On this episode of Dialogue Tree, Eric Brasure talks to Pippin Barr to discuss his collaboration with Marina Abramović, his first iOS game Snek and why it was a failure, and his game creation philosophy.
Contents
02:00 “It would be very funny–I mean, that’s the way most of my game ideas come into being.”
03:30 “As a teenager I was quite anti-art, and sort of always telling my parents that I thought that art was ridiculous.”
12:45 “I was interested in the experience of queueing, and how that feels, and how that interacts with the question of ‘what’s the valuable thing at the end of the queue?’”
16:05 “The absence of any kind of social interaction in the queue is one of the least authentic things about the game.”
21:15 “A huge amount of the process of making this particular game has been about negotiating that tension of digital things and how they are real–because you really are sitting there in front of a computer, pressing keys and looking at a screen–and also that they’re sort of unreal, because they are software, and they’re generated, and they’re just lights on a screen.”
23:00 “I’m emailing them with great frequency and constantly demanding things from them that will make the game more authentic–and causing them problems, basically.”
27:50 “I’m sufficiently antisocial that I shy away from making too many jokes in person, but I have some kind of funniness deep deep within that only comes out through programming.”
29:35 “Part of the good thing about the short games is that you finish them before you get horribly depressed and want to die.”
30:55 “I still feel kind of sad about Snek, I must admit.”
33:05 “There’s been a tendency in making games for it, to makes these games that are very transparent and feel as if you’re not really playing them, or as if you’re just ‘willing’ things to happen. Like in something like Angry Birds, where using the catapult is sort of perfect in a way, and it doesn’t feel like an effort–I wanted effort to be expended.”
34:45 “I think I really misunderstood what it takes to get an iPhone game noticed and played by enough people.”
40:40 “I’m very, very resistant to changing my methodology, which is stupid and terrible, but it seems to be a part of who I am.”
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References
- Featured music: pawspaws, “Cold”
- The Artist is Present game
- Snek (Apple App Store)
- The Art of Video Games at Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Desert Bus
- Marina Abramović Kickstarter (now completed)
- Electron Dance on Barr’s games
- Johann Sebastian Joust
You can subscribe directly to Dialogue Tree via iTunes or RSS. For more of Eric’s podcasting work, please visit his site smallbatch.fm.
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