Half Life 2, perhaps the most modded game of all time? I personally wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true. I’ve played more Source engine mods than any other. The accessibility of the engine and modding tools allows developers of all skill levels to produce the game THEY want, resulting in polished retail-quality modifications that can appeal to anyone – there is such a range of possibilities be they fan-made tributes, mainstream shooters, wacky novelties and even original experimental titles with a focus on narrative such as those developed by thechineseroom.
thechineseroom are somewhat veterans of the modding scene (which at the moment means anybody who’s created more than one mod), their previous release being the eerie and intriguing Dear Esther. They are now putting the finishing touches on Korsakovia, their latest mod, in which you play as a mental patient in a state of severe psychosis – living through hallucinations of questionable degrees of reality. Korsakovia looks like it will offer the same style of cryptic narrative as was present in Dear Esther while incorporating more gameplay elements to balance out the experience.
GamesAreEvil were fortunate enough to be able to conduct an interview with thechineseroom’s Dan Pinchbeck who had some very interesting things to say regarding the development of his latest mod, Korsakovia. Read on to find out just what he told us…
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GamesAreEvil (GrE):
Your previous mod, Dear Esther, was well received amongst the mod community for it’s original implementation of the first person in narrative – unraveling a cryptic tale while encouraging the audience to fill in the gaps between the melancholic narration. How would you describe your current project (Korsakovia) in this respect? Would you consider the concept that of commonly thrown around terms such”Art-Games” or is there any other way you’d describe the inspiration for such games?
Dan Pinchbeck (DP):
I guess it’s trying to take some of the abstract story feel of Dear Esther but bolt in more obvious gameplay. So we have agents, and a very small bit of combat and the odd puzzle. It’s game in other words, which I don’t really think Dear Esther is. But it’s also based around this question of how much a player needs to know, and how much they make up themselves. What happens if you have a story that just doesn’t make sense, agents you can’t see properly or understand and an environment which is just plain odd in places. That’s not exactly new – FEAR and Silent Hill both kick those themes around a lot, for example, but we wanted to play with the more slow-burning emotional feel of Dear Esther. But it’s still about the gaps. Just with an added crowbar. We’ll see how that works.
In terms of Art-Games, I just don’t know. I go backwards and forwards on this one. Part of me gets all pissed-off and starts yelling about why it is people feel the need for games to be called art, like art is a higher cultural form than games, and then this other bits responds with ‘why the hell shouldn’t a game be art’. And there’s some amazing game-based, or game-orientated art out there. The ComputerSpiele Museum in Berlin, for example, have toured this brilliant exhibition with all these works built from or around Pong – it’s just fantastic. Actually, I was at a session with the director, Andreas Lange, at the Nordic Games Conference two days ago and he was laying out some really good reasons why it’s beneficial for the games industry to have games taken very seriously as cultural objects (including claims to being, at the least, on par with art). In terms of obscenity laws, protection, these kinds of issues. So it’s not just an academic question.
Is Dear Esther art and do I want it to be? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s my call, really. That’s down to people who play it, I think they can call it what they want. I initially expected the core audience would be digital arts people, rather than gamers, and I got that really, really wrong. I’m a hardcore FPS player myself and I made a big assumption about the community, and it’s good to have been put straight on that. I’m not sure if I really care if it’s art, and I’m certainly not interested in it being this elitist thing that you need a degree to get your head around. I’m just really blown away by the reaction to it.
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GrE:
Mod development teams are usually either huge groups of like-minded developers, or smaller teams lead by the creative vision of one individual. Which of these would you class thechineseroom as, or would it be somewhere in between?
DP:
It’s essentially me writing, designing, producing. Then I work with a fantastic guy called Adam Griffiths, who basically takes my ideas and somehow turns them into games. He’s a total star and co-designed most of Korsakovia. I’m like the village idiot of Hammer when it comes to actually building the things. Then there’s Jessica Curry, who composed the soundtrack for Dear Esther and has done that and the sound design for Korsakovia. I think her vision (if that’s the right word) is completely integral to the feel of the mods. The environment, gameplay, visuals, writing and sound are all on a complete level, it’s a really holistic process. So I guess, in one way, I drive it, but I see Adam and Jessica as collaborators, equals in the process.
But we are actively looking for more people right now. I need a coder and a mapper to come in and take Korsakovia from an alpha to completion.
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GrE:
The Source engine is a lucrative back-end to many mod developers, causing Half Life 2 to be one of the most modded games of recent years. What was it about Source that attracted you?
DP:
Used it before, plain and simple. It’s getting creaky now. Whatever happens after Korsakovia may shift to CryEngine as even I can use that. Unless GSC release a proper SDK for STALKER, in which case obsession will drive me in that direction. I like Source though, it’s fast and relatively easy, and most importantly, there’s this big community of modders to plug into. We did a mod called Conscientious Objector, which is basically Doom 3 with rubber bullets and an abusive NPC in your ear and it just never got the downloads, but there are so few D3 mods out there really, none of the same community you get around Source. So I guess that’s part of it too.
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GrE:
Your latest project, Korsakovia has been strongly anticipated by fans of your previous mod, Dear Esther as well as newcomers who may have not played the game. Is there anything you’d like to say to old fans or new about your latest mod? What does it offer to each type of fan and what have you learned from your previous mod?
DP:
OK… Let’s take the last question first. Dear Esther was my first major bit of game design and in places it stinks. We were really naive about the relationship between players and environment, and whilst in some ways, I think this is what makes the island such a different place, there are things I just hate in it. The last level just never worked visually in terms of the fog effect – Source just doesn’t ‘do’ altitude! So I’m a better designer now, I’d say. Incidentally, Robert Briscoe is currently re-building the entire thing, and his work is just brilliant – there’s a dev blog at http://www.littlelostpoly.co.uk/devblog/
Korsakovia feels much more like a game, and there’s a better fusion between the abstractness or weirdness and a full playing experience. More emphasis on really using the environment to tell the story – or insinuate there’s this story anyway. It’s been great to have Jess work on sound design as well as music, and the agent sounds are just horrible, they’re brilliant.
Korsakovia is basically a survival horror FPS, but one where we’ve tried to push the idea of a breakdown in reality as far as we can. There’s minimal hints of a story – there is a really strong, solid narrative this time (rather than Dear Esther’s three major interpretations), but what I’m really interested in is keeping this hidden, seeing how much work the player does in joining the dots. The basic premise we’re giving people is this – you have on one hand this patient who has Korsakoff’s psychosis, so they have total amnesia, can’t make new memories, can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality, and are only conscious in short bursts. Then, on the other, is this inference that the world has ended, whatever that means, and that what is left is this disintegrating, shattered reality that’s slowly fading out. And then you have these agents, which are really hard to see (like big balls of angry smoke), make noises like engines or servers being tortured by sadistic dolphins, and you have no idea what they are or why they are there, or anything. And then really weird shit starts becoming evident in the environment, but there’s no clue as to why it’s there or what it means – so a bit like Esther, where the symbols and objects can be taken as in the narrator’s imagination, or actually part of the world.
I hope we keep all the bits that made Esther a lot of fun (if that’s the right word) and added the gameplay, so it’s faster, more about panic and fear and unease. I don’t do fun games, I think. Conscientious Objector was really funny and no-one downloaded that, so it’s misery, insanity, pain and man’s general inhumanity to man all the way now…
For new players, ummm, I’m not very good a sales pitching stuff. It’s a really messed-up survival horror. Don’t play it if you want a nice, straightforward, here’s the big gun heroic epic. It’s us trying to see how much we can fuck with you and whether that makes a rewarding gameplay experience for us all.
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GrE:
What are the goals of thechineseroom in the development of Korsakovia? Do you feel, this close to release, that you have achieved all these goals? What future plans do you have for the game?
DP:
I think we have to change the release date! – it’s further away than May right now (see the shameless recruitment call up above). Yeah, it came from a quite specific set of ‘what-if’ questions and judging from the playtesters’ responses, we seem to be mostly on target.
The wider goals of thechineseroom are all about academic research really, and about how this fuses with games and mod culture. Basically, it came from me getting frustrated about not being able to ask really interesting questions by studying commercial releases – the kinds of what-ifs that have driven Korsakovia, Dear Esther, Conscientious Objector and Antlion Soccer. So like, can you have a game that is basically as full-on, visceral, guns-and-ammo, run-and-gun as Doom 3 – hell, let’s make it Doom 3 – only you can’t kill anything, but it’s still in all intents and purposes, Doom 3. I got talking to this researcher at this conference a few years ago who was talking about the project when it was just starting and they said ‘but why keep the guns, why make that sort of game?’. Partially, because I want to push at the edges of this genre which I love and you need to make things that gamers respond to in order to do that. No-one playing any of our games should be forced to give a damn about whether they are research objects or not – they stand or fall as media experiences, end of story.
If they don’t, for me, they’re not valid, they’re just academic exercises. But Dear Esther, for example, came from this idea of what happens when you take a first-person experience and you take all the traditional gameplay out of it and can only use story to drive people through the experience. You can’t herd them with combat or use reward systems like a traditional game to pull them on. Just story – is that possible? To me as a researcher who is interested in the relationship between story and gameplay, that’s a really, really interesting and important question, but you just can’t answer it if you stick to analysing commercial releases, you have to get out there and develop. So I think we do seem to be succeeding there, we’ve produced this one mod in particular, which has a phenomenal number of downloads, people are really responding to, and it’s a great way of coming back at this question and saying well, yes, you can strip it back to story and it does still work. That’s an important thing to be able to say, for me.
The second part of it is I’m also a player, like most game researchers. I’ve spent five years buried obsessively in FPS games and I love the genre. It’s the most amazing way of creating and delivering and experiencing these unbelievably intense experiences, and as a player as well as a researcher, I want to see where the edges of possibility with this genre are. So Dear Esther, Korsakovia and the rest, they’re driven by a genuine love of first person gaming and what you can do with that. Commercial developers have pushed the genre a long way in the last few years, putting some really left-field, quite experimental stuff into major releases and that’s absolutely brilliant to see. But we’re modders, we don’t have any of the economic pressures or market forces to care about. We can really, really play. That’s a great situation to be in.
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GrE:
What have you learned throughout the process of developing Korsakovia? What ideas or techniques do you feel you could use when you put together your next mod?
DP:
Not even close to being about to give a straight answer to that yet. Don’t know really where we’ll go after Korsakovia. I have an ongoing idea about making a squad based shooter, only ripping off Day of the Triffids and replacing guns with verbal commands – so you have to guide a helpless blind squad through a lethal environment. That means cracking open the FSM and putting things like panic scales in, plus a whole bunch of custom animations, so not sure we’ll ever get the time to do it. But it’s still there. Like I said, I keep holding out for someone to make STALKER easier to mod. I’d love to try and get more of the original novel back in there, much more of the high weirdness that would be so easy to embed in The Zone. So maybe looking at doing something there. I’d kind of like to re-write the original game too, that’d be fun and not too complex technically, so I can sit back and just be a writer for a bit. We’ll see what comes up. We’ve got a couple of more immediate ideas in the pipeline, but as this is about my day-job, it all needs official funding and clearance for me to spend the time on it, so I’m waiting to hear back about that before we can go forwards.
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GrE:
Dear Esther left players with something to think about. A mystery which the player seeked answers to, and had a vested interest in after following the protagonist through a series of memories and hallucinations. What do you wish players to leave with after playing Korsakovia?
DP:
Ideally? I’d love to build something like Greek Tragedy, like Oedipus, where players feel like someone has taken them and dragged them through the darkest pits of their souls and back into the light, so they are shaken and terrified but feel utterly awake and renewed. I have no idea if we’ll even get close to that, but for me, I see no reason why a game shouldn’t be able to do that catharsis thing at all. There’s no conceptual, philosophical reason why a game can’t be every bit as astounding as the greatest theatre, visual art, cinema. music that’s ever been produced in the history of culture. So why not think big?That’s not me being arrogant, I’m not claiming we have or will produce anything that operates on that kind of level – although Dear Esther does seem to have really profoundly touched some players, judging by the responses we’re getting – but I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t aim for the stars. We’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of what games can contribute to human culture, and I’d always rather be absurdly ambitious and fail interestingly, than do something safe. That’s just not as much fun.
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GrE:
What is the latest mod you downloaded and played? How would you compare it (or other mods) to your own work?
DP:
Oblivion Lost for STALKER. Obsessed with it. Absolutely cracking stuff. When we first released Dear Esther, a few people mentioned STALKER. I’m a huge fan of the Strugatsky’s science-fiction, which is where the genesis of that game comes from, so there probably are some links there. Guns and zombies are OK, to a point, but I want worlds…. OL let’s to you loose in one just to explore and live it. STALKER may make you some kind of amnesiac avenging angel, but OL makes you an entrepreneur, explorer, trader, anthropologist. Love it.
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GrE:
Finally, As will be asked of every developer in our Mod Interviews; what, personally, is your favourite aspect of your new modification? What do you feel is your greatest accomplishment within Korsakovia?
DP:
My biggest worry was that it wouldn’t be scary, and play-testers have said it’s not just scary, but in places really quite horrible. So I’m pleased with that. And the warehouse with the big rotating tower of levitating debris. It’s just a really, really great and completely weird scenario. But most of the best stuff about Korsakovia isn’t me – it’s Adam taking these ideas and turning them into these great environments (“what if a TV shot lightning out of it and burnt the viewer and somehow froze time so all the furniture gets trapped in mid-air?”, “Sure Dan, I’ll see what I can do”, etc) and it’s Jess mixing up these amazing sounds and dropping in some of the most upsetting music I’ve heard in a game. It’s a real team effort.
Greatest accomplishment, though, will be actually finishing the thing and getting it released. That’s always the prime mover on that score…
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