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Jamin Warren founded Killscreen as well as Gameplayarts, an organization dedicated to the education and practice of game-based arts and culture. He has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.
Jamin: Great. Let's get started.
I'd love to just talk more about the legacy collection. What was the impetus for wanting to move so much of your work to modern systems?
Simon Flesser: It is something we've been talking about forever because of all the stuff with the App Store and the constant threat of them disappearing or whatever next thing Apple decides on doing. We've been talking about that for 10 years and now it's a little bit of in-between projects or rather we finished up all the big stuff, so it was good timing. It was basically now or never.
Jamin Warren: Were you thinking about preservation and archiving the creative archive when you were getting started 15 years ago?
Simon Flesser: Not really, no. No. It's something that has become more top of mind the last 10 years I would say.
Jamin Warren: Yeah, it is pretty shocking. I'm working on a project right now with the Getty Research Institute and one of the things that was so interesting for me—they did a project with Frank Gehry for the 20th anniversary of the Disney Concert Hall—and just the amount of archival documentation that Frank Gehry has for all the scale models. Some of it I think is because it's a physical building, and so they're taking photographs and computer models. Is there something about games that maybe don't lend themselves as well to that kind of process of personal archiving compared to graphic design or architecture?
Simon Flesser: But I guess now because games are almost exclusively a digital thing, it's less natural, which is also weird because it should be even easier because it's digital. You can just store it on a tape or magnetic tape or whatever you want to store it on. But with different technologies and platforms and stuff, that stuff becomes more difficult.
Jamin Warren: Can you tell me about the difference between a preservation and a remake? I feel like we see that more with games, you know with Resident Evil, popular games, a desire to say, "Oh we're going to take the existing game system and make it focus on the visual polish or the design or make it feel modern." Like the Halo remastered, that was one of the first big attempts at "we're going to redo this thing." You've taken a different approach with the legacy collection. What do you see as the difference between those two different ways of thinking about approaching older work?
Simon Flesser: I think for us it was important. We had discussed early on how we should approach bringing touch games to different inputs. Because some of them are vertical, you have a challenge visually to make them make sense on wider screens.
But when we finally sat down and started working on the project, it became apparent that the main thing we wanted to do was just have it as they were. It was quite alluring to start and try and fix stuff or polish up stuff, but we would always have to say, "No, actually this needs to be exactly as they were when they released more or less."
And I mean I think they are two very different things, remasters and remakes, and just porting games as close as possible to as they were. You can probably have opinions on remasters and remakes if you want to. There's something revisionist about it. But I guess as long as original versions are there, it's fine. But I think that's the main problem with games, that the original versions become unplayable, especially when you're talking about games that were only available on digital storefronts.
Jamin Warren: It is a different approach. We have the Academy Museum, we have a film museum here in Los Angeles. It is focused really explicitly on films, Hollywood, which makes sense because we're in Los Angeles. And they show a lot of 4K remasters. It's interesting with film, the thinking is you're trying to capture—because film as a substance degrades over time—when you're doing the remaster you're trying to capture the purest version of the print. So it looks better in some ways, but it's also because that's the level of fidelity that's captured in the print itself. And now we have digital technology, so it's not trying to up-res the graphics or anything like that. You're trying to capture the things that were already on the original print. And so games do have a different way of thinking about that, which I do think is revisionist. I just think that the approach should be to try to capture things at some level as they are.
Simon Flesser: Yeah, I guess the thing about remasters is they try to sort of capture the games as you remember them, right?
Jamin Warren: Yeah.
Simon Flesser: But I guess also because games is still quite a new medium, and especially when you look at 3D games, that is still also proportionally or relatively new. So I guess in that sense, it makes sense to remake them. But I don't... I'm not saying it's right, but I can understand the train of thought.
Jamin Warren: There's something really poignant about you building this virtual phone—I played it on Switch—so you're building this virtual phone inside of a device to play these games. And so the collection is preserving this relationship that we have between your hand and the screen. It's interesting with the iPhone, at the time that was such a novel technology. Now it's everywhere. It happened so quickly over the life of your career. Now phones are entirely normal. Did it feel like a love letter to that time of holding... I feel like there was a newness about the phone. Our relationships to the phones have changed a ton. Did you feel like you were trying to capture also this relationship that we had to mobile devices at that time as well?
Simon Flesser: I guess that sort of more came naturally for us. It just started as a way of displaying them at different resolutions or the different aspect ratios that you could play them in, cause they were very specifically iOS games. So you had sort of the tall ratios and the more narrow ratios of the iPad for example. So for us it became more of: how do we make a system where we could show the pixels exactly as they were? So you sort of have this window into the world and then the other mode is that you can stretch them to the entire screen or play them in the wide version that covers the entire screen.
So it started with that and then that sort of evolved into, okay, then we could actually use this for everything. Simulate motion controls—motion controls is not widely used in those games, but it is used for some puzzles in Year Walk for example. So we could use the virtual rotation stuff for motion controls. Simulating the feel with two cursors sort of acting as two touch inputs.
It sort of became a playful interface by necessity, I would say. It was basically for us the only way to do it to sort of keep it as close to the original experience as possible.
Jamin Warren: I mean it is also interesting that you're doing the work of preserving your own work. Typically in other fields there are preservationists, you know, there are people who work professionally as researchers that are responsible for that archival work. So it's very interesting I think with games, and I guess other forms of digital media, to both see the preservation work being done simultaneously. You're still very much in the middle of your creative professional career as an artist. And so it's interesting to see you doing that documentation work by necessity because you can't just put things in a drawer or in a closet somewhere. You think about with artists, they just put things in drawers and it goes in the closet and that's their archive. This is a much more active process that you're having to pursue in terms of moving your work from one platform to another.
Simon Flesser: And then it's also not entirely preservation cause it's just moving it from one digital platform to another. But on the other hand, the minute or the hour that it's on PC it will get pirated and so it becomes available forever because of piracy.
Jamin Warren: It is interesting, yeah. Piracy is the permanent archive.
Simon Flesser: Yeah.
Jamin Warren: I want to ask you about your relationship to time. Looking backwards, you're a different person in a different creative career. How is your thinking about how you feel like your relationship to maybe time changed throughout the process of looking back at this older work?
Simon Flesser: It's a broad question, relation to time, but I would say generally when you look back at these things, time gets so weird to imagine that these seven games were made in our first five years and then we made two games in the last 10 years. So it becomes very skewed. And it sort of both feels like it was just yesterday and it feels like it was a million years ago as well. And also because it's interesting to look at these games because we were much younger when we made them. It's quite evident that the people who made them were completely different people than they are now and than we are now.
And in that sense, it's also cool to look back at, but it's also at times embarrassing. Like when you look at something you've written 15 years ago, it's quite evident that you were a child.
Jamin Warren: Do you have an example from one of the games that you feel like is, "Oh I was a very much a different person when I made this?"
Simon Flesser: I mean just generally, but I think also you are sort of embarrassed because they're maybe trying to do more than they could. But I think on the other hand that's laudable or that's good cause at least these were young people that were trying to do something that weren't holding back. And I guess the older you become, you become much more self-aware, or at least I do. You get much more critical of your own work, I would say. Work becomes harder the older you get. When you're young—and also young, this is 15 years ago—but it's quite different to be 25 and 40. You have a confidence that is unparalleled when you're 25. Everything you do is perfect and wow, this is amazing. But nowadays it's much more like... even writing a paragraph takes hours because you need to like, okay, no, this is not good, I need to redo this.
Jamin Warren: No, it does. I think some of it is as you the longer you go making things, you get more... you have a better sense about what is done or complete or what you're trying to do. I think you're able to make decisions more quickly. That seems to be the big one, is the ability to make creative decisions more quickly and decide on a direction.
And then also just energy, the way that you expend energy. You think about older strikers [in soccer], like Messi is a good example where he'd often get critiqued for not moving around too much, and he just was expending less energy. So it wasn't about the distance covered. It was like, "When I move it needs to be in a deliberate direction." And so I do find you are much more able to... you don't need to try 90 things at once. You can make some decisions early on because you have those lived experiences about what you like and also knowing what works or knowing enough to know that something's a dead end. You don't know that unless you actually do it. You have to try those things first and then you build that sixth sense around creativity.
Simon Flesser: But you also have less energy when you're older, right? When you're younger you can work like 14 hours straight, but it is just not possible the older you get.
Jamin Warren: Yeah. One thing that's interested me about your work is you have a wide variety of both aesthetics and mechanics. You've tried a lot of different types of games and that's pretty evident pretty early in your career. Split being more of a puzzle strategy game versus something like Bumpy Road or Device 6. You've kind of had some puzzle through-lines in different respects, but then also a Sailor's Dream is much less puzzle driven, more specifically narratively focused. Do you see there being a through-line between that early work in terms of what makes them all Simogo games?
Simon Flesser: I think if you go through them one by one, you can see the connection, but maybe not going from Kosmo Spin to Sailor's Dream. But if you sort of do it chronologically, you can understand it. I do feel that there's some connections between these games even if they're not always evident. Even if you look at the story of Bumpy Road, which you need to collect a lot of stuff to actually get, you sort of see the early themes of death and memories as a reoccurring thing. Or life, love and loss basically. Which sort of starts as a thing in Bumpy Road and I guess less so, or not at all, in Kosmo Spin and not in Beat Sneak Bandit which is a very lighthearted game.
But artistically I think you can still see the line from Kosmo Spin to Bumpy Road and then going to the more clean, 60s inspired stuff of Beat Sneak Bandit, and then Year Walk. You can sort of also see how that is an evolution from Beat Sneak Bandit. Maybe less evidently so in Device 6, but then again you could sort of see the same themes in Device 6 from interaction styles from Year Walk. So there's always like some DNA from the last thing.
Jamin Warren: The other thing that's interesting to me—I heard the game designer Jonathan Blow give this talk 10 or 12 years ago lamenting that so few game designers are able to stay relevant. If you look in film for example or literature, they're writers and they write through the entirety of their careers. You have filmmakers continuing to make movies well into the twilight of their life. You continue to have that creative output. With game makers, it does seem like there's a window in which your work is kind of relevant and there are very few people who continue to make games that are interesting over a long period of time.
I was curious, why do you feel that is? And maybe what's been different about you all in terms of continuing to make work? I can see you continuing to do this for the next 15, 20 years. A 30th anniversary I'm sure is on the horizon someday.
Simon Flesser: That's a good question and I don't really know. I think probably it has to do with that we... I wouldn't say that we are reinventing ourselves, cause it's also a silly thing to say, cause we just do it more from a perspective like, okay, what would be interesting to make now? What would be surprising to us to explore? So I guess that's one thing. You sort of find new things all the time.
And I guess that's basically it. But as a medium, I think it's also like... because games in many ways are still toys. They don't have to be, but they can be. And that's not necessarily a bad thing either. But there are some games that are toys, right? And I would say if you mentioned Halo, Halo is a toy, right? And so I don't know if 60-year-olds can make toys because they don't understand the people that will play with them probably. I don't know. I don't know if this makes sense. I'm just trying to reason around it.
Jamin Warren: No, I think that's a really good point and a really good distinction. The desire I think for artists as you move along in your career is that one, you can make the things that you would like to make. I think too that your sense of taste or your sense of what's good is limited in some ways by age, but also becomes more honed in some ways because you know kind of what's been done before and so you know what's actually novel.
But I think that third piece is what you're saying is that there's something about being able to make games for your peers. And when you're 60 trying to make games for someone who's 15, that's going to be much harder than if you're 60... I was thinking about playing Sailor's Dream and I remember playing that game when it first came out a decade ago. I feel like my approach to it is different now with some life behind me in terms of thinking about, you know I have a daughter, and so there are different things about thinking about that game or losing someone. There are some of these themes I think sometimes in games that don't really... it's hard to really feel them until you've got some life lived. The hope is I think as a game maker that you can continue to explore a lot of different expressions of humanity as you experience more of life. But yeah, if you're constantly having to go back and make toys again and again and again, then I think that is a road to irrelevance I guess. It's just extremely, extremely difficult.
One of the things that I was seeing in some of your games early on was privileging mood over exploration. Year Walk as a silent film, Sailor's Dream works in these fragments. Can you tell me about withholding information as a design principle? Why not to show things? I think games often kind of do the opposite where they give you a bunch of different tools, mechanics, explanations, kind of over-explain everything. You all moved in the opposite direction.
Simon Flesser: I think a lot of our games are, even from an early idea, made from some kind of production perspective. So it's by necessity more than anything. Usually the idea is not idea-driven, they're production-driven. Basically more like, "I learned this new thing," or "We have this one freelancer that knows how to do this thing," or "We're only three people, how can we do this?"
So I guess Device 6 is a good example of this because basically we came from Year Walk and we just thought that it took too long, it was too many art assets. So basically we were just like, how can we make less art assets? Okay, just a bunch of text is easier I guess. So it's always from this perspective. Even in our later games like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, still the reason why we didn't build an entire photorealistic mansion is just because, you know, we can't.
Jamin Warren: Right. Fair enough. The other thing I've enjoyed about your games also is a sense of architecture and space. Some of it is the constraints of a mobile device or an iPad. That was apparent to me even with Beat Sneak Bandit from the beginning in terms of dividing into these tiers. You're both climbing from ground floor or vice versa. Or with Sailor's Dream, there is kind of this psychogeography that's getting constructed as you're sort of moving through these worlds. What do you think draws you to that sense of creating space as a design team? Is it a constraint-driven approach or is there an interest in architecture in digital spaces that pulls you?
Simon Flesser: I think it's more production. For Sailor's Dream specifically, because that's kind of an art heavy game, it's easy in that sense that it's very loosely connected so we had to do sort of all these imagined spaces between the spaces. For Beat Sneak Bandit specifically, that is just trying to paint music because everything is about the beat there. So it's 4 by 8 or something. We also do very mathematical or mechanical games, much more so than they seem. The boring answer is that it's again mostly necessity. But I think Device 6 is maybe an interesting example of this because it's trying to just make a map out of text. Just building a Legend of Zelda map but with only text, or a dungeon with text only.
But I've always been interested in stuff like that with games. Specifically in 3D games, I've always been slightly obsessed with houses that you can't enter or doors that don't open cause there's so much stuff you can imagine about it. And specifically what we said early on about the cottage in Year Walk is like, okay, you must never be able to enter the cottage cause the player has an idea about what it looks like inside.
Jamin Warren: Right. It's the MacGuffin. With games there's always the imminent possibility that you can do anything. That's obviously constrained by real world budget and production and whatnot, but there is always that possibility. It always feels like that for players. Like there could be something just on the other edge that you just can't quite see. Even if there isn't actually. Your mind fills in the spaces of what could actually be there.
Of the games in the collection, are there any that you feel like in a perfect world you would like to come back to and keep working on? And conversely, is there a game that you're like, "I am finished thinking about that as a work, it's a dead end for me creatively."
Simon Flesser: Good question. I still play SPL-T. I play SPL-T a lot so it's a game I have in my mind a lot still and that I want to sort of keep doing. And we have tried to make a sequel to SPL-T and we did in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. We have SPL-T 2 hidden within it, which is a much worse game. Which I think is interesting because it says something about sequels. It almost becomes a statement in itself how unnecessary sequels are because they're almost always worse than the predecessor.
But I don't know. No. I think we're always keen to move on and try to do a new thing. But SPL-T is always the one that we talk about, "Hmm what could we do with SPL-T?" Because it's also such a—it's a game that is basically only mechanics so you could in theory play it on almost everything. So in that respect it becomes interesting. You could sort of... I guess technically play it on a calculator if you had a screen. But you know, it doesn't really require anything so in that sense it's interesting to think about. But no, I don't think like we really return... The doors are sort of always closed for us when we finish. It's more like, "Ah, okay, now we don't have to think about this anymore."
Jamin Warren: Done is done. I want to ask about—you've always been interested in this idea of intertextuality, how ideas talk to each other across different mediums. It's always been very apparent for me in your work that you're looking outside of games for inspiration. How has your media diet changed over the last 15 years in terms of where you look to be inspired for your work?
Simon Flesser: That is a good question. I think it's still music is the primary inspiration when it comes to atmosphere and story. For me at least, music very easily paints an image of space and time and atmosphere. So that is the main thing. I don't play as much as I used to. I play quite a bit still, but I don't think my media consumption has changed a lot.
I try to not watch American movies or American TV shows because that's basically everything. So I try to seek out more stuff that is not from America, which is very, very difficult to do actually. So I guess that's one thing. And I don't know... I read more boring books now I guess. I read Navalny's memoirs, I just finished that. Now I'm reading a book about Russia. Interesting. So I read more boring stuff now I guess.
Jamin Warren: I think that's fair. My challenge has always been trying to stay interdisciplinary and trying to make sure I'm not leaning too heavily on a single category. Some of that is a function of living in a city like New York and then Los Angeles is like there's ample resources for doing and seeing other things. Although LA has been very strange in that the love language is so clearly film. And so if you are into film it is one of the best cities in the world because there's just simply so many things there being shown. But if you were trying to look for other types of things, that can be a bit more difficult.
One of the things that I was seeing in some of your games early on was... compared to film or music, you have these scenes that emerge from a particular place. I think games have been at times a bit more resistant to identifying that they are from a specific place or time. I was curious about how you think about your Swedish identity and do you see that coming through in your games? Is there a register for other Swedish players that maybe for me as an American I'm not necessarily picking up on? I think Year Walk is a bit more straightforward, but maybe for some of the other work do you see Swedish identity as being something that is apparent in your work?
Simon Flesser: Not necessarily so much in the games in the collection. Maybe in SPL-T because it's so dry. But I think if you look back at the entire catalog of Simogo, then Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is probably the stuff that is more evident. It's slow and it's dry and it's understated.
It's a cultural difference. Americans talk more and they smile more basically. And I guess that's also different in what part of America you are in. But I know coming back from San Francisco—it's been like 10 years now since we went to a Game Developers Conference—but we went like four times maybe, three times. It was always so nice coming back to not have to smile. That everyone is smiling at me and I don't have to smile back and I can just be quiet and I don't have to talk to strangers.
And one thing is not necessarily better than the other, but it's a big cultural difference. A cultural difference that is probably much bigger than people think because we have so much American culture here, so it's very easy for people here to think that we sort of understand or are like Americans. But in fact, there's actually quite a big cultural difference.
Jamin Warren: I can certainly see that. I've heard that about Americans smiling a lot, or they smile at strangers, and that's a very American thing.
Simon Flesser: A thing that games very seldomly are, which I think is probably a more typical Northern European thing, the further north and the further east you get... Things are more understated. Emotions are less pronounced. There's probably stuff that Americans read as sad, but that is not inherently... I think stuff like the Moomin characters for example, there's some stuff that I think in a lot of parts of the world is like, is a bit spooky. But here it's more like a specific atmosphere that I think is very Northern European that you sort of can't describe, that doesn't come off as spooky here. And I guess Year Walk has some of that, but Year Walk is of course more like a more pronounced horror thing at times. But I think there's a specific melancholy or quietness of this part of the world that maybe easily gets read as depressing or sad or spooky, which is just like more a way of living.
Jamin Warren: Do you feel like from a creative community standpoint... Are there other artists, musicians... You mentioned music. Do you feel like you've built that outside of games as well? Are there other folks in Malmö that are doing creative work that you feel like are people that you can bounce ideas off of that aren't just making games?
Simon Flesser: I mean there's a lot of interesting cultural stuff happening here I would say, but it's not something that I really interact with other disciplinaries in that sense. But I also don't interact with a lot of other game developers, so no, not really. But then again we have people working on our games, I would say more so on some games than others, that are not traversed in games. But I wouldn't say that that's a local thing or anything that has to do with this city.
Jamin Warren: I guess the last couple questions for you about what comes next. You mentioned this earlier in our conversation, the legacy collection is also a testament to a very... "productive" is the wrong word, but you were shipping a lot of work out in a very short period of time. And then as your career developed that slowed down. You had a break as well. I was curious about what were some of the things that you were protecting by slowing down, by saying "we're going to do fewer things and not try to make a game a year."
Simon Flesser: I wish I had a good answer to this. I feel for Simogo a lot of stuff just happens and we're just flowing down the stream and trying to see what happens. It's not like things are happening to us. We are making them happen, but we don't sort of plan for them to happen. So sometimes by accident, sometimes by stars aligning I would say. So it's not like we had this grand plan of, okay, now we're gonna make one big game and it's gonna take four and a half years. And I think no one would want to make a five-year project if they knew that it was going to take five years, they would never make it. Or at least I wouldn't. So I think we don't have this master plan and I think maybe that's also what sort of keeps it fresh because we can sort of steer it quite easily towards where we want to go at the moment because it's such a small ship.
Jamin Warren: I mean it's interesting you've worked with a lot of the same people over the years as well. Often times with bands creatively the team moves in different directions. People want different things as bandmates and so you start a side project or whatever. But often times it's just not being in the right place success-wise, like the work isn't selling. But a lot of times it's just personality differences as well that breaks things up. I was curious what you do to keep this core group? Why do you think you've been able to work with the same people for the last 15 years?
Simon Flesser: I think also because we're so different from each other. Especially me and Gordon, who are Simogo, are very different from each other. I think if all of us were too aligned then it probably wouldn't be interesting for us. And I guess because a lot of these people are freelancers, it's nice for them to sometimes work with us and they don't get tired of us that easily probably.
I guess that is. But it's also like that work generally functions quite well. So it's a nice group to work with for most of us. And also because there's no 100% defined role for anyone. I mean sure there are like 3D graphics or 2D UI stuff and specifically programming, but still you have Daniel who makes the music but he's also... he made a lot of pixel art for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes for example. Made a lot of concept art for Sayonara Wild Hearts as well and wrote a bunch of action scenarios for Sayonara Wild Hearts as well. So I guess it's also an interesting group in that sense that no one is maybe a professional but everyone is good at a lot of things more than being specifically doing one thing.
Jamin Warren: 15 years from now, approaching 30 years of Simogo, what do you think would make the next 15 years matter to you as an artist?
Simon Flesser: I do not know. That's a tough question I would say. I think generally with making creative work, you need to find a balance of: is it pleasurable to work on, and is the final product interesting? And those two things, they don't necessarily always align. So I guess that is a thing that the older you get is becoming more and more important, how to balance these two things. Because when you're young then maybe the end product is more important than it being fun to work on. And I'm not necessarily talking about work-life balance, more like the actual enjoyment that you're getting out of working on the thing. Cause there's a lot of games that would be fun to work on probably, but then you would sort of be like, "Okay is the end product worthwhile?" You know, I would love to make a very intense 2D shooter or whatever, but I also like... there's a lot of 2D shooters. I don't need to make whatever everyone else is making.
Jamin Warren: I remember reading an interview with Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates and someone had asked him if he liked making music. And he was like, "No, I don't enjoy it. It's a job. I show up and I do my thing." Maybe that is a key difference with age. You follow your passions when you're young and then you're older... I think some of it maybe is also just it is hard creatively the longer you work in a specific field. It is harder to find novelty. And I find that also playing games. Sometimes my patience for games has diminished over the years in part because I've played so many of them. But when something is novel, that really sticks with me. And I suspect the same is probably true of you for making games. It's harder to find that fresh new territory that you haven't explored. So sometimes you really have to really, really work at it and that work is sometimes not enjoyable, but it is worth it.
Simon Flesser: Absolutely.
Jamin Warren: Well thank you so much. I appreciate you making time to chat. It's been a long time so good to be back in touch.