 Fel ydych chi'n gweithio, wrth gwrs, gwaith i EF Camp Stage A. Felly mae'n rhai o'r ddechrau, fydd o'n fwyfyrnod, rwy'n gwybod i'n bod i'n fwyfyrnod David Hayward, eu bod yn ei wneud i chi'n gweithio i eich ffasiliau ei wneud yn oed. Ie, ddweud. Felly, mae'n dweud i David. Yn eistedd, rydyn ni'n bwysig i'r twf, o wnaeth ei eif yn rhai o'r wneud i'r twf, maen nhw i'r gweithio i'r wneud. and then thought I'll practice it again and realize the device I wrote on was 200miles away at home. Instead of practicing I've hastily rewritten my thoughts from scratch. This might be a little rha Won't Churchill which I sincerely apologise for. B Teddy. Say say I work with the video games industry. I curate shows of interesting games, I produce festivals and work on some really large events. I see a lot of things that kind of make me angry and are a bit stupid. I'm not going to rant about them, but I'm going to talk about what games are to me and how that relates to some of the very specific forms of stupidity I see in the video games industry. Because I think in 100 years all of us are going to look kind of stupid in that no matter how progressive or clever we think we are, no matter how much we distance ourselves from the things we think are bad, our attitudes will still look weirdly regressive and kind of conforming to some awful things that will be very apparent to people in 100 years. We won't look as stupid as people producing anti-suffrage propaganda at the start of the 20th century, nor will we look as stupid as people force-feeding suffragettes, but nonetheless I think we will all look a bit dumb. And I want to spend some of my life fighting that stupidity and one of the places I can do that is basically where I work in the video games industry. So my job in the games industry is basically to show people weird games. It's a strange niche I've carved out for myself over the past seven years because I was really bored of just games companies peddling teenage power fantasies. And I was getting to know creators who were making weird and interesting and different things. But this was a particularly resonant game for me, Super Hexagon, which came out a few years ago. Hands up if you're already familiar with Super Hexagon. OK, that's about half of you, so I am going to explain it, but not really. The other thing I like to do a lot is mountain biking. In fact, I pretty much live with this. Sorry, the project is not working that well. This is a picture of me on a mountain bike, which you might not be able to make out. This is a joke I've built and it's really going to fall flat if you can't see the next picture. Do you have a question? No, but I could put them online later. They're not yet. They probably won't be tomorrow. Yes, I can put them online later. I actually moved to different parts of the country this year because I was fed up of being somewhere where I could not mountain bike. Now you might not be able to tell you probably won't be able to tell from this projector. I'm a little bit less into road biking. This is a picture of me climbing up the wires on a road bike looking exasperated with my belly hanging over my shorts. But never mind, eh? Mountain biking, mega rad 24x7. So this is the only slide I promise where there are bullet points. It's just a reminder to myself that this is the bit where I play Super Hexagon and try to speak over the top of it. I will probably fail. So Super Hexagon is a game. Terry Cavanaugh released the prototype of it, a small flash game called Hexagon. A week after I gave a talk titled Fuck Hexagons, it was a 10 minute talk about Hexagons being a terrible shape. If you use a board game with a hexagonal career to generate commercial suicide, they're quite an ugly shape. Generally they're using advertising to convey some vague sense of the future or sportswear. So I gave this talk titled Fuck Hexagons and then Terry Cavanaugh made what has proven to be my favourite game based around them. So giving that talk was one of my biggest regrets that year. So there's this conversation I have when I show people Super Hexagon. I'll start with the first level just to talk about what it is. Actually no, I'll use a higher contrast one. There we go. So in this game you are the tiny arrow in the centre of the screen and you use just two buttons to rotate it clockwise and anti-clockwise around the centre. And you have to avoid all of the incoming walls. And it's really hard. This is one of the later levels. And when people see me playing it for the first time, there's this conversation I have that always goes the same way and is slightly exasperating. Because this game obsessed me to the point where I built a rivalry with a friend and we chased each other up the high score tables until our scores surpassed the creator's own scores. And we started being invited at events to play on stage and it just got a bit weird and ridiculous. And I learned a lot about how my brain works and how my eyes work by playing this game in a way that no other game has taught me. But this conversation always goes exactly the same way, which is people see me playing and then they say that's a bit nuts. And then they ask does it follow a preset pattern? And the answer is no, not really. There are patterns in it but it throws them at you in an unpredictable order so you can't plan an optimal path. And at that point they kind of reach their natural conclusion which is oh so it's about muscle memory. And the answer is no it's not because the game is actually going too fast for you to just react to it. If you're only looking at the thing that's coming next you will die really really fast. Sorry, get a bit distracted. Basically I have to be looking at the centre of the screen and the edge of the screen. I have to defocus my eyes because by looking at the centre I can maintain precision and keep the arrow planted at the centre face of the hexagon, sorry the centre of one of the faces of that hexagon. But by looking at the edges I see which patterns are coming next and can plan my next moves. Without that I'm absolutely screwed. So playing it well requires this kind of split focus. If you think of your vision as a cone by an act of will you push it outwards towards the edges of the screen to see what patterns are coming next. Well also periodically checking the centre to make sure you've got that arrow positioned where you think it is and that it's not drifting gradually over one corner of the hexagon whereupon you will immediately die. But as the game gets harder it's as if it's pushing against the cone of vision. It's pushing your vision further towards the centre and that sets up this feedback loop where you become more and more tense and stressed and eventually just lose and die. And after playing it for a while I realised this is not only the closest but possibly the only video game I have ever played that actually conveys a similar experience to riding a mountain bike down a hill very fast. That's not a slide, it's a game David. So this is a video of a hill near my house in Calderdale and mountain biking requires exactly the same kind of split visual focus in order to do it fast or well but sort of inverted in that rather than in my peripheral vision all of the upcoming hazards are actually dead ahead of the bike. And all of the immediate hazards are in my peripheral vision underneath the bike and it requires the same sort of split attention in order to deal with both of those things at once. If I'm paying no attention to the immediate surroundings of the bike it's very likely that I'll hit a rock or a wheel sized hole and be catapulted into the nearest hedge which only looking ahead would do to me. If on the other hand I only look close to the bike I'll find my vision gets closer and closer to the bike and I become slower and slower because I'm not spotting what the trail is doing ahead of me and I can't plan how to maintain speed through that. There we go. And both superhacks are going to mountain biking induced this thing called a flow experience which was first posited by this guy, psychologist, wait I can pronounce this. The correct pronunciation of his name is Mihai Chiksant Mihai. He wrote this book rather kind of potentially titled flow of psychology of optimal experience. Now I have a bunch of problems with this book in that as you get further and further through the book he takes this theory and tries to apply it to everything and it kind of becomes this grand theory of all human experience which I don't think it is, I think it's something much smaller than that. But the basic idea is that when you're performing some kind of task if the difficulty of that task and your ability to do it are balanced that is when you're in a state of flow. If your ability exceeds the difficulty of the task you'll get bored. If the difficulty exceeds your ability you'll become anxious. But when things are just right you experience this state of flow and that's something I've experienced through video games and through sports and it can be difficult to describe. It's a state of intense focus where everything feels balanced and right. Your ability just feels totally lined up and sometimes you can even do things that you didn't really think you could do. The mountain biking induces that state in me, video games do too. And also trail designers and mountain bikers and video game designers all talk about flow but in slightly different ways. So I should just not look at the screen. Basically flow is a concept used by game designers. This is a design goal of many game designers in making their video games. They want to induce this state in the player. And that's something that happens when a well-designed game that is a kind of traditional video game centered on the idea of fun. Whereas mountain bikers talk about it as a slightly different concept. So this you probably can't see very well. This is an alpine trail made of sculpted berms and rollers and jumps. And it's a trail considered to have flow in that all of the features lead smoothly into each other. None of them are badly built so they don't kind of throw you off the track. They don't have off canvas. And when you're going fast, you're described as kind of flowing down the trail. It feels like it's not resisting you. You just go fast. You hit every feature. You're managing to plant the wheels exactly where you need to. But rather than a characteristic of the biker or the experience of riding, it's kind of talked about as a property of the trail. And you probably can't see it here. It's just a geeky aside about mountain biking. But a lot of these corners have sets of rhythmic bumps going into them. They're called breaking bumps. And this is possibly one of the nerdiest things I know about bikes. Is those are bumps which are usually mountain bikers absolutely despise them. They see them as some of the disrupts throw because they're bumpy. They're uncomfortable. Basically, if you hit them fast enough, even without suspension, they become trail buzz. But not many people ride that fast at all. And they're caused by basically one person slamming their brakes on and doing a lot of skid with their back wheel. And then someone else goes to the area and does the same thing. And the little divot that it costs gets slightly deeper. And as people go over that and more and more of them slam their brakes on, they basically take material from this side of the divot and deposit it. And their wheel bounces and starts a second and a third. And they have a really regular frequency that is just caused by people breaking and their wheel bouncing. It's sorry that is just a geeky aside about bikes. It destroys flow for mountain bikers. And I basically spent a lot of my life chasing after this state. And it was only last year that I started to worry about the opportunity cost of doing that. In that when I'm out here on a mountain bike, I'm not making new friends. I'm not sending invoises for the freelance work I've done. I'm not doing work. I'm not reading books or leading a rich life of the mind. I'm experiencing something that's a lot of fun, but possibly not actually all that beneficial for me. And I basically excused it by saying that cycling is about fitness. But I kind of can't escape that all forms of cycling eventually come back to that feeling of being 11 and free and going really fast. And mountain biking has its quiet moments. It has its long slugs up hills. But it always comes back to that feeling of going downhill. Likewise, you can't see it. Road biking may involve three hours of thrashing your way up switchbacks to get to the top of a French coal. But then it's always followed by a descent down the mountain. You can probably see a bit of that. It's a ridiculous mountain road that I rode down last week with several thousand feet to fall off to the side. It's a missing wall, but it's great fun. And likewise, commuting. This is a really dangerous road that you can't see. It's quite a utilitarian thing. It was just me getting to work and back or getting to a client's office and back. But my heart pounded. I felt alive. Two weeks commuting on the tube made me feel dead inside to the point where despite having loads of bikes packed up in boxes elsewhere, I bought another bike just so I could ride this around London. It's something I really intensely need if I don't get on a bike after a week I start to feel pent up and irritable. And that's fine. I have all these different reasons for riding bikes, but fundamentally they all do come back to that state of being 11 and going fast. And I can kind of excuse wanting that with the other benefits it has for me. I save money. I get fitter. But it left me thinking if video games are doing the same thing for me, then what place do they have in my life and do I really want them there anymore? I've spent seven years creating shows of interesting games, all they're about, and should I just give up on them? And the answer I found is no, because video games don't come back to that state of just having fun. They're a much more interesting thing. This is a screenshot that you can't see of a game called Flower by that game company. And the reason I put this one up specifically is because the first prototypes they made of this game were built in processing. And it's a game where you play the wind and you have to kind of drift around with no avatar, no kind of corporeal identity within the game other than just your points of presence and you play the wind. And you collect flower petals and blow them around and blow through flowers and make them open up. And once you've opened all the flowers in the level, that level is complete. And the first prototype they built had a timer in the top corner. And they sent it out, they had testers playing it. And they found that the testers were kind of being the wind and opening the flowers. And then they'd get to the end and have shaved a couple of seconds off their personal backs. And they'd jump out of their seat and pump their fist and scream, fuck yeah! And the designers realised that's not what we're going for with this. It's not what we want the game to do. That's not why we want people to play it. It's a serene aesthetic experience. And the game is functionally not much different from that first prototype they built. They just took the time attack out. You can't see how long it took you to complete a level generally. And that completely changed people's experience of the game. It made it a more relaxing experience. And video games now, they're not about the idea of hard fun. That's the term Junova Chen from that game company used is we're not going for hard fun. We're trying to make something else. And at that point people had quite a vague idea of the expressive range of games. But now there are so many people doing so much interesting work. There are people redefining what an arcade means. In the 80s they were a kind of vicious commercial model. Everything on that arcade floor had to be earning its two square feet of floor space by guzzling quarters from people. And if it didn't, it would get ripped out and replaced by something else more commercially viable immediately. Now game designers are making all sorts of strange things. This is Analog Defender by Drogon, which is the game defender rendered in ASCII along with a lot of other stuff. But all of the controls of physical buttons and switches and patch leads and all these modes you have to switch between. It's insanely complicated and really beautiful. And I'll return to this as part of a show I was showing some work in two. And then there's a whole scene, you can see a bit of that. There's a whole scene of people who are still working with the original Doom engine making really weird games and wads and map tracks to go with it. And all of this is non-commercial work. There are people making twine games, which is finally a viable way of making interactive fiction. Rather than the agonising things, people were kind of mashing together in 1997. This is an accessible and easy engine for people to make this stuff with. And people are telling really interesting stories to it. This is one called The Spare Set, which was actually put out by the charity Shelter. And it tells an absolutely heartbreaking story of a family losing their home. And this is a thing I made with my friends, you can't see it. It's a thing I made with my friends George Buckenham, who is around this weekend, and John Brodsky from a company called Lucky Frame in Scotland. It's something we made on the side while we're doing a larger project with some other people. We made an old stand-up piano played Doom in that every key had some copper tape, put on the hammer, sold it up, wired into an iPad board. And then the keys on the piano, there's a monitor mounted on the front of it. The white keys were basically moved forward, strafe left and right, turn left and right, change weapons, go backwards, and then all of the black keys were shoot. It was a ridiculous project. We were incredibly lucky that someone decided, yes, I want you to make a ridiculous thing. We've spent weeks going, but we can't do the piano, that's a stupid idea. We've spent years humping arcade machines around and we hate them. We can't take something that weighs twice as much and make it into an arcade machine. We just went there and every week until the point we knew we were building something, we'd go like, actually, that is kind of a cool idea. And with a week to go, like, yes, let's do this, we can get an upright piano for £30. And it played Doom and ridiculous things happened, like a duet where one person is trying to play Doom and the other person is trying to play the piano. But in the middle of the night, when we'd kind of assigned all of the tasks on that and we're building that, I got bored and we had this briefcase that we'd picked up in a junk shop and a bag full of arcade buttons. And I thought, fuck it, I'm going to make something out of that. So it's got a line of red buttons, a line of green buttons, and a line of blue arcade buttons evenly spaced in the lid. And then a headphone socket, and another do we know on a wave shield inside. And it's just an audio puzzle called RG Briefcase. And we're invited to show it as a show called Alt Control GDC, which was at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this year. And it was non-typical and weird game controllers. And this thing is an audio puzzle that George made a really vicious puzzle at randomly selected notes in a kind of Simon Sers thing. But every time you guess it wrong, it picks a new set of three notes that you have to try and reproduce with the 12 semi-tone scale assigned to the 12 buttons. And it was kind of a last minute thing. We're showing this in an hour, we need an extra puzzle. So let's just throw something together. It turned out to be really, really difficult. Really prominent composers in the games industry were coming and playing with it and going, this is a really good music theory test, I can't do it. And that was a really great show full of weird and interesting stuff. But someone asked me a really, really stupid question. It was in the middle of this vast expo hall with loads of sponsors and companies selling their middleware and their games. And someone came and had a play with RG Briefcase and now asked me, what's your business model? I think I was too stunned to say anything, but if I could be back there right now, I would go, it's a briefcase with arcade buttons embedded in it. There is no fucking business model. Why would you even ask this? Or the factory in China is cranking up thousands of these things as we speak. So basically we, you might just be able to see, we filled it with sweets and these were the only two people in three days to solve it. It was really gratifying to see them come and visit day after day with notepads and tone dialer apps on their phones. The most vicious thing about this is when you solve all three of the puzzles, there's this kind of creepy, synthesised voice that says, congratulations, thank you for playing. Here is the code to redeem your prize. It then plays the sixth digit combination to open the briefcase using DCMF telephone tones and resets to level one. When we showed it in London last year, people did really clever things. Like one guy solved it, learned how to solve it and then just downloaded a tone dialer for his iPhone and held it there as it played it back so you could see the combination on his screen. This time it was unfortunately on a noisy expo hall. So DCMF phone tones are really difficult to listen to. They're not designed for human ears at all. You have to listen to them over and over again before you can pick up both tones and reproduce accurately yourself. With the noise on the expo hall going on, that is almost impossible. So these guys spent about four hours on the final day of exhibiting, solving it over and over again and listening to the tones and recording them and listening to the recordings and mashing at tone dialers with headphones in and then they'd come up with combinations and go, that's not it, but is it close? Is it a transposition? And in the end they got it and it was beautiful. Despite it being absolutely full of sweets, and me and a guy, all of these are yours, they went, oh, I guess I'll have a lollipop. Thanks. And they just say like one lollipop each and then closed it and walked away. My point is games are so much more than an industry. They're so much more than just a thing that people design for fun. They're ways of telling stories. They're essentially, I don't actually think they're a form of media at all or a medium. They mash all prior media together with system design because a video game can reproduce a film, it can reproduce a radio station or a piece of music and it can cut them up and do other weird things with them as well as repetitive based interactions like driving, shooting. They can do all this other stuff and I have much argument beyond that. I just don't think games are a medium. I think they're system design combined with all of the media. And that's a really interesting thing. It also means that game is a really terrible word to describe them and possibly the medium I'm thinking of is hardware and code. But already right now there is so much non-commercial work out there that is not a part of the games industry. But because the games industry dominates all of its own media because every time someone says video games all too often the word industry is attached it doesn't even have ways to articulate or talk about this work or understand it. And me being asked what's your business model about RG Briefcase is one of the most pronounced examples of experience of that. But once you start looking you will see everywhere so much is forced through this frame of industry. And there are so many people making interesting work but once they encounter commercial game developers are basically asked how you plan to get into the industry. Is this part of your portfolio? And for many of them they just don't care. They don't want it. And it's weird. It's like someone fiddling with a mountain bike in their garage being asked by a passerby. So how are you planning to get into the bike industry? I'm not. I'm just going to ride it to the shops mate. I find it deeply strange and alienating. And if you have any aspirations whatsoever to make games or mess around with games there are other communities out there that will welcome you. The games industry has typically been quite high-walled and hard to get into. Everyone figures like making games is probably fun right? It's not. It's a horrible job. Don't do it. And there are so many applicants for every job that basically depresses salaries and people in the industry refer to it as the fund tax. There is to be fair quite a high level of satisfaction among people working in the industry. One of the things I like about it is nearly everyone I meet is smart. Most of them are smarter than me. And that's really delightful in many ways to work with. But if you go to the wrong company you will end up working 90-hour weeks with unpaid overtime and such. And if you have weird and interesting ideas the chances of them getting through that commercial filter and out into the world are almost non-existent and you're probably better off pursuing that in your own time. That's pretty much all I have to say. Thank you very much. Before we let you off the stage does anyone have any questions? For the mountain bike footage David. It would have been good if you were trying to control it with a controller. Well like some kind of homemade peripheral. Maybe next year. You could just get some old handlebars and put accelerometer on them couldn't you? It would be pretty hard to film. I want the consequences to be the same as if you did fall off the bike though. Like rocks coming up at your face and things like that. But I have to give the talk wearing a full face helmet and goggles. Yeah we can work on that. I mean if it makes you feel better like I did crash my bike a lot last week some of that footage was from a holiday in the Alps last week. I crashed a lot and on the last day I did land on the side of my head hard enough that I saw a white flash and it was fine. The helmet did a really good job. Like I got up feeling okay. But I didn't notice I landed on my ribs as well and I'm now in a lot of pain. If that makes you feel better Michael. A little bit good. Any other questions? Maybe not? No? No.