Tapeworm Interview: Binding of Isaac Creator Talks New Card Game, Art, and Themes - GameRant
Tapeworm Interview: Binding of Isaac Creator Talks New Card Game, Art, and Themes - GameRant |
| Tapeworm Interview: Binding of Isaac Creator Talks New Card Game, Art, and Themes - GameRant Posted: 30 Apr 2020 05:53 AM PDT Game Rant recently had the chance to sit down with Edmund McMillen, creator of such classic games as Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, to talk about his newest project. Rather than an update to Binding of Isaac or even the start of another video game, Edmund's latest creation is a tabletop card game called Tapeworm. The Kickstarter campaign for Tapeworm launched just yesterday at the time of writing, but has already reached well over ten times its initial goal for funding. Tapeworm is played similarly to dominoes, with players connecting segments of different colored worms to deplete their hands. However, additional mechanics such as rewards for completing full rings of worm segments, forcing other players to draw cards, and slicing off entire sections of the game add another layer to the gameplay. It seems like most of the challenge of Tapeworm comes from the interaction with other players, and we can't wait to get our hands on it ourselves. advertising
Game Rant's interview with Edmund covered a lot of topics, from the need for more developers to make board games to the inspirations for McMillen's signature art style. Our questions focused on the challenges of designing both video games and physical board games, the interplay of artistic themes with gameplay, and the inspirations behind Tapeworm's unique flair. The interview also gave us some interesting tidbits about difficulty in video games and the importance of playtesting for enjoyment, not just bugs. Q: I notice that a lot of the art in all of your games straddles the line between being cute, and being sort of gross or morbid. Is there anything that was an inspiration for you on that? advertising A: The easy answer is just that it's what I find aesthetically pleasing.... I love that sort of classic 80s to 90s gross-out humor that went into the Ren and Stimpy era. I tend to go cuter I think. I found out early on that if you go with really cute things you can get away with darker themes. I could talk about more serious things without people thinking it was contrived or pretentious. Because it just looks goofy, even when its dark and weird. It's what I'm comfortable with, it's my wheelhouse. Q: Was there an intent behind making dark themes more accessible? A: For me there has to be some element of danger to what I enjoy for me to be able to enjoy it.... The same goes for Tapeworm. I demo'd it multiple times with a bunch of different people, and people were like- 'you know if you just made this trains it would sell really well.' There is no doubt in my mind, but then why would I be making it?... I never want to work on something that doesn't have my voice in it. advertising Q: That cutesy-dark aesthetic that you strive for- do you feel like that goal also translates into gameplay? A: Yeah. For sure. But... There's a big difference between making something thematically inaccessible and mechanically inaccessible.... I can't bring myself to make completely alienating themes mechanically because it seems like it's bad design.... I can do something avant garde and make it very inaccessible for a bunch of people, which is fun, and I've done that in the past, but when I'm making something that's true to what I would enjoy I want something that's well designed and accessible. I honestly don't think that my games are that hard.... Super Meat Boy was not too difficult, I was really pussyfooting around with difficulty and made things easy. They look hard, but they're easy. And it's about perseverance. advertising Q: There's always this difficulty debate in games, but it seems like for those games dying and trying again is built into the core ideas, which is interesting. A: Yeah. And I try to push that. I try my best to not use themes without something tied into a core mechanic behind it. With The Binding of Isaac, the game was literally designed to be played over and over again, which was something that was difficult to explain to people early on. Super Meat Boy was instantly like that, you died right away. It's not always appropriate for every game.... Tapeworm is not like that. Q: How did you feel about the transition between making things that are a little bit more punishing into making something that's more of a light card game that you can do with your friends or with kids? advertising A: For me it's a genre change. I'm mostly known for my platformers, but I've made a lot of games in a lot of different genres. Like, Legend of Bum-Bo is a puzzle game, Binding of Isaac is a top down rogue-like shooter. For me it just felt like switching gears and kind of trying out something new. With Four Souls I kind of jumped into multiplayer- I wanted the social interactive aspect of it to be the core foundation of what you were doing, I wanted a lot of interaction with other players. You know I've been playing board games forever, and there's a few key aspects of that that really get people into the game- like dice rolling. It still blows my mind how you roll a six-sided dice and you get a six and everyone cheers. It's like 'what?' It's such a weird- there's something there to seeing luck happen before your eyes. advertising When designing in the real world, in the physical realm, it's totally different than working in video games. I felt like the main difference was the social interaction, so I wanted to focus on that for Tapeworm. Four Souls was a huge success... but accessibility-wise it was very inaccessible because it was very advanced. With Tapeworm it's the opposite. I wanted to make a game that people could sit down and instantly know what they were doing. And then as they play they discover more strategy, you don't need to explain anything right when they sit down. Q: As a game designer is it more challenging or less challenging to make something so simple? advertising A: I feel like it's the same. The gear switch is more like, more focused on broad playtesting instead of niche playtesting.... with this, I'm literally playing with my mom, my nephew, you know, random people at a table next to us while we're eating. I designed the foundation of this like nine years ago, around the same time I designed the original Binding of Isaac. There was a moment in my life when Super Meat Boy was over and I could feel the depression pocket that I would drop right into, so I needed something to do.... so I sat down and just started designing stuff, and I designed about three or four different games, and one of them was Tapeworm, one of them was the Binding of Isaac, one of them was Mew-Genics. I have a family member who has some learning disabilities and his reading comprehension isn't great, so I wanted to make a game that was mostly visually driven, and spatially driven. I hadn't seen many games like that outside of dominoes. So I set out originally to make something as accessible as Uno, but with strategy, and a dynamically driven visual-spatial thing. advertising So the way the game kind of plays out... it kind of expands expands expands, and then at certain points in the game you can cut, and sever off a whole segment and then grow out from that. So if you could stop motion it, it looks like this growing organism that's spreading all over the table and then shrinking and spreading again. I really loved how that looked, but that was almost ten years ago.... So I shelved it basically. I put it back, and after Four Souls finished I had a meeting... and they were like 'you got anything else that you're working on that's physical that we could- anything Isaac related?' And I was like well, not anything Isaac related but I have this game called Tapeworm.... they really liked it. Let's see what happens. It's gonna be interesting because it's not Isaac, but… I want to do it. I want to get it out there, I want people to play it. advertising Q: As someone who's designing these games, do you feel like there's a huge difference designing a video game as opposed to a physical card game? A: Oh, it's very different. It's night and day.... There's only so much you can do with it. It's not like you have a thousand moving pieces, this isn't Catan. It's only me, I can do whatever I want, and I can play it and then I can say, 'let's play again but with a different ruleset.' Not only am I getting feedback on gameplay, I'm also just looking at their faces. There's a certain point when you can literally see someone go 'Ah, I'm smart! I've done it! I figured this out." A moment like that will suck a person right into the game.... [and] there's just a really cool political game going on where... they always force the guy or gal with he least cards in hand to draw a card.... So then you go around playing a minimal amount of cards, but making sure the ones you do play fill your hand with insta-win conditions, so you stack your hand into something like a flush from a card game.... Once you know what someone else has in their hand you can lock them off, you can screw somebody out of the game completely.... When we went really deep on this game, we came into situations where people actually were able to strategize ahead enough to finish the game by locking it off so no one could play a card. advertising
Q: Do you feel like there's some aspect of designing video games that informs designing board games? Or vice-versa, that designing board games would carry over to video games? A: So far I've learned a lot more about board games that carries over into video games. It's kind of just understanding people more. Understanding what makes people feel smart, what makes people feel upset about things.... In video games you can playtest so much, but a lot of times when people playtest they're just playtesting for bugs, they're playtesting for accessibility and that's it. But to actually sit there and watch expressions, and watch emotion, it's much easier to see when you're in it in the physical realm. advertising Q: Do you feel like maybe more developers should experiment with board games? A: For sure! I honestly think that any designer out there- designers who aren't programmers especially, have a great deal of freedom in this realm. You can do whatever you want and you're not dependent on somebody else, or even yourself, spending countless hours programming something.... You can learn a great deal from it. Of course it's not going to work for all games- I'm most known for reflex-driven games. Card games aren't usually reflex driven. Q: Well that's pretty much exhausted my prepared questions; my last question is just this: What is your favorite thing about Tapeworm? Either in making it or in the finished product. advertising A: I think seeing it come alive from the sketches. I think my favorite part of it is the worms! They were very fun to sketch, and working with the artist on this, who actually illustrated everything.... They just look so cute and weird, and I don't know... people tell me 'if you just did anything else this would do well.' But I really love it! I put worms in a lot of my games and I've always had a fascination with parasite type things, and I just thought it would be really cool to make cute ones. Q: So do you think the game itself would have ended up being different if it hadn't been worms? If it had actually been trains, do you think it would be as good of a game? advertising A: I would have lost all interest in it… *laugh* if it was trains. Maybe if it was poops I could have kept going. It was either poops or worms. I couldn't see anything else outside that. The Kickstarter campaign for Tapeworm is live now. Check it out here.
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| Man who vomited from headaches actually had tapeworm in his brain - Global News Posted: 29 Jan 2020 11:16 AM PST Warning: This story contains images and descriptions some readers may find disturbing. Please read at your own discretion. Doctors have removed a tapeworm from a Texas man's brain after he complained of agonizing, vomit-inducing headaches. Patient Gerardo Moctezuma initially thought the headaches were due to tension, doctors told CBS News. However, the pain became steadily worse, to the point where it was causing Moctezuma extreme physical distress. "It's very intense, very strong because it made me sweat, too — sweat from the pain," Moctezuma told NBC News in Spanish. "I would vomit from the pain." Moctezuma turned to neurosurgeons at the Dell Seton Medical Center in Elgin, Texas for help. Doctors took an MRI scan of his head and spotted something unusual coiled up against his brain stem. It was a tapeworm: a thin, ribbon-like parasite that had likely been hiding there for years, feeding on the patient and slowly growing until it was big enough to hurt him with its movements.  Dr. Jordan Amadio said it's "rare and truly extraordinary" to find such a parasite in a patient's brain. "It is not commonly seen and can actually masquerade as different things," he told NBC News. Doctors are not certain where the tapeworm came from, although Moctezuma thinks he may have ingested it from some undercooked pork he ate in Mexico 10 years ago. The patient added that his sister also had a tapeworm removed from her brain several years ago.  "In this patient's case he had been in the states from Mexico for over a decade. We actually think this had been growing in his brain for over a decade undetected," Amadio said. He added that tapeworm infestations are more common in states like Texas and California, perhaps because people travel across the border with Mexico more often from those areas. "It's definitely something, I think, for every medical professional to be aware of," he said. READ MORE: Woman complains of 'electric shocks' in legs, doctors find tapeworm larvae wriggling in spine The so-called "pork tapeworm," known as Taenia solum, can grow to between 2 and 4 metres, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. It grows in a fluid-filled bladder during its larval stage and is only 8-10 millimetres long at that point. Doctors did not indicate whether the tapeworm in Moctezuma's head was in the larval stage, but photos of the procedure show a translucent white sac that fits the larval description.  Humans typically get a tapeworm infection from ingesting its microscopic eggs, which can be found in tainted water and meat that has not been fully cooked, according to the Mayo Clinic. Adult tapeworms often wind up in the intestinal tract, where they quietly siphon nutrients from the host. "Some people with tapeworm infections never need treatment, for the tapeworm exits the body on its own," the Mayo Clinic says. "Others don't realize they have it because they have no symptoms." Doctors say Moctezuma has recovered from his tapeworm infection and has gone back to normal life — although this experience will likely be stuck in his head for the rest of his days. © 2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.  |
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