Well, another week, another alpha!

If you're just tuning in, we are doing something a little unusual with our development on our upcoming independent video game, Overgrowth. Every week, we release our latest build, however raw it may be, to fans in our secret preorder forum.

We are continuing to polish the Overgrowth alpha for our first blessed build! So far, we have been releasing really raw development builds that of course have a lot of known bugs. However, each week we close more and more bugs and the alpha is starting to shape up. In a couple of weeks we hope to have a solid build that runs on most people's computers.

Here's a run down of what's new this week. First of all, our alpha has about doubled in size. Now it is almost 500 megabytes, most of which consists of high resolution textures. Aubrey added a ridiculous amount of new art in the past few days. We are going to show it off in a post pretty soon, I promise. We have already started demoing it in this thread in the SPF, but unfortunately it is too hot for the blog right now.

Also, Phillip has closed a bunch of map editor bugs. Even though we are trying to clean up the code for our upcoming blessed build, Phillip is a beast and managed to fix all of the known bugs in the map editor. Therefore, Phillip managed to slip in a few new features. Namely snapping and grouping. Thanks for all of the feedback in yesterday's map editor post!

From David, this week, we have much faster shadows, a bunch of bug fixes, object shadows, and the hot lens flare. Thanks for wishing him well last week, David is feeling much better!

As always, see you guys on the forum and in IRC.

The map editor in action. I'm scaling a bunch of blocks on my lovely house.

Here at Wolfire, we're a small team but we want Overgrowth to have lots and lots of content. So, it's really important for us to have powerful tools to speed up asset creation. One of the main things I've been working on is the map editor.

We want to make our editors as easy to use as possible. It's pretty obvious, but it's humans that are going to be using these and that's important. It means we should design our tools around the things humans are good at and bad at. Here are some of the human-centered ideas that have been motivating our design.

Limiting Information Load

I've been trying out a lot of game editors and modeling tools. One common issue I've come across is many of these tools have bloated interfaces and control schemes that are difficult to learn. Often times there are dozens of tools to select between, and users have to navigate through long menu lists to find what they want. Blender is a good example. It's does a lot of things really well, but it's UI is daunting.

I find it easy to get lost when given so many options and so many readouts all at once. Other people are probably similar: a lot of studies have shown that humans can only actively process about four distinct items at once. Luckily, by some miracle of the human brain, there's a lot of leeway in terms of how much information these four items can contain. We can chunk little items together to make bigger items, and then process the whole hierarchy with relative ease. If you want to try this out, write down a 10 digit number and try to remember it for awhile without looking at it. Now imagine it as a phone number. Is that easier? Phone numbers (U.S. numbers at least) contain two or three clusters of three or four numbers -- all manageable quantities.

For Overgrowth, we're applying this chunking principle to the organization of controls. For example, the basic transformation tool gathers together three distinct sub-tools: translation, rotation, and scaling. The particular sub-tool that gets chosen depends on where you click on the object you want to manipulate. Thus, when you're deciding where to click, you only have to think about three categories of manipulation, and earlier, when deciding which root tool to use, you again only had a few choices. As another chunk, there's a set of three basic keyboard modifers. 'Shift' locks transformation to a line, 'control' activates snaps, and 'alt' clones the object as it is moved. These modifiers function in more or less the same generic way no matter which tool you are using, and I think this makes it easier to cognitively distinguish them from the choice of tool. Anyway, the idea is to have modular and hierarchical controls, thereby avoiding infomation overload as much as possible.

Reducing Dimensional Difficulties

One of the prevailing problems we have to deal with is figuring out how to control three dimensions when computer input devices only provide two degrees of control (you move the mouse on a flat, 2D surface). Similarly, computers only tend to provide output in two spatial dimensions (monitors display 2D images with no inherent means for depth perception). These factors make it hard to deal with free, fully 3D manipulation on a computer. And it's not just bad i/o devices: we humans just generally get confused when we're given more than one or two dimensions to think about. This problem often comes up in zero gravity games, in which you can move about in all three dimensions. For example, play Descent for awhile and try not to get disoriented.

For Overgrowth, we want all the tools to have cognitively manageable degrees of control. So, translation is always locked to a line or a plane. Scaling is determined by only one or two dimensional input. Even 'free' rotation is actually parameterized by just two variables (since it's just movement along the surface of a sphere). The idea is you never need to manipulate more than one or two dimensions at once.

Increasing Accessibility

Because of their complexity, a lot of game editors end up requiring serious tutorial investment in order to learn. We want Overgrowth's editors to be more immediately accessible. One way we're doing this is by trying to make controls that do exactly what a player expects they should do. We're going to need a lot more playtesting to work this all out, but we have some initial ideas. We've separated all mouse control into two basic categories: left-click for generic control, and right-click for more specific, contextual control. Ideally, a player with no experience will naturally stumble upon the generic controls, and simply start dragging objects around the screen with no confusion. I've made an effort to lock all mouse movement to one to one correspondence with game object movement, so there are no tricky gadgets to get the hang of; (except in a few special cases) the object should just follow the intuitive physical movements of the mouse. Of course, we can't count on all players stumbling into such understanding, so we'll be adding some hints when the editor is first used. But as much as possible these will be graphical and unobtrusive; we don't want a lengthy, textual tutorial turning users away.

Another way we are making the map editor accessible is by keeping it fully in-game. In fact, right now the map editor is just some meta data and controls running on top of the regular gameplay engine. This means that any player who becomes familiar with the game will be immediately familiar with the basic look and feel of the editor. This differs from, for example, Valve's Hammer Editor, which runs in a very distinct environment from the games it edits. However, lots of other games do have in-game editors. One that really inspired us is the Little Big Planet editor. While the controls are tricky, the environment is very familiar to anyone who has been playing the game, and the editor becomes correspondingly accessible and even fun. You can play music, change clothes, and turn on and off physics all while in the editor; best of all, you can do this with multiple friends at once. This is the spirit we want for the Overgrowth editors. They should be fun in and of themselves.

As cool as it is, LBP is not the only thing inspiring us. Far Cry 2 has a really nifty paintbrush tool that sprays vegetation on the landscape, and Aquaria showcases some nice mechanics for compositing 2D environments, just by cleverly layering lots of sprites. If you have another favorite editor, please let us know about it in the comments!

I'm always looking for new input on the editors. So far, I've been able to work closely with our artist, Aubrey, to make tools that are actually useful to him -- we share an apartment, so it's really easy to coordinate. But Aubrey's not the only one who's going to be using the tools. We're also making them for modders! If you have any suggestions or specific feature requests, I'd love to hear them. Comments here, forum posts, irc chats... all are good.

Last of all, here's a quick visual tutorial of the basic object controls, based off the great graphic by Silverfish in the forums!

Basic object manipulation. Yellow refers to translation, green to rotation, and blue to scaling. Boxed areas are the hotspots for sub-tool manipulation when using the 'omni' tool. Arrows show right-click movement sets. All control types and hotspots exist on all faces, they are just separated here for clarity.

I just started working on lens flares; I need to see the sun's location so I can test shadows! I am testing a new technique for dynamic lens flares based on the anatomy of the human eye, inspired by a paper by Tobias Ritschel.

The basic idea is to simulate the glare as a human eye would see it, instead of how a camera would see it. This means the glare has to be animated: the movements of the iris in response to bright light cause the diffraction streaks to change in subtle ways. Simulating an eye rather than a camera also results in a more grainy texture and a rainbow-colored lenticular halo, instead of the geometric internal reflections you normally see in camera flares.

The Independent Games Festival grand prize is one of the highest honors an indie game can receive. More important than the $20,000 check is the fact that it can rocket indie developers out of obscurity and into headlines; if we won, we wouldn't have to fight to get people to return our emails, they would contact us first! World of Goo, Aquaria, and Braid are some of the past winners. Heard of them? I thought so.

Wolfire is too young to have any games entered in the contest yet, but we are definitely going to enter Overgrowth next year. Since we are still outside observers, I feel like it's easier for me to say what a lot of people are thinking.

There are some serious problems with how the judging is set up.

After hearing that the new IGF finalists have been announced, I looked at the panel of judges, and was surprised by two things: first, the IGF proudly invites winners of the previous IGF to judge for the upcoming contest, and second, a few people on my buddy list, and even some members of Overgrowth's Secret Preorder Forum, are among the judges.

Let me preface what I'm about to say with a disclaimer: I'm not accusing anyone of anything -- I trust all of the people I know on the list. I'm not calling foul play or anything like that. Also, I'm not blaming anyone for being a judge. It is a great honor, and I would sign up in a second if I was in their position.

However, this system of inviting IGF winners to be judges is flawed. Let me express my problems with it first, and then let's explore some possible solutions. We have a whole year to discuss this so let's get started early and constructively.

Indie developers are not one hit wonders.
Here is the problem with bringing back IGF winners as judges. They are going to enter their games in future IGFs. These future IGFs will have judges who have been judged by these judges. And so on. It doesn't take a time-manipulation game mechanic to see why this is a bad idea.

Should peers review each other's work?
These judges won IGF, so aren't they the most qualified to judge other indie video games? Maybe, but being a great designer doesn't necessarily mean you should be a judge. To make an Oscars analogy, it's as if Brad Pitt was judging Edward Norton's movie or Matt Damon was judging Ben Affleck. Sure, Brad Pitt is an award winning actor and probably knows a lot about movies. Should he really be judging his peers though? Probably not, especially when he is in the middle of filming a new movie, or talking with the contestants every day.

Indie politics
Lets say I'm a judge. Am I allowed to sell the game I'm reviewing, as an affiliate? Obviously not, right? Well, if I'm an indie game journalist, can my website accept advertising from a video game that I'll be judging? How about posting articles about it?

It's a messy gray area that I don't really want to think about. Suddenly people who I freely correspond with are now holding the keys to the kingdom, and tremendous power over Wolfire's future.

Another example: I've been floating the idea of having an affiliate program for Overgrowth so other indies can sell it next to their games, in exchange for a generous commission. It sucks that people will have to choose between doing business with us or accepting the honor to be an IGF judge.

The solution
Here are a few possibilities. Please add your own thoughts in the comments.

1. Get some academics in there. One of my biggest problems with the judges is that many of them have huge financial ties to the industry. Let's get some people who aren't financially involved, for instance, professors. I nominate my graphics professor from last semester.
2. Get more industry veterans. I'm thinking John Carmack, Tim Schafer and other giants who are well into their career.
3. Increase the volume of judges.

Unfortunately, as soon as I write these suggestions, I can already think of problems. A graphics professor might be biased towards games with great graphics instead of say, You Have To Burn The Rope, a finalist this year. A bigwig like Carmack might not like games that are built on the Source engine like Zeno Clash, another finalist this year.

It is really hard. Does anyone else have ideas? How do the Oscars work anyway?

The Debate

Roger Ebert largely reignited the debate over whether games are art back in a 2005 column, when he claimed that not only are games not art, but they can never be art: "the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art." In a later article he retreated a little to say that games could not be "high art". His basic claim is that art requires a completely passive audience, and game players have control over the outcome of the game, so it can't be art.

"Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."

On the other side are many gamers and game developers. Many of the more prominent developers voiced their opinion on this subject in a Gamasutra interview. The notable Tim Schafer put it like this,

"Art is about creatively expressing thoughts or emotions that are hard or impossible to communicate through literal, verbal means. Can you use games to do that? Of course you can."

Denis Dyack took perhaps a more extreme position, that not only are games art, but they are the highest form of art:

"I feel video games are probably the most advanced form of art thus far in human history. Not only do video games encompass many of the traditional forms of art (text, sound, video, imagery), but they also uniquely tie these art forms together with interactivity. This allows the art form of video games to create something unique, beyond all other forms of media. Simply expressed, you can put a movie in a video game but you cannot put a video game in a movie. Video games are the ultimate form of art as we know it."

Art History

This debate recurs over and over throughout history whenever there's change - a new art form or a new use for an old one. Ebert's response is like what a literary critic would have said in the 1920's about these newfangled 'moving pictures'. "Well they're all just gimmicks and cheap thrills. Trains coming towards the camera? Charlie Chaplin falling over? I screamed and laughed with the rest of them, but it's just entertainment for the mass market... hardly Shakespeare!"

And you know what, back in his day, some people said the same thing about Shakespeare. It was 'low art'. It appealed to the masses and sold tickets, but strayed far from the pure form of theatre. He broke many traditional rules, for example, by combining drama and comedy, driving contemporary playwright Ben Johnson to state that "Shakespeare wanted [lacked] art". For all we know in a hundred years some aging game critic will be discussing some new fledgling art form and say "Pfah... it's just entertainment... hardly Schafer!"

New art forms and movements are almost never initially recognized as art. Igor Stravinsky is now one of the most famous and respected composers of the 20th century. However, his work The Rite of Spring literally caused a riot the first time it was performed! It broke so many traditional musical rules that many critics and patrons thought it was just noise, not music at all. Similarly, many who care nothing about art know of Claude Monet and his paintings. However, at the time, like other impressionists, his work was heavily criticized for being 'unfinished'... that his paintings weren't even complete works of art. Even the term 'impressionist' was coined in a brutal satire of his work.

How Do Games Fit In?

The Demoscene creates a big problem for proponents of the idea that games are not art. Demos are videos, usually set to music, that are rendered entirely in real-time. The demoscene recently started leaking onto consoles, for example with the game Linger in Shadows. They are usually totally uninteractive, so Roger Ebert's argument does not apply, and we can agree that they are art. Let's say we add a button to control the brightness of the screen. Is it now too interactive to be art? What if we add the ability to shift the camera slightly. Is it now not art? If we slowly metamorphose from a film to a game, at what point exactly does it lose artistic merit? This is a question that must be answered by anyone who claims that interactivity negates art.

"Art games" also require an explanation. These are games that are unlike most commercial games: they're not designed to be entertaining, not designed to be accessible, not designed to make money. They are designed entirely for self-expression and communication. One of the most famous of these is Rod Humble's The Marriage. It's important not because it's necessarily good, but because it's unequivocably art, and its message is one that can not be clearly explained in other media. The game is about the difficulty of maintaining a stable marriage, and the only way to really communicate the experience is to involve the player directly in it instead of just watching passively, as Ebert would prefer. Edmund McMillen has made a lot of games focusing on self-expression, such as the excellent Coil and Aether. He prefers to call them 'alternative' games, because he's not striving to make 'art' in the snobbiest sense of the word, but to create games that are independent of the forces that suck the soul out of most commercial projects.

Case Studies

There are even many commercial games that support the argument that games have to be considered art, because like "art games", they deliver experiences that could not be conveyed as effectively in another medium. Here is a small, woefully incomplete, selection. Please feel free to help complete this list in the comments!

Shadow of the Colossus (PS2):

There are two aspects of Shadow of the Colossus (pictured in the frame above) that would be lost in translation to any other medium. First, there's the theme that you can perform great evil with the best intentions, which is made much more powerful because it's you who's doing it. Second, there's the bond between the horse and rider. This is a feeling that is much less accessible in books and film, because you don't directly experience how much of a difference a horse makes in such a barren and lonely landscape.

Super Paper Mario (Wii):

Here is a video of it in case you've never seen it. Super Paper Mario is noteworthy because it delivers the experience of navigating in an entirely separate dimension from everyone else in the world. This is only possible in a game world because the 2D sidescroller mechanic is so firmly entrenched in gamers' minds as "normal". For this reason, it's almost mind-blowing to switch into 3D for the first time, an experience that could not have been captured in the same way using other media.

Braid (XBLA):

What Paper Mario did for space, Braid does for time. Here is a video review if you haven't tried it yet, to give an idea of how it works. Time travel is of course possible in books and movies, but they don't make you think in terms of time travel. The only way to do that is to require the player to solve puzzles using these powers.

So Are Games Art?

I have listed what I consider to be strong arguments that games should be considered art, and some arguments that it might not be. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide what you think, and history will be the judge of your decision. Please let me know what you think in the comments, and if you can come up with more examples of games that make artistic use of the medium: my list is very incomplete!