Interview with NAOMI CLARK

To start, how would you describe what you do? What is your relation to games and indie games?

Most of what I do is teaching, these days since I'm a full-time faculty member at the NYU game center. I teach about five classes a year, and I'm also involved many student projects as an advisor, and some independent studies of students doing specific kinds of research. In all those capacities, I'm first and foremost a teacher, trying to help and facilitate students gaining skills, practicing stuff. I'm critiquing their work, I'm talking to them about their process and ideas, and development of their creative voice. And besides that, I do a couple other things that are more on the side now since I've started teaching full time. I am consultant, so I work on game projects where I'm not a full-time core member of a team, but I'm coming in to help solve particular types of problems. Sometimes that means I'm looking at a design and offering suggestions, or I'm giving an outsider view to critique a project.

Or I'm contributing in other ways, like providing some writing for a game project, or doing some additional content design as a contributor, or helping to address balance problems in a game by looking at all the numbers involved and making some revisions or changes. I used to do a lot more of that before I got busy teaching. Now it's a relatively small part of what I'm doing on a month-to-month basis. The last thing is I'm working on my own game projects. Over the last couple years at least, my only personal project is my card game Consentacle. I first produced a prototype of it about three years ago, and it was dormant for quite some time, but I was occasionally pulling it out to test it or do some revisions, and learned about the process of manufacturing, since what I wanted to do was raise some funds on Kickstarter to get it manufactured. And then I just recently did manage to do that and raised a bunch of money on Kickstarter to fund the final production version. I'm working on that right now, doing some final art with an illustrator and balancing some cards and making some revisions to visual design, getting it ready to go.

Let's divide between teaching and your game development practice. What kind of games do you make when you're making it? Are you a game designer? Are you a game artist? What kind of words do you use?

I consider myself a game designer. Which means I tend to work with game artists and game programmers to help realize a concept that I'm thinking about or that I'm working on for someone else. And that I'm doing a little bit of the direction of the overall project, sometimes coming up with the concept or really specifying in detail exactly how it should work. And providing specifications or written descriptions of what things should look like to an artist, or specifications of functionality to a programmer more than carrying that out. Sometimes I'm working very closely on a day to day or hour to hour basis with an artist or programmer both, and sometimes I'm waiting for them to finish implementing something and then I look at it and test it. And then as the process gets further along, I'm responsible for adding in a lot of the detail of the content. Sometimes that's in writing or scripting something in an engine, like how a cut scene will work, or exactly what strategy an AI opponent will take, or I'm specifying a lot of numbers for the system of a game, or how long something will take, or numbers that control the difficulty of a particular section of a game. That covers what I do as a game designer. Sometimes it also overlaps into managing the process and doing some project management, something like that too.

But you'd never say you were an artist in the fine art sense, right? Is that correct?

I probably don't ever use that word for two different reasons. One is that in industry parlance, a game artist is someone who is producing visual art as part of a game. And that's true at various scales of production, so it's definitely true at large studios or even mid-size studios that a game designer's doing something along the lines of what I just described, and a game artist is someone who's producing 3D or 2D visual components of the game. And then I guess also I was sort of trained in a design discipline, not formally at a school, but on the job for the most part, by people who also called themselves game designers. Doing the kinds of things that I do, that was considered to be a game design role. And I think the language of design was more often used than talking about ourselves as artists.

I also have tended to work in groups on projects with multiple people. I would say between three and 12 or 15 people on a team. In most of my work, I don't regard as being the product of one creative voice or even two creative voices, but more of something that comes out of a group process.

And it also follows that you don't consider your work to be “art”?

That gets into the tricker question of, what is art?

Yes.

Like would I consider a Stephen Spielberg film to be art? There's certainly a sense in which I would, even though it's produced out of a mass entertainment industrial complex for commercial reasons. I also think that there is a sense in which it's very much an artwork. I don't necessarily find those distinctions super useful. If someone says, do you consider this game art, a game that maybe I worked on with a dozen other people, I will say yes, certainly, insofar as pretty much every game could be considered art.

When you do your game work, both your development practice and your teaching, do you see yourself as being part of the mainstream of games? Or as reacting to a mainstream of games?

I would say the latter category, reacting to the mainstream of games. In part because of my geographic location over the course of my career. New York has never been close to the center of the mainstream of games, so although we have had some large companies here, it's only in the last decade that we've had a large-scale studio producing the 50- or 60-dollar commercial games of the sort that are the blockbusters of the industry. Everyone else is working in much smaller companies, on smaller projects that are not mainstream in one way or the other. They may be part of a different mainstream, like they're popular games in the mobile space, but even mobile games are not quite considered mainstream in 2017,  because the budgets are smaller and the teams are smaller relative to the amount of money invested in producing these games, is smaller.

So, I've never worked in the mainstream of the industry. That's usually something that I tell students or audiences when I'm lecturing, I say yes, my background is in all sorts of games, a huge variety of games, but the one type of game that I have not worked on is what someone would call a AAA game for consoles or PCs. In part because that's not something that generally we've done here in New York, and that's where I have spent my whole career working.

When you make games, are there specific things you're reacting against in mainstream AAA games?

It depends on the period of my work that you're looking at. It's always a little bit in reaction to what's going on in the mainstream, but earlier on when I was focused on doing more commercial work, that was funded by publishers or clients and done usually in larger teams, what we were reacting to was market opportunities, finding an underutilized audience or space within games, types of games that were not being explored as much. The business case was that the mainstream space was dominated by gigantic teams at large companies getting large budgets from publishers, so there was no sense in trying to do that. We had to find some other territory to explore, doing some cross disciplinary work, or creating games for different kinds of contexts or audiences.

It was also appealing to me and to other people I was working with to try something different, explore a different area, do something people haven't before. In more recent years it's parallel to me doing more teaching and writing about games. I tend to think in a more design-driven way rather than as commercial or market opportunities. How can I theorize the work that I'm doing, and understand it in relation to what the dominant mainstream or hegemonic idea of games is?

Could you give an example?

In Consentacle, I adopted a method of design which I've formulated as “queer semi formalism”. I just gave a lecture this morning at Parsons about that method. I would describe that method as taking some older elements of theory and writing about games, for instance ideas from Avedon and Sutton Smith's definition of games. Their definition of games includes a line about reaching a state of disequilibrium, and that's their way of saying games are eventually won or lost. In the early stages of designing Consentacle I got into some arguments about this aspect of that definition with some colleagues, including with the director of the program here at NYU, Frank Lantz, and started talking about, is there value in this definition? Is it important that games should be won or lost? Do we want to uphold that as a tradition, and uphold this sort of agonistic conflict between sides?

And I think this definition is more interesting than maybe even they realized, because they use this term disequilibrium, which you find almost nowhere else. It's an extremely strange word, and usually refers to either a medical problem where you've lost your balance or an economic problem where there's a massive imbalance in supply or demand. And in applying it to games as a slightly more precise or technical way of referring to the fact that there could be multiple win or loss states and that maybe in some games, you'll have first and second or third place, and it's not as simple as just a winner or a loser, it struck me that it points to a potentially even more expansive way of looking at disequilibrium.

A classic strategy game might start in a state of equilibrium, and then it becomes disequilibrated through playing. The board becomes a mess, there are stronger and weaker positions, and then eventually someone wins. But if we just think about disequilibrium, we could say that this doesn't necessarily mean that one player is standing on a higher point in a disequilibrated plane than another player who's on a lower point, which is how we might think of ranking in a race or something. But any number of things could be disequilibrated. It could cause an imbalance in our sense of ourselves or our understanding of what the meaning of these events are. I adopted that, and I said what I would like to do in Consentacle is make a game where there is a conclusion, where the state has changed from the beginning to the end, but there's no sense if one player's higher or lower. And it's a collaborative game.

I decided that over the course of a game there should be multiple different outcomes, and the positioning of resources and things like that would get shuffled around and rearranged as a result of the players interacting.

Then you must figure out where you've ended up. There's enough disequilibrium that you must judge for yourself what that meaning is, and I provide some aids and interpretations in much the way that you might interpret a Tarot card to understand the numerical game state at the end. I find these formal definitions interesting and thought provoking, but not necessary as guidelines. I see these formal definitions and discussion of games as something that's just useful to react against, or to think about. Well, can I reinterpret this in a way that opens the possibility space rather than closing it down?

I think that's interesting. What you're describing reminds me a bit of fractal theory, strange attractors. You usually think of a system as going somewhere towards a resting state. The thing with a strange attractor is that it keeps going, never quite repeating, never quite settling down. You talk about how the interpretation of what's good and bad, which we usually take it for granted is defined by the game, but now you're leaving that open?

At least in theory. I don't think that it worked out quite as experimentally as I was hoping. In Consentacle, as you're learning it, you still need to understand some goals within this system, so you can orient yourself in the system and understand what you are trying to do. The idea that points are good is still present within the system. There's a certain type of point that you're trying to gain more of, but it has to be divided between the players. And there are no guidelines in the game as to how you should to divide them or whether this should be something that's more competitive, or whether you should attempt to divide it equally. In 99 out of 100 play tests or maybe 98 or 97, players tend to just act very amicably and divide these up equally.

Oh, interesting.

This may be in part because I've oriented them to the game by saying it is a cooperative game. You must collaborate to move the economic engine of the game forward, and then after that some players decide that they're going to act competitively within the space of the game. That's more common when people have played more than once.

I was about to suggest it was interesting because the idea of thinking and giving pleasure can go many ways, depending on various ideas of what sexual intimacy is, right? There's pleasure in giving pleasure and so on, and kinks and variations around that.

Yeah, and that was very much the inspiration for the game. I wanted to make sure that the game was open to a lot of different outcomes, where although one player might end up with all the pleasure tokens that might be in part because the other player really wanted that to happen, or both were trying to produce that outcome. To me that is a representation of a certain kind of relationship of two people around sexual pleasure. It's in part the rhetoric of the game itself as a cooperative game or a game where you're trying to both do your part and oftentimes with two strangers playing or people playing for the first time, they lean towards like, okay, the safest default, polite thing to do is to just split these up evenly. I think I would have to watch a particular pair of people play this game.

It’s interesting when you talk about this idea of queer formalism that, which I feel was also expressed in the book you co-wrote, A Game Design Vocabulary, which both has larger political arguments about video games, and detailed, you could say more formal discussions of game design. I think sometimes these things get billed as being in opposition, and similarly in Consentacle, it's both an interesting exploration taking things somewhere else, exploring new territory in a thematic sense, and then also it's a formally well put together system. It seems some people think of these two things as being completely separate or in conflict, but you argue they can work together?

I think is just the way these things have been deployed. In games, my own understanding of how this some evolved was that a set of formal approaches has been built up, maybe starting with Chris Crawford, or certainly there are earlier examples you could look at. Like I was just talking about, Avedon and Sutton Smith, or Huizinga, Caillois, any of the other people who were defining games. Or game theory perhaps, which is certainly an influence on Crawford too. I always think of Crawford because I think he was one of the first people to really say, look, we need to develop these ideas for practical reasons. Not in the service of theory or research or in some other discipline that Huizinga was studying games or Caillois was studying human society and games. But Crawford's objective very clearly was to help people make better games by establishing some groundwork. If you move forward and look at things like Formal Abstract Design Tools or the 400 project, they were rules of thumb. It wasn't that you have to always follow these, but you should know them if you want to try to make games well. To me that is a very formal approach, because it's not about a specific work, it's about saying there's a whole field and we can come up with principles and maxims, definitions and constraints and boundaries that will apply potentially to everyone's work. And if it doesn't apply to your work, maybe that means you're working in a different field, and maybe you're not making a game. It becomes a little bit tautological. Because it happened that way, because it was deployed that way, and maybe this is a property of formalism. I guess you could look at modernist architecture or something like that and say, yes, there were some similar things going on in pursuit of trying to produce an ideal form or understand a Platonic form or something like that to make better work that would be more uplifting.

I think that it became inherently exclusionary of that which falls outside of those bounds. Even if it wasn't necessarily intended to be, it was so preoccupied with defining the problem clearly to solve it, meaning that a bunch of things not within the defined bounds of the problem have to be rejected. When things are rejected, there are insiders and outsiders. And I think part of why it's important to me to actually have the word queer when I talk about queer formalism or queer semi formalism: I want to connect that to a practice from several different disciplines of questioning an established common-sense orthodoxy of how things are supposed to work or function.

When I saw queer people who were thinking of themselves as artists, or at least as not doing commercial work, who were also at the same time being criticized for violating some of these basic tenets of how games work, I felt that there was something familiar going on here, in part maybe because of the experience of feeling like an outsider in terms of gender or sexuality. This connects to an approach that's been taken up again or maybe passed down through lines of community of saying, why should we accept your definition of what marriage is, or family, or inheritance, or the Dewey Decimal system, or any number of orthodoxies. We could just throw that away if we want to, and just do our own thing.

To me it wasn't surprising at all that a set of queer game creators were the ones doing this. I think I was more surprised that they showed up at all and weren't just scared off from the beginning. But I guess there was a certain critical mass that occurred in 2011 or 2012 or maybe a little bit earlier for some folks. And then suddenly there was what people were calling the queer game scene, and it was characterized by a rejection of classical ideas of what constitutes a game in one way or another. I was not really part of the scene since I was doing very different kinds of work that was more commercially oriented and with larger teams, and on the East Coast, and most of those folks were on the West Coast. I saw that this was quite a good idea. And I've been doing this in a smaller way with some projects for business reasons. Questioning some assumptions about who plays games, what kind of themes are appropriate in games, what should we be doing with the difficulty of games, and so on and so forth.

I started working these kinds of ideas into my own projects. There is a method of picking some rule or some maxim, something taken for granted, and just ripping it up. And the act of ripping it up can be a foundational principle for a project. Or one of them at least.

Do you think the queer game scene existed or still exists? Has it existed for an extended period of time but just had peak public relations in 2012, or did it appear in 2012 and go away? Or is it dispersed? What kind of story do you think this is?

I think queer people making games have certainly been around for a long time, and they still are around. I think what was happening in that period between 2011 and 2012 when it was really growing, was that there were a number of people who were living nearby each other who were frequently in conversation both online and also at game events, working in a similar modality but with a lot of different variations. Each doing their own thing, but also you could see the relationship between the works. We're talking about a fairly small core group of people, maybe five or six people. And then there was a much more diffuse halo of others who were around but not geographically close, or who came along slightly later, or who were really interested in what was going, but maybe they weren't making games. They may have been people writing about games, or teaching games, or running events and things like that.

That small group of people were not particularly interested in representing the queer game scene or trying to exploit that label. And I think you have to have somebody who wants to exploit that label somehow, for fame or for profit, or maybe just to get more people involved, start some sort of movement. And I that's what the queer game scene did not have. In contrast to the surrealists or other people: nobody wanted to say, “yes, we're the surrealists, and of course that label is meaningless, but also we're going to make sure that you know that we're the surrealists.” And I don't know whether it was just that people were very jaded with that kind of thing, or whether they sensed that there really is not that much profit to be had in billing yourself this way.

The influence of fine art movements was not actually strong enough in this space. For any number of reasons, a lot of them I don't think related to the artwork at all. People drifted apart geographically or in terms of conversation, and some people stopped making games completely.

Once these articles started to be published about the queer game scene in 2013, that was the death knell of the whole thing.

Since there is no gallery in this scene and nobody who's figured out how to live off of it, there is no gain in keeping the label.  But it also left behind in its wake an awareness of, that something was going on. I could do this too. I think there are more young people especially making queer games in one way or another, and that could mean a lot of different things, than there used to be. And so there definitely has been an effect of that scene existing, and it certainly affected my own practice in the ways that I was talking about. And so, between that and the fact that I have a little bit more leeway to make whatever kind of project I want now that I have a full-time teaching job, I think that kind of defines the way that I'm working at this point.

It's kind of interesting, when you also think about Edmund McMillen’s lament a few years ago about how there used to be an indie scene, but not anymore. It is a similar situation where a very small group of people are taken by the media and by public perception to be the core, the exemplars, of an indie scene.

I think the label indie is probably a separate thing from whether there's a scene or not. You could even have just a category in steam called indie, even if none of these events and so forth exist. Because it means something at this point in terms of production values and aesthetic and budget and scope of work and stuff like that.

Do you use the “indie” label? Is this something you use to describe your own work or other people's work? Or you prefer another label like alt games, or experimental games?

I don't tend to use labels that much. Most projects I've worked on are not published by a publisher for commercial sale through online or physical retail outlet. In some definitions that would mean that most of my work is indie work. But I've never put that label on a game that I've made. I would never describe Consentacle as an indie card game, even though it probably fits the definition. It doesn't hold that much appeal for me because for one thing I think it has some negative connotations for some people.

What do you think those connotations are, for indie?

It depends on who the listener is. For some people it means that it has relatively inexpensive, less polished production values, or it's using an aesthetic that is self-consciously retro somehow. I think even more commonly people take it to mean it is a smaller scale work not produced with the expectation of selling a tremendous number of copies. It might for similar reasons be more of a personal or idiosyncratic vision of some kind. All those connotations don't really give a project a lot of additional value if you just look at it from the point of view of marketing or appealing to people or even communicating to people why they might want to play a game.

There are, as you said, multiple takes on it. Some variations are strict, like if it’s too popular or too involved with, say, Sony then it ceases to be independent/indie. And conversely, some people think that anything that's indie/independent is commercial, and the really interesting stuff is alt games or experimental games.

There's another group of people who I think are a smaller crowd who feel like they are aligned with the word indie, or they have an identity at some level as a consumer of indie games. They enjoy indie games. And so those people may feel an affiliation if you describe a game as indie. And then there is I think a third set of people who are in some ways reactionary to that, who are thinking, oh okay, indie is just another type of product label. Which to me it very much is. And it's just another way of saying, here's what's inside of a package.

I think they're probably right about that. It's never really bothered me that much. I guess I understand the alt games movement as trying to separate itself from indie games by saying that there's only a limited amount of experimentation or creativity or being free from the expectations of a market that you can accomplish by using a term like indie. Especially if you look at the kinds of projects that are now being labeled as indie, which do include some projects by much larger studios. DoubleFine would be the classic example.

The festivals still adopt the label for the same reasons that you might put it on a label at a store to suggest to people, the type of games you will find here. I guess the biggest tension might be the fact that there are different kinds of games now, at IndieCade and at the Independent Games Festival. IndieCade I think tends more towards trying to celebrate the experimental.

One thing I thought was interesting with the history of indie, you probably had an early peak indie moment around 2008 when the term gained public traction. I was looking at old GDC indie events, and it seems to be in 2010 that the question of diversity starts coming up. At first, it's basically gender diversity, then it expands later. But this is also the time when the notion of indie games was criticized for diversity issues. And it's very clear in Indie Game: The Movie, which is clearly white men talking about games. And just after that, you start having the diversity discussion. To some it seems indie games is a label to describe white heterosexual male developers?

All the way from 2005 or so, as soon as I became aware of the term indie games, I was immediately conscious that it was predominantly white guys. That was immediately my understanding of why the term indie was used, adopted from music and comics. I think there was a close relationship between indie music and indie games because indie games were very closely associated with certain events. You would go to a show, and instead of watching music and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or another trendy beer you would drink the same beer, but you would be playing games or watching people play games.

Having talked to some musicians who were working in independent music at the time, I remember having conversations telling them about indie games. And my musician friends were saying, “oh no, don't tell me it's like indie music, and it's just a place for self-conscious white men with artistic pretensions to show how cool they are, outside of the commercial mainstream, and look cool and try to get a girlfriend who will be hanging on their arm”. And I had to say,” oh no, actually it is exactly that.” My musician friends said that of course that's what it is. That's what the definition of indie is.

From their point of view, if someone in another creative field has decided to import the idea of indie, that's the reason that they would import it. Is because we want to set up a scene where we can appear to be cooler than the people who are making other types of creative products around us, and we can associate ourselves with this atmosphere of slightly hipper fashion where we're wearing plaid shirts and we all have beards. Of course it has that tinge and that kind of association.

That's interesting. I haven't heard it expressed that clearly before. You can make two conflicting framings. One, finally making video games are democratic. Everybody can play video games, and now everybody can make video games. You have video games from all perspectives. But this conflicts with framing number two, which as you said transferred to games a specific rarefied taste for the well-educated, well off and non diverse audience. There's indie games for the people by the people versus indie games for the special connoisseur. Those clash, right?

You would think, but it's a pattern that recurs repeatedly. I think indie music is very much the same way, associated with the idea of a garage band or just people deciding to pick up instruments. It's a little bit more concerned with craftsmanship and technique compared to punk music. But there still is this idea of that you don't need to go through the system. You don't need to have some kind of formal education or authorization from a publisher or a talent scout or something like that. You can do it by yourself. You can gain a following on your own, without any kind of intermediary, and get fans and relate directly to them and communicate with them. This is also true I think in indie comics, which arose in opposition to mainstream comics publishing, and was also predominantly white guys engaged in slightly more noncommercial work, a little bit more autobiographical, more not going through the system to train themselves, but a little bit more like outsider artists.

And the same exact complaints come up, it's mostly white guys, there are some women involved but they're mostly sidelined. Their work isn't celebrated in the same way or not thought to express the same kinds of artistic values as the stuff that the guys are doing. It's also true even in role playing games, where it happened earlier than in digital games. The rise of indie RPGs started the 2000s, earlier than in digital games. And it also had a certain sort of white guy machismo and opposition to the mainstream, you having to be a bit of a connoisseur to understand this. But it's paired with, again, with the idea that anyone can make these things. You don't have to have a publisher. You can release them online. You can sell your role-playing game as a PDF. You can gather in indie game forums, whether it's for table-top role-playing games, or for digital games, and share your work with other creators, and that sense of community with other people doing the same kind of thing is important.

For tabletop role playing games, that all happened on a forum called The Forge, which is still around. It was the equivalent of Tig Source, for digital indie games. There were more women involved in indie RPGs, but there's still this core of guys who have a certain kind of outsider machismo, we're going to tackle edgier topics and things that other role-playing games don't, and then they alienated a lot of people. I think you can just find this kind of pattern repeated.

There may be some additional levels to this. Jeffrey Sconce has this thing on Paracinema, watching the Ed Wood movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space. When people start getting into that, they end up recreating the most perfect version of regular highbrow critical language. When you have experimental work that is supposed to break the mold, it is easy to fall back to the regular structure of highbrow criticism. Experimental work is easily subsumed or taken into recreations of standard highbrow critical language.

I would think of these indie movements as just an attempt to create your own local version of a highbrow art scene, that maybe you're going to be able to make money off by getting that kind of critical acclaim. I guess the move to indie is trying to have the best of both worlds. You're trying to appeal to the highbrow critics and use a highbrow critical voice to amplify your work and get attention for it, because you don't have a giant marketing budget, but at the same time you're trying to make something that's accessible enough that maybe a lot of people will still buy tickets or CDs or a game. When Braid came out, games criticism also began, at least as produced for mass consumption rather than as academic papers.

It's all the same, isn't it.

Yeah, the similarities are so striking to me that I can't imagine regarding it as a totally distinct phenomenon. It's distinct I think because of some technological and historical things. There was no highbrow criticism. It's almost like in this case the people who are interested in doing criticism also saw an opportunity. Oh, indie games have appeared, now we can finally write criticism.

Yeah, but I think it's true also, academics, were writing all these papers about like Shadow of the Colossus, but I do think that indie/experimental games are just more interesting. Shadow of the Colossus is still this clunky, large game when it comes down to it.

Right, it certainly takes a longer time to play those through. Yeah, I remember some interesting writing, probably via The Escapist back then, about Shadow of the Colossus, and I think I remember that being some of the first interesting, valuable writing about games that I remember reading. I don't think Shadow of the Colossus was necessarily produced to elicit that kind of reaction. Whereas the indie games, in Braid, I think you see a work that has been created to be written about by a critic.

All right, so I'm through my questions.

Nice to have an opportunity to think through all this stuff and talk about it.

That's great. Thanks a lot for your time.