Pokemon Red/Blue (1996) for the GB is 373 kb and takes between 30 and 100 hours to finish (although you might spend much, much longer playing it). It was developed by a team of ~35 people (depending on how you count), including 5 people credited for map design, 6 for monster design, and 4 for game scenario. There is only one person credited with game design, but you can imagine that with such a small team the reality is probably more collaborative.

Pokemon is in every way a deeper game than Dragon Quest. Comparing the stats for both games, we can see that: the file size has increased by a factor of six; the team responsible is double the size; the playtime is reported to be between 3 and 10 times longer. If we take a step back and look at Pokemon compared to Dragon Quest holistically I think it is reasonable to say that Pokemon is a significantly richer game than Dragon Quest. I’m a big fan of both games, but Pokemon is a much deeper, more engrossing, more personal experience. The experience of playing Pokemon feels more expressive, more nuanced, and more full of interesting little mysteries, questions, and rumours.

Pokemon Gold/Silver (1999) had a similar team size, with a similar focus on monster design, map design, and scenario. The ROM weighs in at 710 kb and, in a marvel of technology, it essentially includes the entire previous game’s world. Once you become the champion of the Johto region, you unlock the ability to return to the Kanto region and go on a second gym tour. I cannot convey to you the impact that this had on me when I played the game the first time. The game is reported to take between 40 and 200 hours to clear. By virtue of the structure of Pokemon games, as well as how much code and content these games shared, I think it is reasonable to say that Gold/Silver is richer than Red/Blue by some factor. Gold/Silver includes all kinds of subtle improvements over Red/Blue: tweaks to inventory management; the battle system; new types; pokemon have genders (for better or for worse); there is breeding; the game has a day/night cycle, etc… The ROM only doubled in size, but the depth of gameplay feels like it grew by a factor of ten!

The steps from Dragon Quest to Pokemon Red/Blue, and then to Pokemon Gold/Silver each involved less than 10x increase in what I would like to to call “size”, but subjectively I would say they each resulted in a greater than 10x increase in what I have been calling richness.

Pokemon Sword/Shield (2019) weighs in at a whopping 12.4 gb (18,000 times bigger than Pokemon Gold/Silver). It is said to take between 30 and 100 hours to finish. The game was developed in 2 years by a team of roughly 600 people. This team includes more than 100 members of the 3D graphics section, and the credits include thirteen “3D Graphics Section Cooperative Companies”. That is to say, we have no way of knowing exactly how many people were working on 3D graphics. Suffice it to say that at least 1/6th of the entire team was graphics. To the game’s credit there is also a significant “World Planning Section” that includes around 70 people, with 16 on monster design. I personally enjoyed playing Sword/Shield, and I thought that the setting in particular was quite charming and well thought out.

You can probably see where I’m going with this: I think that if a ROM is 18,000 times bigger, or a team is 20 times bigger, or a budget is however many times bigger, then we should expect to see a corresponding increase in… something. In particular though in my case I would like to focus on the ROM size rather than the team size, or budget. I personally believe that if a game is some number of times bigger, then it should also be some number of times richer, deeper, or gooder.

I realize that this is a naive premise: that the size of a videogame should map to the richness of that game. It’s silly, I understand that. Imagine if I made a similar claim about the weight of a work of art.

Michelangelo’s “David” (1504) weighs roughly 5,660 kg while “Mona Lisa”, produced in the same year, weighs only 8 kg. Am I claiming that we should expect “David” to be 3 orders of magnitude “better” or “richer” than “Mona Lisa”? That’s absurd too. It’s reductionist thinking to the extreme. The impact of a work of art has roughly nothing to do with it’s size, weight, or carbon footprint.

At the same time, it isn’t wrong to say that Mona Lisa may be (ironically) a denser work. That is, if we think about the amount information packed into the Mona Lisa per gram, compared to David… Hmm.

But that is comparing apples to oranges. Imagine instead a series of large naked old testament man statues, each larger and more ornate than the last. Is there not a point of diminishing returns? At some point I think it becomes reasonable to say “no, I will not make a bigger statue”.

—

So, I admit that this is a silly premise. However, I think that underneath the layers of silliness there is a kernel of solid criticism here. Without defining exactly what “good” means, and acknowledging that this is not a nuanced lens through which to think about videogames or anything else in general: I think a lot of people might agree that Pokemon Gold/Silver was at least “twice as good” as Pokemon Red/Blue. To me it’s a marvel that they managed to fit so much love, such an interesting world, and so many curious interacting systems, into such a relatively tiny ROM. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone could really say that Pokemon Sword/Shield was 18,000 times “better” than Gold/Silver.

I would not like to claim that the relationship I desire between the size of a game and it’s richness should be linear. In other words I would not expect a game 18,000 times bigger to be 18,000 richer. In fact, there might not need to be any increase in the so called “richness” of the output at all: but we should expect some kind of positive outcome. Because otherwise we’re just accelerating the heat death of the universe, burning down the forests, and releasing our precious entropy into space… for nothing! If I’m doing categorically the same work as you, but it costs me millions of times more resources, then there should be some expectation that my results will be better along some metric.

For example, GB Studio games are much bigger than GB games developed in C or assembly. I think the minimum ROM size is 512 kb, which is bonkers. If I ported my puzzle game Ark to GB Studio the resulting ROM would be 16 times bigger. That would be bad. The thing that GB Studio buys us with that increase in size is democracy: a lot more people from a lot more varied backgrounds can make games using low code tools and engines like Bitsy, Twine, GB Studio, or even big engines like Unity and Unreal. That’s worth it! That’s a good trade-off.

So what’s the trade-off that justifies Sword/Shield being 18,000 times bigger than Gold/Silver?

Well there is one enormous, shiny, glaring metric along which many might be tempted to talk about Sword/Shield being some number of times “better” than Red/Blue… which is to say graphics. Someone might argue that the game looks “orders of magnitude better”. But that argument would essentially boil down to the claim that 3D graphics look better than 2D graphics. That’s a tough sell. The way something looks obviously depends more on things like cultural context and the quality of the art direction, and should be basically independent of the medium, right? At least, over time that should be the case: there might be a culture that for some number of decades values oil paintings higher than acrylic, but that’s a transient state. The idea that 3D graphics are “better” than 2D graphics by any factor, is absurd. It is like saying that sculpture is just better than painting.

I reject the idea that Sword/Shield looks better than Gold/Silver. Or no wait, maybe I don’t: it was a rather lovely game at times, and Gold/Silver honestly looks kind of bland at times. So instead I’ll say that I reject the idea that Sword/Shield categorically looks better than Gold/Silver, or that this improvement accounts for the 18,000 times increase in size. It looks nice, but I think that fact is independent of the spend. It could have looked nice and without needing to be 12.4 GB.

—

OK, but what if the argument was not that 3D graphics “look better” but instead that they are “more immersive”. The addition of specular lighting, depth of field, grass physics, and robust facial expressions make the game more realistic and thus more immersive. I think that the this kind of thinking has taken hold in our society and is really at the root of my whole beef.

Consider this clod of dirt:

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I think videogames have a “resolution problem” that the real world doesn’t have. Imagine that the clod of dirt pictured above is freshly torn from the rich loamy forest floor. It is teaming with microbial life; probably contains a worm; or a pill bug; might include tunnels carved out by ants; almost certainly is laced with roots and mycelium engaged in a the chemical equivalent of a trade war. It is a master work of level design. You could study the contents of a clod of dirt for your entire life; you would never run out of things to learn and discover. Perhaps the demiurge would disagree but, from the perspective of a humble human, no: for our purposes reality has infinite resolution.

The real world does not have a resolution problem, and literally any human could spend a decade exploring literally any patch of dirt and grass on the surface of the earth. The real world is infinitely deep…

myself in Brevity is the Darksouls of Witt

This clod of dirt might just be more interesting than any videogame that ever has or ever will exist. Just like a potato chip (10 calories) contains more energy than a AAA battery (8 calories), only it is locked up in fats and difficult to access, this clod of dirt offers an inexhaustible universe of play… for those with the mechanism to unlock it.

I am not exaggerating when I say: it is quite possible that we exist in the richest, densest part of the entire universe. We live in a bustling soup of information in an otherwise mostly empty void.

Why then do we waste so much energy trying to simulate things when we already live in the most interesting part of the universe? Why are we so impressed when our videogames look “realistic”? The inescapable reality is that we will never be able to accurately simulate anything. Our videogames do not and will never look “realistic”. All it takes is a moment of close inspection to undo any multi-million dollar attempt to make a videogame look “realistic”. Just walk closer to anything than the designer intended you to, and it all falls apart immediately. Eyeballs become glassy and hollow; hair is made of thick tubes bouncing and crashing against one another; the textures of rocks and grass repeat endlessly; the texture of wood is a photo plastered across a flat plain; your arms clip through the walls. Billions of dollars are spent every year on making videogames more realistic, but because of the resolution problem all we can ever achieve is a superficial, hollow realism that falls apart when prodded. So stop doing it!

—

I like videogames! I like Super Hexagon, and Pokemon Crystal. I like Minecraft, and Starcraft, and maybe even Warcraft. I like Starseed Pilgrim, and The Beginner’s Guide.

I wish I could like Horizon Zero Dawn (2017). That game really felt like it had a novel setting, but it didn’t really click for me. I’ve heard that it cost $45 million dollars to make, and was 70 GB. When I installed it the minimum requirement was 100 GB. The team that built that game was more than 2,000 people and who knows how many uncredited contractors. It takes between 20 and 60 hours to finish. The recent sequel, Horizon Forbidden West (2022), cost $220 million dollars to make, wants 150 GB (of SSD no less), and offers 30 to 90 hours of play time.

There is a kind of obligatory spend mentality going on here. I feel like people are making what they think they should make, rather than really deciding what’s right. They are enacting a ritual to summon the sales figures. A friend of mine pointed out that if you make a game with motion-capture faces for dialog and such… you basically have to make the hair move realistically. Imagine the dissonance of having motion capture faces if the rest of your game looked like Half-Life. Similarly, there are games where customizing your character’s look is an important part of the experience. You can’t be punk if you can’t dress the way you want, and you can’t be cyberpunk if you’re not punk. In such a game if you give yourself a ponytail and a trench coat, they damn well better flap in the wind when you ride your motorbike down the rain soaked streets of New Neo Tokyo.

This line of reasoning, to me feels like it’s own antithesis. If motion capture is going to be indirectly responsible for bloating your game’s budget to $220 million dollars then maybe don’t do it. What game could possible need motion capture faces?

I’m not saying it’s bad to focus on graphics, either. I’m saying its bad not to focus. I’m saying it’s bad to try to simulate reality in a videogame for its own sake. Your goals should be the goals of your game. If you are making a game where you climb, “Shadow of the Colossus” style, over human faces then OK maybe you need motion capture and hair physics to get that feeling really tight. Imagine Aloy’s braided lock crashing towards you at break neck speeds as you climb the enormous seems of her vest! That’s gameplay! But if your game is just about talking to NPCs, and rolling, I feel like we’ve been doing that just fine without motion capture for like 50 years.

What about “Baldur’s Gate 3” though… is the argument that the dialog is so poorly written that it can’t stand on it’s own without mo-cap faces? I haven’t played the game, but I’ve heard it has good writing. Do these same people think “book” would be better with motion capture talking-heads? The comment I’ve heard is that the motion capture faces improved the overall experience. Fair enough! But it is then our responsibility to ask the question “how much did this improve the experience, and was it worth the cost?”. If we don’t ask these kinds of questions we are doing ourselves a disservice. I think in almost any case if you imagine the budget your favourite AAA game going towards more of that game, rather than hair physics, you will be imagining a better game. A better use of those resources.

As an example of a well-managed relatively recent project, consider the budgets of botw and totk.

BOTW released the same year as Horizon Zero Dawn was 14 gb, was developed by a team of roughly 1000 humans, and takes between 50 and 200 hours to beat. TOTK (2023) was 18 gb, was developed by a team of about 1500 humans, and takes between 60 and 250 hours to beat. That’s not even a 1.5x increase in the metric I care about, ROM size, and yet totk could easily be describe as 3x bigger in terms of just the explorable surface of the game. Looking at the two game more holistically, side-by-side, in terms of richness… love it or hate it, it is not a stretch to call totk 10x richer, or deeper than botw. I played both and prefered totk’s moment to moment gameplay but think botw had the better overall structure, so I’m not even that deeply biased one way or the other.

In addition, comparing botw, totk, and Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t even apples to oranges. They are so similar in so many ways. How did Nintendo do it? How does Nintendo keep doing this?

They build inward, complexifying, deepening, enriching, rather than building outward, embiggening, expanding. They are efficient and focused.

I’m not saying we should forbid the “big budget flashy hyper-realistic horse dick-physics” game development style. What saying is that I want to see a AAA studio make a $220 million dollar MUD. Or a $220 million dollar Dwarf Fortress. Or a $220 million dollar successor to Pokemon Gold/Silver. I want 100 GB of Gold and Silver!

Process Is Art

There is a pleasure in process. The painter paints, and they experience a profound learning, a deep feeling. The consumer has no access to this through the painting, unless they are a very good painter themselves, and conversely the painter probably doesn’t see the painting in at all the same way as the consumer, because of all the extra context they have.

Processes can have qualities. Working with clay gives you a big wet thing that looks like a thing. You have to fire it if you want it to function or last. Working with a guitar produces sounds. You can play to an audience, and have them appreciate the sounds in a way that you can’t exactly do with clay… folks can appreciate watching the process, it is fascinating, but without the fire you don’t have ware. You can record music. A polaroid camera prints a single, perfect, image. Careful! Don’t shake it too much… or too little?

The pleasure in process can have qualities. Working with rough unrefined clay, or old paints, or just unfamiliar tools or materials sometimes, changes the pleasure of the process. When you find that good process that is both soft and malleable but also constrained enough that it almost guides your hand, like the grain of wood guides the carpenter, that is good! It feels right! Processes can feel better or worse.

A process is art, if nature is art. That is to say, you can learn about the world by working your clay, or playing your guitar, even if you never “publish” a work. A process can kick you. There are metaphors and meanings and abstractions in there, naturally occurring non-GMO, just as there are in cherry blossoms and rivers. I mean, just for example, we’re all here talking about a concept from a book on architecture. We aren’t architects. In the process of doing architecture Alexander discovered something so true about his world that it can inspire people today working in a medium that barely existed at the time! On the same note, a process is a performance, which is art: folks can watch you work clay, or play music. Even watching someone write can be powerful!

A videogame is a process someone made for you.

Going Out on a Limb

Maybe! I say Maybe! Maybe the way to make games that feel more alive… is to stop worrying too much about “games as art” and how a player might interpret the game, and think more about “games as process” and what a player might do with the game.

—

Form and Content

The history of videogames has left us with lots of blazing hot electric guitars that have little cuckoo-clock spring loaded paintings inside, so after you finally 100% that sick chord progression you get to interpret a painting. Many of the games we grew up with, the games we have played, tried their best to separate form and content because they wanted to be understood that way, as form (first) and content. Chronologically, Videogames wanted to be games first. Maybe “cut” scenes and dialog “boxes” were just the wrong way to work our inspirations, our passions, our stories, and our real world obsessions into our art, our videogames.

And this history has left us, I think, always stumbling over and kind of endlessly re-dividing form and content. That is, after all, the shape of the thing we see before us. Like the sun, endlessly orbiting the earth.

many games take concentration when your playing, preventing you from playing this metagame at the same time. but you can reflect afterwards on your experience. or some games are pokey enough where you can reflect while playing

– Jack, discord

I don’t think it is necessary to separate these two things. I think it is preferable if they are deeply intertwined. Think about the way you read a challenging book. The pleasure of the words on the page, like a thousand little paintings, modular, serial, and the whole we build up little by little with every passing moment, are one. The more they are the better! Think about the way you read an easy book full of dialog boxes and cut scenes:

“Will you be?” I asked, suddenly anxious. “Will you really be here?”

“As long as you want me,” he assured me.

“I’ll always want you,” I warned him. “Forever.”

Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

_{(nothing inherently wrong with dialog, or dialog boxes, or cut scenes, they all have their place! It’s about how we use them)}

I think, in addition to the historical problem of cuckoo-clock electric guitars, we have the additional, consequent, problem of literacy. How can people learn to play videogames with the same attention they view paintings in a gallery if there just aren’t a lot of cases to work from?

I think we players don’t know how to play a videogame the way we view a painting because we haven’t been given enough good examples, education, time, etc… It is easier to make, separately, a good game that is juicy and fun to play, and some nice paintings, and then “cut” the paintings into “boxes” and pepper them into the game (it parallelizes really nicely too, perfect for… industry?). Once you have games like that, how would you learn to appreciate them as a whole. You might put the controller down to watch the cut-scene, or skip-skip-skip through the dialog. Or you might watch a let’s play! There is often nothing inherently in there asking you to appreciate the whole as a whole.

Two bullet points emerge:

1. Videogames could do to be a less clearly divisible into form and content.
2. We could do to play videogames as actively/presently as we view paintings in an art gallery.

It’s funny! I started writing this post before you wrote Platformer Kigo and had it saved as a draft. Now it feels like a reply: Kafka and his Precursors! This post, then is not so much a reply as a jogging companion. In the second part of your post it looked like you were getting started thinking about your pattern language for platformers.

A Pattern Language

I got to chapter 14 of The Timeless Way of Building, titles “Patterns which can be shared”. It talks about observing a thing, and analyzing it for patterns that can easily be shared. Page 249 includes a description of the process of discovering/defining a pattern. I am going to try to do this with droqen’s recent game “Awake”. Alexander tells us to start with the feeling of something being “right”. When we come across something that feels “right”, or something that “works”, that’s when we should look for patterns. Awake “works” for me, and it is fresh in my mind, so this is where I will start.

_{Disclaimer: it turns out this is hard (Alexander even says so later on in the chapter :D) so I’m going to keep coming back to this post and editing it.}

I am going to start as Alexander does in chapter 14 by seizing on a particular spatial relation (within the space of the game, which is a kind of digital space in the real world).

GRADIENT COERCION

What: The cave has a gradient, a kind of entropy or gravity that draws the player implicitly in a particular direction. This direction lines up with the game’s narrative.

Why: In a game without explicit goals where the player can go this way or that, it is easy for players to end up lost or not know what to do. If the player starts at the centre of a big room, there are instincts pulling them in all direction. Adding a concrete force like gravity or wind means that a player will tend to go in the direction of this force. In Awake, the player starts at the top of the cave, and there is a thing of obvious interest at the bottom. It feels natural to tumble down towards it. Then the player must “work” their way back up. If this gradient was reverse, the player would feel the game pushing them away, rather than inviting them in and setting up a challenge.

Another way to think of this: if the player moved randomly in this room, rather than with purpose, would they end up at the object of interest? In a room with even a gentle gradient, the player will have a tendency in the direction of the gradient.

When/where: This pattern is useful is “open” games, such as open world games, metroidvanias, and walking sims. When you need the player to find a thing but don’t want to point to it explicitly. This pattern is useful for directing traffic and attention. Place the things you want the player to see first “down hill” and the things you want them to see last “up hill”, with respect to the gradient. (actually, Birthplace of Ossian has this too, the whole game is a big 3D funnel sending you to the ending).

Here is a tentative name for this pattern: GRADIENT COERCION. I’ve chosen this name because coercion is “getting someone to do something by use of force” and in this case the force creates a gradient. Maybe I will come back to this one!

AUTHORED VOIDSCAPE

What: A passage into the voidscape. In Awake, the right side of the cave entrance area has no wall; the white background of the inside of the cave spills out into the white background of the UI used to display text. Over the course of the game it becomes clear that the player can go there, and the game continues even after they do.

Why: A videogame has an edge, like a painting. In a 1st person game, if you could clip through the geometry of a level you would find a vast empty void. In Tetris for the gameboy, if you could look to the left or right of the playing field, you would see an endless expanse of madness, tiles or half-tiles mixed together at random. These places have been called “voidscapes”. When making a videogame it seems to be impossible to completely seal off these voidscapes, and since a player naturally sees every oddity as a challenge, if a player happens upon some possible entrance into the voidscape they will try to go there. Often if a player does get out into the voidscape, their game will end abruptly.

This pattern incorporates that void into the fabric of the game, so that a player who does is not left holding a loose thread.

When/Where: This pattern makes sense in games where the player has an explicit avatar that they move through a space. It makes the most sense in games that already feel mysterious, transgressive, or glitch, as it enhances these feelings.

This is wrong, I’m going to come back to it. The system of forces I’ve identified seems to be a conflict between “player wants to explore” and “bugs look like an invitation” but that’s not how it is being used in Awake. The conflict is that the game feels “pointless” and the player, upon finding the lightswitch, is naturally going to think “what have I missed”. When they see that voidscape entrance they might think “hmm, I wonder if I can” OR they immediately tried to jump into the voidscape, which is maybe then resolving a conflict like “how to make something obvious without making it obvious”. Obvious, but easy to miss, like the “purloined letter”.

The thing that felt right was that I was able to think “ah, you tricky droqen, I bet I can walk off the edge here” AND the fact that it felt like the game was “missing” something. Block Fakr had this too, the whole game is saying “there is something more to this game” and then a clever player, eyes ever open to weirdness, notices that you can escape the level geometry.

Maybe the tension is: “how can you put something OUTSIDE your game?” Like, you want there to be a meta layer of the game. The game is about a cave and a light-switch or some coins and skeletons, but you want to add a kind of “escape hatch” to the game as the hidden goal.

I can pour latte art, because I was a barista for many years. I love pouring latte art. When I did it again recently, at a friend’s house with their little espresso machine, I felt tears well up in my eyes. It’s mostly nostalgia, but there is something that I’ve always felt is particularly beautiful about latte art that I’d like to share now.

Latte art¹ is evidence of a very special relationship between cow’s milk and espresso. There are many milks you can use to make a latte, but so far our science has not managed to produce a milk that can be used to make latte art as crisp and perfect as cow’s milk. Barista formulated oat milks come closest. I think that’s wonderful, and I think about it every time I see nice latte art. We didn’t choose cow’s milk for this property: latte art emerged, was discovered, long after we started putting cow’s milk in our coffee.

As art, the result is not very interesting I think. The interesting thing is that it is possible. The play between the miraculous coincidence “latte art is possible” and the journey of mastery “I can pour latte art” is what makes me happy when I pour. Latter art produces little hearts, and the “rosetta” shape, which is reminiscent of a flower. Imagine an artist trying to capture the beauty of nature who had chosen latte art as their medium. It would be impossible! It’s not a very expressive medium, but it is a medium and it’s worth exploring (or nothing is worth exploring).

Now imagine an oil painter trying to capture the beauty of nature! How frustrating must that be!? Certainly if you are focused on outcomes, and on achieving a specific goal I think it would be very frustrating to paint. If you are trying to transmit experiences, and you see the medium primarily as a barrier to that endeavour, then it’s probably pretty frustrating. How can an oil painting ever express the beauty of a tree or a sunset when that beauty is experienced as much in our skin as it is in out eye? Such an artist is running headlong into an existential crisis.

Oil on canvas is another miraculous coincidence, like latte art, but one with much greater expressive power than latte art. The artist has way more control and can get much closer to some particular experience… and yet we still end up with pointillism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism. I would hazard a guess that realism makes up a tiny tiny fraction of all paintings. Essentially, these are artists who are as interested in the relationships between oil, canvas, and eye as they are with the relationship between nature and eye. If they are trying to transmit something, they know it isn’t something that exists primarily in nature. If they are trying to transmit something it is there impression of what they’ve seen. One might say that these artists were looking for places where reality was insufficient, insufficient to capture experience, and then creating lesser realities in those spaces that come closer to experience.

There’s an adventure time episode where Jake finds his brother Jermaine, who has always painted realistic landscapes, painting in an abstract expressionist style. This rocks Jake to his soul, he believes his brother to have been overcome by some demon. Jermaine says:

No one is making me do this. I painted so many landscapes that the shapes of the land began to lose their meaning. The shapes broke apart to me, so… I painted them like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB4I_sGtK7M

Why was Jermaine painting landscapes in the first place? Suppose that he was trying to make art which notices reality; suppose that he was trying to celebrate, or capture, or express the beauty that he saw in the world around him. His abstract art still does that, certainly for him but also for those with an eye for it… but abstract art also notices the medium. Abstract painting notices the miraculous coincidence of oil on canvas, the ways that oil bunches up into little ridges where a brush stroke ends, the ways colours become muddy and indistinct where they meet, or the ways the rough texture of the canvas pushes through into the final product. Like impressionism, abstract expressionism also recognizes how important the human psyche is in the miraculous coincidence of noticing reality. The particular qualities of looking and seeing that reside in us are just as important in the relationship of a person to the natural world as are the qualities of that world.

I ask again: why was Jermaine painting landscapes in the first place? Suppose that he wasn’t trying to make art which notices reality. Suppose instead that he had sat in his father’s house looking out the window at the mountains one day and thought “that’s nice”. He knew he had experienced something but not what. It made him feel good, the way warmth feels good. Then later he thought he might try painting. And what did he paint? He was drawn back to that feeling of warmth. He didn’t know why he wanted to paint a landscape but it’s a thing people do, so he did it. I think Jermaine started painting landscapes as a way to practice a medium, oil on canvas, and as a way to reflect on his own relationship with the world around him, and that in the end it had very little to do with the landscapes themselves.

Videogames is a medium.

There are lots of really interesting videogames, but way more very boring videogames. Unlike paintings, I think gamism and realism dominate the form. When someone makes a videogame, in my experience, 9/10 they want to make something fun. A fun game. I don’t think it is particularly interesting to catch all the pokemon, or defeat Kefka. Open worlds I’ve explored are never as interesting as open or rich as the real thing. After walking in the Japanese countryside I am always left feeling like videogames are deeply insufficient. The game designers are not interested in awe, or in the sublime. Videogames is so close to so many other mediums that often people just paint a videogame, or write a videogame, rather than going really deeply into the medium.

There are things videogames are good at. Executing a good cheese in Starcraft is enjoyable for roughly the same reasons as pouring latte art. Building slowly in minecraft, with an eye for the relationships between things, is nice. Developing a skill that takes months to master instead of years is satisfying. Not because it is useful, or efficient, but because mastery is enjoyable. There are things I’ve learned about myself that would not have been as evident outside of videogames precisely because of how small and focused they are.

I’m a formalist. I love form. I love haiku not because I am particularly interested in old ponds, or cuckoo birds, but because I am particularly interested in kigo, and the structure of a clever turn. I love pouring latte art not because I am particularly interested in rosettas, but because I am interested in exploring the consequences of this miraculous coincidence. In the past I’ve felt a bit removed from artists who are interested in awe, or in ponds. Now I’m thinking that there isn’t really a divide there. I am most interested in noticing, and celebrating, the miraculous coincidences that make things possible. Why is driving around a city interesting? Why are sunsets beautiful? What makes a perfect chair? The answers, I think, lie in the cracks that divide us from reality. We call those cracks “experience” or “being” or “psyche”. The space a signal has to pass through to become an experience has a particular shape, and that shape is what makes a tree beautiful. The machinery that makes us capable of appreciating the awesome machinery of nature is itself awesome.

You can work with a medium, and I think the interesting thing to do is to deepen your understanding of the medium. You can cook, and then you can really cook. I mean, you can make dinner, or you can make miso. I can appreciate the tides, but I can’t really work with them. The best I can hope to do is work with a medium and try to express my appreciation for tides in that medium. To do this I have to work deeply with the medium, to understand how it is expressive, and I need to work deeply with myself, to understand how tides become the appreciation of tides, to notice where the miraculous coincidence of “appreciating tides” exists. I need to try to understand its mechanism, like the way the impressionists understood the mechanism of appreciating a scene.

But maybe that’s not the right approach. Maybe instead maybe I should reflect on what the tides make me feel. If all I ever did was go and see the tides, and walk the shores, and throw stones into shallow pools… maybe I would understand the tides better, but I don’t think I would understand my own appreciation for the tides better. I need to get different angles on the cracks that make that appreciation possible, and to do that I need different media. I need to notice the way a close is like the tides, maybe I should get some lego gears and try to model the tides as a sum of sine waves. Or maybe I should include some tidal action in a game I’m making. If I can create something that makes me feel the way tides make me feel, or even just hints at that feeling, then that is evidence that I’ve understood.

This kind of got away from me. The point is:

I’ve been spending more time offline and just generally loving it, and feeling less and less desire to explore these fantastical unexperienceable things — because real stuff is so cooool. Driving around a city! Talking with a friend! Sunsets! Trees! Colours and fabrics and patterns. Sitting in the perfect chair. The pleasure of removing dust from a dusty screen with a microfibre cloth!!!

I don’t want to spend my time looking for the places where reality is insufficient just so I can create lesser realities in those spaces! Reality is sufficient in so many really cool ways! I want to make art which notices that rather than spurning it, because I want to spend my time noticing that.

droqen, May 2022

That’s great! But you can’t escape needing a medium. If you want to make art you will always have this problem, regardless of the medium. Art has a resolution problem!

¹ When I talk about latte art, I’m talking about the “free pour”, not stylus work like little bears and unicorns, and certainly not the computer printed latte art of the 21st century. Those are fine too, but they aren’t what I love. When you do a free pour, you kind of wiggle the milk pitcher… and magic happens! The patterns are intuitive. In the photo above, I know that I first poured a big circle, then stopped and pushed another circle into it. That’s why you get that distinct white outer ring, followed by a ring of brown, then the bed of milk in which the rosetta itself sits. The rosetta’s leaves are not sharp, they are big soft loops. That’s my style.

I read this and thought, “ah OK! So to make a living platformer I should learn the pattern language for platformers and then BOOM!” But this is magical thinking.

I’m reading The Timeless Way of Building and today it occurred to me: I’ve been reading this book with an eye for how I might be able to instrumentalize it, rather than treating it as a process for reflecting upon the things that I make. It’s a trap I often fall into! I spent a bunch of time learning “about” functional programming, waiting for my brain to suddenly be like “Poof! God mode enabled!”.

The farmer who builds a barn doesn’t think “I sure am glad I have this pattern language for building barns”. Rather, they build a barn and we observe that it is alive. TTWOB is an explanation of how this could be: the farmer is steeped in a cultural context, a pattern language, and can kind of intuitively, expertly, and beautifully blunder their way through the process of building a living barn.

Asking us to look at some pattern we like and then try to learn the pattern language that enables us to generate it seems like the wrong way round. It’s like asking a linguist to learn a language so that they can communicate with people in that language. The linguist might write a grammar, or study the etymology, or compile a dictionary, but that won’t amount to being able to communicate. Linguists don’t learn languages, they study them, and using a linguist’s tools to learn a language is how people end up feeling like learning language is “impossible”. I see it all the time, and have experienced it intimately on multiple occasions: the difference between people who studied a language and people who lived that language.

I think I need to stop thinking, “maybe I could learn a pattern language for platformer and then generate many beautiful platformers” and instead just live my life, and reflect on my experiences. Internalize, and incorporate, rather than instrumentalize. If I want to make platformers, I should make them and reflect on them. This feels like the trivial epiphany: the epiphany I will be having every other week for the rest of my life.

Droqen knows a pattern language for platformers. TTWOB has finally answered my longstanding question “how the heck does droqen make 100 perfect platformers that are all clearly platformers but also all unique and alive” or more specifically, “how did he nail the feel of the platforming in cruel world so hard?” Even before reading TTWOB, Droqen knew a pattern language for platformers. I think the most exciting thing about TTWOB is not pattern languages, but thinking in terms of pattern languages.

A farmer can’t just explain to an architect how to build a barn. The farmer can build a barn because has lived that way, and internalized the relevant pattern language.

What follows is my simple-English wikipedia style generous interpretation of the Impossible Games Manifesto. Go ahead and open it up side-by-side with this one, so you can see how I have massaged each paragraph to serve my own motives.

Make what you want to make!

It is OK to treat your work seriously. The act of creating work is enjoyable, the results are enjoyable. That is good. You are good. You can share your work with others, if you want. You can put a price on your work and sell it if you want. Mainly: don’t get it in your head that your work is not good, or not valuable. (ed: as a curator of an arcade, I have observed that a lot of people do not believe their work is “good enough” to be shown, or shared. I myself felt this way, once. I remember the first time I met droqen he said that he had played Super Plumber Bros and basically assumed he was lying to be polite. “Selling” your game could just mean sending it to another game designer you respect).

• Focus on working towards your vision. You don’t need to succeed the first time, and you don’t need to win.
• Other people will have their own ideas about your work, their own interpretations. Their interpretations are valuable, but so are yours! It is easy to fall into a cycle where you show someone your game, and they play it and tell you about the game they would have made, and then you adjust your vision to be more like their vision. If you have done your work reflecting on your goals, then you will know what parts of their feedback are valuable to you.
• You have probably been conditioned to believe that “success” is commercial success. It takes practice to escape this conditioning. If someone says “your work was not good or valuable, as evidenced by it not selling”, don’t worry about it. You are not in this for the money. Make what you want to make.

Indulge your own silliness:

• Don’t be beholden to realism.
• Play jokes on your players.
• Be obscure and weird.
• Destroy the connection between time and space.
• “Good Game Design” is a lie!

Do something loud and outlandish; make a dating sim where you date a pug. Do what you want to do.

I purchased boots for my son in a small town, and the merchant asked “what colour bag would you like”. There were pink bags and blue bags, and me being me I asked for a pink bag. The merchant said, “blue?”, she was old and seemed hard of hearing. I said “oh um pink please”, to which she replied “Blue, yes? Blue for boys.” Then she happily gave me a blue bag. I am told that at one time in European history, pink was considered a very masculine colour. Some peoples’ ideas of “the right way” to do something align very closely with the ways of doing things that are in vogue at the moment, ie the “status quo”. You don’t need to do things that way, if you don’t want to. If you do things your way, you may end up with something interesting. If you cleave to existing genres/tropes/expectations you may be losing sight of what you wanted to make.

• You don’t need to do what people tell you to do, you can do what you want. (ed: it doesn’t even have to be about rejecting the status quo, you can just do what you want)
• If you spend time reflecting on your own needs and wants, or on what you enjoy or don’t enjoy, you may come up with better answers than if you just do what other people suggest as “the right way”. If you watch a youtube video where someone explains how you should make games, and then you just do that, chances are good that person was just charismatic and not actually wise. You will be sacrificing what you want to make (ie “yourself”) in exchange for their (imagined) approval.
• The more you reflect on your own needs and wants, the better you will know yourself. Like anything, it takes practice. With time you may become more interested in your own approval than in someone else’s. It is a skill to be critical of your own work, and another skill to be able to approve of it.
• Do what you want to do. Act on the values you discovered through reflection. Use those values to create work. If you really know what you want to make, and you make it, it won’t matter much if someone else doesn’t want it.

Do what you want to do

• There are a lot of people who think that they can make a small weird indie game and then become an indie darling and get hired at a studio and make games forever. This isn’t a good plan. It isn’t even really a plan. If you want to make something, you should just make it. (ed: If you actually want to “get into” the Games Industry, maybe try starting at the bottom and do it as your day job. But I mean, it isn’t a great industry, honestly. If you are a programmer, try web-development: it is a cushy job and you will meet lots of nice people. You can still make games, if you want to.).
• Not having a job in the games industry when you are a person who makes games is not a personal flaw. If you have been trying to get hired in the games industry and it hasn’t been working out, reflect on why. If you are making games and no one is rushing over to try to hire you, is that really a problem? Under capitalism, we are alienated from our labor. If you make something, and you find you can’t get a job making that thing, it means that there isn’t a capitalist out there who wants to make that thing. That’s not so bad, is it? (ed: I hope you are making enough money to live comfortably though, I mean if you are young and have family to fall back on the “rent-punk” or “starving artist” thing can be cool, and if you live somewhere with good social services maybe you can make it work in the long term… but the world doesn’t actually owe you anything and I think you should be realistic about trying to take care of yourself).

Just do it.

• Don’t tell yourself you can’t do it, or that you will do it later. Reflect on what it is you want to make, and make it. The more work you make, the easier it will get.

OK so, I do have some problems with this manifesto. Mainly, I think it has some underlying assumptions about the privilege of the reader. Not everyone has the privilege to be able to “stick it to the man”. Ignoring the demands the status quo is trying to place on your art/work is a good idea, but not everyone can get by on art alone and the least privileged are the least likely to be able to survive by just doing it. The stuff about making yourself impossible to hire is kind of terrifying. I, personally, always tried to make myself impossible to hire. I had this idea that if a potential employer took one look at my wacky resume and said “nope!” then that was probably a good move, because I wouldn’t have got a long with them. But I am incredibly privileged: I’m healthy, I have a family to fall back on, my skills have somehow always been in demand. When I was a young (arrogant) gamer, I would frequently recommend that people “make themselves impossible to hire” because I had not learned empathy. I imagined that what had worked for me would work for everyone because in my mind everyone was the same as me. Now, in hindsight, I would say that you should first make sure you can pay rent and feed yourself, and try to get an education or train yourself in a skill that is in demand. I’m not even sure what to say to people who are neuroatypical or differently abled and trying to get by! It certainly would not be “make yourself impossible to hire”!

I also generally agree with droqen’s reading:

My argument: this uh capitalism counterculture is fuelled by the fantasy (utter fabrication) that completely rejecting money and all good money-making strategies will somehow, in the end, be rewarded with money. Or it ‘should’ be and therefore we ‘should’ act as though doing this is a good idea, financially speaking.

http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=257.msg939#msg939

There is a culture of people who believe that the situation we are in with capitalism is bad and broken, and that we should reject it. They believe we should reject capitalism, and the financialization of everything. I am one of them. There are also people who believe that if they do this, they will or should end up being rewarded with money, and I believe this is mostly magical thinking.

But is it an “utter fabrication” that completely rejecting money and all good money-making strategies will somehow be rewarded with money? There are plenty of examples of people doing things that really should not have worked financially, and coming out on top. People who have “played the system and won”. People who have discovered new money-making strategies, but also people who have been rewarded precisely because being an outlier (rejecting money and all good money-making strategies) is a money-making strategy. You can write a novel without using the letter ‘e’ and make some money, I hear.

The thing that it is, if not an “utter fabrication”, is a risky plan. A gamble. It is like buying a lottery ticket. Perhaps most importantly though: it’s pretty shallow. Why not make the things you want to make?

Being on a content conveyor belt moving you endlessly forward from set-piece to set-piece is, ironically, often way more interesting than an open world game, or a metroidvania, or something more “exploration focused”. I believe that this is because videogames have a resolution problem.

We can grow more familiar with a person, place, thing, or concept. I think mostly that’s what “exploration” means outside of videogames. You can explore a branch of math, or a lover’s body, or the 3rd wave coffee scene in Paris. These would all be a process of becoming more familiar. If your interest in a phenomenon was only superficial, then it can quickly go from fresh, exotic, exciting to mundane, boring.

So I ask you: how long would it take you to intimately familiarize yourself with the screenshot above? How long until you ran out of new things to discover? Contrary to what some might have you believe, a similar place in Breath of the Wild is similarly boring: some green lumps here, four roughly identical models of trees, maybe a rock.
Now imagine a similar place in the real world. The real world does not have a resolution problem, and literally any human could spend a decade exploring literally any patch of dirt and grass on the surface of the earth. The real world is infinitely deep, where as any videogame regardless how many millions were poured into its graphics or its horse dick physics is a piece of trash.

That being said, a videogame is a part of the real world and so you can explore a videogame. I mean explore the game itself, not just interact with its systematizations of exploration. The trouble is that videogames tend to suck compared to other parts of the real world. This is often how we experience videogames: we are excited by the freshness, the game becomes a kind of fetish, we rant online. But how many hours does it take for a videogame to lose its lustre? I’ve spent hundreds of hours exploring Starcraft 2 but felt pretty done with Breath of the Wild after maybe 30. In comparison I’ve spent more than a decade exploring computer science and I’m just getting started.

I like to play GAMEFEEL games. Games that give you intimate, direct control over a part of a system. Games that are designed to facilitate your exploration of the system, helping you find the interesting and fun things you can do in it. Games that are focused on this kind of experience, where every aspect of the design is meant to support the player in their exploration.

Jack (HAIKU games, emphasis droqen’s)

But the more I play these games, and the more I understand how they work, the more I am left wanting – wanting for something more than the crystalline perfection of the design. I’ve learned this system, but now what? I can dance in it, play it like an instrument, and there is certainly a perennial joy to be found in that!

Jack (HAIKU games)

When I hear Jack talking about HAIKU games, to me what I hear is a kind of (loving, helpful) “stay in your lane”. Videogames have a resolution problem: they will never be our musical instruments, languages, or literature. “Videogames” is a hobby with a great deal of depth and room for study, but I think each videogame is more like a hobby with not a lot of depth. You can learn to play Mario really well, or you can learn to play the piano really well. You can learn Braid or you can learn Spanish. You can read the text of FFVII, but I assure you there are more interesting texts in other media. Playing videogames is worthwile, but the cost of playing any particular videogame quickly becomes overwhelming compared to the available depth.

Jack’s “but now what?” above addresses this resolution problem. We love these GAMEFEEL games because it can be really interesting to move Mario around the screen gracefully, or to grasp and hopefully master a curious puzzle like Recursed. But then what? The game continues, and you continue to play.

This is why HAIKU games made me think “ah yes, videogames: stay in your lane”. Be polite, be expressive, be real; don’t overstay your welcome, don’t pretend to be a piano, or a novel, or life itself. Be Videogames. Videogames have a resolution problem (I insist, there is no escaping it). I take Jack’s suggestion as a call to work with that constraint rather than against it.

And so, I want to play HAIKU games… I want the games to be brief, like HAIKU, and leave me with some space to find some meaning for myself. I want the games to have helped me learn something about me, in my world. I call them HAIKU games because I see myself engaging with these games and with HAIKU in similar ways. I interact with the medium and discover for myself a system that ties the individual pieces of the game (or poem) together. A system of natural beauty that comments on human experience, that feels at once personal and universal.

Jack (HAIKU games)

It’s not just about brevity! It’s about density, brevity, and humanity. If you pour water on a haiku it will explode so be careful.