Interview with Jason Rohrer

I feel like it is for me; it helps make the end product a very personal thing. I'm not only making the game; I'm also making the website and coming up with a PR plan and doing tech support. And recording the music and writing the music and everything. When the end user interfaces with this product, they are getting a very personal person-to-person thing.

The source code is available, all my work is in the public domain, and if they go and poke around in the source code, they will be poking around in something where I typed each of those characters, right?

To some degree. I mean part of the problem is the end results of what we're making are very ephemeral. Passage no longer runs on the latest Mac OS. It no longer runs on the iPhone, in fact, I think Apple finally removed it from the store.

The source code is the last enduring artifact that's left for some of these things. And the source code, if we think about the longevity of our work, the source code is important. Because that's what people are going to be messing with when they're trying to get the thing running in the future.

I wanted my source code to be out there, and I don't want to stop somebody from doing something else with the game, that doesn't mean I'm opening the door for everybody to throw contributions my way. I pretty much never integrated a patch.

And to call myself an artist in that context would be to be make a claim that I don't really have the capability of making about myself. I've always avoided that pretension.

When I'm talking about art, that's what I'm talking about. And when I draw that line, I'm saying, "Look above this line," I think we can all probably agree that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Lolita, and this photograph, and this stage play, and these things, are great works of art. And they're all very different in the way that they operate. They're completely different formally, and yet they are all doing something that we lump together. I'm saying that we don't have, and I still think that's true to this day, even of my own games, that we don't have many games that have even come close to that line.

But in Passage, it's hard to say that the maze doesn't represent something else. It'd be a stretch to claim that it didn't. So I felt exhausted of that type of design, and I was also looking around at other people who were making art games at the time, and I felt like we collectively had exhausted this, “let's build a system of game mechanics, and have the system be interpretable in terms of its meaning”.

And then getting them to reflect on why they made the choices that they did. And if you go back even further to my game Cultivation, before Passage, in Cultivation you are in a system, and there are all these different things you could do in that system, some are mean, some are nice, some are helping other characters in the game, some that are hurting them.

And you're supposed to sit there and say, "Whoa, why did I make that choice that I did?" And then Rod came along and said, "Well no, but maybe there is something artistic we can do in the construction of the game itself." As I saw people playing Cultivation, I thought that the idea of having more than one right way to play, and having the player reflect on choices, was kind of hollow.

If you look at a game like Heavy Rain, that is what it’s doing. You're in a situation where you can save your child, or torture somebody – spoiler. And the game literally lets you make that choice, and the story goes on. But how much do you really feel based on that choice, and does it really weigh you down? It's an artificial context.

There is some of that in the game, but it felt like that wasn't enough. Maybe because it was hard to give people more than two completely different ways to play. Even if you are giving a spectrum between being nice and mean, it's just one lever that the player is able to pull.

Dishonored as a good example of a modern AAA game that does this, you can play entirely through the game without killing a single person, and the game notices how much violence you are using, even though you're an assassin in the game. If you are violent, it causes a rat plague to grow in the city the more people you kill. I guess because the dead bodies are piling up, and the rats are feeding on them?

Then I started getting interested in creating a gameplay experience, or emotional experience uniquely driven by the play of the game itself. Inside a Star Filled Sky think was the first game where I was doing this. It's a game about infinity, and about the feeling of grappling with infinity, and about recursion, and about the feeling of grappling with recursion. I set up a gameplay system where through playing the game optimally, you end up grappling with recursion very directly. As you go down, you’re stuck in some spot in the game, you go down inside a monster to weaken the monster, and now you're down inside the monster, and you find some other thing you can't get past, and you go down inside a power-up to get a better power up to deal with what you're in that monster. And now you're down inside the power up, and you run into something else that you can't get past, and you go several layers deep. And then slowly you start unwinding the stack, and you realize that you've forgotten what you were even trying to do in the first place.

And the important thing is that a-ha moment, the realization of how deep this has gone, and how unable you are to cope with recursion mentally. Sticking someone in a situation or aesthetic experience of grappling with that, is not about giving choices, nor about creating a mechanical framework for interpretation. There's nothing to interpret in Inside a Star Filled Sky in that way.

On the other hand, I feel that what we're doing when we're playing a really good game is the meat, the meat and the heart of what games are, and we need to figure out how to make aesthetic experiences with that meat.

And why are they boring? I could watch a movie with the same content and not find it boring. Trying to figure out why that is, is really important. We should understand those aspects of interactive experiences and not ignore them. We can't necessarily ignore the constraints of an interactive experience. We have to understand them and embrace them, the same is true for music or any other medium. I mean you don't want to make a sculpture that's so small that people can't see it, you know.

Knowing that you're the only person playing this at this moment gives a tension in terms of what you want to do inside the game before you end up dying by accident. And forcing the rule upon yourself that you never play it again, and pulling the memory stick out, and passing it on to somebody else. The rules engender this feeling that happens when you actually pass it on to somebody else.

Likewise, a game buried in the Nevada desert for 2,000 plus years, is still a playable game, and there's also a game around people trying to find it. If you got on a plane and went to the Nevada desert with a metal detector, I guarantee you'd have an aesthetic experience yesterday.

It's not a complete living room furnished set at the bottom of the ocean, like concept art, or the sculpture that you can't even see. There is a playable element to these things. Which creates the experience.

Most of us in western civilization have gotten to the point where there's enough automation that we're not actively struggling for our basic survival. Most of us are not actively struggling for our basic survival on a moment to moment, day to day basis. We never really think oh, the winter's coming, we better get our act together, or we're going to starve to death, you know?

We've exempted ourselves at least temporarily from the realities of survival and we make up our own worries, our first world problem worries, or our day to day struggles that cloud everything. But we also have a lot of idle mental cycles, and I think most people are spending many of those mental idle cycles, myself included, on consuming works of entertainment, and art. Did you see the latest House of Cards, Jesper?

When you only have five pixels for the character's space, there's only so many faces you can try, and you can quickly settle on one that looks cool given the constraints that you have. And you're not going to be a perfectionist tweaking it forever. The eyes are either up or down. I was reminded of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, where he talks about the power of abstraction, and that sweet spot that cartoons have between photo realism and completely abstract representations. Like printed words, because they visually remind you of something like a face, but they're not so specific that they remind you of a given individual. When we look at Homer Simpson, we see some suburban middle class guy. We don't see a very specific guy, right? He kind of looks like my dad. He maybe looks like your dad, doesn't he?

I was also very interested in things that were at home on the computer, things that weren't mimicking other media, or trying to look like something else. I wouldn't want to make a game that looked like a board game operating on a computer. I wanted to make things back then that were with the grain of the medium. This is a digital medium; these things should look digital.

Pixel art was like the perfect digital cartooning. You can look at the guy from Passage, and he could be almost anybody. But if I put a photograph of my face in there, the game just wouldn't work.

I'm not using fetishism in a pejorative sense; I'm saying I feel that way when I see something lovingly crafted that mimics exactly the way a Super Nintendo game feels. I appreciate if someone goes back to an old platform and makes a work for it, like what Ian Bogost was doing with the Atari VCS. And I appreciate things made for emulators, and so on. But I wasn't doing that, and I think it's pretty clear that my games don't really leverage that. Passage is so pixelated that it almost transcends anything that we ever saw. It’s true that it might be as blocky as an Atari VCS game, but it's also using colors in a totally different way that wouldn't have been possible on the VCS.

It’s not trying to mimic those things, it was more a comfortable effective aesthetic style for me to leverage as a creator at the time, to do things that resonated with people in a way that was general enough, but still looked very digital. And when people call Passage 8-bit, that's not even technically correct. It's definitely using the full range of 32 bit colors, and has all sorts of blending effects, so it's definitely not 8-bit.

They are also chasing photo-realism in a way that I felt was becoming less and less effective and verging further and further into the uncanny valley, with no other side of the valley in sight to climb back up. I felt that wasn’t really working anymore; the wow factor was gone for flashy photo-realistic graphics, and we had a lot of diminishing returns there. If we push as hard as we can away from that, where do we end up, right? We end up in something like pixel art.

I still to this day have not made a 3-D game, and I have no plans on it. And there’s a bunch of reasons for that. I think that when we are in the AAA space, or just 3-D game space in general, we get stuck out on this one little narrow branch of the design tree, which is like some kind of simulation.

It's hard to make something 3D that isn't a simulation, because when we see things in 3D, our brains expect them to behave the way 3D objects behave.

We don't expect spooky action at a distance, we don't expect other kinds of strange things. Pac-Man's a great example, where if you built it in 3D, it wouldn't make any sense.

If someone would ask me, "Well Jason, have you ever thought about making a first person shooter?" It'd be hard for me to imagine, because the ground is so well worn. There are not many variables there for tweaking.

Like partners in life are twice as wide as a single person navigating life by themselves. And no one's ever questioned that. As soon as you hook up and hold hands, then you can't fit because you're like a two tile wide Tetris piece. No one ever said, "Why don't they just go in single file, or rotate?" But if it was in 3D, if it looked like Ico, that symbolic element of them being twice as wide wouldn't make any sense. They would just pull their hands, and snake their way through. That is one of the biggest reasons for working in 2D. It's not just another aesthetic choice, it's not just a cultural positioning, or our desire to distance myself from AAA, as much as the design space is way more open in 2D.

My new game, One Hour One Life, does not have pixel art. Not all of my past games have been pixel art, but One Hour One Life has no pixel art and is all hand-drawn with real markers and pens. But even in the context of that, where One Hour One Life is a simulation of a world, it is a 2D simulation which allows all sorts of weird thing. For example, sometimes you're manipulating one object with another, and the result just pops into existence. That popping into existence allows me to simplify the content creation process to allow many more object interactions. The goal is to have 10,000 objects, and they're all supposed to interact with other in unique ways. In a 3D game, I don't think people would accept the way that it works.

I usually describe myself as independent to indicate to people that I'm not working in the game industry. That's still the main thing for me. I describe myself as independent, because it's a very quick way of saying that I am working on a game outside of a big company.

That's one of the things I felt was missing from video games back when I gave talks about this issue, and drew the line in the sand [of making video games into an art form]. The idea that we have everything but the highbrow. We have high production values, we have high budgets, we have big name voice actors. We had ads on TV during the Super Bowl, and billboards in New York City. But none of the people that I interacted with outside of video games played or cared about this at all.

I felt part of the problem was, and still is, that if they actually took the time to care about video games, they'd find that most of it was not worth their time, relative to season six of House of Cards or whatever. So the amount of effort that they need to expend in order to even be able to play anything that I'd want to show them would not be worth it, given this very small handful of things that might be worth their time.

As game players, and lifetime game players, and studiers, and thinkers, we can play things that are lowbrow, and not really worth our time, but still find amazing things about them, because we're connoisseurs. To the insider, there are a lot of differences that really matter. The differences are magnified, and we can appreciate them, and dig deep into them.

We can take some mainstream relatively trashy pop culture lowbrow game, and write a thesis about why it's way better, or more interesting in certain ways. In ways that would be totally lost on anybody who just took a sideways glance at it. If we're talking about Gears of War and how the cover system was revamped and how totally changes the way the game feels - it's still a game about big heavy guys jumping around with giant guns.

We're at a time when those niches can exist, and we should be happy, because it allows us to make deeper, more complicated work in terms of game designs, because we know that the audience is ready for it. The Castle Doctrine is completely unplayable to someone who doesn't ever play video games.

We can say that Chris Weir is obviously appealing to a very narrow niche of comic enthusiasts, but at the same time it's probably the greatest work in comics. Or if  you show someone the film Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman. Only a fraction of the film audience would even be able to make it through that film.

And it's one of the greatest films of the past two decades or something.

Originally, they had no DRM, no middleman. And then I added an open source icon there, and also the cross platform icon, and the no middleman, I changed to no middle person.

It has a little business tie with a red x through it. It might even just be a marketing gimmick. People feel some personal connection that makes them more likely to want to support you. Edmund McMillen used to have something on his website, where he was selling basement collection, it said something like, "Support independent art."

Giving the person a feeling that there's more to their purchase than just the economic utility of what they're buying. They're actually supporting something they believe in, or supporting an individual person. And I think that does resonate with people.

There have been people who have appreciated my work and sent me gifts by mail for my family to enjoy. That gives me a more personal connection with the people that I'm engaged with, and makes the economic transactions feel less crass, and strangely there has been a contingent of people who played one game after another of mine, and have stuck with me as fans.

Some of those people have, even though I don’t think I've never met any of them in real life, kind of become friends of mine. I've interacted with them in the forums, and they've come up with interesting ideas to fix problems in the game, or they've played the game deeply, and noticed things about it that I'd never even seen before. Or they won the contest, or they're still at the top of the front row scoreboard.

Getting to know those people, interacting with them, has been a really important part of my practice. Those people have improved the games immeasurably. I think they feel a personal connection with me, and I feel a personal connection with them. I have a dream that someday I'll meet them.

I have no idea what they look like, or how old they are. They're just names in a forum. For some of them, I don't even know their real name, I just know their forum handle.

I would have to learn the new stuff. But just making sure it runs in every web browser, that's a democratization issue.

As someone who was using old computers, I was always frustrated at how slow a lot of websites were to load, and how much they assumed about your computer’s capabilities. I want everybody to go to the website. That's also true of the technical constraints that I place upon the games I'm making - that I am developing on older hardware on purpose, because that ensures that they will run on almost everybody's computer. It’s problem with game developers, as they often have invested in the best equipment, which means that they have some monster graphics card, and it runs at 60 frames a second for them. Unity and other modern tools create games that don't run well on older computers.

This goes for even Flash with or JavaScript, as web browser-based games are horrible on computers, because they're depending on an interpretive language for processing arrays and so on. So are two to three times slower, which means that they need to run on a computer that's two to three times more modern. And people who are developing them don't realize until they hear some complaint from a user who's getting two frames a second.

Whereas if I'm doing it myself on my end, I've already written all that stuff, it's been working for five games in a row, and I know it's going to work. But it's a nightmare to imagine doing that again for Steam, and making sure it's still working with the latest API's. With Itch.io, I don't think I can make it work at all, because they're just hosting binary downloads.  That's not enough, I need to have access to the server, accounts and so on.

One more thing about the different platforms. Going down into Xbox Live or PSN, involves many hoops to jump through. Getting my game there is a six month process of full-time work. Having it on my own website is what I prefer if I can, financially.

If it can become successful financially on my own website, I'd rather not put in on Steam. Also Steam takes 30%. And I have to jump through their hoops, so it's just the most straightforward path.

I don't want to get stuck in one stylistic rut, or one method of making games, or one way of thinking about games. I am always looking for ways in which the current way I'm making games is failing, and pushing out into some different direction looking for a new way to go about making games. And also trying to make games each time that are very different than what I made previously. You know Gravitation is not that different from Passage?