Werd I/O

Like a lot of people, the thing that first got me into programming was games. I'd learned rudimentary BASIC as a kid, but it was as a teenager that I started to get a taste for the thrill of making something and sharing it with other people.

Adventure games had always been my favorite. I remember playing a port of the Colossal Cave Adventure; later, I got hooked on Infocom's very well-written output, particularly the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which was co-written by Douglas Adams himself. Finally, I came across LucasFilm Games, who published The Secret of Monkey Island, which is still my favorite piece of digital entertainment of all time. (Honorable mentions from other genres include SimCity 2000, Railroad Tycoon and Populous; to my shame, I never got into Civilization.)

But it wasn't those games that inspired me to build.

Whereas Monkey Island and its brethren were produced by companies that sometimes felt like (and sometimes literally were) movie studios, the shareware games movement was a rich mine of scrappier, but somehow more creative games. Jeff Minter's Llamasoft was probably the pinnacle of this; its game Llamatron was an off-kilter take on Robotron: 2084 but featuring a llama that battled against mutant Coke cans, Mandelbrot fractals and Mr Potato Heads. (It's worth mentioning that I've never been particularly interested in illicit substances, although I can't speak for Mr Minter.) Its anarchic design was liberating, and it felt doable. It was actually doing some sophisticated things behind the scenes, but nonetheless, for a beginner coder, Llamatron felt within reach.

I started learning as I wrote in Prospero Pascal, and then shared what I'd built with my friends Marcus Povey and Tom Nunn, who were also building. Something happened that was new to me: I felt playfully competitive with them, and everything they built spurred me to try and create something better. It was a virtuous circle. We were 14.

My first game involved a simple maze that was slowly revealed as you walked around it, cribbed in part from one that Marcus had already written. Subsequently, each game became a little more sophisticated. The Numerator ("he's always on top") was a take on Llamatron with a wave audio backing soundtrack. Mr A Goes For a Block was a psychedelic take on Sokoban that made it onto some early-90s shareware CD-ROMs. I wrote a space game with 3D starfields and a collaborative maze game where you flipped between two characters at different ends of the same labyrinth who needed to work together to get out. My crowning achievement, eventually, was Mr Sheepz, another game clearly heavily inspired by Jeff Minter, wherein you had to eat sheep grazing in increasingly-complex fields before giant sheep-eating snails got to them first.

And then I turned my attention to the web and never looked back.

Lately I've become aware of a whole new subculture of independent game developers, who have been experimenting with new forms, narratives and designs, using the web as a medium. Using HTML5 and JavaScript, sometimes in conjunction with engines like CreateJS, Turbulenz and many, many others. Others are building mobile apps; others are building the same kinds of full-screen desktop games that I used to.

My friend Tef recently moved into a flat of indie games devs, one of whom organizes an event called The Wild Rumpus, after Where the Wild Things Are:

It was in August 2011 in a glamorous Nandos (a sordid middle-class chicken hut chain where every dish tastes like cayenne pepper dissolved in lemon juice) that George says he was asked to help form a committee to hold something called ‘The Wild Rumpus’. The Wild Rumpus is game roughhousing: the informal event takes place in a hired bar, features simple lo-fi multiplayer games you can play with friends between drinks. They use projectors and huge screens, and the games are always visually mesmerising, competitively thrilling, or require players to engage in social theatre lubricated by beer. It’s always busy, and there is as much pleasure in spectating the bright colours and social friction that the games bring as there is in actually playing games there. “Closer in spirit to party, playground, or even drinking games, these are all games that you can’t play at home on your own” it is declared. The atmosphere is in between that of a game night with friends and an electro-pop club night with extremely well-behaved patrons.

At the first XOXO, meanwhile, one of the standout moments was discovering a game called Johann Sebastian Joust, which is played by multiple people with controllers, but no screen. It's the kind of game that blurs genres, but that's not the point; it's fun, sometimes hilariously so, and the technology creates a framework that feels like an augmented playground. Indie Game: The Movie, screened at the same event, is as inspiring as any movie about individual creativity.

Games never really went away, but the interconnectivity of the web, the openness of our platforms and the ubiquitous availability of simple technology means that there's more opportunity to experiment than ever before. It's not all about running and shooting things, which I've always found pretty snoreworthy (dalliances with the original Wolfenstein 3D and Doom aside).

It's been a while. I think it would be nice to pick up some tools and build some stupid fun.