reliving the same day, Phil decides to test the limits of the world. He drives his car in a crazy fashion, playing chicken with an incoming train, and when he is pulled over by a police officer, he makes fun of the situation by pretending to order fast food. As he drives his car, he claims, "I'm not going to live by their rules anymore!" This act gets him thrown into jail, but he wakes up the next morning back in his hotel room. He cheers as his test succeeded.
• As a player entering a new game, you explore the mechanics and systems. You find out what are your strengths and your weaknesses, your abilities and your limitations.
2. Strategic Action
• After understanding the mechanics, Phil takes advantage of his superhuman ability. He courts Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, by taking her out on a date over and over again. Being the self-centered and misogynous personality that he is, he often says the wrong thing on the date and gets himself slapped in the face. However, he learns from his mistakes each time and corrects it in the following date, ultimately creating the perfect date.
• The player plays with their perceptions of the conditions of the world.
3. Failure
• Phil tries to end the loop by committing suicide, but fails repeatedly. He electrocutes himself, gets hit by a truck, drives off a cliff, and jumps from a tall building, but none of his deaths can prevent the day from repeating.
4. Reassessment and Growth
• Nearing the end of the film, Phil shifts his focus on connecting with the people around him. He gains intimate knowledge of everyone in town. He also makes time out of his day to help people in need including saving a boy who falls from a tree and replacing a flat tire for a group of old women. Despite knowing that all these good action would be undone the next day, he still fits it into his personal routine.
• He did not necessarily realize this was the goal for him to leave the loop, but he does it anyways. The relation between objective and personal growth may not be superficially obvious.
5. Success
• After he finally gets the girl, he was able to break out of the loop. He came out of there as a new man and in the final scene, even suggested to stay in the town.
• Taking the five steps into account, we can define a "Groundhog Day game" as one that achieves player growth by the design of its world. In these games, failure is an option and the world has consistent ethos. The world itself is a source of guidance and the creator (the Hand of God) doesn't directly intervene. It leaves room for epiphany and also for disorientation. Examples of Groundhog Day games include Myst, Spelunky, Metroid, Journey, and Norrland (a game by Cactus).
• In Scrooged, the three ghosts lead Frank around and punish him for not following their directions. In one scene with the ghost of Christmas past, the ghost tells Frank that he must have an emotional reaction when he sees his parents. He leads Frank by the neck even though Frank is completely against it. Instead of letting Frank have that emotional connection naturally, he basically forces him towards that path.
• The ghost of Christmas present is a fairy who obnoxiously leads Frank around, very similar to The Legend of Zelda's Navi.
• John defined a new term. To scrooge is to subvert the player's agency, prompting or making decisions for them. The Hand of God directs the player where to go and the player ends up not trusting the world.
• Examples of scrooging include the "woman in the ear" that happen in many shooters like Splinter Cell: Conviction. Other examples are dialog boxes that pop up after you fail a few times asking, "Do you want to switch to easy mode?" or worse yet, a super guide mode that asks you to give up already and let the computer play the game itself. In the reboot of SSX, after failing a few times, the game allows the player to skip the level altogether while still gaining XP and bonuses from that level. The level does not even matter at that point. These mechanics let the players make the rules, in which case he's no longer the player anymore, he's a creator.
• Choices are the fabric of the game and when you are able to simply skip the level, all efforts have nil value.
• Some other examples of scrooging include internal monologues. In Arkham City, Batman constantly reminds himself that he should go to the next plot point, turning an open-world game into a very linear experience. In Alan Wake, Alan's internal monologues often gives the player the solutions to the puzzles. These types of scrooging alienates players from his own avatar.
• Problems with scrooging is that it values nominal success over personal growth. Without failure, the Scrooged game skips steps 3 and 4 of the Groundhog Day model.
• In the final scenes of each movie, you can clearly see the results of the different models. In Groundhog Day, Phil is genuinely a good person, having undergone a permanent change in his behavior. In Scrooged, he rants about having a second chance in life in a superbly crazy fashion. He seems completely crazy like he was tripping balls.
• Scrooged games give you thrills and power trips, but these only last temporarily.
• Scrooged games  are mass-market. These types of games are defined by business models. Older games followed the Groundhog Day model because they were arcade games that were meant to make the players pump as many quarters in the machine as possible. In the console generation, value was put into longer, more densely packed games, so games shifted to the Scrooged model to ensure more players are able to get through the content.
• Groundhog Day games force you to be more intimate and nuanced with the mechanics and world.
• In the current generation, games are too expensive to fail, so development cannot be put in the hands of the creative people.
• In the indie scene, however, financial motive is secondary. Indie developers have modest resources and personal expression is not directed by marketing or the lowest common denominator.
• There are also social factors. Helicopter parents (who over-direct their children's lives) tend to have better educated kids, but the kids are stunted in social development. Over-direction is not a good thing.
• In the US, there is a safe playground movement where seesaws, merry-go-rounds, and anything deemed remotely dangerous are removed from playgrounds. However, studies have shown that protecting kids would make them more neurotic. Parents shepherding kids are more harmful to them.
• Instead of letting kids go down a slide on their own, many parents put their kids on their laps and slide down with them. However, many kids get their legs caught on the side and the weight of their parents going down end up fracturing the kid's leg. This is a completely preventable disaster if the parents have more trust in their kids.
• "I learned something, I gained something, I found something."
• Hardcore vs. casual gamer is a false binary. Casual players are just like hardcore gamers but they are not so familiar with all the videogame tropes yet.
• Survival horror needs procedural generation to keep it scary without scrooging the player.
• Facebook games do not have true failure. Their type of failure, such as the withering of crops, is so binary and basic that it doesn't illicit any personal growth by overcoming them.