Thought for the day
Rami Ismail on Meditations – a year’s worth of contemplative daily games
Rami Ismail on Meditations’ year of contemplative daily games
Ten dark grey bars lie in the middle of the screen, arranged like rudimentary dominos. Click on the first and it turns a creamy white. Click on the second, and it too lights up. Ditto, the third. But on the fourth click, they all reset to their original colours. It takes a while to realise what you’re supposed to do: curb your natural instinct for instant gratification, leave a longer gap between each click than the previous one and you’ll eventually light up all ten. And that’s the game.
This is Tempres by Melbourne-based developer Tak, the inspiration for a yearlong interactive art project set up and curated by Vlambeer’s co-founder and staunch indie advocate Rami Ismail. Meditations is the work of Ismail, a small team of helpers, and more than 350 game developers. Download the launcher and you’ll receive one game each day for a year. The games are small – no more than five minutes long. You can use them as inspiration, or simply a diversion: Ismail doesn’t mind either way.
It was late 2017 when he first encountered Tempres, via Itch.io’s Randomizer, which lets you set up a filter to discover something new from its vast library. “I played it early in the morning and just having this moment of insight, something little to toy with, had this weirdly profound effect on my day. I ended up thinking, ‘Why don’t we do this every day?'” Why, indeed. The first week of January 2018, he emailed Tak with his pitch for Meditations. “I explained and asked if I could use his game for January 1 [2019], and that’s where it started.”
Ismail set out the structure for the project, formulating a huge spreadsheet and a list of rules. “And then we started searching for 365 game developers,” he says, casually, as if that were nothing at all. But it was a significant undertaking. Ismail started with friends, those in the dev community he knew and knew of. “I got a bunch of smaller developers and a bunch of bigger developers – all people whose work I would see on Twitter. Eventually I realised that this was creating a filter bubble. I didn’t want this to be a parade of Rami’s friends. I wanted it to be unpredictable.”
As such, he assembled a team of curators (including fellow indies Moshboy, Jupiter Hadley and Adriel Wallick) to find a year’s worth of creators. Even so, it was harder than he’d imagined. “There’s a lot of game developers out there, but finding 365 that want to make a small experimental game inspired specifically by a day that is only playable on that day? Not everybody wants to work on an experimental project like that. Not everybody wants to make a game that’s ephemeral or only available temporarily. And not everybody has time to do something like that.”
This wasn’t, after all, a commercial project. And so, mindful of eating into developers’ time – and of those creators with comparatively little experience and limited resources – Ismail determined that each Meditations entry would have to be developed over a period of no more than six hours. More rules were introduced. Each game would need to be inspired somehow by the date on which it was meant to be played. They would be controlled entirely by keyboard or mouse. Games would not feature text beyond the name of the creator, and would need to start upon the first input – so no menus, start screens or pre-game dialogue – and shut down immediately after completion. “And they would not load or save files because that would write to the user’s computer and, well, that’s already an interesting security project,” Ismail says.
Then came a more esoteric demand. “You can’t have more than 30 seconds of interaction spread over five minutes,” he says. “So you can have like a really intense 30-second game or a very chill five-minute game, or anything in between.” But there was another rule that Ismail says has been broken by around a third of the 365 developers involved: game files were supposed to be under 120MB. “This led to my server now being absolutely wrecked,” he laughs, evidently delighted that Meditations has already attracted enough of an audience to create such a problem.
Ismail and team
have recruited a range of developers, including some who are making their very first game. Others will allow us to see another side of established creators, though Ismail has made a decision not to reveal who’s involved beyond the daily introductory messages – a necessary compromise to the ‘no text’ rule which adds context and meaning to certain games. “Throughout the year there’ll be a number of quoteunquote ‘newsworthy’ moments but then at the same time I actually think a lot of the most interesting work happens between those,” he says. In other words, rather than players picking and choosing days to boot it up to play something from their favourite developers, each day should yield a fresh surprise. “We want it to be an advent calendar where you don’t know what’s behind every door.”
“Not everybody wants to make a game that’s ephemeral or only available temporarily”