Interview with Bennett Foddy

Bennett Foddy is an educator and game developer behind “punishing” games such as QWOP and Getting over it with Bennett Foddy.

This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book.

The interview was conducted on March 22nd, 2018.

Jesper:	As a first question: what do you do? How do you describe yourself?
Bennett:	I'm an indie game developer and a professor of game design at NYU.
Jesper:	Okay. What communities do you see yourself as part of?
Bennett:	I would see myself as part of indie games as kind of an international fraternity in some loose way. It's difficult to define it. If I think about the people who are in the community that I associate myself with, they call it indie games. So I call it indie games. I am also part of a general academic community, not particularly games academia, but academia in general.
Jesper:	Would you ever use the word artist to describe yourself?
Bennett:	Yes, all the time.
Jesper:	Okay. Would you say that you're an artist or that you're a game artist?
Bennett:	I feel like if I introduce myself as an artist, people will misunderstand what I think what I'm doing, but I do view my work through an artistic lens. I think that my work is artwork and I refer to it as artwork. I use artistic structures and language to talk about what it is that I'm making, and how I approach it, and what I hope to do, and who I compare myself with. I should say, I take a very big tent-understanding of what artwork can be. It includes low culture and popular culture and so on.
Jesper:	About that indie label, is it a label you like or is it just there?
Bennett:	I think it's become more of an ill fit over time, not just for me but for the community as a whole. We're now at a point where the, I think, substantial majority of people at Game Developers Conference identify as indie developers. There's been enormous upswing in people who identify that way. They can't all possibly mean the same thing. When I say indie developer, what I really mean is I'm part of a loosely overlapping community of people who have been involved in the same spaces, physically and digitally, creating similar kind of work and referencing each other's work since the mid-2000s. My strict understanding is that, of course, independent development was part of making games since the beginning of video games. But I don't want to give any sort of procedural definition of what indie is to me. It is much more of a set of specific relationships, tastes, fashion trends, and physical and digital situations. So that's what indie is to me. It's particular to me and my context.
Jesper:	I wanted to ask you about your games. I guess we can also talk about what would make them indie. They all seem to have a tongue in cheek aspect to them, there are layers that often come across as earnest at first. In QWOP, it seems like someone earnestly tried to do 16 bit graphics with muscle tone gradients. And then you have also typical goals: you have to get very far, get a lot of points, or be very fast. Then that's undercut by the way you control the game, but in different ways. In QWOP or KLOP, there's a complete feeling of incompetence within the first seconds. But in Super Pole Riders you control a pole, but there are just some things that are very hard and lead to comic situations. But you do get a feeling of competence. Getting over It is in between, you get to climb, and the character responds, but then the extremely difficult situations come up later.
Bennett:	Yeah. I suppose I've never really thought about his deeply, but I think it's quite different what's going on it Getting Over It versus QWOP. They're both games that maybe look easier than they are. But in Getting Over It, at least on a micro level, the character is doing exactly what you're asking him to do at all times. This is quite unlike QWOP where you press a button hoping for a certain thing to happen and something unexpected happens. I think the absurdity or comedy in QWOP, and to the extent there is absurdity in Getting Over It, are coming from different places.
Jesper:	There's something in your games about personal suffering, but there's also something communal about that. Today we would say they're made for streaming, even though your early games weren't originally?
Bennett:	When QWOP first came out in 2008, there wasn't very much of a "Let's play" culture. That culture had to be invented and strengthened before QWOP could take off as a viral hit. But two years after I launched it, there was a Let's Play with a guy playing my game with a silly voice, a very deep voice. It was Cr1t1KaL. That was seen by some larger YouTubers, some of whom were Let's Players. PewDewPie is an example, or some of the people who just digest other people's videos, like Ray William Johnson. I think the YouTube people were looking for work that they could play and perform and react to. QWOP was definitely not created with that in mind, it was made for players in the privacy of their own home. But I first noticed that it could work in this communal way at Babycastles in New York, because Kunal and Syed were very interested in showing it. I trekked out to Queens, went down into the basement and watched people playing it. It had an impact on me because from that point forward, I spent the next five or six or seven years making games for those venues, for Babycastles in particular, for Wild Rumpus, Juegos Rancheros, Prince of Arcade, and so on around the world. A lot of the games I made were multiplayer games, but I started to think and talk about the idea of designing for spectacle, designing for the person who is waiting to play the game so that they can watch and draw some enjoyment for it. It's very core to multiplayer game design, especially for party situations. I think it now is so deeply baked into my understanding of how to make a game or in my personal aesthetics that I don't even think about it, but it seems to find its way back in. I would trace that back to it being accidental in QWOP and just the history of being in those live spaces. I think that's how it happened for me.
Jesper:	You were lucky with the arrival of YouTube and streaming culture?
Bennett:	Of course. I mean, YouTube, started earlier, but it was not this mecca of video game Let's Plays. You can't design for something that doesn't exist or that you don't know exists. If you design something that winds up being attractive in that venue or context, then you have to call it luck, right? It can't be anything other than luck. Or at best, it's that all of experiences and influences that I experienced during the first years of the internet, were also experienced by the people who went on to become Let's Players. Maybe there was a shared zeitgeist that I was tapping into it, but it was definitely not deliberate.
Jesper:	I was wondering. There are lots of ways to interpret your games. One might be that they're moralistic. They're tying into the discussion about the role of optimization in video games, where many people feel that too much optimization will make you so single-minded that there are various things you're going to miss. And then, in a way, your games make people snap out of that, forcing them to reflect on the fact that they're not good enough, or that there's something fundamental about the way they're interacting with the game?
Bennett:	Well, it doesn't snap them out of it though. Of course, for people who have that characteristic, it brings it out even more strongly, the stuff that I do. I don't think you're wrong that there is something moralistic or a moralized aesthetic in my games. I have strong moralized tastes when it comes to games, the aesthetics of games and the aesthetics of play. But I don't think that's one of them. I would say that one of my strongest moral aesthetics is that the player should not be the owner of the game. The player should not be the master of the game. I think the game, maybe the designer, but at least the game itself deserves to have some control over the player, to have some mastery over the player. Some disobedience is the word I always prefer to use. I strongly prefer games that have some feeling of disobedience because I don't see how playfulness can exist in an obedient piece of software. Unless, maybe, in a multiplayer situation where two players can be disobedient with each other. But single player games are, historically, a reasonably strange thing. We have a sudden proliferation of them. I remember seeing one of the first books about Solitaire. The subtitle is "A Pastime for Invalids." It just makes you realize how games that are essentially Solitaire have just exploded and become an enormous cultural force. But without a lot of this theorization.
Jesper:	You're playing into this discussion about whether a game should be something that allows players to express themselves, or whether games should be an authorial construct? You seem to be on the authorial intent side of that?
Bennett:	I like games that allow you to express yourself. I like them. I feel like we're in a golden age of them. There are a lot of overt creativity games, and then there are a lot of other games that offer you all sorts of different ways to play or to represent yourself, embody yourself in different sorts of ways. I wouldn't want to reduce my position to saying that I'm giving primacy to authorial intent.
Jesper:	Okay. Primacy to the object, then?
Bennett:	I studied English literature at a time when "Death of the Author" was still considered very relevant. I'm on board with a sort of general post-modernist project. It's not that I want, as the author, to be able to control the experience or to control the ways the experiences are interpreted. I suppose the point that I'm warming to is that in a game of Solitaire, there's something very thin and very uninteresting about the whole experience being authored by the player. I think that where games are interesting, where there is a source of play, whether it's a context for play, is when there is friction for the player. When there is disobedience, when there is argument, when there are all these sorts of tricks making fun of the player, pushing back on the player, questioning the player, criticizing the player. These are all things that you can do very freely in a two player game, almost every two player game. But if it's Solitaire, we now need to define a role for the game itself in performing these functions because if you don't, it is really just a machine for producing a particular neuropsychological effect, which is fine. I like those things, but that's not what I want to build. I want to build things that are in dialogue with the player that do more than simply produce a mental state.
Jesper:	And just to be clear, disobedience is the game being disobedient to the player?
Bennett:	And I think the reason I use that word is that I think there's a universal orthodoxy in software that it should obey the player. I started thinking about this after seeing Robert Yang's presentation on his spanking game, Hurt Me Plenty. In Hurt Me Plenty you spank the simulated character. The character says how badly he wants to be beaten. If you do more than he consented to, the game locks itself and you can't play it for a number of weeks while the game waits to forgive you. I found that very interesting. Just framing it as, "Well, yes you have downloaded this digital piece of executable software, but you don't have an infinite right to run it and treat it how you want." That seemed very vital to me. That seemed like an articulation of something that I was feeling in my own work. I think part of the reason that I arrived at this aesthetic was building games for the web where people don't, in fact, own the software. They don't download anything. It's on my web server. It's only running in a client on their browser and if I want to change it, if I want to delete it, it's gone, right? It's really changing the idea of ownership over software and challenging it. As a user of apps, of Photoshop, I want them to be completely subservient to me and that's totally fine, but I don't think games should be software.
Jesper:	What you're saying is also about the history of video games, that video games started out a bit rough and now you have all these people coming from UI, UX, HCI.
Bennett:	Yeah, but it's not simply a matter of smoothness. Another thing that was inspiring to me in a negative way, was playing N++. I'm a fan of N+ and N++. In fact, I think those games are wonderful. But there's this one thing that I strongly dislike about N++, which is that they have this beautiful series of color schemes that they've put a lot of effort into. The game can look very different and feel very different depending on which colors you use. But the color schemes are not tied to certain parts of the game. They are exposed to the player in a menu. The player goes to the menu and decides what color the game should be. And to me, I could just feel something about the experience draining away there. The game was not standing by its authority as an artwork. It's exposing, to me, functionality that I could use as a piece of software. I feel like those things are at odds. I want my games to be as little like software as possible. You can't completely ignore it, of course, because I don't want my game to be disobedient in displaying the correct graphics mode or running at the correct frame rate. I want it to be obedient in certain ways, but certain very clearly delineated ways.
Jesper:	Is that a historical argument? I know you also like early ZX Spectrum and C64 games. Do you think with the professionalization of the game industry that something was lost?
Bennett:	Yeah, I think that's right. But I think it's not as though they knew it as aesthetic ideal in the '80s or the '70s. They just couldn't do any better. But I developed a taste for that and for that aesthetic. There were flavors of those experiences that I miss in modern video game design for this reason. I think there's absolutely no reason you can't still bring some of that thorny disobedient flavor from Spectrum games to a modern game.
Jesper:	A lot of your games, not all of them, and not Getting Over It, refer to older visual styles. What's the reasoning behind that choice? Why do you do it and what do you think it means to the player?
Bennett:	Well, it's not honesty in materials as you wrote in your paper. It's not that, because I break every rule with those things. A lot of what you're doing as a visual designer in games is framing expectations for the player. If QWOP were done as a pixel aesthetic, you would have different expectations than from the style it has. I think one of the reasons why QWOP resonates with people is that it's not in any kind of visual style that a competent artist would do for a video game. It's not in the hi-fi, HD aesthetic like you get for iPhone games. It's not in a painterly aesthetic, it's not in a pixel aesthetic. It's not even a Flash aesthetic, really. It's just weird. I think that is where the initial shock of interest comes from. That's one sort of framing. In other cases, I wanted to frame things a little bit differently. I'm not really known for my pixel aesthetic games.
Jesper:	Why do you chose a specific style?
Bennett:	I'm not sure this a fully rationalized thing in my head. I think what I'm looking for is a strong image that can say something about the game. Usually, I have that strong first image in mind when I start making my game. I will pursue whatever I have to do to make it look the way I think it ought to look, in order to present that first image to the player. I don't think my games very frequently use a retro aesthetic, though, even if there is a retro aesthetic to the interaction styles or to the unfriendliness or indifference of how they work.
Jesper:	But if anything, the early ones like QWOP and CLOP and GIRP certainly do use visible pixels, and Pole Riders is different?
Bennett:	Right. Pole Riders is inspired by an NES paint program that uses these little pre-configured sprites because that's how you have to do it on NES. I guess the question is why GIRP and CLOP are in a pixelated style. I think they're both just Amiga games. It's just a private joke for me in CLOP, is that it's Kickstart 2, the Shaun Southern game for the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. I played the Amiga one, of course. It looks more like the Amiga one, which is a similarly unforgiving motorcycle trials game. I can't say that I love it, but it is a classic. It was one of the first games I played on 16 bit platforms. For me, my memory of playing it, is similar to the experience I wanted people to have with this horse. Just being unable to make progress on an apparently simple, one-dimensional course. For GIRP, it's more difficult to say. I remember working on the visual style of that game. I think, really, that it was a response to the tools. I think it was the first Flixel game I published, or the first ambitious Flixel game I published. Adam Saltsman [creator of the Flixel tool] has an aesthetic that is 50% inspired by looking at Amiga screenshots. He never played an Amiga game. And 50% SNES and also MSX. He has this very particular pixel aesthetic that is in all of the tutorial files, the font, that Nokia font in Flixel. It's begging you to make things in a particular style. Those were the people I was looking at. I was very much inspired by things like Gravity Hook at that stage. I was leaning into that. I don't think it was an intentional choice at all.
Jesper:	For indie or any kind of movement, however loosely defined, that bills itself as an alternative to a mainstream, is there also a magnetic tendency to converge in a style?
Bennett:	I think that's right. For the mass adoption of this pixel style, obviously the flash point for that is Cave Story, but I think you're absolutely right that the reason that we all seized on that so intensely was as a point of differentiation and tribal brand that was emblematic of rejecting AAA styles of the time, which were very much trapped in that browncore man shooter era of that time. Ca. 2005 to 2008. I remember thinking about it in that way, that it [pixel art] seemed countercultural and transgressive. Even though I remember having those conversations, it's impossible to regain the emotion of that now because pixel style became such a colossal brand. It's much more boring to me now than the browncore shooters of that time. We really, really overdid it as a group of people. I was just swept up in it.
Jesper:	To me this ties to the question of history again. You were making the argument that independent development has always been around. But my understanding was that you frame independent as making games on small teams with somewhat personal off-beat sensibilities. What is the thing that's always been around?
Bennett:	I've gone back and forth on this. Things get so complicated because this has been in such rapid flux over the last 30 years, but particularly over the last five, and particularly, again, over the last three years. We can draw a thread between the small teams and solo authors of the early '80s and the small teams and solo authors today. There are commonalities both in the work they're producing and in the approaches to the work and the audiences as well. But the massive proliferation, especially of cellphone games, complicates that to the point where it's not necessarily a useful way of thinking anymore. What do you do with a term like "independent" in this situation? That's why I was saying at the outset that I can only think about this now as a particular context, a particular set of social connections and a time and a place. But when I say "independent development" has been around, I mean small teams, but I also mean it in the strict sense. The absence of a publisher, the frontiersmen spirit of somebody with very little economic or technical support trying to achieve some particular shared set of values, such as seen with the bedroom coders particularly in Europe in the early '80s. The day-to-day is not that different from an indie game developer now. There's a concrete practical sense in which it's the same pursuit. What was going on for Jeff Minter or Archer Maclean or the Oliver twins in '83 and '84 is in some ways extremely related to what is going on for me now, but in many ways not even overlapping.
Jesper:	Yes. I was also thinking about someone like Jeff Minter. I'm not sure that playing Jeff Minter games at the time was perceived as something particularly alternative or countercultural.
Bennett:	Playing any computer game was countercultural.
Jesper:	It wasn't an alternative to mainstream video games.
Bennett:	They were working alone, on a very short time frame, and that kind of creative process is similar. You can take a wild risk. You can work in the absurd. You can try things that are not commercial because the outlay and the overhead are so low. I guess the reason we didn't view [Jeff] Minter or [Archer] Maclean, say, as countercultural at the time is that there was no colossal industrial behemoth. Ubisoft did not exist and for a long time would only be translating things into French, and Electronic Arts was this tiny little shop. And so, counter to what? I mean, it was countercultural to make any video game in any style, but the way that they were doing it has carried through is what I'm saying. If we look at the very interesting freeware work that took place between '98 and 2004, that doesn't seem to be constructed as countercultural either, even though a big industry did exist while you played Elasto Mania or Ski Stunt Simulator as I did, or Seiklus. Maybe Seiklus is on the borderline.
Jesper:	Yeah, I think that's canonical.
Bennett:	Maybe that's a turning point game. Liero would be another one that I would mention, or Clonk or any of these games that existed in this late shareware milieu. They're not constructed as counter to AAA, even though they are. I think it was something that indie developers started to do to themselves with the cooperation of the press. Maybe starting with Seiklus, maybe that's as good a moment as any to identify.
Jesper:	Another thing to me is that idea of the local, local food, and food miles start appearing around this time as well.
Bennett:	That might be right, the idea of artisanal as a very desirable characteristic for things.
Jesper:	This is also where you can criticize the hunt for authenticity as being too willed or inauthentic. It's like when you go to a farmer's market in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's not just a farmer's market, it's very clear and artificial construct.
Bennett:	I'm very critical of this myself. As a person who's a foreign food aficionado and a white man, of course there's this kind of bourgeois idea of authenticity in food. I can go to a Chinese restaurant and have a set of constructions in my head of which Chinese food is authentic and which is not. I think, at least in Australia, and also in American constructions of Chinese food, there's authentic Chinese food and then there's Americanized Chinese. The idea is like sweet and sour pork or Kung Pao chicken or-
Jesper:	General Tso's chicken!
Bennett:	General Tso! General Tso is obviously not the name for that dish, but that's a real dish people eat in China. We have this false idea that it's inauthentic food. It might not be cooked in the exact same way, but those are all authentic recipes. I have a crystalline idea of what authentic Chinese food looks like. In my construction it's more authentic if it has ingredients I'm unfamiliar with, if it is sold in a dingy place, if the service is rude, if there are very few white people in the establishment, then I can enjoy the food more. That's such a terrible bullshit point of view, but it really suffuses my aestheticization of food. I'm sure that something similar is going on with games, the aesthetics of authenticity of games.
Jesper:	In a way, isn't that also one of the essential conflicts between the idea of indie as a democratizing force versus indie as connoisseurship for the educated?
Bennett:	Well, I guess that my particular experience of making games and of having my games find their audience has been a little bit contrary to that.
Jesper:	I guess your games can read in several different ways?
Bennett:	Obviously so much of my understanding of my own work has been framed by user reactions to QWOP. It's very clear that a lot of how people perceive QWOP is a misattribution of a certain kind of authenticity that I was not signing up for. They view it as a shit game, right? They think that much of the aesthetic is accidental or that the entire thing is accidental. Eventually, I learned to lean into that a little bit and allow people that understanding of my work and leave room for that. But that's not authentic in any way. That's just allowing people a certain kind of comfortable misinterpretation. But to players, I think there is a sense of exactly that sort of authenticity I was talking about with the Chinese food in QWOP. They think they have found something from a foreign culture, not necessarily an international culture, but foreign in some sense and that they're getting an authentic taste of something that is somehow exoticized. I think that's interesting and I'm not against it, but authentic it is definitely not, not in any kind of literal sense. My work, in 2008, was very much not what other indie game developers were doing. Others were making games that either foregrounded the culture it was made in, the particular scene it was made in, or the technical constraints. Like making a Game Boy game. Think about Retro City Rampage which was actually made on NES originally. That's embracing a completely different understanding of authenticity to what I'm talking about with regard to my own work. I always felt my stuff was outside indie mainstream on that particular issue.
Jesper:	I wanted to ask you: do you ever get angry players and death threats? This can be off the record.
Bennett:	Sure. I invite email from people who finish my game on iPhone, my most recent game. The PC version has a live chat room at the end that I sometimes am in. And I get a mixture of very warm fan mail and sometimes very angry mail. I have to decide whether to interpret the angry mail as theatrical in the manner that is central to the cultural norms of streaming, YouTubing, and gaming culture generally, or whether I should interpret it as sincere hate mail. I think maybe some of it is sincere hate mail, but if I have to look at any given piece, I might as well just say, "Well, I think I'm going to take that as being in good fun." I would become worried if somebody sent me repeated hate mail. That has not happened.
Jesper:	I was wondering about the relationship between festivals and YouTube for you. We talked about being part of a community, festivals or events like this. But it also seems like your audience comes to you in different ways. What's the relation between streaming and festivals for you?
Bennett:	Going back to what I was talking about earlier. At a festival, only 5% of the who look at it will get to play it. In both cases these are situations where the game is a spectacle for observers. Having said that, at festivals we're not foregrounded the reactions of the players in the same way. We're foregrounding the reactions of the crowd. Whereas on YouTube and Twitch, we are 100% foregrounding the reactions of the player. Markiplier threw his chair after playing my game. Forsenlol is sitting there closing his eyes, holding his head in his hands. Kim Doe in Korea shaved his head live on screen having failed to beat the game in 28 hours as he promised his fans. That's so clearly right at the center of the spectator's experience on those platforms. In some ways, I think that a game that can work in one of those contexts can often times work in the other. I think the experience of viewership is very different and maybe almost non-overlapping just because of where they're looking and what they're worried about. Where is the enjoyment for them? Where is the interest? At the party last night there was a game where if you make one mistake, it locks everybody out from playing it for an hour.
Jesper:	Oh.
Bennett:	Everybody around is getting ready for the next attempt, and then it falls to one person to play it. Then they screw up inevitably and everybody's disappointed together. The whole crowd's reaction is at the center of that. The individual, of course, in control of the mouse is mortified, but it's not really about that. It's about everybody sharing a moment of disappointment. That’s an extreme example of how different those contexts are.
Jesper:	Thank you.