Interview with Tracy Fullerton
Tracy Fullerton is the director of the USC Game Innovation Lab at the University of
Southern California, author of the design textbook Game Design Workshop, and designer of
experiential games such as Night Journey and Walden, a Game.
This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book.
The interview was conducted on October 10th, 2017.
| Jesper: | You just gave a talk about Walden [at IndieCade 2017] and its ten-year history. You said that the original idea of Walden was, “insane” when you came up with it in 2007. And that now it’s no longer an insane idea. |
| Tracy: | Now it’s somewhat common, at least in the indie game community, to have an idea, to make a game about something. That’s the difference between 2007 and today. One of the strangest things about that statement is actually the word “about.” Nowadays, so many games are made “about” that we’re less judgmental about the third part, what it is about. So it’s not insane any more. |
| Jesper: | How do you think we came to this? What happened in the years between? |
| Tracy: | There’s no one simple answer for what happened. But I will say that some of the strong trends involve the fact that the tools to make games have proliferated, so many people including artists and academics, researchers, people who are not necessarily part of a traditional game company, have the tools to make games. You’re talking about a much broader group of makers. Then a market for a certain kind indie game has sprung up, and that has taught a lot of people—potential team members—who have the skills to make these kinds of games. So now it’s not just AAA people and their internal toolsets. People are using games as an expressive medium; they’re studying games. Because of this, the palette has gotten much wider. We’re saying, “Well what does a shooter mean? What does Halo mean?” Once we’ve determined that Halo actually means something, then the next logical step is; “Oh! Well, what else could a game be?” And then I also think there are several generations of people who’ve grown up with games as their primary form of entertainment media, and who love games, and want to make games about things that are important in their lives. You put all those things together, and you have a culture where it’s possible to make a game about something. |
| Jesper: | I think it’s super interesting. You’re making a game, not just for a technical platform, but for a cultural platform. |
| Tracy: | Yes, exactly—for example, IndieCade is a cultural platform. |
| Jesper: | There is a place where your experimental work can be shown; and you can expect people to parse a game that’s about something a game’s not usually about. |
| Tracy: | When the US Supreme Court determined that games were an expressive form protected as free speech, that was a milestone. If you’re going to say that games are free speech, then they must be saying something. So we started small communities to change the way we think about games, and some of these grew into larger communities. Like IndieCade—I don’t even know all the people here, and IndieCade used to be ten people sitting around in chairs. Now it’s this worldwide phenomenon of makers and people that don’t necessarily know each other, but are supporting each other’s work by being involved in the community. |
| Jesper: | One of the things you’ve been pushing for in teaching is designing for experience. I read it first in your Game Design Workshop book and in the MDA paper. I think it was an important new way of thinking about game design, instrumental in allowing us to ask new questions. We can now take something for which we don’t have any kind of design template, define the experience, and come up with all kinds of ways of creating that experience. |
| Tracy: | I think that’s a shift away from games being primarily a form of software. Once you start working with games as an aesthetic form, as opposed to as software, you can ask what you want to say with your game. It’s a logical question. But when you were thinking of them as software, then asking what you want to say with a piece of software didn’t make a lot of sense. The question was rather, “What do you want to do with the piece of software?” There is a shift, with a lot of people getting into games, who grew up with games, but who maybe were also trained, like myself, in media arts, theatre arts, literature. There are people coming from different expressive forms, and they’re asking these questions. |
| Jesper: | I was wondering one thing. When you’re doing avant-garde games, or you’re trying to reinvent the medium, I think there’s always a danger that you just end up with a new template, right? And at least for a period of time, that template was experimental platformers. What do you think about that? How can we avoid just making a new template? |
| Tracy: | As an artist you avoid it by simply asking good questions. The problem is that it’s not usually the people doing the innovation who create things as templates; it’s the people who follow behind them. The way that I avoid it is exactly what we were talking about—setting an experience goal. Asking new questions, setting a new experience goal. And then you’re going to find the answers. I don’t start out by saying, “Okay! Now that we’ve built this engine with Walden, we’re going to apply this to a whole bunch of other books.” |
| Jesper: | Rousseau! |
| Tracy: | Exactly; “Let’s do Rousseau!” We’re not going to do that. That’s just not a viable next step for me. I’ve been thinking about what else I would like to do, and a lot of ideas do occur to me around different literature, because I love literature, but it would definitely not be the same mechanics; the same system. |
| Jesper: | You referred to the term walking simulators which, as you know, was originally meant as a negative thing. |
| Tracy: | I know! That’s why I was trying to reclaim it a little bit. First-person shooters are really a simulation of a children’s game of tag. Which is an important, fundamental part of human existence. |
| Jesper: | It’s also a very good game. |
| Tracy: | It’s a very good game. When we digitized it, we were basically projecting that fundamental piece of humanity into a digital realm. And it worked, and now we’ve done it a thousand times. But there are other really interesting primitively important functions of human play that we haven’t really dug into. Tag is a game playing with power, but walking is this really fundamental activity that we have used—not only for getting places—but for thinking about things. The transport of our physical body is related to the play of thoughts; when we walk, we think. Maybe it’s right that the walking simulator has come around now as we are trying to build these deeper, richer storytelling engines. Because maybe walking is deeply related to that! |
| Jesper: | And also to memory techniques like the memory palace. |
| Tracy: | Exactly. So “walking simulator” isn’t a pejorative term to me. I actually think it’s a term of great potential. |
| Jesper: | When people use the term “walking simulator,” it is done to set up this conflict or division between “regular” games, “normal” games, and these weird, experimental things. |
| Tracy: | And I just don’t accept that. I’m that weird person who goes, “yeah, whatever you want to call me—that’s cool.” I don’t accept that conflict that they’ve set up. |
| Jesper: | Is it also the other way around? Some experimental game developers have had fairly strong feelings against a lot of mainstream games. |
| Tracy: | I don’t really know that it’s like that anymore. But early on, there wasn’t an indie games community, and so, in order to carve themselves space, experimental game designers basically felt like they had to throw down the gauntlet and say, you know, “we are not games”. I’ve never felt that way. I’m more like: “games are bigger than you imagine.” |
| Jesper: | So you don’t see yourself as working in opposition to the mainstream games industry, but as expanding the palette? |
| Tracy: | I think more “outside of,” but not in opposition. Because “opposition” implies that we have to contest this space. And I don’t think we need to contest it; I think we need to grow it. It is an utterly different way of thinking about it. |
| Jesper: | How does it influence your teaching, or the way you and your colleagues run the program at USC? It’s a fairly famous program for a lot of interesting work, including Walden. When you think about positioning that, is it a conscious choice, the way it’s become a kind of hub for a lot of experiments? |
| Tracy: | Early on, before there was even a formal program, I wanted to grow a place where I could meet people who I’d want to work with. One of the conscious decisions that—for me, anyways—was going to the cinema school to start the program, rather than going to, say, the school of engineering. We have the engineering school; we have communications; we have health; we have a lot of other people involved. But back in the beginning, my challenge was to create a games program focused on the expressive aspects of games. It seemed like that was the place to do it. The first question is, where do you situate it? Some game programs started in literature; some started in engineering. They all carry with them the vestiges of that initial decision that was made. I didn’t see the game industry as focusing on creative direction of a whole idea; of starting from that experience goal and really thinking of the game in a holistic way; as an experience. And I wanted to create a place where that design methodology was central. And we would create a culture around that design methodology. |
| Jesper: | Has it panned out the way you imagined it? |
| Tracy: | Some things. I didn’t realize that making that decision about being in one school at the beginning would be so hard to change. If we’d started as our own school, then there would’ve been a different fight in the beginning, but maybe a cleaner path as we moved forward, right? Instead, our main challenge has been about the process of bringing other schools on campus (engineering, communications, music, business, etc.) into the joint program. In the main USC Games program, I think we have a really strong culture and environment where people can come to learn to be designers that focus on the player experience. |
| Jesper: | I have this feeling sometimes that I need an experimental fix. I see a new game and it does something that’s completely different from what I expected and it’s deeply satisfying… I get a very big kick out that. Then I sometimes worry that I’ll run out of kicks eventually? |
| Tracy: | I don’t know! Have you run out of music that you listen to in the world? Have you run out of films? I wouldn’t worry. There’s always someone out there who’s brain works differently than yours, who’s going to create something that delights you. |
| Jesper: | Glad to hear it! I was wondering about this label, “indie”—we’re at IndieCade. Do you like this label, or? |
| Tracy: | I live with it. I don’t have a better term, and I think that I like its roots; I like its roots in the notion of independence. But I think that it’s gotten somewhat meaningless. When we’re saying “indie,” we’ve cut away a lot of the actual meaning of independence, independent from publishers, independence from market expectations, independence from caring whether the game is going to sell to two people or two hundred thousand. For me, indie has gone through all these gyrations, and people say, “oh, now you can’t make any money in indie.” But was that the goal? The most important question is: as indies, have we used our freedom wisely? Have we done anything in the world, with our freedom? Or have we just sold it away for a place on a console or something? |
| Jesper: | I do find that there’s a conflict within the idea of indie. Part of the time it’s billed as a more democratic game, but at the same time, like with independent cinema, it can also be games for educated connoisseurs. Is that a danger, do you think? That it becomes this elitist form for people who already read The New Yorker? |
| Tracy: | I see that in cinema, but here’s the thing: if The New Yorker covered games, then I might agree with you. But that’s not the case. Indie games are not featured in the upper-echelons of high society. It’s such a different medium, that has grown up in such a different market, that the notion of independence isn’t clear. Yes; there are games that are for a more intellectual audience. But there are also indie games that are just for people who, like with Cuphead, have this masochistic need to play the hardest game ever. That’s not your New Yorker readers, for sure. I don’t think that indie games are associated cleanly, in any way, with a particular demographic. That seems like a failure, but it’s actually a success. |
| Jesper: | So what you’re saying is that indie games generate lots of different experiences for lots of different people. |
| Tracy: | Could Exploding Kittens have gotten the groundswell that it did in an environment that did not have the notion of indie games? I’m not sure. On the other hand, there are many people who consider themselves connoisseurs of indie games, who are interested in a game like Exploding Kittens, right? I don’t think indie games is a cohesive idea; cohesive enough for us to critique its audience or its failures. |
| Jesper: | But to me, indie—and I think this is the case also, to some extent, in music or cinema—can contain this idea of “purity.” I was reading a piece by Keir Keightley about the history of rock music. Especially historically, there was this idea that rock was this authentic musical style. I don’t think we think this way anymore. But rock music was presented as the authentic musical style against pop music. If anything was too commercial, it’d be cast off from rock music and be pop. Later punk music uses the exact same trope against rock music. |
| Tracy: | That’s a really interesting evolution. Then what you’re really saying is that each generation creates its own sense of purity, of authenticity. That’s completely valid. It’s an identity thing, rather than an inherent, unchanging aspect of the work. |
| Jesper: | And a generational thing. |
| Tracy: | How are you even defining indie it in your book? |
| Jesper: | I’m not defining it, but looking at how people are using the terms. In addition, I am looking at the institutions around indie, and the experiments in game design. |
| Tracy: | That makes a lot of sense to me. I had originally wanted to be an experimental filmmaker, back when I was an undergraduate. And so later, I thought, if I had a game lab, I could make these experimental games. Experimental has a lot more resonance for me. When I tell people “I’m doing experimental games,” I can explain that it’s like experimental rock or independent film. This is an easy way to map what people understand about independent film or experimental rock to games, which they’ve never thought of in those terms before.
Earlier on, you actually had to have this discussion about the mapping. But before someone made the connection, there wasn’t any idea of experimental or indie games. We actually had to say, “look; games are created in this economic, cultural context. We could divorce it from that, and they’d be independent. We could start addressing some fundamental questions and they’d be experimental.” |
| Jesper: | As you say, I think the label “indie,” even though it’s very vaguely defined, has done objective work. It’s mattered a lot for being able to explain to people what you’re doing. I’m writing about what the term does; how can it be used, where did it start, come into play, and then what kind of associations it has. But I wanted to ask you: How do you see IndieCade in relation to the Independent Games Festival [IGF]? |
| Tracy: | IGF was always associated with the Game Developers Conference, and therefore positioned in a little sibling relationship to the industry. IndieCade was created by people who saw the expressive potential of games. It’s always been its own community aside from the industry. For me, that’s why it remains vibrant. And anything that’s truly experimental is in constant jeopardy. |
| Jesper: | But I think it’s also interesting how big sponsors such as Sony for periods of time are interested in trying to use indie games through IndieCade? |
| Tracy: | They do that to be revitalized, to be involved in the culture of revitalization. That’s how big companies buy up small companies, they revitalize that part of their thing. I think this industry is no different; when they need energy, they come and look for us, here, at places like IndieCade. |
| Jesper: | Historically, again, it also suggests that many people understand the need for institutions to support experimental games, to create venues for them. |
| Tracy: | There’s a deep symbiotic relationship between not only industry and indie-makers, experimental-makers, but also between academia and industry, and academia and those experimental-makers. They all feed on one another. IndieCade and the indie communities and the festivals make places where academics, and other indies can show their work and gain credibility. They also provide a path to industry and to the evolution of industry. For a long time, the game industry didn’t have all that, and was in a bad death-spiral. The academic game community and the indie community sprang up and revitalized the game industry to a great extent, whether that is acknowledged or not. |
| Jesper: | Thank you. |