Nina Freeman, from Poet to Designer

To quote one of Nina’s bios, “Nina Freeman is a programmer, a game designer and a real-life mahou shoujo. She’s interested in gender, sexuality and narrative in games.” In this interview, Nina unpacks the concepts that make her a game designer, from a poetry major attending Pace University to game designer.

John: Who are you and why are you in New York city?

Nina: I’m a game developer that’s interested in finding new ways to explore narrative through games. I’m also particularly interested in small, personal games. This interest stems largely from my background in poetry, which was my topic of study during my undergraduate degree at Pace University in Manhattan. I originally came to New York City from Boston, in order to attend Pace. While at Pace, I studied under the poet Charles North. He had me read a lot of New York School poetry, which is often very focused on small and ordinary everyday life experiences. Obviously, my own work was influenced by my interest in this era of poetry, and so I wrote a lot of vignette poems about my personal experiences in that style. I’m trying to take the best of what I learned from studying and writing poetry, in order to explore similar narrative structure in game design.

J: I love talking to developers about inspiration because usually when people make games they are passionate about particular mechanics. Could you talk about your inspirations and how they fit into the game you are currently making Cibele?

N: The idea for Cibele came before I started to think about the mechanics of the game. Cibele’s narrative is based on a personal story from the time I spent playing MMORPGs as a teenager. This story, which is about my relationship with another person I met in an online game, is something that’s been stewing in my mind for a while. I used to want to write a poetry chapbook about the experience, but the medium didn’t feel right. Once I started experimenting with personal games, I realized that I’d finally found the perfect medium to tell my story. The core of the story I’m trying to tell is really the nuances of interacting with another person online—the interactions I had with my romantic interest in an MMO. Since these interactions (mostly) took place in a digital space, I knew I could take advantage of the constraints of an MMO world in order to embody the experience of interacting with another person in that context. So, I started to try and figure out the mechanics that would best help players feel and understand the story of two human players building a relationship in a digital space.

I’m not sure I have a good grasp yet on which games are really influencing the design of Cibele in a very direct way, but I do know that games like Dys4ia, Gone Home and Kentucky Route Zero have had a huge impact on my design practice. I’m a huge admirer of those games, and I think they each do really unique and interesting things with narrative. Playing those games really encouraged me to think outside of the box when making a narrative game, which has definitely pushed me to be as experimental as possible with Cibele throughout development.

J: What makes the design process for Cibele unique from how you designed games in the past? What new challenges have you had to encounter and how do you deal with those challenges?

N: Cibele has been an incredibly challenging game to make. We are still in the heat of development, so I’m not sure ultimately what the biggest design challenges will end up being, but I have some ideas. First of all, Cibele is the largest games project I’ve ever undertaken. When I was working on the early prototypes of Cibele, there was a lot of cruft that I was taking over to help build context for the MMORPG world in the game. However, I quickly learned that simplicity is better for both production and design, so as we iterated on the early prototypes, I ended up boiling down the contextual interactions and visuals to a minimum.

I hadn’t before faced the challenge of “feature creep,” because my other games have all been very small and focused right from the start. Now I understand why my urge to boil my ideas down to the essentials (something I learned when writing poetry), is something I should continue to listen to. You can really drive yourself crazy trying to add millions of fun mechanics to your game that don’t actually support the core of your idea.

J: You mention in some bios of yours that you focus on narrative in games but you are also a programmer, how do you approach new projects? Or how did you approach Cibele?

N: Yes, I do identify myself as a programmer sometimes. I think I’m becoming more fond of the term game developer… because I basically do it all throughout the process of making a game. I always program, I always design, I always do marketing and press, I always do production… I think the only things I don’t do are art and music, haha. So, when it comes to a new project, I usually come up with an idea and throw together a prototype myself (programming experience helps with that!), and then I use that to find collaborators. That’s exactly how it went with Cibele, actually. The original prototype was built by me in a class with Bennett Foddy. It was a minute long prototype built using Flixel.

J: How to do you feel about this transition from singular poet to programmer to game designer? I ask because it isn’t really asked often of young developers.

N: I think my transition from poet to programmer to game designer makes a lot of sense if you know a little bit about my childhood and college years. I was lucky enough to have my first computer when I was ten years old. That meant I got to play games like Myst and The Sims when I was very young. I was also exposed to programming around the same age when I started coding web layouts on Neopets using this very same computer my parents had around. So, I was building things and playing lots of games from an early age, and I maintained an interest in those things over the years.

However, I was also really excited about reading and doing theatre, which is what got me interested in poetry and narrative. I ended up becoming more involved with theatre and writing in high school, which is what my family urged my to pursue. They were really supportive of my writing, and that really made me want to pursue that path in college. Unfortunately, this meant I was playing less games and building less websites (which I’d also been doing throughout my teenage years). I am really lucky that I went to college and managed to reignite my interest in games and programming after getting a job in the computer science department at my school. There were a lot of programmers there that were into games, and they really inspired me to catch up on all the games I’d missed, and to try my hand at coding again. Then, I started to meet people (Diego Garcia and Emmett Butler, particularly), who were making games. Once I saw that my friends were making games, I decided that I really wanted to as well. I wanted to take some of the stories I was exploring in my poems, and re-examine them using games as a medium.

So, ultimately, my interest in games and programming has come full circle since I first started doing it as a kid.

J: Sometimes poetry is spontaneous and basically a run on sentence, I think of one of my favorites “Kubla Kahn” and the idea of the sublime. How do you interpret that as a game design? How do you deal with classic themes that don’t require a passage of time or active participation?

N: Games are well equipped to explore things like the sublime. You see those greater concepts explored in works once the medium starts to mature. Games, as you know, are a very young medium. However, we’re already seeing some really amazing things being done in games—I’m thinking of games like Proteus and Kentucky Route Zero. I think both of those games are milestones for games as a medium, especially when it comes to storytelling. I’m thinking, particularly of the second act (I think) of Kentucky Route Zero, in which you watch a concert in a mostly empty bar. Every element in that scene was so well executed—hearing the song and interacting with it, the image of the sparse bar, the empty sky above, the atmosphere—it was really breathtaking. The flow of play in that scene is also really interesting, because I knew I was playing and interacting, but the experience was so elegant that I was barely even aware I was doing those things at the time. Only upon reflection was I able to identify what made that part so impactful as a game. Playing through that scene reminded me that video games have potential as a medium beyond anything we can understand right now.

I know that the developers of Kentucky Route Zero also have backgrounds in art and literature… and I can definitely feel the influence when I play the game. It’s really amazing to see the results of what happens when you allow the conversation between two mediums to inform your design.

J: One last question and it concerns a theme that O’hara beings up throughout his poetry, the idea of identity in isolation. Or at least that is what I relate most and developers are depicted this way in the press and thus by the general public. How do you feel about that and how is that reflect in your games?

N: I love talking about poetry and people don’t ask me about it often, so I’m happy to answer any questions about it!

Forgive me if I misinterpret what you mean by identity in isolation, but I think I know what you mean in the context of O’Hara’s work.

I actually think that this concept of identity in isolation, especially as it relates to the act of creating, is something we don’t talk about enough. You can read and watch as much as you want about an artist or developer through interviews, whether in film or writing. You can also consume as much of their work as you want. However, one thing that you can’t understand through interviews or anything, is the nature of their work itself. You can’t really capture the energy that a creator channels during the creative process. There’s an element to it, I think, that is entirely spontaneous. It happens when you’re staring off into space, or taking a shower, or walking around outside. I come up with my best ideas when I’m taking a break from the motions of work. Ideas come out of no where—not everything in a person’s body of work can be explained or analyzed by reporters or even by other artists working in the same field, because it happens in isolation (often just as a passing thought) and will remain unrecorded forever. That’s what’s so fascinating about creative works, whether they’re poems or games or whatever. There’s always going to be an element of mystery to inspiration—and I think that’s what keeps us all coming back for more.