So I’ve been working on the new game, called Art Game, at a kind of desultory rate for the last couple of weeks. It’s a game I’m kind of meta-enthusiastic about, but have struggled a bit with getting going. I’ve also been finding myself reluctant to write about it here, I suppose because it’s going so slow. But that’s a crappy reason, so here we are, on the blogwagon again. The game centres around making art with classic games, and it took me the longest time to pick the right three games to work with. And then recently it all fell apart. But then spaceship costumes saved my day.
In the game you make art with games, that’s the basic premise. Fairly early on I hit on the two “easiest” media for this. You use the mechanics of Snake to create paintings/drawings, and you use the mechanics of Tetris to create sculptures. For whatever reason those two just seemed obvious to me, and they’re what got me excited about the project. But I wanted a third medium, because good things come in threes. For a long while it was a generic platformer, as a kind of performance art, but it never sat quite right with me. Then one day, I realised that Spacewar! would be perfect – it’s quite beautiful, like dancing, after all.
So that was great until I started going into some of the details of the game. In particular, part of the intent of the game is not to acknowledge that you’re using a game to make art – that just happens to be the mechanics used in the simulation of art-making in the game, a kind of art-physics or something if you like. Thus the painter “really is” painting with the mechanics of Snake.
But this ran into a hitch with Spacewar! It doesn’t exactly make sense to say that the performance artists (two of them, because it’s a two player game, after all) really are flying spaceships in order to make their art. And without a connection drawn between the “physics of art” and the physics/reality of the rest of the (virtual) world of the game, I didn’t feel comfortable with moving forward at all.
Then, sitting in bed one day talking to Rilla, I randomly floated the idea that in fact what the artists do is put on spaceship costumes and go into a darkened room, running around a central “star” and throwing missiles (sticks or whatever) at each other. All according to the rules of Spacewar!, but in the fiction/physics of the game, actually just their chosen form of performance. It was kind of a stupid idea, but I totally think it works, and I’m moving forward with that assumption.
It’s very interesting to me, this tension of “realism” in these extraordinarily unrealistic games. Coherence is deeply important, even in the middle of nonsense.
Finally started making some more progress on Art Game over the last couple of days, which has been a huge relief and managing to dodge it for so long. I now have the basics of the “art forms” the game involves implemented, and the all-important transition from making an artwork to the gallery space. Frankly, there’s been a really weird amount of ontology going on with this game, which has been equal parts fascinating and frustration.
So the basic premise is that you play as an artist who makes art with a classic digital game, let’s say that you make sculptures out of Tetris for now. All kinds of decisions have to be made about the “reality” of Tetris in the world of Art Game. Shit gets complex. In the end, for instance, I decided that the game world has no acknowledgment at all of the idea that you’re ever “playing a game” to make a sculpture – that interface is literally just thought of/presented as “sculpting”. This is what caused all the difficulty with trying to incorporate Spacewar! into the world of the game – how do you try to pretend that spaceships flying around and firing missiles is somehow tied to the game’s internal reality? Spaceship costumes.
But there are all kinds of other questions obviously. What are the Tetris pieces made of? (I sometimes wonder whether the whole game partly came out of these amazing “photos” of “real” digital game pieces.) Should they all be different colours/shades? Well, hmmm. In the end I decided they’re made of just one material, all the same colour, as it seemed to yield the most interesting sculptural forms. But these are decisions that had to be made.
The most recent issue to come up has been trying to “remediate” Spacewar! playings into the gallery space of the game as projections on the walls. It was all roughly okay until I realised that the missiles being fired were too small given the resolution of the reality of the gallery. Even though it mostly looked okay, that breaking of resolution completely spoiled the effect. So I’m currently working on what it means to watch a video projection of a game played at one resolution but displayed at another, such that you maintain the spirit of the performance artwork it represents.
In other words, life is sweet.
I had a productive day working on Art Game today, got over quite a few of the little hurdles that I’ve been feeling super intimidated by getting started on. This led me to the usual question: well why the hell didn’t you just do all this earlier? Why are you not working harder?, I ask myself. Often. It is a subject I spend a lot of time with, and I don’t feel like I know much more about it than I used to, but still, it never hurts to speculate.
My usual attitude to the “getting stuff done” issue is the ever-so-helpful idea that I’ll just tell myself to work harder and it will just happen. This rarely works. Many are the days I have gotten up and assured myself I would work hard and true only to find myself twiddling away at an iPhone game or (someone else’s) Flash game or checking my email again. I suspect that telling yourself to work hard only works for people like the Internet meme version of Chuck Norris.
Then there’s the version where I enlist the advise of organization gurus and productivity websites. I break my tasks down into manageable lists of “next actions”, say. Or I spend several days noting down exactly how I spend my time to the quarter hour, which tends to instill enough dread that most of those quarter hours are productive. Pomodoros? Yes indeedydoros. Etc. This kind of thing does work, but I kind of feel like it only works sometimes, and that the times it works are those times when you finally had the determination to get going anyway. And it’s just that you directed that determination at your work via a whole lot of productivity tricks.
Perhaps my favourite take on somehow magically being productive is Proust’s “lie around in bed” strategy. I find this to be a very convincing approach to getting stuff done. You stay in one place, it’s not too distracting, and I’ll be damned if it’s not pretty bloody comfortable as Winter finally wends its way into Malta and makes our apartment colder inside that it is out. Today’s productivity was courtesy of Proust, in fact, so he’s the currently reigning champ I guess.
Still, the “truth” of it seems to be that there’s no way I can make myself work hard and consistently on my games. Of course, admitting and accepting that feels a bit dangerous, so I might just hold off on it for now.
Maybe a rabbit’s foot would help… preferably still attached to a living and adorable rabbit who could hang out with me while I worked!
Progress is coming along on Art Game. For one reason or another I haven’t felt much impulse to write about it because the task of actually making it has been a bit more all-consuming than I’d anticipated. Still, the basic flow of the game now completely works. You choose an artist to play as, go to your studio and produce candidate works for a big show, call in the curator to judge the works and pick, repeat for a while until you have work in the show, go to the opening and look at the work on the walls/plinths, and then leave and find out what the art world made of it. That last bit, the ending, doesn’t exist yet, but everything else does, mostly to a kind of “final” level other than bugs. So without making promises, I’m really trying hard to have this game finished and release in the next couple of weeks. It really is time to move to other projects, I think, even though I’m still (rather surprisingly, to be honest) a definite believer in this one.
Over the weekend I got Art Game together enough to be tested by people who aren’t my long-suffering parents. Since then I’ve been treated to rather a lot of excellent feedback, some of it daunting in its comprehensiveness, all of it very helpful. Now I face the classic tension of the later stages of game making: I really want to be done with the game and have it out the door, but I’d also quite like to implement a lot of what people have suggested. I may compromise by just giving myself a couple of (long) days to put in as much as I possibly can and then leave it there. In my dreams I release the game on this Thursday or Friday. In reality… we shall see.
I released Art Game into the wild today. Where “the wild” is “Twitter” and my very exclusive mailing list. It’s a game I spent a lot of time on over the last couple of months, and really I’ve been thinking about it in some form for maybe almost a year. So it was an important one to me, is what I’m saying. Did a lot of testing with great testers (where “testing” includes some pretty excellent philosophical discussions about games and art). Everything was looking great! And then the people in the gallery decided to kind of have a mass seizure and march off screen…_
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This probably isn’t the first game I’ve released with some serious bugs – I feel it’s happened before. But for some reason this one really hurt, especially after all the effort by testers, and really wanting this to be a smooth experience, because I think the game relies rather a lot on the whole thing feeling relatively seamless. Nobody wants seizures in their show-of-a-life-time. Because I kind of believe in this blog involving some real disclosure about the activity of making games, I can tell you I felt panicky, that I had the burning cheeks of embarrassment, and that I really beat myself up about for quite a while.
As I debugged, I briefly toyed with the idea that if it was a rare glitch I would pass it off as spontaneous performance art. But it wasn’t rare, it was… always.
But I fixed it (by doing nothing at all as far as I could tell, and with a great deal of help from Eltons Küns), and I fixed another bug (I think), and Art Game floated along, not too much the worse for wear. And I’m pleased with it I think. So far people seem to like it, which is deeply gratifying. I think it does some of the things I imagined it doing when it was just a little baby idea on my list of game ideas.
I think it’s possible to feel proud about the work you make. I think it’s possible to feel angry with the curator for not selecting a particularly excellent example of your oeuvre. I think it’s possible to feel indignant when someone in the gallery takes a cheap-shot at one of your painting. I think it’s possible to feel elated when you’re on the cover of Artforum. And I hope it’s possible for the game to serve as a platform for people to muse about the whole weird games and art business, too. And the art and games business, for that matter. Most of all, I think it’s possible to express yourself as an artist and to invest in that and not have the game let you down too much.
Perhaps I’ll write something more coherent about the game another evening. For not, I’m glad it’s out there and that people can take a look and maybe paint a painting or two.