GAMECITY SPECIAL 3: More Power!

"GTA V is a MALE CRIME WORLD simulation, what do you expect? Flowers to womans?" is a sentence that just appeared in my inbox
— Cara 'Spooky'Ellison (@Carachan1) October 13, 2013

I know, I know, Game City is now a distant memory, but I'm going to record every little ounce of gamey goodness, godammit! So, onward!

Cara & Keith's Power Lunch

 

I'd never attended a Power Lunch before and was a little apprehensive. The only Power Lunch I could envision was important men in starched shirts shouting at each other over a boardroom table. I arrived to find no such horrors. Cara "Flowers to Womans" Ellison (see above) and Keith "Keef" Stuart were actually presenting a friendly, chat-show style live stream and we were the studio audience!

First guests were Ed Stern (who's now kindly provided a link list for all the stuff he talked about here and in the workshop) and Tali Goldstein from indie developer Minority. However, as I attended another talk by Tali which I'll mention at length later, for now I'll skip to the remaining guests: pixel artist Paul Veer and RGCD's James Monkman. As the pair discussed the fact that retro is finally a valid stylistic choice rather than just an era of gaming, I drifted off a little thinking about the uniqueness of Game City and the strangeness it brings to my home city. Paul and James are both respected in their fields and yet spent their Game City week demonstrating their skills to members of the public who had no idea who they were. Paul spent the week in Market Square drawing pixel puppies for every child that asked. James spent his Game City in the Open Arcade, demoing games to kids more used to hyper realistic immersive worlds than simple 8-bit levels. And yet, neither they, nor many of the other talented individuals giving their time and effort to Game City ever seemed like they felt it was beneath them, or that they'd rather be speaking to fellow developers than kids who called them 'Mister Arcade Man.' I think that's pretty great and I hope it's an attitude Game City always retains.

Stupid and Contagious: Games at the Turn of an Age

I attended a lot of Leigh Alexander's stuff, partly because she's great and her work interests me, and partly because I feel a duty to attend anything by a female speaker as they are still, unfortunately, something of a rarity in the industry. As Leigh discussed the film, music and culture surrounding early games development and the way that culture had affected games then and now, I was struck by the similarities of our childhoods, despite growing up on different continents. Leigh's exactly one week older than me, so maybe that closeness in age (plus a shared love of Nirvana and the Dark Crystal) is part of the reason I found her talk so intriguing. However, I was delighted to see the young man alongside me feverishly noting down the Riot Grrl bands Leigh mentioned. Obviously it struck a chord with him too.

Silent Enemy: Global Reveal

Speaking of striking a chord brings me nicely to Tali's second talk. I knew a little of Papo and Yo prior to attending. It's on my 'To Play' list, as when it was released, it was lauded as a triumph of storytelling, challenging the player to think about alcoholism and its effects on those touched by it. Watching the trailer in which a young boy escapes the reality of his world to move buildings and soar with a robot in the favelas of Brazil renewed my desire to play.

But seeing Minority's next game, hearing Tali speak about it, and seeing the audience's reaction to it did more than that. I didn't just want to play the game, I wanted to support Minority in their endeavours, because what they're doing is wonderful and important. Silent Enemy is, on face value, a simple puzzle game in which an Inuit boy must utilise his animal friends to cross the bleak and snowy landscape. But when the crows arrive and attack the boy, it's clear there's more to it than that. They beat him, take his stuff, taunt him and his friends, a rabbit and a bear, are powerless to stop them. The player can effectively choose how badly the crows treat him, but they cannot prevent the incident altogether.

After the brief video playthrough, I realised I was close to tears and not entirely sure why. I glanced around and saw several others sniffing, or dabbing their eyes. Tali went on to explain that the vast majority of the Minority team had suffered bullying and they wanted to make a game about that experience. How it felt and how they overcame it.

See the resemblance? Shut up.

About the only positive thing I can say about my bully is that he was creative. He called me Tosh
Lines (the implication being that he thought I had a bushy moustache. If he thought it was bad then, he should see it now. It's verging on lustrous.) and mocked me for the colour of my socks, the style of my shirt and the brand of crisps I ate. Utterly ridiculous trivial shit looking back, but at the time it mattered. It mattered so much I hated myself, hated every day I had to spend anywhere near him (But still stubbornly refused to change my socks, shirt or moustache. Because I may have been a kid, but I was still ME.)

Silent Enemy made me sad because it reminded me what it is to be helpless in the face of someone else's cruelty. But from hearing Tali speak, it seems Silent Enemy also seeks to remind players that the bullying is not all there is. There's friendship and loyalty and learning to be strong. How many other games can say they teach kids that?

GAMECITY SPECIAL 2: A Leigh Alexander Sandwich

A full and exhausting day yesterday. Here's what went down:

Broadway Breakfast

I realised while eating my fry-up that the grilled tomato was the first piece of fruit/veg I'd had in about four days. This made me depressed, but I wasn't able to stay down for long, as the effervescent Leigh Alexander arrived and showed us the video that had introduced her to the Ways of the English:

Leigh went on to take us on a nostalgia tour of games that had shaped her as a gamer, writer and person over the years. Beginning with Nei's permadeath in Phantasy Star 2, long before Aeris popped her clogs; moving via Greendog the Beached Surfer Dude's bizarre and uninspiring story; taking in the strange tile-stacking God-sim Klax (a personal favourite that I had never seen in that way before, but it's a surprisingly sensible description!) and ending on weird caveman platformer Legendary Axe. I could listen to anyone talk about games they love, and Leigh was particularly entertaining company.

Games Writing Workshop

I remember getting very excited by Brink's beautiful art and immersive world, and then dismissing it when I found it was a FPS. I don't mind watching other people play FPS's, but they aren't for me. I know my reasoning is a little weird, but rather than finding myself immersed in the game story, I find not having a visible character to roleplay makes it difficult for me to relate to the world and NPCs. I know it's strange, but I tried the recent Deus Ex and found that I just didn't care about any of the characters and I don't think it was the writing's fault - I think if I'd been able to 'be' Adam throughout, I would have felt far more engaged. Anyway, the point I'm clumsily attempting to make, is that unlike, say, GTAV, my reason for ultimately not buying Brink had nothing to do with the story.
Therefore, I was extremely excited to see the late edition of a writing workshop with Splash Damage's Ed Stern on Game City's schedule. If there's one thing I love even more than talking about games or talking about writing, it's talking about games writing.

I won't paraphrase his entire talk, but Ed was stunningly knowledgeable about a huge range of books, films and plays which he referenced in interesting, unique ways. Of the many things I learned from him, his catchphrases "The Fleets Meet" and "Exploit the Clunk" were probably the most memorable. With "The Fleets Meet" Ed pointed out that while in movies seeing this on a script would be a production team's worst nightmare, in games, it's not really a big deal. Crowd physics, particularly of things like spaceships or vehicles, aren't particularly complex, and generating tons of the things isn't either. Therefore, in games it's important to be aware of what the equivalent is. In this case, something that would be incredibly easy in film - a close up of an actor's face portraying an emotion. Because unless you're at a massive studio like Naughty Dog or Quantic Dream, it's unlikely you'll have the technology to do this effectively, and even if you ARE at one of those studios, they're going to try and cut as many of those moments as possible to try and keep costs down.

"Exploit the Clunk" almost builds on this point. It hinges on knowing what the weakest point of your game is, and making that endearing, relevant, or necessary through the story. For example, if you know animations are going to be a problem, ensure your protagonists are robots, so their jerky movements add to the characterisation rather than detracting from it. If you have a limited colour pallet, make it a relevant aspect of the game world, and not just because your artist's off on one.

I learned lots of other things that I'll be using in future projects, but I'm not telling you, because I don't want you to be better than me. So there.

Blue Monday

In the evening it was over to tiny but lovely bar, Suede, for sexy talk with real-life couple Leigh Alexander and Quintin Smith. As I've mentioned before, games have a hard time representing sexy times and that was the basis for this talk. Examining various games and platforms, from mermaid sex oddities to seedy sex-based virtual worlds, to modern attempts at injecting sensuality and responsibility into love and relationships, the pair examined why games get it so wrong and how they can begin to get it right. The ultimate consensus was that games are trying to run before they can walk, and attempting to convey complex relationships when even the basics of friendships are only nominally touched on in the vast majority of games. Until we've had more Animal Crossings, we can't have more... well, it was agreed there pretty much aren't any games with good sex scenes, so maybe that should be we can't have our FIRST sexy game.

*mumble* *mumble* Something about calibrations and flexibility *mumble* *mumble* *drool*

I've come over all unnecessary. I'm going for a lie down.