What are people afraid of and what does this have to do with games?

What gives us that weird feeling in our stomach, of something constricting around our gut, when we read something really good? Is it a theme, is it a word?

I recently came across a collection of six word stories. I knew about these for a while now, but only now found them in a collection. These are, as far as I know, from a challenge at one point on Reddit. I read through them, and realized that they could easily be classified in a few categories, which made me think about what affects us on an emotional scale as humans. As such, I decided to write this blog post in which I do my best to categorize the stories and see the underlying content, hoping to understand more about what gives us the proverbial “feels”.

Before we go forward, I should mention that the stories were written, probably, by people who are mostly from the United States of America, and that this post contains triggers for suicide, rape, self harm and death (aka trigger warning).

First, I must say that I tried as hard as I could to keep each story to one category, but there are a few of them who were either too vague or I couldn’t decide to which it fit better, so I assigned them to more than one category. Let’s start with something light!

Love gone wrong

• Brought roses home. Keys didn’t fit.
• I met my soulmate. She didn’t.
• What’s your return policy on rings?
• Strangers. Friends. Best friends. Lovers. Strangers.

These ones are, I think, the lightest in sentiment of all the stories that I have found. They talk about people being dumped and not being loved back. While these stories can affect us quite a lot, I found that love gone wrong had the fewest stories. When thinking about this is, it kind of struck me that it’s possible that we overdid this theme (someone say Romeo and Juliet?) and that’s why we may feel desensitized when experiencing fictional love stories gone wrong. The next field contains the most entries, as it is definitely something that affects us all, so much, in fact, that it even contains subcategories.

Death

Death of a child

• The smallest coffins are the heaviest.
• Birth certificate. Death certificate. One pen.
• Ever seen chalk outlines that small?
• What’s left: training wheels, broken helmet.
• Child’s school: Shooting. Caller ID: School.

Death of a loved one

• Finally spoke to her. Left flowers.
• Siri, delete Mom from my contacts.
• It’s our fiftieth, table for one.
• When you died, Christmas died too.
• Born a twin, graduated only child.
• I still make coffee for two.

Death of someone while in the army

• An only son, a folded flag.
• Dad left; a flag came back.
• Uniforms ring the doorbell. God, no.

Suicide

• One bullet is a lifetime supply.
• One bullet was cheaper than therapy.
• Jumped. Then I changed my mind.
• Wrote note. Took pills. Now…wait.
• Suicide note marked: Return to sender.
• My mom never wanted me anyway.

Miscellaneous about death

• Goodbye mission control. Thanks for trying.
• We’re naming the disease after you.
• Just Married! Read the shattered windshield.
• He hit send, then a tree.
• Cancer, only three months left. Pregnant.
• The sign said stop, I didn’t.

I find it very interesting that I could divide death into so many subcategories, and could have probably divided them into even more. As simple as the concept of death is, it’s surprisingly complex how people perceive it. I’m not entirely surprised, however, that I had a special section for death of a child and death in the army, as these are huge fears in our current society, with child-death, I believe, being a prevalent fear since forever. Insofar as games go, even searching on a single indie game website such as Newgrounds for the term “death” yields around 900 results. True, most of these are shooty shooty death games where you’re the killer, but there’s still a good percentage of them that are contemplations on the notion. The first games that come to mind when I think of death, however, are Binding of Isaac, The Graveyard and Beyond:Two Souls. Definitely, death as a concept will continue to be explored through all types of media, in all kinds of concepts, not the least of which are above. The next category is related to this one closely, as it deals with disease.

Illness in loved ones

• Introduced myself to mother again today.
• I’m faking Alzheimer’s. said Granddad. Again.
• We’re naming the disease after you.

I haven’t played many games where you need to deal with sickness and illnesses, although having a loved one in the picture definitely gives you a sense of depth, allowing you to know who you’re fighting for. Although I can think of maybe one game that approaches this theme, its representation in other medium such as photography, film and animation is much more prevalent (for example think of the plot of My Neighbor Totoro). I believe this says a lot about the incipience of games as an emotional expressive medium. It definitely says that we need to work more on expressing and inducing emotions in our chosen artistic environment. I’ve seen more, however, of the next theme in games. Maybe because it’s easier to create a scenario around this, maybe because so many of us relate to that, maybe because it makes for a good horror premise.

Being left alone/Not being accepted/Not belonging

• My Dads met at Bible camp.
• Goodbye mission control. Thanks for trying.
• Voyager still transmitted, but Earth didn’t.
• Mom taught me how to shave.
• I just saw my relfection blink.
• Sorry soldier, shoes sold in pairs.
• Does Santa love rich kids more?
• Passengers, this isn’t your captain speaking.
• Mom says I can’t call anymore

These make for a variety of scenarios which I’ve seen explored in various media, from Brokeback Mountain and Tropic Thunder (the trailer for Satan’s Alley) to Captain America and Gravity, so I won’t comment more on these. They are very varied and usually can have a secondary theme contemplated through them. The next topic is probably the harshest one in the current social environment.

Rape

• No Dad, don’t touch me there!
• She said no, he didn’t care.

Still a taboo subject, I believe this needs very careful consideration before approaching, so I won’t elaborate more in this post on this theme.

And there you have it. Six word stories, dozens of them, categorized into their overarching themes. Does this say something about our society and culture, about our fears and what gives us the feelies? Definitely. So feel free to make whatever you want out of them, I’m happy I have managed to sort through them and maybe, just maybe, see a pattern and some spots where I could help through making games.

Chris F.

Reference links to the source material:
http://imgur.com/gallery/FP4Cn
http://imgur.com/gallery/1BdMK
http://imgur.com/gallery/sGSOG
http://imgur.com/gallery/XbL7y
http://imgur.com/gallery/FIV39
http://imgur.com/gallery/hgpgF

2D or 3D, that is the question

While doing games design, at least in our course, you will learn about 3D as well as 2D. In our case, we use Flash for 2D by default and Unity and UDK for 3D design. I personally am an advocate of 2D and 2D games since I love the restrictions of the 2D environment, with small exceptions (platformers, I’m looking at you), but this morning I really had a thought about what type of game I would do in my second semester when I will have to make a 3D game. This post is a small discussion about how I see 3D in comparison with 2D from a games design student’s perspective.

Generating creative ideas talk

I enjoy doing presentations from time to time, usually about creativity, photography or, recently, game design. Seeing as how now I am a second year at University Campus Suffolk, and our course did a new thing where 3rd year’s presented their accumulated knowledge to the 1st year’s, I talked with Rob, my course leader, and managed to snatch a spot to do a presentation of my own on a topic that I think it’s highly relevant to 1st year’s and Art students in general (our Games Design is a Bachelor of Arts, so we’re all artists here). This is the extended version of my presentation, with relevant examples and a more cohesive line of thought than my classroom presentation, since that was the first presentation I gave in English to a class full of people since my first ever presentation about 10 years ago.

Enjoy!

We are Game Designers part 1

As children, we designed games. Tons of them. We designed, we played and we iterated the hell out of them. My friends and I, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, designed over 10 games I think, and iterated them and older ones time and time again. In this post, I just want to talk about what I find fascinating about that, and how I love my childhood. As today’s game designer that I am.

That sharpie is for prototyping later

Randomness and story arcs

During one of our first lectures, we discussed about how warning the players that certain things would or might happen is good for the game and the player. How is a player supposed to know what his actions might do in a game? How would he know which path is right to choose? In class, the main reason for this was the designer’s duty to inform the player that, in Mario for example, if he presses the X button, then Mario will jump and only jump. Same for pressing the Y button that causes Mario to shoot jumping fireballs out of his mouth if he has eaten the magic jalapeño flower, while HOLDING that same button would make Mario sprint. Now, I remember that I wasn’t told any of these in Supermario Bros. back when I played it on the NES, but nevermind. The idea was that the player must know what his (physical) actions (over the controller and/or buttons in game) do, and him being able to plan accordingly. How would we have felt if the Y and X button suddenly got inverted? Anyway, I’m deviating. This post is about how the same lecture dealt with RPG’s, a genre in which I wholly agree that that idea is wrong. Let me explain…

Life as remediation

We call the representation of one medium in another remediation

Games are just “interactive entertainment”. They were here after the films;
Films are just moving photographs. They were here after the photographs;
Photographs are just standardized paintings, done through a different mechanical and chemical process. They were here after the paintings;
Paintings are just colored drawings. They were here after the drawings;
Drawings are just drawn thoughts. They were here after the thoughts;
Thoughts are just translated electrical impulses gotten from the brain as a result to the outward activity from what our bodies sense. They were here after the senses;
Senses are…as far as I can see at the moment.

Taking EVERYTHING into account – design perspective

I like new ideas for games. Of course I do, I’m supposed to be a game designer. After all, if we don’t like new game ideas, who would? There are two things that I want to share with you today. One of them baffled me with the tech that’s behind it, while the second one just served as a reminder for something that should’ve stuck with me from the first days in uni.

The games that I want to talk about are “Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint” (iOS) and “Pixeljunk 4AM” (PS3 Move).

Global Games Jam 2012 – The Snake-A-Maze experiment

This post has spent some time in the making, but I believe that now is a good time to publish it. I have participated in the Global Games Jam 2012. Myself, along with a team of 4 other 1st years from University Campus Suffolk, spent 48 hours making a game from scratch, on a set theme. My own contributions to the game were in the form of doing some of the coding, debugging a lot and helping in coming up with the general idea. Also this was the first time I created and recorded sounds, which I found extremely interesting and this could be something I believe I would like to do again, at least once.

For more information about the Global Games Jam, check out their website.

Now, why exactly am I writing about the Global Games Jam? The reason is simple: I’ve managed to create a full game, from start to finish, with 5 people, in 48 hours. Sure, it’s not bug-free, but those are minor details. I’ve been trying to create a full game with another team of 5 people for the last 6 months and we’re somewhere along 3/4’s of the game. I want to talk about good ideas and good managing, being able to do a crunch session in which all the members of the team work together and are together in the same room and do nothing else but work (and occasionally go for a pizza).

The whole experience was great and I learned lots of new things, including how to start thinking as a good object-oriented programmer (taking the lead from the senior 1st programmer which was in our team).

When the theme was assigned…

Shifting Maze – Iterations 3 and 4

In the last post, I had a good idea (in my opinion) for a nice little strategic game with random elements, but the first two iterations relied too heavily on luck, so I decided to rethink some of the game.

Rethinking

Shifting Maze – Iterations 1 and 2

One of the most interesting things that game designers can do, in my opinion, is to make paper prototypes of games, and board games. Nothing quite compares with the feel you get from building up a game from scratch in 30 minutes and then having people play it and give you feedback on it. To compare, it took me around 3-4 hours to write up the balloon game that’s in a post below, just because it was my first solo-take on a coded game, without help from tutors or tutorials.

So here’s the second board game I did since I arrived at UCS, the first one being a not-so-genius race-to-the-finish game. I will present the concept and iterative process as this game advances. At the moment it’s at its 3rd iteration, so I will post the early 2 iterations now and the 3rd one separately a bit later.

The whole idea of this game came when Rob challenged us to make a game in which dice would not be used to decide how many squares you move, after giving us a squared board on which we could try to do our game. I put on my “challenge accepted” face and gave it a go. After a few turns I decided I didn’t like the board, so set out to make my own. Having the idea roaming in my head for quite a while, I decided to do an ever shifting maze game.