Picaro

Picaro fuses a lot of the ideas I’ve had over the past few years (at one point it was much closer to Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death), but it’s current incarnation came from ruminating on short games.

Most other types of media have short forms, but even the shortest gaming experiences tend to be measured in hours. You could argue that high score games (like a Pac-Man or a Canabalt) are short, but in most cases the author expects you to play many sessions of those games.

Robert Greenberg, in his great introduction to the music of the High Baroque, characterizes Bach’s singular genius as knowing how much time each of his ideas deserve. Small ideas are given a few seconds at most, while large ideas will stretch out. By ignoring small ideas in games, we ignore a significant category of meaning. One only needs to look at poetry or photography to see how much can be packed into a brief experience.

Why aren’t we making and playing more short games? I believe there are a number of important factors.

On the player end, games often require you to sit down in front of a console, power it up, dig out the disc, slog through menus and loading screens, watch an opening sequence — you’re already an hour deep by that point and you haven’t even hit the meat of the thing. We’ve designed Picaro so that you can start a game as soon as you click a link, on any device.

There’s also the problem of a common language. Most games have to spend considerable time (hours, often) teaching you the controls and mechanics. We do have shortcuts for this: if you play one first person shooter, you’ll have a big leg up on the next one you play. Even then, each shooter treats these patterns in a unique way (that’s what makes them interesting). The genres that have developed a common language are the ones we’re drawing from: interactive fiction and point & click adventures. By flattening out the learning curve, players can just dive right in.

For the author, making a game is a substantial investment, especially if you can’t code, draw, compose, model… We’re hoping we can focus on one component, writing, and deliver the best experience for games expressed in that format. We’re not there yet, but eventually you will be able to make Picaro games without touching a bit of code¹, and the language is being designed with that in mind. Our scaffolding will lower the resources required to make a game, which means that a game doesn’t have to be large and complex to be worth the author’s time.

Picaro is a very limited platform, especially this early version, but we think this kind of focus actually opens up a lot of new doors, both contextually and creatively. In our brief time with the format, we’ve surprised even ourselves with its potential. Specifically how that’s true is something we’ll be talking about in the near future.