Alphaland took second place in the Interactive Art or Experimental category, and that too makes me very happy. This is another game that “experts” said would not appeal to anyone, and yet here we are. It doesn’t matter whether it won first place or not, it matters that people liked it, that that journey meant something to them.

Maybe we shouldn’t listen to experts so much.

I couldn’t have made Alphaland without Terry Cavanagh’s support, and I couldn’t have made it through 2011 without all of you. Here’s hoping 2012 will be twice and productive and half as frustrating.

It’s gentle, beautiful and elegant as it takes your hand and soothes you through its journey of lyrical and playful words.
- Indie Games Magazine

Arcadia’s a narrative delight.
- IndieGames.com

It’s a rather delightful thing, this game – perfect for the season despite being set in the summer months, full of whimsy and beauty and light and, interestingly, entirely text-based.
- DIYGamer

I have to admit I was impressed with its rich setting, its subtly subversive ideas, its whimsical creatures and the sheer quality and quantity of its words.
- Gnome’s Lair

Yep, I’m very pleased. It’s a game that is surprisingly close to my heart, and making it was perhaps the purest joy I’ve gotten from game design in a while. Maybe ever. Twine is a wonderful tool, clean and simple and to the point; I hope it gets developed further, especially in making it easier to customize how games look. It really is absolutely lovely.

Arcadia: A Pastoral Tale is my newest game. It was created with Twine, which means that it’s a very simple text-based game.

When playing, please keep in mind that this game is not a race. It is a stroll, an afternoon walk. There’s no challenge, no puzzles, no wrong choices. There’s just the path that you take and the things that you see.

I’ve mentioned before that my computer is having a bit of a problem with 3D graphics. They run fine most of the time, but then there are bizarre crashes that ultimately stop the whole program from functioning, and even alt-tabbing out takes skill and preparation. I’m guessing it’s a hardware problem, since I’ve done just about anything you can possibly do to the drivers, but what it affects is how textures are displayed. Basically everything gets swapped around in increasingly crazy ways, skin turning to stars, faces appearing on walls, lights turning to text. Sometimes the results are disturbing, sometimes oddly beautiful. Here’s Mass Effect 2 – a game I’m greatly enjoying, by the way – with the view of space replaced by a green eye and a mysterious red circle. I guess Mordin Solus must have been putting something in the water again.

Links, thoughts, stuff:

• Occupy the first person plural. If you only read one thing on this list, read this one. An excellent piece of writing.
• Anonymous: An ignorant assault on Shakespeare. The WSWS rarely has good film reviews, but if there is one thing that sets my teeth on edge, it’s bullshit like the Shakespeare “authorship question.” And no, I haven’t seen the movie, and you might say I’m strossing, but I don’t think that’s the case here. I can tell you that any movie that claims the Holocaust didn’t happen is crap, and the same goes for any movie that tries to push this long-disproven elitist rubbish on people.
• We attended a presentation of the new Robert Harris book, The Fear Index, featuring the man himself. He was charming and nice and signed Verena’s copy of Imperium.
• I’m currently reading China Miéville’s Iron Council. After Perdido Street Station impressed me with some of its ideas but massively pissed me off with its plot and structure,  this one is a pleasant surprise. I’m not done yet, so there’s still room for a fuckup, but everything I’ve read so far has been much more enjoyable and meaningful.
• I recently read The Alphabet by David Sacks (a book known under a variety of titles). Parts of it were quite interesting, but there was entirely too much repetition, to a large degree because the book originally was a series of newspaper articles. It also contained a number of annoying factual errors, mostly about the pronunciation of words in languages I happen to speak, which unfortunately had the effect of making me question what else might be wrong. Still, if you know nothing about the subject matter (and I happen to know a fair amount, given my general interests and my studies, so I’m probably not the book’s intended audience), you’ll probably find that the story of one of our most important inventions is quite a fascinating one.
• I can’t wait to have a proper internet connection again. This situation has really crippled our ability to work.
• Anne McCaffrey died. I don’t want to be mean about her. I think her books are astoundingly terrible, and sexist to boot. I don’t know what to say without sounding condescending. Verena read her books as a child and thus got into reading, so I can’t say the woman didn’t do any good in the world; inspiring people to read is a great thing. But I still think her writing is terrible.
• The Gnome’s Lair review of Fate of the World is interesting, and mentions something that I think deserves a detailed analysis: the way the climate change situation is often discussed only within the parameters of the current economic and political system, when in fact it is that very system which is causing the problem, or at least making it near-impossible to fix. It’s kind of like wondering how we could get the Nazis to treat the Jews better. By not electing those fuckers, that’s how.
• It’s getting more and more uncomfortable to be Greek in Germany these days. Newspapers raving about “the Greeks,” people casually repeating the most absurd nonsense, and of course everyone having to comment on the situation the moment they realize you’re Greek, as if you were personally responsible for destroying Germany. The other day we were shopping and someone had put up an anti-Greece poster on the wall next to his stall. I never fail to be shocked by how willing people are to be fed the latest scapegoat. Especially in Germany, where they should really know better.
• And in Greece itself, as well as in Italy, we now don’t even need the appearance of democracy anymore, we just switch governments when the markets tell us to. As a friend of mine recently put it to me, “I hate the markets because they made me sympathize with Berlusconi.” Do we really have to keep taking this crap so a few douchebags can keep paying for cocaine and hookers? Our ecocomic system isn’t just problematic, it’s a fucking joke. Does anyone even know what these “markets” are? What do they have to do with the reality of work and production? Nothing, absolutely nothing. We’re shutting down schools to pay for a casino.
• Something more positive from Greece: Greek adventure gaming site Adventure Advocate published an article about me. That doesn’t really counterbalance the whole, you know, destruction of the country by an idiotic international financial elite thing, but it did make me smile, so hey. I was particularly fascinated by the part where my work is categorized into two “phases” (the first being darker and more lonely, the second more open, more satirical and generally more social and colourful) – it may even be true (though I don’t see my work like that), but it’s extremely odd to be talked about in this way. Not bad-odd, just odd.
• Is it just me or does Skyrim have some of the worst voice acting ever recorded? I read various journalists claiming that it all sounded so authentic, so Scandinavian, but… err, what? Is this like that thing where English-speaking people really, really don’t get what German is supposed to sound like? (If you actually speak German, going to the movies can be a painful experience. X-Men: First Class caused a mixture of shock and giggling in the cinema when Kevin Bacon spoke… eh, “German.”) Granted, I’ve only seen the first 30-40 minutes of the game, since my PC is going to hell and I can’t get any 3D game to work without hanging, and no I haven’t bought Skyrim (I’m waiting for the GOTY edition)… but I have seen quite a few NPCs speak, and there is nothing authentic about that shit. In fact, their accents sound half Russian, half Austrian, their pronunciation of names is utterly American, and their children apparently all went to a boarding school in the US. It is, sadly, hilarious. How can a big-budget title like this be so amateurish? And let’s not even mention the writing, which made me groan before the intro was even over. What happened to the people who made something as brilliant as Morrowind?
• I hope you’re enjoying The Oneiropolis Compendium. We certainly are, and while it’s not making us rich, it’s keeping us from starving (literally). If you enjoy the entries, it would be awesome if you could retweet them, share them with friends who might like them, rate them up on StumbleUpon, and generally use the potential of social media to spread the word. Thanks.

Gregory Weir’s Looming is probably my favourite of all his games. Highly atmospheric and extremely well-written, it tells the story of a strange world called Looming through what is essentially archaeological exploration. It’s a haunting and extremely memorable game; there’s nothing quite like it, really.

And at some point it can become very frustrating.

You spend the game mostly doing nothing but walking around the world, collecting artefacts and reading small pieces of text. The world is large and mostly empty, but there’s quite a bit to find, from little objects to enormous ruins. It’s a very enjoyable experience. But as you find more and more of its multiple endings, tracking down the remaining objects becomes increasingly difficult. Unless you’ve been very diligent in noting down every single area you’ve explored (or you have a perfect memory), there’s going to be a lot of very tedious walking to do if you want to discover the final bits. It’s not enough to ruin the game, but you could very easily call it a flaw, perhaps the only one in an otherwise highly polished game.

In most discussions about games, we talk about flaws as something incredibly negative that must be avoided at all costs. But is that really so? (Note that I am not talking about bugs or other issues of execution.) Can all flaws be divided from what makes the game good?

Take human beings. Flaws are part of who we are, part of our personality. Would we be as interesting as we are if we didn’t have any flaws? People who are overly smooth are boring. Not that flaws are always pleasant – I, for example, sometimes have a bit of a temper. Not always, but often enough to have hurt people who didn’t deserve hurting, something which I regret every day of my life. But my anger is also part of what gives me strength; my ability to stand up to injustice, to refuse to compromise, to say things I’m not supposed to say. I’m not brave, and it’s not bravery that allows me to say no when I need to. My anger can make it unpleasant to be around me, and more than enough people have said so, but nevertheless it is essential to who I am, and I would be poorer without it. I can try to control it, and I do, because having an edgy bit doesn’t mean I can’t attempt to keep people from being hurt by it – but it would be foolish to throw away the raw energy inside me for the sake of bland conformity. I’m sure many people have similar examples from their own lives or the lives of people they know.

Looming is about emptiness and archaeological exploration; it’s about a vast space and the ruins inside it. I’m pretty sure archaeologists get frustrated sometimes, looking for a tiny object in a huge excavation area. How could you do a genuine game about the experience of exploring a place like Looming without this kind of frustration occuring? By adding Oblivion-style markers to show you the way? Sure, that would take away the frustation at the end, but it would also take away the entire rest of the experience. Or is it perhaps the overly simplistic gameplay that is at fault, and the solution is to add enemies to fight? That might distract from the walking, but it would also ruin that wondrous sense of emptiness the game has.

A beautiful glass sculpture may have the flaw that it’s hard to transport, but that doesn’t mean it should be made out of straw instead.

Ah, but this is a dangerous road, isn’t it? Because it would be silly to deny that there are real flaws, real game design errors. Accepting flaws may all too easily lead to the (post)modern idea that skill and craft are irrelevant to art; the kind of thinking that has ultimately led much of the modern art world (especially in painting, sculpture and theatre) to glorfying crap presented as crap by crappy artists proud of their crappiness. Nothing sets my teeth on edge quite as much as sloppiness and lack of originality passed off as depth and/or irony. Yeah, your lack of ability is very ironic. As far as I’m concerned, Damien Hirst can fuck off and I hope the Chapman Brothers are stomped to death by tyrannosaurs.

Tolerance for stupidity and a lack of vision and craft is not something that should be supported. Making games, like any artform, requires a great deal of very precise work to be good. But we do have to recognize that the more precisely a game is crafted, the more it becomes something specific, becomes itself, the less it is like other things; you chip away at something to give it shape, but the further away it gets from being a featureless block, the closer it gets to something whose shape we can disagree about. And the more a game is itself, does what it does as well as it can, the less likely it is to appeal to everyone. However – and this is important – it will appeal all the more to the right people.

Some flaws come with the territory. I’d rather play an awesome and sometimes frustrating Looming than a mediocre and forgettable one.

That also makes me think that perhaps the more appropriate form is the exhibition, where games can display their variety and uniqueness without having to try to outdo one another in fields that aren’t even relevant to them. I don’t know about you, but I’d be more honoured to be included in a list with people that I admire than to be told I’m better than them, because I know that I’m not.

The post about narrative as gameplay took a long time to write, mainly because I kept rewriting it to find the right angle. Originally it went into detail both about my games and other people’s games, but that felt wrong for a number of reasons. First of all it felt arrogant, because it felt like I was trying to compare my games to those games. And it also felt presumptuous, because it sounded like I knew what the designers intended. I felt it was more honest and more useful to write about my own work, because there I can speak rather precisely about what was intended and how the result compares to the vision.

I actually find it kind of odious to write about theory. I am primarily interested in making games and allowing them to speak for themselves. (Don’t take this as some kind of statement about what other people should do. Too many of the things I write here are taken in that spirit, even though I say nothing of the kind. This is my perspective, and I do not seek to impose it on you. Neither do I think that my preferences make me superior. I don’t like spinach, but I don’t think spinach should therefore be forbidden.) I only ever end up writing about theory when I feel that certain things are not being said, or that problematic ideas are dominating the discussion without ever being challenged. That’s also why I posted about the IndieCade comments: not bitterness, but a feeling that these comments exemplify certain approaches to games that end up making the field feel restrictive. The comments weren’t terrible, but they were amusing and interesting and worth mentioning.

We need that, I think. We need to question a lot of the assumptions that go into how games are played and reviewed – and designed. Not because there is a better way, but because there are many ways. To take the example of my own games one more time, there are lots of people who enjoy them. From the comments The Book of Living Magic got on Kongregate, there were thousands of people who really loved it just as it is. I don’t say that to brag, but to point out that clearly this is a legit way of making games. When I talked about player reaction to the game in the post about narrative as gameplay, some people thought I was complaining that my game wasn’t successful enough with players. Nothing could be further from the truth – once it actually reached players, I was overjoyed by the response it got. What I will complain about, however, are the attitudes that say that a game like this could never appeal to anybody, that it’s not a proper game, that it doesn’t function. That’s the path to strangling variety and creativity.

Maybe I should try to write about other games more often in the future. I do enjoy doing so, but I think it requires a great deal of thinking and work to be done properly. (Writing The Bolshevik in the Borderlands was not easy.) But I might sound a lot less defensive talking about other people’s work.

Then again, maybe it’s just what I sound like. And that would also be OK.

We keep treating games like tools – it needs to have this feature and that feature and the other feature. But games are art, and are thus much more like people than like tools. What is annoying in one person is endearing in another. To put it another way: Gothic 2 is not the perfect RPG or the perfect game, but it’s pretty close to being the perfect Gothic. And I love it for that.

We need to look at games as themselves. There are many paths to take and all of them lead to places that are interesting. I post with critical and at times confrontational ideas because I think some of those paths need defending. Not as superior, but as equal.