From www.gamesetwatch.com

As the difficult economic times and profit margins continue to force AAA to appeal to the broadest audience possible, it is becoming increasingly likely that the indie scene will be the place where games will address contemporary issues. Unfortunately, funding these ventures is still going to be difficult. Jonathon Blow received help from various sources to help get Braid off the ground, with much of the game’s expense coming from paying for the art assets. Jason Rohrer was able to create his work thanks to similar aid. The more eccentric a game wants to be, the less money people are potentially going to be willing to spend on it and thus the less likely investors will back it. Fortunately, art patronage in games is now more possible than ever thanks to websites like Kickstarter. Rather than try to have one group of investors bear the risk of a large investment, a game can be funded by numerous small donors who are promised copies of the game and other perks.

One such game that has begun to garner attention is Borut Pfeifer’s The Unconcerned. He writes, “The game is set in Tehran, Iran, during the post-election riots that took place this summer. You play a father and mother looking for their lost daughter, amidst crowds of protesters and police. It’s a puzzle/action game, set from a 3/4 overhead perspective in 2D.” You play as both the mother and father, interacting with Iranians, and discovering details about the event as you progress through the game. Playing as a woman will force the player to navigate the repression women experience in Iran while playing as the father comes with its own complications. Pfeifer explains, “I have over 9 years experience making games, and have an extensive network of friends and colleagues that can help me find the other resources I need to finish the game with the funding provided through Kickstarter.”

Games can and should provide players with a way to engage with modern issues in a manner that lets them learn about these issues through play. As a growing medium with a thriving indie movement, efforts like these can make the strengths of the medium shine. 10 dollars buys you a pre-copy of the game, 25 gets a signed copy, and so on until 1,000 earns you a spot as an Executive Producer. The game could potentially end up on PC/Xbox Arcade/PSN and other gaming networks.

You can find the donation site here.

—L.B. Jeffries

This post acknowledges the existence of sex and various game related ways of engaging with the act. Be warned.

As the moral outrage at a Japanese sex game involving rape called Rapelay continues to spread, game critics are confronted with a fairly tricky problem. On the one hand, why is our artistic medium not allowed to discuss rape? It’s not as if books and film did not long ago breach the topic. Blue Velvet, Boys Don’t Cry, or Thelma & Louise all feature incredibly graphic rape scenes. Literature has obviously covered the topic extensively as well, from Wuthering Heights to The Kite Runner. People arguing that these books are superior in their content because they handle the topic maturely are on shaky ground because, frankly, who wants to detail how to tastefully portray rape? As soon you establish some kind of standard you’re just going to inspire something more revolting because the entire point of discussing a topic like rape is the awfulness of it. If Rapelay is the standard of what games should not do, someone will create something just to cross the line.

On the other hand, this is not really the game to stage a protest over. This is not the first filming of two men kissing on-screen in an elegant discourse on the plight of men dealing with H.I.V. in Philadelphia or something equally valid. It’s a bad Japanese dating sim targeting people with a disturbing fetish. Another problem is that considering this is a medium that is short on female protagonists and even shorter on portraying loving relationships, video games haven’t really earned the right to talk about rape. Both film and books long ago covered love and relationships in every way imaginable before discussing this sort of violation. Video games, drawing close to 40 years old, do not have much that demonstrates they can even handle the topic of sex in the first place. So, in the spirit of our last post on sex games, we’re going to discuss another video game that handles the topic of sex responsibly.

It’s debatable whether the creators of the rumble feature in game controllers knew what they were getting into, but the uses for such a device outside strict gaming have been discussed before. A vibrating controller is going to have its uses for anyone with a private moment and a locked door. What’s interesting is that up until now there was never a game that gave you direct control over the vibrations. The girl in the linked article describes a few games where you could get this state going indefinitely, but Rez’s attempt at coordinating vibrations with techno music was the first real breakthrough in consistency for her. The Xbox Community game Rumble Massage has changed all that. For a measly 200 points you can download the game and adjust the vibration rate of your controller and massage any part of your body that you choose. Another addition allows a partner to control this aspect for you over Xbox Live. In essence, one person is moving the joystick adjusting the vibration rate while the other holds the vibrating device. It all works a bit like the vibrating egg from Shortbus without the awkward remote or invasive egg. Fans of the game, it seems safe to say, should keep one controller locked away somewhere.

It all goes back to interaction when it comes to games. The reason people get so upset about sex in games is because the player is interacting with it. The reason people have so much fun with games is because they’re interacting with it. I don’t think any of the sex games we’ve discussed in this series could accurately be called a simulation, but they do represent a unique conceptualization of sex. I’ve not played the game, but Rapelay’s biggest problem might simply be the failure to represent interacting with sex in a way that isn’t one-sided. If Rumble Massage or The Dark Room Sex Game are any indication, sex games seem to always best maintain their dignity as co-op experiences. If YouTube videos like the tasteful Everybody Daylight are acceptable depictions of the act, I suppose video games can manage something eventually.

—L.B. Jeffries

About two months ago I made a few loose predictions about the future gaming trends for 2009. One of the things I pointed out was that the most wide-open genre of gaming for the entrepreneur was the forum game. The primary goal of this game would not really be the typical stats and sense of accomplishment that games provide. It would instead use these to encourage clicks on the website to generate ad revenue.

The closest thing I’ve seen really start pushing this agenda was Facebook’s 25 Random Things. Write 25 facts about yourself that no one knows, tag 25 friends who will be notified about it, and encourage them to do the same. The article cited goes into the various reactions to the phenomenon, some found it therapeutic while others decided it was an excuse to protest the existence of the internet. What is interesting about this Facebook note is the notion of calling it a game instead of a chain letter. I tend to change my definition of video games every couple of months because some indie game will challenge it, but for the moment I’ve been relying on Corvus Elrod’s stab at it: A game is a set of rules and/or conditions, established by a community, which serve as a bounded space for play. In that context, I’d say the 25 Random Things fits the bill nicely.

A recent title from the Global Game Jam has taken this concept of a forum game and moved it one step further. Wikipaths is an add-on for your web browser. It starts you out on one page of Wikipedia and then challenges you to use only links to get to another unrelated page. The game is timed rather than count links since presumably everything in Wikipedia links to itself eventually. As Greg Costikyan notes in his review, there is immense room for improvement here. A spider program could count the minimum number of links it actually takes and challenge the player to reach it. There is also the choice of Wikipedia as a website and the aimlessness of randomly selecting another unrelated page to link towards. The application of such a program to any website is going to be generating clicks and ad revenue, but you still need a carrot on the stick to get it working.

Future iterations could simply take this program and apply it to Facebook. Off the top of my head there are already a few games I personally play with the website when bored. How many clicks does it take to get to a blonde? How many clicks to get to someone from high school? Beyond that is applying the concept for more useful applications such as research. Going back to Wikipedia, a spider search could generate a series of documents that are all applicable not based in word content but in their connections to one another. Whether or not this produces a better search remains to be seen. As noted in the article about 2009 predictions, by the time someone nails this concept it’ll be too late to copy them.

—L.B. Jeffries

The tricky thing about the independent game scene is that much like the music world, there is an absolute ton of material to dig through. With so many games offering variations and minor adjustments to genres, it helps to have someone whose willing to dig through it all and point out the games that really do something interesting.

This year’s IGF Finalists are a fantastic place to find just such a narrowing down. The huge variety of games nominated also means that there is something for any genre fan to find from the list. Whether it’s the artistically amazing browser adventure game Machinarium or the psychedelic tunnel chaser Brain Pipe, games that innovated in a huge variety of ways were able to win praise. Particularly interesting are the breakthroughs in interface this year, such as Musaic Box using changes in sound and tempo to create puzzles or Mightier incorporating printed out puzzles and a webcam into the game. It’s good to see that even though games that were pinnacles of refinement are present, there are also one’s recognized for sheer innovation.

I’m particularly glad to see The Graveyard made it on the list under innovation. As was brought up in the coverage of that game’s post-mortem, it’s extremely hard to classify it as a game since there is no choice to it. All you can do is a linear series of actions combined with a random event. The blurb explaining the nomination says, “It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words.” That’s an appealing sentiment to me because even though the game could improve on the exploration aspect it still acknowledges its strength: the game is just a beautiful space. It’s just a black and white graveyard, a single poetic act, and a sad song about death. If a game like You Have To Burn The Rope is going to be praised for its snark and simple mechanics, then the The Graveyard deserves a nod for its minimalist approach as well.

In addition to I.G.F.’s choices is Indie Games’s choices for best games of 2008. These are broken up by genre instead of awards and include shooters, adventure games, and browser games along with several prolific artists being listed. All of these games are guaranteed to work on just about any PC and several are present on console services.

—L.B. Jeffries

Whenever someone tells me that video games are superficial or generic it always feels a bit like having someone who only watches MTV tell you that all music is shallow and commercialized. Yes, if you only pay attention to AAA games made by companies who want to appease the largest set of consumers possible, you will probably notice that there is rarely much experimentation or issue pushing. They never totally make you happy nor do they totally piss you off, they just get the job done.

A lot of funny things start to happen to video games once you ditch the desire to make money, make people happy, or care about review scores. You start seeing games that are using the player to protest a trend in games. You start to see games that spoof their history. And sometimes you see a painting of Mega Man made out of a woman’s menstrual fluids. All signs indicate the rabbit hole keeps going after this.

Which is why Jason Nelson’s latest game I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies. is a welcome addition to the scene. Mixing a bit of social commentary with basic gameplay and massive amounts of abstraction, the game runs very similar to his last project game, game, game, and again game. As noted in the interview with Nelson that Popmatters did about a year ago, the principle purpose of the game design is to get the player to engage with the art. Not rack up a score, not make you feel pleasure at beating the level, and certainly not at figuring out the solution to Nelson’s nebulous art. There are a couple of basic elements that anyone playing will quickly notice. Your avatar moves in a pattern that is very similar to how your eyes travel when viewing each of the different websites being spoofed. The Yahoo News site moves up and down on platforms like one reads the columns, the Fark website moves in horizontal lines as you traverse down the page. Although being sent back to the level only mildly figured into game, game, etc., here it plays a massive role in communicating how a website sucks you in by constantly dragging you to the start. The mental trap of being stuck in ‘F5’ mode expresses itself throughout the game. Layered throughout all of these levels are Nelson’s signature eccentric videos, scribbles, and cryptic poetry.

I’m as late to the party as ever with this game, if only because watching it make the rounds is almost more interesting than yammering about my own analysis. The principle thing most websites looking at it seemed to struggle with was whether it was gibberish or something really clever that they didn’t quite understand. Which might be one of the most interesting new developments in video games outside the mainstream. While it’s certainly true that player input is what makes these things video games, there is still quite a bit of room to explore in regards to how exactly one should be treating the player. Perhaps the thing that wears people out so much about AAA titles is that they are always treating the player like royalty and rolling everything out in a nice, neat package. One doesn’t have to drag themselves through a film like Vanilla Sky to know that part of how people define their pleasure from an experience is by contrasting it to the things that they didn’t enjoy. In Nelson’s case, chucking the player into the chaotic confusion these websites manifest through an abstract video game interpretation is not really about being clever or using gibberish as an obstacle. It’s just a part of the grander experience of not always understanding what’s going on around you.

—L.B. Jeffries

The Graveyard is an art game about being old. More specifically, it imposes a series of motion limitations in conjunction with an interruptible cutscene and potential random event. The motion limitation is the limping slow pace of the old woman you control. The interruptible cutscene is when she crosses through a graveyard, sits on a bench, and muses about life while a song about death plays. The random event is that she could drop dead at any moment during this exchange. The game is over when you stand up and make it back to the gates of the grave yard.

The game came out in March and received quite a bit of press when it did, so this post is late to the party. What prompted this was a run-down by the company concerning their experiences with making and releasing the game. The objective of the game, as stated by the developers, “In many games, death is simply a temporary game state, a way for the game to express your failure. We were motivated by this shocking disregard for the meaning of death to make something that explores this concept more deeply. Not just your own death but also how we live our lives among people who will die or have died. Death is a fascinating part of life. We find exploring the emotions and contradictions triggered by it, interesting and moving.” Accomplishing this meant animating the old woman in such a way that her pace was slow and tedious. On all sides are tombstones while all the branching paths lead nowhere in particular. You go to the bench and the woman reflects about her life and you observe this. Before and after the sequence there is no music and the soundscape is mostly birds and your slow foot steps.

The reaction to this was fairly interesting. Manifesto Games, who represent countless indie games and distribute them for bargain prices, did not respond when asked to host the game. Steam, run by Valve and home to many classic old titles, was not interested. Even Jonathon Blow, maker of Braid refused to host it at his Experimental Games Workshop. The developers explain, “To some extent The Graveyard is disqualified beforehand because “it is not a game“…The gameplay in The Graveyard cannot be considered experimental/interesting/etc because it cannot be considered gameplay. Or something along those lines. There was another strange response that we heard from several game experts. When they realized that The Graveyard was a work of art, their reaction was to try and uncover its meaning. And they were confused when they didn’t find a clear message. It’s as if they, even when looking at art, couldn’t shake the inclination to deal with everything in the world as a puzzle to be solved.” In other words, because the player lacks the ability to affect the experience through game design, it is not considered a video game.

It’s easy to get pissy about these titans of the ‘Games as Art’ movement shunning a title that goes for such a remarkable experience but they also have their own visions about what direction that movement should be heading. The game is, at best, a piece of interactive fiction and attempts at poesy do not necessarily justify its failure to use the power of choice which makes video games profound. Even the Adventure Company’s Deirdra Kiai complained about the lack of any real understanding about the old woman and being irritated at the game’s slow pace. The issue it raises, both to the developers and the audience, is whether or not revulsion and distaste is a valid emotional response to a video game experience. Kiai complains that she wanted something affirming or interesting about the old woman to make the experience have some kind of meaning that dignified old age, the indie critics preferred Passage because of how the game design created sympathy for the characters as they grew older. Is their failure to find these emotions and meanings in the game a critical failure, considering it sought to explore the contradictions and mixed feeling we have about old age?

Perhaps not. Experiencing that getting old means you don’t have the ability to waltz around the graveyard anymore (and thus isn’t in the game) is disconcerting for most. Having the old woman’s song be little more than musings about frailty and people that have passed away hardly generates empathy. The fact that throughout this experience you may succumb to the very thing all around you, death, hardly allows for much of an emotional response except cynical fear. If there is a flaw to this game, it’s that it does not provide much for the player to experience except the feelings of frustration that Kiai had.

And yet, I am not sure I would expect much else from a game about old age.

—L.B. Jeffries