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GDC 2013: The Experimental Gameplay Workshop

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The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is an annual event at GDC that showcases some of the most innovative, intriguing, bizarre and (of course) experimental ideas in game design. It was founded in 2002 by Jonathan Blow and has been held every year since, organized now by Robin Hunicke, Daniel Benmergui and Richard Lemarchand. Some majorly successful projects have been been shown off at this event, including Braid, Katamari Damacy and Portal. However, the event doesn’t focus on what the organizers feel will be commercially successful. Their goal is to bring to light the ideas that test the boundaries of the medium and to encourage experimentation in mechanics and design. Games entered into the EGW don’t even have to be finished, so long as their prototypes yield some interesting and innovative ideas.

“By defying conventions and traditions in search for new genres and ideas, experimental games aim to inspire and ignite the imagination of all game makers.”

Here are the games showcased at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop.

The Castle Doctrine by Jason Rohrer

The first game in the line-up is something I’ve been trying to conquer ever since gaining entry into its pre-alpha early last month. The Castle Doctrine by Jason Rohrer (known for Passage and Sleep is Death) is a “massively multiplayer” game about home defense and home invasion, one part puzzle, two parts strategy, all parts horror. Rohrer took half of his time demoing the game showing off the home defense segments, introducing the audience to his new family, his empty home, the vault which holds their life savings and the vulnerability of it all. He demonstrated how building a wall around the vault and encasing it completely is not a valid solution. You must be able to break into your own vault without the use of tools in order to move on to the home invasion portion, which brings a host of possible strategies into play: traps involving powered switches and pressure plates, pitbulls and electrified flooring. Rohrer created an easy setup just to save time, a small room with a door in the back, before going off to explore the creations of other players. Many times, he’d enter a home and would be immediately drawn back by hordes of pitbulls, met by laughter from the audience. When he returned to his own home and found the wife’s sprite, shot dead, the audience laughed again. This time, wavering, hesitant.

Earlier in the demo, Rohrer had explained that the game’s themes were rooted within his family’s own fears of invasion, of violation and the scathing paranoia that comes with living in a bad neighborhood. In my own playthroughs, I’ve seen the dead wife many times, but for some reason its imagery struck hard watching Rohrer play the demo. Maybe because watching it, I was free from distractions. I was not planning or strategizing or calculating, all of which the gameplay requires, and none of which helps me really feel anything for the little pixelated family. Where permadeath should grant value to this family, the game’s difficulty destroys it. You’ll see many families in a single day, unless you’ve mastered the game. I have not yet done so. Maybe this is why watching Rohrer’s playthrough was something different. As an isolated session, the sentiment came through. Despite some of its failings (it’s still in alpha), The Castle Doctrine is an intriguing and dark game that continues to beg my attention. It was a good start to the workshop!

Mushroom 11 by Itay Keren

I was excited to see this game up next, as I had the chance to play it at the Media Indie Exchange, held at the IGN offices last Monday night. It began as a prototype for last year’s Global Game Jam, the theme of which was Ouroboros. Created by Itay Keren and his wife Julia at NYU, the prototype won the Best Game Design award out of the jam location’s 30 games. This encouraged Keren to continue with development, and good thing he did! Mushroom 11 is easily one of the most engaging games I played at GDC. It’s a side-scrolling platformer, to put it plainly, but the “character” you control is a static, amorphous blob of cells, something like a formless fungus. To navigate this organism across the game world, you swipe at it from certain angles, destroying the cells that you touch and causing more to sprout and grow from the other side. The organism can be split into multiple pieces, which will continue to survive so long as there is at least one cell left. Using this interaction, you must navigate physics-based puzzles, lava pits, tunnels, lifts and more, taking advantage of the organism’s lack of mobility and growth behaviors to do so.

While demoing this game myself at the mixer earlier that week, I overheard another player tell Keren that he was surprised this hadn’t been done before, given how natural and intuitive the gameplay felt – not to say, of course, that Keren’s idea is not original, because it is. It’s just moving to play something that feels so fresh, yet familiar. It’s all wrapped up in some gorgeous artwork too, with what looks like the ruins of civilization in the backdrop. Could this strange creature be one of the few lifeforms left on the planet?

Plus Gun by Kevin Cancienne

Plus Gun is a new game from one of the creators of the classic Half-Life mod, Science and Industry. I don’t really like referring to games as addictive, so I won’t… but the game is certainly fun and time-consuming, even moreso if you have a competitive side (When it comes to skill-based games like this one, I know I do). Plus Gun was made out of creator Kevin Cancienne’s love of short games, like ZiGGURAT; games that “enable players to build expertise in a system.” It’s a score-based first-person shooter where you fend off waves of enemies, which increase in quantity and type over time. There’s a twist, though. You don’t directly earn points by defeating enemies, but instead must collect the resources they drop – red cubes, yellow diamonds and green triangles – and use them to generate points using a “point gun.” These resources are also used to purchase new and upgraded guns, including a shotgun and a railgun, so you have to prioritize upping your score with maintaining better weapons. Splurge on points and you’ll be stuck trying to repel entire armies of aliens with just a measly pistol. Spend all your money on weapons and you’ll generate no points. You have to strike a balance, and because the buy menu is live, there’s no time to stop and think things through. The action is hectic, ongoing and exponential.

6180 the Moon by Sun Park and Jerome Baek

This is another one of those games, like Mushroom 11, where the developers managed to take a very simple, yet solid mechanic, and make something beautiful out of it. A collaboration between Sun Park and Jerome Baek (who, if I remember correctly, is about 15 or 16-years-old), 6180 the Moon is a platformer where you play as the moon on a journey to find the sun. The game connects the top and the bottom of the screen so that jumping is not limited by the size of the space above you. Jumping up and out of the screen brings you in from the bottom, making the underside of platforms as important as the top. Similarly, falling off a platform and out of the screen brings you in from the top. It’s difficult to describe in a lot of detail because I haven’t had the chance to play it myself, but from what I’ve seen of the trailer, the developers do a lot with the mechanic beyond what was shown during the workshop’s demo. Take a look at the trailer above, or grab it here on Desura! It’s also on Steam Greenlight, so be sure to vote.

Perspective by Pohung Chen and Jason Meisel

This is one a lot of indie gamers are probably already familiar with. Perspective, developed by a group of students at DigiPen (there to present were Pohung Chen and Jason Meisel), is a game that combines platforming of both the three-dimensional and two-dimensional variety. It begins as a side-scroller, demonstrating that the blue platforms are safe, the orange are not, the player can jump and so on. Typical platforming mechanics. Then, in a Fez-like revelation, the game unveils the third dimension, rotating the world to demonstrate the way certain platforms lined up from a different angle can create a new one for the player to navigate. The levels following allow you to switch between a first-person perspective, where you’re in control of the camera and the player-character remains suspended in place, and then again to the 2D platformer, where you can move the character just left or right. Using this mechanic, a shallow pillar in the foreground becomes a platform for the character to jump to, or a hallway lined with blue tiles becomes a walkway uniting both sides from a specific angle. It’s not as complicated as I’m probably making it sound, and it’s a lot of fun in action. The demo was met with multiple rounds of applause as the developers navigated their own odd multi-dimensional-based platforming puzzles.

Miegakure by Marc ten Bosch

Speaking of multi-dimensions. Inspired by Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 satirical novella Flatland and its examination of the third dimension from the perspective of two dimensional beings, Marc ten Bosch’s Miegakure is something of a “romance of many dimensions” in itself. Just based on its demonstration, I know that Miegakure is not the kind of game I can describe without playing it. Bosch began his presentation by showing us a version of his game that operates within 2D and 3D space. Between two characters, there is a wall that the player-character can’t navigate around, being limited to only one plane. Bosch then rotates the game on its axis, moves the character a few tiles to the side and rotates it again to show that the character is now able to walk by the wall. He does this again until the player-character and the NPC are on the same plane. This is what the third dimension would look like for a 2D being. Then, Bosch brought us into the 4th. His game Miegakure is one that navigates four spatial dimensions in much the same way his first demo navigated the third. I think. The reason it’s hard to describe or even conceptualize is obviously because we can’t visually depict what a fourth spatial dimension would look like. Bosch’s game only simulates the possible physicalities. This opens up a lot of doors. Jonathan Blow has referred to it as one of the “great puzzle games of all time,” one of the rare examples of design that works to expand the mind (note: the video above is from an earlier prototype).

As for what the title means and what it signifies, Bosch described it beautifully to Gamasutra in an interview from 2010: “Miegakure literally means ‘hidden from sight.’ It is a general Japanese aesthetics term, but it often refers to a traditional landscaping technique that emphasizes the effect of only partial exposure of garden elements. During a walk along a garden path, a tree or hill might obscure the view, letting the invisible part be imagined. Getting only glimpses of the whole garden creates an illusion of vastness and impression that there are hidden beauties beyond. The title reflects the fact that the player can only see along three out of four dimensions at a time, leaving most of the world perpetually out of view. In fact, modern scientific theories such as string theory predict that our world may actually exist in four or more spatial dimensions, but its high-dimensional beauties are hidden from us.”

Starseed Pilgrim by Alexander Martin (Droqen) and Ryan Roth

Starseed Pilgrim is a game that defies explanation, not because it’s necessarily complicated to do so, but because it risks ruining what the game has to offer. It’s largely a game of pattern, discovery and mystery, a puzzle game that is a puzzle in itself. Droqen, the designer, was hesitant to dig too deep into his own game for the audience, lest some of its secrets be revealed. For some insight into the game and its design, check out the write-up and interview Chris did with Droqen a few weeks ago.

Kachina by Ben Esposito

This was one of the most strangely charming games shown off during the event, from the creator of The Unfinished Swan and Brooklyn Trash King, Ben Esposito. You play as a hole that grows larger the more things that fall into it. The obvious comparison here, and one that a lot of people are making, is Katamari Damacy. Both Katamari and Kachina share similarly cute, quirky art styles and a running theme of accumulation and growth, only Kachina’s twist is the way it highlights the loss that the growth in his game entails. Each level is an assortment of objects, from sprouts of grass, to rocks, to fences, to animals like chickens or a fox. The beginning stages are just about navigating the surface and letting things fall in, but later levels introduce the ability to spit objects back out and begin to play around with some puzzle-like scenarios. One scene depicts two caves which house some kind of glowy-eyed fiends. Absorb some carrots in the foreground and spit them back out in front of the caves, and two bunnies hop out. Let the bunnies fall in, and pretty soon they’ve multiplied, allowing the hole to grow big enough to take in the mountain in the background. At this point, Kachina feels very exploratory in its ideas, an experiment in what kinds of gameplay an interaction like this can offer. I’m really excited to see where this one is going!

Exuberant Struggle, Glitch Tank, Multicolour Alien Olympic, Kompendium, O by Michael Brough

Next up was a series of multiplayer games by Corrypt developer Michael Brough. Rather than focusing on a single project or accomplishment, Brough instead wanted to discuss his design philosophy when it comes to the two-player game, a format that he referred to in his talk as “very special.” He spoke of the “intimacy” of two-player games, of exposing something of your own behavior or personality to your opponent or your partner through the act of play, and how this intimacy is good for us. Brough wrote an excellent blog post about this topic on his site, where he explains, “A two-player game is a tool for paying attention to someone and expressing yourself to them.” He goes on to list questions we should ask ourselves when designing two-player games, such as, “What virtues does it allow the players to display to each other?” and, “How can I direct the players’ attention onto each other rather than just onto the game?” What is frustrating is trying to get people to play multiplayer games with you in-person, especially when said games require high levels of strategy and hence, commitment. Andrew Bossche (aka Mammon Machine) discusses this in a blog post here. If you’re lucky enough to have some committed gamer friends nearby, get them to try out some of the games Brough showcased with you! They include Exuberant Struggle, Glitch Tank, Multicolour Alien Olympic, Kompendium and O.

Versu by Richard Evans and Emily Short

This is one of those games that makes me regret not having an iOS device (actually no, it just makes me sad that it’s only on iOS devices). Versu is a text-based “interactive storytelling platform” by Emily Short, who worked on Galatea and Alabaster, and Richard Evans, who worked on Black and White and The Sims 3. Rather than presenting players with simple choose-your-own-adventure style choices, the game is non-linear, featuring dynamic NPCs that react according to premise, social situation, personality and their current mood. As the devs put it, there’s some “weird-ass simulation going on.” The demo was met with a lot of laughter.

Spaceteam by Henry Smith

Spaceteam is an iOS party game that involves screaming technobabble at your friends. It’s a co-op game for 2-4 people, where each player’s iOS device displays a unique control panel, as well as the status of their space ship. The instructions on operating your own control panel, and all the weird dials, switches, sliders and buttons on it are sent to your teammates, who have to communicate them back to you via yelling (optional, but recommended). You, too, must relate instructions for your partners’ control panels in the same way. Instructions are time-sensitive since the ship is kind of falling apart, which is represented visually, via your control panel. Some elements of the game include (from the website): “Teamwork. Shouting. Confusion. An untimely demise. Beveled Nanobuzzers. Auxillary Technoprobes. Four-stroke Pluckers.”

Soundodger by Michael Molinari

Music games! They’re nothing new, but they’re still great. Soundodger seems a bit like Beat Hazard in that it’s a rhythm-based game that generates waves of enemies to music, only instead of blasting your way through the beats, you move through it. Hence Soundodger. It’s a musical bullet hell, and it’s beautiful!

Memory of a Broken Dimension by Ezra Hanson-White

“Yeah, it’s supposed to look like that.” Always a great thing to hear a designer say about their game (no, really, I love it). Out of all of these, Memory of a Broken Dimension is the game I’ve known about for the longest, and one that I’ve really been looking forward to. Sadly, the game didn’t show up at all on the projector, and so those in the audience unfamiliar with this project missed out on something great. The developer, Ezra Hanson-White, did just put up a demo on his site, so I hope at least something about this struck people enough to go look it up, whether that be the atmospheric whirrs and droning bass in the background or maybe just the mystery of not knowing what the hell they were supposed to be looking at.

Memory of a Broken Dimension starts out in a command prompt. A rudimentary understanding of DOS will get you through this initial section, but if you’re having trouble, refer to the article Chris wrote here. The commands needed are in spoiler tags. Once you’re in the world, it becomes a first-person exploration game, where viewing torn fragments of data from certain angles will line them up, allowing you to solidify them when possible, forming tangible objects. I love the glitchy, degraded VHS aesthetic. I wish the audience could’ve seen it, but at least they can check it out here! This game is just incredible.

Architecture Games by Eric Zimmerman

Next, Eric Zimmerman showed off a series of physical games he made with architect Nathalie Pozzi, one of which was an installation called Interference. Interference is a game made up of five steel walls, super-thin and suspended from the ceiling, with various patterns punctured into them. The walls act as vertical game boards, within which the game pieces are stuck. I’m not quite sure what the game itself is, but it’s played face-to-face (with the wall between two players). In this sense, the holes in the wall serve not only to hold the game pieces, but to allow the players to see each other. Just as Brough spoke of the intimacy of two-player games, Zimmerman discussed the dynamic of group interaction in physical installations. The game of Interference is not isolated to the game board itself, but plays out in the entire space, as players end up needing to steal pieces from other players in the room to carry on with their own game.

Another game shown by Zimmerman, also in collaboration with Pozzi, was Cross My Heart + Hope To Die, a strategic game for nine players that takes place within a life-sized labyrinth. The maze itself is made up of 20-foot tall walls of hanging, translucent fabric. Like Interference, it’s important that players can see each other through the walls, this time in brief glimpses, as silhouettes. The game is based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and is, as described on Pozzi’s website, “Part myth, part puzzle, and part life-sized video game,” an installation that “sculpts space for theatrical and strategic effects.”

Mexican Kitchen Workers by Brenda Romero

Mexican Kitchen Workers

Having been unable to film during this event, I feel like I missed a lot of good quotes from famed game designer Brenda Romero’s talk (I went old-school with the pen and paper. Note to self: bring a laptop next year). Romero’s newest traditional game, Mexican Kitchen Workers, was inspired by something she overheard a manager of a restaurant say to one of her clients while on a business lunch. Struck by the phrase, “Mexican Kitchen Workers,” and all that it entails, Romero set to work, putting together a prototype that initially ended up being a hypermathematical Restaurant City, to her distaste. One playtester, she recalls, fell asleep during a session, which Romero referred to as the harshest criticism.

Romero spent a lot of time working on-and-off on this project, during which she – in her words – ”fell in love with a Mexican” (that is, her husband John Romero). Romero was inspired by her husband’s grandmother’s cooking, as well as the family’s spontaneous efforts to put together a cookbook that could accurately capture all her homemade recipes after she, Socorro Romero, had passed away. This was, as Romero later explained to me in an e-mail, “the best possible way in which to remember her.” As research, Romero began breaking into restaurant kitchens, pretending to be looking for the bathroom, only to realize again and again that no matter what kind of restaurant she was in – Italian, Japanese, American – the kitchen workers were always Mexican. She became fascinated by the idea of people uniting over the preparation of their culture’s traditional food, and these men and women laboring over the food of others. While I’m unsure about the precise rules of the game (it’s still a prototype), Romero’s project aims to explore the system behind illegal immigration and other cultural issues. It’s something she referred to specifically in her talk as “complicity games.” I’m interested in seeing where this one goes.

Hit Me!, Ninja Shadow Warrior by Kaho Abe

Kaho Abe is a NYC-based designer interested in utilizing technology to facilitate face-to-face play. One literal example of this is her game Hit Me!, a two-player game where each participant wears a helmet with a button on top, the goal being (of course) to hit the other player’s button. Abe was inspired by games that value spectators as much as the players themselves, such as the sport of sumo wrestling. Ninja Shadow Warrior is a game that encourages multiplayer, rather than just requiring it as a rule, since the more players involved means more room for creativity and success. It’s a photobooth arcade game using the Kinect and a custom game cabinet that Abe built herself. The game casts the players as ninjas, who have to cooperatively shape themselves into objects displayed on screen, such as an elephant or a vase. Points are awarded for accuracy.

Searchlight by Margaret Robertson

The game Searchlight was borne out of the idea that a game utilizing the Kinect does not have to be about the Kinect itself. That is, players don’t have to be facing the Kinect, consciously gesturing at it, or even be aware of what it does. Game designer Margaret Robertson sought to create a screenless game that could have players directly interacting instead with physical objects, and that did not require any understanding of technology to be enjoyed. Searchlight is a game that involves two players, gathering props stacked across the life-sized game board and taking them back to their zone at either end of the space. The catch is they have to freeze every time the scanning searchlight is on them. The Kinect detects movement. Like Abe, Robertson wanted to create a game that was “spectatable,” where the audience could have fun calling out people caught in the searchlight, but also a game that was “legible, permeable, approachable,” something that people could understand just by watching, and then jump in to play themselves.

Tenya Wanya Teens by Keita Takahashi

After a host of insightful design philosophies and interactive installations had been demonstrated, we moved on to the last game of the night, Tenya Wanya Teens! A game about solving math problems, peeing and playing guitar, and not necessarily in that order (this one’s digital, so no worries). Tenya Wanya Teens is the result of a collaboration between Keita Takahashi, the man behind Katamari Damacy, Venus Patrol, and Wild Rumpus. I had the confused pleasure of seeing this game played at the Venus Patrol + Wild Rumpus party that Wednesday night, but it wasn’t until the EGW that I got a glimpse of the controller. A hefty, custom-built 16-button arcade brick of a thing with a single joystick. It’s not meant to be intuitive, but it sure is fun to watch people operate. The game itself is just as awkward. It’s something like a two-player side-scrolling beat-em-up, only instead of beating people up, you control two bumbling teenagers as they go about their day, waking up, brushing their teeth, going to school, finding porno mags hidden in the forest… Each action is assigned to a specific button on the controller-board-brick-thing, and finding the right one earns you points. Finding the wrong one means you’ll probably end up peeing on the whiteboard or taking a shower in class.

And on that note, there you have it! The Experimental Gameplay Workshop, GDC 2013.

Article header image courtesy of the Official GDC Flickr.



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