2018-01-03 11:58, in which Manifesto 00

I’m going to try again to write a series of manifestos over the life of this project. A huge amount of what I’ve been grappling with over in the process journal has been effectively about the fundamental philosophy of this project, which I think I would like trying to call its manifesto in keeping with Tassos and Kony.

I tried to do this in Sibilant Snakelikes and wrote precisely one manifesto like half-way or more through the project. Let’s see if we can at least write two? It would be a way of understanding my understanding of what the project is and what it means. So.

Manifesto 00

  1. I want to have a conversation with Unity about games and game design.
  2. “Unity, what are games made of?”, I ask.
  3. Unity is a highly structured being and you need a highly structured way of talking to it without getting lost.
  4. Unity would like to talk about its fundamental beliefs about the ontology of a game.
  5. Unity thinks that games are made out of GameObjects and that there are specific kinds of GameObjects that are the most important one, listed in the GameObject menu.
  6. I open the GameObject menu. “This is what games are made of.”, says Unity. Lights, Cameras, 3D Objects, Particle Systems, and so on.
  7. I want to talk to Unity about its GameObjects and what they mean.
  8. To talk to Unity you have to make things with it. This is then a “conversation with materials”. This is design. This is what Donald Schön’s reflective practitioner engages in.
  9. Just making “anything” is too broad to survive.
  10. I can jump start my conversation with Unity by starting with an existing game, TANKS! and modifying it in order to discuss the ontology GameObjects.
  11. To have a good conversation about a specific kind of GameObject I’ll need to make more than one modification. We need to talk about the GameObject from different perspectives, talk about its different uses and potentials.
  12. Using the TANKS! tutorial game is another way of specifically talking to Unity itself because the tutorial was literally made by Unity-the-company to teach Unity-the-software.
  13. Using the TANKS! tutorial game is also a way of talking about game design in a specific way because it represents a kind of Ur game: two entities shooting each other in a delineated space. See: Atari Combat. See: Spacewar!. See: every shooting game ever. “Unity, we need to talk about all this violence.”
  14. “I’m listening.”

2018-01-06 16:30, in which Manifesto 01 and Manifesto 02

In the last days I’ve managed to actually get a little bit of traction on the design and practical side of this project, so it’s worth trying to write another manifesto. I’m not going to try to make it the same as the previous or the same form, I’ll write it from scratch as I think that’ll be more interesting?

Manifesto 01

  1. One tank shoots the other tank
  2. The other tank shoots the other tank
  3. The last tank shoots the first tank
  4. On and on, on and on
  5. Unity’s good at tanks shooting tanks, very good, we’re impressed
  6. ‘Unity’ implies a game as a monolithic block but we need to delicately chisel it into its constituent piece to be able to talk about what the block is made of
  7. We need to get hold of the materials of production and talk about them until our voices are hoarse
  8. Because then we’ll know something?
  9. To understand game design you can’t read and write rules, you need to understand it in situ and that understanding can be driven by thinking about it as a conversation with materials
  10. this manifesto sucks, don’t listen to it

Okay it’s genuinely hard to write these. I think I got carried away with it being poetry and forgot the manifesto is meant to help me crystalise what I’m actually doing.

Manifesto 02

  1. I’m trying to understand game design through practice as opposed to the formulation of ‘rules’ and ‘lenses’ and ‘patterns’ from experts
  2. I’m framing game design as a “conversation with materials” (Schön) because it gives the idea of ‘materials’ and the idea of ‘conversation’
  3. The ‘materials’ refers to all the elements of games we work with in creating them (because they all relate to game design), you can think in terms of MDA or some other framework if you want, but broadly speaking it’s the technology, the mechanics, the aesthetics, the systems, the narrative, and everything else.
  4. The ‘conversation’ gives us a specific metaphor for process, and in particular the idea of push and pull and of interaction with the materials themselves
  5. The central material of inquiry (and conversation) for this is Unity
  6. Here Unity means: the engine as a whole, the company (to some extent), the TANKS! tutorial they have produced to demonstrate their engine, the specific elements of the engine down to check boxes and sliders (this is at least slightly funny in the sense that ‘Unity’ is actually this profusion of disparate elements)
  7. I want to talk to all these materials to make games and in the process of making those games I want to think about what those games are made of, why they are they way they are, how they correspond to and respond to the elements of Unity that are their materials
  8. The documentation of these conversations will be a kind of living imagine of design as a conversation with materials
  9. The games themselves will hopefully at some level also maintain evidence of or allusions to those conversations for the players
  10. Nobody is going to read this documentation and that’s okay

That one’s pretty flat but it’s at least a bit accurate? Manifesto 00 still feels the most emotionally true after all that. Huh.

2018-01-24 20:31, in which Manifesto 03

Manifesto 03

  1. P: “Unity, I think we need to talk about all this violence.”
  2. U: “I don’t only believe in violence, Pippin… you can make anything out of me…”
  3. P: “That’s true, but, you know, the Roguelike tutorial? The Space Shoot? The Survival Shooter? Those tanks?”
  4. U: “Well, I…”
  5. P: “Hey it’s fine, I just want to talk about it. Maybe we can talk about alternatives.”
  6. U: “Yeah…”
  7. P: “I mean, it’s not like violence is baked into the fabric of your reality, right?”
  8. U: “I don’t think so…?”
  9. P: “We could take Lights, or Cameras, or Particle Effects, and use them to talk about violence, maybe use them to defuse it, detune it, avoid it, forbid it, reduce it, replace it, …”
  10. U: “If you want to… I won’t stop you…”
  11. P: “Well let’s talk about those Tanks, they’re kind of the Ur-game right?”
  12. U: “They’re pretty great!”
  13. P: “It’s a very well made game. We can use that as our conversation piece.”
  14. U: “Sure, I love talking about tanks!”
  15. P: “And then we can look at how to shift that most casually violent game away from or around violence with your basic units of ontology? Skew things a bit, reconfigure them, raise questions…”
  16. U: “Well I mean in the end I’m just a tool…”
  17. P: “True enough. But I still want to know what you have to say about all this… let’s find out…”

And they did.