how to let people play your games
how to remember that you are not a tiny corporation
by loren schmidt (bluesky / itch)
the first pixel art was embroidery. embroidered pixel art is something you make, with your hands. the finished product can be held in the hands.
this is validating to me. it is also, at best, complicated. but it is compelling to consider this parallel tradition, and its connection to present day pixel art.
depending on how one reckons it, some of the first programming was either hard coded instruction for mechanical looms, or punch cards for the first generalized computers in the 20th century. both are things you make with your hands. punch cards were either manually perforated, or created in specialized machines called punch card writers. these are something like typewriters, though instead of inked marks, they create holes in paper when one presses a key with one's finger.
the first programmers and data entry specialists were women. this was not the good old days, to which we must return. it was menial work, considered culturally adjacent to secretarial work. it was not well compensated. but it is resonant to me to consider these skilled women, early in the history of the medium, and to recognize the physicality of this labor: adjacent to textile art, highly tactile, the work of one's hands. programming as physical artifact.
at a certain point it became necessary to integrate programming into other grand tasks, and rather than integrate those two distinct social worlds and meet existing experts as equals, men elevated programming to "men's work" and replaced them. who knows what we lost, how far that set us back.
the apollo guidance computers, in many ways an important template for later miniaturized computers, used a now exotic form of memory: core rope memory. it consists of a series of ceramic beads, through which a matrix of wires are passed in a specific order. the entire array must be woven by hand, a process requiring great dexterity and great accuracy. the weavers, of course, were women, and like most women in tech, they were important, were highly talented, and did not receive the recognition or respect they deserved.
this was the nest in which computer games were incubated.
in the early days of computer games, when most games existed in the insular halls of the ARPANET, and before it, mainframe computers, games were available only to a relative few. games were available not just to the subset of people who had leisure time, but to the subset of those few who had access to exclusive educational facilities, and in addition had the specialized training needed to access the (very limited) number of machines on which they could be run.
it was really almost not a joke that most programmers were men who wore wizards' robes and swore one another into secret societies, like masons.
some of the first games were not programs, per se — they were interactive pieces of specialized hardware. Pong (1972) is a good example of this. among the first programmed games were text adventures and fantasy games: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), of which i'm fond, and early PLATO system RPGs with such legally tenuous names as dnd (1975) and Moria (1975).
there is humanity and beauty there, to be sure. one such story, of which i am fond, is that of Colossal Cave Adventure. the game has its inspirations in a collaboration between Patricia Crowther, a cave explorer and programmer, and her then husband William Crowther. the two of them worked together to create some of the first digital maps of cave systems. they would manually plot points in the caves themselves, then enter the data into digital form and produce vector maps. later, after they divorced, William penned Adventure (1976), largely inspired by this work.
this, too, is deeply resonant to me. there's an alluring tactility to imagining both this mapping project and the creation of Adventure itself. but from the perspective of access, there are observations to be made here, certainly. few could explore caves. few could map them. systems like PLATO were in many ways similar to caves, the entry points of which were teletype terminals. even worse than the hardware were the strictures of the cultural labyrinth one needed to navigate to access them. games are a medium which had roots in such inaccessible technology.
[and over time, it was this element, not the one of manual creation, which came to the fore.]
ours is an era when, despite innumerable challenges, game making itself is in many ways more accessible. but it is also an era of increased reliance on centralized platforms. some of these are well loved, such as itch.io, which i myself use. but many game makers distribute their work over steam, through the walled gardens of the playstation network or nintendo's eshop. and any of these comes with compromises: yielding of power, absurd cuts taken by platforms, entanglements with corporations with complicated morals and positions in society. even in the best cases, there's fragility in centralization. the internet archive has had weeks of downtime this year due to a few hackers. itch.io was temporarily downed due to an erroneously filed DMCA takedown filed, by all things, by the Funko Pop company.
in addition to these issues, one problem with this model is that humans are not corporations. we're not. we have limbs and sensory organs. have favorite songs. we don't have marketing departments. in attempting to reach audiences or be compensated for our labor on these centralized platforms, we are expected to present and self-promote our work in ways which are in parallel with, and in some cases directly in competition with, commercial products created by larger groups of people. and some of these actually are, legally (or are at the very least deadly serious about pretending to be) tiny corporations.
so i think again about embroidery.
embroidered pixel art is a physical artifact, but it is also digital: it may be copied, grid by grid, by another embroiderer. this affords redundancy. it also renders it hackable. patterns may propagate, mutate, flower into variation.
can we, as game makers, find alternate modes of distribution which have some of these qualities? i don't think there's a single ideal form or social mode here. in fact, i think it's important that there not be — we need redundancy and culturally specific options. but i do have some interesting avenues of exploration to share, in the hope that they'll be inspirational. and i'm very interested in hearing about any other methods other people are fond of or inspired by.
departing the games market, gift economies
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the most direct solution is not inhabiting the same cultural niche as commercial games at all. make games when you feel like it, without any pretensions of offering “value” in a commercial mode. make games for small groups of enthusiasts. erode the hierarchy between makers and players.
one such example is the “gift economy” prevalent in fanfic and fan art communities. art is not sold. it is default free. sometimes it is specifically made in conversation with other pieces of art — as a thank you, tribute, riff, gift, or homage. the motive force is the art itself being in the world and people receiving it.
"type in" magazine programs
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some print computer magazines historically contained terse games in languages such as BASIC which one could type in oneself and play on one's computer. politically, i think this is an amazing practice in many ways. it is perhaps the single most interesting thing to consider in terms of how it differs from defaults. it blurs the line between creator and player. it all but begs people to hack games themselves or make them personal — changing colors, the title, sprites. it erodes notions of copyright.
i think there are practical challenges to translating this into our world. what would "typing in" a game map do? are there or could there be modern platforms on which this format could work literally, such as Scratch or fantasy consoles like PICO-8? could one deliberately create a platform which was permeable in this way, perhaps one which was graphical, but which embraced modular construction?
decentralized platforms
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in the coming years, political art and expressions of culture in many countries may be increasingly scrutinized. social media and centralized platforms are more susceptible to this than individual communication. over the past years, we've seen both governments and payment providers such as paypal pressure multiple platforms to alter terms of use in ways hostile to sex workers, political activists, Palestinians, and queer people, to name just a few. i don't know what this looks like for games, but certainly corporate platforms such as Steam are more susceptible to this.
are there ways to build resilience and redundancy through decentralized, more secure, or, especially, non-corporate platforms? how does one make a living distributing games over something like Signal-for-gamers? the closest thing we have to this is 10000 separate pocket universes on discord servers, which satisfies some of these requirements. though discord, it is worth mentioning, is not immune to this sort of repression creep.
i can't personally design such a thing, but i think we're wanting for alternatives.
small audiences
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what if making a game was like giving your neighbor your unused bookshelf, or baking a loaf of bread for your friend? small target audiences allow one to circumvent some of the notions which we've talked about here: self promotion, self as games company, struggles with platforms, etc.. this doesn't necessarily mean we're not being compensated for our labor. we sometimes do labor trades with friends or family members when doing things like painting a room, caring for a pet, or cooking while someone is sick. making art can work that way too. or it can be blissfully free of that.
distributing games locally
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one option i'm personally fond of is distributing games at local in-person events. you can go to zine events, political events, art fairs, etc. and sell, trade, or give your games to people in your community. one physical format i've found enjoyable is printing out a small insert with a personal download key on it, and then folding it into a decorative letterfold. this format is nice because it's interesting to hold in the hand, clearly hand made, and it's not pretending to be glossy physical edition of a corporate product. it's more like getting a zine, or getting a letter from a friend.
it is remarkable how refreshingly different exchanging art this way is from trying to interact with gamers in typical social media environments. an incredible number of people in these spaces are very open to nontraditional or experimental games. many of them are not from the demographics who are noisiest and most intent on gatekeeping in games spaces online. and many of them are also artists or game makers, or are other sorts of likeable weirdos. i'm planning on doing more of this in my own life with each new game i release, and experimenting with approaches.
in closing, i'd like to give you a game! it's a very bad game. or maybe it's a very good game? open the console in your browser, and type this in:
///////////////////////
// guess
///////////////////////
function guess() {
console.log("guess a number from one to ten.")
let number = 5
let input = prompt("Guess a number from one to ten:")
if (input == number)
alert("Wow! You must be psychic.")
else {
alert("Sorry, the number was 5. Better luck next time.")
}
}
guess()