La Cartoonerie - A look at creation games and their unique language
In 2019, I was in the final year of my computer science bachelor and needed to find an internship in order to get the degree. At this point, I wasn't desperate enough to give up on finding an internship in something that interested me.
At the time, I was interested in games and educational stuff, mostly related to creation tools. This lead me to think about La Cartoonerie, a website for creating and sharing cartoons which really left a mark on the childhood of many French people of my generation.
This little episode led me to write this blog post, using La Cartoonerie as a sort of case study to talk about creation games (I will define this term later) and what makes them unique in my eyes. I will start by explaining the context surrounding my re-discovery of this website, and I will compare it to other creation games in order to highlight the defining features of creation games which makes them so great.
A website lost to time
For a little context, 2019 was the time when the world learned that support for Adobe Flash Player in browsers was gonna get dropped, and I was wondering what this website (which was based on Flash) had become, and how they were planning to handle the end of Flash. After all, maybe they needed some hands to convert the tool to HTML5? Perfect for an internship!
When searching for it, I stumbled upon forum posts on La Cartoonerie, discussing the end of Flash, and how to deal with it. To my horror, people were saying that the owners of the website basically went away with the key, and it was impossible for these users to make a transition to HTML5 because they had no access to the code, and couldn't inherit the ownership of the site.
Most of the users in this forum post were people who had discovered the website when they were a child, but then kept returning to it and creating new things. La Cartoonerie was evidently precious to them. This is a sad story, but a lot of popular cartoons made on the website were eventually exported to the official Youtube channel, so those cartoons aren't lost media (yet).
Despite me thinking about the website because of the end of Flash and rediscovering La Cartoonerie during this specific period, this post is not about the death of web tools and games and how to preserve them and keep them usable in the long run. I could also write about this topic, but I'm sure others have already said a lot of interesting things about it.
La Cartoonerie itself
To start, I would like to give a brief history and description of La Cartoonerie. The history part is mostly for context's sake, and the description will help me define what I mean precisely with the term creation game" in the next section.
From what I could find, La Cartoonerie was created in 2006 by three people on their spare time before leaving their jobs to work on it full time1. They even managed to get contracts with some big french media at some point, showing that it was quite popular2. Since 2010, the website has been managed by the community, and an association named LAKASSOCIATION was created in 2017. The association still exists, but is probably not active anymore given the death of Flash.
The website itself looks like a lot of browser-based multiplayer games of the time. The interface was pretty childish but usable, I remember that you could sometimes got some floating bills that rewarded you with in-game money when you clicked on them.
There was of course the "theater" where you could go watch some new popular cartoons, or the new episode of a show you were following. In particular, I remember a series named "Lonely Vampire" which you can find on Youtube3. It looks pretty cheap when watching it now, but trust me, making these animations must have taken the author countless hours given the tools available, and when I was a kid, I couldn't imagine ever being able to do something like that (I still don't). I will talk about this specific aspect of La Cartoonerie and creation games in general in another section.
But the real heart of this website was the cartoon editor. It's made with Flash, so it is laggy, and it gets more and more laggy as you add stuff to the scene. The user interface is a bit hard to use if you're clumsy like me, and obviously, since all of this is targeted at children, it's pretty limited. But these limitations are what makes everything interesting right? This is a theme that really speaks to me and is related to my last post. We will get to that later. To be accurate, there actually was multiple different modes you could choose in the editor: a simplified mode allowing everyone to make simple cartoons easily, and an advanced mode giving more control to more experienced users.
Once in the editor, you could switch between different tools: the "casting" tool for creating and editing characters; the "sets" for creating and editing backgrounds for your cartoon; and finally, the "shooting" tool where the actual animation work happened, bringing your characters and decors to life. The animation tool was somewhat simplified, but had pretty much everything you would expect: you could move the character's joints and change object properties such as scale, transform, rotation, etc. Of course, keyframes could be inserted in a timeline, and the animation engine would then do an interpolation between those keyframes, giving us... Animations! The editor also provided you with basic animations like walking, running, moving lips for characters, etc. For audio, you could upload your own files or use provided sound effects and music. All dialogue was handled with speech bubbles like in a comic, and voilà! That's pretty much everything you could do in this editor.
Creation games
Now, what is a creation game then?
I'm not using the term "creative game" as that could mean a game that itself is creative. To me, creation games are centered around creation, and creating something, be it music, animations, games, etc. is the central part. They are often presented as games, but usually are a lot closer to actual tools.
Many games allow players to create. Outside of creation games, games often include level editors. I'm thinking of Super Mario Maker or Portal 2 for example. Here, players can express themselves through the level editor, and the community efforts always result in great levels, enhancing the experience of everyone, and allowing players to get a taste of what level design is like. I'm drawing a line between these types of editors and creation games, as in this case, the creativity of the players is always bounded by the limits and rules of the original game. A user-made level in Super Mario Maker will always conform to the rules of a Mario game, even if many levels are very creative and stretch the game system to its limits. Portal 2 is a bit more permissive, but stays a bit limited (especially if we only consider community levels made with the in-game editor).
Some games with level editors get much closer to creation games without being full-on creation games. I would say these games (or these games' map editors) are on the blurry frontier between normal games and creation games. I'm thinking about real time strategy (RTS) games such as Starcraft II or Warcraft III. These games offer map editors so complete that people actually actually created entirely different games in them, stretching the limits of the engine to the maximum. For instance, people made an MMORPG-style game in the Starcraft II arcade4, and even shooter games5. The fact that DotA was originally a custom map for Warcraft III, which eventually gave birth to the whole MOBA genre of games, is proof of the crazy possibilities these in-game editors provide. We could also mention Couter Strike which was originally a mod of Half Life, but since this is a mod, I believe it's a little different to something made entirely in an in-game editor. These games with incredibly advanced editors close the gap to creation games, but with that said, it would be a stretch to call them creation games, because the main focus of these games, their goal, is not creation. These games were made as strategy games, their whole purpose is not about creating and sharing custom maps, even though they provide the tools to do so.
This brings me to actual creation games. The examples I want to take for this section are Flipnote Studio6 and Dreams7. Those are games that are specifically centered around the act of creating stuff: flipbook-style animations in the case of Flipnote (which is also a game of my childhood), and games in the case of Dreams. Creations can then be shared with the community, and even improved-on by other users in some cases. La Cartoonerie's central focus as a creation game, is on the creation of cartoons. As a web-based creation game, I think La Cartoonerie is a bit more accessible to everyone, and the user interface is less limited than with a DS screen or a Playstation controller.
The reason I love creation games is that they allow users with no prior skills to create music, games, art, animations, etc. But these games are different to traditional tools because they still need to pass as games, and not just software. In fact, I believe they fall on a spectrum according to how simple or how complex they are, and how much or how little control they provide users.
Complexity and features in creation games
In their quest to make creation accessible to everyone, creation games need to determine how much or how little control and features they provide the users. This choice is closely related to the complexity of the final tool: more control and features means more choices to be made for the user, more menus, more stuff to think about; less features means a simpler, but more limited tool. In both cases, too much complexity or too much simplicity can prevent non-expert users from making what they want. I will try to illustrate this with Flipnote and Dreams.
I love Flipnote, but I believe it falls in the category of creation games that are too simple. Few creation games get simpler than Flipnote: you can draw with your DSi stylus, creating animation frames, you have access to two different layers and two different colors, and that's pretty much it. No joints, no keyframes, no other feature. This is cool, but it is so simplistic that it pretty much reduces your ability to make a cool animation to your ability to draw. If you can draw and animate pretty well by hand, you'll be able to make cool animations. If you can't, you're screwed. It's just a flipbook in the end.
I haven't played Dreams a lot, but to me, it's the opposite. Dreams offers a huge amount of features and stuff to do: you can make 3D models, music, logic, etc. Everything needed to make a video game. For example, you don't need to know how to code to make logic in Dreams: you can make logic circuits using blocks, in a kind of visual programming language similar to Scratch. It's a bit more difficult for graphics, but since everyone has to use a Playstation controller, learning to make 3D models in Dreams becomes a skill on its own, and that's the thing: Dreams contains so many features, so many things, it offers so much control, that in order to make something really interesting, you have to become skilled. In this case, you don't have to become skilled in 3D modeling or programming on their own, but you have to become good at using the Dreams editor itself.
I would say those are the two extremes of creation games: in the first case, the tool is so simple that the limiting factor becomes the ability of users in a specific skill like drawing; in the second case, users have to train their ability to use the tool itself.
In my opinion, La Cartoonerie falls in a bit more balanced spot. It is closer to Dreams than it is to Flipnote, but the tool itself is much more limited, resulting in a much shorter learning curve. As an animation tool, it differs from Flipnote by imposing its own way of making characters, backgrounds, and animations. You could say it has its own language, which brings me to my last point.
The language of a creation game
Since creation games provide their own specific tools that the users must use, they become kind of a unique vocabulary.
I explained in the last section that I believe La Cartoonerie sits in a sweet spot in terms of complexity and features. This also makes its language the most interesting out of our three examples. Since Flipnote simply relies on the user's drawing skills for making nice animations, its language is quite limited. The defining features of Flipnote's language are probably the limited colors and brushes available, and the audio which is always recorded through the console's microphone. For Dreams, I would argue that it offers so many features that its language is too complex. You can see that a game was made in Dreams when you play it, but it's very difficult to figure out exactly how the creator has made it. La Cartoonerie, sitting in the sweet spot of complexity and features offers the most balanced language for a creation game out of the three I presented.
Most people who watch movies are not movie directors, and most people who read books are not writers themselves. However, most people watching cartoons on La Cartoonerie have tried to make one themselves because it's the whole purpose of the website. A director watching a movie will probably think about it in a very different way compared to someone who has never touched a camera. The same goes for these cartoons: when you know how the characters are made and how the editor works, you can understand how the creator made certain effects, you can get an idea of the tricks they used when they inevitably have to go beyond the limitations of the tool. Maybe they used a built-in object from the game but changed its color and scaled it so that it looks like something else.
Going back to "Lonely Vampire", I don't remember details of the story or characters, but I do remember some of the tricks used in the show. For example, in the first episode, the main character looks at a photograph of her mother. But the photograph is, of course, just a scaled down version of an actual character, and since there is no way of stopping the character from blinking automatically, the person in the photograph blinks. It looks a bit stupid, but it's a detail that you can understand only if you played around with the editor yourself.
The blinking character is in the end an artifact resulting from the limitations of the editor, but these limitations are much more interesting when they force the authors to make creative decisions to go around them. I remember thinking "wow, that must be so hard!" when seeing cartoons with actual animated fingers: since the characters have no fingers but just have a ball for a hand, the cartoon creators had to come up with a solution which usually involved scaled rectangles making up the phalanges.
Leaving no one behind
I wanted to write this post about creation games to highlight their most interesting aspect in my opinion: allowing everybody to create art (games, animation, music, etc.). I wanted to show that the accomplishment of this goal depends greatly on the subtle balance of complexity and features that are provided in the game (or tool), this fine balance is what makes it really hard to make a great creation game. I took La Cartoonerie as an example because I believe it is (was) a well balanced creation game, but also because it's a part of my childhood and French internet history, and I wanted to pay some sort of homage to it. That being said, Flipnote and Dreams are great creation games in their own right: they are pretty well balanced in the sense that they are much easier to use for people who know nothing about game development or animation than "real" animation software or "real" game engines. I think La Cartoonerie achieves a slightly better balance, and thus is able (in theory) to reach more people (obviously, in practice it didn't).
The design choices of the creation game are what lead to its specific language. When the balance of features / complexity is done correctly, it means that more people can engage in the creation tool, and the language grows in significance and importance within the ecosystem of the game. Flipnote and Dreams obviously have their own language as well (i.e. the limited colors in Flipnote), but in the case of Flipnote, its simplicity makes the language closer to the language of hand-drawn animations, while the language of Dreams is specific to Dreams, but it's so large that it makes it much harder to engage with.
In the end, creation games give us a glimpse of a world where everyone watching a movie is a director, where everyone playing a game is a game designer. They create a small bubble with its own language, limiting the amount of things that can be done, but making the amount of knowledge needed for a deeper understanding of the creations much lower than in the "real world". A good creation game leaves no one behind when it comes to their own creations and deeper understanding of the creations of others, and that's what makes them special.