Hello, it has a been a bit! I thought I might share some recent thoughts I’ve been playing with. Thoughts around feedback, theming, and poetics. As always, in the world of GAMEFEEL.
A couple months ago I started working on a port of the classic Sokoban, but re-envisioned as a sliding block puzzle (a la Rush Hour or klotski), with no pusher object. I’ve played a lot of sokoban, and a lot more ‘sokoban-likes’ via the puzzlescript and thinky-puzzle-games community. I’ve settled on patterns and ways of thinking about them that are useful, fun, and beautiful (in a crystalline sense). I want to make that beauty easier to play with, to surface it and make it easier to see and share, to model it and study it more. I think that’s the driving force behind this project for me. The pusher in sokoban is important for the rules, but not so much for these higher-order patterns. Can I re-theme the game to be about these patterns? Can I streamline play to facilitate exploring these patterns without the busywork of managing the pusher object? I think so…
So I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this specific kind of theming, the ‘skin’ of games as droqen once put it. The propped-up motivations for the rules of play. Intuition pumps. Mnemonics to remember the rules. And it’s got me thinking again about what I like to call Slime Logic (in reference to a number of Draknek’s games that utilize it: Slime Swap, Splitting Headache, and to a lesser extent: Slime Saga). Slime Logic is practically enigmatic. It explains why the game’s rules are the way they are without actually explaining anything. Slime Logic is the ultimate skin stand-in. “Why does that do that? Oh right, because it is a slime.” That’s it. It is beautiful :). Portal 2 also uses Slime Logic, with its paints, though it may have some lore to back it up too. (aside: I don’t really care for lore. I understand it can be fun, but it’s not an interest of mine. Lore is a game to play outside of GAMEFEEL. I am still fascinated by the dynamics of GAMFEEL. I want to know what we can do within its walls.)
Slime Logic bears some resemblance to what I’ll call Particle Effect Logic. Here is droqen talking about it:
i really love the cheap things you can do to communicate state changes. just having those eyes hit maze and blink for a second before becoming actual ghosts feels so good to me
the particle effect when chopping into hedges is just a cheap particle trick: throw objects into the air! they look great 😆 (i’ve been doing that one for probably literally a decade. trying to make an object look good turning from one frame to one wildly different frame? throw a particle effect on it that obscures the whole tile for the first frame and then dissolves in a natural way from there! bam!)
Particle Effect Logic similarly explains ‘something is happening’ without explaining exactly what that is. Somehow it feels different to Slime Logic, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what. Slime Logic is more about rules, Particle Effect Logic is more about state changes? Dunno. Anyway, it’s also on the mind.
These remind me of the wonderful Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and its ‘Big Triangle‘ which outlines the relationship between ‘realistic representation’, ‘abstraction in form’, and meaning. It seems this triangle maps very well to ‘skin’ too, with these weird logics living somewhere on the edge between abstract and meaning. Understanding Comics has lots more to say on all this and I should really reread it, or at least that section, but the main thing I have been thinking about is the way that the less-realistic presentations work as playgrounds for filling in your own specifics of the rationalizations – the lore I guess…huh.
A perhaps mild example that nonetheless sticks out in my memory: Unblock by noa.cubestudio. As you play this game, what are you telling yourself is happening when you ‘use’ the dots? What is their relationship to the player square?
Another example: droqen’s line heads!
In all this I’m also thinking about the uncanny valley. This is a very popular idea, of course. It must be somewhere in The Big Triangle, I forget if Understanding Comics talks about it. But in particular I’ve been thinking about the ways that these weird logics actively avoid the uncanny valley by embracing the abstract side of the continuum, rather than managing to get enough detail in the avoid the weirdness (which is the context where the idea is usually discussed, I feel). It gives me echoes of our conversations about seeking to avoid ‘simulating the whole world’ in our games, and how haiku games and poetics can bring that same impact and scale to the work without needing so much detail. The resolution problem, and all.
More specifically, as I work to construct the theming of my sokoban game, and extend the theming to new ideas of patterns I want to provide feedback for, I see the pull of both ends of the spectrum: to be more realistic to make the theming more apparent (received as Understanding Comics says), but also to be more abstract, because realism brings contextual baggage that isn’t necessarily applicable to the patterns I am trying to highlight. There is a balance to strike it seems. It reminds me of how, after making my first real puzzlescript game Movement Garden, I struggled to imagine higher-production versions of the game that didn’t have an overly complicated or contrived skin. I was relying on too much of a kind of Slime Logic, it turns out, and trying to move away from that ruined the balance – brought me into the uncanny valley.
All this thinking about the power of ambiguity has unsurprisingly got me thinking about Haiku Games a bit again too. Or at least about mixing in a little poetic ambition to these ideas. A more poetic skin, hmm, it might be the artful take on GAMEFEEL that I have been looking for…
Brian Eno has this great quote about working on film scores:
I’ve nearly always worked by hearing a description of the film, then starting to work. Quite a few of the films I’ve made music for, I never saw the picture before I finished all the music. And I like that, because I don’t want the music to map totally onto the film. I want the music to suggest – to increase the ambiguity, basically. To expand the film a bit. Not to underline it. Often, and especially with Hollywood soundtracks, the whole point of the soundtrack is to tell you, the dumb sod watching it, “Now you’re supposed to feel sad. Now it’s funny. Laugh! Go on!” And I just don’t want to be in that business of underlining things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/arts/music/brian-eno-film-music.html
Skin in games is often very much about underlining the game’s rules. Explaining things and etc. But by being so in service of the fun game we are playing, it becomes very boring. I think this is why I dislike most game’s stories – they are just meant to prop up the game. But I often don’t need that prop. I like games, I like playing them. I don’t need help, I don’t want any underlining. The same reason I don’t like laugh-tracks, or the heavy-handed Hollywood movies Eno mentions. I have been playing Metroid: Dread recently (my first Metroid game, strangely!), which is definitely a lot of fun, but boy is the story boring. Limp and lifeless. It definitely gives you a reason to be running around exploring derelict space stations full of aggressive aliens, gathering power-ups. But I don’t really think I need that; it is just boring cruft to me. And so I wonder, how far away from underlining can we go with skin? Some amount seems necessary to communicate the rules, but is it really? Can’t the ambiguity of Slime Logic help us, while also leaving us room to express an interesting, parallel game to play in interpreting the skin?
While not being poetic in the haiku sense, gate’s Control The Body does well here I think. For one, it is chock full of Slime Logic. But more importantly, the skin and theming of the game is playing a similar but parallel game to the main platforming game. It is a jokey, whimsical, naive, and clumsy world that is fun to explore – very much like the awkward platforming game you are playing alongside it, especially when it is framed as ‘controlling a body’. Both games have the same goals, but neither is subservient to the other. There is no underlining going on, no elaborate explanations. Just enough connection is made to support the slime logic, otherwise they are playing their own games. Ben gives you his shoes so you can jump. Makes sense, right? And beyond their parallelism, the skin does help you play the game. It helps identify a frame of mind to play in, a forgiving mindset to explore your clumsiness in. I guess this is form-content assonance? I’m actually not sure that assonance is an important part of my thinking here, but I dunno, I like it.
So how can we follow this train of thought into Haiku Games? I think I’ve brought it up before, but I like this idea of a ‘cosmic order’ to the world of the game, a satisfying yet unknowable reason that things should happen the way they do. Something you can take faith in, and rely on within the game. Slime Logic seems useful for realizing that. I’m thinking a little bit about the moment early in Kentucky Route Zero when the characters turn to watch the TV, but the camera just zooms right past it and looks into the woods behind it. I’m thinking a little bit about Hitchcock’s ‘The Vanishing Lady’, whose characters establish tropes for themselves and then continue to stick to them even in life-threatening situations, to a satisfying effect analogous to this ‘cosmic order’. (this reminds me of comedic improv actually, which I used to do some of, and now that I think about it, the popular troupe Upright Citizens Brigade frames as finding and then playing ‘The Game’ of the scene.) I’m thinking a little bit about ‘how to be born‘, and how its skin compares to its inner game. What about a game that changes its skin mid-game for poetic affect? What is the furthest a game has detached its skin from its inner game? What does it look like for the skin to achieve this suggestive ambiguity?
Let’s end with some choice snapshots from Understanding Comics, which I stumbled on while putting this together:
