Interview with Mark Essen aka messhof
I tell you something: You have to read this and then you have to play his wired games. Better! First you play his games and then you read the interview. Mark Essen: running under the alias ’messhof’ is a very – very – very gifted artist. His works are breathtaking, fresh and of course genius. His style is uncompromise and rocks also galleries. His iconoclastic humour, the vexing and funny game play, the special music selection and the stories will get you fly.
Check out: Cowboyana, Flywrench, Punishment, Scrap Collector (new!), Randy Ballma: Municipal Abortionist, You found the grappling Hook.
Wanted:
Name: Mark Essen
Age: 22
Country: USA
Your inspiring ONEs:
One film director: Luther Price
One writer: James Fenimore Cooper
One philosopher: Angry Rainbow Bear
One game designer: Jonatan Söderström
One drink: Old Overholt
One game: Crystal Quest
One film: Buffalo 66
One book: Hackers
One statement: That sounds sweet you should do that
Storno (S): Mark Essen is a quite german name, how deep are your german roots?
Mark Essen (ME): I’m not sure. My granddad is German, but I don’t know much about family that’s still over there, if there is any. Essen is actually from my dad’s side, and Swedish. I did study at the HfG in Karlsruhe for a semester in 2007, but that’s been my only time in Germany.
S: I’ve heard you studied experimental film. Why do you experiment with computer games instead?
ME: I’ve always played a lot of games, but there was always such a barrier to entry to experimenting with them. Playing games and making games share a lot of the same skills, but you need this other thing, programming knowledge, to do anything. In film or video, you just need to look at something and say “yeah, that’s what my audience will see now” and then you shoot it. How well you shoot it will influence a lot, but anyone can press record and get something. If you want to make a game about a character that can shoot a gun and sit in a chair and hang his head you need to know about programming movement, collision checking, keyboard input, graphics, etc. So as great as that idea was, programming even a rudimentary version of it isn’t possible without a lot of background on the subject.
I think I stopped obsessively playing games sometime in high school and started learning how to program my own. For most of college making games was still really frustrating because I was so pretty terrible at coding. If I changed the some character momentum routine none of the collisions would work, so rather than figure out why, I’d make a bunch of invisible walls and floors that were thicker than the normal ones. This would limit me from making other kinds of floors, etc. Things are better now, but I know that if I spent some more time learning how to program better I could have a better vocabulary to work with. Limitations are good though.
S: Can you draw some artistic parallels between film and game making?
ME: Films and games share a lot of the same ideas like tension and rhythm, and you play a game to test how those ideas are coming across the same way you would watch rough cuts from a film. The actual practice of making games is very different. Film making is all about collaborating with the people shooting the film, the people in it, and the people developing it. I love to collaborate with games, but none of the collaboration can happen at the same time just because it takes so long to program something and it’s hard for me to concentrate with anyone around.
S: Makes interactivity games a better medium to spread messages? If so, how important are the feelings and memories of gamers for the artistic experience?
ME: I think it can be. Without interaction the game just sits there on a frozen screen, and without the right interaction through understanding the game, there’s no progression.
S: How do you see the role of interactivity in art?
ME: Art can be interactive without having buttons to press, like watching eye surgery. And watching eye surgery with friends. Performing virtual eye surgery while your friends watch has to be the peak of art mountain, though.
S: I don’t want to ask you, if games can be art or what do you think of games as art. I’m more interested in the criteria of artful games. Where could we serperate art games from A-title games?
ME: I think you can just look at the motivations behind the games. The big games take millions of dollars to make, and all that money has to be made back so there are a lot of things the developers have to compromise on to cater to the million people they’re trying to sell them to. Ideally that game experience is always just fun fun fun, from start to finish. Frustration, nausea, blaring music, things like that would never fly. Art games are usually made by one person over a much shorter time frame, which opens up a lot more possibilities.
S: Is the 2D limitation a catalyst to creativity?
ME: Any sort of limitation is helpful to me. 2d games are easier to think about, and I personally enjoy them more because of the precision they allow. In 3d games you have to worry about where the camera is placed and how it moves with the player’s movements. Things like collisions are tricky, because the actual collision rectangle is very ambiguous when it’s attached to a 3d figure.
2d games have also been around the longest, so there are a lot of conventions and expectations out there to play with. It also allows one person to take control over all the graphics without compromise. For most people the real hurdle in game making is programming, and with 3d games you have another hurdle with 3d modeling, not to mention animation.
S: What are the musts of a good game?
ME: There needs to be some sort of gameplay that is engaging and involves movement, and not just grid jumping or point and click. Movement is as essential in games as it is in films.
S: Does this equatation working for games: arthouse = message ?
ME: I don’t think you need to be able to draw some moral from a game to consider it arthouse, but there needs to be some motivation behind the mechanics in the game besides just drawing people to buy/play it.
S: Computer games have rules and goals… do gamers need to understand these features in order to understand your messages?
ME: Even if the player doesn’t understand the rules, the computer will always enforce them. The player might also always have a different goal than the one stated in a game, but a designer can always take all of that into account. Obfuscation is a useful tool just as well as clearly defined tasks and directions.
Sometimes just getting two people to jump across the tops of 10 poles is enough. They did what I wanted them to do, and it was a pain in the ass. The game is about the interaction between the two of them more than getting to the finish line in the game.
S: How do you see the role of computer games in the current development of Western society?
ME: I don’t know that they have had a huge effect more than any other sort of entertainment. There’s also always going to be a big barrier to entry for new players, and nothing new to keep people playing for too long. On the other hand, there is a movement for new kinds of games because of all these people that are tired of what’s out there Development tools are becoming easier and easier for anyone to make a game, so we’ll be seeing a lot of interesting stuff.
S: Do you have any visions for how to use games as an output of social investigation?
ME: You can learn a lot about a person from playing a game with them, and as games explore more systems besides trial>reward there will be more people taking the time to go play games together, but in more of a social context than an arcade.
S: You exhibited at Light Industry in Brooklyn. How was it and how were the reactions of the visitors? Do you think art games could be a part of the gallery business, like new media art?
ME: Yes, definitely. I’m still thinking about the ways of monetizing it, since the setups are so expensive, but in my experience they have been great at exhibitions.
S: I saw some pictures of your exhibition. Were you happy with the exhibition design? Do you agree that we should find a special way to present games?
ME: I like to put my games on projectors and use controllers so that everyone can watch and pass around the controller and not worry about getting in the way of anyone. It also makes it much more of an social event.
Light Industry was tricky because we only had the space for a few hours beforehand to set up 5 games on four projection screens. Some equipment ended up not being compatible, and one of the projector bulbs died. I had the same setup with different games at my college thesis show– http://www.flickr.com/photos/markessen/ which worked a little better. shows I’ve done since I’ve only displayed one or two games just because take so long to play or they have a soundtrack that I don’t want to be mixed with 4 other games.
S: You see i’m look for new ideas of presenting art games in exhibitions. Do you have one?
ME: For me the problem has always been time. The games take a long time to experience, but rarely can I keep them up for more than a few hours. I think if you have a space, you should just put up a few games and switch them every once in a while. Maybe rotate them out. It’s just important to give each game its space and give people enough time to play them.
S: How important are festivals like Independent Games Festival and the perhaps A MAZE.? What are the prospects of the artists.
ME: I haven’t been to IGF, but right now I see it basically as a grant. I don’t think it’s so useful for meeting people outside of the industry because the goal there seems to be to find a publisher. A MAZE. looks like fun, and it’s similar to what I’ve been doing– getting people together and having music and games set up, but keeping it casual.
S: What does ‚fun’ mean to you?
ME: In games I’m finding it fun to explore the details in the control of your character. A game is fun if you can really perform some graceful movements.
S: Sex in video games?
ME: I don’t think it makes sense.
S: Most people say, that your games are disturbing or frustrating. There is no place for fun. Is it part of your concept to provoke and say: „Look at me, industry – you have the money and I have the ideas” ?
ME: I think there’s plenty of fun. I have fun playing my games. They don’t reward you as much as conventional games, but I don’t feel obligated to. Besides Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, you can really show off in all the games in a way that isn’t overly flashy or bubbly. It’s like playing a good game of darts.
S: Is it possible for you to work on a project for a console or would that conflict with your artistic independence?
ME: I’m not adept enough at coding to write a game for a console system on my own so it would involve colaborating on parts of games that I normally wouldn’t, but the game could still be a good game. I’m working on a couple of console projects now, and it’s great to be able to do things I normally couldn’t do as well as collaborate on ideas from people I respect.
S: Vision for Game Art?
ME: Games in galleries, and an audience that will go play them.
S: How relevant are the ethics a gamer brings into a game with predefined goals?
ME: As relevant as the designer cares to make them. They can be a good emotional tool if you present ethical choices or general feeling of unease in the right way, but not every game should really concern itself with that.
S: Rules = storytelling?
ME: In part, but things like text and other stuff happening on screen unrelated to what you can interact with are still relevant.
S: What’s next? Any plans?
ME: I’m fixing some bugs in my new game Scrap Collector http://www.messhof.com/games/scrap_collector.php before I release the audio/game CD with Cactus (Jonatan Söderström), Then I’m going out to LA for 6 weeks to stay with some family and work on an xbox version of Flywrench and an iPhone collaboration with Jonatan and Mark Johns. I have some shows coming up in NYC in a few months, so I’ll post the info on that stuff on my blog soon.
S: Thank u very much!!!
Further Readings:
http://angryrainbowbear.blogspot.com
Date 16/12/2008 – Interview by TS. Wiedemann & Mark Essen (messhof)
