Interview: Malizma - Gamification
Hi everyone! This interview was recorded back in March of this year, and I finally got around to editing and transcribing it this month. In this one, Ava interviews Malizma, creator of Gamification, which came out back in October 2022. As always, this episode is also fully subtitled on the Line Rider Review YouTube channel. Enjoy!
AVA: Hello everyone! I’m Ava Hofmann, and this is Outside the Lines, a Line Rider podcast where I interview Line Rider creators and talk to them about the artistry behind their tracks.
Malizma has been posting Line Rider tracks to his YouTube channel since 2018. In that time, he has gone through many evolutions in his philosophical and artistic approach to Line Rider - from toy, to game, to art medium. A longtime quirker, Malizma has recently taken his technical and experimental eye not only to Line Rider’s movement, but to its visual and narrative elements as well, and the result has been a body of work that is at turns diverse, entertaining, and deeply exciting. Malizma’s work manages to capture a wide range of emotional experiences that are difficult to find well-depicted elsewhere in Line Rider, and gives the viewer space to enjoy and appreciate the truths found in music that happens to be absolutely hype as hell.
Today I’ll be interviewing Malizma about Gamification, which was recently featured in the #10 slot of the Top 10 Line Rider tracks of 2022. Combining advanced movement techniques with polished video-gamey visuals, Gamification manages to create an immersive visual experience that captures entering the flow state of a high intensity rhythm game, full of twists and turns that will keep you guessing about what will happen next. Gamification is a wild ride that’ll leave you laughing, energized, and wishing for more. I highly recommend you go watch it.
AVA: Hi Malizma! How are you doing?
MALIZMA: Hello! I’m doing fine, how are you?
AVA: I’m great. Ready to talk about Gamification?
MALIZMA: Yeah!
AVA: In your own words, describe Gamification. Talk a little bit about what you find special or interesting about it.
MALIZMA: So, Gamification is an embodiment of all the different interests I’ve picked up in Line Rider, combined with interests outside of Line Rider that I found in other rhythm games, and seeing how those two worlds interact. I tried to capture what it was like to play those games through my own experiences with them - for example, from Geometry Dash - trying to capture that image of the beginning levels and that feeling of playing it for the first time. Also, a very important aspect of Gamification was syncing with the song, and that rhythm aspect that you find in these different games - trying to capture the feeling of listening to music and moving along with it - trying to use your motor functions, when you’re playing a game, to move along with the music. Also part of the goal of Gamification was to utilize quirk specifically for that task, and all the different avenues that quirk has, and its relationship with music.
AVA: How did you start making Gamification? How did the project come into being? What was the process of making it like?
MALIZMA: I think the start of Gamification in my head was when I found this Schwank song. I’d been listening to their work for a while because I’d been getting into this game called Beat Saber, a rhythm game where you swing around sabers and hit notes to a song. I was listening to this new Schwank song and then I started listening again and again and again. The feeling it gave me just fit so well with the aspects that I look for in rhythm games - the hyper-intensity of trying to focus on the music, and the different sections of the music that clash and develop ideas on each other. I think that’s what made it so appealing to me, and how I was able to picture in my head how it could be made into a Line Rider track. I’ve tried doing that for a lot of Line Rider tracks, but this one just came more easily to me. I was still working on two or three other tracks - like Sadie Sorceress and DROOL - but I was really into this idea. It wasn’t Gamification at the time - it wasn’t going to be about rhythm games, it was just going to be another hyper-intense quirk genre track.
So, I went into Line Rider Advanced: Community Edition to start making the track itself. For a while, I had been trying to figure out how to make a track progress, or develop on ideas. In Carbon Fiber I was struggling with that idea, and then in How I think I made steps in the right direction to figure out progression of an idea. What I wanted to do with Gamification was try and limit the intensity of expression until the peak of the song. Originally I started out trying to make it all flatsled, so that’s where the beginning comes in - where it’s just flatsled on a few horizontal lines, just riding down, sort of like you would see in a - I don’t want to say “DoodleChaos release” to stereotype - but more accessible, rather than advanced quirk tricks immediately out of the gate. I wanted to continue with this, so my idea developed into trying to make an intense track out of... not what was considered advanced quirk tricks or technique. So I started experimenting around with ways I could develop that, to create powerful movement with different techniques. This would have been early October when I started creating it.
Line Rider Advanced: Community Edition had added a 10-point cannon generator, which would minimize the need for the grind to create those tricks. I use that a lot in this track. It seemed like there was this cultural push against using 10-point cannons after the generator had been created, because of how easy it was now to create this intense movement-based trick out of a minimal amount of effort. 10-point cannons were seen as this sign of being a noob, or not knowing how to do quirk. I wanted to use 10-point cannons specifically, because they were a powerful trick that you could do effortlessly, but also to push against that grain of, “Only people that don’t know what they’re doing use these tricks, this technique, this tool.” I also used a bit of this trick called 6th-iteration - this glitch where you can make the rider look like they’re going to fall off the sled, or make them move in ways that don’t look like they’re possible, but they are - trying to emphasize that glitch in the music, but only later on. I tried to use what were considered advanced techniques as little as possible, to focus more on the movement Bosh is doing in relation to the music.
So, that’s what Gamification was, start to finish of the track itself - just condensing different not-traditionally-advanced techniques into a really advanced and hyperfocused sync.
AVA: When did it start sort of becoming about rhythm games?
MALZIMA: Halfway through the track, I was starting to figure out that the different elements of the song were divided in different sections. So, in the Geometry Dash section the movement was distinct from the following section - the Dinosaur Game section - and I wanted to emphasize the different movements. When I got to the Guitar Hero section, where he’s moving up and down through the different pinches or passages, it reminded me of moving up and down to different notes in a rhythm game. That’s originally where the idea started, and then in the following section, I was like, “What if I tried experimenting with different games?” So that's where the Trackmania section comes in, where he’s going around spiral lines like roads. That was catered towards this idea that this was going to be about rhythm games. From there I developed that idea, and figured out which sections I wanted to be about which game. Some of the sections weren’t as planned out - they were just general sandbox-type movements, and that gave me a lot of wiggle room for which game I would dedicate specifically to it. Like, in the Dance Dance Revolution section Bosh is just bopping to the beat, rather than actually playing DDR. I knew that I wanted something there, but I wasn’t sure what. But, for sections like osu!, I was like, “Yes, this needs to be in there.” I started planning out all of the sections following Trackmania - writing down what I would want them to be, so I figured out that this particular part of the song would be good for osu!, and this other part of the song would be good for Trackmania.
The tricky part was… I had been developing this idea - sort of steamrolling through it - until I got to that section right before the drop, where I wasn’t sure how to progress the different ideas, or which games to represent in that section - where the intensity ramps up to 11 after the little dialogue between the two riders. At first, I was leaning towards a sort of boss fight - trying to fight this boss battle at the end of every game - but the main reason I didn’t do that was because it would be a lot of work trying to animate all that and plan all that. I was thinking it would be a lot more work than I’d be willing to put in for that type of ending. Also, it wouldn’t really fit with the rhythm game vibe - I don’t see a lot of rhythm games out there that have a boss fight dynamic to them. So, instead, what I opted for, was looking back to this idea of progression - progressing ideas by using ideas from the previous part. So what you see in the final product is meshing all those games together, and sort of glitching through the transitions. I tried planning that for each of the different sections, around the time I knew which sections I wanted to do.
But I think the entirety of the track was made without the specifics of scenery in mind - I knew generally what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how I wanted to do it yet. And then, still in Line Rider Advanced: Community Edition, I started planning out the different animations that I would need. For example, in the Dinosaur Game section, when the player’s pressing the arrow keys - I got to work on animating that. The key-press animations for Dinosaur Game and Dance Dance Revolution were pretty strenuous to finish, but they were worth it in the end.
AVA: And after that you moved it to linerider.com? To do all the color layers and things?
MALIZMA: Yeah, I was getting really into linerider.com’s features at the time - all the camera features, and color - color was a huge thing. I experimented with those in Untitled Malizma Project, trying to see how they would function in the aspect of syncing to music. I fell out of that idea, because I was falling out of Line Rider. I wanted to get back into Line Rider, and with all the new features that linerider.com offered, I was like, “This would be perfect to draw out these different rhythm games, and more accurately represent them than just a black and white canvas.” The camera would also help a lot in the development process, especially in the osu! section, where the still camera was done entirely within the linerider.com command line.
I started working on that in mid-October, trying to design out all the different sections. It was a bit slow to start, with the Geometry Dash section, trying to take inspiration from the background, and the sprites - the assets - it uses - trying to match the images as accurately as I could. But once I got that section done, it didn’t take as long, so I was like, “I’m just going to press on, and continue this idea, that hopefully won’t take a long time.” [laughter] I was worried that it would turn from a month-long project into a year-long project, but luckily it did not.
AVA: [laughter] Thank goodness.
MALIZMA: I was planning on using layer automation - another feature of linerider.com, where you can make certain lines visible at certain frames, for animations - while I was making the keystrokes in Line Rider Advanced. Then I did all of the scenery, and then I focused on doing the layer automation, which was probably the heaviest part of the production time - trying to figure out animating all of that.
AVA: Yeah, layer automation is a nightmare.
MALIZMA: Yeah - it’s a grind, but I figured out how to take a few shortcuts. [laughter] So I got all of the sections up to osu! done, but once I got to that part, I think I had trouble with the line count, cause the file started to lag. So, I had to split it into two files - which I was frustrated to do, because, personally, my creation process in Line Rider is trying, even though I put the most work on myself for doing this [laughter] - but my goal is to use as little post-production as possible, to make it as authentic or as “pure” as possible [laughter] - which I think is a weird goal to have. But I was trying to do that, so splitting it into two files was frustrating. I was like, “Ugh, it’s ruined! It’s not going to be one file!” [laughter] “You can’t watch it continuously!” I don’t know... But yeah, I had to split it into two files, because the linecount got too big.
AVA: Yeah, once you hit about 1.5 million, it’s a nightmare.
MALIZMA: Yeah - it was getting up there, to the million mark. But after that, I finished the rest of the parts, and it was good to go. Then I started working on the zooms and the camera controls - the osu! part was probably the hardest part, because I had to get a still camera instead of moving around like it normally does. I used an injected script to change the behavior of the camera in ways you can’t do with the normal command.
AVA: Whoa, I didn’t know that there was a script that you injected the camera with.
MALIZMA: Yeah - I had to update the camera smoothing. Normally it’s the same smoothing throughout the whole track, but I used a script to update it from 10 to zero for that osu! part, so it wouldn’t glitch out when it shifted.
AVA: Wait, you have a way to do that?
MALIZMA: Yeah - it’s a very makeshift way that probably shouldn’t exist, but it works, so that’s what you see in the final track.
AVA: The camera smoothing is a nightmare that linerider.com creators have been working around for years at this point - the fact that you can’t change the smoothing for different things. I did not know that you had developed a script to fix that, that’s crazy!
MALIZMA: Yeah, I mean, it gets the job done, is all I’ll say. [laughter] So that was the camera nightmare, and then after that the track was pretty much done. I did the One Eyed Giant ending - I took some inspiration from comedic endings in different rhythm games, but also from One Eyed Giant being a classic of the Line Rider community, and the ending of You Want It. The sound effect at the end is actually part of the song - I was wondering what to do, and decided on that.
It was the biggest project I had created within the shortest amount of time - just one month of on-and-off grinding. It was fun, but I was spending a lot of my free time on it throughout the entire month of October. It was certainly quite the effort. I don’t know if I would do it again - I mean, I kind of did for Gaia [laughter] but that’s a whole ‘nother beast.
AVA: Much of your work features the in-depth use of some of the most technical features of Line Rider in order to produce new and dazzling visual effects - take for example the surreal physics of How, or the fluid movement of lava at the end of Gaia. Gamification is no exception to this - as you just highlighted, you used layer automation, animation, and intense quirk in order to immerse the viewer in the game-playing experience with each new surprise or twist of how the track progresses. Why do you think your artistic voice is drawn to the technical complexity in Line Rider, and how do you think about the surprising and disorienting visual effects of your work, both in Gamification and in your other tracks?
MALIZMA: Yeah - I’ve always been really interested in the mathy and computer sciency stuff, so I think part of what drew me to the nuts and bolts of what makes the physics engine tick is the math, and the intricacies of how you can make Bosh move in that way, and the underlying logic behind it. I guess the best way to describe it is, my love for puzzles - trying to figure it out like a puzzle. I think that’s what drew me to quirk, when I first started getting into the Line Rider community - it’s like a puzzle. Trying to figure out, “How do I make Bosh survive?” - the gamification, if you will, [laughter] of that aspect of Line Rider - trying to figure out all the intricacies in the physics engine - it’s not something you’ve ever seen before in a game - it’s pretty unique to Line Rider, in the way that it behaves.
When I first started getting into Line Rider - getting into the quirk side of things - I was watching a lot of popular quirk tracks in the community, and trying to figure out how they were done - how this certain trick is done, how Bosh moves in this certain way, with this precision. At the time, I was really interested in the technical sides of games - I was really into computer science, and how games were programmed. I think that’s what drew me to Line Rider - the quirk side - trying to figure out all of those nitpicky things about the engine. That’s sort of where my interest arrived - interest in the rules of things, and the puzzle-like nature of it - trying to figure out how it works.
AVA: And then you started applying that to things that weren’t just the physics engine - like layer automation code, or camera code.
MALIZMA: Yeah - that ties into getting into the mod scene. At first I was more into modifying Line Rider Advanced, because I was more accustomed to using it for quirk tricks and techniques. It offered a lot more of the intricacies of the physics engine, and it was the popular choice for quirkers in the community at the time. But I got into the modding scene trying to figure out how to change little things about how the engine worked - trying to make Bosh invincible, or invisible - trying to add more features, that other people might like to try out as well. So, initially, it was out of a desire to see how much I could break Line Rider, but, following that, I think there was an interest in exploring possibilities of Line Rider as a medium, and trying to figure out how to make it more malleable.
So, yeah - I initially got into Line Rider Advanced development, and then I started getting into linerider.com around the time colors became a thing, and then getting into how camera automations and zooms work. I was trying to figure out my passion for the coding scene in Line Rider Advanced, and transferring some of that knowledge to linerider.com. Trying to figure out that development was really interesting - it was like the puzzle of figuring out quirk and the Line Rider physics engine - trying to figure out how to make the camera move in certain ways and how to reverse-engineer all these different features. What drew me to the linerider.com features was that it provided a way to hone its power more efficiently - and it was more open source, more accessible. It offered support for add-ons and mods, and that system added a lot for me as a developer trying to figure this stuff out. Development in Line Rider Advanced was a bit trickier, because it was made in a much more difficult, albeit more powerful, language.
AVA: Yeah, linerider.com is in JavaScript, what is…?
MALIZMA: Line Rider Advanced was made in C#. It’s more… robust, is the word. It was tricky trying to create a new feature when I had to add like 20 lines of code in Line Rider Advanced, when I could add like two lines in linerider.com. So, that was what drew me to linerider.com more - that accessibility of development features.
AVA: It’s interesting - this puzzle-solving thing you’ve described - because it really feels like that in your Line Rider tracks, where you’re sort of creating an odd problem for yourself, and then you’re trying to solve that, artistically and technically. Gamification has some of that, Gaia has a lot of that, and so does How.
MALIZMA: Yeah - that’s what my interest in creating tracks nowadays lies in - creating this problem, or this story that I want to develop, or this idea that I want to progress, and figuring out different techniques, and new techniques building off each other, of how to do that. Taking it piece-by-piece, and - like a puzzle - figuring out the inner mechanisms of what would work best for it.
AVA: How do you think about the way you create visual effects in your work, both in Gamification and elsewhere?
MALIZMA: I think it’s a case-by-case scenario. For How, it started with me experimenting with a feature of Line Rider Advanced where you could change the PNG file of the skin to something completely different, visually - and then going from there, with that weird idea, and exploiting that, without really thinking ahead of the visuals, or how it would progress, until later on. For something like Gamification, I saw the movement, and it reminded me of this rhythm game that I’d played, and then I sort of progressed on that, to where I visualized it as a gameplay experience - playing rhythm games. And then for something like Gaia, I took this abstract concept of what I wanted it to be, tried scribbling it out in a draft, and then was like, “I kind of like this style of scribbles, so I’m just going to do that for the rest of the track.” [laughter] So it was sort of case-by-case, but what those things have in common is this idea in my head, and then narrowing it down to the ways I could progress it with different techniques that I know.
AVA: You talked about the way Gamification recreates a gameplay experience, and that’s obviously the most immediate and striking feature of Gamification - the way it recreates these video games - Geometry Dash, Trackmania - and, like you said, you’re not just recreating the visuals, you’re also proximating aspects of their gameplay - and together they form this stream of flow state experiences and intense gaming sequences, in a way that is very reminiscent of what it’s like to actually play a video game. Like, it feels like playing a rhythm game, tonally. Why did you choose to depict the experience of playing a video game in Line Rider, and what did you want to say about video games with your work in Gamification?
MALIZMA: I guess, by happenstance, I was into Line Rider as a medium, and I was also really into video games, and rhythm games. It was a personal challenge to myself, I guess. Like, “How do these two worlds collide, and what is their relationship,” and trying to figure out how I could emulate one inside the other. So, I think it was initially from a challenge like that, where I would challenge myself by figuring out what techniques I could use, that Line Rider offered, to produce the effects that are seen in these games, or try and produce the feelings you get when playing them. So, yeah - it was from a place of technical challenge, and trying to reverse-engineer that problem.
And then the history of Line Rider being gamified ties into that, with the choices of techniques I used to represent movement, as opposed to how heavily I relied on visuals to focus on the intensity of the song. I was trying to combat the ideas of how to represent intensity with a song - using quirk, rather than visualization, for that. But that relationship with games comes from the history of syncing in Line Rider that’s been been a big thing since Colorblind, when it became an implemented feature. That history of Line Rider - how can you sync this thing to music - had intimate ties with the idea of rhythm games - where, instead of trying to sync Bosh’s movements, you’re trying to sync your movements - a visual representation of music, in an immediate and live context. So I think that’s where that desire to create rhythm games specifically came from - my passion for rhythm games, tying into my passion for Line Rider and its music sync capabilities, and trying to combine those two worlds.
AVA: Sometimes I think - Line Rider is kind of like a zero-player rhythm game, right? [laughter]
MALIZMA: Yeah, it’s very interesting in that aspect, where, you could classify it as a “sandbox game”, but it’s not really - it’s a stretch to call it a game, because it doesn’t really have any goals or objective. But I think that’s where the title, “Gamification” originates - that drive for Line Rider as a game, against it being an art medium, and trying to see how those two worlds could interact - trying to push against the idea of what it means for Line Rider to be a game.
AVA: Yeah it’s a funny use of the word “gamification” - and I mean “funny” in a very positive way - where it’s like, “Well, what if we replicated the visual artistry - what makes video games powerful, in Line Rider?”
MALIZMA: Yeah - coming from a background interest in game design and game development, specifically on the programming side of things - it ties in with how it works, as not a game but a toy - and the different features it offers, trying to figure out how those serve purpose as tools. I guess Line Rider could be also considered - this is a stretch, but - a game engine - where I’ve designed these games in this game engine, - or sort of replicated them - but you’re not actually playing it, so it’s more of a visual experience of those games.
AVA: This is a really interesting idea that I think is true, and resonates, because you then made Flappy Bosh, right? [laughter]
MALIZMA: Flappy Bosh was an interesting challenge. At the time, I’d been experimenting with all of linerider.com’s features, trying to push it to its limits with interactivity, among other avenues I was exploring. But yeah - trying to figure out how to make Line Rider interactive in a way that wasn’t just livedraw - drawing out the track while it’s playing - trying to see if I could make it where you could actually interact with it like a game. Flappy Bosh was the result of that. That was the second game I made - it was more like an official release. I had experimented with it in the early stages by trying to make Tic Tac Toe, which actually has a fully working win-detection system.
AVA: Whoa.
MALIZMA: That was a fun project. But yeah - trying to figure out how Line Rider could be also a game engine, because it has this interesting look to it, from a user interface perspective - a simple minimalist style, with just lines on a canvas. How could that be used to represent various aspects of interactivity and visual stimuli?
AVA: I do like this point about Line Rider being a game engine. Because if you think about it... [laughter] this is me going to be saying something unhinged [laughter] - but, a sheet of paper is a game engine, right? [laughter] You know what I mean?
MALIZMA: That’s true, yeah! [laughter] That’s so true - you can interact with it, and play games on it - you can design a Tic Tac Toe board - that’s game design, when you draw out a Tic Tac Toe board.
AVA: To me, it emphasizes that Line Rider is an art medium, but we play a select few games in the game engine of Line Rider. One of them is the zero-player rhythm game - which is the music sync - and then there’s other things - you can draw things, or some of the ways in which quirkers have approached Line Rider. It’s a really interesting thought about what a medium is - or game engines as a medium. I think it’s very rich philosophical ground, because it’s like, “What other games could we be playing with Line Rider?”, right?
MALIZMA: Exactly, yeah.
AVA: How do you think about music synchronization in your work? You’ve been saying a few things about quirk’s relationship to music sync, and your recent approach to combining those two things has been particularly unique in the Line Rider space - thinking about, “How can I make quirk that serves what the music is doing, or what the narrative is doing?” So, how do you think about quirk as part of your artistic voice, and what do you think about quirk in general? I think you also have some unique takes among quirkers about quirk.
MALIZMA: So, trying to think about how to represent certain parts of different songs - I think my methodology with that stems back to when I was really into Geometry Dash, when I was a kid. I think, playing that for a long time, getting into the ways that different levels were created and how you interact with the song through Geometry Dash - I think, subconsciously, I built a system of visualizing music through Geometry Dash - like, “How could this be a Geometry Dash level?” in my head. I was thinking of it through that lens, and I think I transferred a lot of that experience with Geometry Dash to Line Rider - trying to visualize, “Okay, how could this be represented with what I know about Line Rider?” or, if it can’t be represented, “What different aspects can I exploit, that haven’t been explored yet?” That is usually my initial thought process - when I hear a song and want to try to do something interesting with it.
I think that’s how I approach music sync with Line Rider - visualizing it in my head, and picking out the techniques I know. But - and I guess this ties into my opinions on quirk - trying to not do it in like a monotonous, or sort of autotune way, where it’s just pulling tricks out of a hat and trying to sync it to the music. I try to figure out how I listen to the music, and what I hear upon first listening to it, and trying to best match that without the constraints of quirk. Like, I have quirk as a tool that I can use, but I don’t want to limit myself entirely to it. I want to use it in the context of some interesting scenery, or interesting camera work, where it would best serve the song. I think of quirk more as a precise movement tool, where you can do some really interesting things, rather than the full-on experience - where what they should see is just a bunch of these lines that make no sense and just do stuff. Instead, what they should see is, like, not the lines, just the movement - and then placed in this world that tries to best express what the music is saying. I think a lot of that does derive from Geometry Dash and their community. That avenue is further emphasized with the addition of color in Line Rider - trying to figure out how to use color to present what I feel when listening to a specific piece of music.
But with Gamification specifically, color was my main choice for the visuals, because I didn’t want it to be limited to the black and white canvas - I wanted to truly represent all of the visual elements of the games. I think part of the drive to not use heavy quirk was because, in most electronic-based songs, that was the first choice - to go all-out gigaquirk and make crazy stuff happen - which I didn’t want to do. It’s been done over and over, and I was getting tired of that formulaic approach to interacting with electronic music. Probably another point of discussion is electronic music - being really into that, and trying to see how I can represent it with the tools that Line Rider offers - trying to figure out how this certain glitch in the music could be represented by a glitch in the rider’s sprite, or a glitch in the scenery visuals, or things like that. So I think part of my approach to music is influenced by that inspiration from electronic music.
AVA: It’s really interesting, because there has been a lot of electronic music that’s been put into Line Rider tracks - but your tracks are some of the first that I feel are really listening to the electronic music. It’s not just, “This thing happens on the beat,” you’re really trying to capture the emotion of electronic music. I’d be really interested in hearing your thoughts about Line Rider and electronic music.
MALIZMA: I guess this would tie into my interest in figuring out the advanced techniques in the engine, and the different modifications you could add to Line Rider to add features to the engine - as well as this idea of progression that I’ve been experimenting with, that have all channeled into my interest into using electronic music in Line Rider. I think Line Rider as a digital medium really helps that case, of how you could use frame-precise visuals and specific technicalities involved in Line Rider to represent the technicalities involved in electronic sounds, and how those two worlds interact.
AVA: Something you mentioned in the previous question was the use of color - color in Line Rider seems like something you’ve been drawn to for a long time, even in tracks as early as 2018’s Barbara Streisand. [laughter]
MALIZMA: At the time, I think that was just like, “Hey this looks cool, I’ll do it.” I wasn’t really thinking of how it actually interacts with the song - it was just a new, glitched build of Line Rider Advanced where it added these weird color effects.
AVA: But I think it’s indicative of what you’ve been drawn to, right? You’re one of the first quirkers to really embrace the use of color - one of the few Line Rider creators who has been combining quirk with color visuals - in Gamification, Untitled Malizma Project, and Gaia - so I was going to ask about what your approach to color in Line Rider is, and how you go about combining movement with color.
MALIZMA: I don’t think I had a big approach to color before color was introduced. I wasn’t really pushing for Line Rider to have color, but when it became available to me, I started thinking of all the possibilities I could do with it, and how it could change how I think about syncing in Line Rider. I think it was a big help to have that Geometry Dash background, which had a lot of involvement in color, and how color interacts - feeding my interest in how color could interact in Line Rider, and how it could evolve to interacting with quirk in interesting ways.
The way I use color is to illustrate what I see in my head when I visualize tracks - I try to start with an image, or an online reference, of what I’m visualizing - that’s actually real and not in my head - trying to figure out how I could best represent that image in Line Rider, taking inspiration from that, and using the different color features to try to match the image while the music is playing. With the color, it sort of creates this incidental effect, where the color is adding to the music in a way that I might not have intended.
I don’t know if I would say I engage a whole lot with combining color and movement - I don’t really consider the effects that color has on movement as much as I could, which could be an interesting avenue to go down for future tracks - the effect that color has on movement. I don’t want to say I have room for improvement, but it could be an interesting project to figure out how color specifically ties into the effects of music, and the effects of movement. I’ve had some instances where I do give intentional choices to color, and what colors I use, but I don’t think I overall typically consider color as a tool that could work well with those other tools. I think my intentions lie in the overall experience, where color is a tool, and movement is a tool, that could serve this overall purpose for the viewer. But it would be an interesting conversation - interacting with those tools and seeing how they serve each other.
AVA: Gamification also contains within it what feels like a bit of a commentary on Line Rider as a whole. We’ve already talked about “gamification” as this word that has a lot of associations attached to it in the Line Rider community - specifically around Rabid Squirrel’s video essay, Line Rider: The Gamification of an Art Medium. And the games you selected don’t feel like random selections either - as we’ve been talking about, many of the games are rhythm games - some with some pretty close associations with Line Rider, like Geometry Dash! You also feature a few meta-commentary in-jokes in the track - like the differences between the linerider.com and Line Rider Advanced versions of Line Rider, and that One-Eyed Giant reference at the end. What do you think you were trying to say about Line Rider’s relationship with itself in Gamification, and what do you think about Line Rider’s capacity to comment on itself?
MALIZMA: You mentioned that section with the two Boshes, contrasting linerider.com with Line Rider Advanced - and I think what I was trying to paint a picture of was the divide between linerider.com and Line Rider Advanced - the stereotype of artists versus quirkers - where for the quirkers, there’s this idea where they have this drive to try and get respect for quirk, and enforce it as a serious avenue of artistic expression - which it is, but in the way that it’s communicated it’s a little, I guess, aggressive is the word - where there’s not a lot of room for what you can do with quirk alone, but as a tool it’s an effective way to get precise movement for what you want. I think what I was trying to say with that whole conversation, with the Line Rider Advanced Bosh telling the linerider.com Bosh to go harder and faster and more intense, was just adding to this idea that the way to engage with electronic music is that you have to pump it up to the max and go to 11, per se, with quirk - to the point where it’s basically incomprehensible - and that’s the only way to represent it properly, which is not a great outlook for electronic music. It’s a very limited scope of what you can do with it. And that ties into why I used specifically flatsled and 10-point cannons - that you don’t have to just use advanced quirk as a tool, or “advanced techniques” of quirk - you can use different ways of movement and still get the intense result.
But another part of that was the toxic culture with Line Rider quirk - I guess competitive is the word - but to a not-very-fun point, where it’s extremely over-gamified. The community has gotten a lot better about this, from what I’ve noticed, but this was discussing that whole 10-year background of quirk, where it was this competitive ground of who could outperform who, and who could do the best tricks with the least amount of red lines, or no red lines at all - all of these different challenges. Which - I mean, from a puzzle perspective - that’s part of what brought me to quirk, and the part that I enjoyed - but from a mental health perspective, or an enjoyment perspective, that kind of sucked the fun out of quirk - trying to engage with that competitive aspect. What I wanted to do - I think it was sort of a slow process of figuring out that, with Line Rider, I didn’t want to adhere to the same formula of using quirk over and over, and instead of getting hyperfixated on the nitpicky details for the sake of being competitive, and being the first one to do it, I instead wanted to see, “How can I use this to engage with this music in a more accurate way - the way that I listen to it?”
Another element of that toxicity sort of underlies gaming communities as a whole, including those rhythm games that I represented - where there’s that competitive aspect of doing intricate tricks. Where I experienced this the most was probably the Geometry Dash community - trying to get into the more and more difficult and nuanced levels, I would watch as people in the community spent days doing attempts on a level over and over, just to die over and over again, and that sort of turned me away from Geometry Dash. There is an element of skill to it, but it was a lot more about the tedium and the time put into that, rather than the performance itself - how it represents the music. So that’s what fueled me away from Line Rider quirk competitiveness - that initial disgust for the competitive culture of rhythm game communities and competitive gaming in general. And there is some enjoyment to be found in competitive gaming - I’m not saying that it’s bad and you should never do it - but the way that it’s presented as, “You should always be doing better than everyone else,” it’s had a history of turning a lot of people away and making something anti-accessible - if your ultimate goal is to surpass everyone else, from the onset.
AVA: I get what you’re saying about competitiveness - I find it a lot less satisfying when I’m competing to someone else’s puzzle - if we want to put it in terms of puzzles. I think it’s a lot more satisfying when you create a puzzle for yourself, or a challenge for yourself, and then you complete it - instead of this competitiveness, it’s a self-directed engagement with something. And there’s still a competitiveness to that, but it’s not, “Who’s the best?” - it’s like, “What am I able to do?”
MALIZMA: Yeah - I think that’s what kept me going with Line Rider - trying to figure out how I could use what I learned from quirk and push the limits of what is possible with music syncing, and the visual possibilities of Line Rider in general. And I think that’s definitely an important aspect of gaming in general - not to get caught up in comparing yourself with other people, but trying to challenge yourself at your own pace.
AVA: I think that’s such an important thing. I think games are for everybody, and Line Rider is for everybody, and it’s about engaging at your level.
Final question, and then I’ll let you go. What do you hope for from the future, both in terms of Line Rider, and in terms of your life and the world?
MALIZMA: I think I mentioned this way at the beginning, when I was talking about my purist ideology around creating in Line Rider. I want everything to be in-engine - I don’t want to use any post-production methods with Line Rider. I think what I hope for, is that everything you can do in an editing software, you can do in Line Rider, but in a more accessible way, without having to go through the hoops of trying to make a script for this certain camera feature, or trying to learn how to code just to make layers turn on and off. I want you to be able to do all of that within the constraints of just opening linerider.com, for that accessibility purpose. And I think that part of that drive comes from wanting to make something that’s purely authentic from the perspective of gameplay, or video games - trying to make it so that you didn’t cheat. So part of it comes from that unhealthy rabbit hole of wanting it to be the most authentic, or prove that you can do it within these certain constraints, but I think it would be beneficial for the community as a whole, because it would make it more accessible if you had those editing tools.
Where I started with Line Rider - when I started making content in general - I didn’t really have access to those editing tools, and I didn’t really know how to utilize them properly. So, coming from my figuring-out-puzzles background, I would try and figure out, “Okay, how could I make this effect, or replicate this effect best, with the tools that I’ve got?” But I think I hope, for the future, that you don’t have to do that, and that it can be more accessible and easy to do - that you don’t have to use an external source to do it.
And for my life and the world... I don’t know.
AVA: See, these are the big questions.
MALIZMA: Okay, yeah.
AVA: Getting real.
MALIZMA: [laughter] I guess we just... keep existing. We’re existing, and Line Rider is an art medium that exists in this world that we exist in, and I think it can be used to make interesting and beautiful things, in a way that no other medium can really fully touch on the way Line Rider can. I don’t know. That’s an answer, I guess. [laughter]
AVA: Neatly side-stepping “What do you want from your life?” but I understand.
MALIZMA: Line Rider! That’s what I want!
AVA: Line Rider for life!!! Let’s go!!!
MALIZMA: Yeah!!!
This interview was conducted on March 21, 2023. It has been edited for concision and clarity.
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