Patrick: Playgrounds might be a good technical analogy, though. Like, in a playground, you might have a weird, bendy, climb-upon thing, and it could be a dinosaur, or a mountain, or a house, or MewTwo; I dunno.

Whereas if you had a big fibreglass dinosaur, well, that can only be a dinosaur. If you don’t like dinosaurs, well, this isn’t the playground for you.

So the bendy, climb-upon thing is like pixel art and whatnot, and the fibreglass dinosaur... is a... hi-res, 3D, bump-mapped dinosaur? Well, you get what I mean.

Dessgeega: abstraction is important. that is what you mean.

Patrick: Yes, thank you.

I’m thinking about Keita Takahashi now.

Dessgeega: abstraction is fundamental to game design because abstraction is the crux of communication. if the player’s vocabulary is comprised entirely of the verbs ‘run’, ‘jump’, and ‘shoot’, the author needs to write a story abstract enough to be told with just the words ‘run’, ‘jump’ and ‘shoot’.

the game and the player need to be able to communicate with one another.

Patrick: I guess that’s true! Maybe that’s why I tend to dislike talky games – they talk to me more than I can talk back.

Dessgeega: they tend to disrespect the player’s time more, too. it takes a while to click through all these pages of text.

Patrick: Did you play Twilight Princess, and if so, how far did you get into it?

Dessgeega: i played twilight princess from start to finish. it is one of most uneccessary games that i think has ever been made, but i played through the whole thing because midna and link’s relationship looks suspiciously like a D/s relationship.

Patrick: I like that I am talking to a game fan for whom ’DS’ means ’domme/sub’.

Dessgeega: nintendo D/s.

Patrick: Dess, you said that your games are informed by personal experience, and it strikes me that this may be their fundamental strength, given that they are not at all ‘innovative’ (in the sense that the word is used by those in this field today).

Dessgeega: i’m interested more in telling stories than in ‘innovating’. the videogame medium is often described as ‘technology-driven’, but i think we’re making very slow progress in terms of actually telling compelling stories and stories that are relevant to players’ lived experience.

this is one of the things that annoys me about the independent games festival. all their categories are ‘innovation in audio’ and ‘innovation in graphics’. there’s no avenue for celebrating good, holistic use of the medium.

gregory weir, who does a podcast called ludus novus, pointed out – in comparing the progress of film and videogames as artistic mediums – that filmmakers give out awards for telling stories through film. in videogames, the trend is toward partitioning. we don’t consider the work as a whole.

Patrick: I think innovation (again, in the sense that it’s meant currently) is a positive thing, but it’s only compelling like Isaac Asimov’s fiction is compelling. Concepts, just as concepts, are engaging and interesting when you’re an intelligent teenager, but once you’ve grown into a well-rounded adult, you want some humanity in your art. You want to learn something about being human, so you can improve your own life, and your own personality.

That’s been my experience, at least.

Dessgeega: i think designers are more swayed by parlor tricks than by the possibility of actually creating something worth experiencing. that’s certainly true in the industry because the industry is so hit-driven.

Patrick: So what’s worth experiencing, Dess? When you think of games that you like, what qualities do they have in common? (Feel free to give examples!)

Dessgeega: the games i admire tend to have in common that they use the medium to serve the narrative. cactus’s psychosomnium, for example, has this structure where you the player continually cause your character, your on-screen avatar, to die, which then results in you taking control of a different character in the story. the game is aware that there’s this dissonance between the player and the player character, and then it nurtures that into such a chasm that the player has no choice but to fall into it.

because the player of a game is expected to identify with the character to an extent that’s not true of other mediums. i press the button, the character moves. but the player often has competing goals from the character. i might lead this character to tragedy just because i want to “see the rest of the game.”

in psychosomnium, the player is becoming the game. and that is a kind of narrative that can’t really be explored in a film or novel.

Patrick: I really like that game. I’m looking forward to Fucked-up Nightmare Horrible World or whatever it’s called. You know the one. I’m looking forward to playing a ‘fleshed-out’ Cactus game.

Dessgeega: yeah. i’m wondering if a longer cactus game may lose its immediacy, though. the advantage of the short form game, aside from not wasting my time as a player, is that they say exactly what they intend to say and nothing more. they don’t repeat themselves.

Patrick: He doesn’t seem the type to expand on an idea for no good reason.

Dessgeega: cactus’s games tend to be built around a single idea, and they state that idea as succinctly as possible.

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