This is my first public post for Soccerthon88, a game project.
I’ve been working on this one since fall, but I consider that to be an experimental sprint, I’m easing into a more structured work period with the project now that some resources have been freed up for it and there’s been some interest from conferences to talk about the project.
Danny Snelson is my good friend and was one of my Thesis Advisors when I was in my MFA program at UCLA. This project presented itself when VHS footage that his estranged grandfather had shot of his family and their small town during the last sanctioned Guiness Book of World Records endurance record attempt— a 75+ hour long game of outdoor soccer.
I’m following a few different paths of kismet into this project. My thesis project was about games as psychogeographic territory for family drama and trauma, a sort of extra wing of a house that children retreated into. I was also working with some self-imposed formal constraints, including using a palette of tiles/characters that I could combine in different ways like lego to represent different things. Very early in our talks Danny said he wanted to adopt the visual language of the NES game GOAL!, which came out the same year and was played heavily in his household. This was exciting to me because the NES handles its graphics as 8x8 pixel tiles. There was an opportunity to break the GOAL! graphics up and reuse them as material, in the same way that the images and text of the recorded video were material.
So far the GOAL! graphics have suggested some other interesting formal qualities, such as an unusual isometric perspective that suggests a specific style of pixel art when new graphics need to be made.
Early on I wanted to recreate the gameplay of GOAL! with a major difference, the game clock would continue to tick indefinitely, and the game would start to behave as if the time was buffer overflowing into the video ram, exposing the grid and tiles that the game was made of in a glitch effect. This is still part of the current prototype, but I’ve discovered that programming quality soccer game ai for computer controlled players is well above my punching weight (I’d love to find out how the programmers of the Jaleco game did it on the NES/Famicom!). As we start to slow down and design a bit, we’ll likely be backgrounding the soccer playing to something simpler. After all, nobody cared who won or lost in the real world event. It was an endurance feat, one that might have had some unexamined religious overtones given the heavy Mormon demographics of the town in which the game took place. Danny and I both are thinking of this as a sort of horror game– We’ve been discussing different flavors of media glitch as hallucination and religious vision. Movies like They Shoot Horses, Don’t They and Simon of the Desert have come up in our talks. I’ve managed to already include a crude day/nigh cycle in the prototype, but I’m hoping to empasize the cycle of half hour chunks and days. For the game to actually run in real time for the length of time that the record-setting event did, we’ll need it to be able to function autonomously too. Maybe a game even ‘continues’ when it’s quit. You open it in the morning to intervene and check on status. It could be that there are only a few human interventions allowed a day, and the rest is simulation, seeing who passes out, seeing chatter among the characters. Danny is a professor in the English Department at UCLA with heavy crossover into the Design Media Arts department, so he has his own ideas about the game as a poetic work that centers text. I also have a lot of ideas about this, coming fresh from my Didaktik Gama experiments, that kicked and stretched character-sets as both word and meaning building material as well as image. Things I learned from last summer seem to be getting their more practiced day in the sun here. Yesterday, as an exercise, I made a p5.js sketch playing with making quilt like patterns using tiles ripped from GOAL! along with lines of transcribed dialogue from the VHS footage.
It’s slightly unstable territory making a game with all this real stuff. I probably won’t be posting very regularly about the project as there’s some legal or even ethical stuff to figure out, not to mention I don’t want to demystify the project. This is what I’m currently working on, though. Drop me a note if you know how to program 2d soccer ai :)
