Innuendo Studios

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“Why should we care about women’s representation in video games?”

“Nobody is going to want a female protagonist!

“Their target audience isn’t big enough to warrant any games!”

“Women aren’t as capable as men, they don’t belong in video games!”

“If more women started playing video games, maybe then they’d have a say in the matter!”

tumblrbot asked: ROBOTS OR DINOSAURS?

Correct.

Playing Depression Quest on a low night. If you can call this “playing.” Wherever games go, we use the old words. We can accept what a “game” is now, that it may not have rulesets or win states, may not have stochastic consequences for your decisions, may not be “fun.” Tonight I didn’t want “fun.” Fuck “fun.” Tonight was “fuck anything.” I opened up Depression Quest tonight because I was depressed. You could only call this “playing” if you understand with what generosity we use the word “game.”

This is how it was going to happen. I didn’t want to play Depression Quest when I was up. I don’t want to go there when I’m up. I’ve had a copy of The Noonday Demon sitting around for months. My lows have been deep but too short for books—little earthquakes. Long enough for a game, though. I’d read the testimonials about Depression Quest, and caught the last 10 minutes of Zoe Quinn’s post-mortem at Boston WIG. Zoe’s a Twitter-friend; we’ve exchanged about four sentences in meatspace. I knew her game hit people who’ve felt what she’s felt like a sledgehammer, and was grateful at the time that I wasn’t in that place right then.

How was that only a few weeks ago?

I don’t know what Depression Quest would be like up. Low, I couldn’t game it. Depression Quest is coded in Twine, an engine that makes, basically, HTML-based Choose Your Own Adventures. Only more sophisticated. And sometimes I knew what the “right” choices were. When my in-game therapist suggested I start taking anti-depressants, I knew they would be good for me. Depression Quest strikes out the options you’re too depressed to make, and it had been tracking from the beginning whether or not I was medicated. I knew options would open up if I’d just accept the pills. But I couldn’t do it, because I couldn’t do it. In meatspace, I’ve been too scared to ask any of my therapists for pills. Some possibly stupid notion that working it out with therapy is “more authentic” than medication.

When my in-game friend offered me a kitten, I sat at my desk for five minutes trying to decide, visualizing it on my lap, knowing the cat would be good for me but also knowing I couldn’t possibly take care of one, remembering people who’ve had to give dogs away because they couldn’t emotionally handle pets anymore. I knew “yes” was the right answer, and defeatedly knew I’d still say “no,” and then clicked “yes” anyway, with the same impulsiveness I would have needed to say it in real life. I chose to reach out to my in-game girlfriend, Alex, to meet her for dinner and tell her a bit about how hard things have been, and she didn’t push me away. And, sitting on a stool in my bedroom, I cried.

I was “playing a game.”

Tonight my real-life girlfriend took time out of some social engagement—she wouldn’t tell me what my call interrupted—to talk to me, and I got all shaky-voiced about how worthless I felt. That I was stupid and pathetic. And she listed all of the reasons I wasn’t any of those things. I was good at my dayjob, got to work on an awesome magazine, loved my department at school, was designing a great game, and had she mentioned I had an awesome girlfriend?

But all the evidence in the world won’t make me feel like less of a failure. I’m convinced my coder is going to quit my game, my boss is going to fire me, I’m going to have to drop out of school and work a shit job to make money. Also, I’ve gained fifteen pounds in the last year and I have an ear infection like a fucking 10-year-old.

And I know none of it matters. I know fifteen extra pounds means I’m not underweight for the first time in my life. I know my ear infection is hardly my fault. I know my job would be worse without me. I know all this things, and I don’t care. Tonight I can’t care. I do not have it in me to care. Fuck you if you think I’m not a failure.

I phrased it once to a friend that it’s like being replaced; that I’ve disappeared and there’s some other guy I have to be for a while. It’s not that I hate myself. I like myself, and I miss myself, and this other guy seems like a decent sort but I don’t know anything about him. It’s like babysitting someone’s nephew; I take him to the movies, as if asking, “do you like Mission: Impossible?” I take him to dinner, “do you like Thai food?” All he ever has energy for is fucking around on computers, and I can’t stand to watch because I know it’s not making him happy.

When I’m depressed, living with myself is like living with an addict. An addict with really boring addictions.

What people find meaningful in Depression Quest is knowing that someone understands. It forces that on you. Of course we know, academically, that we are not alone in feeling this way. Doesn’t matter. Tonight, this is the entirety of the world, just this dead emptiness. There is nothing and no one outside of it. But you can’t play Depression Quest and believe no one understands. Not while she’s telling you your own story. Not while she’s telling it to hundreds of others.

Communion.

Depression Quest does what only a game can do. It makes you take action. And if you know, from years of therapy and terabytes of web articles, that the right answer is always “reach out to someone,” Depression Quest does the unthinkable: it guides you out.

It takes you in, and it guides you out.

At least for tonight.

At the end of it, I knew I should get back into therapy. And I knew I should write a game in Twine. And I knew I should thank Zoe Quinn.

Thanks, Zoe.

    The most common word you will say if you play Jumpman is “fuck.”
    You’ll say it because you suck at Jumpman. Your blocky, orange character controls like a bar of soap on a bathroom floor. The inertia is incredible. Hold an arrow key for a quarter-second and you’ll go sliding across the ground with physics that would better suit an air hockey table, and the only way to stop is to apply equal force in the opposite direction.
    You suck at Jumpman. Get used to it.
    Many obstacles would be comically unchallenging but for the deliberately awful controls—it’s like trying to do a single push-up while wearing fifteen wool sweaters. Pixelated green enemies kill you if they touch you. Flashing blocks kill you if they touch you. Enormous yellow bouncing balls kill you if they touch you.
    You don’t die in Jumpman. You explode.
    I don’t care whether you’re a Catholic priest; play Jumpman and you’ll swear like a fucking sailor. You’ll swear more often than you blow up. And you’ll blow up a fucking load.
    And you will be laughing as you swear.
    The secret to Jumpman is that the penalty for failure is nil; in fact, there are a few rewards. You can rotate most levels by 90 or 180 degrees, causing enemies and giant bouncing balls to fall haphazardly as gravity re-orients itself. It is often beneficial to ignore your character and just maneuver the giant ball into all your enemies, often exploding yourself repeatedly in the process. Every time you explode, you reappear a moment later at your start point. Your enemies stay dead, but you do not.
    Jumpman, a free indie game by Run Hello, is part of the masocore genre. Masocore games are masochistic, spine-breakingly difficult games, with a prevailing (though not universal) wisdom that failure need not equate with punishment.  Failure in Jumpman is a setback of less than a second. This is also true of popular masocore games Super Meat Boy, Give Up Robot 2, and VVVVVV. Levels tend to be small, often a single screen. A level may take fifteen seconds to run through perfectly. A perfect run may take eighty failures to achieve. But you can do eighty failures in eight minutes. There are few training levels - eighty failures are all the training you need. Eighty failures in eight minutes and you can do something impossible.
    And when the next level loads, your eyes boggle, and you, priest, minister, Mormon missionary, say, “I am so fucked.”
    And you say it with a smile.
    Being fucked is fun.

***

    Spencer, a therapist I saw some years ago, asked why I had so many issues with failing. I almost never finished a work of art that wasn’t a school assignment, and then usually in a mad panic, days before the deadline, a sheet of paper taped to my wall, frantically making piles of charcoal and eraser dust on the carpet and pissing off my roommate. Why did I always want my time free to work if I was going to waste it on the internet? Why did I resent hours spent at dayjobs for taking time away from art I probably wouldn’t make?
    (I am putting words in Spencer’s mouth; he would never be so strident.)
    I told him that being afraid of failure meant being afraid to try. I had structured my life so I’d always have several ambitious, half-started projects going, enough that I could peck away at one whenever I needed the illusion that I was working, but never anything in such a state that it could actually be completed and released to the world’s judgment. I could feel like an artist without ever having to fail.
    The creeping depression that had brought me to his office was the feeling that, if the payment for being zero-failure was to be without accomplishment, then the failure in my life was life itself.
    “Can you think of any time,” Spencer asked me, “when you actually failed at something?”
    I had to think.
    Eventually I came up with this:
    My first relationship was emotionally and, very briefly, physically abusive. My first girlfriend and I got together when I was nineteen. Warning signs that it was going to be a horrible relationship occurred about one month in, but we stayed together til I was nearly twenty-one. It was more or less a solid year and a half of crisis, as she went from one temporary living situation to another, depending on me for all emotional support and slowly destroying every relationship in her life. She’d pick a fight with me every night, I’d eventually get four hours of sleep, this would go on for months. I cracked several times, but also felt a steady weariness—a general grinding-down. I realized that I didn’t want to kill myself, but for the first time I understood why people who felt this way all the time wanted to kill themselves.
    But I stayed. I had a very young notion that when two people love each other, they can always make it work. They have to make it work. To leave someone you still love is to fail them.
    By the time I broke up with her, I said, I didn’t believe that anymore.
    Then, in that way that therapists do, Spencer slowly coaxed the lesson in that out of me, mostly by saying, repeatedly, “…and therefore?”
    Therefore what? Failure didn’t kill me. In order to end the relationship, I needed to believe that love alone couldn’t sustain a relationship with someone who mistreats you and, on rare occasions, punches you in the face. That perhaps such behavior was a turn-off. That “making it work” can’t be one person’s job in a two-person relationship. These were lessons in maturity, but they were also coping mechanisms. Believing in them was necessary to get out.
    I failed. But in retrospect, failure looked a lot like the other thing.
    It redefined what it meant to fail.
    This is as close to a breakthrough as therapy gets for me.

***

    I wish I could say I’ve never looked back. Within a couple years I was living in New England and working on a large independent game project, with a coder in another country, feeling like a proper developer. But I was making little actual progress.
    Some lessons need to be learned through repetition.
    Masocore games appeal to me, first and foremost, because they’re incredible. But they start to mean something to me more personal than fun.
    My breakup was not without fallout. Past the liberating first months, I was a wreck. I had to figure out how to be single again, and how to earn back the friends I’d alienated. Failures in real life are messy where Jumpman’s are clean: you die, you are reborn, you try again. As many times as it takes.
    There is a purity to this process. There is always a way to win. You have infinite tries, infinite time. There is a joy in death.
    Being fucked is fun.
    These lessons are harder to pick out in real life, among all the noise.
    I often forget that the creative process is one of self-doubt. To write one sentence is to reject a half-dozen inferior ones that came to mind, and to reject the survivor upon revision. A blot of paint or chisel-chip in a block of marble obliterates the thousands of other paintings and sculptures that could have been. This is what it means to design. Most of these alternatives are considered for seconds and then forgotten, until the final product feels as though it came from nowhere. As if the right choices were my first thoughts. And I often ask when I start the next work, “Why isn’t this as easy as last time?”
    Often, masocore games track statistics. Give Up Robot 2 told me that, by the final level, I had died over eighteen hundred times. Super Meat Boy kindly follows every perfect run with a replay that superimposes all your attempts on top of one another: copies of your character race across the screen, each ending in a burst of blood, perhaps a hundred or more times, until only one is left, the one that lived.
    Upon victory, the game reminds you of all your failures.
    “This is what it took to get here,” it says.
    Without penalties, masocore gaming lets me explore this single theme: the ultimate success that comes after a thousand failures.
    Why can’t I go back to when it was easy?
    It was never easy.

-Ian Danskin

refs:
Jumpman
Super Meat Boy
VVVVVV
Give Up, Robot 2

This article originally appeared in twenty-four magazine, Issue 3.
Reprinted under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

    It is strange, sobering, maddening, amazing, and ultimately inconsequential to think that I will never be a string theorist. I have no particular drive to be a string theorist, and no guilt about being a non-string-theorist. But during most of a person’s youth they are aware that life is long and there is still time. Want to be a clown? You can still be a clown. Wake up one morning needing to be a novelist? You can start today. But at the age of not-quite-thirty, the very first possibilities are closing off. The number of years it takes to be a string theorist probably exceeds the number of good, math-y years I have left.
    Beyond the 6-odd years of college and grad school I haven’t taken, there are all of the remedial classes I’d have to take for the math I’ve forgotten. I haven’t done trig since freshman year of high school. Call it 8 years, then, and that’s just to get to quantum. (This is all presupposing, by the way, that my brain can even get back into the swing of things after so long away from any formal scientific training.) And then once I hit quantum, there’s however many years to get to string theory itself. It’s safe to say I’d be well into my forties, perhaps my fifties, before I could claim to be a string theorist.
    I think we know that’s not going to happen. And it’s curious to know that the very first doors are closing.
    What’s also curious is to realize just how elite the premier science-geniuses are. Edward Witten, the theoretician behind the prevailing version of superstring theory, is, if Time is to be believed, “generally considered the greatest theoretical physicist in the world.”
    Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about string theory. I can’t talk about string theory; I don’t understand a word of it. After seeing the Nova special on string theory in my college math class (this was “math for artists”), I talked to a friend about it, one who used to be an engineering student. He said, “Yeah, I tried to read a book on string theory. I couldn’t understand any of it.”
    If you saw the same Nova special, you may remember how all the underlying physics were explained with cute analogies, i.e. “imagine a parent and child playing catch, but every time they throw the ball, they move closer together; that’s how a graviton works.” Did you notice the way that once they started talking about string theory itself—and Witten’s M-theory in particular—they stopped explaining their analogies?
    We’re talking about math so many orders up that it may be impossible to put into layman’s terms.
    M-theory, allegedly, proposed a way that the 5 competing string theories could, in fact, all be correct at the same time. I am taking Witten’s word on this. But that’s the question: how many people have to take him at his word? It takes 20 or more years of concentrated study to even begin tangle with his theories. I can’t imagine how few people can even claim to fully understand M-theory.
    If he’s the world’s greatest theoretical physicist, who’s qualified to peer-review him?
    And that’s the thing; that’s looking at the potential limit of what a human can come to know in a single lifetime. That’s the idea that’s fascinating, and perplexing, and yet has negligible effect on one’s life, which makes it doubly-fascinating and doubly-perplexing. Journalists like to talk about Witten like he’s one of those once-in-a-century geniuses, like Newton and Einstein. Maybe that’s hyperbole, but geniuses of that type to pop up, and they’re usually dead by the time the next one comes along. During their lifetime, perhaps that’s it; that’s as far as people go in that direction. Until the next one comes along, you have to wonder if there’s any further we can go.
    So as not to flaunt some glaring ignorance, I’ll stress that I am quite sure many people understand M-theory, at least as well as theories of this kind can be understood. And perhaps someday, if they work out all the iffy bits and string theory still holds up, it will be ungodly simple. Teachable, even. It took a genius like Newton (or Leibniz if you prefer) to invent calculus, but now that the legwork is done it can be understood by teenagers. (Or, certain teenagers, anyway. I got a C in Calc.)
    But somehow I doubt that M-theory is going in that direction. twenty-four teammate Johanna, a Real And Actual Scientist, explained science education to me like this: Your first year in college physics, they tell you all the science you learned in high school was lies and here’s the real truth. Then your second year, they explain that everything in your first year was lies, oversimplifications, and here’s the real truth. And then your third year comes around and… et cetera.
    It’s always more complicated. Each progressive level is both more accurate and more abstract. In many fields, you never hit The Truth, and a good science education won’t pretend that anyone knows The Truth. We have only better and better guesses. If your interest in gravity is only in the way objects of certain mass move in relation to each other, you are interested in knowable, teachable facts. If you want to get into the movements of gravitons, the why of gravity, forget about it. No one knows. But they can show you the prevailing theories. Dedicate 30 years of study to it and maybe you’ll push the theories forward a tiny bit, and if you’re lucky you’ll die before you’re disproven.
    But the really crazy idea is that sooner or later we’re going to hit the edge, and it’s not going to be answers; it’s going to be the hard limit, either of the brain’s processing power or the length of human life. The idea that we’ll find things our brains are simply unable to decode, or that require more years of study than a human lives.
    I wouldn’t say that this is certainly true, and you’d never know if you’d hit that point or if you’re just waiting for the next revolution. A limit’s only a limit until someone breaks it, like calculus, or the 4-minute mile. And it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever run out of things to ponder. If M-theory were the end of physics (hint: it’s not), there’s still biology. It’s not so much the idea that the hard limit of what humans can know is almost here, or that we’ll see it in our lifetime. Simply consider the idea that it may exist at all, and at any given time, and you don’t know how far away it is.

-Ian Danskin

This article originally appeared in twenty-four magazine, Issue 2.
Reprinted under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.