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.

Addicted to Game Culture

When fellow blogger, Leigh Alexander, tried to abstain from playing video games for an entire week and found it nearly impossible, I said to myself that that wasn't me. I'm not addicted to video games. In fact, I've gone weeks without touching a single game. I'm usually far too busy with school or work to make games my priority. And I have a healthy dose of secondary interests to satisfy my itch for entertainment.

A couple of days later, the unthinkable happened. The Verizon DSL service in my area went down. My first reaction was, of course, confusion and panic. Was there something wrong with my modem? Was my computer attacked with malware? I called Verizon and literally went through an hour of waiting and providing information before customer service tried to help me reset my PPP connection. It worked. My computer was finally online again and I could continue my daily Internet routine.

Twenty minutes later, it went down again. And thus, I called customer service and this time, they told me my modem was broken and offered to sell me a new modem for $65. I declined and called my friend, who is much more technically savvy than I am, and he told me that the network was probably down. The only solution was to wait it out. But how long would I have to wait? A couple of days? The entire month?

The prospect of being disconnected from the Internet almost gave me an anxiety attack. I felt depressed. I tried to play some video games to get my mind off the problem, but I couldn't get myself to play them. I picked up a book that's been on my reading queue for a while and I only got through four pages before my depression compelled me to stop. I did manage to marginally forget about the situation when my technically savvy friend invited me over to his house for the weekend. We watched the entire fourth season of Alias in one sitting, but the moment we finished the season finale, I was reminded that I had nothing to do when I returned home.

Fortunately for me, my Internet was back up the following day. I was ecstatic. Feelings of anxiety, depression, and isolation were all instantly gone in one moment. It was then when I knew I had a problem and I started investigating its origins. In my discovery, I realized that I didn't particularly have an Internet addiction; I had a video game addiction. I have over 100 RSS subscriptions, all but two are related to games. The guys I chat with the most online are fellow enthusiast gamers and the girls I chat with the most often play against me in casual web games like Boggle and Scrabble.

I was addicted to games, but not in the same way that Ms. Alexander was. I could go weeks without feeling a game controller in my hands. But going a few days without reading the latest gaming news and previews, without chatting with friends or posting in forums about games, without checking gamers' blogs for their insights on the medium, was just too much for me to handle. When I made my triumphant return to the Internet after a five day hiatus, the gaming community had moved so quickly ahead of me that I felt like I had been living under a rock for a year. There was so much backlog of news in my RSS feeds, it took me two days to catch up to the world.

Now at work, whilst everyone else has their headphones on to listen to music, I'm listening to three game-related podcasts a day. In my browser, I'm constantly running my RSS reader and checking it every hour or two. Next to my bed are a stack of game magazines and a pile of game theory books. On my desk are some philosophy and cognitive science textbooks and a copy of my unfinished dissertation about games. It's funny how I spend much more time reading, writing, watching, and talking about video games than I actually spend playing them. Is that abnormal?

Removing Genre Awards

With the near release of the U.S. version of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, I'd like to comment on the petty arguments over whether or not the game is a fighting game. On one side, since the game involves characters fighting against each other, it's a fighting game by its most elementary definition. On the other side, people argue it isn't a fighting game since it has too many random elements, it lacks several standard fighting game elements such as health bars and command inputs, and half the game has to be turned off in order to make it competitive.

After a while, most people just stopped caring, as did I. So what if SSBM is accepted as a fighting game? It doesn't make the game any better or worse. Genres are simply marketing terms after all; they're there to help consumers find something that matches their interests. I'd like that to be the common sentiment, but unfortunately, the video game industry is stuck in a state in which genres do matter.

At the end of the year, every media outlet and publication gives out their "best of year" awards. These awards tend to fall under three categories. The first one is achievement awards, which include best graphics, music, writing, and artistic direction. The second is platform awards, which include best PC game, PS3, PSP, XB360, Wii, DS, or whatever platform is on the market. Finally, the third category is genre awards. Out of these three categories, the achievement awards are the only ones that are stable and ubiquitous. For example, "best graphics" is a stable category since all games of past, present, and future have some form of graphical display.

Platform awards, on the other hand, such as "best PS3 game" is not a stable category because 50 years into the future, someone would look back at these lists and have no idea what a Playstation 3 is. Platform awards also sometimes create ambiguous or paradoxical situations. For example, more than one publication of 2007 gave Call of Duty 4 the "best XB360 game" award over Bioshock, but Bioshock won "game of the year" award over Call of Duty 4. Isn't a platform award just a subcategory of the "game of the year" award? If we already establish that Bioshock is the better game overall, then shouldn't Bioshock still be the better game on the console? Personally, I think we should get rid of platform awards altogether and add a new achievement award called "best handheld game." It's the equivalent of "best animated movie" at the Academy Awards.

Genres are even less stable and more ambiguous than platforms. Genres fade away and new genres are formed every year. Beat-em-ups and shoot-em-ups are a rare breed, while rhythm/music games are relatively new. In addition, most games nowadays are a combination of multiple genres and it's difficult to place them into one specific category. Mass Effect is a role-playing / third-person-shooter, Halo 3 is a vehicular-combat / first-person-shooter, Kingdom Under Fire is a hack-and-slash / real-time-strategy, and Smash Bros. is a fighting / platformer. Who really is to say which one encompassing genre these hybrids fall into? It's okay if we attach arbitrary keywords to these games that would help other people find something to their interests, but to define exactly which genre they fall under is quite pretentious and irresponsible.

The way we think about classification is very different now than it was back then. I attribute this change to the advent of the Internet, specifically Web 2.0. We don't necessarily have this notion of a hierarchical taxonomy anymore, but more of a folksonomic classification system. Things aren't broken down into a tree-like structure where every node only has one parent. Instead, they resemble a giant spider-web, where nodes have multiple neighbors, therefore multiple precedents and derivatives. I made a mock-up of the two types of genre classifications for your viewing pleasure.


Game publications should leave genre awards out of their annual award ceremonies because it's irresponsible for them to define which genre a game belongs to. We don't define a game by its genre; we define genres by the games. Let's stop putting so much emphasis on genres and perhaps, the forum posters would stop their petty arguments over whether or not Smash Bros. is a fighting game, or if Zelda is a role-playing game.

Now, I certainly know why game publications have genre awards -- it's to give mention to games of niche genres that generally have no chance of winning game of the year. When was the last time a puzzle game, a sports game, or a fighting game won best game? These genres are the equivalent of comedies and horror movies at the Oscars. Removing genre awards would be removing any appraisal these niche games would get. My solution to this is a simple change to the nomenclature. Instead of giving out the "best puzzle game" award, we give out the "best puzzle mechanics" award, which makes it more of an achievement award than a genre award. As explained before, genres are not very stable and most games are cross-genre nowadays, so placing a hybrid game into one genre is an opinionated decision. However, the different mechanics that the game employs can be clearly defined. Attacking enemies with ranged attacks is a shooting mechanic. Getting from location A to location B before the opponents do or under a specific time is a racing mechanic. Gaining a form of experience points and upgrading character statistics, skill set, and equipment is a role-playing mechanic.

I find that this is quite an elegant solution that solves a number of problems. First off, hybrid games can be nominated in several mechanic categories, instead of being arbitrarily thrown into a specific genre. Secondly, the merits of its mechanics will be judged, not the overall package. So if a game like Puzzle Quest wins best puzzle game because of its RPG mechanics and not its derivative puzzle elements, then it's not exactly fair to other more innovative puzzle games. There's always the "game of the year" award for the overall package.

Different Types of Gaming Skills and Their Competitive Values

Games teach. We learn from games and we obtain new skills from games; some skills being more useful than others in our everyday lives. Games can have educational value that ameliorates one's mind, teach social skills through interaction with online players or smart A.I. characters, and be artistically and philosophically engaging to alter one's view of the world. These types of skills, however, are discussion for another time. Here, I will try to categorize the different types of competitive skills that can be gained from playing video games and list them in order of value, defined as how useful the skill is in competitive games and how much of it is intrinsically carried into another game.

1) Strategy
Strategic skills involve overcoming mental challenges, making decisions based on situations on hand, and outsmarting the opponent with mind-games. This is the most important and useful gaming skill. It is a mental skill that you can take with you into other games and stays with you until a very old age when you lose control of your cognitive abilities. Games built entirely around strategy, with no need for the other types of skills, happen to be the best games and longest surviving.

One such example is Chess, which takes about five minutes to understand how the game works and learn how the different pieces move, but takes a lifetime to master its strategic depth. Chess is a game of perfect information, stripping away luck from the equation, and is a turn-based board game, removing the need for physical mastery. Being a game of pure thinking and strategic planning, we find that it caters to players of all ages, from elementary school kids to old men sitting at parks. Other similar games are Chinese Chess, Go, Checkers, and Othello. There are also some great strategy games with imperfect information such as Mahjong, Poker, Bridge, Spades, Hearts, Big Two, Scrabble, and Stratego. Without perfect information, there is an element of luck thrown into the mix, but as long as players have complete control over their actions (actions during a turn are not based on a dice roll or a random card draw) and there is a fixed pool of resources (144 tiles in Mahjong, 52 cards in a deck, 100 tiles in Scrabble), then strategy is not compromised by random luck.

What does this have to do with video games? Competitive games that put primary focus on strategic skills tend to have longer lifespans. One such example is the Street Fighter 2 series, whose simplicity is its strongest asset. Being a fighting game by nature, it is played in real-time and involves a lot of twitch-based combat, but with its relatively simple system and tight controls, its barrier of entry is far smaller than more recent fighting games. As much as I love them, games such as Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Guilty Gear XX Accent Core are too execution heavy, thus the best player is the one who practices their combos the most, not the one who has the better mind-games. In the Street Fighter 2 series, however, the game is not too fast-paced, has little effects clutter, and has a simple universal system, therefore putting emphasis on spacing and zoning, reading the opponent's moves, and tricking the opponent into a defenseless position. The newest iteration of the game, entitled Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix, will put further emphasis on the strategic elements of the game by making execution easier, and I absolutely cannot wait for it.

Another popular game with focus on strategy is Counter-Strike. Of course, it's a first-person shooter and it involves twitch-based gameplay, but it's not as important as what weapons you take into combat and tactical teamwork. And a more recent example of a great strategy game is Defense of the Ancients, which removes all the things that made real-time strategy games too convoluted and twitchy (e.g. resource gathering, structure building, and micromanagement) and focuses on the core mechanics such as teamwork, flanking, and character match-ups.

Strategic skills are the most important skill to master. Most gaming tournaments center around strategy-based games and you can expect these games to have a long lifespan, so all your time invested in them is not immediately wasted. As most games are based on the same elementary concepts, an understanding of controlling space and pressuring the opponent will help you win many games.

2) Twitch
Whereas strategy represents the mental elements of a game, twitch represents the physical elements. Twitch skill is based on execution of complicated controller commands and quick reactions to circumstances. Although the aforementioned games are primarily focused on strategy, all three contain twitch elements such as Street Fighter 2's execution of combos and complicated moves (e.g. Zangief's Final Atomic Buster, Guile's Double Somersault), Counter-Strike's shootouts and bunny-hopping, and Defense of the Ancient's click-combat and operation of its user-interface. In fact, there are genres based entirely around twitch gameplay such as shoot-em-ups, music and rhythm games, and most block-dropping puzzle games. These are the games that test your reflexes and improve your hand-eye coordination.

You can improve your strategic skill by watching others play and talking to expert gamers, but twitch is a skill that can only be improved through your own practice. Having an expert Guitar Hero player tell you how to effectively perform hammer-ons or play the fifth button does not help; you have to actually try it for yourself over and over again until you get the hang of it. Practicing your twitch skills does help you when you make the jump to other games. Since all first-person shooters involve pointing an aiming reticule over an enemy model, learning how to do it in one game will give you an automatic advantage when you play another shooter. Likewise, learning how to perform quarter-circles and charges in one 2D fighting game will help you jump into another 2D fighter with a low barrier of entry.

Ultimately, strategy has more overall value than twitch skills. You lose your physical capabilities much sooner than your mental capabilities, and since twitch is a physical skill, you find it quite difficult to master twitch games before the age of 10 and past the age of 30. You'll see strategy-focused games played by people of all ages, but twitch games are mainly played by the young adult crowd who not only has the physical proficiency to master the game, but also has the time to invest in practicing the game.

3) Knowledge
Knowledge is another mental skill, but it is different than strategy. Strategy is based on the how, knowledge is based on the what. Strategy involves making informed decisions and outsmarting the opponent, but knowledge simply involves knowing more than the opponent. For example, knowing the map in a first-person shooter definitely gives the player the advantage over someone who's playing the map for the very first time. Knowledge can be gained simply by playing the game for a while and obtaining observations from other players; it does not require as much analyzing as it does to obtain strategy or as much practicing as it does to obtain twitch skills. Whereas strategy and twitch have essentially no limit, your knowledge of a game caps out when you find out everything the game as to offer.

Knowledge is an undeniably significant skill to have, but unfortunately, it is game-specific. Knowledge of the Valhalla map in Halo 3 is only useful in the context of Halo 3; it is no longer a useful skill when you're playing Call of Duty 4. Generally, knowledge is reset with every new game you play. The only time when that is not true is when you play another game of the same series and familiar characters, weapons, maps, or system make it into the sequel. However, with every new character, weapon, or map that is added to the new game, you must rethink and alter your knowledge.

4) Willpower/Time
Willpower is a bit of a mental skill and a bit of a physical skill, but mostly, it is a time-based skill. This skill applies mostly to role-playing games. Willpower is the skill to drudge through long amounts of simple and unsophisticated gameplay to level up your character or find a new item. It is the skill to endure, or maybe even enjoy, a grindfest or a collectathon. And it is arguably not a skill at all as heard through the phrase, "It's a test of will, not a test of skill."

Role-playing games give the least competitive value for amount of time put in. The time spent in willpower-based games do not reflect the skill level of the player, but the skill level of the virtual character. The character will grow in statistics and learn new moves, but the player's skill level remains stagnant throughout, growing not much further than what he started out with when first picking up the game. Though there is some strategy and some twitch skills to be gained in role-playing games, the emphasis is mostly on willpower, time, and knowledge of the game. Unfortunately, when jumping to a completely new game, all that is reset and lost in the process. Willpower and time are skills that are not carried over to new games and thus, has the least value.

Despite being a useless skill, games based around willpower manage to be incredibly popular. Perhaps, fans of RPGs don't like exercising their minds and their bodies when playing games or they just don't care about competitive gameplay. RPGs are designed for a different type of gamer, someone who enjoys aesthetics and narrative over competition, someone who plays games for relaxation or social endeavors, someone who likes exploring or the simple act of achieving.