INTERVIEW WITH Zach Gage

I’m somewhat part of the scrappy fine art community of New York City. There’s a bunch of artists and tech artists. Eyebeam was a big hub—or I guess is a big hub—for that group of people. I would say I’m a part of that group. Babycastles is also a big space for the New York City art-tech scene. And then also, I am a part of the indie game community—the people who I kind of grew up with career-wise at IndieCade and GDC, the sort of old-school indie game community. I think the community is opening up a bit and broadening in a couple of ways, but the part of the indie community that I’m a part of is the people who are making games because we want to express things that we feel the best way to do is through games.

As opposed to, I think, there’s another part of the indie community where their goal is sort of like, “Oh hey, here’s a cool industry and I want to be a part of that industry,” which is a very different goal.

No, I mean, I play a lot of mainstream video games. I really love mainstream video games. A big part of my interest in making video games comes from loving mainstream video games growing up and spending a lot of time playing them and thinking about them. I would say that I don’t really think this is true of—obviously everybody has their own approach—but I think this is maybe specifically true for me and a couple of other people: I’m not really engaging in the mainstream game arena at all.

I think there are a lot of indies who do, but for me, I’m interested in speaking to the new wave of people that came to gaming, which is “normal” people. Everyday people who go about their lives and are casually interested in things like movies, music, and video games. That’s sort of a new space for people to be casually interested in, and that makes it a really exciting space to explore because it’s an entirely fresh group of people who are learning a whole new literacy. For me, the interesting part is being a part of teaching them that literacy and exploring that space with them, building experiences that allow them to start to explore the depth and possibility of video games.

I think “casual” and “hardcore” as terms are not very good. They seem designed to be descriptive of a level of difficulty, and I don’t think that’s accurate at all. I think crosswords is something that you would describe as a casual game, but people who do crosswords are doing something that’s far harder than people who play Halo. Obviously, people at the top end of Halo are really amazing, and so are people at the top end of crosswords.

To me, when I think of casual and hardcore, what you’re actually talking about is different sets of literacies. “Hardcore” gamers are people who have grown up with mainstream triple-A video game trends; they know how to use controllers, they know how to navigate 3D spaces, they know who to talk to in RPGs, and they know how to organize items. People who are “casuals” know how to deal with dice and cards. They know how to touch something and move it and see what it does. So, I am definitely interested in working with the literacies that are available to casual players and expanding those literacies, but I would never say I make casual video games because I think there’s too much attached to that term that is not accurate.

I’m not sure King is interested in education. I think King is largely interested in taking a set of attributes of the target market they’re targeting—this demographic of casual users—and then exploiting the aspects of play that those people understand and don’t understand.

That’s why when you look at the casual market of games, they come in waves. First, you have FarmVille games, and those are extremely limited in terms of the kinds of depth that are available to you. They’re heavily cosmetic and built around Skinner box structures. Then the next wave of games—as people suddenly figured out after years, everybody finally got educated to the way these things were working—now we have these Candy Crush style games that do offer a higher degree of strategy and depth, but are still ultimately sitting on top of these very slot machine-style structures.

So, I think they’re watching the growth and understanding of games in this casual market and targeting things very specifically for where that growth, understanding, and literacy is. My interest is in expanding that growth and literacy. I’m trying to take things that are way further down the rabbit hole from the video game arena and bring them into the more casual area in a way that feels friendly and comfortable to players in that space. The more they engage with them, the more they start to discover that there are special things that video games can do, ways that you can interact with them, and kinds of depth and strategy that you can reach that they may or may not be familiar with. Hopefully, when they find them in my games, they start to bring that kind of critical thinking back out into their lives and into the ways that they engage with other games.

There are two questions that you’re asking. One of them is, “Why am I doing this stuff for me?” and the other one is, “Why am I doing this for other people?”

For me, I view my practice as a learning and growth experience. When I try to fix things, generally what I’m trying to fix is the thing that kept me from getting invested in a game or an area of games. Oftentimes, I will deal with a game like Chess that I always wished I loved, but I never have. I try to think about what the thing is that’s causing friction in this experience, what’s blocking me from getting into it, and then I try to fix it so that I can get into it and access the depth of that community or the depth of the game. My assumption is that if I can open a door for myself, there are probably people who are like me that might also want to go through that door. And for people who are within that space, it will provide a different perspective on the thing that they love, and that’s a valuable kind of work for them.

The other side of it is that oftentimes the way that I try to open those doors or fix these things is by taking subtle aspects of video games and bringing them into games that are not really video games. I think there are a lot of really great things that video games can do that people who don’t really play video games don’t get a lot of access to, and people who do play video games take for granted because these were things that were revolutionary twenty years ago and are not really relevant now.

For example, with Really Bad Chess, one thing that computers are really good at is that if you want to have 200 of something, that’s just as easy as having one of it. If you want to totally randomize something, that takes two seconds; it doesn’t take sixteen rolls of a six-sided die to figure out what set of pieces you’re going to get. When people were looking at Chess and thinking of modifying it before it was in a video game state, it would be quite a lot of work to build a game that required using four sets of pieces. But on a computer, it’s not even four sets of pieces—you have an infinite number of pieces. You can do whatever you want. That’s not something that you would typically consider to be a “video gamey” thing, but it does happen to be a very subtle aspect of the medium. So I could use that to take a very traditional game and turn it into a very modern, different game while feeling like I’m bringing a video game component.

The other thing I did in Really Bad Chess - which is extremely video gamey - is building a game that’s really structured around playing against an AI, delving into the depths of how that AI makes its decisions and playing against it as if you’re playing against a human being, as opposed to playing against it as if you’re playing against a computer. For example, when you play Poker against a human, you’re sitting there looking for the errors, the tells, and the weird sets of decisions that that human makes. To get really good at Really Bad Chess, you have to do the same thing with the AI. You have to start to understand over forty or fifty games: what are the places where this AI is not smart? What kinds of weird moves does it make, and how can I use that to exploit the AI? That’s something, again, that really comes from video games, that isn’t in board games at all. When you play the game, you might not even really notice that that’s a major new component of the game because it’s so subtle, but I feel like it’s the subtle stuff that lets you really open up a lot of these older designs.

I think really it’s an extremely sacrilegious statement, and that’s part of the reason why something that’s as simple as the change I made in Really Bad Chess isn’t something that has really been taken seriously before—because it’s so “anti-chess.” Chess is a game about the ultimate battle of two minds; it’s perfectly fair. Really what I wanted to do wasn’t even make a statement about Chess; I wanted to make a statement about fairness. I wanted to try to tackle why the theoretical ideals that we have around fairness in society don’t match up with the reality of what we actually enjoy and what seems interesting to us. Chess happened to be the easiest thing to take apart and build a thing around that would question that.

The fairness in this case is... in Really Bad Chess, your pieces and your opponent’s pieces are not the same pieces. What is interesting about Really Bad Chess is there are two ways to judge the quality of your setup. Part of it is what pieces you have; obviously, if you have all queens and I have all knights, you have a more powerful setup. But the other part of it is that the position of all of those pieces is actually really relevant. What becomes interesting about that is it’s very hard to understand the relative power of positions in Chess, even for pros, unless you’ve got books and books of learning and structure. When you randomize it, it’s very difficult to understand how even the fact that this knight started one square over really mattered. It’s hard to tell.

The thing that I was looking at as a parallel is: I think we think in society that if you’re going to be in a contest, that contest needs to be fair. That’s the only way to do it. But the reality is, what are the contests that we enjoy the most? Organized sports. Organized sports are pretty much the least fair games that we have in our society. If every basketball team was stacked with players of perfect skill, basketball would be extremely boring to watch. What we like about basketball is that it’s unfair, but somehow that quality doesn’t translate into our understanding of sport and our understanding of competition. That’s part of the point that I was trying to make with Really Bad Chess and get people to think about—this idea that maybe fairness isn’t what we want. Maybe fairness isn’t as fun as we think it is. Maybe there’s something to be said for things not being fair. I think that’s a topic that’s extremely broad that hits a lot of places in life. When you back up that far out of Really Bad Chess, that’s where you can really start to see why I’m saying that this is emerging from my art practice and this is the stuff I’m trying to address, but I’m trying to address it through something that most people would be totally happy to pick up and play. They might not build out to the point of what I’m trying to say, but maybe it just infects them a little bit. To me, the thing that is powerful about games isn’t that they give you messages, it’s that they give you experiences. Experiences are the kind of thing that stay with you and that you unpack over a very long period of time, and that’s the medium I’m interested in working with.

Right. I mean, I think clearly there are going to be constraints that are wrapped around it at some point. But I think one thing that’s interesting about fairness is we don’t generally, when we’re not trying to make specific rules about something, we generally consider fairness as something that either is or isn’t. It’s not levels of gray. But the reality, the practicality of fairness, is that it is extremely built around levels of gray. Even when you look at salary caps—people will look at salary caps and they’ll go, “That’s fair.” Nobody is going, “Oh, salary caps make basketball more fair,” which is what it actually does. They’re saying that this aspect is fair and they focus on it very discretely. I think it’s a weird mental poison about what fairness is in society. It’s like this one thing you do and then you’re done.

And I think that kind of rhetoric is what leads to, for example, the big issue right now—thanks to the Trump administration—about affirmative action. “Is affirmative action fair?” I think when you look at it from the framework of “is it fair or is it not fair,” people are invited to give arguments as to why it’s not fair because of this situation. But I think if you look at affirmative action and you say, “Is affirmative action more fair? Is it making the process fairer?” then you have a very different conversation.

Right. I think it’s weird that play is supposed to be something that’s for children. Obviously, children play and that’s great, but adults play all the time too. I think, especially in America, there are just an unbelievable number of taboos around what adult play is and maybe that connects back to the weird fear of it. I don’t know, I think it’s fine to play with children’s things too, like Legos are great. I don’t know why that would be a—I guess in general in my practice that’s not something that I’m worried about. I think to some extent exploring things that are conventionally a little disrespected leaves you in a place where there’s just a lot of extremely low-hanging fruit and stuff to explore.

I also, for example, think money in games is very similar. It’s a thing that there are huge taboos about exploring because of the connection to the gambling industry.

It applies to everything. I think so often there’s this weird myth that has been created that if you explain your work, your work will have no mysteriousness and you’ll destroy the significance. Even there’s a very strong idea that if you explore your own art practice, you’ll break it and that you won’t be able to do the art and it won’t become meaningful anymore. Suddenly your connection to your subconscious and the depth of the art will be cut off and you’ll make very shallow, derivative work that’s all conceptual and not actually interesting.

I think early on I just realized that that was totally bullshit. As soon as I figured out how to explain my work and talk it up and explain what I was doing, I actually started getting way more attention. Curators were more interested and people who were not even interested in art suddenly became interested in art because I was reaching out and building a bridge to them. Discovering that that extremely large taboo was extremely hurtful made me feel like anytime now that I encounter a taboo, it’s like, “Well, why is this a taboo? Is there some real way that this is extremely bad that everybody needs to be super aware of, or is this just something that because of the way that institutions are built up and because of the way that systems are structured in our society, we ended up here?”

I think that’s extremely true of money in art and it’s extremely true of money in video games.

Every once in a while, somebody will sort of get angry and write me an email or get angry on Twitter and write me some message about it. Every single time that I’ve responded and explained what I’m doing, they’ve sort of backed down. For me, the thing with money is: money is maybe the most interesting component of games. Money and randomness are the most powerful, compelling components of games of all time. They’re so much more compelling than anything else we’ve come up with. They’re this incredibly dangerous thing because they’re so amazing. But the flip side is, they’re amazing! We love it. It’s really interesting.

The depth of topics and exploration that you can do with money is totally limitless because money is this amazing, transformative force that touches every aspect of our lives. So it’s really weird to me that that would be something that you would explicitly stay away from. For example, my in-app purchases broadly follow the shareware model: it’s free, and if you want to unlock it, it costs four bucks or whatever. No one’s ever gotten mad at me for doing that. Where the tension starts to come in is when you make consumable purchases—like this feature of my game is a dollar.

Typically, my approach to that stuff is I don’t worry about optimizing it; I try to stay as un-optimized as possible in terms of the kind of money that I’m making. For example, in Really Bad Chess, you can buy a pack of Undos for a dollar. Undos aren’t free; you can watch an ad to get some, but if you pay a dollar, you get 100 of them, which is quite a lot. I mean, a penny an Undo is almost an arbitrary amount of money. It’s the kind of money that if you were playing Poker and you wanted to play the most bare-bones version of Poker, you might have everybody buy in for a dollar and then all your stacks are pennies. Clearly, that’s not something that’s tuned to make money; it’s not surrounded by a bunch of dark design patterns.

What I wanted is a way in the game to say, “Here’s something that you can do, and it’s a very powerful thing—you can undo your move and take back what you wanted—but it does have a level of consequence.” Whenever you’re designing something in a game that you want to have a level of consequence, you have to figure out a way to design that consequence in. Oftentimes that consequence is part of the game system itself; for example, every time you use an Undo, your score goes down or the amount of time that it takes goes up. But there are other ways to design consequence that are more directly pointed at the player and in things that are extrinsic to the game. One way to do that would be to have a countdown; you can use an Undo now, but you can’t use another Undo for ten minutes. That’s not part of the system at all; it’s a totally extrinsic thing saying an Undo is worth ten minutes of your time. But that doesn’t necessarily work in a game like Really Bad Chess where the style of engagement is, “Alright, maybe I have five minutes in between meetings and I want to play one game of Really Bad Chess—what if I need to undo twice?”

Money is another extrinsic structure that you can use to say, “This is a thing that is penalizing you.” Doing this is penalizing you in a way that’s not in the game, but is personally attached to money. These things are valuable in this one way, and I think that that is a totally fine thing to be doing. I’m clearly not trying to extract a ton of money out of people, but I am trying to explore where money can fit in game designs and what it’s like. I think that was an interesting move in Really Bad Chess. I wouldn’t say that it’s the most compelling thing that could possibly be done with money, but anytime I launch a new work, I want to have it filled with as many little experiments as I can so that I can learn what things really feel like and hear from players what they feel like.

It’s interesting, this breaking out of the game structure. I did a conference game once with Eric Zimmerman where you were in teams and you had to swap cards to make the longest creative sentence, but then we also had an in-game store where you could take some of these game tokens and just buy candy. It was funny because the people who just didn’t want to play would just buy candy instead. It had that kind of weirdness to it; it was a lot of fun.

I wanted to ask you about visual style. A lot of your games have this “good taste” in graphic design, which is also what distinguishes them from, say, King.com games with the garish feedback. What is the design choice here?

Ultimately, if you step far enough away from my games, what they’re all working on is delivering a concept and a place for people to explore it, making that structure as accessible as possible so that I can bring in a wide variety of people and have them find the things that I’m hoping they’ll find. That touches all the aspects of the game design, and where it touches graphics is what I’m interested in: providing foremost a level of clarity and using that clarity to walk people through understanding not just what all the components of the game are, but how those components work together—which of those components are important that they should be focusing on and thinking about, and which of those things might come into importance later.

Outside of that, when I can, I try to push a little bit in terms of making things feel friendly or visually appealing so that people will want to engage with the games. But primarily, my number one focus is on using the design and the visual organization to teach and to improve accessibility.