A Ludic Medium

In my early twenties, shortly after the turn of the millenium, I spent some hot summer evenings studying old arcade games.

I was frustrated with a lot of mainstream games of the time, which I perceived to be overly genrefied and derivative. I wanted freeform imagination in game design.

Was it just my memory, or did the Commodore 64 games, from my childhood, experiment more widely and wildly with form?

And so I thought to go all the way back, to real-time videogaming's primordial ooze: early arcade games.

I was particularly interested in the nature of real-time action, which seemed to produce a purely ludic energy (i.e. energy derived solely through interactive play; see my last post).

Unlike a text adventure, which draws at least some energy from the text medium, this real-time action was mostly of an energy unique to videogames.

Perhaps here, in this sticky primordial arcade ooze, I could study raw explorations of this exciting ludic medium.

I sampled every old arcade game I could dig up. Most of them weren't interesting for my purpose—their use of real-time action was too primitive (more on that later).

But deep in that arcade ooze, I did find some gems. Two in particular became true loves—my crown jewels of ooze discoveries.

The first of these felt almost fortold to me. It was the broken game on my special C64 disk that I talked about earlier, the one I had never played but often wondered about.

And here I was, deep in my arcade studies, and suddenly that old mysterious name appears: Robotron.

Robotron... Finally, I meet you.

I was stunned. The game struck me as preposterously intense. "You can't make a game like that!" I didn't think it was playable.

The experience was almost comically manic. Even the level transitions, the only respite from otherwise constant action, would blast the screen and speakers with an assault of flashing colors and synth sounds.

But, having unlimited emulated quarters, I kept playing. It didn't take long to realize: It was playable. And it didn't feel like anything I had played before.^*

Eureka! Here was a new specimen of real-time ludic possibility. Stuff of that raw, visceral medium that is more like music, in its abstractness, than other more literal art forms.

And maybe it could help me find more. I prioritized, in my studies, other games by Robotron's creators—Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar. And here I found my second ludic love: Defender.

Defender had been there all along—it was on my special childhood disk, and it worked—but as a kid, I hadn't appreciated it like this.

Defender was like no other game! It was similar to Robotron in its fast-paced intensity, but the mechanics were all different.

Robotron had one hand clearing a path with your laser gun, while the other hand navigated that path. Defender was nothing like that.

In Defender, you control a jet-like spaceship. A stick moves your ship up and down, while buttons reverse and thrust. Reversing changes which way your ship faces—left or right. Thrusting accelerates you forwards.

Flying with these controls (up, down, reverse, thrust) is exhilerating. The inertia and speed of your ship, along with fast and smooth screen scrolling, produce a supple and continuous kind of play experience.

You learn to dynamically sculpt the flow of your ship's inertia, almost as if you are using your ship to dance. And as the game gets going, you are incentivized to increase your ship's speed (to save the humanoids).

Robotron is part of a genre—twin-stick shooters—that further explores its ludic premise in some directions (though rarely with Robotron's intensity). But is there anything that plays even remotely close to Defender?

Isn't there more to unearth there?

The ludic premises of these games hadn't seemed obvious to me. How easily could game designers have missed them altogether? What else might we be missing?

From this kind of thinking, I formed an idea of a game design ethos, which might be interesting for a future project: Pretend I've never played any games, and design one solely through direct exploration of this ludic medium.

Under this ethos, we banish the influence of past games. Instead, through experiment and play, we summon game possibilities from the nature of the medium itself—from this continuous action material, that is flowing over real time.

This little design approach sat in the back of my mind for years. Every now and then I'd daydream about it.

Which brings us to Smasher.

In my first post, I talked about how I wanted to make a game of tiny scope, to prioritize releasing. This real-time action exploration project seemed like a good fit. Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar were able to make Robotron in six months; if I was careful, my project might not drag on for years.

But there was a problem hiding in my plan, which caused a scope explosion: These arcade games, even the good ones, are too primitive compared to the kind of art I want to make. Some of them establish fine ludic premises, but then they barely do anything with them! These arcade games are all essentially short-form works.

Pacman^† is typical here. The game is essentially one beautiful, pure level. After that, you've seen most of the ludic material.

As is common, there is a hint toward a longer-form structure: The level is repeated, with some timings and speeds altered to create a faster pace. But this is only a limited and basic development of the ludic material;^‡ I crave something deeper.

Robotron and Defender have a little more progression, adding some new game pieces in later levels.

I loved this in Robotron—gradually getting further through the progression, discovering new ludic elements and learning how they function. But then, after a few waves, it was over. It unceremoniously launched into the usual arcade loop of repetition.

Even these crown jewels of the arcade are short-form works. But what would the long-form look like?

What if the ludic motives were fully developed? Flipped around, upside down, backwards, streched, squashed. Look to Bach for inspiration! Marvel at his magnificent music compositions. Through development of a few simple motives, the inherent possibility of these motives is explored, and used to create a larger-scale structure of vastly greater significance.

And so the muse called to me: What would the long-form of these real-time action motives look like? Something in the ludic area of Robotron and Defender, but that goes all the way—a journey to the end of the ludic line.

And so Smasher's scope exploded as I set off on my quest. What would I find out there, in this vast possibility space? We'll take a closer look in future posts.

^* Especially since, until this point, I had somehow missed the twin-stick shooter genre.

^† Pacman is another gem, but I knew that going in (from memories of my special childhood disk).

^‡ I'm sort of ignoring that other hint toward the long-form: the ubiquitous scoring systems of arcade games. These can be especially long-form—getting the highest scores can require marathon sessions of play.

I'm more interested in long-forms that are dense with ludic development. These arcade games just grind a level or so's worth of ludic material over and over and over. But what if it were constantly developing?

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A Ludic Definition

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Smasher's Engine

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