INTERVIEW WITH Celia Pearce
Celia Pearce is an educator, writer and game developer who has worked with games, VR, and multimedia since the late 1980s.
This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book.
The interview was conducted on October 6th, 2017.
| Jesper: | I know you work with games, but in what way? How do you describe it? |
| Celia: | Most of my life I couldn’t really give a simple answer to that, because I have always done things before there was a name for it. Today, the easiest thing is to say that I’m a college professor that teaches game design. Even though that gets a weird reaction, it gets the least amount of quizzing. My relationship to indie games is that I started an indie game festival [IndieCade]. |
| Jesper: | Okay, but you also worked with games or game-like things before that, going back to the ‘80s. Did you call that “games”? |
| Celia: | When I started in the ‘80s, there wasn’t really a name for it, and with the company that I worked at in New York, from 1983 to 1989, I had to sign a non-disclosure form. So not only weren’t there any words describing what I did, I couldn’t talk about it! It was a weird thing, where for seven, eight years, nobody really knew what I did. And then there were terms like “interactive multimedia”. I met you when I first came to Denmark—I think it was ‘94, ‘95—and everyone would say “multimedia”. It’s changed names over the years. When I was working in the theme-park industry, it was “interactives”— and later it was “VR”. It’s always changing, I guess, is the short answer. |
| Jesper: | When did you feel the word “game” started having currency? |
| Celia: | When I worked at Schlossberg, in the ‘80s, we called what we were making “games”. And that was when I first wrote a taxonomy of games. In one of the first conversations I had with my boss, I was supposed to write descriptions of all the games everyone was working on, and I said, “well, what’s a game?” And he said, “I don’t know—figure it out!” Which was what he always said whenever I asked him a question. So I spent many hours looking at games, playing games, and coming out with a list of characteristics that seemed to be present in "things that are called games.” That’s where I came up with the goals, resources, and that whole list of characteristics. I think it was in ‘95 that I published the paper with that list. I wasn’t trying to be academic; it was just a practical thing where we had to figure out when something was a game. I was doing playtesting, and I ended up running the playtesting department, and I was also writing game documents. I worked on the game design, game mechanics, and logic, drawing flow-charts, writing documents. And the funny thing is that it was easier in the beginning because it wasn’t as codified. We were inventing it while we were doing it. Therefore, we could call it whatever we wanted. |
| Jesper: | I feel that some people doing interesting experiments in the late ‘90s wouldn’t call them games? The products of the Voyager company were certainly not promoted as games. But it seems that such works would now be called games? |
| Celia: | That’s a good point. This is my thought about that. I went to the first E3 shortly after I moved back to Los Angeles. In 1994, there were two parallel trajectories. One was the multimedia trajectory represented by Philips CD-I and DVI [Digital Video Interactive], coming out of laserdiscs. This trajectory was based on the notion of multimedia and of video and animation that was interactive. That’s where Voyager was, and things like Voyeur, Burn:Cycle, and that ridiculous Johnny Mnemonic game. Those were all on an interactive cinema, multimedia trajectory. They weren’t calling themselves games at that point. On the other side was the arcade trajectory, which became Nintendo and Sega and Sony. Then came Myst—which was a CD-ROM, on the multimedia trajectory, and at the same time, Doom. To me, that’s the pivotal moment, where Doom won. And because of this, this whole interactive media history just stopped, or faded away. From that point forward, it became FPS and twitch, and also the word game. |
| Jesper: | If you play Twine games, many of them are very similar to hypertext fictions. But people who made hypertext fictions certainly wouldn’t call those “games”. Something apparently happened to the word “game”. And my theory is that part of it just the existence of festivals, and a community of people who are interested in games, including in things that are very experimental. Now the word game has become more attractive as a term to describe your work, than it was 20 years ago. |
| Celia: | I’ve been designing games since 1983, and I feel like my medium was stolen from me. I feel like the first-person shooter, twitch, PlayStation, mentality, took away from me the medium that I worked on when in its very beginning. Part of why I joined IndieCade, was because I wanted it back. I was depressed when I came out of the first E3 [1995], because I saw this looming situation with the loud music and everything we know about E3 today, and I thought, “this is not the industry that I wanted to be in. This isn’t what I signed up for”. So, when Stephanie Barish invited me to be part of the IndieCade team, it was highly appealing—because the industry had become something I didn’t like. When I started in the 1980s, I felt fine! I was in a company that was half women. I never felt that I shouldn’t be doing this, I never felt marginalized. I was excited because I knew I was doing something new. And ten years later, I felt like I was elbowed out. It’s not dissimilar from what happened in the early film industry where women were directing and editing and writing, and then by the time the industry became financially successful (not to mention credited), suddenly all the women went away. And I felt the same thing was happening in the video game industry. It became very monomaniacal, like, “there’s only this one thing and that’s what a game is”. When I started teaching at USC [University of Southern California], I think it was ’98, I would get in arguments with the students if I said, “your game can’t have killing in it”. And they would say, “well then it’s not a game,” because somebody told them, somewhere along the line, that that’s what a game was. I felt a similar way in the early academic research days, because I felt like the academy was just accepting what industry had made, uncritically. And my feeling was that we should be critiquing what was made, we shouldn’t just be saying, “oh! Grand Theft Auto is so cool, look at all its characteristics.” We should be asking, “what’s wrong with this picture?” And I understand why, because we were very young at the time. |
| Jesper: | We very much wanted to defend the medium, for it to gain legitimacy? And to some extent, after indie and experimental games came about, we had the realization that we didn’t need to talk about GTA all the time; we could talk about these interesting, experimental other things that better matched our image of what video games were supposed to be.
Do you feel vindicated? That the kind of experiments you promoted, but which fell by the wayside, have come back? |
| Celia: | Totally. When Her Story won at IGF, I felt it was the classic interactive cinema thing that had been happening in the mid- ‘90s. What happened back then, which to me was part of the tragedy, was that there used to be all these nascent game genres, people doing all kinds of wacky things! And the development of adventure games and interactive cinema genres was arrested because they were dropped. And that’s why I think somebody like Tale of Tales were brilliant, because they picked up where the industry had abandoned the genre and made it into something artistic. Myst was called the first “work of art” in the game industry, that’s what people said about it. But I think that indies were smart, because they found a genre that was popular, like the platformer, and did something weird with it. They said, “oh, here’s a genre that’s been sitting there basically dormant for 20 years.” |
| Jesper: | And which most people still understood. |
| Celia: | Yep. And the last couple of years, people keep coming up to me and talking to me about “FMV; FMV! It’s all the rage! FMV!” And I’m like, “that was all the rage in 1995!” Trauma was an IndieCade game that had some of this interactive cinema quality to it, or Pry. Pry is brilliant. It’s essentially an interactive movie, but it has an interesting interface where you split the screen open with two fingers, and it opens into other parts of the game. I think it’s great when people pick up dead genres, bring them back to life, and evolve them. And we have the technology to do full motion video, now, in interactive form. Which we couldn’t do very well in the ‘90s. |
| Jesper: | But I do think Her Story is much better than the interactive cinema of the ‘90s because they figured out the interface. I always felt that in the ‘90s experiments, developers hadn’t really figured out what the player was supposed to do. |
| Celia: | Completely. It’s funny because one of the things I’m really interested in now is—and this’ll make you laugh—is participatory theatre. I’ve gone to see Sleep No More twice, and I’m very frustrated by it, because it’s a missed opportunity. It’s brilliant for what it is, but it’s passive. I’ve been talking to people doing this kind of work in Boston, and the LARPers, who are adjacent to them, but don’t really intersect at all. I was involved in a participatory theatre project a couple of months ago. It was a game about death, and I signed up for it, and I was playing, and in the middle of the game, my step-mom died. Suddenly, very quickly. It was horrible, and the game had no affordance to deal with that. I was in the middle of the very experience that the game was about, and the game had no capacity to absorb or integrate that into its experience. Which I think was a missed opportunity. I talked to the people who made it, and they said, “we’re theatre people.” I told them, “I know. You want to control the experience, and at the same time, you don’t have affordances for emergent outcomes.” I think it’s the same problem, stemming from the way cinema is taught. When I worked at USC in the ‘90s, I had an argument because film is set up such that the screenwriters are over here, and the production people are over here. In film, "in the beginning is the word." The screenplay is the first thing. And I tried to explain to them, that’s not how it works, that in games we write the dialogue after. And they didn’t understand how we could do that. Once a medium is codified in that way, it’s very hard to introduce agency into it. I think this goes back to your original question. The people who made Her Story are clearly game designers, not filmmakers. They did something smart, too, in the game mechanic. It’s like Voyeur, which worked in that same way. The premise of Voyeur is that you’re looking at people through windows, and surveillance cameras. It made up for the crunchy video, and it also explained why we were watching live action video in the first place. And why you couldn’t change it. With Her Story, game designers who understand agency are returning to video, and say “oh! We could do something interesting with this”. |
| Jesper: | Let’s talk about the terms for a while. Do you like the terms independent games, or indie games? |
| Celia: | I guess it’s one of the great things about being an academic: We get to make decisions about what things mean. When we started IndieCade, Stephanie Barish and I went to GDC together, and we met with Sam Roberts. I think it was 2007, right after the Super Columbine Massacre controversy. We went to the Independent Games summit [at GDC], and there was a clear diversity issue. It was all white guys and Robin Hunicke. Robin’s great, but she was the token woman for a decade. And you’d go into the serious games summit, and you’d see more women and more people of color, and those are all indie games too. They didn’t have big publishers, they didn’t have funding, a lot of them were done on a shoestring. There was the Games4Change crowd, and cell phone games, which were also not counted as indie, because they were on phones. That made no sense. And then there were casual games, which were also not counted as indie, why? Because they were in a browser? That made no sense either. We said, “why don’t they count as indie games? And why doesn’t Night Journey?” That was really important to us. Because we loved Night Journey; we gave it an award. We showed it at E3. We understood what that game was, but it completely befuddled the IGF. They just didn’t get it. It doesn’t seem to have a goal, it’s in black and white, it’s deliberately made to look like old video. They just didn’t get it. And none of them knew who Bill Viola was. How is it possible that the work of a guy who’s a pioneer of video art is not even acknowledged? That’s a problem. |
| Jesper: | You are referring to the fact that Night Journey wasn’t accepted into the IGF? |
| Celia: | Exactly. It has a bunch of characteristics that makes it a poster child for the problem. It has a woman designer, it’s an artwork meant for a museum, and it was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. None of those things make it not indie. But all of them broke the mold of what the group of people at IGF saw as indie. I was also doing art game exhibitions at the time. There were no artgames at IGF in 2006 or ‘7. Nobody even knew what they were. I think in 2005, I did a panel on art games at GDC, and it got completely opposing reviews. Half the people said it was the worst panel they’d ever been to at GDC, and the other half said it was the best. I did the same thing at SIGGRAPH. I wanted people to be aware that there are other people who call themselves artists, making things they call games. And those are just as independent as Jonathan Blow, who makes money as a software designer, and then makes games in his spare time. Why is Eddo Stern any less indie than Jonathan Blow? That was really where we were coming from. We also put everything on a level playing field—we didn’t segregate student games in the festival, or mobile from PC games. |
| Jesper: | I hear from some people who do experimental games, that they think of indie games as being the corporate version of small games, and they reserve the term indie for something that’s slightly commercial. |
| Celia: | Right, but I don’t agree with that. I think that’s wrong. Because if the principle of indie is that it’s independent of the publishing apparatus, then my big gripe with IGF for a long time was that it wasn’t independent of the publishing apparatus. You could argue that IGF, up until the Nuovo Award, wasn’t indie at all. Because the goal of most of those games was in fact not to be indie. |
| Jesper: | The criteria on the IGF website was that you couldn’t have a publishing deal at the time you entered the competition. |
| Celia: | But everybody wanted one. Everybody there wanted to be not-indie. That’s very telling. The Portal developers is a great example of a group that got exactly their wish; they became not-indie. Eddo Stern doesn’t want to be not-indie. He has no interest in that. |
| Jesper: | Does he submit to game festivals? |
| Celia: | He’s been in IndieCade a couple of times. Yeah. I think he’s had three games in. |
| Jesper: | I was wondering, when you make games, or when you teach, my impression is that you’re trying to do something different from the mainstream game industry, but could you describe what it is? |
| Celia: | For all the work that I’ve done in the last decade or more, I look where everyone’s running, and then I run the opposite way. When I did the Mermaids game at Georgia Tech, we worked on it for eight years, but we never finished it. It was the anti-MMOG. We had a wall of Post-its: I’ve played MMOGs, and I’ve studied them, and I love them in some ways, but there were lots of things that I hated about them, so I just had all these Post-Its—these are the things that we don’t want to do: we don’t want to make it grind-y; we don’t want to make it linear. It was called the pet-peeves wall. One of the things I hate about MMOGs is that you always have to play with people within three levels of you. It makes no sense. How are you ever going to learn anything if you can’t play with people that are more skilled? A lot of my game design inspiration comes from things I don’t like. The candy-crusher game that was at IndieCade East in the show-and-tell - that was a homework assignment that I did, of my own. And that was in reaction to another game, too. I was staying at a friend’s house, who always told me she never played games, and she was playing Candy Crush the whole time. So I wrote her a Yoko Ono-esque score, describing a game where you would smash candy with hammers. I ended up making it into an actual board game—Candy Crusher. The next one was the Suite for Overhead Projectors, which was just a very artsy-like “I want to make a game” for a projector; I don’t know yet what it’s going to be.
My most recent game, eBee, the electronic quilt game, came out of an idea I’d had with Ludica. We wanted to make a game that combined quilting, board games, and electronics. That was the big idea. And when I met Gillian Smith, she had had a similar idea. I'm currently going through my "post-screen" phase. I’m doing some augmented reality stuff. It’s also hilarious that people keep asking me about VR. And I did that twenty years ago. Why would I want to do it again now? There are enough people doing it. Again, I’m interested in participatory theatre —what I'm starting to call "playable theatre"—because it needs something. There’s plenty of people making interesting and weird and cool VR things. Why do what everyone else is doing? |
| Jesper: | You talked about first-person shooters before. Is there anything about mainstream AAA games that you don’t like? |
| Celia: | Well, I don’t like most things about mainstream AAA games. |
| Jesper: | Like the explosions or the violence? |
| Celia: | I just find it boring. I’ve played a lot of World of Warcraft, I’ve played a lot of Guild Wars, I like the teamwork. I think those games do a really good job of creating interdependency between players by giving them complementary skills. I wish that they would come up with something more interesting to do than just killing things. It’s not even that I’m a pacifist per se—I mean, I am—but I find it boring and un-motivating. I like Katamari Damacy, but it’s not really mainstream in that sense. There are a few older games—Ico, Ōkami, The Sims. But again, every one of those is an outlier. I remember playing Half-Life on a local area network when it first came out. It was a multiplayer game—I was never that interested in single-player games. We went in, and it was fun for 10 minutes. And then I just got bored.
I’ve been citing you lately, because I like your discussion of indie as a style. Although technically “indie" games are games that aren’t funded by publishers, there is also an aesthetic that people recognize as "indie." Publishers are a great nemesis for creativity. Marketing people are calling the shots. And the mainstream game industry suffers from fidelity fetishism - photorealism and cinema envy. You can look to film for an equivalent to "indie style" in games. Memento is like an indie game. Inception is a high budget, indie-style film. We often cite Journey as the game equivalent to this—the "triple-I" game. There have always been games like that. PaRappa the Rapper. It's an anti-mainstream aesthetic. Mainstream is obsessed with 3D; so let’s make it 2D! Let's make black and white games. At the second IndieCade in LA, there were five games in black and white. There were three at the first IndieCade; three! It reminded me of indie films of the early ‘90s. Jim Jarmusch’s first film was in black and white. |
| Jesper: | Stranger Than Paradise? |
| Celia: | Yes! And David Lynch’s first films were in black and white. And the Coen brothers. These directors make essentially "triple-I" films. That’s a legitimate way to frame it. It would be nice if there was another way to define it, but I guess maybe what we need to ask ourselves is—and this might be where the linguistic question comes up –Independent of what? I think that’s the bottom line, and I think for people like Jenova Chen, it’s not independent of money or independent of being beholden to a publishing entity; it’s independent of the constraints of marketing. Were you at his [IndieCade 2017] talk? |
| Jesper: | I was. |
| Celia: | I love the way he talked about being asked to consider doing something that would make some money, and he had been like, “no, I can’t do that! I’m an artist.” And then you look at somebody like [Minecraft creator] Notch, who was unbelievably successful, and hates it. He is incumbered by his own independence somehow. He’s a victim of his own success. |
| Jesper: | Very much. It’s clearly not something that he was made for. |
| Celia: | He resents it and hates it, which is weird. You took the money. If you really hate it that much, send the money to Africa or something. |
| Jesper: | Yeah, he could be the new Bill Gates. |
| Celia: | But I do think that question is key: “what are we independent of?” I think that changes all the time. I think, at any given moment, we’re striving to be independent of different things that we feel constrained by. I feel constrained by screens right now. |
| Jesper: | I also think there’s an independent churn, in a sense, of the word. As you say, the early, nominally independent games were trying to become dependent; to get a publisher. And then there was a black and white style, and the pixelated platformer, and these games of modifying core conventions, “we’re doing weird tricks with time!” |
| Celia: | One of the important things you talked about in one of your writings is the move away from photorealism and fidelity. Because that is where most of the money in mainstream games goes now. The game mechanics haven’t changed in a decade. They really haven’t. Gears of War is just Doom with a lot more polygons. |
| Jesper: | It also has a cover mechanic, a purist would tell you, you can cover behind things. |
| Celia: | Oh yeah. |
| Jesper: | Which is clearly a footnote. |
| Celia: | But the thing with the first-person shooter is that they innovate incrementally in features; not in fundamental game mechanics. I think what blew people’s minds about Portal, is that you could do something with a shooting game framework, other than kill people. And it was quite brilliant of them to say, “here’s a thing that everybody knows how to do; let’s just turn it on its head.”
John Sharp and Richard Lemarchand always talk about indie games being punk rock. One of the things central to the punk rock movement was a rejection of high production value. I think it’s the same thing, “why are you spending millions and millions of dollars putting more polygons on Doom and adding a couple more features? Or adding boob physics to Lara Croft? Instead of trying something interesting and new?” Indies are very deliberately moving away from this fidelity fetishism—as an aesthetic choice, but also because we want to put our resources into gameplay. That was the gist of Jenova [Chen]'s talk today. |
| Jesper: | I think something else is also happening in that you get more space for style? It also becomes about having a graphical style; having a graphical artist who has a knowledge of history. It becomes a way of demonstrating a sense of style. |
| Celia: | But think about the comparison to film. Think about Tim Burton versus Jerry Bruckheimer. That’s the exact comparison. Tim Burton is the Jenova Chen of film, right? He has a style; you know you’re watching a Tim Burton film. Jerry Bruckheimer just has this very commercial, loud, style. It’s always the same. |
| Jesper: | But there’s also this thing that happens with indie, or anything that bills itself as alternative. You have moments where style gels, and it becomes a dead style. And I think we felt it with experimental platformers for a while. Enough with that already. |
| Celia: | Having an art history perspective is very useful. Avant-garde is avant-garde in relation to something. I was showing my students—it was hilarious—Nam June Paik last week. This is the guy who invented video walls. And one of the kids goes, “what’s a video wall?” I’m like, “it’s the thing that’s behind every rock star you’ve ever seen on stage”. It was invented by a crazy Fluxus artist who was putting magnets on top of televisions in the 1960s. Now it’s mainstream! Similarly, David Lynch is no longer considered avant-garde. He’s now a mainstream director. Avant-garde is always a moving target. |
| Jesper: | I wonder whether you think indie can be destructive? Because there’s sometimes, within indie, an idea of purity. You can be ‘pure’ indie, but if you take money from Sony, you’re impure—you’ve sold out. There can be in-fighting about being ‘true’ indie, while other people are ‘fake’ indie? This happened also in punk music, for example. |
| Celia: | I feel we give a little more leeway. I asked my students what an art game was, and half of them said Journey. They recognized Journey as a game that’s about artistic expression. And many people think that Journey is an indie game also. But I think that again—independent of what? Maybe what we want to be independent of is not necessarily the money from the publishers, but the creative limitations that come with that. |
| Jesper: | There’s some writing which distinguishes between independent in the financial sense, and independent as a question of control. And when we talk about independent as financial, we often mean control. |
| Celia: | Regarding this question of ‘indie purity’: I’m not going to name any names, but I was speaking with someone yesterday, saying that IndieCade was dead because Jonathan Blow doesn’t come any more. And I think that there is a certain clubby-ness—which I’ve been fighting against, and I think IndieCade has tried to fight against, too – this idea that somebody gets to decide, “oh, since Jon Blow doesn’t go there, it’s not a real indie thing anymore.” What made him the God of Indie? It is still the case with the independent game track at GDC. They’ve never accepted a single proposal that anyone from IndieCade has submitted. I stopped after a couple of years, there’s no point. They don’t want to give us the "good housekeeping seal of approval," for whatever reason. I think it is a status thing. “Oh, well you don’t get to be indie because I’m indie”, or “I’m more indie than you.” Well, I don’t think that Anna Anthropy is any less indie than Jon Blow. If anything, she’s a lot more indie.
Who gets to decide that? I’m a gatekeeper; it’s true, but I think that my gate is a lot bigger and has more keys than other people’s gates. This is why we started things like game-tasting and the game-slam, because we thought we should do something that isn’t gate-kept. Anybody could come and participate—it's not juried. I guess it's ironic that I’m criticizing all these people for trying to define "indie", and I’m defining also trying to definite it. But my indie is better than their indie. (laughs) |
| Jesper: | What makes it better? |
| Celia: | Because it’s more inclusive. When you’re inclusive of different genres, and different practices, and different contexts, you automatically get more diverse people—that’s a secret sauce. People ask me why IndieCade is so much more diverse. It’s because we went to Twine people and invited them to the party when other people were saying they weren’t making games. We said, “come to us! We will love your games!”? We brought Eddo Stern to E3 at a time when "artgames" weren't even a thing that the IGF acknowledged. It’s about embracing the broadest definition, which produces more innovation. If there’s a question about whether or not something is a game, it’s probably doing something right. From an innovation perspective, if people go “oh, that’s not really a game.” I want to see that. Because that means they’re doing something different. Right? And we still have things here that completely straight-up fit the taxonomies that were made in the early days of academia. But then you have things like Night Journey and Walden, neither of which fit that strict definition, but which have opened up the range of what games can be and can do. That's where I'm always putting my bet. |