I don’t mean to imply that I have conquered my numerous OK Plateaus, but long before I watched the video, I’ve seen the work of others this way. I will often find myself peering through a window into the creative effort necessary to produce a given work. For instance, when watching a movie, the way the camera moves makes me think of the crew behind the equipment, affecting how the scene is captured. Sometimes I’ll take it a step further and try to imagine what the director was thinking.

It’s not a look “behind the scenes”, it’s more of a limited intuition into the technical creative process.

A good example of seeing nearly all the way through is with most of today’s comedians. Even the “shocking” ones aren’t too opaque. Being a comedian is, like a good illustrator, more about observing the world in a certain way. You go through life with certain filters in place (this appears to take a conscious effort), and you methodically record all of your thoughts. Add a few showmanship flairs, and you can make a pretty good comic routine. Yes, this is an exaggeration or an oversimplification. But it helps emphasize the ability of a small subset of humorous creatives to bring something truly special and new to the table. For example, Leon Arnott’s twitter writing is special, because most of the time I can’t even get a glimpse of the underlying process. His work is behind a creative veil, so to speak.

Here are some other examples of works that I’ve experienced recently, or have stood out in my mind, that demonstrate this creative veil:

• The Haruhi Suzumiya anime — especially the “Endless Eight” episodes, which defy my every ability to discern how they were conceived and produced
• Most of David Lynch’s work
• The film Enter the Void
• droqen’s Starseed Pilgrim, which remains a consistent yet impenetrable fortress of creativity, despite my long hours and diagrams
• Phillip K. Dick novels
• Music by Akufen — I know HOW he made it, I just don’t know HOW he made it
• The MyZaza video — no matter how short it is or how many times I watch it, I still can’t figure out how it was made, or why. I hope I never find out.

I most recently experienced this veil with Liz Ryerson‘s latest endeavors.

It began with her newly released collection of music & sound, Scraps. I hesitate to call it “experimental”, because the pieces sound so directed and purposeful. They may be disparate snippets, but there’s a strong coherence between them, definitely alluding to something grander that is utterly invisible to me. There is nothing random or thrown together, it all seems to serve something, something that, for me, is inaccessible. And I think that’s why I like it so much.

One of her blogs, l0stw0rlds, is of a similar texture. These images of hyper-obscure games, alluding to entire worlds that no longer exist, is crushingly wonderful. I don’t recognize nearly any of these places, and yet I’m instantly drawn into a nostalgic mood. And like her music, I can’t understand how these were made, or what thoughts stood behind them. Why do they strike me so?

Finally, her game Problem Attic which I have been playing in ~30 minute slices, and not yet completed. Its grain is quite thick, and the player is met with formidable impedance. The challenge of progression goes beyond the glitchy controls, relentless “enemies”, and strict goals — the entire game exists in a different plane, where the rules change often, seemingly trying to reject the player’s intrusion into this space. I perform actions in the game in order to get to the next level, but I cannot be sure if my actions are positive or negative. Am I breaking out of a prison? Am I the jailer? Am I reliving an endless Sisyphean struggle against a system I cannot comprehend? There aren’t any names for the sections, and players refer to them as the “first” and “second” parts, etc., which tells me that people don’t feel comfortable describing what they see in the game, which makes me feel that I am not alone in my inability to discern what is going on here.

These uncertainties are, again, due to my failure to see into the creative process from outside. This is what keeps me coming back, session after session, to throw myself against the jagged wall of Problem Attic. If I ever do finish the game, it won’t be because I “understood” it or “figured it out”. I will have completed just one stage of a process of understanding that may never be completed.

But ultimately, I hope I never find out. I want to continue interacting with this world, with my imperfect knowledge of it, and never crack the code. I’m glad Liz herself does not endorse any particular interpretation of the game.

It’s interesting to note that Liz spoke much about her troubles with the Stencyl game engine via Twitter, and therefore I have actually been exposed to a substantial amount of the inner workings of the game (from a technical standpoint). And yet, I still don’t feel I know how it was made.

In conclusion, the world is very large, and my experience of it is negligible. Mainstream media is authored by ≲1% of the creators, and represents ≳99% of the content that is visible by default. Untold fortunes exist outside of this narrow field of view. When it comes to revealing things to your audience, less is more. Go outside your experience to find wonderful things.

PS. Anna Anthropy recently wrote about the lost art of 90s web design, which strikes a similar chord.

Listening to some of the accounts reminded me of a game that I really enjoyed, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. I was in high school, and it must have been either 1999 or 2000. A friend from my class lent me a precious CD, holding a number of games that were … less than legitimate. This was before broadband internet was widespread, meaning the original game, which spanned (I believe) two whole CDs, had been stripped of its full-motion video cut-scenes and CD-quality music and compressed into a single .ZIP file.

Around that time, my parents had taken me to a Pat Metheny concert, when his trio visited Israel on tour. On the way out of the auditorium, we bought his album, Trio 99->00, which I still love today. This CD was in my computer’s optical drive a lot during this period, so while playing Jedi Knight, the familiar orchestral Star Wars background music was replaced with a modern American jazz trio. As I would explore the industrial factories and extra-terrestrial valleys, I might be accompanied by A Lot of Livin’ To Do or Capricorn.

There was a lot of mystery in the game, because I didn’t have those full-motion video cut-scenes to help tell me what was going on or what my objective was. I also used cheat codes because I was a huge sissy. Despite Jedi Knight being a first-person shooter, there was a third-person mode for when the light saber was used, in order to aid combat. I would use third-person as much as possible, because it was fun to control this character jumping around, waving a light saber. This resulted in me wandering around an empty level, looking for something to trigger the next level, listening to cool jazz and brandishing a light saber.

It’s hard to explain how calm and peaceful it was. To be sure, I was trying to get out of the level and move on to the next one. But the exploration had a special feel to it. Maybe some of this magic is rediscovered today in games like Proteus. And I think the Megastructure and its endless chambers may bring back other aspects.

EDIT: A video to help relive the experience!

• This year I will be attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. All arrangements have been booked, and I will arrive a few days earlier to poke around the city and meet with family and friends. If you are into game development and want to meet up, please let me know! Especially if you want to jam. I hope to document my experiences (photos and writing), so keep an eye on this blog.
• I am currently seeking a new work situation. My CV is available in Hebrew and English — please contact me if you are interested.

== — == and now back to your regularly-scheduled programming == — ==

The competition, hosted by the elusive MrDude, broke the classic competition mold and asked participants to strive for the one thing they would never consciously desire to make. But what is “bad”? If one succeeds in creating a bad game on purpose, does the game become good? If a game achieves “worst game” status, doesn’t that make it good automatically? Would the 2nd-place Worst Game be promoted to first place, thus eventually emptying the “Worst  Games” set?

We could run in philosophical circles – but what about practicality? Can we analyze the entries (in, say, a blog post), and use the results to better our game-making skills in the future? Can we help identify what makes a bad game so bad?

Non-games or games that are meta-bad

It’s hard to call these “games” at all, and thus hard to learn from them. Anything I add at this point would probably deteriorate into a “what is a game” discussion, so we’ll just leave it as-is.

Examples:

Glitchy and buggy games

Of the glitchy games, the most pronounced was probably the nearly-unplayable “BOBER<S QUEST”, in which the simple task of moving left or right becomes a tiring chore.

More importantly is “Upside Down”. Besides being (as the title suggests) an upside-down and backwards platformer, the glitches here are so woven into the fabric that some puzzles relied on glitches in order to be beaten. This kind of broken game-world opens new venues of exploration. I tired of this game rather quickly, but the takeaway here is that the rules don’t have to be constrained to higher-level concepts, but can blur into technical limitations as well.

Examples:

Games with viable concepts that were seemingly thrown together

To these developers, “bad” meant “unrealized potential”. The core gameplay was (supposedly) good, but the game was tacked together hastily or unskillfully (on purpose or not, obviously). Are these bad games? Could they be considered prototypes, or proof-of-concept material?

Examples:

Games that insult the player’s intelligence

Some developers interpreted “worst” on a higher level. My favorite was “Hero Test”, which leads the player through a series of unbeatable challenges, served with insults.

Examples:

Boring/repetitive games

The worst kind of worst. Making a boring game is easy. A developer is nearly guaranteed to succeed in making a game repetitive. Any takeaway that I could offer is: don’t do it.

For example:

Games that defy categorization!

Potato, potato: potato. Potato potatoing potato, potato. Potatoes, potatoed potato.

For potato:

Final thoughts

I am mostly interested in how these games differ from a game that was not meant to be bad, yet came out that way. The most famous was E.T. the Extraterrestrial, but there are many, many others. Further research into previously-made bad games will undoubtedly improve the way we build new ones!

On a related note, this competition taught me that letting go of our ideals can lead to many new concepts and directions. Also, it’s easier to finish something if it is meant to be bad! And finishing things is the way to salvation.

You can check out the other entries in the competition, as well.

However, the idea has been around for years now, and it will reincarnate better than ever. Maybe next time a less lofty goal will be chosen, and the project may attain a feeling of completeness. I believe I may have reached too high in this current cycle, and constantly straining my neck looking at the goals is frustrating and discouraging.

For now, there are some other projects that demand pursuing. Rest assured that the Megastructure will return; because the truth is, it never ceased existing to begin with.

This blog will continue to exist as a development log, as well as @megastrata. I am participating in Ludum Dare #16 this weekend, under the name eli.