How can designers create refreshing games drawing inspiration from existing art and popular games? Zach Gage discusses how conceptual creativity in game design can create compelling experiences for players which are meaningful and culturally responsible lenses for the world.
How can designers create refreshing games drawing inspiration from existing art and popular games? Zach Gage discusses how conceptual creativity in game design can create compelling experiences for players which are meaningful and culturally responsible lenses for the world.
Anna: Hi and welcome to Game Dev Dialogues. I am Anna Kipnis, a former game developer, and a current creative technologist in the Research Org at Google. Our guest today is Zach Gage. Zach is an award-winning conceptual artist and independent game developer who has been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, and Edge Magazine and has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the New York MoMA. His best known games are SpellTower, Ridiculous Fishing, and Sage Solitaire, and his newest game is Knotwords. Hi, Zach, and welcome.
Zach: Hi, thanks.
Anna: So one of my personal favorites of yours is your work Glaciers, which is a gallery installation of small e-ink readers and each of them is displaying a digital poem generated using the top three Google auto-complete results. I also really love the game Lose/Lose where you shoot these little aliens on screen and actually deletes the files on the player's machine which explores the, in your words, propensity for us to follow directions and the real-life consequences of in-game actions. Can you talk a little bit about your art background and what drew you to making games initially?
Zach: I was originally interested in making video games growing up, playing a lot of shareware on the Mac and seeing a lot of games that were being made by people who were in college or in high school or even sometimes by other kids. I took a little detour, I guess, in my life, when I went to college and I got very interested in art and in particular design and photography. I ended up in a graduate program in New York City in conceptual art and right around then the iPhone came out and I made a sound tool that I had created on the computer. I made a version of it for the iPhone because it just felt like it would be an interesting place to put this. It garnered a huge response and I got–thousands of people are downloading it and using it. It was like a total mind-blowing kind of moment. And so I thought, well I guess I'm making art on the iPhone now
One of my friends, Amit Pitaro, who is a really talented artist who's a little older than me, actually works at Google now. He said, you know, you never know what something's gonna bring and what's gonna be important about it, and you should just do the thing that you're really excited about doing. The big thing that happened right around that time was this game Lose/Lose that you brought up. And the idea of it was that it would be a provocative work that would force you to reckon with the idea that data was a physical thing. And the way it would do that is by threatening you and saying, if you play this game and you shoot these aliens, then you will delete files on your computer. And it's sort of mashing up this idea of this fun, exciting, violent thing with like actual real-life misery, kind of. This idea that something that exists entirely in the digital space can be a real, actual, damaging act to you, which now is really obvious and everybody understands that, but at the time it wasn't meant really to be played. It was more a thing that would force you to reckon with the fact that it exists. And when you had an emotional reaction to it, you would then have to go, oh why did I have that emotional reaction? What am I actually thinking about here?
Conceptual art is like the least accessible kind of art. And yet on Neogaf people who didn't even know really what paintings meant were explaining art to each other. And it made me realize that conceptual art and interactive art and video games share the same language. That they're really all forms of exploring this idea of an experience that is a meaningful thing. And how do you create an experience that's meaningful? But also, how do you think about an experience that you had? How do you react to it, how do you discuss it with other people, how do you dismantle it as you look back on it over and over again in your life?
Anna: Can you talk a little bit about what you think the difference is between, essentially a user experience that is about trying to accomplish a task versus an interactive experience that you are sort of talking about?
Zach: if somebody's filling out their taxes you don't care, as the developer of a tax application, if they are the greatest person in the world at filling out their taxes, if they're speed running their taxes, or if they're just filling out their taxes. What you care about is that they've succeeded in filling out their taxes. If you're building an experience for a player or a viewer at a gallery, or even if you're writing a script for a play, what you're looking for is to create an experience that allows the person who's engaging with it to be able to put themselves into the work.
When arcade games first came out, they were completely foreign to everybody. Anytime a new arcade game came out, it basically had to teach people immediately how to interact with it and think about it. The way that you made money on arcade games is by getting people to put in as many quarters as possible in the shortest amount of time. So if you're spending an hour walking someone through a tutorial, that's not gonna fly. The way that these games were designed was all about how do we get people to be performant in this as fast as possible and then turn them into performers, because that's the other thing that's happening in an arcade. People are watching over your shoulder or you're playing a two-player game against somebody or with somebody. And having people capable and able to perform at a high level is a really sought-after thing in an arcade space.
One of the most successful arcade games of all time is Pacman. So when you start a game of Pacman, you have a four-way joystick in front of you. it's clear what your controls are. There's no extraneous buttons sitting around. And the game waits for you to move the joystick to start, and then as soon as you do, you direct Pacman in a direction. And at this point, players might think a bunch of different things. They might think, oh, I notice I'm eating these little circles and I'm gonna try to eat all the circles. They might be paying attention to the ghosts and think, oh, I'm just gonna try to get away from the ghosts for as long as possible. They might see the giant blinking power pellets and think, oh, what's that blinking thing? I guess I'll go over there. If they do go over there, they might discover that the ghosts change and they might notice that they can eat them or they might just think that they make the ghost flee and not even know that ghosts can eat them and that's totally okay as a way to play the game. Really, if you think about it, all of these are player-directed ideas. The player has come up with an objective and they’ve decided that they’re going to attempt to do it. And the important thing about all of these little goals that players are laying out is: it doesn't matter which one you do or what you come up with. Anything you do is going to make you better at Pacman. If you work on catching ghosts, you're getting better at Pacman. If you work on dodging ghosts, you're getting better at Pacman. Pacman has laid out this sort of invisible line around what your brain can even conceive of doing and thinking about in such an elegant way that anybody who sits down in front of Pacman is going to very quickly come up with some idea of some challenge that they're gonna go after that will make them better at the game. And that's a very intuitive, powerful way to learn something and it's very difficult to design things that put the player into that space.
Anna: Can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say performance in the game language and so on?
Zach: For me, performance is just thinking about players as leaving a game with more than they put into it. That doesn't mean that everybody who plays a game is gonna engage with it at that level, but doing the right kind of design and thinking about games in this way is more about inviting performance than sort of demanding performance.
You know, there are a lot of different ways that players can come away from games and get a lot of meaning out of it. Sometimes players are just going through a tough time in their lives, and they play a game as an escape and it's a dumb thing that they don't engage with and it's deeply meaningful to them because it helps them in that moment.
Anna:. I wanted to ask you about Knotwords in the context of your design approach because what I think is really special about it is the fact that it feels like you're playing a crossword, but I personally have never been able to solve crosswords, and it feels really satisfying and fun and familiar while being something new. What inspired you to create it?
Zach: I frequently try to find things that I'm not interested in or haven't previously been interested in. I try to have an experience that I think is particularly interesting or surprising and then I build a work around how to get somebody else to have that experience or explore the space that having experience can be within. I've never really clicked with crosswords even though my mom does crosswords every day. But I was never really particularly interested in them until I was at a friend's wedding in L.A. and one of my college friends was there and his parents are crossword setters. And so I spent a lot of time talking to them about what it is to set a crossword and why they're interested in it. One of the things that I noticed right off the bat is that: when you play a crossword you don't really think very much about the board itself. But if you're a crossword setter, the entire game of crossword setting is fitting these words into the board. Coming up with a theme, making it fit, trying to find words that fit into the theme–clues that you've already done so people feel like it's holistic. It’s weird that crossword setters and crossword players are doing these two things that are totally different than each other, and I wonder if there's a game just in fitting words into a grid. And of course, there are like a million attempts that people have made about making games where you fit words into a grid. We knew that the game we wanted was a very particular shape of game, and that shape of game is something that I've been chasing for a very long time. It's this very sort of minimal paper puzzle.
There's a game called Picross or a game that most people probably will be familiar with, Sudoku. You can present them on a single piece of paper.The whole game is there. There are a bunch of techniques and strategies that you could derive from the rules to play through the game, but frequently these games only have one rule. So for Sudoku, that one rule is every row, column, and house which is each of the 3x3 blocks in the Sudoku has to have the numbers one through nine in it and only the numbers one through nine in it one at a time. Which is a really simple rule, but gives rise to this very deep and interesting game.
Anna: On the subject of your game Good Sudoku: playing that game really felt like there was somebody who really wanted me to love and appreciate all of the deeper strategies of the game and try to get me to engage with those in a way where all of the other Sudoku games I've ever played didn't really do that for me. This really felt like, you know, one of the experiences I had with my father, for example, who taught me a lot of card games. This was the closest I had to someone dedicated to me learning how to play that game.
Zach: I wanted to learn how to play Sudoku and I was very frustrated with the tools that existed and I wanted to build tools that would teach me to play. I had sort of put together this prototype that I brought to Jack where the game would essentially help you play and there was an AI and it would sort of attempt to teach you things a little bit. But the AI was really bad and the puzzles weren't super good, and we wanted to make it better. So Jack set to work building a really good AI, and very quickly one of the things that we needed to test the good AI is, we needed better puzzles. Because the puzzles that we had didn't have a lot of the techniques that we were interested in learning.
If you play a normal Sudoku game and you get stuck and you hit the hint button, what it will do is it will put a number on the puzzle. And to me, that's not a hint. That's just an answer. And it frequently will not actually help you get better at Sudoku, because Sudoku is all about knowing this very strange sort of techniques that are vague, and they have terrible names, and you can look them up online, but they never seem to represent the problem that you're dealing with in the moment. Our game, Good Sudoku, when you're stuck and you hit the hint button, instead of it giving you a number, what it will do is it will show you where on the board the technique that you haven't realized is. It'll teach you very quickly how to recognize every single kind of technique in Sudoku and how to think about Sudoku. And it trains you very quickly to be able to play Sudokus at a level where they are good. 'Cause I think at a low-level Sudokus are a grindy waste of time, but at a high level, they're this beautiful elegant game about looking and recognizing patterns.
The big lesson for me from Good Sudoku was: I thought that Sudoku was this beautiful system that any group of numbers you put on a grid would create this incredible Sudoku. We realized it's actually really, really hard to generate Sudokus in general, and it's incredibly hard to generate Sudokus that are really interesting and dynamic and feel like a good puzzle to work your way through. And that was a real shock to me. I didn't realize actually the elegant and beautiful part of Sudoku is the puzzle construction. It's not the set of rules.
Once we sort of realized that, we returned to Knotwords. And we had to generate and think about really interesting, good puzzles because that is actually where the depth comes from, even in these very simple games. Knotwords is a new puzzle game that Jack Schlesinger and I built, kind of like a crossword, but with no letters in it. And that grid is sectioned out into different sections that look like Tetris pieces. And in each of those Tetris pieces, there are a few letters that need to be distributed into that zone, and the end state of the puzzle needs to be that every horizontal and downward that's at least two letters long is a valid English word. It's a logic game that's built around language.
Anna: I wanted to ask you about your approach to UX in your games. They have a very strong design language, they're visually very consistent, and there's clear emphasis on this intuitive simplicity. Can you talk about how you arrived at that approach?
Zach: I went to college for art, but one of my big focuses was graphic design, and that taught me a lot of lessons about visual hierarchy. Visual hierarchy is basically, if you're designing a movie poster or an event poster, when somebody's 20 feet away from the poster you want them to see who the artist is. And then when they walk up to the poster, you want them to be able to see when the event is. And then if they're really looking at the poster 'cause they already know they wanna go to the event and they already know when it is and it fits in their calendar, then you might want them to see what the webpage is where they could get tickets or something like that. So that's like a three-stage visual hierarchy that–each part of it is meant to act sort of independently of the others and structure the information in a way that when somebody is looking at the poster they're getting the information they need when they need it. It's very important to be very austere when you're designing that way because if you start putting a lot of information on the screen, you very quickly get to a state where you have no visual hierarchy at all. Everything is broken down, too many things are at the same level, and players can't understand the game.
Anna: What makes games compelling? What is it that's compelling to you about creating them?
Zach: As a player, the kinds of games that I play are mostly multi-player competitive games: competitive shooters or very competitive card games like Hearthstone Battlegrounds. They give me a deep experience that is often years long. There are games that I've been playing for many years and I'm still learning new things every day. It feels sort of similar to engaging with something very hard like an instrument or learning a language or learning a new hobby or something like that. I'm not making those kinds of games because those kinds of games are frequently very inaccessible to players who are new, who are coming to games.
And for me, the most important audience that I can address is the giant audience of people who are new for games mostly because it's the biggest audience that's in games right now, but also because those are the people who have the most to learn about the power of games and the most to learn about the literacy of interaction and experiential design. We are in a world where we are surrounded by systems that are frequently very, very complicated, and I think we don't understand them. And that's pretty normal because systems, even when they're very, very simple, are frequently very hard to understand.
We don't understand really what a system is, how powerful a system is, how to think about a system and engage with a system. And that's one of the things that I think games can teach you. One of the most important moments of learning and in critical thinking is when you are experiencing something that isn't matching what you want, and you say, hold on, and you take a step back and you reassess what you're looking at. It's very important, especially in a world that's dominated by these systems that other people have designed for us, to be able to step back from Twitter and instead of saying, like: oh, you know, what did this person say? What did that person say? To step back and say: why are we talking like this? How did I end up in a conversation with somebody like this? Is this even a conversation that I wanna be a part of? Why did I get into this conversation? Things like that that require you to sort of look more at the meta space of the system that you're engaged with and start to understand what kind of effects it's having and why it's having those effects and what you can do to engage with it in a different way than this very immediate visceral experience. That is the thing that I'm constantly going after with my artwork, is trying to take a very small thing that I thought–well that's weird, I should think about that--and give that experience to people. And so my games–I’m trying to get people to understand how they themselves can have that experience on their own.
Anna: That's a really beautiful way of defining it as the design lens to look through. So games can subtly educate us by revealing implicit goals, kind of the way that you were talking about in Pacman. What responsibility do we have as designers to be aware of the lessons that are being taught? You mentioned that you could approach games in terms of these sort of addiction machines and so on. So what responsibility do we have as designers to be aware of these lessons that are taught and the goals kind of being imparted by games?
Zach: So there's two things happening there. The biggest responsibility that we have is maintaining a level of respect and decorum for teaching players how to engage with the experiences that we're providing them. Gambling is one of the most powerful drives we have as human beings and it's kind of incredible that the medium that we work in has access to that kind of drive. Paintings don't have that. Sculptures don't have that. Movies and TV, they don't have that. They don't have anything that's so incredibly powerful that it drives people to ruin their own lives, ruin their own relationships.
The impulse to gamble–the use of it in a really negative way is horrible, but it's so powerful because it's fun. I don't want people to not be able to access something like that as a designer. I think being able to explore with gambling structures is really important, but it's also important to be building games in a way that people understand what they're engaging with.
The thing that bothers me about a lot of these games is: if you're not building a game that's teaching people how to play and how to understand the interactive structure and understand systems in this meaningful, critical thinking way, then you're getting yourself into a lot of trouble because at that point you have an incredible responsibility to make sure that you're not doing anything that's gonna harm the person who's interacting with the thing.
But if your approach is to be an educator and to be helpful and to be friendly and to be very careful about what you're exposing people to and when you're exposing it to them, then that opens up the space of what you're allowed to design with because ultimately the tools that we're working with, they are to give people a experience where they are a co-equal.
It's not the topics that we're choosing to engage with. It's--are we respecting the people who are working with our software? And part of that respect is are we putting them into a place and inviting them to be in a place where they can be interested and be informed and be able to give the kind of consent to engage with whatever topics we want to engage with. So that's the first part of it.
The second angle on that is: I do think games as a cultural object are a very powerful thing. Historically, media as a cultural object has had a very powerful effect on society. Oftentimes when we make games you are really working with the expectations of an audience. And frequently if you are not interested in educating that audience, then you have to work with the basest, most broad expectations of that audience. You need to work in genres that that audience already understands. You need to work with themes and concepts and characters that that audience is already excited about and already wants to dive deep into.
And I think when you're working in that way where you're being sort of less respectful to the intelligence of an audience, you frequently are going to be creating things that are less creative, less interesting, and more kind of in this cultural gutter. And frequently you are ceding your decision-making around what you're building to what you think a group of people that you've defined want.
One of the things that I've always thought was really kind of amazing in America is how weird it is that our biggest franchise for the entire time that we were in the war in Iraq was a war video game. That's the biggest entertainment product in America. I don't think I saw a single cultural article in any newspaper pointing this out, whereas just from an art historical standpoint it's amazing that we have hundreds of thousands of teenagers murdering each other with realistic guns online at the same time that we have this horrible war going on. Regardless of whether or not you think that's good or bad, clearly there's this massive cross-cultural thing happening here. And I think clearly the people who are developing something like Call of Duty are using and leveraging a lot of the culture and media around what it is to be an American and what gun culture is to create their games. And so I do think there's a responsibility from that angle of, all right, I'm going to use this culture as the fuel for what I'm building. Is this a culture that I endorse? And if you don't endorse it in a wholehearted way then that probably isn't a culture that you should be using.
Anna: I think in part the reason why there hasn't been that much coverage is because games are not viewed as cultural products on the same level as, you know, a film and books and so forth. And what I think is really unique about your perspective with games is the fact that you are actually trying to bring that sense of seriousness to their creation. You are engaging with the cultural forms. Sudoku is an old game. Another game you had worked on before is Bad Chess and chess is an ancient game. Crosswords are quite old and very familiar. Is there something intentional about that as well?
Zach: Part of it is that I want them to be accessible to the broadest swath of people and really what everybody knows about games, whether they engage with them or not, is they understand playing cards to some extent. They understand what chess, is which is really all you need to know to play really bad chess. They've seen a Sudoku board. They've tried a word search which is really what SpellTower is based off of. It's not always the thing that people want from games, is to play something that's really hard and is a challenge that they're going to really have to devote themselves to and think about. And what I'm trying to do is convince them that yes actually that's what you do want from games. That’s the thing that's beautiful about games, is you're gonna do this thing that's gonna give you this deep, complicated experience because you're gonna put time into it.
And you might not be someone who's ever put time into a game, but I want you to put time into this. And so in trying to chase that down, I think I have to work with the thing that is going to hit the broadest variety of players.
Anna: How do we get games to teach systems instead of hiding them or using them to manipulate?
Zach: I think the biggest trick there is just understanding how to teach someone. Designing the right system is really just, is your game good or bad, right? And I think this is a mistake that games make frequently, is not being able to correctly understand what kind of priors people can learn and can't learn and how to give people the space to learn the things that they need to learn. In Assassins Creed 2, there's this very famous sequence where you have to walk through this company, Abstergo. And the reason that they put this in is so that people would learn how to use a joystick. Which is completely ridiculous because nobody is gonna learn how to use a joystick in two minutes. And everybody who knows how to use a joystick is gonna be bored by this kind of scene.
In a talk, what I asked for is a version of Assassins Creed where there are no enemies, where you just explore and there's no goals. And the reason that I wanted something like that is that's how you actually teach someone to use a joystick. You put them in a very chill environment where they can make their own objectives just like Pacman. The motivation of being able to explore a world is high enough that I think a lot of people would just explore. And then they did that in the Egyptian Assassins Creed. They made a mode that's called I think tourist mode and you can go just anywhere and it gives you facts about stuff and it's really amazing. So I think part of it is understanding what is possible to teach and being able to recognize which parts of your game are going to be appealing to the kinds of people that you're trying to reach, and then being very cutthroat about what you can teach and how you can teach it and trying your best to teach it.
Anna: Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Zach: You could go to my website which is stfj.net or just zachgage.com. Z-A-C-H-G-A-G-E or the real place to look is just following me on Twitter where I'm @helvetica like the font.
Anna: Well, thank you so much for coming, Zach. This has been Game Dev Dialogues. Thank you all for listening.