Experimental Game Design

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Indie Game Show and Tell

by | Dec 7, 2018 | ,

The game I’d like to present is “Limbo”, a 2D platformer released by an indie company called “Playdead”. This game tells a story through very minimalistic visuals and gameplay, but with the few things this game does, it does very well. For example, the game’s color palette is merely black and white, with a shadow-box/silhouette kind of aesthetic, but the amount of detail the game provides through other means such as dust clouds or inertia is incredible. Because a player’s focus is drawn away from the normal things eyes gravitate towards, they are able to notice the more minute things that really pull together how believable an environment is. The game also does not give you a direct narrative, but rather incorporates that through small interactions of nuances in the visuals.

Limbo does an excellent job of creating a game with a captivating world through very unconventional methods, and overall I enjoyed playing and replaying each stage of the game. It was a refreshing take on platformers, and I would definitely recommend others to play this game.

Image result for limbo

Artwork 4: Detective Game

by | Dec 6, 2018 |

While reading through John Sharp’s Works of Game, I thought a lot about his comments on affordances in games, specifically experiential affordances. I wanted to experiment with that concept, to try to both fulfill and subvert the player’s expectations of the typical detective game. I think both fulfilling and subverting expectations is a valid way to engage a player. The player feels comfortable playing the game, as they find that the game is familiar, yet also is encouraged to think critically about their experience when they encounter subversive elements.

I created a Twine game in which the player takes on the role of a police detective investigating a suicide. The detective can choose to investigate the case further, questioning suspects and looking for clues. This is what the player expects from a detective game. However, I also gave the player the option at any time to choose to end the investigation, even right at the very beginning. I chose to have this option to comment on the ineffectiveness of the police system in our country, and its willingness to ignore domestic abuse. I attempted to subvert the player’s expectations of what a mystery game is in order to make a statement that the player is encouraged to reflect on.

The process of writing this game was emotionally draining. I had to put myself in the perspective of both the abused and the abuser in order to accurately capture the essence of domestic abuse. I wanted the game to be short and quick and within a reasonable scope for this class, so I had to cut a lot of elements I originally planned to add. For example, I could have added a neighbor commenting on their perspective of the relationship, and given the player the option to either believe them or ignore them. I also thought about adding a journal written by the domestic abuse victim as a clue, but I thought commenting directly on the experience of domestic abuse might be too on the nose. I attempted to be more subtle with the hints in this game.

Below is a link to a zip file containing my game.

Experimental.html

Indie Game Show and Tell: Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars

by | Dec 4, 2018 |

 

Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars is the prequel to the now much beloved Rocket League by Psyonix. Originally released on the PS3, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars was a rudimentary first draft that included the bare bones of what is now Rocket League. It was devoid of power-ups, all the modes, cars, customization options, and maps that appear in Rocket League. Nobody played it, but it was still my favorite game at the time. The fact that the studio decided to release such an improvement of a sequel was an absolute joy to me in 2015, never mind its overwhelmingly positive critical reception.

I chose this game because it not only manipulates, but redefines the conceptual affordances of ideas like soccer or even cars themselves. What you can do with both has been vastly expanded upon for the entire medium, standing as a shining example of a game that strikes at the core of what it means to have fun in a video game, doing things we couldn’t possibly dream of achieving in real life.

Appropriation Project – Score

by | Nov 28, 2018 | ,

My score was inspired by the disjointed and wandering progression of Yoko Ono’s scores in her book Grapefruit, the similarly disjointed and wandering of my own mind. The score is supposed to emulate the way my ADD causes my mind to regularly repeat, fail, and stall as I try to complete both simple and complex tasks. Yoko Ono’s scores reminded me of that process because of its often abrupt changes in direction and tone, as well as its occasional repetition and abstract directions.

Another component that inspired me was how Ono’s scores didn’t always have conclusions, and when they did, they were  either abstract or ambiguous. Those vague endings related to the cyclical concept I wanted to put into my score, so I decided to end my score in such a way that the ending was open-ended and also ambiguous enough that the score could just be read over and over (almost) seamlessly.

I was also in part inspired by Jeanann Verlee’s poem “Good Girl”, specifically the portion that reads:

Every morning I sit at the kitchen table over a tall glass of water swallowing pills. […] (So I remember the laundry.) (So I remember to call.) (So I remember the name of each pill.) (So I remember the name of each sickness.)

It is a very good representation of the uses of medication and by extension a representation of the simple things that can be lost or forgotten through illness.

Sit down

Take out a piece of paper

Look up at the ceiling

Take out another piece of paper

Stare at the paper

Stand up and walk back and forth

Think about the paper

Cry

Throw away both papers

Sit down

Think about crying

Take out another piece of paper

Throw away the paper

Sit down

 

Intervention: Lifting Up Spirits

by | Nov 10, 2018 | ,

Intervention: Lifting Up Spirits

(lol because elevators are called lifts)  

Artist Statement:

I created Lifting Up Spirits because i beloved the elevator is a great petri dish of awkwardness and mundanity to produce interesting social interventions.

This piece draws influence from my personal life and interventions we examined in class (and on my personal time) of causing a public disturbance in a playful manner. I take a less obstructive approach to intervening because I felt it would be rude to interfere with people/students schedules. Instead my piece passively engages with the awkward tension in an elevator.

In my own life, because sometimes I do strange things to spice up someone’s life with a little fluxus/micro-happening. For example when I am walking by the communal bathroom door where I live, ill pop my head in and make a strange noise like an alien bird call or a fart sound, then continue down the hallway.

The other veins of inspiration I pulled from were less extreme than the works found in On Edge, and more geared towards the playfulness in the pieces by improv everywhere. I was hoping for people to become apart of the piece by participating in the game rather than marinating in the awkwardness. The other aria I drew inspiration was the 1962 psychology experiment in conformity Elevator Groupthink. Mostly because this was the only work done in an elevator that came to mind.

Combining my desire to inject strange moments into people’s lives and the interventions I’ve learned about, I wanted to encourage other people to make those same odd decisions by participating in a game in the elevator.

The most common effect my intervention had on the “players” (aka anyone who enters the elevator) was an odd (almost disgusted look) at the instructions. Most people stared at it during their ride, often glancing up at the paper like it was looking at them. The second VERY RARE response was actual participation. This usually arose when people came into the elevator as friends or sometimes questioned me about what was taking place in the elevator. The last reaction was the person just didn’t witness the paper and continued with their lives. One instance i was able to enter the elevator while someone was already inside and participate without seeming suspicious. I made the fart sound with my mouth because it was a personal favorite. The persons reaction was silent but there facial expiration could be described in the words “not to shabby..”.

 

Iterations:

Iteration 1 (I tried to keep it simple and easy to process)

 

EARN THE MOST POINTS

Group

Say Hi/Hello = 5

Complement = 10 points

Question =15 points

 

Iteration 2 (I added two sections in case people wanted to participate solo or they were alone in the lift)

EARN THE MOST POINTS

 

Group Points

 

Say Hi/Hello = 5

 

High Five = 10

 

Everyone Hold Hands = 15

 

Everyone = 15

 

Solo Points 

 

Snap your fingers = 5

 

Clap your hands = 5

 

Stand on one foot = 10

 

Dance = 20

 

Iteration 3 (eliminated the words “Solo Points and Group Points” because they weren’t necessary and i decided the sections with lines)

EARN THE MOST POINTS

_____

 

Say Hi/Hello = 5

 

High Five Someone = 10

 

Everyone Hold Hands = 15

_____

 

Clap or Snap with your hands = 5

 

Stand on one foot = 10

 

Make a fart sound = 15

 

Dance = 20

 

[untested Iteration 4]

Print out an outline of a hand and above it reads “SLAP FOR GOOD LUCK”

I believe this iteration takes a lot of the social pressure away and i would sit in the elevator and slap it during the ride to encourage people to participate.

Documentation:

This is how the piece looked when the doors were closed.

Here are people not participating and just observing/being intervened.

Girl looks

Girl looks 2

Girl looks 3

Guy looks

Here are people becoming apart of the intervention.

People participate

participatioon guy

Guy participates 2

Girls participate

Artwork #3 Intervention: Somebody

by | Nov 9, 2018 |

Materials:

  • Laptop
  • Bluetooth/wireless speaker
  • Song/meme of your choice

Rules:

  • Connect your laptop to the speaker and make sure to hide it in a reasonably obscure place
  • When playing the song of your choice, leave the window open in full view and make sure it is no smaller than the video player
  • Your screen brightness has to be no lower than 4 (on a mac)
  • Play the song and only end it if A: you are ratted out by classmates, B: you are questioned by the professor, or C: the source is stopped.

For this  assignment, my goal was to intentionally disrupt an established system/procedure with something that was lighthearted or otherwise inherently meaningless, but familiar and socially relevant enough to be funny. In essence, I wanted to break up the daily monotony of class (especially one that was 3.30 hours long) with a direct injection of laughter and general non-seriousness, relying on a somewhat shared generational sense of humor to optimally make light of a serious moment.

I had originally intended for this project to be competitive, and while I issued an open challenge at the end of my intervention, I am doubtful that many people would be willing to take it up. Class choice was important for this as well; I had to pick a class with a professor who wouldn’t take it too seriously, was full of class mates with a shared culture of media consumption, and had a similar/not too distant sense of humor.

This project most closely resembles some situationists’ tactical interventions, mainly situationist pranks and jests that served to subversively undercut what they considered oppressive establishments, corporate institutions, and top-down media broadcasts. One comparable example is the Notre-Dame Affair that aired on French national television in the 1950s where key members of the radical wing of the Lettrist movement (which has its roots in Dada and surrealism) hijacked an Easter Sunday sermon broadcast, “choosing a quiet moment in the Easter High Mass to climb to the rostrum and declaim before the whole congregation a blasphemous anti-sermon on the death of God, penned by Serge Berna.”

While my intervention was nowhere near as goal-oriented, subversive, or scathing, both instances were wholly disruptive, completely driving attention away from a previous focal point and towards this abrupt, curious interruption. They were both situations where the “soap box” or podium speaker that has harnessed the attention of the crowd was usurped by something entirely foreign to the audience and their setting. However, while the Lettrist intervention probably earned the contempt of many a French church-goer, mine seemed to positively influence the atmosphere of the room, making the experience feel like a transactional performance of sorts whereby I gained the audience’s favor in exchange for a curious happening and a good laugh.

Intervention

 

 

Artwork #2 Appropriation: Go Carrom

by | Oct 31, 2018 |

Materials: 

  • Two bowls of Go stones
  • A dry-erase game board with targets of any number of rings (depending on desired difficulty)

Artist Statement:

For this assignment, I decided to appropriate the stones and bowls from a classic strategy board-game that predates even chess known as Go. The game board used was the underside of a dry-erase board from a board-game making kit that I’m using for another game in another class.

My goal for this project was to create a short, simple, fun game that retained some of the sensory experiences of its components. Carom alone is the result of decades of play and refinement, while Go is largely considered to be the ultimate strategy game, focused on knowing the mind of the opponent, the sensory and aesthetic experience of playing the game itself, and the creation of a celestial landscape that mirrors the universe itself through the regular procedure of play.

I was pleasantly surprised during play to find that the sensory and aesthetic appeal of both games was retained in this hybrid. Flicking a stone just hard enough for it to land in the perfect spot, knocking your opponent’s stones off of an advantageous position, or even just feeling the the stones click against each other as you reach in the bowl are all experiences that coalesce into a delightful amalgam of the sensory impact afforded by both games.

The original idea for this piece was inspired by Maciunas’ Fluxkits, whereby each item contained within served some aesthetic purpose as a set-piece for preservation and interaction. As such, I had meant to find an adequately appealing game board and some other items that would enhance the experience, but I ended up settling for the dry-erase stand-in from my other game. In doing so, I decided not to place the entire thing in a box or case as it might have been confusing to make sense of these disparate pieces on one’s own. The end result manages to feel like what a Saudi Arabian boy (Carrom is popular in Saudi Arabia, where I was born and raised) might think of doing with a set Go stones he’s never seen before.

Appropriation S&T – Twice “What Is Love?”

by | Oct 30, 2018 | ,

This music video is for a song titled “What Is Love?” by a K-Pop group called Twice and features each of the nine members presented as characters in different iconic films such as Romeo and Juliet, Pulp Fiction, La La Land, etc.

Music Video:

Side by Side Comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQRLlAafBL4

 

Artwork #1: “Fresh Attempt”

by | Oct 30, 2018 | ,

Final Score

When you wake up on a cloudy day

Catch rainwater in an empty medicine bottle.

Do this for a month, filling more bottles as desired.

Then take the water and wash your bedsheets in it.

 

Author’s Notes

This piece is a metaphorical comparison of coping methods. It doesn’t take a stance on what is right or wrong, but rather a comment on how our coping methods are often ineffective ways of dealing with a problem with issues that might be more deeply rooted.

 

Documentation

I found some creative ways to collect rainwater. It took a while because rain doesn’t really fall in the same place so much as it just collects in areas after it falls. By the time it was full enough for me to try washing my sheets, I basically just made a small wet mark that dried in a matter of minutes. Ultimately though, I can say that the score played out the way I intended it to.

Not so Hungry Not so Hungry Hippos

by | Oct 18, 2018 | ,

Artist Statement: Not so Hungry Not so Hungry Hippos

This works intention was to appropriate a childhood game and incorporate adult-life concepts into the gameplay. The childhood game modified for this project was Hungry Hungry Hippos and the concept from adult life was dietary restrictions. I represented prominent symptoms of four human dietary issues through the certain penalties players receive when consuming colored pills. For instance, lactose intolerance is known to cause diarrhea/flatulence, this is represented by the player disposing of half their stomach contents before tallying up points.

I was attempting to change a fast paced game of greed into a slower game of timing a strategy. This was well accomplished after eliminating the hypoglycemic diet. That diet penalty was activated when it did not eat a certain food so it was incentivized to eat more, rather than the other players who were penalized for eating voraciously. Without that intense energy stirring the pills, all the players were more forced to be more cautious when consuming. A strategic element of timing developed which slowed the pace of the game. Players also discovered new ways to manipulate the hippo head. They found stages in its opening depending on how hard you pressed down on the button which they used to help manipulate which pills fell into their mouths.

Balancing the amount and type of pills in play was going to be a main issue to work out. For the first iteration of playlets attempted to work out a decent balance between the pill types by working out percentages and ratios of probability in respect to each hippo. After play testing, slight adjustments were made by one or two units to polish off balance.

My piece Not so Hungry Not so Hungry Hippos comes from the vein of fluxes artists reinventing classic games while weaving in a new narrative or alternate meaning. Yoko Ono’s “Play It By Trust” is a prime example by altering the colors of the classic game Chess to reflect a more serious theme, the pointlessness of war. My piece follows a similar structure by appropriating the classic game of Hungry Hungry Hippos and changing the colors to reflect a new meaning found in adult life.

Appropriation Game: Not so Hungry Not so Hungry Hippos

Game Contents:

  • Game base
  • Four hippo heads and bodies
  • A malleable Clay/Putty substance
  • 43 Marbles
    • 20 Normal Red marbles
    • 23 food marbles
      • 5 Yellow
        • Peanut
      • 5 Pink
        • gluten
      • 6 Black
        • Sugar
      • 6 White
        • Milk
      • 1 Blue
        • Cure-all

How to set up: Start off with all the food units in the eating zone. Fill up each marble release aria with normal (non food) red marbles

How to win: Whoever’s hippo gains the most points after 6 rounds wins.

Rules: Every hippo has a unique dietary restriction. Depending on the diet, the player will receive a penalty upon consuming food units that negatively correlate with their diet. The hippo that collects the one cure-all (blue) marble will not be affected by their diet for that round.

Hippo Diets:

Diabetes

If consumed 3 or more sugar pills in one round, all red pills don’t count

(Symptom: increased thirst and hunger, frequent urination)

Lactose Intolerance

If consumed any milk pills, lose 1/2 of points gained that round

(Symptom: diarrhea, flatulence)

Anaphylaxis Shock

If consumed any peanut pills, pass out for next round

(Symptom: anaphylaxis shock)

Gluten Intolerance

Stick a quantity of putty equal to the size of the pink pills consumed in the stomach of the hippo.

(Symptom: bloating and abdominal pain)

How to play:

Before playing, the players pick dietary issues at random

Once that game begins all the hippos can consume the colored pellets. Once all pellets are consumed, the eating phase ends.

The players then check the contents they have collected. Every pellet counts as a point. Dietary penalties are activated in this phase if a hippo eats a pill that interferes with their diet.

After six rounds the player with the most points wins

 

Iterations:

Not so Hungry Not so Hungry Hippos underwent 3 iterations. The changes between iterations improved major balance issues and changed the functions of certain diets to bring gameplay closer to a reimagining of Hungry Hungry hippos.

Changes from Iteration 1 to Iteration 2

-Replaced hypoglycemia diet with diabetes diet

-Why: During play-tests, hypoglycemia was at an unfair advantage because it received a penalty for not eating enough sugars. Essentially punished for not eating enough, where the other players were forced to play more cautiously because they can not eat certain things.

-Added 2 more milk and 1 more peanut pill

-Why: To improve balance between the players

-Changed the punishment of anaphylaxis-lips from sticking putty onto the hippos lips too putting putty in the hippo’s stomach.

-Why: The weight of the putty was too much for the hippo eating mechanism to perform effectively, it was too much of a disadvantage.

Changes from Iteration 2 to Iteration 3

-Renamed the ‘anaphylaxis-lips’ diet to ‘gluten intolerance’ and the Strawberry pill to the Gluten pill

-Why: The new rule of putting putty in the stomach of the hippo is more accurate to the sensation of bloating found in gluten intolerant people.

 

Playtesting:

  • The play testing video below depicts usual gameplay.
  • The play testing video below is when the hypoglycemic hippo was passed out for a turn. This reflects the more cautious gameplay I discussed.