Folk Games, Festivity and Subversive Game Design

[Music] okay so uh for the past three years uh I was really hoping someone would take a photo of me giving that but there's no screen here anyway um for the uh past three years I've been a researcher at it University of Copenhagen and I've been writing a PhD dissertation about folk games design Theory and computer games um but in addition to writing about and studying these games I've also been making a bunch of digital games with my colleagues in Copenhagen um and um so there's been a bunch of games some of the more popular ones are a weo game called dark room sex game a party game called button which we showed at igf last year um and this year we're showing a game called Johan Sebastian Joust which uh you can try on the show floor um Wednesday Thursday and Friday for the PlayStation move controller um so actually I have a secret to share what I really wanted to call this talk but what kind of got vetoed is uh do ridiculous

with technology and so like what I want to tell you in the next 20 minutes is uh like why I why would you want to do ridiculous with technology so that's that's really the the point of this talk um and so to start with a really discreet a really clear example I want to do a live demonstration of uh a move game uh that I had done uh with David uh Cana over here uh who is also the composer of uh and sound designer for Proteus and diet and so yeah David and I have been working on this really deliberately stupid installation game uh and that's what I want to show you really quickly uh okay okay so get get in get in position I'm going to come join you in a second uh actually can you do me uh oh when I tell you can you press enter on this uh okay so here's how Works um

and sorry we're going to play over here cuz I need space so I hope everyone yeah sorry um okay so uh here's how it works we each have a PlayStation move controller tied to our butts uh and we're going to be all on uh all all fours uh and we're basically dogs and we get more points the more we accelerate our controllers but we're not allowed to touch it with our hands so we kind of have to like Shake our butts around and uh accelerate this now occasionally uh some of the controllers will start flashing and that means You're vulnerable so if you can wrestle the person down and press one of their buttons they lose a bunch of points uh and then there's a little rest period so you'll hear the music like a little bit more calm which we catch our breath and then it's back at it this will last only a minute and the person with the most points wins it's like pretty simple um and it's a little violent uh okay so uh 3 2 1 go

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[Music] [Music] all right David win [Applause] all right let catch my breath for a second you guys can sit down or not whatever all right let's uh calm it down a little bit I'm going to play the wees My Heart soundtrack on the back uh for some good more calm Vibes after that

okay now I'm going to give the rest of the talk out of breath but that's good okay so I want to talk a little less about the game itself but more the design thinking and the process that went into making that really stupid deliberately silly and violent insulation game um so this summer my friend Joanna uh pictured here got to try some um Swedish folk games in a suburb of gothamberg and so she she sent me some photos of these games she played you can't see it entirely well in this photo but she has a rod tied to a string um from the back of her belt and she's not allowed to use her hands and she's trying to knock those beer cans off there's a whole obstacle course of these beer cans on these little shelves and the cans are full of sand so they're actually pretty tricky to knock down cuz they're quite heavy uh and of course she can't use her hand hands so she's trying

to uh in the best time possible run around this obstacle course and with her butt um knock these things over uh there was a second similar game where there was a pen tied to uh the string and they were trying to insert them into this empty water bottle which is really tricky right cuz this pen is dangling around um anyway so she uh she told me about these two games and at the time I had been making Johan Sebastian Jou for the move controller and immediately when I heard about this it was like okay I know exactly what I'm going to do with this um and that's those are really the games that directly inspired um that that game you just saw there um and so I would say those two two two games are what I would call folk games um and and here's another example a more more famous example a game called ninja uh which I'm sure a lot of you have have tried and played recently it's like a playground game U and I won't explain the full thing

uh but you stand in a circle and you each get a turn and you're trying to slap the hands of other people who can kind of Dodge with their arms um it's okay so what do I mean by calling all these things folk games okay so a uh a philosopher of games play and Sport uh Henning iberg who's based in Denmark uh writes a lot about folk games and he defines it he says there are traditional ethnic or indigenous Sports and games uh can also include new activities like ninja right that are based on traditional practices okay so more colloquially I would say folk games are they're simple games uh so they're easy to understand for spectators and they're easy to learn for the players uh they usually don't they don't often uh require equipment and if they do it's common equipment like a ball or a deck of playing cards or a bat so they're equipment that everyone has around that they could use to play the game

they're often spread by word of mouth and that's partly because they're so easy to teach and so they spread organically through groups of friends and through culture and so forth um and because of that there are often house rules so each family each playing Community each culture usually has different ways and slight different variations of these games and in fact that's why these games evolve organically over time through different cultures so for me I want to focus on a specific type of folk game I'm really interested in very physical games and deliberately really silly games and so that's what I want to talk about today um so iberg uh makes this distinction between what he calls modern sport and popular sport and folk games would be a type of popular sport um so modern sport is kind of like professional sports that we see on TV or the Olympics or something where it's kind of about achieving per Perfection or setting some sort of record whereas he contrasts that with a popular sport which he sees as more festive uh uh

deliberately unserious and there's this idea that anybody can get involved so rather than professional sports where there's a clear distinction between Spectators and the people playing the game that in a in a folk game or a popular sport setting everyone gets in and takes a turn um it's a lot Messier and and the hope is that everyone will get involved so to blur the boundary between player and spectator and uh I think this dichotomy is obviously a little oversimplified but what I like about it is it it makes this nice distinction between the seriousness sometimes of sport and the unseriousness of more popular sports folk games and carnival games and so forth um and what we're getting at here is folk games isn't just a genre or like a formal quality of games it's also an attitude it's how we approach the games both as the players and the designers and so for me it's an attitude of unseriousness okay so now think again about that uh dog the wag game I was

just showing uh right this is a game that's deliberately supposed to be really stupid it's supposed to make the players look a little silly um and enjoyable for The Spectators and specifically I think what's going on here is this idea of subversion right so tying a move controller or really any video game controller to your butt is just like not what you typically do with game controllers it's not what they were really designed for um and that's why these games to me are are really fun uh kind of apart from the game itself there's something fun about using this technology in deliberately Stupid Ways uh that you you know you weren't meant to use them in that kind of way um so I do think there is a joy and subversion so to speak okay so uh I want to give you know some other examples of games I've made um inspired by folk games so here here's another installation I did recently also with Sound and Music uh by David it's a game called beacons of Hope

and uh so let me tell you the story behind the game before I tell you about the game so I was um sitting with my friend Tom and his wife uh this summer over beers and they were telling me about this summer camp game that they run for these kids at a summer camp and they get a house out in the middle of the woods and they turn off all the lights and it's night the house is Pitch Black and it's maybe like 30 people in the house running around this pitch black house now two players are monsters so they're crawling around the ground and they're trying to catch all the other players who are the humans right uh and the game is called monsters now the monsters win if they can catch all the humans the humans win they're looking for a flashlight that has been hidden in the house by the moderator before the round if they can find the flashlight and shine it at the monsters they win and it's a simple game but the idea is I don't know if you guys have ever tried this but playing in the dark is actually just really fun in it of itself um and so immediately again when I heard this I was like oh man I know EX exactly what I want to do with this idea

um so I made this installation game it's played in an auditorium maybe about this size and there about 20 players two players are monsters like in the monsters game however they carry around move controllers and if they're still or slow no light so the room remains completely pitch black however if they ever move a little bit say to grab reach out and grab um one of the human players it lights up red quickly so suddenly out of the darkness red light and then it goes black again now the human players are looking for three move controllers additional move controllers that have been hidden around the room uh and there're these beacons of hope these torches that you're trying to find so the humans their goal is before time is up before the 10 minutes they're trying to find all three of them and light them up at the same time which vanquishes the monsters so again a game that was directly inspired by this type of folk game Camp game playground game okay and

finally uh this game Johan Sebastian Joust uh which is a little bit more maybe accessible than the other two games uh it was also directly inspired by a number of folk games uh one of them which doesn't even have a name uh Nels Bernie and I uh a few years ago were hanging out in Christiania in uh which is an area of Copenhagen and we found this piece of playground equipment um and we just started messing around and eventually we improvised a really simple game where you start uh and you slowly walk towards each other balancing on the rope and you're trying to push each other off and the first player to hit the ground loses so um even if you fall off you want to fall off after the other person um and uh of course it's even better if you can make it to the other side uh and uh without falling off and push the other guy so here uh Nils has made it to the other side and I I have to crawl under the rope in shame I've just been roped um okay uh here's uh another example I'm

going to show you a quick video and I'm actually going to switch over to DLC okay it's a game called Lista lancea which means sneaky Lance in Danish uh and we each are blindfolded so we can't see and we have a kitchen spoon this is a great party game by the way if you ever want to try this uh especially good if you're drunk okay so well we have to move in slow motion is the thing um and the first player to hit the other see I just won there um the first player to hit the other wins um and it's the crowd around you watching um is the thing that enforces that you're going slow enough um and so the basic Insight with this game is that moving in slow motion is feel super badass but looks ridiculous like you look like an idiot um so the spectators are having fun you're having fun and moving in slow motion no matter what game you're playing is sweet um and that's really the core idea that inspired jous which is like man let's make make a game where we just move in slow motion um so again

like like pulled directly from uh folk game so I think a game like joust uh the rhetoric um and the ideology around the game is very different than the type of rhetoric you hear in like AAA game marketing around all these new motion control devices like the connect like the Wii like the move so here's I'm going to you know pick on the Move since I use it use a commercial I think this you know this takes the promise of this technology very seriously uh it's very optimistic about the capabilities of these devices and you know uh promising these games that are really immersive where you really feel uh like you're in this fictional world doing these crazy things with this technology uh but I think often the reality is that these Technologies are super super limited I don't know how much you guys have been able to play around with these uh gesture recognition or motion control Technologies really a lot of technological limitations uh and

despite all these promises and optimism like all these Technologies just kind of suck uh is the reality um and to me that's that's awesome like it it's precisely because these Technologies suck which makes them really interesting and really fun so I think part of the key here is to embrace these technological limitations rather than to try to fight them to try to uh fight the latency problems of doing gesture recognition and and make complicated algorithms to to deal with these problems so for example a game like joust uh okay so we have an accelerometer right what can an accelerometer do well it can detect acceleration okay so let's just make a game about accelerating your controller or in this case not accelerating your controller right and so that's uh of the algorithm's slightly more complicated than that but the idea here is let's just do exactly what this technology does so we don't really have to fight uh and pretend that this technology can do

something more than what it's really doing um I think this is especially valuable Insight if you're an indie right so if you're if you're uh Ubisoft and you can throw uh like tons of money and tons of top talent into making complicated algorithms to get for example uh four people working the connect tracking four people which is kind of a miracle right um if you can't do that uh you can't throw that type of money at it because you're just a solo indie or you're in a small Studio uh I think it's often more uh effective and more productive to offload some of that work onto the players so this is almost kind of like the Lazy Man's approach to doing motion control design uh so there's no like camera and joust that makes sure that you all stand in a circle or something or that you're not pushing each other or kicking each other or whatever right that's actually up to the players themselves to enforce those rules um the only thing that Jou uses is this kind of toy that detects whether it's uh mov too much or not and uh you

know this isn't that new we've all been playing uh we've all been enforcing rules when we play board games and sports and uh playground games for centuries right so this is this is something we're used to and so the design trick here becomes uh making the players think it's fun to improvise the rules to enforce the rules to add new rules and to sell them on this idea that hey uh we're not going to expect the computer to do everything for us we're going to uh enjoy enforcing some of these rules as well uh and so the term I refer to in my research is this idea of deputizing the player uh to modify the rules themselves and I think in a lot of my uh installation pieces and the types of motion control games I'm interested in there's an aesthetic of imperfection here um so that these games are deliberately messy uh the technology is deliberate is imperfect and really embracing that aesthetic um so this philosopher iberg I was talking before has a really nice uh quote on this he's

he's writing about folk games here he writes the grotesque body displays what is imperfect in human form the fool and the carnival are images of things going wrong in life all this gives birth to laughter which is thus linked to a deep recognition of human failure and blurs the edges between success and failure that are sharpened by the modern culture of perfection and I think that's really exactly summarizes um this idea of laughter and imper Perfection what I'm personally going for when I'm making these motion control games and so the idea here is that like to me motion control is the slapstick comedy of computer games um and yeah here's some people playing uh one of our weote games at at our um kill screen GDC party last year and right the idea is playing the fool so these games are uh an excuse that just an alibi for the players to make themselves look like and for everyone in the room to enjoy a laugh at the player's expense right um

now a game like dog the wag or beacons of Hope is a pretty Niche installation game it's a little intense right uh so a more accessible game like joust uh still has elements of this playing the fool right so joust looks deliberately silly you're kind of Waltzing around in slow motion so the way joust works is you have a move controller in your hand and uh if you ever move it too much you're out and you want to be the last player uh uh remaining now of course your opponents are going to try to hit your hand or hit your controller to to make you out so you're all slowly revolving around each other trying to defend your controller from the other players and also trying to hit them to make them to make them out and so joust is a little bit more sport-like than some of the other installations I was talking about but it has that nice element of looking ridiculous acting theatrically and I think in gou it's that nice mix between competitive Sport and and playing the fool that gives it this uh this nice

feeling this nice compromise between the two uh and I think this idea of playing the fool has actually already been used really successfully in a number of commercial games um so here's my absolute favorite Wii game uh Wario whereare smooth moves and um this is a game that tells you to to put the weote in all sorts of crazy positions like do the Mohawk pa uh pose do the elephant pose and the key is there's a bunch of micro games so these like five 5 Second games and you just play a bunch of them in a row and in in a way that's genius because even if the game can't detect your input correctly uh doesn't even matter because the game is over in 5 seconds and you have no idea what the hell just happened uh and so the point of that game isn't to like really win or play well with your controller it's to look like an like with this controller on your head and to give everyone a laugh um so I think this is a really perfect example of that and I to me it's not surprising that this is the best game on the Nintendo Wii right um a

more recent example of this that I love is uh it's a new game for the Vita called frobisher says um it's by Richard hog and a small studio in England called honey Slug and this game like warwar uses a bunch of micro games and it tries to use all the different capabilities of the V controler the camera the buttons the the two screens and so forth and so on here's a picture of some people playing it my favorite example is a is a micro game called look away and so the the uh the V tells you to look away and you have to like look away while you're playing this and if it ever if the camera ever detects the whites of your eyeballs you lose so you really do have to to look away uh and of course the game is trying to tempt you into looking at it with all sorts of ridiculous subliminal images that it's showing and so again that's a really nice comedic example of using this uh VA technology I'm sure in a way that the the people who invented it never thought of anyone using it right um and of course another really great

example uh is an iPad game called fingle it's it's like twister for your fingers and that's also an igf finalist uh this year that I'm sure you'll be able to try on the show floor um again deliberately really silly physical simple um and humorous this a nice example um so speaking of iOS I think smartphones and smartphone technology in general is a really promising platform for this type of stuff right we're all walking around well not all of us but many of us are walking around uh every day with accelerometers and music playing devices in our pockets um and so be really easy to bust out one of these games um at a Party in the Park at a family reunion uh so me and the Chums at Duda fa uh want to start and we plan to start making a series of joust likee uh physical games for smartphones uh that we're tentatively calling shiel plots uh which means playground in German um um and so then yeah here's a kind of a fun

illustration of us playing these types of games with with smartphones um and again yeah I think uh these Technologies are becoming more and more prevalent uh and so I think I do think you're going to start to see more of these types of physical games using these Technologies which is really exciting um however the note I want to end this on is to be really clear the idea here is not to use technology to improve games I think you often hear a lot of rhetoric about we're augmenting the living room and we're in ening traditional play with like the beauty of technology or something um and to me that optimistic that rhetoric is a little too optimistic um and it's also a little insulting right like a game like ninja is like actually pretty perfect the way it is it doesn't need any technology to make it any better right um so what exactly like and what is the point of these these things why would why would we add technology so I want to like flip the script a little bit so I'm not interested in how technology can games I'm interested in

how games can improve technology right so I actually kind of loathe this stupid little smartphone that I walk around with my pocket every day like this ising hate this thing um and so I I would love to repurpose this thing to ends more personal and more silly uh and more playful uh that makes this thing uh speak to my life right um and I think these types of physical games are one way of doing that of course I'm being a little glib right but I you know I do think it is important to uh to repurpose these things and and you know give us a reason to to use these things um in creative ways and uh yeah that's that's basically it uh you can go to my website there's some of my uh research papers I'm going to post my dissertation um on the website soon where I talk about some of these ideas and some of these games and yeah you can uh reach us by email or come talk to me or or whatever and that's that's it thank you

say what oh really okay uh yeah apparently we have time for questions um if they don't use the microphone repeat the question okay and I'm supposed to repeat the question if they don't use the microphone um so I guess I could take the question but no questions or is there a question say what microphones in the aisles yeah so could you ever have a folk game with one player or does the definition have to include uh Community uh yeah I think you can so I think Solitaire would be an example of right like it uses common equipment uh it's kind of organically evolved over the years um it's simple uh I guess when I personally the types of folk games I'm interested in our multiplayer and physical but I guess if we we if we take the broad example of folk games um yeah I think solitire would be a

great example Andreas you got to use the microphone uh how often do you guys end up breaking from all the different games you play so I'm gonna I'm GNA sound like an advertisement for Sony uh but like godamn the engineers who made these controllers are uh like kudos to them I these all my controllers have been dropped like over a hundred times uh and they're still working pretty well um even with button we had uh uh you know with these Xbox controllers people wrestling over them uh they held up pretty well so yeah I think these things are um we thought we would be breaking tons of them but uh yeah kudos to control our Engineers thank you out there where wherever you are uh but yeah so with the Advent of Facebook and social media sort of uh breaking down and dictating how we interact with each other we're getting further and further away from physical interaction yeah how would you best uh want to reintroduce uh physically interacting with each other

in a game modality using these mediums using Facebook not necessarily Facebook but the so I'm the wrong person I'm not even on Facebook so like uh uh shoot I don't know um I will say though that's like for me that introducing physicality back is like a big deal so in Jou one of the nice things that it gives adults an excuse to be able to touch each other right uh and actually that's you know that's pretty cool that's just not something we get to do every day so that's that's certainly a goal goal um how we do that with like Twitter or Facebook I have no idea um but I would love to see someone do it yeah I don't I misunderstanding the question or too long of a rant for a okay one question thing so you're fine uh and one more uh Andreas uh do you see any risk U not getting improved if you make a game for iPhone for example yeah you you have to have the the reason I said joust like games not Jou is like iOS um we've been

thinking about this a lot um or smartphones in general require different type of games um I think they're less physical but less VI aggressive games that make a lot of sense and we have a bunch of ideas for for smartphones I also thought about that you need if it's a multiplayer game you can't really do anything with it if you only have buy one copy yeah but that's not true right you you can imagine a lot of folk games that just use one device that you're passing around with a bunch of people and that's what I mean like I think those games are going to look different for the smartphone technology than they are going to for the move right but they're out there and fingle is living proof of a really good you know I wouldn't call them folk games but a folk folkish type game that only use this one device that iOS did approve that's really cool right so I mean these games are out there I just think the Move games are going to look a little different than the smart Bing games but thanks yeah right that is it for time thank you