Found in Translation - Autopsia

This is a post-mortem post about Found in Translation.

Found  in Translation is a variation on a type of game I have started making a  few times, let’s call that a writing game. It’s certainly not original  to me (Endure by Emily Short, 18 Cadence by Aaron Reed). The  key to a  writing game is that it let’s you play at writing in a  constrained way. I  forget where I heard this, but the idea is that  games can be a lens (a  telescope/microscope) to explore some facet(s)  of the world. What  compels me about writing games is how they’re  experienced both as a  reader and a writer. As a reader I get to walk  thru a text, and as a  writer I get to express something using that  text.

Since I have been practicing this for a while, a post-mortem of FiT   is gonna start back a way. There are a lot of bodies in this morgue. But  really I dislike the term post-mortem because finished games are not   dead, our little Frankensteins are out there living life. Maybe what is  dead is just the laboratory where we nurtured the thing, or the team   that worked there. Maybe this suggests something about death, that tho   the structure has collapsed and the particles disbanded, they are still  out there animating something else. But it is still sad tho, I miss   those forms, and you do lose track of the pieces.

Years ago I made a game where the player wrote a letter as a soldier  going off to war, a letter to be sent if they died. It started as  making  branching decisions, written sentence A, B, or C. But as I made  the  choices more granular the level of player expression increased, and soon  my friends were writing letters that I hadn’t imagined (some very  striking, “my last thoughts will be of you”. Others less so, “I really  hope you die die die.”). A very important lesson there is that quality  expressiveness is proportional to the amount of garbage output.

That prototype has captivated me for years. After my brother died in  2020 (talk about a post-mortem. Apologies, I feel like half a person  and  figured I ought to explain myself, or lack of myself) I needed to  work  on it again, but it wasn’t until 2021 that I felt able to. This  time you  played as four different characters, each writing a letter to  the  mother of a dead soldier.

Mechanically these games were simple: the player would hover over a   thought which would turn into a page of monologue. They could choose any  word from that monologue and write it down. It was a very open   possibility space, too open in some ways. For one, there was no cadence  to how the thoughts were doled out, they were just embedded there in   space for the player to read in any order. Secondly, the player was able  to write any word at any time. Their working memory was quite high. It  was less like they were in this character’s head and more like the   character’s mind was unrolled for them. More than once I was asked “why  not just let them type their letter?” My answer is that the appeal of   the game is in traversing a character’s mind and finding a way express   something about that person given a set of words.

I moved on to other projects, but I knew I wanted to return to this   one, and when I did I wanted to experiment with using card mechanics.

====================

The Play Aspect

====================

Last year I read a some helpful books: The Glass Bead Game, Homo Ludens, and 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

I reread Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game where he describes the   titular game which is played on some type of instrument which I imagine  some where between a go-board and a harp, maybe a simaril rubik’s cube.  It allows the players to play with ideas and bring out connections. I  first read this before I was a game designer, and while the book is   actually not much concerned with the game itself, and totally   uninterested in describing it in any detail, it’s been aspirational.

I read Homo Ludens for the first time and was struck by Huizinga’s   reverence for Sanskrit and the hypothesis that riddle games were the   origin of philosophy. I asked my friend Storm about this since they had  been interested in Sanskrit. Some things this conversation helped   clarify for me:

- the playful instinct in humans is how we discover

- what constitutes civilization (music, art, stories), developed  out  of play. So I have to ask “what future traditions will emerge out  of  what we play?” What are video games in 1000 years? l

- if the origin of these traditions was in play, they still  retain  some play component. (In English at least we say that a musician plays  music, an actor plays someone else). A video game let’s you  experience  the play aspect of an activity. Games are dreams and trips, I really do  want to put on a cloak, take up arms, and go diving for  treasure, but I  also covet my neighbor’s treasure. I want to play with  cells and think  about the moon. My life is short, my means limited, and my abilities  feeble. Video games are the printing press for play: they let us play  with something we’d never get a chance to touch (if there  is an idea  behind the form then we share in it). Games are our own  Virgil taking us  thru Heaven and Hell.

I had gotten serious about learning Spanish when my son was born.   Thru that process I got interested in the idea of translation and so I   started reading Weinberger’s book about Wang Wei. The book asks what   qualities does the translators preserve? What do they notice about the   text? What do they invent? Enumerating the different paths a translation  took planted the seed for what became Found in Translation.

====================

 Found in Translation 

====================

So when I started Found in Translation I knew I wanted to use cards and that the poems were going to be in Spanish.

Two design problems I wanted to solve with cards:

- pace the character’s thoughts and actions

- control the working-set of actions

I had a couple vague notions of how to do that inspired by counters in *Magic the Gathering* and the clock system from *Citizen Sleeper*

I pitched the game to Kalish who I had worked with before, and   whenever I thought of working on a card game I imagined the cards with   Kalish’s art. With Kalish on board I reached out to Rosko, not just  because I like their music but we both have backgrounds in literature  and we had had a good conversation about the letter writing game when  they played it. I am really blessed to know interesting people  who want to work with me.

I had a few poems I wanted to use. The design details were still   fuzzy but I thought it’d be relatively easy to include multiple poems,   but Kalish had the good sense that that would make the art-load too   heavy (turns out it would’ve made the writing-load too heavy also). So I  had to pick a poem and I went with this passage from Piedra del Sol by  Octavio Paz because it was the one that had a definite narrative  moment  where the translator’s thoughts came thru. I particularly wanted to  follow that moment because it was timely, and over the last couple  years  I have been frustrated at the difficulty I’ve had of making  projects  that deal with the present.

This focus on moments is really important in my prototyping process.  It gives a specific target to hit, and it’s something that I can  respond  to as a player. As I’m shooting for that moment I know I’m onto  something if I’m finding other moments. So when prototyping I’m asking  “does this moment exist?” And if I’m lucky I’ll find other moments,   better moments.

When Kalish and I started discussing the art direction they were   drawn to the dial from the Aztec sunstone that Paz structures his poem   around. Given the time frame we knew giving each card unique art wasn’t  possible, so instead we gave the Idea cards art that appears when   they’re on the field.

The workflow was outside my comfort zone. I tend to have a pretty   fleshed out design idea with a playable prototype before I collaborate   to flesh out that design. This time I really only knew the basic   mechanic (play cards to write words), but had no idea of what the game   flow was. So the design was very shaped by the art that Kalish made   early on, and the influence of the dials really shaped the whole game.

The key insight about dials was that a dial could execute effects the  same way a card could. This meant that rather than having a single  deck  of cards, the dials created by the Idea cards could deal you cards when  they were activated.

The question was still how to trigger the dials turning. I had   started with a counter system like in MtG where you would play cards   onto the dials to increment a counter. I knew it wouldn’t work to have   all the dials ticking in parallel because then you’d have multiple   thoughts firing at the same time. The goal was to model the character’s  mental state and have the cards on the field respond to that. As I was  implementing things the idea of having the dials tick in response to  the  words you were writing or text on narration cards, which felt like a  good model of the writing process: as you are putting words down this  is  triggering other ideas, drawing up connections, resonating every  where,  and it’s grace that you sometimes hear those frequencies. I  didn’t  explicitly discuss this with Rosko but the chiming music when  you play a  card evokes this beautifully.

The game only came together the last day or two. I put some time into  the writing right at the beginning, but I was busy with lots of   technical tasks and experimenting with the mechanics. I’m glad I wrote   an initial draft of the character’s thoughts, interleaving a monologue   with the translating, because it gave me something to adapt once the   game systems were working.

We invested in a tutorial . This is something I’ve learned from   designing puzzles, but you want to think about the introduction and how  the player encounters the ideas. This was an interesting problem,   because in a puzzle game I would pick a puzzle where the player can   discover the rules by experimenting. This is not the poem I would choose  as an introduction to a larger game, but it did have some nice   properties:

- an opening line that is essentially just English

- a second line that is grammatically simple and mostly a place name

Still tho I needed to just explain how to interact with the game. It  was pretty cool that this could be done by just dealing cards that are  about how to play.

Besides some bugs the game faltered in a few places:

- the cursor was clunky since you had to move the mouse each time  to  place a word. I decided against using cards to handle cursor  movement  (“Go to a New Line”, etc) because it would be annoying to just twiddle your  thumbs until you got the right card. But it’s annoying to move the  mouse all the time, and was not very clear.

- Your hand can get too big

- There’s a lot of noise (getting multiple synonyms at once)

- Unclear whether a card type is an Idea, Word, Action, or Narration.

I think The Big Moment definitely landed for those that reached it and is the part of design I’m most proud of.

One of the moments I found working on the game: On line four you need to translate “grito”, which could be yell, scream,  or shout. I had a  friend Shout who died recently (as sudden as any bomb  falls). It was  cathartic to find his name lurking all these years in  the poem, and to  be able to write about it as it happened. I remember  discussing my  original letter writing game with him the last time we saw  each other.

====================

Second Round

====================

I wrote a CSV parser to load card definitions in. I am a big fan of   custom data formats, I think it’s one of the most helpful tools in my   belt. But my thinking was that CSV was an easy format to parse and I had  a lot of writing and programming to do anyway. This was probably a   mistake, because working with data tables are not the most pleasant or   inspiring format. And besides, it turned out that parsing CSV didn’t   really save me any time. For Round 2 I rewrote the parser to use a   custom file format which I’m much happier working in.

To handle getting too many cards in hand I decided to make discarding  a free action instead of tying it to a card effect. This way the  player  is able to get more words than they would want to use, but they  aren’t  bound by their discard rate.

The previous version was dominated by the big dial in the center   despite it not having a very important gameplay role. I wanted to turn   the focus to the pages this time. And one benefit of doing that is that  the player can have multiple pages to write on, which means they’re  able  to use those pages as a scratch pad, putting a word down to store  for  later. In the previous version you had an “erase word” and “lift  word”  cards, but that restricted how often you could erase a word. Now  the  player can hold click on a word to lift it off the page and put the card  back in their hand. I kept the “copy word” card because that does feel  like a more intentional expressive choice (“*then* the alarm, *then* the screams”).

An important part of my practice is to learn more about a topic thru  game development. Sometimes this has been historical research, theater,  cellular automata, or mythology. The last couple years it’s been   language, theater, and music. Because so many things originate from play  we can use game design as a tool/excuse to learn about them. We’re  also  very lucky that games are almost always about something more   fundamental than themselves, so even if the thing you’re mastering is   the game itself, you’re still learning about more than just the game (I  think this is true for many pursuits).

It gives you a way to work on the game when you don’t feel like   working. It can fill the reservoir that you’re going to draw from   unconsciously.

I read the following leading up to and after this game:

- This Craft of Verse - Jorge Luis Borges
  - “Literal translations make not only for uncouthness and  oddity, but also for strangeness and beauty” The sun that famous star…  The sun, the bright candle of God. (Godes candle beohrt) Tennyson  translates that as “when first the great / sun-star of morning-tide” and “the Lamp of the Lord God”

- This Little Art - Kate Briggs
  - “writing in a new language resembled a sort of blindness… but it did not prevent me from thinking, in fact it was a stimulus”

  - “translation is nothing if not a process of elimination”

- 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei - Eliot Weinberger (turns out he was the translator of my copy of Piedra de Sol)
- Cathay - Ezra Pound
- Translating Myself and Others - Jhumpra Lahiri
- Paul Celan - John Felstiner