It’s been a bit over a month since Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates was released and we’re still totally exhausted…

Here's a short roundup of some of our favourite media about Utopias so far...

We've been interviewed by a few podcasts, where we go into the process of making the game, especially the mechanics of working in a collective:

1. Utopian Horizons
2. Away From Keyboard

And, a few articles about the game have also popped up, our favourite one so far was this piece by Lewis Gordon for Vice. Here’s a snippet:

"…if you’ve got the bandwidth for a daring, occasionally challenging (in terms of presentation and ideas) game, Utopias is a galvanizing experience. Trust me, its ending will leave you gasping for breath and filled with hunger for a new world."

😅 High praise to live up to!

If you haven't played the game already, it's free to download from https://utopias.aaasoftwa.re

The following is a transcript of a talk I gave as part of our performance Data Mutations - Game of the Year Edition in 2018. You can watch a (not amazing quality) video of the performance here.

ACT 3, SCENE V, glowing castle on a mountain top

JACK enters, wearing a capsule collider on his head.

JACK:

The sun rises over another wonderful Unity day, and we know that after a long
winter of hard toil, spring has come. And so we gaze back longingly over what
we have created, and we realise that Steam has taken 30% right off the top of
our sales. But it's ok, because I have 3,000 followers on Twitter! And they
retweeted lots of gifs of my game, so.. surely someone will buy it.

I come to you, this wonderful morning, as a nav mesh agent of one possible
future. A capsule seeking to collide with the present morning. An
indie developer sees the king's castle and tries to make for themselves a
smaller, fairer castle. But does not a castle entail walls from which to fire
arrows? Does not a castle sit upon a moat? Does not a castle require a King,
who rules?

If we have so many criticisms of the industry, why are we trying to build a
smaller version of it?

I see the manipulative, attention-sucking logic of social media praised in
every industry talk. I see games designed to exploit the screeching reactions
of celebrity streamers. I see radical political positions harvested, and used
as meaningless backdrops clumsily in every murder simulator. I see crafting,
inventory management, and base building forced into every game in an
evolutionary arms race.

From a materialist perspective, art is inherently pointless, which is a good
thing, because if we had to figure out a purpose for all of this stuff, it
would be a lot harder to make it.

There is simply an endless amount of ideas. Of manifold worlds. An infinity of
outputs. It's just something that happens automatically to us. In the minds of
animals, evolved to recognise patterns.

However, marketability, whether economic or social, proves only one thing:
that your work is able to be transmuted into another identical resource,
traded only in naked self-interest. We confuse our raw impulses, that create,
by churning ourselves on the numbers, by worrying about how much people will
like, or hate something, before we've even seen what that something will
become.

OUTSIDE, Sun begins to set on the castle

A wise person once remarked: There is a policeman in all of our heads, and he
must be destroyed. Maybe there is certainly also a scrum master and a marketing team in there as well.

If you feel like ignoring the market somehow removes all purpose in life,
consider all the things we still need to make that the market will never
support. We need video chat, but for finger painting. We need a federated
video game distribution system that is controlled by noone. Or what about a
rhythm game that syncs you with your neighbours, based on your own style? A
text messenger that occasionally bumps you into other people's conversations.
A simulation about collaboratively gardening the entire Earth, with real plant
species. Or what about a buddy system for the internet, because the internet
is a scarier place every day.

We don't have to give the gatekeepers any money if we don't sell our games. We
don't have to confuse our art with agile timelines and social media marketing
if we don't market our games. We don't have to use automated build systems and
test-driven development if we don't distribute on 25 different platforms. So
try anything, and everything, without giving the industry a second thought.
Make all of your own assets and give away all of your source code. Or take
something in the world as free, and modify it as your own.

Release your work like you stole it.

I'm not saying you need to quit your job. We still need to pay rent, at least
for a while. What I'm saying is that you can't sell out if you have nothing to
sell, and you'll never think of anything without profit sneaking in if you
don't shut it out for good.

Also if you're going to stay in the industry, let's get some unions going.

A different wise person said: You can't dismantle the master's house with the
master's tools. So forget the whole thing. Forget twitter fame, forget the
indie self-annihilation through overwork mythology. Forget jonablon flow.
Forget the industry even exists.

JACK removes capsule collider hat.

JACK: And meet me, in a field, after sunset. We can remove our prefabs. I have
something to show you, and I hope you have something for me.

END OF SCENE V

The following is a transcript of a talk I gave as part of our performance Data Mutations - Game of the Year Edition in 2018. You can watch a (not amazing quality) video of the performance here.

Crunching to the future

For most game artists, stories about bad labour practices in the video game industry are old news.

In the last couple of years, there were numerous reports about exploitative working conditions, sobering tales of gross underpayment, severe overworking often known as "crunch", lack of overtime compensation, no job stability and the alarming absence of unions.

This toxic relationship with labour is not limited to the industry's biggest players and similar problems exist in the indie scene, where artist will often endanger their physical and mental health,  sometimes being tougher on themselves than any boss would be, only to stay competitive, to ship their product on time and to get a shot at their dreams.

This has been going on for years and might provide a glimpse at how many of us may be working in the years to come... and how many of us are already working now.

The fact that the video games industry seem so representative of current labour practices and even seem to anticipate future labour practices, is not mere coincidence.

Seeing that games and work have always been strangely related, it makes complete sense that the video game industry has become a sort laboratory for the incubation of new strategies of capitalist exploitation.

Work hard, play hard

There is an essential proximity between work and play. Both are two different sides of the same coin, like inverted mirrors of themselves.

In video games the permeability of work and play becomes particularly apparent.

One essential aspect of work has always been what I will call terraforming - the act of domesticating nature and restructuring it to adapt it to our needs.  

This allows accumulation - of food, of raw materials like coal or wood, of wealth in all its forms.

Both of these essential functions of labour are dramatically over-represented in video games.

The terraforming is obvious - think of Sim City, Civilisation, Rust, Minecraft, etc. But the accumulation part is even more present - from collecting coins in Mario, to competing for points in almost every game around.

Excel, my love

The proximity of games and labour is even more apparent if we consider their shared aesthetics.

After all, we play video game on a computer, which is not only the main tool of modern capitalist labour but also the pinnacle of a long list of technologies designed for one of the most ancient of jobs: the accountant.

In a digital age when more and more jobs are done on computer screens glimmering with obscure interfaces like Google Adwords or impenetrable Excel sheets, it appears that video games and modern work share a kink for the same visuals: complex windows filled with statistics, status updates, task reports, progress measurements and flowcharts.

Finally, the production of video games itself has often a strange and eerie tendency of mirroring a kind of timeless labour - a bastard child between the hard physical labour of our past industrial society and the contemporary Excel grinding.  

There is no better example to illustrate this than the 3D artist. In IRL they work in front of a screen, spending long hours only slightly moving the tip of their fingers in a perfect illustration of modern office work. But take a look in the virtual space behind their screen, and you will see that they are in fact sculpting, modelling clay, cutting blocks as would any sculptor, miner or blacksmith of the past.

It could be argued that the prevalence of a certain labour aesthetic in games is perfectly normal - as work has always been a central aspect of human life. In this sense, video games are merely imitating the materiality of labour, taking inspiration from an everyday concern.  

However, in recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that inspiration goes in both ways.

The management of passions

"Gamification" has become a buzzword - the new favorite trend of the neoliberal entrepreneur.

The idea behind gamification is that games have a long tradition and experience in the art of "hooking" people, and thus, their tactics can be used to create true workaholics.  

Gamification has entered the office in the form of organizing principles which try to boost productivity by speaking to the creative, play loving part of our brains: from Teambuilding and the dreaded Escape Rooms, to the RPG-like Skill Planning, slides and endless feedback loops, badges, points and a swarm of meaningless awards rewarding meaningless tasks.

The worker in this brave new world works almost as hard and sometimes more as their ancestors, but - so the story goes - they do it while having fun, because their job is not only something which has to be done: it's their passion.

Passion here is the important word. The video game industry justifies its practices by arguing that the workers are not really working... they are doing what they love. And if you are doing what you love, you are able to spend that one extra night away from your family.

This doesn't just happen in the video game industry. In the age of enthusiastic entrepreneurship, we are being trained to see work as the greatest measure of our own worth, a reflection of our dreams and the direct path to self-realisation.

This is evident in the rhetoric of every job application or job interview, from somewhat creative marketing positions to Amazon robot workers: getting results is not enough anymore, you should be passionate about your work.

I would argue that the powers of late Capitalism are rapidly making a move from the management of bodies to the management of passions.

The dream of humans as rational agents making their choices based on carefully analysed information has long been debunked. It sometimes seems that all we are is a boiling bundle of unchecked emotions, into which the powers that control us - from our bosses, to our politicians - can tap, manipulating the passions than run through us like strings at the hands of a puppeteer.

Put us in a gray office building and tell us that if we don't do the work we will not get paid: for sure we will do the work, but we will put all our efforts to do the bare minimum. Tell us that we are young creatives making the world a better place and we will burst in the office every morning, a Latte Macchiato in one hand and a wide smile on our faces, ready to pump those numbers.

The good old metaphor of the carrot and the stick was wrong all along. Leave the stick out and give us the carrot. We will soon want another carrot, and then another and another and we will continue to run after those delicious carrots until we drop dead.

Gaming the system

But don't panic, everything is not as bleak as it sounds.

Until now, I argued that games are more or less a tool used to condition us to capitalist exploitation. But well made and well used, they might also just do the opposite and actively help us to resist… by allowing us to navigate statistical labyrinths more expertly, to train our bullshit detector and to see through the lies of the Silicon Valley mythology.

In the future, games could easily help us understand the mechanism of alienation underlying particular work situations.

Through new forms of  collaborations in game development, sharing of assets and skills, and a refusal to accept the management of passions imposed on us by late capitalism, it is possible to induce spaces of creation that are not exploitative, or oppressing, but liberating.

My point is : if games are so intricately related to capitalist work and its abuse, that means that they also are uniquely qualified to reflect on it and counter attack.

This is the final of our four ACID GAMES talks we gave at Università IULM in 2018. The others can be found here, here and here.

Looking back at the time we gave these talks I can't help myself but try and re-access the state of mind I was in when I wrote this. It was written very last minute sitting at a too small dinner table at an Airbnb in Milan, exhausted from a flight and a day job that was really really bad for my health. My hair falling out in chunks. And this trip was a personal experience of stepping outside of my usual reality that had started to feel more and more claustrophobic at that point. And writing (and now transcribing) this talk reminded me of the giddy elation felt when stepping into a newly discovered expanse (thank you for the birthday oysters!).

Like most of my talks it is less coherent presentation of "done" thoughts than an accumulation, an accretion disk for ideas that needed the point of gravity of a speaking engagement to attract each other into...something I guess.

1. Masochistic drives

Games are transient objects, immaterial systems, doomed to be overruled and erased by the next software updates, whole ecosystems of them lost in the purgatory of not-yet-emulated

and yet we make them.

Our backs might hurt from sitting long hours after already sitting long hours at our day jobs that pay our rents

and yet we make them.

They drive us crazy with all their tiny moving parts, the newest Unity update breaking our projects in the most unforeseen and annoying ways

and yet we make them.

The question stands: Why are we all masochists? We could have chosen to paint or dance or write or film, to pursue photography.  The reason why we do the things we do is a central point of reference. I remember that when I studied this was a question that everyone seemed to avoid asking. The WHY can tell us a lot of things.

2. ACID as method

These are all comments from a Let's Play video of our project Data Mutations. Notice the references to drugs and psychedelics in particular. It's funny to see that these comments are actually pointing towards something that we have been talking about for a while now.

Before his untimely death in 2017, Mark Fisher was working on a new book on what he coined “Acid Communism” a concept relating to the consciousness raising practices of the psychedelic countercultural movements of the 60s and 70s , envisioned as an counterpoint to the Capitalist Realist “there is no alternative" (to the neoliberal reality that is) narrative.

Acid meaning psychedelic, reality rendered malleable, expandable. Acid as corrosive ontological agent. Exit or egress from our reality filter bubbles.

3. Malleability and corrosion

You most likely remember the intense rush of euphoria when you made things in a game engine react to each other, to you, for the first time. Being the architect of a system of interlocking parts. In the end this is what games are. Games are systems, objects programmed to interact, retract, combine, fight, children inheriting properties from their parents and on and on it goes.

And as systems it might be hard to find another framework as uniquely equipped on commenting on other systems of any kind.

In a way there is this prevailing idea that beautiful computer graphics are the ones that are invisible. that interlace perfectly with our lived realities. The stain of technology meticulously removed by an invisible army of 3d and visual effect artists. the seams burned out as best as possible. since real time computer graphics allow videogames to emulate pre rendered graphic standards more and more we see more games being praised for their realistic graphics, nature-like nature and human-like humans. Patterns are the most fundamental underlying structures of the videogame (shoutout to Em Reed who is the victim of a very bad misattribution in the origial talk here, sorry Em!). They used to be much so more visible, in the tiled textures, looping animations, blocky polygons, ever repeating dialogue parts etc. Now all those things often times being considered an ugly and eerie other. Computers are made to be really good at making the same thing over and over again, copying into infinity. but more and more patterns are receding from our perception. AI driven animation, markov-chained dialogue, realistic physics engines creating the illusion of a "tile" free or better seamless experience. that makes me think of services like Uber or even Deliveroo or literally Seamless whose self-accaimed selling point is an ultimate seamless engagement of both customers and workers. ugly systems being effective because their code vanishes into the background. Ambient game-like governance.

4. Edges and Seams

There is this meme: 1 hour you spend working in Unity: you have a cube and it looks like shit. 1 hour in Unreal: you have a cube and it looks amazing. The software tools that we are using are inherently biased. Unity is apparently very good at making 3d games with harsh lighting and a moving capsule collider and so on. The softwares we use in our creations are built on patterns themselves, they all have seams at which they break easily revealing the machine underneath like a freudian slip.

So I urge you to look at the things others might consider ugly or faulty design: the seams of repeating textures, flipped normals, z fighting planes, stand and revel at the edge of terrains, as we all have our borders, an uncharted place beyond the HDRI skybox.

So what if we can use working in game engines as a method for self-outsiding, making and playing games as techniques of ontological widening, to imagine our lives in different ways as well?

5. Game building as culture building

When we define a culture as a conglomerate of rules of how things interact with each other, as patterns of behavior and reaction then in a way the systems that we build in game engines can be described as cultures as well. With this in mind it becomes clear that culture is something that is designed, it's people coming together and setting up rules for interaction. It's a mental antidote to the overarching feeling that things around you are static, forever. The mainstream media landscape mirroring and amplifying this feeling that we all share. Forthcomes the eternal ever expanding expanded franchise in which actors will never grow old or die or the blood of the young is being drained into the veins of aging libertarian silicone valley technocrats (also quite literally so). Immortal narratives in eternal temporal suspension. Apex individualism. Undying capitalist realism.

As game creators we will always ingrain our conscious, unconscious ideas, hopes and dreams, fears and regrets into our creations. And there is a reason why we chose to do projects together as AAA, as a collective. Designing games that way and experimenting with new forms of countercultural organization in the end being one and the same thing. We are setting up another mode of  production of cultural objects in order to make expressing new narratives even possible for us.

Roleplaying as if a better place is already here.

to hone our desire for an outside

so make your games your drugs

become a drug yourself

.

.

.

.

.

and then let's hope we can become each others drugs

acid acid acid

For those of you who have been waiting to play Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates on their home computers, we have good news for you: It's coming. Very soon. The precise date will be announced in a few weeks on our blog.

Thanks again to everyone who supports our work by attending our events, playing our games, giving us advice, and being our friends.

Love,

AAA Collective

This is the third of our four ACID GAMES talks we gave at Università IULM in 2018. The others can be found here and here.

The text below is not an 100% exact transcription of the talk, but a reproduction of the notes I used to prepare for it.

Introduction

I want to speak a little bit about collectives, games and how both can be useful for political struggle.

What are collectives? In general, a simple definition of a collective is a group of people that are motivated by a common interest, and working together to achieve a common objective.

I would argue that collectives (and art collectives in particular) have always been political to a certain degree. Very often they have been leaning to the left side of the political spectrum. But you also have right wing collectives - as we are in Italy I will just take the example futurism, which, at least in parts, was famously very sympathetic towards fascism.

Regardless of partisan orientation, collectives often are constructed as political entities aiming to fight the real or perceived power in place. Art collectives are often built as a response to state oppression, or to challenge the artistic status quo (to get marginalized artists into galleries, to give minorities more visibility, etc.).

Very often collectives are places of political activism. But what can they be today - especially in the game world?

I think the first question to ask is: what are we even fighting today? What are we up against?

I guess you could say our main problem is Capitalism.

I don't speak of capitalism as an economic system. I don't even think capitalism is really a good word to describe the economic system we live in. I also don't mean capitalism as a political view.

I mean Capitalism as a generalized experience - as a way to be in the world.

What is the experience of capitalism? I think capitalism is an experience of loss:

• The loss of the future
• The loss of community
• The loss of the sacred/magical

All of which results in a perceived loss of alternatives to the current status quo.

The loss of the Future

Do you ever think that the future never happened? Are you ever disappointed by the hopes you had as a kid? Where are the spaceships reaching to Andromeda, the teleportation pods, the benevolent aliens and the cool hoverboards?

We think of the internet as something so revolutionary but go back in time and show to your younger self that the best we could do in the future is basically a glorified encyclopedia and see what your past self thinks of that.

So there is this sense that the future is disappointing - which is probably why we have this strong nostalgia for the 80's, a time where the future seemed fascinating and open.

The loss of community

It is not only the future that disappeared, capitalism also eroded the social fabric itself.

While promising us the ultimate community through social media, smart objects and constant communications, the digital revolution has made us increasingly alone and isolated as seen by a worldwide epidemic of solitude and mental illness.

This has many causes. The collapse of the division between work and leisure time, the destruction of labour unions, hyper-individualisation and the constant push for self-representation, rapid urbanisation and the collapse of local communities have combined to produce a new lonely but productive individual - someone who is constantly their own business and brand  - but is also alone, someone who lives everywhere but is nowhere at home.

The loss of the sacred/magical

When you look at the news, you might think the world is strange, weird. But I think the problem is not that the world is strange, but that it is not strange enough.

Somehow, the invisible, the mystery, the sacred, has disappeared. God, famously, is dead. Ghosts are debunked. The aliens might never come or if they're already here they don't seem to care much about us. Sure, mysteries still exists in weak versions of themselves,  through conspiracies and so called "fake news", but the real wonder is gone.

Seemingly everything has been explained:  when we look at the skies we don't see god's anymore, we see Easy Jet planes flying to Majorca. When you mysteriously lose your phone in your home, you don't think that fairies stole it, you just go buy a new one on Amazon.

What it feels like to be digested

When we don't have a community in which we can thrive, when we don't have a fascinating future to look forward to, when we have no gods, no spirits, no mysteries to enchant our everyday routine,  what happens is that we get trapped by the present. All that exists is what is now and the slight variation brought to the now by already expected future technological evolutions (we know we are going to Mars one day, but even that seems boring now).

This constant infestation of a never ending present, is what it feels like to be digested by the capitalist superorganism. This uncanny feeling that we are living in the wrong world, that somehow we entered a parallel universe where the future never happened, where everything is kind of dull and the most exciting thing is to work for a start-up.

What can Collectives and Game Artists do?

I think they can do a lot.

Collectives mainly allow two things:

1. The sharing of resources: as an artist, working in collectives allows you to share money, material resources (PC, workplaces, etc), knowledge (someone knows how to make shaders, someone else how to paint, etc), contacts/networks and even art (assets). This helps to get out of the capitalist trap of the single genius artist, the glorification of individualism which forces you to be good at everything and almost always leads to failure and burnout. It's very important to remember: you don't have to be good at everything! Less time spent trying to be the best alone, is more time spent getting better together. More time being able to think about the world around you and to question it. Put simply: working in collectives is simpler, more effective, and good for your mental health.
2. The creation of a culture: becoming not only a group of people who work together, but a collective of minds, cross-pollinating with ideas, working towards the same ideals while avoiding getting trapped by the prejudices of one's own skin. Of course, the inherent risk of a collective is always to end up creating a bubble or an echo chamber, but if you manage to be open and permeable to ideas, if you continuously take inspiration from the different people inside your collective, you can become a sort of organic entity, continuously shifting and adapting, never losing yourself in the limits of the self. Collectives are places of discussion and debates, compromise and healthy disputes. Don't hold too tight to an idea. Don't write a manifesto, capitalism will swallow it and assimilate it. Be open and fluid - change your point of attack, learn from others, get over yourself. From this, a culture will emerge and it will allow you to get a long lost sense of community back.

The future should be weird

In addition to the power of collectives, I see two main advantages in games :

1. Games are THE medium of capitalism. We play games on a computer: the ultimate tool of modern capitalism. Also, games and capitalism share two very essential aspects: accumulation of wealth and the exploitation of nature. This is what capitalism does, and it is something that you can find in most games (collecting resources, making money, making points, terraforming, building infrastructure, gaming the environment, etc.). Not to mention gamification and how this concept is slowly infesting every interaction we have, at work, on social media or even at home. So basically when you make games, you are deep in the middle of capitalist production - which you can use. You are fighting back with the tools of the enemy.
2. Games can put the magic and the weird back in life. We need magic. Not the disney kind but the kind the Celts called Anderswelt, the sense of an Otherworld, a mysterious place lurking in the shadows that can help us escape but also make sense of the real world, and most importantly bring a sense of wonder back into our lives. Games can do that very well. Why?

Even more than other form of arts, games create places that you can explore, that use all these sensory effects, sound, visuals, storyline to create a completely immersive experience. To some extent, games come closer to a psychedelic drug trip than any other form of art. And if ancient shamans used drugs to create a bridge to the sacred, could we maybe do the same with games? I think we can.

Games use all these sensory tools and these complex systems to produce their effect. In this sensory overload, they perfectly mirror the complexity of our society. And any Underworld is always a mirror of the world above ground. Any magical realm is the pulsating shadow of the mundane.

Of course, you can use games to build giant worlds with new experimental political systems. But you can also just create weird magical, nonsensical places. As opposed to a medium like literature that is around since ever, games are extremely new.

They still have a future.

Everything is still possible. Every weird world you can think of is just waiting to be created.

On December 5 we had our Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates Release Party at panke.gallery.

The culmination of two years worth of (unpaid, unknown) work, what was once contained within private meetings and sleepless nights was released into the world. Seeing so many people watch the whole 1.5 hour live play through of the game was an honour that really made all the work worth it. Knowing that we’ve built our own community from the ground up is something we’re proud of.

Thank you to BUNGALOVV ( TRRUENO / Infinite Machine) for the DJ set. It was the perfect mood for the post event.

Furthermore, thank you to Andrew Knight for volunteering to interview us and film the event. Look forward to a short documentary about AAA sometime in the future from him!

Utopias will be available to download mid February next year for download on both Windows and Mac. Subscribe to our mailing list and/or social media to stay updated with our future releases and events.

See you in the new decade. Another world is possible.

Sincerely,
Chloê, Fedya, Gabriel, Jack, Jessica, Matias, Merle, Nick, Tristan, Troy

xoxo

This is the second of our four ACID GAMES talks we gave at Università IULM in 2018. The first can be found here.

Hello, this is my talk, it’s called: UNLEARNING, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Hive Mind.

Intro

!Disclaimer! There’s no right way to make art, or games, or ąяţǥąʍ€$. These are my own viewpoints on collective work, so please don't hold my collaborators against my own terrible ideas. And three -

I - Collaboration

All so called games start with an idea.

Brilliant ideas like:
What if I could kill a lot of people?
or
What if I could kill A LOT of people?
or
What if I could kill A LOT of people in VR?

But before we talk about ideas, we need to talk about how these ideas are EXPRESSED!

THE PYRAMID OF VIDEOGAMES

FLOOR 2: THE EXPOSED AAA FRUSTUM OF SURFACE EXPRESSION

This is kinda like a self help graphic I’ve created: I created this artwork, it’s called The Pyramid of Videogames.

The top is a very complicated subject we’re not going to get into.
The second is, “the exposed AAA frustum of SURFACE EXPRESSION”. And by “AAA”, I don’t mean us, I mean the actual AAA, that we all know, the mainstream AAA. So this expression exists outside of the behaviour patterns of the game. You have a theme, and then you have your game designers, your dev team, and the art team, and they’re kinda getting these abstract concepts and kind of applying an idea to them. This is like, if you get a big rectangle, and you know it does 10 points of damage, and so you turn it into an axe, or something like that, because your game is a Skyrim game.

So this is kinda how Skyrim and Fallout 4 are essentially the same game, and you’re kinda just changing the setting, and the mechanics and the theme are kind of separated. Another one is the Talos Principle (Has anyone played that?), where it’s like quotes from the bible while you push boxes around - I don’t really understand what that games about. Gameplay, story, and gameplay, story, rinse repeat, kind of creates this cognitive dissonance: like press “F” to pay respects.

It can also be weaponized, cos you’re kind of associating something enjoyable with something that is not actually related. Like how Call of Duty games are made to be fun, but they are also made to recruit people to the military. There’s no relationship between those two things, but you think there is when you play it. I couldn’t have put it better myself: in game design, “environmental storytelling” is the art of placing skulls near a toilet - [ben esposito 5:16AM - 15 March, 2016].

FLOOR 1: THE IGF NOMINATED INNER FRUSTUM OF INPUT EXPRESSION

So that’s level one, and now we’re going down a ground, this is the “IGF nominated innerfrustrum of INPUT EXPRESSION”. This is like what indie games does. Indie games love this. This is when you create a systemic thing that is expressing your idea. I think probably the best example is “Papers Please” - this is like a holy grail to many people, I think it’s a fantastic game, in fact this view is totally legit - to express the theme through the direct actions of the player. The medium is the message.

FLOOR 0: FACELESS PROLE CODE SLAVE LOWER FRUSTUM OF FOUNDATIONAL EXPRESSION

But then, there is a level below that, ground zero, the “faceless prole code slave lower frustum of FOUNDATIONAL EXPRESSION”. So, what does that mean? Well, as an example, I worked on this game called “Data Mutations” with Chloê, Gabriel, Jack, Jessica, Matias, Merle, Mike, Tristan, Nomi, Yulia, Troy and Fedya - and it involved collective asset creation. This is an alternative to industrial power hierarchies that most games are made.

This is what the game looks like, I guess some of you are already familiar with it. It doesn’t look like a typical game.

From indie to AAA, all these games are made 👏 the 👏 exact 👏 same 👏 way. You have a hierarchy that’s formed of leads, and there’s leads above that, and so on. The responsibility is going downward, and people at the bottom are paid less, the people at the top are paid more.

All games are made this way, basically, even a team of two has a structure like this. A team of one has a structure like this. And so, the indie game dev is internalising the industry. They’re crunching like they’re going to get fired, but they literally don’t have a job. They’ve embodied the industry themselves. It’s interesting to think about “how independent are they?”, if their method of creation is drawn from such a toxic industry? The industry model of creation dictates the type of games being created. The industry model equals the vision of the most powerful (through wealth or social capital) dictated to the voiceless worker drones. Before there are interactive systems that make your game, there is the environment in which the work is created. But the internalisation continues…

II - Distribution

Let’s do a little maths experiment...

This is my bank account, that's 237€.

This is the earnings Data Mutation makes: 25€. That’s not much.
12 people worked on Data Mutations.
Thats 25€ divided by 12, that’s 2.083333€.

I’ve been working on Data Mutations in some capacity (assets, my game, trailer, social media, talks, performances, exhibition) for 10 months. Let’s say 3.5 months, full time. 2.083333€ divided by 3.5 equals 0.59€ per month, that’s not much.
But it’s not bad news for everyone...

Esteemed let’s player, Vinesauce, did a let’s play of Data Mutations. It looks like it has 23,877 views, 578 likes, 10 dislikes. It seems like people like it, that’s pretty cool. I’ve checked out a bunch of YouTube money calculators, this isn’t a hard science, obviously, but the numbers are pretty similar across all of them. Vinesauce earns, on average, $732 per video. He’s got approximately $289,149 total from his channel. The Data Mutations video was unedited, so it was effectively made in real time, so it took less than an hour to create, it took 40 minutes.
Vinesauce uploads approximately 90 videos a month. $732 times 90 equals $65,880 per month. I earned 21k last year while making games during weekends, evenings and sick days - so essentially I had to work to work more. Therefore, Vinesauce earns 3 times as much per month as the actual creators of the games he plays do in a year.

But it keeps going, because Youtube uses a revenue split of 45/55 - 45% going to the channel owner and 55% going to YouTube. So if Vinesauce earns $65,880 per month, that means YouTube earns $80,520 per month from Vinesauce. YouTube steals $80,520 from Vinesauce, who exploits hundreds if not thousands of unpaid game developers for nothing. And by the way, we do not get spikes in downloads from these let’s play videos, because they are essentially mocking strange games. No one who watches these videos wants to play these games. So trickle down economics just does not work.

So, this kind of begs the question: Why do we do this, If we’re just going to get insulted by randoms on the internet? Sometimes the hatred is funny, sometimes it’s not if you're feeling particularly vulnerable. And what’s more frustrating is falling between the cracks, between the game space and the art space.

III - Collectively Dreaming New Cultures

Do we do this for the joy of collaborating with friends and people all over the world?

Or do we do it for the thrill of 50 people crowded in one room playing your game - the pride in creating a communal space?

Or is it the continual journey in exploring computer logic artistically - to transform a bureaucratic machine into a poet?

Whatever the reason, simply put: collectively owned work built without infantilizing or stroking the toxic ego of the player is at odds with the populist society we live in. Social media, streaming, and the race to the bottom of the digital marketplace is destroying culture and killing artists. Without a populist demographic, we, as AAA, have no platform, we are invisible within this current ecosystem - and I think that’s good, because that’s not the future I want to live in. Do you? Fuck their platform, burn it to the ground.

Did you know: culture is created collectively, by people. Together.
Did you also know: You are a person.

Games are a series of arbitrary choices by the 80’s toy industry that blew up to a massive scale and became cultural canon. Our current understanding and literacy of this ephemeral medium of real time systemic art is so impossibly narrow. Something much greater is possible. I am not sure what it is, but I know we will not find it within the centralised culture we presently find ourselves. It’s time to branch off and discover a new culture together. It’s like if you looked at this animal and thought it was a dog (it’s what I think).

This is The Pyramid of Videogames again. That’s where we have to go, that inverse pyramid, that’s below the ground.

No matter your future direction after study, whether  you become an artist or professional game dev, or a butcher, or a baker: I wish you an authentic happy life. The world is your oyster, and the oysters are pretty good in Italy, so thank you for your time.

Also, don’t follow me on Twitter. But I’m thinking of starting a mailing list, so if anyone wants just give me your email.

Troy's mailing list
AAA mailing list

Hey friends,

Approximately 100 years ago (last year), some members of AAA, including myself, gave some talks at the Università IULM, Milan. Writing this out today, considering we are just finishing Utopias now (a project I introduce at the end of this talk, before we even technically started it), feels pretty damn weird. I now remember my state of mind about the project then, all of my hopes and dreams for it, and can’t help but compare that to how it is now. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. It’s not a disappointment, but it’s something like that. When you create something, you commit to that thing every step of the way. As you do this, you destroy potential other ways it could have been. For me, personally, this is a loss that I feel grief over perpetually while creating. Sometimes, it almost prevents me from creating at all, for the fear of what I am destroying. I also feel immense joy while I create, and I am proud of what we have created together: Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates - which will be released to the public on December 5th this year. The talk I post here describes things from my perspective, from a previous version of myself, which I want to emphasise as extremely limited. This is not AAA canon, it’s my ancient head canon. So, do not hold any members of AAA, past, present or future, accountable for what I say.

Love,

Some Donkus

Actual Introduction

Hello, my name is Jessica [Some Donkus]. And I participate in the collective AAA, and in my presentation I’m gonna go through basically what AAA is, and two projects that we have worked on: Our second project Data Mutations, which is complete, and our third project Utopias, which we are working on now.

What is AAA Collective?

I’ll start off with “What is AAA?” - Here’s a short history: It started off originally as a meet up, called ąяţǥąʍ€$, at a venue in Berlin called Spektrum, which is dedicated to art, science and technology - and they host us for free, which is very nice of them [RIP Spektrum, bless Lieke forever] ~ and we’ve been doing this for 3 years, and we do it every two months. It was originally started by Merle and Troy, because when they came to Berlin, they realised there was a pretty healthy indie games scene, but there was no one really making art with game engines. So they decided to start their own group, and I think it’s flourishing. There's usually about 50 people who attend, and it's always new people, with maybe some familiar faces. Then Troy started a Slack, so people who wanna join, who go the ąяţǥąʍ€$ meet up, they can ask, and then they are added. Current there are about 50 members total, but about 8-12 that are super active. And we just talk about games, and games that we are working on, and art, and stuff like that. So then, from there, there was this: people who wanted to work together - and this became AAA collective: Which has no set members, no set amount of members, there’s no requirement for where they live, or what kind of work they do, or how much they want to contribute - it’s kind of an amorphous blob...

And these are more or less the members that participated in our second work: Data Mutations. I can’t really describe AAA collective like completely accurately, I’m just one person, but this is just based on my observations: We are multifarious: we have different backgrounds, different personalities, different values, all of us have different jobs: Some of us are network engineers, some of us are game designers, some of us are scientists, some of us are data scientists. We are not all the same type of person. We are very generous. We collectively share labor, by contributing assets to each other, if somebody is good at objects or programming, they might do the work for someone else completely on their own accord [if they have the time and they’re keen to do it]. It’s not expected, but you know, maybe you want to help someone out a bit. We are non-hierarchical: there’s no one person making decisions, like what we do, or who is in AAA collective, it just kind of self regulates. And we are completely non-commercial: we’ve made 0$ from AAA collective, maybe, we have even made negative money, I’m not sure… : (((

What is Data Mutations?

I’m going to describe how Data Mutations, our second collective project, worked, to give you a good idea what our working process is like. You might see familiar techniques, but I think it’s kind of a weird atypical process, so maybe it’s helpful to learn about something that's not super regulated.

So on June 14th 2017, we met in my office at the hospital, after hours, to talk about what kind of games we wanted to make, or if we wanted to work together at all. And the only thing we decided on was that we wanted to create assets, randomly, from a lottery. We wanted to make things we weren't used to making, like, maybe someone who is really good at sculpting ends up making a poem, or something like this. There was a list: text, images, sounds, shaders, and they were assigned randomly to all the people. This is the concept we wanted to go with. The next day, Merle wrote a manifesto based on this concept. The idea is that you make these assets, they become a pool, like a gene pool. You can mutate those assets: say you have an image, you can convert that into text, or if you have text, you can convert that into sound. If you have a sound, you can convert that into an object - cos information on the computer is more or less a bunch of numbers, and if you mash it around enough, it can become something else. We create mutant projects, and we ourselves become mutants.

From June 16th - July 15th, we created these assets, from the lottery, idk exactly, I didn't make it... it was in a spreadsheet??? And this was the result: we have some poems, an object, motivational poster, a sculpture of a play set, 3 different sounds collection, a modular architecture building made of different architectural parts, a really bad shader, we have a microscopic image of some bacteria, and another sculpture called Armball (which you’ll see a lot later), we have a transparent .png which can be used as a crosshair, another very long poem, another sculpture and 3 sounds, 2 very short poems, and everyone's favourite: Eggman. We have 2 animated gifs separated into pngs, we have a really long textural sound and a couple of images, and then this layered sound, so, if you play them all together it makes a kind of music set, but you could separate those layers into individual ones and create another song from them. We also have a rigged character model and a large texture atlas... and we used all these assets together over a weekend to start building something. Immediately we have some repetitive motifs happening, cos were all using the same assets. Between July 16th, and July 23rd, when we worked on these games after the initial jam, you start to see this Armball being used, and also this modular room being used to make different architectures - so, although we're not planning to make something related, it's already occurring cos were using the same stuff.

August 5th, we decided to show our progress and give each other a critique. We invited some friends over, Merle made this great poster, we met in Troys bedroom, some of us on Skype, and some of us in real life, and we played all the games and gave each other some critiques.

From August 6th to November 1st, we continued to work on our games based on that critique. And these are the results:

This is my game: Gallery Prison. This is Fedya’s game: G-moll. This is Matias’ game: New Age of Swarms. This is Troy's game: All That is Solid Melts Into. This Merle’s game: The Means of Production. This Super’s Game: Wildlife Museum. This is Tristan’s game: Bummer Coaster Ride. This Gabriel’s game: Best Practises.

So from Nov 1st - I mean the games are made now!!! - but from Nov 1st to Nov 15th, we thought shit: we have like... 9 games??? But they feel like individual games, but we made them together, and we want them to feel like they belong together. So our first attempt to bring them together was to make a dedicated website to hosting them, and we tried a bunch of different things, like hosting them on itch or whatever, but it seemed too fragmented. So we zipped them into one file, and told people to download it? And it just… also didn't seem to make sense. The website was OK, but it did not unify them like we hoped. So, Troy and I got together, and we made another Unity project, which encapsulates all the other the other projects by launching them remotely, so it's kinda like... another game, which holds all the other games… and kinda acts like a launcher, so you can select which game you want, and I feel like now it’s more apparent that these things belong together and they are not separate games. This was the best we could do, in post, to join things together that were initially not made together, like not made in the same [Unity] project.

Amaze 2018

Then April 25th 2018, we were somehow nominated for an award at a games festival in Berlin, even though it’s not a game, it’s art, and don't tell anybody. We were also asked to give the opening night performance. We were given an hour and a half time slot, and we kinda went a little bit overboard, I think - because for that hour and a half we did a performance which was a mixture of a spoof of lets plays, mixed with a little bit of esports flavour, mixed with a talk series, mixed with performance art - and it was completely choreographed for the entire hour and a half. It had AV! We made an entire engine for overlaying the presentations with special effects, having a little picture in picture of our streamer, Troy, who hosted the event, like as this streamer persona. And we played the games for people, but we also talked about the games, and we talked about what we like about making games, and we made a huge to-do out of it…

From me, more or less giving the talk I’m giving now (but this is the deluxe version ; P) - to Jack, who dressed as a capsule collider and talked about games from the perspective of a Unity prefab. We had Matias, who generated a manifesto from other manifestos, and using search and replace magic created a new one to describe our collective. We had Gabriel, who gave a manifesto about games and labor politics. We had Chloê give a talk about what she would like to see more in art, not just games, but art in general. We had Merle give a reading of a poem over a really long period of time, including this repetitive breathing performance. And I think people were interested, confused, maybe... I’m not sure.

What I realised afterwards is that we kind of created another pocket universe, something that's different than normal everyday life. This really weird mixture of lets plays, esports, performance art, talk series - which was an environment that was a different way to experience the games, as opposed to if you downloaded them and played them yourself in your bedroom at night, or if you watch somebody else play them on YouTube. This was like a completely different other reality context to experience seeing a let's play, or what a game can be. And because of this, I feel like we had more control over how the game might be interpreted by the viewer. And I thought this was really interesting. The game is currently here, at this URL: https://aaa.itch.io/datamutations, If you haven't played it already, and you wanna play it.

Utopias

Feb 13th this year [2018], we decided to start a new project. Data Mutations is over!!!! and hopefully we never have to do it again!!!! We wanna do something new!!!!!!!!! We met to discuss what we liked about Data Mutations, like working on it, and what we did not like, and what we wanted to do as we move forward. We came to some agreement on how we want to work, for now. The new project is called Utopias, and where Data Mutations was focused on sharing this asset gene pool and mutating it, Utopias is focused on linking worlds to other worlds. We decided there should be no engine limit. We learned from Data Mutations that it doesn’t matter what engine you make the game in, we can still link it together with code that remotely executes other code. There’s always a way to link something. We also agreed that Utopias can be experienced from any point of view. It doesn't have to be first person game, it doesn't even have to be 3D, it doesn't even have to have images in it, it could just be text or sound. This type of experience and linking can even go as far as to embed utopias in other utopias. Someone's game could be on a mobile devices in someone else's game. It can get recursive.

We also agreed to share resources in a slightly more formalised way. Before we were just putting it in a big GDrive folder, but we started to host our own GitLab server. People are posting their entire projects, or tools - For example, Chloê made a tool for Unity that automatically grabs synonyms for words, so if you wanted to write a poem that dynamically changed, it would find synonyms for words for you, and mutate the poem as you interacted with it. And you could use that tool in your game if you want. We also agreed to have regular meetings, so with Data Mutations before, we met a few times, and gave progress reports, but we didn't really develop the games together. So, we meet once every week or two weeks, not everyone has to be there, but more or less we agreed to have these interval meetings so we can shape the Utopias towards each other - and hopefully they will converge. The main overall goal is to have these things come together in a natural way, instead of like with Data Mutations, we kind of tried to wrap them together in post with this launcher game. We’re hoping that over time, we can shape these games towards each other in a way that makes more sense conceptually - I hope!

Thank you for listening. If you want you can download our game, and all our assets. Like, It’s not just the game, it’s like all our assets, the entire manifesto. If you wanted, you could even make your own, I guess! Anyway, thank you. https://aaa.itch.io/datamutations

See the video of all the talks here: https://vimeo.com/277525284

In trying to describe our (upcoming) Utopias project, we settled on explaining it as nine interlinked utopias - each utopia a "world" developed in a game engine by a member of the collective. We hope that this explanation at least manages to convey the task we set ourselves for this project in practical terms, but of course we run the risk of this project being quite literally evaluated as "nine people's ideal worlds, explained in 3D simulations".

In reality, the project is much more of a sprawling mess of ideas. Which is how the extended version of the project name came about - "Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates". During the long development time of the project, we became aware how much "utopia" was not necessarily a place or an ideal we could attain but rather a process of trying to navigate the territory that lies between us and change. On the one hand, this very much describes the practical process of learning to organise a collective. We are navigating without coordinates (or at best, hazy ones).

utopia is cooking meals to share after long sunday dev sessions, utopia is trying to figure out how to find the time to develop a game when we all have "real jobs", utopia is fumbling our way though collective non-hierarchical decision-making. utopia is trying to imagine that things could be different, utopia is trying not to be crippled by how things are.

utopia is not a literal place, this isn't a 3D simulation of a utopian world, utopia is the process, utopia is trying to find our way to utopia, utopia is navigating without coordinates, utopia is reaching forward into darkness and reading the way with our hands, utopia is looking with our fingers when our eyes fail us, utopia is rubbing the meaning out of snail skins and utopia is ciphering fish tails with fingertips.

PRESENTATION OF A COLLECTIVE INTERACTIVE UTOPIAN EXPERIENCE

December 5th, 2019. 20:00 - late.
panke.gallery, Gerichtstr. 23, Hof 5 13347 Berlin.

RSVP!
Facebook Event and/or Meet Up

Join us at the wonderful panke.gallery to celebrate the release of our latest project, Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates.
Utopias is an interactive digital maze made up of nine interlinked games. A network of conflicting realities exploring the possibility of utopian ideals.

🔓 It's a game and you can play it.
🔓 But you can also just chill, grab a drink and watch us perform it for you :)
🔓 ~ We got palm trees and space ships and islands of fingers and custom gravities ~
🔓 WE OFFER A COMFY AND CHILL ARCADE AND LIVE PERFORMANCE WITH MUSIC

🕳️ Made in Berlin.
✖️ No institutions.
✖️ No bosses.
✖️ No budget.

🦽 Venue has wheelchair access.
Nearest train station is U+S Wedding, which has elevator to street level.

💸 FREE 💸
bring your friends and hang out with us for an hour or stay and dance into the night.

⚔️ About AAA ⚔️
AAA is an international collective that uses video game engines to explore topics of collaboration and culture building.
Find more info about us here https://aaasoftwa.re/

Another world is possible.