Hello journal. I’m starting a new project. Is this a good idea? Unclear.
I’m starting a new project because I started and then became disillusioned with/lost momentum on:
All of those still strike me as “good ideas” that I “should make” but the fact is I don’t seem to possess the enthusiasm for them right now, and so… I’m avoiding that by starting another thing and I suppose I’m hoping that the sheer momentum of newness along with “simplicity” just gets me to the end of this process before I slow down and stop. Gaming the system that is my heart.
This significantly stems from more than one person telling me to just make really small stuff, or telling themselves that while I was also there. It’s good advice, I give it to myself and others often.
The project itself, outside its role in my psychology, is to make a small set of classic videogames (Pong, Breakout, Snake, thing 4, thing 5) where the only difference (at least in the first imagining) is that they are incredibly slow. As in, you’re playing breakout and it’s breakout but the ball moves at… whatever, 0.001 pixels per second or something along those lines. The “how slow?” question is something I need to feel out.
The point here (and I guess I need to write a Why? to go along with this) is a continuing thinking through of “meditation games” in part. It’s partly coming from the fact I’ve often advised beginner programming students to make this change to something they’re working on: what if it was just really slow? And when they sometimes actually try it (god knows they don’t always listen to me) it can be kind of incredible. There’s something very powerful about slowness after all.
The slowness speaks to meditation to me most immediately. When I made It is as if you were on your phone there was a constant tugging on my designstrings to make it be about meditation and Zen via the whole Zen Gong Sound Effect thing. I didn’t do that because it felt like too much to encompass, but these slow games are one opportunity to do a “meditation thing” in a new form, and I like that about them.
There’s a tension here too because it’s obvious that an incredibly slow videogame is going to be pretty fucking annoying or stupid to most people. So questions arise about “user experience” and whether I need to signal the aim, whether I need to implement things that speak to the aim with things like scores or timers or reminders to come back or blah blah? And in what ways those things end up in tension with the Zen idea? Or whether the Zen idea can’t survive the encounter with game design in the first place?
One thing I’ve pondered is whether it could/should be so slow that you could go away and come back later and it would still be going/would simulate out the physics of the game while you were away and reach an end-state. I quite like the idea, though it would seem to encourage quite a different orientation to the whole thing.
There’s that John Cage? organ piece that’s going for hundreds of years. There’s the Marina Abramovic piece which I think is where I’m getting that title from (the ramp exercise at the Institute). There’s Tai Chi. There’s slow reps at the gym. There’s that embarrassing slow motion ninja game. There are references.
I think that’s enough to set out with. I have thoughts on individual games within this including major problems I think I foresee.
BUT more than anything, could I just make this and move on without it being a whole fucking thing? I don’t know. Yes? No? How on the hook are we not just to make the first move but to react? How do we know when we’re lost in a morass of decisions that aren’t all that interesting or don’t really make a big enough difference to bother with?
I think internal simulations of physics are going to come into this - the sense of calculating what will happen and when you know your sense of a resolved tension in the game state making it boring? Or just changing the “vibe”?
Some of this can only be decided by making it.
What is it like to playtest something slow? Horrible?
I was going to try implementing some stuff this evening but haven’t got to it as yet. I’ve been caught up in thinking about the differences between the games I’m proposing (to myself) but also the question of mobile-friendly, which generally speaking I do want.
Mobile massively changes the kinds of controls we can reasonably have and the way that they feel. Like, how would you do Asteroids on mobile? I could look at an example most obviously I guess. Swipe left and right to turn, tap to shoot? I suppose that’s alright actually. Alright well maybe that bit is solvable.
The other big controls-oriented thing is the relationship between the player’s not-slow-time and the game’s slow-time. In my imagining of Pong for instance it’s that the player can move the paddle as rapidly as they want, but the ball will move very slowly (no thoughts just yet on the AI paddle, but I suppose it too can move ultra slow - though in doing so it will kind of imply the player ought to as well?).
That makes sense in mobile (just to tie these two together) as well because there’s not necessarily I super obvious way of converting mobile input into slow-input? I suppose you could press or swipe and have it translate to small amount of motion? But it seems off? And I think I like the realtime-ness of the paddle movement as something that throws into relief your relationship to the system. It kind of “creates” time-feel? What the fuck am I talking about with time-feel? Let’s not take ourselves too seriously even though it’s a pretty fun term.
BUT not every game would have this kind of realtime input or, if it did, it might impact how the game plays. e.g. Asteroids? Can the ship spin at a “real-time” speed but everything else is slow including the pace and cool-down of shooting? If so the game is radically changed because it’s so much easier to play? But then I suppose that’s just the same as in the Pong… the point here isn’t for the game to remain challenging… almost the opposite? The Zen-ness (and the frustration of it?) is all about the lack of tension? Or the relocation of the tension to “I want to act!”
So, alright, Asteroids sure. Pong sure. Breakout sure. Tetris?
Tetris… well I suppose so yes. You can move the pieces around willy-nilly in terms of left/right and spin, but they drop slow and presumably you can’t do the turbo-drop or maybe even the speed-up thing? Or is it funny to have the speed-up but it’s also VERY SLOW?
So Tetris sure. And perhaps one more for the no-reason-for-ot number of five? I do like Snake, but the problem with Snake is that it doesn’t have that idea of a separation between player and motion? You contro the snake and the snake is slow and on tiles, so your actions only have an outcome on tile boundaries/ticks (and in fact you would have to make the snake slide continuously between ticks). So it kind of doesn’t work?
Space Invaders makes sense (provided a shooting cool-down as with Asteroids). Are they too similar? Frogger is quite funny, though feels somehow really distinct? Missile Command is quite appealing to me somehow, but I don’t know that I know how to make it? But probably I could learn.
So that fifth slot is up for grabs.
Seems reasonable and I can absolutely make Pong and Breakout now so as to get a decent start on this before I lose hope. Tetris scares me a bit, but I can probably do it.
Phaser3 versus p5? Any reason to use one or the other? Probably. I’ll think about it tomorrow.
Yesterday and today I got the basics of a Pong set up. Slow feels slow. One of the things I don’t think I’d accounted for is how smooth slowness is… it has a… mouthfeel? I suppose it’s a game feel™ isn’t it, Steve. At any rate there’s a pleasure to it, I think - though I’m perverse by nature. I think there’s an “erotics” of slowness in here…? Edging? Am I going there? I’m not meant to go that way, this isn’t sexy-times, this is meditation and frustration (is that what sexy times are?).
The Pong feels like it already confirms my feeling that this is worthwhile. It makes the key move (slow ball, a nice slow ball), and the move works, and the move invites further moves. The next moves aren’t totally clear but:
Currently there’s no score - does it need one? Yes I suppose so, though it feels like it’s not the point? Finishing the game wouldn’t be interesting… it’s about the movement… I think I’m talking myself out of the score.
What happens when you miss? What slow thing could happen? The ball teleporting back and starting again feels incorrect?
I’m currently: happy with this.
Can I move so fast that the whole thing is done really soon and I don’t second guess myself out of happiness? Let’s just see.
I have a basic implementation of three of the games already and it felt like something more or less immediately, as I wrote.
At least in Pong, there was the potential for an “erotic charge” version of slowness, the anticipation of physical touch essentially. The meditative thing I think can be felt as well. All through just the slow minimalist version. I wonder the extent to which Pong being two player creates the eroticism of it? Will need to investigate that.
The question becomes (for this and the rest) how I seek to emphasize and shape the experience toward a specific experience of time. Maybe the most fundamental question is just: well, how do you get someone to stay with it? Erotic anticipation is an answer, something that fills the attention in between key moments is another, pre-emphasis on a meditative state is still another. And they’re not all incompatible.
Music has come up as a key question - would some sort of procedural/generative musical accompaniment help to make the in-between time “engaging enough”. Do I even want to walk into that territory of feeling responsible for the player’s engagement or do I want to pull the old trick of saying “be engaged” and relying on the conceptual layer to do it (losing most people in the process)?
In calling these a “suite” I’m realizing the inheritance/influence of the Nothings Suite which I think I like - a different tradition of variation for me, one where you take known quantities and modify them all in the same way (by generating them from nothing, by slowing them down, by x’ing them). This is turning into a journal entry so let me relocate.
The “in between” is key, and ties very well to meditation and erotic experience. Anticipation on the erotic end, and being-in-the-moment on the meditation end? That seems like a huge part of the “investigation” involved in this then.
In the last commit I found myself thinking about using/wanting to use open source versions of the games as a starting point and just slowing them down and pulling them toward what I need - with the caveat/worry about using a different level of materials meaning I maybe miss affordances/opportunities I would have seen if I’d been paying attention at the deeper level. Also just the classic thing of it taking longer/being a worse experience using existing code than rolling your own.
But I did resolve to try it out, so I will with Tetris at least. No real reason not to.
I got circle colliders working on my asteroids this morning because I couldn’t bear them to be otherwise. And the reason for that is that when they were square (but the asteroids themselves circles to try to keep with a rectangles-and-circles aesthetic) the missile would of course often collide before visually touching the asteroid. Which in the fast-paced hectic world of normal play you don’t really notice (or you make the hitbox smaller that the asteroid and so you get the opposite where the missile collides “late”). But one of the key practical outcomes of slowness is that you see any of those compromises really distinctly.
I’m actually in two minds about it - one way is to hew to the “reality” of the original games and have flawed collisions etc. become visible to the player in a way they wouldn’t normally be. Another is to embrace slowness as they operating factor and have things “make sense” in that slow world. Currently I’m leaning to the latter because I still have it in mind that this is “about” relaxing/calming/meditating and distractions like odd collisions would seem to distract from that.
So there are kind of different factors of slowness I hadn’t anticipated that now rear their heads, scrutiny being a big one. Players have the time to examine (and find wanting?) the game. The game seems more vulnerable to the player’s gaze? Even at the same time that the game is being sort of “muscular” in asserting an “inhuman” (or at least “non-gamer”) timescale? It reminds me a bit of the CPU edition of Ancient Greek Punishment, that tension between the unbeatable/eternal Sisyphus and simultaneously his vulnerability once the timescale is huge to things like electricity shutdowns and hardware degradation.
I took a look at the Atari version of Asteroids to check on what the missiles look like and they’re just dots. I also saw that the cooldown is way less than I thought. I’d imagined a single missile at a time, but in fact you could shoot tons of them! So that needs to be worked in (and indicated?).
Also recalled the existence of the UFO so need to contemplate how I approach that.
I now have versions of the “full suite” of games I intend to produce up and running: Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, and Missile Command. It feels a shame to lose Tetris maybe, but also fine. A match-3 would be funny too, but essentially this can be the first one and I can always make a new set. Four feels like enough to explore important questions and feelings.
Missile Command feels too slow in a way that interests me. There is clearly a pace I’m looking for with this which isn’t literally “as slow as possible” which could be a frame update every thousand years. So working out quite what the slow pace is is key - a weird player-experience question. Makes me think of things Jonathan said the other evening about the “taste” of a game (as in flavour). I’m searching for a specific level of slowness that will, I suppose, best unlock the kinds of feelings I hope the player will have… a balancing of boredom and frustration (slow flow? haha), a willingness to continue, a sense of high anticipation at key moments, a sense of peace and calm…
So, this project stays alive in my mind which is neat. Mobile controls worrying me right now but I’ll either beat that or stay desktop.
I’m avoiding thinking about mobile/touch controls a bit and it might be time to tackle that.
Is this a deal breaker for this one? Feels a bit dumb to have worked on it so hard. And there’s something beautiful specifically about spatial navigation in this context that I would rather not lose. Could it be tap and hold and it rotates to and thrusts to that point? And then a separate tap to fire? Still weird. I suppose there must be a mobile Asteroids I could crib from?
If not Asteroids then what? Combat (Tanks)? Has similar complexities of motion involved, though less pressure on elegant movement (which I think is a part of the Asteroids problem). There’s a balance to having two paddle games and two shooting games. Oh Duck Hunt would be pretty funny but ludicrous. Not all that interesting at that speed other than waiting for the duck to come? Is there something there? That you might even “let” it continue before shooting it? I think the shooting in duck hunt is instantaneous right? (And if not it kind of collapses to Missile Command in important ways that I don’t want).
Are we back to Space Invaders? Perhaps we are. It’s a different task to Missile Command while remaining related. There will be implementations out there I can take.
I think that might be the direction and I retire Asteroids for now.
Wellll it has been a little while since I’ve taken the time to write a journal entry on this puppy. Commit history shows that I’ve done quite a bit since the last, though mostly the pivot to Space Invaders is now done and then I’ve mostly been working on menu stuff and simpler aesthetic tweak stuff (like discovering the beauty of fades).
It feels like the project is in that classic state where it functions and the bits and pieces are all in place but a lot hangs on the “syrupy feel” I’m looking for and that’s not established really for any of them except perhaps Pong and Breakout feel kind of good?
Need to think of how much I want to deal with communicating the point of the slowness/shape the player’s perception of it ahead of time versus just letting it happen? To what extent do I care if the player just bounces of with “I don’t have time for this bullshit”? Or is that well within the parameters with the idea they might be then like “oh ha ha” as they walk away?
Do I want the game to “take a position” on slowness as relaxation? As test of nerves? Could be as simple as a subtitle for example, doesn’t have to be massively complex? Or does the title do enough on its own even? Do I solve this or just ship it with a more ambiguous vibe and see what happens?
Main remaining stuff is timefeel so I guess that’ll be my big push for tomorrow. And there remains the question of music looming - nothing really done there except I did learn about .clip() and .slow() a bit more in strudel so it’s possible I can build something where there are multiple time signatures(??) and overlaps and that’s enough to get us something? Bea’s drum patterning in their project was nice too… randomization for the drums perhaps.
ANY HOO.
Hi journal. In thinking about “game over” situations in all the game (missed ball in Pong or Breakout, dead ship in Space Invaders, dead bases in Missile Command) I keep coming back to the decision of whether the player should now contemplate the dead world of the game for the remainder of the time, or whether they should get a new ball/ship/base and forge ahead. It’s most awkward for Missile Command where there’s no real idea of that as I understand it? And conversely it’s kind of most satisfying to imagine continuing missile command as just an observer… but would that be too great an inconsistency with the others? Because losing your ball forever in Pong seems kind of dumb?
Though what excuse is there for missing in the first place? But again… what’s the point here? To experience the mastery/power/rhythms of play at the syrupy speed, or to experience the “world” as it exists, or to play the game more literally (e.g. points in Pong and Breakout and Space Invaders etc.)?
Instinctively I don’t like the thought of points because I felt I was very specifically replacing them with the timer. The point became to “survive” the experience of slow play, to show your mastery over yourself. Does that more suggest that you should keep playing the whole time? Or that you should simply be present?
This similarly gets at the resource of missiles in Missile Command, which I had limited, but does that make sense? Maybe a little more of a cooldown would do it?
What is at the core of this thing in the end?
I think it’s obvious that Pong or Breakout with no ball with is uninteresting… I’m removing the sense of surviving play… why not just put it aside. No new balls… yes.
Space Invaders is kind of the same - it’s “something else” to just witness the destruction of your bases without a ship/thing to protect them.
And I suppose to that end it’s the same for Missile Command. Which means what? Resurrecting bases I suppose, after some amount of time? Or just taking them out of the targeting system altogether?
Or you just reset the game if you lose both bases? (And add time to the timer??? Whoa… that’s saucy… I quite like that? The punishment for poor play is you lose more of your actual life to the game… yeah… yeah I think… so?)
So
I think this is worth implementing and I’m probably going to feel more feelings about it as I go that will lead the way.
Well I just deleted Space Invaders from the project. This after also deleting Asteroids a while back (and replacing is with Space Invaders). I was struggling a lot with some really basic coding stuff around the physics but also just the general mess of the complexity of Space Invaders as a game compared to the other three and I realized… I don’t even like this. Of all three games it feels the least like it works in the slow mode. I mean, everything works but it doesn’t feel like it emphasizes what I want enough? Missile Command does the job of the almost melancholy nature (aided by the music - realizing melancholy is in here) of warfare in this setting. Space Invaders was just fiddly in play and in code.
So in the spirit of conversations we’ve had in the Materializing Design group, but also in the spirit of a writing workshop I attended yesterday with Lídia Perreira where we wrote something and then deleted it (I wrote about Mario not moving at the start of World 1-1 for the record)… in that spirit I realized I could just delete Space Invaders and stop fighting it.
When I look at the menu now there are “only” three games and I can feel my anxiety around why there aren’t more games. But what would more games achieve? There’s something about the balance of “two paddle games and two laser games” in there (which is why when Asteroids failed I turned to Space Invaders) but that’s kind of arbitrary? Three games is enough I suspect… the idea survives and doesn’t need expounding through as many as possible? Just a handful.
I just realized Pong could be multiplayer. OOOOoooooo. That’s nice. I’ll throw that in as I think it’ll be kind of easy to implement (though nicer on mobile than on desktop). And having a multiplayer in there maybe asks some different questions. Can be optional too, can have a submenu for number of players.
Hmmm… anyway my main point is that deleting one of the games feels useful and clear. And with it the game is close to done. I need to reflect a bit more on “what it is” and what I think it accomplishes, but I don’t think I need to labour on it too too too much further?
Okay well. Simultaneous with working on this project I feel like life has been pretty definitively whirling out of control just in terms of work in general (mostly: being department chair) and I’ve been reflecting over the past couple of days about just how much the emotional tenor of moment to moment life impacts how enthusiastic I’m able to feel about the creative project I’m working on. Hardly surprising, but it’s one more challenge to account for when you’re trying to do good work right? I think I still feel like I “know” this is a good and worthwhile project, and I can kind of “coast” on the core work early on (when I was enthused) to establish what “works” here… so I don’t need the emotional power as much right now? But then I have doubts - what if my flat mood about things means that I’m no longer seeing the project clearly and making bad decisions for it? Impossible to say.
Soooooo, where are we? Well, we’re very close to done. I pruned a lot in the end so that there are “only” three games in this thing, but I still think today (as I did yesterday) that this is completely fine. It’s arbitrary how many there are so long as, perhaps, there are more than two for some reason? Three’s a crowd in a good way? I’d kind of like to add more but I also don’t think I have the energy and I don’t thiiiiink it’ll make so much of a difference to the outcome… and that’s kind of the key? What am I trying to do, to prove to explore? I think that the core of this thing is in there and doesn’t require further expansion…. I think.
So what remains? Well mostly as seen in my to-dos it’s to try to nail down the pacing on them all, the “syrup level” as I’ve been calling it. I want each game to feel syrupy in just the right way. And one of the tricky things here is that I think it hugely depends on how you’re feeling when you play… sometimes it seems too fast and sometimes “too slow” and sometimes just right… so what do I tune it to? I think it would be sensible to tune it to someone a bit more impatient than me… their threshold for this experience will be lower and it would be nice to keep them in it a little longer, even at the expense of it being a bit too fast for me? Or I don’t know? Anyway this question of perception and experience of time is key and it’s different for different people of course.
I think over the passage of this project I’ve for sure moved away (and never really deeply considered) the whole “erotic charge” thing… though I do want to go back to that somehow… the idea of “touching” things (I guess this relates to stuff Junior did).
Instead it has coalesced around ideas of, what…
So I suppose I’m thinking of a kind of dual potential:
Hmmm, that’s still not sufficiently well expressed, but these are the thoughts cycling in my mind.
Sitting down with the game now to do some syrup tastings.
It makes me want to stay at 20 pixels per second because that seemed to have the deepest time-sense? I definitely perceived time more then, it took me outside whatever normal “system” there is of feeling in the game… I was observing different things… I felt the time dilate as the ball got closer to the paddle… etc.? It’s odd to me that this is true but I think it’s true? Strangely there’s just time to breath… it meets the tone of the music better? Getting a bit woo and need to check with others. But for now it’s at 20 (can can be tweaked easily with the URL)
I suppose I would assume the same settings for now? Let’s see… yeah. It’s the same thing. FIrst brick breaks after like 40 seconds. It’s so weird. I think I love it.
Okay well actually spending even this little time with the game makes me feel… in love with it again thank fuck. A reminder to play the game and feel the feelings, not assume you know them, or not remain detached for too long?
I’m in a weird mood right now, but missile command makes me kind of want to cry in a good way.
The timing here is kind of perfect I think.
I sent the game out to some trusted smart friends last week and they responded very generously with feedback which they also said I could paste in here for the record, so I’m pasting. I’ll write another entry in a bit to reflect on what they said, all of which was very perceptive, encouraging, and worth following up on.
I think the combo slowness/sparse music work very well! the speed of the game is so slow, and the music is so meditative, that I ended up thinking/playing/listening at the same time. I also think the "nostalgic" feeling of the music goes well with the nostalgic craving for these games 🙂
This is... this is just beautiful.
I love this... but I have an emotional connection to ASLSP, there is a chance I will attend the next Klangwechsel in Halberstadt this year.
I'm writing you all this without having read your journal. Would be curious about your thinking.
The obvious question is: is this slow enough? My initial thought was: make it much slower. But what is the right speed of this, especially in our fast world? What speed is meaningful? When is watching still enjoyable? When is it too much...? Missile Command feels the fastest, as there is sooo much happening on the screen. The slowness of the chain-reactions is really impressive.
In a way: Do you go for the original ASLSP or the Halberstadt-version?
For me it feels strange to connect the difficulty to time. It somehow feels like you would see the this as a punishment. The longer you have to do it the harder? But what if I enjoy this? I mean, is this not the point of ASLSP? To speed down, to get into the rhythm, the see what you can't see usually?
Have you considered connecting the difficulty to speed?
I like the endless mode though.
The city of Missile Command has a certain juiciness to it.
Somehow missing sounds of the interactions. My brain is waiting for sounds to happen when the ball hits a paddle... but thats for sure because this is what I know from the originals (at least Pong & Breakout). So a very slow explosion, or a sound that just mixes itself into the music (what I really like, who is this?). But I could imagine it could add something interesting, an other element of anticipation.
Three bug-like observations:
in Pong, the enemy paddle is vibrating a few pixels left-right when it is adjusting its position in all 3: nightmare mode is also activated by having completed easy or normal this could be a design decision, but: I can't quit the levels, I have to play them to the end
I'm out now, but this is really just... ❤️ Thanks!
this is beautiful
could see it in an exhibit as-is tbh
been playing pong on "hard"
no pause button? heh
part of me wonders if there are sentences that ought to come up in the margins, questions, like meditative accusations
it's probably best to leave it open to interpretation
an instant replay might also be a fun thing
decisive moments
guessing this is the music you were making you mentioned on a previous VMM?
(switching to missile command) if you are going for an arcade thing, too, you might consider the score
missile command is beautiful
it's odd how much of this is just serene in accepting a feeling of inevitable doom
it also reminds me of this
https://youtu.be/EPhBgRSj6YQ
Later
i hope it's helpful
i think you can add more that also gives space for people to reflect / interpret
i think the koans would be a bit heavyhanded, just depends
there's likely a way to add score and the way the numbers change can be really really significant because w hat is in a point anyway?
maybe the score is a timer ticking up as the time on the game ticks down
I promised myself I would refelct further on the feedback above (plus some more I’ve received in conversation with a couple of these people) and see how I could maybe integrate into the game which I’m now considering closer and closer to done and would reeeeeeeaaaaaally like to send into the world tomorrow if remotely possible. Which I know is a dumb way to feel, but I always hit this point in a project where I’m just kind of “done” and need to move on.
Unclear to me whether the wise person listens to that feeling, or the wise person fights that feeling? I dunno.
ANYWAY.
Here are some notes:
Both Csongor and David used the word “beautiful” and I could not be more happy about that. I feel that about this game too… there’s a quality to slowness that I find a huge relief in its counterposition to what’s normal in a game. And the strange restfulness it creates for me is, yeah, beautiful in a way. So great.
Gabriel pointed out the idea that the music feels nostalgic which I liked because it’s not a word I’ve thought about at all during this process. Which is odd because if you look at it it’s full of kind of “nostalgic moves”.
So yeah. Notalgia.
Csongor is an incisive guy so I wasn’t surprised to get really key questions from him. This is a question I’ve kept asking myself, oscillating between feeling like the games are “too slow” and “too fast” and trying to find that middle-ground I keep referring to as “syrupy”.
I don’t know if it’s slow enough. As I said to him, I feel caught in trying to second guess what a general “player” will think and feel. People’s perceptions of time, their impatience and their patience… it’s all pretty personal. So how do you strike the right quality of time here? My working assumption has been that I should make the game slightly faster than is “slow enough” for me, figuring I’m a slower person than most. Significantly, in case it’s not clear, I don’t want people to just instantly quit when they see how slow it is. I want to hit that line where they can’t quite resist waiting and feeling the time… (gets a tiny bit back to the erotic stuff I wrote about early on…?)
Csongor and I have discussed this a bit more too. There’s also his suggestion to try out the different levels having different speeds instead of durations. And I think that’s interesting. It pulls me back into all these questions about what is meant by “difficulty” here and my use of those classic difficulty mode names (especially Nightmare!). As I sit here I wonder… should they just be called “Slow, Slower, Slowest” instead?
David and Csongor both end up kind of alluding to or directly addressing this core question of “punishment” and points. The worry I’ve had myself about the game positioning the experience of slowness as punitive and “bad”, something to survive more than to love or to drink in or simply experience. The framing matters here because it’s very very different to think about just “white knuckling through it” versus sinking into it with loose fingers.
And how I present the game (however minimally) will shape that. Most notably:
Hmmm.
Replacing the timer with points is interesting for sure, it gets more toward time spent as virtuous which I like, rather than counting downwards as an indication of “surviving” the specified time?
Nightmare Mode is hugely there, when I think about it, because it’s funny and it also represents something to “unlock” and therefore to strive to achieve for gamers who fall into that category. Which I like. But perhaps just the “slowest” mode could be unlocked? Or they could be sequentially unlocked?
So what about a model of
Each one increasingly slow, each one with a higher “score” to reach by continuing to play. Each one unlocking the next.
I should probably at least see that.
So my big next moves are:
Released this game yesterday? Day before actually I think. 25th. To no particularly strong public effect, as happens. But
Have ended up thinking quite a bit about, or at least holding in my mind, Paolo Pedercini’s idea of artists in today’s post-social media (kinda) moment (and also the bigger “discoverability is either impossible or so much work you better think twice” era) needing to think about focusing more on a few “sickos” who actively appreciate and are interested in your work (and probably it is/should be reciprocal?). So that rather than thinking about making a game as something where you should “naturally” try to achieve the widest possible distribution, you should think more about the “quality” of the people who you do actually show it to. Sickos.
There’s a part of my game making soul that grew up exactly during a kind of social media boom on Twitter - and so did get to send work out to really quite large numbers of folks - that hurts when I don’t get to really do that so much anymore. That is uncomfortable with the idea that I can very easily release a game to relative silence.
But increasingly I’m leaning more toward the validity of the sickos idea. I could try super hard to get attention for the work I’m doing, but the problem is that it turns into an entire job on its own, a job I don’t enjoy and that necessarily sucks time from making the games themselves. So I’m trying to steer my ship toward the sickos. In a sense I already do some of this - I know there’s a core group of people (not many!) who I can reach out to directly and say “hey here’s my new thing” and they’ll take a look and even offer some thoughts on it (I very obviously got that from Gabriel, David, and Csongor above in their literal playtests). I think there’s a really crucial reorienting toward the true value of someone else’s genuine engagement and attention and insight, over the raw numbers of something being seen a lot.
(All this said, I’ll acknowledge that the numbers are useful. I do have a job, I do have to prove that I’m good at it. The people who evaluate me do understand numbers like “10,000 people played this game” better than “Csongor liked it!”)
The sickos thing makes me think about newsletters again, something I’ve “had” in the past but never really treated as an important angle. I’ve talked to Gordon a bunch about this stuff, and good ol email came up as a really useful, really basic concept. It also gels, I think, with the general “slow down” ethos that I think is kind of important. I just daydreamed about tiktoking my process but then I’m like… really? Really, Pippin? No, not really.
So here’s to the sickos? Here’s to resurrecting my newsletter and actually thinking about it as a thing-in-itself? Here’s to fewer eyes and more genuine care? Let’s see.
When I revisit the Why document and more generally think about this project, I find something notable in the way it grew its focus - or maybe more actually stripped away things that were blurry or too much?
The idea of a “slow arcade game” has room to express quite a few different ideas, and I thought about a bunch of them (or at least some of them) throughout, but I ended up mostly with some sort of “meditative state” version of things. I should/will write more about that separately, but what isn’t the final game about in the end? (I tried to say some of this out loud to Matt the other day kind of unsuccessfully - or it’s just not as profound as it feels internally perhaps.) Anyway, there were maybe two really separate conceptions of what this game could have been.
One was the idea of skilful play where the effect of the slowness is that it emphasizes the nature of skilled play because it allows any player to have the time to think and react, more or less cutting out the physical dexterity and high-speed-thinking that arcade games end up requireing. My thought was that there would be a kind of expert flow state involved - a marvelling at how “awesomely” you’re playing the game. It applied maybe most of all when I was working of Asteroids which I ended up cutting (mostly because of mobile control issues). The idea of effortlessly pivoting, firing with precision, dancing around the screen, etc. The idea that if you played a session back at “normal” speed it would look like incredibly high level play and kind of would be? There was something to that - there’s a feeling involved in that that’s worth exploring and shaping. But I didn’t do that - it’s not that that’s not still available in the game (you can play missile command with great expertise, say), it’s that I chose not to emphasize it through design decisions surrounding the most fundamental “slow play” idea. There’s the core idea (slow games) and then there’s how you shape the experience of that through the myriad decisions involved in bringing it to life - the UI, the language, the visual representation, the music, the sfx, etc. I went another way (toward this meditative idea).
The other idea I was interested in during early testing with Pong was the thought that there’s an erotic charge involved when you slow things down. The main observation was that as the ball would approach the player paddle (my paddle - already feels like innuendo in this context!) there was this anticipation of being touched by another thing, a charge would build up around that, and then release with contact. And then the next touch would be anticipated etc. The slowness made that happen - I’ve never even thought about it when playing regular-speed Pong. Even as I write about this I remain pretty fascinated and keen to explore this, but at least in the game I made this time, I didn’t emphasize these ideas and so again they’re there (a player could think about the same thing that I did) but not shaped by design strongly occur to the player, to try to ramp up the erotic potential of the situation. (Occurs to me that missile command - despite its phallic stuff - doesn’t really work in the same way? The key would seem to be the feeling of being touched.) So, this one is there and not there - I’d really like to explore it further. Sex sells, sickos.
So what is it? Like I said, I think my pre-occuptation has been with the meditative side of things, definitely a continuation of stuff I thought about in It is as if you were on your phone. But it’s not chasing the more explicit “Zen-stuff” I was interested in then, it’s not as explicit in that way. I think the core of my idea here was around the games as a weird kind of interactive meditation timer - they occupy you for the length of a meditation, slowly, not overexciting you etc., marking time. And I think that works pretty well - I think the game communicates “meditation timer” relatively well in its design, particularly in terms of the UI stuff (the slow fades, the minimalist presentation, Rilla’s contribution of the progress-bar style literal timer at the end there).
However, Gabriel’s comment about nostalgia helps me to properly see and acknowledge that it’s not really, or not only, a meditation thing. One of the core elements of the game I didn’t necessarily grapple with a ton as I made it, but was definitely aware of the whole time, was the emotional quality of play. Slowing these games down - and most especially Missile Command - gives them a different emotional quality. They aren’t exciting and action-packed, they aren’t particularly about victory, or winning and losing, because those things become moot when you can react more or less perfectly all the time (and also the games themselves don’t acknowledge the basics of success/failure - they just reset etc. as necessary without points or “you lose”es etc.).
There’s fact that these are old games from a different time in videogame history for sure, but it’s the slowing down that changes the experience of them. The slowness means you spend more time operating at a different - distanced? - level relative to the game itself. You observe the game as you play it. If I may, the game seems a bit more vulnerable without its immersive/compulsive/engaging qualities? Your core concerns aren’t the design concerns anymore - “reacting accurately in time”, essentially? Now they’re about having time and space to sit, to reflect, to watch, to assess, to feel?
Nostalgia is literally an “ache for the past” or something right? That ache is very interesting. The slowness to me is something like a stretch? Stretches also kind of hurt “in a good way”? A good pain, a pain we seek out. A pain that’s good for us in some way? And there’s a layer, maybe of nostalgia for simplicity? For a slower pace of life? These are things that a slow game can communicate or facilitate our thinking and feeling about?
And then there’s the music - I didn’t give the music a ton of really planned thought. I was inspired in part by some drums that Bea had put together in strudel.cc, and I was feeling (yep) my way towards something open and spare, something that wouldn’t sound driving and repetitive, nothing with a clear fixed rhythmic propulsion. So the drums became kind of sparse, the chords blur into each other or sometimes aren’t there at all, I randomized whether you’d hear any given drum or chord at all (or how much). All of this stuff was basically intuitive, but in retrospect it was intended to find a shape for that more emotional component of the slowness, and it’s clear that it’s almost sort of depressive - but ideally maybe swimming into the kind of deliciousness of that feeling, like goth music say? Luxuriating in a kind of poignant-feeling sadness? (Again, nostalgia is pretty strong here.) That pain is in the game without the music, but I think the music is what emphasizes it and encourages the player to feel that way. (I’m brand new to even remotely thinking about making music for my games at all - outside of some very basic generative stuff I’ve done - and especially new to questions of emotional tone in the music.) The key (or whatever) being established by the chords from Let It Be are part of all this too - I don’t pretend to know how that actually works, but it’s there as well and was chosen consciously as having the right kind of “mood” to match what I was thinking the game felt like.
That musical part, the nostalgia part, that’s no longer about meditation in any real way. Or it’s a focused kind of “meditation” that’s not the same as Zen - it’s about dwelling in a feeling, a different kind of immersion? So the games are a way to spend time feeling this way …? Kind of interesting to me.
Also also, but I need to wrap up here: there’s something specific about Missile Command. It’s the star of the show to me, the one that works especially well. Pong/Breakout do a great job of surfacing the basic questions of slowness, waiting, anticipation; but Missile Command is the one where I think the emotional pitch works the best. Anyway, I was also just wanting to register: I think that counter to the ideas above about slowness being about skilful play and expertise, the slowness of Missile Command feels tragic to me? The war seen in slow motion doubles down on the horrible inevitability of the missiles incoming, the missiles outgoing, the vulnerability of the buildings, the endlessness of the war? I think there’s some stuff in there too.
So I think… I started this talking about how I’d really refined down the point of the game, I’d thought it was meditative-but-using games, but in writing this and getting impressions (from sickos) it’s apparent that: a) “meditation” is probably not exactly the right word and b) it’s not as pure and focused as I thought, there’s a bunch of complexity and multiple ideas still swimming in it.
Maybe that’s always the case no matter how much you refine things, and maybe that’s kind of awesome, but there’s clearly more to think about in all of this about how this sort of minimal design can still be super complicated and blurry?
Things to “follow up on” in design?
Slowness is powerful. Let’s go as slow as possible.
Also I need to write a real closing statement. I’m hoping the above brain dump helps me.