The Secret Lives podcast is up to "become a great artist in just 10 seconds" in their year-long series on my work, and I noticed that in the show notes they linked this old blog post of mine. I have not listened to the episode yet, so I don't know the context in which the post is referenced, but looking back at it got me thinking so I wanted to write up how I see this now. (I'm curious to see how this will relate to what's said in the episode - whether it's a constructive response, if I've said things that agree or disagree with them, or if it's just a completely different track.)

A theme that was in my thinking around that time, which I don't think I ever wrote down publicly (maybe because it seemed too ambitious, or too woo), was something like "the soul of mobile games".

People had convinced me to try selling my games on telephones, and the fit was mixed. Certainly some design concepts I was exploring were appropriate for small-screen gaming, but culturally I was nowhere near. I am not an early tech adopter - I've never been able to afford to be, but also I will be quite happily still enjoying the tech that I do have. At the time I did not personally use a mobile telephone. Someone had lent me one for a while a few years earlier and I wasn't into it. I didn't like having people expecting that they could get in touch with me at any random time, when normally they would just have not been bothered. I do use one now, and I appreciate the convenience of being able to navigate in a foreign land without having to ask for help. If I was asking for help I would be forging stronger connections with the people around me. My attention span is reduced just by having it on me.

Selling my games on telephones put them in unpleasant company. Already then "mobile games" were synonymous with gambling, race-to-the-bottom pricing, advertising, operant conditioning, and exploitation of vulnerable people. Someone set me up once with a call with someone from Apple to try to get my games better promotion and it was all this kind of shit. It was clear that they were not taking their work seriously.

So to put that post in context: I was working on Imbroglio. As I said I don't think I've written this publicly, but the initial concept was to destroy all of this evil in mobile games. I wanted to play with all of the unpleasantness that was happening in the medium, and by bringing those things into the play (rather than wielding them against the players) break the power that they have over us. A vaccine against cognitive exploits. OK, that's a wild ambitious concept, and we should be wild and ambitious. I tried to find the structure for a game that would let me play with these ideas, and the exploration found me something. As you work on a game it starts to speak for itself, telling you the shape it wants to take. The shape that it eventually resolved itself into was a lovely little game that didn't bear any obvious mark of these initial concepts. I had set about the important task of exorcising evil and healing souls, and instead I got something that looked very much like the last couple of games I'd made. It felt like a failure. Of course I wasn't going to throw away the thing that I'd made because it was really a delightful game, but it wasn't what I'd hoped for.

From the perspective I have now, I'm not even sure now I did fail. Okay it didn't slay all those demons, but still it's a game that does something interesting with attention span - I talked about play as meditation in my imbroglio notes - maybe it did some good. And young Michael, you are being very hard on yourself describing that game as generic traditional "collect magic gem for high score". It did so much that was very novel. You reached into the void and pulled forth a seed, gave it the care it needed to grow, patiently took the time for it to find a coherent form, released it into the world, and inspired many others. And some of the other concepts I was exploring eventually came home to roost in 868-BACK. Nothing is lost.

In that post I contrasted my more conventionally "game design" games with the ones that felt more like pieces of art. Back then there was a lot of talk about the relationship of games and art. A lot of us found ourselves called to be artists, in the medium of games, but we lacked a clear model of how to do that. Many of the games that had inspired us were made as products, by large teams, and trying to follow those was unhelpful. A couple of overthought and underfelt sketches by famous game-industry men were being paraded as though they were something important. Someone who mostly wrote about movies claimed that games could never be art (feeling insecure in their own medium's tenuous recognition as 'proper' art?). But there we were, doing the thing that is art and what we were making was games. We were doing it, but got confused when we tried to talk about it. Probably best talk less do more.

Looking back, I could say that I was trying to fish in two ponds, and one turned out to be much shallower and one much deeper than I was expecting. Having made several abstract art games, I felt like I was onto something interesting - but I didn't keep finding more to make there that I hadn't already covered. Meanwhile the roguelikes kept revealing more and more.

Creative expression needs a frame to support it. Droqen can declare "death of gameplay" but he's still making platformers. Tale of Tales were doing the same ten years earlier. Try to take out all the "gameplay" to just have it somehow be pure art, and you've just dug down to whatever your default assumptions of gameplay are. Platformer jumping or first person 3d wandering isn't any less "game mechanics" than grid puzzling or tech trees, it's just that person's comfortable default. Which is fine! These gameplay models provide the structure for the art to happen in. It's just very not dead. And what I've found for my own work is that more structure gives more space for expression. Gameplay and "art" aren't in conflict: with more of both they can each support the other. If - as always - it's done with taste and sensitivity. Feels like a good direction for me. Other people have to find their own directions sorry.

I was worried about being typecast. I was right to worry! It straight away went and happened. I made a 3rd similar-ish game and suddenly "broughlike" is a genre? Everyone forgets I made anything else. Nobody even knows I made multiplayer games, when it's what I've done the most of. Certainly nobody knows I used to think abstract interactive art like Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J might be my whole direction. It's ok I'll just make whatever I make.