programming games! (and: writing games, art games, etc)

[queenlua]

so the other day at work my team played this really cute programming game!

the game works like so: take some basic-ish, well-understood program that most coders could reasonably implement in an hour or two (e.g., Conway's Game of Life).

you are to write a test for some very basic unit of functionality for the program. say, a test for the GenerateBoard method, or CheckNeighbors, or whatever. "assert GenerateBoard(3,3) == [some three-dimensional-array]", that sort of deal.

then, pass your partner the keyboard.

your partner is now the "lazy, evil" programmer. and/or a government contractor programmer. (zing!) they write some lazy, stupid, wrong code that will still manage to pass your test.

you go back and fix your test, partner tries to do something evil again, continue until your test is bulletproof, then switch roles.

this is pretty transparently an exercise in The Holy Gospel of Test-Driven Development. and while that is a good gospel and a good thing to learn, it can also be delightfully and hilariously subversive little exercise in Programmers Trolling Each Other For No Reason In Particular. python attributes that modify themselves in insidious ways each time they're called! subtly dicking with stack frames! evil c macros! like, i think this would legit make a kind of fun party game with a few tipsy hackers. it's reactive; it's partner-y; it's fun; and if you can't win the "honest" way (by finding a gap in your partner's test cases) there are plentiful opportunities for mischievous hacking. i love it.

anyway, it got me thinking. programming, visual art, writing, music: all are art forms or crafts of some sort. and i like my games to have a bit of craft in them. it lets you practice; it lets you delight the other players in unexpected ways; it's fun because art is fun.

unfortunately, most games are not particularly craft-driven in and of themselves—board games mostly lie on an axis between "randomness" and "skill/strategy," most video games are based on mastery of the game's particular combat system, and so on. and, to be fair, it's super-hard to design engaging experiences that are just based on "everyone does an artsy thing," since everyone's skill levels vary. (for instance, as a classically-trained pianist, i'm really weak on improv/freeform type stuff, and thus could only handle the basics of jazz sessions, which often consist of a lot of this sort of play. similarly, you have to be at least an okay programmer to do the programming game i described, and you'll have far more fun with it if you've done a bit of mischievous programming before.)

but. i want to collect a list of such craft/art-based games. because they are fun, and because maybe they will help me generate ideas for more and then i can badger all my friends into playing with me yaaaay.

i can name a few off the top of my head:

• i don't have a name for it, but i saw it described online the other day, and it's basically "telephone with art." first person in the circle writes a sentence describing a funny scene. second person has to draw it. third person has to write a sentence describing the picture... without looking at the original description. continue alternating through the circle until the pictures and their descriptions are thoroughly hilarious and removed from the original intent


• play-by-post rpgs. i know, i know, i go on about these all the time, but i can't help it. they're such a lovely hybrid of game-y aspects and legit art/storytelling/character stuff. i always favored the ones that were really light on game-y aspects, but, some games had tons of gamey relics to collect and achievements to unlock, and those were neat in their own way.


• popcorn stories! (i... thought the phrase was commonplace, but google was confused, so! a popcorn story is when, i start telling some silly fictional story, tell about a paragraph of it, then "pass" to the next person in the circle. they then have to tell at least one sentence of the story, usually more, and pass again. keep going until someone gets around to coming up with a proper ending.) anyway, we used to do these all the time at girl scout camp and on long car trips, but it tapered out around high school, and i kind of wonder why. i guess it's a lot of pressure—it's performance, everyone's listening to you, you have to come up with some way to continue the story all by yourself!—but man i'd kind of like to bring that back. the stories were never good but that wasn't the point; they were wild and silly and full of inside jokes and backtracking and in the end you had to find some way to wrangle all that into a proper story-ending.

i am actually quite curious if anyone else knows of such games! if so, please share them :)

Comments

[amielleon]

I'd argue that more mechanical games, the good ones, also operate off of that sense of delight and discovery. They hand you some basic rules, you're like "ok cool", and then they throw you challenges where you're forced to deepen your understanding of how the game follows from those rules. Or they show you creative nuances in the rules via the opponents they throw you.

Imo metagames for fighting games develop very similar to the hack-offs you describe. Someone comes up with a smart way of fighting; other player needs to devise a way to break it.

[queenlua]

hmm you're right, i need a more nuanced model for this

i was imagining "mastering the arbitrary rules and/or constructs of an individual game" as being a separate thing from "doing things with a creative flair/flourish/skill that is often applied to other creative pursuits," but, what is magic the gathering if not a very massive hilarious combinatorics problem in disguise, and such skills are totally creative and totally applied to other pursuits

and when you look at the chess games people get excited about and relate in books and stuff, ofentimes the really famous games include wacky strats that people dug partially due to utility but largely b/c of flourish and such (the romantic era of chess was the best)

metagames are fun like that, though it's hard for me to think of "metagame" these days without thinking of the m:tg metagame, which is mostly "reading lots of articles on the internet and figure out how everyone else is beating the mainstream strategies," just because several hundred brains thinking really hard about the problem are going to do better than me all on my lonesome every time

which makes me nostalgic for tournaments in the late 90's, really. there was the internet back then, and magazines talking m:tg strategy, but the metagame evolved much more slowly, and was much more regional in nature, so it was v possible for my brother and i to come up with weird stuff that beat the metagame in our local card shop

(i mean, okay, you can still beat the metagame, i'm still proud that i was rocking g/w elves archetype during lorwyn/shadowmoor a couple weeks before it got big, but, y'know, more a problem of scale/speed and all that)

anyway yeah tl;dr good point

[kradeelav]

Wow, it's deceptively hard to come up with good examples for this! You're right, most of the minigames that try to achieve this turn into 'how to beat the game mechanics' and less 'create shit with friends', even if it's a solid game like portal and so on. Very subversive sort of medium, no wonder you dig this topic so much. :P

(attempts at) examples:

- iscribble was a ye olde drawing platform where you and a gang of 2-5 friends could join a private board and draw whatever the hell you want - however, it often devolved into cute craft-like games. You draw a thing, you let the other person draw on top, so on, like a visual version of telephone? (Sometimes we'd also try to draw random characters interacting with each other without realizing who the other person was drawing at first. ALWAYS FUN - especially when you got ... sephiroth and then ness from earthbound making silly faces at each other, haha.

- I feel like the one true game platform that lends to this phenomenon would be the Nintendo DS with its focus on 'mobile and friendly playing with others'? like, there's nothing coming off the top of my head, but someone with a better knowledge of its non-franchise library might be able to pick out one or two titles that tried this. Bits of Animal Crossing feels like it would fit (people creating custom patterns to share with others?), but other bits don't.

- oh! I got one! Way back in the deviantart heydays, OCT's used to be HUGE - aka Original Character Tournaments. You'd have a group (10+) of people sign on, make their own OC that would specifically 'battle' the other OC's ... except the kicker is that you 'won' by creating the most well written/drawn comic strip by showing -how- your OC beat the other person's OC. Absolutely no fan-characters allowed, too. It was delightfully self-moderated when done well; as the better the artist/writers, the less they relied on cheap tricks like godmodding and stuff, and in the end, everyone got a really cool fighting-game like series of comic strips to follow with a decent plot. There's a number of OC's that literally got their own fandoms with how well written they were; Endling (http://endling.deviantart.com/gallery/26460867/OCTs) for example is the most well known artist in that circle. Unknown-person is the other one that did SHOCKINGLY GOOD flash animations for their entries (http://unknown-person.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=%2F&sort=popularity) (watch the ones with Karl in them; good god there were so many fangirls over that dude ahaha) (what do you mean I was one of them NOPE)

... now you're making me miss those days, awww.

[queenlua]

iscribble sounds goddamn adorable.

it's funny you mention the DS one, actually, because it made me think of the little DS image-chat program, which then reminded me of a cute game i'd forgotten about over Twitter, magic missle, in which you duel with your opponent by "casting" spells (i.e. linking stock images) and explaining what your spell does. super-freeform and cutesy, and seems like DS picochat could take advantage of similar things, hm

and oh my god that OTC tournament stuff is kind of amazing. i. i had no idea this was a thing, and wow the technical quality of some of those is obscene, and i just think it's kind of amazing there was this big community game in some corner of dA that i have never encountered in my years of casually browsing the site. how delightful. (i actually read a book once, where storytellers competed in an OTC tournament-ish game, except with spoken word storytelling rather than visual telling... though, it wasn't scored by audience votes, the two competitors "just knew" when they were beaten, and they respectfully refrained from things considered godmoding, or, something. it was also set within a utopian society, which i think is the only reason it kind of worked :P)