Last semester I watched the demo day from the outside, observing its strengths and problems. This semester I decided to become part of the problem. I took my high ideas and led a project. In the process I learned about the psychology of a particular breed of software engineers, game developers. During the week leading up to demo day the lab in which the demo would take place swelled with students. For long hours of the afternoon and night, chairs were filled and monitors were gazed upon by glassy eyed game enthusiasts with the technical savviness to give their ideas a shot at realization. From the long hours that the developers spent in the lab, and the near-party atmosphere, especially during the last weekend when every computer was occupied till late, I came to admire the dedication of these upcoming engineers and artisans.
They were clearly not doing this for the grade; they were in it for the love of the game. I haven't witnessed that kind of long-hours anywhere else, except, during crunch time in a commercial game. That these students were pouring all their spare time into projects that would live for only fifteen minutes apiece, was admirable and indicative of the collective psychology of game developers. As I had discovered from the pass/no-pass intro to cinema production (CTPR507), grades don't motivate me. At all. Only the admiration of my peers motivates me. That class drove me to great lengths in which the most I could hope for was to entertain my classmates for 5 minutes, through the production of a movie.
Here I found myself in the same loop, but making digital entertainment. As folks in cinema (or anyone without experience in computer science) are so apt to overlook, and as Peter Brinson put it, making games is just as hard as making movies, except in videogames you have to build your own camera. In the lab, I was surrounded by people not just dedicated, but addicted to the process of digital creation. Along with the tedium of training a machine with less intelligence than a guppy, comes the power to create a microcosm. Inside the Visual Studio, one becomes Yahweh, bespeaking light into existence within the electronic void. Within the hall of the one-eyed OGRE, one becomes master and demigod of a tiny digital realm.
During our first month of class in Computer Science 529A (Advanced Game Project), I was impressed at the intelligence, breadth and depth of knowledge my fellow students had for videogames. My experience disspelled half of the stereotype that engineers are the implementers and "designers" are the idea generators. During an extemporaneous class exercise that dissected Super Mario brothers, one student (Danny), covered the nuances of the design and cultural impact of that 8-bit classic with such poetry that his impromptu performance verged on the art of spoken word. In discussing videogames of yore we were all exposed, geeks and gamers, each and every one of us.
Not just any kind of geek, but the kind that is insatiable for innovation; the variety that takes elitist pride in novelty and thumps its chest at their ability to dominate the machine. During our pitches for projects, I was impressed at the grab bag of creative concepts and pent-up childhood nostalgia. Behind every pitch was the chambered psyche of a pre-teen boy (or girl) who had one of their young, life-fulfilling moments in digerati. While some of the pitches were a Return to Castle Vanity, about half of them were stellar ambitions to push (or at least lick) the envelope of interactive art in videogaming. The three projects that the class voted to greenlight were indicative of the crave to innovate. Alphabetically, these were: Cirque du Slay, Drum God, and Euphonics. And don't succumb to the software engineering stereotype. Each project was an interdisciplinary effort.
Cirque du Slay was championed by an engineer whose alter ego must be a magic wielder. From the gems of an Arduino, and electronic entrails he crafted a glove of power +1. Fully articulated bend sensors for each finger would be the interface. The story came from John, a witty writer. With the glove, you would in short order slap around denizens of a banal circus, using a variety of clever gestures.
Drum God iterated on Guitar Hero, but for the Wii, by drumming. The level of visual quality that five students plus a few modellers in the sister pipeline class (CS 281), was comparable to recent years' commercially released rhythm games. And oh, you got to play the air drums with a Wii.
I can't speak objectively about Euphonics; it was my pitch and my fortune to be teamed up with both an amateur musician and a dual-classed artist-programmer versed in the illusions of Maya and cryptomancy of C++. Together we programmed an arcade shooter that rendered procedural graphics and whose action was synchronized to techno music.
Our class was only one of many that day of demos. The others were also stocked with zany mashups, enveloping a kernel of passion. Bushido Beat and Motorball, both which demoed last semester, continued their development, each blending genres and cultural contexts. There were mobile games and networked games and serious games, but regrettably I didn't get to see these. I slept through half of the morning, having spent the night as did more than a handful of others, coding and tweaking. I make no excuse. In the psychology of entertainment software, there is both the dedication to quality, and the addiction to work, which is inefficient and self-destructive. Like gamblers at a slot machine, we pushed the button and pulled the menu down in hopes of hitting the debugger's jackpot, hacked code that obeyed our wishes. And yet, as the house is betting on, we end up in debt to both sleep and quality assurance.
On demo day, we each had our fifteen minutes of fame. Industry headhunters perched and even endured technical failures to see us. As ironic as last demo day, in this hall of computer science, technical issues tarnished the glory. From what I saw, most of the games themselves survived for their ten minute bouts with reality, but the projector system itself failed us. Awaiting our turn from the overflow room, I shook my head at the video monitor that relayed a digital image from the video camera in the demo room of the projector, that emitted the light whose image was constructed from a machine; from a machine that the mind of an obsessive-compulsive, and quite talented, team had created and controlled. From this image of an image of an image, I could still make out the childhood centers of pleasure and dreams in the brain that were firing for these sleep-deprived slaves to digital creativity and gods of the machine.