In Super Tap-Out Saga, players end up fighting each other over control of the device.
This is an example of the experimental games designed by Design | Media Arts alumnus and UCLA Game Lab researcher Nick Crockett, who will be giving a talk about his work for Unity Club in the Game Lab at Broad Art Center on Thursday.
Unity Club began as a support group for UCLA users of the Unity engine – a popular tool for developing 3-D games on a small budget. It meets biweekly in the Game Lab room. Since beginning in 2013, it’s morphed into a showcase for local students, teachers and affiliated game designers.
Sofia Staab-Gulbenkian, a third-year English student, said the Unity Club helped her develop her work and design sense. She publishes her games on a program called Twine, which lets writers quickly make interactive fiction without the need to know code.
Eddo Stern, professor of Design | Media Arts and director of the Game Lab, said that Crockett’s game work uses his skill set to comfortably develop different interfaces, as his body of work expands.
Crockett said he began making small Flash games in middle school, and he was accepted to the Design | Media Arts program in part based on that portfolio. After graduating in spring 2014, he began working as a researcher to design experimental games in the Game Lab, developing systems that support showcasing students’ work. He also helped develop Stern’s game, “Vietnam Romance,” which is about the way art and culture have distorted the historical memory of the Vietnam War.
His current games focus players on their controller, and connect players to the game in unusual ways, like in “Sneaky Cactus,” where the player touches real-life cacti hooked to a controller input to move his or her character on-screen.
“There’s something really fun about pushing people to a place that’s uncomfortable,” Crockett said.
Crockett said he is influenced by game makers like his former teaching assistant and fellow Design | Media Arts alumnus Mark Essen, now known for his arcade fencing game “Nidhogg,” and by alternative games creators like Anna Anthropy, who make games that express a point of view and attempt to influence players’ opinions.
Crockett has also worked on satirical, political games like “Black Friday,” a video game about fighting over holiday shopping. Crockett said these games were straightforward about the way they attempted to influence opinion, something he hopes to avoid in future work.
“(Crockett) has a critical, political point of view and (his) games use humor to encode that,” Stern said.
Crockett said his future projects will attempt to bring his expressive, political goals and unique control schemes together. He said while anyone can read a book or watch a movie, video games are a harder sell for those that aren’t already playing them.
Ultimately, Crockett said he hopes that work like his can appeal to players beyond those already playing games and encompass everyone.
“(We’re) trying to broaden the context in which games can exist,” Crockett said.