ROBLOX: A MODERN PROMETHEUS

For this response, I’m focusing on Professor Akten’s lecture and bouncing around some of his themes and ideas. I am mostly interested in game development as a future plan right now, so I’m going to key in on that for this response.

I think one of the most interesting parts of professor Akten’s lecture was this recurring theme of waves across a lot of his works. One of his earlier works (I think; when he really started doing most of his work was a little unclear in the lecture) MSAFluid is literally just a library for simulating real-time fluids. This theme emerges again in Reincarnation, Waves, and Gloomy Sunday. It’s really interesting how subjects like that can sculpt a career. Professor Akten links his thoughts on our “new gods” (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) with his exploration of waves. He connects the two by asserting that waves and our new gods are universally recognized by humans as these underlying, ever present forces in contemporary society.

    Another idea that I thought was particularly interesting was the idea that Professor Akten essentially made a game for his work on My Secret Heart that acted as a visual instrument to create real-time video graphics to use in other projects. I think this space is where a lot of the game industry is going to be moving to in the future. For digital creators, there is an imperative to stay up-to-date on trends and new technologies, and I think the field of games as tools is one of the most important emerging fields. Games as game development tools is probably the most prominent of these fields. You can trace a lot of these ideas back to games like WarioWare, where “players” are given the tools in a game engine to create. David Cole, a game developer I follow on Twitter, did a great write up on how WarioWare empowers players to create (link).  WarioWare caters to both an inexperienced audience and an audience who will take the time to learn and perfect the tool.

I think this connects with a lot of Professor Akten’s work, as much of it follows a similar design sensibility. The progression from Body Paint to Reincarnation is a perfect example of this. In essence, these are the same tool (and I think Professor Akten said something like that in the lecture), but the difference is how complex the tool is and how complicated it is to get a desirable output. Games like Sony’s Dreams and Roblox Corp.’s Roblox are some more examples of tools to introduce people to easy-to-use and hard-to-master development tools. 

I think anyone who is interested in game development should take a hard look at Roblox, because in terms of getting your project seen by as many people as possible, Roblox does that better than any other platform. Essentially Roblox is a social media platform, mixed with a game platform, mixed with a development studio that has features that are easy-to-learn and experiment with. As well as being easily monetizable for creators, the platform has a monthly user base of around 199 million users and growing.

As many social media platforms are becoming more out-of-step with creators who create more labor intensive content, it is refreshing to see a free platform that has such a huge user base and is actively working to support their creators. Here’s a small write-up by the creator of the game VVVVVV, Terry Cavanagh, about how easy it is to get a project up and running in Roblox (link). Roblox as a platform has been on my mind for weeks as I try and think about what my plans for the future are, so naturally Professor Akten’s lecture pushed me in this direction.

I don’t think there is a platform that is as accessible and robust as Roblox for other mediums. Youtube used to be a lot friendlier for filmmakers, but as the platform has become more commercial, it has become less friendly to artists who make video content that takes more time and effort. This isn’t necessarily the result of direct changes that Google has made either, as a lot of what the search engine shows is based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. I guess it just feels ironic that the same machine learning that Google has created and honed for their search engine would probably ignore the films that Professor Akten uses for his work in Gloomy Sunday or We are made of stardust. In some ways it feels as if our “new god” Google has gifted us fire and in the same stroke made it obscure.