Of Blocklists, Groupthink and (tangentially) the Gamergate Thing

Preface: It's been a bit of a horrible time of it in the world of games and games dev for the past few weeks with the whole #gamergate business. I guess it's sadly necessary for me to open this post by stating that I find the various forms of threats, doxing, hacking and general harassment that have gone on abhorrent. As far as the theories that have been thrown around go, I'm unconvinced by the claims of some Machiavellian conspiracy. I think games dev and journalism has issues with cliques and "in-crowds" that I won't go into here but the strings that most people can pull aren't that long or strong.

However, I've also been disappointed with the responses from commentators who have chosen to join in with the name-calling and tribalist us-vs.-them rhetoric by constructing a straw-man "gamer" definition to rail against. I dislike polarised argument and poor argument and there's been a lot of that on both sides. As usual most useful conversation got lost in the shouting. That's unsurprising, considering the poisonous start to the whole affair, but I can still mourn for the lack of better communication.

Anyway, that said, my involvement in the whole thing has been mostly shaking my head and frowning. That was until today when I discovered that my Twitter account had been placed on a block list that was publicly shared by Chris Grant, the editor-in-chief of Polygon.

The list as linked is now unavailable but it was obviously quickly copied and can be found around the web. Here's a pastebin that will probably expire at some point: http://pastebin.com/zrcXiTdL . I'm not hosting it so if that's gone you'll have to take my word for who's on there.

Okay, so Twitter is a free-for-all and you can imagine that those with larger followings might have a good use for the block button. Although I think I'm generally a benign sort of presence on Twitter I have no problem with the idea that some might prefer not to interact with me. The problem here is not being blocked, it's the who and why and context of the whole thing.

Firstly, why was I on the list? Fortunately, because my Twitter interactions are quite rare, I knew exactly why I was on the list when I read that it was a merged list with Ben Kuchera. I had a Twitter conversation with Kuchera earlier this year that ended with him blocking me. Here it is:

That was it. I sent that last tweet and then later discovered I was no longer following Kuchera and was told that I was blocked when I tried to re-follow. You can judge for yourself if you think that was a block-worthy interaction but he's free to block me from his feed and it's ultimately no big deal. However, half a year later and now I'm on this list. A list that is propagated to other editors at Polygon, an editor at IGN and posted publicly as effectively a shitlist in the context of #gamergate harassment.

That's a bit of a bigger deal.

I am, at least in theory, a developer of games software. I may well at some point wish to interact with any number of people in the games space. Twitter is an extremely common path to opening contact or continuing contact in that space. Being on that list directly bars my use of Twitter to contact those using the list and it also casts a shadow on the indirect/serendipitous networking that occurs.

Now Chris Grant has gone back and unblocked everyone, so problem solved, right? No, not at all. The list is out there and being used. As of time of writing I'm still blocked by Chris Plante, another Polygon editor and Bennett Foddy, well-known indie dev of QWOP and GIRP. I've seen at least one example of the list being rolled into an even bigger shitlist and re-posted for general use -- again supposedly under the banner of "these people are harassers".

I'm not alone here. The list contains other devs who weren't involved in gamergate (that I'm aware of) like @Worthless_Bums (dev of Steam Marines) and people solidly on the social justice side of things like @TRONMAXIMUM. I'm sure there are some genuinely nasty Twitter accounts on there but a significant part just looks like a list of people who have at some point irritated one person enough for them to hit the block button.

This is why shared block-lists are a terrible idea in general and a dangerous idea when applied to an industry space. Everyone who subscribes to such a list is willingly limiting their communication based on the most hair-trigger sensibilities of the group. I and many others are now marked to be avoided or treated with suspicion by games devs and writers for possibly little more than tweeting Ben Kuchera while he was having a bad day.

That's a shitty thing to do to people and I hope Chris Grant and the others involved think hard about the implications of what they've done here.

Kramer vs. Kramer

Kramer vs. Kramer was written for the retroremakes.com Cassette 50 competition/jam thingy. As that has finally been bundled up and finalised and I've put Kramer vs. Kramer up as my onegameamonth for February I thought I'd finally get around to writing a few words about it. If you want to read a bit more about the Cassette 50 as an event I put a post up here and also some babble about what the entries as bad games might say about "not-games" here.

So here is Kramer vs. Kramer. Go ahead, have a play.

You may be wondering what the hell I just put in front of you. If so you are not alone. Certainly, pencpeci's Newgrounds comment echoes your feelings.

Kramer vs. Kramer is based on the five time academy award winning movie about a couple's break-up, divorce and custody battle. More specifically it concerns the part of the movie where Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) tries to deal with being a single father after being abandoned by his wife. The game reflects Ted Kramer's struggles with the unfamiliar practicalities of parenting, his son's emotional response to the breakup and his own feelings about how his life has changed. It is also a joke.

I want to emphasise the "also" because I don't want to seem to be pointing a finger at anyone and giving a Nelson "haha!" if they took the symbolism in the gameplay seriously. When I designed the game I absolutely thought about how to represent the themes of the movie. I was wearing an ironic roleplay hat while doing it but that doesn't change the fact that those themes are intended to be readable in the gameplay.

There's always a danger of invoking Poe's Law with parodic humour and considering the references I'm using it's not surprising that many people don't pick them up. I put the game up on Newgrounds and Kongregate knowing that a load of players would have no clue about a 1979 movie or recognise the visual style. If you're too young or too not-British to get a lot of it then that's no failing at all. Having said that I really wouldn't want anyone to take the whole thing seriously or at least think I took it seriously. So, just for the record, I'm going to do the thing you should never do and explain the jokes.

The Technical Jokery

If you're older than about 35 and British or Spanish (maybe a bit younger and from old Soviet Bloc countries or South America) then you probably immediately recognise the graphics as being those of a ZX Spectrum (or clone). Otherwise you'll just see "something retro" and a bit of a mess.

No, not an Atari, Wegra. Thanks for the stars though.

The mess is down to the ZX Spectrum's colour rendering scheme which only allowed two colours per 8x8 pixel block. These were called attributes and the effect when graphics ended up having their colours changed because something else entered the block was called attribute clash. About half of the total time I spent on KvK was spent creating a simulation layer for the Spectrum rendering hardware and attribute clash in particular.

Why spend time simulating something that is objectively a bad thing? Firstly because that's a joke in itself. Knobbling a modern platform and giving it the limitations of a 1980s 8-bit computer is absurd. Secondly because if you remember the Spectrum then simply seeing it raises a smile. Mostly though I see as an opportunity for some technical slapstick and as part of a broader joke about over-ambition.

Altered Beast - showing how (not) to do it

It was pretty much understood that to make a good looking Spectrum game you had to be careful about attribute clash. A lot of games chose to go monochrome to avoid it entirely. The lure of colour was strong though and you'd keep getting games that inadvisedly tried to stick moving colourful sprites on colourful backgrounds with predictably poor results.

I wanted to play with the idea that KvK was written by a coder whose ambitions exceeded their skill and aesthetic sense (The role came very easily. I wonder why.) which boiled down to getting as much clashing as possible and doing things like not clearing the attribute values properly. So, when Billy throws a tantrum and you end up with blinking and inverted colour blocks all over the place it's an intentional cock-up. It also happens to look interesting and maybe represent the Kramer household descending into domestic chaos. I'm totally having my cake and eating it too here.

Jokes All The Way Down

The over-ambition joke runs on into the game design. The sub-theme for the Cassette 50 was "one screen", explained as taking a bigger game and interpreting it as a single screen. Thinking about big ideas made small reminded me of movie tie-in games from the 80s and their ridiculous compression of Hollywood scale experiences to a few kilobytes of game.

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" on the Atari 2600. Evocative.

 8-bit game dev ambitions weren't limited to cramming big screen blockbusters into big block screens. Long before what we now consider as "Indie art games" existed devs were trying to address emotion and human life experiences. From the fairly clinical (but entertaining) Alter Ego through experimental little numbers like id and onto the high-concept game/musical mash-up Deus Ex Machina (the last two both coming from the prolifically bonkers Mel Croucher), 80s games devs weren't afraid of trying to get 8-bit games to speak to people on levels other than simplistic fun.

So, that was the foundation of the idea. Take a non-action relationship movie that is totally unsuited to a game tie in and make a Spectrum game written by an inept but somewhat pretentious dev (again, a role that came every easily). Kramer vs. Kramer and the Deus Ex Machina/Frankie Goes To Hollywood approach to obscure percentage scoring seemed a good match.

Deus Ex Machina. This bit is about... something.

To me the very idea of making a game based on Kramer vs. Kramer gets a chuckle. Making a game that boils Ted Kramer's struggle to learn how to be a father down to a floating Dustin Hoffman head shooting breakfast foods at Billy is hilarious and delivering it with a straight face even funnier. I appreciate that I may be alone in this but I don't think I've ever laughed as much while coding.

One point I'd like to clarify for posterity is that, yes, I'm poking fun at the likes of Deus Ex Machina and also modern works like Passage and The Marriage. It is with some affection though. The joke is meant to deflate some of the high art claims and pompous conversations but only a little. By pointing out that, from certain angles, it's a bit silly to think a distance check on some pixels really says something about human closeness I'm not intending to say that such games aren't valuable, interesting or worthwhile. I like Passage and I have a great soft spot for Deus Ex Machina -- I'm glad these things exist. If they're truly worthwhile artistic statements then they'll stand a few jokes at their expense.

Bad Games / Not Games

This post is about some thoughts that have come out of my participation in the retroremakes.com Cassette 50 compo. I've put up a separate post giving the context of that competition here, but a brief summary is that the theme was essentially to make a bad one-screen game in celebration of a very old compilation of very bad games.

At first I didn't think much about my participation in Cassette 50. I was looking for small projects and Rob (@retroremakes) mentioned it on Twitter. The theme tickled my nostalgia bone and that was about it. I spent a couple of days writing Kramer vs. Kramer, which I'll write about some other time, and posted it to retroremakes. I was pleased with it and I got a few bits of appreciation from the forum, which was nice, but that was that. Right at the end of the contest I entered PieRim, which I'll write more about later in this post.

Since I entered KvK I've been going back and dipping into the other entries to see what other people have done. At the same time I've been doing this there's been another cycle of the "what games are/should be" debate, mostly driven by the Steam tagging beta resulting in tags like "not a game" and "walking simulator" being applied to some Indie titles. Somewhere along the line I ended up reflecting on the Cassette 50 entries in light of that issue and I've come to think that this odd little competition might offer more than just the silly nostalgia of some middle-aged kids. Or I might be fooling myself.

Meteor Storm by Ian. You either recognise this as the most common type-in game ever, or you weren't there.

The Waffle Commences - "Not A Game"

Disclosure to start: I don't have an issue with "not a game" as a comment. I've said it and will no doubt say it again. I don't see a problem as long as it's understood that it's referring to a narrow definition of "game", i.e.  a system of interaction rules with goals etc. I'm not a card-carrying game formalist, but I get why formalists feel the need to add precision to the terminology in the same way that physicists need to be strict about the difference between weight and mass. I think it's a useful tool for analysis and in talking about what sort of experience a "game" provides.

Of course there's endless room for misunderstanding. If I'm in mixed company and state that "Proteus", for example, is not a game then I'd be unsurprised if someone reacted as if I'm making a negative value judgement and suggesting that it should be banned from using the label. The fact is that some do hold such opinions and people love to pigeon-hole and polarise discussions to avoid thinking too hard. Also, "No, I'm okay with it being sold as a game, but it's not a game. See?" isn't exactly crystal clear.

Sometimes, when I find myself unwisely involved in these discussions, I try to differentiate between videogame as "electronic entertainment experience" and game as formalism. I'll say something like "I agree with formalist approaches to game mechanics and art/zinester approaches to game experience" but it rarely helps much. Occasionally I have tired of someone insisting that things like "The Graveyard" must be included under all definitions of game or you're being exclusionary at a market level and let fly with something like "Well if you insist then it's a spectacularly shit game" and that helps even less.

For me a lot of the combative responses to "not a game" seem misplaced. They're aimed not at what is actually meant by most formalists but at a group of noisemakers who aren't really formalists at all. The target is the "Not On Bloody Steam!" crowd (or NOBS for short) whose idea of "gameyness" is only loosely aligned with formalist definitions. I don't believe the NOBS are arguing from a position that "games have goals" is a useful definition for some analytical purpose. They seem to be arguing simply from an "I like playing the games that have goals and I want the label to only apply to stuff I like and not to have to look at these other things" stance.

A Russian Valentine by Empty Fortress. A game about homosexual love in Sochi.

Anyway, what does this have to do with the Cassette 50 jam? What do a bunch of bad games have to do with whether "Thirty Flights Of Loving" gets to be called a game or not? Well, I'd make the argument that many of them tip the "this shouldn't be called a game because it's not a formal game" view on its head. Many of the Cassette 50 entries meet the "games have goals" definition but they're not games. Alternatively: "It's a game [formally], but it's not a game [experience]."

Jesus Christ, What The Hell Am I On About?

Okay, as an example, here's PieRim from the Cassette 50 compo. I chose one of my own entries so that I can at least speak with authority on intent but a lot of what I'm going to say could apply to a lot of the other Cassette 50 entries.

So it's a game, right? It's a system, there are rules and a goal with a bunch of sub-goals. You guide your little hero avatar around and complete the tasks and then you win. Hurray!

Except I'd argue that, as an experience, it's not a game. It's certainly not a game that the NOBS would like but its not-gameness goes beyond just being unenjoyable for those people. Even to non-NOBS this isn't a game experience. If I intended it to be a game experience and then went about making that experience horrible... well, I can be a git on occasion but that would exceed my rated arsehole envelope.

It's Not A Game. It's A Joke. (And Also A Game)

PieRim is a parody. It's a piss-take of RPG quest structures wrapped in a layer of schoolboy humour and 1980s references. After the full twenty seconds it takes to absorb PieRim's complexity if you walk away thinking about it as a game then something has gone wrong -- you didn't get it. I suspect that's the same not getting it that applies if you play "Dear Esther" and say it's a rubbish FPS.

But there are plenty of films that are parodies and they're still films, right? "The Colour of Magic" is a parody of fantasy novels and still a fantasy novel. Weird Al Yankovic songs are still songs. Yes, but these things are intended to remain appreciable in terms of the form. They're mostly parodies of theme and style. PieRim sacrifices the actual game experience in order to comment on the form. It is a game with goals only to demonstrate the flaccidity of goals as a game mechanic without the experience elements. If a film, book or song did this they'd be unwatchable/unreadable/unlistenable in the same way that PieRim lacks any semblance of gameplay entertainment.

Most of the other Cassette 50 entries also seem to be made with similar intent. They're jokes. Sometimes the joke is just that they're awful, many times the joke is almost purely referential, others are satirising things outside of games. The common thread is that there's no apparent aspiration to provide a game to enjoy as a game.

Dare To Win by Empty Fortress. I found the interpretation of Who Dares Wins' graphic style hilarious.

Again, I'm not claiming that you can't define PieRim or the other entries as games. They fit both a reasonable formal definition and the wibbly inclusive "interactive electronic experience" definition. What I'm saying is that it requires an obtuse approach to consider formal gameness as their primary quality and to judge them by how good they are in that regard. It requires an even more obtuse approach to look at something like Proteus, which clearly isn't attempting to offer a formal game experience, and consider its gameness as the correct criteria for judging its validity.*

So, to sum up:

Some videogames are games.
Some videogames are not games.
Some videogames are games but only in the same way that tomatoes are fruits - don't put custard on them.

Enjoy your videogames.



* Although I maintain that it's perfectly okay to point out that it lacks that gameness and that you'd rather have that gameness.

Cassette 50

Sometime now-ish the retroremakes.com Cassette 50 games compo/jam will have a line drawn under it and become a very modest bit of history. It's a tiny event in what has become an endless parade of game jams. It doesn't have the cachet of Ludum Dare or the topicality of the FlappyJam. Hardly anyone will ever play the games from it and most people who play one of them probably won't want to play another. The output is intentionally unapproachable to pretty much everyone.

So, I joined in! Here are my two entries:

Kramer vs. Kramer - a heartbreaking rendering of the Academy Award winning film starring Dustin Hoffman. Playable Flash Version

PieRim - an epic quest to rescue a nation from making do with a cheese sandwich. Playable Flash Version

What the Hell?

Some explanatory context for those not familiar with the reference: Cassette 50 was a games compilation for 8-bit home computers published by a company called Cascade back in the 1980s . The compilation was heavily advertised in back pages of home computing magazines and offered fifty games for £9.95. Considering the average game cost £5-6 each at the time this was quite an offer. Eventually they juiced up the deal with a "free" calculator watch. Surely there was no way to lose?

Cascade's most evolved trap... I mean advertisement. Note the glowing praise quoted for Frogger.

Of course nothing is that good a deal (well, Steam sales and Humble Bundles have spoiled us but, back then, nothing was that good a deal). The truth behind the ad was that the games were all throwaway amateur projects written by teenagers for a tenner a piece. Those unfortunate enough to persuade their parents to write a cheque received in return a couple of hours of misery working through the tape and having the youthful optimism beaten out of their heads one shitty game at a time.

If you didn't buy it you knew of someone who had and the curious would borrow it. That's how I got it. The owner/primary victim, a school friend, tried to persuade me not to bother. Being too stupid to take his good advice I kept asking and he eventually agreed to lend it to me. The tape was handed over apologetically on a Friday lunchtime.

"No, really, they're all shit. Here, have Wheelie for the weekend too so you've got something decent," he said, trying to protect his game swapping credentials. It was a good move and I still lent him Scuba Dive the following week. Smart guy. I should have kept in touch.

I don't recall how many of the games I played. I doubt it was half of them. I just remember being amazed at how bad the games really were. They were all written in BASIC and mostly worse than the type-in listings in magazines. (For those too young to remember, tape duplication was too expensive back then to put a tape on the cover, so magazines would print game code for you to type in yourself. And we did. I'm not kidding.) I also remember, thanks to not having wasted my money, finding it quite funny.

Needless to say the Cascade Cassette 50 became a sort of touchstone for those who grew up playing videogames on those 8-bit computers, at least in the UK. Which brings us back to the jam/competition theme - write a game celebrating the awfulness of Cassette 50. There was also an optional sub-theme, which was to write a one-screen version of some bigger game. A bad one.

Why Write a Bad Game?

On its face it seems like a bit of a waste of time writing something intentionally bad and I made my first entry, Kramer vs Kramer, on a whim without thinking I'd get much out of it. It turned out to be great in a number of ways though:

•  Having the freedom to create something terrible is liberating. I spent very little time worrying about decisions and the whole thing had a great creative flow.
•  It didn't take very long. With the mentioned flow and the freedom to not polish KvsK took a couple of days (even with a fair chunk of non-game effort) and PieRim took less than 2 hours.
•  I used both games as a testbed for a simple framework for prototyping and jams I'm putting together.
•  It was a huge giggle. I mean I was literally laughing out loud while implementing things like the Billy tantrum code. I don't care if anyone else finds them funny. I found them hilarious.
•  I got to join up with the bunch over at retroremakes. I've swung by there many times in the past but never signed up to the forum. It seems like a great little dev community. 

So, all in all, it was a great success. If you've got a nostalgic twinge from the advert above or just fancy playing a bunch of terrible games then head over to retroremakes.com and check out the entries here.