Lattice is a cooperative, five-player Game Boy game controlled not with buttons and joysticks but through the act of holding hands. Players win by collectively directing the avatar to the end of a pixelated maze using jumper wires and a USB circuit board with preprogrammed directions.
Materials: GB Studio, MaKey MaKey, Adobe Photoshop
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How does interface alter the way we engage with games and with humans? Is it possible to build trust and companionship directly into game mechanics? What does the intimate act of holding hands do to a standard game form (the RPG maze)? How are decisions (at moral or spatial crossroads) negotiated between players?
The goal behind Latice was to convey a feeling of trust and companionship through interface. I wanted to transpose the intimacy between hands and hardware onto an intimacy between players. The prototype harnessed the affordances of the MaKey MaKey to impinge on human conductivity to catalyze in-game action; players collectively explored the game world as the controller rather than through it.
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Exploring design as a metaphorical process, Rusch and Weise observe that players only ever have a limited perception of what occurs in a virtual world. Bridging the gap requires the “interface metaphors” of hardware and conceptual abstraction. But the authors’ close readings of the games Passage and Ico—which they see as exemplary of how “abstract concepts can be made tangible, first for designers, then for players”—lacked engagement with the embodied experience of hardware use.1 Although they posit that Passage and Ico’s mechanics push against the limits of interface to produce emotionally rich experiences, both games remain resolutely reliant on the controller—which advantages some and disadvantages others through industrial design.2 Of Ico, Rusch and Weise explain, “you grab [Yorda]’s hand” to lead her, but, materially, all you do is press R1 on the PlayStation controller.3
With literal handholding between players as Lattice’s core mechanic, the game succeeded as a provocative transformation of player interactions and platform use. The human controller altered how players navigated and experienced an 8-bit RPG, by inviting them to try new forms of interaction.4 While players initially held hands to move the sprite, they later began experimenting with alternative forms of contact: tapping, fist-bumping, high-fiving, hugging. This free exploration naturalized the mechanics and built a feeling of trust and companionship among players.
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While the mechanics were successful in reintroducing touch, a point of failure (both aesthetically and mechanically) is that the center player who held the ground wire had a disproportionate amount of power (they could reach to other players) and nominal control over the A button. Although I had intended to animate all five players on the screen at once (like Link in Four Swords), GB Studio’s constraints prevented me from implementing a visual metaphor to equalize agency. Potential ways to address this power imbalance include:
giving the center player a separate, partially covered screen so they can only see tiles immediately around them
instructing the center player not to move toward others but to accept the hands that are offered.
Despite the disproportionate distribution of power, the centre player often deferred to the others, trusting their companions to lead them through the maze. The game was successful in that players observed that the game asked them to trust each other well before I explained my research aims. The feeling came across through touch and through the game’s aesthetic/narrative qualities, particularly around the moral dilemmas encountered in the maze.
Ike
A successful practical contribution is therefore that the project invites players to reflect on their approach to decision making. Early on in the game, players find a frog and a duck and can choose to feed the frog to the duck or let the duck go hungry. Decisions in the maze impact the aesthetic composition of the game’s final scenes: if players feed a frog to the duck, the duck will appear in the garden, but the frog will not (and vice versa). Decisions therefore have consequences that players must collectively accept. This dilemma was particularly well-received, since players enjoyed how there was no right answer but there was a cost nonetheless.
As the group navigated the geographical and moral landscape of the 8-bit woods, they discussed the power dynamics behind the mechanics (“I knew we should have gone the other way. You should have listened to me,” said a player who had reached out a hand to head east, but the group had headed north instead). When handing twin girls a poison mushroom, the center player said “I don’t agree with this” even as he pressed the A button to feed them the lethal fungus. After the act, he said, “okay, I did that, but now I feel bad about it.”
In the conversation that ensued after players reached the garden, they observed their run skewed dark and attributed it to playing with friends. Players said they would have made “better” choices had they been alone, but, because they were together, they felt safe exploring darker options. This outcome attests to the prototype’s success in creating a feeling of trust while fulfilling the practical aim of asking players to think about their interactions with the game and each other. Lattice’s aesthetic qualities—especially the nostalgia of the 8-bit style—elicited feelings of guilt and empathy, inviting players to question their decisions upon completing the game.
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In addition to being useful art for thinking about human interactions, the prototype was successful as a personal project. The affordances and constraints of GB Studio—built around the limitations of Game Boy hardware—not only rendered my doctoral research more concrete but also allowed me to cultivate an artistic fingerprint I hope to develop as a tool for future research-creation. This free, open-source program draws its affordances and constraints from the limitations of Game Boy hardware—the object of my doctoral research. Aesthetically, it’s nostalgic; mechanically, it’s easy to use and connect to the MaKey MaKey.
But GB Studio is also steeped in slowness. Just as Ian Bogost suggests the Atari is a slow machine, the process of building a Game Boy ROM through GB Studio is a lengthy and meticulous one.5 Most Game Boy games build worlds with tilesets, sheets of unique 8 x 8-pixel tiles. Developers instruct the system on where to place each tile through programmed tilemaps; backgrounds are then procedurally generated by the system itself. In GB Studio, the technical complexity of coding tilemaps gives way to a drag-and-drop visual interface where the designer can input complete backgrounds prepared in an image editing software. For over 40 hours, I manually designed 32 unique Game Boy scenes pixel by pixel in Adobe Photoshop. The experience was an exercise in patience: an hour of work might result in a single line of trees.6 While I found the experience meditative and rewarding, it was ultimately too demanding to be sustainable as we moved further into the semester.
Ike
Notes
1 Doris C. Rusch and Matthew Weise, “Games About LOVE and TRUST? Harnessing the Power of Metaphors for Experience Design,” in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games (New York: ACM, 2008), 89-97, 96.
2 Janine Fron, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, “The Hegemony of Play,” in Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2007), 309-318.
3 Rusch and Weise, “Games about LOVE and TRUST,” 94.
4 My evaluation of this prototype draws primarily on audience response. The prototype’s success is indebted to my playtesters, who were not only all friends but also familiar with the Game Boy aesthetic. I am cognizant that the prototype was tested under ideal conditions; groups of strangers or people who have no emotional connection to 8-bit games (such as my grandmother) may approach the game differently.
5 Ian Bogost, A Slow Year: Game Poems (Louisville: Open Texture, 2010).
6 Incidentally, my process for creating backgrounds in a gridded Photoshop document is virtually identical to how I design my own cross-stitch patterns. The only difference is that machine, rather than my needle, weaves together the final output.
