Art Games Thesis

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

For this project, we decided to try to each make a self-portrait in the form of a game. We spent two weeks on our projects and were very careful about not sharing too much information about what we were making with one another until we were finished. We checked in on our progress a few times and spoke about how the process was going, what we were finding easy and difficult, etc.

For me, this project came at a very interesting time. I’ve been thinking a lot about my identity lately, a lot about who I am and who I want to be, and digging into a self-portrait was really good for me. As I was thinking about what I wanted to make, I realized that all of my ideas were communicating a small piece of me, something that is sometimes true and sometimes false about me depending on how I’m feeling. I decided that I wanted to make something that communicates something more fundamental about me, something that is always true. From there, all I could find that felt at all genuine was the idea that I am never the same, that I am always changing. As much as that seems like a cop-out in terms of fundamental truth, I found that the idea really hit home. I quickly began to see where I wanted the rhetoric of the game to sit: I wanted the game to be about how someday I hope to be able to relax and allow myself to change freely, allow my moods to be all over the place, and find the meaning and the beauty in the movements. Being somewhat all over the place (in a lot of different ways) is something that I’ve learned to value as an important part of me, and this idea felt like it really nicely represented that.

Note: If you would like to play this game, please reach out to me at zachnorthrop@gmail.com. Creating it was a very personal experience for me, and I would be happy to show it to anyone who reaches out a bit more carefully than just posting it on the internet. 

What is the game?

The game is in first person, and the main mechanic involves moving around in an enclosed space and finding objects that can be moved to progress to the next space.

The game is divided into three main sections:

1. Beach: The player begins on a small beach. Wake Up Little Susie by The Everly Brothers plays on a radio, there are chairs and an umbrella and a sunset in the distance. Around the small beach are floating blocks, and the player points and clicks on these boxes to drag them until they form an enclosure around them. A sphere appears, and when the player moves the sphere, the beach ambient audio turns stormy. Another sphere appears, and as the player drags it, the sky changes to a dark galaxy. When it reaches its resting place, the player blinks into the Room.
2. Room: The player is in a dark room with metallic walls and floors. In front of them is a desk with a bright white computer screen and a radio playing Run by Snow Patrol. The player drags the walls of the room high up into the sky, revealing the infinite space around the room. The player then drags huge distant platforms into place on the ground around them, creating a huge ground plane. The first sphere that appears turns off the stormy ambience and just leaves silence, and the second sphere changes the sky to bright clouds and puts the player in the Kaleidoscope.
3. Kaleidoscope: The player is on an empty, silent plane with a bright, cloudy sky above them. A few floating colored shapes surround the player. When the player drags these shapes, they change color and fade in and out different sounds, some of them ambiences and some of them pieces of Glassworks: I. Opening by Phillip Glass. The difference in this space is that when the player lets go of the objects, they continue to move, traveling back and forth on their path and bringing in and out the audio they contain. 

The game leaves the player in the Kaleidoscope with the ability to manipulate the different objects to create a constantly moving and changing soundscape around them. 

Takeaways and Postmortems

This was an extremely fruitful project for me in terms of developing my art and my ideas about how games work in the context of artistic communication. The self-portraits started a long conversation about clarity and communicating intent that has continued to guide our following work. In a lot of ways, our self-portraits were focused on being poetic and not focused on being clear. This worked well for me because my intention for the project was not to create something that would entirely speak for itself and rather to create something that holds meaning to me (and potentially to those who know me very well). We began to consider the kinds of changes that we could make to our games that would broaden the ability for people to understand and connect to our intention, and in a lot of instances, we are seeing that clear communication and poetic depth are not mutually exclusive. It’s a line that we are beginning to spend more time engaging with. 

Another big takeaway from my portrait was a greater understanding of the importance of carefully designing perspective in games. One of the core confusions around my portrait was understanding what part of the game actually represented me. I wasn’t entirely clear with my intentions in my own head with that, and I ended up with a muddy mix of my identity being contained both in the world itself and in the perspective of the player. In games, perspective is much more embodied and concrete than in other mediums, and as such it contains a lot of potential for artistic expression. It’s something that I hope to be more deliberate in future projects.

Finally, this project holds deep meaning to me in my relationships and personally, and that is something that’s hard to clearly express. It was really enjoyable to be able to show this game to Austen and David and see how they understood me and communicate more about me to them. And on a personal level, this feels like one of the first times in my life when I have sat down alone and really expressed something deeply from myself, and gotten to finish it. Creating art in this way can be really scary, and I’ve had a lot of trouble with it in the past. It means a lot to me to be able to see this game in front of me, play it myself, feel what I was putting into it, and know myself a little bit better. This exact process is a very large part of what I want my art to mean to me. To be able to see that process gives me a lot more confidence that I can keep developing it and find that meaning that has always drawn me into creating art.