Patrick: Moving on to your most recent game, Calamity Annie, and therefore your life and relationship again: Where did Calamity Annie come from?

Dessgeega: from texas. i moved across the country to attend a design school, or so they claimed. it turned out to be a business school whose only intent is to land students jobs in ‘the industry’. it was the most frustrating four months of my life, at the end of which they kicked me out for repeatedly butting heads with my instructors. i was stranded in texas, miles from my slut and from my family, angry and determined.

i had a strong desire both to prove myself and to show up my former classmates.

i started working on calamity annie while i planned my move back to new york, where i finished the game.

Patrick: I gathered that technically you quit that school, but the way you tell it, it’s kind of like how Gunpei Yokoi ‘quit’ Nintendo.

Dessgeega: yeah, they took pains to preserve the fiction that i left of my own volition, but i was told in no uncertain terms to scram.

Patrick: You missed your slut – Is that why you made another game about her?

Dessgeega: she was incredibly strong in dealing with me being so far away. i was constantly frustrated and exhausted while i was at that school. i would call her and just cry. we only saw each other for a week every two months. that she was willing to support me through that made me admire and respect her so much.

Patrick: Calamity Annie is a love story, and quite a rich one, and yet Annie communicates with her paramour entirely by firing her gun. What’s the significance of this?

Dessgeega: there’s no ‘whisper in ear’ button. i wrote a love story that can be told with the single verb the player has at her disposal: SHOOT. the player has to play out her side of the romance, and the player’s vocabulary is limited to shooting. so shooting becomes both a means of flirtation and, in the bar scene, the means by which annie expresses her concern for valentine’s wellbeing.

Patrick: See, now I want there to be a ‘whisper in ear’ button, so I can use it in gunfights just to see what happens.

Dessgeega: i think you might be able to do that in gun mute.

Patrick: I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means.

Dessgeega: gun mute is a text game by c.e.j. pacian. it’s about a gunslinger in the neo old west who has to save his boyfriend from a corrupt sheriff. it’s one of the games that inspired annie. the interesting thing is that as it’s a text game, any sentence can theoretically be a verb, but there’s some obvious effort on the part of the author to establish ‘shoot’ as the game’s primary verb.

Patrick: Huh. I was just thinking about games with text-typing interfaces, like the old Sierra adventure games, and the middle three Ultima games. The fact that you could type in anything made them seem... bottomless. As much toys as games; you type in ridiculous things just to see what happens.

Interesting to hear about a text game where that’s kind of turned on its head.

Dessgeega: i think there’s something of a movement towards focus in interactive fiction of late. some people are writing games that are designed to be played start to finish in a single sitting, with no saving or loading or ‘undo’. it’s almost the opposite of what infocom was doing back in the day.

Patrick: I was going to mention The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a game that played tricks on the player; that was always one step ahead of the ridiculous things you would think to type in. It was very thorough! I guess that was possible when text games had budgets.

Dessgeega: yeah. the advantage of text games is still that it’s much cheaper to implement things in text than it is in polygons, which i think is why there’s such a large community of hobbyist interactive fiction writers.

Patrick: Back to Calamity Annie – and, actually, all of your games, but I’m thinking of Annie particularly: There’s a strong focus on character, and likewise the characters are strong; they have a lot of personality – not just the leads but the varmints too.

Given that your games are very small and tight and, well, basic – meaning there’s not a lot to them, in a technical sense – how do you achieve this richness? (This is kind of a suck-up question but I’m assuming it will lead to interesting discussion.)

Dessgeega: a lot of it comes, i think, from ambiguity. part of the reason i work with pixels as much as i do is that there’s a lot of room for ambiguity. andrew toups, who does the music for some of my games, feels the same way about chip music. and there’s a lot that’s left unsaid in what we see between annie and her girlfriend. what i do is establish a few key tones and let the player insinuate the rest.

it’s the same with the hombres. each of them has a unique sprite and a unique name, and that’s just enough to let the player imagine a character. that was important to me with annie: i wanted the violence to be personal, not the senseless violence of so many games. i wanted the player to be able to imagine a conflict that led up to this shootout.

Patrick: That rings true with my own experience of the game.

Dessgeega: too much detail leads to alienation. i prefer to suggest than to make explicit: i think it makes for more engaging storytelling.

Patrick: It makes sense that I will find a character compelling, if 90% of that character comes from my own imagination.

Dessgeega: yeah. and i think it better suits the nature of the medium. heather campbell, who’s an editor for play magazine now, once wrote that if super mario bros. began with mario bragging about what an unstoppable goomba killer he was and then the player immediately steered him to his death in a pit, the player would be playing against the character the authors had written.

it’s important to leave room in the role for the player to occupy.

Patrick: That’s a very, very good point.

Dessgeega: i like to think of the player in a videogame as being like a player in theater, which is where we get the term from. the player is playing a part, but it’s important the player enacts her part of the script. consequently, you the designer have to write that role in a way that suits player improvisation.

Patrick: And it’s not enough to simply make a character mute, like Link and Mario these days. Because there’s still all these non-player characters telling you who you should be and what you should be doing.

Actually the difference between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Galaxy is like the difference between Donnie Darko and Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut.

It’s the OH GOD SHUT UP SHUT UP difference.

Dessgeega: yeah. i think as a designer there’s a temptation to consider a game your own, but you have to consider that a game is a collaborate performance.

Patrick: You can’t create a game selfishly. You’re building a playground for other people.

Dessgeega: not always a playground: i always try to guide a player through a particular experience in a particular way. but the important word is ‘guide’. as a designer you have to allow the player to experience your story, not to tell it to her.

Patrick: Like arranging an egg-hunt for a child. You have to hide the eggs where you know the child will find them, but the child has to feel like she’s discovered something all by herself; something all her own.

Dessgeega: i like that metaphor. it’s why tutorials in games are so frustrating.

Patrick: Yes! Aren’t they tacky?

Super Mario Bros. didn’t have a tutorial – it just had the first level, which serves the same purpose but doesn’t feel like a lecture.

Dessgeega: yes, the player learns how to play by actually engaging with this system of rules and elements that the author has put into place. tutorials just signal to me self-doubt on the designer’s part and a lack of confidence in the player. we’re getting games now that are nothing but tutorial from start to finish.

Page << 1 2 3 4 5 >>