The Power of the Abstract

my name is Liz Ryerson uh I am a a game designer uh composer of Music uh visual artist and critic um I did the music for dysphoria which you might have played um I did a game called problematic I write stuff about games on my blog and um yeah I have some art actually that is going to be sold at the wild rumpus party tonight anyway um this talk uh is about kind of conveying ideas through abstraction so let's get started this by the way is a screenshot from uh an Atari 800 game it's like a sort of a home brew polish game in case you're wondering so the history of video games is kind of a history of expression defined by technological limitations in hindsight it's easy to look back fondly on the old days of games and forget all the mind-numbing efforts that went into to even making these games run back then

games were constantly engaged in a struggle to make any sort of basic sense of the language of game design and try to make it look or feel like something kind of tangible and interesting within the strict limitations that were imposed on them and I think a lot of like older games carry this very strongly For Better or For Worse um now of course we choose the limits oh sorry um and uh um we can do pretty much whatever we want within you know our own limitations um and you know the what kind of context we're working in but I I think there's a thing where uh we sort of see this like this gaminess this kind of uh expression defined by these the limits of this technology as kind of a prison that we need to escape from like as something that needs to be kind of uh transcended in order to like realize our ideas or in order for games to be taken more

seriously um games like like Call of Duty Grand Theft Auto whatever we think of these games as approaching a kind of like representational realism or or kind of like a documentary realism or as speaking at at the very least speaking to our reality in some more kind of real or tangible way even if you know we don't like them or whatever um but we forget that there are like thousands and thousands and really millions of tiny little details from many different sources that go into the constructions of building these realities um in actuality game worlds in like Call of Duty or GTA are really no less abstract in some ways than than Mario or Tetris they're just way way more detailed and convincing sort of fim faimes of something kind of more resembling our own reality um okay a lot of the ideas uh that we see in games are not really new instead they're sort of retellings of retellings

of retellings um you know maybe this screen this area in like a call of D in the newest Call of Duty game was inspired by like the original alien film or like a Superman comic or like maybe it's cribed from other games like Bioshock or halflife or something like that um and I think increasingly games have been so reflective of themselves that they've stopped being able to kind of owledge how constructed the worlds in them are because we've seen an idea or a gameplay concept so many times before we start to see it kind of as being part of our reality um and then as a culture we're kind of unable to accept that these are abstractions because when you see these kind of images saturated everywhere around you it's easy to feel like they're current and relevant and kind of speak to you in some way and that's kind of the scary thing when you put something out into the world it can affect other people in a really powerful way that you probably never even considered and people start to internalize it and it becomes part of

the way that we construct like the reality around us outside of a game and I think games do this in a really really powerful way but the kind of weird Paradox here is um that while game worlds are like feel increasingly real and sort of powerful almost hyperreal uh there's still kind of like an undeniable fakeness to it like you know the uncanny valley that kind of stuff um and it doesn't ever really go away um but I don't I don't think this is actually really a bad thing at all I think like contrary to popular belief um their fakeness provides us a different way of like looking at our reality and looking at ourselves and uh realizing ideas or feelings that we can't fully experience in our own reality through the language of this machine we just have to understand that it's a machine and and this is the language that is speaking in and it is not our own reality um and you know games can put us um

Outsiders kind of Might fear games because they're kind of an unknown or they put people into this like trans-like State um but you know it can just as easily be kind of a Dreaming or meditative or contemplative or playful State as as kind of like a VI violent angry control obsessed one that like the cliched image of video games is okay so the disclaimer is this talk is not about how to kind of realize more abstract design ideas through AAA I don't have experience with that I'm here to tell you about kind of smaller more independent things that and talk about ideas that you might not have realized but I can't help with that um I think this is more intended to be inspirational and um and kind of communicating with fellow game designers or people thinking about games or just curious ious and want to be introduced

to new things um I'm also you know this is like I'm not going to be up get up here and like [ __ ] talk AAA because I don't have time to and it's not really worth it like you all are probably intimately familiar with all the problems of AAA so I don't really need to to talk about that um so this is a game Sorry the the screenshot is quite big so it takes up the this game's called strange climbing by strange think um he actually has a game downstairs at the mild rumpus kind of like an art gallery game um but I I like this game because it's kind of a procedural firstperson climber where your goal is just to make it to the top of this like weird structure um and it's it's generated obviously um but I find it interesting how the mechanics of the the game are so integrated into the actual structure itself like um the geometry kind of serves both uh an aesthetic purpose of just being like this weird structure in kind of like the

the mood of that is like a very distinctive thing and also like a gameplay purpose where all those kind of jagged edges are like things that you have to interact with and potentially like assess whether you're able to jump further up and um I actually really I really like this game because it's very simple but it's very challenging at the same time and it's all just doing it within this like one little structure and the jump key um in a way I think it's kind of applying same principle um I I saw this when I was in uh film class um this uh documentary about uh this architect Lewis Khan who sort of wanted his buildings to not hide their raw materials this is a big kind of uh if you saw Robert Yang's talk about level design yesterday he sort of talks about this um you know uh philosophy of of uh more modern architecture is buildings not hiding their materials and stuff like that um and I think I think that game by by strange think is very similar

and that it's completely computer generated and unreal but it's still like beautiful in a way even though you know you can see that it's not like a real structure it's it's not hiding the sort of algorithms and whatever that created it in the structure it's kind of embracing it um so I I don't think that like you know not hiding your parts means like like a lack of Polish and that's one thing that I want to talk about like you know it was a concern when I submitted my talk that that that I should talk about this like I think that polish is kind of a a loaded term or at least a kind of a construction in a lot of game circles because we we kind of do have you know established standards of what polish means that have come out of like industry practices you know what it means kind of visually and soundwise in terms of like the design and you know what is kind of accessible what it communicates clearly what it means to

communicate and uh usually or at least often it's equated to kind of like a level of detail or a level of like this looks like it's actually you know something kind of that was like designed and intentionally made um and um or or it can just mean like more shiny and Commercial looking um but I I think these the point is the constructions are kind of Def this is a construction kind of defined by the culture of games and it doesn't really necessarily speak to how well the content of the games is conveyed or tell you you know about what's inside the game that in fact there really is kind of no approach that's made necessarily better for you know a work across the board it completely is dependent on what you're kind of trying to express and there are a lot of kind of range of emotions and ideas that aren't expressed through this kind of Triple A idea or even like um more commercial India idea of what polish means

and I I think if you look at something like polish in kind of a more Progressive light uh and you look at it as being a reflection of how well a game realizes its ideas it's more subjective but it's not arbitrary like there is definitely a difference between things that are kind of like one-off experiments and things that effectively kind of use uh a particular style or idea to realize their ideas and we're going to look at some of those uh so this is a game it looks like a YouTube window but it's actually a game by Steven lvll AK inara who is probably the most interesting no without a doubt in my opinion the most interesting game designer who's working today um and I'd say this game is very polished uh it was for like a ludum but like essentially you open it up and it's like this YouTube window and you're actually playing the game that's inside the window but it's a finite length that like 210 that it's saying you know that's as long as the game is and uh

there's a narration over top with this guy like boring narration this guy is talking about yeah this game is okay I guess and and like and then like random like gay porn Windows pop up and you have to like click them out and then like people like try to message you on messenger and you're trying to like click that out while you're controlling the thing and sometimes the cat just jumps on the dude's keyboard and like screws you up just like and you you die um and like so so this game is only 2 minutes long it's kind of a a joke game but the way that it's presented is really like really effective because you open it up and it's like what why why am I in a YouTube window like what is this it has this purpose the presentation has this purpose of sort of defamiliarizing you with your kind of relationship with games and uh you know putting it in a different context and I think it for this purpose it's like a joke it's not really trying to communicate something narrative wise but um it does it really really effectively and really powerfully

which is why I think it's a really interesting game Al so there's this other game by him that you know looks again completely different let's see if I can uh open it up in okay that's another game let see if I can open it up in a window here um it's called Uh the terrible whiteness of Appalachian Knights um and I'm not going to play very far into it but um it has this sort of asy art style um and uh it's incredibly disturbing as you can probably tell um it uses this kind of weird like uh kind of old computer monitor kind of font to to make to kind of uh you know give a off of a particular feeling of like weirdness and disorientation that's like really well reflected by the audio and I think the audio really does like the strongest work in this game but I'm going to skip all

this um essentially all you do in this game is wander around and you're this like asky character and this this crazy weird frantic music plays in the background um and you're this like housewife who's aimlessly wandering around her house kind of periodically checking up on members of her family and uh basically all she does is sleep um and most of it you're just kind of wandering around frantically um just like checking on your family members and uh I don't know the this the music and stuff is just like there's almost kind of like a dissociative U approach to the like the visuals is almost like kind of reflecting the dissociation of the character um that there's something like really disturbing sort of going on under the surface and that everything kind of in her life has been abstracted to these symbols uh that she just doesn't know how to control or or do anything with anymore and this all kind of builds up to like a really bizarre like not safe

for work moment at the end that I don't really know what it means but kind of reflects the mood of the game and I so I guess the point that I wanted to get across here is that this game uses that kind of style to um you know that we associate with like very kind of older games that you know don't have that um didn't have the graphical capability to to realize much and it Embraces it as kind of a reflection of the narrative themes of the game um and another game sort of indirect contrast by him is called slave of God I'll show you a a video here you're it's like a really bizarre game where you're in a dance club and you're just like wandering around and dancing with people essentially it looks like um like being on drugs um but like you know when people say like oh this looks like being on drugs no this game like literally looks like being on drugs it like has this all these like bizarre Shader effects but um it like kind of captures this feeling

way more directly and sort of powerfully than other any other games that I've seen that sort of oh goodness well you get the idea anyway um and um I don't know it it it's really effective in a kind of a way that's hard to convey um but the the point is that these games were while they're all very different uh kind of really effectively convey what they're setting out to capture um and they use all the tools of games to do this they use the visuals they use the design they use the interface they use the audio as you've seen like which is a really overlooked component by the way as someone who's like a a composer and sound designer of like conveying sort of narrative um or ideas um that you want to convey in a game um and I think uh this is why I find his work really interesting it's all completely based on what idea he's

trying to realize and the visuals and everything are kind of uh just all in service to whatever IDE he's trying to realize and that's why I think he's like probably the most interesting game designer working in games right now so this is another designer who's a little less welln he's uh it's called his name is Pedro Piva um I think that's how you pronounce it he's Brazilian um and this this game's called caroccia and like literally uh it's even it runs even faster than this this just animated gif is slowed down because uh you know I blew it up and everything but um it's a short game and basically all all you can do is like you can't cross the road cuz there's too many cars like and you're just like your character's frowning and then you go into like the car God like um garage here and then they just tell you you don't have a car so you can't do anything and like and that's all it is it's like this really like weird sarcastic commentary about cars and like why you need a car

for everything and like it it just conveys it in this kind of like weird like bootleg game looking style where um you know it just seems like this kind of like weird amateurish thing but it reflects kind of the the weird tone of the game and um the kind of anarchic sort of ideas that he is trying to get across his games are almost kind of like I I describe as being like anti- games so if I can get this to run this is another game of his it's like a compilation of it seems like some kind of comp compilation of arcade games this called this one's called Mel Gibson the Hedgehog c i I don't speak Spanish but um you open the game and it does this sometimes it just randomly crashes I don't know um but these are all like broken arcade games basically and this is like as you can tell this is um I don't know if you guys are Sonic fans but this is the Green Hill Zone music oh no I

died um and here's a here's another game that I like a lot um yeah and every game does this when you when you hit start and sometimes it just crashes um and you're like like this little frenzy thing running around I don't know actually what the goal in this game is um most of the other ones have goals but I I like what happens when you die any anyway that's uh that's called VHS maluco um and it's sort of a compilation of like really like weird anti-game like sarcastic takes on um old arcade games and and the game is like the games are hardly playable but there's a there's a like an undeniable sort of like artistic sensibility that runs through his games of like this kind of like Anarchist like um you know uh like idea of like the games the game mechanics are dishonest

and they're kind of disingenuous and and we need to kind of destroy them or melt them and actually it's something that he talks about like called melting video games and he says um from his patreon it's uh when I talk about melting video games I'm thinking of corroding the B borders that maintains the most diverse part of people away from the inside Community uh he's not a native English speaker so uh and the inside people stuck in I love video games but I hate the mainstream culture around it um and I think like uh the the you know the the reaction that a lot of people would have is oh these games look amateurish but like if you play them you realize that there's something very different about these games like they are very simple and and they are very like kind of abstract and broken looking but there's kind of a philosophy or sensibility that's reflected uh in the design and in the way that it's presented and I think that's something

that we need to understand is very intentional and it's something that is using this kind of idea of glitch or like Brokenness as part of its philosophy rather than just doing it as a trend or whatever so I think it's really important to make that distinction and it's yeah it's not just it's not just done because it's easy to do I mean it might be easy to do and that's a good reason to do something but that's not the only reason to do something or really the best reason to do something um so like abstraction uh is not just about like glitch or looking weird in eight bit uh there are plenty of like I think horror games are really the best at kind of uh realizing abstraction you know embracing abstraction and using that in kind of the game mechanics uh you know reflecting what uh they want to get across and which is usually a feeling of like Terror or disorientation this game's called never mind it just had a Ki starter recently um and like this is

the main area that you are outside where there's just this like bizarre models of 3D house that are like stacked um like 3D models of a house that are just stacked up on top of each other in a really surreal way and when you play it it's like obviously intended uh to reflect this kind of idea that the house is a terrifying place and and it's like building up on your sort of the characters or your sort of um like anxieties about being in the house and you see that it's a very like easy misual visual metaphor that kind of reflects what the game is trying to get across something that we understand intuitively but might not necessarily be able to explain I think like horror games do that really well but like I said these visuals are very quote unquote Polished in the conventional sense but it's still doing something very weird with the form that is is different and and abstract and not real in like the representational realism sense um this is a shot from um Silent Hill 4

and you have this character who's like wandering around with you in your apartment who's she's a pretty she's pretty nice like um but she just gets kind of beaten up throughout the game especially if you play badly um and like you know sometimes at the end of the game she'll just be in bandages and like just bruised all over but there's this room where you just sort of randomly enter into and a huge version of her head just like stares at you and like its eyes are sort of twitching and it's this this really odd moment um that isn't necessarily like explained in the plot or the the story or anything but like I think it kind of uh is something that like the Silent Hill games in particular are really good at doing uh reflecting this the themes of this game or the themes of the games in a very kind of surreal uh way that's hard to really verbally Express why it works or what it's saying but it has this incredibly strong impact on you when

you're playing and it's not just um an impact of being scared it's also like what is this like why am I experiencing this and it kind of uh pressures you to con you know think about your relationship with the game in a way that you might not normally do so um another like um moment that I think about a lot is uh in Silent Hill 2 where it's towards the end of the game I think they do this in several Silent Hill games but like you're in this sort of hotel and it your character is kind of um without spoiling too much like your character's kind of psychological world is falling apart and you know you have like very clear maps and layouts in the game but um and at this point you uh it starts raining inside the hotel which is like already like what is this doing and you open a door and you go to a completely other side of the hotel in a completely different room and all the doors just start connecting with each other in this really bizarre way

unpredictable way and it's it's something that that games like it's almost arbitrary what door that you enter into where it leads you in a game right like it's just any you it's something that you can change easily and um but it's using this in a way to kind of reflect uh the mood of the game um and and kind of you know defamiliarize your relationship with the space and say that this is kind of a psychological world this is not not really a a real world and I think it's it's something that games are incredibly um good at doing um so another game that's one of my favorite games called y Nikki uh it's it's a free uh Japanese game uh RPG Maker game and it's another game sort of about dreams let's see if I can um show you a video quickly um and you sort of you're this little girl um and you wander around this kind of weird surreal world let's skip ahead so that I can um

and you enter from your apartment you enter into this um I don't know okay you enter into this like bizarre hallway of doors and the doors kind of send you through to these very surreal worlds which the further that you go into it um the more kind of the less abstract they become and the more kind of reflective of something that this girl might be experiencing um you actually see like and you're actually able to extrapolate some narrative from it but it's a very kind of nonlinear narrative that isn't really like something that you can explicitly Define but I think like this game has a huge following people have tried to just kind of interpret the plot there's a lot of like discussion about it and it's all because this kind of just curiosity of exploring this game and like all the these bizarre symbols what they mean and and what your relationship with them is because it's something that just so different from from what other games try

to do because really like you have these objects that you can use to do certain things but really basically all you do is wander around and there isn't really any sort of direction that you're guided towards so that kind of allows you to have your own relationship with a game and experience it in a in a different way than something is like yeah you just got uh she just got the Frog power and now she can turn into a frog um but yeah um let's exit out that I think in a way like uh a game like y Niki is kind of a metaphor for all games because we we enter into these doors we enter into these digital spaces not knowing what's going to come out we know it's not real we know it's going to like change Us in some way and we're going to have some certain interaction with it but it's kind of mysterious it's almost like we're kind of um injecting ourselves with something without really knowing what what is going to happen um but uh these doors like through their

kind of the weird abstract machine language and like these uh kind of array of symbols um tell us something about ourselves and tell us something about the way that we experience the world and um I think that's tremendously beautiful and Powerful games are in basically dreams um so before I I continue on my last thing I just want to mention a few games by women because I didn't do that in this talk and I feel really bad about that but there are some games that um I also think that you should really check out um uh some games by Lilith uh who made this game called [ __ ] worlds which I I'm biased because I did like the sound effects and the music for it but um she has another game called what is it called weric Gardens I don't know how to onic Gardens I don't know how to pronounce it but it's like this kind of anth ology of different weird 3D spaces

that kind of seems like like old PlayStation One games and um kind of reinterpreting it um another game that's interesting that was almost in the igf but not quite nominated it's called curtain by Laura dreamfield it has this really kind of bizarre lowii style and it's kind of more of a narrative game that one's definitely worth worth checking out and also um one of the games that's in the noovo this year is called tetraeder tremendously like really really cool and um kind of use this like cheesy um '90s kind of uh net art AOL kind of uh old Flash movie style to um kind of get at their own aesthetic thing so those are all worth checking out but this is a game called Judith which is also by incr par and Terry Kavanaugh who is somewhere at the conference um and uh it's a game that I keep coming back to cuz I had a real relationship with like Wolfenstein in 3D when I grew up and um

that sort of like there's a sort of disturbing to that game that's never really kind of put to the surface but you sort of is sort of implied at in some of the level design and some of the other things like that and so I I kind of just like imagined in an extrapolated based on that I've written some articles about it that are you know worth checking out if you're interested in that but the thing that I like about Judith is it takes this like raycaster 3D style you know essentially 2D 3D style and uh it it kind of owns it and uses and and brings that disturbing to the surface as part of the The Narrative theme which is about this um it's essentially about the story of Blue Beard and it's about this woman finding out that her husband is actually this horrible guy who's doing all these horrible things um and uh there's another aspect to the narrative but essentially like it's about this woman wandering around kind of experiencing things passively um and I I think that an interesting uh kind of kind of gender metaphor in there along with yum Nikki

about like the ways that women are kind of taught to interact with the world through like kind of passively and observation um you know rather than this kind of traditional masculine view um quote unquote masculine view of how we approach games where it's about interacting and sort of controlling and manipulating systems but anyway that's just something I thought about um uh with the history that we create we sort of leave traces of the past behind um ideas or styles that we might have thought were dead keep popping up again in different contexts there is kind of an eeriness to the old that never quite go goes away it's almost like a ghost it's almost as if it is still calling out to us to be kind of exed and reexplored with all that we know now conventional wisdom um in games says that the legacy of a lot of old forgotten games uh was that they were stepping stones or they were the results of technological struggle strugles or dead ends or sometimes even just like embarrassments like we want to

bury them in the ground and forget about them like the the ET Story the famous story about ET um being buried in like a a I don't know was like a under concrete in like Arizona there was actually just a documentary about them digging it up but um we've sort of inevitably thrown them out for more polished or easy to play or easy to look at games and in many ways of course we have improved the craft of games uh exponentially design wise and gameplay-wise a game as like singularly in Industry defining as Mario was so huge because it was a huge improvement over what came before and like Mario 3 is a huge improvement over Mario we we built that language we know what works well we we know what feels kind of better and smoother to the player but in other ways I think still think we're left wanting for something more I know there's a lot of attitudes um around game culture now that like to kind of assert that games um games are

all about like Mario and doom and Pac-Man and that's like games culture and that's what like gamers are and that's that's that that gamer culture but that that whole thing isn't a construction like weird art experimental games have always existed even before Mario and we need to realize that like as part of the industry we need to realize part of the history of this medium and respect it and not just like you know go with the the Kool-Aid token narrative that that everyone kind of just blindly accepts um here are some very strange games from the 80s this one's called microsurgeon uh it's for the intell vision you're kind of controlling this thing and you're like shooting this bacteria um it came out in 1982 which is three years before Mario this game's called uh deusex makina it's a a spectrum game it's one of the first like art experiment games there's actually voiceover narration through the whole thing it's because it was on a cassette like uh ZX Spectrum had sort of a cassette player um and uh yeah it was

a kind of interesting ambitious game even though it was kind of you know had its own problems this game's called go to hell um for the ZX Spectrum the the the same guy did another game called soft and cuddley which is also equally weird but this came out the same year as Mario and it's just as bizarre as any like random weird indie game that you're going to find online probably even more bizarre to be honest um in spite of the the technological limitations uh of these games um like they still speak to us and and there's still something that makes them us able to see something about them in the present their Unapologetic abstractness reveals something natural and intrinsic about the form of games um and I I don't know I I just think that it's important to realize that this kind of experimentation has always been around um but I believe that we need to start a embracing abstractness as a

virtue rather than a shortcoming if we're really interested in expanding the form of games we should be leaving no stone unturned and of course that doesn't mean that all games have to look like weird 8bit Punk games or whatever but at the very least we can be open to the the ideas that are in these games and respect them and take inspiration from them even when they're broken and you know they have design weaknesses games are dreams their gaminess uh quote unquote is a central part of this dream it's the source of their power it's their light and I believe that we do ourselves a huge disservice to this medium the more that we spend trying to tame this abstractness this gaminess in order to build something kind of more predictable and representational and known instead of sincerely trying to explore something new and unknown that might tell us something different about ourselves and the world around us thank you

[Music] I'm I'm sorry I went a little bit over time um I don't know if there's any time for question okay okay I do have time if you want to ask uh a question a few questions uh go up to the mic I have a question okay um that was awesome I really liked how you made uh game art topics very fun and approachable and my question is can you give us like the 30 second summary of your take on the the wolf 3D aesthetic um what specific Castle wolf you said you had a whole thing that you wrote about the sort of like the eeriness of yeah well so I think there's sort of a um the game is about something that's like very kind of real uh like representational it's about sort of like World War II or at least ostensibly but then there's this kind of bizarre gaminess about it uh where you have to collect all this treasure and there's like no way that you could carry all this treasure and there just like turkey dinners lying on the floor and I I think

it kind of it it kind of toes the line between having some sort of like realistic uh art and then having this like weird gaminess that is actually kind of disturbing and I don't know if it's intentional but it's just something that I've always kind of thought about and um you know had like weird dreams about and and things like that so I I don't know that's just my person it's like a little grotesque right yeah it is a little grotesque and that can that can be like really kind of bad and that can be a good thing and I don't really know which way to take it with that game but it's I I think it's like interesting for me to think about and look at as an illustration of other things anyway and you felt like that other game you were comparing it with yeah Judith yeah was similar in that sense or um well it uses the same sort of like raycaster format and it kind of but it kind of brings that disturbing to the surface as part of the theme of the game as like the narrative but yeah no I I see those two things as being related just you know because of the kind of style it's the same thing with like like uh the game terrible whiteness of Appalachian kns like there are a lot of old games that

sort of have that asy art but this is kind of using it in a different way and reappropriate it for for something that was always kind of there but never really kind of called attention to awesome thanks a lot no problem uh I have a question sure uh if we compare game development with art and if we see the uh path that the classic visual art uh followed from some primitive forms then to realism and then to some surrealism some abstract art uh do you think that game development will follow the same path and now we are seeing that it uh turns from some realism to some more uh abstract forms Let's uh well yeah I mean I think there's some like Universal patterns but it's also not probably going to happen in exactly the same way but I I also think it's kind of

is happening with a lot of like indie games and experimental games and it's always been around it's just like it being sort of popular popularized and understood it might take a while cuz games are tremendously complicated like there's a lot of things that go into kind of understanding interacting with games but uh you know like newer generations of people are able to kind of deal with like navigating all these like technological interfaces and stuff because they grow up with that it's so intuitive and just like Central to their part of life so I think that the culture and literacy around games is definitely going to develop and that's going to result in kind of more weird abstract things um but yeah thank you no problem okay uh I have to take it to the wrap-up room so um I'm sorry but I would thank you if any questions feel free to come up to me later but I hope you have a good s rest of your day come to last levels 1 a

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