Plane Defensive - my old indie game prototype

After finishing my PhD in physics in 2015, I decided to pivot towards video games. I went to some talks and workshops at Tech Valley Game Space in Troy, New York, near Albany, gathered up some tools, and started coming up with ideas, vetting them, and turning them into something playable.

The main product of this period was a game called Plane Defensive. The latest (and probably final) version can be played for free here. This was the end of a long line of prototypes that I playtested at TVGS's Interactive Showcase, which allowed members of the Troy community to try out locally-developed game. 

The premise was that the player would be controlling some kind of defensive platform, whose purpose was to deflect invaders from another dimension. To begin with, the platform would live in a two-dimensional plane and deflect invaders that came into it from the third dimension; I was thinking that some day I'd try to create a version where the platform would travel around our own space and deflect higher-dimensional foes.

Working on versions of this game taught me a lot about the differences in what you can expect from people familiar with video games, as opposed to people coming to play one for the first time. Many things that seemed obvious to me required a bit of education, like clicking and dragging objects around. I also saw first-hand how adapting a game to different platforms can be a challenge: for example, tying text to size in pixels is not great when you're developing on a low resolution laptop for high resolution test computers.

In terms of content, I went through a few separate conceptions of how to express that there is a way for the two-dimensional platform to peek into the third dimension. At first I mixed different cameras, but eventually I decided that the most convincing detector would simply point towards the projection of the high-dimensional being onto the play space - given enough directional detectors, the invaders can be triangulated and anticipated. I also played around with using stereo sounds for some of the challenges. The visuals were very "programmer art", and the sounds were simple generated effects.

You can see a full play-through of pretty much all of the versions, along with a more elaborate discussion of my process, in this video, part of a series called Devs Play, hosted by TVGS for a span of time. Enjoy!

Beneath the Rising - review

Premee Mohamed is an eldritch scientist beetle who writes speculative fiction. I first encountered her on the pages of Analog (Sep-Oct 2018), in Shepherd Moon, one of the many stories about commercial spaceflight that were published there that year. It touched me emotionally, so I sought the author on Twitter, to find out more about her, and when and where she'll be publishing more work. I discovered an entertaining and insightful science and fiction personality, who belongs on your feed. I am joking about the beetle, but I'm not always sure she is!

Her Beneath the Rising came out earlier this year. Like most good cosmic horror, it isn't just about Horrible Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and What Goes Wrong When Man Seeks Them Out Anyway, but about people, how they live their lives, and what they do to each other. Well, it's also not about "Man" - Mohamed's Herbert West is a woman, a teenage girl, in fact - Joanna "Johnny" Chambers, a child prodigy with rich white parents, and best/only friend of the protagonist, Nicholas "Nick" Prasad, who is supporting his poor Indo-Guyanese family on retail wages. This friendship, crossing class, ethnic, gender, and professional lines, is what holds the narrative together. As they learn more about the threat that Johnny has awakened, and race to stop it before it destroys the world, Nick and the reader also learn more about this relationship, as circumstances test it, and its past is slowly revealed.

Having read a lot of Clark Ashton Smith's fiction lately, it's refreshing to experience some cosmic horror that isn't revealed to be race realist as soon as the narrative crosses the ocean to Africa. Instead, we see a protagonist who transitions from a feeling of otherness resulting from being a visible minority in Canada, to a feeling of otherness due to being in an unfamiliar country, when he and Johnny cross over to Morocco, where it is she who is singled out as a foreigner just by the way she looks, even though she is the one who is fluent in the language and culture. These evolving terrestrial feelings of strain and dread complement the more cosmic, Lovecraftian tropes that appear throughout, all the way to a very emotional conclusion.

I enjoyed Beneath the Rising very much, and recommend that you get it. A sequel, A Broken Darkness, comes out next year, and is available for preorder.

Virtual reality and immersion - a reflection

In 2017 I was planning my annual trip to Israel, to see my family and friends there. I aimed for the Jewish fall holidays, because they corresponded to one local holiday off that I could take, and meant more of the people I would like to meet would be free. I realized that I could schedule things so that I can attend ICon, the big Israeli science fiction, fantasy, and role-playing game festival. I announced this on Facebook, and a friend asked "well, what will you be presenting?"

I hadn't considered presenting anything, but I realized that I definitely could. I had left academia about a year before, but still had some presentation chops, and I was working in virtual reality, which was really hot at the time, and often featured in genre fiction. So I decided to propose a talk comparing virtual reality in fiction and in, well, reality.

For recent advances in the field, while I needed to do some reading, I mostly could depend on the work I was doing for a living. For a more historical view, and references to fiction beyond my own favorites like William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, I read through Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality, from 1991. This, in turn, lead me to The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, Pygmalion's Spectacles, by Stanley G. Weinbaum, and other early works. To the written fiction I added a discussion of The Matrix and the Holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation. So there, I had a series of comparisons, as promised. But would that make for a good enough talk?

People with a better liberal arts education than mine probably already know that any type of non-fiction work is carried best by some kind of thesis statement. So I needed one. And as I read the fiction and delved into the history of the field, I came to realize something important: immersion didn't really require all of that technology, what was presaged in Cyberpunk literature, or what I was using at work. I could think back to spending the '90s on IRC, arguing with people across the world, feeling that I was together with them, even though it was just text going back and forth. I was reminded of BBSs, and MUDs, and text-parser games that were able to immerse people in worlds, together with others or alone, without high quality graphics or audio, not to mention VR headsets. I compared it to immersion when reading, or in the theater, both as an actor and as spectator.

So here was my thesis statement. I broke down immersion into three types, which I will credit properly if they are not my own invention, once I find my notes:

1. Authenticity - do you feel like you are in the virtual world?

1. Connection - do you feel involved in the goings on in the computer?

1. Belonging - do you feel part of a community?

and stated that the first is not necessary for the other two. In fact, people have felt a connection to virtual worlds and each other through computers for almost as long as there were interactive computers. Furthermore, the kind of control the user has over their immersion when not encased in a headset can be very important for a variety of use cases.

I gave this talk in Israel, in Hebrew. A few months later, the local IGDA chapter needed someone to substitute for a last-minute cancellation, and since I had already redone some of it in English for a small VR interest group, I expanded it and refocused on my thesis, concluding with a long example concerning Chile's Project Cybersyn, as documented in Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries. That talk was recorded, and you may watch it for a full treatment.

After that I didn't pick up the material for a while. Instead, a few months further into 2018, I went back to tabletop roleplaying, first as a player at conventions and with a local group, and then taking over said group as a dungeon master, with my own campaign. And as we have been forced to move online, I find myself returning to my thoughts from creating those presentations. It might be worth reflecting a bit more, especially if I can find more documentation of my research leading up to them. Immersion is one possible goal for role-playing, and I think this connects well with my thoughts on radio. The need to be able to control immersion is also relevant, especially when considering the importance of safety tools in role-playing games.