VGA FIRESIDE Ep. 2 feat. Karina Popp: Interview Highlights
In Episode 2, Chaz Evans, still in his chilly basement, warms up with VGA FIRESIDE, where he was joined by video game artist and NYU Game Space instructor Karina Popp. They discussed her game 10 Mississippi and her other projects, as well as her thoughts on the soft skills required to make games and the meaning of choice.
Highlights from their conversation are below, edited for brevity and clarity. The full interview, which includes demos of Karina’s game 10 Mississippi, is above and on YouTube.
Episode 3 of VGA Fireside streams live on Wednesday, March 31st at 5PM — tune in for our interview with Akash Thakkar!
On how she got into making video games
CE: Many FIRESIDE viewers, I believe, are just interested in the stories of how people got involved in making video games in the first place. So my very first question would simply be how did you get involved with making video games?
KP: Yeah, um, I, the the shortest answer is that I went to graduate school for game design. The longer answer is that I'm a lifelong player of games. I come from a family that plays a lot of games. And it's always been part of my life, but definitely not something I thought I could do. Definitely bought into that myth of like, you have to be good at math or something. So you know, when I, when it came time to like, decide what I was going to do for college for undergrad, you know, you're 18 years old, and you're like, I have to decide what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. I chose English, which is the major for people who don't know what they want to do, I think,
CE: Sure. You could do communications or something, too, right?
KP: Yeah, I went with English. I enjoyed my English classes in high school, like writing papers. And I found that like, some of my professors and undergrad would let me write papers about games instead of instead of literature, right? Like, the idea was really that we were critically engaging with a work rather than like, reading a novel, necessarily. So I was able to like write papers about video games. And I was like, This is dope. I like this. So I wanted to pursue like scholarly work in games and game studies in graduate school. Yeah, so I ended up at the NYU Game Center, which is actually like an MFA in game design, not necessarily really like a scholarly focus program. But I had it in my head that like, I needed to know how to make games or like how they were made in order to fully understand them and write about them in a academic way. Yeah, and through my time in the program, I just got to the point where I was like, Oh, no, making games is fun. I kind of found found it more fulfilling, and wince more on the side of like creative practice, rather than just writing papers and stuff.
CE: Terrific. So taking a thoughtful approach to trying to interpret meaning out of games. And you first thought that we were going to take a writer leeway about doing that, that's sort of like what focused you on working in the field in the first place? Yeah. Do you still keep up with with games writing, in addition to games making?
KP: Not so much in terms of my own practice, I guess, like I do, like teach game studies classes. And like, I will read the work of others, but it's not something I've been doing recently. Yeah, mostly mostly focusing on making stuff now.
On the real skills required to make games
CE: And I want to follow up on another statement, that is, I think, a popular myth that's worth touching on again. So you mentioned maybe you don't have to be good at math in order to participate in the field a good video game making Is this the case?
KP: I am of the opinion, yes. That you don't need to be good at math. I'm definitely like one of those people that's like, like labels themselves as a person who's bad at math and trying to break out of that I'm trying to, like improve my own knowledge. I like sat in on a math for game designers class. And I do think it's like helpful, definitely helpful skill. But when it comes to like, just getting into making games, absolutely. You don't really.
CE: Yeah. I was trying to tee you up for a full proclamation: It's okay. You don't necessarily have to specialize in math to be part of this field. You heard it here, folks, right here. VGA Fireside. There's no math prerequisite.
So, can we talk about also what specific skills you thought were most useful when approaching creative work when you're making games for the first time? For those who similarly are interested in getting into it? What kinds of tools, techniques, bits of software did you find to be most useful starting out?
KP: I would say across the board, soft skills are the most useful.
By soft skills. I mean your ability to plan out a project, your ability to communicate with other people, whether you're working with them, or people that are like in the general like gaming community that you're in, the ability to do research and find, you know, if you're having trouble with something, whether that be a programming problem, or like a game design problem, the ability to do research on like, on Google, or like playing other games, and understanding the games and how you can apply it to your work. Those kind of like learning skills and communication skills will take you a long way with some of the other like, hard skills like programming and visual design and stuff, I think. Yeah, just the ability to learn, I guess.
CE: Terrific. So that cast a pretty open door towards participation for those who may be watching are interested in this kind of thing.
On the influences in her games
CE: So I guess we just talked about your there was a really interesting writing. And it's fun to talk about influences on your work from a sort of transmedia perspective. So what kinds of non game media do you also like to create in or just find highly influential to your current work?
KP: Just in terms of things I created, I do a lot of things not necessarily well, but I just like to try my hand at creating different things like I play piano, kind of. [laughs] And I do a lot of photography, which the practice of doing other work definitely informs what I'm doing. Like the the game that I guess I'm most well known for, 10 Mississippi, is very much inspired by my time of like, messing around with photography, and with film and explicitly inspired by the film La Jetée of sort of drawing, drawing on different ideas. They're not just like, I don't know, I think when people hear that someone is inspired by film and games, they think like, oh, like the person wants to make, like narratives and cutscenes and stuff. And that's totally valid. But I'm also really inspired by the ideas that other people are employing and what they do, and how I can sort of morph that into a similar concept of games, if that makes sense.
CE: Would you be able to share an example of that, for instance? We have for those who are maybe not familiar. Can you talk about sort of like, what La Jetée looks like? Or what ideas you were sort of gleaning from Chris Marker and remediating them into your own work?
KP: Yeah! La Jetée is this short film, I actually haven't watched it in several years. But it's like it's sci fi, right? It's like in most time traveling sense. But it's told mostly, almost exclusively, in a series of still images--there's like one part of it that has actual motion. I had to watch it for like a film, class in undergrad. And as a part of the class, we had to do a similar method and make our own short film of photographs. And when I did that assignment, I totally bombed it. Like, it was not good. But the idea in La Jetée of like, really going against what a movie is, like, it's in the name, right? Like, it's like moving. I'm trying to do the opposite, essentially, of like, employing something that seems so antithetical to what a movie is, was really, like stuck in my head. And so when I was in the context of like, making games several years later, the idea of trying to make something that was like very much antithetical to the medium I was in was sort of what I was pulling from La Jetée. So like, partially I was I wanted to reuse the idea of telling a story and photographs, but I also wanted to play with the idea of like, what is really, really integral and key to video games. And I was like, oh, like, interaction, like, how can I make interaction like, slower in a way that we don't totally expect from games, I guess.
CE: Terrific. So you saw a kind of position taken against cinema from within cinema, right? In La Jetee, questioning what it's supposed to be, and saying, well, it doesn't necessarily have to move. We could do all kinds of things inside cinema, and you wanted to apply that perspective towards making a game like 10 Mississippi.
On the concept of meaningful choice in 10 Mississippi
KP: I did something early on in the design [of 10 Mississippi], I was thinking about a lot of like having meaningful choice—this really key game design idea. But I thought that that was kind of adding another dimension to it that I didn't really want to bring in. I wanted to focus on the idea of the interaction, and turning and making a metaphor of the keyboard from this interaction as much as possible. Ironing shirts…brushing some teeth…
CE: Can we talk about that phrase itself: "Make a meaningful choice." What do you suppose that conventionally means to the game maker? And like, how do we get past, or how you contrast it from that conventional idea of a meaningful choice here?
KP: Yeah, so a meaningful choice for game design typically is gonna be, as from the perspective of the player, making choices that have a clear and like discernible impact on the game.
So when, like, I don't know playing Mario, I don't know, choosing to press the jump button is going to have ideally some kind of impact on the world, right? Like, it's gonna let me hit like a question block, it's gonna let me jump into a Goomba, which changes the game space. That's the sort of key pleasure of a game. Or it's, you know, said to be the key pleasure of playing games. But in this context, I found it distracting, especially today, I think, like in contemporary digital games, you're looking at situations where you find a game pleasurable because of the game feel, or because of the aesthetic of the feeling of playing the game, not necessarily just like the decisions you're making. So I wanted to focus on that, more of the game feel aspect of it.
