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: 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.