Can a game where Wario writes sonnets prove games are art and fix microtransactions?

This interview has been edited to fit (extremely roughly, so please don’t check) iambic pentameter. Alice Bell has never interviewed Nate Crowley before.

ACT VII SCENE I

ALICE: I saw some post online that said that the

Iliad and the Odyssey are fun

If you imagine Homer a GM

And all the men and women merely players.

​

NATE: That’s super f***ing true! That has to be

A thing in the tradition of epics.

You’ve got to forget bits and make it up.

These days we haven’t got the earlier ones,

So whole bits where Homer was winging it

Will seem like they were always the story.

​

ALICE: Like Achilles is a player going

‘I want to attack the river’ and so

Homer is like, ‘You cannot attack it.’

And then Achilles rolls a nat 20.

​

NATE: See Homer as an MMO dev team.

There’s nerf patches and out of control buffs.

I think it’s Book Five of the Iliad,

The Trojans, they’re like just going berserk

And wailing on the Greeks, and so the gods,

Who are just like the dev team avatars,

Give a massive buff to Diomedes.

He just Hulks out and rips the heads off loads

Of Trojans for eight pages, and then he

Calms down again when things have levelled out

And they bring in the post patch nerfs. So there.

Games are art. The conversation’s over.

ALICE: If you can read classical art as games

There’s no reason to not do the reverse.

​

NATE: I guess it goes back to divergence from

Convention in the reason to play games.

My int’rest at the moment is in games

That simulate the grind of history.

​

ALICE: I’d like them more if they went all the way,

And just said ‘You are not special, at all.’

If every day you just got up and you

Had to farm for cabbages or something,

And hope that bandits didn’t kill you all,

And that was the whole game. And then you died.

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NATE: Aw yeah! Just ‘Feudal Scum Simulator’

And there’d be quite a lot of reward there.

Because in the trad sandbox RPG,

Hunting is like walking through a small zoo

With a machine gun, mowing them all down,

Then finding out a taxidermist with

More money than he has sense in his head

Will pay you infinitely for boar scrotes.

It’s quite nice to have to struggle over

The simplest of things. There you go, that’s art.

ALICE: For sure.

​

NATE:                   So let me ask you a question.

Can you think of big commercial titles

(Since Mario Paint) about making art?

‘Cos when you pose the question are games art,

Then what about games about its making,

Maybe even attached to a franchise.

Like, what about a game from Nintendo

In which Wario has to write sonnets?

​

ALICE: That would be really good because I feel

Wario is quite a complex figure.

​

NATE: Oh there is so much going on with him.

He’s quite a counter cultural icon.

Wario is especially, I think,

Beloved to more mature audiences.

So how would you do the mechanics of

A game to construct fairly complex verse?

​

ALICE: Depends if the game wants you to succeed,

And if part of Wario’s struggle was

Inherently part of the game itself.

Maybe he’d, like, get better at writing

If he took time out to read some Shakespeare.

NATE: You could have different skill based mini-games

Involved in the sonnet construction too,

Like one of those weird WarioWare things;

An owl swinging above a pile of clocks

And you must feed it beans at the right time

To get the right number of syllables

To match to iambic pentameter,

Or you’re f***ed and left with three syllables.

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ALICE: F*** dactyls.

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NATE: The more limits you have placed on the form

The more creative you’re going to be

To create something beautiful within.

Maybe you’d just share it with your friends list.

A little icon would appear on screen:

‘Your friend Alice has made a new sonnet,

Will you critique it?’

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ALICE:                       What would the name be?

NATE: Super Wario Poetic Expression

​

ALICE: So all the poems by all the players,

Are they all art in their own right as well?

NATE: They are. Extend it beyond Wario.

You could have the full Mario roster;

There’d be an element of roleplaying.

Say you were Wario, and I Bowser,

So when I had done rating your sonnet

You’d get a little cutscene of Bowser

Reading a paper and wag’ling his head

And being like ‘I think it’s good but

It could use work. I award three coins.’

And you can use those on new mini games.

That is a microtransaction system

Where the currency is peer reviewing.

It solves the microtransactions problem!

Imagine now PUBG or whatever

But you’re rewarded not based on your grind

But based on players’ appreciation.

If you’ve been a good healer or something,

Well then someone else might be like ‘fair play’.

If someone kills you most impressively

Then you might choose to reward them in turn!

​

ALICE: People kind of do that when they share clips

On Twitter, of the cool stuff that they’ve done.

They get likes.

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NATE:             That’s a microtransaction.

It could stamp out really toxic voice chat

because if you were nice you might get coins.

You see, it’s all about culture jamming

In a kind way.

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ALICE:             I like that idea.

Interesting concept. You should pitch it

At Jeff Kaplan from the Overwatch team.