Rest – 9/12/23

https://artgamesthesis.itch.io/rest

What were we trying to accomplish and what did we do to pursue the goals we set for ourselves?

We started this week out with the question of “Can you make a game that is not task-oriented/goal-oriented?” Obviously, this is a very dense question, and it started out with a very long conversation about the nature of tasks and goals in games. 

We started with an exploration of how extrinsic and intrinsic goal setting engages with this question. It was pretty easy to establish that we definitely didn’t want to create something with extrinsic goals: a lot of what we were trying to subvert with this prompt was the classic video game quest log. We knew we wanted to be leaning towards intrinsic goal setting, but we still found that this felt like just another way of giving a player a quest log. Yes, it is much more self-driven and has the potential to create more personal meaning, but we found that we were interested in exploring a space where the player minimally engages with goals at all, essentially wandering.

In addition to this focus on wandering, we wanted to approach the question from a systemic lens in an attempt to avoid leaning too deeply into aesthetics to create our intended experience. This opened up a lot of additional conversations about how aesthetics and mechanics work together to create a gameplay experience, and these negotiations are certainly ongoing. 

With these focuses in mind, we created a list of essential heuristics through which to understand the function of the game we were making. Spending the time on these really helped to clarify and solidify our thoughts on the topic, and as we will discuss below, was a significant contribution to our design understanding moving forward.

• The game should move a player from a state of restlessness to restfulness through non-goal-oriented systemic interactivity. 
• A fundamental goal of the system is that it will return to equilibrium (balancing feedback).
• The player interacts with this system by pushing it out of equilibrium. 
• The player COULD interact with the system as it moves back into equilibrium, but the system will do this on its own if not. 
• Use the aesthetics to communicate to the player that the system will naturally return to a state of equilibrium (for example, water ripples on a pond is an easily understandable premise).
• The interactivity in the system is defined by MULTIPLE player-affected, internally connected stocks that each bring the overall system out of equilibrium in different ways and can be interacted with in different combinations for emergent behavior. 
• The game should feature stillness and not silence. The space is not empty, the things occupying the space are just not moving around. 
• The aesthetics should exist in service of the experience of the system itself. 

We settled on this idea of moving a player from restlessness to restfulness in realizing where the meaningful experience of the interactions could lie. In thinking about wandering, we were finding that it would be interesting to explore a system in which the player brings tension externally and exercises it through this non-goal-oriented interactivity.

With these heuristics in mind, we began ideating on different ideas with a focus on exploring real world systems with characteristics and behaviors that matched the systemic requirements that we had identified. We settled on the idea of modeling human grouping and how people form small groups that eventually consolidate into one another to form a single whole. The interactivity of the system would come from the player separating individuals in the system, but over time, the system would return to a state of equilibrium in which one large group is formed. 

In order to actually create the game in the time we had remaining after discussing at length, we simplified the idea significantly to reflect only the core behavior. 

What is the game?

When the game opens, there are a bunch of differently colored cubes on an empty plane. Over time, the cubes will move towards the center of the area, bunching up and creating a large group. The player is able to pick up the individual cubes and move them around the space by clicking and dragging, and they can drop the cubes anywhere in the space. After being moved, the cubes will continue on their normal path to the center. The color of each cube randomly changes over time, creating a pulsating effect that grows stronger when they are bunched together. 

Austen Reflection

How on earth are you supposed to make a non-task oriented game? Going into this week I thought we would be able to find something resembling a clear answer, but that was naivete I now recognize. We ended up linking non-task oriented-ness to creating a game about rest. To be frank, when we stepped back, having barely squeaked out something that runs, I felt like what we had made indicated that we had wasted a week, which was demoralizing. The following Tuesday came around and we semi-jokingly all booted up the game and played it… I was incredibly shocked at how quickly my brain emptied. I ended up in a headspace oriented for rest, which was incredibly counter-productive in the context of trying to start working on the next week’s prompt. Even though we in effect ended up making a fidget toy, some of the design theory and vocabulary we gained from talking about non-task oriented gameplay was incredibly useful and interesting.

David Reflection

Taking a step back, I think this was a project where the ideation brought me much more value than the game itself. Diving deep and technical into the topic of player goals was a very fruitful experience. The goal of making a non-task oriented game is a prompt that sounds simpler than it actually is. Upon first reaction, one might think to simply reduce extrinsic motivators, however, upon further thought that doesn’t quite cut it. We attempted to go a step further and also remove any possible intrinsic motivators while still making the experience… well, an experience. The design we originally laid out was very interesting to me, and I am honestly disappointed that we weren’t able to execute on it. The game we ended up with was a best attempt at a minimum viable product. It has the backbone of what could be a really great project, but never quite got there.

Zach Reflection

This was a really interesting project, I think it got us to a much better understanding of some of the definitions that we’ve been throwing around a lot lately. Really taking the idea of a “goal-oriented” game to the extreme of having no goals helped me understand where the line sits between mindless fidgeting with a toy and finding meaningful interactivity without a need to be productive. We ran into questions about the definitions of games and toys, which is sometimes helpful, but I was glad that we decided to focus less on definitions and more on the direct experience of interacting with the piece. From a process perspective, this also clarified how important it is for us to really understand our prompts; developing precisely defined goals and heuristics for the project was honestly one of the main pieces that I am taking away. We worked on a system for understanding how interactivity relates to goals, and I will likely reference that much more than the actual finished project.

Takeaways and Postmortems

As was mentioned above, a lot of the feeling in the room after “finishing” the project was that it was a bit of a bummer that we weren’t able to make something more complete. After some time has passed though, we’ve been settling more into the idea that the “product” of these projects is not the executable itself but is instead us as artists. We are intending to develop ourselves and our ideas through this thesis, and in this project, we absolutely did. The process of thinking deeply through the design challenge of making a game that is not oriented around tasks gave us a great deal of new vocabulary that we have been using a lot in other projects since. 

That being said, we also found that the game itself was closer to what we intended than we had thought immediately after finishing it. It had the intended effect of producing a state of rest in us as players as we poked it and watched it move back to equilibrium, and it did fit within many of the rules that we set out for ourselves.

We do have a sense with this project that there is more to explore if we were to continue development and see some of our more complicated ideas reflected in the game. We weren’t able to use aesthetics to frame the experience very much, which, in retrospect especially, would allow the game to land much more effectively without necessarily taking away from the integrity of the interactive system.

Additionally, we discussed how allowing ourselves to incorporate aesthetics more deeply into our process would open the door for some of our more artistic ideas about how humans interact and the meaning behind that to be communicated. The artistic point that we want to develop would be supported by the systemic interactivity, creating something that we would consider an effective piece of interactive art. We are certainly interested in exploring more artistic and less fundamentally experimental topics in the future, and this has given us some important lenses through which to understand the games that we are making.