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Seeing Through the Diamonds: Jason Rohrer Continues to Make Games More than Just Art

I’m really hoping to be dead and rotting by the time humanity gets sucked into the matrix. I can faintly hear the sound of ad men and bureaucrats salivating waterfalls over technology that can mind-read your dreams and contact lenses that “double as a...

I'm really hoping to be dead and rotting by the time humanity gets sucked into the matrix. I can faintly hear the sound of ad men and bureaucrats salivating waterfalls over technology that can mind-read your dreams and contact lenses that double as a computer screen. I can also hear lots of explosions. I imagine it will be like being trapped inside of QVC mixed with Spike TV, and I want no part of it. However, I take a little comfort in knowing that there will likely be some corner, tucked away behind a holographic billboard, that will blow my head up like a balloon and push my brain into a realm of understanding as fresh as a powdered baby bottom. And that corner will exist thanks to people like Jason Rohrer.

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Four years ago or so, Rohrer managed to stuff Roger Ebert's video-game-damning flap hole by creating Passage, a pristine example of a video game's capability for artistic expression. But narrowing Rohrer's importance down to this peak is completely ignorant of a long, steady history of meaningful works and innovations, the latest of which, Diamond Trust of London, is just now finishing up a successful Kickstarter campaign that ends Saturday. As with any artist, his latest work arrives out of the context of previous works that, when strung together, hang like Christmas lights that blink patterns through what is obviously a finely tuned program.

The game’s premise is unique. It's the year 2000 in Angola, and the country is an apple tree full of diamonds. You're a slick businessperson whose fortune depends on plucking those diamonds from hobbled hands before the UN busts in with their fancy-shmancy Kimberly Diamond Certification Process that's going to shoot a hole through your golden parachute. But you're not the only one. There's another Slick Rick trying to do the same thing, and so it's a race for diamonds. You send your agents, he sends his, and once everyone's landed, things get hairy. He bribes your agents for information so he can outbid you for diamonds. You bribe some of his agents for counter information, unbeknownst to him. It becomes a sailor's knot of double agents, triple and quadruple agents, an epistemological origami concoction of who knows what when and how.

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Rohrer’s thoughts on the game from the Diamond Trust of London Kickstarter.

If that seems confusing, then you're beginning to understand some of Rohrer's intention with Diamond Trust.

“You know, you’re moving these guys around on the board that are your guys, but you can’t even trust that they’re really being honest to you. So I was really interested in exploring this new corner of the game design space,” he explained. “There really aren’t any games about this kind of thing, about this deception kind of thing. About revealing information, hidden information from one player to the other without the owner of the information knowing that the reveal has happened. Or maybe knowing without the other person who’s getting the reveal knowing that the person knows that the reveal has been made. That hadn’t really been done in a game ever before and it seemed like a cool thing to explore and this seemed like the best setting for it.”

The game is designed for Nintendo DS, and like the game itself, the process of bringing it to life was long and convoluted. It began three years ago when the publisher Majesco suggested making a cartridge game for the DS, to which Rohrer said, "Seems like a good idea." The notion of deception was percolating in his mind at the time, and he initially pitched a game about cheating spouses and private eyes, but that got shot down. After translating that idea into diamond traders in Africa, he got the game nearly completed before Majesco pulled out and effectively shelved the project.

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"People kept saying, 'Well why don’t you just port it to another platform? Why don’t you put it out on the iPhone or whatever?'" Rohrer said. “But, you know, it was a game that was designed from the ground up around how the DS works and a lot of people don’t really understand that. In a video game world where everything is ported to every single platform the minute it comes out, the idea of designing for one platform or a game working well on one platform and not working well on another… Well, I mean, people are aware of this but they don’t seem to really care I guess.”

Samples from Diamond Trusts’ soundtrack.

Had this game been a studio product, it would likely be sucking dust in a cabinet somewhere. But as with all of Rohrer's work, he was essentially a one-man show, from programming the game to designing the box art and cartridge stickers. It wasn't until another publisher, Zoo Games, gave Rohrer a second chance that he as able to push to the finish. At that point, he also brought on musician/friend Tom Bailey to help with the score, and they worked out a system of interchangeable music samples that cycle and repeat in an almost endlessly unique set of patterns. Yet, even with new help, the behemoth that is Nintendo provided more obstacles and set backs, requiring a minimum number of cartridges be produced. Without the money to front himself, Rohrer turned to Kickstarter to raise the funds and essentially pre-sale the game. For $35 dollars, you can be the proud owner of a boxed copy of Diamond Trust of London. But again, it's not just a game.

"The end product is much more sort of personal and cohesive and authentic when it came completely out of me," Rohrer said. "It’s entirely born by me. When you sit down at one of my games, for all the games that I’ve made so far, you’re seeing something that I made start to finish 100% by myself. It’s a very personal thing. Even the music is personal. Even the graphics are personal. Even the font – I designed the font myself – even the font is personal. So, and the website is personal, because I put it up. I typed all of that html myself, right? So that I think adds value to the thing I’m creating."

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If you were an idiot, you might call that kind of talk narcissistic, but if you're able to sit with his games and understand the intention, you begin to see that Rohrer is quite the opposite and has a deep interest in understanding how an individual relates to the outside world and to other individuals. On the surface, Diamond Trust is about the diamond trade and outwitting an opponent, but the real magic of the game is about getting into the psychology of your opponent. It's about telling a bald faced lie with a straight face and then reading the reaction to gauge what is happening in your opponent's head. We do this unconsciously all the time, but with Rohrer it's all about turning those social mechanics into gaming mechanics so that they become explicit.

"It’s kind of this mystery to me exactly what strategy to use when you’re playing," he said. "I mean, I’ve done the math analysis, and I know, like, there’s no strategic ruts, there’s no Nash Equilibriums. I’ve gotten all that stuff ironed out. So I know theoretically the game is sound. But in terms of the psychological game play that you would interact with as a skilled player, I have no idea what that is. We'll be discovering that as the game comes out and people start playing it."

Sleep is Death allows forces players to create their own stories.

This especially is what Rohrer excels at: creating a virtual space in which players can explore an intentional concept. He somehow manages to turn the abstract into something concrete while maintaining its essential abstractness. Diamond Trust can implore you to investigate deception without defining a concrete conclusion. An earlier game of his, Cultivation, allows you to explore the nature and consequences of compromise. Transcend at first appears to be just interesting geometrics, but the game play presses you to examine internal balance as the foundation for external success. And Sleep is Death literally forces players to create their own narratives by creating their own virtual spaces and dialogues.

If you tried, you could certainly read into more traditional games this way as well. I wouldn't doubt that somewhere, someone has written a Marxist critique of Super Mario Brothers. But what most games lack, and what Rohrer's games typically possess, is the inescapable feeling of intention that permeates the game. Of course you can surf the internet and read about those intentions, but even without an authorial context the games exude the feeling of self-expression. He's saying something, and in doing so, inspiring future game designers to continue the conversation, to develop the language of video games beyond head sniping and coin collecting. That way, when the matrix comes, there will at least be a few people creating virtual spaces that don't suck, and that aren't trying to sell me lotion.

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