I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Aryeh D, a fellow Dartmouth student, on the topic of his particular expertise: competitive Minesweeper. Over the years, Minesweeper has birthed its own online competitive community– one very different from the competitive gaming communities we’re used to reading about on the internet today. It’s centered around a single website, communicates chiefly through a carefully-preserved, late-nineties-style website guestbook, and has weathered a number of disasters and controversies on par with those generated by any more-popular e-sport community.

This interview has been edited for length. I have also taken the liberty of linking some of Aryeh’s comments to relevant articles in the definitive Minesweeper wiki. But first: a video compilation of his best recorded times.

Laura: So. Competitive Minesweeper! My first question: how did you get into competitive Minesweeper? How did you discover this was a thing you liked and were good at?

Aryeh: Well, I first played Minesweeper in the late ninties on my dad’s old Windows 3.1 computer. And I enjoyed playing it from time to time as an alternative to, like, Solitaire. But then, in freshman year of high school, I started to play it a bit more, and went online and found that there was a whole Minesweeper-centered community! And at the same time I had a friend who was pretty decent at Minesweeper, and I wanted to improve my times to simply beat him. So that’s kind of how I got into the community aspect of Minesweeper, just being able to compare scores. And then by the end of my freshman year of high school I was participating in the Minesweeper community and that continued through my sophomore and junior years of high school especially.

Laura: What is your current ranking?

Aryeh: My current ranking? Let me check, because these days, it changes way too often! People keep passing me! It’s not good. Right now I’m going to minesweeper.info, which is the main hub of the community and contains the world ranking. And… I am currently ranked 31^st. I’m 4^th in the US.

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I bought Inside a Star-Filled Sky this week. The game is currently being sold via the now-unremarkable (for PC indies, anyway) pay-what-you-want model, with a set minimum of $1.75– which is also how he now sells Sleep is Death. The purchase gets you every version of the game, the source code, unlimited downloads, and a guarantee for access to all future updates.

Why the minimum? Rohrer explains that $1.75 covers “payment processing fees and download bandwidth” only—so, we can guess, it’s money Rohrer himself doesn’t keep. If you wanted, you could pay him a price so low that he wouldn’t see a cent of it. I haven’t seen a pay-what-you-want point out the minimum, break-even price like this before. Normally, when we buy things over the internet, that kind of math is opaque to us: we know that there are transaction fees and bandwith costs floating around out there, but we don’t actually know how much they amount to, and it’s almost as if they don’t really exist. So when Rohrer points out how much he actually gets from every sale, the option of leaving him nothing at all looms larger than it usually does.

Rohrer is a very consciously-‘arty’ designer. He does this kind of thing, and it certainly makes him stand out. In games-world, see, there’s recently been some discussion about what art is worth, and whether art is really something we should expect to pay for—whether we should allow art to be influenced by the demands of a market. Taken generally, that question is an unhelpful one. All art requires a time investment. Wherever food costs money, labor deserves compensation. But when people complain that the experience of art costs them money—as happened with Dear Esther and the ModDB community—or express the idea that it might be a good idea for them to earn zero dollars for their art—as with Star-Filled Sky—it suggests to me that there might be a better way to compensate these games artists. Is there a way that feels more right to us, and to them?

We’ve always had rather intricate, complicated ways of compensating our artists. In the past, patronage made art possible. Italian princes paid Michelangelo so they could brag about it. “Hey,” they would shout at one another in the streets. “I just paid Michelangelo to paint a picture of Jesus for me! Yeah!” Then they’d fist-pump and high-five a peasant, or something. Similarly, admission to the Getty is free because a fat-cat captain of industry established a trust to fund the thing. Public art is generally made possible through taxes or charitable donations– I’m thinking about things like the Crown Fountain in Chicago. Other kinds of art have weirder compensation-rituals. Most ‘literary’ novelists don’t live off of their work: they’re professors, journalists, or other professionals. Creative Writing professors at my college have to publish things to keep their jobs, so the department gives them the time and resources. Their compensation, in the end, is provided by a system only tangentially related to the production and sale of their books.

Allow me, for a moment, to imagine some weird possibilities. What if Rohrer– or another games artist like him– worked at a university, like my published professors? In an alternate universe, could some museum or public institution have funded a Rohrer project? If a games artist got a grant from a government to make public games art– what would that look like, exactly? Like this? I’ve been noticing more and more games floating around the internet which were commissioned by institutions for particular events. The money could be coming from tuitions, or charity, or endowments, or who-the-hell-knows-what mysterious deep-sea money vent. And as public games tied to specific physical places, the commissioned-by-the-college route makes sense for these particular works of art. Public art usually has a strong connection to places and local communities. However, only some kinds of games make sense in a public setting. For the same reason books aren’t ‘public art’, we’ll never see an eighty-hour, story-heavy game as public art.

And while I’m mentioning new ways to pay for games, I think it’s important to point out that the way we pay for things strongly influences the way we think of and value them. Imagine a universe where games started out as public art, and never left public spaces: there wouldn’t be any eighty-hour story-based games at all in that universe, would there? We might not think of such games as having value. The governments paying for them certainly wouldn’t.

I guess you could say that since somebody has got to assign art a value, why shouldn’t each member of an audience do that, for themselves, via PWYW? Maybe this is better than allowing an institution, a government, a corporation, or the artist to do the job. It certainly allows us to choose from a broader variety of ways to assign value to games. To some extent, what a game is ‘actually worth’ depends upon the aggregate philosophical stance of its audience.

So– are we lucky to be living in an environment where this is actually realizable? We’ll have to wait a few more years, at least, to see if PWYW really makes it possible for more artists to get better compensation for their work. But while we’re at it, I think we should keep our minds open for even weirder– weird for games, anyway– compensation systems. I’m hoping that ten years from now, my school will be giving money to games artists in the same way it gives money to writers, filmmakers, and studio artists.

And part of me is also hoping that I’ll be able to drive through my hometown and see, somehow, some kind of public-art game. I know that not all public art is the bee’s knees, but some of it comes pretty close. Why not give it a shot?

In the spirit of popular revelation-analysis like “Fight Club Is Really Calvin And Hobbes” and “Secretly, the Joker Has Homoerotic Feelings For Batman,” I present: “Assassin’s Creed is Really About A Little Child Climbing on Furniture.”

–

In elementary school, I was addicted to climbing low obstacles. I’ve always had a paralyzing fear of drops and edges, but there was something I loved about clambering along the backs of couches, along crumbly retaining walls, on bookshelves and stair railings. I was, and still am, uncomfortable with merely looking at cliffs, but jumping on furniture was a thrill. Although it still scared me, it wasn’t actually dangerous, so I loved it. Kids seek out these kinds of controlled encounters with fear. They’re important.

This behavior was not very popular with my parents and teachers. I remember getting in trouble for standing on desks, trying to climb out first-story windows, and sitting on high stacks of classroom chairs. Everyone who remembers being eight knows what adults say when they see children doing these kinds of things. Those chiding, deriding warnings have been ground into our skulls, and when we warn children, we use the same words without even thinking about it. Ubisoft was quite right to label wall-climbing “socially unacceptable” in Assassin’s Creed I and II.

Socially unacceptable horse behavior.

Ubisoft also nailed the language of derision. The following quotes are taken from the first game; they’ve always reminded me, rather strongly, of the things I was told as a child, and the things I’ve told to children myself.

He’s going to hit someone!

Is there a reason for this nonsense?

Look at him! He’ll break his neck!

I don’t understand what he’s trying to accomplish!

He’s going to hurt himself And when he does, I won’t help him!

When will he stop acting like a fool?

Does he really have a reason for doing that?

He should stop acting like a child!

Stop acting like a child, indeed! There’s something about the bystanders in Assassin’s Creed which infuriates some of us and makes us want to kill them. The sneering pedestrians who see you riding your horse at anything faster than a walk. The neutral guards’ bemused teasing. The nagging beggar-women who tell you, angrily, that “No, you don’t understand!” It’s sometimes as though the city is made up entirely of angry parents, and you’re the kid, misbehaving. They want you to stop climbing on shit and stay on the floor, like a normal person. They all wish you would just stop messing around.

But this time, you have a knife, and you can throw parents and teachers and angry bystanders off cliffs and into walls and stab their eyes out, if you so please. You can run up sheer walls and vanish like a hero before they’ve even finished talking, and there’s nothing they can do about it. The relationship you have with these bystanders gets even clearer, and more satisfying, in the second game. The opening levels are filled with street heralds who warn their bumbling audiences about how the young men of the cities have taken to climbing on the buildings “for sport.” That, of course, means you. And the herald warns you, over and over again, that “It’s only divertimento until somebody breaks a leg!”

But you know that’s not true. It’s always fun, particularly when you’re breaking your leg, or other people’s legs, and running at breakneck speeds through crowds of screaming idiots who can’t do what you can do. They don’t mean a thing. They’re worthless. You can breeze through the press of people with your ‘pickpocket’ button held down and rob them of a hundred florins in a minute, and they’re so stupid there’s nothing they can do about it.

This sense of avenging your unfair belittlement is a powerful undercurrent in both of these games, both explicitly, in their plots, and implicitly, in the little ways you’re casually treated by the ambient dialog. When I play, I feel like a triumphant child. I’m showing them! That experience is powerful through its own artistry, but it’s important through what I bring to it. You don’t have to be twelve or thirteen to feel that there’s some deep, mighty, mysterious kind of children’s revenge taking place in these imagined streets of the Holy Land and Italy. Like the plot, it resonates through time: the shoppers of ancient Jerusalem sound like my third-grade teachers. Everything, particularly resentment, belittlement, and childish rage, persists.

–

The only time I’ve ever been disciplined officially by a school was in seventh grade, when I was written up for running in the hallways. I actually sobbed. I’d never been punished like that before, and I felt the injustice very sharply. At the time, when the issue seemed so dramatic and serious, I think I’d have loved to push the responsible authorities off of a roof.

Socially unacceptable. But it's what you want.

In AC2, you won’t be written up for running in the halls, but you might be laughed at, and if you’re notorious, you’ll probably get stabbed. And you’ll certainly get a chance to throw someone off a roof. For once, you’ll beat your enemies soundly. It’s a refreshing feeling. A dark and bitter kind of refreshment, but refreshing nonetheless.

Have you ever played 1000 Blank White Cards?

It’s a card game—a party game—which the players make up themselves.  Everyone gets a few blank cards and writes whatever rules they please on them. The goals, objectives, and substance of the game itself is entirely up to those players. It is absolutely one-hundred-percent player created content.

Over the past few days, as my friends and I unwound from the fever-pitch of an awful academic term*, we played this game several times. We cut a pack of index cards in half, doled them out to 5 or 6 people, and wrote whatever we pleased on them. There isn’t even a skeleton ruleset in this game—each card should contain a title, a cartoon, and a rule, but that structure is mainly just a suggestion. We had a few cards without rules or point values—only pictures. A few were crude copies of cards from other games we own. We only bothered enforcing the rules we liked.

Any stranger who walked in off the street would have found our game impossible and absurd. One player named his cards exclusively after people we knew. I made several cards referencing the game Bang. One card could only be played successfully if the players knew where in the house to find a NERF gun. We had more than one scribbly copy of the Base Set Pikachu Pokemon card. When it entered play, others used their blank cards to draw Energy Cards so that Pikachu could attack—though no one ever managed to pull that off. One card made points irrelevant. Some cards forced players to play while blind, or without using their hands. Other cards punished players for being sober. Others punished them for being drunk. One card forced players to reveal ‘deviant sexual desires.’ One card—my favorite, in fact—forced the players to light it on fire and pass it around in a circle until one player drops it. We had another card which forces the players to recreate the burned card if had been reduced to ashes.

Though the game has a points system, many of our cards never even referenced points, and it is certainly impossible to deliberately win while playing with our deck. Too many crazy pyramids of stacked and nested rules collapse during play. The point of the game, you might say, is to create the cards, not to play with them. If a card is interesting in theory, we love it.

Every game, we play with about 40 cards from our ‘live’ deck. We create about 20 more cards during play, and at the end of the session, we search the deck for cards we didn’t like, and set them aside. We have a card which allows players to ‘resurrect’ cards from this ‘dead deck’ and return them to the ‘live’ one. We have cards which allow players to destroy other cards by cutting them up with scissors or ripping them apart. In this game, ultimate victory consists in never making a card so dull someone wants to retire it. The winners are the ones who make us laugh the most. We preserve their senses of humor in the deck.

We stopped playing because it tired us out. One session was so loud, raucous, and fire-filled that most of the people in our house at the time jumped into the game halfway through, hypnotically fascinated by whatever we were doing. But they didn’t understand our cards. Some of our cards struck them as cruel. Our jokes seemed out of line. When we culled the deck at the end of our game, half the cards we loved were thrown out. The ecosystem of humor and self-congratulation we’d cultivated was upset.

You can’t let other people join your group, we realized. 1000BWC is private. It’s for hateful jokes and unintelligible humor. That final game was so apocalyptically confusing, with so many voices—we had something like twelve people playing—that it no longer made sense. It was too exhausting. We haven’t picked it up since, though the decks are all still there, ready to go.

It’s been a few days since we put the game aside, and in that time, I’ve realized why player created content is so tough. 1000BWC is the Communist revolution of player created content. Because all you need is a pen and a stack of index cards, you can do anything. The game is whatever pleases the players. There aren’t any real rules. There aren’t any real restrictions on resources or playstyle. You can’t be this creative in a computer game, and I doubt we’ll ever be able to. 1000 Blank White Cards is minimalistic. It isn’t anything. You can’t buy it in a store. Really, it’s more like some primitive inversion ritual than a card game. It’s so formless that it seems to deliberately bait frowny proscriptivists with the ‘is it actually a game!!?!’ debate.

If 1000BWC is the wild, extreme end of player-created content, where does Spore lie? Way down on that other end, I bet. Where’s the APB character creator? Where’s Minecraft? What are we actually looking for in player-created content? Are we looking for a chance to be as creative as we could be if we weren’t playing a game at all?

I’ve infected my circle of friends with Minecraft. Yesterday, one of them angrily asked me why he couldn’t put redstone dust on the sides of walls. “I was coming back across the beach and I saw my house sticking up there with its big blank sides,” he told me, “and I thought: hey, you know what would be great there? A big skull face made out of redstone dust. With torches for eyes.” But he can’t do that, because redstone dust is not for vertical surfaces.

“You’re too creative for Minecraft, I suppose,” I told him. I’ve been playing Minecraft for something like eight or nine months now. I bought it the week I finished with Dwarf Fortress. I remember picking it up back before there were even any trees. These days, I no longer imagine further than the game seems to let me. I’ve been wishing that I could reclaim some of that imagination and think up something splendid. That I could bring to it the fine, invention-drunk attitude that comes with 1000BWC. But I can’t. It’s an actual, imagined, conceived-of game, and 1000BWC isn’t—not until you make it.

Besides, our final game kind of sucked. There was a bit too much raucous creativity there, and it broke the feel. It’s very easy to break the feel when you make the feel yourself.

——-

*So awful that it would mangle your brain, Lovecraft-style, if I explained it to you