See the video here.

(An embedded player from video.google.com was here. It used Flash, which browsers no longer support.)

Sorry about the incorrect aspect ratio, but I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to fix it, with no success. The web is kind of sad sometimes.

Here’s the link to the article at NextGen Player.

Ben Fritz at Variety recently wrote a column wondering why there’s so little industry participation in these awards, and postulating that it’s because the industry is anti-union. After all, to be eligible for the awards, game writers only need to join the Video Game Caucus and pony up some cash ($75 a year). No problem, right?

Being self-employed and having no employees, I have no reason to be pro- or anti-union. But I am definitely anti- these awards; they are insulting to game developers and serve no real purpose for anyone else except the WGA.

The problem is that it’s not really an award ceremony. It’s a membership drive masquerading as an award ceremony, and that’s a large part of the insult. You can tell it’s not really an award ceremony because of their decision to exclude most people from qualifying! So, here’s what’s going on: they are giving out pretend awards, in order to get people to join their caucus. Implicit in this action is the message that we are too dumb to notice what they are doing, or else vain enough that we don’t care what’s going on as long as we get some awards. I don’t take either of those as a compliment.

I would not mind participating in an award ceremony that is honestly trying to recognize the best in video game writing. When the WGA sat down to create their awards, they could have made this their priority: that the awards would go to the people most deserving, and over time would build a reputation of respectability, giving game writers something real to aspire to. Along with the award nominations they could have sent out a letter saying “Hey, please join our guild; guild membership does not influence the awards in any way, but we feel that we have a positive contribution to make to the game industry.”

Instead, they mandate caucus membership, with the obvious effect that the awards probably won’t go to the best games. So the structure becomes this: you give them a little something by making their guild more powerful, they give you a little something back by maybe giving you an award. It’s just slimy, and if the public were to assume that these awards were chosen based only on quality, then it would be fundamentally corrupt.

I said that all this was just part of the insult. The rest of the insult is that, apparently, by joining the caucus you are not even a real member of the WGA, because hey, just because we are giving you an award for outstanding video game writing doesn’t mean you are a real writer. This is made very clear on the first page of the application (see the sentence that I’ve hilit in yellow):

Video Game Writers Caucus membership does not provide the right to vote in WGAW elections, to run for office or to attend WGAW membership meetings for the Writer’s Guild of America, West Inc.

The bolding and italics are theirs. They want to be very sure about this point!

Suppose a video game writer felt very pro-union and wanted to join the WGA. After reading this he might feel a little miffed, and wonder, okay, if this doesn’t make me a real member, what does? So he goes to the WGA’s web page to find out. What he sees is that he has to accrue a bunch of points by doing radio, TV and movie stuff. In other words, there is no path available to him for actual guild membership.

But wait — what about authors of books, short stories, poems, and whatever else? That’s writing, isn’t it? Oh, those people join the Authors Guild, a completely separate entity.

Since the writing in Braid is patterned after book writing, not TV or movie writing, I then feel especially out-of-place in this whole arrangement — hey, I should be submitting the game to the Authors Guild Video Game Writing Awards, except that those don’t exist.

Braid also has problems with the WGA awards because the game contains no explicit writing credit, which one of the documents says very clearly disqualifies Braid immediately, though a clause elsewhere says that maybe I could petition them. But this, and other parts of the application, make clear that the WGA is targeting large-team industrially-created games, and that indie games are out of their area of concern; this reinforces to me the notion that this is about business, and money, and union power, rather than being about quality. (I guess to appease them for my next game, instead of saying “A game by…” in the credits, I can say “Designed by Jonathan Blow, Written by Jonathan Blow, Programmed by Jonathan Blow, Business Development by Jonathan Blow, Producer: Jonathan Blow, Key Grip: Jonathan Blow,” and try to put my name in there as many times as I could before I get to David Hellman, Edmund McMillen, Sean Barrett and Harry Mack. Yeah, that would be a lot more elegant.)

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t participate: I do not feel that these awards are worthy of respect. This has nothing to do with my feelings about the WGA as a whole; I don’t know anything about the WGA, so I can’t form an opinion. But this was a horrible way for them to try and make a first impression with an industry they’d like to break into.

Jason Rohrer’s art game Passage, a work that has inspired many developers since its original release a year ago, is now available on the iPhone for the low low price of 99 cents.

Passage is a game that I recommend everyone play, especially if you are interested in game design. And if you’ve already played it, here’s your chance to have a portable version, and to support the art game community, all for a meager sum.

The PC version of Passage is still free; you can get it at Jason’s web site.

Here it is as a zip file (about 33 megabytes) containing the slides and an mp3.

This lecture focuses on the story-centric paradigm that we use to design a large number of games, and why I think it is problematic. Both pre-authored and dynamic story are discussed. It’s a heavily-revised version of this lecture given a few months ago in Brighton; This new version is probably better.

This year at the Tokyo Game Show, the Sense of Wonder Night event was held for the first time ever. This was a session where developers from around the world gave 10-minute presentations on their unconventional game designs, the idea being to inspire the designers in the audience, and give them a good summary of some of the things being done on the avant-garde.

Even if you follow the Western indie game scene, there will probably be some surprises there for you; often games that are made in Japan don’t become well-known in the West, because of the language barrier.

You can follow that link to the Sense of Wonder home page, where videos of all the presentations are posted (they are on YouTube).

(In related news, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop page is a bit out of date, so we are going to update it soon and also put out the Call for Participation for 2009; and the fact that SOWN is posting videos seems like a really good idea, so we are going to try and do videos for 2009 as well).

[Note: Thanks to Tim at the Indie Games Blog for posting the original notice of this.]

Perhaps a little bit of ranting makes all the difference. This week on their podcast, Jeff Roberts and Casey Muratori explained the situation very well. (Both Jeff and Casey are in the credits for Braid, for those looking for a Braid connection here).

If you are interested in the future of games, and for some reason you don’t think advertising is bad, please listen to the following excerpt:

(Yes, David Perry, you too.)

Here’s a direct-download link if you want to save the mp3.

Early in this discussion, Casey refers to Sut Jhally’s lecture “How TV Exploits its Audience”, which is available for a small fee at this link. Or, here is a Sut Jhally web site with some free clips.

If you liked this discussion, you may wish to visit: The main page for The Jeff and Casey Show, where you can download any of the episodes (28 so far!).

As a special bonus, as mentioned in the excerpt, here’s David Lynch’s opinion on the matter:

The interview discusses some of the design philosophy behind Braid, why innovation in game design isn’t so important, life as an indie developer, and ideas about where we can go when pushing on the boundaries of game design.

(Note: The MMO project hinted at, at the end of this interview, is not the post-Braid project any more. Since then I had an idea for a project I am much more motivated to pursue.)

Jonathan Blow gave the closing keynote speech at Games:EDU South on July 29, 2008 in Brighton, England. This one-hour lecture is about three ways in which current mainstream games are inherently conflicted, and how this holds them back from affecting people as strongly as the forms of linear media they are striving to emulate. Art games are used to build a perspective from which to see this problem and maybe attack it a little bit.

You can download the lecture as a .zip file containing the PowerPoint slides, along with an mp3 of the audio:

(Games:EDU Keynote, 35MB).

Unfortunately the recording came out at a low quality; the questions from the audience at the end are difficult or impossible to hear, but hopefully the answers are detailed enough to provide clues as to the questions.

Sometimes art forms go through various periods, where the artists are inspired by similar themes and pursue various avenues in the same conceptual space.

I guess this is our Feeding Human Food to Animals period.

The first game is… fruit mystery.

The second game is… Jason Rohrer’s new artgame sketch, Regret.

(picture stolen from tigsource.com).