LAZA KNITEZ!! as Carpentry, Pt. II

“An obvious question, then: must scholarly productivity take written form? Is writing the most efficient and appropriate material for judging academic work? If the answer is yes, it is so only by convention.”

“When we spend all of our time reading and writing words— or plotting to do so— we miss opportunities to visit the great outdoors.”

“Let’s draw a distinction: unlike tools and art, philosophical carpentry is built with philosophy in mind: it may serve myriad other productive and aesthetic purposes, breaking with its origins and entering into dissemination like anything else, but it’s first constructed as a theory, or an experiment, or a question— one that can be operated. Carpentry is philosophical lab equipment.”

—Ian Bogost, “Carpentry”
Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

I don’t have any particular allegiance to philosophy per se, being a long-confirmed interdisciplinary mongrel of the worst sort, but I can’t help but return to Ian Bogost’s call for academics to engage in the world in ways other than writing.  It must be said that I can’t exactly deride the written word, either: I shudder to think of the thousands of keytaps, the miles of ink and graphite I’ve put away. It seems obvious that many questions are not best investigated, answered, evaluated or communicated by the written word yet it is clearly the hegemon — projects which are not the written report (with the proper margins and citation style, naturally) are the exceptions, frequently the preserve of teachers of the hip/too-lazy-to-read-hundreds-of-pages variety.  In my time at ITU, I’ve spent far more time working on projects with an output where the written report was ancillary to the work of creation and design, and that approach has taught me much.  Even more helpfully, it has helped me translate some pretty esoteric ideas about videogames into concrete projects fit for consumption by a much wider audience. At Extending Play and just recently at Free to Play in Antwerp, I had the chance to talk about excessive games by letting an audience see LAZA KNITEZ!! played, to see not just an excerpt of the game but to be able to see the players and experience spectatorship. Free to Play, in particular, was not an academic conference but a celebration of playful culture— inviting the audience not just to listen, but also to play, let me get away with a short lecture on play theory written sixty or seventy-odd years ago.

How’d we end up putting LAZA KNITEZ!! in an arcade cabinet in the first place?  Joon and I worked together with a couple of people to turn a defunct arcade cabinet, Scollbar’s Barcade, into a Winnitron.  With no budget, broken hardware, few tools, and cabinet owners that were more interested in a warez-based emulator of   classic arcade games than an indie gaming platform, we ended up abandoning the Barcade renovation.  But along the way, problem solving and prying apart wooden hardware, even cleaning the gunked-up Coke spilled all over the arcade controllers, we learned a lot about what it feels like to get inside the guts of an arcade cabinet, gathering up the obscure materials required for its resurrection, and how to transfer our minimal handiness into useful work.

When we were seeking user feedback in our alpha jam, we were hesitant to ask people to come up to a stuffy room somewhere with the lure of some dry cookies.  We’d been in those smelly little rooms, with a team of developers watching your progress with bated breath, too many times to trust that method.  We wanted to attract people who weren’t going to try a game for a couple of dusty pastries, and we needed people to play against each other, even complete strangers.  With knowledge of wiring up the barcade to hand, we commandeered it for a day and set up shop on the main floor of ITU:

Putting up our shingle for the first time was electrifying.  We tested and developed simultaneously, which I think gave players a great chance to understand how integral their contribution is to game design.  We got to see people stake part of the cabinet as their own with some well-placed elbows, negotiate the appropriate noise & celebration levels of a public space and slip into a game unobtrusively to do some “testing” of our own.  A huge part of our success was the hulking weight of the arcade cabinet, something that lent a facade of substance to four first-semester Master’s students who had never made a game before.  It solidified our interest in building arcade installations and games that suited them.

We built our first arcade installation, the Buttfighter (top photo), after being accepted to the Nordic Game Indie Night Summit— something we were awfully surprised by in the first place.  We were up against some pretty amazing games, and worse, we needed to figure out a way to show off LAZA KNITEZ!!  We hatched a wild idea to build a cocktail cabinet out of IKEA parts, and with some help from Mads’ dad (and the generous use of his workshop) we put the Buttfighter together in about five hours.  It’s basically two IKEA tables, a door, four wheels, a screen and speakers.  We swap out our laptops when we show it.

I feel pretty confident in claiming that the Buttfighter won us Nordic Game Indie Night — even getting it there was an adventure in taking games into the Great Outdoors, as we had plenty of opportunities to explain to puzzled Metro stewards that we were transporting an arcade machine.  The LEDs on the side of the cabinet and the echoing BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM of the death ray got people interested in our game.  The cocktail format was great for letting people crowd around and see what was going on, and especially to see the players.  All weekend you could hear LAZA KNITEZ throughout the venue, and it felt pretty great.

Since then, we’ve shown LAZA KNITEZ!! all over the place, in the Buttfighter, on projectors, playing behind Chipzel, on a boat.  I’m still working on an arcade cabinet in the US of A, which has taught me a lot about the business of arcades — I’ve had a chance to talk to people who renovate machines, people who hoard & sell them, and bar owners looking for something to fill up an empty corner.  I’ve talked to engineers about manufacturing a custom button fitting, found out that the CRT era is coming to an end, and moved a goddamn 400 pound arcade machine from some dude’s garage into my parents’ house.  More than that, I got to see people enjoying the hell out of themselves playing a game that I helped make.  Marx, on non-alienated creation:

Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature.

—Notes on Mill.

I’m not trying to downplay what I’ve learned by reading outstanding histories of the arcade era, like Tristan Donovan’s Replay or ethnographic accounts of arcade spaces.  At the same time, there’s something to be learned by pulling apart controllers, dragging machines to another country, and beer-proofing an arcade cabinet.  Even as home consoles become ever more amazing, there’s still plenty to create and learn from games as a common physical gathering point for people to come together and play.  Creating a game allowed me to intervene in social situations.  I was able to see how games create a community in ways that would have been fairly impossible as an outside researcher. It also gave me access to communities I didn’t even know existed.  I didn’t come to ITU to get involved in game design, but it’s been the most academically and personally rewarding part of my time here.  If you get a chance, fellow writers, turn in your pen and keyboard for a little while, and pick up a hammer, drill or paintbrush and see if you can’t learn something by crafting something besides the written word.

This journal entry is part of a series written for an independent study project at the IT Univeristy of Copenhagen under the supervision of Mark J. Nelson.

LAZA KNITEZ!! as Carpentry, Pt. I

“In the first place, it is clear that vertigo cannot be associated with regulated rivalry, which immediately dilutes it.  The paralysis it provokes, like the blind fury it causes in other cases, is a strict negation of controlled effort.  It destroys the conditions that define agôn, i.e. the efficacious resort to skill, power, and calculation, and self-control; respect for rules; the desire to test oneself under conditions of equality; prior submission to the decision of a referee; an obligation, agreed to in advance, to circumscribe the conflict within set limits, etc.  Nothing is left.”

—Roger Caillois, “Forbidden Relationships”
Les Jeux et les Hommes ¹

LAZA KNITEZ!! doesn’t exactly scream “philosophical.”  It is, to be clear, a game about four ultranoble warriorz locked in eternal combat in the distant, absolutely radical, technofuture.  It was inspired by arcade classics like Joust, and in making it we accepted a minimalism that was consistent with our resources and experience. While LAZA KNITEZ!! seems like a fairly simple game, its free rotation of non-vector art, its pixel-perfect collision and its wacky pentatonic high-fidelity audio are far beyond the capacity of the early 80s games it mimics, and if we had really tried to replicate the medium itself in time-period hardware (as Ian Bogost does in A Slow Year), rather than a broader idea of the genre, the game as it exists would be essentially impossible.  We didn’t make LAZA KNITEZ!! to be kitschy or retro: the loose constraints of the 80s multiplayer arcade genre fit well with what we could do and what we had to do it with.  In six weeks, we knew we couldn’t make something that brought more to the game than the inherent pleasures of other players, so we spent our time-budget on making a tight, gleeful platform for player interaction, namely involving splattering pixel blood and guts of fellow players throughout the lazaverse.

One of the motivations of our design was to explore the forbidden relationship discussed above, and to see if it might be not just theoretically possible but actually fun. High-level LAZA KNITEZ!! gameplay and especially the little-understood “craziness” modifier within the launch menu took Caillois’ forbidden relationship of agôn and ilinx as a design goal.  In its standard mode, the base-speed of the game increases with each kill, with victory set at first player to achieve {5 x # of players} kills. ² In craziness mode, the speed factor is set by input from a microphone pointed at players, and the maximum and minimum speeds of the game (and pitches of the lazaz) open up to a much wider range.  With a sort of shocking regularity, players walk up to the cabinet and start shouting in the ecstasy of triumph and the ignominious groans of defeat: their yells, motivated by bursts of intense emotion, spawn a sharp jump in the playspeed, making the game more difficult to control and more dangerous for the players’ knitez, which loops back into cries and boasts.  It’s not long before the game is careening along at an incredible speed, knitez dissolving into blurs of color and a fine mist of pixelated blood.

Of course, the craziness mode of LAZA KNITEZ!! relies on an environment in which it is sonically dominant & which human voices aren’t drowned out— when housed in the mighty warhorse that is the Buttfighter arcade cabinet and given permission to let loose with the 8 in. subwoofer and surprisingly loud speakers on a conference floor, it works great.  But put us in a barroom or a dancefloor blasting dubstep³ and the game kind of transcends any traditional agonistic competition.  It’s turned up as fast as it can go the entire time.  The screen shakes constantly, explosions cover most of the screen, and games are over in a few minutes that seem like hours.  The competitive justice of agôn, overwhelmed by the sensual overload of ilinx, is partially replaced by the aloof fairness of aleatory chance.  One of the most intense gaming sessions of my life was an ultraspeed LAZA KNITEZ!! match with Simon Gustafsson, later crowned mightiest LAZA KNITE in the universe at Nordic Game, that left me physically dazed.

Through the process of making and modifying LAZA KNITEZ!! and watching players adopt and ultimately transcend my own play, I began to think more seriously about Caillois’ play-elements and a reconciliation between his division of paidia (free-wheeling anarchic play) and ludus (regimented rule-based play).  Caillois’ regimented rules-based play in ludus and the need for perfect balance in agôn are closely aligned, while ilinx has a natural affinity for the unregimented, embodied and system-less joys of paidia.  The paidia/ludus divide is played out in slightly different variations in some uses of play/game, W. Keating’s athletics/sportsmanship, or DeKoven’s well-played game v. David Sirlin’s playing to win— play theorists new and old, analog and digital, recognize the tension between games that instrumentally rationalize play in the name of victory (Huizinga in particular dedicates the majority of his study to the core competitiveness of multiplayer games) and games that exist for mutual, cooperative hedonistic maximization (a kind of ludic utilitarianism best represented by the New Games Foundation).  I think Doug Wilson’s writings on B.U.T.T.O.N. suggest an affinity between self-effacing games (basically a parody of ludus) and Caillois’ ilinx.

We wanted to avoid a purely agonistic game; as Caillois says, the perfectly balanced game relying only upon the player makes the victory particularly important, and defeat particularly personal.  By de-emphasizing skills like aiming and planning ahead, and putting an emphasis on managing a chaotic game-state, LAZA KNITEZ!! keeps the contest from being a fateful judgment on the player’s skill and self-worth.

While teaching the same material to IT University of Copenhagen game students as a teaching assistant for Espen Aarseth’s Foundations of Play and Games course, I realized that Caillois already describes a combination of ilinx and agôn, the games of competitive disorientation (choking, spinning, “daring” each other into dangerous feats) which he dubs “ascetic games” and ignores Huizinga’s description of competitive (and fatal) drinking games in the court of Alexander the Great.  I started thinking more about taking away the negative normative judgment that Caillois applies to ascetic games and taking a more serious look at games of competitive excess.  That line of inquiry resulted in my presentation on “Excessive Play” as part of the Dark Play panel with Miguel Sicart, Jesper Juul, and Mathias Fuchs at Rutger’s Extending Play conference and the publication of “The Handbook of Excessive Games, Vol. 0″.  It was the process of designing and revising LAZA KNITEZ!! that was the core intellectual work of pushing back against Caillois’ “forbidden combination”— my experience has been very different from my friend Doug Wilson, who writes on B.U.T.T.O.N.:

I would like to stress that the game should not be viewed as an “experiment” or a research prototype. Developed as a project with the Copenhagen Game Collective, B.U.T.T.O.N. was not designed in an academic context. It is the product of a particular social milieu and reflects a particular set of agendas. I do not consider my design work as a “method,” because for me the term carries with it some unwelcome institutional baggage. When I am “in the moment” of design, it is crucial that my practice not be instrumentalized towards a context external to the collective. As such, I view the “research” component of my work as the theoretical reflection contained in this article – a kind of literature-grounded creator’s statement, written in a university context. My aim here is to provide an evocative conceptual framework that will inspire us to think about digital game design in a different way.

—On Self-Effacing Games and Unachievements 

LAZA KNITEZ!! began in a very academic context: our “budget” was the 15 credits a piece that we were earning for Miguel Sicart’s Game Design course.  Coming into ITU, I never really imagined making a video game even managed to be fun, much less a game that has gone as improbably far as LAZA KNITEZ!!  But beginning design with several previous academic engagements with play theorists like Huizinga and Caillois profoundly influenced what areas of play I explored as we developed LAZA KNITEZ!!  It helped tremendously that my academic influence was mediated by three other developers working on the game, and a common commitment to putting gameplay first.

The second part of this essay will deals with Ian Bogost’s writings on carpentry and the relationship between game studies and game design practice, as part of an independent project at IT University of Copenhagen under the supervision of Mark Nelson.

As the conversation grows more sprawling, I have a more difficult time keeping up with the different branches and simultaneous threads.

]]> http://www.ludist.com/?feed=rss2&p=658 0 http://www.ludist.com/?p=656 http://www.ludist.com/?p=656#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 01:06:10 +0000 tommy.rousse http://www.ludist.com/?p=656 Continued from here.

]]> http://www.ludist.com/?feed=rss2&p=656 0 http://www.ludist.com/?p=652 http://www.ludist.com/?p=652#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 14:14:31 +0000 tommy.rousse http://www.ludist.com/?p=652

“The intuitive idea is to design the social system so that the outcome is just whatever it happens to be, at least so long as it is within a certain range. The notion of pure procedural justice is best understood by a comparison with perfect and imperfect procedural justice. To illustrate the former, consider the simplest case of fair division. A number of men are to divide a cake: assuming that the fair division is an equal one, which procedure, if any, will give this outcome? Technicalities aside, the obvious solution is to have one man divide the cake and get the last piece, the others being allowed their pick before him. He will divide the cake equally, since in this way he assures for himself the largest share possible. This example illustrates the two characteristic features of perfect procedural justice. First, there is an independent criterion for what is a fair division, a criterion defined separately from and prior to the procedure which is to be followed. And second, it is possible to devise a procedure that is sure to give the desired outcome. Of course, certain assumptions are made here, such as that the man selected can divide the cake equally, wants as large a piece as he can get, and so on. But we can ignore these details. The essential thing is that there is an independent standard for deciding which outcome is just and a procedure guaranteed to lead to it. Pretty clearly, perfect procedural justice is rare, if not impossible, in cases of much practical interest.”

—John Rawls

 A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (Kindle Locations 1510-1520).

The photos used in this post & more are available under a Creative Commons (attribution) license here in hi-res. Enjoy!

When I got to San Francisco on the Saturday night before the 2013 Game Developers Conference, I had already been on the road for two weeks, hopping from Copenhagen to Chicago to Ann Arbor to LA to Philadelphia on PhD visits and law school tours.  I’ve never done travelling like that, but maybe the worst part is that I kind of liked it.  After the first few days, I had a routine even if I wasn’t in a set place— I read a lot on planes, made single serving coffee, sampled the greasy street fare and free art museums of places I’d never been before, walked constantly, etc.

I was eating at a hot dog joint with my folks on the way to the New Orleans airport when I found out about receiving the GDC IGDA Scholarship  and I promptly cheered and told my parents. They weren’t that impressed, initially, but once I explained what the slew of letters I had just blurted out stood for, and also that I don’t technically have class this semester, I’d say they were at any rate supportively bemused.   I sent the application for IGDA’s GDC scholarship from the deepest pit of LSAT purgatory, and it came sailing back through sattelite transmission to the screen in my pocket at half-time of a chilidog double-header.  This is the modern world.  

If you’re a student involved in the games industry in any way, I encourage you to check out the IGDA Scholarship program!  It can get you to a lot more places than GDC!

In December, nobody in Glitchnap thought we’d be at GDC, but through an incredible spree of luck, we were all going by the time March rolled around.  We sent in a ton of applications, hoping that something would pan out, and I ended up with an IGDA Scholarship, then Mads, Joon & Mikkel (as Wolfmans) found out they were selected for a slot at Chartboost University: Boot Camp, a two week session on the tech needed to successfully get a commercial software product off the ground, while we were in the middle of a submission to Mozilla’s Game On competition.  A week later, Glitchnap won the Mozilla Game On Grand Prize and Best Multi-Device awards with an HTML5 port of Zumbie: Blind Rage. Through some careful finagling between the various prizes, we were able to get our whole team out to San Francisco.  We can’t thank IGDA, Mozilla and Chartboost enough for getting us to GDC!

One of the great things for us was witnessing the global indie community in action first hand (and also getting drunk with them). Before GDC even started, we had a chance to meet some of the people who make games that have started some serious internal rivalries: we played the hell out of Samurai Gunn in my apartment, and I’d been a huge fan of 0space & Shoot First! so it was really amazing to meet Beau Blyth (a.k.a. @teknopants)—here he is on the right next to Paul Veer (a.k.a. @pietepiet), who does a lot of amazing pixel-art for Vlambeer.

Here’s Mads Johansen listening to Dick Hogg (member of Wild Rumpus & creator of Best Game on PSVita, 2012 Tommy Rousse Award-winner, Frobisher Says!) talk about the narwhals of his youth.

As part of the IGDA Scholars on-site tours, we got a chance to tour Double Fine and ask some questions of legendary game designer Handsome Tim Schafer.

Joon & Mads made it to the Rumpus Royale MMXIII finals in Hokra.  The team that beat them was Doug Wilson, who was behind the whole Kickstarter that’s publishing the game, and fellow Sportsfriend Noah Sasso, so I’d say Glitchnap made a pretty good showing.  I was hoping to dominate at Samurai Gunn, but we had to play on PS3 controllers and I got knocked out of the first round.

Here we are at the Mozilla San Francisco offices!

I got a chance to check out Ian Bogost’s Zen Atari game Guru Meditation ¹

At the same exhibition, here’s avant-garde weirdo tabletop game Everything is Dolphins! (bit of a misnomer, really, as the game I overheard a lot of things seemed to be swords/maces/halberds held by dolphins) with David Kanaga’s Panoramical in the background.

Of course, getting an All-Access pass to GDC also meant going to some really outstanding talks.  I wrote up one of those talks, by QWOP Maestro Bennett Foddy, over at Killscreen.  I got a chance to see talks by Blizzard and Riot Games, plus I got a chance to get on stage and play some folk games with Doug Wilson.  One of my favorite talks of the conference was the indie rant, and the highlight of the indie rant was an impassioned reading & reinterpretation of Cara Ellison‘s “John Romero’s Wives” by Anna Anthropy.

A lot of other awesome stuff happened at GDC– the Wild Rumpus party, exhibiting LAZA KNITEZ!! at the infamous IGDA/YetiZen shindig, going to Five Rings with the IGDA Scholars, meeting Jenovah Chen and all the awesome Mozilla folks, and lots of other stuff but with all the running around I did, I often found myself without my camera when I really wanted it.

Going to GDC made me feel like I had some kind of grasp on the videogame industry and the various factions it’s composed of, from academics to indies to AAA developers. Seeing the whole ecology at once gave me a better idea where I fit in, and even that there might be a place for an academic with a newly discovered passion for game design. Getting to mill around the IGF booth and “see the future” of indie gaming was pretty unforgettable!

Special thanks to Luke Dicken, Kate Edwards, Heather Decker-Davis, Sheri Rubin, & Molly Malone for all their great work putting the IGDA Scholars program together this year!

I’ll be starting a joint JD/PhD with Northwestern Law & the School of Communication’s Media, Technology & Society program in the fall.  I did my bachelor’s degree in American Studies at Northwestern and I worked in an MTS-affiliated lab for a year before studying in Copenhagen.  I’m proud to be going back to Evanston and Chicago.  The JD/PhD process was fairly torturous, but I’m very happy to be on the other side.  I was fortunate to have had no bad choices for graduate school, and I had a chance to meet some amazing scholars and see beautiful campuses on the first part of my little U.S. tour.

I’m editing photos now for a recap of my trip to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last month.  That post will be coming soon.