I had no idea Getting Over It had an ending like that. I'll never play it so don't consider myself spoiled but getting there entirely unaware must have been a great experience.
I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;)
When you're done with the article, I found a link in the comments by Bennett Foddy about naming things (related to his role in naming the rooms in VVVVVV) which is also worth a read: https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/
> I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;)
I heard him mention in an interview that he received a lot of abuse (cathartic, not mean, from the way he described it). I think the mobile version actually used text messages, which must've been fun for him after the game took off.
I could not help, but smile at Divinity part. I absolutely despised Red Prince, but it only shows the writers did a good job creating non-bland character. Also now I know where the inspiration came from. Neat.
One of the featured games is Kine, a cool looking 3D puzzle game. The creator, Gwen Frey, just did a great GDC talk, "The Kine Postmortem": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ
>“Trigger Happy is a two-player deathmatch game I made when I was 12 years old, using the Klik & Play game-making tool.
Ha, I played that game when I was around that age myself. It's one of those things that you don't remember until you see it again and the memories come back.
The article conveniently has a download link included.
Klik and Play was great. I made a multi-minigame project with it for months ... until shutting down Windows 3.1 cut off the save process. No backups :(. I was experimenting with making an RTS by that point.
The Pirate Queen example doesn't really seem like something to be proud of - choosing the gender of a character and making it powerful aren't challenges are they? Couldn't you do that by flipping a coin? Surely the thing to be proud of there is getting to a position where you have the authority to make those choices?
It's a decision she made that proved to be great, so she's proud of it. Strange how you targeted the only vaguely feminist achievement in the whole list.
Some insecure little boys feel extremely threatened and frightened by strong women in video games, and throw tantrums about it and viciously attack people in public, as we all know. She's brave to potentially subject herself to that kind of abuse and harassment by making such a decision.
Not that you're not correct but if I wrote a post with words like that, I'd get busted by the mods for flamebait. Bad behavior by others doesn't excuse more bad behavior.
Just to play devil's advocate, it's not really clear from the article what the designer is proud about. "The strongest and most expensive unit in our Pirate Faction is the Pirate Queen. She is kick ass, looks cool, and is even voiced by myself!" Why shouldn't she be kick ass and looking cool? Why shouldn't she be the most expensive unit in the faction? It's speaking to a narrative for which we have to guess the other side.
I think the implication is that players of the game are not predisposed to enjoy female units in the game. I don't know anything about the game, so maybe I'm missing something, but I actually find that insulting. Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view? While we have to accept that some gamers do have this awful point of view, I think it's part of the problem that some people feel that gamers must be like that.
In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of. I mean it can be taken in a few ways. One might be proud to have pushed this strong female unit into the midst of an audience that normally wouldn't accept it. Or one might be proud to have been able to deliver the strong female unit that the audience has been hungering for.
I can see some people feeling a bit put out if they assume that the designer's intent was the former rather than the latter. It's potentially really demeaning.
>Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view?
Have you been cryogenically frozen for the past six years, and just thawed out and taken a nice long pee, but haven't had a chance to catch up on Gamergate? Do you even know who's president?
No, I don't think it's the female game designers who are being "demeaning".
It's not really a reaction that I expect from someone whose posts I have respected so well up to this point. There is a difference between acknowledging that some people are behaving in horrible ways and assuming that everyone must be educated about the need for inclusion. If someone assumes I am a mysogynist simply because I am a male gamer, that is a really terrible problem.
I don't think that's what's happening here, but being open to the idea that someone may reasonably misinterpret the situation as such is not a massive stretch. Please don't assume that all people who have a different view of a situation are massive jerks.
Understanding that different people have different perspectives is key to improving interpersonal problems. For example, I wonder if you know who the prime minister is?
Relax: Other people have much worse "really terrible problems" than having their feelings hurt because they mis-interpreted a female game designer describing her proudest achievement as implying that you're misogynistic because you're a male gamer.
Was Gamergate news to you, or not?
It sounds like you don't know anything about it (which is perfectly fine if you've been living in a cave for the past six years), or you're in denial that it happened and what its consequences were.
The obvious answer to "Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view?" is "Gamergate".
It's not about your pain and anguish from being implicitly painted as a misogynist because you're male gamer.
It's about your own words, not your gender or pastime.
It's about the women who have been attacked and their careers destroyed, or their proudest achievements belittled by jerks on the internet saying things like "In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of."
I'll admit it was kind of you to graciously hedge your attack with "potentially a bit", magnanimously allowing her the remote possibility of actually being proud of her achievement in a non-sad way. But to socially distance yourself from the responsibility of your own words, you should have thrown in a "some people say" or "a lot of people are saying" to give it more corn pone authenticity, to make it clear you're belittling her sense of pride in her greatest achievement on someone else's behalf, not on your own accord.
You should familiarize yourself with the concept of your own "male fragility".
If I was clumsy in trying to express my point of view and insulted you or others, then I humbly and truly apologise. It certainly was not my intention. It is frustrating to be shouted down in such an aggressive manner by someone who is unable to understand what I was writing. I suppose that you fear the damage that might occur if someone were to similarly misunderstand as completely as you have done. I think that is a valid complaint. It is unfortunate because there are people who are being harmed by those who feel it is important to punish anyone who sees the world differently than they do. Frequently these people have done nothing wrong other than to be misunderstood. When we condemn people simply by association, we harm everyone. If we assume that someone is guilty of the horrible crimes that were committed in Gamergate simply because they happen to be male or a gamer or view things differently, we harm everyone. When I say that this is part of the problem, that's what I mean. This isn't making things better -- it's making them far worse. Please try to understand what your conversation partner is saying, why they are saying it and what they mean before you jump to conclusions.
Guy is hired by videogame studio, makes a kickass warrior and is proud of it. Tells it to interviewer. Is accused of pushing an egalitarist agenda by internet strangers. Come on guys.
I think she was just proud of adding more "representation" of her gender in a game that didn't have it and not having a ceiling on how powerful those units could be. It's an important cultural message of equality of our genders. I don't think she was implying that male gamers can't enjoy strong female characters but maybe the developers didn't consider it more. Maybe female gamers would appreciate the representation.
I do think Don is being a bit harsh in his criticism of you. I don't find any malevolence in your comment.
The fact that you think so doesn't change the fact that she is proud of it – and that's what matters here, that's the whole point of the article.
But the thing goes deeper: if you chose the attributes of the characters by flipping coin, the distribution would look very different than what it did, according to the article – judging from the earlier stuff, the developers were in "rut" and didn't think outside of the box, at least in this aspect. Male characters are very much the norm in many genres. She's proud that she made a difference against that "normal", and improved the result doing so.
Jacques Servin programmed an unauthorized easter egg into SimCopter that had an unintentional bug in the coin flipping code, which resulted in a very different looking distribution of hundreds of shirtless Speedo-clad "himbos".
>Easter egg: The game gained controversy when it was discovered that designer Jacques Servin inserted an easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. Servin was fired for adding unauthorized content (which delayed the release of the game, and caused Maxis to miss Christmas season). He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis. This caused a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a gay AIDS organization, to call for a boycott of all of Maxis' products, a measure which Servin rejected. Some months later, a group named RTMark announced its existence and claimed responsibility for the himbos being inserted into the game along with 16 other acts of "creative subversion." Servin stated that he had received a money order of $5,000 from RTMark for the prank. It was revealed later on that Servin was a cofounder of RTMark.
I plan on publishing a paper about what I would have talked about, and I'll post that to HN when it's ready, but for now, here's the abstract I wrote, and a few notes and references.
----
How Inclusivity Saved The Sims.
By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software.
Abstract:
The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.
The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.
Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.
The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.
The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.
This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.
On page 5, Don Hopkins wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:
The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitely going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.
The 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a video-game conference held in Los Angeles, California, was a typically lavish, if bawdy, affair. Here, for three days, the world’s video-game publishers gathered to show off their forthcoming titles to press and to purchasers in an overstimulating marketing circus. David Bowie performed at one of the conference’s orbiting parties that week, and Bill Goldberg and some other glistening-skinned wrestlers grappled one another in a custom-built ring on the publisher E.A.’s gargantuan booth. Away from the action of its main stage, E.A. had stationed a humble area advertising The Sims, an ambitious social-simulation project that almost nobody outside of its development team believed in.
For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of 1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the company purchased its development studio, Maxis. The game had been in stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. But replicating the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. “We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be cancelled for good,” Patrick J. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers, told me. “E.A. did nothing to help us. They hid us away. The game wasn’t even displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background characters made The Sims the talk of the show.
I love articles like this. And I can definitely relate. Game development allows for a lot of joy, frustration and eventually pride once you look back at it.
I was very proud when I figured out how to calculate if two axis-aligned rectangles intersect. The most complex equation I knew then, and I did not have internet to look it up.
30 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 76.8 ms ] threadI wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;)
When you're done with the article, I found a link in the comments by Bennett Foddy about naming things (related to his role in naming the rooms in VVVVVV) which is also worth a read: https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/
Wow.
Just wow.
That's got to be the coolest, most unique game ending ever. There's nothing that could ever top that.
If you plan on playing the game, don't spoil yourself (you're in for a treat), but if you don't think you'll get to it, you must read about this.
I'd really like to copy that some day.
I heard him mention in an interview that he received a lot of abuse (cathartic, not mean, from the way he described it). I think the mobile version actually used text messages, which must've been fun for him after the game took off.
EDIT: It's here, in a GDC presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s -- the whole presentation is worth watching.
Ha, I played that game when I was around that age myself. It's one of those things that you don't remember until you see it again and the memories come back.
The article conveniently has a download link included.
EDIT: typos
Carmack hardcore fan over here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
I think the implication is that players of the game are not predisposed to enjoy female units in the game. I don't know anything about the game, so maybe I'm missing something, but I actually find that insulting. Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view? While we have to accept that some gamers do have this awful point of view, I think it's part of the problem that some people feel that gamers must be like that.
In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of. I mean it can be taken in a few ways. One might be proud to have pushed this strong female unit into the midst of an audience that normally wouldn't accept it. Or one might be proud to have been able to deliver the strong female unit that the audience has been hungering for.
I can see some people feeling a bit put out if they assume that the designer's intent was the former rather than the latter. It's potentially really demeaning.
Have you been cryogenically frozen for the past six years, and just thawed out and taken a nice long pee, but haven't had a chance to catch up on Gamergate? Do you even know who's president?
No, I don't think it's the female game designers who are being "demeaning".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgFDo6G-EO8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
I don't think that's what's happening here, but being open to the idea that someone may reasonably misinterpret the situation as such is not a massive stretch. Please don't assume that all people who have a different view of a situation are massive jerks.
Understanding that different people have different perspectives is key to improving interpersonal problems. For example, I wonder if you know who the prime minister is?
Was Gamergate news to you, or not?
It sounds like you don't know anything about it (which is perfectly fine if you've been living in a cave for the past six years), or you're in denial that it happened and what its consequences were.
The obvious answer to "Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view?" is "Gamergate".
It's not about your pain and anguish from being implicitly painted as a misogynist because you're male gamer.
It's about your own words, not your gender or pastime.
It's about the women who have been attacked and their careers destroyed, or their proudest achievements belittled by jerks on the internet saying things like "In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of."
I'll admit it was kind of you to graciously hedge your attack with "potentially a bit", magnanimously allowing her the remote possibility of actually being proud of her achievement in a non-sad way. But to socially distance yourself from the responsibility of your own words, you should have thrown in a "some people say" or "a lot of people are saying" to give it more corn pone authenticity, to make it clear you're belittling her sense of pride in her greatest achievement on someone else's behalf, not on your own accord.
You should familiarize yourself with the concept of your own "male fragility".
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a30324982/ris...
The Prime Minster is Mark Rutte, of course.
I do think Don is being a bit harsh in his criticism of you. I don't find any malevolence in your comment.
But the thing goes deeper: if you chose the attributes of the characters by flipping coin, the distribution would look very different than what it did, according to the article – judging from the earlier stuff, the developers were in "rut" and didn't think outside of the box, at least in this aspect. Male characters are very much the norm in many genres. She's proud that she made a difference against that "normal", and improved the result doing so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Servin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Easter_egg
>Easter egg: The game gained controversy when it was discovered that designer Jacques Servin inserted an easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. Servin was fired for adding unauthorized content (which delayed the release of the game, and caused Maxis to miss Christmas season). He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis. This caused a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a gay AIDS organization, to call for a boycott of all of Maxis' products, a measure which Servin rejected. Some months later, a group named RTMark announced its existence and claimed responsibility for the himbos being inserted into the game along with 16 other acts of "creative subversion." Servin stated that he had received a money order of $5,000 from RTMark for the prank. It was revealed later on that Servin was a cofounder of RTMark.
LGR - SimCopter - PC Game Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI&t=8m15s
SimCopter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8
Here's an actual authorized easter egg in SimCopter that Paul Pedriana put in:
SimCopter: Aliens Easter Egg (including developer comments)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2S5-QUKmhU
https://qgcon.com/
I plan on publishing a paper about what I would have talked about, and I'll post that to HN when it's ready, but for now, here's the abstract I wrote, and a few notes and references.
----
How Inclusivity Saved The Sims. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software.
Abstract:
The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.
The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.
Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.
The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.
The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.
This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.
----
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/
The Sims Design Document Draft 3 (1998-08-07)
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
On page 5, Don Hopkins wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:
The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitely going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.
----
The Kiss that Changed Video Games
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...
The 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a video-game conference held in Los Angeles, California, was a typically lavish, if bawdy, affair. Here, for three days, the world’s video-game publishers gathered to show off their forthcoming titles to press and to purchasers in an overstimulating marketing circus. David Bowie performed at one of the conference’s orbiting parties that week, and Bill Goldberg and some other glistening-skinned wrestlers grappled one another in a custom-built ring on the publisher E.A.’s gargantuan booth. Away from the action of its main stage, E.A. had stationed a humble area advertising The Sims, an ambitious social-simulation project that almost nobody outside of its development team believed in.
For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of 1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the company purchased its development studio, Maxis. The game had been in stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. But replicating the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. “We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be cancelled for good,” Patrick J. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers, told me. “E.A. did nothing to help us. They hid us away. The game wasn’t even displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background characters made The Sims the talk of the show.
----
Player Created Content
How to make the leap from smut to art, while ...
Also reminds me of the old twitter thread where game developers shared their various tricks: https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640 Summarized in this article: https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112
I was very proud when I figured out how to calculate if two axis-aligned rectangles intersect. The most complex equation I knew then, and I did not have internet to look it up.