I’m heading off the US tomorrow morning, first Dallas for a couple of days, then New York to speak at Critical Play at the Museum of Modern Art there. It’s exciting times indeed! I’m also off to Paris almost immediately on returning from that trip, too. So, in short, I’m not expecting to write any posts or make any games for the next while. The idea, at least, is that I’ll get started again in June.

Let’s see what really happens!

Since I’ve been obsessing over it for a few days now, I figured I should at least mention that I’ve been playing Trials: Evolution. It’s my first encounter with the series, but certainly not my first encounter with the addictive nature of such Flash-game-esque mechanics. It has super fancy graphics, and some pretty fun backgrounds and effects, but ultimately the game does boil down to very traditional physics simulation joy. Nothing wrong with that. And you can share it with your friends! Well, you can watch them kicking your ass, at least…

Trials, as must all games these days, has various bits of social stuff going on in it. Probably you can do all kinds of things with other people, but the thing I encounter constantly is the ability to see how your friends did on the same track as you. In fact, you get to see your friends represented while you race as these disembodied floating dots. One key quality of those floating dots? They’re always zooming away ahead of your while you face-plant twenty times into a concrete tube. And that is because the dots represent the friends’ best paths through the course.

It makes sense – I mean, if you’re going to display anything, it might as well be that. But it’s pretty dispiriting too. Trials, as per its title, is one of those games where you need to repeat the exact same track many times in order to master it. During that process, during every screw-up and misfire, there are your friend-dots racing past you. Well, not past you – they’re always already ahead. In not representing the trial and error that your friends no doubt went through, Trials effectively erases that history, leaving you to compare yourself only with the very best of your friends’ efforts.

There’s something so brutally sad about knowing that the dot you’re watching will, for instance, inevitably finish the course. Every time. It won’t accidentally skip its invisible back tire off a cinderblock and go into uncontrollable flips. It won’t quietly tilt backwards onto its invisible head while trying to climb a steep wall. But you will. Oh you will. And your failure will be rubbed in your face every time by those fast-moving, gap-jumping ghosts.

Out damned dots! Out I say!

Racy title eh? It’s because I don’t feel like I have anything awesome to say, so I’m trying to cheer myself up with some title foreplay. But no, I’d wanted to say something about the process of designing a sex game with no sex, and particularly the mapping of sex to coffee making, and the failed attempt to make the game feel gender and sexual-orientation neutral. Heteronormativity, here I come.

So when I started Hot Coffee I was pumped (you’ll have to excuse every single word sounding like innuendo, I don’t mean it) about the idea of making it this totally “all comers” (oh god) game. So women could play it and imagine the other person was a man, or a woman, and men could play it imagining the other person was a woman or a man. And any other combinations I’m missing. And all would be happily feeling awkward together. But in the end I don’t think I’d want to deny that the game pretty much reads as having a male “avatar” and a female NPC engaged in entirely heterosexual coffee preparation. Which saddens me, because it indicates a lack of imagination.

Part of the blame could conceivably be shifted onto the game’s frame of reference: the Hot Coffee Mod of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In San Andreas the main character is a guy, and the mod involves him having sex with a girlfriend, no negotiation. So it may be that the male-female dynamic was somehow “implied” to me by the inspiration of the game itself.

But that’s an extremely lame excuse, not least of all because I explicitly thought about wanting to make it agnostic on such matter and, at least for a time, actively tried to achieve that. Ask Rilla, I was constantly bugging her about these things during development. No, in the end, it was a failure on my part to be able to envisage gameplay (and, as a consequence, dialog) that could be read in all the different ways. The short answer is quite possibly that I didn’t try hard enough.

Because at least as I’m thinking about it now, male sexuality and performance does seem (and feel) more obvious (I’d rather not say “crude”) than female sexuality and performance does. And, frankly, its obviousness feels like it lends itself to awkward, blatant metaphors/analogies in a way that female sexuality doesn’t, at least to me. All apologies to the Tantric gentlemen out there, of course. Plunging the cafetiere, spilling the milk, jerking the coffee grinder, these are all overly physical, repetitive, and non-subtle motions that lend themselves well to cheesy simulation in a game. Games themselves are usually pretty blatant, after all. And so that’s what I did.

Could a woman make a Hot Coffee that worked the other way around? It’s entirely possible – I’d like it if someone did! I did think about movements and mechanics that might work more from a female perspective, most of them involving smaller, more subtle motions on a track-pad, but I couldn’t make them fit the world of the game like I’d wanted. (This is partly why I’d like to make another sexual innuendo game in the future.) And even those seemed lacking somehow. It may simply need a woman’s touch? (I’m sorry, I’m sorry.)

I’m sure it’s possible to make this kind of game with a more female sexuality behind it, anyway. Perhaps a large part of the problem is just that the dream of making the game agnostic to sexuality and gender was never going to work – that we experience sex so differently that you can’t generalise to “just sex” but have to come down on one side or the other when translating to a game. I simply don’t know. It’s a frontiere. We need to send our best men and women – straight, gay, and anything else – out there. Maybe something like Flower could serve as a potential counterpoint, all that swirling… anyway…

Now I will crawl away from this post feeling about as awkward as I have ever done! Thanks, racy title!

I spent some time today preparing my (brief) talk for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Critical Play” event. It a really weird feeling for lots of reasons, not least of all being invited to speak at MoMA for goodness’ sake! But perhaps the weirdest part of the whole thing is actually that I’ve been invited to the event as an artist.

I’ve spent a long, long time in or around the wonderful world of academe. I have a PhD, I teach at a university, my wife is an assistant professor, a large number of my friends are academics. More than any other identity, I’m pretty used to self-representing as a university type, who reads theory and writes papers and strokes his chin a lot. Except that I’m not actually that guy and haven’t been for some time (and I hardly ever stroked my chin even when I was). I’ve been quite consciously sidling out of the academic world for a few years now, in fact, and although I still really enjoy teaching, I don’t miss reading the arduous work of research all that much at all.

So for a while there I simply haven’t had an “identity” in any easy way, and that certainly causes the odd panic. Particularly when I was “just” teaching at university without being a professor of any kind, it did feel strange. But then I started making games, and found that I quite liked making games. And although I haven’t entirely gotten around to embracing the idea of myself as “Pippin Barr: Game Maker”, there’s enough of other people assuming just that out on the internet that I guess that it’s at least partly who I am now. And I pinch myself, because it’s a pretty great thing to be able to be.

But now I’m invited to MoMA as an artist, rather than as a “game maker” per se, and this requires yet more re-jigging of identity and modes of representation. I grew up deeply embedded in the New Zealand contemporary art scene, so I have a somewhat mixed relationship with art and artists – I like and respect the artists and don’t always love the surrounding stuff, including the art, but particularly the broader contemporary art culture. Just not for me so much. But now I’m an artist, and now I need to engage with these things a bit. I may even need to say something about having a “practice”!

The strangest thing, perhaps, is that I actually do have a “practice”. I do think about making games in much the same way that I at least think contemporary artists do. On a personal level, this is all rather alarming and strange and requires some mental acrobatics to come to terms with. At a wider level, though, speaking to the idea of games-as-art and game-makers-as-artists, I find it rather encouraging. If the proof is in the pudding, then I’m pleased to be part of the pudding. (Or making it? Both? Yuck!) So to the extent that it means something and is important, I guess I am an artist.

Just ask MoMA if you don’t believe me!

This evening I finally decided it was time to release Hot Coffee. So now it’s released. Did some final passes through the innuendo levels, and deemed them high enough. Changed some background colours. Added a preloader. The usual. It was a pretty fun game to make, perhaps most fun when I thought of the idea (on the same flight from Athens that I came up with PONGS actually), and when I started drawing the graphics is a faux-ANSI style. I thought I’d say a couple of things about my intentions with it. “Spoilers” ensue.

So, Hot Coffee is kind of a “sex game” that features no sex. Its name is in reference to the “Hot Coffee” sex scandal that surrounded the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Basically, that edition of the GTA series had a secret minigame where you get to have super awkward-looking polygon sex by pressing the buttons on your XBox controller. It was actually almost totally inaccessible and buried deep in the code, but people being people someone dug it out and wrote a patch to allow people access. Importantly, the sex sequence implemented in the “hot coffee mod” is meant to show you what happens when your character is invited in for “coffee” by a girlfriend. In the normal version of the game you don’t see anything, they just go into the house and “sexy” sounds come out.

Naturally, it occurred to me that it would be pretty hilarious to make a game that traded on the scandal somewhat, and if possible to make kind of a “sexy” game, or at least one that felt suitably awkward and dirty to play. But the catch was to make the game without mentioning or representing sex at all, so that it would simultaneously be totally innocuous and really filthy. Thus, in Hot Coffee all you do is actually make a cup of coffee, but in a highly suggestive and innuendo-fueled manner.

I’m not sure if I succeeded in making a game that genuinely feels awkward or dirty, and it almost certainly doesn’t feel at all “sexy”, but it’s also true that I’m a bit blind to how it feels to play having spent so much time with it. I do think it works in terms of the basic premise of being implicit porn instead of explicit porn, and that was really the core idea, so I’m not unhappy with it for that reason. It’s really a tension that interests me a lot in game – sex is just so rarely dealt with at all, and the question of what it would take for a game or part of a game to be “sexy” is just so fascinating. I’d love to play around with the ideas involved a bit more.

There are also some really difficult issues surrounding gender and heteronormativity (big word!) in Hot Coffee that I didn’t resolve but which I might write a little more about next week. All in all, it was, as ever, a deeply interesting experience to make for all kinds of reasons I didn’t really suspect when I set out. Everything from the inane business of “tuning innuendo” and figuring out just how phallic a coffee grinder can look to those more serious issues of wanting but failing to make the game gender neutral and searching for sexiness in 80×80 pixels.

Anyway, it’s out there now, so take a look if you like. More on it next week!

It’s later than it usually is when I write a post so I figure I won’t try terribly hard to write something thoughtful. Instead I give you the news that I have spent some time on Wolfram Tones trying to conjure up a suitably smooth jazz loop for the new game, Hot Coffee, which is pretty close to being done. In its final stages, the tasks involved with the game are pretty hilarious. Things like, “find smooth jazz” and “tune innuendo levels” are what concern me most of all right now. Anyway, the idea will be to have it out in the world perhaps on Friday I think, once a couple of other people have had a chance to take a look and opine.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing Fez and Mass Effect 3. As I noted last night, I finished Mass Effect 3 with a bit of a whimper. And Rilla and I made it to something on the order to 196.5% in Fez, which was all the collectibles and one heart piece, leaving the two most insane riddles in the game untouched. We feel pretty good about having done that all on our lonesome, and having read the solutions to the two remaining puzzles I’m glad we didn’t try any harder on them than we did. Yikes. The other thing I’m glad about is that I’m not playing any games now.

And that’s a bit sad, perhaps, but a reality. While ME3 and Fez were in play they sucked up a lot of time, both in terms of moment-to-moment play hours and in terms of thinking about Fez‘s puzzles offline. Both experiences were fairly good, overall, and I don’t think I regret playing either game, but I kind of do wish I could have a few of those hours back. My game-making productivity took a pretty bad dive, for instance, and it’s taking me ages to put together the next game even though it’s insanely simple.

If I ask myself the cheesy but effective question about the ol’ death-bed, “what would you rather have done more of in your life, playing video games or making them?”, it’s a pretty easy response. It even gets dicey when I compare games to books, which feels like a form of betrayal to me, but true nonetheless. In fact, in many ways the best thing that comes from playing games isn’t the experience of play (which I’m prepared to admit is only ever fleetingly joyful or interesting and mostly a grind), but rather the experience of thinking about, blogging about, and discussing them after the fact. That is, any given existing game offers a chance to reflect on the medium itself, and that feels valuable.

But how many games do you need to play to stay fresh and up-to-date? Because I’d kind of like to play as few as possible, if that’s alright with you. At least for now.

Finished off Mass Effect 3 this afternoon, got my ending and so on. Frankly, I’m kind of overwhelmed by the “meh” of it all. I was totally one of those people who thought that all the disgruntled gamers were being precious about not getting a “good” ending, but hadn’t realised that by good they didn’t necessarily mean they wanted something happier, but rather wanted something that wasn’t entirely mediocre. So, bit of a shame given that the series did have a handful of actually interesting decisions and more instances of decent scripting than your average game. And, as has been said before, holy shit it’s crass that the game is like “don’t forget the DLC!” at the end and then rewinds your entire decision-making process to plunk you back before the final mission stuff begins. Ah, well, c’est la vie, right? My FemShep was true to form for most of the games, and that’ll do me fine.

I don’t normally go in for the weighty titles, but I enjoyed the contrast that this one afforded. I played Fuck Quest long ago when it was first put out there, I guess, and I was in my late teens. It’s not exactly a great game – you’re a dude who wants to get him some sex and you go through a Sierra style mini-adventure culminating in exactly that. It’s super crass, of course, and pretty gross in lots of ways. Despite that, it has some charm. The backgrounds of the areas in the game are hilariously human – a rug that it looks like the creator just totally gave up and scrawled in a pink squiggle, for instance. More importantly, though, Fuck Quest has a Brad Pitt mask.

You can get the Brad Pitt mask right at the start of the game, and it’s a truly lovely and perhaps important game moment. You go into your house, open the drawer in the desk, and find the Brad Pitt mask (which according to the description you have used to help you get the ladies in the past). Even the fact that your character owns a Brad Pitt mask is, frankly, hilarious and a great example of the kind of absurdity we don’t see enough in our games. But then you put it on…

The character animations to pull something over his head, and where he previous had an unusually wide head with bulging eyes, he now has a little, svelte, pixel-style Brad Pitt head (as in the screenshot above). So the mask totally impossibly replaces his head with Brad Pitt’s. And it’s just a fantastic thing. It’s a magical moment in a semi-realistic game, at least a game based in a universe you think you understand. The rest of the game doesn’t actually live up to it, but for that brief moment, Fuck Quest shines.

Perhaps far too much time is spent in games “living up to” the nature of the surrounding world. There’s a sci-fi/fantasy-related obsession with consistency, with total-immersion in a lovingly crafted world. In such a world, amazing things can happen, but it’s rare that unexpected or surprising things can happen. In Fallout 3 when you see a supermutant and it’s this big, yellow, muscular thing – you’re not really taken aback. You might be intimidated, but it’s still an entirely reasonable thing to be in that world.

But when you put on a Brad Pitt mask and it turns you into Brad Pitt, that’s a whole other thing. And it feels good.

Rilla and I have been playing Fez for the last few days. It’s been a pretty weird ride, actually. One in which we didn’t particularly enjoy much of the game (beyond some pretty captivating cuteness) until we’d finished up to 100% and then started a “New Game+”. It has a bunch of elements that didn’t quite work for us, particularly the map, some of the platforming physics, and the inanity of trying to get around from area to area once you’d already been somewhere. However, Fez does do some things pretty well, and there’s one element I particularly admire.

Mild spoilers coming up, perhaps, I’m not really sure since I don’t know what I’m going to write.

Anyway, if you think about what you can do in the game, in terms of your agency, it’s apparently not much. Move around, jump, spin the word on the vertical axis, and that’s most of it. Throw in talking to people and the odd specialised interaction (bombs, ringing a bell) and you’re pretty much done. This is typical of most platformers and, if we’re being honest, this is typical of pretty much every game out there. Your level of direct agency is incredibly limited and this is usually made up for by complicating that agency in terms of its efficacy – +2 broadsword, level 50 zombie, etc etc.

So one really smart thing that Fez does is choose moments (puzzles) that reinterpret what your standard agency means at a meta level. Effectively it uses the language of console cheat codes, which have always been combinations of button presses, as a further means of expression in the game world. In particular, you can use the buttons that normally control your physical movement (and still do even then) to basically say to the game “I get it”. Specifically, that you “get” a puzzle.

This is so simple, but so extremely effective, and I’m full of admiration for that leveraging of a different kind of agency, that movement away from endlessly physical expression toward something more cerebral (and something more cerebral that doesn’t involve dialogue trees, thank god). It works incredibly well and feels like a real sort of communion with the “spirit of the game” or whatever. You call, it answers (or not, if you got it wrong, obviously).

If there’s one thing I’ve found to genuinely love about Fez (apart from Gomez, the little cutie pie!), this is it, and I hope people take note.