Tuesday, September 29, 2009

DEUS EX VIENNA. 16-color lifetime achievement

I am back from Vienna, from the amazingly friendly Future and Reality of Gaming conference. I will try to sum up my impressions of the conference later, now I'd like to share the topic of my talk.
















First, some personal history. Last fall, while living in Willow Street in Cambridge, MA, I rediscovered the weirdest game of the 1980's - Automata UK's Deus Ex Machina. I thought it would be a nice fun event to do a real-time playthrough of the game in the Gambit Game Lab, where I was a visiting researcher at the time. Each playthrough of the game takes exactly 45 minutes, as it is to be synchronized with the audio soundtrack. The invitation for the event read:

DEUS EX MACHINA
A Bizarre Multimedia Experience straight from 1984
50 minutes of awe!
Projected on a moderately big screen!

Somewhere between Shakespeare and The Wall, between Breakout and the Holodeck, there is Deus Ex Machina.

Designed by the repeatedly failed visionary Mel Croucher, who not only wrote the game, but also played banjo, Korg Vocoder and a zillion of other instruments on the game's soundtrack, this is probably the first commercial art house game. It came on two cassette tapes, one with the game, the other with the soundtrack, which was to be synced with the computer program.
In many ways, it was a total failure, which brought its publisher Automata UK Ltd. to bankruptcy; in many ways it's an amazingly non-conformist take on computer entertainment, which left the reviewers baffled, disoriented and strangely pleased.

The game, whose treads the thin line between artsy and campy, takes the player through the Seven stages of man, each one a different minigame, hinting at comparisons with both Will Wright's Spore and Jason Roher's Passage. The soundtrack features compositions such as "I'm the Fertilizing Agent" and "War Crimes Are Easy" and bears eerie resemblance to trip hop, which was to arrive many years later. Also, it features John Pertwee of the Doctor Who fame and some other British actors who used to be famous in 1984.

A playthrough of Deus Ex Machina takes exactly the duration of the soundtrack to finish, which is why it is such a great game to play and screen with curious friends and colleagues. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum version of the game running on a emulator will be synced with an MP3 of the audio track, the keyboard will be passed around (you cannot win or lose the game, anyways) to anybody who wants to play and the rest will get carried away by the immersive 256x192 attribute-clashing visuals and insane soundtrack.

For the talk, I did an interview with the author/auteur Mr. Mel Croucher (he's still a witty, sarcastic and eccentric guy) and did a detailed analysis of the game. I will post the whole paper when it's done, but for now, you should at least try Deus Ex Machina yourselves (if you haven't seen it yet). Download a ZX Spectrum emulator for your system, the game and the audio. I'm always surprised by how positive people's reactions to the game are and how much they love the music. Initial distrust and condescending smile always gives way to involvement, immersion and singing along.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

GAMERS' BAD CONSCIENCE: Moral emotions in games & other news

The semester is over and I am reading through my students' essays and assignments. I realize that it is very hard, almost impossible, for some of them to write anything else than a game review. The question is: to buy, or not to buy. Or rather: to download illegally, or not? This confirms what José Zagal wrote about in his paper on teaching about digital games.
Apart from that, my paper about "moral" decisions in single-player games just made it into a book called Ethics and Game Design. It basically explores the feelings of guilt and bad conscience we get while playing scoundrels in video games. Kicking innocents, teaming up with vampires, abusing doctors sans frontiers, such things. I tried to come up with a model (oh yes, a model!) of what has to be considered while thinking about our moral emotions in gameplay. Of course, much of what I'm talking about came up in the discussions in the Valuable Games Harvard-MIT sessions, which I dearly miss. Another source of inspiration was John Walker's incessantly entertaining and disturbing account of playing evil in Knights Of The Old Republic.
It was one of those papers that make you read stuff, read more stuff, turn your brain into jelly and read some more. I read many an investigation on moral decision-making and moral identities. Most of them were even completely useless for my purposes. In the end, I found that Prinz's and Greene's neo-Humean (and relativistic) take on moral emotions were most inspiring. Especially Greene's dissertation is great read, although I did not find it as shocking as the author seems to think it is. I guess I had already been a moral relativist. See you in hell.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

BOBBIN ATTACKS BRNO: Loom paper, teaching game studies (updated)

The editor of eLudamos, the journal I submitted my close reading of Loom to, turned out to be a big fan of the game as well. The result is that the Loom paper, my labor of love (and given it's not that long, it was actually a lot of labor), was published and it is now your turn to read it, comment, agree, or disagree. It's here.
In other news, I started teaching game studies at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. It's a full-on assault, seven 3-hour lectures total, with attendance of over 70 people, many of whom have very interesting gaming histories (there's even a fan of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream). It is a part of their Interactive Media Theory programme whose existence is fitting given that Brno is the Czech capital of game industry with 2K Czech and others having their offices there.

Update: My friend Clara Fernandez has just sent me images from the last FuturePlay conference in Toronto. To have this post visually stimulating, I'm going to put one of them right here... Or, is it stimulating?

Thursday, January 22, 2009

THE PLEASURABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: Writing about Loom

I've always loved Loom and had this feeling that even though The Secret of Monkey Island is the classic graphic adventure game, Loom is more... special. It has got a unique interface, in which you play melodies at things instead of using objects on objects - thus eliminating the inventory. It has a very deep and mysterious, however sparsely sketched, story. And it also attracted me by being a black sheep of the Lucasfilm's oeuvre.
Inspired by detailed analyses of games my Gambit colleagues Doris Rusch, Matt Weise and Clara Fernandéz-Vara wrote for the forthcoming Well Played book, I revisited Loom again to try to find out what's so special about it. I also read some online reviews that called Loom "the buddhist of videogames", for example, and tried to capture the elusive magic of the game in words. The recurring theme of fan reviews is the notion of lightness and intangibility.
I totally agree with them. But what intrigued me is how these feelings are brought about by the game's narrative and interface (especially given that adventure games are by many considered clumsy and not gamey enough). So I decided to write an "academic review" of the game.













I submitted the whole paper to the game studies journal Eludamos, so I cannot repeat the whole thing here. But in principle, Loom is a damn smart game. Instead of sucking the player in by the standard immersion techniques, it rather takes Bobbin, the main protagonist, out of the game world. He is a weaver, a member of a tribe that can alter the fabric universe with their magic of music, just like the player can control the game. He cannot bring any objects with himself on his journey, just as the player cannot bring any real-world objects into games. These parallels run very deep on all possible levels. Moreover, the identification of the player with Bobbin is made easier by him not having a face.
I spent so much time dissecting Loom that it bordered on obsession. Hopefully the paper will be published - and maybe it will even inspire people to look for smartness in games or to make smart games. If it is, I will instantly link it from here. Of course, there will be no screenshots, for reasons explained in the previous post.