Readme.txt for Raspberry Originally written 9 January 2006; Updated 28 January 2006. This game is pretty hard to "get". The tutorial will tell you how to play the game, and some of the ideas that led to it, but some more explanation seems to be in order. The original idea was to try and explore the way music can induce emotion, and see if the same sort of thing can be done through gameplay -- that is, using rhythms of gameplay instead of sound to create an emotional reaction. That is a very difficult goal, and it's really unclear how to do it, since gameplay is a subtle thing. So this game was aiming at a humbler target: just to experiment with gameplay as a time-based composition (the same way music is), and see what happens. Given that, this game was moderately successful, because hey, expectations going into the project were zero (this could have been a totally random idea that didn't produce anything playable). At the same time, it's obvious that the gameplay does not inspire emotion the same way music does. You can view this one of two ways: (1) This is evidence that this idea/paradigm sucks, (2) It's just a really hard problem and it will be many years before we solve it, and it will take many steps like this game to get there. I don't know which of these is the right answer. I hope for (2), but I would not be surprised at (1). The "8 dots on the screen" idea was thought up as a framework that allows us to switch between gameplay modes (and thus player's goals) without the changes being too discontinuous. Having implemented this game, though, I now think that the same ideas could be executed better in a different form. I think that the successfulness of this game also depends heavily on the experience of the player, which is unfortunate. Most new players will kind of get the game on a surface level, and not see the deeper stuff, or just be confused. But for an expert or ideal player, the shifts in various gameplay parameters will cause definite shift in the player's intention. It is that intention shift that this game is trying to manipulate in patterns to create a music-like effect. Here are some examples of interesting / subtle things that happen in some of the compositions, that may not be evident to new players: * Changes of the Reward/Punishment parameters changing the optimal gameplay strategy. Every few seconds, alternating from "X is a good idea" to "Y is a much better idea than X, do that", then back to "Y is not so good now, X is better". Unfortunately the reward/punishment parameters are somewhat mentally subtle, so it's hard for players to keep them in mind. * Tensions between different player goals (As two gameplay modes are cross-fading between each other, perhaps you want to touch a certain dot in mode A but a different dot in mode B; or else you want to be close to dots in A to push them, or be far from them in B to score). * Synthesis of two modes into a hybrid. For example, there is a sequence where you need to Push the dots but they are large and slow; this is cross-fading with a Match mode. Because the rules of Match are predictable to an extent, you can actually use Match to help get the dots on the right sides of the screen, possibly much more quickly than you would have been able to Push them. ----------------- Here's some email from playtesters, and occasional responses from me: ----------------- Casey Muratori wrote: >> Can you be more specific? Is the idea that, in the limit, I might have some gameplay modes, A B C D etc., and playing C after playing A makes me feel sadder, but C followed by D makes me happier, kind of thing? >> >> I did understand the things you're saying here when I played the game, I just didn't understand how that related to musical composition, and still don't. I replied: > I think in the abstract -- if you take any kind of semantics away from gameplay (setting, story, etc) and just have gameplay, it's way too early for us to really know what would make a player "sad", "happy", etc. That's not really what I am aiming for. > But music can create visceral responses at a lower level than that. For example, your brain just keys into call-and-response patterns in a certain way, or notes that are ascending then descending, or statement and restatement, etc. They have semantics that join to make some kind of abstract picture. I was trying to do something like that. > Since this was a quick project and I did all the compositions in like 4 hours (with basically no tools), I'm not saying that I did a great job composing things either. But I don't think that matters too much in some sense -- if there were big "aha gotcha" ability in the paradigm at this level, even crappy compositions ought to be able to elicit it. > Anyway, one of the things I think about this gameplay is that it's a little too low-frequency, and the shifts between objectives involve a little too much high-level thought. One vague idea I have is to try this again with a "shmup"-style game (vertical 2D shooter like xevious, 1942, etc) where the enemies attack, raise/lower shields, hails of bullets fly at you in clear and definite music-like patterns. I'm not sure how much that would really improve on this, but it might be worth doing. ----------------- Sean Barrett wrote (on 9 January 2006): My reaction to it was not emotional in the way you were hoping for, but there was something interesting there. You know how sometimes in fiction there's a certain breaking of the 4th wall with the characters or even the (apparent) author talking directly to the reader? This rubbed me a little that way, which is interesting since that sort of direct-speaking-to is really a fundamental element of music, although we don't really think think or talk about it. Music doesn't involve the suspension of disbelief. The way it struck me that way was, hmm, how to put this. Normally games go out of their way to hide the author: in a 3d sim, if you're like "man, the game designer just set up a trigger here to make this happen", that's bad--you're being pulled out of the immersive experience. Obviously in an abstract 2d puzzle game, there's no attempt at immersion like this, but there's still generally an attempt to hide the author, for whatever reason. A classic arcade game rule is "you should feel like you died because you screwed up, not because the game hosed you". A sequence may be paced so that some sections are easier or harder, but the player isn't generally expected to be conscious of this as _authored_. For me, at least, having gone through the tutorial before playing, that was constantly my reaction: "oh, look how he's trying to screw me up here! hmm, I wonder why he's giving me this big long easy section, is he going to eventually follow it up with some cruel... yep, there you go". Etc. I don't think there's anything wrong with this; I think this notion that you _can_ see the author reaching through to control the game is quite interesting if done in the right way with game mechanics that don't feel like you're just being fucked with. (I don't think it necessarily leads to anything at all like the emotional experience of music, though.) In response, I wrote: So this is going to be somewhat redundant with what we said but I am trying to distill down the thoughts to myself: * Music doesn't require a belief structure of the listener, because it's not about story or any high-level fictional construct. * Therefore there is no "breaking the 4th wall" because hey, it's just assumed that music is about the authors displaying to the listeners directly. Most games aren't like that. Especially single-player computer games, they tend to directly posit a fiction. Games that don't posit a fiction tend to have "environments" / rules that don't change. (e.g. checkers, go). In the case of a game like tetris, the rules change but they just do so monotonically, i.e. all they are expressing is "the game is getting harder now". So it may be better to weed out the emotion issue as a red herring and view this game as an experiment in "changing the game environment as a function of time in order to directly express things to the player", which seems to be something that games don't do very often. (Thus I think, by extension, maybe there is some interesting stuff in there to find if people do a bunch of experimentation like this). ----------------- Terry Stewart wrote (on 12 January 2006): Interesting... definitely a, as you say, quixotic goal. Some random thoughts that have come to mind as I've been playing it - I definitely find that having the music synchronzed to the composition adds a lot to the gameplay. I've found myself replaying "wreath of barbs" quite frequently over the last few days. I haven't replayed the other levels after my initial exploration of the game. - The colour-based matching ran into a common problem I have with a lot of games: they don't take into account the wide range of colour vision in people. I'm 90% red-green deficient (as are about 10% of caucasian males), and so I think some of that colour matching was a bit more stressful for me than was intended. This was especially true when cross-fading to a solid colour, which caused some very confusing contrast effects.... - I think the emotional impact is strongest surrounding the "Distance" mode. With small or cicling dots, it gave a distinct relaxation feeling, and with large dots closing in, I got a strong feeling of panic and claustrophobia. It was a surprisingly strong effect. With the other modes, however, I found myself very much in an active, explicit thought mode, making it more of a puzzle-solving excercise: searching for the next brightest dot, or looking for a particular colour or pushing dots back from the border. The distance one was the only one which seemed to run mostly on implicit reflex action, and my guess is that's part of why I got a stronger emotional reaction from it. "match" was pretty good (other than the afore-mentioned colour problem). With the "touch" objective, I found the differences in brightness to be too small for me. I had to resort to explicit visual matching to figure out which dot I should be going for next, which I felt interrupted things a bit. "push" seemed to involve me fighting a lot to keeping things moving up and down, which never ended up coming smoothly to me. - I could not get a handle on "Juxtapose". I like the idea of competing objectives like that, but the cross-fading between them didn't seem to work for me. I think I sort of wanted them to stay at a 50/50 level for longer, or something like that. - If you do take a stab at is as a shmup, please keep the direct mouse control. I really like that interface within a 2d game -- I find it gives me a stronger connection to the object I'm controlling, to the point where I feel that the object is me, rather than me controlling the object. The only shmup I play regularly is Alien Outbreak for precisely this reason... I love the control. Plus, I love the cognitive effect of seeing people move in such a game slowly, but only because they _believe_ they should only be able to move slowly, and so move the mouse slower. It's damn fun to watch and train oneself out of..... - Overall, I really like the idea of composition-based flow of a game. Having a bunch of elements that can be combined in slightly-but-not-quite predictable ways. Having "choruses" or underlying "themes". I like the structure that provides. Plus, it gives a nifty excuse for short, predictably time-constrained gameplay, which is I think good for casual games... at least, that's how I've been using "Wreath of barbs"..... ----------------- Jonathan Mak wrote (on 17 January 2006): I've been thinking about your game a lot as it's made me think of a number of things as well as forcing me to revisit old, faded theories I've had. I'm not really sure where to begin... I totally agree that the analogy to music is a valid one so far as: more gameplay parameters is like having more instruments playing polyphonically. I think to the extent that when you have two different game objectives crossfading into each other it is almost like rapid slicing or "glitch" music. If you had them together it'd be like a counterpoint. But what I'm not convinced about is whether this needs to be made explicit. Put another way, I think that many games already have made this analogy except not explictly (going back to my whole rant about how we should innovate the way we think about games rather than innovating the games themselves). For example, even say, Ikaruga has these moments where gameplay parameters are adjusted to give that shift in player intention. The part that jumps out at me the most is in the second level past the blocks, when it's much easier (only possible if?) you don't fire/kill anything. To me, that part of the game is like softer parts in music. But then I think that another reason the analogy to music need not, or in fact should not be explicit is when comparing it to other mediums such as a novel, since (at least to my knowledge) there is no real analogue that compares the two...at least not in terms of instruments. Unless, maybe the characters themselves are the instruments/parameters....? Or when even just thinking about how music is more of a one way medium (the artist composes, the audience listens, that's it) whereas a game is two-way -- there's a feedback loop so the player themselves is arguably the artist playing the instrument and the game should be open enough to allow for some expression via the gameplay rules. I don't mean that a game has to be open like an mmorpg... I mean.. I think even Tetris is like this... on the most basic level, when I play Tetris I always ask myself "do I go for the high score and just keep getting tetris-clears, or do I go for max lines and play it safe?" My gameplay always ends up being a blend of the two and it depends on how I feel at the time. Like when I play guitar, the next chord I play depends on how I feel at the time. So eventually this line of thought lead me to idea of pacing in various forms of expressions. At least in the media that I'm at least slightly familiar with (game,movie,film,narrative), pacing is the one commonality. Your game helped me make the connection that gameplay parameters can in fact be varied to create this sense of pacing. And while I mean that beyond "hey now there should be tons of enemies instead of just a few," it still me feel that it doesn't need to be anything spectacular. For instance, you could vary the movement speed of the ship. Anyway, I'm not sure if you were expecting such a long winded response, it's just it made me think a bit and I just wanted to get that out. ----------------- Note: The dots in the game are supposed to be round. If they look a little warped, it means the game is running at 1280x1024 pixels (not square pixels... sigh). You can run the game with the -windowed option to fix this, but then of course you're running in a window. The music in this prototype is "Wreath of Barbs" by Wumpscut, from the album "Wreath of Barbs", Metropolis Records, 2001. www.wumpscut.com, www.metropolis-records.com.