During the first 2-3 days I was doing incremental changes and fixing as I saw things happen with how the audience was interacting. This meant I could polish things that otherwise would have gone unnoticed or at the very least have been invisible to me.

Response and publicity
My goal to put posters all over town went essentially unfinished but I got help with a few in strategic places. Next time this should be better, I hope, or at least someone else will take care of it. I contacted a number of media outlets and got response from one writer who hooked me up for two interviews: Göteborgs-Posten and Level magazine. This could have gotten way bigger had I had time and energy to be more rabid and pushy, I guess, but I wasn’t. Also, I think it is fairly reasonable to think that, for a journalist, the interest in covering a student exhibition (not even a part of any greater, end-of-year thing or something like that) will be somewhat slim, at least when the press release is in front of you it will likely not be the most prioritized issue in the dull scope of worldly matters.

Audience response was, from what I heard when talking to them, very good. It seems that the amount (or lack, some may say) of interaction was if anything at least graspable for most. Don’t Get Raped had the problem, paradoxically, of being more game-like and demanding more precise input from interactors. This meant that practically everyone “died/lost” in the work, taking with them one of the work’s key points but TOO harshly/effectively.

Possible future changes
The installations/environments for Don’t Get Raped and Not a Place of Honor were both compromises in that they had to somehow communicate the setting, but I did not have the time to take them to any full realization. They were spiritually there, but will have to evolve later to blend in better with Welcome Home and Equalizer, undoubtedly the main pieces of the exhibition. Also, the space was hard to work with as the spotlights combined with the white walls reflected a fair bit of the light, meaning the darkness I had envisioned Don’t Get Raped taking place in, could not be replicated without substantial blocking materials, say, heavy curtains. All I had was semi-transparent ones. Not a Place of Honor should have been inside a small storage area. Obviously, however, it was used for storage of things too numerous, heavy and bulky to remove, ergo, I had to make due. When seen together I don’t mind the slight differences in ways they communicate – they are not identical works.

The future of these works
Due to a number of reasons – good fortune, some luck, actually good work presented – I managed to secure at least one more exhibition of fuller quality, at Datamuseet IT-ceum (Linköping) during a gameart exhibition they are staging, opening in September. I am extremely happy about this! Also, it seems there will be a few more smaller ones that I am still waiting to hear more from, but I have my hopes up.

Of course if you haven’t bought the works, you can do so either digitally (7$) or in physical form (50€).

Oh, and…
…Wrong? will come out this month – now there is finally time to do all the small shit necessary to get it onto the App Store. I am still getting to terms with Thom if we will do the NonViolence release. It deserves coming out. More on this very soon!

What is now history
2011 was the first whole year of the Bureau in its current, one-man shape. In the summer months I declared the “new” Propaganda Bureau 2.0 born out of the ideological ashes of the old team-based one. This cleansing has been useful and engaging and it is only in the coming year(s) where it will all ignite as it should. The groundwork has been laid and one should not underestimate the amount of work it takes to make things really feel like ones own. I am now there. Yay.

CPU released the Dance Idiot Dance teaser named Party of None, in June. In an upcoming blog post I will write more extensively on what exactly is brewing with CPU, but suffice to say that it has expanded and will finally break with the earlier album format to something both grander but also more true to the original concept.

Much of my digital, interactive work has been reconsidered, polished, recoded and remade during the year, much of which goes into the soon-to-happen exhibition (more on that further down). 95% or so is done, and some final things in the first two weeks of 2012 will be spent on putting a fine-ass package together!

I’ve continued using more (social?) channels to inform you, comrades! This will not stop as my phone now has permanent internet access so I can do updating even more often and without the hassle of my work laptop.

I got into Valand School of Fine Arts, a major feat if I may say so myself, which has given me time and place to work more broadly and with fine co-students. One of the things that happened there recently was the Vistas concept. That breadth will be the main focus of 2012 – something that has before only been hinted at with KUKBÖG, iSinner and Riot Gear. Far more expansive things will breed out of this new soil, I am sure.

What is to be done
With new year’s resolutions the most controversial fact likely (as with all promises) remains that of truth and accuracy. That is: will what I say actually happen as a consequence of my own doing? Some of my history has been sketchy on this point, as far as this blog goes, with me saying that things will come true at specific times and then they won’t, like with releases and so on. Therefore I do not hesitate to simply gather these in two discrete categories: What I know, and What I want.

[What I know]
There will of course be the exhibition, It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Blows Their Brains Out, happening between January 17th through January 21st. This will mark the first real, nerve-wracking, event for me where my work and not knowledge/opinion will be in focus and in a highly direct, physical way as opposed to the disjointed internet presence the Bureau and its works has. It is also the first time I can try out some ideas I’ve had on “format”, the sort-of enormously unwieldy meta-subject I see digital media fighting incessantly in any publicly shown variety.

Before that – the Level Up seminar I’m holding this coming Friday (6th) in Malmö.

If nothing unfortunate happens, I have arranged to show work at Atalante in Gothenburg in the spring thanks to Dataspelsakademin.

[What I want]
Again, broader projects but within the same agendas and goals I’ve been going with. I am considering performance, video, installation and other things along with the new version of CPU and some ideas that connect business ventures with interesting aesthetic and social experiences. More when something concrete happens. I can, however, say that I’ve sent tons of mails, (grant) proposals and other such letters to people around the country so I hope some of those things will unlock themselves before I venture into anything too certain straight after the show so as not to overburden myself.

Gothenburg is, at least from time-to-time, packed with interesting things to go to and people to see, something this fall made me sure to know in the saddest way possible. With the exhibition coming up and all of the extra work that its projects involved, I missed much more than I wanted to. You will see me at more places, shaking more hands than ever in the coming year.

I want CPU to do at least a couple of no-compromise gigs at decent venues.

I want to stay sane and healthy. Please, please, please.

There is more as always, but this should make do until next week.

—–

I hope you have had a good year, so make sure next year is even better – no such thing as modesty.

All that is left now is to sum up my thoughts of the process involved in the creation of the two games. For now I will only write some about Wrong?. The text extends from private concerns and matters to the highly specific, work-related topics. I however do not think that there is a clear distinction between creation and creator, and that some focus must be on my personal discoveries along the way.

Depending on one’s view of history, Wrong? is (or is not) one of the first games I’ve made. It is one of the first to be released on a bigger scale than the experimental releases of 2010 and early 2011, that’s for sure, but it is also a project that bears a lot of the wisdom(s) from earlier attempts and work. Being fuller and more elegant than the dirty little secrets that were the initial public versions of Don’t Get Raped, NonViolence, Welcome Home and Equalizer (all of which are now – again – done, but infinitely more polished), Wrong? has defined a set of disciplines and workflow decisions that have made my practice less error-prone and decidedly more creative and full in scope. Yet they are but foundational elements of even further knowledge gained during the year that has passed since Don’t Get Raped 1.0. In short I think I have finally grown out of the initial, extremely hard period of working with gameart that is based on actual games: just making it to the other side of a finished project that you can somehow defend and stand for, something that is not riddled with bugs and errors, making a work that can at least in some sense be compared with the craftsmanship of other interactive works. What makes all of this so much more interesting is of course that they are meant for purposes wholly different than commercial games and that I feel large strides have been taken in the degree of maturity.

OK. Wrong? is a very stripped-down game (for this is, as NonViolence, a game), if compared to other things I’ve made. Wrong? is a way of looking at familiar contexts in the most publicly accessible manner that may be possible in a context of digital games today. Opposing Wrong? to, say, Don’t Get Raped, marks (for me at least) a solid line in what can and cannot be expressed in game-mechanics alone. Where DGR is condensed and builds on a multitude of expectations, genre conventions and general mood/spatial story-telling, Wrong? takes the simple but highly abstract game of Pong and uses only a few elements along with some contextual information (text and the general positioning of symbols and icons) to establish a base for a subverted game that now is about something clearly other than table tennis.

I started this project early this year (2011) with, then, only the name and its juxtaposition in mind. Quickly I had a fairly decent prototype that modeled Pong: stark white-and-black, blocky typography, simple paddle sound and the basic 2D icons for the characters/avatars.

It didn’t feel right. It also may have had something to do with the fact that I didn’t exactly enjoy the idea of this game as a purely icon-switched “art product”, ready to be digested. It was neither elegantly basic nor neatly remodeled. That’s when I started experimenting with additional mechanics, textual descriptions, and more recently, with different art styles, cameras (orthographic or perspective) and 2D versus 3D spaces.

Because I’ve come closer to the idea, over time, that the model of interaction – which obviously must be handled via an interface of sorts – should be a central issue in the work I make, something of that sort needs to apply to Wrong? as well. Already during the summer, if not earlier, I had the distinct idea that the players should be holding hands while playing. As my personal interest and envelopment in interfaces has grown (along with a much more rigid and positive notion on the types of work I want to do after this), the hand-holding could be seen as one way of creating a unique sort of interaction-interface. Looking at Boring Games for Adults, a series of works dealing with mundane interactions (still unreleased), I took that as a hint to where I should take Wrong?. Because any non-standard interface (one might even argue that anything beyond keyboard and mouse – even that uncertain – is going to be impossible to know if the user owns and can use) is bound to be expensive, nonexistent or custom/exclusive. While I believe that Wrong? would have a hard time in ONLY an installation environment (in this very minute) then Wrong? would need to take a different route. On the other hand, if Wrong? is to be a game for the “masses”, how can I make most of a standardized piece of equipment? And also, what equipment should it be? The micro-issues involved in making something like this into a general product of sorts may even over-shadow the singular issue of exclusivity in the context of (fine digital) art. In the case of Wrong?, meant for mass-distribution, the choice to involve exotic interfaces was impossible so the hand-holding became a strong guideline and also cheap, reproducible and evocative.

I thus came to a conclusion that is much, much too early to say what its consequences will be in the long run. Wrong? is to be released for iPad. Distribution will be the standard variety App Store. How this will affect chances of showing and getting Wrong? out to the world I do not know. This model gives me the artistic possibility of trying various different ways in which the interaction will always be the same, which although functional and boring as a statement, is extremely important.

While it took me some time getting here, there are interesting things that happen when one uses a methodology and workflow that takes equal parts from design and artistic practice. It is less rigid than pure design, but also not as aimless as artistic discovery can be in its worst moments. In the end, Wrong? is a game about the way in which it is played and what we make of a set of simple conditions, a theme that I feel (based on the amount of similarly-themed games I have stacked over time) compelled to continue exploring. Wrong? is a simple game, meant for 5 minutes of uninterrupted hard work, close to each other. You may be strangers or lovers. But when the heart starts bouncing on-screen you better take your responsibility and bounce it back, although it is all up to you to decide how it will be done.

Some history: I played Deus Ex first in its inceptional demo version in the early 2000s and instantly loved it and its then-unrivalled sense of discovery and complexity. It was, and probably still is, a good example of a world that evolves progressively through visual changes in the cities of the game and in how character relations are always temporary, as one never truly trusts anyone. If I remember right, I finished the complete game in the mid 2000s, along with the much reviled Deus Ex: Invisible War, which I however found a decent game at the time. When/if I have the time I would love to redo both games which I have on Steam, but less of the time needed to complete them to any extent.

To mimic GameCritics I would also like to upfront specify my gaming conditions and some meta-information that may be relevant. Total gametime was estimated at 15-18 hours (realtime) from start to completion and I played on a 2011 Macbook Pro on high settings hooked to a 30” Cinema Display and Xbox 360 game controller. Difficulty settings were mostly medium, except for boss fights where I tuned the difficulty down. The game’s title will be shortened to DXHR in this text.

As I could see on a friend’s Facebook comments, I saw a tendency to think more about the game details as such, rather than looking at DXHR as a successor to a game (because most do not count DX2 as a proper game, there cannot be a series as such) rich in cultural capital and important for the general growth of video/computer games as a mature medium in its own right. This focus on the “gameness” is troubling, not just because it de-emphasizes factors that convey the bulk of the ethical core that DXHR builds on, but also since this alternate focus does not acknowledge the world in which the game takes place but rather the (classical) mazes through which one makes progress.

Also looking at the greater media context in which DXHR lives and is currently in, it is easy to get the feeling that this may yet be another game that has fallen victim to a trend of injecting non-existing meta-content into the game via marketing ploys and viral/propaganda materials. Ars Electronica wrote about how this has affected Gears of War 3, and you may be interested in drawing comparisons with DXHR (which has 14 pre-launch trailers on GameTrailers, a series of comics dedicated to it and a general media campaign that has pumped tons of material out for over a year). The trailers et cetera point to a fascinating and broad background which unfortunately feels hollow and strangely binary when actually experienced. Were the video editors simply more skilled than the game designers? Looking at two of the possible endings, I think so. But somewhere shit hit the fan and things simply got out of hand – the meta-contents, that is everything outside of the game and what it conveys via its mechanics, started to mean less than the marketing machinery. Propaganda and ultimately believing in ones own lies seems like an ironic way for the DX franchise to end up.

DXHR is, as a game, fairly attuned to the genre expectations placed on it and offers few surprises as a pure play system. I did not find the game particularly boring as such, and there is certainly great tension when applying a stealthy approach to the game. It instantly gets really tough and the mood is well-executed for the tempo in which the game paces itself. However, I want to point out that there is a fundamental flaw in the ways in which players usually play these games: because mistakes are expected in high-risk situations like sneaking into an enemy compound, the game takes little if no regard for how the temporal flow gets cut up and is interjected with loading and reloading the same segments over and over again. This is not the place and time for a more solid, broad critique how games and gamers must grow up to accept a variable gradient between failure and progress. Heavy Rain has some real bearing on this aspect but DXHR is just as uninterested as triple A games and their developers usually seem to be in everything that involves non-binary dichotomies. In short, my approach is that I do whatever I need to do in order to survive, even if playing with “unfair” and brutal tactics. Unfair may be a stretch because the AI is so stupid that they do not even exit rooms, hence headshotting them from a distance with a pistol is usually my approach. Combat is equally stiff and harsh as it was in the other two Deus Ex games. If this is good or bad I do not know, but playing it for the action seems a bad choice.

Many of my favorite games use an ascetic, survivalist system at its core. Limited inventory, the need for planned action and a certain outlook on honing skills and equipment make these games have interesting things to say about how we use tools and strategies to solve problems. For the duration of the game, I seldom spared any guards, opting for a takedown solution combined with some sneaking but mostly hacking and counter-tactics. All the game I kept upgrading the first pistol I received and then being less selective with the larger armaments needed for any specific missions. The portrayal of violence in DXHR is problematic because it feels unattached to a clearly implied framework of both narrative backdrops and ethical beliefs that should be superimposed on my play-style. There was simply nothing hindering me from slaughtering the masses of punks in the Detroit inner city areas or the Harvesters of Lower Hengsha (until I became friends with their boss and the smoldering remains of their crew were magically brought back to life effectively erasing any tracks of my relentless path getting there – imagine how powerless my ally would have been were the foot soldiers not respawned!). Compare this to the original Deus Ex in which the activity of killing became problematic for many as soon as players left the first area (Liberty Island) and got hints that allegiances and goals may not be what they seem. It did a better job in giving possibilities to BELIEVE AND WORK FOR somebody other than whoever got to be your initial employer. This is instant fail for DXHR.

I believe it is crucial in a game that tries to make ethical decisions overt to not lead by the hand because that would be counter-productive. Spaces and their traversal along with the characters inhabiting them must be connected to the player or else they (the instances of embodied society and diverging goals) will leave the player in a vacuum-packed state of hermetically clean individualist actionability. What you do you then cannot do for anyone except yourself – which in the context of DXHR’s greater over-arching theme of societal and technological change – is plain stupid. The original Deus Ex, as I remember it (which means nothing I am afraid, but bear with me) was less concerned with the structuring into levels that happens more in this recent installation. A self-contained level may in theory be a more experimental sector that can grow and work as an independent area of possibilities when detached from the looser hub-based city areas. I do however never see examples of applied positive use of this and find the in-betweens, if one may call them such, less compelling in DXHR: mere sewers connecting a few over-ground “goodie” spots from the general passageways instead of being believable passages between undisclosed, but yet, relevant experiences/areas. Except for a few highlights, the level design is not something I feel was very strong, although set décor and execution is often of much higher quality. The problem is that the repetitious use of locales should not be a hindrance in a game like this: it should be akin to the familiarity of one’s own local streets, a few quadrants of known space where things may happen unplanned and unexpectedly. It should invite exploration into unsafer areas.

Being very brief here, I will also say something about the ethics, or lack thereof, in DXHR. It may be smart to separate morals from ethics by measures of certainty and dogma that apply to them. Morals are then solid truths such as right vs wrong, just as game mechanics are moralistic in different (often not explicit) ways, while ethics would be those decisions – both overt and covert inquisitive phenomena – that may not even result in direct results (action). An ethical game will take stances to make the player question the actions asked of him/her, the system that provides these and then also the representation itself. Often the common-place look at games as ethical systems stop at a moralistic view of the representation. In my playthrough I have no strong memories of any obvious ethical dilemma whatsoever, which is highly problematic in a game such as DXHR, to the extent that the game might as well be exactly whichever other carbon copy clone of a contemporary first person shooter out there today. As an aside I skipped many of the FMV sequences because I found them tasteless and poorly executed, relics of times past. If this has impacted my understanding of something, then so may it be. In any case, FMV should not be a transporter of ethical experiences – in a game, those choices must be made on a continual basis.

Nietzsche writes, in “Human, All Too Human”:
“When men determine between moral and immoral, good and evil, the basic opposition is not ‘egoism” and “selflessness,’ but rather adherence to a tradition or law, and release from it. The origin of the tradition makes no difference, at least concerning good and evil, or an immanent categorical imperative; but is rather above all for the purpose of maintaining a community, a people.” Because the game’s subtitle is Human Revolution and a fairly obvious parallel to the Icarus myth was drawn in an early trailer, I must say I am disappointed with how the game only gives one very clear thematic indicator of how society at large is having trouble accepting the augmentations that permeate the game (the riots in Detroit). In my mind’s eye I see a grander version of this game, where there was less reliance on tropes from action-stealth games, and more focus on the compelling promises of the persuasion dialog system. I imagine more vivid realizations of the social struggle and debate, with more focus also on the gray areas involved in research for such a revolutionary project.

Overall the theme, and especially the gradient values between mild and extreme augmentation do not seem to be explored all that much. While much of the player’s choices of augmentations involve invisible and non-obtrusive effects (hacking more complex targets, being able to breathe poison gas) it seems hostilities surround “godlike” or immoral changes (faster, stronger, more durable). Also here, only one clear indicator exists of how this technology may be counter-productive (being hijacked by unknown forces). If augmentations and the issues that surround bio-ethics at large should be addressed, it cannot be in a simple black and white model (The Clash comes to mind with a slightly changed line – “Should it stay or should it go?”). DXHR does not allow itself to complicate matters.

In the end, the general scenario is this: You are head of security at a company that makes augmentations, shit goes down and you investigate, fairly standard plot twists occur all the while as every NPC talks but never actually enacts situations based around possible problems with augs, so mostly you are sent to simple tasks and exploration never uncovers anything more exotic than hackable terminals and meager ammunition deposits. As the game progresses the drama is raised via bosses and lead characters while the actual game does extremely little to make the player sense changes in the cityscapes he/she roams. Finally an extremely simplified ending is provided. All is answered, but no real questions were ever really put on the table. It’s all a mess, really, as narrative and reason for immersive gaming goes.

In conclusion, I find DXHR to be a game that faithfully reincarnates a similar mood and feel of the older games, along with a fairly accurate new model of how the games would work in a contemporary versioning. The problems are therefore more glaring, as DXHR reveals itself handicapped in creating a mature context that questions the medium itself as its older brother did, as well as Half-Life 2 and Bioshock clearly have done as well. I want to say that its failings are not those that relate to broken, childish hypes and promises, but to issues that are children of poor design and less visionary outlook on the game-work. For me, then, DXHR goes in much the same category that other recent sequels fall into (including Bioshock 2 and Crysis 2): the gang of games that somehow stopped seeing what they did well and spent most of their time doing what many more out there do much better.

The way of dying I acted and reenacted so many times is something that seems to have grown in occurrence in later years. That way is what I call “death by invisible and/or stray bullet”. Play styles change to accommodate the higher number of inaccuracies, variable conditions and to simply keep oneself alive under stressful conditions. As has been written earlier, gone are the days of full auto machine gun fire in other than the most survivalist moments. In short: in the most unexpected moments, you find yourself immediately dead from something you could never have foreseen or expected. Games have had a few major systems for health and its representation over the years, and the more contemporary ones are self-regenerating health (which is low as to not become unbalanced) and different ‘hardcore’ varieties where health is a relatively life-like thing where low health is coupled with permanent damage and medical aid. This is the one Battlefield Bad Company 2 uses. As an effect of health being in short supply, any mistake, even small, can be the grain of sand that tips the scales in the enemy’s favor. In the end, the enemy’s sporadic, defensive firing into blind spots could mean your death, ergo, death by stray bullet – it was never directly (but indirectly) meant to hit something.

This is an effect of a total war scenario that focuses on collaborative pushes instead of heroic determination. The occlusion of positions, variable lines-of-sight and rapid redeployment/regrouping increases stress levels and paranoia. In any given moment (remember, this is all a complex matrix of locative/spatial and temporal factors) all vectors and directions cannot be covered by the narrow slit of the camera-eyes. Players get nervous as the noise and chatter increases in volume and particle effects spread from collapsing buildings, further covering the milieux and environs. A quick look at the map reveals positions of friendlies meaning it is safe to shoot into dust clouds or spray at random into windows that may contain a spotter – if there is a spotter he may immediately fall prey to a seemingly random swarm of bullets. BFBC2 has a good number of those random moments where players can’t expect death but always should. Paranoia increases and the number of stray bullets fired grow exponentially. One learns to accept this over time. Death is thus cruel and random at many times.

Oh, and you are a man when you die. Always a man. There exists no women, civilians and terrorists on this, or any I would argue, digital battlefield today. No grey lines. Only total, punishing war and the beauty of collapsing buildings. Masks often hide the faces, shooters becoming anonymous, technology and face-gear hiding the human beneath. Because of the lack of the physical ‘Other’, there is no shame in killing. There are no hard and fast questions posed when encountering an enemy. The masculine tone of the game is not challenged either by introducing the other sex(es), or even notable age differences. There is no depth to the avatars because they only portray the image of war, the carriers of death rather than the fully-fleshed characters of the great war films. Truly this is a clear case of how avatarism differs strongly from characterization: the avatar is only a body without organs, it is shallow, lifeless and only the container that holds the hitbox at which you aim and shoot.

The collective effort has many interesting side effects. When you die, you are usually shown a view that shows your killer and what (s)he is doing right now. Then, you are shown a map of the area and can choose to ‘respawn’, that is be reborn, at one of the 2 current key locations or straight at the location of any surviving squad member. This often saves lots of time traveling over the hazardous in-betweens. Life and death circulates around this penultimate position of all-seeing eye: seeing the killer (sometimes dying immediately thereafter when exposed after killing you) and being able to manipulate your continued cycling of existences. Your body is a beacon for others to re-enter combat and your one true call.

Your true call is simple. You are born into the service of the military. Your weapon is so obviously the centerpoint that it is always there in your hands from birth. It has practically been melded into your skeleton. Sometimes you will make a physical scar in the haunted lands by throwing a few grenades around just to celebrate that you are back, or possibly just to enjoy the scattering of cement and wood splinters. It is optimal usage of inventory to use your equipment, especially if you expect to die soon. It is martyrdom walking hand-in-hand with cynical rationalism. You can always say you were smoking out the enemy from their hiding places if you happen to put holes in friendly placements.

But what if you started unarmed, with weapon holstered, ready at the press of a key but not directly available? The cycle of life and death can be meta-physically reflected, and the (un)certainness of the current situation can be a selfish (?) signal to not spawn by your comrades sides. Your squad is dead and the game signals this by sending a message that you should stay alive because they are counting on you, or some similar such thing. When they die you have to live to carry on the fight, just as they did for you just now. The beacon of your body must continue to shine if but for a very brief period of time until they can use you as a vehicle to be transported back into certain death. You should probably hide to provide cover for the yet unborn. A man has now become the mother of martyrs.

Your squad members are thus passed into the timed respawn system, the dharma wheel turning and releasing its contents in regular intervals. It is stable, not ending until the tickets are spent. It is an economy of lives where there is no repercussions for having negative kill-death ratios (‘KDR’). A negative KDR means that someone has died more often than they have killed others. It is sometimes more practical being a ruse or shield, expecting low KDRs just for spending enemy time. It is not unlikely to think this way when death means almost nothing. The only implication is that your post-game score which is used to unlock new upgrades and weapons is lower than it could have been, had you played simply to slaughter the enemy. BFBC2 seems to imply that life is a process that always ends with some, if meager, progress towards betterment. You contribution may mean the team’s victory while it is still a personal ‘defeat’ of sorts. Life is something we can start measuring by a value given the name of ‘optimal life span’. Life does not by itself mean progress, awards or good team standing if you are but walking in the distant groves far away from the battle zone.

So, now you are dead. There was no blood where you fell, only the clinical falling over of the ragdoll after the near-simultaneous particle puffing of an enemy rifle. If, and when, you decide to go back into action sometimes you will have to wait, sometimes you are almost immediately back. If the adrenaline is still kicking in, an early re-entry could mean certain annihilation. Team tickets are spent wastefully and enemies can see an emerging pattern continuously repeating itself. Over and over again, the same man comes over the same hill. Or is it the same man? They all look the same. The enemy’s ammunition is becoming depleted, yet the freeze frame of the corpse is there if in uneven arrangements of ragdoll physics bodies. The great battlefield devolves into the multi-perspective, variable private tower defense of two players, one rushing in and the other defending. Death is not glorious but loud, expensive and often abrupt. It becomes private the moment the same player shoots you in the face five or so times. Then he is marked your nemesis. You are awarded more score if you kill him then.

You were wasteful again. You should have listened to your teammates. You should not have spawned on your squad when you saw that the enemy offensive was so strong. You could have planned it better. Now your score is negative. But it doesn’t matter: the next map is waiting. Perfect asymmetry of buildings not yet destroyed, roads not yet torn with tank tracks and places waiting for corpses vanishing into thin air after a few seconds. A new postcard view of remote un-populated villages waiting for the intense cycling/recycling of lives. The only thing that is taboo here is blood, because that would mean people die here. Life prevails and death means nothing on this battlefield.

At the time I played as the sniper class and helped occupy a building that contained a mission objective. Line of sight is clear towards this building, perched on top of a hill. The map is set during a relatively dark winter evening. A road goes by the house: this is the main passage to the building. Another mission site is located obscured mostly by trees and foliage around 200 meters in a denser wooded area. Attacked as per usual by the enemy, together with the four or so other teamplayers we held the second floor and attic, laying down sniper fire and suppressive machine gun fire to halt them. An unknown but presumably larger quantity of assault class players were holding the downstairs entry points. We were doing very well. Because this is one of the first sites that the enemy forces will have to capture, the tempo is high since enemies start relatively close-by.

Several of the factors I’ve ruminated on were making their mark on that round. More experienced players have the choice of a range of class-based upgrades such as mortar strikes and team spotting markers. Thanks to this, senior snipers could spot-mark enemy locations further down the road. This in turn means that machine-gunners can suppress movement over open areas without worrying for too many hidden enemy snipers. Markers are indispensable in a confined space as the echoes are loud and shut out most of whatever one could hear from the outside. What happens is a changing act of balance and counter-balance between the active classes and the dynamics of their conflict (and statistics). We hit a sweet spot with that balancing and made sure to play it that way.

If you are familiar with FPS games you may think that what is happening is simple camping. I think it is more wise to see the enforced playstyle in a game like BFBC2 as a more intricate complex of player relations. The collective effort is central here. All available weaponry and specialization must be fully used to survive for any lenght of time.

Being declined close access to the building, the enemy forces began putting heavy long-distance fire on the attic whose only way of shooting in (and out) is through a small window. Because the room is dark a sniper inside will not be visible against a contrasting background which makes it a highly suitable, if predictable, spot. Also, this means only very few (at most two) can make use of the window. An impressive technical feature of BFBC2 is that practically everything is possible to destroy, meaning that there is physical scarring in the environments to show what happened in just that timespan. The game therefore takes cues from modern military tactics in how new paths can be created with demolitions, exposing or undermining enemy positions. The enemy fire, topped with rockets tearing down most of the slanting roofs, had the side-effect of not only revealing my team members, but also making the attic-located players capable of firing back en masse. Rubble and remaining wall sections provided little but useful cover.

As the game progressed increasing damage was made to our building with a quick decision to move downstairs as an airstrike was incoming. While there was no attic left, only open air above, the almost wall-less second floor become a powerhouse of resistance where teamplayers made effective use of medics and distributing ammunition to those who were running dry. All the time the team was reforming to the more and more shattered remains of the building. Because players are aware of the destruction they can also proactively engage enemies with heavy weapons and choose attack positions that are optimal based on current conditions. One might say that the resistance around the building was unstoppable and completely independent from the assistance of the occupants of the other mission site.

It should be abundantly clear that this way of playing is a far cry from the tunnel-based run-and-guns of yesteryear. Even more fine-grained choices like making shortcuts with explosives, clearing enemy resistance points by blowing up strategic points and using debris and smoke as cover exist but are not more than (just now) mentioned. Destruction becomes a way of being actively creative.

Now I want to return to the in-betweens from part 1 a bit and apply a broader perspective on this first section. The map we were playing contains mostly clearly defined non-civilian or military installations. Those buildings are large, unappealing, square and rectangle shaped concrete things. They are hard to destroy. But at the start of the map civilian-looking buildings are the targets. On many other maps, a much greater number of civilian structures come between the clashing factions. Is there then a history, even just an implied one?

What does speculative historicizing add to the game? Well, it makes it possible to think about the use value of the architecture in a civilian context. Does that house (the one on the hill in the winter night) fill a purpose? If it does, then who lived there, what did they do? Did they commute someplace or did they work near-by? Was the address exclusive or was it some reclusive hermit who used that house? If I was passing by car under different circumstances, what would these places reveal to me? Would I want to stay for coffee, looking at the views? Visiting the places of the deported, those places that haunt the vast landscapes that are increasingly devastated by mortar fire and tank battles, countless deaths and helicopter raids ending in airborne, burnt-out missiles falling to the ground, leave a strange feeling. Houses, garages and seemingly temporary housing like sheds are there merely architecturally but are strangely devoid of anything that might humanize them. Of course we may go into some detail on why it serves good hardware practice not to insert a million different small objects in a networked environment. Regardless of practicalities, the stripped-down aesthetics of war in Battlefield are at odds with the punishing difficulty of its gameplay.

This is probably where BFBC2 is -not- the Apocalypse Now of gaming. There is no third party suffering, only the surgical, masochist warfare of almost infinite prejudice. It is as if the enemy was so clearly cut-out that the civilians were never there, there being no more modern grey areas, no terrorism and only the pure, undiluted battle(field)s of the 1700s. Buildings explode, collapse and are rebuilt for the next round. But no-one seems to have lived there: the places are mostly industrial-type locales like building sites and ports. No one is missed, or at least I can’t get to grips with what I am supposed to feel about it. The population is displaced and their former habitats are now only playgrounds for Battlefield’s Destruction 2.0 (yes, it’s called so). I am concerned with this fetishization just because I have a deep respect for the effort put in the rest of the game experience. The contemporary warfare meets a distanced old-fashioned closed space. In short, killing an accepted, non-political enemy where no one else gets hurt. No enemies but these other men. Interestingly the uniforms are not even that very distinct. Technology (markers) are often the only way of seeing the difference between friend and foe. What if the tech overlay started lying?

When a building crumbles I think of the indistinct person who paid the monthly mortgage for the privilege of living there. Or am I overthinking it? After all, the rooms are empty, no pictures hanging on the walls. No china in any cupboards or old cars that have been lovingly taken care of in garages with neatly ordered tools. The closest thing that comes to mind is the first episode of Twilight Zone (“Where is everybody?”) where mysteriously no one is to be found anywhere. The non-existing inhabitants here must be either figments of the player character’s imagination, merely alluded to, or they have been transferred.

What would happen if players could use the fully equipped civilian houses as shelter? What happens when a soldier enters a new apartment and starts firing out a window from which he has never leaned out of, smelling the fresh crisp autumn air? Does respect of other’s living quarters, personal belongings and in turn mannerisms deny the impersonal shelterization and practical military use of that space? Is there a border that needs to be crossed before one can walk into someone’s place with boots on (I’m European-Swedish, meaning this means something different to me than it may mean to you) just to take a few potshots at others outside?

More questions than answers this time. In the third part I will look at identity, life/death and the meaning of life in an FPS.

Recently I got around to playing a few hours of Battlefield Bad Company 2 on PC. Since then I’ve put a small amount of time in it with some regularity, though I will end my playing of it soon because it easily hooks me. Last year I had a short fling with the game, although at the time it was the PS3 version, and I enjoyed it a great deal. This will not be a review so I will skip any details relating to “quality” and judgements of that kind. In short, BFBC2 is both a singleplayer, standard FPS as well as a large scale class-based multiplayer FPS. Comparisons will be made to other games. I have not played ArmA or America’s Army or very much of Operation Flashpoint so I will skip any references to them. My opinion is that they are fairly marginalized games and do not fall into the more established commercial sphere. This text concerns only the multiplayer aspects of BFBC2.

On the bigger scale, my fascination with (certain) FPS games, comes from the many complex readings that can be made around factors that are deeply game-centric, such as time, timing, pacing, death and respawning and the group/team structure in which they are commonly played.

—————–

BFBC2 is the closest thing commercial gaming has gotten to the dull experience of the Generation Kill kind of war depicted in, say, films. As has been asked by GameCritics (“Where is gaming’s Apocalypse Now?”), we may not yet be there, but in a fit of complete irony, we may be getting closer as “immersive” environments expand spatially. While the “horrors” of war are not depicted (more in part 2) the aesthetics, formation and systems are exposed. Movement and territorial gain is the metagame, every player’s radar the device to coordinate strikes.

Competing, but thematically similar games like those in the Modern Warfare series builds on the traditional twitch shooter legacy of games like Quake. While the games in the series have a multitude of play modes, much is still of the old-school variety. MW seems to be instantaneous in its firing, meaning there is virtually no time and space traversed when firing a gun: the bullets just stick to the target. This is not only a gameplay decision but most likely also a balancing issue because of networked physics or other calculations. First-time players will learn the hard way the intricacies of weapons usage in BFBC2.

The spaces in-between zones of conflict, those areas that never truly form into ad hoc battlefields in their own right, empty voids containing debris, shipping containers, crop fields or just plain barren ground, are there to connect the consensual, approved and demarcated areas. Moving by foot over these areas takes time, rendering one helpless to the scopes of the enemy. It is almost a way of consistently rebuilding the slaughter at Normandie, repeating this pattern over most of the Rush type maps. Snipers spotting soldiers, a team-based visual effect, is essential for the rest of the team to move and navigate correctly. Markers are placed on spotted enemies so they can be found even if hiding. The hivemind of the team starts working collectively in a fashion strongly reminiscent of the Future Warrior project. Usually, after some time, someone starts infiltrating the perimeter and the conflict changes from long distance warfare to close quarters battles: more players switch to assault and support classes.

For the attacking players, more ammunition is spent firing into the distance, it being impractical and unsafe to cover all that land (distance) by foot, using the aid of a passing vehicle only if the opportunity arises. Warfare is a state that needs to be maintained: rather firing at impossibly distant targets than being subjected to the castrated loneliness and insecurity of the in-betweens. Without the aid of a vehicle, one is relegated to find cover while running towards the frontline. Modern Warfare, and the others, using a different field-of-view setting, emphasize broad 360 degree focus, quite different from the 55 degree narrow perspective of BFBC2. You can barely turn while sprinting, meaning you are always aiming for a defined location when running, rather than applying a hyperspeed boost to your abilities like in other similar games. The camera is focused on a goal or set direction, a voyeur of sorts that aims forward. Even the vast vistas and landscapes become geographies for hidden places and secluded spots. Horizons and contrasting backgrounds are located and deemed inappropriate for snipers because there snipers are highly visible. Once again, this does not rule out the off-chance that someone may order mortar strikes at that spot purely out of paranoia. Long distance warfare has no price – it is cheap and non-negotiable. No one will deny the legitimacy for bombing a few bushes, civilian houses or the horizon.

Getting closer to the frontline, a massive soundscape of heavy weapons fire creates a mood of impending death, far from the clinical silence of a game of Modern Warfare. There is no in-between audioscape, only the rattling of mostly small-guns fire when disjointed groups collide, evaporate and rejoin. The frontline of BFBC2′s Rush mode is probably the most intense war simulation that has been created in any FPS this far: As the smoke rises, multiple heavy weapons detonate and vehicles clash together, one is reminded of the relative insignificance of the single soldier. There is none of the personal hero-mythologizing that pervades the classic FPS games. No gun will ever save you from an airstrike or a tank.

Weapons are imprecise, single man raids suicidal and vehicles are impossible to effectively man alone. Firing at close range is usually extremely risky and damage is permanent. The trade-off to go in point-blank is so high, there is usually no reason to do so. Here is then the essential feature that separates BFBC2 from the other games: Cover is impermanent – it is used dynamically when needed, and battles are fought behind mobile covers (such as tanks) over medium distances. It would be easy to write about how BFBC2 becomes a dedicated military simulator by virtue of its tighter squad-based gameplay. I, however, think that is only a very small piece of what is going on.

So how do players know what to do at a given time? Where games like SWAT 4 make close-quarters combat and preliminary information and decisions a core tenet of its particular breed of gameplay, the ordinary FPS uses little of long-term informational holds, instead opting for a small set of direct, reflex keys to denote and connote state and place. Examples include the sound of an armor pickup in Quake and the pattern of spent pickups in the near-by environs. This is a staple of the flow-oriented, fixed-structure levels in most games. They are usually defined by their static qualities: maps do not change and they are constructed to facilitate movement. In direct opposition to this, BFBC2 uses impermanent structures to support resistance and wave formations rather than flow. We can therefore see the tendency of modern/guerrilla/fourth generation warfare emerging in the entertainment area. What I have refused to go into here has been ideology. The issue is obviously extremely interesting, but is something I may bring up later instead.

Part 2 will come in around a week. The focus then will be on history, permanence and civilian lives.

Without any further ado: I’ve hit a milestone. It is definite, and something that can’t be backed out of. Hence, a milestone. We are almost at PB 2.0 – if not the technological singularity, then at least the focused effort of trying to put some more oomph, aha and §£[£≈©≈±] to the world. First, the story so far: a cautionary tale about a business of passion and how it took years for it to begin gelling into place. It’s brutally uncensored and honest, and the most definite source of the history of PB 1.0 that will ever be put in pixels. Still, it won’t be all-encompassing and will skip some details that don’t add to the general story. Skip to the bottom if you only want the future. You can do that now, thanks to the internet. The future always is the past.

This is for friends and enemies, those who know me and those who don’t, those around today and those who will read this much later. This is also for people I know professionally and those I know as acquaintances, for those who know me as a student and those who call me an artist. This is for better or for worse, and for setting things straight before going onwards.
But mostly this is for those that started this, so I dedicate this to Thom Kiraly and Kristoffer Åberg.

Summer 2009
During the two years that Propaganda Bureau has been around as a formal business, many changes have occurred over time, shaping and reforming what the ultimate goals of PB are. It’s gone from a very broad, exclusively commercial endeavor with three very different guys, to a single-man and mostly artistic practice. This has, of course, much to do with crass realities (personal goals, family life) but more interestingly this has history in our collective, and since a year back, directly been affected by my personal development more than ever. Looking back just two years, some of the ideas we had at the time were probably far, far off the chart of any reasonable possibility to complete. The first two years have been a road: I can’t say I regret anything (although some stuff was never very fun at the time) because it has led us to where it all is now.

I’m married to a woman much unlike me. I find her company comforting. Our location in Karlskrona has had the unfortunate effect that she has been mostly unemployed during our years there (2005-2011, with a small break 2008-2009). This means I’ve been the sole provider at most times. How this is relevant will be made more clear along the way. That is my family situation.

On a July night in 2009, in a very infrequent case of public intoxication (I believe I was hanging out with my mentor and former colleague and teacher/professor before this), Kristoffer drove me to Thom’s place on the outskirts of Karlskrona. We’ve all known each other for years. There we signed the documents to start the company, and some legal documents between us as partners. This was the culmination of at least 18 months of planning and discussion. That was the easy part. In the papers, our business plan was simply “media production”. We aimed broad and were kind of familiar with what we’d like to do. I had high hopes to realize some amount of the game designs I’d been thinking about. No definitive plan was set in stone, however.

Fall and Winter 2009
In the autumn of ’09, before receiving the official OKs and blessings of the state, me and Kristoffer did the first paid gig for PB – a restaurant he had contact with wanted a new web site. We’ve never worked so much for so little, is my final and only remark on that. It was drudging, boring, very much uncreative modern man-labor at its worst.

Over the two years that have passed, the most bullshit crass question that has been circling the existence of PB has been how to make this a full-time job for three people. Now that’s just me, but the point is the same. Thom was studying, Kristoffer had a full-time employment as a salesman and I was teaching half-time, so we had something to go by, although my situation was much more dire than theirs as explained earlier. As any upstart or economically-conscious person will know, the process of starting a new business (and don’t be kidding yourself, even an artistic practice is business as much as stock trading is) takes time and involves a great deal of hard lessons to be learnt and a steep incline to get to the first contract pennies or sales. I believe that the incline is proportional to the diffuseness of one’s business not merely as an actual firm, but in one’s dealings with clients and the general interested public. While we weren’t off the mark entirely in 2009, we had this condensed set of problems:
* Naturally diffuse nature between commerce and “art” + a bit too vague mission statement
* Negative factor in experience versus revolution-ability
* No background/history/back catalogue, no clients, based in small town: only way out is clawing upwards
* Highly diverse nature between the founding members; skills, skill levels, time, interests etc.

We tried, poked and were in contact with a range of people and possible jobs, but much of this was more in the tech crafts and man-labor area (design, writing, coding) that in short was fairly unexciting. I’ve personally never seen those tasks as first priority things to do, or even grasp for when in need of cold hard cash. Original work is what I’ve aimed for all along.
What was good, because all was not bad, was our dedicated efforts to think about different approaches, side projects, interventions and were thus constantly rethinking the nature and subject matter of PB. Many good ideas came out of this which unfortunately had some problems taking root in how we worked back then.

Aside from everybody’s small quirks and mannerisms, ultimately I think the dividing line between us three members was how art was conceptualized and thought of in the context of creative practice and sustainable living (income-wise). At the time pretty severe breaks occurred in discussions of the game design ideas I had. We weren’t agreeing on directions, intentions and even on the digital aspect of contemporary games. Suffice to say that even my own, today much more elaborated and expanded-upon, framework of (as Tale of Tales would call it) ‘not-games’ was still in its infancy and unable to cope with the practical issues we had then. Because there was still no hard evidence of the wide competencies required to make a game, we probably had a collective feeling that we’re in for the long haul (time, learning, pain) if we decided to go down that road, unsure and disagreeing where to start grinding.

January-May 2010
Then came our go-ahead from Karlskrona municipality and the local arts grant we had applied for before Christmas. So we made a ‘game’. We had proposed Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces and received half of what we had proposed in our budget, which still was the best money I’ve ever received. Their placing faith in the fulfillment of the game/web installation/public art project along with the more substantial cash involved (if compared to the meager web design pennies) most definitely set a spark to the latent flames we tried to keep alive. I had been somewhat unsure that our rhetoric and goals were not being communicated well enough, and the difference in how people in the cultural sector took us was miles from the world of the “paid gig commercial barbarians”. For me, although it may have been a bit brash based on a single occurrence, I took this as the go signal to begin turning more exclusively to that kind of clients. We began the project while sending emails to lots of groups who might have been interested in games dealing with issues related to them (groups included KRIS and Tindra, among many, many others). No replies came. With the first money we were hunting for an office and finally landed a pretty exclusive space in a kind of business hub with some other information-media firms. I can’t say we were all agreeing on the wisdom of this at first, but it did serve as a good working space during our time there.

For Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces we had many ideas that we wanted to realize. Because that piece was heavily textual we wanted to have local authors and writers contribute to it. Goal one was to textually reproduce the speech Horace Engdahl delivered at the Karlskrona City Library’s 50 year jubilee. We got the OK: done, and check. Next up was Katarina Mazetti, who interestingly thought we were some bratty media kids trying to rip off a professional writer’s new, original work for free. As soon as we told her our much humbler nature and that we worked practically for free the ice melted. Check, and done. The rest of the ideas died because our budget got tighter and tighter because we had to cover rent and expenses. I think we all feel a bit sad about it.

After lots of deliberation we decided to try making a game (NonViolence) in 30 days for release on the Worker’s Day, May 1st. The short story is that it mostly went fine, but that the time that could be allotted by Thom and Kristoffer made things hard to keep to schedule. I was doing almost all of the heavy lifting while trying to outsource increasing amounts of skill-based tasks to them. This obviously takes much time and is really only worth it in the (very) long run. Harder still was Thom’s hardline position that he wanted none whatsoever of the technical implementation work, although he finally had to help with levels and such. Overall it was a very good experience when it worked. Problem is it was dysfunctional from the start and I’m glad something good came of it at all. NonViolence never made it out in any proper, good version but I’ve been putting time in it now and then to finally release it for iPad sometime this year.

Somewhere here we got the contract to make a slideshow for the Karlskrona Visitor’s Centre in the “German Church” that was being restored. In short, our idea was much more interesting than a simple slideshow but not interesting enough to write much more about here. It was a fairly decent job that focused on the information space firstly (the narrative and sequence) and left the implementation up to us as well – I think this is a pretty good setup for a contract job because it places faith in the skills I see myself doing more than merely pointing a camera at a building. The budget was again on a much more acceptable level than before which felt heart-warming, so there was some evidence we could actually earn some money doing this.

Summer 2010
As summer 2010 drew near, I sat in a meeting with Kristoffer and a new client. The task was to create a new web site for them in around a month’s time. The pay was hilariously low, if you are curious. This contract was in Kristoffer’s hands and I only checked in on progress at times. When deadline loomed the client was not pleased with the results. In hindsight the experience of dealing with a dissatisfied client was strengthening but not at all pleasant. Diplomatically I solved it as best could at the time. After a serious conversation Kristoffer was no longer a partner of PB, but not only due to this unfortunate event. He seemed to be lacking the energy in general, and it seemed a waste dragging on from here. The moral of the story is not that bad work makes paying clients angry, however, but that the interweaving of personal time, day job commitments and business ventures on top of that is not suited for everyone. Possibly the worst decision here was NOT to quit the day job long ago. I sincerely think it takes that kind of commitment to break through and not die trying when struggling upstream like we did. If it would have been the correct choice for us/him at that time is something entirely different. Anyway, we parted ways because that was the only sane thing to do. We never became enemies, but instead became closer than we’ve been for many years, almost like when we were kids.

While that was a backlash, it was not something I much grieved for. I remember clearly how I said that my primary concern was protecting the company name, regardless of who’s personal name gets shat down in the process. I still believe that in a very intimate business the alter ego of the company becomes the stronger and more important character. That’s also the notion I’ve wanted to play with in PB – the personal feel that clashes with the corporate/state facelessness.

The single biggest hit was when Thom wanted to inform me of his departure at the time of the Öppna Sinnet (Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces) press event in July or so. While his departure would not come at once, he made it clear that FR/ES would be the last thing he worked on. I will keep it brief and say that we talked about it like adults although I felt that the motivation for his decision was at the time rather vague. Later that year I would learn that both my compatriots were to expect children. Maybe the decisions for the future family life did affect something of this. Suffice to say, I was at times feeling that the death of the combined forces approach left me personally in a whole shitpile of trouble. I had to find out what my own path was, do it to 110% of my ability and, if only temporarily, fend off some of the more complex multi-facetted projects to make rapid, visible progress. My job situation was changing because the program I was teaching at was in a state of redevelopment and I was no longer entirely certain that I was going to be needed much longer. I had to provide food and rent and somehow manage to be much more wildly creative, unforgiving and directed in my efforts than before. No one was there for support any longer. And I still had an office to pay rent for along with equipment bought for PB that wasn’t fully paid for yet.

August-January 2011
Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces was released on August 2nd. A live demo was held in a local mall (bad idea, but interesting stories and some unexpected users) and we had a small press conference. Unfortunately all of this had a weird vibe as Thom was, in practice, no longer a part of it. We stuck through it because there was no other choice.

During the late summer I had come to the decision that games, of some sort, would be my primary focus. Everything else would be secondary until I had something to show for my dedication. Game design and theory has been what I love most since 2005 when I found a proper channel for it. The problem with something like game design is that while it is a pretty abstract thing itself, all the disciplines that make incorporated, actual games work need to be seen, felt, heard. Thankfully I’ve spent practically all my “free” time since 2008 learning, among other things, programming and 3D modeling. I was still scared shitless about doing a game all by myself despite a range of demos, my final project for my BA was made in Unity, and then the more recent NonViolence. So I came up with the first ideas to the game that would become Don’t Get Raped. “That should be easy enough”, I thought to myself.

Along with a few smaller income sources/jobs via PB and the final payments for the year’s earlier big projects I managed to get Kristoffer and Thom’s company loans paid and the final rent situation arranged and out of the way. I was well on my way to get economically straightened out.

Working on DGR, I spent considerable time researching victimology, crime statistics and rape cases to cover ground for the game mechanics. I fell hardest for the paranoia aspect and fear of rape instead of the explicit act, and on how victims project real fears to external entities. Technically I learnt something new all the time working on DGR. It gave an enormous boost of confidence seeing it grow. When it was deemed ready for 1.0 (on which I will write later) I released it in late October, with five updated versions in a week’s time or so to cover unexpected problems and bugs, on the Unity (the game engine I use) forums and IndieDB. Some interesting debate took place. I was covered in Blekinge UpplevelseIndustri and talked about how digital games can cover issues not usually seen in gaming. The reporter was almost as excited as I was, saying he had never heard anyone talk this way about games before. Still, the reporter was in no way the generic reporter jerk. It made me happy. I felt as if this might actually work for me on a whole different level than what I thought previously.

After an unexpectedly interesting business development weekend, where I spent -lots- of time thinking and rethinking Propaganda Bureau, I finally got to the final act: present to, and “impress”, a panel of creative industry judges with your business/craft/talent/whatever-it-is-you-do. I took with me notes on paper when coming in. I threw these after two seconds and did what I think I do best: spontaneous, engaged presentations. They seemed very, very “impressed”, almost awestruck in fact, and asked me why the hell I’m here in Karlskrona and not in a bigger place where my work can gain an audience. I had no good answer other than my work being here, for the time being. Probably not much longer, though, I reckoned.

I left that weekend understanding that something has to happen. PB has to be even more streamlined. It needs to know its place, if not just for other people understanding if they have any use of my services and what they can expect of my own work. After a short intermission, I continued creating games, trying to establish my optimal flow in the work process. Without really thinking about it, the transition from a much broader, title-less job description I was seeing for myself had almost entirely gone up into the more understandable calling of “artist”. Because, frankly, that’s what all my original work has been. It was not something that went in fast for me, mind you, and I had a very hard time accepting the “artist” title initially but the turn came around November when all of this happened. People weren’t shooting me down when I called myself that. Instead they took a very different angle on what they saw me do, and responded in ways much more suiting to it. Perhaps an “artist” becomes so through some degree of concensus, like many would argue that art is a consensual agreement. I was happy to see I had past the first hurdles on the road that would completely redefine PB.

The college I was working at was making little effort to inform me of my future there. My mentor and soon-to-be former colleague was frank when he told me I need to look into a graduate education so I can have a place to develop and stop worrying about the impending cash issues. I had previously done some half-hearted research into possible grad schools without finding anything that interested me at the time. Also, the prospect of PB growing into a mature, three-man business was looming only six months earlier. Making a new attempt I found a program that immediately clicked with me: a master in fine arts that had a digital focus, at Valand School of Fine Arts (Gothenburg University). I worked like crazy to complete the courses I was studying (to get student loans so I could pay rent, half-time teaching didn’t cover all expenses for us) and to create some more substantial body of work that would somehow show some of what I do and want to do more elaborately with the game medium. Together with my wife we made arrangements to leave Karlskrona for good, the place where we’ve spent our adult years, a beautiful place with no jobs, and the place where we got married. We left, still with no answers from my former workplace.

February-June 2011
For all the dreams and aspirations at the time, I was feeling down. The only thing me and my wife Jessica could resort to was to move back to her parents house in a tiny town on the other side of the country. My only goal would be to complete my portfolio and just stay sane. While I am grateful of their support it is one of those low points in life that will never truly wash away.

The application date was in February and I sent my portfolio, statement and letter to them. At the time I didn’t think so much about it, but considering that I’ve spent much time now in June to polish those projects, the work I sent to grad school still wasn’t really good enough in retrospective. It was much more of a prototype quality – there was something lacking. Context. A “critical game” for someone like Amnesty has context and message merely by being. My games didn’t have that. I will return to this matter a bit later.

In the end of March, I was supposed to show my work, in a pseudo-commercial rather than purely artistic context, at a rather large creative industries event in Karlskrona. In the pre-event planning I had talked about maybe doing some participatory installation-style games for the event, but these got sidetracked as I was gradually burning out. At the event would be a number of other creative enterprises – some of these were traditional-style artists. The many people who came to see what we (the collective of enterprises) do “for a living” could immediately understand what these artists did and discuss it with them. Few got around to discussing my work, which was botched because a multitouch company that had partnered with me got cold feet and the other technical arrangements were sub-par. All the participating companies, mine included, had posters with the company name and what the company does printed on it as shorthand, informational signposts. At some point during the very, very long day I pasted on top of the part that says what PB does, “Boring, adult games”. This dissuaded the kids who thought my iPad game was about something other than oppressive dictatorship, for example, so it worked. I took the entire experience to be a combination of me being burnt-out, my work and business still being slightly too hard to take in fast and (especially) the context and setting to be completely wrong that day. So wrong in fact that I promised myself something must happen so I’ll never have to relive that again.

After this event I made a trip to Stockholm for an interesting meeting. As soon as I got “home” I was depressed for weeks, trying to work but never getting much done even if I tried my hardest. I was trying to pull the threads of projects that could need revamping, fixing bugs or doing something entirely new. To cut straight to the chase, this depression let go gradually until the first week of May, when it was all gone. During this month Jessica had managed to get employment in Gothenburg, I got into grad school (decision delayed by about 5 weeks) and with enormous luck we got to sublet a comfy apartment. I’ve had contract work that pays well, so now all equipment and the personal money I’ve stuck into PB is repaid. 2011 also marks the year where I’ve been able to take my first, albeit relatively small, salary (this is mostly because of very big expenses and investments, there’s always been some money going in). Not every month or so, but it’s definitely been helping. Frankly, because of how things have been going this development seems almost unrealistic. So, since June I’ve been working pretty solidly from our new crib in Gothenburg. We love it here. PB is also getting much-needed energy and vitality.

Now: Moral(s) of the story, and what you can expect from now on.
I won’t waste much more of your time.

Some of the lessons learnt are:
* That I should have accepted my artistic, free side more a few years ago – not suppress it so much with the commercial side. There is money, work and opportunities in the kinds of art and information I am interested in without the need to make up complex plans that are incompatible with myself (and others). I blame this on coming from a small place that practically had no artistic community as such. Artistry was a concept that was always second-hand via media and such.
* If you are an upstart, think wide but try to find a common voice for as much of it as possible. Test it, rethink it, make it better. I would never have thought talking about PB with hair dressers and children would make PB better. It did.
* A modern business, of any kind, should be formed on passion. Sometimes people have wanted to tell me one should be crass and detached from the work one is doing. I call bullshit on that. Never start anything own if you don’t love it like you hated it. Knowing that real people are behind a piece of art, food, or even a rigid object-product means the world.
* And lastly: You’re not a pensioner at 25. You learn all the time. I’ve been running too fast to think about the road, being too age-conscious. I don’t have cancer. I will survive some more time. Sometimes I think I was way too brash a few years ago based on how I would have gone about today. If you don’t get better with time, however, is when you start having real problems.

What’s going to happen from now on is that I will continue to rephrase Propaganda Bureau’s mission statement and how the website communicates to the public. Much of it has been done gradually over the year and won’t be extremely noticeable for anyone who’s used the site this year. It’s all about filtering and getting closer to the core. So what is the core?
The core of PB is information, ergo, messages, ergo, ideas and thoughts. Art can be information and the way in which something, often complex, gets communicated. What is under constructive rearrangement is therefore not so much the types of work I do – this is pretty much set now, mostly consisting of multimedia “artsy” critical work, and some occasional contract work for the cultural sector. That got fixed along the very long road to here. Check.

What I am doing is rethinking the contexts, as I was implying earlier. Something like DGR 1.0 was never what it should have been despite a series of updates. Strangely many of the ideas I’ve been sketching for years have been far from a screen-presented digital game, still that’s what I was just doing earlier this year. What happens now is that I’m working actively to work in series: questions that spawn a number of works that work collectively. This also means, very much thanks to the fact that I’m soon starting graduate art school, that installations and more exclusive works will now be the new norm rather than the theoretical exception. Artworks will be able to grow and my practice will gain from it. I am more harmonious about the rest of reality and am going to some very interesting meetings this week. It seems very likely that some of my dream projects will start getting helped, funded and initiated in the near future. I am very content with things now, and it seems clear that the two years worth of history, contracts, art work has gotten me through the worst of times. In 2009 my mom, once a small-business owner, told me that any business/venture will need two years to get to a stable point. She was right.

If you read all of this, I hope it was worth your time. Regardless if you skipped here or read it all, PB will retain the dynamism and unforgiving critique of whatever gets in the way, but things will be way more awesome from now on. All thanks to rough times, burnout and stress. Who would have thought?

Also, I have been gaining even more knowledge in the the more practical realm of shaders, texture work and Blender/Unity materials. Now that may sound like I didn’t know squat about it, but time and practice do indeed make a lot of difference. It’s no understatement to say that two of the biggest concerns when going between Unity and Blender (and likely any other 3D modeling app) has been getting the proper workflow between Blender’s internal materials and the created materials that Unity uses. Normally I’ve just been getting work done with zero materials and plainly going about it with an assigned texture. This gets really stupid and really hard really quick when working with levels, especially. As you may well remember, DGR uses a couple of environments of which the outdoor section is quite large. That means lots of areas and sometimes small details to attend to.
As the process has now been not so much simplified as it has been integrated into my mind, as well as having naturally grown into each other as applications with the recent Blender 2.58 and Unity 3.3 that fixes some problems I’ve had earlier.

As with Equalizer the changes made are numerous. So many in fact that a recap is hard to write down. Similarly to the other games, much that has happened is work concerning many of the subtle details apart from the merely decorative and highly visual graphical changes.

This list is (again) very similar to that for Equalizer:
* LOTS of “tedious bullshit” work: merging extra vertices that create artifacts in buildings, for example.
* Shaders changed, proper usage of alphas and better use of specular and normal maps.
* Texture rework
* Meshes corrected, fixed, patched and quite a few are entirely new including original, new ones
* Code optimization
* Relit and rebaked with Beast instead of Blender 2.49s legacy lightmapping

I don’t remember the exact number of draw calls at the start of the outdoor scene but I know I’ve gone from 800 during early work to 400-500 now. Of course this also implies that it will run better and on more machines. Strange, considering that it looks enormously more polished than 1.1.

In short, the amount of lessons learned, and the weight and importance of these, mean a lot to me. Any new projects with Unity/Blender will certainly gain tons from the last month of polishing on the games.

See for yourself!

Equalizer is important to me. It is a poetic, short, condensed and potent concept that should receive a treatment fair to that potential. In short, I find the first version of Equalizer sloppy, ugly, primitively lit and too “soft” – it is too little of a poetic exploration of the kind I envisioned. Were it not for the randomly-chosen texts behind the hostage, nothing would point at the notions of spectatorship and ill-fated choices.

To rectify these issues, a fair amount of work has been put on pretty much everything that can be improved. A short bullet point list follows with some of the critical changes:
* Better, more thorough lighting. Optimized sorting of lights makes it look better, and should also improve performance.
* Code and scene/mesh optimization. Plugging inverted normals, missing stuff, ends up with less draw calls.
* Work on textures and shaders makes a world of visual difference – looks much more like what I was aiming at from the start.
* Minor changes to meshes and geometry. No more visible UV seams and repeating or wrong textures.
* Better depth illusion in large/deep scenes.

To see some evidence of the changes I’ve attached a few comparison shots. They are not -exactly- identical views, but should give a reasonable idea of what to expect.

As for the interactions and “game” as such, some small changes have been made and I am constantly revising these to feel them in action.

More updates as these get released as soon as I feel I can leave the games alone.