What if things were different

I'm currently reading Uzumaki by Junji Ito, a horror manga where supernatural phenomena revolve around spiral patterns. I find it to be more of dark humor than truly frightening, but that's okay. It's a fun, strange, and often really gross read. But aside from the specific content, I appreciate the approach Ito takes in creating his own twisted take on the modern world. It's a technique used often; this work just brought it to mind.

Uzumaki is a series of stories that take place in a small Japanese coastal town where people go about their lives and everything functions normally-- except that the town has somehow mysteriously been "infected by the Spiral." One man becomes obsessed with the spiral, until he is drawn in so deeply that he contorts his body itself into a spiral form, losing his life in the process. When he is cremated, the smoke rises into the sky, causing a spiral in the clouds that transfixes the town's residents. Unsettling whirlwinds spiral through the town; locks of girls' hair spiral and take on a life of their own; the spiral stairway of a lighthouse leads residents to their death. The spiral is everywhere, and it makes life in our world different, scary, and surprising.

It's a way of thinking that many artists possess, and that leads us to follow them into their imagined works: the power of visualization, not to take the world around them for granted, but to picture, "what if things were different?" It connects straight back to how we see the world as children. Before we know how everything around us works, and we settle into static assumptions about our surroudings, the possibilities are endless. It's the fertile ground in which imagination grows. Could there be a monster in the closet or under the bed? No reason there couldn't be, so maybe there is! Could aliens come down out of the sky? Could dogs and cats talk to each other when people aren't around? Could there be ghosts and angels everywhere, that we just can't see? Could another world exist on the other side of the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole? Before we knew it couldn't, it could, and we imagined, "what if this IS the way the world works?"

This kind of functional question, explored in fiction like Uzumaki, engages directly with the rules of our world. It disrupts them, adds in a variable, and explores the implications. In that sense, this sort of imaginative journey maps directly to games. It changes the ruleset of ordinary life, and games are all about rules. The sense of discovery is the same, when you first get your hands on a new game and explore how it works: what do the buttons do? What can I pick up and climb onto and go inside of and affect in this world? How does everything work? Once you've become comfortable in that gameworld, and all its possibilities are exhausted, the newness and sense of discovery fades away.

But the artist continues to see new possibilities. And in that way, game designers can take the world we know, imagine if it worked differently, and then by abstracting and implementing those rules in a game, allow players to experience the possibilities they've imagined. Working backwards, having come in contact with this new and unexpected vision of our own world, the player can return to their familiar assumptions, and question them just a bit more.

If you've read Uzumaki, you probably didn't think about spirals the same way for a while when you encountered them in your daily life. And if you've played Katamari Damacy, maybe you had trouble driving for a while without thinking about rolling up traffic cones. Maybe you enter the lobby of the public library and think what you'd use for cover if the Covenant were to attack, or start noticing great hiding spots for GTA's Hidden Packages as you wander around the city.

All of us should be so lucky as to retain our sense of wonder and infinite possibility from childhood; the best games show us possibilities we never would've imagined, let us play with them, internalize them, and bring them back into our own world, imagining, "what if?"

In small but important ways, contact with inspiring gameworlds transforms our everyday into something just a little bit less ordinary.

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Helping Players Find Their Own Way - talk from NYU Practice 2011

This past weekend I was lucky enough to participate in the first annual Practice Conference at NYU. I gave a talk on level design technique and wanted to share it here. So please click through to the presentation on Slideshare and be sure to click the "Speaker Notes" button beneath the slideshow. This way you can read through the presentation along with the illustrations.

Here's the presentation.

You can also download the .ppt directly from Slideshare if you prefer to view it offline.

Thanks to Charles Pratt, Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman and everyone at NYU for inviting me, and to all the incredibly smart and inspiring designers I met there. It was a fascinating event and I'm really glad to have taken part. Hope to be there again next year!

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The closed loop

"Humanity, loss, race, friendship, acceptance - heavy topics for any medium, and especially difficult for videogames. After finishing Minerva's Den, these are the things I'm contemplating regardless."

-from Arthur Gies' review on IGN.com

---

So, a couple of weeks ago, Minerva's Den, the story-based DLC for BioShock 2, was made available on Xbox Live and Playstation Network. This gives me some stuff to talk about.

Firstly, the response has been quite positive, for which I am very grateful. We're up there near the top of the highest rated add-ons on Xbox Live, and last I checked we had 200+ reviews on PSN with an average user rating of 4.96 stars out of 5. Can't really ask for more than that.

It's encouraging because, as DLC, we were a small team without a ton of resources. I'm insanely proud of what our team accomplished, and I think our success was based on having scoped the project appropriately for the amount of time and personnel we had. The story in particular was designed to be told as economically as possible from the ground up, and yet we seem to have connected with people despite a lack of flash.

The ending seems to garner the most attention on this front, even though the reveal is two stillframes on a monitor screen and a couple of voice clips, and the denouement which many people have called very emotional is nothing but some empty rooms and an audio diary, followed by a narrated 4-frame slideshow.

The key, I think, is in trying to tell a personal story-- something that followed the arc of an individual's life, and illustrated his getting through a particular trauma. The specifics are very sci-fi, but the core themes of loss and longing are intended to be universal. I think that on some basic human level it's very easy to put oneself in Porter's shoes, and so the impact of his plight comes across intuitively.

Race is one issue in the DLC that, while touched on very lightly in the actual content, has been brought up frequently in the reviews and other responses I've seen online as a central component of the experience. The guide character is a black man: Charles Milton Porter, a groundbreaking computer scientist. His race is only mentioned once, in the audio diary "How to Get Ahead," and otherwise goes unaddressed. I think it's the kind of thing where the issue of race hangs over the experience implicitly, and that one single point of acknowledgment carries with it much broader implications that were already in the player's mind. I found the response on this point interesting, anyway, largely because I never thought of that diary as being a big deal when I wrote it, so it made me take pause and try to analyze just why it's struck a chord.

As a side note, I've been monitoring responses to the DLC by searching for keywords on Twitter and Facebook, and it's been interesting for me to see the relatively high representation of female players posting their thoughts on Minerva's Den. Rachel suggests that this might be attributable in part to female users having a greater tendency to post on social networking sites in general. Nonetheless, it's nice to see a relatively high volume of responses from players who don't precisely fit the typical FPS-playing demographic. One likes to think that they've made something that can be relevant to people who aren't exactly like themselves.

In any case, I want to take this opportunity once again to thank the immensely talented team that poured so much hard work into making Minerva's Den a reality, and to thank everyone that's taken the time to play it. This is the first project that I've led, and as writer and lead designer, it's kind of my baby; it means so much to me to know that people are enjoying the experience of playing through the thing. I should also thank Zak McClendon, Jordan Thomas, and the rest of the management at 2K Marin for giving me and my team this great opportunity. Check out the Secrets of Minerva's Den on the Cult of Rapture to see who else worked full-time making great content for the DLC (as well as finding out about some obscure Easter eggs and in-jokes.)

Finally, you might have (though almost certainly haven't) noticed a slight change to the blog: the daruma in the header image, one-eyed for so many years, has finally earned his second pupil. Okay, so it's a crappy clonebrush job in the header image, but his real-life counterpart, which I've had since college, also has depth perception now.

In a lot of ways, this kind of closes the loop on this blog: Fullbright began in 2006 as a progress journal for the very first amateur FPS levels I made, right out of college; it was aspirational, meant to keep me honest and encourage me to keep working toward my dream. In the interim I banged the drum about games being smaller, shorter, more digestible experiences; telling more personal stories at an individual scale; of maintaining a focus on fidelity and immersion despite a more modest overall scope and team size. And now I've managed to lead Minerva's Den, a product which arguably upholds all of the above values.

DLC benefits from the stable base of a AAA game to build on top of, and the strong support framework of a full-size AAA studio to keep the production running smoothly, while allowing a small sub-team to follow its own creativity, making a new experience within the possibility space of the main game's premise. I feel highly privileged to have been involved in an enterprise like this in the capacity I was able, and I feel that by and large the results speak for themselves.

And that's just it. Maybe this entire blog has been one very long, indirect way of expressing a desire to make work that can speak for itself, finally rendering this little internet soapbox obsolete. Maybe that time has come.

Thank you all so much for reading this blog and contributing to my thinking on video games and game design. You've all made me more able to do the kind of work I've always wanted to do. For that I will be forever grateful.

Thanks for playing.


-steve

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Specific Violence

How does one refer to this discussion? It's the one we have all the time, in the blogs and in the design pits-- the one about maturity, about meaning, gravity, the medium mattering. About how all we do is let players shoot each other in the face and how we could be so much more. The one about our potential and how we fall short and what we can do about it. The one about how we're a bunch of little boys who want to grow up but don't know how. That one.

It strikes me that we discuss these things in vague and airy terms, but we don't know what we're looking for. Maybe we know what we're not looking for-- "I want a game where you don't have to kill things all the time"-- or what accolades we desire-- "for games to be considered art"-- but we don't have the concrete, mid-scale examples of what trips us up, or exactly what we need to achieve. We're missing a measuring stick.

Hold that thought.

It bothers me that people demonize violence in video games as a concept. I understand that it's because violence is so wildly overused, and often so luridly fetishized, that the instinct of those of us immersed in the medium is to swing 180 degrees to the other side of the spectrum: no killing! no guns! no blood! But violence-- and I'm not trying to be apologist here-- is an integral element of drama through the ages. The question is in its application. Violence can and should be powerful; I argue that video games rob violence of its power by making it lightweight, pedestrian, throwaway, meaningless-- by making it de rigeur, the violence no longer matters: it is made mundane.

Again, put that one on the back burner.

The comics author Alison Bechdel focuses on feminist and queer issues in her work, and is perhaps most widely known outside of alt-comics fandom for establishing "The Bechdel Test" for film. The criteria are:

1. The film has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.

I assume that this test followed a number of protracted discussions among friends regarding film presenting a largely male perspective, and failing to treat female characters as legitimate individuals; that mainstream film tended to dehumanize women in them, and that only certain movies were tolerable, but what exactly was the dividing line? And so the Bechdel test was born.

All together now:

Violence in film, literature or on stage can either be meaningful or meaningless. When it is meaningful, it resonates with the audience; when it is meaningless, it is largely (and rightly) derided. Consider the death of Shakespeare's Hamlet following a duel, or of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, or of Evelyn Mulwray at the end of Chinatown, versus, say, the nameless mooks mown down in Rambo II or Commando or Hard Boiled. The killing by the protagonist of those without identity devalues human life in the work, and thereby robs the violence of meaning (it being perpetrated upon human forms with no value.)

And so a metric for games comes to mind: violence performed by the player in a video game is only legitimate if the victim is a unique and specific individual.

The metric becomes a constraint on content: don't remove the violence-- remove the faceless masses of "enemies." If every character the player interacts with is a unique and specific individual, then any act of violence committed by the player is invested with some amount of meaning: individuals have families, homes, jobs, friends, and most importantly, relationships with other characters in the game. The player's act spiders out from the individual to those that surround them, even if that social web is for the most part only implied. There are no more broad swaths of generic violence, then; there are only discrete acts of specific violence, each of which has the potential to matter.

The metric becomes a constraint on scale: if the player is able to commit violent acts, and they may only visit violence upon individuals, then every character the player meets must be unique, and therefore the approach to making the game-- the scale of environments, the construction of the cast, what the player does-- must be considered differently from the ground up. The end product cannot be the same.

At that point, maybe violence in games starts to mean differently.

______________________________________________

Notes and examples:

* This obviously shares some overlap with Warren Spector's theoretical "one city block" game. If a game took place entirely within one city block, then clearly every person in the game would be an individual with a face and name, and any violent act performed would instantly reverberate through the entire block (or have to be very carefully concealed.) Maybe this is an idea whose time has finally come.

* One extant example that takes a somewhat more abstract form would be Shadow of the Colossus. While they aren't human, there are only sixteen enemies in the entire game (no filler fodder to wade through between Colossi) and each has its own unique appearance, environment, and behaviors. When you kill one, you have killed the only one of its kind, and the act carries with it a sense of sorrow and regret. The killing is a transaction between the player and another individual; and so, the violence has meaning.

* SPOILER: Consider BioShock. At the climax of the story, Andrew Ryan is killed by the player. This follows the deaths of hundreds of Splicers, deranged freaks that attack the player on sight and are eradicated en masse ("it's the same guy!") And yet, despite the numbing effect that this shredding of fodder should have on the player, Andrew Ryan's death still means. And it means not because of the fact of the parentage twist, but because Andrew Ryan has been built up over the course of the game as an individual, with an intellect and a history and a set of ideals. Such is the power of violence against the individual, that its ability to mean survives despite any devaluation of human life that precedes or follows it.

* Similarly, embracing fodder in film generally relegates the work to genre status, but not always: think kung fu films. Masses of foes fall to the heroes, and the works are considered niche and lightweight. Then along comes a film like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that wraps a compelling human melodrama around kung fu fighting at the height of its grace and theatricality, and it moves us as any great piece of human expression might. But it is the exception, not the rule. Alternately there is a whole genre of film-- the slasher film, like Friday the 13th or Saw-- that is composed of nothing but individual, named characters being killed, and these films are almost always dismissed as trash. The problem of course being that these individuals are introduced for no other purpose than to be killed in spectacular ways (and maybe to get naked.) Point being, removing fodder is no magic bullet.

* There are games now that are both character-based and have no generic fodder characters: games like The Sims, Animal Crossing, or most point-and-click adventure titles. Notably, they almost never feature any potential violent interaction at all (or if so, introduce more generic targets to the game for this express purpose: think of the bike duels in Full Throttle.) The mixing of the two seems to be largely taboo, possibly because it's really hard to support.

* A character doesn't have to be lavished with tons of backstory, a fully-fleshed-out family tree, or even a name to be a unique and specific individual: we might not know the name of the cop who's tortured and killed in Resevoir Dogs, or the men killed by Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver, or the female Viet Cong killed at the end of Full Metal Jacket, but they are nonetheless individualized, and their deaths are meaningful in context. The specifics known about individuals are scalable, whereas fodder is only fodder.

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Quick Hits 2

Welcome to the second episode of Quick Hits, wherein I sling nonsense about a number of topics, with no real connective throughline. Bang! Starter pistol.

Fuck This Conversation

I'm just gonna say it: art. I didn't want to say it, I don't want to hear it ever again, but here we are.

Why don't I want to hear about it? I'm a veteran of that war. Anyone who went to art school is. We have PTSD from that endlessly repeated conversation. We have flashbacks, we get the shakes. The trigger: someone, anyone, asking, "what is art?"

It doesn't have to be up and stated outright. The trigger phrase is hidden within any number of statements. For instance, when a film critic with a Twitter account says that video games are not art, the natural followup becomes, "Well then... what is art?" And suddenly we're in some goddamn flourescent-lit student lounge, sitting on a nine-dollar couch across from a dude whose shirt is self-consciously spattered with daubs of encaustic, hip-to-hip with the girl who stamped each page of a copy of The Feminine Mystique with an ink print of her own labia, hearing the guy over our shoulder mention Duchamp for the sixth time this week, and it all just needs to stop right now.

I had a professor, Harrell Fletcher, who is better known as an artist than a teacher, and anyone who immerses themselves in both the art world and art education has certainly been through this conversation enough times to come out the other side. I appreciated his perspective, which was open and accepting while deftly dismissing the question entirely. I'm paraphrasing but, as I remember it: "Art is anything that someone claims to be art. It is then your job to determine for yourself whether you believe that thing is good or bad art."

This acknowledges a number of important aspects of the words in play here. For one, "art" has no concrete definition. Anything more specific than "something which someone has chosen to call art" can be challenged from any number of angles. Is art something that someone calling themselves an artist makes? No, because John Ford wouldn't call himself an artist or his films art, but Francois Truffaut would say they were. Is it something that someone creates to express feeling or emotion? No, let's look at Minimalism or Andy Warhol. So on and so forth. I can smell the nine-dollar burlap upholstery now.

But first and foremost, above all, the term "art" is not qualitative. There may be good art or bad art as the viewer determines it, but something being called simply "art" is not in and of itself either good or bad. It is at most a classification, like "food" or "animal," but it is a classification without any objective requirements, only subjective ones, which means the definition is specific to the individual. One is free to define what is or is not art for themselves if it helps them sleep at night, meaningless as it may be, but anyone who claims to be the arbiter of defining the term for others is absolutely bankrupt in their reasoning, much too enamored of their own opinion for it to be worth a damn, and should likely not be taken seriously in matters such as these.

The Mona Lisa is a painting. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a movie. Ico is a video game. And art is just a word.

My Favorite Albums of the 00's

1. The Glow Pt. 2 by The Microphones. Phil Elvrum passes through towns and countryside, under buzzing flourescents and the shadows of Mt. Eerie, and wonders to himself the big questions, about life, why we're here, what our role is, essentially, what it is to be alive. It all comes out as epic, strange and intimidating as it should: rattling acoustic guitars ask the questions, timid and indrawn; distortion and huge drums answer back big as the looming sky. Under it all, in the quiet places, the fog horns of a Pacific northwestern coastline echo, situating the album in the place that Elvrum lived it, grounding us in what was for me at the time I first listened, my new home-- a fresh, inviting place that was then still alien, and where I was asking myself a lot of the same big questions... just not as epically. Elvrum had that handled.

Companion piece: Advisory Committee by Mirah. The album was produced by Elvrum, but his signature is so strong on it that it's almost as much his as hers. Very different from The Microphones, but very much the same.

2. Knife Play by Xiu Xiu. Jamie Stewart is not a reserved guy, at least as evidenced by his music. With Knife Play, he wants to get personal right up front: a sticker on the cover before you even open the CD states: "When my mom died I listened to Henry Cowell, Joy Division, Detroit techno, the Smiths, Takemitsu, Sabbath, Gamelan, 'Black Angels' and Cecil Taylor." It's a strategy to scare off as many of the undevoted as possible, which continues in the music: the first 30 seconds or so of Knife Play is some of the most discordant, atonal sound you're likely to hear this week. And then Stewart starts in with his airy, otherworldly voice, his lyrics about suicide, hermaphrodites, and HIV, his gongs and bells and whispers and yelps... and it all starts leveling out into something incredibly listenable and intriguing, while remaining dark and personal. Some people find Knife Play to be terribly depressing, but I don't feel that; I love the songs, I love the sound, and while the words are tough, I don't feel like this is a downer of a record; Knife Play is the sound of someone getting through it.

Companion piece: Fag Patrol by Xiu Xiu. Acoustic versions of a number of the songs from Knife Play and its followup, A Promise. Hearing these songs in their more compositionally-pure state strips away the artifice and shows what strong songwriting underlies them.


3. The Sunset Tree by Mountain Goats. John Darnielle had performed as Mountain Goats for a number of years prior to the release of The Sunset Tree, but it was the death of his stepfather that allowed the album to appear-- Darnielle had been abused by the man throughout his childhood, and had to wait until that presence was out of this world to address his experience directly. What results is a document of a young man growing up with the torment of physical abuse, and his escape from it through love and music. The album begins with an attempted suicide and ends with a death that provides closure and reflection; in between are scenes of youthful abandon set against harrowing violence and contemplations on shame and mortality, all fusing together into an image of a young Darnielle coping with hardship in ways that would define his music, and the rest of his life. The tenderness with which the final track sets down the memory of his stepfather, steps back and lets go is a heartbreaking relief.

Anyway,
Usability

Video games are objects that people use.

Look at the history of the video game industry: the number of users has gone up and up, and what has driven this climbing userbase? One might credit graphical fidelity, innovative new gameplay modes, online connectivity, and so forth; I might credit, above all, improvements in usability.

The obvious stuff here is what we normally apply the concept of usability to: interface, primarily. And this is important, but only one element. In video games, gameplay is usability.

I guess we should define usability here. I'm going to go with "the degree to which the user intuitively understands the function of the object, and is able to achieve the desired effect without frustration or confusion." If I look at a toaster, I should be able to to intuit where the toast goes, how to set the darkness of the toast, how to initiate the toasting process, and be able to achieve the desired results consistently.

Perhaps in a video game my desire is to progress forward through a linear sequence of challenges. In the 80's, I might have died at the end of a level containing multiple challenges, requiring me to return to the beginning of the level and repeat all of the challenges up to the one on which I died. This is frustrating and monotonous. If I die enough times, I lose all my lives and must start the entire game over. This will drive away most users.

In the 90's, I might have died at the end of the level, returning me to a mid-level checkpoint, requiring me to retry only the last couple of challenges in the sequence. I can die as many times as I want and simply return to the checkpoint in time. However, if I have to repeat this enough times, I still get frustrated with having to redo challenges I've proven I can pass, and many users will still be driven away.

In the 00's, I might have died at the end of a level and been returned in space, not time, to a respawn point, allowing me to keep all of my progress and collected items and requiring me to retry only the challenge that killed me. Many fewer users will now be driven away. If the challenge itself is too difficult, users unable to surmount it will check out, but this is due to the difficulty of the challenge itself, not to the difficulty of retrying the challenge, as in prior revisions.

The intended use of the object in this case is to "progress forward through challenges." As game mechanics have improved usability, the audience has grown due to more people being able to use the object as they intend.

And so artfulness, graphical fidelity, innovation, connectivity, while all attractive, are secondary to usability improvements in interface ("I want to get online and play against my best friend,") input ("I want to be able to shoot that enemy using these controller thumbsticks,") and progression ("I want to always know where I should go next.") These elements are concrete-- sets of rules and conditions that can be tested against real users, scientifically, and adjusted to accommodate the most fluid user experience. Improved usability, then, is the conduit through which the creativity of your game flows. The more usable the object, the more people will be able to connect with the unique aesthetic experience you're trying to convey. Usability is the aspect of games which must advance first, to allow the rest of the medium to flourish.


This has been Quick Hits. Thanks for playing.

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State change as the key to emergent play

Here's something that I'd only recently considered concretely (or that I'd probably heard in one of Clint's talks years ago and forgotten), which is elementary yet worth restating:

The key to fostering emergent play is the introduction of meaningful state change into a game's sytems.

Consider a game with little emergent play in its combat encounters: your verbs are bullets and grenades, and so are the enemies'; battle lines are clear and enemies are aggressive toward the player; you attack the enemies until they're dead and move on.

Alternately, consider a game with highly emergent outcomes to combat encounters-- unsurprisingly, I'll use BioShock as my example. Your verbs are bullets and explosions, as well as abilities that can freeze, burn, or turn enemies against one another, or be deployed as traps; the spaces are open-ended and enemies roam around freely; environments contain hazards that the player can affect the states of such as pools of water and flammable oil spills.

Say the player encounters a neutral Houdini Splicer (a teleporter that throws fireballs) and a Leadhead Splicer (standard firearm enemy.) They might just shoot the Splicers on sight. But they might instead Enrage the Houdini, who starts throwing fireballs at the Leadhead, igniting a nearby oil puddle which spreads fire to an explosive barrel, which then explodes and kills them both at once. Well that was unexpected.

This outcome emerges from the range of possible state changes applicable to the pawns in the scene: the Houdini can be neutral or aggressive, and made aggressive toward other enemies by the player's Enrage ability; the Houdini's fireballs have imperfect accuracy and carry a fire stimulus, which can change the state of the oil puddle to "burning"; the fire from the oil puddle can spread to the explosive barrel, causing damage to all pawns in the area.

Emergent outcomes are arrived at when the player brings those outcomes about indirectly; the method that allows the player to cause indirect outcomes is state change, and furthermore state change that can propagate through the world. By introducing a single meaningful state change into the world, the player kicks off an unpredictable chain of causality from which a final outcome emerges.

A matrix of the different pawns in the world (bots, turrets, Splicers, Big Daddies, oil spills, water, etc.) their potential states (neutral, friendly, aggressive, burning, frozen, shocked, ragdolled,) and how they can be changed (hacking, Enrage, Incinerate!, Winter Blast, Cyclone Trap, electric tripwires, rocket spears) defines the map of potential emergent outcomes in the game's systems. Simply having a high number of verbs that do damage to enemies does not change the end result; fostering meaningful state change of pawns both by the player and propagated through the world enables the indirect inputs that result in emergent play.

The payoff is for the player to be surprised (Enrage -> ??? -> "Ha! Both of those guys blew up!") Surprise is valuable in all entertainment: plot twists, novel settings, shocking spectacle, dramatic turns of phrase-- all are meant to present us with something unexpected, something different from our normal experience that we couldn't have predicted if we'd tried. The key to humor is surprise-- if you expected the punchline of a joke, it wouldn't be funny; it's the key to drama-- if you saw the ending coming, you wouldn't be satisfied. Fostering emergent play encourages the player to be surprised when your mechanics crash into each other, and better, gives them the tools to surprise themselves.

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Points

I wanted to write a response to Jesse Schell's DICE talk, but David Sirlin said everything I wanted to say, better and more concisely than I would have. If you've watched or heard about the Schell talk on the future of game design, do read Sirlin's response. To picture the best game designers of the coming generation throwing their talents away on building false reward structures to manipulate people's behavior, as Schell encourages, makes me cringe, and Sirlin rightly voices why.

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On pointlessness

If you've played through Mass Effect 2, you've met Thane. He's an assassin with morals: a stoic figure who only kills those that he believes are causing suffering to others. He has a deep belief in the old gods of his people's native religion; after completing each assignment, he retreats to his quarters for solemn meditation.

His characterization works well in the game; I found him to be the most interesting supporting character, anyway. It made me think, though: how much more interesting would an instance of "the assassin who prays after each assignment" be if it weren't a pre-baked, special case occurence? This is outside the expectations for Mass Effect obviously, but it got me thinking.

Consider a game in which a couple of elements exist: some method for being assigned assassination targets, and a church or altar at which characters are able to use the verb "pray." If both of these elements can be used by either the player or AI characters, the potential for self-expression and discovery are enormous: the player is able to roleplay the above "assassin who prays after each assignment" in a completely self-driven way, imbuing his avatar with a unique and specific character in the gameworld; alternately, the observant player could follow an AI to the mission assignment-dispensing element, observe them tracking down and killing their target, and then follow them to the church to see them pray. The discovery of this systemic characterization might be that much more memorable than encountering a pre-scripted story character.

For this sort general paradigm to be successful, a few things would have to be true about the gameworld:

A plethora of unique interactive objects such as the above altar/church would need to be present.

The majority of these objects would need to have absolutely no input into the game's central success mechanics.

The objects would need to be interactable by both the player and AI.

The first two points are required to make any potential chain of interactions unpredictable and personally meaningful. If there's a game with only assassination missions and a church, well, the potential combinations are not especially surprising. But as the number of mundane interactable objects rises into the dozens or hundreds, the potential for drawing meaning from performing one interaction after another increases as well.

Divorcing these expressive interactions from success-based systems is important, otherwise the player has a purely optimal reason to interact with them aside from expressivity. So if the player receives bonuses from a "Serenity" stat, and killing someone lowers that stat, but praying at the church raises it, then the designer is telling the player in a fairly straightforward way to pray after killing someone. This makes the chain of interaction less an autonomous player choice, and instead simply the most optimal reading of the game's numerical systems.

The third point is less essential, but preferable: if only the player can interact with the expressive elements in the world, their use feels less authentic, more special-case, more predestined in function. If only I can pray at the church, then this church has been put here for me to pray at, and I as the player am separated from the gameworld. But if an AI is able to perform the same actions I can, it confers not only the advantage of the above player integration into the gameworld, but hooks into discoverability: I can see someone walk into the church and kneel down to pray, which clues me in organically to the fact that this interaction is possible, without simply scrubbing the world for interactable objects.

Allowing NPCs and the player equal interactive access to these objects gives the designer the ability to script characters with specific cycles of expressive behavior: one could create an NPC named Thane (for instance,) then set him up so that he tended to take assassination missions, only accepted assignments for targets with certain traits ("criminal," "corrupt,") then always went straight to the church and prayed as soon as his assignment was completed.

Fostering this sort of "systemic characterization" would clearly require a lot of work in a game's development be put towards completely "pointless" interactions. This is already done with some frequency in certain aspects of mainstream games: for instance, visual avatar customization is completely pointless, but it's been acknowledged that many players see value in imprinting a specific appearance on their in-game cipher, and so the work is expended. Extending this kind of personalization into the interactivity of the gameworld, into not just how your avatar looks but who they are, seems that much more valuable. Broadly, it might help foster the feeling of a gameworld where "anything is possible," and the specific occurences played out or observed are authentic and unique expressions of that potential.

This entry was inspired in part by Alex Hutchinson's talk at GDC09.

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An obligation

Here's the typical internal exchange:

When something terrible happens in the world; when people are sick, hungry and dying, uneducated, unjustly treated and suffering, doesn't it seem like if everybody turned their efforts to those causes, the world would be a better place?

Maybe. But then who would take out the trash? Sell us groceries? Keep the phone lines connected and the trains running on time?

And what would any of us do when we're tired, bored, need to escape from mundanity, need to relax after our hard work, need something less concrete to stimulate and rejuvenate our minds?

And so it's alright to dedicate your life to creating entertainment. You're not curing cancer and you're not passing laws and you're not even keeping the streets swept or the shelves stocked. But diversion is important to everyone. And somebody has to make it.

I think, then, that there's some obligation one has in creating entertainment that is meaningful and enriching in whatever way their chosen medium can be.

Video games by their nature rely on the input of the player to mean anything. The fact that you can fail at your entertainment is in some ways a barrier to entry for video games. But it's also the medium's defining characteristic, and our one inherent hook for engaging the player and making them important.

It's our opportunity to make the player think. Not to encourage or invite players to in the way that challenging music, art or film might, but to absolutely require demonstrable logical reasoning from our audience. To immerse them in a world and motivate their progress through it with the promise of constantly evolving core interactions and intriguing fiction, then require them to engage their powers of visualization, abstract thinking and mental mapping to proceed. It's good for the health of the player's brain. I think of that as being meaningful and enriching entertainment.

This kind of on-the-fly problem solving is accomplished by activity in the player's prefrontal cortex, employing fluid intelligence and working memory. One's fluid intelligence decreases over their lifespan, making them less able to formulate new ways of thinking. However, some scientific and military studies have shown that engaging in interactive mental exercises that require us to make these kinds of connections can slow the decline of fluid intelligence, essentially keeping our brains younger and healthier as we age. They're the kinds of mental challenges that video games can ably provide-- creating and maintaining logical connections between new and abstract concepts and spaces to overcome obstacles-- that might confer this benefit to players, along with their escapist fun.

Not all games work this way, certainly. As blockbuster, spectacle-focused rollercoaster games rise in popularity, we seem to see less of these sorts of challenge structures in gaming's mainstream. When the game I'm playing doesn't need me-- when I can sleepwalk through it, when I can tune out and let it wash over me, when it doesn't make me think-- an opportunity has been wasted. Our work can be more than an empty waste of time for our players. We can entertain them while engaging their minds in ways beneficial to their cognitive wellbeing. I think that there is practically an obligation to do so, if we're going to dedicate ourselves to creating interactive entertainment at all.

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Quick critique: Silent Hill Shattered Memories

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an incredibly interesting and enjoyable... what is it, exactly? Well, it's Silent Hill. Which in this case means an immersive third-person/first-person psychological horror adventure. Bit of a mouthful. But the immediacy of navigating this new imagining of that town, Silent Hill, is wonderfully compelling. When not being chased by faceless ghouls, you spend most of your time quietly walking through snowbound streets and abandoned shops, your ever-present flashlight (aimed by the Wii remote) casting enormous shadows on walls and ceilings, searching for locks, drawers and cabinets to physically grab hold of and manipulate (by "pinching" with A+B and moving the remote,) or for numbers to punch into your smartphone, hoping to make contact with some other living person. Just exploring the town in this manner gave me one of the strongest senses of presence in a gameworld that I've felt in quite some time. It's the kind of stuff I find extremely compelling, and it kept me riveted to the game from start to finish, tearing through it ravenously in less than a day like some people do with a novel they just can't put down. The breadth of what you do in the game enhances the feeling of being a person in a place, not a limited bundle of verbs bouncing through a series of boxes: you'll be interviewed by a psychotherapist, driven around in cars (and given full ability to slide from seat to seat and mess with the locks and windows,) log into computers, mess with a fully functional smartphone, and occasionally perform the simple act of walking down the street and chatting with another character. It all gives your experience in Silent Hill the kind of fullness that is so often missing from games. It is an exceptional experience, and one I recommend very highly. I'll quibble a bit though. This is a critique after all.

The story and challenges wrapped up in the experience tend to be enjoyable, if not quite all there. Disappointingly, the key to every single locked door in the game will be somewhere in the adjacent room (aside from a couple isolated exceptions in the later Nightmare sequences.) It's missing what I so loved about Saira-- that sense of not just making logical connections but spatial connections. I remember past Silent Hills (okay, Silent Hill 2, my only other strong point of reference) having much more spatially-scattered puzzles, which is great! "Ah, right, this key must be for that locked door I saw in that other building. I should head over there." You feel smart for remembering various points in the gameworld and drawing lines between them. Each major location, such as the apartment complex or the abandoned hospital, was its own convoluted, self-contained untying knot. When the key and the lock are sitting right next to each other, there's not much satisfaction in the brief, perfunctory act of untying.

The game is schismatic in general, as there are two separate modes of play: exploration, and the Nightmare. This could be thematically interesting, and does work in the game's favor when the transition to the Nightmare coincides with a traumatic story event. But deciding there will be no combat in the game, and that being chased by phantoms will only ever occur in the Nightmare, removes all tension from the exploration half of the game. Which is a shame, because if ever a player should feel tense, it's when they're wandering through an abandoned high school/hospital/amusement park, alone in the dark with only a flashlight. It's a problem that's not new to Shattered Memories: a consistent complaint with F.E.A.R., for instance, was that the supernatural stuff was never a threat (until the end,) so why be scared of it? In the same way, why be scared in the creaking, empty children's restaurant when I know that monsters only come out during the Nightmare? Well, there is no reason. Removing combat from the game entirely was a bold decision, but cordoning off all threats to one separate context robs the experience of the tension and dread it should be built on. Capcom's Haunting Ground offers a more effective model, wherein the threats are constant and wandering, and the only combat is to momentarily fend off attackers, long enough to lure them to another part of the level and escape.

The story is also kind of meandering and squishy between cutscenes. All throughout the town you'll find tidbits of text and voice messages which describe... what? I guess isolated little side-stories that happened in these places which are just sort of supposed to be generally creepy (someone freezing to death in the woods, an implied date-rape, an anonymous highschooler asphyxiating himself with a belt,) but don't add up to much. They're reminiscent of the narrative bits found in the original Fatal Frame, but where those all added up to express the abandoned mansion's history of ritual sacrifice, these just sort of... are. Between these scattered tidbits and the dreamlike, shifting characterization of the people you meet, it's easy to assume that the story isn't really going anywhere. Until it does, at the very end. And it's a hell of a reveal. The striking convergence of multiple concepts in an unexpected way is top form, really. But you'd be forgiven up to this point for assuming the story's just going to peter out, since so much of it does end up being inconsequential filler. It's not the kind of narrative that grips you with surreal intrigue the way that Silent Hill 2 did, or the kind of ambient storytelling that conveys a cohesive picture of a place and the people that populated it as with Rapture in BioShock. It's halfway there in a way that makes everything between a few major anchor points feel meaningless, which seems a wasted opportunity.

The concept of the therapy sessions impacting the gameworld has a similar problem. Your answers to the therapist are supposed to change the game itself, creating a nightmare tailored just for you (as an opening "Psychology Warning" screen states.) I played through the game one-and-a-half times. On that second half-playthrough I chose the exact opposite responses as I'd given the first time to see what would be different. And the answer was... not very much. Why was the bear in the hunting lodge dead on the table the first time I played, and standing stuffed in the corner the second time? Because I said "I'd rather spend time with family than friends" in the therapy session? I don't know. Is going through the planetarium instead of the art room in the school actually a meaningful change? Why are the wording of the text and voice messages slightly different, but the meaning still the same? The implementation of this system seems to have too many vague points of input, with too subtle outcomes. Depending on your answers, some characters' appearances will change slightly, and some dialogue will change slightly. So what? It seems like the developers weren't truly committed to the concept: how about giving me big, binary choices in the therapy sessions ("Who do you think loved you more? Your mother, or your father?") and then have that present me with truly divergent content (I meet an entirely different character in the following chapter) if you're going to do it at all? The implementation in the game is a middleground that doesn't really accomplish much. If they couldn't afford to branch the game significantly based on your answers, I'd kind of rather the answers literally have no impact at all. The aesthetic power of being interviewed by the therapist would still be there, without teasing me into wanting to replay the game for no real difference in the experience.

I've spent a lot of time quibbling over elements of the game that are half- or mostly-there, because it's easier to pinpoint what was wrong than what was right. So to be clear, what's right does outweigh what's not-quite-right. The game gives you an exceptionally immersive sense of being there, conveyed by a strong presence in the world as expressed in your direct physical manipulation of doors and other objects, your constantly-roving flashlight, and your highly functional cell phone that allows you to call all sorts of numbers found in the world, as well as take photos, browse voice and text messages, and employ a working GPS map. The world is rendered convincingly, stuffed full of evidence of everyday life with that strange Silent Hill skew to it all. First-person perspective is used to great effect, often to make you feel claustrophobic and trapped, but also to better convey conversations with characters throughout the game. And the characters themselves are quite well-realized, both visually and in their dialogue and behavior: the creepy, overconfident psychologist, the no-nonsense cop, the friendly, playful prom queen all feel like truly different personalities that could nevertheless all coexist in the odd world of Silent Hill. Outstanding facial & character animations and believable dialogue give the sense of the presence of other actual humans, not cardboard "characters." The Nightmare sequences are legitimately frantic and terrifying; the closest analogue I can remember is fleeing desperately from Constantine's Manor in Thief: The Dark Project, which is the nearest I've ever been to experiencing an actual nightmare in a video game. High praise coming from me. And the ending packs a hell of a wallop, while leveling out into a touching and satisfying resolution (the ending I got, anyway.)

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories does an enormous amount new and right, and masterfully uses the Wii's motion controls in ways that draw you deeper into the world. Its tone and content are worlds apart from most games you'll have played this year. Anyone who thinks that all that mainstream video games can do are adolescent power fantasies needs to play this game, to be reminded that there's a world of possibilities out there. It doesn't nail everything it attempts, or even everything that Silent Hill normally does well, but Shattered Memories is as exciting for what it does as for the potential that it implies. A reason to turn on your Wii again. Don't miss it.

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Quick hits

Wherein I sling bullshit regarding a few game things, in brief segments.

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Dialogue

In the most recent issue of Edge Magazine, Randy Smith's column addresses three approaches to dialogue with AI characters.

1. Natural Language Processing-- speaking to an AI as you would another person, and letting them reason out a response procedurally. He acknowledges that this requires non-existent technology for processing human speech into meaning and Turing test-passing AIs to synthesize that meaning and respond believably. In other words, not in our lifetimes.

2. Dialogue trees. We've all seen these, most often in traditional RPGs like Fallout or Planescape. You have a limited list of authored dialogue options, to which the AI replies with a limited list of authored responses. This is effective for what it is, but very transparent to the player.

3. Single-word query response. The system used in old Ultima games wherein the player could type in any single word they liked and test whether the AI "knew" anything about that (ie, whether a response had been authored for that query.) This allowed the player to feel out the possibility space more organically, but presumably leads to a lot of interactive dead ends ("I don't know anything about that" in response to all but the handful of recognized queries.)

Smith prefers the third option overall, and I think there have been examples of games that mix 2. and 3. fairly successfully: Sam & Max Hit the Road, for instance, presented dialogue topics as single icons, so you knew which topics were valid (no dead ends) but didn't know exactly what your character was going to say about it. As you encountered new concepts they were added to the icon list. Similar are Mass Effect or Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay, wherein the dialogue tree options are single words or short phrases-- you choose the gist of what you want the character to express, and the author takes over from there.

But in any case, I agree that some version of the classic dialogue tree is the best we've got, and that probably finding ways to make it feel more natural is our best bet in the short-term.

I think dialogue trees probably feel least natural in games where the player character is a pure cipher-- in which the character is as close to being "me" as possible. So in Fallout 3, for instance, it feels limiting because the tree doesn't contain all the options that "I" would want to say in that situation. Conversely, in Escape from Butcher Bay, Riddick is an established character with a strong personality. It feels more natural for the dialogue tree to only contain options that "he" would say. (Commander Shephard in Mass Effect is in similar territory.) So, one valid approach when considering a design with dialogue might be to give the player an established persona to inhabit ("I am Jim. It has been demonstrated that Jim is very timid. He would NEVER just walk up to the cute girl and ask for her number!") as opposed to a true blank slate. This might open up more interesting possibilities in the end than the cipher route, depending on the broader design ("I played in such a way that Jim became much more confident over time, and by the end had totally different dialogue options available for that same cute girl.")

Alternately, the stranger in a strange land could be useful. Maybe the player character is a recent immigrant and hardly speaks any of the native language. You can only talk to people who know some bit of your own language (hence why every person in the game isn't a dialogue target) and then can only communicate using rudimentary phrases, pointing, and gestures. It's a familiar real-world paradigm for any player, and could again open up interesting avenues of play involving indirect communication.

Or maybe the problem could be externalized more literally: the player character is the only human left alive in a world filled with robots, and those robots only understand specific inputs depending on their preprogrammed role.

In any case, taking the dialogue tree as a mechanical constraint, perhaps strides could be made by making our chosen fictional context less perilous for dialogue ("I'm whoever I want, talking to whomever I want") and instead couching our limited dialogue systems in situations that complement them. I do wish more games allowed you to converse with characters in the world, and I hope we'll see more player-driven dialogue going on in games outside the traditional RPG space.

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Margot

Warning: this segment contains spoilers for a very minor subplot in the Grand Theft Auto 4 downloadable content, The Ballad of Gay Tony.

In The Ballad of Gay Tony (TBGT from here on) you play as Luis Lopez, an ex-con and current manager/business partner at a string of nightclubs in Liberty City. It's established early and often that Luis is a promiscuous guy and not interested in commitment to any one woman. When you check your email in the game, you find multiple messages from "Margot," a girl that hooked up with Luis in the past and who has developed an unhealthy obsession with him.

Partway into the campaign, if you drive to a small icon on the map, you can meet Margot. In a cutscene, she expresses her obsession with Luis, and he explains that he's not interested, and that he thinks she's crazy. It's comic relief, but it turns fairly dark when Margot reveals she's taken a whole bottle of pills as a cry for help. You drop her off at the hospital and complete the mission. Still played for laughs.

At another icon, you meet Margot again, this time on the third-floor walkway of a shopping center on the pier. She again expresses her obsession, and another funny exchange goes on between the two characters. Then she steps over the railing and says that if she jumps, everybody will think Luis did it. The scene stays in the black humor zone, until Margot jumps from the railing, falls three stories, cracks her head on a flight of stairs and dies.

This is pretty surprising and unexpected! And there was nothing you could do to prevent it (except not to visit that nondescript little side-mission icon.) Help text pops up onscreen: "Everybody thinks you pushed her! Get out of there!" Civilians in the area start yelling that you pushed her, that you're a murderer. And your only option is to run until you're out of the danger zone, at which point the mission completes successfully.

And while there are a LOT of things the player can do in Liberty City, the entire premise for this side-mission exposes the boundaries of interactions that are possible in a GTA game. For one, you have no control in a cutscene. I'd have loved the ability to talk Margot down, or to jump out and grab her hand and keep her from falling. But, alright, Luis is Luis, not me, and drama is often based on the viewer being unable to avert terrible events, so there you have it. But then you're forced to flee the scene of a suicide that you're the primary witness to. Even if you wanted to, there's no "stop and explain" button. If I didn't know it would've resulted in a failure state, I would've wanted to just turn myself into the police. The scene is begging for an entire sequence wherein Luis is explaining himself to the arresting officer under a hot interrogation light; wherein he's on the stand at trial-- does his testimony outweigh that of the other witnesses that day? What about the forensic evidence? Can the medical examiner prove she was or wasn't pushed? Was she in psychotherapy at the time? Hospital records show she was suicidal-- she was taken to the ER due to an overdose of pills not more than a week or two earlier, and it was you that dropped her off. Isn't that worth something? What will the jury say?

Of all the situations in GTA that result in police sirens, Margot's subplot seems the most defensible-- you didn't shoot a cop, you didn't blow up a plane, hell, for once you didn't do ANYthing. But GTA doesn't support the player being innocent. And so, in raising more questions than it's capable of answering, Margot's sad, surprising little story is an interactive bridge too far. But if it could be supported with mechanics... man, wouldn't that be exciting?

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Loss of Progress

Challenge in games is a weird thing. Especially when I tend to find a lot of games too challenging to be fun, even on normal difficulty.

The thing is that the moment-to-moment challenge itself isn't the issue. I enjoy difficult problems and things that I actually have to try hard to figure out, or build skill to overcome. The problem is with loss of progress as punishment, and the drudgery of retrying the exact same sequence over and over again.

Recently, for instance, I've been playing Left 4 Dead 2 in singleplayer mode. Granted, this isn't the central focus of the game (that's co-op or versus.) But friends aren't often playing when I am, and I prefer not to play with random jokers. And I just enjoy singleplayer games-- I like having that time to myself, just me, the gameworld, and the experience. So I pick the Singleplayer menu option and away I go. And I can't clear a single campaign on normal difficulty.

It's not because any one part is too hard on its own. I wouldn't want the enemies to be wimpier or myself to be hardier, as the experience would feel pointless then. And though I do die too often, I think I could clear most chapters after a few retries. But the design of the game's systems actively discourages me from retrying by stealing away a criminal amount of progress if my character dies.

So, part one. Many co-op focused games are made significantly more punishing in singleplayer mode in that the AI is unable to revive you the way another player can. This is true of Left 4 Dead, it was true of Gears of War. Survivability of a multi-human party is increased due simply to the developers being unwilling or unable to account for AI partners reviving the player when killed (either by using defibrillator paddles or freeing them from a spawn closet.) When you're dead, you're dead. Sorry. So the single player is just that much more fragile, and backed up by AI characters that are generally less capable in some ways than a human player.

Part two: each chapter is probably 20 minutes long or more on average, meaning you can die at the end of a level and lose fully 20 minutes of your life. The level restarts in the saferoom and you're staring down 20 minutes of rote retread of the exact same environments and scripted sequences you already cleared, just to get back to the point where you failed. And if you fail again, you're back to square one in every regard. When the player fails in your game, you want them to instinctively feel the desire to jump up and try again. Saying "the last 20 minutes of your life have been erased. Do it over" does not engender this response.

So, mitigation. Maybe each chapter has a mid-mission checkpoint. Or, hell, I'm playing alone, let me save wherever I want. Or maybe when my party is wiped out, all four of us respawn in the saferoom without the level being reset: you're back to basic equipment, but all those hordes you cleared and scripted gates you opened are still in their completed state. It becomes a corpse run across empty ground instead of a full instance reset, which is much more palatable. There's a penalty, but the penalty isn't "do all that over again."

In many games, failing and restarting discrete challenges makes sense-- a racing game or fighting game or puzzle game, where each stage is micro and retryable in a few minutes, or even GTA4 wherein each mission is relatively short, generally has mid-mission saves, and lets the player instantly retry from the last checkpoint on failure via the cell phone. In games that have a more fluid sense of progression this is much less the case.

I don't mean to rag on L4D2 so hard. It's just my current example of a phenomenon I've completely outgrown: a game turning into a joyless then frustrating slog because of lost progress on failure. Even in the core action space, we live in a post-GTA-hospital, post-Vita-Chamber world. It should be as challenging as you want it to be to make material progress, but forcing me to go through the motions when I die, redoing challenges I've already proven I can overcome just to try again, shows an outright lack of respect for the player's valuable time.

It's not to say that loss of progress can't be available to the player as a challenge mechanic: BioShock has an option to turn off Vita-Chambers, and Rock Band offers No Fail Mode if that's what you're looking for. I love games with robust options menus. Let me turn "restart chapter on death" on or off to fit my own playstyle. Plenty of games disable achievements or unlockables when difficulty modifiers are applied; so be it.

Of course, these are pretty pedestrian observations about a fairly specific genre. What about unlimited time rewind? Prince of Persia Sands of Time only seemed to limit rewind as a form of challenge. Halo 3 seemingly saves the state of the game continuously, allowing you to revisit and fly around "footage" of your play session after the fact. Doesn't this imply that the design could reasonably allow for the player to choose to rewind only as far as they want to on failure? Braid supported this, opening up the game's challenge to be entirely based on the player's ability to reason out a solution to move forward, not to restart the level to retry that one tricky jump again, as you had to in the game it takes as its inspiration, Super Mario Bros.

And of course, zooming out further, what about games that have no explicit failure state, where reverting to an earlier state to retry a "challenge" is outside of the player's expectations entirely? Games like The Sims or Animal Crossing, where small failures or setbacks within the interactive frame are generally deemed acceptable by players, because they can always be undone through further play? I'd love to see more games unask the question of checkpoints, quicksaving and loss of progress by removing death and failure from the experience entirely, instead of searching for less abrasive ways to tell the player "you have failed."

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Those turned out longer than I'd expected.

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Design of a decade

It's near the end of the decade, and everybody's making a list. Why not?

These aren't my favorites. If this were a list of my personal favorites, Fallout 3 would be number one, and Hitman: Blood Money would be number two. Metal Gear Solid 3 would be near the top as well.

Instead, here's my idea of 10 titles that defined the state of the art in game design in the 00's:


10 Ico. (Sept. 24, 2001) Fumito Ueda's first game took the puzzle-platforming of Prince of Persia or Out of This World into 3D the way Mario 64 did for action-platformers. It introduced an AI-controlled companion that the player developed a bond with entirely through mechanics and animation, as well as a cold, mysterious, wondrous, desolate fantasy world, all near-wordlessly and with absolute grace. Ico trumpets the possibilities for deep emotional resonance with person and place using only the means that games handle best: play and atmosphere.

9 Peggle. (Feb. 27, 2007) The ultimate development of the casual game explosion over the course of the 00's. It is everything that a casual game can be: skill-based but random, accessible but surprisingly complex, both turn-based and realtime, clever, fresh, instantly gratifying but rewarding to the devoted player. Like Tetris, it relies on mechanics only a video game can provide, as opposed to being a digital tabletop game-- physics are its lynchpin, but in a frame that any player immediately grasps. It's a sensation: Breakout meets Pachinko. It's a perfectly-constructed core loop that lends itself to endless variation. It's everywhere, and it deserves to be.

8 BioShock. (Aug. 21, 2007) It was an incredibly unlikely phenomenon in a number of ways: A revival of System Shock 2's FPS/RPG gameplay, set in a mid-century undersea city based on the Objectivist philosphy of Ayn Rand, populated by little girls that drink blood and their hulking, diving suit-wearing protectors. And it became a critical and popular hit. The storytelling was a triumph of economy, being all the more impactful for taking place almost entirely off-screen; the twist not only revealed unexpected aspects of the story's major players, but commented deftly on the role of the player of a video game; the open structure of the levels and the myriad combinations of abilities never took the player for granted; the city of Rapture near-instantly became one of the signature locations in the history of video games. In contrast to its peers, it demonstrated what else the FPS, and story in games, could be.

7 Portal. (Oct. 9, 2007) Above all, the design of Portal is incredibly economical. Built out from one central mechanic, the final product felt lean and focused, while the presence of GladOS-- a disembodied voice for most of the game-- gave it heart. The mechanic itself-- creating arbitrarily placed and spatially contiguous portals on walls, ceilings, and floors to solve puzzles-- was one of a kind, and its mind-bending possibilities were exploited to the utmost by the designers at Valve. Refusing to overstay its welcome, Portal introduced you to its mechanics, setting and antagonist all in step, saw them through to their logical conclusions, and provided the player resolution in a few scant hours. If only all games knew themselves so well.

6 Katamari Damacy. (Sept. 22, 2004) Keita Takahashi's interactive manifesto on play and whimsy came out of nowhere and floored us all. Using simple graphics in service of powers-of-ten gameplay, Katamari Damacy introduces us to a gonzo conception of modern life, and invites us to roll it all up and fire it into space. Mechanically unprecedented and immediately engrossing as pure play, the game worked equally well as an ambient commentary on the absurdity and disposability of consumer culture. The visceral sensation of growing from the size of a pea to the size of a city in the span of minutes is unmatched anywhere else; the game takes this constant outward expansion to its logical conclusion in a perfectly pitched end credit sequence. It's a brilliant, self-contained statement of intent and followthrough upon it; it is a creator's worldview expressed through atmosphere and interactivity.

5 Deus Ex. (Jun. 22, 2000) A love letter to player agency, in both mechanics and story; a paranoid fantasy about all those conspiracies being true after all; a meditation on the blurry line between man and machine, between progress and self-destruction. Equal parts George Orwell and William Gibson, the world of Deus Ex is one rife with conflict, and asks the player what kind of mediator they might be. In speech: straightforward, or deceitful? In action: loyal, or self-interested? In combat: all sound and fury, or silent interloper? Deus Ex trusted the player-- trusted them to build their abilities the way best suited to their personality, to help or hinder the people they encountered as they saw fit, to explore the gameworld and draw their own conclusions. Deus Ex is, above all, an experience defined by the player, and ably provides a gameworld begging for the player to define it.

4 Animal Crossing. (Sept. 15, 2002) This disc does not contain a game, but a place. Playing off of our natural alignment with time and season, Animal Crossing makes itself real by matching what you see on screen to what you see out your window. In the morning the sun rises and animals get up to start their day; at night the shops close and everyone goes to bed. This isn't only the game's clock-- it matches the clock of the real world, a little autonomous town puttering by in time with our own. In this way, it presaged the current trend of low-pressure, near-ambient games that have gained popularity on social networking sites, while providing a much fuller experience when you did decide to spend a few minutes (or hours) in town. It also bucked the standard of high-pressure video game pacing, implicitly encouraging players to relax, only play for a little while, and be patient: letters sent by post take days-- real days-- to be delivered. Insects go into hiding in the winter, and the player waits months-- real months-- for them to reemerge. A year in the life of Animal Crossing is a singular, rich experience, one that teaches moderation through practicality and that good things come to those who wait. It's an experience only a video game could provide-- a simulated, parallel other place, humming along almost perceptibly inside your Gamecube even when it's turned off, just waiting for you to visit, if you want.

3 Passage. (Dec. 13, 2007) The last few years have seen the rise of the indie game to greater prominence, and the one work that expresses the promise of this movement most clearly, succinctly, and affectingly is Jason Rohrer's Passage. It exploits the symbolic quality of Atari-era graphics towards a sharply-honed observation on youth, memory, companionship, and the emphemerality of life. It has no tutorial, but its mechanics aren't obfuscated-- movement is your only verb; that and perhaps taking the hand of another. The implications of these simple inputs say more in just a few minutes than do the reams of dialogue of a thousand big-budget console games. Passage is a deceptively simple, elegiac and touching meditation on our path through life that gains its power as you tease out its meaning through interaction. Along with Braid and Flower, Passage sits at the crest of a wave we're only just now seeing break the horizon. These games will likely define our next decade even more strongly than they did this one.

2 Grand Theft Auto 3. (Oct. 22, 2001) It's rare for a game to come along that creates a new genre unto itself; for the 90's it was Doom, and for the 00's it was Grand Theft Auto 3. The open-world, "sandbox" aesthetic exploded from this point forward, but what impresses most is how GTA drew from the past: while everybody else has spent the decade adding "RPG elements" to their games by way of stats, loot and leveling up, GTA brought the overarching RPG structure to the masses by stripping that all away. Think of it: what other game has a wide-open world for the player to explore, a cipher protagonist who who starts as a nobody and ends up turning the gameworld on its head, a series of questgivers that can be visited in an arbitrary order, optional side-quests that can be opted into for better money and equipment, and takes 40+ hours to complete? Ultima, maybe? Fallout? Baldur's Gate? The creators of GTA saw in traditional RPGs an incredibly compelling structure for play; the brilliance was in building a convincing, familiar, modern setting around it, and stripping out all the math and inventory screens. The delaying action became car chases and shootouts instead of turn-based battles and loot collecting; the fiction played off of its setting and mechanics by placing the player in an over-the-top vision of modern American life populated by sociopathic criminals and consumerism gone wrong. And from all this arose a new popular framework for game design based on player freedom, easily expanded upon with new settings and mechanical innovations, the same way so many had added onto the work of id a decade earlier. Has there been a truly new, game-changing epiphany following GTA3, as Half-Life was to Doom? Maybe, if only in the incredible immersiveness and relative gravity of Rockstar's own GTA4, which succeeded in making Liberty City that much more vibrant, alive and real (which perhaps casts GTA4 as Quake to GTA3's Doom... with a Half-Life moment still to come.) The existence of Liberty City, in its original and then next-gen form, may be the crowning technical and creative achievement of video games this decade. And amazingly, that's not even half of why GTA is so significant.

1 The Sims. (Feb. 4, 2000) But then, a true sandbox is nothing except four walls, some rolling sand, and the toys you choose to put in it. And while lighting the fire of a new genre is quite the achievement, doesn't creating an absolutely singular design-- one which is a genre unto itself and which practically no one has even attempted to match-- mean more than spawning a legion of imitators? The Sims, in all respects, stands alone. Will Wright dared to take the pieces of our daily lives and recast them as the toys in that sandbox, and in doing so, The Sims became a lens through which we reflected ourselves-- our visions of prosperity or squalor, of harmony or discord, of fancy or practicality; it let us play with the possibilities of the world we know, to faithfully replicate our own house, friends and family, or instead to imagine a world in which that's all completely different. Its underlying structure implies a simplified vision of the bootstrapping American dream, where anyone can start out in an empty lot with a few bucks in their pocket and end up being a celebrity or CEO. And it acknowledges the modern implications of that dream-- to end up with an ever-expanding house, filled to bursting with the most expensive furniture, appliances and knick-knacks you can find. It's a view of the allure and emptiness of consumerism through the most open, unfettered kind of play-- like SimCity, all that's defined by the designer is the bounds of the sandbox and the identities of the toys that can go in it; the rest is up to you. But the rules also result in an almost Tetris-like determinism: no matter how successful you are, you'll eventually run out of rungs on the career ladder, run out of tchotchkes to buy. And what are you left with? A big house filled with expensive things, and a life you're most likely bored of living. It's been said that Passage was "the first interactive memento mori." I'd have to disagree. While Liberty City is an amusing and wry parody, The Sims presented us with a concentrated abstraction of the comfort and futility of 21st century America, and let us realize that grim system entirely through our own means. It is play, self-expression, aesthetic, and message all rolled into one, and its overwhelming success-- selling millions upon millions of copies to the very demographic it depicts, and millions more expansions containing fresh junk for them to pretend to buy-- is the confirmation of its thesis. Will Wright intended The Sims to be a simulation of ourselves, and we proved him right. If great art is both a reflection of its society and is reflected in it, then it's hard to argue that The Sims is any less than the defining game of its era.

Disclaimers:

• Where is World of Warcraft? Call of Duty? Halo?

These games had a huge impact on gamers, but their success was much more in refinement of existing designs and strong production values and usability than in achieving the kinds of design breakthroughs outlined above. WoW is Everquest shined to a blinding sheen, Halo is a standard PC FPS executed superbly for a home console, and so forth. This is the same reason I highlighted GTA3 instead of GTA4, or The Sims over The Sims 3; the latter are more refined but are not the original conception of the thing.

• What about Shadow of the Colossus? Resident Evil 4? Metal Gear Solid 3?

Again, if this were a list of favorites, it would be different. Oh fuck it, here's my list of Personal Favorite Games of the 00's, written up hastily and with little forethought:

25 Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

24 Yakuza 2

23 Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

22 Metroid Prime

21 Far Cry 2

20 F.E.A.R.

19 No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way

18 Bully

17 Resident Evil 4

16 Deus Ex

15 BioShock

14 Grand Theft Auto 4

13 Super Mario Galaxy

12 God Hand

11 Shadow of the Colossus

10 Portal

9 Silent Hill 2

8 Ico

7 Dead Rising

6 Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence

5 No More Heroes

4 Katamari Damacy

3 Animal Crossing

2 Hitman: Blood Money

1 Fallout 3

Thanks, and here's to next decade! See you on the other side!

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Two links worth reading

Jordan Mechner's tips for designing narrative-based games, 1996

Tom Chick's reaction to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 mission "No Russian"

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A predator

This morning I woke suddenly from a dream.

In the dream, I was playing a video game. The game took place on some sort of alien Serengeti. I played a predator, something like a lion-- I couldn't see my own form, as the game was in first person. I approached a group of prey animals standing in a clearing of yellow grass. They resembled giraffe or llama, sort of similar to the mucalosaurus from Zeno Clash, but smaller and with fur. They were scaled to various sizes-- adolescents to adults, I assumed.

Being a predator, I leapt forward and seized onto a fairly large one, biting at its flesh. It offered no real resistance, but within a few moments I began taking damage from the side. I turned from my prey to see a larger one of the creatures trying to fend me off. I realized that this creature must be my target's mother. I swiped at her, easily repelling the mother and sending the rest of the group scattering. They stood uncomfortably in a perimeter around me as I returned to my work.

I looked up to see the mother creature keeping its distance, as it was no match for me. It looked back at me and said sadly, "No, stop."

I dropped the game controller and recoiled, repulsed and disgusted by the scene I was in the midst of: as I tore at its child, the mother creature-- which I didn't expect to have the power of speech at all-- was reduced to pleading as it looked on helplessly. My predefined role as the player was that of a predator, but the unexpected repercussions of that role on these alien life forms hit me with a wave of shock, terror and remorse. That's when I woke up.

I wonder if it means anything.

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The three R's

Game design is the act of serialized decision-making. And so, good game design is the process of making many decisions well. In the context of a fiction-based video game, I've found that three principles should be applied when considering each design decision you're presented with. Obviously the earlier, bigger decisions require much deeper consideration on these fronts than the later, micro decisions.


Restraint

Restraint is the act of resisting the urge to throw in every idea you have simply because it sounds cool, awesome, or hilarious. Pop culture in-jokes, gratuitous violence and sexuality, and self-indulgent story content tend to benefit the designer before the player. Do you want to make an idea simply to make it ('I want to make it so you can blow dudes' heads off,' 'I want to make a chick with big boobs,' 'I want to make a Monty Python in-joke,') or does it objectively benefit the identity of the design? Lack of restraint is adolescent. Restraint is based on tastefulness. Restraint will save you time because it is a culling behavior. Restraint is your first line of defense against executing on bad ideas.

Rigor

Rigor is applied through the act of objectively and deeply considering the practical implications of an idea. No design element is an island-- in fact, almost every design element is connected to every other by a complex web of dependencies. An idea that is not analyzed rigorously is destined to unstring that web, simply due to lack of consideration. Rigor is the act of questioning your idea unflinchingly from every angle, as this veteran programmer does for a couple of big ideas that sound good on the surface. Your job is to attack your design idea from all directions-- technical and gameplay systems in equal measure-- and find the holes in it before moving forward. Is your game engine capable of supporting this design element? Are any other design systems in conflict with this element? Any new idea must stand up to intense scrutiny before you move onto the implementation stage. This isn't to downplay the role of iteration-- even the most deeply examined idea will need to be iterated upon once you have it running. The intent is to root out those problems which would be "so obvious" once you got around to implementing the thing, and avoid spending time on an idea that is inherently untenable. As the old carpenter's aphorism goes: measure twice, cut once.

Rationale

If Restraint questions the "what" of your idea, and Rigor questions the "how," then Rationale questions the "why." Does this idea fit into the broader experience-- the identity of the gameworld, the conceits of the fiction? What is your justification for this thing's existence? Many of the fictional conceits for established genre mechanics in BioShock are wonderful examples of clever Rationale: why are there heavy weapons and vending machines selling ammunition in an undersea utopia? Because this society fell into civil war between its inhabitants (motivating them to construct grenade launchers, crossbows, turrets, etc. from scavenged materials) and was hyper-capitalist (meaning that war profiteers were free to exploit the conflict by selling bullets to the combatants via convenient vending machines.) In other words, Rationale can be seen as coming up with "excuses" for mechanics' presence in your gameworld, but this is a two-way street: your fiction might reasonably imply mechanics (a game set on a desert island might 'want' a cooking mechanic) just as the mechanics of your chosen genre might require adjustments to your fiction. The question is whether you can wrap your idea in a clear, easily-graspable Rationale, or whether it will disrupt the player's experience, sticking out like a sore thumb (as a counterpoint from BioShock, the Bot Shut-Down Stations had this latter effect for me.) An idea without clear Rationale feels arbitrary, and threatens the integrity of the player's experience. Mechanics with clear Rationale have a unifying effect, helping the whole of the experience hang better together.


Hopefully the above three principles are clear, and can help you analyze a design idea in its early stages. The goal is to arrive at a lean, coherent design, wherein every element supports every other. The challenge is to be objective in your questioning, not to fall in love with any one design idea, and to pare down carefully but liberally until you arrive at the core experience you want to convey. Hopefully, embracing Restraint, Rigor and Rationale from the outset will better guarantee smooth sailing as your ideas make the leap from paper to playable.

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Game design

The next time you're all wrapped up in a contentious design meeting, remember this:

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