Blog Posts

Here are public-facing blog posts I wrote while creating the game.

New Project: Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Limited Edition (2016-06-05)

This is just to say that I did decide to plow on ahead with that sequel/remake of Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment. I’m calling it Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Limited Edition. For a while there it was a more obvious Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment 2, but it doesn’t really make sense as a direct “sequel” per se – it’s another take on the concepts from the first game. Plus, I’ve already made Let’s Play: Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Art Edition Edition, so it seems like a game that comes in editions rather than in series/sequels.

The idea behind this one, which I’ve had sitting in my queue for quite a while, is to explore the idea of the punishments being finite – the idea that you can in some sense “win” each of the previously unwinnable levels of the game. So I guess the thought is to make it a more “successful game” by moving away from the “realism” of infinite punishment and toward the deep satisfaction we all feel (don’t we?) at getting to the end of a trial.

Thus, Sisyphus will be able to finally get that stupid boulder (that looks like a cookie, I know) up to the top of the slope. Prometheus will at last shake free of his chains. And so forth. I like this as a way of prodding at the idea of a “good game” some more. The original game was unapologetically about how the game form allows for a kind of faithful rendition of the punishment, but at the expense of being “unplayable” in some ways. This version will then explore the idea of bringing the game back into the fold of conventional wisdom to some extent.

Except that I’m me, of course, and so my though right now is that after each of the trials is completed – after Zeno’s race is run, after Tantalus’s apple is eaten – it will be even more depressing because you won’t even have anything left to do. My dream is for it feel even more abject than the original punishment – in a way it could be thought of as the “true game version” of the punishment, in fact? It makes me think of the Camus essay on the myth of Sisyphus, in which Camus suggests that we must “imagine Sisyphus happy” essentially because: he has something to do.

In other words: what’s worse than pushing a boulder endlessly up a hill? Endlessly not pushing a boulder up a hill.

Eternal Punishment… Complete? (2016-06-14)

Almost done with Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Limited Edition! now. It’s not a complicated game, much like its predecessor (Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment), so it hasn’t taken especially long. Naturally, though, it’s taken much longer than I’d like, and has revealed my many incompetencies as a programmer and animator. For a project that is basically the previous game “plus a bit” I sure did seem to have to do a lot of extra work and animating.

As I believe I’ve said, the premise of the game is that instead of an eternally repeating punishment cycle, Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Limited Edition! “frees” the various characters from their torment by allowing them to finish what they’re doing in one way or another. The problem being that life after punishment turns out to not be much better, and in fact perhaps it’s worse.

This led to the most interesting part of making the game, which was working out what happens differently – in particular, how do they finish their eternal task, and what do they do afterwards? There are lots of ways that Sisyphus could defeat his boulder, for example, but not all of them are going to be appropriate to the emotional tone I’m trying to set or the idea that the game is about showing that the very game-y act of “winning” can be as depressing as its opposite. This means that the endings and their followups can’t be too empowering, for instance.

So, you can’t have Sisyphus pick up his boulder and fling it into the horizon and stride boldly offscreen – that would suggest a much more traditional story of victory, and in particular would let the player (and Sisyphus) off the hook by simply eliding what happens post-boulder. This is pretty typical of depicting victory I guess? At some point you cut away so that you don’t have to deal with the fact that life goes on, things probably get worse again, better again, worse, better, you die (if you’re lucky?). Etc. So I needed to keep the “eternal” part of the games in tact (which makes sense if you’re still in the underworld) so you can see that post-boulder (or post-race, post-bath, etc.) isn’t really better.

Similarly, the defeating of each given task needed to be fairly prosaic, while guaranteeing the task’s end. Tantalus can obviously just eat the fruit and drink the water, say. Sisyphus was the toughest, since the boulder is a big thing that’s not necessarily easy to get rid of. I thought about having him get it to the top of the hill and the just leave it there, but then it’s still there and the player will naturally want to mess around with it, which means the game might be in danger of still be slightly fun/interesting. He could push it offscreen, but then you wonder why the boulder can roll offscreen but Sisyphus can’t follow it. So in the end I opted for pushing the boulder off a cliff (done with quite a nice reveal if I may say so myself). This way he loses access to it, but it’s not unreasonable not to allow players to “follow” the boulder down.

Finally, you need to decide what the characters do after they’ve “won”. For maximum drudgery, I opted for: walk around. You don’t want to have it be “nothing”, because if you totally remove the player’s agency you’re basically saying the game is over, which is another way of saying they won. If the game rolls on, you have to be able to have some minimal input. Given that each character is left standing there after completing their task, it made sense to just limit interactivity to selecting where to walk to next. And there’s a nice way in which this mirrors, say, the Zeno level: infinite walking. Except it’s worse because it’s not even a race and there’s no visible finish line.

So they just walk around. Some of them sit down sometimes, which I like because characters sitting down in the absence of any other stimuli always looks to me like the most sad and defeated action possible, like you’re taking time to think about how awful things are. I guess they could lie face-down on the ground, but that seems overly dramatic at that point, and also final in a way that works against the eternity.

And that’s how you work through the design problems of making an eternally futile game even more futile. Videogames.

Not Moving On (2016-06-15)

A few times over the last years of making games, say once a year at least, I find myself thinking about how I should “move on” from making videogames in which a key point of investigation tends to be “the nature of videogames.” Much of what I’ve made has tended to be “about” games as much as anything else. And there’s some part of me that I guess has felt a bit embarrassed about that, like a bit of a one-trick pony perhaps. People are always going on about how games can be a transformative medium, the most important thingamajing of the millennium, expressive power, narrative, etc. etc. And so perhaps I should be doing more of that and less of the kind of programmer’s-chair philosophy I do?

I had these thoughts again just yesterday while wrapping up Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Limited Edition! which is classic for its depth of videogame-y navel gazing – a videogame about videogames based on a videogame about videogames. Am I doing this too much?, I asked myself.

No.

While there’s definite merit in the idea of working on making games in other veins, perhaps pursuing narrative stuff or personal stuff etc., there’s definite merit in doing what I’m doing too. Why? Well mostly because I find it interesting thanks very much. I mean, not that you, gentle reader, have been rolling your eyes and wanting me to stop doing this kind of work, but when you’re working in a very niche area of a niche area of a medium, it’s hard not to question yourself. But ultimately, especially if I position myself as a kind of artist-academic (which I guess I do, given my job), it makes a great deal of sense to pursue the line I’m pursuing. It’s not like Shakespearean experts are sitting there fretting about whether it’s time to “move on” to Dante or something (and if they are I wish them well). It’s possible to spend a lifetime working on what you find interesting and worthwhile, even if it seems small sometimes.

Even if it’s highly abbreviated videogames about videogames. And so, onward for now, I think. Until I decide to do something else instead.