Zach Gage is the conceptual artist, and now videogame designer, behind games such as SpellTower, BitPilot and SynthPond. While initially self-contained art projects, his work has veered ever closer to traditional videogames to the point that now a distinction is harder to make. Here, we continue the conversation started in our profile of Gage in issue 237 of Edge.
Do you make any distinction between your work as an artist and a designer?
I think for a long time there was a serious distinction. When I first started, there was a real split between the stuff I was doing as games, the stuff I was doing as art, and the stuff I was doing as a crossover. My new media stuff was clearly art, and then Unify was clearly a game, and then Lose/Lose was art that makes use of a game to promote what it’s saying. Lately those things have blended. There are definitely still categories, but I don’t know if the categories would be art and games. Most of my new media stuff is still conceptual internet sculpture, but the games, I wouldn’t say they’re not art. They’re just game experiences that are a different category of art. I’d split them up just as I’d split sculptures up from any paintings I might do.
I think where games are at currently, it’s just too hard to discuss them in terms of art. Where it really came up for me was when I was trying to work out what I wanted to spend my time doing. For a while I was really concerned that I was falling into games and doing all this game stuff, and I felt like I really wanted to be putting forth artistically meaningful works like I’d done a couple of years ago. But then I realised that we don’t really know what games mean yet; we don’t really know where they fit into cultural frameworks. And that actually makes them more exciting, because I’m not trying to fit the meaning and the success of the work onto something that’s already been defined very well. I’m just trying to make the greatest and most interesting thing that I can, and then years down the road we’ll see what was important and what that all meant.
As an artist, did you suspect that games might be beneath you and the things you should actually be doing for a time?
I don’t think beneath is the word I would use, but I think art has always been really special to me. I hate to say this, but there’s a moment that I’ve had a lot and it’s really important to me. It’s when I walk into a gallery and see a piece and it makes me feel something different, like when you go into a gallery and there’s painting on all the walls, there’s this reverence. The works just protrude into this tangible feeling and you feel amazing. I think games are amazing, and they’re artistically totally viable, but I haven’t gotten this feeling from them yet. But then I realised that games have given me a lot of other experiences that aren’t that feeling. I remember playing Secret Of Mana when I was a kid, and that bit at the start where you’re thrust into the wilderness and you’re just looking around trying to find a town: that feeling’s amazing, and it’s not something I’ve ever got from art. It’s a different medium and a different thing, but I think it took a lot of time for me to come around to that and understand that I could spend a substantial amount of time building these things and that it’s worth it. Now it’s paying off in the same way that art pays off: I can give lots of people an awesome experience and share myself through the work.
Can you define that missing feeling?
It’s indefinable. I’m not religious, but I guess the feeling I get from art is bordering on religious reverence: the idea that something you’re looking at is connecting to so many parts of you and so many parts of the world that you can’t even begin to understand what it is. I think there are actually games that do this, they just do it differently. Poker and Go, say, do this, but we just don’t engage with them the right way enough. When you first start in on Poker or Go, it’s really visceral. When you’re looking at a painting, you don’t think about how you’re looking at a painting, you just stare at it and let go. But then, Secret Of Mana, that was amazing because after I was in that world, I still thought about it. That’s a lot more like how we engage with art, and it’s also where the fond, incredible memories comes from.
You have an interest in sculpture that is created as a by-product of something. SpellTower and SynthPond seem to be built on similar ideas. Is that link with sculpture something that attracted you to working with games?
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it like that at all, but I definitely think you’re picking up on something that’s there. The way I engage with this stuff is that I’m trying to explore the world and the way I think about it, and I try to find physical or digital means of getting other people to have the same experiences. It’s about dealing with all of these small ideas and systems as efficiently as possible. It’s often about following a feeling. With Spelltower, I didn’t understand word games at all, and I decided I wanted to make one, and with the visuals and the idea, I just followed where I felt it was going and where I thought it would work. What’s left from that is what people get to play.
SpellTower
You made SpellTower because you didn’t like the word game genre. Did you find yourself excavating a lot of the rules of the genre on a first principles approach?
Yes, and it was amazing. I love engaging with stuff I have absolutely no idea about. With SpellTower it was really incredible to watch people play word games and to find out what they liked. The entire concept that when you design a word game, you’re designing a game for people who could have perfect skills. That blew my mind. You can’t be perfect at Halo, but you can actually know the dictionary - it’s a physical possibility. How do you make something that they like? It’s a really hard problem. It made me realise that the reason people like Bookworm or Boggle is that you can show off how good you are. I’m not even sure they’re games. They’re more like exercises in showing off. So a lot of SpellTower was figuring out how to take something like that and make it a game. How do I bring the game part back? How do I make strategy important in all of this? I have one vector of difficulty, which is how good you are at words, and I have another one which is strategy. So it doesn’t matter how good you are with words, because if you suck at strategy, you won’t be able to win. The good stuff often has to emerge. A lot of times the coolest stuff, and the most interesting stuff, are the things that you look at it and think, 'There’s no way I can do that. It’s crazy. I don’t know anything about it'.
I’ve done that with a couple of things. I did it with SynthPond, because I wanted to make a musical instrument and I didn’t know anything about music. With Unify it was because I wanted to make a block-dropping game and I hated block-dropping games. I learned to so much and now I really love them. With SpellTower it was, okay, I have two weeks to do something I’ve never done before that I hate. That sounds awesome. Let’s fucking do that.
Were you a fan of games as a kid?
I definitely was. My mom was really smart and didn’t let me have videogames, so I ended up playing them at friends’ houses then coming home and designing them with something called Kid Pix. It was a gamified drawing program for kids. Then Apple had something called Coco – it’s different to the Coco they have now – which was essentially a way for young people to learn object-oriented programming. It still exists in the form of a company called Stagecast, but it was really cool back then. I did a lot of that at school, and I thought I wanted to be a game designer, and then I went off to college and art just sucked me in. So this is like a return to that.