One Precious Room
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A nice, spaced out, sunglow of a track for you: Geotic - Sunspell. (Psst, I also have another one for you, but I don't think it fits the contents of this newsletter. Maybe listen to it later?)
I've spent a lot of time thinking about games that allow you to inhabit spaces with other players. Games where the environment isn't incidental to gameplay, but plays an essential part of the experience of being with someone. There aren't that many, but the VR age has brought us a couple good ones like VRChat and Rec Room. However, there have been some historic classics like Second Life, The Sims Online (now FreeSO, Habbo Hotel, and in a younger, more innocent time as a 10-year old with no idea what a "fetish" is, Furcadia. All of these games include an experience where the point is to embody a space with other players. You can customize your avatar, own a home, create custom content, and to varying degrees, interact with the environment. These are games that aim to produce an experience that goes beyond the confines of simple textual chat.
I also include what I affectionately refer to as "wobble games", games like Human: Fall Flat and Wobbly Life. These are ragdoll-physics powered games where your avatar flops around via physics and forces, as opposed to controlled by predetermined animations. In them you can interact with the environment by grabbing, grappling, holding, throwing, bouncing, falling, jumping, and generally doing stuff to the world with your stubby little arms. Of course, they're also the only types of games that allow you to hold hands, embrace, and navigate space with another person in a way that feels uncontrived.
There's something about Wobbly Life in particular, a completely open world where you can wander around and complete jobs, make money, buy a house, and go on little adventures as a wobbly little customizable person that is particularly precious. I loved buying a house ($750!) with my fiance and playing with the stuff in the furniture, realizing that you could pick up the stereo to get it to play music, use the wardrobe, and be disappointed that there's nothing on TV (yet--the game is early access). I loved how much I felt like I actually was in those spaces, how I felt at home, and how it made me feel... tender?
Contentment (after Parrish), James Usill
I've been obsessed with the idea of virtual spaces that feel this way. Tender. Spaces that make you want to cultivate them, exist in them with someone else, and feel alive and collaborative. Wobbly Life does this incredibly well, to the point that every time I found myself unable to interact with something such as being unable to pick up a piece of fruit clearly embedded into the fruit stand model in a grocery store, I felt slighted. I played VRChat with my fiance, and while it was fun to be in a warmly lit balcony with an inexplicable bed and TV upon which we watched YouTube videos in sync in the middle of the rain, there was still something distinctly static and artificial about the experience. VRChat, while trying to be absolutely anything by allowing you to create custom content, falls far of a high fidelity experience by the natural jank that comes along from supporting anyone's experience and custom models and levels. While you can theoretically create any space, VRChat is really a space that is incidental to the game's main point as it was described to me: meeting and having fun with new people.
As a result of not seeing another friend in person for literally half a year, I've found myself lost down little rabbit holes of fantasy, imagining being in my house or a friend's, leaning against walls, chairs, touching shoulder-to-shoulder, friendly smiles over a table, snacks laid out, coats strewn across couch arms, a computer monitor turned slightly to show its contents more properly. I keep imagining all the little intricacies of space and the people that share it temporarily, and for some reason this has captured my imagination in particular.
After playing Wobbly Life, I wanted to make a game that was all about that feeling: being in a space that matters with someone else. Unlikely to be a stranger. Probably a friend. One where you could arrange a pencil so it's neatly aligned with a book on a desk, and feel satisfied about it. One where you can pull out a board game like in Tabletop Simulator and play it meaningfully. I like the idea of next-to-useless animations like being able to lean against a wall or an arbitrary surface like sitting on the arm of a couch. I like the idea of being able to slowly unlock little extra inventory items or things for your room/house that will arrive in packages at your door that you get to open, and then figure out how to put into your space. I like the idea of focusing on the very small and precious. In general, I'm in love with the idea of the One City Block--a hypothetical game design that describes a game that fully realizes, in deep detail, the intricacies and complexities of a single city block and the spaces and people within them. In the visions I've had, I've just been imagining One Medium-Sized Room. Maybe One Small House. But I'm no game developer.
THE CREATION OF GLITCH, Vittoria Iannone
So, since my birthday was this past weekend (want to get me a gift? share Glitchet with a friend ❤️), I rewarded myself with the diversion of finally learning a little bit more about game development in Unity 3D. (It's funny that I call something I've wanted to do for literally over a decade a "diversion", but I guess that's what capitalism does to someone.) This time things seemed to click a little bit more and I felt like I was where I was meant to be at that time; finally, years of programming paid off with a more intuitive understanding of the principles of component-based programming which is what drives much of Unity under the hood. I also finally learned how to load custom animations, import assets, build the basics of a level, work with collision, all in the matter of hours. All of this was full of a sense of wonder, to the point that in my extra raw state I found myself crying over the wisdom of a young child in VRChat.
I'm certainly very far from I want to be right now, and if I decide to continue this project besides a "guilty" pleasure, it'll probably be many months before I approximate something close to the feeling I'm looking for. In fact, I'm not sure what I'm envisioning is even possible--but I'll keep tinkering. At least it gives me another project with which to cheat on my main project (ending the world with astrology).
Hope you're doing well.