Interview with Robin Hunicke

I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company. I'm also a game designer and a professor. I've made commercial games for a long time. First, with publishers like Electronic Arts, and then supported by publishers like Sony. Now, independently through my business, I'm supported more often by companies like Google, Facebook, and Intel. I am currently, as a developer, in the space of doing playful research that sometimes results in commercially sold games, but sometimes results in things for research with the National Science Foundation, or that we give away as part of promotional package for new technology.

My research practice is playful, but sometimes also commercial. I'm definitely on the boundary between academic, and commercial, and mainstream publisher relationship game development, and bootstrapped scrappy raise-all-the-money-yourself basement indie. I'm in the middle of all those things.

Nobody's ever said that to me about Funomena, but when I was at Thatgamecompany, I definitely heard that argument from certain developers, say the lone-wolf, independent-creator-type person who really struggles creatively and emotionally with the isolation of making their own game alone on their own money. Whether that money comes from income or family or an inheritance, there's a deep struggle sometimes for those folks where they're totally isolated, working on a game for maybe four, six years at a time.

When you go through those experiences all by yourself, sometimes people develop an attitude about what is indie. Then, when other people who are in more team-like environments or have publisher funding, but still own their company, say that they're independent, it feels like a challenge to the lone developers’ independence. But nobody's ever actually said that about Funomena.

I think that argument is kind of old and not happening as often these days. Most of the young people that I talk to look at Funomena and say, "Oh my gosh, I hope I can be indie and successful like you." I'm like, "Oh man, we can barely make our payroll, so maybe dream bigger."

By commerce? A pure indie would be someone who made a game by themselves in a cabin in the woods with materials that they'd made themselves from nature and never showed it to anybody. Like some sort of weird Unabomber game developer person. I don't know. That's like saying that the purest form of art would be somebody like Henry Darger, who was a complete recluse, worked as a janitor, and made thousands of pages of writing and hundreds of images, but was never discovered while he was alive. The most indie thing you can do is to be a completely outsider artist.

In the art community, I think that conversation has led to a lowest common dominator place where you're really trying to define the work by the label, as opposed to the other way around. Maybe indie is a bad label. Maybe experimental is better. I like experimental games or deep games. I like to tell people I'm part of the deep games movement or the experimental games movement, because independent games makes it sound like we're fighting against something. Especially experimental can mean, “I'm a game producer. I do experimental games. Some of them I sell, and some of them I give away, and some of them I make with my kids."

I just like playing. I love dress-up, I love decorating. I love the Sims. I love little simulated worlds. One of the things I love about Wattam is that it's got all these little people in it. The people have behaviors, and then behaviors cause interactions in different ways. I like turning on Wattam and looking at it. Even just not even playing it is fine for me. I like fish. I enjoy dogs and cats. I love the narratives that people create about systems. Funomena is called Funomena because Martin [Middleton] and I are nerds that love systems and system thinking, but what we really love is the fact that lots of complex systems have simple outcomes.

We spend a lot of time making art about the things that intrigue us as children. Kids love to look at water, they love to look at airplanes, and look at birds. We love the idea of things that can exist in physical spaces, like fish, where we can't. I guess all my inspiration comes from that kind of stuff. Why do I like collecting? Why do I care how I look? Why am I curating my glasses or my jewelry? What is the effect of the curation that one does in one's apartment or in your book collection?

Painters, too. If you think about it, it's a system that works somewhat for those cases. If game artists use the same systems that poets, and painters, and paper makers, and book binders, and musicians use, then that's the thing. But if you really want a society that pays people to do that kind of work without having them to have to jobs, we need to have a universal minimum wage. I'm very passionate about that. I'm part of the Shift Commission on the future of work, a Bloomberg initiative.

I feel that this is going to be the conversation of the generation I'm teaching. They're going to be asking, "Why do I have to get on that treadmill to do what I want to do when it's just a treadmill?"  Just pay me to draw. I will stay home and draw. Drawing doesn't take any electricity. You can draw during the day, sing at night, and have a very low impact in terms of your total energy footprint.

I think what you've seen is that as you diversify the creator base, and give people more opportunities to learn how to make games, and diversify the tools, games begin to express of a broader set of views.

Games become something that someone who wants to resist, or have a political message, can use as a platform. In the beginning, that was not the case. You had to be a much more of an expert. Those experts had to spend a lot of time being experts. Therefore, their politics or their messages maybe weren't as developed, or at least they never thought that it would be appropriate to put messages into a game. It took artists transgressing the boundary of what games are to create games with messages. I also think it's kind of awesome. It's really cool to have a game [Gone Home]  about going home and finding out that your sister's queer.

This is why things like Lost Levels appears, right? Power is distributed into systems like this, and is taken back down into the artistic circles by people who resist those labels and find other ways to success. The only way to resist capitalism is to resist the labels, and resist the funding, and resist the models that constrain the creativity, as opposed to expanding.

The only way to truly fight it is to get rid of the need to survive by making your art. That's a universal question that's much broader than indie games. If indie games were defined as separate from commercial game, that's no longer true. Especially now that you can get a huge prize for making something that people think is artistically interesting. Then, the question becomes, "Okay, what do I do with my weird idea that won't fit any of those categories?"

I make games that I want people to play. I make commercial video games. I don't make games that I release on a website for free just to have made a statement. I'm trying to actually have other artists that work with me get paid to make things that they enjoy making, reducing the total burden of the capitalist system on the people that work for me. That's my goal, but it's just one small step. True revolution is deciding you don't want to use money.

I don't believe that in that idea. I believe that you can be a creative entrepreneur. If you want to live in a capitalist society and do creative work, you have to figure out a way to get the people who enjoy it to support it. If you were a Michelangelo, you went to the Pope. I'm an Independent game creator, so I go to the audience and say, "Hey, if you like gardening games, you will like Luna. If you like animals, you'll like Luna."

Maybe it will be a huge hit with Furries. That'd be amazing. They don't have enough games that are being made for them. If I can make games in a way that engages more and more people in expression in a way that they feel positive about, that's the best that one can hope for within a system where money works the way that it does. I've thought about this a lot, but money is the only thing on planet Earth that gains value over time infinitely.

In the end, the concept of money is flawed, I think, because it fundamentally contains the idea that there is a thing that will never go bad. It will always generate more of itself. If you hoard it, it's better than if you share it.

Any curated festival, any curation is in and of itself, is exclusive. I guess you could say that curation is evil, but a non-curated experience is overwhelming to the average person. It's a signal to noise issue. If you just look at the app store, it has to be curated, there has to be stuff on the front page. think this is one of the hardest problems in running a games portal, or store, or festival that assigns credibility.

You have to have a specific ethics about how that gets done, and it has to be well communicated. Otherwise, eventually the community stops participating in it. If you look at a store like Steam, it's gone from being highly curated and extremely quality driven, to robotically curated. Effectively it ends up promoting what that appeals to the most people. That leads to the lowest common denominator, and to the lowest price. That's just market politics and market realities. But curating is a responsibility, it's power. Steam has a power that it is exercising by refusing to curate.

This is the thing. Luna is going to be a three or four hour experience, depending on how much time they spend in the create mode, but you can speed run the tutorial in 10 minutes. It's not designed to be time consuming; it's designed to be like gardening. You get in what you put in. You put effort into the garden, and then you get tomatoes out of it, but you have to go harvest them. If you don't harvest them, they rot on the vine.

If you put time into the game and make it beautiful and personal, then when you go to the cut scenes and you look around, it's really a world you feel you own. If you don't, it's just another cut scene. I don't want to demand that you spend time with me to feel like you got value for your money. I want you to think that, "Wow, a beautiful engaging musical experience that has a little bit of a puzzle game play and some story. It took seven people three years to make. I'd spend $10 or $15 on that."

Sort of. I think Keita [Takahashi]'s style is even more abstract than children's book. It's more like toys.

For the first things we’ve done, we used two art directors, Glenn Hernandez, and Keita Takahashi. Glenn comes from an animation background and Keita comes from a sculpture and product design background, so they have very different styles. What we like about Glenn's style and Keita's style is that they're very broadly appealing and they're familiar without being intimidating. They lower the barrier, I think, for people to try.

I think that's fair. I think both Keita and Glenn's work inherits from cartoon culture, anime culture, animation, classic Disney. The next title that I do I think will inherit more from a Moebius style, the psychedelic art that came out of the 70s. I'm interested in that period right now, which was really prominent in my childhood. The look of games is very much influenced by the age of the person making them.

Keita, Glenn, and I are all around the same age. We have similar influences and interests. In Minecraft or Fez, the pixelated stuff is clearly influenced by the video games that the developers absorbed.

If you go back to the original Tomb Raider, there are a ton of places where there's just tears, and holes where nothing’s being rendered.

The texture and the resolution of things will eventually become much more of an artistic choice as we develop higher and higher definition. Lower and lower fi will be considered a way of being less commercial, less acceptable.

Yes. There's a restaurant down the street from me in San Francisco where there's one pizza oven and one guy. He makes a certain amount of dough every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. You go there at 7:00, there's a huge line. You wait in line. He's like the Soup Nazi, he gives you a pizza. It has three types of pizza he makes, except on the weekend there's one more because he does meat.

You order a glass of expensive Italian wine and you eat your pizza. Then, you leave. There's nothing else, literally nothing. That's making the pizza glamorous again. What used to be a thing that you call on the phone, and pick up, and shove in your mouth without thinking about it, now you're actually think about, "Okay, this guy has a philosophy of pizza. Is this pizza really truly authentic?" It's an Italian Napolitano pizza place. Una pizza Napolitano.

Have you read Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco?

That's also what is interesting to me. The idea of indie experimental games also occurs at this time where we have peak authenticity, and peak locally sourced ingredients, but reservations about the hyperreality you describe. These are the things that fit into the discussion around IndieCade.

Whereas, say, during the 70s, you had a reaction to all of this, with anonymized music, like Kraftwerk.