No Quarter is NYU’s annual games event that features original games, all commissioned by the university, that showcases new games by up and coming designers. If you’re into indie games/games culture/etc., it’s by far the coolest thing that regularly happens in the city.
Every year, the event lands somewhere between house party and a gallery show and the raucousness implied by that intersection is often mirrored in the games themselves. “No Quarter” obviously referencing the idea of an arcade — the games on show are often strange, silly affairs that act as a conduit to get people to gather shoulder to shoulder around a screen and just Have A Good Time Playing Some Damn Videogames.
Traditionally, these games lean into the idea of the arcade — they are often multiplayer, raucous affairs that feature many people crowded around a screen laughing, smiling, etc. The kinds of games that produce really great stock photos of “people playing video games”-core.
This is not to undercut the accomplishments of the games from No Quarter (many who have gone on to release successfully elsewhere!) but more to say they are often of a Type.
This year’s event was no different, packed with lots of games of the aforementioned type that beckoned you play them and engage with their (often hilatious) eccentricities. The laughter and halo light around the backs of heads from people cramed shoulder to shoulder looking at screen beckons you — “What could be so fun with a controller and some buttons??”
However, there was one game that wasn’t this. Something quieter, unassming. Projected large against a screen in the back of the main room (and behind a giant tower made of old keyboards), was “Dreamscape Explorer” by Izzy Kestrel.
Dreamscape Explorer looks like a sort of standard top down RPG. It lacks what have become the unspoken tenets of other No Quarter games. There is no funny controller, there is little to no onscreen action, and there is no local multiplayer component. It’s played by one person, holding a normal controller, sitting on a chair in front of a single player game.
But that’s obviously not all there is. Look closer at the above picture: “Look for the Pink QR”.
As Rob Dubbin (another showcasing dev from the event and co-host of the wonderful Eggplant podcast) put it, Izzy “understood the assignment”. Scattered around the venue itself were QR codes, that, when scanned would show one of a variety of different micro-experiences (all made in different engines!) that fed into the functioning of Dreamscape Explorer being played on the “main” screen. Far from just a rote singleplayer experience, Izzy turned the whole venue into part of the game.
People would scan the QR codes and play the (fun in their own right) microgames, and change the state of the “main” game, with either party being either absolutely clueless or completely aware of what was happening. The whole of No Quarter (or at least those who scanned the QR codes) were playing Izzy’s game together.
It’s a perfect showcasing of the type of experimental work No Quarter aims to platform, and as such I was excited to get to talk with Izzy all about this project. How do you plan out such a thing? How do you get disparate web-based engines to all talk with each other? How do you account for the venue itself? How do you even make it all work?
Izzy and I talk about all this and more in the latest episode of Game Data. It’s a great conversation about pushing the boundaries of what we expect our tools to be able to do and how to just voraciously Try Things to get at something new and different. Enjoy!
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