Games News: Five things I learned at GameCity 8

The Old Market Square in Nottingham, where GameCity's giant screen games took place. Photo: GameCity

Nottingham is a game-like city – compact yet intricate and filled with intriguing architectural detail. The looming Victorian warehouses of the Lace Market jam straight up against the modern multi-lane roads that slice through the centre; the vast old market square, like an arena section in a death match map, gives way on all sides to rising alleyways and pub-lined back streets. The city coils around itself, embracing the medieval remnants, the sprawling shopping malls and the huge brutalist hotels that jut out above the skyline like grave stones. Everything huddles in, forming a monumental Super Mario 64 level. It is a good place for a game festival.

And so many games, so many developers. This year's GameCity festival covered everything from the Fullbright Company's critically revered Gone Home, to Roflpillar a game in which you roll around in a tent to control a caterpillar. There were talks, workshops, weird experiments and brilliant new titles that will certainly be hits one day. There were also lots of discussions about the state of game development and the meaning of it all. Here are five things I took away.

Games want pleasure too

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn from Belgian studio Tale of Tales were at GameCity to show their sensuous exploration game Luxuria Superbia – a game that demands you pleasure it, not the other way around. The interaction consists of stroking a series of tunnel-like flowers, which respond to your caresses with increasingly urgent on-screen prompts. "Touch me, kiss me, softly…" If you 'complete' a level too quickly, you leave the game disappointed and unsatisfied.

Meanwhile, Robin Arnott's experimental audio adventure Soundself has you effectively singing with the computer as transcendental imagery throbs across the screen. We're used to players being judged in terms of skill and the mastery of rules; we're not used to being assessed by a game for our sensuality, our sensitivity of touch and voice. Perhaps this is a future avenue for games – the idea of interacting with an artificial intelligence in a giving way. Perhaps the skills that make people better lovers will soon make them better gamers too.

The arcade concept can be indie-fied

For several years, events like Wild Rumpus have explored and celebrated the concept of social installation games – the likes of Johan Sebastian Joust and BUTTON, which work brilliantly in pub and club venues, with lots of semi-inebriated players. GameCity 8 was filled with experimental projects that looked like indie arcade cabinets. There was Lucky Frame's Roflpillar, in which players lie on the floor wearing a reverse-engineered motion control device, and then wriggle to move an onscreen caterpillar. It's a hilarious two-player competitive, apple-munching game; like Snake, but taking place under a weird table-like display cabinet. There were also all the astonishing dual-screen games that appeared in the Old Market Square, like Jonathan Smith's Crisis Panic Team and Martin Hollis' Aim For Love. Watching the dynamics of mass interaction, of curious shoppers approaching and then cooperating within these bizarre games was fascinating. They hint at emerging forms of entertainment that combine spontaneous teamwork, spectatorship and competition.

Players are increasingly performers

At his press event on Friday night, Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell spoke about how his new game, Volume, was designed to allow player expression. Not only does this stealth game provide a level editor, but it also directly addresses and embraces the YouTube generation, employing online video superstar Charlie McDonnell as the lead voice actor. Bithell wants to embrace the generation that creates its own content out of games; just as the PS4 and Xbox One want to with their record-and-share functions. Add in the coming era of HD cameras, motion tracking and VR role-play and we have a formative generation of gamer/actor/presenters. But also, we can move on from the display altogether. Ste Curran's Kickstarted card game Karaokards and Hide&Seek's brilliantly inclusive Tiny Games bring the social connectivity right out into the social environment, until the players are enjoying each other in a space only partially mediated by pixels.

'Gameplay' is not necessarily game mechanics

In a fascinating interview with playwright Lucy Prebble, Steve Gaynor, the designer of Gone Home, talked about how he rejected standard game conventions such as puzzles and enemies, to create a much less rigorously systemised gaming experience. But yet Gone Home, filled with atmosphere, narrative content and exploration is clearly a game. In their talk about sexuality in games on Monday evening, Leigh Alexander and Quintin Smith discussed several of the much-maligned 'interactive cinema' games of the early nineties, criticised for their lack of interactivity, yet loaded with challenging content, some crass and exploitative, but much of it – like voyeuristic couples therapy game Tender Loving Care and psychosexual thriller Phantasmagoria – pushing at new buttons for gaming audiences.

So often, interaction is linked with the mechanics and conventions of input and interface, but immersion and attention can be more subtle. Gone Home evokes an atmosphere of tension, it offers an explorable world, yet it is sort of a linear experience that toys with player agency in a similar way to Dear Esther, only more refined. In the haunting Papa Sangre II, which we played in the supernaturally-charged Galleries of Justice, the underworld is navigated by sound alone and the domain is purely imaginative. In games as in life, whether or not we truly inhabit a world has as much to do with how we think as how we behave. And gameplay isn't a set of instructions, it's a gift. "There's this girl, she gave me this tape, I haven't stopped playing it since..."

Video games can do subtext

Tali Goldstein from Montreal-based studio Minority had many audience members on the verge of tears when she appeared on me and Cara Ellison's Power Lunch chat show thing. She spoke about how the underlying meaning of the team's first game, Papa & Yo, spoke to victims of childhood trauma and abuse; she told us about the letters and emails sent in from players who found the game's allegorical story – of a boy coping with his father's alcoholism – to be therapeutic. At her talk the following day, she introduced the next game, Silent Enemy, which uses aboriginal myths to explore concepts of bullying and loneliness. Like the Fullbright Company, Minority isn't scared to let meaning lurk under the surface. We're so used to narrative games pummeling us with exposition, turning every theme and idea into deadening dialogue. Subtext requires trust in the player – and game designers are beginning to open up in that way.

A story is something that happens somewhere between the page and the reader, the screen and the viewer, and the game and the player. GameCity told us that the location for this meeting can pushed more toward the recipient. Gone Home and Silent Enemy are both about trust, subtext and allegory. The game is in the connection, the personal reading, the semiotics of interaction. Games want to be pleasured and they want to be understood. But it is time they stopped telling us everything.

Oh yeah, there was something else – not a lesson so much as a reminder. That games are empowering and enhancing, and that the way Twitter problemitises the industry is not the only lens through which to view it. That people love playing together; that dads can teach their daughters, and daughters can teach their siblings, and that everyone can sit on bean bags and play Micro Machines and it is all okay.

GameCity is a community, where distinctions between developers, press and public fade away and become irrelevant; where everyone gets a say. This is what I mean about games and performance. There is an electro-static connection between designer and player that mimics that between actor and audience, and incredible things happen when the two meet and interact. Things like Twine and Game Maker are democratising creation even beyond the opportunities offered by digital distribution and free 3D engines. I spent a while in one of Cara Ellison's Twine classes at GameCity, hidden away on the top floor of the Confetti building, a room full of screens and people creating stuff. What a sense of achievement from that place, what a sense of belonging.

On the train back to Somerset, through endless suburbs and slab-like industrial ghettos, a sustaining thought: people going home and understanding games a bit more, and feeling included, like I did. Games are for everyone, everywhere – they mean something, they can save people, they can be solace. The men and women are merely players, you see; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.

That's it, I think. Play more parts. Play all the parts.

Source: Theguardian. com

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