Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

all those company logo bumpers are pulled from this year's crop of IGF Games I'm Benefit e I'm Zach gage and if you're not familiar with that work you're about to be this is a really personal talk in preparing this talk I went through and looked at the 500 or so IDF trailers that are on YouTube but this year's idea I wanted to see how hard it would be to figure out who the developers were on each game so I looked to see if their names were in the trailer the metadata under the trailer or if they had a link to the website I took through and went to see if their names were there as well and these are the numbers for a hundred or so of this year's IGF games less than a quarter of them have the developer names anywhere near the trailer and less than half have the names on the game website the

numbers are significantly lower if you limit it to games that are on sale for money or that have a steam wish this page was some other kind of thing that's indicating it's going to be on sale for money so my takeaway from that is that indie game developers don't like their names to be too visible on their game especially if they're planning to sell it for money they do like putting company branding at the right very very visibly on their game that's a pretty high horse Bennett aren't you kind of guilty of this as well yeah that's fair that's fair I've been part of that culture this is the game I worked on called sports friends is what you see when you vote up sports friends there's a logo yeah company logo and then is five more logos six logo it's all up one of them is for a person's name the others company logos in fact that co-op logo isn't even a company logo because I don't have a company it's just me pretending I have a company and a company logo and putting that at the

start of the game I can't even tell you why I did that rather than putting my name there it just it just seemed like it was the thing to do but hold on a second Zach what about your games prior to this year you got me that's true I did basically hide behind this totally impenetrable logo for a very long time but since last year all my games look like this alright so some of you are probably starting to think well I have a really good reason for using a company logo instead of my own name so all right let's let's talk about some of those reasons why why you might want to do that so many reasons are really good reasons first of all the big one maybe you just hate your name I like your name Bennett exactly maybe your given name sounds ridiculous or fake maybe you've spent your whole life feeling embarrassed when you introduce yourself you know it's it's possible to imagine that happening hypothetically but about

feeling embarrassed there could be a good practical reason why you don't want to use your name charlotte brontë like many others had to deal with a widespread prejudice against female authors and she did that by using a male pen name and there's a really long history in arts of people choosing a different name to represent their work including pen names stage names and other names a choice like preferred names or romanization of English names Lewis Carroll / Helen Mirren cactus our own names that were chosen by the artist and they always use those names in connection with their creative work Helen Mirren's birth names a little harder to pronounce in English Lewis Carroll had a academic writing career as well and wanted to differentiate his creative work / was just given this really cool name by a friend and I think there's just like a million good reasons to if your own choosing rather than your given name so as long as the name that you're using identifies a person rather than a company we are 100% onboard with that

we're we're behind you it's also really important to acknowledge at this point not everybody is going to feel safe being identified at all in their creative work regardless of whether it's through a company name or through an individual name so if you need your work to be totally anonymous that's a great reason not to put your name or your company logo on it and we're not questioning that at all just to be totally clear if you're working as part of a team probably the biggest issue with putting names on your game is having to think about who gets credit and this is a extremely understandable concern working with other people is hard enough having to bring credit into the mix but that said if your game is successful at all this is an issue that probably will come up anyway so it's worth at least looking down that road in advance something I've learned about credit over the past couple of years is that it really exists in two pieces one of the pieces is how your team chooses

to credit itself and then the second piece is how the world chooses to credit you and the first one of those you have absolute control over but the second one you can only really hope to influence it and this can make giving credit particularly complicated especially in situations where members of the team have different levels of public exposure there's no real simple solution to this it's just good to go into this process being aware of it for example this is the opening screen of ridiculous fishing a game that Greg wand and I worked on that very few people know that we worked on maybe people in this room but out of out of this room very few people and that's despite you know putting this title screen up first despite Romney and JW working really hard to make sure that we were credited in press pieces we did what we could to make it clear who was involved but there was only so much we could do and that is totally fine with us we knew that that was going to be an issue going in one time I was at a festival exhibiting multi-ball a game I made with the

amazing talented designer ap Thompson and right next door the game next door was was after by Jenny Taos Yahoo was showing the glitched again that she made there was also designed and coded by AP Thompson and somehow his name had been left off the printed signs for both games we were horrified and Jenny and I wound up finding sharpies and modifying the signs by hand at the last second you can see Jenny did a much better job than me but in fact that had become a pattern for both of those games even though AP was clearly credited in both so to be clear nobody in this example or in saks example was acting in bad faith not the developers not the festival organisers not the press everyone was trying to get it right and yet it still doesn't always turn out how you want so yeah we've both had experiences where this was really hard to get right but it's not impossible to get it right this year I worked on a game called a power as part

of a three-person team and we approach the problem this way both in the trailer and in the beginning of the game [Music] so obviously the first person in a list like that is gonna get more visibility which happens to be what we wanted in this case but we've actually found that all three of us are mentioned in the majority of press articles and tweets and so on and maybe that's just good luck maybe that's a bit of good luck but it's not always easy to control who gets credit for a game but one thing is totally for sure if you don't put any names on your game then nobody gets any credit which is fairer sure that is totally fair but it's fair in the way that it's totally fair if nobody in the world gets any food and I think it's

definitely possible to do a little better than that okay next reason people give you know and I know a lot of indie developers have this idea that they're gonna use this company logo in this company name for their trip from their trailer for a bunch of different games and eventually growing their business into a giant brand with a large number of employees like you know dress for the job you want not the job you have you might think you know Activision started as an indie game developer in 1979 for people and you might think something like this well if they had to call their first game David cranes fishing derby instead of Activision fishing fishing derby it would have been much harder for his co-founders to grow the company after all crane didn't work on every game and he departed seven years later - and took any artistic cachet that his name might have had with him while Activision continued to grow into this huge corporate brand so maybe your company awesome where games is going to be like Activision you don't want to hit your fortune to any single person's name and

what I want to say about that is like that's totally valid but I want to caution you that it is numerically very unlikely if you take all the game companies on mobygames which is thousands of companies over four or five decades the median number of games that each company worked on is one I did their analysis mobygames is missing as well a lot of a lot of the e.p.a companies in this room and you know that have come before but I'm willing to bet that if we took all the indie games that are missing from MOBA games and rolled them into this data the median would be even more one that means your company is more likely to work on one game than any other number of games and in fact more than half of all companies have shipped only one game if you form a company and you release a great game and you attach all the visibility and all of the respect or the kudos or the press to the company instead of to the person who made it on people who made it and then you fold the company all that work building the brand

just vanishes meanwhile you as a person will most likely to go on and work on many more than one game in your career so you might be thinking well you know there of course there are strong identifiable company brands in indie games Zac already mentioned Vlambeer who have been releasing about a game a year for about ten years sock pop have released 32 games as a collective in the past three years right and their body of work has this really really clear artistic identity so yeah if you buck the trend and you release more than one game you can get some value out of the company name both artistically and in terms of branding but the odds are you're gonna fold the company after you launch one game so you might want to think about at least sharing credit between your name and the company brand if you're a modest person you might feel like signing your games is just gross I can relate to this so true story before I released getting getting over it I was trying to convince

Zach that sage solitaire should be called gauge solitaire sage solitaire doesn't mean anything that's meaningless so yeah but he said not on the grounds that it seemed too egotistical and it did it still seems gross to me but I think that's kind of the point right for some reason name my game gage solitaire is gross but saying sage solitaire a game by Zach gage it feels totally fine to me I don't know why and I think hold on I think that's kind of the nuance that we're asking from you here right we're not standing up here saying like that you need to do something that makes you feel bad we're inviting you to engage with something that you might have not engaged with because it made you uncomfortable we're let's greet this discomfort head-on and try to find something meaningful and personal something that feels good something that works for you otherwise you're just settling for the default and whenever you settle for the default it's

worth thinking about where that default came from and what it means all right so let's take a few minutes to talk about that it's easy to lose sight of where our traditions come from and sometimes when you really look at the history of a tradition you might wonder why we're continuing it and over year over year in the 1970s as Atari moved from arcade manufacturing into console manufacturing quite famously began to eliminate the designers names from their games and from the packaging the Atari logo would be listed prominently on the packaging but none of the developers names were ever mentioned and that very quickly became the industry standard here in the USA Warren Robinett the designer of adventure invented the idea of the Easter Egg as a kind of low-key rebellion against that policy in that game if you find an invisible single pixel object and you take it in three other objects to a particular room and pass through the wall you get to this secret room and he hid his name like the

reward is you get to see the developer's name and Warren Robinett knew that Atari wouldn't see that they wouldn't find it until all of the cartridges had been printed and sold and he quit his job so they couldn't get in trouble but that's also been the norm in Japan over in Japan you Tanaka stated staged a very similar rebellion at Sega so it's also policy at Sega that developers couldn't use their real names and on the loading screen for Sonic 1 the developer names are actually there but they're in black text on a black background but if you put in a secret button code the names show up if the designers of the games seemed so desperate to put their names on them well why weren't they allowed to I think this video which is from 1982 it's like a ABC news segment hopes to shed a little bit of light we go by what we call what's in the cash box you know I first mentioned the cashbox as a cruel mistress that's where we go by Jack

middle is president of Taito America this is a company that first had space invaders until it sold license to Bali sometimes this can get a little confusing title let us videotape in a room called deep engineering without being overdramatic about the whole thing this is the most secure room in the plant this is where the game gets its life and personality from computer programmers because of the fierce competition among video game companies pyro requested we do not use last names but Rex is working with mark on a new game called toasters and chainsaws mark is computing what will appear on the screen Rex is using a computer to synthesize the sound you will hear when the game hits the arcades right because of the fierce competition between companies what that means is the company is worried that if the designers names were known then Rex or mark might have gotten a better offer at another company they might have broken out of deep engineering and been able to get a different job some designers have even

staged more organized effective rebellions against this so it happened a while ago in board games in 1988 at the Nuremberg Toy Fair a number of well-known well-known board game designers they signed this be a coaster declaration by Reinhold vidiq pledging that they would never allow a publisher to print their game designs if their names were not written on the box and that did become the norm in board games starting in the 1990s one of the best-known recent rebellions against the lack of credit was the case of Metal Gear Solid 5 where Konami removed Kojima's name from the box art really late in the process and kijima responded dramatically by inserting prominent detailed credits into every single mission of the game so all of this is just to say although triple-a games and tabletop games have this long history as well of downplaying the developer names that's not something the developers have

wanted or accepted they no credit is important and they're fought for it and they've kind of rebelled against those policies but they have commercial forces pushing them to remove their names associate the games with the companies instead as indie developers we don't have that kind of force pushing on us if we're raising our names from the games we're doing that voluntarily we're doing something voluntarily that developers in other areas are actively trying to resist and rebell against in some industries these rebellions have led to different defaults than we have in indie games even in industries with comparable team sizes and structures to our own so this is how indie films handle credit we can look at whoa there we go it's a plane I have to get back so this is how the Terminator and extremely famous movie indie movie handles it there's a name another name there are a lot of

names here actually indie films might be doing it too well because it would take us like five minutes to get through this opening sequence and it's only names so maybe there's somewhere less far from from us less far than indie films that we could look at for better crediting practices and it actually turns out we can just look at the non-professional side of indie games in community mods names are everywhere which is kind of weird right because you'd think that in a world where loads of people entire communities are working on things that names would be the least important aspect there's so many people contributing to these projects but it actually doesn't work that way and I wonder if it's because map creators have always typically been credited I don't know why it just is how it worked actually the most the earliest name that I ever remember seeing in a video game is Cliff Bleszinski 's name in on real tournament way back as the person who's making some of the maps and

it's a charming easy to remember name so it's stuck in my mind and at Mott as mods have turned into full games this trend has really continued when valve decided to make dota 2 they bragged to the news about hiring icefrog they didn't call it ice frogs dota but that's changing so clearly some developers even developers at big my knees are starting to put their names on their games and that doesn't still mean that it would be easy for us to change in our little corner of indie games where the default is still to be a company because breaking from norms is uncomfortable and to do that especially with such personal work it requires a lot of effort so and then I wanted to share with you guys why we did it the thought that we put into it and hopefully give you a fuller picture of it even if ultimately you decide I don't want to put my name on this thing so why do I put my name on my games I think there are really two questions here why did I do it and why do I do it now

and I'll just start with the easy one why did I put my name on my games initially I just did it because I came from the arts and in the arts you sign your work I am NOT a good painter this is the best painting I've ever made warning is not a good painting but there it is in the lower right hand corner I signed it I was proud of it at the time in college and so there you go that's that's me signing my work also when you sign up for the App Store if you don't have a company you just use your name so I kind of benefited from this sort of double default coming into making indie games and it turned out that in the game space this default decision was actually an accidentally radical business decision and I didn't really care for business decisions at the time that I made it I was the opinion that art and great games stand for themselves and promoting them as gross and I wouldn't be a part of it and then I wasn't gonna be that [ __ ] walking around talking about how good my stuff was so this one

accidental business decision it ended up being my only business decision for a number of years and that gave it this weird sort of power and it slowly quietly became the entire core of my business philosophy putting my name on my work forced me out into the public realm in a way that I didn't understand at the time that I made that decision or didn't make that decision I guess but as I released more games my name started to come up in press pieces and in comments and in forums and the press started to want to talk to me on podcasts and interview mean articles interviewers started to ask me deeper questions about my work they started to find lines of continuity between my works and the conversation started to become really fun for me I ended up learning a lot about myself and about my practice through these interviews in these podcasts and I started becoming comfortable sharing the things that were exciting to me why I liked making what I was making what was exciting about it and it made me realize

that promotion didn't have to be soulless or hype centric it could just be about transparency and honesty about opening up to the world and sharing why I was doing the things that I was doing what mattered to me it was really just a different way of telling the kinds of stories that I was already trying to tell through my games this decision to put my name's on my games locked me in to a certain level of thought and consideration about every single choice that I was making and it meant that any time I did something that was challenging to come and perceptions I had to think about why I was doing that what was important about it and how I was excited about it and this process of doing those things really ended up being a major driver in most of my most successful work a few years ago I made a game called really bad chess it's a chess game where you get random starting pieces and everything is a mess but it turns out that it's kind of fun but it's not about a mess turning out to be fun it's about my feelings that fairness is

overrated that people think they like fairness but really actually we love unfairness chess is a boring game to me because it's so ridiculous and grossly obsessed with being fair and I wanted to turn that on its head and see what that did and this idea that the press for really bad chess wasn't going to be about the game itself but about my connection to the game why I made it the meaningfulness of my relationship to fairness and the world that came out of the line of thinking that started with putting my name on my work standing behind it it forced me to come to terms with the idea that the public reception of my work was actually stronger if I was in it if the work was about my connection to the world the birth of the idea and not just the contents of the game itself and this has been really successful for me really bad chess got covered in the places including including slate and that slate piece ended up getting me an interview on NPR which is really like kind of a ridiculous thing to happen for a very small mobile phone game so now I

put my name in front of all my games because I want to lean into this humanity to my connection to these games and I use this idea as a guide for all of my other business decisions so as I said I'm coming to this as an artist I'm not a business person so having a moral and ethical framework to use on the business side is something that has really helped me out in terms of making me feel comfortable putting the effort and the work into the things that aren't the games the stuff around them so here's an example a few years ago two things started to come up every single time I talked to strangers and they asked me what I did the first one was when I encountered people who had played my games many of them could identify one game I'd made but they didn't know about others that that I'd made even if they played them and liked them so many times people would come up to me and be like oh my god you also made whatever the other thing that happened is when I encountered people who didn't know about my work or who didn't play video games the conversation alson often become kind

of excruciating as I tried to explain what I did video games are stuck with this very low culture label which sucks right I don't feel that way about video games you probably don't feel that way about them and I started to become convinced that this problem is because most people out there see games as disposable toys not as artistic works and I think that happens because we hide the people who make them this is something that Bennett is gonna actually get more into pretty heavily in a moment so I don't want to go too much into it but I did what just want to say that I think it really changes the way that people understand and relate to art when they can see the people in it anyway I realized actually both of these problems are essentially outreach problems so I had this little widget built for my games initially by John Brodsky and then later rebuilt by Denver Coulson and the idea with this widget is that it sits on the main screen of my games and it serves a bunch of different purposes this is what it looks like cool

Gamze so on the business end it cross promotes my other games it allows me to send messages to everybody who's playing my games when I release something new that they might care about and it allows people to sign up for my mailing list and it makes it clear to everybody what I've worked on they know nobody's telling me oh my god I can't believe you worked on that - nothing particularly groundbreaking though although you know still not something a lot of Indies are doing but nothing amazing but on the values end it shows Who I am a real human being right at the top a big embarrassing dumb photo of me hi I hate that it was really hard to pick that photo out but it really matters that it's there it also lets me tell you what my games are about in my own words not in the words of journalists or app stores and it also lets me send you messages about things that I think matter beyond the scope of games like when there's an election I would never have been comfortable spending time on something

so businessí if I couldn't have married it with the values that I have and the truth is I think this is what people actually want I think they want the values that's why they come to artistic mediums in the first place and the business that I built is just this mechanism that I can use to share these values but if you don't care about values here are some numbers after I put this in my games I had an additional 8,000 downloads in four days and 65% of those people bought the games which is absolutely stupid because my games are free to play and you don't have to buy them I also tripled the size of my mailing list which is completely ridiculous and but most important to me these numbers are not just business success numbers they represent people that I've connected to who my work is connected to people who are learning and exploring and enjoying the space of games and the humanity within that space I don't often know how people come to my games I don't do analytics and not a lot of

even if I did there's not too much that I could really learn but in the case of these 8,000 people I know that they went through the door that I set up with my values and the story that I think matters and as an art that's the thing that I really care about and it totally trips me out that this can basically be accomplished with cross-promotion all right as you saw in the boats friends loading screen I didn't start out with this point of view I had the default point of view everybody else has so this is something that I've arrived at relatively recently and I wanted to take a few minutes just to tell you about how I round up there and and how I think about it now back in 2013 I made a real-time chess game for 16 people and I called it Bennett bodies speed chess and at the time to be honest that was just a flippin joke about Sid Meier I really hadn't thought about it at all it's just a joke but the idea started to nag at me I sort of seemed it seemed a little bit more interesting and

if I think back actually there was a long string of games that I played growing up that experimented with prominent author placement and it always seemed exciting and radical to me when I would encounter them Richard Garriott's nom de plume Lord British appears both as the author and as the authority character the king in the Ultima series of game starting an ultimate line and ultimate - I love that series of games and in 1999 I was finally able to download after years of waiting I was able to download the demo of this game I was so hyped for Ultima 9 and not many people have seen this I guess in this room but when you boot up that demo for the game Richard Garriott appears sort of half in character is Lord British and half was Richard Garriott I'm gonna just show you the beginning of that greetings i am richard garriott known to some of you as Lord British and today I've brought you deep into the dungeons below Britannia Manor to introduce to you at

long last the demo - Ultima 9 ascension he goes on in that video to explain their creative goals and making the game what they're what they're hoping for your experience and the video in the situation is kind of awkward through 2019 eyes but it was so unexpected it sort of stuck in my mind for 20 years as a memorable experience and you know around 1999 we could go a couple years forward into the future was about that time that art games started to emerge and just like today the people who make art games feature themselves and their names more prominently in their games presumably because that's just normal if you think about yourself as making art rather than games in 2001 tale of tales put 3d scans of their own naked bodies into a virtual Garden of Eden in this quake 3 mod Eden Garden and a couple years after that Mary Flanagan's Unreal Tournament mod domestic 2003 I think is one of the

first games it's overtly about the designers autobiographical experience and it features her name prominently as well I think that's the first autobiographical games from some point of view when you get to the end of sexy hiking which was first released around the same time - doesn't it - the reward for beating the game is you get to virtually meet the designer Jasso he wrote a thank-you poem to himself comparing himself to Jesus and there's a song and it features his smiling face so fast forward a decade to 2015 two games came out that year that had a huge impact on me in Nina Freeman Sybil you're literally literally Austin I play as Nina why don't you run together taking a perspective in a way that I had never really been asked to do by him before huge impact I made and in the beginner's guide David readin is in your ear the whole time while you're playing speaking and the trailer for that game

is actually super helpful for understanding what I'm talking about here so I'm just gonna play the first part of it let's say you sit down at a stranger's computer you start opening up files and looking through stuff and eventually you come to a folder that just says my work so you open it and you click on a random file and it's a video game that looks like this if you had to guess what would you say you know about this person right now like maybe they're kind of goofy all those games were really meaningful to me as a player I think much more meaningful for the fact that I understood the games to be the work of actual human beings it felt like when I was playing the games I was somehow in dialogue with the designers responding to ideas or arguments that they were putting forward in their designs and when I appreciate artwork in any other medium or including games actually whether it's music film fine arts literature I feel like one of the deepest most important and beautiful

parts of it is the sense that I'm getting an understanding of the person or the people behind those things and seeing their perspectives if you look at Frida Kahlo's self-portraits it's impossible not to connect to the sense of defiance against social norms social social roles in artistic norms or if you play one of Jeff mintues games right it's so clear how they connect to his childhood playing golden age' arcade games and is interested in psychedelics those connections help me to understand each piece of work and how it relates to the artists other work for me that's the good stuff in indie games that's what that's what I'm here for that's why I played them one of the reasons it seems so radical to put a personal side in the game I think is that this idea of games being the products of human beings the the you know they're they're made by human beings that idea runs contrary to

the overwhelming trend in the culture so I feel like this is ongoing crisis of depersonalization in games where the people who play our games are disconnected from the idea that we are human beings they're on the extreme end there's review bombings and these kind of pro consumerist campaigns but even just the tone of regular everyday technical support can reveal a human disconnect between the people who make games and the people who play them I I feel honestly like I shouldn't have to work hard to convince you of this probably everybody in this room has had some kind of exchange with a player where they were treated like a giant corporation rather than as a person conversely I've noticed that when we put a human face on our games sometimes that adversarial relationship just kind of melts away because most people are basically decent and empathetic when they realize that they're talking to a person instead of a corporation in this exchange a person goes from being like aggressive out of nowhere to suite just with one personal note from the designer and you know it's Chris Hecate so sweet

guy but if it was just a question of avoiding getting yelled at in your steam forums that would be fine I'll be easy because you could just respond personally to every person who was mad at you and you could get them to simmer down but to me these exchanges are a sign that something that should be happening when people play our games is sort of failing to happen I want to be treated by my audience as a human being that's something I want for me but I also want for them to be able to see me as a human being because if they aren't doing that they're missing out on half of what makes my games beautiful what makes them enjoyable so it was with all of that in mind that I started to push the game that I was working on at the time getting over it in the direction of overt self humanization I put my name on the title again this time with much more intent behind it trying to frame the game as a thing made by me a particular person for the player who was also a

particular person and I'm gonna play some clips from the game it's got my voice in it it's very embarrassing for me I really like I hope you feel a little sorry for me there's gonna be torture so I had the idea I was really inspired by Davey's game that I could help the player to understand where I was coming from if I just straight-up explained where I was coming from while they were playing the game a funny thing happened to me as I was building this I'd have an idea for a new obstacle build it test it and I would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard but I couldn't bring myself to make it easier it already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault as a player rather than as a builder imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts decline and it's our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real as you get further along in that game I stopped explaining my

ideas and I start trying to reflect the fact that the player has been sitting and listening to me Yammer on and playing my game for several hours drawing attention to the fact that we must at least have certain tastes in common if they've played that far in the game it feels like we're closer now composer and climber designer and user you could have refused but you didn't there was something in you that was hidden that chose to continue finally by the very end of the game I'm sincerely thanking the player for putting in the effort now you've conquered the ice cliff the platform's the church and the rectory the living room and the factory the playground the construction site the granite rocks in the lakeside you've learned to hike there's no way left to go but up in a

moment I'll shut up but let me say I'm glad you came well when I was writing and recording those lines I actually found that the way I was thinking about my players was changing too if I'm honest I came into the process of making this game harboring certain resentments about the players who treat my games as like disposable fun machines or rage engines or who just watch them being played on YouTube and then kind of click away it's kind of resentful of those people but in the process of recording those lines I started to feel closer to them and I started to feel more appreciative of the contribution that they would make to the game by playing it partly cuz having to play it myself is pretty annoying game so but I was I was feeling closer to the players inspired by jesuis game I wanted to go further and put a reward at the

end of the game for people who finished it but I wanted to make it a real way to connect with the real individuals who finished the game I figured it would be a special moment for a small handful of people and I kept it secret for a while but I'm gonna spoil it for you now if you haven't seen it so plug your ears if you haven't played it yet the first thing that happen is a friend suggested I could I could show a live feed of my computer's webcam like to my desk and I could wave at players who finish the game and be like hello like like Richard Garriott in the ultimate demo but it's a little too invasive partly because I work on a laptop so I had this idea instead that what if when you finish the game you get to visit a chat room and maybe I'll be there and so I built one and I set it up so my phone would get a notification if somebody finished the game and I could run over to my computer and jump into the chat room and talk to them right as they finish the game I want to share some of that with you this was one of the first

people to finish the game and the first thing he does is he connects his experience of playing it to earlier games of mine since I've been playing all your games since I was a kid it's connecting it to my other work it was huge for me except my coop antics got me into trouble in computer science I hear about that a lot a lot of people who reach the end of the guns couldn't believe that they were talking to me this was really common here I'd share a Yee with Zoey you really can't believe I'm there some people just refuse to believe in like logged out it's like not talking to a robot some people just wanted to say thanks for the game and I wanted to take time to thank them for playing through it as well it's usually what I said congratulations and thanks for playing and they would say thank you for the game I really love these moments this

was really meaningful to me but the best ones the ones that meant most to me were these cases where I could share a feeling with the player a feeling that I had felt myself playing my own game but I wanted them to feel when they were playing it so in this case this player says he started to feel like he felt more relief from falling back down in the game than he did from making progress which was exactly how I wanted him to feel and this player by the way was among the first to finish getting over it but still hangs out in a fan discord for the game every single day on the mobile version there's no chat room does not guarantee it online but there's an invitation to send me an email [Applause] so that similar to what they Devi has something similar in the beginning Scot I really want to emphasize the humanity that comes out in this exchange right this person these are two emails from

the same account that came within like five minutes of each other the game is really I'm intentionally frustrating in anger inducing and the fact that this person understood that I was a human being even when they're just sending angry emails and getting no response that was extremely satisfying I feel like we've got a little off topic Bennett what does this have to do with putting your name on the game yeah alright it's a fair question for me putting my name on my game sent me down a road of thinking about how indie games are mostly depersonalized and reflecting on what I could do to change that in my own work how I could signal to the player that I was a human being and in the end it changed the way that I was able to relate to the fans of getting over it and I hope to the way that they were able to relate to me and to my work and for me it set me on the road to finding a way to relate to running my business as an artist it helped me not feel like an [ __ ] when it came time to promote my games

ultimately putting your name in the title of the game doesn't matter that's just a symbol of something that's more important whether you're making a live chat server or building a cross-promotion or widget writing cinema style credits or just having your name show up at the start of the game or it started the trailer all those choices have the same effect which is to draw you closer to your audience and to draw your audience closer to you and if we push in this direction as a group we have the potential of moving the whole industry towards a more culturally and culturally important and powerful place a place in the arts alongside film and television and sculpture and music a place where video games are not even video games they're just video games alright this has been a talk by us Bennett Fadi and Zack cage

okay I guess we've got some time for questions Kevin Harper us to New York I guess where I'm struggling a little bit on my indie side is there are times where I need to sell out so to speak and I'm not necessarily proud of what I put out at times how do you feel about putting your name on something that you're not all so happy it's such a good question I mean I think we should be clear we're not trying to say that everybody should do this in every case there's gonna be good reasons in many cases to not do it and one reason might be that you're not ready to stand behind it as part of the

other parts of your artistic practice yeah I think the bigger thing than just like putting your name on the thing that you've built is kind of like a step to say that you're standing behind a thing and to get all of the privileges and and gloriousness that comes with standing behind something and relating to people and having it be a human thing and so if you're doing work that you're not super proud of and you can't find a way to be super proud of it that's okay right we all gotta figure out how to survive and make a living and be allies and be able to do the work that we're doing but when you do something that you are proud of that you do want to stand behind that's when we think it's really important that you feel comfortable putting your name on it and start to think about what that means and how to do that I would just add you know I have some games I have a game called evacuation I made very early on in my game design career that I'm not super proud of that I still put my name on anyway and oh well I see problems in that game and I don't really feel like

it sort of represents well my abilities as a designer every time it goes down cuz there something wrong with my server somebody will send me an email they'll be like oh I need that game to be there I need it like so important to me and I'm like all right so part of it is like it's not it's not always for me to tell people which of my pieces of work are important or which connect us and as an artists all right tilt the balance in favor of signing it I would also Jesus Christ now in just ping-pong this is the danger of having two people I would also say that like I have on my website I have like everything I've ever put out since before I was in college which is like deeply embarrassing some of that stuff is just like horrible photography but the reason that it's up there is because I think that on the extremely rare chance that someone is gonna come to my website and be like oh I like this person how'd they get to where they are what was their path like I think it's important that they see all the stuff that I thought was cool once upon a time and now I'm embarrassed about because

that was my path here and I want to share that that's the kind of relationship I want to have with the people who like my work it's real yeah hey thanks Rosa my name is young and I'm wondering what to do if you dislike your own name or if it is hard to pronounce or remember for people so I adopted the pseudonym young my name is Jana tan or Jonathan because I was thought I was too long and didn't mean anything and then I found out after going by young for a couple years is what the most common name in Korea so it's pretty much ungoogleable and and also like he doesn't I don't like my last name combined with the pseudo name doesn't make any sense I have this like weird like every other pseudo name ever worked under I get tired of that for about a year do you have any thoughts on that yes my name is is stupid but easy to pronounce but it doesn't save me from that kind of problem you forty is actually a very rude word in Brazilian Portuguese yeah I don't know I mean I think in that situation if I was feeling that way I

would just pick a suit on him and I would just stick to it for my whole career that's what we're talking about is like connecting the game to an individual person doesn't matter what kind of name it is really I really don't think it does matter and yarn is definitely easier to pronounce also the you're the only yarn that I know so that's cooler I know a bunch of you should hang out with some more Koreans hi my name is Duncan I'm a journalist question for Bennett have you played Celeste yep okay cool first of all what do you think of it and second how do you think you and Matt makes games differ or are similar in your creative styles because you know getting over it is tennis similar yeah I'm a huge fan of Matt's work especially level design I'm not actually good at video games so I didn't get very far and Celeste but I think that there is like some kind of similar ambition in that game it's again by a group of people but it is about humanization in some kind of way so I do see a strong connection

there I haven't played enough of it to give a really kind of deep view that's fine thank you teddy hi I'm teddy um I I sort of got this is a real question but feel free to disregard it and me I'm using the mobile app for GDC which I'm enjoying and in the schedule it says put your name on your game I talked by Bennett ellipses so I'm wondering like process wise in the preparation of this talk if you discussed whose name was going to appear first in the description or on this slide I don't know if you caught the slide about how you don't have control over how other people will credit you there you go thank you hi my question is about building a brand around yourself and you talk about you know indie game devs as artists um I know like youtubers and stuff they always really build it around their personality a lot of the times what is the process like doing

that as a game dev and like how is it different for you like if there's you know thousands of copies of your work out there is it more personal I mean like we're not songwriters with you know big giant cult of the performer type things have you ever seen that I think mmm I don't know what the best way to answer this I guess for me it was just like a very natural process I think the reason I make things is because I want to share stuff with the world like I want to I'm pretty shy and I like putting out work so that when I talk to people we can talk about it when we can talk about what they put out and we've like already shared this human level of connection through the things that we made and then it's much easier to have a conversation with somebody and so when I started to notice people on the internet starting to try to have a conversation with me about my work which happened just

totally because my name was there it was very easy to engage with and it was something that I was quite excited about because that's why I'm making it I want to have those conversations I've I want to get it out there and I think when I started I mean I don't know how eloquent I am now but I was definitely not very eloquent when I started because like why would I be like who has the practice of figuring out how to get their message out to a lot of strangers but that's part of the process of having these conversations is like you start to hone in on like oh what are the things that what are people seeing when they look at my work that gets them excited how can I start to be clearer about what I want them to see and how can I start to relate to the things that they're seeing I think in a lot of probably the biggest lesson I've learned in all of my time and game development is a broader appreciation for the kinds of things that I personally don't like that other people like and a lot of my best games probably have come out of genres that I didn't like or didn't respect and had

never spent time with and then made something and then people sort of liked it and then I was like oh why do they why do they like that how can I relate to this person like they're coming at it from such a totally different angle and like I want to be there with them I want to figure out how to like rotate my view to see what they're seeing yeah this this is a thing that people will do to your work yeah the experience that I had is the first games interview that I gave was for Wired magazine the Fred Benenson wanted to interview me for why I'd had like a part-time gig writing for them and so he wanted to write about coop in NY and I've never given a interview about it before I was working as a philosopher at the time and Fred came in with these questions where he'd like looked it on my work and thought about how it connected to my work in philosophy and it made all the connections between the different games and he asked really smart questions and I was like oh my god like there's so much more going on in my work than I realized yeah it really no it really changed how

I think about the work that I had done previously and how I thought about work going forward from that point so this is something that that can only happen if there's like some kind of individual contact and I think that's one of the best gifts that you can get from this it really changed my perception of what press could be because interrogating your own work as an artist is like impossible it's just so hard and then it turns out people are gonna do that for you and tell you about it like that's amazing yeah hi Matilda Pinole and I just released the game it's an online multiplayer game and I was actually advised to take my name off of it because in that genre other developers have gotten death threats fun players they have banned for cheating or bad behavior in the game I'm just curious if you've experienced any kind of harassment and how you might have dealt with that yeah a little bit I think new

genres that I work in it's not as much of a problem I think that was probably good advice if the person gave you in that context and I think what Zach and I we're trying to get across here is there are going to be situations where there's some other considerations you should just overwhelm all of these things right like if you're really worried about the particular base of players then that absolutely absolutely safety should come first I think yeah I've never had harassment on one of my games but I did write a polygon article awhile ago that I got a lot of [ __ ] for ya and it was really scary and horrible is horrible that's like very real and I got just the tiniest amount of it so I mean I think as with everything being safe and comfortable and happy and having a good life is kind of the most important thing that you can have but I guess part of this talk is that when when we were coming up with it we're starting to realize that like maybe there are things

that we can do that can sort of push the industry in a place where that isn't something that we have to worry about quite as much that like if we can engage with this uncomfortable thing in a way that's safe then like maybe things will get a little bit better I have a hypothetical situation where you create a business with your own brand you still happen to have a business to accept money from steam and iOS and stuff but now sudden you're in legal trouble and now you need to fold the business that has your name on it and oh yeah yeah oh yeah I would love to have a business yeah I would love to but I can't because I'm on a non-immigrant visa in the United States you can also you can set up a sole proprietorship LLC my business does not have my name on it it's s gfj LLC but I do business under my own name right annually basically removed STF j branding from your Games's right yeah but that doesn't mean that that's not the legal entity yeah Heather we missed messed up my own name sorry

William survey thinks of the talk so if there's my if there's one takeaway from the talk it's it's creating a human connection and two from the game to the developer during the talk you sorry this is for Bennett during the talk you expressed your displeasure dissatisfaction with the streaming culture surrounding games yeah and being that and getting over it is really all about the human connection of the game I was wondering why there was a strong choice in your marketing for the game particularly the trailer whereas almost entirely focused on the streamers on the people that weren't playing the game oh that's not the main trailer I made a streaming trailer after it already blowing up with streamers the mate the mate trailers are used to actually having the talk I don't have it handy right now buddy it starts out just it's just me it's playing the game and I say you know why did I make this right and then I suggest

in that trailer that there might be some people who like this kind of horrible thing so in that trailer what I'm actually doing is I'm saying well I'm a particular person I did a weird thing I made this strange game but I had in mind somebody who would like it a particular person and so actually was framing it in that way from the absolute beginning but I will say like you know I did as I said I mean I came in with some resentments about screaming culture I felt like it was kind of feeding this disconnect but I think I was I was just wrong like one of the things that I was that I kind of came to grips with through the process was just to have more respect for that and and to understand the human dimension of people watching games being streamed as well yeah wonderful thank you okay so first off thanks secondly so you talked a little bit about kind of Zack you talked about being kind of thrown in to the public scene and maybe not necessarily anticipating the you know the degree of attention or the amount of

attention you'd get Bennett you talked about you know essentially being messaged every time someone finished your game and both of those sound kind of invasive in terms of personal life so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the balance between kind of personal and professional where that fell apart and how you survive just as a as a human this is a hard question yeah I don't know I mean my game is even in the chat room is is not as unguarded as one in Nina Freeman's games it's at a certain remove it's a professional remove I'm the game developer you're the player and I'm not I'm giving away some of my thoughts about the game and about playing games and about what it means to confront challenge in that and that's personal it's like real there's my real feelings but I'm not telling them about my life we're giving them my my home address or anything like that

and I that was how I felt I had to protect myself and kind of maintain those those those boundaries and I don't think it's easy I think you have to kind of strike the right level it's gonna be different for every game as well and some games are about somebody's personal experience I could never do what taalib tails did with their naked body scans that I just for me would be impossible but you know I just gonna be different in every case yeah I think I guess I probably have to processes so one is if I'm thinking about doing a work and something is uncomfortable I think it's important to engage with that discomfort and to think about it like a lot of this stuff this this has like been such a weird talk for me because like I don't care about any of this business stuff and it's weird for me to put up a slide that has like all the clippings that like would be on like my mom's fridge or whatever like that [ __ ] weird but I

felt like there was like a value in in engaging with that discomfort because I'm trying to convince you of something that I think is really important and on that level dealing with discomfort it's like worth it to engage it because I'm doing it on my terms in terms of after a game is out how people are reacting to it if something makes me uncomfortable I just leave it alone or ice like don't read the reviews for a week or I block it keep like it's not at that point like once you're not creating something then you should just be focusing on like how can I lead a happy healthful up health healthy life how can I continue to create work and feel comfortable like then it's okay to because you're not it's not on your terms anymore now it's like shared with people and it's gonna be the same kind of interaction that you would have anywhere if someone started talking to you and at a party and it was uncomfortable you'd walk away and and that's fine you don't have to that there's no additional value to engaging with awesome thank you cool all right thanks very much everybody thank you